Chapter 7 voices from beyond the walls

voices from beyond the walls —The Story of Lina St. Clair one When I was a child, I heard from my mother that my great-grandfather once sentenced a beggar to Ling Chi to death.Later, the ghost of the beggar came to claim the life of the great-grandfather.Anyway, a week later, my great-grandfather died.Some people said that he died of influenza, and others that he died of some other disease. Anyway, there are different opinions. I don't know how that beggar survived the last moment of his life.In my mind, I imagined again and again how the executioner tore off his clothes and pushed him down on the torture tool. "This conspirator will be executed with a thousand swords and lingering death." The executioner read out his crimes in public.However, before he raised the knife, the beggar's spirit had already collapsed.A few days later, my great-grandfather was reading in the study when suddenly the beggar appeared in front of him.His face was scarred like a broken china vase. "I thought the scariest moment," said the ghost, "is when the knife cuts down. Unexpectedly, I guessed wrong. The hardest thing to suffer, just the opposite, is when the knife is about to be struck but not yet cut. At that time." As he said, he stretched out his jagged arm, held my great-grandfather hostage, and disappeared through the wall.

I asked Ma once how exactly he died.She replied: "He died on the bed, and he died within a few days after lying down." "No, I'm talking about another person, that beggar. What do you mean by Ling Chi's execution? Did he cut off his flesh piece by piece? Did he still have his tendons and skin? Was he really hacked into pieces?" "You Americans know how to cut corners," my mother yelled in Chinese. "That man has been dead for almost seventy years. How did he die? What does it have to do with you?" Of course it is related.I want to be able to see all the bad omens, try to avoid the disaster and take refuge, I would have let that silent magic swallow you up.Because when I was very young, I felt that the surroundings of our house were filled with an unspeakable horror.They threatened my mother, making her want to curl herself up and try to hide in some corner she thought was safe.But the indescribable terror still refused to let her go.For years, I've watched them devour Mom, bite by bite, like the executioner who was executed by Ling Chi, until she vanished from the world and became a ghost.

I remember that the basement of our old house in Oakland always made my mother uneasy and frightened, as if there were hidden secrets hidden there.I was only five years old that year.Mom wanted to hide it from me, so she put a wooden chair against the basement door, put two turns of iron chains on it, and added a big iron lock for double safety.This makes it even more mysterious.I have been trying every means to open it, until one day, by chance, my little finger touched the door, and it opened, but before I could calm down, I fell into a mass of darkness. Unfathomable chasm.When I was able to howl loudly, I found that I was already being hugged by my mother, and the nosebleeds were dripping on her shoulders.At this time, my mother told me that there is a villain living in the basement, and he has been in it for thousands of years, so from now on, I should not open the door again.She said it was such a villainous villain that she almost dragged me out in time.This villain will let me give birth to five babies, and then swallow me and five babies, bone and flesh.

Since then, I have often witnessed many scary scenes.I look at this kind of horror with the eyes of a Chinese. This kind of gene is derived from my mother.When I was playing with the sand in the sandbox, from the hole I dug myself, I seemed to see a group of demons dancing wildly.I even saw green eyes shining on their green faces, and they were looking for children.Once when I was riding a tricycle, I suddenly found a beetle on the ground with a child's face. I immediately crushed it with a wheel.When I grew up a bit, I could see many strange things that other girls couldn't see: the hoop would suddenly split in two, and a child would be thrown into the air.The hammer ball would suddenly come off the chain and hit one of the laughing kids, sending their brains all over the playground.

I never told anyone about this, not even my mom.Most people don't know that I am half Chinese, probably because I have a foreign surname: "St. Clair".At first glance, I look like my father, a typical British Irishman: tall and well-proportioned, but if they get closer, they will find that the outline of my face is not as thin as my father's, and my lines are smooth and smooth. And yes, like pebbles on the beach.I don't have my father's yellow hair and fair skin, but my skin has a pale, sun-faded color. But my eyes were given by my mother. They are not deep-set, but like the eyes on the jack-o-lanterns in the ghost festival; the two holes that were hastily poked out with a knife, at first glance, seem to have no eyelids.I used to keep my eyes wide open to make them look brighter, but when I walked around the house with that look, my father would wonder why I looked so nervous and panicked.

