Maxine Hong Kingston - China Men

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
CHINA MEN

Maxine Hong Kingston is senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and Hawaii One Summer, Kingston has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the rare title of Living Treasure of Hawaii. Her forthcoming memoir, The Fifth Book of Peace, will be available from Knopf in fall 2003.

ALSO BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The Woman Warrior
Tripmaster Monkey
Hawaii One Summer
The Fifth Book of Peace

First Vintage International Edition, April 1989

Copyright 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Maxine Hong Kingston

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York,
in 1980.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kingston, Maxine Hong.
China Men.
(Vintage International)
1. Chinese AmericansHistory. 2. Kingston, Maxine Hong
Family. 3. Chinese AmericansCaliforniaBiography.
4. CaliforniaBiography. I. Title.
E184.C5K5 1988 973.04951 88-40512
eISBN: 978-0-307-78781-1

Portions of this book have been published in different forms in
Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Review, The New York Times,
The New Yorker, and Seattle Weekly.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of California
Press for permission to reprint from The State of the Language,
edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, 1980.

v3.1_r1

FOR

Tom, George, Norman, and Joe Hong

AND

Earll and Joseph Kingston

Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women. The women immediately captured him, not on guard against ladies. When they asked Tang Ao to come along, he followed; if he had had male companions, he wouldve winked over his shoulder.

We have to prepare you to meet the queen, the women said. They locked him in a canopied apartment equipped with pots of makeup, mirrors, and a womans clothes. Let us help you off with your armor and boots, said the women. They slipped his coat off his shoulders, pulled it down his arms, and shackled his wrists behind him. The women who kneeled to take off his shoes chained his ankles together.

A door opened, and he expected to meet his match, but it was only two old women with sewing boxes in their hands. The less you struggle, the less itll hurt, one said, squinting a bright eye as she threaded her needle. Two captors sat on him while another held his head. He felt an old womans dry fingers trace his ear; the long nail on her little finger scraped his neck. What are you doing? he asked. Sewing your lips together, she joked, blackening needles in a candle flame. The ones who sat on him bounced with laughter. But the old women did not sew his lips together. They pulled his earlobes taut and jabbed a needle through each of them. They had to poke and probe before puncturing the layers of skin correctly, the hole in the front of the lobe in line with the one in back, the layers of skin sliding about so. They worked the needle througha last jerk for the needles wide eye (needles nose in Chinese). They strung his raw flesh with silk threads; he could feel the fibers.

The women who sat on him turned to direct their attention to his feet. They bent his toes so far backward that his arched foot cracked. The old ladies squeezed each foot and broke many tiny bones along the sides. They gathered his toes, toes over and under one another like a knot of ginger root. Tang Ao wept with pain. As they wound the bandages tight and tighter around his feet, the women sang footbinding songs to distract him: Use aloe for binding feet and not for scholars.

During the months of a season, they fed him on womens food: the tea was thick with white chrysanthemums and stirred the cool female winds inside his body; chicken wings made his hair shine; vinegar soup improved his womb. They drew the loops of thread through the scabs that grew daily over the holes in his earlobes. One day they inserted gold hoops. Every night they unbound his feet, but his veins had shrunk, and the blood pumping through them hurt so much, he begged to have his feet re-wrapped tight. They forced him to wash his used bandages, which were embroidered with flowers and smelled of rot and cheese. He hung the bandages up to dry, streamers that drooped and draped wall to wall. He felt embarrassed; the wrappings were like underwear, and they were his.

One day his attendants changed his gold hoops to jade studs and strapped his feet to shoes that curved like bridges. They plucked out each hair on his face, powdered him white, painted his eyebrows like a moths wings, painted his cheeks and lips red. He served a meal at the queens court. His hips swayed and his shoulders swiveled because of his shaped feet. Shes pretty, dont you agree? the diners said, smacking their lips at his dainty feet as he bent to put dishes before them.

In the Womens Land there are no taxes and no wars. Some scholars say that that country was discovered during the reign of Empress Wu ( A.D . 694705), and some say earlier than that, A.D . 441, and it was in North America.

Waiting at the gate for our father to come home from work, my brothers and sisters and I saw a man come hastening around the corner. Father! BaBa! BaBa! We flew off the gate; we jumped off the fence. BaBa! We surrounded him, took his hands, pressed our noses against his coat to sniff his tobacco smell, reached into his pockets for the Rainbo notepads and the gold coins that were really chocolates. The littlest ones hugged his legs for a ride on his shoes. And he laughed a startled laugh. But Im not your father. Youve made a mistake. He took our hands out of his pockets. But Im not your father. Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not. We went back inside the yard, and this man continued his walk down our street, from the back certainly looking like our father, one hand in his pocket. Tall and thin, he was wearing our fathers two-hundred-dollar suit that fit him just right. He was walking fast in his good leather shoes with the wingtips.

Our mother came out of the house, and we hung on to her while she explained, No, that wasnt your father. He did look like BaBa, though, didnt he? From the back, almost exactly. We stood on the sidewalk together and watched the man walk away. A moment later, from the other direction, our own father came striding toward us, the one finger touching his hat to salute us. We ran again to meet him.

Father, I have seen you lighthearted:

Lets play airplane, you said. Ill make you a toy airplane. You caught between your thumb and finger a dragonfly. You held it by the abdomen. Its fast wings blurred, but when its motor paused, I saw that the wings were networks of cellophane. Its head bulged with eyes, below which the rest of its face was crowded. You hold it, you said. Around its belly you slipped a lasso of thread, which you tightened, crinkled its shell, pinched a waist, and the tail bent downward slightly. Then you tied the other end of the string around my finger, and said, Let go. The tying hadnt hurt it one bit; the dragonfly whirled up and flew in circles at the extent of the string, which I pulled toward me and cast away, controlling my pet airplane. It flew lower, and I turned with it not to get entangled. Suddenly the dragonfly dropped and dangled, but all we had to do was shake it, and it flew again. After a while, though I poked and prodded, it did not go any more. You watched for five more dragonflies to alight until each sister and brother had had a turn.