Polite Lies Read online

  Years later, Keiko would stand at a crowded train station, telling complete strangers about her faith, which she must have considered to be the ultimate truth. She wasn’t embarrassed to be proclaiming her beliefs, to be sharing the secrets of her happiness and peace. Faith often involves this kind of disclosure—a shouting-out of private beliefs, bringing what is hidden into light. Although I do not share Keiko’s particular faith, she has set an example for me as I try to navigate my way through truths, lies, and secrets. I want to find my way out of lies and confusion. If I cannot inherit her prayers or her peace, then, at least, I want to inherit her courage to speak and hear the truth.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  RITUALS

  In the summer of 1993, while I was visiting my friend Katie in New Mexico, the two of us drove up to Chimayo to see a miracle. The sand that bubbled up from the dirt floor of a Catholic church there, it was said, had powers to heal both physical and spiritual wounds. Although we did not believe in miracles, we thought it would be a good day-trip to drive through the mountains to visit a spiritual place.

  The church, located on top of a hill, was a small adobe building. Katie and I entered the sanctuary, which looked like any small Catholic church: wooden pews, an altar with statues of saints and a cross, alcoves for candles, a stone basin of holy water. A sign on the wall indicated that the sand was in the adjoining room. We ducked under a low door beam and went into what looked like a dark storage room. The only light came through a few small windows high in the mud walls. In the corner by a wooden pillar, four or five people stood looking down at the floor. Joining them, we saw a hole in the floor the size of a large mixing bowl. The sand in the hole was lighter than the adobe floor—pale gold instead of reddish brown. A sign on the wall said, NO PICTURES. ONLY ONE HANDFUL OF HOLY SAND PER FAMILY, PLEASE.

  Katie and I looked at each other and almost laughed, though that didn’t stop us from kneeling down to scoop a handful each into the two plastic bags we had brought, just as the people ahead of us were doing. I had no doubt that the sand didn’t bubble up from the floor beneath me but was brought in from the desert. I didn’t mind. The ritual seemed quaint and well intentioned.

  Another sign pointed to the exit—a door on the other side of the room. The wall on that side, underneath the small windows, was lined with wooden shelves. As we approached, we saw that the shelves were filled with small altars dedicated to the dead, built out of scrap metal, wood, and glass. One of them was a ten-gallon aquarium lined with pebbles and planted with miniature cacti; it had a wire mesh cover, the kind you would use to cover a hamster or gerbil cage. From the wire hung numerous silver and beaded crosses, angels, saints’ medals and rosaries. On one side of the aquarium, three photographs were taped to the glass. They were wallet-sized studio portraits, all of them with the same pearly aqua background. The two photographs on the bottom were of young boys, perhaps ten and eight, both very fair and blue-eyed. They were wearing matching blue suits. The third, taped above them to form a pyramid, was a portrait of a young Mexican woman in a red dress. She appeared to be about twenty. There were no inscriptions, names, or dates. The dim light from the window was shining on the cacti inside the glass, their needles translucent like the bones of a small fish.

  Katie and I left the church through the small door and found ourselves back in the parking lot. We stood by her car, blinking in the bright sunshine. I kept wondering how the three people on the aquarium were related. The boys might be brothers, but what about the young woman? She could not possibly belong to the same family. All I knew for certain was that the three people were dead and that the same person mourned them. I imagined the aqua background rolled down and stretched behind each of them at a photography studio in a small town in New Mexico. There was something timeless and placeless about the color, which was so artificially bright and pretty. Its cheerfulness made me a little sad. Even now, I remember that background as the color of grief.

  On the way back to Albuquerque, Katie and I passed a cemetery where one of the graves was surrounded by a white picket fence. Inside the fence, two Harley-Davidsons, their engines removed, were chained to a rock. Colored lights and plastic roses festooned the fence and the chains. The grave looked as festive and childlike as a park or a petting zoo; the grounded motorcycles seemed so harmless, like large, dumb animals grazing in the grass.

  Everything we saw that day was silly—gaudy and overdone. But sentiment isn’t always tasteful. Against our better judgment, Katie and I were moved by people’s desire for a miracle and by their quirky, private expressions of grief. Inspired, we decided to enact some ending rituals of our own. The two of us had met in Green Bay because our husbands, Chuck and Dean, had grown up together; they had been best friends since third grade. By the time I visited, Katie and Dean had been divorced for nearly a year. Shortly after moving to Albuquerque together, they split up; Katie stayed on and Dean returned to Wisconsin. Though the divorce was by mutual choice, Katie still felt angry. For myself, I was thinking that I would like to be divorced, but I didn’t seem to be able to work up enough energy to start such a big change. Every time I thought about it, I felt scared and exhausted. Maybe, I thought, I should get angry—anger would make me move on. This was hard since Chuck was such a nice guy. I wanted to get divorced, not because he had wronged me, but because I didn’t think we were suited to each other anymore.

