The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

  When I finished, the letter was still shaking in my hands. I remembered that I had once been jealous of GaoLing. Now her fate was worse than mine. Sister Yu had said we could find happiness in our own situation when we thought of people whose lives were much worse. But I was not happy.

  Yet in time, I did become less unhappy. I accepted my life. Maybe it was the weakness of memory that made me feel less pain. Perhaps it was my life force growing stronger. All I knew was, I had become a different girl from the one who had arrived at the orphanage.

  Of course, by then even the gods in the monastery had changed their minds. Over the years, Miss Towler had been removing the coverings from the statues, one by one, as cloth was needed for making clothes or quilts. Eventually, all the statues revealed themselves, mocking Miss Towler, so she said, with their red faces, three eyes, and bare bellies. And there were many, many statues, both Buddhist and Taoist, because the monastery had been occupied by both kinds of monks in different centuries, depending on which warlord was in charge of the land. One day, before Christmas, when it was too cold to go anywhere, Miss Grutoff decided that we should convert the Chinese gods into Christians. We would baptize them with paint. The girls who had grown up in the orphanage since they were babies thought this would be a lot of fun. But some of the students who had come later did not want to deface the gods and tempt their wrath. They were so scared that when they were dragged to the statues they screamed and foamed at the mouth, then fell to the ground as if possessed. I was not afraid. I believed that if I was respectful to both the Chinese gods and the Christian one, neither would harm me. I reasoned that Chinese people were polite and also practical about life. The Chinese gods understood that we were living in a Western household run by Americans. If the gods could speak, they, too, would insist that the Christian deities have the better position. Chinese people, unlike foreigners, did not try to push their ideas on others. Let the foreigners follow their own ways, no matter how strange they were, that was their thinking. As my brush ran over their gold-and-red faces, I said, "Pardon me, Jade Ruler, forgive me, Chief of the Eight Immortals, I am only making a disguise for you, in case the Communists or the Japanese come and recruit statues for a bonfire." I was a good artist. With some of the gods, I glued on sheep's hair for beards, noodles for long hair, feathers for wings. In this way, Buddha became fat Jesus, the Goddess of Mercy was Mary of the Manger, the Three Pure Ones, boss gods of the Taoists, turned into the Three Wise Men, and the Eighteen Lohan of Buddha were converted to the Twelve Apostles with six sons. Any small figures in hell were promoted to angels. The following year, Miss Grutoff decided we should also paint the little Buddha carvings throughout the compound. There were hundreds of those.

  The year after that, Miss Grutoff found the musty storeroom where I had gone to reread Precious Auntie's pages. The statues there, Sister Yu said, were for a Taoist diorama that showed what would happen if a person went to the underworld. There were dozens of figures, very realistic and scary to see. One was a kneeling man with horned animals feeding on his entrails. Three figures dangled from a pole like pigs on a spit. Four people sat in a vat of boiling oil. And there were giant devils, red-faced with pointed skulls, ordering the dead to go into battle. When we finished painting those, we had a complete nativity scene, Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, Father Joseph, everybody including Santa Claus. Even so, the mouths on the statues were still wide open in screaming fright. No matter what Miss Grutoff said, most of the girls did not think the nativity statues were singing "Joy to the World."

  After we finished with those statues, there were no more idols to be changed to angels. By then, I too had changed, from tutor to teacher, from lonely girl to one who was in love with Teacher Pan's son.

  The way we started was this.

  Every year, during the small New Year, the students painted good-luck banners for the temple fair in the Mouth of the Mountain. And so I was with Teacher Pan and our students in the classroom one day, painting the long red strips, which covered the desks and floors.

  As usual, Kai Jing came by on his bicycle to take his father to his rooms. The ground at Dragon Bone Hill was frozen hard, so most of Kai Jing's time was devoted to drawing diagrams, writing reports, and making casts of different spots where bones were found. On this particular day, Kai Jing came early, and Teacher Pan was not ready to leave. So Kai Jing offered to help us paint banners. He stood next to me at my table. I was glad for the extra hands.

