The Buddha in the Attic Read Online Free PDF

And every day there was nothing. Sometimes, late at night, as we were getting ready for bed, we suddenly burst into tears and our husband would look at us with concern. “Was it something I said?” he would ask, and we would just shake our heads no. But when the envelope from the man on the boat finally did arrive one day in the mail —I have sent money to your husband and will be waiting for you at the Taisho Hotel —we had to tell our husband everything. And even though he struck us many times with his belt and called us many well-deserved names, in the end he let us go. Because the money he received from the man on the boat was several times the amount he had spent to bring us over from Japan. “At least now maybe one of us will be happy,” he said to us. He said, “Nothing lasts for long.” He said, “The first time I looked into your eyes I should have known they were the eyes of a whore.”
    SOMETIMES the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes we were approached by a well-dressed fellow countryman who appeared out of nowhere and offered to take us back with him to the big city. If you come work for me I can pay you ten times what you earn in the fields . Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say to us. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. “Meet me tomorrow night behind the lettuce shed at nine,” we’d tell him. Or, “For five dollars more I’ll do it.” Perhaps we were unhappy with our husband, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods. We have lost everything and are living on nothing but tree bark and boiled yams . Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything back in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife . And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.
    SOME OF US worked as cooks in their labor camps, and some of us as dishwashers, and ruined our delicate hands. Others of us were brought out to their remote interior valleys to work as sharecroppers on their land. Perhaps our husband had rented twenty acres from a man named Caldwell, who owned thousands of acres in the heart of the southern San Joaquin Valley, and every year we paid Mr. Caldwell sixty percent of our yield. We lived in a dirt-floored shack beneath a willow tree in the middle of a wide, open field and slept on a mattress stuffed with straw. We relieved ourselves outside, in a hole in the ground. We drew our water up from a well. We spent our days planting and picking tomatoes from dawn until dusk and spoke to no one but our husband for weeks at a time. We had a cat to keep us company, and chase away the rats, and at night if we stood in the doorway and looked out toward the west we could see a faint, flickering light in the distance. That, our husband had told us, was where people were. And we knew we never should have left home. But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice