My father has asked me to be the fourth er at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has beey since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts.
"She had a new idea inside her head," said my father. "But before it could e out of her mouth, the thought grew too big and burst. It must have been a very bad idea."
The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind. My mother was supposed to host the meeting of the Joy Luck Club.
The week before she died, she called me, full of pride, full of life: "Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck. Im going to cook black sesame-seed soup."
"Dont show off," I said.
"Its not showoff." She said the two soups were almost the same, chabudwo. Or maybe she said butong, not the same thing at all. It was one of those ese expressions that means the better half of mixed iions. I ever remember things I didnt uand in the first place.
My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949, two years before I was born. This was the year my mother and father left a with oiff leather trunk filled only with fancy silk dresses. There was no time to paything else, my mother had explaio my father after they boarded the boat. Still his hands swam frantically between the slippery silks, looking for his cotton shirts and wool pants.
When they arrived in San Frany father made her hide those shiny clothes. She wore the same brown-checked ese dress until the Refugee Wele Society gave her two hand-me-down dresses, all toe in sizes for Ameri women. The society was posed of a group of white-haired Ameri missionary ladies from the First ese Baptist Church. And because of their gifts, my parents could not refuse their invitation to join the churor could they ighe old ladies practical adviprove their English through Bible study class on Wednesday nights and, later, through choir practi Saturday ms. This was how my parents met the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs. My mother could sehat the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in a and hopes they couldnt begin to express in their fragile English. Or at least, my mother reized the numbness in these womens faces. And she saw how quickly their eyes moved wheold them her idea for the Joy Luck Club.
Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. Thats why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. It was the story she would always tell me when she was bored, when there was nothing to do, when every bowl had been washed and the Formica table had been wiped down twice, when my father sat reading the neer and smoking one Pall Mall cigarette after another, a warning not to disturb him. This is when my mother would take out a box of old ski sweaters sent to us by unseeives from Vancouver. She would snip the bottom of a sweater and pull out a kinky thread of yarn, anch it to a piece of cardboard. And as she began to roll with one sweeping rhythm, she would start her story. Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, aually into mine.
"I dreamed about Kweilin before I ever saw it," my man, speaking ese. "I dreamed of jagged peaks lining a curvi