The Hundred Secret Senses

‘Oh.’

‘But our father didn’t do this. He left us when my mother was about to have another baby. I’m not telling you lies, Libby-ah, this is true. When this happened, I was four years old by my Chinese age. I can never forget lying against my mother, rubbing her swollen belly. Like a watermelon, she was this big.’

She reached out her arms as far as she could. ‘Then all the water in her belly poured out as tears from her eyes, she was so sad.’ Kwan’s arms fell suddenly to her sides. ‘That poor starving baby in her belly ate a hole in my mother’s heart, and they both died.’

I’m sure Kwan meant some of this figuratively. But as a child, I saw everything Kwan talked about as literal truth: chopped-off hands flying out of a roofless house, my father floating on the China Sea, the little baby sucking on his mother’s heart. The images became phantoms. I was like a kid watching a horror movie, with my hands clapped to my eyes, peering anxiously through the cracks. I was Kwan’s willing captive, and she was my protector.

At the end of her stories, Kwan would always say: ‘You’re the only one who knows. Don’t tell anyone. Never. Promise, Libby-ah?’

And I would always shake my head, then nod, drawn to allegiance through both privilege and fear.

One night, when my eyelids were already heavy with sleep, she started droning again in Chinese: ‘Libby-ah, I must tell you something, a forbidden secret. It’s too much of a burden to keep inside me any longer.’

I yawned, hoping she’d take the hint.

‘I have yin eyes.’

‘What eyes?’

‘It’s true. I have yin eyes. I can see yin people.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Okay, I’ll tell you. But first you must promise never to tell anyone. Never. Promise, ah?’

‘Okay. Promise.’

‘Yin people, they are those who have already died.’

My eyes popped open. ‘What? You see dead people? … You mean, ghosts?’

‘Don’t tell anyone. Never. Promise, Libby-ah?’

I stopped breathing. ‘Are there ghosts here now?’ I whispered.

‘Oh yes, many. Many, many good friends.’

I threw the covers over my head. ‘Tell them to go away,’ I pleaded.

‘Don’t be afraid. Libby-ah, come out. They’re your friends too. Oh see, now they’re laughing at you for being so scared.’

I began to cry. After a while, Kwan sighed and said in a disappointed voice, ‘All right, don’t cry anymore. They’re gone.’

So that’s how the business of ghosts got started. When I finally came out from under the covers, I saw Kwan sitting straight up, illuminated by the artificial glow of her American moon, staring out the window as if watching her visitors recede into the night.

The next morning, I went to my mother and did what I promised I’d never do: I told her about Kwan’s yin eyes.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize it wasn’t my fault that Kwan went to the mental hospital. In a way, she brought it on herself. After all, I was just a little kid then, seven years old. I was scared out of my mind. I had to tell my mother what Kwan was saying. I thought Mom would just ask her to stop. Then Daddy Bob found out about Kwan’s ghosts and blew his stack. Mom suggested taking her to Old St. Mary’s for a talk with the priest. But Daddy Bob said no, confession wouldn’t be enough. He booked Kwan into the psychiatric ward at Mary’s Help instead.

When I visited her there the following week, Kwan whispered to me: ‘Libby-ah, listen, I have secret. Don’t tell anyone, ah?’ And then she switched to Chinese. ‘When the doctors and nurses ask me questions, I treat them like American ghosts – I don’t see them, don’t hear them, don’t speak to them. Soon they’ll know they can’t change me, why they must let me go.’ I remember the way she looked, as immovable as a stone palace dog.

Unfortunately, her Chinese silent treatment backfired. The doctors thought Kwan had gone catatonic. Things being what they were back in the early 1960s, the doctors diagnosed Kwan’s Chinese ghosts as a serious mental disorder. They gave her electro-shock treatments, once, she said, then twice, she cried, then over and over again. Even today it hurts my teeth to think about that.

The next time I saw her at the hospital, she again confided in me. ‘All that electricity loosened my tongue so I could no longer stay silent as a fish. I became a country duck, crying gwa-gwa-gwa! – bragging about the World of Yin. Then four bad ghosts shouted, “How can you tell our secrets?” They gave me a yin-yang tou – forced me to tear out half my hair. That’s why the nurses shaved everything off. I couldn’t stop pulling, until one side of my head was bald like a melon, the other side hairy like a coconut. The ghosts branded me for having two faces: one loyal, one traitor. But I’m not a traitor! Look at me, Libby-ah. Is my face loyal? What do you see?’