I've seen a photo of my mother, and her eyes are so frightened and nervous.Dad said it was the first time Mom took a photo after she came out of the immigration office on Angel Island.She was held captive there for three weeks until immigration had enough papers to prove she was a war bride.Only those who were forced to flee their country of origin due to the war, or international students, or spouses of American citizens, are eligible to be released from Angel Island. two Mom never talked about her life in China, but Dad said he rescued Mom from a dire situation.How terrible it was, he kept silent.Dad proudly wrote her Betty St. Clair on her immigration card and crossed out her original Chinese name: Gu Yingying.However, he got my mother's birthday wrong again. My mother was born in 1914, but he wrote it as 1916. With just a sweep of the pen, my mother's name disappeared, and my zodiac sign changed from tiger to dragon.

After seeing that photo, you will understand why Gu Yingying no longer exists.In the photo, she is clutching a toad bag tightly as if afraid of being snatched. She is wearing an ankle-length cheongsam with high forks on both sides, and a western-style coat on her upper body, the old-fashioned one with shoulder pads. With a wide placket and oversized buttons of the same material, it was Mom's wedding dress, a gift from Dad.Such an attire makes you wonder where she came from and where she is going.Her chin was almost touching her chest, and the left side of her hair was neatly picked out, which stood out strikingly.

Although she lowered her head and looked inferior and pitiful, her eyes were staring straight at the camera. "Why does Mom look so nervous?" I asked Dad. The father explained that it was only because Mom had to insist on blinking after the howling of the flashlight, and her eyes were open for a full ten seconds. However, I am very familiar with my mother's frightened and restless expression of staring and staring, as if waiting for some unexpected disaster to come.But later, gradually, she no longer had the strength to keep her eyes wide open. That day in Oakland China Town, on the sidewalk, my mother suddenly grabbed my hand and made me hug her tightly. She told me in a low voice: "Don't look at her, don't even look at her." Of course, how could I Don't you want to see it?On the sidewalk, a woman was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. This woman's eyes were dull, as if she hadn't slept in several years, she looked old and young at the same time.Her fingertips and toes were purple-black, as if soaked in India ink.But I know it's festering.

"What happened to her?" I asked Mom softly. "She met a bad man," said Ma, "and she had a child she didn't want." I knew she was lying to me, and the reason she made up this or that was just to warn me and help me avoid some hidden eddies.My mother had this genius for predicting the omens of disaster in everything. Even for other Chinese people, she also has this ability to predict.Where we live and shop, people speak almost exclusively Cantonese or English.Mom is from Wuxi, so she can only speak Mandarin and a little bit of English.Dad can only speak a few dull Chinese phrases, and he insists that my mother learn English.Therefore, whenever Mom talks to Dad, she always helps with her tone, gestures, expressions and eyes. Sometimes, when she gets stuck, she will use Chinese with an English accent, with a southern accent: "Say—no—out—— .” At this time, my father would help her speak out.

"I think what your mom means is that she's tired," he'd say when Mom seemed a little downcast. And when Mom cooks a delicious dish, he will say: "I think, what she means is that our family has the best housekeeper in the whole country." But whenever we, mother and daughter, were alone, my mother would talk to me in Chinese, things my father couldn't think of.I can fully understand these words, but I often make the opposite understanding, which is more irrelevant. When she thought that I could go to school alone without a pick-up, she told me: "You can only go to school at two o'clock and one line. When you get home from school, you are not allowed to wander around in other places."

