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Who are you? Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. I pulled my shirt back on and opened the house to the villagers.
The villagers dragged them out into the courtyard, where they tried them next to the beheading machine. They beheaded the others. Their necks were collared in the beheading machine, which slowly clamped shut.
There was one last-minute reprieve of a bodyguard when a witness shouted testimony just as the vise was pinching blood. The guard had but recently joined the household in exchange for a child hostage. A slow killing gives a criminal time to regret his crimes and think of the right words to prove he can change.
I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet.
Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any.
I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army.
They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons.
They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality. After the trials we tore down the ancestral tablets. Go to your mother. She gave him her helmet to wear and her swords to hold.
My parents had bought their co ns. They would sacri ce a pig to the gods that I had returned. From the words on my back, and how they were ful lled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality. My American life has been such a disappointment. And it was important that I do something big and ne, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums.
Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. Better to raise geese than girls. Bad girl! I minded that the emigrant villagers shook their heads at my sister and me. Is that why not? Who wants to go out with Great-Uncle? Wait for me. The boys came back with candy and new toys. I went away to college—Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy.
I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam. If I went to Vietnam, I would not come back; females desert families. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency.
And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates. I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. I do not feed people. I let the dirty dishes rot. If I could not-eat, perhaps I could make myself a warrior like the swords woman who drives me.
I will—I must—rise and plow the fields as soon as the baby comes out. Once I get outside the house, what bird might call me; on what horse could I ride away? Marriage and childbirth strengthen the swordswoman, who is not a maid like Joan of Arc.
You know how it is. Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet. I easily recognize them —business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.
I once worked at an art supply house that sold paints to artists. Nigger yellow. The boss never deigned to answer. The building industry was planning a banquet for contractors, real estate dealers, and real estate editors. He leaned back in his leather chair, his bossy stomach opulent. He picked up his calendar and slowly circled a date. My job is my own only land. Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia.
A descendant of eighty pole ghters, I ought to be able to set out con dently, march straight down our street, get going right now. Surely, the eighty pole ghters, though unseen, would follow me and lead me and protect me, as is the wont of ancestors. I dislike armies. Once at a beach after a long hike I saw a seagull, tiny as an insect. My brain had momentarily lost its depth perception.
I was that eager to find an unusual bird. The news from China has been confusing. It also had something to do with birds. I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry. My father screamed in his sleep. My mother wept and crumpled up the letters. She set re to them page by page in the ashtray, but new letters came almost every day.
The other letters said that my uncles were made to kneel on broken glass during their trials and had confessed to being landowners. They were all executed, and the aunt whose thumbs were twisted o drowned herself. Other aunts, mothers-in- law, and cousins disappeared; some suddenly began writing to us again from communes or from Hong Kong.
They kept asking for money. The ones in communes got four ounces of fat and one cup of oil a week, they said, and had to work from 4 A. They had to learn to do dances waving red kerchiefs; they had to sing nonsense syllables. The aunts in Hong Kong said to send money quickly; their children were begging on the sidewalks, and mean people put dirt in their bowls.
When I dream that I am wire without esh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that oats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other. My parents felt bad whether or not they sent money. Sometimes they got angry at their brothers and sisters for asking.
And they would not simply ask but have to talk- story too. They attacked the house and killed the grandfather and oldest daughter. The grandmother escaped with the loose cash and did not return to help. Fourth Aunt picked up her sons, one under each arm, and hid in the pig house, where they slept that night in cotton clothes. The next day she found her husband, who had also miraculously escaped.
The two of them collected twigs and yams to sell while their children begged. Nobody bought from them. Finally Fourth Aunt saw what was wrong. He sat under a tree to think, when he spotted a pair of nesting doves. Dumping his bag of yams, he climbed up and caught the birds. That was where the Communists trapped him, in the tree. They criticized him for selfishly taking food for his own family and killed him, leaving his body in the tree as an example.
They took the birds to a commune kitchen to be shared. It is confusing that my family was not the poor to be championed. They were executed like the barons in the stories, when they were not barons. It is confusing that birds tricked us. What fighting and killing I have seen have not been glorious but slum grubby. I fought the most during junior high school and always cried. Fights are confusing as to who has won.
But at news of a body, I would nd a way to get out; I had to learn about dying if I wanted to become a swordswoman. Once there was an Asian man stabbed next door, words on cloth pinned to his corpse. Japanese words. Me Chinese. A medium with red hair told me that a girl who died in a far country follows me wherever I go. This spirit can help me if I acknowledge her, she said.
