Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

It seems that they communicated little in either of their languages. My father must have felt no curiosity about her, for in later years he could tell me nothing about her, not even her real name. I have tried to imagine what her life was like. Given the attitudes of the European immigrants who made up the majority on Hunters Point, she would have been seen as barely human by her neighbors, a concubine-slave, a useful disgrace in the house of that seedy American who talked fancy English, a little French, and dead Greek. My sister once mentioned that Dilly sometimes stayed in the house for weeks, as if in hiding. Whether she hid from her neighbors, from immigration agents, from her employer at the Jade Palace, or from her own fantasies of anti-Chinese mobs I will never know. Perhaps she hid from all of them.

      In 1894, at the age of sixteen, Sophie married a soldier and went with him to his post in Montana. The following year Erika left to take an apartment downtown on Stockton Street, paid for by an acquaintance of Father’s. This man, older than Father and very rich, had met him at a card game and frequently came to Hunters Point for duck shooting. He brought books to Erika, and Father was unaware of his real interest in her until Erika, on her eighteenth birthday (it was like Erika to make sure of her legal right to independence), announced she was moving out. For a time there was some coldness between Father and his rich friend, but gradually Father accepted the arrangement, often staying at Erika’s apartment when, after a late night at the clubs, he was in no condition to make the long car ride home.

      Two months after Erika left I was born.

      Because I lost my mother when I was only eight years old, every shred of memory of her is precious, but the shreds are meager. She brought no documents with her when she fled the Jade Palace. If any existed elsewhere in the City, they were destroyed in the 1906 quake, as was my birth record, which might have given her full name. When I asked her about China, she described a land of dragons and river gods. When I asked how she had come to America, she said that beautiful goddesses had woven her into the corner of a rich brocade which was then rolled up and sent to America. When the brocade was unrolled by an art dealer, she said, she leaped out of it and ran away to Hunters Point, where she found me in a basket of shrimp, swallowed me, nurtured me in her body, and, when I was big enough to nag at her for my freedom, spat me out.

      I had been born so beautiful that the water goddess who lived in the Bay was jealous. That was why I must never swim out too far in the water, and that was why I must always obey my mama, because disobedient, beautiful children were easily caught by jealous goddesses who would not let them return to their mama until they had performed awesome tasks.

      Instead of being frightened by her story, I was delighted and begged my mother to invent one story after another of my disobedience and capture by the water goddess. The high point of each story was the terrible task imposed by the envious water goddess. The task changed with each telling. Sometimes it was to clean out all the Butchertown slaughterhouses between the tip of Hunters Point and Potrero Hill. Another task was diving for treasure hidden in the hulks sunk in the sand off the Point. One was catching all the flies that swarmed around the tanneries on Third Street. Or swimming across the bay, climbing ashore at Benicia, then walking on a single track of the railroad all the way to Sacramento to bring back a pinch of gold from a deserted mining camp where the ghosts of disappointed prospectors still panned the streams. Or counting all the shrimp laid out by the oriental fishermen who worked on the shore, hauling full baskets from the boats, then boiling the shrimp and spreading them out on broad screens to dry.

      In my memory she stands small and thin, with a round, brown face, wearing a long dark cotton dress with a little white collar. I hear her calling me, “Mei-li! Mei-li!” her voice rising on the second syllable to a high note like birdsong. Her wide mouth is always smiling at me or laughing with me, a laugh which turns into a cough she covers with a small hand.

      I see her sewing a dress for me or cooking the meals we shared, with a portion laid out for Father, when and if he might appear. I see her working in the garden, planting, cultivating or gathering cabbages or carrots or tiny strawberries. Like all the other families, we ignored boundaries between our yards and railroad or livestock land, planting our vegetables wherever a good spot of open, high ground appeared above the swampy tidelands. My mother’s garden patches were among the best, and the secret of her success was no secret: she put on boots and took a wheelbarrow and shovel to the nearest cattle pen, bringing mounds of manure to her plantings.

      On Mondays—killday at the slaughterhouses—when the smell of hearty, grassy manure changed to the awful stench of terror and blood, we went down to the shore where the air was better. I played in the sand or climbed on one of the beached ferryboat wrecks while my mother bargained with shrimp fishermen, who smiled at me or swung me up to ride on their shoulders. To these lonely, aging Chinese men, with wives and children (if any) back in China, I was that rare treasure in those years after the exclusions laws, a Chinese child, albeit only a girl, albeit half white.

      To add to their delight I mimicked their different dialects, then turned to the men from a Japanese boat, switched to their jargon, then back to English. I did not know that I was speaking separate, distinct languages, and at first I mixed them freely. But I soon learned to match them with the appropriate people. I spoke Italian to our Italian neighbors, Spanish to the Spanish, a variation of this to Mexicans, and other combinations of sounds to the Yugoslavians, Russians, Swedish, French. I did not know that this facility with languages was unusual. It seemed easy and natural, a game like all the other games my mother and I played or she watched me play, ever smiling.

      I was almost seven when this fairy tale life began to end. My mother had remained isolated from most of our neighbors, but not too isolated to know that in America all children went to school, even girls. She talked to me about school constantly, telling me that when I learned to read and write all secrets would be opened to me. I could even myself become a teacher. She had seen the teachers at the Hunters Point Grammar School, and they were all, incredible as it seemed to her, women. I did not want to be a teacher. I wanted to be woven into a rich brocade and sent to some exotic part of the world. But I did want to learn to read, and so I went.

      I was ahead of my classmates because I could speak English. Only the Irish children could, and they knew no other languages. As soon as the teachers learned that I knew a bit of all the languages spoken at the Point, they passed me around as a translator for the terrified kindergarten children. But the goal was for us all to learn English, and the woman hired to work this miracle was Miss Elva Harrington.

      Miss Harrington came from a reformist, abolitionist family in Boston. Her father had served in Congress and had been killed in the Civil War when she was a small child. She was born, she told us, with two passions, “to teach and to travel,” and had done so, teaching in a dozen states, Mexico, and several European countries. In 1890, deciding it was time for her to settle down, she had come to California to join the Kaweah Colony, a socialist commune in the redwood forest, but it failed and dispersed about the time she arrived. She came to San Francisco and began teaching at Hunters Point. When I came into her class she was nearing fifty.

      I knew these facts about her because her first lessons were built upon each of us telling about ourselves and our families—in English, insofar as possible. She began with her own history to set the example, but hardly ever spoke of herself again. Her interest lay in us, her students.

      Under Miss Harrington, I quickly learned to read and write. I remember her patient, expertly planned sequence of adding knowledge, bit by bit, day by day, a most undramatic and difficult art, that of teaching complicated skills so that they seem simple and natural. But most of all I remember the afternoon storytelling sessions when we sat on the floor around Miss Harrington and she asked for the stories we told at home, stories our families brought from far away, “in English, please, so that we may all share the gift only you can give us.” During the storytelling, there was no correction of our grammar, only the help of a word supplied as we groped for one yet missing from our vocabulary, only the look of enthralled appreciation on the pale face of Miss Harrington, her sharp eyes intent behind her gold-rimmed spectacles.

      I told the story of Mei-li and the water goddess. Miss Harrington said it was similar to a story from the tradition of my Greek classmates and gave me a book of Greek myths where I could read the story of Psyche and Eros. I read it over and over, loving