"Why? I asked. "You do not understand." "Why don't you understand?" "Because I haven't poured them into your head yet." "Why didn't you feed me?" "My God! How can I answer that! Because it's a terrible question to ask. The kind of bad man who will take you off the street and sell you to someone else, and when you have children, you will kill The kid, and then the kid's body will be found in the trash can. After that? You'll go to jail and end up dead in there." I know she's making it up again.But I also learned to make things up, especially when she had to ask me to do some translation for her.For example, in a grocery store that day, she stuck her nose into an open can, and a man next to her yelled at her.This is very embarrassing to me. "What did he mean?" Ma asked me.I coaxed her: He said Chinese people can't buy things here.Another time, the school sent a notice about vaccination against polio. In addition to translating the time and place above to her, I also picked up some private goods without authorization. I said that the school stipulated that all students in the school must use Metal lunch boxes, because paper bags can spread polio. three One day, my father announced proudly: "I have started to rise!" That means, he was promoted to the sales manager of the garment factory. "Now, your mother will be so happy." We did get better.We crossed the Bay Area, came to San Francisco, and up the hills, moved to the North Sea, an apartment, and had an Italian neighbor.The sidewalk over there is very steep, and I have to climb a section of slope every day from school to home. I was ten years old that year.I hope that all fear can be left in Oakland from now on. It was a three-story apartment building, with two families on each floor.The outer wall of the house is covered with a layer of white brushed cement veneer, and a metal fire safety ladder hangs down, but the equipment inside is outdated.A glass-paned door leads to a musty doorway, where the names of the residents of the whole building are densely packed on the microphones.Anderson, Heyman, Nancy, Suzies, and our St. Clair family, in a typical courthouse tone.We lived on the second floor, surrounded by the smell of cooking oil and the sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs.My bedroom faces the road. At night, I can imagine the scene on the road: the car panting and struggling to climb up the steep slope, and the nocturnal gods gathered on the road are frolicking, smoking, talking and laughing loudly "Why, everyone is here?" Then there was the shouting of the police, then the siren of the fire engine, and a woman's roar on the road: "You bastard, dog! Be quiet." All of this Became my nightly lullaby and I fell asleep in no time. Mom didn't like the apartment.I didn't realize it at first, but when we first moved in, she was so busy packing that it took almost a whole week to get everything in place.One day not long after that, she took me out, and as soon as I got to the station, I was startled by a man. It was a red-faced Chinese who staggered along the sidewalk as if lost with his companions.When his cloudy, gum-filled eyes turned to us, he stopped, stretched out his arms, and yelled, "I've found you at last, Suzys, the man of my dreams. Hi." !” As he spoke, he grinned and rushed towards us with his arms outstretched.Immediately, Mom let go of me and covered her chest with her hands as if she were naked.The moment Mom let go of me, I screamed desperately.The man was getting closer and closer to me until two other men came up and grabbed him with giggling faces: "Come on, Joe, for Christ's sake, don't scare them." From then on, no matter on the bus, or in or out of the store, my mother was always trembling with nervousness, holding my hand tightly, and I was painfully pinched by her.Once, when she briefly let go of my hand to take money from her purse to go to the cashier, I slid off to the candy cabinet, but she grabbed me back right away.I knew that in the blink of an eye, she was sorry for not being able to hold me. When she got home, she put away the cans and vegetables one by one.Suddenly, she seemed to feel that something was wrong, so she swapped the cans on the two shelves.Then, he walked quickly into the living room and moved a large round mirror from the wall facing the front door to the wall next to the sofa. "What are you doing?" I asked. She said something about imbalance in Chinese, which is called "Xiang Ke" in Chinese.I think she was referring to a visual imbalance, not a sensory imbalance.Then, she began to move large furniture: sofas, chairs, sofa coffee tables, and a scroll of Chinese paintings. As soon as my father came in after get off work, he asked, "What's the matter?" "Mom is rearranging the furniture to make the room look a little nicer," I said. But the