Rules of the Game
Waverly Jong
I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games.
"Bite back your tongue," scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that sold bags of salted plums. At home, she said, "Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind—poom!—North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen."
The next week I bit back my tongue as we entered the store with the forbidden candies. When my mother finished her shopping, she quietly plucked a small bag of plums from the rack and put it on the counter with the rest of the items.
My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances. We lived in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like most of the other Chinese children who played in the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, I didn't think we were poor. My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn't want to know the names of.
We lived on Waverly Place, in a warm, clean, two-bedroom flat that sat above a small Chinese bakery specializing in steamed pastries and dim sum.
In the early morning, when the alley was still quiet, I could smell fragrant red beans as they were cooked down to a pasty sweetness. By daybreak, our flat was heavy with the odor of fried sesame balls and sweet curried chicken crescents. From my bed, I would listen as my father got ready for work, then locked the door behind him, one-two-three clicks.
At the end of our two-block alley was a small sandlot playground with swings and slides well-shined down the middle with use. The play area was bordered by wood-slat benches where old-country people sat cracking roasted watermelon seeds with their golden teeth and scattering the husks to an impatient gathering of gurgling pigeons. The best playground, however, was the dark alley itself. It was crammed with daily mysteries and adventures. My brothers and I would peer into the medicinal herb shop, watching old Li dole out onto a stiff sheet of white paper the right amount
of insect shells, saffron-colored seeds, and pungent leaves for his ailing customers. It was said that he once cured a woman dying of an ancestral curse that had eluded the best of American doctors. Next to the pharmacy was a printer who specialized in gold-embossed wedding invitations and festive red banners.
Farther down the street was Ping Yuen Fish Market. The front window displayed a tank crowded with doomed fish and turtles struggling to gain footing on the slimy green-tiled sides. A hand-written sign informed tourists, "Within this store, is all for food, not for pet." Inside, the butchers with their blood-stained white smocks deftly gutted the fish while customers cried out their orders and shouted, "Give me your freshest," On less crowded market days, we would inspect the crates of live frogs and crabs which we were warned not to poke, boxes of dried cuttlefish, and row upon row of iced prawns, squid, and slippery fish. The sanddabs made me shiver each time; their eyes lay on one flattened side and reminded me of my mother's story of a careless girl who ran into a crowded street and was crushed by a cab. "Was smash flat," reported my mother.
At the corner of the alley was Hong Sing's, a four-table caf�ith a recessed stairwell in front that led to a door marked "Tradesmen." My brothers and I believed the bad people emerged from this door at night.
Tourists never went to Hong Sing's, since the menu was printed only in Chinese. A Caucasian man with a big camera once posed me and my playmates in front of the restaurant. He had us move to the side of the picture window so the photo would capture the roasted duck with its head dangling from a juice-covered rope. After he took the picture, I told him he should go into Hong Sing's and eat dinner. When he smiled and asked me what they served, I shouted, "Guts and duck's feet and octopus gizzards!"
Then I ran off with my friends, shrieking with laughter as we scampered across the alley and hid in the entryway grotto of the China Gem Company, my heart pounding with hope that he would chase us.
My mother named me after the street that we lived on: Waverly Place Jong, my official name for important American documents. But my family called me Meimei, "Little Sister." I was the youngest, the only daughter.
Each morning before school, my mother would twist and yank on my thick black hair until she had formed two tightly wound pigtails. One day, as she
struggled to weave a hard-toothed comb through my disobedient hair, I had a sly thought.
I asked her, "Ma, what is Chinese torture?" My mother shook her head.
A bobby pin was wedged between her lips. She wetted her palm and smoothed the hair above my ear, then pushed the pin in so that it nicked sharply against my scalp.
"Who say this word?" she asked without a trace of knowing how wicked I was being. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture."
"Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture."
My older brother Vincent was the one who actually got the chess set. We had gone to the annual Christmas party held at the First Chinese Baptist Church at the end of the alley. The missionary ladies had put together a Santa bag of gifts donated by members of another church. None of the gifts had names on them. There were separate sacks for boys and girls of different ages.
One of the Chinese parishioners had donned a Santa Claus costume and a stiff paper beard with cotton balls glued to it. I think the only children who thought he was the real thing were too young to know that Santa Claus was not Chinese. When my turn came up, the Santa man asked me how old I was. I thought it was a trick question; I was seven according to the American formula and eight by the Chinese calendar. I said I was born on March 17, 1951. That seemed to satisfy him. He then solemnly asked if I had been a very, very good girl this year and did I believe in Jesus Christ and obey my parents. I knew the only answer to that. I nodded back with equal solemnity.
Having watched the other children opening their gifts, I already knew that the big gifts were not necessarily the nicest ones. One girl my age got a large coloring book of biblical characters, while a less greedy girl who selected a smaller box received a glass vial of lavender toilet water. The sound of the box was also important. A ten-year-old boy had chosen a box that jangled when he shook it. It was a tin globe of the world with a slit for
inserting money. He must have thought it was full of dimes and nickels, because when he saw that it had just ten pennies, his face fell with such undisguised disappointment that his mother slapped the side of his head and led him out of the church hall, apologizing to the crowd for her son who had such bad manners he couldn't appreciate such a fine gift.
