(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (19 page)

“I’m going to school now,” Ruth would say.

“You have lunch money?”

“Yeah. You need more tea?”

“No more.”

And each day, several times a day, Ruth wanted to tell her mother that she was sorry, that she was an evil girl, that everything was her fault. But to do so would be to acknowledge what her mother obviously wanted to pretend never existed, those words Ruth had written. For weeks, they walked on tiptoe, careful not to step on the broken pieces.

On her sixteenth birthday, Ruth came home from school and found her mother had bought some of her favorite foods: the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, both kinds, one with meat filling, one with sweet red-bean paste, as well as a Chinese sponge cake stuffed with strawberries and whipped cream. “Cannot cook you better things,” LuLing said. Her right side was still supported in a sling, and she could not lift anything with that arm. It was hard enough for her to haul bags of groceries from the market with her left hand. Ruth saw these offerings as a gesture of forgiveness.

“I like this stuff,” Ruth said politely. “It’s great.”

“No time buy gift,” her mother mumbled. “But I find some things, maybe you still like.” She pointed to the coffee table. Ruth slowly walked over and picked up a lumpy package that was clumsily wrapped in tissue paper and tape, no ribbon. Inside she found a black book and a tiny purse of red silk, fastened with a miniature frog clasp. And within the purse was a ring Ruth had always coveted, with a thin gold band and two oval pieces of apple-green jade. It had been a gift from Ruth’s father, who had received it from his mother to give to his future bride. Her mother never wore it. GaoLing had once hinted that the ring should belong to her, so it could be passed along to her son, who was also the only grandson. Forever after, LuLing brought up the ring in the context of that greedy remark of her sister’s.

“Wow, wow, wow.” Ruth stared at the ring in her palm.

“This is very good jade, don’t loose,” her mother warned.

“I won’t lose it.” Ruth slid the ring onto her middle finger. Too small for that one, but it did fit her ring finger.

Finally Ruth looked at the other gift. It was a pocket-sized book with black leather covers, a red ribbon for a place marker.

“You holding backward,” her mother said, and flipped it so the back was the front but facing the wrong way. She turned the pages for Ruth, left to right. Everything was in Chinese. “Chinese Bible,” her mother said. She opened it to a page with another place marker, a sepia-toned photograph of a young Chinese woman.

“This my mother.” LuLing’s voice sounded strangled. “See? I make copy for you.” She pulled out a wax-paper sleeve with a duplicate of the photograph.

Ruth nodded, sensing this was important, that her mother was giving her a message about mothers. She tried to pay attention and not look at the ring on her finger. But she could not help imagining what the kids at school would say, how envious they would be.

“When I little-girl time, hold this Bible here.” LuLing patted her chest. “Sleep time, think about my mother.”

Ruth nodded. “She was pretty then.” Ruth had seen other photos of LuLing and GaoLing’s mother—Waipo is what Ruth called her. In those, Waipo had a doughy face with wrinkles as deep as cracks and a mouth as severe, straight, and lipless as a sword slash. LuLing slipped the pretty picture into the Bible, then held one hand, palm up. “Now give back.”

“What?”

“Ring. Give back.”

Ruth didn’t understand. Reluctantly she put the ring in LuLing’s hand and watched as she returned it to the silk purse.

“Some things too good use right now. Save for later, ‘predate more.”

Ruth wanted to cry out, “No! You can’t do that! It’s
my
birthday present.”

But she said nothing, of course. She stood by, her throat tightening, as LuLing went to her vinyl easy chair. She pulled up the bottom cushion. Underneath was a cutting board, and beneath that a flap, which she lifted. Into this shallow cavern, her mother placed the Bible and the ring in its purse. So that’s where she also hid things!

“Someday I give you forever.”

Someday? Ruth’s throat ached. She wanted to cry. “When’s forever?” But she knew what her mother meant—forever as in, “When I forever dead, then you don’t need listen me anymore.” Ruth was a mix of emotions, happy that her mother had given her such nice presents, because this meant she still loved her, yet filled with a new despair that the ring had been taken away so soon.

The next day, Ruth went to the easy chair, pulled back the cushion and cutting board, then reached her hand into the hollow to feel for the silk purse. She extracted the ring and looked at it, now a forbidden object. She felt as if she had swallowed it and it was caught in her throat. Maybe her mother had shown her the ring just to torture her. That was probably it. Her mother knew exactly how to make her miserable! Well, Ruth would not let her have the satisfaction. She would pretend she didn’t care. She would force herself never to look at the ring again, to act as though it did not exist.

A few days after that, LuLing came into Ruth’s room, accusing her of having gone to the beach. When Ruth lied and said she had not, LuLing showed Ruth the sneakers she had left by the front door. She banged them together and a storm of sand rained down.

“That’s from the sidewalk!” Ruth protested.

And so the rights continued, and felt to Ruth both strange and familiar. They argued with increasing vigor and assurance, crossing the temporary boundaries of the last month, defending the old terrain. They flung out more pain, knowing already they had survived the worst.

Later, Ruth debated over throwing away her diary. She retrieved the dreaded book, still in the back of her underwear drawer. She turned the pages, reading here and there, weeping for herself. There was truth in what she had written, she believed, some of it, at least. There was a part of her in these pages that she did not want to forget. But when she arrived at the final entry, she was stricken with a sense that God, her mother, and Precious Auntie knew that she had committed near-murder. She carefully crossed out the last sentences, running her ballpoint pen over and over the words until everything was a blur of black ink. On the next page, the last page, she wrote: “I’m sorry. Sometimes I just wish you would say you’re sorry too.”

