Frogs Don’t Eat the Moon

This is from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Random House, NY: 1976, pp 169-171:

We were working at the laundry when a delivery boy came from the Rexall drugstore around the corner. He had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick. Reading the label, we saw that it belonged to another Chinese family, Crazy Mary’s family. “Not ours,” said my father. He pointed out the name to the Delivery Ghost, who took the pills back. My mother muttered for an hour, and then her anger boiled over. “That ghost! That dead ghost! How dare he come to the wrong house?” She could not concentrate on her marking and pressing. “A mistake! Huh!” I was getting angry myself. She fumed. She made her press crash and hiss. “Revenge. We’ve got to avenge this wrong on our future, on our health, and on our lives. Nobody’s going to sicken my children and get away with it.” We brothers and sisters did not look at one another. She would do something awful, something embarassing. She’d already been hinting that during the next eclipse we slam pot lids together to scare the frog from swallowing the moon. (The word for “eclipse” is frog-swallowing-the-moon.) ((The ideograph for eclipse (蚀）is a piece of astrological shorthand. Peasant stories notwithstanding, I do not believe the radical on the right to be short for “frog.” I believe it to be short for the dragon whose head and tail， i.e. the lunar nodes, are responsible for eclipses. （蛇属于虫，大蛇即龙也。） The dragon radical itself could not be used because it is preempted as the animal of the fifth earthly branch (辰）, associated with the year when Jupiter is in sidereal Aries -xp)). When we had not banged lids at the last eclipse and the shadow kept receding anyway, she’d said, “The villagers must be banging and clanging very loudly back home in China.”

(“On the other side of the world, they aren’t having an eclipse, Mama. Thats’ just a shadow the earth makes when it comes between the moon and the sun.”

(You’re always believing what those Ghost Teachers tell you. Look at the size of the jaws!”)

“Aha!” she yelled. “You! The biggest.” She was pointing at me. “You go to the drugstore.”

What do you want me to buy, Mother?” I said.

“Buy nothing. Don’t bring one cent. Go and make them stop the curse.”

“I don’t want to go. I don’t know how to do that. There are no such things as curses. They’ll think I’m crazy.”

“If you don’t go, I’m holding you responsible for bringing a plague on this family.”

“What am I supposed to do when I get there?” I said, sullen, trapped. “Do I say, ‘Your delivery boy made a wrong delivery’?”

“They know he made a wrong delivery. I want you to make them rectify their crime.”

I felt sick already. She’d make me swing stinky censors around the counter, at the druggest, at the customers. Throw dog blood on the druggist. I couldn’t stand her plans.

“You get reparation candy,” she said, “You say, ‘You have tainted my house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.’ He’ll understand.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose. And no, he won’t, Mother. They don’t understand stuff like that. I won’t be able to say it right. He’ll call us beggars”

“You just translate.” She searched me to make sure I wasn’t hiding any money. I was sneaky and bad enough to buy the candy and come back pretending it was a free gift.

“Mymotherseztagimmesomecandy,”I said to the druggist. Be cute and small. No one hurts the cute and small.

“What? Speak up. Speak English,” he said, big in his white druggist coat.

“Tatatagimme somecandy.”

The druggist leaned way over the counter and frowned. “Some free candy,” I said. “Sample candy.”

“We don’t give sample candy, young lady,” he said.

“My mother said you have to give us candy. She said that is the way the Chinese do it.”

“What?”

“That is the way the Chinese do it.”

“Do what?”

“Do things.” I felt the weight and immensity of things impossible to explain to the druggist.

“Can I give you some money?” he asked.

“No, we want candy.”

He reached into a jar and gave me a handful of lollipops. He gave us candy all year round, year after year, every time we went into the drugstore. When different druggists or clerks waited on us, they also gave us candy. They had talked us over. They gave us Halloween candy in December, Christmas candy around Valentine’s day, candy hearts at Easter, and Easter eggs at halloween. “See?” said our mother. “They understand. You kids just aren’t very brave.” But I knew they did not understand. They thought we were beggars without a home who lived in back of the laundry. They felt sorry for us. I did not eat their candy. I did not go inside the drugstore or walk past it unless my parents forced me to. Whenever we had a prescription filled, the druggist put candy in the medicine bag. This is what Chinese druggists normally do, except they give raisins. My mother thought she taught the Druggist Ghosts a lesson in good manners (which is the same word as traditions.).

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The root (礼） to which she refers does not really mean either good manners or traditions. It means rituals. It only means all things Chinese when your life is dealing with your Chinese mother’s ritual behavior. The title of the book refers to the mother.

The mother had been a medical doctor in China, but couldn’t get qualified in America because she couldn’t learn English, and wound up spending the rest of her life working in her husband’s laundry in the SF Bay Area. The author, the eldest daughter, was the natural linguist of the bunch, and she is absolutely a sympathetic character to me, because I recognize the symptoms. The book is full of blow-by-blow accounts of how your entire life can be screwed up, and is routinely screwed up on the cultural interface, by ideographic thought misapplied. She writes that the upshot of the above was that her brothers all decided to study math and science. One hopes that one of them made his mother happy by becoming a doctor.

This book (The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Random House, NY: 1976) is hysterically funny, often in the face of real tragedy, and it is a linguistic tour de force, being ideographic thought written in English, than which nothing could be more difficult. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1976, and it should be read by anyone who wants to understand the Chinese language, Chinese culture, or the plight of the American Chinese immigrant community.

Namu amida Butsu
Xing Ping