The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

blood. They burned it in one of the pots, and the stench was like a corpse exhumed for its bones too soon. They laughed at the smell.
    T he students at the To Keung School of Midwifery were new women, scientists who changed the rituals. When she got scared as a child, one of my mother’s three mothers had held her and chanted their descent line, reeling the frighted spirit back from the farthest deserts. A relative would know personal names and secrets about husbands, babies, renegades and decide which ones were lucky in a chant, but these outside women had to build a path from scraps. No blood bonded friend to friend (though there were things owed beggars and monks), and they had to figure out how to help my mother’s spirit locate the To Keung School as “home.” The calling out of her real descent line would have led her to the wrong place, the village. These strangers had to make her come back to them. They called out their own names, women’s pretty names, haphazardnames, horizontal names of one generation. They pieced together new directions, and my mother’s spirit followed them instead of the old footprints. Maybe that is why she lost her home village and did not reach her husband for fifteen years.
    When my mother led us out of nightmares and horror movies, I felt loved. I felt safe hearing my name sung with hers and my father’s, my brothers’ and sisters’, her anger at children who hurt themselves surprisingly gone. An old-fashioned woman would have called in the streets for her sick child. She’d hold its little empty coat unbuttoned, “Come put on your coat, you naughty child.” When the coat puffed up, she’d quickly button up the spirit inside and hurry it home to the child’s body in bed. But my mother, a modern woman, said our spells in private. “The old ladies in China had many silly superstitions,” she said. “I know you’ll come back without my making a fool of myself in the streets.”
    Not when we were afraid, but when we were wide awake and lucid, my mother funneled China into our ears: Kwangtung Province, New Society Village, the river Kwoo, which runs past the village. “Go the way we came so that you will be able to find our house. Don’t forget. Just give your father’s name, and any villager can point out our house.” I am to return to China where I have never been.
    After two years of study—the graduates of three-week and six-week courses were more admired by the peasants for learning at such wondrous speeds—my mother returned to her home village a doctor. She was welcomed with garlands and cymbals the way people welcome the “barefoot doctors” today. But the Communists wear a blue plainness dotted with one red Mao button. My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.
    “When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagerssaid, ‘Ahhh,’ at my good shoes and my long gown. I always dressed well when I made calls. Some villages brought out their lion and danced ahead of me. You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America.” Until my father sent for her to live in the Bronx, my mother delivered babies in beds and pigsties. She stayed awake keeping watch nightly in an epidemic and chanted during air raids. She yanked bones straight that had been crooked for years while relatives held the cripples down, and she did all this never dressed less elegantly than when she stepped out of the sedan chair.
    Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies.
    Walking behind the palanquin so that the crowd took her for one of themselves following the new doctor came a quiet girl. She carried a white puppy