Honey-sweetheart, my promise is as good as gold
I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents’ promise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise.
I watched this same movie when you did not come. The American soldier promises to come back and marry the girl. She is crying with a genuine feeling and he says, “Promise! Promise! Honey-sweetheart, my promise is as good as gold.” Then he pushes her onto the bed. But he doesn’t come back. His gold is like yours, it is only fourteen carats.
To Chinese people, fourteen carats isn’t real gold. Feel my bracelets. They must be twenty-four carats, pure inside and out.
It’s too late to change you, but I’m telling you because I worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will say, “Thank you, Grandmother, for the gold bracelet. I’ll never forget you.” But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother.
In this same war movie, the American soldier goes home and he falls to his knees asking another girl to marry him. And the girl’s eyes run back and forth, so shy, as if she had never considered this before. And suddenly! — her eyes looked straight down and she knows now she loves him, so much she wants to cry. “Yes.” she says at last, and they marry forever.
This was not my case. Instead, the village matchmaker came to my family when I was just two years old. No, nobody told me this, I remember it all. It was summertime, very hot and dusty outside and I can remember cicadas crying in the yard. We were under some trees in our orchard. The servants and my brothers were picking pears high above me. And I was sitting in my mother’s hot sticky arms. I was waving my hands this way and that, because in front of me floated a small bird with horns and colorful paper-thin wings. And then, the paper bird flew away and in front of me were two ladies.
The two ladies were looking at my face without talking. The lady with the watery voice had a painted face that was melting. The other lady had the dry face of an old tree trunk. She looked first at me, then at the painted lady.
Of course, now I know the tree-trunk lady was the old village matchmaker, and the other was Huang Taitai, the mother of the boy I would be forced to marry.
Extract from the book Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
All Rights Reserved.
New York: Ivy Books, c1989.
Call Number: English TAN
Extract contributed by Teh Hui Ping
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What are some of the promises you have made? Have they ever been broken?
March 16th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
I once made a promise that I would sleep with my father until I am a thousand years old. Now, I sleep with my sister.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:53 am
I promised my friend I wouldn’t lie to her. That was my broken promise.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Wow!!!!! she will forget her grandmother???!!!
April 4th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
I once made a promise to my grandmother….. but i broke it…. it was a secret….. i can`t tell anyone….