Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen Page 2

  Moonie was one of those Chinese wise-women who could climb to the apex of a mountain and see everything. Someday she will become a famous biologist or anthropologist, and the people will pay two hundred bucks a plate to hear her talk about neo-genetic theory. And she will get back at those white folks for all those years of humiliation and bench-warming by saying something utterly inane, like, “Caucasoids have more hair on their bodies because they are less evolved,” and everybody will applaud, buy her book and stand in a long line for her autograph. Afterward, they will go home and say, “I have touched the sleeve of genius.”

  But I was not as self-assured as Moonie. I was a shallow nobody. I was a teenager, for God’s sake; I didn’t have any depth. It was not my station in life to see beyond my petty, personal predicament. I was always falling through the cracks, always afraid of being different. In this way, I was more like Sunny than Moonie. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be conventional. I wanted the sublime, banal package made in the mall. I wanted to be the perfect, stupid blonde girl who married the perfect stupid, blond boy next door. It was no secret that I wanted to be white, to be “accepted” by the in-crowd, to look as white as a magazine cover—I confess, in sixth grade, in the shameful privacy of my own bathroom, I used to tape my eyelids up with strong Scotch mailing tape and pretend that I was Madonna, with big round cow eyes.

  Don’t worry. This is no Kafkaesque tale in which I turn into a giant cockroach and my family, the Philistines, beat me up and kill me. I had no fear of my present transformation. We know that anything can happen during adolescence: nipples turn into breasts, breasts turn into beards. Look, there is no mystery to this—at fifteen, the entire female population of the species is mired in self-hatred and most girls despise their own face and body. We all wanted to be cookie-cutter Barbies. If the dominant race had green skin and purple genitals, I would’ve wanted that too. It was not until I turned thirty-five that I finally realized that I was a beautiful Chinese woman and that my ancient features were hand-painted on the elegant Sung Dynasty scrolls. But so what, my enlightenment came too late; my self-esteem was already irreversibly damaged.

  Finally, on that fateful day, Moonie suggested that I tell an adult. Mind you, this was the last resort. In my household, my father was already dead. My mother and grandmother were my guardians now. My mother was doing double shifts at an electronics firm, putting tiny chips into “motherboards.” She had just returned to work after spending three days in the hospital recovering from carpal tunnel surgery. And she was asleep, which was her favorite thing to do on Saturdays. I dared not disturb her dreams. She smiled in her sleep. I knew that it was only in her dreams that she could be happy.

  So, I had to tell my grandmother, the Great Matriarch. She was the one who raised us while my parents spent most of their lives grueling at their respective sweatshops. She was, as all Chinese grandmothers are, the self-appointed keeper of our Chinese identity. She thought that we were still sojourners, that sooner or later we would improve our Cantonese and pack up our belongings, and that the Chinese from ten thousand diasporas would fly back to China like a pack of homeward geese, back to the Middle Kingdom. And there we would start over in a new Utopian village, marry yellow husbands, produce yellow children and live in eternal golden harmony.

  Indeed, my grandmother would be the one to offer me a profound explanation. She was the one who knew about the transmogrification of the soul. She used to tell us stories about all kinds of magical transformations—women turned into foxes, foxes into spirits. Don’t be a jerk in this life, for you would be punished in the next by being transformed into a water-rat. She showed us pictures of a Buddhist hell where the punishment always fit the crime. If you were a liar, an ox-headed hatchet man would cut off your tongue. If you were a thief, he would cut off your hands. If you were an adulterer, he would cut off your “you know what.” What, then, would be the appropriate punishment for a girlchild who wished so hard to be accepted by white people that her beautiful slanted eyes turned round?

  Right then Grandmother was asleep, snoring in her favorite armchair. See that squished gnat on her dress—that was her characteristic signature. The Great Matriarch did not believe in frivolity. I never approached her with the various hormonal problems of prepubescent girls. When I found a spot of blood on my panties, it was Moonie who bought me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and said, “Damn, sorry, sis, but you’ve entered the world of womanhood.”

