The woman warrior audiobook download free

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Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms. But perhaps my aunt, my forerunner, caught in a slow life, let dreams grow and fade and after some months or years went toward what persisted.

Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her desires delicate, wire and bone. She looked at a man because she liked the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, or she liked the question-mark line of a long torso curving at the shoulder and straight at the hip. Why, the wrong lighting could erase the dearest thing about him.

It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.

To sustain her being in love, she often worked at herself in the mirror, guessing at the colors and shapes that would interest him, changing them frequently in order to hit on the right combination.

She wanted him to look back. On a farm near the sea, a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity. All the married women blunt-cut their hair in aps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns.

No nonsense. Neither style blew easily into heart-catching tangles. And at their weddings they displayed themselves in their long hair for the last time. A bun could have been contrived to escape into black streamers blowing in the wind or in quiet wisps about her face, but only the older women in our picture album wear buns.

She brushed her hair back from her forehead, tucking the aps behind her ears. When she closed her ngers as if she were making a pair of shadow geese bite, the string twisted together catching the little hairs. Then she pulled the thread away from her skin, ripping the hairs out neatly, her eyes watering from the needles of pain.

Opening her ngers, she cleaned the thread, then rolled it along her hairline and the tops of her eyebrows. My mother did the same to me and my sisters and herself. Sisters used to sit on their beds and cry together, she said, as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins.

Once my aunt found a freckle on her chin, at a spot that the almanac said predestined her for unhappiness. She dug it out with a hot needle and washed the wound with peroxide. More attention to her looks than these pullings of hairs and pickings at spots would have caused gossip among the villagers. They owned work clothes and good clothes, and they wore good clothes for feasting the new seasons. But since a woman combing her hair hexes beginnings, my aunt rarely found an occasion to look her best.

Women looked like great sea snails—the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs. The Chinese did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight. Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched. Such commonplace loveliness, however, was not enough for my aunt.

She plied her secret comb. And sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and herself. Even as her hair lured her imminent lover, many other men looked at her.

Uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers would have looked, too, had they been home between journeys. Perhaps they had already been restraining their curiosity, and they left, fearful that their glances, like a eld of nesting birds, might be startled and caught.

Poverty hurt, and that was their first reason for leaving. But another, final reason for leaving the crowded house was the never-said. She may have been unusually beloved, the precious only daughter, spoiled and mirror gazing because of the a ection the family lavished on her.

When her husband left, they welcomed the chance to take her back from the in-laws; she could live like the little daughter for just a while longer. And one day he brought home a baby girl, wrapped up inside his brown western-style greatcoat. My grandmother made him trade back.

When he nally got a daughter of his own, he doted on her. They must have all loved her, except perhaps my father, the only brother who never went back to China, having once been traded for a girl.

Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to e ace their sexual color and present plain miens. Disturbing hair and eyes, a smile like no other, threatened the ideal of ve generations living under one roof.

To focus blurs, people shouted face to face and yelled from room to room. The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village where they called their friendships out across the elds. Walking erect knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine and speaking in an inaudible voice, I have tried to turn myself American-feminine.

Chinese communication was loud, public. Only sick people had to whisper. But at the dinner table, where the family members came nearest one another, no one could talk, not the outcasts nor any eaters. Every word that falls from the mouth is a coin lost.

Silently they gave and accepted food with both hands. A preoccupied child who took his bowl with one hand got a sideways glare. A complete moment of total attention is due everyone alike. Children and lovers have no singularity here, but my aunt used a secret voice, a separate attentiveness. He may have been somebody in her own household, but intercourse with a man outside the family would have been no less abhorrent.

All the village were kinsmen, and the titles shouted in loud country voices never let kinship be forgotten. Parents researched birth charts probably not so much to assure good fortune as to circumvent incest in a population that has but one hundred surnames. Everybody has eight million relatives.

How useless then sexual mannerisms, how dangerous. It hexed the boys, who would or would not ask me to dance, and made them less scary and as familiar and deserving of benevolence as girls. But, of course, I hexed myself also—no dates. Love me back. If I made myself American-pretty so that the ve or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me, everyone else—the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys—would too. Sisterliness, dignified and honorable, made much more sense. Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together.

Marriage promises to turn strangers into friendly relatives—a nation of siblings. In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land.

But one human being aring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky. The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them. If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment.

But the men—hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil—had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home.

There were ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese, oods. My Chinese brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food. The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that t one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls—these talismans had lost their power to warn this family of the law: a family must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the family.

The villagers came to show my aunt and her lover-in-hiding a broken house. The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her in delity had already harmed the village, that waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby.

Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars. After the villagers left, their lanterns now scattering in various directions toward home, the family broke their silence and cursed her.

Death is coming. Dead ghost! When she felt the birth coming, she thought that she had been hurt. Her body seized together. She turned on her back, lay on the ground. The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear. An agoraphobia rose in her, speeding higher and higher, bigger and bigger; she would not be able to contain it; there would no end to fear. Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her body.

This pain chilled her—a cold, steady kind of surface pain. Inside, spasmodically, the other pain, the pain of the child, heated her. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. She saw them congratulating one another, high joy on the mornings the rice shoots came up. When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart.

Black space opened. She got to her feet to ght better and remembered that old-fashioned women gave birth in their pigsties to fool the jealous, pain-dealing gods, who do not snatch piglets. Before the next spasms could stop her, she ran to the pigsty, each step a rushing out into emptiness. She climbed over the fence and knelt in the dirt. It was good to have a fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone. Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a foreign growth that sickened her every day, expelled it at last.

She reached down to touch the hot, wet, moving mass, surely smaller than anything human, and could feel that it was human after all— ngers, toes, nails, nose.

She pulled it up on to her belly, and it lay curled there, butt in the air, feet precisely tucked one under the other. She opened her loose shirt and buttoned the child inside.

After resting, it squirmed and thrashed and she pushed it up to her breast. It turned its head this way and that until it found her nipple. There, it made little snu ing noises. She clenched her teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a piglet, a little dog.

She may have gone to the pigsty as a last act of responsibility: she would protect this child as she had protected its father. It would look after her soul, leaving supplies on her grave. But how would this tiny child without family nd her grave when there would be no marker for her anywhere, neither in the earth nor the family hall? No one would give her a family hall name. She had taken the child with her into the wastes. At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close.

A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose. At dawn the villagers on their way to the fields would stand around the fence and look. Full of milk, the little ghost slept. When it awoke, she hardened her breasts against the milk that crying loosens.

Toward morning she picked up the baby and walked to the well. Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise abandon it. Turn its face into the mud.

Mothers who love their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born. I have thought that my family, having settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment.

And I have. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further—a reverse ancestor worship. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would su er forever, even after death.

Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts.

She would have to ght the ghosts massed at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed. At peace, they could act like gods, not ghosts, their descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity—essences delivered up in smoke and ames, steam and incense rising from each rice bowl. In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people outside the family, Chairman Mao encourages us now to give our paper replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be.

My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead. My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.

We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. It was a woman who invented white crane boxing only two hundred years ago. She was already an expert pole ghter, daughter of a teacher trained at the Shao-lin temple, where there lived an order of ghting monks. She was combing her hair one morning when a white crane alighted outside her window.

She teased it with her pole, which it pushed aside with a soft brush of its wing. Amazed, she dashed outside and tried to knock the crane o its perch. It snapped her pole in two.

Recognizing the presence of great power, she asked the spirit of the white crane if it would teach her to ght. It answered with a cry that white crane boxers imitate today. Later the bird returned as an old man, and he guided her boxing for many years. Thus she gave the world a new martial art. This was one of the tamer, more modern stories, mere introduction. My mother told others that followed swordswomen through woods and palaces for years. Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep.

And on Sundays, from noon to midnight, we went to the movies at the Confucius Church. At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking- story. Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village.

I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman. The call would come from a bird that ew over our roof. I would be a little girl of seven the day I followed the bird away into the mountains.

The brambles would tear o my shoes and the rocks cut my feet and ngers, but I would keep climbing, eyes upward to follow the bird. We would go around and around the tallest mountain, climbing ever upward. I would drink from the river, which I would meet again and again. We would go so high the plants would change, and the river that ows past the village would become a waterfall.

At the height where the bird used to disappear, the clouds would gray the world like an ink wash. Even when I got used to that gray, I would only see peaks as if shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky. There would be just two black strokes—the bird.

Suddenly, without noise, I would break clear into a yellow, warm world. New trees would lean toward me at mountain angles, but when I looked for the village, it would have vanished under the clouds.

The door opened, and an old man and an old woman came out carrying bowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies. They gave me an egg, as if it were my birthday, and tea, though they were older than I, but I poured for them. The teapot and the rice pot seemed bottomless, but perhaps not; the old couple ate very little except for peaches. When the mountains and the pines turned into blue oxen, blue dogs, and blue people standing, the old couple asked me to spend the night in the hut.

