I would answer, "Which book, Ma?"

The one with the rubber-paper pages.

I knew that this evening Mother was happy and would keep me company in the library, would light an oil lamp and embroider a pair of slipper faces for Daddy.

Not a single word was written in this rubber-paged book. It was indeed a "tabula rasa" into which were stuffed an assortment of red and green silk threads, design patterns cut from white paper, and a pair of aqua satin slipper faces that Grandmother had given to Mother, that had never been made into slippers but which Mother had kept pressed between the pages of the book for nearly ten years. Grandmother had died long ago, but the cherries embroidered on the aqua satin still looked bright red enough to pick and eat, and there was a pair of tiny embroidered magpies, one with its beak open, the other with its beak closed. Mother had told me that the one with the open beak was the male and the one with the closed beak was the female. She said that, like people, magpies were differentiated by male and female sexes. Each time mother opened the book she would turn first to this page, which was stuffed the fullest. She would examine the pair of magpies for a long time, the corners of her mouth seeming to smile without smiling, her eyes fixed in thought as if in profound contemplation or appreciation of some important event. Afterward she would turn not in book to another page, carefully select some threads, and begin to embroider, as if this pair of cherry and magpie embroidered slipper faces were Mother's eternal model, from which the design and colors in her mind seemed to evolve.

Why did Mother call this the book with rubber-paper pages? Because the material from which the pages of the book were made was both thick and rigid, the color of bark. I do not know what kind of material it was, but the pages were extremely sturdy and durable. No matter how many times they were turned, they would not tear, and because they also repelled water Mother gave them a new name—rubber paper. Actually it was some kind of extremely old paper that my maternal great-grandmother had bound with her own hands for my grandmother, who had then handed it down to Mother. The book pages were double-layer bound, accordion style, and in between the two leaves of an individual page were often secreted Mother's most precious possessions, Father's letters from Peking, the real book within the book without words. Mother never pulled these out or retread them in front of me, but when she tired of embroidery, when the flame of the lamp burned low and weak, when I, exhausted from reciting The Analects of Confucius or Mencius, fell asleep at the desk, she would silently pull out one of these letters and recite in a low voice the words from father, far away across a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers.

There was another book my mother loved that left an extraordinarily deep impression on my memories. That was the fascinating, startling, Shih-tein Yen-wang (Ten Palaces of the King of Death十殿阎王), printed on rough yellow paper with simple pictures depicting the ferocious visage of the King of Death in his ten palaces in hell. He had the head of an ox, and the face of a horse, and was accompanied by ghosts and spirits of all shapes and descriptions who, depending upon their good or evil merits when alive as human beings, received different rewards or punishments. The most fearsome forms of punishment included climbing a knife-edge mountain, falling into a cauldron of boiling oil, being chased and caught by wild beasts. Afterward, emerging from a complete cycle of the wheel of transmigration, some would rise as great officials or wealthy gentry others would become beggars, and still others would fall to the status of pigs and dogs, ducks and chickens, or of insects. Mother never seemed to tire of looking atthese pictures. Sometimes she would point to them and say to me, "The difference between life and death, the world and hell, is but the breath. The living still have this breath. You must be a good person, do good things." An admonition that Mother liked to repeat often was, "Do not lie; beware the plucked tongue that plows the fields." The "plucked tongue that plows the fields" was a picture in this book which portrayed the disheveled head and wild hair of a female ghost whose tongue was plucked out, pierced with a hole, stuck onto a plough handle, and dragged by an ox to plow a field. This was the most extreme punishment for lying, so Mother often brought it out to warn us. Grandfather said that The Ten Palaces of The King of Death was the work of someone's imagination, but there definitely was a law of retribution, of cause and effect, as clearly explained in the Buddhist classics.

