Shanghai Girls Read online

  Out of options, we go to the Dollar Steamship Line office, exchange our original tickets, and procure spots in special second class on the President Coolidge for the twenty-day voyage to San Francisco. We don’t think about what will happen once we get there, finding our husbands, or anything like that. We’re just trying to stay out of the Green Gang’s net and stay ahead of the Japanese.

  ON THE SHIP, my fever comes back. I stay in our cabin and sleep for most of the journey. May’s plagued with seasickness, so she spends most of her time outside in the fresh air on the second-class deck. She speaks of a young man who’s going to Princeton to study.

  “He’s in first class, but he comes to our deck to see me. We walk and talk, and walk and talk some more,” she reports. “I’ve fallen for him like a ton of bricks.” It’s the first time I’ve heard the American phrase, and it strikes me as odd. This boy must be very Westernized. No wonder May likes him.

  Sometimes May doesn’t come back to the room until very late at night. Sometimes she climbs to the top bunk and goes right to sleep, but sometimes she crawls into the narrow bed with me and wraps her arms around me. She matches her breathing to mine and falls asleep. I lie awake then, afraid to move out of fear of waking her, and worrying, worrying, worrying. May seems very smitten with this boy, and I wonder if she’s doing the husband-wife thing with him. But how could she when she’s so seasick? How could she, period? And then my thoughts spiral to even darker places.

  Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it’s just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we’ve been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we’re on, wherever it takes us.

  Shadows on the Walls

  THE NIGHT BEFORE we land, I pull out the coaching book Sam gave me and leaf through it. The book says that Old Man Louie was born in America and that Sam, one of five brothers, was born in China in 1913, the Year of the Ox, during one of his parents’ visits to their home village of Wah Hong, which makes him an American citizen because he was born to one. (He’d have to be an Ox, I think dismissively. Mama said that those born under this sign lack imagination and are forever pulling the burdens of the world.) Sam went back to Los Angeles with his parents, but in 1920, the old man and his wife decided to go China again and then leave their son, only seven years old, in Wah Hong with his paternal grandparents. (This is something different from what I’d been led to believe. I had thought Sam came to China with his father and brother to find a bride, but he was already there. I suppose this explains why he spoke to me in the Sze Yup dialect instead of English on the three occasions we met, but why hadn’t the Louies told us any of that?) Now Sam has returned to America for the first time in seventeen years. Vern was born in Los Angeles in 1923, the Year of the Boar, and has lived there all his life. The other brothers were born in 1907, 1908, and 1911—all of them born in Wah Hong, all of them now living in Los Angeles. I do my best to memorize the tiny details—the various birth dates, the addresses in Wah Hong and Los Angeles, and the like—tell May the things I think are important, then put the rest out of my mind.

  The next morning, November 15, we get up early and put on our best Western-style dresses. “We’re guests in this country,” I say. “We should look like we belong.” May agrees, and she slips into a dress that Madame Garnet made for her a year ago. How is it that the silk and buttons made it all the way here without being soiled or ruined, while I…? I have to stop thinking that way.

  We gather our things and give our two bags to the porter. Then May and I go outside and find a spot by the rail, but we can’t see much in the rain. Above us, the Golden Gate Bridge is draped in clouds. To our right, the city perches on the shore—wet, dreary, and insignificant compared with Shanghai’s Bund. Below us on the open-air steerage deck, what seems like hundreds of coolies, rickshaw pullers, and peasants push and shove against one another in a writhing mass, the smell of their wet and stinking clothes wafting up to us.

  The ship docks at a pier. Little family groups from first and second class—laughing, jostling, and happy to have arrived—show their papers and then walk down a gangplank covered to protect them from the rain. When our turn comes, we hold out our papers. The inspector looks them over, frowns, and motions to a crew member.

  “These two need to go to the Angel Island Immigration Station,” he says.

  We follow the crewman through the corridors of the ship and down flights of stairs to where the air is dank. I’m relieved when we step outside again until I see that we’re now with the steerage passengers. Naturally, no umbrellas or awnings cover this deck. Cold wind blows rain into our faces and soaks our clothes.

  Around us people frantically pore over their coaching books. Then the man next to us tears a page from his book, stuffs it in his mouth, chews for a bit, and swallows it. I hear someone else say that he dropped his book into the waves the night before and another boast that he threw his into the latrine. “Good luck to anyone who wants to look for it now!” Anxiety clenches my stomach. Was I supposed to get rid of the book? Sam didn’t tell me that. Now I have no way to get to it, because it’s tucked in my hat in our luggage. I take a deep breath and try to reassure myself We have nothing to be afraid of. We’re out of China, away from the war, and in the land of the free and all that.

  May and I elbow our way through the smelly laborers to the railing. Couldn’t they have washed before we landed? What kind of an impression do they want to give our hosts? May has something else on her mind altogether. She watches the people still filing off the first-and second-class decks, searching for the young man she’s been spending time with on the voyage. She grips my arm excitedly when she sees him.

  “There he is! That’s Spencer.” She raises her voice and calls. “Spencer! Spencer! Look up here! Can you help us?”

