Part 1 (2/2)
Full of host slept When it awoke, she hardened her breasts against theshe picked up the baby and walked to the well
Carrying the baby to the well shows loving Otherwise abandon it Turn its face into theIt was probably a girl; there is soiveness for boys
”Don't tell anyone you had an aunt Your father does not want to hear her name She has never been born” I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that ”aunt” would do ht that rants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their na ould incite the kinspeople even here But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment And I have
In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for details nor said my aunt's name; I do not know it People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worshi+p The real punishers, but the fa her Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food frohosts, snatch and steal it froifts She would have to fight the ghosts htful citizens leave to decoy her away froe and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed At peace, they could act like Gods, not ghosts, their descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity-essences delivered up in s from each rice bowl In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people outside the faive our paper replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they ry Goods are not distributed evenly ahost drawn to lect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes I do not think she alwayson her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute
White Tigers
When Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves We could be heroines, soot even with anybody who hurt her faerous that they had to have their feet bound It was a woo She was already an expert pole fighter, daughter of a teacher trained at the Shao-lin tewhen a white crane alighted outside herShe teased it with her pole, which it pushed aside with a soft brush of its wing Amazed, she dashed outside and tried to knock the crane off its perch It snapped her pole in two Recognizing the presence of great power, she asked the spirit of the white crane if it would teach her to fight It answered with a cry that white crane boxers iuided her boxing for ave the world a new martial art
This was one of the tamer, more modern stories, mere introduction My h woods and palaces for years Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreaan, her voice the voice of the heroines in ht, ent to the movies at the Confucius Church We saomen jump over houses fro start
At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, rew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followedabout how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive frootten this chant that was once iven me by my mother, who row up a wife and a slave, but she taught row up a warrior woman
The call would cos it looks like the ideograph for ”hus The bird would cross the sun and lift into the raph ” the irl of seven the day I followed the bird away into the mountains The brambles would tear off ers, but I would keep clio around and around the tallestever upward I would drink froo so high the plants would change, and the river that flows past the village would becoht where the bird used to disappear, the clouds would gray the world like an ink wash
Even when I got used to that gray, I would only see peaks as if shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky There would be just two black strokes-the bird Inside the clouds-inside the dragon's breath-I would not kno many hours or days passed Suddenly, without noise, I would break clear into a yelloorld New trees would lean toward e, it would have vanished under the clouds
The bird, now gold so close to the sun, would come to rest on the thatch of a hut, which, until the bird's two feet touched it, was caed as part of the mountainside
The door opened, and an oldbowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches
”Have you eaten rice today, little girl?” they greeted me
”Yes, I have,” I said out of politeness ”Thank you”
(”No, I haven't,” I would have said in real life,so much ”I'm starved Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies”) ”We were about to sit down to another meal,” the old woman said ”Why don't you eat with us?”
They just happened to be bringing three rice bowls and three pairs of silver chopsticks out to the plank table under the pines They gave h they were older than I, but I poured for them The teapot and the rice pot seemed bottomless, but perhaps not; the old couple ate very little except for peaches
When the s, and blue people standing, the old couple askedway down in the ghostly dark and decided yes The inside of the hut seee as the outdoors Pine needles covered the floor in thick patterns; soreen, and brown pine needles according to age When I stepped carelessly and mussed a line, my feet kicked up new blends of earth colors, but the old htly that their feet never stirred the designs by a needle
A rock grew in the middle of the house, and that was their table The benches were fallen trees Ferns and shade flowers grew out of one wall, the mountainside itself The old couple tucked me into a bed just my width ”Breathe evenly, or you'll lose your balance and fall out,” said the wo stuffed with feathers and herbs ”Opera singers, who begin their training at age five, sleep in beds like this” Then the two of theh theI could see them pull on a rope looped over a branch The rope was tied to the roof, and the roof opened up like a basket lid I would sleep with the moon and the stars I did not see whether the old people slept, so quickly did I drop off, but they would be there waking irl, you have now spent alht with us,” the old woht I could see her earlobes pierced with gold ”Do you think you can bear to stay with us for fifteen years? We can train you to become a warrior”