Though she could never show her mother those words, it felt good to write them. She was being truthful and neither good nor bad. She then tried to think of a place where her mother would never find her diary. She climbed onto the kitchen counter and stretched her arm way up and tossed the diary on top of the cabinet, so far out of reach that she too forgot about it over time.

Ruth now reflected that in all the years gone by, she and her mother had never talked about what had happened. She put down the diary. Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time. She felt a curious sympathy for her younger self, as well as an embarrassed hindsight in how foolish and egocentric she had been. If she had had a child, it would have been a daughter who grew up to make her just as miserable as she had made her mother. That daughter would have been fifteen or sixteen right about now, shouting that she hated Ruth. She wondered whether her mother had ever told her own mother that she hated her.

At that moment, she thought of the photos they had looked at during the Moon Festival dinner. Her mother had been around fifteen in the photo with Auntie Gal and Waipo. And there was another photo, the one of Precious Auntie, whom LuLing had mistakenly identified as her mother. A thought ran through her mind: The photo her mother kept in the Bible. She had also said that was her mother. Who was in that picture?

Ruth went to the vinyl chair, removed the cushion and the cutting board. Everything was still there: the small black Bible, the silk pouch, the apple-green-jade ring. She opened the Bible, and there it was, the wax-paper sleeve with the same photo her mother had shown her at the family reunion dinner. Precious Auntie, wearing the peculiar headdress and high-collared winter clothes. What did this mean? Was her mother demented thirty years before? Or was Precious Auntie really who her mother said she was? And if she was, did that mean her mother was
not
demented? Ruth stared at the photo again, searching the features of the woman. She couldn’t tell.

What else was in the bottom of the chair? Ruth reached in and pulled out a package wrapped in a brown grocery bag and tied with red Christmas ribbon. Inside was a stack of paper, all written on in Chinese. At the top of certain sheets was a large character done in stylish brushed-drawn calligraphy. She had seen this before. But where? When?

And then it came to her. The other pages, the ones buried in her bottom right-hand desk drawer. “Truth,” she recalled the top of that first page read. “These are the things I know are true.” What did the next sentences say? The names of the dead, the secrets they took with them. What secrets? She sensed her mother’s life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been there all along.

She looked at the top page of this new stack in her hands, the large calligraphed character. She could hear her mother scolding her, “Should study harder.” Yes, she should have. The large character was familiar, a curved bottom, three marks over it—
heart!
And the first sentence, it was like the beginning of the page she had at home. “These are the things I—” And then it was different. The next word was
ying-gai,
“should.” Her mother used that a lot. The next, that was
bu,
another word her mother often said. And the one after that… she didn’t know. “These are the things I should not—” Ruth guessed what the next word might be: “These are the things I should not
tell.”
“These are the things I should not
write
.” “These are the things I should not
speak
.” She went into her bedroom, to a shelf where her mother kept an English-Chinese dictionary. She looked up the characters for “tell,” “write,” “speak,” but they did not match her mother’s writing. She feverishly looked up more words, and ten minutes later, there it was:

“These are the things I should not forget.”

Her mother had given her those other pages—what?—five or six years before. Had she written these at the same time? Did she know then that she was losing her memory? When did her mother intend to give her these pages, if ever? When she eventually gave her the ring to keep? When it was clear that Ruth was ready to pay attention? Ruth scanned the next few characters. But nothing except the one for “I” looked familiar, and there were ten thousand words that could follow “I.” Now what?

Ruth lay down on the bed, the pages next to her. She looked at the photo of Precious Auntie and put that on her chest. Tomorrow she would call Art in Hawaii and see if he could recommend someone who could translate. That was One. She would retrieve the other pages from home. That was Two. She would call Auntie Gal and see what she knew. That was Three. And she would ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do. She would even move in with her mother, spend more time getting to know her. Art would not be too happy about that. He might take her moving out as a sign of problems. But someone had to take care of her mother. And she wanted to. She wanted to be here, as her mother told her about her life, taking her through all the detours of the past, explaining the multiple meanings of Chinese words, how to translate her heart. Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.

PART TWO

HEART

These are the things I must not forget.

I was raised with the Liu clan in the rocky Western Hills south of Peking. The oldest recorded name of our village was Immortal Heart. Precious Auntie taught me how to write this down on my chalkboard.
Watch now, Doggie,
she ordered, and drew the character for “heart”:
See this curving stroke? That’s the bottom of the heart, where blood gathers and flows. And the dots, those are the two veins and the artery that carry the blood in and out.
As I traced over the character, she asked:
Whose dead heart gave shape to this word? How did it begin, Doggie ? Did it belong to a woman ? Was it drawn in sadness?

I once saw the heart of a fresh-killed pig. It was red and glistening. And I had already seen plenty of chicken hearts in a bowl, waiting to be cooked. They looked like tiny lips and were the same color as Precious Auntie’s scars. But what did a woman heart look like? “Why do we have to know whose heart it was?” I asked as I wrote the character.

And Precious Auntie flapped her hands fast:
A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end.

I remember her often talking about this, how things begin. Since then I have wondered about the beginning and end of many things. Like Immortal Heart village. And the people who lived there, myself included. By the time I was born, Immortal Heart was no longer lucky. The village lay between hills in a valley that dropped into a deep limestone ravine. The ravine was shaped like the curved chamber of a heart, and the heart’s artery and veins were the three streams that once fed and drained the ravine. But they had gone dry. So had the divine springs. Nothing was left of the waterways but cracked gullies and the stench of a fart.