  On the last day of my visit, Katie and I performed our moving-on ritual. In her cupboard, we found a green ceramic cup Dean and Katie had bought in the late seventies when they were newly married. Somehow, this cup came to symbolize everything we thought was wrong with Dean and Chuck, their post-hippie laid-back attitude toward life. It was an ugly cup, designed to match those avocado kitchen walls and refrigerators that were hideous even when they were in fashion. Katie and I drove up to the mountains under the shooting stars of August. We broke the cup at a camp ground, built a fire, and she burned a birthday card she had bought for Dean and never sent. “No more ugly empty cups for us,” we kept chanting. We asked the spirit of change to take the anger away from Katie and pass it on to me, to get me moving. We were laughing and crying at the same time. It was ridiculous, really, and we knew it even while we were doing it.

  We each took a small shard of that empty cup. For about a year, I kept mine—a green chip the size of my fingernail—in a plastic deli container with the miraculous sand from Chimayo. Sometimes I burned incense sticks in the sand. It was my altar to something, but I’m not sure what. The ritual didn’t quite work for either of us, at least not in the way we had planned. I didn’t get divorced for three more years, and when Chuck and I finally split up, it wasn’t out of anger. We like to think it was an odd expression of our love or respect—we were sad and relieved. I think Katie is still a little angry at Dean, but that hasn’t prevented her from being happy. She is married again and has a son. Once in a while we call each other and leave messages: “Lots of change in my life, good change,” “Just checking in. I hope you’re happy.” I imagine us twenty years from now, calling and saying the same things. Katie is a transplant like me—a Wisconsin farm girl living in Albuquerque. She knows about changes, about living between two cultures. The ritual has not been a complete failure. We could never get rid of our past with broken cups, but we have moved on.

  When I saw the altars to the dead in New Mexico, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. Usually, I feel a bit out of place in Catholic churches because the objects there—the holy water, the statues, the candles—are so different from what I grew up with in Buddhist temples and Protestant churches. Those objects remind me that I am an outsider who does not know how to bless herself with the holy water and genuflect in the aisle, or when to kneel during the service, or what prayer to recite when. The church in Chimayo was different. In that dark room with scarcely enough light to see by, the altars reminded me of the Buddhist altar at my grandparents’ house.

  My grandparents kept their Buddhist altar in a large room called butsuma
, Buddha-room. A black box the size of a dresser, the altar had several shelves and drawers. On the top shelf stood a golden statue of a bodhisattva, a merciful manifestation of the Buddha spirit. On the shelf below that, my grandparents had placed four golden plaques with names and dates of the family dead—my grandfather’s parents, my grandparents’ two oldest children, who had died as infants. The other shelves were for flowers, incense, candles, and the small cups and bowls in which we offered food. The drawers below the shelves contained books of sutras—written in Chinese characters I could not read—and extra candles, incense, and matches.

  The Buddha-room was next to the room where my mother, brother, and I slept on our futons during our summer visits. Every morning, when my grandmother offered fresh food, tea, and flowers, I got up and helped her place the bowls and cups on the shelves and light the incense sticks. Eyes closed, we prayed to the dead, asking them to protect us and bring us luck. My grandmother referred to the dead as hotoke-sama, the honorable Buddha-spirit, or gosenzo-sama , the honorable ancestors. I understood these words to mean the same thing: the spirits of all the people who had lived and died in our family, including the four whose names were on the plaques. To me, there was no distinction between the four more recent deaths and the rest, since I hadn’t known any of my ancestors as living people. Even my grandmother seemed to group them together, not mourning or calling on the recently dead more than the others.

  The Buddha-room was not a holy and scary place at all. During the day, our family used the room as a study. Every morning after breakfast, my grandfather and I sat at the big desk by the window to write in our journals. For a couple of hours after that, he would try to help me with math, my weak subject. I never worried that our ancestors would be embarrassed or angered by my inability to memorize multiplication tables. For the most part, I forgot about them except when we were performing the morning ritual of offering the food and saying our prayers. They were like very old people who sat around and said nothing all day.

  I don’t think I was being particularly disrespectful. We were encouraged to think of our dead ancestors as benign visitors rather than holy presences. In mid-August, the time of the shooting stars, my grandparents celebrated a weeklong festival called O-Bon. During O-Bon, they told me, the spirits of the dead came up from the sea to visit their families. The story confused me at first because the dead were supposed to be with us every day anyway—that’s why we offered them food, tea, and flowers. But I came to imagine that our morning visits with them at the altar were like my mother’s weekly telephone conversations with my grandmother, while the spirits’ return at O-Bon was more like my family’s annual return to my grandparents’ house. They were two different kinds of visits.

  During O-Bon, my grandparents held special ceremonies for our ancestors, inviting the monks from the local temple to read the sutras in the Buddha-room. On the last night of the week we dressed in our summer kimonos to attend the community dance held in the village square. Most of my uncles, aunts, and cousins were at our grandparents’ during the summer, so we were a big group as we walked to the square, everyone taking smaller steps than usual because of the long kimonos.