As I peered into the sack, I quickly fingered the remaining presents, testing their weight, imagining what they contained. I chose a heavy, compact one that was wrapped in shiny silver foil and a red satin ribbon. It was a twelve-pack of Life Savers and I spent the rest of the party arranging and rearranging the candy tubes in the order of my favorites. My brother Winston chose wisely as well. His present turned out to be a box of intricate plastic parts; the instructions on the box proclaimed that when they were properly assembled he would have an authentic miniature replica of a World War II submarine.
Vincent got the chess set, which would have been a very decent present to get at a church Christmas party, except it was obviously used and, as we discovered later, it was missing a black pawn and a white knight. My mother graciously thanked the unknown benefactor, saying, "Too good.
Cost too much." At which point, an old lady with fine white, wispy hair nodded toward our family and said with a whistling whisper, "Merry, merry Christmas."
When we got home, my mother told Vincent to throw the chess set away.
"She not want it. We not want it," she said, tossing her head stiffly to the side with a tight, proud smile. My brothers had deaf ears. They were already lining up the chess pieces and reading from the dog-eared instruction book.
I watched Vincent and Winston play during Christmas week. The chess board seemed to hold elaborate secrets waiting to be untangled. The chessmen were more powerful than Old Li's magic herbs that cured ancestral curses. And my brothers wore such serious faces that I was sure something was at stake that was greater than avoiding the tradesmen's door to Hong Sing's.
"Let me! Let me!" I begged between games when one brother or the other would sit back with a deep sigh of relief and victory, the other
annoyed, unable to let go of the outcome. Vincent at first refused to let me play, but when I offered my Life Savers as replacements for the buttons that filled in for the missing pieces, he relented. He chose the flavors: wild cherry for the black pawn and peppermint for the white knight. Winner could eat both.
As our mother sprinkled flour and rolled out small doughy circles for the steamed dumplings that would be our dinner that night, Vincent explained the rules, pointing to each piece. "You have sixteen pieces and so do I. One king and queen, two bishops, two knights, two castles, and eight pawns.
The pawns can only move forward one step, except on the first move. Then they can move two. But they can only take men by moving crossways like this, except in the beginning, when you can move ahead and take another pawn."
"Why?" I asked as I moved my pawn. "Why can't they move more
steps?"
"Because they're pawns," he said.
"But why do they go crossways to take other men. Why aren't there any women and children?"
"Why is the sky blue? Why must you always ask stupid questions?" asked Vincent. "This is a game. These are the rules. I didn't make them up.
See. Here. In the book." He jabbed a page with a pawn in his hand. "Pawn.
P-A-W-N. Pawn. Read it yourself."
My mother patted the flour off her hands. "Let me see book," she said quietly. She scanned the pages quickly, not reading the foreign English symbols, seeming to search deliberately for nothing in particular.
"This American rules," she concluded at last. "Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don't know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself." She tossed her head back with a satisfied smile.
I found out about all the whys later. I read the rules and looked up all the big words in a dictionary. I borrowed books from the Chinatown library. I studied each chess piece, trying to absorb the power each contained.
I learned about opening moves and why it's important to control the center early on; the shortest distance between two points is straight down the middle. I learned about the middle game and why tactics between two adversaries are like clashing ideas; the one who plays better has the clearest plans for both attacking and getting out of traps. I learned why it is essential in the endgame to have foresight, a mathematical understanding of all possible moves, and patience; all weaknesses and advantages become evident to a strong adversary and are obscured to a tiring opponent. I discovered that for the whole game one must gather invisible strengths and see the endgame before the game begins.
I also found out why I should never reveal "why" to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use.
That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
I loved the secrets I found within the sixty-four black and white squares.
I carefully drew a handmade chessboard and pinned it to the wall next to my bed, where at night I would stare for hours at imaginary battles. Soon I no longer lost any games or Life Savers, but I lost my adversaries. Winston and Vincent decided they were more interested in roaming the streets after school in their Hopalong Cassidy cowboy hats.
On a cold spring afternoon, while walking home from school, I detoured through the playground at the end of our alley. I saw a group of old men, two seated across a folding table playing a game of chess, others smoking pipes, eating peanuts, and watching. I ran home and grabbed Vincent's chess set, which was bound in a cardboard box with rubber bands. I also carefully selected two prized rolls of Life Savers. I came back to the park and approached a man who was observing the game.
"Want to play?" I asked him. His face widened with surprise and he grinned as he looked at the box under my arm.
"Little sister, been a long time since I play with dolls," he said, smiling benevolently. I quickly put the box down next to him on the bench and displayed my retort.
Lau Po, as he allowed me to call him, turned out to be a much better player than my brothers. I lost many games and many Life Savers. But over
the weeks, with each diminishing roll of candies, I added new secrets. Lau Po gave me the names. The Double Attack from the East and West Shores.
