by Amy Tan
“That was the love we had and gave you. He made me pure. I was no longer the courtesan I had been forced to become. I was loved, and that was knowledge I would always have. When Mrs. Lamp called me a prostitute, she could not take his love away. Instead, they took my baby. They took you and made you forget who I was.”
Flora was somber. “In a way, I didn’t forget. That’s why I wouldn’t let anyone touch the locket. As long as I had it, I knew someone like you would come back. I waited for you. And every day, those awful people told me that you didn’t exist, that it was a bad dream. Every day they said this until you became a dream.” She looked at me with a desperate face. Her eyes were like Edward’s just before he confessed that terrible story of the boy who fell off the cliff.
“They took me away from you and tried to make me someone else. I’m not them. I hate them. And I’m not you either. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t know who I am. People see me and they think I look so sure of myself. Hey, lucky girl, you’re rich and have no worries. But I’m not who they think. I’m wearing an expensive dress. I’m walking with my shoulders back like a confident girl who knows where she’s going. But I don’t know what I want to do in my life. I’m not talking about the future after I finish college—if I finish. I don’t know what I want to do day after day. There’s nothing that strings the days together. They’re all separate days, and each day, I have to decide what I want to do and who I will be.
“Minerva tried to make up who I was. Her daughter. But she knew I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me. I used to try to believe she did. But somehow I knew love was not what I felt from her. I thought there was something wrong with me. I was a girl who was unlovable, who could not love. I saw the girls at school with their mothers. They decorated Easter baskets and they’d say, ‘Blue is my mother’s favorite color.’ I had to pretend that I was as excited as those other girls. And then I grew tired of pretending. Who was I pretending for? Who was I if I didn’t pretend?
“Like father, like daughter, I was raised in the good ol’ Ivory family tradition. You can do no wrong. You’re always right. You can lie through your teeth and make people do what you want because you have enough money to buy your way clean. You can buy admiration, buy appreciation, buy respect—all of it fake, of course. To them, flimsy cardboard facades were good enough. And I did my best to prove they weren’t.
“I stopped studying when I was a kid and flunked my tests. If I knew the right answer, I wrote down the wrong one. My family accused the teachers of treating me unfairly and they bullied them into letting me take the tests again at home. They hired someone to fill in the answers. I became a stellar pupil!
“I started shoplifting when I was eleven. It was exciting because it was dangerous and I could get caught. I had never had such strong emotions—not that I could remember—and I felt I needed to do it. I stole a little tin soldier from a toy store. It wasn’t anything I really wanted. But when I took it home, I suddenly felt it belonged to me and I had a right to take it. My right. I stole things that were valuable and other things that were not: a silver baby cup, an apple, shiny buttons, a thimble, a silver dog that fit in the thimble, a pencil. The more I stole, the more I felt I had to steal. It was like having a huge Santa Claus bag inside me that I had to fill and I didn’t know why. I figured I wouldn’t know why until I filled it. Finally, I got caught, and my erstwhile fake mother sat me down and asked if I lacked for anything. I said nothing because I couldn’t tell her I had the empty Santa bag inside me. She said I only needed to tell her what I wished for and she would provide it. She gave me ten dollars. I threw the money away when I went outside. It made me mad that she thought she could pay to make the bad part of me go away. I went back to stealing. I wanted to be caught again right away. But no one noticed. So I stole bigger things and in plain sight—a doll, a piggy bank, a wooden puzzle. I knew the shopkeepers saw me, but they said nothing. My erstwhile mother, I later found out, had set up an account with the shopkeepers, and they would mark down the cost of what I had stolen. The amount of money would be paid from the account. It was like a joke to them.
“I didn’t want to be bad. That wasn’t who I was. It just felt closer to who I might be, because I wasn’t like them. Being like them meant I had to feel nothing was wrong with them, with the world, with those who rubbed their hands and pretended to respect them, when it was really their money. Being them was believing love was a kiss on the cheek. Love was supposed to make you feel happy and that you weren’t alone. You could feel something you didn’t feel with anyone else. And your heart would squeeze when there was love. That’s what I had with my dog. People say true love is constant. Well, no love is constant, too.
