Amy Tan - The Hundred Secret Senses

The mission was a large compound, with one big courtyard in the middle, then four smaller ones, one big fancy main house, then three smaller ones. In between were covered passageways to connect everything together. And all around was a high wall, cutting off the inside from the outside. No one had lived in that place for more than a hundred years. Only foreigners would stay in a house that was cursed. They said they didn’t believe in Chinese ghosts.

Local people told Lao Lu, ‘Don’t live there. It’s haunted by fox-spirits.’ But Lao Lu said he was not afraid of anything. He was a Cantonese kuli descended from ten generations of kulis ! He was strong enough to work himself to death, smart enough to find the answer to whatever he wanted to know. For instance, if you asked him how many pieces of clothing did the foreign ladies own, he wouldn’t guess and say maybe two dozen each. He would go into the ladies’ rooms when they were eating, and he would count each piece, never stealing any, of course. Miss Banner, he told me, had two pairs of shoes, six pairs of gloves, five hats, three long costumes, two pairs of black stockings, two pairs of white stockings, two pairs of white undertrousers, one umbrella, and seven other things that may have been clothing, but he could not determine which parts of the body they were supposed to cover.

Through Lao Lu, I quickly learned many things about the foreigners. Only later did he tell me why local people thought the house was cursed. Many years before, it had been a summer mansion, owned by a merchant who died in a mysterious and awful way. Then his wives died, four of them, one by one, also in mysterious and awful ways, youngest first, oldest last, all of this happening from one full moon to the next.

Like Lao Lu, I was not easily scared. But I must tell you, Libby-ah, what happened there five years later made me believe the Ghost Merchant had come back.

Ever since we separated, Simon and I have been having a custody spat over Bubba, my dog. Simon wants visitation rights, weekend walks. I don’t want to deny him the privilege of picking up Bubba’s poop. But I hate his cavalier attitude about dogs. Simon likes to walk Bubba off leash. He lets him romp through the trails of the Presidio, along the sandy dog run by Crissy Field, where the jaws of a pit bull, a rottweiler, even a mad cocker spaniel could readily bite a three-pound Yorkie-chihuahua in half.

This evening, we were at Simon’s apartment, sorting through a year’s worth of receipts for the free-lance business we haven’t yet divided. For the sake of tax deductions, we decided ‘married filing joint return’ should still apply.

‘Bubba’s a dog,’ Simon said. ‘He has the right to run free once in a while.’

‘Yeah, and get himself killed. Remember what happened to Sarge?’

Simon rolled his eyes, his look of ‘Not that again.’ Sarge had been Kwan’s dog, a scrappy Pekingese-Maltese that challenged any male dog on the street. About five years ago, Simon took him for a walk – off leash – and Sarge tore open the nose of a boxer. The owner of the boxer presented Kwan with an eight-hundred-dollar veterinary bill. I insisted Simon should pay. Simon said the boxer’s owner should, since his dog had provoked the attack. Kwan squabbled with the animal hospital over each itemized charge.

‘What if Bubba runs into a dog like Sarge?’ I said.

‘The boxer started it,’ Simon said flatly.

‘Sarge was a vicious dog! You were the one who let him off leash, and Kwan ended up paying the vet bill!’

‘What do you mean? The boxer’s owner paid.’

‘Oh no, he didn’t. Kwan just said that so you wouldn’t feel bad. I told you that, remember?’

Simon twisted his mouth to the side, a grimace of his that always preceded a statement of doubt. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said.

‘Of course you don’t! You remember what you want to remember.’

Simon sneered. ‘Oh, and I suppose you don’t?’ Before I could respond, he held up his hand, palm out, to stop me. ‘I know, I know. You have an indelible memory! You can never forget a thing! Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It’s called holding a goddamn grudge.’

What Simon said has annoyed me all night long. Am I really the kind of person who hangs on to resentments? No, Simon was being defensive, throwing back barbs. Can I help it if I was born with a knack for remembering all sorts of things?

Aunt Betty was the first person to tell me I had a photographic memory; her comment made me believe I would grow up to be a photographer. She said this because I once corrected her in front of a bunch of people on her account of a movie we had all seen together. Now that I’ve been making my living behind the camera lens for the last fifteen years, I don’t know what people mean by photographic memory. How I remember the past isn’t like flipping through an indiscriminate pile of snapshots. It’s more selective than that.

If someone asked me what my address was when I was seven years old, the numbers wouldn’t flash before my eyes. I’d have to relive a specific moment: the heat of the day, the smell of the cut lawn, the slap-slap-slap of rubber thongs against my heels. Then once again I’d be walking up the two steps of the poured-concrete porch, reaching into the black mailbox, heart pounding, fingers grasping – Where is it? Where’s that stupid letter from Art Linkletter, inviting me to be on his show? But I wouldn’t give up hope. I’d think to myself, Maybe I’m at the wrong address. But no, there they are, the brass numbers above, 3–6–2–4, complete with tarnish and rust around the screws.

That’s what I remember most, not addresses but pain – that old lump-in-the-throat conviction that the world had fingered me for abuse and neglect. Is that the same as a grudge? I wanted so much to be a guest on ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things.’ It was the kiddie route to fame, and I wanted once again to prove to my mother that I was special, in spite of Kwan. I wanted to snub the neighborhood kids, to make them mad that I was having more fun than they would ever know. While riding my bicycle around and around the block, I’d plot what I’d say when I was finally invited to be on the show. I’d tell Mr. Linkletter about Kwan, just the funny stuff – like the time she said she loved the movie Southern Pacific. Mr. Linkletter would raise his eyebrows and round his mouth. ‘Olivia,’ he’d say, ‘doesn’t your sister mean South Pacific ?’ Then people in the audience would slap their knees and roar with laughter, and I’d glow with childish wonder and a cute expression.

Old Art always figured kids were so sweet and naive they didn’t know they were saying embarrassing things. But all those kids on the show knew precisely what they were doing. Why else didn’t they ever mention the real secrets – how they played night-night nurse and dickie doctor, how they stole gum, gunpowder caps, and muscle magazines from the corner Mexican store. I knew kids who did those things. They were the same ones who once pinned down my arms and peed on me, laughing and shouting, ‘Olivia’s sister is a retard.’ They sat on me until I started crying, hating Kwan, hating myself.

To soothe me, Kwan took me to the Sweet Dreams Shoppe. We were sitting outside, licking cones of rocky road ice cream. Captain, the latest mutt my mother had rescued from the pound, whom Kwan had named, was lying at our feet, vigilantly waiting for drips.

‘Libby-ah,’ Kwan said, ‘what this word, lee-tahd?’

‘Reee-tard,’ I corrected, lingering over the word. I was still angry with Kwan and the neighbor kids. I took another tongue stab of ice cream, thinking of retarded things Kwan had done. ‘Retard means fantou ,’ I said. ‘You know, a stupid person who doesn’t understand anything.’ She nodded. ‘Like saying the wrong things at the wrong time,’ I added. She nodded again. ‘When kids laugh at you and you don’t know why.’