The Love Wife by Gish Jen

Author:Gish Jen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400043798
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

CARNEGIE / I could hear my voice rise with an impatience and insistence that surprised me.

Said Blondie slowly, then: — It’s in your blood.

— Yes.

— Well, she said. And suddenly she sounded like her father:

— So then what does this mean? In your view?

I found a new batch of photos one day. The people in these pictures mostly wore Chinese dress, but a few of the younger men wore Western. They had shiny hair and shiny faces, and a certain swagger. Who was who? I tried to remember things my mother had said over the years, but all I could recall was that most of her family was dead. That she had lost all three of her brothers—or were they half brothers?—in the War Against the Japanese. Were they the swaggerers? I recalled too that her father had died early—was he one of the older, gowned men?—and that though the women in her mother’s family used to live to be a hundred, her own mother—one of the women?—had died young too, of grief and poverty. She was not even my grandfather’s wife, exactly, but a love wife—a concubine—his favorite. I remembered too that my grandfather was a scholar turned chile merchant, and that once he died his family turned my grandmother out of the house. But more than that I could not remember.

Blondie said that if I had been a girl, I would know everything, and who knew but that she was right. Much as I hated all things New Age, I began in any case to meditate, at her suggestion, to see if that would help my recall. I kept a small notebook by the side of the bed at night, and carried another around in the daytime, in case things came back to me.

Omm. Omm.

This did seem to help, slightly. Only what came back were not stories about my family in China so much as images of my childhood here: Of my mother, young and preoccupied. Of the powdered milk we drank, not being able to afford fresh. I remembered the peaches my mother brought home for us one day—two beautiful, enormous peaches, not one for her and one for me, but both to share, one that day and one the next. One had a bruise; she insisted on eating that part. I remembered the taut give of their fuzzy skin; I remembered their thick smell and their juicy flesh and, inside, those strange red-ridged cups that had held the rutted pits. So close had they grown, the pits and the flesh, so completely had they fit themselves to each other; and yet look how they came apart, just like that, there on our melamine cup saucers. The saucers my mother had bought cheap to use as small plates, and were still in good shape. They weren’t like our larger plates which, having doubled as cutting boards, sported dark brown cross-hatching in their centers. Across the table our gray metal fan turned and turned its head, like the radar on a warship.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.