Throwing Stones on the Drowning Man. The Sudden Meeting of the Clan.
The Surprise from the Sleeping Guard. The Humble Servant Who Kills the King. Sand in the Eyes of Advancing Forces. A Double Killing Without Blood.
There were also the fine points of chess etiquette. Keep captured men in neat rows, as well-tended prisoners. Never announce "Check" with vanity, lest someone with an unseen sword slit your throat. Never hurl pieces into the sandbox after you have lost a game, because then you must find them again, by yourself, after apologizing to all around you. By the end of the summer, Lau Po had taught me all he knew, and I had become a better chess player.
A small weekend crowd of Chinese people and tourists would gather as I played and defeated my opponents one by one. My mother would join the crowds during these outdoor exhibition games. She sat proudly on the bench, telling my admirers with proper Chinese humility, "Is luck."
A man who watched me play in the park suggested that my mother allow me to play in local chess tournaments. My mother smiled graciously, an answer that meant nothing. I desperately wanted to go, but I bit back my tongue. I knew she would not let me play among strangers. So as we walked home I said in a small voice that I didn't want to play in the local tournament. They would have American rules. If I lost, I would bring shame on my family.
"Is shame you fall down nobody push you," said my mother.
During my first tournament, my mother sat with me in the front row as I waited for my turn. I frequently bounced my legs to unstick them from the cold metal seat of the folding chair. When my name was called, I leapt up.
My mother unwrapped something in her lap. It was her chang, a small tablet of red jade which held the sun's fire. "Is luck," she whispered, and tucked it into my dress pocket. I turned to my opponent, a fifteen-year-old boy from Oakland. He looked at me, wrinkling his nose.
As I began to play, the boy disappeared, the color ran out of the room, and I saw only my white pieces and his black ones waiting on the other
side. A light wind began blowing past my ears. It whispered secrets only I could hear.
"Blow from the South," it murmured. "The wind leaves no trail." I saw a clear path, the traps to avoid. The crowd rustled. "Shhh! Shhh!" said the corners of the room. The wind blew stronger. "Throw sand from the East to distract him." The knight came forward ready for the sacrifice. The wind hissed, louder and louder. "Blow, blow, blow. He cannot see. He is blind now. Make him lean away from the wind so he is easier to knock down."
"Check," I said, as the wind roared with laughter. The wind died down to little puffs, my own breath.
My mother placed my first trophy next to a new plastic chess set that the neighborhood Tao society had given to me. As she wiped each piece with a soft cloth, she said, "Next time win more, lose less."
"Ma, it's not how many pieces you lose," I said. "Sometimes you need to lose pieces to get ahead."
"Better to lose less, see if you really need."
At the next tournament, I won again, but it was my mother who wore the triumphant grin.
"Lost eight piece this time. Last time was eleven. What I tell you? Better off lose less!" I was annoyed, but I couldn't say anything.
I attended more tournaments, each one farther away from home. I won all games, in all divisions. The Chinese bakery downstairs from our flat displayed my growing collection of trophies in its window, amidst the dust- covered cakes that were never picked up. The day after I won an important regional tournament, the window encased a fresh sheet cake with whipped- cream frosting and red script saying, "Congratulations, Waverly Jong, Chinatown Chess Champion." Soon after that, a flower shop, headstone engraver, and funeral parlor offered to sponsor me in national tournaments.
That's when my mother decided I no longer had to do the dishes. Winston and Vincent had to do my chores.
"Why does she get to play and we do all the work," complained Vincent.
"Is new American rules," said my mother. "Meimei play, squeeze all her brains out for win chess. You play, worth squeeze towel."
By my ninth birthday, I was a national chess champion. I was still some 429 points away from grand-master status, but I was touted as the Great American Hope, a child prodigy and a girl to boot. They ran a photo of me in Life magazine next to a quote in which Bobby Fischer said, "There will never be a woman grand master." "Your move, Bobby," said the caption.
The day they took the magazine picture I wore neatly plaited braids clipped with plastic barrettes trimmed with rhinestones. I was playing in a large high school auditorium that echoed with phlegmy coughs and the squeaky rubber knobs of chair legs sliding across freshly waxed wooden floors. Seated across from me was an American man, about the same age as Lau Po, maybe fifty. I remember that his sweaty brow seemed to weep at my every move. He wore a dark, malodorous suit. One of his pockets was stuffed with a great white kerchief on which he wiped his palm before sweeping his hand over the chosen chess piece with great flourish.
In my crisp pink-and-white dress with scratchy lace at the neck, one of two my mother had sewn for these special occasions, I would clasp my hands under my chin, the delicate points of my elbows poised lightly on the table in the manner my mother had shown me for posing for the press. I would swing my patent leather shoes back and forth like an impatient child riding on a school bus. Then I would pause, suck in my lips, twirl my chosen piece in midair as if undecided, and then firmly plant it in its new threatening place, with a triumphant smile thrown back at my opponent for good measure.
I no longer played in the alley of Waverly Place. I never visited the playground where the pigeons and old men gathered. I went to school, then directly home to learn new chess secrets, cleverly concealed advantages, more escape routes.