  But then I noticed what he was doing. Whatever character or figure I drew, he would make the same. If I drew "fortune," he drew "fortune." If I wrote "abundance," he wrote "abundance." If I painted "all that you wish," he painted the same, stroke by stroke. He used almost the same rhythm, so that we were like two people performing a dance. That was the beginning of our love, the same curve, the same dot, the same lifting of the brush as our breath filled as one.

  A few days later, the students and I took the banners to the fair. Kai Jing accompanied me, walking alongside, talking quietly. He held a little book of brush paintings done on mulberry paper. On the cover it said: The Four Manifestations of Beauty. "Would you like to know what's inside?" he asked. I nodded. Anyone who overheard us would have thought we were speaking of school lessons. But really, he was speaking of love.

  He turned the page. "With any form of beauty, there are four levels of ability. This is true of painting, calligraphy, literature, music, dance. The first level is Competent." We were looking at a page that showed two identical renderings of a bamboo grove, a typical painting, well done, realistic, interesting in the detail of double lines, conveying a sense of strength and longevity. "Competence," he went on, "is the ability to draw the same thing over and over in the same strokes, with the same force, the same rhythm, the same trueness. This kind of beauty, however, is ordinary.

  "The second level," Kai Jing continued, "is Magnificent." We looked together at another painting, of several stalks of bamboo. "This one goes beyond skill," he said. "Its beauty is unique. And yet it is simpler, with less emphasis on the stalk and more on the leaves. It conveys both strength and solitude. The lesser painter would be able to capture one quality but not the other."

  He turned the page. This painting was of a single stalk of bamboo. "The third level is Divine," he said. "The leaves now are shadows blown by an invisible wind, and the stalk is there mostly by suggestion of what is missing. And yet the shadows are more alive than the original leaves that obscured the light. A person seeing this would be wordless to describe how this is done. Try as he might, the same painter could never again capture the feeling of this painting, only a shadow of the shadow."

  "How could beauty be more than divine?" I murmured, knowing I would soon learn the answer.

  "The fourth level," Kai Jing said, "is greater than this, and it is within each mortal's nature to find it. We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again."

  He turned the page. On the next was an oval. "This painting is called Inside the Middle of a Bamboo Stalk. The oval is what you see if you are inside looking up or looking down. It is the simplicity of being within, no reason or explanation for being there. It is the natural wonder that anything exists in relation to another, an inky oval to a page of white paper, a person to a bamboo stalk, the viewer to the painting."

  Kai Jing was quiet for a long time. "This fourth level is called Effortless," he said at last. He put the booklet back in his jacket and looked at me thoughtfully. "Recently I have felt this beauty of Effortlessness in all things," he said. "How about you?"

  "It's the same for me," I said, and began to cry.

  For we both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bent toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other an
d kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.

  EFFORTLESS

  The first night Kai Jing and I tried forbidden joy, it was summertime, a bright-moon night. We had slipped into a dark storage room at the abandoned end of a corridor, far from the eyes and ears of others. I had no shame, no guilty feelings. I felt wild and new, as though I could swim the heavens and fly through waves. And if this was bad fate, let it be. I was the daughter of Precious Auntie, a woman who also could not control her desires, who then gave birth to me. How could this be bad when the skin on Kai Jing's back was so smooth, so warm, so fragrant? Was it also fate to feel his lips on my neck? When he unbuttoned the back of my blouse and it fell to the floor, I was ruined, and I was glad. Then the rest of my clothing slipped off, piece by piece, and I felt I was growing lighter and darker. He and I were two shadows, black and airy, folding and blending, weak yet fierce, weightless, mindless of others—until I opened my eyes and saw that a dozen people were watching us.

  Kai Jing laughed. "No, no, they're not real." He tapped one. They were the painted-over theater of hell, now converted to Merry Christmas.