”What about my mother and father?” I asked
The oldacross his back He lifted the lid by its ste in the water ”Ah, there,” he said
At first I saw only water so clear it ourd On the surface, I saw only my own round reflection The old ourd with his thuave it a shake As the water shook, then settled, the colors and lights shi+ I could see around ourd werethe sky, which here I was ”It has happened already, then,” I could hear my mother say ”I didn't expect it so soon” ”You knew from her birth that she would be taken,” my father answered ”We'll have to harvest potatoes without her help this year,” my mother said, and they turned away toward the fields, straw baskets in their arain ”Mama Papa,” I called, but they were in the valley and could not hear me
”What do you want to do?” the old o pull sweet potatoes, or you can stay with us and learn how to fight barbarians and bandits”
”You can avenge your village,” said the old woman ”You can recapture the harvests the thieves have taken You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness”
”I'll stay with you,” I said
So the hut becae the pine needles by hand She opened the roof; an autumn ould coreen strands, yellow strands The old wo ht, nature certainly works differently onyou have to learn,” the old woman told me, ”is how to be quiet” They left me by streams to watch for anio without water”
When I could kneel all day withoutbecas at the hem of my shi+rt and then bend their tails in a celebration dance At night, the mice and toads looked at me, their eyes quick stars and slow stars Not once would I see a three-legged toad, though; you need strings of cash to bait thean at dawn and ended at sunset so that I could watch our shadows grow and shrink and grow again, rooted to the earth I learned to ers, hands, feet, head, and entire body in circles I walked putting heel down first, toes pointing outward thirty to forty degrees, raph ”hu into the slow, measured ”square step,” the powerful walk into battle After five yearsthat I could control even the dilations of the pupils inside my irises I could copy owls and bats, the words for ”bat” and ”blessing” homonyms After six years the deer let me run beside them I could ju like askill and a fighting skill a warrior can use When birds alighted on ive them no base from which to fly away
But I could not fly like the bird that ledthe seventh year (I would be fourteen), the two old people led ers They held me by either elbow and shouted intooff a cliff at the edge of ainst a wall, ran faster A wind buoyed me up over the roots, the rocks, the little hills We reached the tiger place in no time-a mountain peak three feet three from the sky We had to bend over
The old people waved once, slid down the ood with the bow and arrow, took theourd I would have to survive bare-handed Snow lay on the ground, and snow fell in loose gusts-another way the dragon breathes I walked in the direction from which we had come, and when I reached the timberline, I collected wood broken from the cherry tree, the peony, and the walnut, which is the tree of life Fire, the old people had taught row red flowers or red berries in the spring or whose leaves turn red in the fall I took the wood from the protected spots beneath the trees and wrapped it in ht have co one or two nuts at each place These I also wrapped in my scarf It is possible, the old people said, for a hu to live for fifty days on water I would save the roots and nuts for hard cliency should I not find the hut This tiht I burned half of the wood and slept curled against theon the other side of the fire, but I could not distinguish the rose perfectly I hurried along, again collecting wood and edibles I ate nothing and only drank the snow ifts, the fasting so easy to do, I so shtat the nuts and dry roots Instead of walking steadily on or even eating, I faded into dreams about the otten That night I burned upmy death-if not death here, then death someday The moon aniiven up the habits of a carnivore since living with the old people I would not trap the ed just outside the fire
On the fourth and fifth days, er, I saw deer and used their trails when our ways coincided Where the deer nibbled, I gathered the fungus, the fungus of immortality
At noon on the tenth day I packed snohite as rice, into the worn center of a rock pointed out to er of ice, and around the rock I built a fire In the warus of immortality For variety I ate a quarter of the nuts and roots raw Oh, green joyous rush inside my mouth, my head, my stomach, my toes, my soul-the bestlong distances without hindrance, er stopping to collect it I had walked into dead land Here even the snow stopped I did not go back to the richer areas, where I could not stay anyway, but, resolving to fast until I got halfway to the next woods, I started across the dry rocks Heavily weighed down by the wood on ly, I had burned al it
