The Kitchen God's Wife Part 14

Hulan stopped talking. She was squeezing the hem of her dress, biting her lips. I thought her story was over.

"Very sad," I said. "You're right, we are lucky."

But Hulan was not finished. She began to cry. "Boy or girl, I don't know which it was," she said. "My mother would not cut her open to find out. She refused to send her daughter to the next world with her womb cut open. She would not send her firstborn grandchild without a head. So that's how my parents buried her, with the baby half in, half out."

Hulan looked at my face. "That's right," she said, still crying. "My sister. And that pilot was Jiaguo, so scared of my sister's curse that he married me."

I watched her, not able to say anything. Finally, Hulan spoke again, this time more calmly. "I knew he was marrying me only to ease his fear, so she wouldn't come back and pull his plane down. But I married him anyway, thinking I could get some revenge for my sister. Of course, my parents were angry beyond belief. I kept telling them I was marrying him only to make him miserable every last day of his life, to always remind him of my sister and the tragedy he had caused.

"But how did I know Jiaguo would turn out to be a good man, such a good man? You know this, you see his character. He was so sorry, so sad. And he was kind to me, bought me nice clothes, corrected my manners, never laughing at me. How did I know he would be so kind?"

Hulan looked out at the rain still coming down. "Sometimes I'm still angry at him," she said quietly. "Sometimes I think about it another way. After all, he didn't kill her. She would have died anyway, giving birth, married or not. And sometimes I think my sister is angry at me, her baby hanging down from her limbs, cursing me for marrying the man who was supposed to be her husband."

So that's how Hulan and I started this telling and keeping of secrets. I told her the first, my ignorance about my own body. And she told me how she wished for revenge, and got happiness in return. And later that afternoon I told her about Peanut, how she was the one who should have married Wen Fu.

"So we both had our fate changed just in time! Lucky for us," cried Hulan. And I said nothing. I told her only half my secret, because I no longer knew whether I was lucky.

I waited until nighttime before I told Wen Fu about the baby. We were getting ready for bed. He reached for me.

"Now we have to be careful," I said. "I am going to have a baby."

He frowned. And just like me, he did not believe this news at first. So I told him about my appet.i.te, my recent sickness, how these were all the signs of new life. Still he did not say anything.

Perhaps Wen Fu knew no words for the feeling he had. In any case, he did not show me what he was thinking. Maybe most men would have walked around like roosters, crowing to everyone. But Wen Fu only said, "It's true, eh?" and then he began to undress.

Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced me, pressed his mouth to my forehead, breathed in my ear. At that moment I thought he was telling me he really was happy, pleased about the baby. At that moment I truly felt I had finally pleased him, and I was content to be the nest of his future children.

But that feeling lasted only one more moment. Wen Fu was touching the back of my leg, pulling up my dress. How can he be thinking this? I protested softly, but this only made him hurry more. He was trying to part my legs.

I said, "I have a baby growing inside me now. We can't do this anymore."

Of course, I was ignorant saying this. But he had no understanding or sympathy for me. He only laughed and called me a silly country girl.

"I'm only making sure it comes out a boy," he said. And then he pushed me down on the bed and fell on top of me.

"Stop!" I said. And then I said it louder and louder. "Stop!" Stop!" Wen Fu stopped and frowned at me. I had never shouted at my husband that way. Maybe it was because of the baby inside me. Maybe that's what made me want to protect myself. But he kept looking at me with such a terrible eye that I finally said to him, "Sorry." And without another word, he finished what I had begged him to stop.

The next day, I confided in Hulan once again. I thought she would listen with a sisterly ear. So I told her that my husband had "unnatural desires," an "overabundance of maleness." He was this way every night, even after I told him I was carrying a baby. And I was worried, so unhappy-that was my pitiful excuse for burdening her again with my problems.

Hulan looked at me without any expression. Maybe she was shocked by my frank words. Finally she said, "Hnh! This is not a problem. You should be glad. That's how you got your baby, isn't it?" Her voice sounded mocking. "This kind of desire doesn't hurt a baby. It is only a small inconvenience to you. Why shouldn't you do this for your husband? You should be grateful he still wants you! And when he does lose interest in you, he'll just go somewhere else. And then you'll know what it truly means to be unhappy with a husband."

Now it was my turn to look shocked. I thought she would give me her sympathy. She gave me a scolding instead. And she wouldn't stop. "Why do you think something good is bad?" she said. "Eh, if you think a dish won't be cooked right, then of course, when you taste it, it won't be right."

