Amy Tan - The Hundred Secret Senses

‘Let’s go! Hurry come!’ she’ll be whispering above the storm. ‘But don’t tell anyone. Promise me, Libby-ah.’

Before seven in the morning, the phone rings. Kwan is the only one who would call at such an ungodly hour. I let the answering machine pick up.

‘Libby-ah?’ she whispers. ‘Libby-ah, you there? This you big sister … Kwan. I have something important tell you. … You want hear? … Last night I dream you and Simon. Strange dream. You gone to bank, check you savings. All a sudden, bank robber run through door. Quick! You hide you purse. So bank robber, he steal everybody money but yours. Later, you gone home, stick you hand in purse – ah! – where is? – gone! Not money but you heart. Stolened! Now you have no heart, how can live? No energy, no color in cheek, pale, sad, tired. Bank president where you got all you savings, he say, “I loan you my heart. No interest. You pay back whenever.” You look up, see his face – you know who, Libby-ah? You guess. … Simon! Yes-yes, give you his heart. You see! Still love you. Libby-ah, do you believe? Not just dream … Libby-ah, you listening me?’

Because of Kwan, I have a talent for remembering dreams. Even today, I can recall eight, ten, sometimes a dozen dreams. I learned how when Kwan came home from Mary’s Help. As soon as I started to wake, she would ask: ‘Last night, Libby-ah, who you meet? What you see?’

With my half-awake mind, I’d grab on to the wisps of a fading world and pull myself back in. From there I would describe for her the details of the life I’d just left – the scuff marks on my shoes, the rock I had dislodged, the face of my true mother calling to me from underneath. When I stopped, Kwan would ask, ‘Where you go before that?’ Prodded, I would trace my way back to the previous dream, then the one before that, a dozen lives, and sometimes their deaths. Those are the ones I never forget, the moments just before I died.

Through years of dream-life, I’ve tasted cold ash falling on a steamy night. I’ve seen a thousand spears flashing like flames on the crest of a hill. I’ve touched the tiny grains of a stone wall while waiting to be killed. I’ve smelled my own musky fear as the rope tightens around my neck. I’ve felt the heaviness of flying through weightless air. I’ve heard the sucking creak of my voice just before life snaps to an end.

‘What you see after die?’ Kwan would always ask.

I’d shake my head, ‘I don’t know. My eyes were closed.’

‘Next time, open eyes.’

For most of my childhood, I thought everyone remembered dreams as other lives, other selves. Kwan did. After she came home from the psychiatric ward, she told me bedtime stories about them, yin people: a woman named Banner, a man named Cape, a one-eyed bandit girl, a half-and-half man. She made it seem as if all these ghosts were our friends. I didn’t tell my mother or Daddy Bob what Kwan was saying. Look what happened the last time I did that.

When I went to college and could finally escape from Kwan’s world, it was already too late. She had planted her imagination into mine. Her ghosts refused to be evicted from my dreams.

‘Libby-ah,’ I can still hear Kwan saying in Chinese, ‘did I ever tell you what Miss Banner promised before we died?’

I see myself pretending to be asleep.

And she would go on: ‘Of course, I can’t say exactly how long ago this happened. Time is not the same between one lifetime and the next. But I think it was during the year 1864. Whether this was the Chinese lunar year or the date according to the Western calendar, I’m not sure …’

Eventually I would fall asleep, at what point in her story I always forgot. So which part was her dream, which part was mine? Where did they intersect? Every night, she’d tell me these stories. And I would lie there silently, helplessly, wishing she’d shut up.

Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose hope, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart.

Anyway, that was the year I gave Miss Banner the tea. And she gave me the music box, the one I once stole from her, then later returned. I remember the night we held that box between us with all those things inside that we didn’t want to forget. It was just the two of us, alone for the moment, in the Ghost Merchant’s House, where we lived with the Jesus Worshippers for six years. We were standing next to the holy bush, the same bush that grew the special leaves, the same leaves I used to make the tea. Only now the bush was chopped down, and Miss Banner was saying she was sorry that she let General Cape kill that bush. Such a sad, hot night, water streaming down our faces, sweat and tears, the cicadas screaming louder and louder, then falling quiet. And later, we stood in this archway, scared to death. But we were also happy. We were happy to learn we were unhappy for the same reason. That was the year that both our heavens burned.

Six years before, that’s when I first met her, when I was fourteen and she was twenty-six, maybe younger or older than that. I could never tell the ages of foreigners. I came from a small place in Thistle Mountain, just south of Changmian. We were not Punti, the Chinese who claimed they had more Yellow River Han blood running through their veins, so everything should belong to them. And we weren’t one of the Zhuang tribes either, always fighting each other, village against village, clan against clan. We were Hakka, Guest People – hnh! – meaning, guests not invited to stay in any good place too long. So we lived in one of many Hakka roundhouses in a poor part of the mountains, where you must farm on cliffs and stand like a goat and unearth two wheelbarrows of rocks before you can grow one handful of rice.

All the women worked as hard as the men, no difference in who carried the rocks, who made the charcoal, who guarded the crops from bandits at night. All Hakka women were this way, strong. We didn’t bind our feet like Han girls, the ones who hopped around on stumps as black and rotten as old bananas. We had to walk all over the mountain to do our work, no binding cloths, no shoes. Our naked feet walked right over those sharp thistles that gave our mountain its famous name.

A suitable Hakka bride from our mountains had thick calluses on her feet and a fine, high-boned face. There were other Hakka families living near the big cities of Yongan, in the mountains, and Jintian, by the river. And the mothers from poorer families liked to match their sons to hardworking pretty girls from Thistle Mountain. During marriage-matching festivals, these boys would climb up to our high villages and our girls would sing the old mountain songs that we had brought from the north a thousand years before. A boy had to sing back to the girl he wanted to marry, finding words to match her song. If his voice was soft, or his words were clumsy, too bad, no marriage. That’s why Hakka people are not only fiercely strong, they have good voices, and clever minds for winning whatever they want.

We had a saying: When you marry a Thistle Mountain girl, you get three oxen for a wife: one that breeds, one that plows, one to carry your old mother around. That’s how tough a Hakka girl was. She never complained, even if a rock tumbled down the side of the mountain and smashed out her eye.

That happened to me when I was seven. I was very proud of my wound, cried only a little. When my grandmother sewed shut the hole that was once my eye, I said the rock had been loosened by a ghost horse. And the horse was ridden by the famous ghost maiden Nunumu – the nu that means ‘girl,’ the numu that means ‘a stare as fierce as a dagger.’ Nunumu, Girl with the Dagger Eye. She too lost her eye when she was young. She had witnessed a Punti man stealing another man’s salt, and before she could run away, he stabbed his dagger in her face. After that, she pulled one corner of her headscarf over her blind eye. And her other eye became bigger, darker, sharp as a cat-eagle’s. She robbed only Punti people, and when they saw her dagger eye, oh, how they trembled.