But I found it difficult to concentrate at home. My mother had a habit of standing over me while I plotted out my games. I think she thought of herself as my protective ally. Her lips would be sealed tight, and after each move I made, a soft "Hmmmmph" would escape from her nose.
"Ma, I can't practice when you stand there like that," I said one day. She retreated to the kitchen and made loud noises with the pots and pans. When the crashing stopped, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was
standing in the doorway. "Hmmmph!" Only this one came out of her tight throat.
My parents made many concessions to allow me to practice. One time I complained that the bedroom I shared was so noisy that I couldn't think.
Thereafter, my brothers slept in a bed in the living room facing the street. I said I couldn't finish my rice; my head didn't work right when my stomach was too full. I left the table with half-finished bowls and nobody complained. But there was one duty I couldn't avoid. I had to accompany my mother on Saturday market days when I had no tournament to play. My mother would proudly walk with me, visiting many shops, buying very little. "This my daughter Wave-ly Jong," she said to whoever looked her way.
One day, after we left a shop I said under my breath, "I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everybody I'm your daughter." My mother stopped walking. Crowds of people with heavy bags pushed past us on the sidewalk, bumping into first one shoulder, then another.
"Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?" She grasped my hand even tighter as she glared at me.
I looked down. "It's not that, it's just so obvious. It's just so embarrassing."
"Embarrass you be my daughter?" Her voice was cracking with anger.
"That's not what I meant. That's not what I said."
"What you say?"
I knew it was a mistake to say anything more, but I heard my voice speaking. "Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess."
My mother's eyes turned into dangerous black slits. She had no words for me, just sharp silence.
I felt the wind rushing around my hot ears. I jerked my hand out of my mother's tight grasp and spun around, knocking into an old woman. Her bag of groceries spilled to the ground.
"Aii-ya! Stupid girl!" my mother and the woman cried. Oranges and tin cans careened down the sidewalk. As my mother stooped to help the old woman pick up the escaping food, I took off.
I raced down the street, dashing between people, not looking back as my mother screamed shrilly, "Meimei! Meimei!" I fled down an alley, past dark curtained shops and merchants washing the grime off their windows. I sped into the sunlight, into a large street crowded with tourists examining trinkets and souvenirs. I ducked into another dark alley, down another street, up another alley. I ran until it hurt and I realized I had nowhere to go, that I was not running from anything. The alleys contained no escape routes.
My breath came out like angry smoke. It was cold. I sat down on an upturned plastic pail next to a stack of empty boxes, cupping my chin with my hands, thinking hard. I imagined my mother, first walking briskly down one street or another looking for me, then giving up and returning home to await my arrival. After two hours, I stood up on creaking legs and slowly walked home.
The alley was quiet and I could see the yellow lights shining from our flat like two tiger's eyes in the night. I climbed the sixteen steps to the door, advancing quietly up each so as not to make any warning sounds. I turned the knob; the door was locked. I heard a chair moving, quick steps, the locks turning—click! click! click!—and then the door opened.
"About time you got home," said Vincent. "Boy, are you in trouble."
He slid back to the dinner table. On a platter were the remains of a large fish, its fleshy head still connected to bones swimming upstream in vain escape. Standing there waiting for my punishment, I heard my mother speak in a dry voice.
"We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us."
Nobody looked at me. Bone chopsticks clinked against the insides of bowls being emptied into hungry mouths.
I walked into my room, closed the door, and lay down on my bed. The room was dark, the ceiling filled with shadows from the dinnertime lights of neighboring flats.
In my head, I saw a chessboard with sixty-four black and white squares.
Opposite me was my opponent, two angry black slits. She wore a triumphant smile. "Strongest wind cannot be seen," she said.
Her black men advanced across the plane, slowly marching to each successive level as a single unit. My white pieces screamed as they scurried and fell off the board one by one. As her men drew closer to my edge, I felt
myself growing light. I rose up into the air and flew out the window. Higher and higher, above the alley, over the tops of tiled roofs, where I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone.
I closed my eyes and pondered my next move.
Rules of the Game | Up | Half and Half
The Voice from the Wall
Lena St. Clair
When I was little, my mother told me my great-grandfather had sentenced a beggar to die in the worst possible way, and that later the dead man came back and killed my great-grandfather. Either that, or he died of influenza one week later.
I used to play out the beggar's last moments over and over again in my head. In my mind, I saw the executioner strip off the man's shirt and lead him into the open yard. "This traitor," read the executioner, "is sentenced to die the death of a thousand cuts." But before he could even raise the sharp sword to whittle his life away, they found the beggar's mind had already broken into a thousand pieces. A few days later, my great-grandfather looked up from his books and saw this same man looking like a smashed vase hastily put back together. "As the sword was cutting me down," said the ghost, "I thought this was the worst I would ever have to endure. But I was wrong. The worst is on the other side." And the dead man embraced my great-grandfather with the jagged pieces of his arm and pulled him through the wall, to show him what he meant.
