The Hundred Secret Senses

Miss Banner once told me the music box was a gift from her father, the only memory of her family that she had left. Inside, she kept a little album for writing down her thoughts. The music, she said, was actually a German song about drinking beer, dancing, and kissing pretty girls. But Mrs. Amen had written new words, which I heard a hundred times but only as sounds: ‘We’re marching with Jesus on two willing feet, when Death turns the corner, our Lord we shall meet.’ Something like that. You see, I remember that old song, but this time the words have new meaning. Anyway, that was the song we heard every week, telling everyone to go outside to eat a bowl of rice, a gift from Jesus. We had many beggars who thought Jesus was a landlord with many rice fields.

The second Sunday, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner for three. Then Pastor for another five minutes, Miss Banner for one. Everything became shorter and shorter on the Chinese side, and the flies drank from our sweat for only one and a half hours that Sunday. The week after that it was only one hour. Later, Pastor Amen had a long talk with Miss Banner. The following week, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner spoke the same amount. Again Pastor spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner the same amount. But now she didn’t talk about rules for going to heaven. She was saying, ‘Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a giant and the filial daughter of a poor carpenter who was really a king. …’ At the end of each five minutes, she would stop at a very exciting part and say something like: ‘Now I must let Pastor speak for five minutes. But while you wait, ask yourself, Did the tiny princess die, or did she save the giant?’ After the sermon and story were over, she told people to shout ‘Amen’ if they were ready to eat their free bowl of rice. Ah, big shouts!

Those Sunday sermons became very popular. Many beggars came to hear Miss Banner’s stories from her childhood. The Jesus Worshippers were happy. The rice-eaters were happy. Miss Banner was happy. I was the only one who worried. What if Pastor Amen learned what she was doing? Would he beat her? Would the God Worshippers pour coals over my body for teaching a foreigner to have a disobedient Chinese tongue? Would Pastor Amen lose face and have to hang himself? Would the people who came for rice and stories and not Jesus go to a foreigners’ hell?

When I told Miss Banner my worries, she laughed and said no such thing would happen. I asked her how she knew this. She said, ‘If everyone is happy, what harm can follow?’ I remembered what the man who returned to Thistle Mountain had said: ‘Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.’

We had five years of happiness. Miss Banner and I became great and loyal friends. The other missionaries remained strangers to me. But from seeing little changes every day, I knew their secrets very well. Lao Lu told me about shameful things he saw from outside their windows, also strange things he saw when he was inside their rooms. How Miss Mouse cried over a locket holding a dead person’s hair. How Dr. Too Late ate opium pills for his stomachache. How Mrs. Amen hid pieces of Communion bread in her drawer, never eating it, just saving it for the end of the world. How Pastor Amen reported to America that he had made one hundred converts when really it was only one.

In return, I told Lao Lu some of the secrets I had seen myself. That Miss Mouse had feelings for Dr. Too Late, but he didn’t notice. That Dr. Too Late had strong feelings for Miss Banner, and she pretended not to notice. But I did not tell him that Miss Banner still had great feelings for her number-three sweetheart, a man named Wa-ren. Only I knew this.

For five years, everything was the same, except for these small changes. That was our life back then, a little hope, a little change, a little secret.

And yes, I had my secrets too. My first secret was this. One night, I dreamed I saw Jesus, a foreign man with long hair, long beard, many followers. I told Miss Banner, except I forgot to mention the part about the dream. So she told Pastor Amen, and he put me down for a hundred converts – that’s why I knew it was only one. I didn’t tell Miss Banner to correct him. Then he would have been more ashamed that his hundred converts was not even one.

My second secret was much worse.

This happened soon after Miss Banner told me she had lost her family and her hopes. I said I had so much hope I could use my leftovers to wish her sweetheart would change his mind and return. This pleased her very much. So that’s what I prayed for, for at least one hundred days.

One evening, I was sitting on a stool in Miss Banner’s room. We were talking, talking, talking. When we ran out of the usual complaints, I asked if we could play the music box. Yes, yes, she said. I opened the box. No key. It’s in the drawer, she said. Ah! What’s this? I picked up an ivory carving and held it to my eye. It was in the shape of a naked lady. Very unusual. I remembered seeing something like it once. I asked her where the little statue had come from.

‘It belonged to my sweetheart,’ she said. ‘The handle of his walking stick. When it broke off, he gave it to me as a remembrance. ‘

Wah! That’s when I knew Miss Banner’s sweetheart was the traitor. General Cape. All this time, I had been praying for him to come back. Just thinking about it shriveled my scalp.

So that was my second secret: that I knew who he was. And the third was this: I started praying he would stay away.

Let me tell you, Libby-ah, I didn’t know how much she hungered for love, any kind. Sweet love didn’t last, and it was too hard to find. But rotten love! – there was plenty to fill the hollow. So that’s what she grew accustomed to, that’s what she took as soon as it came back.

5 LAUNDRY DAY (#ulink_14eb942e-e20d-5552-8e07-ba36725dd299)

Just like clockwork, the phone rings at eight. That makes it the third morning in a row Kwan’s called at the exact moment that I’m buttering toast. Before I can say hello, she blurts out: ‘Libby-ah, ask Simon – name of stereo fix-it store, what is?’

‘What’s wrong with your stereo?’

‘Wrong? Ahhhh … too much noise. Yes-yes, I play radio, it go cccahhhhhhhssss.’

‘Did you try adjusting the frequency?’

‘Yes-yes! I often adjust.’

‘How about standing back from the stereo? Maybe you’re conducting a lot of static today. It’s supposed to rain.’

‘Okay-okay, maybe try that first. But just case, you call Simon, ask him store name.’

