Shanghai Girls (30 page)

“Just don’t push for marriage,” May continues. “Let her get an education.” (Something I’ve been working toward practically from the moment Joy was born.) “I didn’t have what you had in Shanghai,” my sister complains, “but she should go to college, like you did.” She pauses, letting that sink in, as though I haven’t heard this before too. “But it’s nice she has such good friends,” May adds as the girls cling to one another when a big wave approaches. “Remember when we could laugh like that? We thought nothing bad could happen to us.”

“The essence of happiness has nothing to do with money,” I say, and I believe it. But May bites her lip, and I see I’ve said the exact wrong thing. “We thought the world ended when Baba lost everything—”

“It did,” May says. “Our lives would have been very different if he’d saved our money instead of lost it, which is why I work so hard to make it now.”

Make it and spend it on clothes and jewelry for yourself
, I think but don’t say. Our differing attitudes about money are among the many things that aggravate my sister.

“What I mean is,” I try again, hoping not to further darken May’s mood, “Joy’s lucky to have friends, just as I’m lucky to have you. Mama married out and never saw her sisters again, but you and I will have each other forever.” I put my arm around her shoulder and jiggle it affectionately. “Sometimes I think that one day we’ll end up sharing a room just like when we were girls, only we’ll be in the old folks’ home. We’ll have our meals together. We’ll sell raffle tickets together. We’ll make crafts together—”

“We’ll go to matinees together,” May adds, smiling.

“And we’ll sing psalms together.”

May frowns at that. I’ve made another mistake, and I hurry on.

“And we’ll play mah-jongg! We’ll be two retired ladies, fat and round, playing mah-jongg, and complaining about this and that.”

May nods as she stares wistfully west across the sea to the horizon.

WHEN WE GET
home, we find Father Louie asleep in his recliner. I give Joy, Hazel, and Rose some straws and send them out to the backyard, where they gather peppercorns off the ground, load up their straws, and blow the harmless pink pellets at one another, laughing, squealing, and running through the yard between the plants. Sam and I go to Vern’s bedroom to change his diaper. The open window does little to blow away the smells of sickness, shit, urine, and pus. May comes in with tea. We sit together for a few minutes to tell Vern about the day, and then I go back to the kitchen. I unpack and begin getting things ready for dinner, washing the rice, chopping ginger and garlic, and slicing beef.

Just before I start cooking, I send the Yee girls home. As I make curried tomato beef
lo mein
, Joy sets the table—a job that back in Shanghai had always been done by our servants under Mama’s close watch. Joy lines up the chopsticks just so, making sure not to set out any uneven pairs, which would mean that the person using them will miss a boat, a plane, or a train (not that any of us are going anywhere). While I put the food on the table, Joy gets her aunt, father, and grandfather. I’ve tried to teach my daughter the things that Mama tried to teach me. The big difference is that my daughter has paid attention and learned. She never speaks at dinner—something May and I failed at miserably. She never drops her chopsticks for fear of bad luck, nor does she leave them upright in her rice bowl, because that’s something done only at funerals and is impolite to her grandfather, who’s been thinking about his own mortality lately.

When dinner’s over, Sam helps Father back to his chair. I clean the kitchen, while May takes a plate of food to Vern. I’m standing with my hands in soapy water, staring out at the garden aglow in the last of the summer evening’s light, when I hear my sister coming back through the living room. The sound of her steps is familiar and comforting. Then I hear her gasp—a breath so deep and sharp that I’m suddenly very afraid. Is it Vern? Father? Joy? Sam?

I rush to the kitchen door and peer around the jamb. May stands in the middle of the room, Vern’s empty plate in her hand, her face flushed and with a look I can’t comprehend. She’s staring at Father’s chair, and I think the old man must have died. I think if death has come today, then that’s not so bad. He lived to be eighty-something, he spent a quiet day with his son, he had dinner with his family, and none of us can feel bad anymore about the relations between us.