  When two bullies at school beat me up and stole my lunch money, I was too ashamed to tell my grandmother. Instead, I worked an extra shift at my uncle’s restaurant and peeled shrimp to pay for the missing money, and I had to work extra hours to pay for my own lunch. I peeled so much shrimp that my allergic fingers blew up like pink pork sausages. Finally, I told my pugilistic father. He immediately took time off from work and drove me to the hospital to get my fingers drained. They also gave me adrenaline shots that made me dizzy. My father then went to school and grabbed my vice principal, Mr. Comely, by his lapels and loudly urged in broken English that those boys be suspended. “Moogoogaipan, you want Moogoogaipan? You get Moogoogaipan.” For some reason, my father just happened to have a giant spatula in his pocket that day. He pulled it out and started slapping Mr. Comely with it, making tiny red marks the size of chop-suey chunks all over his face. And there I was, a typical stupid teenager, not proud that my father was trying to defend me, but embarrassed that my geek-father would actually use a spatula as a deadly weapon. It would be a different story had he brandished a machete or a sawed-off assault rifle. What a sight, my father waving his spatula and Mr. Comely backing up, defending himself with a wooden chair and his gold Cross pen.

  The boys were never suspended. But suddenly, I was given a reprieve. After all, it’s not divine intervention but fate that is the catalyst for change. Within the next few months, everybody sort of—poof—disappeared. My father died shortly after that episode; my mother finally gave up on the American dream and bought a one-way ticket back to Hong Kong. Mr. Comely was transferred because of his alcoholism; one bully went to prison; the other moved to Pittsburgh with his divorced mother. (And who could’ve predicted that I would someday end up graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School to become a Yuppie trial attorney for the Small Business Administration? Or that after several failed marriages, I would marry a Filipino activist I met at a coffee shop, a man whose radical ideas would transform my whole life? Or that I would end up devoting my life’s work to writing poetry and defending the wives of assassinated guerrillas in Luzon? Of course, this is another story.)

  Well, anyway, in my terrible childhood, life was humiliation after humiliation and tiptoeing around that sleeping mother and grandmother. My grandmother had survived a series of natural and man-made disasters: the Sino-Japanese War, famine, drought, flood, torrential rain, bloodthirsty warlords, the Nationalist debacle, Communist tyranny, even a long bout of the cholera epidemic. Now that she was eighty-five and had survived everything and reached the shores of safety, it was the ripe time for her to finally enjoy peace, her grandchildren and napping in her favorite armchair. I was worried that she would have a heart attack upon seeing me. I climbed up onto her lofty lap and said, “Granny, look what happened to my eyes, they’ve turned round, I am sorry for having been remiss, for being a bad child. For wishing the unthinkable. For dreaming the unmentionable.”

  She looked at me with her complacent Buddha smile. “So, girlchild, now you are a round-eye. When you were born you were such a beautiful princess, more beautiful than Yang Kuei Fei. You had skin of jade and slanted moon-like eyes. Our ancestors were proud to behold such a plum blossom. Now, look what has happened to you, my little snake-in-the-grass, my little damselfly, how you have changed.”

  Her compassionate words touched me deeply and I began to cry from my little round eyes. The tears were especially bulbous and fat. She caressed me all night long, telling me ancient revenge tales and fables, where the tiniest girl always ended up victorious. We
munched on baggies of glazed ginger and dried plums. No mention was made of my transformation. Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret—the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the ten thousand diasporas will never coagulate—there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom.

  Parable of the Cake

  The Neighborwoman said to us, “I’ll give you a big cake, little Chinese girls, if you come to the Christmas service with me and accept Jesus Christ, our lord, into your heart.” We said, “Okay,” and drove with her to the other side of the city and sat through a boring sermon when we should have taken the bus to Chinatown for our Cantonese lessons. Afterward, she gave us a big cake that said “Happy Birthday, Buny” on it. She must have got it for half price because of the misspelling. My sister and I were really hungry after the long sermon, so we gulped down the whole cake as soon as we got home. I got sick and barfed all over the bathroom and my sister had to clean it up before Granny got home. Then my face swelled up for two days on account of my being allergic to the peanut butter in the frosting. My sister was so afraid that I would croak that she confessed everything to Granny. First, Granny gave me some putrid herbal medicine, then she whipped us with her bamboo duster. She whipped us so hard that we both had red marks all over our legs. Then she made us kneel before the Great Buddha for two hours balancing teapots on our heads.