“When I was older, I took up with the kind of friends the Ivorys thought were the scum of the earth, and especially a boy named Pen. I know Mrs. Danner saw him when she was spying on me. He and I smoked cigarettes. We drank booze. I did all the things I shouldn’t do, and then I got pregnant. When I realized I was going to have a baby, I felt like I had finally done it. I had changed myself. I was now different. My body was different. The way people would see me was different. Girls who got pregnant were immoral and stupid. But now I didn’t like the change. I wasn’t immoral and stupid. I got into a situation and with a boy I didn’t love. I used to think he was different, because he didn’t care what people thought. He was fun and dangerous. But I knew I didn’t love him. I wanted to, but he was not that smart. The cream didn’t rise to the top, if you know what I mean. And now he wanted to make me an honest woman, he said. He said he loved me and asked if his love was reciprocated. Reciprocated! That was the biggest word he had ever used. He had a chance to marry Little Miss Moneybags and he had gone to the dictionary to figure out how he could do it. Even he had become fake. The baby was the only one who wasn’t.
“So what was I going to do? I had not plotted it out yet, but I would. I knew I would soon have to leave home. I would not let my baby grow up to be like the erstwhile family. And they would be glad that I left. They could not pile on enough lies to cover up a belly that was going to grow bigger and bigger. It took Minerva two months to notice something was wrong with me. I was vomiting every morning in my room. One day, I got sick at dinner. She was about to call the doctor, thinking I had a stomach ailment. I told her, ‘Don’t bother. I’m pregnant.’ She closed the dining room doors, so it was just the two of us. I told her I didn’t know who the father was, just to further upset her. It could be any of a half dozen boys, I said. She said the strangest thing: ‘I knew this would happen. You were born without morals, and for all I tried I couldn’t change that.’ I didn’t know she was referring to you. She told me I had ruined the family reputation, the Ivory family’s social standing, and that I would be the source of a lot of gossip. It was thrilling to hear her say this. ‘Young lady,’ she said in a shrill voice, ‘you’ve crossed the threshold into the devil’s playground.’
“I burst into laughter. She shouted for me to stop. Her command made me laugh even harder. I was laughing hysterically. And then I realized I couldn’t stop, and it was frightening. How could laughing be frightening? She kept shouting and I kept laughing. She said that if I went off with this dirty boy, I would be living in a slum with the baby. I laughed and laughed, until all I could do was wheeze because I could hardly catch my breath. I was suffocating on my own laughter. And then she shouted that if I ran off and had this baby, I would receive no money from her ever again. And suddenly, I was able to stop laughing. I said, ‘I’m the one who is going to inherit the money, not you. You’re the one who will get no money.’ She got quiet.
“I told her that, like it or not, I would live in the house and have the baby, and if we were the pariahs of the town, I would at least be honest about it. She immediately changed her tune and said in a fake soothing voice that I should put my mind at rest about the baby and my future. Everything would be fine, she said in her phony voice of concern. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll call th
e doctor now to prescribe something to help with your nausea.’ She called me ‘my dear.’ My inheritance had bought those words and made her choke them out. I was grateful when the doctor came. I was sitting on the side of the bed, doubled over. He set down a bottle of medicine on the nightstand and told Minerva to give me a pill three times a day. And then he said he would give me a shot to help me feel better right away. The needle went in, I said, ‘Ow,’ and I remembered nothing else until I woke and was in terrible pain. Minerva said that this was normal with nausea and gave me a pill. I fell asleep. I awoke again, and she gave me another pill.
