Amy Tan - The Hundred Secret Senses

‘Okay-okay, maybe try that first. But just case, you call Simon, ask him store name.’

I’m in a good mood. I want to see how far she’ll carry her ruse. ‘I know the store,’ I say, and search for a likely-sounding name. ‘Yeah, it’s Bogus Boomboxes. On Market Street.’ I can practically hear Kwan’s mind whirring and clicking into alternate mode.

Finally she laughs and says, ‘Hey, you bad girl – lie! No such name.’

‘And no such stereo problem,’ I add.

‘Okay-okay. You call Simon, tell him Kwan say Happy Birthday.’

‘Actually, I was going to call him for the same reason.’

‘Oh, you so bad! Why you torture me, embarrass this way!’ She lets out a wheezy laugh, then gasps and says, ‘Oh, and Libby-ah, after call Simon, call Ma.’

‘Why? Is her stereo broken too?’

‘Don’t joke. Her heart feel bad.’

I’m alarmed. ‘What’s wrong? Is it serious?’

‘Mm-hmm. So sad. You remember new boyfriend she have, I May Hopfree?’

‘High -may ho- fray ,’ I pronounce slowly. ‘Jaime Jofré.’

‘I always remember, I May Hopfree. And that’s what he do! Turn out he married already. Chile lady. She show up, pinch his ear, take home.’

‘No!’ A ripple of glee flows into my cheeks, and I mentally slap myself.

‘Yes-yes, Ma so mad! Last week she buy two loveboat cruise ticket. Hopfree say use your Visa, I pay you back. Now no pay, no cruise, no refund. Ah! Poor Ma, always find wrong man. … Hey, maybe I do matchmake for her. I choose better for her than she choose herself. I make good match, bring me luck.’

‘What if it’s not so good?’

‘Then I must fix, make better. My duty.’

After we hang up, I think about Kwan’s duty. No wonder she sees my impending divorce as a personal and professional failure on her part. She still believes she was our spiritual mei-po , our cosmic matchmaker. And I’m hardly in the position to tell her that she wasn’t. I was the one who asked her to convince Simon we were destined to be together, linked by the necessity of fate.

Simon Bishop and I met more than seventeen years ago. At that moment in our lives, we were willing to place all our hopes on the ridiculous – pyramid power, Brazilian figa charms, even the advice of Kwan and her ghosts. We both were terribly in love, I with Simon, he with someone else. The someone else happened to have died before I ever met Simon, although I didn’t know that until three months later.

I spotted Simon in a linguistics class at UC Berkeley, spring quarter 1976. I noticed him right away because like me he had a name that didn’t fit with his Asian features. Eurasian students weren’t as common then as they are now, and as I stared at him, I had the sense I was seeing my male doppelgänger. I started wondering how genes interact, why one set of racial characteristics dominates in one person and not in another with the same background. I once met a girl whose last name was Chan. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and no, she wearily explained, she was not adopted. Her father was Chinese. I figured that her father’s ancestors had engaged in secret dalliances with the British or Portuguese in Hong Kong. I was like that girl, always having to explain about my last name, why I didn’t look like a Laguni. My brothers look almost as Italian as their last name implies. Their faces are more angular than mine. Their hair has a slight curl and is a lighter shade of brown.

Simon didn’t look like any particular race. He was a perfectly balanced blend, half Hawaiian-Chinese, half Anglo, a fusion of different racial genes and not a dilution. When our linguistics class formed study groups, Simon and I drifted toward the same one. We didn’t mention what we so obviously shared.

I remember the first time he brought up his girlfriend, because I had been hoping he didn’t have one. Five of us were cramming for a midterm. I was listing the attributes of Etruscan: a dead language, as well as an isolate, unrelated to other languages … In the middle of my summary, Simon blurted: ‘My girlfriend, Elza, she went on a study tour of Italy and saw these incredible Etruscan tombs.’

We looked at him – like, So? Mind you, Simon didn’t say, ‘My girlfriend, who, by the way, is as dead as this language.’ He talked about her in passing, as if she were alive and well, traveling on Eurail and sending postcards from Tuscany. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he looked sheepish and mumbled the way people do when they’re caught arguing with themselves while walking down the sidewalk. Poor guy, I thought, and at that moment my heartstrings went twing.

After class, Simon and I would often take turns buying each other coffee at the Bear’s Lair. There we added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies. We discussed primitivism as a Western-biased concept. Mongrelization as the only longterm answer to racism. Irony, satire, and parody as the deepest forms of truth. He told me he wanted to create his own philosophy, one that would guide his life’s work, that would enable him to make substantive changes in the world. I looked up the word substantive in the dictionary that night, then realized I wanted a Substantive life too. When I was with him, I felt as if a secret and better part of myself had finally been unleashed. I had dated other guys to whom I felt attracted, but those relationships seldom went beyond the usual good times induced by all-night parties, stoned conversations, and sometimes sex, all of which soon grew as stale as morning breath. With Simon, I laughed harder, thought more deeply, felt more passionately about life beyond my own cubbyhole. We could volley ideas back and forth like tennis pros. We wrestled with each other’s minds. We unearthed each other’s past with psychoanalytic gusto.

I thought it was eerie how much we had in common. Both of us had lost a parent before the age of five, he a mother, I a father. We both had owned pet turtles; his died after he accidentally dropped them into a chlorinated swimming pool. We both had been loners as kids, abandoned to caretakers – he to two unmarried sisters of his mother’s, I to Kwan.

‘My mom left me in the hands of someone who talked to ghosts!’ I once told him.

‘God! I’m amazed you aren’t crazier than you already are.’ We laughed, and I felt giddy about our making fun of what had once caused me so much pain.

‘Good ol’ Mom,’ I added. ‘She’s the quintessential social worker, totally obsessed with helping strangers and ignoring the homefront. She’d rather keep an appointment with her manicurist than lift a finger to help her kids. Talk about phony! It wasn’t that she was pathological, but, you know – ’

And Simon jumped in: ‘Yeah, even benign neglect can hurt for a lifetime.’ Which was exactly what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words. And then he clinched my heart: ‘Maybe her lack of attention is what made you as strong as you are today.’ I nodded eagerly as he went on: ‘I was thinking that, because my girlfriend – you know, Elza – well, she lost both parents when she was a baby. Talk about strong-willed – whew!’

That’s how we were together, intimate in every way – up to a point. I sensed we were attracted to each other. From my end it was a strong sexual charge. From his it was more like static cling – which he easily shook off: ‘Hey, Laguni,’ he’d say, and put his hand firmly on my shoulder. ‘I’m bushed, gotta run. But if you want to go over notes this weekend, give me a call.’ With this breezy sendoff, I’d trudge back to my apartment, nothing to do on a Friday night, because I had turned down a date hoping that Simon would ask me out. By then I was stupid-in-love with Simon – goo-goo-eyed, giggly-voiced, floaty-headed, infatuated in the worst way. There were so many times when I lay in bed, disgusted that I was twitching with unspent desire. I wondered: Am I crazy? Am I the only one who’s turned on? Sure, he has a girlfriend. So what? As everyone knows, when you’re in college and changing your mind about a million things, a current girlfriend can turn into a former one overnight.