The Opposite of Fate. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ why this happen? Amy-ah, you searching too? Why this brain tumor second time? No, don’t write this down, I just asking you. Why so many bad things happen? …What you mean, don’t know? You don’t think! You don’t care! And why you don’t cry? You daddy, me, we cry so much. But you—look you face—no feeling! What’s wrong with you, you don’t cry? And why you make you hair that way? You look like Japanese girl. Ugly …Okay, put this down …Friends they so good to us. You daddy and I, we cry, tears so much overflowing, for sadness, for thanks so much.”

      It was torture to write those letters. I had to compose the thank-you notes to friends for coming to the hospital, the cards acknowledging them for coming first to my brother’s funeral and then to my father’s. Extra-long letters went to those who sent memorial donations.

      After my father died, my mother no longer prayed to God. This was strange to me at first, because we had once been a family who prayed at every meal, before every important occasion. Now when the meal was served, we ate in silence. Or rather, it was silence if we were lucky. At times, my mother would go into obsessive monologues about our tragedies, about the curse, punctuating with her laments every bite we took: “Why two brains tumors? Why same family? Why same time? Who else die? If someone next, let be me.” (Little did my mother know then that she may have already had a brain tumor. We learned of it in 1993 after she fell and suffered a suspected concussion. An MRI showed that she had a meningioma, a benign tumor, which, the neurologist said, had been growing probably for twenty-five years, meaning since 1968 or so, around when my brother and father had died of their brain tumors.)

      To counter the curse, my mother began to call openly on the ghosts of her past. She prayed to a painting of her mother. She hired a geomancer to inspect the spiritual architecture, the feng shui, of our suburban tract house. What forces were aligned against us? She sought faith healers who taught her to speak in tongues, a gibberish that convinced me she was insane. She blamed herself for not moving from our current house, the one we had lived in longest, two years. In that neighborhood, she now realized, nine bad things had already happened. She counted them out on her fingers: The man down the street had had a heart attack. This one lost his job. That one was getting divorced. Every day, my mother would count these disasters out, asking herself uselessly why she had not seen them clearly before.

      When my father died, more phantoms sprang from my mother’s past: ideas about karmic retribution, reincarnation, and the presence of ghosts as signaled by our barking dog, a misplaced object, a door slamming when a certain name was spoken. My mother was sure that what was uncertain in the real world could be accounted for in the supernatural one. There the possibilities of what happened and why were boundless. And because my mother still believed I was sensitive to the other world, she often asked me to use a Ouija board to communicate with the ghosts of my father, my brother, and sometimes her mother, my grandmother.

      I had never met my grandmother. In 1925 she swallowed a large amount of raw opium, and my mother, then a girl of nine, watched her die. Yet in another sense I saw my grandmother every day. She was in our living room, in the form of an oil portrait my mother had commissioned, based on a sepia-toned photograph. In this portrait, my grandmother’s face was larger than life. She was a beautiful young woman in her thirties with straight-cut bangs and a neat bun. Her dress was blue with a high collar. Her expression was enigmatic, her gaze ethereal, eyes focused on a spot beyond the artist, out into the future. The painting hung near the piano, where I practiced every day for one hour, with my grandmother peering over my shoulder.

      This was the face I also saw in my mind as I sat before the Ouija board. My fingers would be poised on the planchette, my tearful mother opposite me. She was always hoping for one last good-bye, one more message of love. “Do you still love me? Do you miss me?” It was heart-wrenching even to me, the heartless teenager who would not permit herself to show any kind of emotion. I would give the answers my mother hoped for: Yes. Yes.

      Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would eventually seek advice about daily living. For some reason, she thought the ghosts had as much interest as she did in the Dow Jones. “IBM or U.S. Steel?” she would say, hoping for insider-trading tips of the best kind. And I, the supposed purveyor of these spiritual answers from Wall Street ghosts, pushed the planchette to whatever came to mind just to get the ordeal over with. Buy. Sell. Yes. No. Up. Down. Upon reflection now, I see that my spurious advice was probably no worse than that of most stockbrokers. My mother did amazingly well in building up her modest portfolio.

      She turned to the ghosts for child-rearing advice too: “Amy treat me so bad,” she once said as I prepared to divine the answer. “What I should do—send her Taiwan, school for bad girls?” The planchette deftly scooted to the correct answer: No.

      Another time my mother wanted to know whether she should open a Chinese restaurant. Everyone loved her potsticker dumplings, and she dreamt she could make a million selling them. I pictured myself washing heaps of greasy bowls and pans with burnt dough stuck to the bottom. Bad idea, came the Ouija’s answer. Lose money.

      In my memory, which I admit can be subjectively poor and riddled with a wild imagination, I recall that our sessions with the Ouija board were often accompanied by eerie signs that ghosts were indeed in the room. It would suddenly become not just cold but windy. A flower would snap from its stem as if in answer to an important question. A sound would be heard in the distance—first by my mother, then by me—seemingly the voice of a crying woman. And once the board rose in the air several inches, my fingers still attached to it, then crashed to the floor. That is what I remember, although logic tells me it was the result of either hysteria or peanut butter stuck to my fingertips.

      Besides using the Ouija board, my mother continued to find advice in other, less traditional places. One time she looked under the kitchen sink, where she stored cleaning products. She was cleaning the kitchen after dinner, and my little brother and I were watching TV nearby. I saw her pick up a can of Old Dutch cleanser and stare at it as if it possessed the lucidity of a crystal ball. “Holland,” she announced to us. “Holland is clean. We moving to Holland.”

      A few months later, my mother, my brother, and I boarded the SS Rotterdam. Our mother had sold the ranch duplex, the maple colonial furniture, and the Plymouth, and otherwise reduced our worldly possessions to the contents of three new Samsonite suitcases and a huge duffel bag. Once in Holland, my brother and I realized our mother had absolutely no plan. We stayed in The Hague, then Amsterdam, then Utrecht. In each city, my mother used idiosyncratic sign language to inquire after the nearest Chinese restaurant. We would find these miserable way stations, and there she would eat with the hunger of the starved, Chinese food tinged with Indonesian ingredients and prepared for a Dutch palate. Awful, my mother would pronounce, and drink copious amounts of tea to wash away the bad taste. (This would be her pattern in every city, town, and hamlet we visited in Europe over the next year—this hopeful search for Chinese food, her disappointment in every dish she tasted.)

      We located an international school in a small town called Werkhoven, as well as lodging in a woman’s house. This landlady did not allow us to keep our lights on beyond nine at night, making it difficult for my brother and me to finish our homework. Equally bad, her housekeeping skills did not satisfy my mother’s notions of Old Dutch cleanliness.

      After two weeks in Holland, we took a train to Germany and landed in Karlsruhe, where we lived as guests of a U.S. Army chaplain, an old friend of my father’s. We attended an American school, where students thought it a fun prank to aim lit Bunsen burners at one another. This, I told my mother, was not the kind of education she had had in mind when she had envisioned us studying abroad. With that, she bought a Volkswagen Beetle and a handbook of English-speaking schools, and off we went, heading south, letting ourselves be guided purely by the twists and turns of European highways.

      By such maps of fate, we wound up in Montreux, Switzerland, at the shores of Lake Geneva. In this resort town, my mother quickly found our new home, a fully СКАЧАТЬ