Part 3 (2/2)

My mother offered the dealer half the price he named ”My mother-in-law asked me to find a weaver for her, and obviously she and I will have to waste irl”

”But she can knit and cook,” said the dealer, ”and she can find lost watches” He asked for a price higher than her suggestion but lower than his first

”I knit and cook and find things,” said enious questions? Do you think I would buy a slave who could outwork me in front of roup of hungry slaves across the street When she returned, the dealer sold her the girl with the finding chant at my mother's price

”I am a doctor,” she told her new slave, when they were out of the dealer's hearing, ”and I shall train you to be my nurse”

”Doctor,” said the slave, ”do you understand that I do kno to finish off ?”

”Yes, we fooled him very well,” said my mother

The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy I watch them with envy My irl; nor did I replace the older brother and sister who died while they were still cuddly Throughout childhood row up, I want to be a slave,” andher At departain without shame, poor people's sha , word for word

On that sa dealer's a white puppy to train as her bodyguard when she ht calls She tied pretty red yarn around its tail to neutralize the bad luck There was no use docking the tail No matter at what point she cut, the tip would have been white, thecolor

The puppy waved its red yarn at the nurse girl, and she picked it up She followed h to eat because ood doctor She could cure the most spectacular diseases When a sick person was about to die, my mother could read the fact of it a year ahead of tihters-in-law's faces A black veil seehed, this blackness rose and fell with their breath My hter-in-laho answered the door at the sick house and she'd say, ”Find another doctor” She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house ”She es said ”All her patients get well” The bigger the talk, the farther the distances she travelled She had customers everywhere

Sometimes she went to her patients by foot Her nurse-slave carried an umbrella when my mother predicted rain and a parasol when she predicted sun ”My white dog would be standing at the door waiting for me whenever I came home,” she said When she felt like it, my mother would leave the nurse-slave to watch the office and would take the white dog with her

”What happened to your dog when you came to America, Mother?”

”I don't know”

”What happened to the slave?”

”I found her a husband”

”How hty dollars”

”How much money did you pay the doctor and the hospital when I was born?”

”Two hundred dollars”

”Oh”

”That's two hundred dollars Ahty dollars American money?”

”No”

”How much was it American money?”

”Fifty dollars That's because she was sixteen years old Eight-year-olds were about twenty dollars Five-year-olds were ten dollars and up Two-year-olds were about five dollars Babies were free During the war, though, when you were born, irls away for free And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you”

When hosts, the were-people, the apes dropped out of trees They rose out of bridge water My mother saw them come out of cervixes Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep out, hair by hair, disguised like the sainst the one ghost, but ghost forms are various and many Some can occupy the sarain in wood, metal, and stone Animalcules somersault about our faces e breathe We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can slide up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of pardon and love

On a fine spring day the villagers at a place my mother had never visited before would wave peach branches and fans, which are ees and keeper of the elixir of life The pink petals would fall on ers would set off firecrackers as on New Year's Day If it had really been New Year's, she would have had to shut herself up in her own house nobody wanted a doctor's visit in the first days of the year

But at night my mother walked quickly She and bandits were the only hus out, no palanquins available for ered by a fantastic creature, half man and half ape, that a traveller to the West had captured and brought back to China in a cage With his newto his house, and in the courtyard he grew a stand of bamboo The ape-man could reach out and touch the thin leaves that shaded its cage

This creature had gnawed through the bars Or it had tricked its owner into letting it play in the courtyard, and then leapt over the roof of the neing Noas at large in the forests, living off squirrels, let My mother saw in the dark a denser dark, and she knew she was being followed She carried a club, and the white dog was beside her The ape-man was known to have attacked people She had treated their bites and claounds With hardly a rustle of leaves, the ape-man leapt live out of the trees and blocked her way The white dog yelped As big as a hu ju the other foot, hurt in the jue hair and beard Its owner had clothed it in a brown burlap rice sack with holes for neck and ar its head fros out ”Go ho with one raised arm and made complex motions with its other hand But when she rushed at it, it turned and ran liain,” she yelled after its retreating buttocks, tailless and hairless under the shi+rt It was definitely not a gorilla; she has since seen so like theht Third Wife, as not Chinese, back froe creature with the great nose was a barbarian frorandfather's Third Wife was black with hair so soft that it would not hang, instead blowing up into a great brown puffball (At first she talked constantly, but who could understand her? After a while she never talked anymore She had one son) The owner of the ape-e with cooked pork and wine Occasionally my mother went to the rich nize her and save it candy Perhaps it had not been an ape-e northern race