I once asked my mother how he really died. She said, "In bed, very quickly, after being sick for only two days."
"No, no, I mean the other man. How was he killed? Did they slice off his skin first? Did they use a cleaver to chop up his bones? Did he scream and feel all one thousand cuts?"
"Annh! Why do you Americans have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?" cried my mother in Chinese. "That man has been dead for almost seventy years. What does it matter how he died?"
I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. Because, even as a young child, I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind. And still they found her. I watched, over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost.
As I remember it, the dark side of my mother sprang from the basement in our old house in Oakland. I was five and my mother tried to hide it from
me. She barricaded the door with a wooden chair, secured it with a chain and two types of key locks. And it became so mysterious that I spent all my energies unraveling this door, until the day I was finally able to pry it open with my small fingers, only to immediately fall headlong into the dark chasm. And it was only after I stopped screaming—I had seen the blood of my nose on my mother's shoulder—only then did my mother tell me about the bad man who lived in the basement and why I should never open the door again. He had lived there for thousands of years, she said, and was so evil and hungry that had my mother not rescued me so quickly, this bad man would have planted five babies in me and then eaten us all in a six- course meal, tossing our bones on the dirty floor.
And after that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother. I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children. I saw a beetle wearing the face of a child, which I promptly squashed with the wheel of my tricycle.
And when I became older, I could see things that Causasian girls at school did not. Monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. Tether balls that could splash a girl's head all over the playground in front of laughing friends.
I didn't tell anyone about the things I saw, not even my mother. Most people didn't know I was half Chinese, maybe because my last name is St.
Clair. When people first saw me, they thought I looked like my father, English-Irish, big-boned and delicate at the same time. But if they looked really close, if they knew that they were there, they could see the Chinese parts. Instead of having cheeks like my father's sharp-edged points, mine were smooth as beach pebbles. I didn't have his straw-yellow hair or his white skin, yet my coloring looked too pale, like something that was once darker and had faded in the sun.
And my eyes, my mother gave me my eyes, no eyelids, as if they were carved on a jack-o'-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife. I used to push my eyes in on the sides to make them rounder. Or I'd open them very wide until I could see the white parts. But when I walked around the house like that, my father asked me why I looked so scared.
I have a photo of my mother with this same scared look. My father said the picture was taken when Ma was first released from Angel Island Immigration Station. She stayed there for three weeks, until they could process her papers and determine whether she was a War Bride, a Displaced Person, a Student, or the wife of a Chinese-American citizen. My father said they didn't have rules for dealing with the Chinese wife of a Caucasian citizen. Somehow, in the end, they declared her a Displaced Person, lost in a sea of immigration categories.
My mother never talked about her life in China, but my father said he saved her from a terrible life there, some tragedy she could not speak about.
My father proudly named her in her immigration papers: Betty St. Clair, crossing out her given name of Gu Ying-ying. And then he put down the wrong birthyear, 1916 instead of 1914. So, with the sweep of a pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger.
In this picture you can see why my mother looks displaced. She is clutching a large clam-shaped bag, as though someone might steal this from her as well if she is less watchful. She has on an ankle-length Chinese dress with modest vents at the side. And on top she is wearing a Westernized suit jacket, awkwardly stylish on my mother's small body, with its padded shoulders, wide lapels, and oversize cloth buttons. This was my mother's wedding dress, a gift from my father. In this outfit she looks as if she were neither coming from nor going to someplace. Her chin is bent down and you can see the precise part in her hair, a neat white line drawn from above her left brow then over the black horizon of her head.
And even though her head is bowed, humble in defeat, her eyes are staring up past the camera, wide open.
"Why does she look scared?" I asked my father.
And my father explained: It was only because he said "Cheese," and my mother was struggling to keep her eyes open until the flash went off, ten seconds later.
My mother often looked this way, waiting for something to happen, wearing this scared look. Only later she lost the struggle to keep her eyes open.
"Don't look at her," said my mother as we walked through Chinatown in Oakland. She had grabbed my hand and pulled me close to her body. And of course I looked. I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a building. She was old and young at the same time, with dull eyes as though she had not slept for many years. And her feet and her hands—the tips were as black as if she had dipped them in India ink. But I knew they were rotted.
"What did she do to herself?" I whispered to my mother.
"She met a bad man," said my mother. "She had a baby she didn't want."
And I knew that was not true. I knew my mother made up anything to warn me, to help me avoid some unknown danger. My mother saw danger in everything, even in other Chinese people. Where we lived and shopped, everyone spoke Cantonese or English. My mother was from Wushi, near Shanghai. So she spoke Mandarin and a little bit of English. My father, who spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions, insisted my mother learn English. So with him, she spoke in moods and gestures, looks and silences, and sometimes a combination of English punctuated by hesitations and Chinese frustration: "Shwo buchulai"—Words cannot come out. So my father would put words in her mouth.
"I think Mom is trying to say she's tired," he would whisper when my mother became moody.
"I think she's saying we're the best darn family in the country!" he'd exclaim when she had cooked a wonderfully fragrant meal.