Between the head line and heart line in my right palm, she said, I have the mystic cross. I could become a medium myself. And martial arts are for unsure little boys kicking away under fluorescent lights.
I live now where there are Chinese and Japanese, but no emigrants from my own village looking at me as if I had failed them. He has a tong ax in his closet. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a private shawl; I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. And I had to get out of hating range. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.
I refuse to shy my way anymore through our Chinatown, which tasks me with the old sayings and the stories. The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them.
What we have in common are the words at our backs. There are also little owers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels o stopped because the red and gold paint came o too, leaving silver scratches that rust.
Somebody tried to pry the end o before discovering that the tube pulls apart. When I open it, the smell of China ies out, a thousand-year-old bat ying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain. Crates from Canton, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have that smell too, only stronger because they are more recently come from the Chinese.
Inside the can are three scrolls, one inside another. Wu Pak-liang, M. The school seal has been pressed over a photograph of my mother at the age of thirty- seven. The diploma gives her age as twenty-seven. She looks younger than I do, her eyebrows are thicker, her lips fuller. Her naturally curly hair is parted on the left, one wavy wisp tendrilling o to the right.
She has spacy eyes, as all people recently from Asia have. Her eyes do not focus on the camera. My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. The second scroll is a long narrow photograph of the graduating class with the school o cials seated in front. I picked out my mother immediately. Her face is exactly her own, though forty years younger. She is so familiar, I can only tell whether or not she is pretty or happy or smart by comparing her to the other women.
On the other women, strangers, I can recognize a curled lip, a sidelong glance, pinched shoulders. My mother is not soft; the girl with the small nose and dimpled underlip is soft. My mother is not humorous, not like the girl at the end who lifts her mocking chin to pose like Girl Graduate. My mother does not have smiling eyes; the old woman teacher Dean Woo? She is intelligent, alert, pretty. The graduates seem to have been looking elsewhere when they pinned the rose, zinnia, or chrysanthemum on their precise black dresses.
One thin girl wears hers in the middle of her chest. A few have a ower over a left or a right nipple. My mother put hers, a chrysanthemum, below her left breast.
Chinese dresses at that time were dartless, cut as if women did not have breasts; these young doctors, unaccustomed to decorations, may have seen their chests as black expanses with no reference points for owers. In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering o a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans.
Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. He and his friends took pictures of one another in bathing suits at Coney Island beach, the salt wind from the Atlantic blowing their hair.
They are always laughing. My father, white shirt sleeves rolled up, smiles in front of a wall of clean laundry. In the spring he wears a new straw hat, cocked at a Fred Astaire angle. He steps out, dancing down the stairs, one foot forward, one back, a hand in his pocket. He wrote to her about the American custom of stomping on straw hats come fall. He is sitting on a rock in Central Park. In one snapshot he is not smiling; someone took it when he was studying, blurred in the glare of the desk lamp.
There are no snapshots of my mother. In two small portraits, however, there is a black thumbprint on her forehead, as if someone had inked in bangs, as if someone had marked her. The last scroll has columns of Chinese words. I keep looking to see whether she was afraid. Year after year my father did not come home or send for her.
Their two children had been dead for ten years. If he did not return soon, there would be no more children. They could talk already. She bought good clothes and shoes. Then she decided to use the money for becoming a doctor. She did not leave for Canton immediately after the children died. In China there was time to complete feelings. As my father had done, my mother left the village by ship.
There was a sea bird painted on the ship to protect it against shipwreck and winds. She was in luck. The following ship was boarded by river pirates, who kidnapped every passenger, even old ladies. At the dormitory the school o cial assigned her to a room with ve other women, who were unpacking when she came in. They greeted her and she greeted them. But no one wanted to start friendships until the unpacking was done, each item placed precisely to section o the room.
My mother spotted the name she had written on her application pinned to a headboard, and the annoyance she felt at not arriving early enough for rst choice disappeared. The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed again how neatly her belongings tted together, clean against the green lining.
She refolded the clothes before putting them in the one drawer that was hers. Then she took out her pens and inkbox, an atlas of the world, a tea set and tea cannister, sewing box, her ruler with the real gold markings, writing paper, envelopes with the thick red stripe to signify no bad news, her bowl and silver chopsticks.