What I saw paralyzed me with fear. She looked as if she’d been given a crew cut with a hand-push lawn mower. It was as bad as seeing an animal run over on the street, wondering what it once had been. Except I knew how Kwan’s hair used to be. Before, it flowed past her waist. Before, my fingers swam through its satin-black waves. Before, I’d grab her mane and yank it like the reins of a mule, shouting, ‘Giddyap, Kwan, say hee-haw!’

She took my hand and rubbed it across her sandpapery scalp, whispering about friends and enemies in China. On and on she went, as if the shock treatments had blown off the hinges of her jaw and she could not stop. I was terrified I’d catch her crazy talking disease.

To this day, I don’t know why Kwan never blamed me for what happened. I’m sure she knew I was the one who got her in trouble. After she came back from Mary’s Help, she gave me her plastic ID bracelet as a souvenir. She talked about the Sunday-school children who came to the hospital to sing ‘Silent Night,’ how they screamed when an old man yelled, ‘Shut up!’ She reported that some patients there were possessed by ghosts, how they were not like the nice yin people she knew, and this was a real pity. Not once did she ever say, ‘Libby-ah, why did you tell my secret?’

Yet the way I remember it is the way I have always felt – that I betrayed her and that’s what made her insane. The shock treatments, I believed, were my fault as well. They released all her ghosts.

That was more than thirty years ago, and Kwan still mourns, ‘My hair sooo bea-you-tiful, shiny-smooth like waterfall, slippery-cool like swimming eel. Now look. All that shock treatment, like got me bad home permanent, leave on cheap stuff too long. All my rich color – burnt out. All my softness – crinkle up. My hairs now just stiff wires, pierce message to my brain: No more yin-talking! They do this to me, hah, still I don’t change. See? I stay strong.’

Kwan was right. When her hair grew back, it was bristly, wiry as a terrier’s. And when she brushed it, whole strands would crackle and rise with angry static, popping like the filaments of light bulbs burning out. Kwan explained, ‘All that electricity doctor force into my brain, now run through my body like horse go ’round racetrack.’ She claims that’s the reason she now can’t stand within three feet of a television set without its hissing back. She doesn’t use the Walkman her husband, George, gave her; she has to ground the radio by placing it against her thigh, otherwise no matter what station she tunes it to, all she hears is ‘awful music, boom-pah-pah, boom-pah-pah.’ She can’t wear any kind of watch. She received a digital one as a bingo prize, and after she strapped it on, the numbers started mutating like the fruits on a casino slot machine. Two hours later the watch stopped. ‘I gotta jackpot,’ she reported. ‘Eight-eight-eight-eight-eight. Lucky numbers, bad watch.’

Although Kwan is not technically trained, she can pinpoint in a second the source of a fault in a circuit, whether it’s in a wall outlet or a photo strobe. She’s done that with some of my equipment. Here I am, the commercial photographer, and she can barely operate a point-and-shoot. Yet she’s been able to find the specific part of the camera or cable or battery pack that was defective, and later, when I ship the camera to Cal Precision in Sacramento for troubleshooting, I’ll find she was exactly right. I’ve also seen her temporarily activate a dead cordless phone just by pressing her fingers on the back recharger nodes. She can’t explain any of this, and neither can I. All I can say is, I’ve seen her do these things.

The weirdest of her abilities, I think, has to do with diagnosing ailments. She can tell when she shakes hands with strangers whether they’ve ever suffered a broken bone, even if it healed many years before. She knows in an instant whether a person has arthritis, tendinitis, bursitis, sciatica – she’s really good with all the musculoskeletal stuff – maladies that she calls ‘burning bones,’ ‘fever arms,’ ‘sour joints,’ ‘snaky leg,’ and all of which, she says, are caused by eating hot and cold things together, counting disappointments on your fingers, shaking your head too often with regret, or storing worries between your jaw and your fists. She can’t cure anybody on the spot; she’s no walking Grotto of Lourdes. But a lot of people say she has the healing touch. Like her customers at Spencer’s, the drugstore in the Castro neighborhood where she works. Most of the people who pick up their prescriptions there are gay men – ‘bachelors,’ she calls them. And because she’s worked there for more than twenty years, she’s seen some of her longtime customers grow sick with AIDS. When they come in, she gives them quickie shoulder rubs, while offering medical advice: ‘You still drink beer, eat spicy food? Together, same time? Wah! What I tell you? Tst! How you get well do this? Ah?’ – as if they were little kids fussing to be spoiled. Some of her customers drop by every day, even though they can receive home delivery free. I know why. When she puts her hands on the place where you hurt, you feel a tingling sensation, a thousand fairies dancing up and down, and then it’s like warm water rolling through your veins. You’re not cured, but you feel released from worry, becalmed, floating on a tranquil sea.

