Part 1 (1/2)

The Wo Kingston

No Name Woman

”You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, ”what I am about to tell you In China your father had a sister who killed herself She jumped into the family well We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born

”In 1924 just a few days after our village celebrated seventeen hurry-up weddings-toman ent 'out on the road' would responsibly corandfather and his brothers and your aunt's new husband sailed for Arandfather's last trip Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye frouarded the stoays and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali, Hawaii 'We'll meet in California next year,' they said All of the at your aunt one day when she and I were dressing; I had not noticed before that she had such a protruding nant,' until she began to look like other pregnant wo and the white tops of her black pants showing She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years No one said anything We did not discuss it In early su after the tie had also been counting On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house Sohts, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds As the villagers closed in, we could see that some of them, probably men and wo hair hung it over their faces Women with short hair made it stand up on end Sos

”At first they threw an slaughtering our stock We could hear the anireat roar froht s; the villagers encircled us So like searchlights The hands flattened against the panes, fraers broke in the front and the back doors at the saainst them Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals They s a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in red arcs about her We stood together in the middle of our house, in the family hall with the pictures and tables of the ancestors around us, and looked straight ahead

”At that tis When the men came back, ould build two in a second courtyard The villagers pushed through both wings, even your grandparents' rooms, to find your aunt's, which was alsofor one of the younger farow They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her co them underfoot They tore her work fro fire and rolled the neeaving in it We could hear the the pots They overturned the great waist-high earthenware jugs; duck eggs, pickled fruits, vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents The old woh the air and loosed the spirits-of-the-broo,' they sobbed and scolded while they ruined our house

”When they left, they took sugar and oranges to bless themselves They cut pieces from the dead animals Some of them took bowls that were not broken and clothes that were not torn Afterept up the rice and sewed it back up into sacks But the save birth in the pigsty that night The nextwhen I went for the water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well

”Don't let your father know that I told you He denies her Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you Don't huotten as if you had never been born The villagers are watchful”

Whenever she had to warn us about life, row up on She tested our strength to establish realities Those in the eenerations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far froenerations have had to figure out how the invisible world the erants built around our childhoods fits in solid A their curses,them with crooked streets and false na as well, who, I suppose, threaten theht, always trying to name the unspeakable The Chinese I know hide their nauard their real names with silence

Chinese-As in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one fa with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

If I want to learn what clothes in, ”Remember Father's drowned-in-the-well sister?” I cannot ask that My mother has toldunless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the Gods

Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew high kites We children caht home from work and the American movie on New Year's Day-Oh, You Beautiful Doll with Betty Grable one year, and with Betty Grable one year, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon She Wore a Yellow Ribbon with John Wayne another year After the one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home with John Wayne another year After the one carnival ride each, we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk hoance Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the ear for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining-could such people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woh My aunt could not have been the lone ro for sex Women in the old China did not choose Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family

Perhaps she had encountered hihters-in-law collected fuel Or perhaps he first noticed her in the e housed no strangers She had to have dealings with hi field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore His demand must have surprised, then terrified her She obeyed him; she always did as she was told

When the fae to be her husband, she had stood tractably beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised before they met that she would be his forever She was lucky that he was her age and she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now The night she first saw him, he had sex with her Then he left for Aotten what he looked like When she tried to envision hiraph the

The other man was not, after all, ave orders: she followed ”If you tell your faain next week” No one talked sex, ever And sheif only she did not have to buy her oil froather wood in the sa as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained No drawn-out fear But women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes The fear did not stop but pernant” He organized the raid against her

On nights when my mother and father talked about their life back home, sometimes they mentioned an ”outcast table” whose business they still seeht In a commensal tradition, where food is precious, the powerful older peoplethem start separate new lives like the japanese, who could becoeishas, the Chinese fa on to the offenders and fed them leftovers My aunt must have lived in the same house as my parents and eaten at an outcast table My mother spoke about the raid as if she had seen it, when she and hter-in-law to a different household, should not have been living together at all Daughters-in-law lived with their husbands' parents, not their own; a synonyhter-in-law” Her husband's parents could have sold her, ed her, stoned her But they had sent her back to her own races not told ers

She was the only daughter; her four brothers ith her father, husband, and uncles ”out on the road” and for so the faest, ave their daughter away to her husband's family, they had dispensed all the adventure and all the property They expected her alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brothers, now a the barbarians, could fumble without detection The heavy, deep-rooted woainst the flood, safe for returning But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space

The work of preservation deuts not be turned into action Just watch their passing like cherry blossoht in a slow life, let drearow and fade and after some months or years went tohat persisted Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her desires delicate, wire and bone She looked at a man because she liked the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, or she liked the question-ht at the hip For warm eyes or a soft voice or a sloalk-that's all-a few hairs, a line, a brightness, a sound, a pace, she gave up family She offered us up for a chartail that didn't toss when the wind died Why, the wrong lighting could erase the dearest thing about him

It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoy coh I don't know any wo into ivesin love, she often worked at herself in theat the colors and shapes that would interest hiht combination She wanted him to look back

On a farm near the sea, a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity All the married women blunt-cut their hair in flaps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns No nonsense Neither style blew easily into heart-catching tangles And at their weddings they displayed the hair for the last time ”It brushed the backs of my knees,” my mother tells me ”It was braided, and even so, it brushed the backs of my knees”