But with me, when we were alone, my mother would speak in Chinese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine. I could understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings. One thought led to another without connection.
"You must not walk in any direction but to school and back home," warned my mother when she decided I was old enough to walk by myself.
"Why?" I asked.
"You can't understand these things," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't put it in your mind yet."
"Why not?"
"Aii-ya! Such questions! Because it is too terrible to consider. A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a
baby. Then you'll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage can, then what can be done? You'll go to jail, die there."
I knew this was not a true answer. But I also made up lies to prevent bad things from happening in the future. I often lied when I had to translate for her, the endless forms, instructions, notices from school, telephone calls.
"Shemma yisz?"—What meaning?—she asked me when a man at a grocery store yelled at her for opening up jars to smell the insides. I was so embarrassed I told her that Chinese people were not allowed to shop there.
When the school sent a notice home about a polio vaccination, I told her the time and place, and added that all students were now required to use metal lunch boxes, since they had discovered old paper bags can carry polio germs.
"We're moving up in the world," my father proudly announced, this being the occasion of his promotion to sales supervisor of a clothing manufacturer. "Your mother is thrilled."
And we did move up, across the bay to San Francisco and up a hill in North Beach, to an Italian neighborhood, where the sidewalk was so steep I had to lean into the slant to get home from school each day. I was ten and I was hopeful that we might be able to leave all the old fears behind in Oakland.
The apartment building was three stories high, two apartments per floor.
It had a renovated fa�e, a recent layer of white stucco topped with connected rows of metal fire-escape ladders. But inside it was old. The front door with its narrow glass panes opened into a musty lobby that smelled of everybody's life mixed together. Everybody meant the names on the front door next to their little buzzers: Anderson, Giordino, Hayman, Ricci, Sorci, and our name, St. Clair. We lived on the middle floor, stuck between cooking smells that floated up and feet sounds that drifted down.
My bedroom faced the street, and at night, in the dark, I could see in my mind another life. Cars struggling to climb the steep, fog-shrouded hill, gunning their deep engines and spinning their wheels. Loud, happy people, laughing, puffing, gasping: "Are we almost there?" A beagle scrambling to his feet to start his yipping yowl, answered a few seconds later by fire truck
sirens and an angry woman hissing, "Sammy! Bad dog! Hush now!" And with all this soothing predictability, I would soon fall asleep.
My mother was not happy with the apartment, but I didn't see that at first. When we moved in, she busied herself with getting settled, arranging the furniture, unpacking dishes, hanging pictures on the wall. It took her about one week. And soon after that, when she and I were walking to the bus stop, she met a man who threw her off balance.
He was a red-faced Chinese man, wobbling down the sidewalk as if he were lost. His runny eyes saw us and he quickly stood up straight and threw out his arms, shouting, "I found you! Suzie Wong, girl of my dreams! Hah!"
And with his arms and mouth wide open, he started rushing toward us. My mother dropped my hand and covered her body with her arms as if she were naked, unable to do anything else. In that moment as she let go, I started to scream, seeing this dangerous man lunging closer. I was still screaming after two laughing men grabbed this man and, shaking him, said, "Joe, stop it, for Chrissake. You're scaring that poor little girl and her maid."
The rest of the day—while riding on the bus, walking in and out of stores, shopping for our dinner—my mother trembled. She clutched my hand so tightly it hurt. And once when she let go of my hand to take her wallet out of her purse at the cash register, I started to slip away to look at the candy. She grabbed my hand back so fast I knew at that instant how sorry she was that she had not protected me better.
As soon as we got home from grocery shopping, she began to put the cans and vegetables away. And then, as if something were not quite right, she removed the cans from one shelf and switched them with the cans on another. Next she walked briskly into the living room and moved a large round mirror from the wall facing the front door to a wall by the sofa.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She whispered something in Chinese about "things not being balanced," and I thought she meant how things looked, not how things felt. And then she started to move the larger pieces: the sofa, chairs, end tables, a Chinese scroll of goldfish.
"What's going on here?" asked my father when he came home from
work.
"She's making it look better," I said.
And the next day, when I came home from school, I saw she had again rearranged everything. Everything was in a different place. I could see that some terrible danger lay ahead.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked her, afraid she would give me a true answer.
But she whispered some Chinese nonsense instead: "When something goes against your nature, you are not in balance. This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward."
And then she started pointing to the walls and doors of the apartment.
"See how narrow this doorway is, like a neck that has been strangled. And the kitchen faces this toilet room, so all your worth is flushed away."
"But what does it mean? What's going to happen if it's not balanced?" I asked my mother.
My father explained it to me later. "Your mother is just practicing her nesting instincts," he said. "All mothers get it. You'll see when you're older."
I wondered why my father never worried. Was he blind? Why did my mother and I see something more?
And then a few days later, I found out that my father had been right all along. I came home from school, walked into my bedroom, and saw it. My mother had rearranged my room. My bed was no longer by the window but against a wall. And where my bed once was—now there stood a used crib.
