I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston Read Free Book Online

“seek your fortune.” A generation
    had learned the language from fairy tales broad-
    cast by loudspeakers across the commune
    agricultural zone, across orchards,
    furrows, paddies, dairies. “Farewell,
    dear Father. Farewell, dear Mother.
    The open road beckons me.” “Farewell,
    my child. Go forth. Win your fortune.
    Make money, my son. Find love.
    Marry the princess.” The widow spoke addressing
    her husband, telling him his own story.
    “Following the waterways, you walked and swam,
    swam and walked from duck pond and streams
    and rivers to the Mouth of the Tiger. You had no
    Permit To Settle. All through nights,
    lights beckon Hong Kong Hong Kong
    red red green green. Liang
    liang. Ho liang. You swam
    for those lights, and came to the ten thousand
    sampans, the floating town gone now.
    Free and safe for a night and a morning. Boat
    people fed you and let you sleep, gave you
    bed on the water, fed you twice, supper
    and breakfast. JAWK!” She hit the box, caged
    it with fingers and arms. “They CAUGHT him.”
    Wittman jumped. She laughed; everybody
    laughed. “Don’t be scared, foreign
    Chinese person. They did not
    torture my husband to death. He got
    hit a few times was all. You know
    the Chinese, they hit to teach you a lesson.
    I saved him out of I.I. I got
    out of jail because China and Viet Nam
    became normal. Han and Viet same-same.”
    “Hai, law. Hai, law.” Her American
    listener chimed in: “Hola! Hola!
    In California, we, Chinese and
    Vietnamese, together celebrate Tet.”
    Sing dawn. Tet nguyen dâ
.
    “I took you, my Chinese husband, by the hand,
    and we left prison. I’m the one,
    freed you, you Old Rooster. Woman
    is better at living than man is. We
    went to live in public housing just
    like everybody else, the sampan
    people, everybody. I made
    money. All I do, each meal,
    I cook enough for more than 2—
    2 people eat very little.
    The extra, I sell on the street. A hungry man
    always comes along; he’ll buy
    breakfast or lunch or dinner or suey yeah.
    Life is easier on a woman. Your abilities,
    my good Old Rooster, were to swim and to farm.
    In the city, you had to sell your
lick
.
    Ladies and gentlemen fellow travelers, he
    sold his kung.” His strength, his labor. “You
    rode a water-soldier boat out
    to one of the warships from all over
    the world. I watched you be lifted and lowered
    by ropes. You hung from ropes down the side
    of the ship’s mountainface. Using rags,
    you painted the gray ship gray,
    ashes, ashes, gray on top of gray.
    Fields of gray above you and behind you, you
    and the cadre of painters—many women—women,
    who adore flowers—oozed gray everywhere
    you touched. Metal doubled the sun’s heat,
    and baked you, baked lead paint into
    your skin. You could’ve let yourself
    fall backward into air and water. But you,
    everyday you went to Pun Shan Shek
    and toiled for me. For me, you caught yang
    fever. You breathed poison. Skin and lungs
    breathed poison, sweated poison. We
    could not wash the gray paint out of you.
    It was painting warships killed you. That work
    so dangerous, the foreign nations don’t order
    their own water soldiers to do it. Old One,
    I thank you for your care of me. You are / were
    a good hardworking husband to me.
    I’m sorry / I can’t face you, my gray
    Old Rooster, we never had a son.
    Okay. We’re each other’s child.
    I take care of you, and you take care of me.
    I bring you home. I’m sorry / I can’t
    face you, I have taken too long
    to bring you home. Stacks and stacks of caskets
    and urns wait to get out of Hong Kong.
    I pulled you out of the pile-up. We’re on
    our way home. You’re a good man.
    You worked hard. Jeah jeah jeah.
    Daw jeah. Thanks thanks thanks.
    Big thanks.” No verb tenses,
    what is still happening? What is over?
    Yet refugee camps? Yet piles
    of unburied dead? Yet coolies painting
    ships with lead? All that’s happened always
    happening? “I too am walking mountain,”
    said a man dressed Hong Kong