The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston Read Free Book Online Page A

time, they got back into their sedan chairs, and their servants carried them away.
    I led my army northward, rarely having to sidetrack; the emperor himself sent the enemies I was hunting chasing after me. Sometimes they attacked us on two or three sides; sometimes they ambushed me when I rode ahead. We would always win, Kuan Kung, the god of war and literature riding before me. I would be told of in fairy tales myself. I overheard some soldiers—and now there were many who had not met me—say that whenever we had been in danger of losing, I made a throwing gesture and the opposing army would fall, hurled across the battlefield. Hailstones as big as heads would shoot out of the sky and the lightning would stablike swords, but never at those on my side. “On his side,” they said. I never told them the truth. Chinese executed women who disguised themselves as soldiers or students, no matter how bravely they fought or how high they scored on the examinations.
    One spring morning I was at work in my tent repairing equipment, patching my clothes, and studying maps when a voice said, “General, may I visit you in your tent, please?” As if it were my own home, I did not allow strangers in my tent. And since I had no family with me, no one ever visited inside. Riverbanks, hillsides, the cool sloped rooms under the pine trees—China provides her soldiers with meeting places enough. I opened the tent flap. And there in the sunlight stood my own husband with arms full of wildflowers for me. “You are beautiful,” he said, and meant it truly. “I have looked for you everywhere. I’ve been looking for you since the day that bird flew away with you.” We were so pleased with each other, the childhood friend found at last, the childhood friend mysteriously grown up. “I followed you, but you skimmed over the rocks until I lost you.”
    “I’ve looked for you too,” I said, the tent now snug around us like a secret house when we were kids. “Whenever I heard about a good fighter, I went to see if it were you,” I said. “I saw you marry me. I’m so glad you married me.”
    He wept when he took off my shirt and saw the scar-words on my back. He loosened my hair and covered the words with it. I turned around and touched his face, loving the familiar first.
    So for a time I had a partner—my husband and I, soldiers together just as when we were little soldiers playing in the village. We rode side by side into battle. When I became pregnant, during the last four months, I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful, big man. As a fat man, I walked with the foot soldiers so as not to jounce the gestation. Now when I was naked, I was a strangehuman being indeed—words carved on my back and the baby large in front.
    I hid from battle only once, when I gave birth to our baby. In dark and silver dreams I had seen him falling from the sky, each night closer to the earth, his soul a star. Just before labor began, the last star rays sank into my belly. My husband would talk to me and not go, though I said for him to return to the battlefield. He caught the baby, a boy, and put it on my breast. “What are we going to do with this?” he asked, holding up the piece of umbilical cord that had been closest to the baby.
    “Let’s tie it to a flagpole until it dries,” I said. We had both seen the boxes in which our parents kept the dried cords of all their children. “This one was yours, and this yours,” my mother would say to us brothers and sisters, and fill us with awe that she could remember.
    We made a sling for the baby inside my big armor, and rode back into the thickest part of the fighting. The umbilical cord flew with the red flag and made us laugh. At night inside our own tent, I let the baby ride on my back. The sling was made of red satin and purple silk; the four paisley straps that tied across my breasts and around my waist ended in housewife’s pockets lined with a coin, a seed, a nut, and a juniper