Somewhere in the dead land I lost count of the days It see forever; life had never been different from this An old man and an old woman were help I had only wished for I was fourteen years old and lost fro in circles Hadn't I been already found by the old people? Or was that yet to come? I wanted my mother and father The old man and old woer
One nightfall I ate the last of ood fire I stared into the fla e looking through water into fire and seeing e and warm
A white rabbit hopped beside ht it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky The rabbit and I studied each other Rabbits taste like chickens My ht s, then skin theht to be an animal,” I said ”So you want some fire too, do you? Let me put on another branch, then” I would not hit it with the branch I had learned from rabbits to kick backward Perhaps this one was sick because normally the anih, however, looking atup to the fire But it did not stop when it got to the edge It turned its face once toward me, then jumped into the fire The fire went down for ain surprise, then the flaain, I saw the rabbit had turned intothe rabbit had sacrificed itself for ift of h trees hour after hour-and I finally reached trees after the dead land-branches cross out everything, no relief whichever way your head turns until your eyes start to invent new sights Hunger also changes the world-when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing I sao peoplethe earth's dances They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth's turning They were light; they were old-Chinese lion dancers, African lion dancers into Indian bells, Hindu Indian, Aold tassles that fanned into two royal capes that softened into lions' fur Manes grew tall into feathers that shone-becaht rays Then the dancers danced the future-a machine-future-in clothes I had never seen before I a the centuries pass inand fixed like the North Star And I understand hoorking and hoeing are dancing; how peasant clothes are golden, as king's clothes are golden; how one of the dancers is always a row bigger and bigger, so bright All light They are tall angels in ts They have high white wings on their backs Perhaps there are infinite angels; perhaps I see two angels in their consecutive htness and coverso ithout a blink When I put nize the old browntoward me out of the pine forest
It would seem that this small crack in the ic, as by hunger Afterward, whenever I did not eat for long, as during famine or battle, I could stare at ordinary people and see their light and gold I could see their dance When I get hungry enough, then killing and falling are dancing too
The old people fed etable soup Then they asked me to talk-story about what happened in the ers had stalked ht therandparents had coh the forests I had ht ration: one does not have to beco-as in our own huetable soup into people too That o to sleep, and toon lessons”
”One ,” I wanted to say ”I saw you and how old you really are” But I was already asleep; it came out only a murmur I would want to tell them about that last moment of my journey; but it was only onewould keep tillBesides, the two people must already know In the next years, when I suddenly caht them out of the corners ofblack hair, and she, as a beautiful young wo she dressed like a bride; she wore juniper leaves in her hair and a black embroidered jacket I learned to shoot accurately becausean arrow, there to the side I would gli woain By this tiuessed from their manner that the old woman was to the old man a sister or a friend rather than a wife
After I returned froon ways, which took another eight years Copying the tigers, their stalking kill and their anger, had been a wild, bloodthirsty joy Tigers are easy to find, but I needed adult wisdoon from the parts you can see and touch,” the old people would say Unlike tigers, dragons are so immense, I would never see one in its entirety But I could explore the mountains, which are the top of its head ”These mountains are also like like the tops of the tops of other other dragons' heads,” the old people would tellthe slopes, I could understand that I was a bug riding on a dragon's forehead as it roah space, its speed so different froon solid and ion's veins and muscles; the minerals, its teeth and bones I could touch the stones the old woman wore-its bone marrow I had worked the soil, which is its flesh, and harvested the plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs I could listen to its voice in the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the clouds Its tongue is the lightning And the red that the lightning gives to the world is strong and lucky-in blood, poppies, roses, rubies, the red feathers of birds, the red carp, the cherry tree, the peony, the line alongside the turtle's eyes and the on awakes, I watched its turnings in the rivers dragons' heads,” the old people would tellthe slopes, I could understand that I was a bug riding on a dragon's forehead as it roah space, its speed so different froon solid and ion's veins and muscles; the minerals, its teeth and bones I could touch the stones the old woman wore-its bone marrow I had worked the soil, which is its flesh, and harvested the plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs I could listen to its voice in the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the clouds Its tongue is the lightning And the red that the lightning gives to the world is strong and lucky-in blood, poppies, roses, rubies, the red feathers of birds, the red carp, the cherry tree, the peony, the line alongside the turtle's eyes and the on awakes, I watched its turnings in the rivers