Pomegranates and English Education
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 13, No. 10/11. (Jul., 1996), pp. 9-11.
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"He's so smart!" my mother replied sweetly. "I don't know what to do about
Malcolm. I got another call from school today. The principal says he's smart. He scores
high on the IQ tests, but he doesn't try. And rude! No me digar."
Then Esmerelda would put her two cents in. "He misses his father, manita," she
would say, "Boys need their fathers."
"I know," my mother would say, "I know."
There was never any talk about me or what I needed. I was just a quick rest stop in
their marathon conversations.
"And Veronica?" they would say eventually.
"She's fine. All A's as usual," she would say. And I could tell from her voice that
she was sad, thinking about Malcolm. She never used the proud, bragging tone that
Delores did when she spoke about Ernesto.
I almost would have preferred if they just ignored me altogether. Esmerelda would
take it upon herself to start bossing me around. She never called on my brother to do
anything, because like most Panamanian women, she thought housework was a girl's
domain.
"Veronica! !!" she would scream,even though the apartment was only so big. And most
of the time I would be sitting behind the kitchen door eavesdropping, as she well knew.
"Yes," I would say politely. My mother hated it when I said, Yeah?
"Come take these glasses and put them in the sink. You've got to start helping
around the house now. You're a big girl and your mother could use a break," Esmerelda
would go on and on. She reminded me of the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon*
after a while her voice would just tum into gibberish in my head.
What really worked my nerves was how my mother never objected to what they
said. After they left, when I would complain, my mother would say, "In Panama, every
elder is considered the parent of the child. You could be walking down the street and
if someone asked you to carry home a bag of groceries, you'd have to do it."
"Oh yeah, well, this isn't Panama," I'd say, giving her my most evil look. "And if
your friend isn't careful, I'm going to call Immigration on her."
"That isn't funny!" she would say, but I could see the smile on her face.
"Try me," I would say, mischievously. It was an idle threat, mostly because by this
time, all of my mother's friends were citizens. But the thought of shipping those bossy
women back to Panama, especially Esmerelda, was always a tantalizing daydream.
WANIED MY MOTHER to talk to me like she talked to these women. There was so much
I
going on and because I didn't speak Spanish, I could only make out bits and pieces.
I knew that besides the fact that he hardly ever showed up for his scheduled Saturday
visits, my father had not paid one single child-support check and my mother had already
taken him to court once. I wanted my mother to know that I was brave enough to hear
her problems, courageous enough to face the severity that defined our day-to-day lives.
That December, I heard my mother tell Esmerelda that she was only going to be able
to spend a hundred dollars on presents for my brother and me. She'd have to spend the
rest of her Christmas bonus on bills.
I sat down with the Sears Christmas catalog. Every year my brother and I would flip
through it in search of presents until the pages started to fall out. But this year, I decided
to make a list of presents that totaled exactly fifty dollars or less. This did not take a
very long time. So I made another list, then another, with different combinations of
presents.
Barbie dolls (1 Barbie, 1 Ken) and a Holly Hobby Bake Set = $50, or
One Christie (the black Barbie doll) plus a Barbie Corvette = $36, or
One Operation board game and the Holly Hobby Bake set = $45.
I must have come up with ten different combinations. One night before I went to
bed, I gave it to my mother. She looked horrified. I was scared she was mad at me. So
often she was so quick and cruel in the way she said no to our requests. "I will not beg,
borrow. or steal for you kids," she would say. "You'll make do with what I can
provide." But this evening, she held that list and just looked down at the floor.
"What did I do wrong?" I asked.
"Nothing," she said quickly, kissing me good night. "Go to bed."
The next day I told my brother to make a reasonable list of presents within my
mother's budget, but he refused, too young to see the gap between the hundred or so
presents he'd request and the three or four presents he'd receive. He knew my mother
was Santa Claus, but he didn't think that it could also mean that she was poor. He knew
what he wanted even if he wasn't going to get it. I envied his sense of entitlement, the
way he always thought the world would unfold for him, no matter what. I had always
reveled in Wing the "smarty pants" in the family, but this was a time when knowledge
began to work against me. I had seen too many bad things and eavesdropped on too
many of my mother's conversations ever to dream the way he was able to dream.*
Reprinted by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a division of the Putnam Berkley
Group, Inc., from Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers. Copyright O 1996 by Veronica
Chambers.
