The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

without noise, I would break clear into a yellow, warm world. New trees would lean toward me at mountain angles, but when I looked for the village, it would have vanished under the clouds.
    The bird, now gold so close to the sun, would come torest on the thatch of a hut, which, until the bird’s two feet touched it, was camouflaged as part of the mountainside.
    T he door opened, and an old man and an old woman came out carrying bowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches.
    “Have you eaten rice today, little girl?” they greeted me.
    “Yes, I have,” I said out of politeness. “Thank you.”
    (“No, I haven’t,” I would have said in real life, mad at the Chinese for lying so much. “I’m starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies.”)
    “We were about to sit down to another meal,” the old woman said. “Why don’t you eat with us?”
    They just happened to be bringing three rice bowls and three pairs of silver chopsticks out to the plank table under the pines. They gave me an egg, as if it were my birthday, and tea, though they were older than I, but I poured for them. The teapot and the rice pot seemed bottomless, but perhaps not; the old couple ate very little except for peaches.
    When the mountains and the pines turned into blue oxen, blue dogs, and blue people standing, the old couple asked me to spend the night in the hut. I thought about the long way down in the ghostly dark and decided yes. The inside of the hut seemed as large as the outdoors. Pine needles covered the floor in thick patterns; someone had carefully arranged the yellow, green, and brown pine needles according to age. When I stepped carelessly and mussed a line, my feet kicked up new blends of earth colors, but the old man and old woman walked so lightly that their feet never stirred the designs by a needle.
    A rock grew in the middle of the house, and that was their table. The benches were fallen trees. Ferns and shade flowers grew out of one wall, the mountainside itself. The old couple tucked me into a bed just my width. “Breathe evenly, or you’ll lose your balance and fall out,” said thewoman, covering me with a silk bag stuffed with feathers and herbs. “Opera singers, who begin their training at age five, sleep in beds like this.” Then the two of them went outside, and through the window I could see them pull on a rope looped over a branch. The rope was tied to the roof, and the roof opened up like a basket lid. I would sleep with the moon and the stars. I did not see whether the old people slept, so quickly did I drop off, but they would be there waking me with food in the morning.
    “Little girl, you have now spent almost a day and a night with us,” the old woman said. In the morning light I could see her earlobes pierced with gold. “Do you think you can bear to stay with us for fifteen years? We can train you to become a warrior.”
    “What about my mother and father?” I asked.
    The old man untied the drinking gourd slung across his back. He lifted the lid by its stem and looked for something in the water. “Ah, there,” he said.
    At first I saw only water so clear it magnified the fibers in the walls of the gourd. On the surface, I saw only my own round reflection. The old man encircled the neck of the gourd with his thumb and index finger and gave it a shake. As the water shook, then settled, the colors and lights shimmered into a picture, not reflecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was where I was. “It has happened already, then,” I could hear my mother say. “I didn’t expect it so soon.” “You knew from her birth that she would be taken,” my father answered. “We’ll have to harvest potatoes without her help this year,” my mother said, and they turned away toward the fields, straw baskets in their arms. The water shook and became just water again. “Mama. Papa,” I called, but