  She waves and calls a few more times, but he doesn’t turn to look for her standing at the rail of the third-class deck. Her face tightens as he tips the porters and then strolls with a group of Caucasian passengers into a building to the right.

  From deep within the ship, cargo is brought up in big netted bundles and deposited on the pier. From there, most of the cargo goes straight on to the customshouse. Pretty soon, we see those same crates and boxes leave customs and get loaded onto trucks. Duties have been paid and the goods go on their way to new destinations, but we continue to wait in the rain.

  Some crewmen hoist another gangplank—this one with no protection from the weather—onto the lower deck, where we are. A lo fan in a slicker bounds up the gangplank and climbs onto a crate. “Take everything you brought with you,” he shouts in English. “Anything you leave will be thrown away.”

  People around us mumble, confused.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “Be quiet. I can’t hear.”

  “Hurry up!” the man in the slicker demands. “Chop! Chop!”

  “Do you understand him?” a soaked and shivering man next to me asks. “What does he want us to do?”

  “Take your belongings and get off the boat.”

  As we begin doing what we’re told, the man in the slicker puts his balled fists on his hips and yells, “And stay together!”

  We disembark, with everyone pushing against one another as though it’s the most important thing in the world to be the first off the ship. When our feet touch ground, we’re marched not into the building to the right, where the other passengers went, but to the left, along the pier, and then across a tiny gangplank and onto a small boat—all without explanation. Once on board, I see that, although there are a few Caucasians and even a handful of Japanese, almost everyone here is Chinese.

  The lines are let go, and we pull back into the bay.

  “Where are we going now?” May asks.

  How can
May be so disconnected from what’s happening around us? Why can’t she pay attention? Why couldn’t she have read the coaching book? Why can’t she accept what’s become of us? That Princeton student, whatever his name is, understood her position perfectly, but May refuses to consider it.

  “We’re going to the Angel Island Immigration Station,” I explain.

  “Oh,” she says lightly. “All right.”

  The rain gets heavier and the wind colder. The little boat bobs in the waves. People throw up. May hangs her head over the rail and gulps in wet air. We pass an island in the middle of the bay, and for a few minutes it looks like we’re going to chug back under the Golden Gate Bridge, out to sea, and return to China. May moans and tries to stay focused on the horizon. Then the boat veers to the right, curves around another island and into a small inlet, where it pulls up to a wharf at the end of a long dock. Low-slung white wooden buildings nestle on the hillside. Ahead, four stubby palm trees shiver in the wind and the wet flag of the United States slaps noisily against its pole. A large sign reads NO SMOKING. Again everyone pushes to be first off the boat.

  “Whites without satisfactory paperwork first!” that same man in the slicker shouts, as though his higher decibels will somehow make the people who don’t understand English suddenly fluent, but of course most of the Chinese don’t know what he’s saying. The white passengers are pulled out of the line and brought forward, while a couple of squat and very solid guards push away the Chinese who’ve made the mistake of standing at the front of the line. But these lo fan don’t understand much of what the man in the slicker is saying either. They are, I realize, White Russians. They’re lower than the poorest Shanghainese, and yet they’re given special treatment! They’re led off the boat and escorted into the building. What happens next is even more shocking. The Japanese and Koreans are grouped together and politely led to a different door in the building. “We’re ready for you now,” the man in the slicker instructs. “When you get off the boat, line up in two lines. Men on the left. Women and children under twelve on the right.”

  There’s a lot of confusion and a lot of manhandling by the guards, but once they line us up the way they want, we’re led in the driving rain along the dock to the Administration Building. When the men are sent through one door and the women and children through another—separating husbands from wives and fathers from families—cries of consternation, fright, and worry fill the air. None of the guards shows any sympathy. We are treated more poorly than the cargo that traveled with us.

  The separation of Europeans (meaning all whites), Asiatics (meaning anyone from across the Pacific who isn’t Chinese), and Chinese continues as we’re marched up a steep hill to a medical facility in one of the wooden buildings. A white woman wearing a white uniform and a starched white cap folds her hands in front of her and begins speaking in English in that same loud voice that’s somehow supposed to make up for the fact that no one except May and I understands what she’s saying.

  “Many of you are trying to enter our country with loathsome and dangerous parasitic diseases,” she says. “This is unacceptable. The doctors and I are going to check you for trachoma, hookworm, filariasis, and liver fluke.”

  The women around us start to cry. They don’t know what this woman wants, but she’s wearing white—the color of death. A Chinese woman in a long white (again!) cheongsam is brought in to translate. I’ve been moderately calm up to now, but as I listen to what these people plan to do to us, I start to tremble. We’re to be picked over like rice being prepared for cooking. When we’re told to undress, murmurs of distress ripple through the room. Not so long ago I would have snickered with May about the other women’s prudishness, because we hadn’t been like most Chinese women. We’d been beautiful girls. Good or bad, we’d shown our bodies. But most Chinese women are very private, never exposing themselves publicly and rarely even in private before their husbands or even their daughters.