You never saw this side in Auntie Helen? Now you know, she can be mean too! She saves it up only for me, I don't know why. Or maybe I'm the only one she can show this side to.

You know what I think? I think she does this when something else is bothering her and she can't say. She tries to hide this by becoming bossy. That day, when she said this to me, I was very hurt of course. She made me feel so small that I became nothing. And I did not find out until several years later why she really said that. I did not know she was holding a secret inside, and only letting her anger come out. But L will tell you about that later.

It was in that little pavilion, about a week later, that I knew for sure that the war had begun.

Hulan had fallen asleep after lunch. A rainstorm started and I decided to go to the pavilion alone to write Peanut a letter. I was writing about pleasant things: the interesting sights I had seen, the boats on the lake, the temples I had visited. I said maybe we would come home soon, perhaps in a few months. I said I hoped we were back in Shanghai by the new year, when I hoped to show everyone a little son.

And then I saw Hulan running toward the pavilion, her wet clothes pressed against her plump body in an immodest way.

"They're flying away! Already leaving!" she shouted even before she reached me. Chennault was at the air force base, other Chinese leaders from the north and south had come. All the pilots were already gathered. And everyone was saying the same thing: No more time to get ready. It's already time to go.

Soon Hulan and I were back at the monastery, still in our wet clothes, packing for our husbands. I carefully put Wen Fu's clean s.h.i.+rts and pants, his socks, and a good new blanket into a trunk.

My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding. China at war. Wen Fu could die. I might not see him again. I wondered whether I really did love Wen Fu and only now realized it.

A truck began sounding its horn, telling us it was time to leave for the air force base. I ran to Hulan's room to tell her. And I saw she was not ready. She was running her fingers through a bureau drawer, then her hair. She was crying, confused, and saying to herself: "What picture of me as a pretty wife? What good-luck charm? That book he always forgets, where is it?"

At the airport, n.o.body would tell us where our husbands were going. And yet we could see above the rain: the blue sky, the white clouds. We were excited, proud. And then someone led us into a damp little room with a small cracked window that made everything outside look small and dangerous. The rain poured down on a narrow runway. Pilots were standing underneath the airplane wings. Someone was pointing to the blade of a propeller. Another man ran by with a box of tools. Jiaguo was going from plane to plane, holding out a large piece of paper, perhaps a map, that flapped with a wind that now seemed to rise up from the ground.

And then we saw the blades were spinning, the engines roaring louder. And I fought hard not to look at the others, not to say anything, not to let any wrong words leap out of my throat that would bring everyone bad luck. I think everyone was the same way, quiet and still, now uncertain.

But as the planes moved away from us slowly, Hulan began to wave. Rain, steam, and smoke were swirling all around, so the planes looked as if they were moving forward in an uneasy dream. Hulan waved harder and harder, tears streaming. The planes raced down the runway. And then she was waving furiously, crazily, like a wounded bird, as if this effort and all her wishes and hopes could lift them up safely, one after the other, and send them to victory.

Of course, the next morning we heard what really happened.

11.

FOUR SPLITS, FIVE CRACKS.

Do you remember the stuck-up girl, the one Hulan and I took baths with? She was the one who told us what happened in Shanghai, where the air force flew to save all of China.

She had come into the dining hall, where we were sitting in front of a radio. We had already heard our husbands were alive, and now we were listening to the victory report, our ears open, ready to catch every word of this good news.

"What you are listening to," she had said in a bitter voice, "is just empty noise." We turned to look at her. We saw her eyes, red as a demon's.

And then she told us. The man who always saved a chair by the ceiling fan for my husband, he died. The young one that my husband shouted at for playing tricks on him, he died too. And the stuck-up girl's husband, he was also killed.

"You think you are lucky because your husbands are alive," she said. "You are not."

And then she told us how the planes had flown late at night, toward the Shanghai harbor, swollen with j.a.panese boats. They were hoping to surprise them. But before they arrived, j.a.panese planes dropped from the darker sky above-already knew our planes were coming. And it was our pilots who had the surprise, became confused, then hurried to drop their bombs. Such a big hurry! Such a small distance from the sky to the ground. So the bombs fell on Shanghai that night, on the roofs of houses and stores, on streetcars, on hundreds of people, all Chinese. And the j.a.panese navy-their boats still floated on the water.

"Your husbands are not heroes. And all those people, those pilots, my husband-died for worse than nothing," the girl said, and then left the room. We were all quiet.

Hulan broke the silence. "How does she know what happened, what did not happen?" she said in an angry voice. And then she said she was still happy, because Jiaguo was alive. At least that was true, she said.