Kwan once told me, ‘After they die, the yin bachelors still come visit me. They call me Doctor Kwan. Joking, of course.’ And then she added shyly in English: ‘Maybe also for respect. What you think, Libby-ah?’ She always asks me that: ‘What you think?’

No one in our family talks about Kwan’s unusual abilities. That would call attention to what we already know, that Kwan is wacky, even by Chinese standards – even by San Francisco standards. A lot of the stuff she says and does would strain the credulity of most people who are not on antipsychotic drugs or living on cult farms.

But I no longer think my sister is crazy. Or if she is, she’s fairly harmless, that is, if people don’t take her seriously. She doesn’t chant on the sidewalk like that guy on Market Street who screams that California is doomed to slide into the ocean like a plate of clams. And she’s not into New Age profiteering; you don’t have to pay her a hundred fifty an hour just to hear her reveal what’s wrong with your past life. She’ll tell you for free, even if you don’t ask.

Most of the time, Kwan is like anyone else, standing in line, shopping for bargains, counting success in small change: ‘Libby-ah,’ she said during this morning’s phone call, ‘yesterday, I buy two-for-one shoes on sale, Emporium Capwell. Guess how much I don’t pay. You guess.’

But Kwan is odd, no getting around that. Occasionally it amuses me. Sometimes it irritates me. More often I become upset, even angry – not with Kwan but with how things never turn out the way you hope. Why did I get Kwan for a sister? Why did she get me?

Every once in a while, I wonder how things might have been between Kwan and me if she’d been more normal. Then again, who’s to say what’s normal? Maybe in another country Kwan would be considered ordinary. Maybe in some parts of China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan she’d be revered. Maybe there’s a place in the world where everyone has a sister with yin eyes.

Kwan’s now nearly fifty, whereas I’m a whole twelve years younger, a point she proudly mentions whenever anyone politely asks which of us is older. In front of other people, she likes to pinch my cheek and remind me that my skin is getting ‘wrinkle up’ because I smoke cigarettes and drink too much wine and coffee – bad habits she does not have. ‘Don’t hook on, don’t need stop,’ she’s fond of saying. Kwan is neither deep nor subtle; everything’s right on the surface, for anybody to see. The point is, no one would ever guess we are sisters.

Kevin once joked that maybe the Communists sent us the wrong kid, figuring we Americans thought all Chinese people looked alike anyway. After hearing that, I fantasized that one day we’d get a letter from China saying, ‘Sorry, folks. We made a mistake.’ In so many ways, Kwan never fit into our family. Our annual Christmas photo looked like those children’s puzzles, ‘What’s Wrong with This Picture?’ Each year, front and center, there was Kwan – wearing brightly colored summer clothes, plastic bow-tie barrettes on both sides of her head, and a loony grin big enough to burst her cheeks. Eventually, Mom found her a job as a bus-girl at a Chinese-American restaurant. It took Kwan a month to realize that the food they served there was supposed to be Chinese. Time did nothing to either Americanize her or bring out her resemblance to our father.

On the other hand, people tell me I’m the one who takes after him most, in both appearance and personality. ‘Look how much Olivia can eat without gaining an ounce,’ Aunt Betty is forever saying. ‘Just like Jack.’ My mother once said, ‘Olivia analyzes every single detail to death. She has her father’s accountant mentality. No wonder she became a photographer.’ Those kinds of comments make me wonder what else has been passed along to me through my father’s genes. Did I inherit from him my dark moods, my fondness for putting salt on my fruit, my phobia about germs?

Kwan, in contrast, is a tiny dynamo, barely five feet tall, a miniature bull in a china shop. Everything about her is loud and clashing. She’ll wear a purple checked jacket over turquoise pants. She whispers loudly in a husky voice, sounding as if she had chronic laryngitis, when in fact she’s never sick. She dispenses health warnings, herbal recommendations, and opinions on how to fix just about anything, from broken cups to broken marriages. She bounces from topic to topic, interspersing tips on where to find bargains. Tommy once said that Kwan believes in free speech, free association, free car-wash with fill’er-up. The only change in Kwan’s English over the last thirty years is in the speed with which she talks. Meanwhile, she thinks her English is great. She often corrects her husband. ‘Not stealed,’ she’ll tell George. ‘Stolened.’