So the secret danger was a ballooning stomach, the source of my mother's imbalance. My mother was going to have a baby.
"See," said my father as we both looked at the crib. "Nesting instincts.
Here's the nest. And here's where the baby goes." He was so pleased with this imaginary baby in the crib. He didn't see what I later saw. My mother began to bump into things, into table edges as if she forgot her stomach contained a baby, as if she were headed for trouble instead. She did not speak of the joys of having a new baby; she talked about a heaviness around her, about things being out of balance, not in harmony with one another. So I worried about that baby, that it was stuck somewhere between my mother's stomach and this crib in my room.
With my bed against the wall, the nighttime life of my imagination changed. Instead of street sounds, I began to hear voices coming from the wall, from the apartment next door. The front-door buzzer said a family called the Sorcis lived there.
That first night I heard the muffled sound of someone shouting. A woman? A girl? I flattened my ear against the wall and heard a woman's angry voice, then another, the higher voice of a girl shouting back. And now, the voices turned toward me, like fire sirens turning onto our street, and I could hear the accusations fading in and out:Who am I to say!…Why do you keep buggin' me?…Then get out and stay out!…rather die rather be dead!…Why doncha then!
Then I heard scraping sounds, slamming, pushing and shouts and then whack! whack! whack! Someone was killing. Someone was being killed.
Screams and shouts, a mother had a sword high above a girl's head and was starting to slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds.
I lay back against my pillow, my heart pounding at what I had just witnessed with my ears and my imagination. A girl had just been killed. I hadn't been able to stop myself from listening. I wasn't able to stop what happened. The horror of it all.
But the next night, the girl came back to life with more screams, more beating, her life once more in peril. And so it continued, night after night, a voice pressing against my wall telling me that this was the worst possible thing that could happen: the terror of not knowing when it would ever stop.
Sometimes I heard this loud family across the hallway that separated our two apartment doors. Their apartment was by the stairs going up to the third floor. Ours was by the stairs going down to the lobby.
"You break your legs sliding down that banister, I'm gonna break your neck," a woman shouted. Her warnings were followed by the sounds of feet stomping on the stairs. "And don't forget to pick up Pop's suits!"
I knew their terrible life so intimately that I was startled by the immediacy of seeing her in person for the first time. I was pulling the front door shut while balancing an armload of books. And when I turned around,
I saw her coming toward me just a few feet away and I shrieked and dropped everything. She snickered and I knew who she was, this tall girl whom I guessed to be about twelve, two years older than I was. Then she bolted down the stairs and I quickly gathered up my books and followed her, careful to walk on the other side of the street.
She didn't seem like a girl who had been killed a hundred times. I saw no traces of blood-stained clothes; she wore a crisp white blouse, a blue cardigan sweater, and a blue-green pleated skirt. In fact, as I watched her, she seemed quite happy, her two brown braids bouncing jauntily in rhythm to her walk. And then, as if she knew that I was thinking about her, she turned her head. She gave me a scowl and quickly ducked down a side street and walked out of my sight.
Every time I saw her after that, I would pretend to look down, busy rearranging my books or the buttons on my sweater, guilty that I knew everything about her.
My parents' friends Auntie Su and Uncle Canning picked me up at school one day and took me to the hospital to see my mother. I knew this was serious because everything they said was unnecessary but spoken with solemn importance.
"It is now four o'clock," said Uncle Canning, looking at his watch.
"The bus is never on time," said Auntie Su.
When I visited my mother in the hospital, she seemed half asleep, tossing back and forth. And then her eyes popped open, staring at the ceiling.
"My fault, my fault. I knew this before it happened," she babbled. "I did nothing to prevent it."
"Betty darling, Betty darling," said my father frantically. But my mother kept shouting these accusations to herself. She grabbed my hand and I realized her whole body was shaking. And then she looked at me, in a strange way, as if she were begging me for her life, as if I could pardon her.
She was mumbling in Chinese.
"Lena, what's she saying?" cried my father. For once, he had no words to put in my mother's mouth.
And for once, I had no ready answer. It struck me that the worst possible thing had happened. That what she had been fearing had come true. They were no longer warnings. And so I listened.
"When the baby was ready to be born," she murmured, "I could already hear him screaming inside my womb. His little fingers, they were clinging to stay inside. But the nurses, the doctor, they said to push him out, make him come. And when his head popped out, the nurses cried, His eyes are wide open! He sees everything! Then his body slipped out and he lay on the table, steaming with life.
"When I looked at him, I saw right away. His tiny legs, his small arms, his thin neck, and then a large head so terrible I could not stop looking at it.
This baby's eyes were open and his head—it was open too! I could see all the way back, to where his thoughts were supposed to be, and there was nothing there. No brain, the doctor shouted! His head is just an empty eggshell!
"And then this baby, maybe he heard us, his large head seemed to fill with hot air and rise up from the table. The head turned to one side, then to the other. It looked right through me. I knew he could see everything inside me. How I had given no thought to killing my other son! How I had given no thought to having this baby!"
I could not tell my father what she had said. He was so sad already with this empty crib in his mind. How could I tell him she was crazy?