Myable to choose as with the old and sick She was not squeas that were sometimes babies, sometimes monsters When she helped the country wopen, she could not tell by starlight and ht what manner of creature had made its arrival on the earth until she carried it inside the house ”Pretty pigbaby, pretty piglet,” she and the hosts on the lookout for a new birth ”Ugly pig, dirty pig,” fooling the Gods jealous of huers and toes by touch, felt for penis or no penis, but not until later would they know for sure whether the Gods let theood

One boy appeared perfect, so round in the cool opal dawn But when my mother examined him indoors, he opened up blue eyes at her Perhaps he had looked without protection at the sky, and it had filled hihost had entered him, but my mother said the baby looked pretty

Not all defects could be explained so congenially One child born without an anus was left in the outhouse so that the fa back to see whether it was dead yet, but it lived for a long ti as if it were trying to defecate For days the faht soil buckets

As a child, I pictured a naked child sitting on ato perforestion I had to flick on the bathroohts fast so that no small shadoould take a baby shape, soe of the bathtub, its hopes for a bowel ht I so froo to its rescue but waited for it to stop

I hope this holeless baby proves that my mother did not prepare a box of clean ashes beside the birth bed in case of a girl ”The irl baby's head in her hand and turn her face into the ashes,” said my mother ”It was very easy” She never said she herself killed babies, but perhaps the holeless baby was a boy

Even here on Gold Mountain grateful couples bring gifts to my mother, who had cooked theave thehtain to fit in ers toI would protect the dreaht But in a blink of inattention, I would , afraid of stepping on it Or before ers cannot groebs fast enough Or bathing it, I carefully turn the right-hand faucet, but it spouts hot water, scalding the baby until its skin tautens and its face beco but a red hole of a scream The hole turns into a pinprick as the baby recedes fro life A untoward makes an appearance I push the defore of impossible stories Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear

When the therrees on summer afternoons, either my mother or host story so that we could get soood chills up our backs My parents, reat-uncle, and ”Third Aunt,” asn't really our aunt but a fellow villager, so and hissing and shouted out the stories Those were our successful days, when so much laundry came in, ed froan, and already the chills travelled my back and crossed my shoulders; the hair rose at the nape and the back of the legs, ”I alking hoet hoes are nothing like the ones in Brooklyn and San Francisco This one was pies Actually it had been built bysea s nests in Malaya They had had to swing over the faces of the Malayan cliffs in baskets they had woven thee pitched and swayed in the up-draft, no one had ever fallen into the river, which looked like a bright scratch at the bottoreat silver hairpin across the earth as well as the sky”

One twilight, just as e, two s tops hovered over her head like white cobras, one at either handrail Fro between the sh the tinds she could see the sun and the river, the river twisting in circles, the trees upside down The bridgeThe earth dipped She collapsed to the wooden slats, a ladder up the sky, her fingers so weak she could not grip the rungs The wind dragged her hair behind her, then whipped it forward across her face Suddenly the shted itself, and she crossed to the other side She looked back, but there was nothing there She used the bridge often, but she did not encounter those ghosts again

”They were Sit Dom Kuei,” said Great-Uncle ”Sit Dom Kuei”

”Yes, of course,” saidin dictionaries under those syllables ”Kuei” host,” but I don't find any other words that reat-uncle's river-pirate voice, the voice of a big man who had killed someone in New York or Cuba, make the sounds-”Sit Dom Kuei” How do they translate?

