Free The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan Page A

sneaking out of his pocket when we were at Sunday mass. He didn’t notice because he was pretending to pray. I know it was just pretend, mm-hmm, because his head went this way —booomp!— and he was snoring. Nnnnnnnhhh! It’s true! I gave him a little push. He didn’t wake up, but his nose stopped making those sounds. Ah, you think that’s funny? Then why are you laughing?
    So anyway, after a while I looked at the Christmas flowers, the candles, the colored glass. I watched the priest waving the smoky lantern. Suddenly I saw Jesus walking through the smoke! Yes, Jesus! I thought he had come to blow out his birthday candles. I told myself, Finally I can see him—now I am a Catholic! Oh, I was so excited. That’s why Daddy Bob woke up and pushed me down.
    I kept smiling at Jesus, but then I realized—ah?—that man was not Jesus but my old friend Lao Lu! He was pointing and laughing at me. “Fooled you,” he said. “I’m not Jesus! Hey, you think he has a bald head like mine?” Lao Lu walked over to me. He waved his hand in front of Daddy Bob. Nothing happened. He touched his little finger light as a fly on Daddy Bob’s forehead. Daddy Bob slapped himself. He slowly pulled the nasty pen from Daddy Bob’s pocket and rolled it into a fold of my skirt.
    “Hey,” Lao Lu said. “Why are you still going to a foreigners’ church? You think a callus on your butt will help you see Jesus?”
    Don’t laugh, Libby-ah. What Lao Lu said was not polite. I think he was remembering our last lifetime together, when he and I had to sit on the hard bench for two hours every Sunday. Every Sunday! Miss Banner too. We went to church for so many years and never saw God or Jesus, not Mary either, although back then it was not so important to see her. In those days, she was also mother to baby Jesus but only concubine to his father. Now everything is Mary this and that! —Old St. Mary’s, Mary’s Help, Mary Mother of God, forgiving me my sins. I’m glad she got a promotion. But as I said, in those days, the Jesus Worshippers did not talk about her so much. So I had to worry only about seeing God and Jesus. Every Sunday, the Jesus Worshippers asked me, “Do you believe?” I had to say not yet. I wanted to say yes to be polite. But then I would have been lying, and when I died maybe they would come after me and make me pay two kinds of penalty to the foreign devil, one for not believing, another for pretending that I did. I thought I couldn’t see Jesus because I had Chinese eyes. Later I found out that Miss Banner never saw God or Jesus either. She told me she wasn’t a religious kind of person.
    I said, “Why is that, Miss Banner?”
    And she said, “I prayed to God to save my brothers. I prayed for him to spare my mother. I prayed that my father would come back to me. Religion teaches you that faith takes care of hope. All my hopes are gone, so why do I need faith anymore?”
    “Ai!” I said. “This is too sad! You have no hopes?”
    “Very few,” she answered. “And none that are worth a prayer.”
    “What about your sweetheart?”
    She sighed. “I’ve decided he’s not worth a prayer either. He deserted me, you know. I wrote letters to an American navy officer in Shanghai. My sweetheart’s been there. He’s been in Canton. He’s even been in Guilin. He knows where I am. So why hasn’t he come?”
    I was sad to hear that. At the time, I didn’t know her sweetheart was General Cape. “I still have many hopes of finding my family again,” I said. “Maybe I should become a Jesus Worshipper.”
    “To be a true worshipper,” she said, “you must give your whole body to Jesus.”
    “How much do you give?”
    She held up her thumb. I was astonished, because every Sunday she preached the sermon. I thought this should be worth two legs at least. Of course, she had no choice about preaching. No one understood the other foreigners, and they couldn’t understand us. Their Chinese was so bad it sounded just like