  "They're like an audience at a bad opera," I said, "not so pleased." There was Mother Mary with a screaming mouth, the sheepherders with pointed heads, and Baby Jesus, whose eyes stuck out like a frog's. Kai Jing draped my blouse over the head of Mary. He covered Joseph with my skirt, while Baby Jesus received my slip. Then Kai Jing put his own clothes over the Three Wise Men and turned the sheepherders around. When all their eyes faced the wall, Kai Jing guided me to lie down in the straw, and once more we became shadows.

  But what happened after that was not like a poem or a painting of the fourth level. We were not like nature, as beautifully harmonious as a leafy tree against the sky. We had expected all these things. But the straw made us itch and the floor stank of urine. A rat stumbled out of its nest, and this caused Kai Jing to roll off me and knock Baby Jesus out of his crib. The frog-eyed monster lay next to us, as if it were our love child. Then Kai Jing stood up and lighted a match, searching for the rat. And when I looked at Kai Jing's private parts, I saw he was no longer possessed. I also saw he had ticks on his thigh. A moment later, he pointed out three on my bottom. I jumped up and was dancing to shake them off. I had to try very hard not to laugh and cry as Kai Jing turned me around and inspected me, then burned off the ticks with the tip of a match. When I took back my blouse from Mary's head, she looked glad that I was ashamed, even though we had not fulfilled our desires.

  As we quickly dressed, Kai Jing and I were too embarrassed to talk. He also said nothing as he walked me to my room. But at the door, he told me, "I'm sorry. I should have controlled myself." My heart hurt. I didn't want to hear his apology, his regrets. I heard him add: "I should have waited until we're married." And then I gasped and began to cry, and he embraced me and uttered promises that we would be lovers for ten thousand lifetimes, and I vowed the same, until we heard a loud "Shhhh!" Even after we quieted, Sister Yu, whose room was next to mine, kept grumbling: "No consideration for others. Worse than roosters . . ."

  The next morning, I felt like a different person, happy but also worried. Sister Yu had once said that you could tell which girls in the lanes were prostitutes because they had eyes like chickens. What she meant by this, I didn't know. Did the eyes become redder or smaller? Would others see in my eyes that I had a new kind of knowledge? When I arrived in the main hall for breakfast, I saw that almost everyone was there, gathered in a circle, talking in serious voices. As I walked in, it seemed that all the teachers lifted their eyes to stare at me, shocked and sad. Then Kai Jing shook his head. "Bad news," he said, and the blood drained from my limbs so that even if I had wanted to run away I was too weak to do so. Would I be kicked out? Had Kai Jing's father refused to let him marry me? But how did they know? Who told? Who saw? Who heard? Kai Jing pointed to the shortwave radio that belonged to the scientists, and the others turned back to listen. And I wondered: Now the radio is announcing what we did? In English?

  When Kai Jing finally told me, I didn't have even one moment to be relieved that the bad news was not about me. "The Japanese attacked last night," he said, "close to Peking, and everyone is saying it is war for sure."

  Maku polo this, maku polo that, I heard the radio voice say. I asked: "What is this maku thing?"

  Sister Yu said, "The Maku Polo Bridge. The island dwarves have captured it." I was surprised to hear her use this slur for the Japanese. In the school, she was the one who taught the girls not to use bad names, even for those we hated. Sister Yu went on: "Shot their rifles in the air—just for practice, they said. So our army shot back to teach the liars a lesson. And now one of the dwarves is missing. Probably the coward ran away, but the Japanese are saying one missing man is enough reason to declare war." With Sister Yu translating the English into Chinese, it was hard to tell which was the news and which were her opinions.

  "This Maku Polo Bridge," I said, "how far away is it?"

  "North of here, in Wanping," Miss Grutoff said, "close to the railway station."

  "But that's the Reed Moat Bridge, forty-six kilometers from my village," I said. "When did they start calling it something else?"