I step into the room to face this sadness and then freeze, as shocked into immobility as my sister. The old man is alive all right. He sits there with his feet up on his lounger, his long pipe in his mouth, and a copy of
China Reconstructs
held in his hands so the two of us can see it. It’s shocking enough to see him with this magazine. It comes out of Red China, and it’s a piece of Communist propaganda. There’ve been rumors that the government has spies in Chinatown keeping track of who buys things like this. Father Louie, who cannot be called a supporter of the Communist regime by any measure, has told us to avoid the tobacconist and the paper goods store where the magazine is sold from under the counter.

But it’s not the magazine that’s the real shock; it’s the front cover, which my father-in-law is displaying to us with such pride. The image is one that, even if we avoid these products, is familiar to us: the glory of New China as exemplified by two young women dressed in country clothes, their cheeks full of life, their arms loaded with fruits and vegetables, practically singing the glories of the new regime—all rendered in glowing red tones. Those two beautiful girls are instantly recognizable as May and me. The artist, who without hesitation has embraced the heightened, exuberant style favored by the Communists, is also clearly identifiable by the delicacy and precision of his brushstrokes. Z.G. is alive, and he hasn’t forgotten me or my sister.

“I went to the tobacconist when Vern was sleeping. Look,” Father Louie says, the pride in his voice unmistakable as he looks at the cover with May and me—not one question in my mind that it’s us—selling not soap, face powder, or baby formula but a glorious harvest out by the Lunghua Pagoda, where Z.G., May, and I once flew kites. “You’re still beautiful girls.” Father sounds almost triumphant. He worked his whole life, and for what? He never went back to China. His wife died. His birth son is like a dried-up bedbug and about as companionable. He never had a grandson. His businesses have shriveled to one mediocre curio shop. But he did do one thing really, really well. He procured two beautiful girls for Vern and Sam.

May and I take a few tentative steps toward him. It’s hard to say how I feel: surprised and stunned to see May and me looking the same as we did fifteen years ago with our pink cheeks, happy eyes, and luscious smiles, a bit fearful that these magazines are in the house, and almost overwhelmed by joy that Z.G. is still alive.

The next thing I know Sam is at my side, exclaiming, and gesturing in excitement. “It’s you! It’s you and May!”

My cheeks flush, as though I’ve been caught. I
have
been caught. I lift my eyes to May, looking for help. As sisters, we’ve always been able to say so much to each other with just a glance.

“Z.G. Li must have painted this,” May says evenly. “How lovely that he has remembered us in this way. He made Pearl look especially beautiful, don’t you think?”

“He’s painted both of you exactly as I see you,” says Sam, forever the good husband and appreciative brother-in-law. “Always beautiful. Forever beautiful.”

“Beautiful enough,” May agrees lightly, “although neither of us ever looked that good in peasant clothes.”

Later that night, after everyone goes to asleep, I meet my sister on the screened porch. We sit on her bed, holding hands, staring at the magazine. As much as I love Sam, a part of me soars with the knowledge that across the ocean in Shanghai—I have to believe Z.G.’s there—in a country that is closed to me, the man I loved so long ago loves me still.

ONLY ONE WEEK
later, we realize that Father’s weakness and lethargy are more than just the usual slowing of age. He’s sick. The doctor tells us it’s lung cancer and there’s nothing anyone can do. Yen-yen’s death was so sudden and it came at such an inconvenient moment that we didn’t have the opportunity to prepare for her death or mourn her properly when she passed. This time each of us in our own way reflects back on the mistakes we’ve made over the years, and we try to make amends in the time we have left. During the coming months, many people visit, and I listen to them speak highly of my father-in-law, calling him a successful Gold Mountain man, but when I look at him during these final days, I see only a ruined man. He worked so hard, only to lose his businesses and property in China and almost everything he’d built for himself here. Now, in the end, he has to rely on his paper son for his housing, food, evening pipe, and copies
of China Reconstructs
that Sam buys from under the counter at the shop on the corner.

Father’s only consolations in these final months, as the cancer eats his lungs, are the photographs I cut from the magazine and pin to the wall next to his recliner. So many times I see him with tears running down his sunken cheeks, staring at the country he left as a young man: the sacred mountains, the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City. He says he hates the Communists, because that’s what everyone has to say, but he still has a love of the land, art, culture, and people of China that has nothing to do with Mao, the Bamboo Curtain, or fear of the Reds. He isn’t alone in his nostalgia and desire for his homeland. Many of the old-timers, like Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, come to the house and also pore over these captured images of their lost home; that’s how deep their love of China is, no matter what it’s become. But all this happens very fast, and too soon Father dies.

