Chapter One
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 weddingsto make sure that every
young man who went `out on the road' would responsibly
come home-your father and his brothers and your grandfather
and his brothers and your aunt's new husband sailed
for America, the Gold Mountain. It was your grandfather's
last trip. Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye
from the decks. They fed and guarded the stowaways
and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali, Hawaii. `We'll
meet in California next year,' they said. All of them sent
money home.
"I remember looking at your aunt one day when she and
I were dressing; I had not noticed before that she had such
a protruding melon of a stomach. But I did not think, `She's
pregnant,' until she began to look like other pregnant
women, her shirt pulling 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 summer she
was ready to have the child, long after the time when it
could have been possible.
"The village had also been counting. On the night the
baby was to be born the villagers raided our house. Some
were crying. Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights,
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 women we knew well, wore white masks. The people
with long hair hung it over their faces. Women with
short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white
bands around their foreheads, arms, and legs.
"At first they threw mud and rocks at the house. Then
they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock. We
could hear the animals scream their deathsthe roosters,
the pigs, a last great roar from the ox. Familiar wild heads
flared in our night windows; the villagers encircled us.
Some of the faces stopped to peer at us, their eyes rushing
like searchlights. The hands flattened against the panes,
framed heads, and left red prints.
"The villagers broke in the front and the back doors
at the same time, even though we had not locked the doors
against them. Their knives dripped with the blood of our
animals. They smeared blood on the doors and walls. One
woman swung 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 time the house had only two wings. When the
men came back, we would build two more to enclose our
courtyard and a third one to begin a second courtyard. The
villagers pushed through both wings, even your grandparents'
rooms, to find your aunt's, which was also mine until
the men returned. From this room a new wing for one of
the younger families would grow. They ripped up her clothes
and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot.
They tore her work from the loom. They scattered the cooking
fire and rolled the new weaving in it. We could hear
them in the kitchen breaking our bowls and banging the
pots. They overturned the great waist-high earthenware
jugs; duck eggs, pickled fruits, vegetables burst out and
mixed in acrid torrents. The old woman from the next field
swept a broom through the air and loosed the spirits-of-the-broom
over our heads. `Pig.' `Ghost.' `Pig,' 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. Afterward we swept up the rice and sewed it back
up into sacks. But the smells from the spilled preserves
lasted. Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The
next morning when 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 humiliate us. You
wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you had never been born.
The villagers are watchful."
Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told
stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She
tested our strength to establish realities. Those in the emigrant
generations who could not reassert brute survival died
young and far from home. Those of us in the first American
generations have had to figure out how the invisible world
the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their
curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false
names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well,
who, I suppose, threaten them in similar waysalways trying
to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable.
The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners
take new names when their lives change and guard their
real names with silence.
Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what
things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is
peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family,
your mother who marked your growing with stories, from
what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the
movies?
If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether
flashy or ordinary, I would have to begin, "Remember
Father's drowned-in-the-well sister?" I cannot ask that. My
mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She
will add nothing unless 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 came up off the ground over
the melting cones our parents brought home from work and
the American movie on New Year's DayOh, You Beautiful
Doll with Betty Grable one year, and 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.
Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their
own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies
and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving
only the gravel, eating even the gizzard liningcould such
people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woman, to have
a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough. My aunt
could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything
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 him in the fields or on the
mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps
he first noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a
stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had
to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he
worked an adjoining 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 family found a young man in the next village
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 America. She had almost forgotten what he looked
like. When she tried to envision him, she only saw the black
and white face in the group photograph the men had had
taken before leaving.
The other man was not, after all, much different from
her husband. They both gave orders: she followed. "If you
tell your family, I'll beat you. I'll kill you. Be here again
next week." No one talked sex, ever. And she might have
separated the rapes from the rest of living if only she did
not have to buy her oil from him or gather wood in the
same forest. I want her fear to have lasted just as long 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 permeated everywhere.
She told the man, "I think I'm pregnant." 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 seemed to be settling, their
voices tight. In a commensal tradition, where food is precious,
the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone.
Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the
Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese
family, faces averted but eyes glowering sideways,
hung 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 my aunt, a daughter-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 synonym for marriage in Chinese
is "taking a daughter-in-law." Her husband's parents could
have sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her. But they had sent
her back to her own mother and father, a mysterious act
hinting at disgraces not told me. Perhaps they had thrown
her out to deflect the avengers.
