An-Mei Hsu
Yesterday my daughter said to me, "My marriage is falling apart."
And now all she do is watch it falling. She lies down on a psychiatrist couch, squeezing tears out about this shame. And, I think, she will lie there until there is nothing more to fall, nothio cry about, everything dry.
She cried, "No choio choice!" She doesnt know. If she doesnt speak, she is making a choice. If she doesnt try, she lose her ce forever.
I know this, because I was raised the ese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other peoples misery, to eat my own bitterness.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, oep after anoing up and down, but all going the same way.
I know how it is to be quiet, to listen and watch, as if your life were a dream. You close your eyes when you no longer want to watch. But when you no longer want to listen, what you do? I still hear what happened more than sixty years ago.
My mother was a strao me when she first arrived at my uncles house in Ningpo. I was nine years old and had not seen her for many years. But I knew she was my mother, because I could feel her pain.
"Do not look at that woman," warned my aunt. "She has thrown her fato the eastward-flowing stream. Her aral spirit is lost forever. The person you see is just decayed flesh, evil, rotted to the bone."
And I would stare at my mother. She did not look evil. I wao touch her face, the ohat looked like mine.
It is true, she wore strange fn clothes. But she did not speak back when my aunt cursed her. Her head bowed even lower when my uncle slapped her for calling him Brother. She cried from her heart when Popo died, even though Popo, her mother, had sent her away so many years before. And after Popos funeral, she obeyed my uncle. She prepared herself to return to Tientsin, where she had dishonored her widowhood by being the third e to a rich man.
How could she leave without me? This was a question I could not ask. I was a child. I could only watd listen.
The night before she was to leave, she held my head against her body, as if to protect me from a danger I could not see. I was g t her back before she was even gone. And as I lay in her lap, she told me a story.
"An-mei," she whispered, "have you seetle turtle that lives in the pond?" I his ond in our courtyard and I often poked a sti the still water to make the turtle swim out from underh the rocks.
"I also khat turtle when I was a small child," said my mother. "I used to sit by the pond and watch him swimming to the surface, biting the air with his little beak. He is a very old turtle."
I could see that turtle in my mind and I knew my mother was seeing the same one.
"This turtle feeds on our thoughts," said my mother. "I learhis one day, when I was ye, and Popo said I could no longer be a child. She said I could not shout, or run, or sit on the ground to catch crickets. I could not cry if I was disappointed. I had to be silent and listen to my elders. And if I did not do this, Popo said she would y hair and seo a place where Buddhist nuns lived.
"That night, after Popo told me this, I sat by the pond, looking into the water. And because I was weak, I began to cry. Then I saw this turtle swimming to the top and hi