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1
by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
P~MEGRANATETREE grew
in a pot on the open-air balcony at the back of the
second floor. It was a small skinny tree, even to a small skinny child like me. It
had many fruits, marble-sized, dark green, shiny like overwaxed coats. Few
grew to any size. The branches were sparse and graceful, as were the tear-shaped leaves
that fluttered in the slightest breeze. Once a fruit grew round and large, we watched it
every day. It grew lighter, then streaked with yellow and red. Finally we ate it, the
purple and crimson seeds bursting with a tart liquid as we cracked the dry tough skin
into segments to be shared by our many hands and mouths.
We were many. Looking back it seems to me that we had always been many. Beng
was the fierce brother, the growly eldest son. Chien was the gentle second brother, born
with a squint eye. Seven other children followed after me: Jen, Wun, Wilson, Hui, Lui.
Seng, and Marie, the last four my half-siblings. I was third, the only daughter through
a succession of eight boys and, as far as real life goes, measured in rice bowls and in
the bones of morning, I have remained an only daughter in my memory.
We were as many as the blood-seeds we chewed, sucked, and spat out, the indigestible cores pulped and gray while their juice ran down our chins and stained our mouths
with triumphant color. I still hold that crimson in memary, the original color of Chinese
prosperity and health, now transformed to the beny shine of wine, the pump of blood
in test tubes and smeared on glass plates to prophesy one's future from the wriggles of
a virus. My Chinese life in Malaysia up to 1%9 was a pomegranate, thickly seeded.
When Beng and Chien began attending the Bandar Hilir Primary School, they
brought home textbooks, British readers with thick linen-rag covers, strong slick paper,
and lots of short stories and poems accompanied by colorful pictures in the style of
Aubrey Beardsley. The story of the three Billy Goats Gruff who killed the Troll under
the bridge was stark and compressed, illustrated by golden kids daintily trotting over a
rope bridge and a dark squat figure peering from the ravine below. Wee Willie Winkie
ran through a starry night wearing only a white night cap and gown. The goats, the troll;
and Willie Winkie were equally phantasms to me, for whoever saw anything like a
flowing white gown on a boy or a pointy night cap in Malaya?
How to explain the disorienting power of story and picture? Things never seen or
thought of in Malayan experience took on a vividness that ordinary life could not
possess. These British childhood texts materialized for me, a five- and six-year-old
child, the kind of hyper-reality that television images hold for a later
a
reality, moreover, that was consolidated by colonial education.
At five, I memorized the melody and lyrics to "The Jolly Miller" from my brother's
school rendition:
A
There lived a jolly miller once
Along the River Dee.
He worked and sang from mom till night,
No lark more blithe than he.
And this the burden of his song
As always used to be,
I care for nobody, no not I,
And nobody cares for me.
It was my first English poem, my first English song, and my first English lesson.
The song ran through my head mutely, obsessively, on hundreds of occasion$. What
catechism did I learn as I sang the words aloud? I knew nothing of millers or of larks.
As a preschool child, I ate bread, that exotic food, only on rare and unwelcome
occasions. The miller working alone had no analogue in the Malayan world. In
Malacca, everyone was surrounded by everyone else. A hawker needed his regular
customers, a storefront the stream of pedestrians who shoppcd on the move. Caring was
not a concept that signified. Necessity, the relations between and among many and
diverse people, composed the bonds of Malaccan society. Caring denoted a field of
choice, of individual voluntary action, that was foreign to family. the place of compulsory relations. Western ideological subversion, cultural colonialism, whatever we call
those forces that have changed societies under forced political domination, for me
began with something as simple as an old English folk song.
