The Buddha in the Attic Read Online Free Page B

English language. They understood the American ways. And whenever we needed new underwear they swallowed their pride and walked through the hot blazing fields into town and in perfect but heavily accented English they asked the shopkeeper for a new pair. “Not for me,” they explained. And when we arrived at a new ranch and the boss took one look at us and said, “She’s too frail,” it was our husbands who convinced him otherwise. “In the fields my wife is as good as a man,” they would say, and in no time at all this was true. And when we fell ill with malaria and could not lift our heads off the floor it was our husbands who told the boss what was wrong: “First she’s hot, then she’s cold, then she’s hot again.” And when the boss himself offered to drive into town that very same afternoon to buy us the medicine that would cure us—“Don’t you worry about the money,” he said—it was our husbands who thanked him profusely. And even though that medicine turned our urine dark purple for days, we soon began to feel well.
    SOME OF US worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and top beets and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong . Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never before held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. Some of us had been sickly and weak all our lives but after one week in the lemon groves of Riverside we felt stronger than oxen. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row. Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. One of us was distracted by the handsome Hindu man cutting asparagus in the next furrow over while she worked and all she could think of was how much she wanted to unravel his white turban from his enormous brown head. I dream about Gupta-san nightly . Some of us chanted Buddhist sutras while we worked and the hours flew by like minutes. One of us—Akiko, who had gone to a mission school in Tokyo and already knew English and read aloud to her husband every night from the Bible—sang “Arise, My Soul, Arise” while she worked. Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do.
    THEY ADMIRED US for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said that our short stature made us ideally suited for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese—we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite—but none of their vices—we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day . We were the best breed of worker