Another book which throughout her life never left Mother's hand was the almanac. In the drawer of a small table at the head of her bed, and also in the cupboard drawer in the kitchen were separate copies of the almanac which she might pull out to consult at any time, to find out what kind of a day it was that day. Whether the day was good or bad was extremely important to Mother. She was meticulous about everything, and everything required a calculation of the auspicious omens: buying suckling pigs, repairing the ox fence or pig pen, transplanting the rice seedlings, and harvesting the grain all required selecting a good day. For making wine and steaming rolls for the winter sacrifice, this went without saying. The only thing for which Mother could not choose the proper day was when the hen would hatch her nest of little chicks, but Mother would still have to consult the almanac, and if it fell on a highly auspicious day she would be very happy, thinking that this brood of chickens would grow to maturity verysmoothly and easily. If it was not a very good day she would tell me to be especially careful walking, not to step on one of the little chicks, and to keep the hawks away from the courtyard. Once a big hawk flew down and Mother set down the cooking spade and rushed out to chase away the hawk, which still made off with one little chick. Mother was running so frantically that she was not careful and stepped on a chick, breaking off its little wing under her foot. The chick chirped out most pitifully and the mother hen flapped around and around us, cluck, cluck, clucking mournfully. Mother hen forward and almost fell down. I helped her sit down on the bench. In the palm of her hand she was holding the wounded chick. As it awkward she was worried about the chick carried off by the hawk. Her tears fell in a stream, and I wanted to cry too because the little chick was covered with blood and the whole scene was really tragic. Grandfather immediately poured some sesame oil and rubbed the wound. The poor chick: its pitiful chirps became weaker and weaker and finally stopped. As she wiped her tears, mother recited an incantation for the dead. Grandfather said, "It's for the best. Of the six cycles of transmigration, these two little chicks have already turned one. If their sins are expiated a bit sooner, then they will be able to enter the world as humans sooner." I again thought of the picture in The Ten Palaces of The King of Death; in my little heart I suddenly felt the sadness that everything in this life is beyond our control.

The twenty-four seasonal celebrations of the year in the almanac mother had memorized. Thorovshly each time she opened the almanac to find out the day of the next upcoming celebration she would always recited from the very beginning up to the celebration of that current month. I recited them with her: "First month: beginning of Spring (about February 5), The Rains (about February 19); second month: Insects Awaken (about March 5), Spring Equinox (about March 20); third month: Pure Brightness (about April 5), Grain Rains (about April 20) … But every time we recited down to the White Dews (about September 8) and Autumn Equinox (about September 23) of the eighth month, I don't know why, but I always sensed a feeling of cold and chill. Though young, I responded to the sigh of "the year passes quickly and again the autumn wind blows." Perhaps it is because the eighth month contains the Mid-autumn. Festival and there are so many poems describing the Mid-autumn Festival. The Mid-autumn Festival is supposed to be a time of homecoming and family reunion, but year after year Father and Eldest Brother tarried at Peiping and did not return. Furthermore, my tutor had taught me the poem "The Rushes" from The Book of Poetry (Shih Ching): "Thick grow the rushes, white dew turns to frost, where is that man? Somewhere along the river bank, I follow upstream, but the way is long and difficult, follow back downstream, there he is in mid-stream," and furthermore it seemed a bit facetious. I liked best the first two lines. "White dew turns to frost" reminded me of "hair tinged with frost." My tutor had taught me that that was a metaphor for white hair, and I frequently looked up to see whether or not my mother's hair on the temples was "tinged with frost."

Of course mother also had many other books such as Ming-huan Pao-chuan (Tales of Famous Flowers), Pen-ts'ao Kang-mu (Encyclopedia of Plants and Herbs), Hui-t'u Lieh-n Chuan (the Biographical Sketches of Famous Women), and other classic. The ones she treated with most reverence were the Buddhist sutras. Every day she lit incense and kneeled on the grass mat to recite the sutras, turning page after page. Sometimes she finished reciting a whole sutra volume and I had not seen her turn the pages; she had long ago memorized it. I would sit at a desk in the left corner of the temple room and intently listen to her recite the sutra, the tone of her voice suddenly high then low, slow then fast, each word distinct and clear, proper and exact. Seeing her close her eyes in reverent concentration, I sat in silence, not moving a muscle. After finishing reciting the sutras she still had to recite a few lines resembling a benediction, the last two lines of which were, "forty-eight vows to save all people, nine grades of merits to carry the soul to the other world." After finishing these two lines a light smile floated upon the composed face of my mother as if she had already left her body and crossed over to the other side. I watched the flickering of the candle flame and the thin taper of smoke, and felt that for the two of us, mother and daughter, to be alone in the empty temple room was rather lonely.

The Encyclopedia of Plants and Herbs was mother's book for scholarly study. So many of the characters in it has wood or grass radicals; mother could really recognize only a few, but she placed this book squarely on the table at the head of her bed. Occasionally she opened it and could explain something from it clearly and logically. Actually her explanations all came from the mouth of grandfather, who was a country physician with a knowledge in herbal medicine. Mother knew only that the sources of this knowledge all derived from this book.

Mother had never attended school or studies formally, but in my eyes she was a person of broad and extensive learning.