“Three days went by before I knocked away Minerva’s hand as she brought the pill toward my mouth. I knew the dull ache in my womb was not nausea. They had gutted me. They had taken out what they felt was wrong, what had embarrassed her and would have ruined her social standing. Minerva wore her phony kind face and said through lying teeth that I had had a miscarriage. She said it so sincerely. She said I didn’t remember it, because I had been in such pain it knocked me out cold. I cursed her with every name I could think of. I was screaming, and Minerva said I would be just fine and it was natural to suffer melancholy after what I had been through. And then I was quiet. Why was I screaming? What would change? I couldn’t win against her, because there was nothing to win. I was an orphan. I belonged to no one. I had nothing and nobody to hang on to. The only person I could trust and rely on was me. But I was helpless and wanted to give up, because I didn’t want to be strong anymore. What was the point?
“I felt like I was dying and I would never know the difference between who I was and who I did not want to be. I ran away as soon as I was able to get out of bed. The police found me and brought me back. I ran away again. I was caught again. Every time they caught me, something else died in me. I slashed off my hair. I cut my wrists and ran through the house letting the blood spurt everywhere. I guess you would say I had a nervous breakdown. The doctor was called again. Instead of taking me to an asylum, Minerva hired nurses to watch me until I felt better. They slipped medicines into my food or drink to make me docile. I stopped eating and flushed the food down the toilet. I grew weaker and weaker. And then I thought it was stupid that I would let myself die just because I hated them. I knew what I had to do to escape. I would be the good girl who lived a false life. I would smile at the table and say what a nice day it was. How lucky we were not to be starving like some people. How lucky we weren’t Jews in Poland. How lucky we were not like other people who lived on the other side of the river. I studied, passed my exams without any help from paid tutors, and I was accepted by a school in New Hampshire that took hours to get to and on winding roads, which I knew made Minerva throw up.
“I didn’t return home, except twice. The first time was when my grandmother, Mrs. Ivory, died. The lawyers gave the official word that I had just inherited the Ivory family estate. It had passed to me and not to Minerva. But she, as my purported mother, would have the power to determine how to spend that fortune on herself, until I was twenty-five. Practically the first thing she did was marry a man who claimed to own an oil well. If he owned a well, it was a well in someone’s backyard into which he had thrown a bottle of Crisco. The second time I came home was last Christmas, when I knew Minerva was away with her new husband in Florida. I had gone there to remove more of my belongings. I didn’t want any part of myself to remain there. That was when I found Uncle Loyalty’s letter and gift in the mailbox.
“When I learned Minerva wasn’t really my mother, I could feel myself being turned upside down. I felt like all my emotions had been in a saltshaker, tapped out a little at a time. And now everything had poured out all at once. Finally, I understood so many things. Minerva resented me. She hated my face because it was the face of the woman my father loved. She couldn’t love me. I couldn’t love her. There was nothing wrong with me, except that I was someone else’s child. I was elated. I could be me! But then I immediately became scared. I didn’t know who I was. I was like that big empty Santa bag.
“So here I am, the smart-alecky girl who doesn’t really know who she is yet. I’m lost. But I feel better here in China because everything is so different and anybody coming here would be lost. I don’t mean lost on the streets. I mean it’s confusing and jarring and strange and new. The language is different, and you don’t know the rules. And all this confusion here is pushing aside the other confusion I’ve had. I can start over. I can be three and a half again. I can learn a few words: ‘milk,’ ‘spoon,’ ‘baby,’ ‘pick me up.’ And I do remember those words. I feel part of me is in those words and part of me is coming back. A memory of me. A memory of you. I remember saying, ‘I’m scared.’ I don’t remember if it was in Chinese or English. I also remember being a little girl in my mother’s arms, your arms. I know it was you, because when I first got to Shanghai and we were seated in the car, I was looking at your chin. I remembered seeing that same chin when you held me and it was at eye level. I used to poke your chin, and when you smiled, it changed, like a little face. It was different when you were talking or laughing. It was different when you were sad or angry. In the car, I saw your chin was bunched up and I knew you were afraid, because I remembered being in your arms when I was little, bouncing as you ran. I was holding on to your neck. I said, ‘I’m scared.’ You told me in our language, ‘Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid.’ And then I felt someone pulling me away from you. I was reaching for your face and I saw your chin was bunched up hard. You were calling my name and you were afraid. So I was, too.”
