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

didn’t wind up a burden on society, you could advance right away to heaven. And there you’d learn the answers to all the stuff your catechism teachers kept asking you, like:
    What should we learn as human beings?
    Why should we help others less fortunate than ourselves?
    How can we prevent wars?
    I also figured I’d learn what happened to certain things that were lost, such as Barbie’s feather boa and, more recently, my rhinestone necklace, which I suspected my brother Tommy had filched, even though he said, “I didn’t take it, swear to God.” What’s more, I wanted to look up the answers to a few unsolved mysteries, like: Did Lizzie Borden kill her parents? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? What really happened to Amelia Earhart? And out of all the people on death row who had been executed, who was actually guilty and who was innocent? For that matter, which felt worst, being hanged, gassed, or electrocuted? In between all these questions, I’d find the proof that it was my father who told the truth about how Kwan’s mother died, not Kwan.
    By the time I went to college, I didn’t believe in heaven and hell anymore, none of those metaphors for reward and punishment based on absolute good and evil. I had met Simon by then. He and I would get stoned with our friends and talk about the afterlife: “It just doesn’t make sense, man—I mean, you live for less than a hundred years, then everything’s added up and, boom, you go on for billions of years after that, either lying on the proverbial beach or roasting on a spit like a hot dog.” And we couldn’t buy the logic that Jesus was the only way. That meant that Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Africans who had never even heard of Christ Almighty were doomed to hell, while Ku Klux Klan members were not. Between tokes, we’d speak while trying not to exhale: “Wow, what’s the point in that kind of justice? Like, what does the universe learn after that?”
    Most of our friends believed there was nothing after death—lights out, no pain, no reward, no punishment. One guy, Dave, said immortality lasted only as long as people remembered you. Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus—they were immortal, he said. He said this after Simon and I attended a memorial service for a friend, Eric, whose number came up in the draft and who was killed in Vietnam.
    “Even if they weren’t really the way they’re now remembered?” Simon asked.
    Dave paused, then said, “Yeah.”
    “What about Eric?” I asked. “If people remember Hitler longer than Eric, does that mean Hitler is immortal but Eric isn’t?”
    Dave paused again. But before he could answer, Simon said firmly, “Eric was great. Nobody will ever forget Eric. And if there’s a paradise, that’s where he is right now.” I remember I loved Simon for saying that. Because that’s what I felt too.
    How did those feelings disappear? Did they vanish like the feather boa, disappear when I wasn’t looking? Should I have tried harder to find them again?
    It’s not just grudges that I hang on to. I remember a girl on my bed. I remember Eric. I remember the power of inviolable love. In my memory, I still have a place where I keep all those ghosts.

4
THE GHOST MERCHANT'S HOUSE
    M y mother has another new boyfriend, Jaime Jofré. I don’t have to meet him to know he’ll have charm, dark hair, and a green card. He’ll speak with an accent and my mother will later ask me, “Isn’t he passionate?” To her, words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them, if he says “amor” with a trill rather than ordinary “love.”
    Romantic though she is, my mother is a practical woman. She wants proof of love: Give and you should receive. A bouquet, ballroom dancing lessons, a promise of eternal fidelity—it must be up to the man to decide. And there’s also Louise’s corollary of sacrificial love: Give up smoking for him and receive a week at a health spa. She prefers the Calistoga Mud Baths or the Sonoma