  On Christmas Eve, Granny went to Safeway and bought a big white cake with Santa’s face on it and made us go with her to the Neighborwoman’s house. She placed the cake into the woman’s hands and said to me, “Peapod, translate this, ‘Malignant Nun, we do not beg for your God.’” I didn’t know how to translate “malignant” and said politely, “Dear Missus, No beg, No God.”

  My sister and I both wept silently, embarrassed that Granny made us into a spectacle and ashamed that we had to lie to get out of it. Meanwhile, Granny was satisfied that we learned our lesson and decided to take her two favorite peapods to Chinatown for sweet bean dessert. We were the only riders on the bus that night; everybody else was probably home with their families preparing for a big meal. “Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, I am Santa’s helper!” said the bus driver. He was wearing a green elf’s hat, but we knew that he was really Mr. Rogers the black bus driver. He winked at Granny and gave us each two little candy canes. Granny scowled, “Tsk, tsk, ancient warrior in a fool’s cap!” Then we sat way in the back of the bus and Granny began singing our favorite song.

  “We will go home and eat cakies, little lotus-filled cakies,” Granny sang. “We will eat sweet buns, sweet custard sweet buns!” she sang. “We will eat turnip squares, salty white turnip squares,” she sang. “We will eat grass jelly, tangy green grass jelly. We will eat dumplings, soft, steamy dumplings.” She was so jolly that we forgot our embarrassing episode and we sang with her, clapping hands—we sang and sang.

  Granny would die a few years later, leaving us three thousand dollars under her mattress and a brand new cleaver, still wrapped in Chinese newspaper from Hong Kong. We would grow up into beautiful, clear-skinned young women. We would become born-again Christians and get a complete makeover at the mall. We would work hard in our studies, become successful and drive little white Mercedes. We would remember nothing, nada, nothing that our grandmother taught us. We would learn nothing from our poverty, but to avoid poverty at all cost.

  Fa la la la la, little cakies, little cakies, little cakies…We would drive around in our little white Mercedes all over southern California eating little cakies. Yes, let’s put on the Ritz, sisters: little petit fours in pastels and rainbows…booze-soaked baba au rhums, oooh yes, nuttynutty Florentines on little white doilies…Oh sisters! Let’s ghetto it! Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, pink and white snowballs, let’s suck the creamy hearts out of the Twinkies. Come hither, come yon, young Chinese girls. Come, let’s drive around in our little white Mercedes eating cakies, little cakies. Come, let the crumbs fall down our chins and dance on our laps. Come, light light airy madeleines, come, creamy creamy trifles. Come, little cakies, little cakies. Come, the sweet, sweet hereafter….

  Parable of the Fish

  Grandmother, how do you know that the fish are happy?”

  “Irreverent polyp-of-a-child, how do you know that I don’t know that the fish are happy?”

  “Well, Grandmother, you’re not a fish. You cannot know what fish know.”

  “Well, my ignorant gnat-of-a-girl, you are not I, how do you know that I don’t know what fish know.”

  One day she fetched me from school and said, “Let’s take a stroll through our honorable Mayor Willie Brown’s mansion. The Gold Mountain News said that he wants all of his citizens to visit his new Japanese water garden.” So we took the No. 25 bus and transferred to a No. 85 bus at the Montgomery station, where she bought me a cold can of Coke from a machine. I knew that it was going to be a special day.

  When we got to the mansion, we went straight to the Mayor’s new water garden. There were pink and white lotuses in bloom, assorted duckweed and hyacinth. Catkins and dwarf willows bent over; they looked like they were washing their beautiful hair in the pond. Suddenly, without warning, my grandmother stuck her hand into our honorable Mayor’s fish pond and pulled out a magnificent spotted orange carp. It was at least three feet long and as it thrashed, its brilliant scales shimmered like mirrors. She pulled her smile into a deep frown then pointed to the bronze plaque on the wall that said in both Chinese and English, “A gift to the city of San Francisco from His Majesty the Emperor Hirohito of Japan.”

