Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.
It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.
I also found out why I should never reveal the “why” to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it’s all diminishing returns after a certain age.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
I learned about opening moves and why it’s important to control the center early on; the shortest distance between two points is straight down the middle.
But in art, lovely subversive art, you see what breaks through in spite of restraint, or even because of it. Art despises placidity and smooth surfaces. Without art, I would have drowned under still waters.
I think about our marriage. The weft of our seventeen years together was so easily torn apart. Our love was as ordinary as the identical welcome mats found in the suburbs we grew up in. The fact that our bodies, our thoughts, our hearts had once moved in rhythm with each other had only fooled us into thinking we were special.
Now that our marriage is over, I know what love is. It’s a trick on the brain, the adrenal glands releasing endorphins. It floods the cells that transmit worry and better sense, drowns them with biochemical bliss. You can know all these things about love, yet it remains irresistible, as beguiling as the floating arms of long sleep.
I hope you don’t suffer forever from keeping love from your heart.
Our meeting each other could not possibly be as random as two leaves from two trees being blown together.
Never show a weapon before you have to use it.
I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it. We fail to see ninety percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic.
I felt as if I were running in a labyrinth, chasing after something I could not see yet knew was important. I sensed it was just ahead, and then it would go around a corner, and I would be lost. I would have to decide what to do next, where to go, and what I needed to get out of that confusing place. If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would be nowhere else to go.
But to pretend that all was right with the world, I first had to know what was wrong.
And in my family, there were two pillars of beliefs: Christian faith on my father’s side, Chinese fate on my mother’s. Picture these two ideologies as you might the goalposts of a soccer field, faith at one end, fate at the other, and me running between them trying to duck whatever dangerous missile had been launched in the air.
If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.
Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That’s why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story.
We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.
My father put his life in God’s hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.