by Amy Tan
In recent weeks, LuLing had related several times how she received the apple-green-jade ring that Ruth had retrieved from the La-Z-Boy. "We went to a dance hall, you and I," she said in Chinese. "We came down the stairs and you introduced me to Edwin. His eyes fell on mine and did not turn away for a long time. I saw you smile and then you disappeared. That was naughty of you. I knew what you were thinking! When he asked me to marry, he gave me the ring." Ruth guessed that GaoLing had been the person who did the introductions.
Ruth now heard LuLing speaking in Mandarin to Art: "My mother found one of these. It was carved with words of beauty. She gave it to me when she was sure I would not forget what was important. I never wanted to lose it." Art nodded as if he understood what she had said, and then LuLing translated into English for Mr. Tang: "I telling him, this bone my mother give me one."
"Very meaningful," he said, "especially since your mother was the daughter of a bone doctor."
"Famous," LuLing said.
Mr. Tang nodded as if he too remembered. "Everyone from the villages all around came to him. And your father went for a broken foot. His horse stepped on him. That's how he met your mother. Because of that horse."
LuLing went blank-eyed. Ruth was afraid her mother was going to cry. But instead, LuLing brightened and said, "Liu Xing. He call her that. My mother say he write love poem about this."
Art looked at Ruth, waiting for her to acknowledge whether this was true. He had read some of the translation of LuLing's memoir, but could not connect the Chinese name to its referent. "It means 'shooting star,'" Ruth whispered. "I'll explain later." To LuLing she said, "And what was your mother's family name?" Ruth knew it was a risk to bring this up, but her mother's mind had entered the territory of names. Perhaps others were there, like markers, waiting to be retrieved.
Her mother hesitated only a moment before answering: "Family name Gu." She was looking sternly at Ruth. "I tell you so many time, you don't remember? Her father Dr. Gu. She Gu doctor daughter."
Ruth wanted to shout for joy, but the next instant she realized her mother had said the Chinese word for 'bone.' Dr. Gu, Dr. Bone, bone doctor. Art's eyebrows were raised, in expectation that the long-lost family identity had been found. "I'll explain later," Ruth said again, but this time her voice was listless. "Oh."
Mr. Tang traced characters in the air. "Gu, like this? Or this?" Her mother put on a worried face. "I don't remember." "I don't either," Mr. Tang said quickly. "Oh well, doesn't matter." Art changed the subject. "What's the writing on the oracle bone?" "They're the questions the emperors asked the gods," Mr. Tang replied. "What's the weather going to be like tomorrow, who's going to win the war, when should the crops be planted. Kind of like the six-o'clock news, only they wanted the report ahead of time." "And were the answers right?"
"Who knows? They're the cracks you see next to the black spots. The diviners of the bones used a heated nail to crack the bone. It actually made a sound—pwak! They interpreted the cracks as the answers from heaven. I'm sure the more successful diviners were skilled at saying what the emperors wanted to hear."
"What a great linguistic puzzle," Art said.
Ruth thought of the sand tray she and her mother used over the years. She too had tried to guess what might put her mother at ease, the words that would placate but not be readily detected as fraudulent. At times she had made up the answers to suit herself. But on other occasions, she really had tried to write what her mother needed to hear. Words of comfort, saying that her husband missed her, that Precious Auntie was not angry.
"Speaking of puzzle," Ruth said, "the other day you mentioned that no one ever found the bones of Peking Man."
LuLing perked up. "Not just man, woman too."
"You're right, Mom—Peking Woman. I wonder what happened to her? Were the bones crushed on the train tracks on the way to Tianjin? Or did they sink with the boat?"
"If the bones are still around," Mr. Tang replied, "no one's saying. Oh, every few years you read a story in the paper. Someone dies, the wife of an American soldier, a former Japanese officer, an archaeologist in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And as the story goes, bones were found in a wooden trunk, just like the trunks used to pack the bones back in 1941. Then the rumors leak out that these are the bones of Peking Man. Arrangements are made, ransoms are paid, or what have you. But the bones turn out to be oxtails. Or they are casts of the original. Or they disappear before they can be examined. In one story, the person who had stolen the bones was taking them to an island to sell to a dealer, and the plane went down in the ocean."