A funeral is the most important event in a person’s life—more significant than a birth, a birthday, or a wedding. Since Father was a man and he lived into his eighties, his funeral is much larger than Yen-yen’s. We hire a Cadillac convertible to drive through Chinatown with a large flower-wreathed photographic portrait of him propped on the backseat. The hearse driver tosses spirit money out the window to pay off malevolent demons and other lowly ghosts who might try to bar the way. A brass band trails behind the hearse, playing Chinese folks songs and military marches. At the hall for the ceremony, three hundred people bow three times to the casket and another three times to us, the grieving family members. We give coins to the mourners to disperse the
sa hee—
polluted air associated with death—and candy to cleanse the bitter taste of death. Everyone wears white—the color of mourning, the color of death. Then we go to Soochow Restaurant
for gaai wai jau—
the traditional seven-course “plain” banquet of steamed chicken, seafood, and vegetables, designed to “wash away sorrow,” wish the old man a long next life after this death, and launch us on our healing journey and encourage us to leave behind the vapors of death before returning home.

Over the next three months, women come to the house to play dominoes with May and me as we pass through the official mourning period. I find myself staring at the pictures I pinned to the wall above Father’s recliner. Somehow I can’t take them down.

Inch of Gold

“
WHY CAN’T I
go?” Joy demands, her voice rising. “Auntie Violet and Uncle Rowland are letting Leon go.”

“Leon’s a boy,” I say.

“It only costs twenty-five cents.
Please.”

“Your father and I don’t think it’s right for a girl your age to go around town by yourself—”

“I won’t be by myself All the kids are going.”

“You’re not
all
the kids,” I say. “Do you want people to look at you and see porcelain with scars? You have to guard your body like a piece of jade.”

“Mom, all I want to do is go to the record hop at the International Hall.”

Yen-yen sometimes said that an inch of gold could not buy an inch of time, but only recently have I begun to understand how precious time is and how quickly it passes. It’s 1956, the summer after Joy’s high school graduation. In the fall, she’ll be attending the University of Chicago, where she plans to study history. It’s awfully far away, but we’ve decided to let her go. Her tuition has turned out to be more than we anticipated, but Joy’s received a partial scholarship and May’s going to help out too. Every day Joy asks if she can go somewhere or other. If I say yes to this record hop—whatever that is—then I’ll have to say yes to something else: the dance with the fifteen-piece orchestra, the birthday celebration in MacArthur Park, the party that will require a bus ride going and coming home.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Joy asks, not giving up. “We’re only going to play records and dance a little.”

May and I said things like that too when we were girls in Shanghai, and it didn’t work out that well for either of us.

“You’re too young for boys,” I say.

“Young? I’m eighteen! Auntie May married Uncle Vern when she was my age—”

And already pregnant, I think to myself.

Sam has tried to pacify me by accusing me of being too strict. “You worry too much,” he’s said. “She’s not aware of boy-girl interests.”

But what girl of Joy’s age isn’t aware of those things? I was. May was. Now when Joy talks back, ignores what I say, or walks out of the room when I tell her to stay, even my sister laughs at me for getting upset, saying, “We did the exact same things at that age.”

And look what it got us
, I want to scream at her.

“I’ve never been to a single football game or dance,” Joy resumes her complaints. “The other girls have gone to the Palladium. They’ve gone to the Biltmore. I never get to do anything.”

“We need your help at Pearl’s and in the shop. Your auntie needs your help too.”

“Why should I help? I never get paid.”

“All the money—”

“Goes into the family pot. You’ve been saving for me to go to college. I know. I
know
. But I only have two months left before I leave for Chicago. Don’t you want me to have fun? This is my last chance to see my friends.” Joy folds her arms over her chest and sighs as though she’s the most burdened person in the world.

“You can do anything you want, but you have to do well in school. If you don’t want to go to school—”

“Then I’m on my own,” she finishes, reciting the line with the fatigue of centuries.

