In the photo on the card table, Ma is pregnant with Jie and holding two babies like they’re grenades with the pins pulled out. She’s waiting for this picture to be taken so she can throw them far out of frame. There’s a third girl in a white dress standing in front of her. The photo’s too water-wrinkled to see any of their faces, and the oldest girl is out of focus, a streak like a tree. Ma never acknowledges the photo or the table, which makes their presence even more a punishment. Once, at dinnertime, Jie asks what their names are. Ma locks her out of the house that night, and in the morning, Jie is curled like a stray on our doormat, one arm jammed through the mail slot like she’s been trying to fold herself into a paper daughter.
Ma stands at the not-altar, holding the handkerchief in her left fist and the jade in her right. There is no god we know better than her fist. Ma never looks at the photo. She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face. She prays to the sisters whose names I don’t know. Her prayers robbed of a god.
Jie and I were born thieves. Born to orphan our sisters by birthing our mother into this country. You don’t know about gold, about grieving what you could have owned. Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her.
Today she complains she’s married to a manhole, a shaft for memories to fall down, a man who can see only the sky above him. But Ba’s smarter than she knows. The one time we got robbed, the thieves didn’t know to dig. Couldn’t find anything worth taking. Only our door was missing. We were sure they took something else from the house, but we didn’t know what to look for. How to search for an absence.
When Ma stews the apricots we steal, she never asks where we get them. She knows nothing belongs to us, and that’s why she won’t let us sit on chairs until she wraps them in cheesecloth or scrubs off our skin. We can’t put pictures on the walls, if we had any, or fully unpack—she still thinks we’ll have to give everything back. Jie’s mouth is still magnetized to the word sister, but outside of her dreams she’s stopped asking for names. Jie goes to church and her English has gotten so good she’s started reading aloud the billboards outside our house. One of them is the phone number of a divorce lawyer. One is for bail bonds. One is for a casino, which tempts Ba until Ma throws her quilt basket at him, tells him to sit down or she’ll snip his balls off and sew them to his earlobes. Jie and I can’t stop imagining Ba wearing his balls like earrings, and we laugh until we piss, the stains in our laps symmetrical.
* * *
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We dig beneath so many trees we’ve given them nicknames: The one with the bent knees. The one that sways like a drunk. The one with a woman’s hips. The gold is under none of them. It’s the earthquake that finally wounds a way to the gold: I sleep through it, but Jie claims it felt like the whole earth was operating on itself, scraping back its own skin, rearranging its organs.
On our porch, one of the floorboards splits open and shakes off its scab of moss. Light spits from it and we flock to the crack like moths. Underneath the porch is a finger of gold, bedazzled with flies and reclined on a sheet of butcher paper. Ma dances on the kitchen table for a whole hour, her feet forgoing gravity. She stacks the gold on the not-altar, directly to the left of the photo so flat and dull in its frame. The gold is too exposed, like looking directly at someone’s bones. We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost.
DAUGHTER
Hu Gu Po (I)
California, a generation later
Mothers ago, there was a tiger spirit who wanted to live inside a woman. One night when the moon was as brown as a nipple, the tiger spirit braided itself into a rope of light and lowered itself into a woman’s mouth, rappeling down her throat and taking the name of Hu Gu Po. But the price of having a body is hunger. Hu Gu Po could remain a tenant in the woman’s body as long as she hunted. When she smelled the sweat-seasoned toes of children, her belly hardened into a beetle of need and scuttled out of her throat, a scout in search of salt. Craving their toes, she climbed into the children’s bedrooms at night. With her teeth, she unscrewed the toes of sleeping daughters and sucked the knuckles clean of meat, renaming them peanuts.
Every morning, Hu Gu Po walked through the market and appraised the fish dragged in from the river, their bodies like oiled opals. A fisherman’s wife, smelling something that scarred the air with its smoke, turned to Hu Gu Po and asked what she was eating.
Peanuts, Hu Gu Po said, shucking nut-bones with her teeth.
The fisherman’s wife asked if Hu Gu Po might be willing to share.
Hu Gu Po laughed. How much would you pay for one?
The fisherman’s wife named a price.
Slipping the skin off another nut, Hu Gu Po said, That’s not enough for me to make a living. She laughed, her black braid unraveling to ash, charring the air.
The next morning, every child in the village woke with a toe subtracted from each foot. On each of their pillows was a five-cent coin, rusted dark as a blood spot.
The fisherman’s wife had no children, but when she heard what had happened, she remembered the woman in the market cleaving peanut shells with her teeth. When she opened her door, there was a skin pouch lying in her doorway. She slit open the pouch and it spilled dozens of toes, deboned and dusted with salt.
* * *
_
My mother lifted the bedsheet over us both when she told me this story, crouching down over my feet, grasping them in her fists, and ferrying them to her mouth. My toes squirmed like minnows in her maw, swimming against the current of her spit. In the dark, I watched the geography of her face rearranging: the mountain range of moles on her forehead, the hook of her lip lowering when she fished up a story. She let go of my feet when I begged her not to eat them, but one night she concluded the story by biting down on my big toe. Her teeth encircled it like a tiara, resting on the skin rather than breaking it, but I could feel her trembling, her jaw reined back by something I couldn’t see. In the morning, my toe wore a ringlet of white where the blood didn’t return again for months.
Some nights, I woke to my mother’s finger foraging around in my ear, nicking out the earwax with her hooked pinky nail. She liked to joke she was digging for gold. She lifted the canoe of her pinky nail, loaded with my grit, and brought it to her mouth. I yanked at her wrist and said, No, no, no no no. But she ate it anyway, laughing when I said it was gross. I used to eat my earwax when I was hungry, she said. My ears were always so clean. That’s why I can hear everything. My mother said if I let the earwax live inside me, it would eventually grow beetle legs and scuttle into my brain, nesting there like shrapnel. She said she was saving me by eating my ear canals clean, allowing the sun to tunnel into my skull and keep all my memories lit.