Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" Chapter 1 66 words

When the train pulled out of Hangzhou the next day, the Hsus found themselves depleted of some nine thousand dollars worth of goodwill.

"We were a city of leftovers mixed together.

A friend once told me that my mother and I were alike, that we had the same wispy hand gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look.

She and Auntie An-mei were dressed up in funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts.

Auntie Lin looks exasperated, as though I were a simple child: "How can we play with just three people?

How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws?

So now I know Auntie Yings daughter, Lena, told her about my being evicted from my apartment on lower Russian Hill.

"Will you look at that," he says, pointing to another nondescript picture.

The white chenille bedspreads are so worn they are almost translucent.

She traded that gruel for two feet from a pig.

And always, I would be amazed to find the hills against the burning sky had not been torn apart.

We ate sparingly, not as if we didnt have enough, but to protest how we could not eat another bite, we had already bloated ourselves from earlier in the day.

When the sirens cried out to warn us of bombers, my neighbors and I jumped to our feet and scurried to the deep caves to hide like wild animals.

The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm.

"What fine food we treated ourselves to with our meager allowances!

We have something important to tell you, from your mother," Auntie Ying blurts out in her too-loud voice.

The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil.

"Her dutiful nature to family."

They are not like the ladies of Kweilin, who I always imagined savored their food with a certain detached delicacy.

What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces?

Listening now to Auntie Lin bragging about the virtues of her family in China, I realize that Auntie Lin is oblivious to Auntie An-meis pain.

"I dreamed of jagged peaks lining a curving river, with magic moss greening the banks.

They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.

There are piles of food on the table, served buffet style, just like at the Kweilin feasts.

"I think your mother die with an important thought on her mind," she says in halting English.

As if on cue, the women peck at last morsels and then carry plates and bowls to the kitchen and dump them in the sink.

It was the story she would always tell me when she was bored, when there was nothing to do, when every bowl had been washed and the Formica table had been wiped down twice, when my father sat reading the newspaper and smoking one Pall Mall cigarett

My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldnt begin to express in their fragile English.

From the time we were babies, our mothers compared the creases in our belly buttons, how shapely our earlobes were, how fast we healed when we scraped our knees, how thick and dark our hair, how many shoes we wore out in one year, and later, how smart Wav

We translated each others meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

In perfectly straight vertical rows I see Chinese characters written in blue fountain-pen ink.

"I was chiszle," she says, still fuming, "mad to death."

Too many Chinese meals cooked in a too small kitchen, too many once fragrant smells compressed onto a thin layer of invisible grease.

I rearrange my tiles, sequences of bamboo and balls, doubles of colored number tiles, odd tiles that do not fit anywhere.

The society was composed of a group of white-haired American missionary ladies from the First Chinese Baptist Church.

Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.

When I shyly told my mother this, she seemed insulted and said, "You dont even know little percent of me!

My table was from my family and was of a very fragrant red wood, not what you call rosewood, but hong mu, which is so fine theres no English word for it.

At first my mother tried to cultivate some hidden genius in me.

Only the scroll-length calendar, free from the Bank of Canton, changes every year.

They had all brought their mothers-in-law and children, and even their village friends who were not lucky enough to have overseas Chinese relatives to show off.

Auntie An-mei is rubbing her tile carefully before discarding it.

One was crammed with Sees Nuts & Chews, M & Ms, candy-coated cashews, instant hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows.

She spoke Mandarin slightly blurred with a Shanghai dialect.

Still, what little we say to one another often comes back in another guise.

In my twenties, while taking Introduction to Psychology, I tried to tell her why she shouldnt criticize so much, why it didnt lead to a healthy learning environment.

Nor could they ignore the old ladies practical advice to improve their English through Bible study class on Wednesday nights and, later, through choir practice on Saturday mornings.

But after sixteen rounds, we would again feast, this time to celebrate our good fortune.

I could only see the dripping bowels of an ancient hill that might collapse on top of me.

And as she began to roll with one sweeping rhythm, she would start her story.

They are not like the ladies of Kweilin, who I always imagined savored their food with a certain detached delicacy.

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people—men, women, and children who had never lost hope, but had

Except for the smell of camphor, it feels the same—as if Rose, Ruth, and Janice might soon walk in with their hair rolled up in big orange-juice cans and plop down on their identical narrow beds.

I wonder what Auntie An-mei did to inspire a lifelong stream of criticism from my mother.

And then the clouds would move just a little and the hills would suddenly become monstrous elephants marching slowly toward me!

And always, I would be amazed to find the hills against the burning sky had not been torn apart.

I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago.

They are not like the ladies of Kweilin, who I always imagined savored their food with a certain detached delicacy.

Even though Lena and I are still friends, we have grown naturally cautious about telling each other too much.

Uncle George is dealing out cards, fast, as though he learned this technique in a casino.

Until one could see cages of ducklings now quiet with thirst and, later still, silver urns lying in the road, where people had been too tired to carry them for any kind of future hope.

Never on time!" he announces.

"People thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving, eating rats and, later, the garbage that the poorest rats used to feed on.

They are not like the ladies of Kweilin, who I always imagined savored their food with a certain detached delicacy.