Can you imagine? In front of all of us she let her happiness show, didn't matter. How could she reveal such a selfish thought?

But I did not scold Hulan for her bad manners. I tried to correct her in a big-sister way: "If what that girl said is true, we should be thinking about this tragedy. We should be serious and not let our own happiness take over."

Hulan quickly took that happy look off her face. Her mouth dropped open to let this thought come in and nourish her brain. I was thinking, Good, even though she is uneducated, she is quick to learn something new.

But then her eyebrows drew close, her face became dark as clouds. "This kind of thinking-I don't understand," she said.

So I explained again: "We must have concern for the whole situation, not just our own husbands. Something worse could still be coming."

"Ai-ya! Daomei!" she cried, and covered her mouth. "How can you use these kinds of bad-luck words to poison everyone's future?"

"They are not bad-luck words," I insisted. "I am only saying we must be practical. This is wartime. We must feel with our hearts, but also think with our minds-clearly all the time. If we pretend the dangers are not there, how can we avoid them?"

But Hulan was no longer listening to me. She was crying and shouting. "I've never heard such poisonous words! What use is it to think this way, to use bad thoughts to attract only bad things?"

On and on she went, like a crazy woman. Now that I remember it, that was when our friends.h.i.+p took on four splits and five cracks. Hulan did it, broke harmony between us. I tell you, that day Hulan showed me her true character. She was not the soft melonhead she made everyone believe she was. That girl could throw out sharp words, slicing fast as any knife.

"You are saying tragedy will come to us too. You are saying a husband can still die," she shouted. "Why can't you be happy, holding onto what you have now?"

Can you imagine? She was accusing me in front of everyone! Throwing out a question that was looking only for a wrong answer. Making it seem as if I were the one who had said something bad.

"I did not say this," I answered right away.

"You are always wis.h.i.+ng for the worst."

Again these lies! "No such meaning," I said. "Practical is not the same as bad-luck thinking."

"If there are five ways to see something," she said-and here she fanned out the fingers on one hand, then pulled up her thumb as if it were a rotten turnip-"you always pick the worst."

"No such thing. I am saying our own happiness is not enough during a war. It is nothing. It cannot stop the war." I was so angry I could no longer understand what I was saying.

"Chiang Kai-shek says he can stop the war," she was shouting. "You think your thoughts are stronger than Chiang Kai-shek's?"

Hulan and the other two women were staring at me. Not one of those women stepped forward to stop our fight. They did not say, "Sisters, sisters, you are both right. You only misunderstand each other." And I could see Hulan's strong words had already damaged their thinking, left big holes where understanding could drain out. No wonder they could not see how ridiculous Hulan's arguments were.

So I said, "Suanle!"-Forget this! And I left them to go to my room.

Remembering this, I still get mad. And that's because she has not changed. You can see this. She twists things around to her way of thinking. If something is bad, she makes it sound good. If something is good, she makes it sound bad. She contradicts everything I say. She makes me seem like the one who is always wrong. And then I have to argue with myself to know what is really true.

Anyway, after that fight, I was so mad I could only sit on my bed, thinking about Hulan's mocking words. I told myself she was the one who always said foolish things. She was the one people laughed at behind her back. And when I no longer wanted to hear her words in my head, I searched for something to do. I opened a drawer and took out some cloth given to me by New Aunt, a bolt of cotton made by one of our family's factories.

It was a pale green fabric covered with small gold circles, very light cotton, suitable for a summer dress. I had already thought up a pattern in my mind, fas.h.i.+oned it from my memory, a dress I had seen in Shanghai, worn by a carefree girl.

So with this picture in my head, I began to cut my cloth. I imagined myself as this girl floating by in a green dress, all her friends admiring her, whispering to themselves that her clothes were as fine as her manners. But then I saw Hulan criticizing the dress, saying in her too loud voice, "Too fancy to wear after a husband has just died."

Right away I made a mistake-cut a sleeve hole too big-that's how mad I still was. Look what she did! Affected my concentration. Worse!-twisted my thinking and put a very bad thought into my head.

Such a bad thought, a thought I never could have imagined on my own, never. But now it had jumped out and I was chasing it. I was imagining a time, not too far away, when Hulan would say to me, "Sorry, your husband was killed. Bad fate that he fell from the sky."

"Oh, no," I said to myself. "G.o.ddess of Mercy, never let him die."

But the more I tried to push this thought out of my mind, the more it fought to stay. "He's dead," Hulan would say. She would probably smile when she told me this. And I would be angry and shouting like the stuck-up girl who had just lost her husband.