Ruth thought about the curse of ghosts who were angry that their bones were separated from the rest of their mortal bodies. "What do you believe?"
"I don't know. So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life." Mr. Tang winked at LuLing.
"Wonderful," she echoed.
He looked at his watch. "How about a wonderful lunch?"
"Wonderful," they said.
As Ruth and Art lay in bed that night, she pondered aloud over Mr. Tang's romantic interest in her mother. "I can understand that he's intrigued with her since he's done this work on her memoir. But he's a man who's into culture, music, poetry. She can't keep up, and she's only going to get worse. She might not even know who he is after a while."
"He's been in love with her since she was a little girl," Art said. "She's not just a source of temporary companionship. He loves everything about her, and that includes who she was, who she is, who she will be. He knows more about her than most couples who are married." He drew Ruth closer to him. "Actually, I'm hoping we might have that. A commitment through time, past, present, future . . . marriage."
Ruth held her breath. She had pushed the idea out of her head for so long she still felt it was taboo, dangerous.
"I've tried to legally bind you in the past with ownership in the house, which you've yet to take."
That's what he had meant by a percentage interest in the house? She was baffled by the mechanisms of her own defenses.
"It's just an idea," Art said awkwardly. "No pressure. I just wanted to know what you might think."
She pressed closer and kissed his shoulder. "Wonderful," she answered.
The name, I know your mother's family name." GaoLing was calling Ruth with exciting news.
"Oh my God, what is it?"
"First you have to know what trouble I had trying to find out. After you asked me, I wrote Jiu Jiu in Beijing. He didn't know, but wrote back that he would ask a woman married to a cousin whose family still lives in the village where your grandmother was born. It took a while to sort out, because most people who would know are dead. But finally they tracked down an old woman whose grandfather was a traveling photographer. And she still had all his old glass plates. They were in a root cellar and luckily not too many were damaged. Her grandfather kept excellent records, dates, who paid what, the names of the people he photographed. Thousands of plates and photos. Anyway, the old lady remembered her grandfather showing her the photo of a girl who was quite beautiful. She had on a pretty cap, high-neck collar."
"The photo Mom has of Precious Auntie?"
"Must be the same. The old lady said it was sad, because soon after the photo was taken, the girl was scarred for life, the father was dead, the whole family destroyed. People in the village said the girl was jinxed from the beginning—"
Ruth couldn't stand it any longer. "What was the name?"
"Gu."
"Gu?" Ruth felt let down. It was the same mistake. " Gu is the word for 'bone,'" Ruth said. "She must have thought 'bone doctor' meant 'Dr. Bone.'"
"No, no," GaoLing said. "Gu as in 'gorge.' It's a different gu. It sounds the same as the bone gu, but it's written a different way. The third-tone gu can mean many things: 'old,' 'gorge,' 'bone,' also 'thigh,' 'blind,' 'grain,' 'merchant,' lots
of things. And the way 'bone' is written can also stand for 'character.' That's why we use that expression 'It's in your bones.' It means, 'That's your character.'"
Ruth had once thought that Chinese was limited in its sounds and thus confusing. It seemed to her now that its multiple meanings made it very rich. The blind bone doctor from the gorge repaired the thigh of the old grain merchant.
"You're sure it's Gu?"
"That's what was written on the photographic plate."
"Did it include her first name?"
"Liu Xin."
"Shooting Star?"
"That's liu xing, sounds almost the same, xing is 'star,' xin is 'truth.' Liu Xin means Remain True. But because the words sound similar, some people who didn't like her called her Liu Xing. The shooting star can have a bad meaning."
"Why?"
"It's confusing why. People think the broom star is very bad to see. That's the other kind, with the long, slow tail, the comes-around kind."
"Comet?"
"Yes, comet. Comet means a rare calamity will happen. But some people mix up the broom star with the shooting star, so even though the shooting star is not bad luck, people think it is. The idea is not so good either—burns up quick, one day here, one day gone, just like what happened to Precious Auntie."
Her mother had written about this, Ruth recalled, a story Precious Auntie told LuLing when she was small—how she looked up at the night sky, saw a shooting star, which then fell into her open mouth.
