An-Mei Hsu
When I was a young girl in a, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about. So I knew Popo wanted me tet my mother on purpose, and this is how I came to remember nothing of her. The life that I knew began in the large house in Ningpo with the cold hallways and tall stairs. This was my uncle and aunties family house, where I lived with Popo and my little brother.
But I often heard stories of a ghost who tried to take children away, especially strong-willed little girls who were disobedient. Many times Popo said aloud to all who could hear that my brother and I had fallen out of the bowels of a stupid goose, two eggs that nobody wanted, not even good enough to crack over rice pe. She said this so that the ghosts would not steal us away. So you see, to Popo we were also very precious.
All my life, Popo scared me. I became even more scared when she grew sick. This was in 1923, when I was nine years old. Popo had swollen up like an overripe squash, so full her flesh had gone soft and rotten with a bad smell. She would call me into her room with the terrible stink and tell me stories. "An-mei," she said, calling me by my school name. "Listen carefully." She told me stories I could not uand.
One was about a greedy girl whose belly grew fatter and fatter. This girl poisoned herself after refusing to say whose child she carried. When the monks cut open her body, they found inside a large white winter melon.
"If yreedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry," said Popo.
Aime, Popo told me about a girl who refused to listen to her elders. One day this bad girl shook her head so vigorously to refuse her aunties simple request that a little white ball fell from her ear and out poured all her brains, as clear as chi broth.
"Your own thoughts are so busy swimming ihat everything else gets pushed out," Popo told me.
Right before Popo became so sick she could no longer speak, she pulled me close and talked to me about my mother. "Never say her name," she warned. "To say her name is to spit on your fathers grave."
The only father I knew was a big painting that hung in the main hall. He was a large, unsmiling man, unhappy to be so still on the wall. His restless eyes followed me around the house. Even from my room at the end of the hall, I could see my fathers watg eyes. Popo said he watched me for any signs of disrespect. So sometimes, when I had thrown pebbles at other children at school, or had lost a book through carelessness, I would quickly walk by my father with a know-nothing look and hide in a er of my room where he could not see my face.
I felt our house was so unhappy, but my little brother did not seem to think so. He rode his bicycle through the courtyard, chasing chis and other children, laughing over whies shrieked the loudest. Ihe quiet house, he jumped up and down on Uncle and Aunties best feather sofas when they were away visiting village friends.
But even my brothers happiness went away. O summer day when Popo was already very sick, we stood outside watg a village funeral procession marg by our courtyard. Just as it passed ate, the heavy framed picture of the dead man toppled from its stand ao the dusty ground. An old lady screamed and fainted. My brother laughed and Auntie slapped him.
My auntie, who had a very bad temper with child