I’m in a good mood. I want to see how far she’ll carry her ruse. ‘I know the store,’ I say, and search for a likely-sounding name. ‘Yeah, it’s Bogus Boomboxes. On Market Street.’ I can practically hear Kwan’s mind whirring and clicking into alternate mode.

Finally she laughs and says, ‘Hey, you bad girl – lie! No such name.’

‘And no such stereo problem,’ I add.

‘Okay-okay. You call Simon, tell him Kwan say Happy Birthday.’

‘Actually, I was going to call him for the same reason.’

‘Oh, you so bad! Why you torture me, embarrass this way!’ She lets out a wheezy laugh, then gasps and says, ‘Oh, and Libby-ah, after call Simon, call Ma.’

‘Why? Is her stereo broken too?’

‘Don’t joke. Her heart feel bad.’

I’m alarmed. ‘What’s wrong? Is it serious?’

‘Mm-hmm. So sad. You remember new boyfriend she have, I May Hopfree?’

‘High-may ho-fray,’ I pronounce slowly. ‘Jaime Jofré.’

‘I always remember, I May Hopfree. And that’s what he do! Turn out he married already. Chile lady. She show up, pinch his ear, take home.’

‘No!’ A ripple of glee flows into my cheeks, and I mentally slap myself.

‘Yes-yes, Ma so mad! Last week she buy two loveboat cruise ticket. Hopfree say use your Visa, I pay you back. Now no pay, no cruise, no refund. Ah! Poor Ma, always find wrong man. … Hey, maybe I do matchmake for her. I choose better for her than she choose herself. I make good match, bring me luck.’

‘What if it’s not so good?’

‘Then I must fix, make better. My duty.’

After we hang up, I think about Kwan’s duty. No wonder she sees my impending divorce as a personal and professional failure on her part. She still believes she was our spiritual mei-po, our cosmic matchmaker. And I’m hardly in the position to tell her that she wasn’t. I was the one who asked her to convince Simon we were destined to be together, linked by the necessity of fate.

Simon Bishop and I met more than seventeen years ago. At that moment in our lives, we were willing to place all our hopes on the ridiculous – pyramid power, Brazilian figa charms, even the advice of Kwan and her ghosts. We both were terribly in love, I with Simon, he with someone else. The someone else happened to have died before I ever met Simon, although I didn’t know that until three months later.

I spotted Simon in a linguistics class at UC Berkeley, spring quarter 1976. I noticed him right away because like me he had a name that didn’t fit with his Asian features. Eurasian students weren’t as common then as they are now, and as I stared at him, I had the sense I was seeing my male doppelgänger. I started wondering how genes interact, why one set of racial characteristics dominates in one person and not in another with the same background. I once met a girl whose last name was Chan. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and no, she wearily explained, she was not adopted. Her father was Chinese. I figured that her father’s ancestors had engaged in secret dalliances with the British or Portuguese in Hong Kong. I was like that girl, always having to explain about my last name, why I didn’t look like a Laguni. My brothers look almost as Italian as their last name implies. Their faces are more angular than mine. Their hair has a slight curl and is a lighter shade of brown.

Simon didn’t look like any particular race. He was a perfectly balanced blend, half Hawaiian-Chinese, half Anglo, a fusion of different racial genes and not a dilution. When our linguistics class formed study groups, Simon and I drifted toward the same one. We didn’t mention what we so obviously shared.

I remember the first time he brought up his girlfriend, because I had been hoping he didn’t have one. Five of us were cramming for a midterm. I was listing the attributes of Etruscan: a dead language, as well as an isolate, unrelated to other languages … In the middle of my summary, Simon blurted: ‘My girlfriend, Elza, she went on a study tour of Italy and saw these incredible Etruscan tombs.’

We looked at him – like, So? Mind you, Simon didn’t say, ‘My girlfriend, who, by the way, is as dead as this language.’ He talked about her in passing, as if she were alive and well, traveling on Eurail and sending postcards from Tuscany. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he looked sheepish and mumbled the way people do when they’re caught arguing with themselves while walking down the sidewalk. Poor guy, I thought, and at that moment my heartstrings went twing.

After class, Simon and I would often take turns buying each other coffee at the Bear’s Lair. There we added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies. We discussed primitivism as a Western-biased concept. Mongrelization as the only longterm answer to racism. Irony, satire, and parody as the deepest forms of truth. He told me he wanted to create his own philosophy, one that would guide his life’s work, that would enable him to make substantive changes in the world. I looked up the word substantive in the dictionary that night, then realized I wanted a Substantive life too. When I was with him, I felt as if a secret and better part of myself had finally been unleashed. I had dated other guys to whom I felt attracted, but those relationships seldom went beyond the usual good times induced by all-night parties, stoned conversations, and sometimes sex, all of which soon grew as stale as morning breath. With Simon, I laughed harder, thought more deeply, felt more passionately about life beyond my own cubbyhole. We could volley ideas back and forth like tennis pros. We wrestled with each other’s minds. We unearthed each other’s past with psychoanalytic gusto.

I thought it was eerie how much we had in common. Both of us had lost a parent before the age of five, he a mother, I a father. We both had owned pet turtles; his died after he accidentally dropped them into a chlorinated swimming pool. We both had been loners as kids, abandoned to caretakers – he to two unmarried sisters of his mother’s, I to Kwan.

‘My mom left me in the hands of someone who talked to ghosts!’ I once told him.

‘God! I’m amazed you aren’t crazier than you already are.’ We laughed, and I felt giddy about our making fun of what had once caused me so much pain.

‘Good ol’ Mom,’ I added. ‘She’s the quintessential social worker, totally obsessed with helping strangers and ignoring the homefront. She’d rather keep an appointment with her manicurist than lift a finger to help her kids. Talk about phony! It wasn’t that she was pathological, but, you know – ’