Read Online The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan - Free Book Online

taught her the five tastes that give us the memories of life: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty.
    One day, Miss Banner touched her palm on the front of her body and asked me how to say this in Chinese. After I told her, she said to me in Chinese: “Miss Moo, I wish to know many words for talking about my breasts!” And only then did I realize she wanted to talk about the feelings in her heart. The next day, I took her wandering around the city. We saw people arguing. Anger, I said. We saw a woman placing food on an altar. Respect, I said. We saw a thief with his head locked in a wooden yoke. Shame, I said. We saw a young girl sitting by the river, throwing an old net with holes into the shallow part of the water. Hope, I said.
    Later, Miss Banner pointed to a man trying to squeeze a barrel that was too large through a doorway that was too small. “Hope,” Miss Banner said. But to me, this was not hope, this was stupidity, rice for brains. And I wondered what Miss Banner had been seeing when I was naming those other feelings for her. I wondered whether foreigners had feelings that were entirely different from those of Chinese people. Did they think all our hopes were stupid?
    In time, however, I taught Miss Banner to see the world almost exactly like a Chinese person. Of cicadas, she would say they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil. She hated them, decided they had no purpose in this world. You see, in five ways she could sense the world like a Chinese person. But it was always this sixth way, her American sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.
    F or most of my childhood, I had to struggle not to see the world the way Kwan described it. Like her talk about ghosts. After she had the shock treatments, I told her she had to pretend she didn’t see ghosts, otherwise the doctors wouldn’t let her out of the hospital.
    “Ah, keep secret,” she said, nodding. “Just you me know.”
    When she came home, I then had to pretend the ghosts were there, as part of our secret of pretending they weren’t. I tried so hard to hold these two contradictory views that soon I started to see what I wasn’t supposed to. How could I not? Most kids, without sisters like Kwan, imagine that ghosts are lurking beneath their beds, ready to grab their feet. Kwan’s ghosts, on the other hand, sat on the bed, propped against her headboard. I saw them.
    I’m not talking about filmy white sheets that howled “Oooooohh.” Her ghosts weren’t invisible like the affable TV apparitions in Topper who moved pens and cups through the air. Her ghosts looked alive. They chatted about the good old days. They worried and complained. I even saw one scratching our dog’s neck, and Captain thumped his leg and wagged his tail. Apart from Kwan, I never told anyone what I saw. I thought I’d be sent to the hospital for shock treatments. What I saw seemed so real, not at all like dreaming. It was as though someone else’s feelings had escaped, and my eyes had become the movie projector beaming them into life.
    I remember a particular day—I must have been eight—when I was sitting alone on my bed, dressing my Barbie doll in her best clothes. I heard a girl’s voice say: “Gei wo kan.” I looked up, and there on Kwan’s bed was a somber Chinese girl around my age, demanding to see my doll. I wasn’t scared. That was the other thing about seeing ghosts: I always felt perfectly calm, as if my whole body had been soaked in a mild tranquilizer. I politely asked this little girl in Chinese who she was. And she said, “Lili-lili, lili-lili,” in a high squeal.
    When I threw my Barbie doll onto Kwan’s bed, this lili-lili girl picked it up. She took off Barbie’s pink feather boa, peered under