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Автор Анчи Мин
Anchee Min
Pearl of China
© 2009
For Pearl S. Buck
I belong to China for I have lived there from childhood to adulthood… Happy for me that for instead of the narrow and conventional life of the white man in Asia, I lived with the Chinese people and spoke their tongue before I spoke my own, and their children were my first friends.
Pearl S. Buck
My Several Worlds
Behind the calm steadfast eyes of a Chinese woman, I feel a powerful warmth. We might have been friends, she and I, unless she had decided first that I was her enemy. She would have decided, not I. I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flower-like lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world. Seeming always to yield, they never yield. Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this female strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted.
Pearl S. Buck
Letter from Peking
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Before I was Willow, I was Weed. My grandmother, NaiNai, insisted that naming me Weed was better. She believed that the gods would have a hard time making my life go lower if I was already at the bottom. Papa disagreed. “Men want to marry flowers, not weeds. ” They argued and finally settled for Willow, which was considered “gentle enough to weep and tough enough to be made into farming tools. ” I always wondered what my mother would have thought if she had lived.
Papa lied to me about my mother’s death. Both he and NaiNai told me that Mother died giving birth. But I had already learned otherwise from neighbors’ gossip. Papa had “rented” his wife to the town’s “Bare-sticks” in order to pay off his debts. One of the bachelors got Mother pregnant. I was four years old when it happened. To rid her of the “bastard seed,” Papa bought magic root powder from an herbalist. Papa mixed the powder with tea and Mother drank it.
Mother died along with the seed. It broke Papa’s heart, because he had intended to kill the fetus, not his wife. He had no money to buy another wife. Papa was angry at the herbalist, but there was nothing he could do-he had been warned about the poison.NaiNai feared that she would be punished by the gods for Mother’s death. She believed that in her next life she would be a diseased bird and her son a limbless dog. NaiNai burned incense and begged the gods to reduce her sentence. When she ran out of money for incense, she stole. She took me to markets, temples, and graveyards. We would not act until darkness fell. NaiNai moved like an animal on all fours. She was in and out of bamboo groves and brick hallways, behind the hills and around ponds. Under the bright moonlight, NaiNai’s long neck stretched. Her head seemed to become smaller. Her cheekbones sharpened. Her slanting eyes glowed as she scanned the temples. NaiNai appeared, disappeared, and reappeared like a ghost. But one night she stopped. In fact, she collapsed. I was aware that she had been ill. Tufts of hair had been falling from her head. There was a rotten smell to her breath. “Go and look for your father,” she ordered. “Tell him that my end is near. ”
