Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
along her hairless eyebrows, chattering nonsense. My older brothers
managed to escape her grasp. They were immune to her influence
and treated her with blank-faced disdain. Thus, all her arrows fell on
me as her solitary target.
“I tell you this,” Sweet Ma would say to me, “only so you won’t be
stricken sick to hear it from someone else.” And she would tell me
once again that my mother had been a tiny girl like me, but not as
squat, barely seventy pounds at age sixteen when my father took her
in as his breeding concubine.
“Itty-bitty though she was,” Sweet Ma said, “she was excessive in
everything she did. She ate too many pears. She showed too much
emotion. Why, when she laughed she could not control herself, and
would fall to the floor in a fit of giggles until I slapped her back to
her senses. What’s more, she slept all night long, yet yawned all day.
She slept so much her bones turned soft. That was why she was al­
ways collapsing like a jellyfish out of water.”
During wartime, when the price of fatty pork had tripled, Sweet
Ma could be heard to declare: “Though we have money enough, I’m
content to eat meat sparingly, just for the taste and certainly not
more than once a week. But your mother, when she was alive, her
eyes were like those of a carrion bird, ready to pounce on any dead
flesh.” Sweet Ma said a decent woman should never show eagerness
for food or any other kind of pleasure. Most of all, she should
“never be a burden,” this being what Sweet Ma strived not to be, and
she desired in particular for my father to acknowledge this as often
as she did.
In those days, we lived in a three-story Tudoresque manor on Rue
Massenet in the French Concession of Shanghai. This was not in the
best of the best neighborhoods, not like Rue Lafayette, where the
Soongs and the Kungs lived, with their villas and vast, multiacred
gardens, croquet lawns, and pony carts. Then again, we were not the
kind of family to rub our bountiful luck into the faces of our inferi­
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