So this is what I translated for him: "She says we must all think very hard about having another baby. She says she hopes this baby is very happy on the other side. And she thinks we should leave now and go have dinner."
After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one. I never knew when it would happen, so I became nervous all the time, waiting.
Sometimes she would start to make dinner, but would stop halfway, the water running full steam in the sink, her knife poised in the air over half- chopped vegetables, silent, tears flowing. And sometimes we'd be eating and we would have to stop and put our forks down because she had dropped her face into her hands and was saying. "Mei gwansyi"—It doesn't matter.
My father would just sit there, trying to figure out what it was that didn't
matter this much. And I would leave the table, knowing it would happen again, always a next time.
My father seemed to fall apart in a different way. He tried to make things better. But it was as if he were running to catch things before they fell, only he would fall before he could catch anything.
"She's just tired," he explained to me when we were eating dinner at the Gold Spike, just the two of us, because my mother was lying like a statue on her bed. I knew he was thinking about her because he had this worried face, staring at his dinner plate as if it were filled with worms instead of spaghetti.
At home, my mother looked at everything around her with empty eyes.
My father would come home from work, patting my head, saying, "How's my big girl," but always looking past me, toward my mother. I had such fears inside, not in my head but in my stomach. I could no longer see what was so scary, but I could feel it. I could feel every little movement in our silent house. And at night, I could feel the crashing loud fights on the other side of my bedroom wall, this girl being beaten to death. In bed, with the blanket edge lying across my neck, I used to wonder which was worse, our side or theirs? And after thinking about this for a while, after feeling sorry for myself, it comforted me somewhat to think that this girl next door had a more unhappy life.
But one night after dinner our doorbell rang. This was curious, because usually people rang the buzzer downstairs first.
"Lena, could you see who it is?" called my father from the kitchen. He was doing the dishes. My mother was lying in bed. My mother was now always "resting" and it was as if she had died and become a living ghost.
I opened the door cautiously, then swung it wide open with surprise. It was the girl from next door. I stared at her with undisguised amazement.
She was smiling back at me, and she looked ruffled, as if she had fallen out
of bed with her clothes on.
"Who is it?" called my father.
"It's next door!" I shouted to my father. "It's…"
"Teresa," she offered quickly.
"It's Teresa!" I yelled back to my father.
"Invite her in," my father said at almost the same moment that Teresa squeezed past me and into our apartment. Without being invited, she started walking toward my bedroom. I closed the front door and followed her two brown braids that were bouncing like whips beating the back of a horse.
She walked right over to my window and began to open it. "What are you doing?" I cried. She sat on the window ledge, looked out on the street.
And then she looked at me and started to giggle. I sat down on my bed watching her, waiting for her to stop, feeling the cold air blow in from the dark opening.
"What's so funny?" I finally said. It occurred to me that perhaps she was laughing at me, at my life. Maybe she had listened through the wall and heard nothing, the stagnant silence of our unhappy house.
"Why are you laughing?" I demanded.
"My mother kicked me out," she finally said. She talked with a swagger, seeming to be proud of this fact. And then she snickered a little and said, "We had this fight and she pushed me out the door and locked it. So now she thinks I'm going to wait outside the door until I'm sorry enough to apologize. But I'm not going to."
"Then what are you going to do?" I asked breathlessly, certain that her mother would kill her for good this time.
"I'm going to use your fire escape to climb back into my bedroom," she whispered back. "And she's going to wait. And when she gets worried, she'll open the front door. Only I won't be there! I'll be in my bedroom, in
bed." She giggled again.
"Won't she be mad when she finds you?"
"Nah, she'll just be glad I'm not dead or something. Oh, she'll pretend to be mad, sort of. We do this kind of stuff all the time." And then she slipped through my window and soundlessly made her way back home.
I stared at the open window for a long time, wondering about her. How could she go back? Didn't she see how terrible her life was? Didn't she recognize it would never stop?
I lay down on my bed waiting to hear the screams and shouts. And late at night I was still awake when I heard the loud voices next door. Mrs. Sorci was shouting and crying, You stupida girl. You almost gave me a heart attack. And Teresa was yelling back, I coulda been killed. I almost fell and
broke my neck. And then I heard them laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love.
I was stunned. I could almost see them hugging and kissing one another.
I was crying for joy with them, because I had been wrong.
And in my memory I can still feel the hope that beat in me that night. I clung to this hope, day after day, night after night, year after year. I would watch my mother lying in her bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa.
And yet I knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them. I still heard Mrs. Sorci and Teresa having terrible fights, but I saw something else.
I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable.
I saw the mother lying in bed in her long flowing robes. Then the girl pulled out a sharp sword and told her mother, "Then you must die the death of a thousand cuts. It is the only way to save you."
The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.
The girl said, "Do you see now?"
The mother nodded: "Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing."
And the daughter said, "Now you must come back, to the other side.
Then you can see why you were wrong."
And the girl grabbed her mother's hand and pulled her through the wall.
The Voice from the Wall | Up | Two Kinds
