The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

Author:Amy Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

That same morning, Hulan and I went into town. I put on my long green coat and everyday shoes, because it was three or four li to get to the middle of the city. A li? That’s maybe half of one of your American miles. And I had to walk that distance. I wasn’t like you, getting into a car to go two blocks to the grocery store.

Along the way I stopped off at a post office to send another telegram, this time to Peanut, who was now married to a rich husband in Shanghai, the one the fortune-teller found for her. I told Wan Betty to write the same message as the last telegram: “We are soon taonan.” This time, however, I added: “Send four hundred yuan direct to Jiang Weili only.” Betty did not ask what had happened to the other four hundred. But I think she knew.

After I sent the telegram, Hulan and I headed to the market square to do our grocery shopping. It was very cold that morning, and I remember looking at the gray, cloudy sky, saying, “Maybe it will snow again.”

Hulan looked up at the same sky. “Not enough clouds. In any case, I heard that snow comes here only once or twice all winter, not one day after the next.”

We arrived at the marketplace. It was perhaps ten o’clock and the vendors had been at their stands since dawn. They were now eager to do a little bargaining to warm up their blood. On the outskirts of the marketplace, young boys crouched in front of vegetables, piled neatly on the ground. And in the marketplace itself were rows of tables, covered with buckets of tofu and weighing scales, piles of sweet potatoes and white turnips, baskets of dried mushrooms, pans of live fish, freshwater soft-shell crabs from the south, and wheat, egg, and rice noodles.

Already people in a stream as long as a dragon were pushing past the stands, puffing little clouds of cold breath. At that hour of the morning, everyone was happy, not yet tired from the day’s work, already thinking about the evening meal’s ingredients.

Hulan and I had followed the sweet smoke of roasting chestnuts, and we were now standing in front of a sidewalk vendor. He was stirring a basket filled with dark nuggets. It was three hours since we had eaten our breakfast, so Hulan and I agreed: A handful would be good for warming our hands.

“You’ve come just in time,” the vendor said. “I added the honey just half an hour ago, when the shells cracked open.” He poured six chestnuts each into two newspaper cones.

I had just peeled one open, was about to put the steaming chestnut into my mouth, when—a shout in the street: “Japanese planes! Disaster is coming!” And then we heard the airplanes, faraway sounds, like thunder coming.

All those people, all those vendors—they began to push and run. The basket of chestnuts tipped over. Chickens were squawking, beating against their cages. Hulan grabbed my hand and we were running too, as if we could go faster than those planes could fly.

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