next day, I came home from school and saw her moving furniture again.I felt something ominous. "Why are you doing this?" I asked, hoping she would give me an honest answer. But she just muttered to herself in Chinese: "This house seems too narrow and too high. A strong wind from the top of the mountain blows all your strength back to the foot of the mountain and cancels it out. Therefore, it is difficult for you to develop." Pointing to the walls and doors of the apartment, she said, "Look at how narrow the corridor is, like a throat that's been squeezed, and the kitchen is directly facing the bathroom, so everything you ingest is just washed away." "What's wrong? So what?" I asked. Later, my father explained to me: "Your mother is practicing how to build a more secure nest," he said, "Poor mother, you will understand when you grow up." I wondered why my father never worried about anything?Is he blind?Why can Mom and I see more? It took a few days for me to understand.I came home from school that day to find that Mom had rearranged my bedroom.My bed was moved from the window to the wall, and there was an old cot where I put the bed. I suddenly understood that the key to all my mother's anxiety and worry was because she was pregnant.Her danger point is as fragile and breakable as an inflated balloon. "Look," Dad said to me facing the little bed, "this is the little nest that your mother has been worrying about, and it's just been put in place after a lot of work." He looked at the little bed with an uncontrollable expression joy.But he was oblivious to what I witnessed afterwards.Mom didn't know how to do it, and often bumped into the furniture or the wall, bumping into things like this, as if she had completely forgotten that she was pregnant with the child, as if she was deliberately angry.She never talked about the child to be born.She talked a lot about her worries, insecurities, weightlessness, and other people's gums.This made me very worried about the child in the womb. He seemed to be trapped in the gap between my mother's belly and his crib, hanging alone in between. Now, my bed is against the wall, so at night, instead of the street, I hear voices from the other side of the wall.According to the sign on the buzzer in the doorway, on the other side of the wall lived a family named Suzies. On the first night of sleeping on the bed next to the wall, I heard screams from the other side of the wall, which sounded like screams from being covered.That's a woman?Or a girl?I put my ear against the wall, only to hear a woman's angry voice, and then a girl's shrill plea.All of a sudden, it seemed like it was all coming at me, intermittently. "Who am I talking to?" "Why are you eavesdropping?" "Get out." "Better die." Then, there was another push, fight, and yelling, like a fight, mixed with screaming.The mother raised the knife in her hand to her daughter, ready to dismember her.First she tore off her braids, then her scalp, her eyebrows, and her cheeks, layer by layer, until there was nothing left. I lay down with my head buried in the pillow, and was so frightened by the violent scenes I heard and hallucinated that I couldn't even breathe.A girl was killed, and the sounds of chaos and commotion reached my eardrums irresistibly.I can't stop this from happening.All around is a boundless horror. But the next night, the girl seemed to come back to life again, she screamed again, there was another fight, and the commotion became even harsher.The girl is once again in danger.It repeats itself night after night.At this time, a voice came from the wall: This is a worst omen.The horror of it is not knowing when it will all end. That noisy family, even across the public corridor outside the door, I can hear their loud voices. "See if I don't break your neck if you slide down the banister again." It was a woman's curse.Then, there was a loud crackling sound on the stairs, and someone came downstairs. "Don't forget to get back your dad's shirt." It was the same woman's voice. At that time, I had just closed the door of my apartment and came out with a few books in one hand.Turning around suddenly, I found a tall girl walking towards me.Because I was so familiar with the terrible household details of that family, when Leng Buding came face to face with her, I screamed in fright and scattered my books all over the floor.I know she is that girl.She just snickered and hurried downstairs.I guess she was about twelve years old, two years older than me.I quickly picked up the book, followed her quietly, and crossed the road to follow her. She really doesn't look like the girl I've fantasized about being killed a hundred times.She was clean with no trace of blood.I saw her wearing a dazzling white shirt with a blue cardigan and a blue-green pleated skirt.She seemed very