The Joy Luck Club

Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

Saint took me to America, where I lived in houses smaller than the one in the country. I wore large American clothes. I did servant's tasks. www.highschoolbooks.ru I learned the Western ways. I tried to speak with a thick tongue. I raised a daughter, watching her from another shore. I accepted her American ways.

With all these things, I did not care. I had no spirit.

Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was a man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out the trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.

How could I not love this man? But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.

Now Saint is a ghost. He and I can now love equally. He knows the things I have been hiding all these years. Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is the daughter of a ghost. She has no chi. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?

So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.

I hear my daughter speaking to her husband downstairs. They say words that mean nothing. They sit in a room with no life in it.

I know a thing before it happens. She will hear the vase and table crashing to the floor. She will come up the stairs and into my room. Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.