I thought about the long way down in the ghostly dark and decided yes. The inside of the hut seemed as large as the outdoors. Pine needles covered the oor in thick patterns; someone had carefully arranged the yellow, green, and brown pine needles according to age. When I stepped carelessly and mussed a line, my feet kicked up new blends of earth colors, but the old man and old woman walked so lightly that their feet never stirred the designs by a needle.

A rock grew in the middle of the house, and that was their table. The benches were fallen trees. Ferns and shade owers grew out of one wall, the mountainside itself.

The old couple tucked me into a bed just my width. The rope was tied to the roof, and the roof opened up like a basket lid. I would sleep with the moon and the stars. In the morning light I could see her earlobes pierced with gold. We can train you to become a warrior. The old man untied the drinking gourd slung across his back.

He lifted the lid by its stem and looked for something in the water. At rst I saw only water so clear it magni ed the bers in the walls of the gourd. On the surface, I saw only my own round re ection.

The old man encircled the neck of the gourd with his thumb and index nger and gave it a shake. As the water shook, then settled, the colors and lights shimmered into a picture, not re ecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was where I was.

The water shook and became just water again. You can go pull sweet potatoes, or you can stay with us and learn how to ght barbarians and bandits. You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness.

So the hut became my home, and I found out that the old woman did not arrange the pine needles by hand. She opened the roof; an autumn wind would come up, and the needles fell in braids—brown strands, green strands, yellow strands. The old woman waved her arms in conducting motions; she blew softly with her mouth. I thought, nature certainly works differently on mountains than in valleys. At night, the mice and toads looked at me, their eyes quick stars and slow stars.

Not once would I see a three-legged toad, though; you need strings of cash to bait them. The two old people led me in exercises that began at dawn and ended at sunset so that I could watch our shadows grow and shrink and grow again, rooted to the earth.

I learned to move my ngers, hands, feet, head, and entire body in circles. After ve years my body became so strong that I could control even the dilations of the pupils inside my irises.

After six years the deer let me run beside them. I could jump twenty feet into the air from a standstill, leaping like a monkey over the hut. Every creature has a hiding skill and a ghting skill a warrior can use.

When birds alighted on my palm, I could yield my muscles under their feet and give them no base from which to fly away. But I could not fly like the bird that led me here, except in large, free dreams. During the seventh year I would be fourteen , the two old people led me blindfolded to the mountains of the white tigers. A wind buoyed me up over the roots, the rocks, the little hills. We reached the tiger place in no time—a mountain peak three feet three from the sky. We had to bend over.

The old people waved once, slid down the mountain, and disappeared around a tree. The old woman, good with the bow and arrow, took them with her; the old man took the water gourd. I would have to survive bare-handed. Snow lay on the ground, and snow fell in loose gusts—another way the dragon breathes. I walked in the direction from which we had come, and when I reached the timberline, I collected wood broken from the cherry tree, the peony, and the walnut, which is the tree of life.

Fire, the old people had taught me, is stored in trees that grow red owers or red berries in the spring or whose leaves turn red in the fall. I took the wood from the protected spots beneath the trees and wrapped it in my scarf to keep dry. I dug where squirrels might have come, stealing one or two nuts at each place. These I also wrapped in my scarf. It is possible, the old people said, for a human being to live for fty days on water. I would save the roots and nuts for hard climbs, the places where nothing grew, the emergency should I not find the hut.

This time there would be no bird to follow. The rst night I burned half of the wood and slept curled against the mountain. I heard the white tigers prowling on the other side of the re, but I could not distinguish them from the snow patches.

The morning rose perfectly. I hurried along, again collecting wood and edibles. I ate nothing and only drank the snow my fires made run. The rst two days were gifts, the fasting so easy to do, I so smug in my strength that on the third day, the hardest, I caught myself sitting on the ground, opening the scarf and staring at the nuts and dry roots. That night I burned up most of the wood I had collected, unable to sleep for facing my death—if not death here, then death someday.

The moon animals that did not hibernate came out to hunt, but I had given up the habits of a carnivore since living with the old people.

On the fourth and fth days, my eyesight sharp with hunger, I saw deer and used their trails when our ways coincided. Where the deer nibbled, I gathered the fungus, the fungus of immortality. At noon on the tenth day I packed snow, white as rice, into the worn center of a rock pointed out to me by a nger of ice, and around the rock I built a re. In the warming water I put roots, nuts, and the fungus of immortality. For variety I ate a quarter of the nuts and roots raw.

Oh, green joyous rush inside my mouth, my head, my stomach, my toes, my soul—the best meal of my life. One day I found that I was striding long distances without hindrance, my bundle light. Food had become so scarce that I was no longer stopping to collect it.