Ying-Ying St. Clair
For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid.
All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table.
And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Yet today I remember a time when I ran and shouted, when I could not stand still. It is my earliest recolle: telling the Moon Lady my secret wish. And because I fot what I wished for, that memory remained hidden from me all these many years.
But now I remember the wish, and I recall the details of that entire day, as clearly as I see my daughter and the foolishness of her life.
In 1918, the year that I was four, the Mooival arrived during an autumn in Wushi that was unusually hot, terribly hot. When I awoke that m, the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, the straw mat c my bed was already sticky. Everything in the room smelled of wet grass simmering in the heat.
Earlier in the summer, the servants had covered all the windows with bamboo curtains to drive out the sun. Every bed was covered with a woven mat, our only bedding during the months of sta heat. And the hot bricks of the courtyard were crisscrossed with bamboo paths. Autumn had e, but without its s and evenings. And so the stale heat still remained in the shadows behind the curtains, heating up the acrid smells of my chamber pot, seeping into my pillow, chafing the bay ned puffing up my cheeks, so that I awoke that m with a restless plaint.
There was another smell, outside, something burning, a pu fragrahat was half sweet and half bitter. "Whats that stinky smell?" I asked my amah, who always mao appear o my bed the instant I was awake. She slept on a cot in a little room o mine.
"It is the same as I explained yesterday," she said, lifti of my bed aing me on her knee. And my sleepy mind tried to remember what she had told me upon waking the m before.
"We are burning the Five Evils," I said drowsily, then squirmed out of her warm lap. I climbed on top of a little stool and looked out the window into the courtyard below. I saw a green coil curled in the shape of a snake, with a tail that billowed yellow smoke. The other day, Amah had showhat the snake had e out of a colorful box decorated with five evil creatures: a swimming snake, a jumping scorpion, a flyiipede, a dropping-down spider, and a springing lizard. The bite of any one of these creatures could kill a child, explained Amah. So I was relieved to think we had caught the Five Evils and were burning their corpses. I didnt know the green coil was merely inse used to chase away mosquitoes and small flies.
That day, instead of dressing me in a light cotton jacket and loose trousers, Amah brought out a heavy yellow silk jacket and skirt outlined with black bands.