  "More than six hundred years ago," Miss Grutoff said, "when Marco Polo first admired it." And as everyone continued to talk about the war, I was wondering why no one in our village knew the bridge had changed its name so long before. "Which way are the Japanese advancing?" I asked. "North to Peking or south to here?"

  Everyone stopped talking at once. A woman stood in the doorway. With the bright sun behind her, she was a shadow, and I could not make out who she was, only that she wore a dress. "Is Liu LuLing still living here?" I heard her say. I squinted. Who was asking this? I was already confused about so many things, now this as well. As I walked toward her, my confusion turned into a guess, then the guess into a certainty. Precious Auntie. I had often dreamed that her ghost would come back. As in dreams, she could talk and her face was whole, and as in dreams, I rushed toward her. And at last, this time she did not push me away. She threw open her arms and cried: "So you still recognize your own sister!"

  It was GaoLing. We spun each other around, danced and slapped each other's arms, taking turns to cry, "Look at you." I had not heard from her since she wrote me the letter four or five years before. In minutes, we were treating each other like sisters once again. "What's happened to your hair?" I joked, grabbing her messy curls. "Was it an accident, or did you do this on purpose?"

  "Do you like it?"

  "Not bad. You look modern, no longer the country girl."

  "No flies circling your head, either. I heard rumors you're now a high-and-mighty intellectual."

  "Only a teacher. And you, are you still—"

  "Wife to Chang Fu Nan. Six years already, hard to believe."

  "But what's happened to you? You look terrible."

  "I haven't eaten since yesterday."

  I jumped up, went to the kitchen, and brought her back a bowl of millet porridge, some pickles and steamed peanuts, and little cold dishes. We sat in a corner of the hall, away from news of the war, she eating with much noise and speed. "We've been living in Peking, Fu Nan and I, no children," she said between thick mouthfuls. "We have the back rooms of the ink shop. Everything's been rebuilt. Did I tell you this in my letter?"

  "Some."

  "Then you know that the Changs own the business, our family owns only the debt. Father and our uncles are back in Immortal Heart village, churning out ink till it sweats from their pores. And now that they're home all the time, they have bad tempers and argue constantly among themselves about who is to blame for this, that, and the weather."

  "What about First Brother and Second Brother?" I asked. "Home, too?"

  "The Nationalists conscripted First Brother five years ago. All the boys his age had to go. And Second Brother ran off to join the Communists two years after that. Big Uncle's sons followed, then Big Uncle cursed that all three should never come back. M
other didn't speak to him until the United Front was formed and Uncle apologized, saying now it didn't matter which side they were on."

  "And Mother, how's her health?"

  "Remember how black her hair used to be? Now it's like an old man's beard, white and wiry. She no longer dyes it."

  "What? I thought it was naturally black from working with the ink."

  "Don't be stupid. They all dyed their hair—Great-Granny, the aunts. But these days Mother doesn't care what she looks like. She claims she hasn't slept in two years. She's convinced the tenants are stealing from us at night and rearranging the furniture. And she also believes Great-Granny's ghost has returned to the latrine. She hasn't had a bowel movement bigger than a bean sprout in months. The shit's hardened to mortar, she says, that's why she's distended like a summer gourd."

  "This is terrible to hear." Though this was the same Mother who had kicked me out, I took no pleasure in hearing about her difficulties. Perhaps a little bit of me still thought of Mother and Father as my parents.

  "What about Precious Auntie's ghost? Did she ever come back?"

  "Not a wail or a whimper, which is strange, since that Catcher of Ghosts turned out to be a fake, not a monk at all. He had a wife and three brats, one of whom was the assistant. They were using the same vinegar jar to catch other ghosts, just opened the lid, sealed it up, over and over. They caught a lot of foolish customers that way. When Father heard this, he wanted to stuff the crook in the jar and plug it up with pony dung. I said to him, 'If Precious Auntie's ghost never came back, what does it matter?' But ever since, he's been muttering about the two ingots he lost, tallying their worth, while according to him was enough to purchase the sky."