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

wrote to her about the American custom of stomping on straw hats come fall. “If you want to save your hat for next year,” he said, “you have to put it away early, or else when you’re riding the subway or walking along Fifth Avenue, any stranger can snatch it off your head and put his foot through it. That’s the way they celebrate the change of seasons here.” In the winter he wears a gray felt hat with his gray overcoat. He is sitting on a rock in Central Park. In one snapshot he is not smiling; someone took it when he was studying, blurred in the glare of the desk lamp.
    There are no snapshots of my mother. In two small portraits, however, there is a black thumbprint on her forehead, as if someone had inked in bangs, as if someone had marked her.
    “Mother, did bangs come into fashion after you had the picture taken?” One time she said yes. Another time when I asked, “Why do you have fingerprints on your forehead?” she said, “Your First Uncle did that.” I disliked the unsureness in her voice.
    The last scroll has columns of Chinese words. The only English is “Department of Health, Canton,” imprinted on my mother’s face, the same photograph as on the diploma. I keep looking to see whether she was afraid. Year after year my father did not come home or send for her. Their two children had been dead for ten years. If he did not return soon, there would be no more children. (“They were three and two years old, a boy and a girl. They could talk already.”) My father did send money regularly, though, and she had nobody to spend it on but herself. She bought good clothes and shoes. Then she decided to use the money for becoming a doctor. She did not leave for Canton immediately after the children died. In China there was time to complete feelings. As my father had done, my motherleft the village by ship. There was a sea bird painted on the ship to protect it against shipwreck and winds. She was in luck. The following ship was boarded by river pirates, who kidnapped every passenger, even old ladies. “Sixty dollars for an old lady” was what the bandits used to say. “I sailed alone,” she says, “to the capital of the entire province.” She took a brown leather suitcase and a seabag stuffed with two quilts.
    At the dormitory the school official assigned her to a room with five other women, who were unpacking when she came in. They greeted her and she greeted them. But no one wanted to start friendships until the unpacking was done, each item placed precisely to section off the room. My mother spotted the name she had written on her application pinned to a headboard, and the annoyance she felt at not arriving early enough for first choice disappeared. The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed again how neatly her belongings fitted together, clean against the green lining. She refolded the clothes before putting them in the one drawer that was hers. Then she took out her pens and inkbox, an atlas of the world, a tea set and tea cannister, sewing box, her ruler with the real gold markings, writing paper, envelopes with the thick red stripe to signify no bad news, her bowl and silver chopsticks. These things she arranged one by one on her shelf. She spread the two quilts on top of the bed and put her slippers side by side underneath. She owned more—furniture, wedding jewelry, cloth, photographs—but she had left such troublesome valuables behind in the family’s care. She never did get all of it back.
    The women who had arrived early did not offer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. The book would stay open at the very page she had pressed flat with her hand, and no one would complain about the field not being plowed or the leak in the roof. She would clean herown bowl