She was the only daughter; her four brothers went with
her father, husband, and uncles "out on the road" and for
some years became western men. When the goods were
divided among the family, three of the brothers took land,
and the youngest, my father, chose an education. After my
grandparents gave 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 among the barbarians, could
fumble without detection. The heavy, deep-rooted women
were to maintain the past against 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 demands that the feelings
playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just
watch their passing like cherry blossoms. But perhaps my
aunt, my forerunner, caught in a slow life, let dreams grow
and fade and after some months or years went toward what
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-mark line of a long torso curving at
the shoulder and straight at the hip. For warm eyes or a
soft voice or a slow walkthat's alla few hairs, a line,
a brightness, a sound, a pace, she gave up family. She offered
us up for a charm that vanished with tiredness, a
pigtail 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 enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman,
kept rollicking company. Imagining her free with sex
doesn't fit, though. I don't know any women like that, or
men either. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she
gives me no ancestral help.
To sustain her being in love, she often worked at herself
in the mirror, guessing at the colors and shapes that would
interest him, changing them frequently in order to hit on
the right 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 themselves in their long 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
streamers blowing 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 from her forehead, tucking
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 making a pair of shadow
geese bite, the string twisted together catching the little
hairs. Then she pulled the thread away from her skin, ripping
the hairs out neatly, her eyes watering from the needles
of pain. Opening her fingers, 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" meant a captive held with a depilatory string. It
especially hurt at the temples, but my mother said we were
lucky we didn't have to have our feet bound when we were
seven. Sisters used to sit on their beds and cry together,
she said, as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages
for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush
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 almanac said predestined her for unhappiness. She dug
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 among the
villagers. They owned work clothes and good clothes, and
they wore good clothes for feasting the new seasons. But
since a woman combing her hair hexes beginnings, my aunt
rarely found an occasion to look her best. Women looked
like great sea snailsthe corded wood, babies, and laundry
they carried were the whorls on their backs. The Chinese
did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood
straight. Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of
beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched
and arched.
Such commonplace loveliness, however, was not enough
for my aunt. She dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of
New Year's, the time for families to exchange visits, money,
and food. She plied her secret comb. And sure enough she
cursed the year, the family, the village, 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 home between journeys.
Perhaps they had already been restraining their curiosity,
and they left, fearful that their glances, like a field of nesting
birds, might be startled and caught. Poverty hurt, and
that was their first reason for leaving. But another, final
reason for leaving the crowded house was the never-said.
She may have been unusually beloved, the precious only
daughter, spoiled and mirror gazing because of the affection
the family lavished on her. When her husband left,
they welcomed the chance to take her back from the in-laws;
she could live like the little daughter for just a while longer.
There are stories that my grandfather 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 home a baby girl,
wrapped up inside his brown western-style greatcoat. He
had traded one of his sons, probably my father, the youngest,
for her. My grandmother made him trade back. When
he finally got a daughter 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 plain miens. Disturbing
hair and eyes, a smile like no other, threatened the ideal of
five generations living under one roof. To focus blurs, people
shouted face to face and yelled from room to room. The
immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American
tones even after years away from the village where they
called their friendships out across the fields. I have not been
able to stop my mother's screams in public libraries or over
telephones. Walking erect (knees straight, toes pointed forward,
not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine) and
speaking 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 from the mouth is a coin lost. Silently they gave
and accepted food with both hands. A preoccupied child
who took his bowl with 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 man's name to herself throughout her
labor and dying; she did not accuse him that he be punished
with her. To save her inseminator's name she gave silent
birth.
He may have been somebody in her own household, but
intercourse with a man outside the family would have been
no less abhorrent. All the village were kinsmen, and the
titles shouted in loud country voices never let kinship be
forgotten. Any man within visiting distance would have
been neutralized as a lover"brother," "younger brother,"
"older brother"one hundred and fifteen relationship titles.
Parents researched birth charts probably not so much to
assure good fortune as to circumvent incest in a population
that has but one hundred surnames. Everybody has eight
million relatives. How useless then sexual mannerisms, how
dangerous.