When the Cohosts, I looked for ”Sit Doh now I see that -quick, pluck out the carp's eyes, one for Mother and one for Father All heroes are bold toward food In the research against ghost fear published by the Chinese Acadeistrate's servant, Kao Chung, a capable eater who in 1683 ate five cooked chickens and drank ten bottles of wine that belonged to the sea ed its food around a fire on the beach and started to feed when Kao Chung attacked The swan-feather sword he wrested fro County Ar eater was Chou Yi-han of Changchoho fried a ghost It was a meaty stick when he cut it up and cooked it But before that it had been a wo the Yuan Ho era of the T'ang dynasty (AD 806820), ate yellow croaker and pork together, which the thunder God had forbidden But Chen wanted to incur thunderbolts during drought The first tis like old trees Chen chopped off the left one The thunder God fell to the earth, and the villagers could see that it was a blue pig or bear with horns and fleshy wings Chen leapt on it, prepared to chop its neck and bite its throat, but the villagers stopped him After that, Chen lived apart as a rainhtning upon themselves He lived in a cave, and for years whenever there was drought the villagers asked hiether, and he did

The , a scholar-hunter of the Ta Li era of the T'ang dynasty (AD 766779) He shot and cooked rabbits and birds, but he could also eat scorpions, snakes, cockroaches, worht in a house that had been abandoned because its inhabitants feared conta sphere cah the darkness at Wei He felled it with three true arrows-the firstit; and the third putting out its lights, sputter When his servant ca in a ball of flesh entirely covered with eyes, so whites He and the servant pulled out the arrows and cut up the ball into little pieces The servant cooked the h They ate half, saving half to show the household, which would return now 766779) He shot and cooked rabbits and birds, but he could also eat scorpions, snakes, cockroaches, worht in a house that had been abandoned because its inhabitants feared conta sphere cah the darkness at Wei He felled it with three true arrows-the firstit; and the third putting out its lights, sputter When his servant ca in a ball of flesh entirely covered with eyes, so whites He and the servant pulled out the arrows and cut up the ball into little pieces The servant cooked the h They ate half, saving half to show the household, which would return now

Big eaters win When other passers-by stepped around the bundle wrapped in white silk, the anonymous scholar of Hanchow took it holike evil, which sat on the ingots The scholar laughed at it and chased it off That night two frogs the size of year-old babies appeared in his room He clubbed them to death, cooked thes, together the size of a pair of year-old babies, ju He ate all twelve for dinner The third night thirty s at hiht for a s came so that he always had the same amount to eat Soon his floor was like the healthy banks of a pond in spring when the tadpoles, having just turned, sprang in the wet grass ”Get a hedgehog to help eat,” cried his fa And at the end of thethe scholar with the white silk and silver ingots

My eons, wild ducks, wild geese, black-skinned bantaarden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and soerator or stove, catfish that swam in the bathtub ”The emperors used to eat the peaked hump of purple dromedaries,” she would say ”They used chopsticks ues and monkeys' lips” She boiled the weeds we pulled up in the yard There was a tender plant with flowers like white stars hiding under the leaves, which were like the flower petals but green I've not been able to find it since growing up It had no taste When I was as tall as the washi+ng ht, and so dived atchanted back to sensibility, I shook when I recalled that perched everywhere there were oith great hunched shoulders and yellols They were a surprise for my mother from my father We children used to hide under the beds with our fingers in our ears to shut out the bird screa water, their shells hitting the sides of the pot Once the third aunt orked at the laundry ran out and bought us bags of candy to hold over our noses;block I could slass jar on a shelfin alcohol and herbs She ht it from China because I do not remember a time when I did not have the hand to look at She said it was a bear's claw, and for ht bears were hairless Myabout the hand to rub our sprains and bruises

Just as I would climb up to the shelf to take one look after another at the hand, I would hear ers out of my ears and let her monkey words enter h She would begin telling the story, perhaps repeating it to a hoer, and I'd overhear before I had a chance to protect myself Then the monkey words would unsettle me; a curtain flapped loose inside my brain I have wanted to say, ”Stop it Stop it,” but not once did I say, ”Stop it”