The pomegranate is a fruit of the East, coming originally from Persia. The language
of the West, English, and all its many manifestations in stories, songs, illustrations.
films, school, and government, does not teach the lesson of the pomegranate. English
iaught me the lesson of the individual, the miller who is happy alone, and who affirms
the principle of not caring for community. Why was it so easy for me to learn that
lesson? Was it because within the pomegranate's hundreds of seeds is also contained
%!!&y
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Tbe Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-11 /July 1996
9
the drive for singularity that will finally
produce one tree from one seed? Or was it
because my grandparents' Hokkien and
nonya societies had become irremediably
damaged by British colonial domination,
their cultural confidence never to be
recovered intact, so that Western notions of
the individual took over collective imaginations, making of us, as V.S. Naipaul has
coined it, "mimic" people?
But I resist this reading of colonialist corruption of an original pure culture. Corruption is inherent in every culture. if we think
of corruption as a will to break out, to rupture, to break down, to decay, and thus to
change. We are all mimic people, born to
cultures that push us, shape us, and pummel
us; and we are all agents, with the power of
the subject, no matter how puny or inarticulate, to push back and to struggle against such
shaping. So I have seen myself not so much
sucking at the teat of British colonial culture
as actively appropriating those aspects of it
that I needed to escape that other
familidgenderhative culture that violently
hammered out only one shape for self. I act i v e l ~sought corruption to break out of the
pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl.
allowed to go out. The community was allowed into the chapel every Sunday to attend
the masses held for the nuns and the orphans
S about my parents and the communities I
who lived in the convent.
grew up h-my father'sChh-immig~ant
But if the convent closed its face to the
community, and my mother's assimilated
town of men and unbelievers, it lay open at
5 Malaysian community.
the back to the Malacca Straits. Every recess
It's being simultaneously published in SinI joined hundreds of girls milling at the cangopore, in the
where my
tcounters for little plates of noodles,
live. I expect condemnation there, on a nurn- cT puffs
with potatoes, peas and
ber of levels. There are skeletons in the
traces of meat, and vile orangecolored
ckOS&-llliCit c i t X U d licdsoIlS, child abmdonShirley Ceok-lin Lim.
sugared drink. The food never held me for
ment. I'm telling stories that aren't just perlong. Instead I spent recess by the sea wall, a
s0nal, pcdnful Ones but social O U t d stories. In the United States people
stone barrier free of bristling glass. Standing
are concerned about self%xposurercrther than community exposure. In
before the sandy ground that separated the
Asia people are really concerned about the exposure of the community.
field and summer house from the water. I
gazed at high tide as the waves threw themBut the -PomegrancrtBS-section isveD(scde.
I'm dealing with the
contact between theWest crnd
peoples. From a local point of selves against the wall with the peculiar
repeated whoosh and sigh that I never
view there would be a great deal of sympathy for that, because I'm tellwearied of hearing. Until I saw the huge
ing about damage that has been done to that community rather than
pounding surf of the
Osun, I
damage the community has done to itself.
believed all the world's water to be dancing,
The second half of the memoir deals with my struggle to 'rebjrV1' another diarnond-bright surfaced, a hypnotic meditahomeland. It's really been the first time I've struggled to write about how
tive space in which shallow and deep seemed
one and the same. Once inside the convent
I am an American. It's easy for recent immigrants to focus on the past,
gates, one was overtaken by a similar sense
and the futureof their children. The present tense, 'How me you a n
of an overwhelming becalmedness, as if one
American now?' is something that is not often dealt with. - 4 G L
had fallen asleep, out of worldliness, and
entered the security of a busy dream.