I’m Joy’s mother and I see her with mother eyes. Her long black hair holds the blue of distant mountains. Her eyes are the deep black of a lake in autumn. She didn’t have enough to eat in the womb, and she’s smaller than I am, smaller than May. This gives her the appearance of a maiden from ancient times—lithe like willow branches swayed by the breeze, as delicate as the flight of swallows—but inside she’s still a Tiger. I can try to tame her, but my daughter can’t escape her essential nature, just as I can’t escape mine. Since graduation, she’s complained about the clothes I make for her. “They’re so embarrassing,” she says. I made them out of love. I made them because there wasn’t a place in Los Angeles like Madame Garnet’s in Shanghai for me to take her to have dresses molded to her exact shape. What upsets Joy most of all is her perceived lack of freedom, but I know the kinds of things May and I—especially May, really
only
May—did when we were young.

A lot of this wouldn’t happen if Father Louie were still alive. He’s been gone four years now. Sam, Joy, and I could have used Father’s death as our chance to move out on our own, but we didn’t. Sam had made a promise when Father took him as more than just a paper son. I may not believe in ancestors anymore, but Sam lights incense for the old man and makes offerings of food and paper clothes to him during New Year’s and other festivities. But beyond that, how could we leave Vern, who’s lived longer than anyone expected? Who will explain to him that his parents are gone when he asks for them, as he does every day? How could we leave May to care for her husband, run the Golden Prop and Extras Company and the curio shop, and manage the house? But it goes even past loyalty to the family and promises made. We continue to be deeply afraid.

Every day the news from the government is bad. The U.S. consul in Hong Kong has accused the Chinese community of being inclined to fraud and perjury, since we “lack the equivalent of the Western concept of an oath.” He says that everyone who comes through his office looking to go to the United States is using fake papers. Angel Island has long been closed, but he’s devised new procedures requiring the answering of hundreds of questions, the filling out of dozens of forms, and the procurement of affidavits, blood tests, X-rays, and fingerprints, all in an effort to keep Chinese from coming to America. He says that almost every Chinese already in America—going all the way back to those who panned for gold more than a hundred years ago and helped build the transcontinental railroad eighty-some years ago—entered illegally and is not to be trusted. He says that we’re responsible for trafficking in drugs, using fraudulent passports and other papers, counterfeiting American dollars, and illegally collecting Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Worse, he claims that for decades the Communists have sent paper sons—like Sam, Wilburt, Fred, and so many others—to America as spies. Every single Chinese living in America must be investigated, he insists.

For years, Joy has come home from school with stories about her duck-and-cover drills. Now it’s as though we want to live each day in that coiled position—cocooned in our houses with our families, hoping the windows, walls, and doors won’t be shattered, immolated, and turned to bitter ashes. For all these reasons—love for one another, fear for one another—we’ve stayed together, and we’ve struggled to find balance and order, but with Father Louie gone, we’re all slightly adrift, especially my daughter.

“You don’t have to wash clothes for
lo fan
, make their meals, clean their houses, or answer their doors,” I say. “You don’t have to be an office girl or a clerk in a store either. When your baba and I first came here, all we could ever hope for was to have our own café and maybe one day live in a house.”

“You and Dad got that—”

“Yes, but you can have and do so much more. Back when your aunt and I first arrived, only a handful of people could go into a profession. I can count them on one hand.” And I do. “Y. C. Hong, the first Chinese-American lawyer in California; Eugene Choy the first Chinese-American architect in Los Angeles; Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American doctor in the country—”

“You’ve told me this a million times—”

“All I’m saying is you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or an accountant. You can do anything.”

“Even climb a telephone pole?” she asks tartly.

“We just want you to get to the top of the heap,” I reply calmly.

“That’s why I’m going to college. I never want to work in the café or the shop.”

I don’t want her to either, which is exactly what I’ve been saying. Still, there’s a part of me that hates that our family businesses—the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed—are so embarrassing to her. I try—not for the first time—to make her understand.

