The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

Author:Maxine Hong Kingston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Social Life and Customs, Minority Studies, Chinese Americans - California, California, Test Preparation & Review, Authors, American - 20th Century, Chinese Americans, Medical, United States, American, Chinese Americans - History, Maxine Hong - Childhood and Youth, History, Kingston, General, Biography, Biography & Autobiography, Maxine Hong - Family, Chinese Americans - California - Social Life and Customs
ISBN: 9780780736849
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1977-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When she was about sixty-eight years old, Brave Orchid took a day off to wait at San Francisco International Airport for the plane that was bringing her sister to the United States. She had not seen Moon Orchid for thirty years. She had begun this waiting at home, getting up a half-hour before Moon Orchid’s plane took off in Hong Kong. Brave Orchid would add her will power to the forces that keep an airplane up. Her head hurt with the concentration. The plane had to be light, so no matter how tired she felt, she dared not rest her spirit on a wing but continuously and gently pushed up on the plane’s belly. She had already been waiting at the airport for nine hours. She was wakeful.

Next to Brave Orchid sat Moon Orchid’s only daughter, who was helping her aunt wait. Brave Orchid had made two of her own children come too because they could drive, but they had been lured away by the magazine racks and the gift shops and coffee shops. Her American children could not sit for very long. They did not understand sitting; they had wandering feet. She hoped they would get back from the pay t.v.’s or the pay toilets or wherever they were spending their money before the plane arrived. If they did not come back soon, she would go look for them. If her son thought he could hide in the men’s room, he was wrong.

“Are you all right, Aunt?” asked her niece.

“No, this chair hurts me. Help me pull some chairs together so I can put my feet up.”

She unbundled a blanket and spread it out to make a bed for herself. On the floor she had two shopping bags full of canned peaches, real peaches, beans wrapped in taro leaves, cookies, Thermos bottles, enough food for everybody, though only her niece would eat with her. Her bad boy and bad girl were probably sneaking hamburgers, wasting their money. She would scold them.

Many soldiers and sailors sat about, oddly calm, like little boys in cowboy uniforms. (She thought “cowboy” was what you would call a Boy Scout.) They should have been crying hysterically on their way to Vietnam. “If I see one that looks Chinese,” she thought, “I’ll go over and give him some advice.” She sat up suddenly; she had forgotten about her own son, who was even now in Vietnam. Carefully she split her attention, beaming half of it to the ocean, into the water to keep him afloat. He was on a ship. He was in Vietnamese waters. She was sure of it. He and the other children were lying to her. They had said he was in Japan, and then they said he was in the Philippines. But when she sent him her help, she could feel that he was on a ship in Da Nang. Also she had seen the children hide the envelopes that his letters came in.

“Do you think my son is in Vietnam?” she asked her niece, who was dutifully eating.

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