T WAS THE CONVENT SCHOOL that gave me the first weapons with which to wreck my
During recess the little girls sang,"In and out thewindow, in and out the window, as we
familial culture. On the first day, Ah Chan took me, a six-year-old, in a mshaw to
have done before." and skipped in and out of arching linked hands, in a mindless pleasure
the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. She waited outside the classroom the entire
ofrepeated movement, repeating thedesire for safety. formtine, and for the linked circular
day with a chun, a tiffin carrier, filled with steamed rice, soup, and meat, fed me this
enclosure of the women's community that would take me in fxurn six'to seventeen.
lunch at eleven-thii, then took me home in a trishaw at two. I wore a starched blue
My teacher was an elderly nun of uncertain European nationality, perhaps French,
pinafore over a white cotton blouse and stared at the words, See Jane run. Can Jane
who didn't speak English well. She spoke with a lisp, mispronounced my name, calling
run? Jane can run. After the first week, I begged to attend school without Ah Chan
me "Chtrie" instead of "Shirley." and, perhaps accordingly, showed more affection to
present. Baba drove me to school after he dropped my older brothers at their school a
me than to the other children in her class. Sister Josie was the first Europe.an I knew.
mile before the convent; I was now, like my brothers, free of domestic female
Even in her voluminous black robes and hood, she was an image of powder-white and
attachment.
pink smiles. Bending over my small desk to guide my fingers, and peering into my teary
The convent school stood quiet and still behind thick cement walls that hid the
eyes, she spoke my name with a tender concern. She was my first experience of an
buildings and its inhabitants from the road and muffled the sounds of passing traffic.
enveloping, unconditional, and safe physical affection. She smelled sweet, like fresh
The high walls also served to snuff out the world once you entered the gates, which
yeast, and as I grew braver each day and strayed from my desk, she would upbraid me
were always kept shut except at the opening and closing of the school day. Shards of
in the most remorseful of tones, "ChCrie," which carried with it an approving smile.
broken bottles embedded in the top of the walls glinted in the hot tropical sunshine, a
In retum I applied myself to Jane and Dick and Spot and to copying the alphabet
provocative signal that the convent women were daily conscious of dangers intruding
letter by letterrepeatedly. Sister Josie couldn't teach anything beyond the alphabet and
on their seclusion. For the eleven years that I entered through those gates, I seldom met
simple vocabulary. In a few years, she was retired to the position of gatekeeper at the
a man on the grounds, except for the Jesuit brought to officiate at the annual retreat. A
chapel annex. When I visited her six years later, as a child of twelve, at the small annex
shared public area was the chapel, a small low dark structure made sacred by stained
in which a store of holy pictures, medals, and lace veils were displayed for sale, Sister
glass windows, hard wooden benches, and the sacristy oil lamp whose light was never
Josie's smile was still as fond. But to my mature ears, her English speech was halting,
her grammar and vocabulary fractured. It was only to a six-year-old new to English that
dear Sister Josie could have appeared as a native speaker of the English language.
It was my extreme good fortune to have this early missionary mother. Her gcntlc,
undemanding care remains memorialized as a type of human relation not found in the
fierce self-involvements of my family. My narrowly sensory world broadened not only
with the magical letters she taught that spelled lives beyond what my single dreaming
could imagine, but differently with her gentle greetings, in her palpable affection.
Nurturing is a human act that overleaps categories, but it is not free of history. It is
not innocent. For the next eleven years nuns like Sister Josie broke down the domain
of my infancy.
This memoir is not just &out me; it talks
3
9
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10 Tbc Women's Review of Books l Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-11
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sleeves like bat wings, long voluminous black skirts,black stockings, and shoes.
Deep white hoods covered their heads and fell o v a their shoulders,and a white skull
cap came down over their brows Inexplicably they were collectively named "the French
Convent," like a French colony or the foreign legion, but they were not chiefly white or
European Even in the early 1950s. some were Chinese and Eurasian "sisters."
Yet.despite their uniform habits and sisterly titles, a ranking regulated by race was
obvious, even to the youngest Malayan child. Mother Superior was always white. A
few white sisters. Sister Sean, Sister Patricia, and Sister Peter, taught the upper grades;
or they performed special duties, like Sister Maria who gave singing lessons, or Sister
Bernadette, who taught cooking and controlled the kitchen and the canteen.