FLORA AND I took walks in the early morning and we watched everyday life pour out of doorways and onto the widest boulevards and narrowest alleys. She wanted to understand my life in Shanghai and what her father had experienced. What was it like to be Chinese? What was it like for a Westerner? Whose morals were more severe? Who did I think I would have become if my mother had not left?
I used to ask that last question all the time. Who would I have become? If I had lived in San Francisco, would my mind have been different? Would I have had different thoughts? Would I have been happier? “I wanted to live somewhere else,” I told Flora. “But I didn’t want to become anyone different. I wanted to be who I had always been. And I was and still am.”
We went to the house on Bubbling Well Road, where Edward and I had lived. It was now a middle school for the children of foreigners.
“Foreigners,” Flora said. “I’m a foreigner.”
The big tree was still in the courtyard garden. We stood in its shade, as we had just before she was taken away. The stone bench was there, and it bore a plaque with Edward’s name. Beneath were violets. Mother and I had placed the plaque there a week ago and replanted the flowers. She had given the school a nice contribution and also paid for a gardener to tend it.
“Is he really buried here?” Flora asked.
I nodded. I remembered watching the dirt falling on the cabinet that had served as Edward’s coffin. The old sorrow came back: Edward, how could you be leaving me?
Flora brushed her fingers over the violets and closed her eyes. “I want to feel he’s holding me in his arms.”
I pictured Edward rocking Little Flora, looking at her with a wondrous face, soothing her, telling her she was pure and unharmed.
FLORA AND MY mother stayed for a month. A few days before they would leave, I felt she was again being pulled from me.
“You should come to visit us in San Francisco,” Mother said. “You have a birth certificate under the name of Danner that says you’re an American citizen. I can help you get it. Although maybe you’d be too wary to let me try that again.”
“We wouldn’t be able to get a visa for Loyalty. Thousands of Chinese citizens want to leave, and the consulate knows they wouldn’t return. I can’t leave Loyalty by himself,” I said. “He wouldn’t know how to take care of himself.” I did not tell her that Loyalty had already made me promise that I would not leave without him. He was afraid I would be pulled to America, now that I had fou
nd both my mother and my daughter. When people go to America, he had said, they don’t come back for a long time. “After the war, Loyalty and I will both come,” I told Mother. “Or you come back here and bring Flora. We can go to the mountain that Edward and I climbed, or to Hong Kong and Canton, places I’ve never been. We can see them together.”
Mother gave me a sympathetic look. She knew I wanted to see Flora again. “I’ll see what I can do.” She squeezed my hand.
Three days later, Loyalty, Magic Gourd, and I stood on the dock with Flora and Mother. How long would it be before we could see each other again? How long would the war last? What other terrible things could happen between now and when I would next see them? What if I did not see Flora again for ten or fifteen years? What if Mother died in the middle of writing a letter to me? They were leaving me again. It was too soon.
Magic Gourd shoved a large sack of candied walnuts into Flora’s arms. She had been cooking them for the past two days. “She looks like you when you were that age,” Magic Gourd said. She had said that nearly every day since Flora arrived. “I used to wonder what would happen if someone saved you and you left and I was all alone. I wanted you to be saved, but then …” She put her fist against her mouth to keep from crying. “Watching her leave is like watching you go.” Flora embraced her and thanked her in Chinese for her good care when she was little.
“She has a good heart,” Loyalty said to me in Chinese. “She got that from you. Three and a half years was enough time to give that to her. She’s the daughter we might have had. I’ll miss our daughter.” He made Flora promise to send a cable as soon as she arrived so that we would know she was safe.