pleased with herself, her two brown braids swaying in unison.Then, as if aware that I was guessing her secretly, she turned her head abruptly, gave me a sullen look, and then turned quickly to avoid me. From then on, as soon as I met her, I would deliberately avert my eyes and pretend to concentrate on walking, or I was busy arranging the buttons on my coat or my schoolbag.I always feel guilty about her. Four One day, my parents’ friends, Aunt Suyun and Uncle Canning, came to pick me up from school and went to the hospital to see my mother, and I realized the seriousness of the problem.Although they said some trivial things, their expressions were serious and serious. When we rushed to the hospital, I saw my mother lying on the hospital bed, twisting her body in grief. Suddenly, her eyes widened and she stared straight at the ceiling. "It's all my fault, it's all my fault! Actually, I've expected it a long time ago." She repeated these words tremblingly, "But, I didn't stop it!" "Dear Betty!" Father tried to comfort her.But Mom still kept blaming herself.She held my hand tightly, her whole body trembling.Then, she looked at me with a strange look, as if she was begging me for something, as if she was begging me to forgive her something... I saw her muttering to me in Chinese indistinctly. "Lina, what did she say?" my father asked me anxiously, which prevented him from being able to help her get the words out. The same move made me unprepared to give any answer to this question.Immediately, I felt that the worst was over.In other words, what she feared has come true.They were no longer harbingers of terror, no longer to torment her.I just listened attentively to my mother telling: "During labor," she murmured, "I have heard the baby screaming in my stomach, and the baby's immature fingers are still clinging to me. But the doctors and nurses just want to push him out, Pushed him into the world. As soon as the baby showed his head, the nurses screamed. It turned out that his eyes were wide open! He could see everything clearly! Then his whole body slid out and lay on the operating table, Slowly wriggling, exuding the heat of life. "I turned my eyes to look at him, and immediately found that his small hands and feet, with a huge head on his head, looked so terrifying, I was stunned. I looked at him intently and found that his eyes were open. , His head is also open—it is open, I can see inside at a glance. There is nothing there, no brains. In other words, he has no thoughts.’ Alas, this child’s head is just an empty egg Like a shell!' the doctors exclaimed. "The child may have heard our voices, and there seemed to be bursts of heat in his huge head. He raised his head and turned to look this way, then turned to look that way.I know he sees everything and understands everything.He is familiar with all the secrets in my body, and understands how I lost a son in a daze, and conceived a son in a daze. " How can I tell my father what she said?He is sad enough, how can I have the heart to pass her crazy talk to him? So I had no choice but to make up a lie: "She said that we are very confident that we will have another child in the near future. She hopes that the child will be happy in another world. She advised us to go back for dinner early." Since then, Mom's spirit has broken down.Not suddenly, but just like saucers falling from the shelf one by one, one after another, fell and shattered.I don't know when another dish will fall.For this reason, I have been waiting nervously and anxiously. Sometimes, when she was cooking, halfway through, she would put it aside and do other things.The faucet was running, rushing through the sink, but she didn't feel it.Halfway through cutting vegetables, the hand holding the kitchen knife will freeze naturally, and tears will start to fall down.While eating at the table, he would suddenly put down his fork, cover his face and cry. "It doesn't matter." My father sat there blankly, speaking blunt Chinese, trying to ease the air.And I simply stood up and left the table, wondering what would happen next time, and there was always a worrying next time. My father was also failing day by day, and he was breaking down too, only in a different way.It's like, when he sees something about to fall, he tries to catch it, but often, before he gets there, he falls himself. "She's just tired, so tired." One day, when we were eating at the Golden Harvest Restaurant—just us father and daughter, because Mom was lying in bed like a wooden figure all day long.My father told me so.I knew that he was worried about his mother all day long, and I saw his father was exhausted, staring at the vegetable bowl in front of him in pain, as if the bowl contained wriggling worms instead of macaroni. Mom's eyes turned a blind eye and looked around the house, her