The Joy Luck Club: Feathers from a Thousand Li Away

The hostess had to serve special dyansyin foods to bring good fortune of all kinds—dumplings shaped like silver money ingots, long rice noodles for long life, boiled peanuts for conceiving sons, and of course, many good-luck oranges for a plentiful, sweet life.

A friend once told me that my mother and I were alike, that we had the same wispy hand gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look.

Months later, after an inspiring Christmastime service at the First Chinese Baptist Church, Auntie An-mei tried to recoup her loss by saying it truly was more blessed to give than to receive, and my mother agreed, her longtime friend had blessings for at least several lifetimes.

This is how I became betrothed to Huang Taitai’s son, who I later discovered was just a baby, one year younger than I.

She had even commissioned someone to write felicitous messages on red banners, as if my parents themselves had draped these decorations to congratulate me on my good luck.

And she had arranged to rent a red palanquin to carry me from her neighbor’s house to the wedding ceremony.

I chose an auspicious day, the third day of the third month.

“They knew you would not believe me,” I said in a remorseful tone, “because they know I do not want to leave the comforts of my marriage. So our ancestors said they would plant the signs, to show our marriage is now rotting.”

There was another smell, outside, something burning, a pungent fragrance that was half sweet and half bitter.

“Slowly, go slowly,” admonished Amah.

I climbed into the rickshaw with my mother in it, which displeased Amah, because this was presumptuous behavior on my part and also because Amah loved me better than her own.

That is how Amah found me: an apparition covered with blood.

“Stop now,” scolded the woman in the boat, “you’ve frightened her. She thinks we’re brigands who are going to sell her for a slave.”

“My fate and my penance,” she began to lament, pulling her long fingers through her hair, “to live here on the moon, while my husband lives on the sun. So that each day and each night, we pass each other, never seeing one another, except this one evening, the night of the mid-autumn moon.”

“For woman is yin,” she cried sadly, “the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.”