Free (2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

think you might have left it on the BART train?”
    “Left what?”
    “Your purse.”
    “Why you always take her side?”
    “I’m not taking sides… .”
    “Maybe she keep my purse, don’t tell me. She always want my things. Jealous of me. Little-girl time, she want my chipao dress, want my melon fruit, want everybody attention.”
    The dramas her mother and Auntie had gone through over the years resembled those off-Broadway plays in which two characters perform all the roles: best friends and worst enemies, archrivals and gleeful conspirators. They were only a year apart, seventy-seven and seventy-six, and that closeness seemed to have made them competitive with each other.
    The two sisters came to America separately, and married a pair of brothers, sons of a grocer and his wife. LuLing’s husband, Edwin Young, was in medical school, and as the elder, he was “destined” as LuLing put it, to be smarter and more successful. Most of the family’s attention and privileges had been showered on him. GaoLing’s husband, Edmund, the little brother, was in dental school. He was known as the lazy one, the careless boy who would always need a big brother to watch over him. But then big brother Edwin was killed in a hit-and-run car accident while leaving the UCSF library one night. Ruth had been two years old at the time. Her uncle Edmund went on to become the leader of the family, a well-respected dentist, and an even more savvy real estate investor in low-income rental units.
    When the grocer and then his wife died, in the 1960s, most of the inheritance—money, the house, the store, gold and jade, family photos— went to Edmund, with only a small cash gift given to LuLing in consideration of her brief marriage to Edwin. “Only give me this much” LuLing often described, pinching her fingers as if holding a flea. “Just because you not a boy.”
    With the death money, along with her years of savings, LuLing bought a two-unit building on Cabrillo and Forty-seventh, where she and Ruth lived in the top flat. GaoLing and Edmund moved to Saratoga, a town of vast-lawned ranch-style homes and kidney-shaped pools. Occasionally they would offer LuLing furniture they were going to replace with something better. “Why I should take?” she would fume. “So they can pity for me? Feel so good for themself, give me things they don’t want? “
    Throughout the years, LuLing lamented in Chinese, “Ai-ya, if only your father had lived, he would be even more successful than your uncle. And still we wouldn’t spend so carelessly like them!” She also noted what should have been Ruth’s rightful property: Grandmother Young’s jade ring, money for a college fund. It shouldn’t have mattered that Ruth was a girl or that Edwin had died. That was old Chinese thinking! LuLing said this so often Ruth could not help fantasizing what her life might have been like had her father lived. She could have bought patent-leather shoes, rhinestone-covered barrettes, and baby roses. Sometimes she stared at a photo of her father and felt angry he was dead. Then she felt guilty and scared. She tried to convince herself that she deeply loved this father she could not even remember. She picked the flowerlike weeds that grew in the cracks of sidewalks and put them in front of his framed picture.
    Ruth now watched as LuLing searched in the closet for her purse. She was still pointing out GaoLing’s transgressions. “Later grown-up time, want my things too. Want your daddy marry her. Yes, you don’t know this. Edwin not Edmund, because he oldest, more success. Every day smile for him, show off her teeth, like monkey.” LuLing turned around and demonstrated. “But he not interest in her, only me. She so mad. Later she marry Edmund, and when you daddy die, she say, Ooooh, so lucky I not marry Edwin! So stupid she saying that. To my face! Don’t consider me, only concerning herself. I say nothing. I never complaining. Do I ever complaining?”
    Ruth