  But whatever looseness I had in the past has disappeared for good. I can’t bear to be unclothed. I can’t stand to be touched. I cling to May, and she steadies me. Even when the nurse tries to separate us, May stays with me. I bite my lips to keep from screaming when the doctor approaches. I look over his shoulder and out the window. I’m afraid that if I close my eyes I’ll be back in that shack with those men, hearing Mama’s screams, feeling… I keep my eyes wide open. Everything’s white and clean … well, cleaner than my memories of the shack. I pretend I don’t feel the icy chill of the doctor’s instruments or the white softness of his hands on my flesh; I stare out across the bay. We face away from San Francisco now, and all I see is gray water disappearing into gray rain.

  Land has to be out there, but I have no idea how far it is. Once he’s done with me, I allow myself to breathe again.

  One by one, the doctor makes his examinations while we all wait—shivering from cold and fear—until everyone has given a stool sample. So far we’ve been separated from other races, then men separated from women, and now we women are separated yet again: one group to go to the dormitory, one to stay in the hospital for treatment for hookworm, which can be cured, and one for those with liver fluke, to be instantly and without appeal deported back to China. Now the tears really flow.

  May and I are in the group that goes to the women’s dormitory on the second floor of the Administration Building. Once we’re inside, the door is locked behind us. Rows of bunks two across and three high are connected to one another by iron poles attached to the ceiling and floor. There are no “beds” to sleep on, just wire mesh. This means that the frames can be folded up to create more space in the room, but apparently no one wants to sit on the floor. The distance between bunks is barely eighteen inches. The vertical gaps between the bunks are so tight that at first glance I can see I won’t be able to extend my arm without hitting the one above. Only the top bunk has enough space to sit upright, but that area is cluttered with drying laundry of the women already here, which hangs on strings tied between the poles at the ends of the bunks. On the floor beneath each occupied tier of bunks are a few tin bowls and cups.

  May leaves my side and hurries down the center aisle. She claims two top bunks next to each other near the radiator. She climbs up, lies down, and promptly goes to sleep. No one brings our luggage. All we have with us are the clothes we’re wearing and our handbags.

  THE NEXT MORNING May and I straighten up as best we can. The guards tell us we’re going to a hearing before the Board of Special Inquiry, but the women in the dormitory call it an interrogation. Just the word sounds ominous. One of the women suggests we sip cold water to calm our fear, but I’m not afraid. We have nothing to hide, and this is just a formality.

  We’re herded with a small group of women into a room that looks like a cage. We sit on benches and stare at one another pensively. We Chinese have a phrase—eating bitterness. I tell myself that, whatever happens with our hearings, it won’t be as bad as the physical inspection, and it can’t be as bad as what has happened to May and me day after day since the moment Baba announced he had arranged marriages for us.

  “Tell them what I told you to say and everything will be fine,” I whisper to May as we wait in the cage. “Then we’ll be able to leave this place.”

  She nods thoughtfully. When the guard calls her name, I watch her enter a room and the door close. A moment later, the same guard motions me to another room. I put on a false smile, straighten my dress, and stride in with what I hope is an air of confidence. Two white men—one nearly bald, one with a mustache, and both wearing glasses—sit behind a table in the windowless room. They don’t return my smile. At a table set to the side, another white man busily cleans the keys on his typewriter. A Chinese man in an ill-fitting Western-style suit studies a file in his hands, looks at me and then back at the file.

  “I see you were born in Yin Bo Village,” he says to me in Sze Yup as he passes the file to the bald man. “I am happy to speak to you in the dialect of the Four Districts.”


  Before I can say that I know English, the bald man says, “Tell her to sit down.”

  The interpreter motions to a chair. “I am Louie Fon,” he goes on in Sze Yup. “Your husband and I share the same clan name and the same home district.” He sits to my left. “The bald one before you is Chairman Plumb. The other one is Mr. White. The recorder is Mr. Hemstreet. You don’t have to concern yourself with him—”

  “Let’s get on with it,” Chairman Plumb cuts in. “Ask her …”

  Things go well at first. I know the date and year of my birth in both the Western and the lunar calendars. They ask the name of the village where I was born. Then I name the village where Sam was born and the day we were married. I recite the address where Sam and his family live in Los Angeles. And then …

  “How many trees are in front of your alleged husband’s home in his village?”

  When I don’t answer right away, four sets of eyes stare at me—curious, bored, triumphant, snide.

  “Five trees stand before the house,” I answer, remembering what I read in the coaching book. “The right side of the house has no trees. A ginkgo tree grows on the left.”

  “And how many rooms are in the house where your natal family lives?”

  I’ve been so focused on the answers from Sam’s coaching book that I haven’t considered they’d ask anything so detailed about me. I try to think what the right answer would be. Count the bathrooms or not? Count before or after the rooms were divided for our boarders?

  “Six main rooms—”

  Before I can explain myself, they ask how many guests were at my “alleged” wedding.

  “Seven,” I answer.

  “Did you and your guests have anything to eat?”

  “We had rice and eight dishes. It was a hotel dinner, not a banquet.”

  “How was the table set?”