The Hundred Secret Senses. Amy Tan
of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional reservoir?
So of course, I didn’t want Kwan as my sister. Just the opposite. Which is why I made great efforts in front of my mother to appear enthusiastic. It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don’t want.
Mom had said that a big sister was a bigger version of myself, sweet and beautiful, only more Chinese, and able to help me do all kinds of fun things. So I imagined not a sister but another me, an older self who danced and wore slinky clothes, who had a sad but fascinating life, like a slant-eyed version of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, which I saw when I was five. It occurs to me only now that my mother and I both modeled our hopes after actresses who spoke in accents that weren’t their own.
One night, before my mother tucked me in bed, she asked me if I wanted to pray. I knew that praying meant saying the nice things that other people wanted to hear, which is what my mom did. So I prayed to God and Jesus to help me be good. And then I added that I hoped my big sister would come soon, since my mother had just been talking about that. When I said, ‘Amen,’ I saw she was crying and smiling proudly. Under my mother’s eye I began to collect welcome presents for Kwan. The scarf my aunt Betty gave me for my birthday, the orange blossom cologne I received at Christmas, the gooey Halloween candy – I lovingly placed all these scratchy, stinky, stale items into a box my mother had marked ‘For Olivia’s big sister.’ I convinced myself I had become so good that soon Mom would realize we didn’t need another sister.
My mother later told my brothers and me how difficult it was to find Kwan. ‘In those days,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t just write a letter, stick a stamp on it, and send it to Changmian. I had to cut through mounds of red tape and fill out dozens of forms. And there weren’t too many people who’d go out of their way to help someone from a communist country. Aunt Betty thought I was crazy! She said to me, “How can you take in a nearly grown girl who can’t speak a word of English? She won’t know right from wrong or left from right.”’
Paperwork wasn’t the only obstacle Kwan had to unknowingly surmount. Two years after my father died, Mom married Bob Laguni, whom Kevin today calls ‘the fluke in our mother’s history of dating foreign imports – and that’s only because she thought Laguni was Mexican instead of Italian.’ Mom took Bob’s name, and that’s how my brothers and I also ended up with Laguni, which I gladly changed to Bishop when I married Simon. The point is, Bob never wanted Kwan to come in the first place. And my mom usually put his wishes above everyone else’s. After they divorced – I was in college by then – Mom told me how Bob pressured her, just before they were married, to cancel the paperwork for Kwan. I think she intended to and forgot. But this is what she told me: ‘I watched you pray. You looked so sweet and sad, asking God, “Please send me my big sister from China.”’
I was nearly six by the time Kwan came to this country. We were waiting for her at the customs area of San Francisco Airport. Aunt Betty was also there. My mother was nervous and excited, talking non-stop: ‘Now listen, kids, she’ll probably be shy, so don’t jump all over her. … And she’ll be skinny as a beanpole, so I don’t want any of you making fun of her. …’
When the customs official finally escorted Kwan into the lobby where we were waiting, Aunt Betty pointed and said, ‘That’s her. I’m telling you that’s her.’ Mom was shaking her head. This person looked like a strange old lady, short and chubby, not exactly the starving waif Mom pictured or the glamorous teenage sister I had in mind. She was dressed in drab gray pajamas, and her broad brown face was flanked by two thick braids.
Kwan was anything but shy. She dropped her bag, fluttered her arms, and bellowed, ‘Hall-oo! Hall-oo!’ Still hooting and laughing, she jumped and squealed the way our new dog did whenever we let him out of the garage. This total stranger tumbled into Mom’s arms, then Daddy Bob’s. She grabbed Kevin and Tommy by the shoulders and shook them. When she saw me, she grew quiet, squatted on the lobby floor, and held out her arms. I tugged on my mother’s skirt. ‘Is that my big sister?’
Mom said, ‘See, she has your father’s same thick, black hair.’
I still have the picture Aunt Betty took: curly-haired Mom in a mohair suit, flashing a quirky smile; our Italo-American stepfather, Bob, appearing stunned; Kevin and Tommy mugging in cowboy hats; a grinning Kwan with her hand on my shoulder; and me in a frothy party dress, my finger stuck in my bawling mouth.
I was crying because just moments before the photo was taken, Kwan had given me a present. It was a small cage of woven straw, which she pulled out of the wide sleeve of her coat and handed to me proudly. When I held it up to my eyes and peered between the webbing, I saw a six-legged monster, fresh-grass green, with saw-blade jaws, bulging eyes, and whips for eyebrows. I screamed and flung the cage away.
At home, in the bedroom we shared from then on, Kwan hung the cage with the grasshopper, now missing one leg. As soon as night fell, the grasshopper began to chirp as loudly as a bicycle bell warning people to get out of the road.
After that day, my life was never the same. To Mom, Kwan was a handy baby-sitter, willing, able, and free. Before my mother took off for an afternoon at the beauty parlor or a shopping trip with her gal pals, she’d tell me to stick to Kwan. ‘Be a good little sister and explain to her anything she doesn’t understand. Promise?’ So every day after school, Kwan would latch on to me and tag along wherever I went. By the first grade, I became an expert on public humiliation and shame. Kwan asked so many dumb questions that all the neighborhood kids thought she had come from Mars. She’d say: ‘What M&M?’ ‘What ching gum?’ ‘Who this Popeys Sailor Man? Why one eye gone? He bandit?’ Even Kevin and Tommy laughed.
With Kwan around, my mother could float guiltlessly through her honeymoon phase with Bob. When my teacher called Mom to say I was running a fever, it was Kwan who showed up at the nurse’s office to take me home. When I fell while roller-skating, Kwan bandaged my elbows. She braided my hair. She packed lunches for Kevin, Tommy, and me. She tried to teach me to sing Chinese nursery songs. She soothed me when I lost a tooth. She ran the washcloth over my neck while I took my bath.
I should have been grateful to Kwan. I could always depend on her. She liked nothing better than to be by my side. But instead, most of the time, I resented her for taking my mother’s place.
I remember the day it first occurred to me to get rid of Kwan. It was summer, a few months after she had arrived. Kwan, Kevin, Tommy, and I were sitting on our front lawn, waiting for something to happen. A couple of Kevin’s friends sneaked to the side of our house and turned on the sprinkler system. My brothers and I heard the telltale spit and gurgle of water running into the lines, and we ran off just before a dozen sprinkler heads burst into spray. Kwan, however, simply stood there, getting soaked, marveling that so many springs had erupted out of the earth all at once. Kevin and his friends were howling with laughter. I shouted, ‘That’s not nice.’
Then one of Kevin’s friends, a swaggering second-grader whom all the little girls had a crush on, said to me, ‘Is that dumb Chink your sister? Hey, Olivia, does that mean you’re a dumb Chink too?’
I was so flustered I yelled, ‘She’s not my sister! I hate her! I wish she’d go back to China!’ Tommy later told Daddy Bob what I had said, and Daddy Bob said, ‘Louise, you better do something about your daughter.’ My mother shook her head, looking sad. ‘Olivia,’ she said, ‘we don’t ever hate anyone. “Hate” is a terrible word. It hurts you as much as it hurts others.’ Of course, this only made me hate Kwan even more.
The worst part was sharing my bedroom with her. At night, she liked to throw open the curtains so that the glare of the street lamp poured into our room, where we lay side by side in our matching twin beds. Under this ‘beautiful American moon,’ as she called it, Kwan would jabber away in Chinese. She kept on talking while I pretended to be asleep. She’d still be yakking when I woke up. That’s how I became the only one in our family who learned Chinese. Kwan infected me with it. I absorbed her language through my pores while I was sleeping. She pushed her Chinese