At the mirror my aunt combed individuality into her bob A bun could have been contrived to escape into black strea in the wind or in quiet wisps about her face, but only the older women in our picture album wear buns She brushed her hair back fro the flaps behind her ears She looped a piece of thread, knotted into a circle between her index fingers and thumbs, and ran the double strand across her forehead When she closed her fingers as if she were ether catching the little hairs Then she pulled the thread away fro froers, she cleaned the thread, then rolled it along her hairline and the tops of her eyebrows My mother did the same to me and my sisters and herself I used to believe that the expression ”caught by the short hairs”It especially hurt at the temples, but my mother said ere lucky we didn't have to have our feet bound ere seven Sisters used to sit on their beds and cry together, she said, as their es for a few ush back into their veins I hope that the man my aunt loved appreciated a smooth brow, that he wasn't just a tits-and-ass man

Once my aunt found a freckle on her chin, at a spot that the al it out with a hot needle and washed the wound with peroxide

More attention to her looks than these pullings of hairs and pickings at spots would have caused gossip aood clothes, and they wore good clothes for feasting the new seasons But since a wos, my aunt rarely found an occasion to look her best Woreat sea snails-the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs The Chinese did not adht Still thereof beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched

Such coh for my aunt She dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of New Year's, the tie visits, h she cursed the year, the fae, and herself

Even as her hair lured her imminent lover, many other men looked at her Uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers would have looked, too, had they been ho their curiosity, and they left, fearful that their glances, like a field of nesting birds, ht Poverty hurt, and that was their first reason for leaving But another, final reason for leaving the crowded house was the never-said

She hter, spoiled andbecause of the affection the family lavished on her When her husband left, they welcomed the chance to take her back frohter for just a while longer There are stories that randfather was different from other people, ”crazy ever since the little jap bayoneted him in the head” He used to put his naked penis on the dinner table, laughing And one day he brought horeatcoat He had traded one of his sons, probably randhter of his own, he doted on her They must have all loved her, except perhaps my father, the only brother who never went back to China, having once been traded for a girl

Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to efface their sexual color and present plainhair and eyes, a senerations living under one roof To focus blurs, people shouted face to face and yelled frorants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to Ae where they called their friendshi+ps out across the fields I have not been able to stop my mother's screa erect (knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-fe in an inaudible voice, I have tried to turn myself American-feminine Chinese communication was loud, public Only sick people had to whisper But at the dinner table, where the family members came nearest one another, no one could talk, not the outcasts nor any eaters Every word that falls froave and accepted food with both hands A preoccupied child who took his boith one hand got a sideways glare A complete moment of total attention is due everyone alike Children and lovers have no singularity here, but my aunt used a secret voice, a separate attentiveness

She kept the ; she did not accuse him that he be punished with her To save her inseave silent birth

He may have been somebody in her own household, but intercourse with a man outside the fae were kinsmen, and the titles shouted in loud country voices never let kinshi+p be forgotten Anydistance would have been neutralized as a lover-”brother,” ”younger brother,” ”older brother”-one hundred and fifteen relationshi+p titles Parents researched birth charts probably not so ood fortune as to circumvent incest in a population that has but one hundred surnaht million relatives How useless then sexual erous

As if it came from an atavism deeper than fear, I used to add ”brother” silently to boys' names It hexed the boys, ould or would not ask me to dance, andof benevolence as girls

But, of course, I hexed , and shouted out across libraries, ”Hey, you! Love h, how to make attraction selective, how to control its direction and nitude If I made myself American-pretty so that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with ro, and japanese boys-would too Sisterliness, dignified and honorable, made much more sense

Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationshi+ps a people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another fro the very poor and the wealthy, brothers married their adopted sisters, like doves Our fa adult brides' prices and providing dowries so that their sons and daughters could ers into friendly relatives-a nation of siblings

In the village structure, spirits shi+ the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibriu up into violence could open up a black hole, a ers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she hadcouples snapped off the future, which was to be eers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from thee grain yields and peace, whenbuilt on ht have escaped such severe punish in dry soil-had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-ues, ith the japanese, floods My Chinese brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness Adultery, perhaps only a e needed food

The round raduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round s and rice bowls-these talismans had lost their power to warn this fa the descent line by having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the faers ca a broken house The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already hare, that waves of consequences would return unpredictably, souise, as now, to hurt her This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby Awaken her to the inexorable People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability Deny accidents and wrest fault froers left, their lanterns now scattering in various directions toward home, the fa to die Death is co Look what you've done You've killed us Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You've never been born” She ran out into the fields, far enough froer hear their voices, and pressed herself against the earth, her own land no ht that she had been hurt Her body seized together ”They've hurt all, and it will kill ainst the earth, her body convulsed and then relaxed She turned on her back, lay on the ground The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her coht dot in blackness, without hooraphobia rose in her, speeding higher and higher, bigger and bigger; she would not be able to contain it; there would no end to fear

Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her body This pain chilled her-a cold, steady kind of surface pain Inside, spasmodically, the other pain, the pain of the child, heated her For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space Sometimes a vision of normal coa their elders' backs She saw thes the rice shoots came up When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart Black space opened

She got to her feet to fight better and resties to fool the jealous, pain-dealing Gods, who do not snatch piglets Before the next spassty, each step a rushi+ng out into emptiness She cliood to have a fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone

Laboring, this worowth that sickened her every day, expelled it at last She reached down to touch the hot, wet,huers, toes, nails, nose She pulled it up on to her belly, and it lay curled there, butt in the air, feet precisely tucked one under the other She opened her loose shi+rt and buttoned the child inside After resting, it squirmed and thrashed and she pushed it up to her breast It turned its head this way and that until it found her nipple There, itnoises She clenched her teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a piglet, a little dog

She sty as a last act of responsibility: she would protect this child as she had protected its father It would look after her soul, leaving supplies on her grave But hoould this tiny child without farave when there would be no marker for her anywhere, neither in the earth nor the faive her a family hall name She had taken the child with her into the wastes At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the faht could close A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose At dawn the villagers on their way to the fields would stand around the fence and look