The Joy Luck Club

It was perhaps two weeks after we had arrived. I was in the large garden in back, kicking a ball and watching two dogs chase it. My mother sat at a table watching me play. And then I heard a horn off in the distance, shouts, and those two dogs forgot the ball and ran off barking in high happy voices.

My mother had the same fearful look she wore in the harbor station. She walked quickly into the house. I walked around the side of the house toward the front. Two shiny black rickshaws had arrived and behind them a large black motorcar. A manservant was taking luggage out of one rickshaw. From another rickshaw, a young maid jumped out.

All the servants crowded around the motorcar, looking at their faces in the polished metal, admiring the curtained windows, the velvet seats. Then the driver opened the back door and out stepped a young girl. She had short hair with rows of waves. She looked to be only a few years older than I, but she had on a woman's dress, stockings, and high heels. I looked down at my own white dress covered with grass stains and I felt ashamed.

And then I saw the servants reaching into the backseat of the motorcar and a man was slowly being lifted by both arms. This was Wu Tsing. He was a big man, not tall, but puffed out like a bird. He was much older than my mother, with a high shiny forehead and a large black mole on one nostril. He wore a Western suit jacket with a vest that closed too tightly around his stomach, but his pants were very loose. He groaned and grunted as he heaved himself out and into view. And as soon as his shoes touched the ground, he began to walk toward the house, acting as though he saw no one, even though people greeted him and were busy opening doors, carrying his bags, taking his long coat. He walked into the house like that, with this young girl following him. She was looking behind at everyone with a simpering smile, as if they were there to honor her. And when she was hardly in the door, I heard one servant remark to another, "Fifth Wife is so young she did not bring any of her own servants, only a wet nurse. "

I looked up at the house and saw my mother looking down from her window, watching everything. So in this clumsy way, my mother found out that Wu Tsing had taken his fourth concubine, who was actually just an afterthought, a foolish bit of decoration for his new motorcar.

My mother was not jealous of this young girl who would now be called Fifth Wife. Why should she be? My mother did not love Wu Tsing. A girl in China did not marry for love. She married for position, and my mother's position, I later learned, was the worst.

After Wu Tsing and Fifth Wife arrived home, my mother often stayed in her room working on her embroidery. In the afternoon, she and I would go on long silent rides in the city, searching for a bolt of silk in a color she could not seem to name. Her unhappiness was this same way. She could not name it.

And so, while everything seemed peaceful, I knew it was not. You may wonder how a small child, only nine years old, can know these things. Now I wonder about it myself. I can remember only how uncomfortable I felt, how I could feel the truth with my stomach, knowing something terrible was going to happen. And I can tell you, it was almost as bad as how I felt some fifteen years later when the Japanese bombs started to fall and, listening in the distance, I could hear soft rumbles and knew that what was coming was unstoppable.

A few days after Wu Tsing had arrived home, I awoke in the middle of the night. My mother was rocking my shoulder gently.

"An-mei, be a good girl, " she said in a tired voice. "Go to Yan Chang's room now. "

I rubbed my eyes and as I awoke I saw a dark shadow and began to cry. It was Wu Tsing.

"Be quiet. Nothing is the matter. Go to Yan Chang, " my mother whispered.

And then she lifted me down slowly to the cold floor. I heard the wooden clock begin to sing and Wu Tsing's deep voice complaining of the chill. And when I went to Yan Chang, it was as though she had expected me and knew I would be crying.

The next morning I could not look at my mother. But I saw that Fifth Wife had a swollen face like mine. And at breakfast that morning, in front of everybody, her anger finally erupted when she shouted rudely to a servant for serving her so slowly. Everyone, even my mother, stared at her for her bad manners, criticizing a servant that way. I saw Wu Tsing throw her a sharp look, like a father, and she began to cry. But later that morning, Fifth Wife was smiling again, prancing around in a new dress and new shoes.

In the afternoon, my mother spoke of her unhappiness for the first time. We were in a rickshaw going to a store to find embroidery thread. "Do you see how shameful my life is? " she cried. "Do you see how I have no position? He brought home a new wife, a low-class girl, dark-skinned, no manners! Bought her for a few dollars from a poor village family that makes mudbrick tiles. And at night when he can no longer use her, he comes to me, smelling of her mud. "

She was crying now, rambling like a crazy woman: "You can see now, a fourth wife is less than a fifth wife. An-mei, you must not forget. I was a first wife, yi tai, the wife of a scholar. Your mother was not always Fourth Wife, Sz Tai! "

She said this word, sz, so hatefully I shuddered. It sounded like the sz that means "die. " And I remembered Popo once telling me four is a very unlucky number because if you say it in an angry way, it always comes out wrong.

The Cold Dew came. It became chilly, and Second Wife and Third Wife, their children and servants returned home to Tientsin. There was a big commotion when they arrived. Wu Tsing had allowed the new motorcar to be sent to the railway station, but of course that was not enough to carry them all back. So behind the motorcar came a dozen or so rickshaws, bouncing up and down like crickets following a large shiny beetle. Women began to pour out of the motorcar.