Saving Fish From Drowning. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ All in all, our house was still quite good, better than most people could say they live in, even in comparison with today’s multimillion-dollar San Francisco homes. My father’s family had a longtime cotton mill business and the department store Honesty, which he and my grandfather had started in 1923. It was maybe one degree less prestigious than the department store Sincerity, and while our store was not as large, our merchandise was just as good, and in the case of cotton goods, the quality was even better for the same price. All my father’s foreign customers said so.

      He was a typical high-class Shanghainese: absolutely traditional in matters of family and home, and completely modern in business and the outside world. When he left our gates, he entered another realm and adapted himself to it like a chameleon. When necessary, he could speak in other languages, and the accent was absolutely particular to the tutor he had chosen for reasons of class distinction: the English was Oxford, the French was Right Bank, the German was Berlin. He also knew Latin and a formal kind of Manchu into which all the literary classics had been translated. He wore pomade in his sleeked-back hair, smoked filter-tip cigarettes, and conversed on subjects as wide-ranging as riddles, the physiology of different races, and the curiosities of other cuisines. He could argue persuasively on the mistreatment of China in the Treaty of Versailles and compare the political satire in Dante’s Inferno with Tsao’s earlier version of A Dream of Red Mansions. When he stepped back through the gates of our family home, he reverted to his private self. He read much, but seldom spoke, and truly, there was no need in a household whose women worshipped him and anticipated his needs before they ever occurred to him.

      His foreign friends called him Philip. My brothers’ English names were Preston and Nobel, which were auspicious, sounding like the word “president” and the name of the prestigious prize that comes with a lot of money. Sweet Ma chose the name Bertha, because my father said it was close-sounding to “Bao Tian,” and my mother had been known as “Little Bit,” which was how she pronounced the Western name Elizabeth, which my father had given her. My father called me Bibi, which was both a Western name and short for Bifang, the name my mother bestowed on me. As you can imagine, we were a worldly family. My brothers and I had English- and French-speaking tutors, so we could receive a modern education. This also gave us secret languages to use in front of Sweet Ma, who knew only Shanghainese.

      One time, Nobel reported that our Bedlington terrier, whom Sweet Ma detested, had left a small offering in her room—“Il à fait la merde sur le tapis”—and because the pattern in the rug masked the appearance of fresh fecal deposits, our stepmother could not figure out why every room in the house stank until it was too late. The boys had a fondness for adding surprise elements to Sweet Ma’s vials of medicines and snuff bottles. Caca d’oie, collected from the scummy shoals of our goose pen, was a favorite because it encompassed the trifecta of disgusting things: foul, slimy, and bilious green. To hear them tell me what they had done left me laughing helplessly on the floor. I so miss my brothers!

      More often, however, my brothers were not at home to buffet Sweet Ma’s assaults upon me. Whenever I sat before the keys of the piano, Sweet Ma recounted my mother’s poor musicianship as a possible cause of mine. I defended my mother once, telling Sweet Ma that my father had recently told some guests that she “could make Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu sound like fast-running water in a spring brook.”

      “Ssss!” Sweet Ma countered with irritation. “That was said to guests who are foreigners. They expect inflated talk. They have no shame, no propriety, no standards of excellence. Besides, any school-girl can play that easy song, even you, if you practiced a little harder.” And then she poked the side of my head for good effect.

      Sweet Ma said that my father did not need to inflate her worth, because they had a complete understanding. “Superfluous words are not necessary when the marriage is balanced, in perfect harmony,” she told me. “And that is because our union was fated to be.”

      At the time, it did not occur to me to question what she said, and my brothers had no opinions on love, or if they did, they would not share them with me. I was thus left to assume that a good marriage was one in which the husband respected the wife’s privacy. He did not intrude in her life, visit her rooms, or bother her with questions. There was no need to speak to each other, since they were of the same mind.

      But one day my uncle and his family came for a visit several months long. My cousin Yuhang and I kept each other company morning to night. We were like sisters, although we saw each other only once a year. On that particular visit, she told me that she had overheard her parents and their friends gossiping—which, at the time, was the only way anyone learned the truth. The gossip had to do with the union between Sweet Ma and my father. It had been agreed to before their births. In 1909, two comrades from different life circumstances vowed that if the revolution to end the Ching dynasty succeeded and they were still alive to see it, their families should be united by marriage. Well, the Ching was overthrown in 1911, and the comrade with a son had a reputation so high it was said to have reached the heavens. That would be my father’s family. The other had a daughter, and his household clung to earth like the rotted roots of a tree about to tilt over with the next small gust. That would be Sweet Ma’s household. When the poor comrade with the daughter ran into the rich one with the son, he mentioned their earlier vow, incompatible in status though their lives were. It was widely known, the servants said, that my grandfather was a man of high morals for forcing his eldest son to marry a girl so plain, so lacking in any charms that would compensate for her embarrassingly meager dowry. No wonder the son took on a concubine as soon as he could.

      Of course, Sweet Ma reported things differently: “Your mother,” she said, “was the daughter of a concubine to a family of only middle status. The concubine had given birth to ten healthy babies, all boys except one. That one girl, while weedy in looks at age sixteen, held promise for being as baby-prolific as her mother. I suggested her to your father, and he said I was wife enough. But I insisted that a stallion must have mares, and mares produce broods, so he mustn’t be a mule.”

      According to Sweet Ma, the relationship my father had with my mother was “very polite, as one should be toward strangers.” In fact, my father was much too kind, and my mother learned to take advantage of this. The way Sweet Ma described it: “She was a schemer. She’d put on her rose-colored dress, twirl her favorite flower hairpin, and with eyes dishonestly lowered, she would raise that simpering smile of hers toward your father. Oh, I knew what she was up to. She was always begging money to pay off the gambling debts of her nine brothers. I learned too late that her entire family was a nest of snake spawn. Don’t you grow up to be like them, or I’ll let the rats in to chew you up at night.”

      According to Sweet Ma, my mother proved true to her breeding and excelled at becoming pregnant every year. “She gave birth to your eldest brother,” Sweet Ma said, counting on her fingers. “Then there was your second brother. After that, three blue babies, drowned in the womb, which was a shame but not so tragic, since they were girls.”

      I came along in 1937, and Sweet Ma was there to witness my dramatic arrival. “You should have seen your mother when she was nine months pregnant with you. She looked like a melon balanced on chopsticks, teetering this way and that.… Early in the morning, that’s when her water broke, after making us wait all night. The winter sky was the color of spent coal, and so was your mother’s face.… You were too big to come out between her legs, so the midwives had to slice her nearly in two and pull you out like a fatty tapeworm. You weighed over ten pounds, and you had bloody hair down to your shoulders.”

      I shivered when she said that.

      “Bifang, your mother named you, though heaven knows I tried to persuade her to choose something else. ‘Good-reputation jade’ sounds like an advertisement poster, in my opinion, what pleases the ear of those who don’t know better. ‘Bifang, bifang, buy your bifang here!’ Ha, fang pi would be a better name to call you, a fart, yes indeed, that’s СКАЧАТЬ