The Buddha in the Attic Read Online Free PDF Page A

they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don’ t have to look after them at all .
    BY DAY we worked in their orchards and fields but every night, while we slept, we returned home. Sometimes we dreamed we were back in the village, rolling a metal hoop down the Street of Rich Merchants with our favorite forked wooden stick. Other times we were playing hide-and-seek in the reeds down by the river. And every once in a while we’d see something float by. A red silk ribbon we’d lost years before. A speckled blue egg. Our mother’s wooden pillow. A turtle that had wandered away from us when we were four. Sometimes we were standing in front of the mirror with our older sister, Ai, whose name meant either “love” or “grief,” depending on how you wrote it, and she was braiding our hair. “Stand still!” she said. And everything was as it should be. But when we woke up we found ourselves lying beside a strange man in a strange land in a hot crowded shed that was filled with the grunts and sighs of others. Sometimes that man reached out for us in his sleep with his thick, gnarled hands and we tried not to pull away. In ten years he will be an old man , we told ourselves. Sometimes he opened his eyes in the early dawn light and saw that we were sad, and he promised us that things would get better. And even though we had said to him only hours before, “I detest you,” as he climbed on top of us once more in the darkness, we let ourselves be comforted, for he was all that we had. Sometimes he looked right through us without seeing us at all, and that was always the worst. Does anyone even know I am here?
    ALL WEEK LONG they made us sweat for them in the fields but on Sundays, they let us rest. And while our husbands wandered into town and played fan-tan at the local Chinese gambling hall, where the house always won, we sat down beneath the trees with our inkstones and brushes and on long, thin sheets of rice paper we wrote home to our mothers, whom we had promised never to leave. We are in America now, picking weeds for the big man they call Boss. There are no mulberry trees here, no bamboo groves, no statues of Jizo by the side of the road. The hills are brown and dry and the rain rarely falls. The mountains are far away. We live by the light of oil lamps and once a week, on Sundays, we wash our clothes on wet stones in the stream. My husband is not the man in the photograph. My husband is the man in the photograph but aged by many years. My husband’s handsome best friend is the man in the photograph. My husband is a drunkard. My husband is the manager of the Yamato Club and his entire torso is covered with tattoos. My husband is shorter than he claimed to be in his letters, but then again, so am I. My husband was awarded the Sixth Class Order of the Golden Kite during the Russo-Japanese War and now walks with a pronounced limp. My husband was smuggled into the country across the Mexican border. My husband is a stowaway who jumped ship in San Francisco the day before the great earthquake of 1906 and every night he dreams he must get to the ferry. My husband adores me. My husband will not leave me alone. My husband is a good man who works extra hard whenever I cannot keep up the pace so the boss does not send me home .
    SECRETLY , we hoped to be rescued from them. Perhaps we had fallen in love with a man on the boat who came from the same island as we did, and remembered the same mountains and streams, and we could not get him out of our mind. Every day he had stood beside us on the deck and told us how pretty we were, how clever, how special . He’d never met anyone like us in his life, he’d said. He’d said, “Wait for me. I will send for you as soon as I can.” Perhaps he was a labor contractor in Cortez, or the president of an import-export company in downtown San Jose, and every day as we dug down into the black, sun-baked earth with our hands we prayed that a letter from him would arrive.