And then I thought: Maybe I should cry and look sad instead, lamenting about my fatherless child. Yes, that was more proper.

The next moment, my thoughts ran in another direction: Would I have to return to the island and live with Old Aunt and New Aunt? Perhaps not, not if I married someone new. And then I decided, Next time I will choose my own husband.

I stopped sewing. What was I thinking? That's when I realized that I truly was wis.h.i.+ng Wen Fu might die. I wasn't thinking this because I hated him. I didn't. That was later, when he became much worse.

But that night, in my room, in my mind, I was arguing with Hulan, with myself: Sometimes a girl makes a mistake. Sometimes a mistake can be changed. A war could change it, and it would be n.o.body's fault, one unlucky thing exchanged for another. This could still happen.

And so I finished making that dress. I cut the loose threads. I drew the dress over my head. But by then, my belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s had already begun to swell from the baby. I put only one arm in before I realized: I was stuck.

Oh, you think this was funny? Stuck in my dress, stuck in my marriage, stuck with Hulan as my friend. Sometimes I wonder why she's still my friend, how it is that we can do a business together.

Maybe it's because we fought so much in those early days. Maybe it's because we had no one else to turn to. So we always had to find reasons to be friends. Maybe those reasons are still there.

In any case, this is what happened after that big argument.

A few days later, the air force told us they would soon send us to Yangchow, where we would be reunited with our husbands.

We heard this news at breakfast and we were suspicious. We were thinking the bombs would soon start falling where we were sitting.

"A big danger must be coming here," I said. "That's why they are sending us away."

One of the other women, Lijun, said, "Then we should leave right away. Why must we delay two more days?"

And the other woman, Meili, said, "Why Yangchow? Bombs can fall there too."

"It must be that Yangchow is not a good place," I said, thinking aloud, "a city the j.a.panese would never want, so it will always be safe." You see how I was thinking in a logical way? I was not saying I did not like Yangchow. How could I? I had never seen it.

Right away Hulan contradicted me. "I heard Yangchow is very pretty, lots to see," she said, "famous for beautiful women and good-tasting noodles."

I already knew I would not see such women. I would not taste such noodles. "I am not saying it is not a pretty city," I explained carefully, "I am only saying it is not a good city for the j.a.panese. What j.a.panese want and what Chinese want are not the same thing."

So we left for Yangchow at the end of summer, only a few weeks after the war began. And we went by boat, because by then many roads and railways were already blocked. And when we arrived I saw that city was just as I had imagined it, a place the j.a.panese would never want.

Our new home was only one half-day northwest of Shanghai, the best city in the world, very modern. Yet Yangchow was completely different-an old-style place with no tall buildings, only one story for houses, maybe two stories only for more important buildings. Who knows why Du Fu and the old poets wrote about this place? To me, the city seemed to be made entirely out of dirt and mud. Under my two feet, it was dirt streets, dirt courtyards, dirt floors. Above, it was mud-brick walls, mud-tile roofs.

The air force found us a place just like that, mud and dirt, divided into four living quarters, two rooms each, and a shared kitchen with four old-fas.h.i.+oned coal stoves. When we first saw this, we were all shocked.

"This is wartime," I finally said to the others. "We all have to make sacrifices." Lijun and Meili immediately nodded and agreed. Hulan turned her face.

And then she began inspecting everything, criticizing what she saw. She poked her finger into a crumbling part of the wall. "Ai!" She pointed to another wall, where bugs were marching through a crack of sunlight. "Ai!" She stamped her feet on the floor: "Wah! Look how the dust rises up from the floor and chases my footsteps."

I was looking. We were all looking. I wanted to shout, "You see how she is. She's the complaining one, not I." But I saw I did not have to say one word. Meili, Lijun, they could see for themselves how Hulan was.

That afternoon a cook girl and a manservant also arrived. The air force provided only one of each, so we had to share. The cook was a local girl, very young, with a big, happy face. Her job was to keep the coal stoves burning at the right times throughout the day, to wash and chop the vegetables, to kill the chickens and gut the fish, to clean up everything before it began to stink.

The manservant belonged to the air force, a middle-aged man we called the chin wubing, which is the common word for a common soldier, the kind who fights only with broomsticks, only against flies. He was a small, thin man who looked as if his arms and legs would break if he carried anything too heavy. He was also a little crazy. When he worked, he often talked to himself, imagining himself to be a high-ranking officer who had been given bad orders: "Beat this bed cover! Wash this spot out!"

That's how I found out Hulan had ordered the chin wubing to mix six egg whites into a bucket of mud.