In spite of all our obvious differences, Kwan thinks she and I are exactly alike. As she sees it, we’re connected by a cosmic Chinese umbilical cord that’s given us the same inborn traits, personal motives, fate, and luck. ‘Me and Libby-ah,’ she tells new acquaintances, ‘we same in here.’ And she’ll tap the side of my head. ‘Both born Year the Monkey. Which one older? You guess. Which one?’ And then she’ll squash her cheek against mine.

Kwan has never been able to correctly pronounce my name, Olivia. To her, I will always be Libby-ah, not plain Libby, like the tomato juice, but Libby-ah, like the nation of Muammar Qaddafi. As a consequence, her husband, George Lew, his two sons from a first marriage, and that whole side of the family all call me Libby-ah too. The ‘ah’ part especially annoys me. It’s the Chinese equivalent of saying ‘hey,’ as in ‘Hey, Libby, come here.’ I asked Kwan once how she’d like it if I introduced her to everyone as ‘Hey, Kwan.’ She slapped my arm, went breathless with laughter, then said hoarsely, ‘I like, I like.’ So much for cultural parallels, Libby-ah it is, forever and ever.

I’m not saying I don’t love Kwan. How can I not love my own sister? In many respects, she’s been more like a mother to me than my real one. But I often feel bad that I don’t want to be close to her. What I mean is, we’re close in a manner of speaking. We know things about each other, mostly through history, from sharing the same closet, the same toothpaste, the same cereal every morning for twelve years, all the routines and habits of being in the same family. I really think Kwan is sweet, also loyal, extremely loyal. She’d tear off the ear of anyone who said an unkind word about me. That counts for a lot. It’s just that I wouldn’t want to be closer to her, not the way some sisters are who consider themselves best friends. As it is, I don’t share everything with her the way she does with me, telling me the most private details of her life – like what she told me last week about her husband:

‘Libby-ah,’ she said, ‘I found mole, big as my nostril, found on – what you call this thing between man legs, in Chinese we say yinnang, round and wrinkly like two walnut?’

‘Scrotum.’

‘Yes-yes, found big mole on scrotum! Now every day – every day, must examine Georgie-ah, his scrotum, make sure this mole don’t start grow.’

To Kwan, there are no boundaries among family. Everything is open for gruesome and exhaustive dissection – how much you spent on your vacation, what’s wrong with your complexion, the reason you look as doomed as a fish in a restaurant tank. And then she wonders why I don’t make her a regular part of my social life. She, however, invites me to dinner once a week, as well as to every boring family gathering – last week, a party for George’s aunt, celebrating the fact that she received her U.S. citizenship after fifty years, that sort of thing. Kwan thinks only a major catastrophe would keep me away. She’ll worry aloud: ‘Why you don’t come last night? Something the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Feel sick?’

‘No.’

‘You want me come over, bring you orange? I have extra, good price, six for one dollar.’

‘Really, I’m fine.’

She’s like an orphan cat, kneading on my heart. She’s been this way all my life, peeling me oranges, buying me candy, admiring my report cards and telling me how smart I was, smarter than she could ever be. Yet I’ve done nothing to endear myself to her. As a child, I often refused to play with her. Over the years, I’ve yelled at her, told her she embarrassed me. I can’t remember how many times I’ve lied to get out of seeing her.

Meanwhile, she has always interpreted my outbursts as helpful advice, my feeble excuses as good intentions, my pallid gestures of affection as loyal sisterhood. And when I can’t bear it any longer, I lash out and tell her she’s crazy. Before I can retract the sharp words, she pats my arm, smiles and laughs. And the wound she bears heals itself instantly. Whereas I feel guilty forever.

In recent months, Kwan has become even more troublesome. Usually after the third time I say no to something, she quits. Now it’s as though her mind is stuck on automatic rewind. When I’m not irritated by her, I worry that maybe she’s about to have a nervous breakdown again. Kevin said she’s probably going through menopause. But I can tell it’s more than that. She’s more obsessed than usual. The ghost talk is becoming more frequent. She mentions China in almost every conversation with me, how she must go back before everything changes and it’s too late. Too late for what? She doesn’t know.