  In the center of the square, two or three men sat in a tall drum tower, beating on the large festival drums. There was also a singer. We danced in a circle around the tower, shuffling a few steps forward and turning sideways with a hand gesture, clapping our hands and shouting out words that made no sense, like ah, yoi yoi (I think this meant “yes, good, good,” but I was never sure what was good). My brother, cousins, and I didn’t understand the words that the singer chanted in the traditional nasal and slurred style. This was the only time during the year when we heard Japanese dance music. We just followed our relatives and neighbors around the circle, trying to make the right gesture at the right time. Some of us would invariably turn the wrong way or clap at the wrong time, and we would all giggle. It didn’t matter. The music was so loud no one heard us. Our grandmother told us that we were dancing to honor the spirits of the dead, to send them back to the world of the dead for another year in peace and happiness. We imagined our great-grandparents and our great-aunts and -uncles coming back from the dead to dance with us. The weak shadows cast by the lights in the drum tower could be the dancing dead people; they were floating above us in the dark, laughing and talking about the old times. We would never be afraid of their ghosts. They were family.

  Years later, when I saw an exhibit of Hmong needlework in New York, I remembered some of my childhood feelings about the ancestors. The last room of the exhibit featured burial vests and dresses, all of them hand-embroidered. The stitches were smaller than grains of sand and arranged to form complicated patterns of triangles and circles. A note under one of the glass cases explained that the patterns were particular to each clan. The Hmong trusted that when they arrived in the land of the dead their ancestors would recognize them by the clan stitches on their vests and dresses.

  This belief reminded me of what my brother, cousins, and I had thought of the ancestors. They were people we had never known in life but they seemed utterly familiar. Just like our living aunts and uncles, our dead ancestors would recognize the minute details of our clothing, the shapes of our noses or eyebrows, or a particular way we smiled. “I know you,” they would say. “You have our family’s thin lips and big ears; that’s our family crest on your kimono.” Living or dead, family was the same.

  The Buddhist rituals about death gave me a vague sense of comfort as a child, when I didn’t know the dead. They made me feel that I was part of a big family whose members watched over one another forever. I wish I had been able to hold on to that feeling of comfort, but these days, the same rituals seem out of place when I try to mourn or at least think of the dead I know.

  The morning Akiko and I went to Michiko’s house to pay respects to my father’s spirit, we both wore dark clothing, as was customary. She chose a navy blue suit; I wore a black sweater and dark purple pants. While my brother and Michiko waited in the kitchen, I followed Akiko down the narrow hallway that led to Michiko’s bedroom.

  The tatami floor was bare, with the futons folded and put away in the closet. The room didn’t have much in it except for the altar against the wall by the window—a set of shelves partially covered with white cloth, taking up the entire wall. On the top shelf was a plain pine box, no larger than a shoe box, which held my father’s ashes. On the other shelves, there were several incense burners, all of them sending white columns of smoke upward, a brass bell, paper lanterns, a tray of food. Incense filled my nose and mouth as I stood before the altar, staring at the tray. The doll-sized dishes and cups contained rice, pickled ginger, scrambled eggs, boiled vegetables and herbs, tea—the kinds of food I used to help my grandmother prepare for our ancestors honored at her altar. There was something wrong about seeing the dishes next to my father’s ashes, as though my father, in his death, had been reduced to a good-natured make-believe spirit for whom we could leave make-believe food in toy cups.

  My father did not belong in the benign white cloud of ancestral spirits I used to imagine. My relationship with him was the exact opposite of my relationship with my ancestors. After my mother’s death and his remarriage, till I left home, I saw my father a few times every week, even though it was only at meals during which no one talked; some nights, we passed each other in silence in the hallway. The only time my father ever talked to me was when he scolded me and beat me. My father and I lived in the same house, ate the same food, and still we never got to know or love each other. I knew more about my ancestors than I knew about him: all through my childhood, I had heard stories about my great-grandfather—what happened when he was bitten by a poisonous snake, what a kind landlord he was. I was used to seeing pictures of my mother’s two older sisters, who had died before my mother was born, and recognizing that one of them, the one photographed in a beret, looked like me. We had the same round eyes; like me, she half-frowned and half-smiled as she faced the camera. I
knew nothing about my father as a child or an adult except that he was a person who drove my mother to suicide. He couldn’t possibly turn into a spirit, good-natured, familiar, and yet far away.

  I sat down in front of the altar, my shoulder almost touching my aunt’s. She reached out and rang the brass bell to greet his spirit, just as my grandmother used to do to call our ancestors’ attention to our visit. Akiko closed her eyes and bowed her head, her hands held together, palm to palm. I followed her example and closed my eyes, but no prayer came to my mind.

  Are you really dead? I wanted to ask. This can’t be you. Next to me, Akiko began to sniffle. I imagined my stepmother preparing little cups of food daily and putting them up on the shelf, as though my father’s spirit were an absurd pet bird. When I thought of that, he seemed almost pitiful. Taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes and turned sideways. Akiko was pressing a white handkerchief to her eyes. Only a few years before, she had told me that my father was a strange person, that she felt scarcely related to him. I wasn’t sure why she was crying. Did she pity my father now that he was dead, or was she crying because he was, after all, her brother? And what about me? Should I pity him now that he was gone? Should I tell myself that he was my father? My throat felt suddenly tight, but I didn’t want to cry. My tears could only be false. Turning away from my aunt, I looked up at the wall.