“The sons in the Fong family have become doctors and lawyers, but they still help out at Fong’s Buffet,” I point out. “That one boy goes to trial in the courthouse during the day. At night the judges go to the restaurant to eat. They say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ And what about that Wong boy? He went to USC, but he’s not too proud to help his father at the filling station on weekends.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me about Henry Fong. Usually you complain he’s become ‘too continental,’ because he married that girl whose family came from Scotland. And Gary Wong is only trying to make up for the fact that he broke his family’s heart by marrying a
lo fan
and moving to Long Beach so he can live a Eurasian life. I’m glad you’ve become so open-minded.”

This is how Joy’s last summer at home unfolds—with one petty argument after another. At one of our church meetings, Violet tells me she’s experiencing the same things with Leon, who’ll be going to Yale in the fall. “Sometimes he’s as unpleasant as a fish left behind the couch for too many days. Here they talk about the bird leaving the nest. Leon wants to fly away all right. He’s my son and my heart’s blood, but he doesn’t understand that a part of me wants to see him leave too. Go! Go! Take your stinkiness with you!”

“It’s our own fault,” I tell Violet on the phone another night when she calls in tears after her son complained that her accent means she will be forever labeled a foreigner and that if anyone asks where she’s from she should answer Taipei in Taiwan and not Peking in the People’s Republic of China, otherwise J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI agents might accuse her of being an undercover agent on an intelligence mission. “We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.”

May, aware of the discord in the household, offers Joy work as an extra. Joy flutters with excitement. “Mom! Please! Auntie May says if I go to work with her, then I’ll have my own money for books, food, and warm clothes.”

“We already saved enough for that.” This isn’t quite true. The extra money would be welcome, but having Joy go off with May is the last thing I want.

“You never let me have any fun,” my daughter complains.

I notice that May isn’t saying a word, just watching us, knowing that the impish Tiger will have its way in the end. So my daughter goes off with her aunt for several weeks. Every night when she comes home she treats her father and uncle with stories of her adventures on the set, but she still finds ways to criticize me. May tells me I should ignore Joy’s rebelliousness, that it’s just part of the culture these days, and that she’s only trying to fit in with American kids her age. May doesn’t understand how confused I feel. Every day I have an inner battle: I want my daughter to be patriotic and have all the opportunities that being an American will give her. At the same time, I worry that I’ve failed to teach Joy to be filial, polite, and Chinese.

Two weeks before Joy leaves for the University of Chicago, I go out to the screened porch to say good night. May’s in her bed at one end of the porch, flipping through a magazine. Joy sits on top of the covers of her bed, brushing her hair and listening to that awful Elvis Presley on her record player. The wall above her bed is covered with pictures she’s cut from magazines of Elvis and James Dean, who died last year.

“Mom,” Joy says, after I kiss her, “I’ve been thinking.”

I know by now to beware this opening.

“You always said that Auntie May was the most beautiful of the beautiful girls in Shanghai.”

“Yes,” I say, glancing at my sister, who looks up from her magazine. “All the artists loved her.”

“Well, if that’s so, why is your face always the main focus on those magazines Dad buys, you know, the ones that come from China?”

“Oh, that’s not true,” I say, but I know it is. In the four years since Father Louie bought that issue of
China Reconstructs
, Z.G. has designed another six covers in which May’s and my faces are absolutely recognizable. In the old days, artists like Z.G. used beautiful girls to advertise the luxurious life. Now artists use posters, calendars, and advertisements to communicate the Communist Party’s vision to the illiterate masses, as well as to the outside world. Scenes in boudoirs, salons, and baths have been replaced by patriotic themes: May and me with our arms outstretched as though reaching for the bright future, the two of us with kerchiefs in our hair, pushing wheelbarrows filled with rocks to help build a dam, or standing in a shallow paddy, tending rice shoots. On every cover, my face, with its rosy cheeks, and my body, with its long lines, is the central figure, while my sister takes the secondary position behind me, holding a basket into which I put vegetables, steadying my bicycle, or bending her head from the burden she carries while I gaze skyward. Always there’s some hint of Shanghai in the painting: the roll of the Whangpoo outside a factory window, the Yu Yuan Garden in the Old Chinese City for uniformed soldiers to practice their rifle drills, the glorious Bund made drab and utilitarian for marching workers. The subtle hues, romantic poses, and soft edges that Z.G. once loved have been replaced by everything outlined in black and filled with flat color—especially red, red, red.