These things she arranged one by one on her shelf. She spread the two quilts on top of the bed and put her slippers side by side underneath. She never did get all of it back. The women who had arrived early did not o er to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.
The book would stay open at the very page she had pressed at with her hand, and no one would complain about the eld not being plowed or the leak in the roof. To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of owers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life.
Above her head is her one box on a shelf. The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. Free from families, my mother would live for two years without servitude. Now she would get hot water only if she bribed the concierge. She brought out meats and gs she had preserved on the farm.
Everyone complimented her on their tastiness. The women told which villages they came from and the names they would go by. My mother did not let it be known that she had already had two children and that some of these girls were young enough to be her daughters.
Then everyone went to the auditorium for two hours of speeches by the faculty. They told the students that they would begin with a text as old as the Han empire, when the prescription for immortality had not yet been lost.
Chang Chung-ching, father of medicine, had told how the two great winds, yang and yin, blew through the human body. The diligent students would do well to begin tonight memorizing his book on colds and fevers. After they had mastered the ancient cures that worked, they would be taught the most up-to-date western discoveries. By the time the students graduated—those of them who persevered—their range of knowledge would be wider than that of any other doctor in history. Women have now been practicing medicine for about fty years, said one of the teachers, a woman, who complimented them for adding to their growing number and also for coming to a school that taught modern medicine.
Then they went to the dining hall to eat. My mother began memorizing her books immediately after supper. There were two places where a student could study: the dining hall with its tables cleared for work, everyone chanting during the common memorization sessions; or the table in her own room. Most students went to the dining hall for the company there. Once in a while she dropped by the dining hall, chanted for a short while with the most advanced group, not missing a syllable, yawned early, and said good-night.
She quickly built a reputation for being brilliant, a natural scholar who could glance at a book and know it. They only needed to pick up a word or two, and they could remember the rest. You get a lot more clues in actual diagnosis. Patients talk endlessly about their ailments. To make up the lack, she did secret studying. Older people were expected to be smarter; they are closer to the gods.
The night before exams, when the other students stayed up, I went to bed early. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. Even though they had to crowd the other rooms, none of the young women would sleep in it. Accustomed to nestling with a bedful of siblings and grannies, they tted their privacy tighter rather than claim the haunted room as human territory. No one had lived in it for at least ve years, not since a series of hauntings had made its inhabitants come down with ghost fear that shattered their brains for studying.
The haunted ones would give high, startled cries, pointing at the air, which sure enough was becoming hazy. They would suddenly turn and go back the way they had come. When they rounded a corner, they attened themselves fast against the building to catch what followed unawares moving steadily forward. The stranger with arms hanging at its sides who stood beside the wall in the background of the photograph was a ghost.
The girl would insist there had been nobody there when she took the picture. Most ghosts are only nightmares. Somebody should have held her and wiggled her ears to wake her up. Once our whole family saw wine cups spinning and incense sticks waving through the air.
We got the magic monk to watch all night. He also saw the incense tips tracing orange gures in the dark—ideographs, he said. He followed the glow patterns with his inkbrush on red paper. And there it was, a message from our great-grandfather. We needed to put bigger helpings and a Ford in front of his plaque. And when we did, the haunting stopped immediately. And you developed a talent by working very hard at becoming good at something. A great glimpse into Moroccan traditions, lovingly told.
Chapters 18 through Return to Book Page. The book almost seems a cross between an autobiography and an ethnographic study of French Colonial Morocco, just as the stirrings of an independence movement are in the air. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by tals French protectorate.
The harem is a ahrem for women and the boundary symbolizes something to overcome somehow in search of freedom. The precocious, smart girl grows up within the safe boundaries of her family harrem where her paternal grandmother Lala reigns supreme, while her maternal grandmother who lives out in the country is a free spirit allowed to roam the countryside on her own. There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
And magic flourishes when you spell out that dream and make the frontiers vanish. Talss was a founder of Islamic feminism and here she recounts the roles of the women in her life. I lived in Morocco with dreasm author. A House in Fez: Buy the selected items together This item: Girlhodo just been to Morocco and in particular the city of Fez I found the story fascinating and enlightening.
It is not enough to reject this courtyard—you need to have a vision of the meadows with which you want to replace it. We offer fast download speeds. The maximum filesize for a single file is MB. The file can be downloaded at any time and as often as you need it. File Life: 30 days after no activity.
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