Sister Maria was the only woman who was recognizably French. Her accent was
itself music to us as she led us through years of Scottish and Irish ballads. No one asked
why "Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon" or "The Minstrel Boy" formed our music
curriculum, why Indian, Eurasian, Malay, and Chinese children should be singing,
off-key, week after week in a faintly French-accented manner, the melancholic attitudes of Celtic gloom. What was the place of Celt ballads in a Malayan future? What
did they instruct of a history of feelings, of British bloodshed and patriotism? Or were
the curriculum setters in the Colonial Office in London reproducing in fortissimo an
imperial narrative-the tragedy of failed Scottish and Irish nationalism, the first of
England's colonies-in the physical pulses of the newly colonized?
Of the non-missionary teachers from Malacca, many were Eurasian, and a few were
Indian, and Chinese. The sole Malay teacher appeared only after the British ceded
independence to the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Chik Guru taught us the Malay
language in my last two years at the convent, just as now in the United States in many
colleges and universities, the only African American or Latino or Asian American
professor a student may meet teaches African American or Latino or Asian American
studies. Up to the end of the 1950s. and perhaps right up to the violence of the May 13
race riots in 1969, the educational structure in Malaya was British colonial.
My first inkling of race preference was formed by these earliest teachers. In primary
school, my teachers were almost all European expatriates or native-born Eurasian
Catholics bearing such Hispanic and Dutch names as De Souza, De Witt, Minjoot,
Aerea, and De Costa. They were the descendants of Portuguese soldiers and sailors who
had captured Malacca from the Malay Sultanate in 1511, when Portugal was a small,
poorly populated state. Expanding into the Spice Islands in the East, the GovemorGenerals of the Indies encouraged intermarriage between Portuguese males and native
thousand fighting men. For over four hundred years, the mestizos of Malacca had
identified themselves as Portuguese. The Eurasian teachers were physically distinguished from me. I learned this in
Primary Two with Mrs. Damien, a white-haired, very large woman whose fat dimpled
arms fascinated me. While she demonstrated how to embroider a daisy stitch as we
crowded around her chair, I poked my finger into the dimples and creases that formed
in the pale flesh that flowed over her shoulders and sagged in her upper arms. She was
a fair Eurasian who dressed as a British matron, in sleeveless flowered print frocks with
squarecut collars for coolness. Her exposed arms and chest presented dazzling mounds
of white flesh that aroused my ardent admiration. I do not remember learning anything
else in her class.
A few Eurasian girls were among my classmates. While they were not as coddled
as the white daughters of plantation managers, they had an air of ease and inclusion
that I envied. Their hair, which often had a copper sheen to it, was braided, while we
Chinese girls had black, pudding-bowl cropped hair. By the time we were twelve and
thirteen, and still flatchested, they had budded into bosomy women whose presence in
Sunday masses attracted the attention of young Catholic males. The royal blue pleated
pinafores that covered our prim skinny bodies like cardboard folded teasingly over their
chests and hips. The difference between us and the early maturity of Eurasian girls was
a symptom of the difference between our Chinese Malaccan culture and that dangerous
Western culture made visible in their lushness. They were overtly religious, controlled
by their strict mothers and the Ten Commandments that we had all memorized by
pre-adolescence. But their breasts and hips that made swing skirts swing pronounced
them ready for that unspoken but pervasive excitement we knew simply as "boys."
The convent held a number of orphans, girls abandoned as babies on the convent
doorsteps, or given over to the nuns to raise by relatives too poor to pay for their upkeep.
During school hours these "orphaned" girls were indistinguishable from the rest of us.
They wore the school uniforms, white short-sleevcd blouses under sleeveless blue linen
smocks that were fashioned with triple overpleats on both sides so that burgeoning
breasts were multiply overlayered with folds of starched fabric. But once school hours
were over they changed into pink or blue gingham dresses that buttoned right up to the
narrow Peter Pan collars. Those loose shapeless dresses, worn by sullen girls who
earned their keep by helping in the kitchen and laundry, formed some of my early
images of a class to be shunned.
