House of Many Gods Read Online Free Page A

from posters and clothes on racks. Down Fifteen Cent Alley she had found Tung Lok, the Happy Together Hotel. The lobby smelled rancid, and she heard people coughing in their rooms. Her walls were flocked with dead roaches, but there were no bloodstains on her mattress, and her sheets were clean.
    At dusk she had walked the streets again, asking for work in several shops. People passed her arm in arm. Even the gods had company: icons of Buddha, Jesus, and Confucius lined up abreast for sale. She felt the fog curl up her sleeves, a chilly sense of loneliness, the sense of one who has crossed frontiers and sees that what was left behind is already fading into flashbacks. There was only now, the aftermath.
    For weeks she labored in a sweatshop, stitching pockets into cheap dungarees. Around her in palpitant, moist heat were Mexicans, Asians, and Latins—robust, velvet-eyed women nursing their infants as they bent at ancient Singers. Ana stood the heat until one day, exhausted, she fainted between blue pyramids of dungarees. The owner woke her by pinching her, punching her with his fist between her shoulder blades.
    After that, she served dim sum in a restaurant where four-generation families ate, holding each other in their laps. Each day, in the abrupt turbulence of beaded drapes, she exploded from the kitchen, pushing carts loaded with metal and bamboo steamers, lifting and replacing the scalding lids hour after hour until whole constellations of blisters lined her palms. Skin peeled from her fingertips, which bled.
    When Chinese customers were rude, she had the manifest advantage of being an “immigrant” not understanding their language, pretending not to understand English. They cursed her, waving her away, and she reflected on how, at home in her islands, she had never thought of Chinese as rude or cruel. She had only thought of whites that way.
    At night she swept up hair in a beauty shop, then sat with the owner sewing hair-pillows which women bought to cushion their elbows in the sweatshops. They sewed till dawn, when the sun lit little rainbows in a toothbrush glass. Years later, she would remember those nights as luminous—two women gloved in human hair, lost in hanging strips of brilliant silks, a small rotating fan lazily wafting the silk this way, and then that way. Long hours drew them close, coaxing out confessions,their life stories knotted up in bits of thread they bit off with their teeth. And in the mornings, a roomful of brilliant pillows that often they fell asleep upon, waking at noon like concubines.
    Still, in the permanent twilight of exhaustion, Ana could not seem to make progress, to save enough money for proper clothes, a better job. She began to see how lack of money engendered shame, how without it people allowed themselves to disappear. She lost the dim sum job. The hair-pillow woman moved back to Hong Kong. She tutored English in the back room of a laundry. She waitressed, washed dishes. Graveyard. Swing shift. One job rinsing into another.
    One night a sailor offered her a fifty-dollar bill. Balanced on the girders of indecision, Ana reached out and thoughtfully touched the bill before she walked away. She was beginning to know hunger, what it was to lie awake and hear her insides working on almost nothing. She began to learn how far she could go on water and air, how far she could divest herself of herself without collapsing. She avoided open markets and food stalls. She began to despise food a little.
    In a mirror her face was becoming narrow; she imagined it all frontal like a cat’s. Increasingly she felt weak, intimations of how easily her system could fail, her organs ignore the chain of command, how hunger could drive verbal and motor skills back in evolution so that movements suggested a human being learning to walk upright. It was not quite starvation, which had manners. Starvation just walked up to folks and knocked them down.
    Hunger, near hunger, was sly. It allowed her to get up