And then there’s my marriage. She simply won’t accept the fact that Simon and I have split up. In fact, she’s purposely trying to sabotage the divorce. Last week, I gave a birthday party for Kevin and invited this guy I was seeing, Ben Apfelbaum. When he told Kwan he worked as a voice talent for radio commercials, she said, ‘Ah, Libby-ah and me too, both talent for get out of tricky situation, also big talent for get own way. Is true, Libby-ah?’ Her eyebrows twitched. ‘You husband, Simon, I think he agree with me, ah?’

‘My soon-to-be ex-husband.’ I then had to explain to Ben: ‘Our divorce will be final five months from now, December fifteenth.’

‘Maybe not, maybe not,’ Kwan said, then laughed and pinched my arm. She turned to Ben: ‘You meet Simon?’

Ben shook his head and started to say, ‘Olivia and I met at the – ’

‘Oh, very handsome,’ Kwan chirped. She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth and confided: ‘Simon look like Olivia twin brother. Half Chinese.’

‘Half Hawaiian,’ I said. ‘And we don’t look alike at all.’

‘What you mother father do?’ Kwan scrutinized Ben’s cashmere jacket.

‘They’re both retired and live in Missouri,’ said Ben.

‘Misery! Tst! Tst!’ She looked at me. ‘This too sad.’

Every time Kwan mentions Simon, I think my brain is going to implode from my trying not to scream in exasperation. She thinks that because I initiated the divorce I can take it back.

‘Why not forgive?’ she said after the party. She was plucking at the dead blooms of an orchid plant. ‘Stubborn and anger together, very bad for you.’ When I didn’t say anything, she tried another tack: ‘I think you still have strong feeling for him – mm-hm! Very, very strong. Ah – see! – look you face. So red! This love feeling rushing from you heart. I right? Answer. I right?’

And I kept flipping through the mail, scrawling MOVED across any envelope with Simon Bishop’s name on it. I’ve never discussed with Kwan why Simon and I broke up. She wouldn’t understand. It’s too complex. There’s no one event or fight I can put my finger on to say, ‘That was the reason.’ Our breakup was the result of many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy. After seventeen years together, when I finally realized I needed more in my life, Simon seemed to want less. Sure, I loved him – too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I’m number one in his life. I’m not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.

But Kwan wouldn’t understand that. She doesn’t know how people can hurt you beyond repair. She believes people who say they’re sorry. She’s the naive, trusting type who believes everything said in television commercials is certifiable truth. Look at her house: it’s packed to the gills with gadgets – Ginsu knives, slicers and dicers, juicers and french-fry makers, you name it, she’s bought it, for ‘only nineteen ninety-five, order now, offer good until midnight.’

‘Libby-ah,’ Kwan said on the phone today, ‘I have something must tell you, very important news. This morning I talk to Lao Lu. We decide: You and Simon shouldn’t get divorce.’

‘How nice,’ I said. ‘You decided.’ I was balancing my checkbook, adding and subtracting as I pretended to listen.

‘Me and Lao Lu. You remember him.’

‘George’s cousin.’ Kwan’s husband seemed to be related to just about every Chinese person in San Francisco.

‘No-no! Lao Lu not cousin. How you can forget? Lots times I already tell you about him. Old man, bald head. Strong arm, strong leg, strong temper. One time loose temper, loose head too! Chopped off. Lao Lu say – ’

‘Wait a minute. Someone without a head is now telling me what to do about my marriage?’

‘Tst! Chopped head off over one hundred year ago. Now look fine, no problem. Lao Lu think you, me, Simon, we three go China, everything okay. Okay, Libby-ah?’

I sighed. ‘Kwan, I really don’t have time to talk about this now. I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Lao Lu say cannot just balance checkbook, see how much you got left. Must balance life too.’

How the hell did Kwan know I was balancing my checkbook?

That’s how it’s been with Kwan and me. The minute I discount her, she tosses in a zinger that keeps me scared, makes me her captive once again. With her around, I’ll never have a life of my own. She’ll always claim a major interest.

Why do I remain her treasured little sister? Why does she feel that I’m the most important person in her life? – the most! Why does she say over and over again that even if we were not sisters, she would feel this way? ‘Libby-ah,’ she tells me, ‘I never leave you.’