Instead I longed to be like the privileged boarders, almost all of whom were British, whose parents lived in remote and dangerous plantations or administrative outposts in the interior. These girls wore polished black leather shoes and fashionable skirts and blouses after school. In our classes, they sang unfamiliar songs, showed us how to dance, jerking their necks like hieroglyphic Egyptians. In the convent classroom where silence and stillness were enforced as standard behavior, they giggled and joked, shifting beams of sunshine, and were never reprimanded. To every schoolgirl it was obvious that something about a white child made the good nuns benevolent. The Chinese nuns and teachers looked like us, yet they had social status and power.
VEN AS SOME TEACHERS acted badly, in ways that suggested they were not
E
infallible, we were told that teachers were objects of reverence: they could do no
wrong. Many teachers were openly unfair and harsh, yet at the same time we
were ceaselessly indoctrinated with their moral superiority.
My lessons in the pedagogy of terror began in Primary Three, when our teacher,
Mrs. Voon, asked if any of us had played the Ouija board. Ignorant of the game, we all
answered in the negative. She chose two of us, her best pupils, to report this to Sister
Arthur who was investigating the matter. Pleased at being let out of the classroom even
for n short errand, we ran to the Primary Five classroom, where Sister Arthur, a
dark-complexioned Chinese nun with pronounced flat cheekbones and owlish glasses,
was teaching. When I announced that no one in our class had ever played with a Ouija
board, Sister Arthur's gaze bore down on me. "No, no," she exclaimed, "your teacher
sent you here because you-oo are the one who has played the game!" I protested that it
was not so; she only had to ask Mrs. Voon herself. "No, no, I know how wicked you
are, I can see it for myself. You-oo are the one who has been playing this devil's board."
I burst into tears, but Sister Arthur held firm. "You are not getting out of my class. You
are a liar and you'll stay here until I decide what to do with you." She sent my
companion to report to Mrs. Voon that I was detained, and I stood sobbing in front of
the older children for the rest of the school day. It was only later in the afternoon that
Sister Arthur sent me away. "I hope you have learned your lesson now," she said, and
I womed for weeks about what that lesson could be.
Mrs. Voon never explained what had happened, and it seemed to me that only I
knew that a homble injustice had occurred. I hated Sister Arthur from then on, and
remember hardening myself for years as her pupil. She taught art for all classes from
Primary Four upwards, and there was no way convent girls could have avoided being
in Sister Arthur's class at least once a week until they left the school.
Sister Arthur was vigilant against any form of talk during her class hours, and
irrepressible child that I was, I could not help occasionally whispering words to the
girls around me. Turning around quick as a gekko from the blackboard where she was
writing directions, she would command me to stand up on the desk chair. Then,
selecting a stick of chalk, she strolled up to me and asked me to place the chalk upright
in my mouth. While the jaws ached from the forced open position, my saliva flowed
copiously. To avoid the humiliation of slobbering over my pinafore, I worked my throat
and kept swallowing my own bodily fluid. As the minutes changed into hours, the chalk
disintegrated with the saliva and I kept choking down this foul combination of spit and
gritty chalk, until such time as she allowed me down from my public perch.
My first meeting with Sister Arthur coincided with the year that my father lost his
shop on Kampong Pantai, we lost our home and moved back to Grandfather's house
on Heeren Street, and my mother left us for Singapore. In a year of such misery, I turned
Sister Arthur into a joke, Old Battle-ax. Her penetrating voice was to be immediately
exorcised with ridicule. Her myopic gaze allegedly unearthing evil thoughts in our
faces taught me that the convent, like my own disintegrated family, held no certainty
of trust or goodness.
In one sense Sister Arthur was correct. Though I had not used a Ouija board, I was
full of questions that no known spirits in my family or in the convent could answer. I
talked back to my teachers not because I was defiant but because my thoughts in
response to their actions and statements appeared irresistibly logical. It always
surprised me when teachers were offended by my answers and remarks, though they
were frequently, it is true, unsolicited. I did not understand why they were angry, even
inflamed, when I said something that appeared to me obviously correct. This pattern of
punishment in the convent school for speaking what appeared transparently true
continued for years.