As if it came from an atavism deeper than fear, I used
to add "brother" silently to boys' names. It hexed the boys,
who would or would not ask me to dance, and made them
less scary and as familiar and deserving of benevolence as
girls.
But, of course, I hexed myself alsono dates. I should
have stood up, both arms waving, and shouted out across
libraries, "Hey, you! Love me back." I had no idea, though,
how to make attraction selective, how to control its direction
and magnitude. If I made myself American-pretty so
that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love
with me, everyone elsethe Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese
boyswould too. Sisterliness, dignified and honorable,
made much more sense.
Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies
designed to organize relationships among people cannot
keep order, not even when they bind people to one another
from childhood and raise them together. Among the
very poor and the wealthy, brothers married their adopted
sisters, like doves. Our family allowed some romance, paying
adult brides' prices and providing dowries so that their
sons and daughters could marry strangers. Marriage promises
to turn strangers into friendly relativesa nation of
siblings.
In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the
live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and
land. But one human being flaring up into violence could
open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky.
The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to
maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal,
physical representation of the break she had made in the
"roundness." Misallying couples snapped off the future,
which was to be embodied in true offspring. The villagers
punished her for acting as if she could have a private life,
secret and apart from them.
If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large
grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and
wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might
have escaped such severe punishment. But the menhungry,
greedy, tired of planting in dry soilhad been forced
to leave the village in order to send food-money home. There
were ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese,
floods. My Chinese brother and sister had died of an
unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during
good times, became a crime when the village needed
food.
The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round
tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another,
round windows and rice bowlsthese talismans had
lost their power to warn this family of the law: a family
must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having
sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after
the family. The villagers came to show my aunt and her
lover-in-hiding a broken house. The villagers were speeding
up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted
to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village,
that waves of consequences would return unpredictably,
sometimes in disguise, 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 from the stars.
After the villagers left, their lanterns now scattering in
various directions toward home, the family broke their
silence and cursed her. "Aiaa, we're going to die. Death is
coming. Death is coming. 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 from the house
so that she could no longer hear their voices, and pressed
herself against the earth, her own land no more. When
she felt the birth coming, she thought that she had been
hurt. Her body seized together. "They've hurt me too much,"
she thought. "This is gall, and it will kill me." With forehead
and knees against 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 complexity seemed to disappear. She was
one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home,
without a companion, in eternal cold and silence. An agoraphobia
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 hera 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 comfort obliterated reality: she saw the family in
the evening gambling at the dinner table, the young people
massaging their elders' backs. She saw them congratulating
one another, high joy on the mornings 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 remembered that
old-fashioned women gave birth in their pigsties to fool the
jealous, pain-dealing gods, who do not snatch piglets. Before
the next spasms could stop her, she ran to the pigsty, each
step a rushing out into emptiness. She climbed over the
fence and knelt in the dirt. It was good to have a fence enclosing
her, a tribal person alone.
Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a
foreign growth that sickened her every day, expelled it at
last. She reached down to touch the hot, wet, moving mass,
surely smaller than anything human, and could feel that it
was human after allfingers, 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 shirt 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, it made little snuffling noises. She clenched her
teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a piglet, a
little dog.
She may have gone to the pigsty 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 how would this tiny child without family
find her grave when there would be no marker for her anywhere,
neither in the earth nor the family hall? No one
would give 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
family pressing tight 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.
Full of milk, the little ghost slept. When it awoke, she
hardened her breasts against the milk that crying loosens.
Toward morning she picked up the baby and walked to the
well.
Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise
abandon it. Turn its face into the mud. Mothers who love
their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there
is some hope of forgiveness 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 my father mysterious
harm. I have thought that my family, having settled
among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the
ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong
word would 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 furthera reverse ancestor worship. The real
punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers,
but the family's deliberately forgetting 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 from other ghosts,
snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants
give them gifts. She would have to fight the ghosts massed
at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave
to decoy her away from village 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 eternityessences
delivered up in smoke and flames, steam and
incense rising from each rice bowl. In an attempt to make
the Chinese care for people outside the family, Chairman
Mao encourages us now to give our paper replicas to the
spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter
whose ancestors they may be. My aunt remains forever
hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.
My aunt haunts meher ghost drawn to me because
now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of
paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes.
I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on
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.
Copyright © 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-72188-6