Ruth began to cry. Her grandmother had a name. Gu Liu Xin. She had existed. She still existed. Precious Auntie belonged to a family. LuLing belonged to that same family, and Ruth belonged to them both. The family name had been there all along, like a bone stuck in the crevices of a gorge. LuLing had divined it while looking at an oracle in the museum. And the given name had flashed before her as well for the briefest of moments, a shooting star that entered the earth's atmosphere, etching itself indelibly in Ruth's mind.
EPILOGUE
It is the twelfth of August and Ruth is in the Cubbyhole, silent. Foghorns blow in the night, welcoming ships into the bay.
Ruth still has her voice. Her ability to speak is not governed by curses or shooting stars or illness. She knows that for certain now. But she does not need to talk. She can write. Before, she never had a reason to write for herself, only for others. Now she has that reason.
The picture of her grandmother is in front of her. Ruth looks at it daily. Through it, she can see from the past clear into the present. Could her grandmother ever have imagined she would have a granddaughter like her—a woman who has a husband who loves her, two girls who adore her, a house she co-owns, dear friends, a life with only the usual worries about leaks and calories?
Ruth remembers how her mother used to talk of dying, by curse or her own hand. She never stopped feeling the urge, not until she began to lose her mind, the memory web that held her woes in place. And though her mother still remembers the past, she has begun to change it. She doesn't recount the sad parts. She only recalls being loved very, very much. She remembers that to Bao Bomu she was the reason for life itself.
The other day Ruth's mother called her. She sounded like her old self, scared and fretful. "Luyi," she said, and she spoke quickly in Chinese, "I'm worried that I did terrible things to you when you were a child, that I hurt you very much. But I can't remember what I did. . . ."
"There's nothing—" Ruth began.
"I just wanted to say that I hope you can forget just as I've forgotten. I hope you can forgive me, because if I hurt you, I'm sorry."
After they hung up, Ruth cried for an hour she was so happy. It was not too late for them to forgive each other and themselves.
As Ruth now stares at the photo, she thinks about her mother as a little girl, about her grandmother as a young woman. These are the women who shaped her life, who are in her bones. They caused her to question whether the order and disorder of her life were due to fate or luck, self-determination or the actions of others. They taught her to worry. But she has also learned that these warnings were passed down, not simply to scare her, but to force her to avoid their footsteps, to hope for something better. They wanted her to get rid of the curses.
In the Cubbyhole, Ruth returns to the past. The laptop becomes a sand tray. Ruth is six years old again, the same child, her broken arm healed, her other hand holding a chopstick, ready to divine the words. Bao Bomu comes, as always, and sits next to her. Her face is smooth, as beautiful as it is in the photo. She grinds an inkstick into an inkstone of duan.
"Think about your intentions," Bao Bomu says. "What is in your heart, what you want to put in others'." And side by side, Ruth and her grandmother begin. Words flow. They have become the same person, six years old, sixteen, forty-six, eighty-two. They write about what happened, why it happened, how they can make other things happen. They write stories of things that are but should not have been. They write about what could have been, what still might be. They write of a past that can be changed. After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember? They can choose not to hide it, to take what's broken, to feel the pain and know that it will heal. They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.
Ruth remembers this as she writes a story. It is for her grandmother, for herself, for the little girl who became her mother.
* * *
About the Author
Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which will be adapted as a PBS series for children. Tan was a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Tan, who has a master's degree in linguistics from San Jose State University, has worked as a language specialist to programs serving children with developmental disabilities. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.
A reading guide for this book is available at www.penguinputnam.com/guides.
Table Of Contents
· TRUTH
· PART ONE
o ONE
o TWO
o THREE
o FOUR
o FIVE
o SIX
o SEVEN
· PART TWO
o HEART
o CHANGE
o GHOST
o DESTINY
o EFFORTLESS
o CHARACTER
o FRAGRANCE
· PART THREE
o ONE
o TWO
o THREE
o EPILOGUE
· About the Author
Table of Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Table of Contents
TRUTH
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
HEART
CHANGE
GHOST
DESTINY
EFFORTLESS
CHARACTER
FRAGRANCE
EPILOGUE
About the Author