  She then said, “Remember this, my mooncake, Hirohito was a mass murderer and rapist and this pond was built with Chinese blood.” So she swung the fish by the tail and whacked it five times against the stone wall. When it continued to thrash and convulse, she took her trusty cleaver from her giant purse and whacked it five more times with the blunt edge. “This one for Manchuria, this one for Nanking, this for our cousin Lu, this for Auntie Jade…” When it finally stopped thrashing, she wrapped it up in newspaper and stuffed it in her purse; and we walked briskly past the guard station toward the bus stop. The guard was listening to some funky tune in his earphones and didn’t even notice us.

  So we took it home on the No. 4 bus to Market Street, where we changed to a No. 65 bus back to the Richmond. On the bus we met her skinny gossipy fussbudget friend, who always wore an ugly hairnet. They started talking in this ancient dialect about Mr. Hong’s whore-mongering son. What a pity that the whole regal bloodline has been tainted by this whore-mongering bastard. The whore-mongering bastard emptied the till of the laundromat and went to Hong Kong to continue his whore-mongering activities. Then they went on about Mrs. Lew’s slut-of-a-dead-girl. That slut-of-a-dead-girl went on to live with several white devils. They said she lived with three of them at one time. One devil lived in the Richmond, one lived in Mill Valley, one in San Jose. That she was always driving and stopping and leaving her grandmother in the back seat to bake in the sun. Then my grandmother turned to me and said, “You better not do that to me when you get older.”

  They rattled on like two ancient kettles. There was a mother-beating gangster named Wu. An ox-naped gigolo named Lee. A long-spined good-for-nothing named Fu…“Oh, how ironic that he was named Fu! Ha, ha!” A cockroach-eating numbskull named Ming. A mutton-of-a-loser named Wei. How can Buddha visit such terrible creatures upon us?

  I said I had to pee and Grandmother said, “Hush, you should have peed in the green plastic toilets in the Mayor’s house. Did you know that it took him two weeks to install those plastic toilets for his loving citizens?”

  When we got home, she wasted no time to clean the fish and steamed it with ginger and onions, and ordered me to climb up the back fire escape and pluck fresh spinach from our communal roof garden. “Pull out the whole root,” she said. “You must leave room for the baby shoots.”

  “Tonight is a special celebration,” she said. She presented the magnificent orange carp on a large celadon plate that h
er own grandmother had given her. She shaped the spinach into curly tidal waves all around the lip of the giant plate. She decorated the fish and capped the spinach waves with bits of candied ginger; they shimmered like diamonds. And look! The fish is wearing a pearly onion necklace! I squealed with joy as I collected the sweet gems and saved them in a little dish for later, when I would relish them as a late snack with fruit and tea.

  “So you ungrateful, arrogant drop-plum, tell me that the fish aren’t happy!” This time, I could not formulate an argument, for my mouth was already busy sucking on a fin. The inner fleshy side was especially tasty. “I must tell you, my little trinket, my hungry little glowworm, that I have no doubts, heaven has issued an edict: I know that the fish are capable of sublime happiness.”

  Parable of Squab

  When Sasha moved to New Jersey, he bequeathed his whole collection of pigeons to Mei Ling and Moonie. Since they all lived in the same building, it was easy for Sasha to give them the keys to the rooftop coop and say, “They’re all yours, suckers!” By year end, there were 155 birds and counting. The girls could identify each of the birds by their markings and had renamed them after flowers and famous women.

  There was Dandelion, Iris, Fleabane, Peony, Jonquil…Tiger-lily had fancy horizontal stripes on her wings…Jackie, Eleanor, Madonna, Lilith…Anna Akhmatova was an especially beautiful bird, with long lashes and blue, sultry eyes. Each time a new chick hatched, the girls would go to the library and search through both the Encyclopedia of Famous Women and The Sunset Almanac of Wildflowers for a new name.

  They fed the birds breadcrumbs from Zack’s bakery. After school, they helped Zack sweep his street front in exchange for all the leftover bread. They also brought home scraps and day-old rice from the Double Happiness, their family restaurant.