eyes were dull, without any vitality.Every day when my father came home from get off work, he would pat me on the head and ask softly, "How is my eldest daughter today?"I was filled with an inexplicable fear.I can't explain what I'm afraid of, but I can feel the ominous omen.I am very sensitive and can detect every slight movement in the silent room.At night, the sound of beatings and disputes on the other side of the wall continued. Listening to it, it seemed that the girl would be beaten to death.I lay still on the bed, pulling the sheet up to my chin.I often secretly guess, which one is more unlucky, our family or the one on the wall?After comparing for a while, I comforted myself that the girl next door seemed to be even less happy. Fives One day after dinner, the doorbell rang.This is very strange, because usually the visitor always presses the downstairs buzzer first. "Lina, look who it is," my father said to me in the kitchen, cooking.Mom was lying on the bed, and now she lies on the bed all day long, like a living dead, without feeling or thinking. I cautiously opened the door a crack, and was surprised to find that the girl next door was standing outside the door.I froze, but she smiled indifferently.I saw her disheveled and disheveled hair. "Who is it?" Father asked. "It's next door—" I looked at her hesitantly. "Teresa," she said quickly. "It's Tereza," I said. "Ask her to come in." Before my father could finish his sentence, Tereza walked quickly into my room, completely uninvited. I closed the door and followed her two jumping brown braids that whipped like whips on a horse. She went straight to the windowsill and opened the window. "What are you doing?" I exclaimed.She sat on the window sill facing the street and gave me a foolish smile.I sat by the bed, only feeling the chilly wind blowing in from the night outside the window. "What are you laughing at?" I asked her. "My mother kicked me out," she said, stopping her laugh, in a smug tone, as if proud of it.Then she smiled again and said, "We had a fight, and she kicked me out and locked the door. Now, she thought that I would wait outside the door in great frustration, thinking about how to apologize to her.Let her wait, I won't. " "Then what are you going to do?" I asked holding my breath, sure that this time, her mother would not let her go, maybe she really wanted to kill her, just for once and for all. "I want to climb the fire escape outside your window back to my own room," she whispered in my ear, "she'll wait until she can't stand it anymore, then she'll open the door and I'm gone. But I'm in my own room, lying on the bed." She giggled as she spoke. "She'll freak out when she finally finds you in her room." "No. She'll just be happy that I'm alive and that nothing happened. But she'll act crazy for a while, just for a few minutes. I do that kind of thing all the time. It's all right!" The window slid down gently, and quietly went back to her own room. I stared blankly at the open window, puzzled.How could she still go home?Didn't she feel that life was so terrible!Moreover, does she realize that such days are endless for her. I lay in bed, waiting to hear the screaming and the beating.It's late at night, and I'm still sleepy.From the next door came Mrs. Susies' loud voice, mingled with wailing. "You bad girl, you almost scared me to death." Tereza also yelled, "I almost broke my neck." Then; there were crying and laughing. Hearing the sound, they seemed to be hugging and kissing warmly.I was surprised.Anyway, I'm happy for them. My estimate was completely wrong. I still remember how strongly the word "hope" shocked me that night.Since then, day by day, year after year, I have always firmly grasped the word "hope" and stayed by my mother's bedside, watching her drowsy and talking to herself unconsciously.But I believe that this situation - this most terrible situation - will end one day.Disaster has come, but now, I think of hope.The terrible quarrel between Mrs. Susies and Tereza continued, but I seemed to get something out of it. I saw a girl complaining, "I can't take it anymore!" I saw the mother, lying on the bed in a beautiful dressing gown.Later, the girl held up the sharp blade to her: "You must suffer a thousand knives, this is the only way to free you." The mother closed her eyes and accepted it calmly.Whoosh!Whoosh!Whoosh!The sharp knife cut at the mother quickly.The mother screamed loudly as the pain penetrated her skin, but when she opened her eyes, there was no blood or debris. "Did you see that?" said the girl Mother nodded. "Now I understand perfectly. The worst is over, and there's nothing more to fear." The girl said, "Go to the wall and have a look, and you will understand why you are wrong." Then the girl took her mother's hand and walked away through the wall.