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

joined in the search, sticking her hands under seat cushions.
    LuLing straightened herself to all four feet, eleven inches of indignity. “And now you see! Why GaoLing still want my money? She crazy, you know. She always think I got more, hiding somewhere. That’s why I think she take my purse.”
    The dining room table, which LuLing never used, was a raft of junk mail. Ruth pushed aside the Chinese-language newspapers and magazines. Her mother had always been sanitary, but never neat. She hated grease but didn’t mind chaos. She kept junk mail and coupons, as if they were personal greeting cards.
    “Here it is!” Ruth cried. What a relief. She pulled out a green pocket-book from underneath a mound of magazines. As LuLing checked that her money and credit cards were still inside, Ruth noticed what had obscured the purse in the first place: new issues of Woodworking Today, Seventeen, Home Audio and Video, Runner’s World, Cosmopolitan, Dog Fancy, Ski, Country Living —magazines her mother would never read in a million years.
    “Why do you have all these?”
    LuLing smiled shyly. “First I thinking, Get money, then tell you. Now you ask, so now I show you.” She went to the kitchen drawer where she kept years of expired coupons and pulled out an oversized envelope.
    “News from the gods, “ LuLing murmured. “I won ten million dollar! Open and see.”
    Sure enough, inside were a sweepstakes promotion coupon that resembled a check, and a sheet of peel-off miniature magazine covers. Half the covers were missing. LuLing must have ordered three dozen magazines. Ruth could picture the mail carrier dragging over a sackful of them every day, spilling them onto the driveway, her mother’s hopes and logic jumbled into the same pile.
    “You surprise?” LuLing wore a look of absolute joy.
    “You should tell the doctor your good news.”
    LuLing beamed, then added, “I win all for you.”
    Ruth felt a twinge in her chest. It quickly grew into an ache. She wanted to embrace her mother, shield her, and at the same time wanted her mother to cradle her, to assure her that she was okay, that she had not had a stroke or worse. That was how her mother had always been, difficult, oppressive, and odd. And in exactly that way, LuLing had loved her. Ruth knew that, felt it. No one could have loved her more. Better perhaps, but not more.
    “Thanks, Ma. It’s wonderful. We’ll talk about it later, what to do with the money. But now we have to go. The doctor said we could still come at four, and we shouldn’t be late.”
    LuLing turned crabby again. “You fault we late.”
    Ruth had to remind her to take her newly found purse, then her coat, finally her keys. She felt ten years old again, translating for her mother how the world worked, explaining the rules, the restrictions, the time limits on money-back guarantees. Back then she had been resentful. Now she was terrified.
     
    THREE
    In the hospital waiting room, Ruth saw that all the patients, except one pale balding man, were Asian. She read the blackboard listing of doctors’ names: Fong, Wong, Wang, Tang, Chin, Pon, Kwak, Koo. The receptionist looked Chinese; so did the nurses.
    In the sixties, mused Ruth, people railed against race-differentiated services as ghettoization. Now they demanded them as culturally sensitive. Then again, San Francisco was about a third Asian, so Chinese-targeted medicine could also be a marketing strategy. The balding man was glancing about, as if seeking an escape route. Did he have a last name like Young that had been mistakenly identified as Chinese by a race-blind computer? Did he also get calls from Chinese-speaking telemarketers trying to sign him up for long-distance calling plans for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Ruth knew what it meant to feel like an outsider, because she had often been one as a child. Moving to a new home eight times made her aware of how she didn’t fit in.
    “Fia start six grade?” LuLing was now asking.
    “You’re