Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club

Most of the relatives had left the next morning. And by the evening, my half-sisters and I were bored. We were sitting at the same large table, drinking tea and eating roasted watermelon seeds. My half-sisters gossiped loudly, while I sat cracking seeds and laying their flesh in a pile.

My half-sisters were all dreaming of being married to worthless young boys from families not as good as ours. My half-sisters did not know how to reach very high for a good thing. They were the daughters of my father's concubines. I was the daughter of my father's wife.

"His mother will treat you like a servant…" chided one half-sister upon hearing the other's choice.

"A madness on his uncle's side…" retorted the other half-sister.

When they tired of teasing one another, they asked me whom I wanted to marry.

"I know of no one," I told them haughtily.

It was not that boys did not interest me. I knew how to attract attention and be admired. But I was too vain to think any one boy was good enough for me.

Those were the thoughts in my head. But thoughts are of two kinds. Some are seeds that are planted when you are born, placed there by your father and mother and their ancestors before them. And some thoughts are planted by others. Maybe it was the watermelon seeds I was eating: I thought of that laughing man from the night before. And just then, a large wind blew in from the north and the flower on the table split from its stem and fell at my feet.

This is the truth. It was as if a knife had cut the flower's head off as a sign. Right then, I knew I would marry this man. It was not with joy that I thought this, but wonderment that I could know it.

And soon I began to hear this man mentioned by my father and uncle and aunt's new husband. At dinner his name was spooned into my bowl along with my soup. I found him staring at me across from my uncle's courtyard, hu-huing, "See, she cannot turn away. She is already mine."

True enough, I did not turn away. I fought his eyes with mine. I listened to him with my nose held high, sniffing the stink of his words when he told me my father would not likely give the dowry he required. I pushed so hard to keep him from my thoughts that I fell into a marriage bed with him.

My daughter does not know that I was married to this man so long ago, twenty years before she was even born.

She does not know how beautiful I was when I married this man. I was far more pretty than my daughter, who has country feet and a large nose like her father's.

Even today, my skin is still smooth, my figure like a girl's. But there are deep lines in my mouth where I used to wear smiles. And my poor feet, once so small and pretty! Now they are swollen, callused, and cracked at the heels. My eyes, so bright and flashy at sixteen, are now yellow-stained, clouded.

But I still see almost everything clearly. When I want to remember, it is like looking into a bowl and finding the last grains of rice you did not finish.

There was an afternoon on Tai Lake soon after this man and I married. I remember this is when I came to love him. This man had turned my face toward the late-afternoon sun. He held my chin and stroked my cheek and said, "Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden."

I did not laugh, even though this was a poem he said very badly. I cried with honest joy. I had a swimming feeling in my heart like a creature thrashing to get out and wanting to stay in at the same time. That is how much I came to love this man. This is how it is when a person joins your body and there is a part of your mind that swims to join that person against your will.

I became a stranger to myself. I was pretty for him. If I put slippers on my feet, it was to choose a pair that I knew would please him. I brushed my hair ninety-nine times a night to bring luck to our marital bed, in hopes of conceiving a son.

The night he planted the baby, I again knew a thing before it happened. I knew it was a boy. I could see this little boy in my womb. He had my husband's eyes, large and wide apart. He had long tapered fingers, fat earlobes, and slick hair that rose high to reveal a large forehead.

It is because I had so much joy then that I came to have so much hate. But even when I was my happiest, I had a worry that started right above my brow, where you know a thing. This worry later trickled down to my heart, where you feel a thing and it becomes true.

My husband started to take many business trips to the north. These trips began soon after we married, but they became longer after the baby was put in my womb. I remembered that the north wind had blown luck and my husband my way, so at night when he was away, I opened wide my bedroom windows, even on cold nights, to blow his spirit and heart back my way.

What I did not know is that the north wind is the coldest. It penetrates the heart and takes the warmth away. The wind gathered such a force that it blew my husband past my bedroom and out the back door. I found out from my youngest aunt that he had left me to live with an opera singer.

Later still, when I overcame my grief and came to have nothing in my heart but loathing despair, my youngest aunt told me of others. Dancers and American ladies. Prostitutes. A girl cousin younger even than I was. She left mysteriously for Hong Kong soon after my husband disappeared.

So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.

I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man's firstborn son poured from me.

When the nurses asked what they should do with the lifeless baby, I hurled a newspaper at them and said to wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake. My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby.

When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming , no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming , she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.

I was born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a Tiger. That was the year a very bad spirit entered the world. People in the countryside died like chickens on a hot summer day. People in the city became shadows, went into their homes and disappeared. Babies were born and did not get fatter. The flesh fell off their bones in days and they died.

The bad spirit stayed in the world for four years. But I came from a spirit even stronger, and I lived. This is what my mother told me when I was old enough to know why I was so heartstrong in my ways.

Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.

I became like the ladies of the lake. I threw white clothes over the mirrors in my bedroom so I did not have to see my grief. I lost my strength, so I could not even lift my hands to place pins in my hair. And then I floated like a dead leaf on the water until I drifted out of my mother-in-law's house and back to my family home.

I went to the country outside of Shanghai to live with a second cousin's family. I stayed in this country home for ten years. If you ask me what I did during these long years, I can only say I waited between the trees. I had one eye asleep, the other open and watching.