( "The fall of Louis"
by Eunice Lipton
Y FATHER.LOUfs (pronounced in the French manner), falls in Israel, so he can't
M
come to my wedding. He loves me, but he crossed the street in Netanya and
before he knew it he was on the ground. He's 72, and virile, was a boxer, a
good swimmer, a strong handball player. The widows agree he's still handsome, or so
he thinks and so does his wife, Lena. So, he telephones and says, Sweetheart, I can't
make it, I'm s o y rneydelah, you know how much I'd like to be there, I love you. I shrug
it off. Okay, so he won't be coming. He fell. Ken expresses some regret, but he doesn't
know Louis. My father sends a couple of thousand dollars and says, This is towards the
wedding, a present.
The ceremony with a blues-singer-turned-rabbi from Ken's past takes place in
Lotte's loft. I'm 42, Ken is 33. Looking back on pictures of that day, I see I look 20,
moonbeams dancing off my face.
Ken makes a hupa of midnight-blue velvet, the same velvet we use to wrap the two
settings of silverware we exchange instead of rings; we like to eat. Ken wears white, I
black. It's May 31st, my wedding day, and my father's birthday.
I miss him. There's not going to be any giving away this time, but still my father, I
love him. I wanted him to be here, smiling, happy for me. Rut he's in Israel, in bed I
imagine. How did he fall? It is not his thing, falling. He is a determined walker, like
everything he does. I can see him waving off Lena: No goodbyes please-the absolute
opposite of Grandpa Max stretching farewells out, silently weeping and waving in
fedora and topcoat-putting on his hat against the sun, already dreaming, walking down
the steps smiling to himself. He smells the sea, feels a breeze upon his face, crosses the
street to walk along the beach. He waves at people, sometimes touches the brim of his
hat.
But instead he falls? He never makes it across the street that day? Well, maybe he is
not smiling coming down the steps. Maybe he has the baseball hat on, but underneath
the peak, his long nose hangs down, closed in on himself brooding: Eunie getting
married, I didn't think it possible. She must be in her forties already. Not going to have
children, he's ten years younger. He'll never stay. Why is she getting married again?
She doesn't want children. She doesn't need a man, I told her that a long time ago: She's
smarter than most men, than 'most anybody. She earns her own living, she goes to
France whenever she wants. Why should she get married? She hasn't had any luck with
men. Maybe they don't like her, or she doesn't like them. Her first husband, Mcl, was
a nice guy, a gentle guy, his own person. Came from money, but I felt comfortable with
his parents. They owned a furniture store, nice people. We met the day they got married.
The rabbi was the one who buried my mother. He was the only one we knew. They
looked nice, the two of them, reserved. They didn't talk much. Mel always did what he
wanted, but very politely. He was a fine boy. You never felt he wasn't being nice to you,
he had a way about him. Well, the marriage didn't work, 1don't know why. I think he
had another woman. Eunice was working too hard. She should've had a kid, stayed
home, then he would've too. A man doesn't want his wife running around. I don't blame
him. She took it hard though. She always took things hard, ever since that first
boyfriend, Gary. She got crazy, wouldn't eat, cried constantly, wouldn't come out of
(
I
LlLlTH is the legendary predecessor of
Eve who insisted on equality with Adam.
After the Holy One created the first human being, Adam, the Holy One
created a woman, also from the earth, and called her Lilith. Lilith said:
"We are equal because we both come from the earth. .."
-Alphabet of Ben Sfra 23a-b
Each quarterly issue of LlLlTH provides lively reporting,
analysis, resources, interviews, historical essays,
reviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and art. LlLlTH
features such compelling Jewish women as Gloria
Goldreich, Blu Greenberg, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley,
Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Adrienne Rich.
*
Reprinted by permission from Among (he While Moon Faces: An Asian-American
Memoir of Homelands, forthcoming from the Feminist Press at C U M : by Shirley
Gwk-lin Li.Copyright O 19% Shirley Geok-lin Lim.
The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIII, Nos. 10-11 /July 1996
11