Shanghai Girls Page 16

  He snorts. “No good. Chao-di or Pan-di is better.”

  The redness of anger creeps up my neck. This is exactly what the women on Angel Island warned us about. I feel Sam’s hand on the small of my back, but his gesture of comfort sends a ripple of anxiety along my spine and I step away from his touch.

  Sensing something’s wrong, May asks in our Wu dialect, “What’s he saying?”

  “He wants to name Joy Ask-for-a-Brother or Hope-for-a-Brother.”

  May’s eyes narrow.

  “You will not speak a secret language in my home,” Old Man Louie declares. “I need to understand everything you say.”

  “May doesn’t know Sze Yup,” I explain, but inside I reel from what he’s proposing for Joy, whose cries are shrill in the disapproving silence around her.

  “Only Sze Yup,” he says, emphasizing his point by sharply rapping the table. “If I hear the two of you speak another language—even English—then you’ll put a nickel in a jar for me. Understand?”

  He isn’t a tall or heavily built man, but he stands with his feet planted as if daring any of us to defy him. But May and I are new here, Yen-yen has edged to a wall seemingly trying to make herself invisible, Sam has barely said a word since we got off the boat, and Vernon stands to the side, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Get Pan-di dressed,” Old Man Louie orders. “The two of you brush your hair. And I want you to wear these.” He reaches into one of the deep pockets of his mandarin robe and brings out four gold wedding bracelets.

  He grabs my hand and locks a solid gold, three-inch-wide bracelet on my wrist. Then he attaches one to the other wrist, roughly pushing my mother’s jade bracelet up my arm and out of his way. While he locks May’s bracelets in place, I look at mine. They’re beautiful, traditional, and very expensive wedding bracelets. Here at last is material evidence of the wealth I expected. If May and I can find a pawnshop, then we can use the money …

  “Don’t just stand there,” Old Man Louie snaps. “Do something to make that girl stop crying. It’s time to go.” He looks at us in disgust. “Let’s get this over with.”

  WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES we’ve gone around the corner, crossed Los Angeles Street, climbed some stairs, and entered Soochow Restaurant for a combination wedding banquet and one-month party. Platters of hard-boiled eggs dyed red to represent fertility and happiness are set on a table just inside the entrance. Wedding couplets hang on the walls. Thin slices of sweet pickled ginger to symbolize the continued warming of my yin after the strain of birth are set on each table. The banquet, while not as lavish as I imagined in my romantic days in Z.G.’s studio, is still the best meal we’ve seen in months—a cold platter with jellyfish, soy-sauce chicken, and sliced kidneys, bird’s nest soup, a whole steamed fish, Peking duck, noodles, shrimp and walnuts—but May and I don’t get to eat.

  Yen-yen—carrying her new grandchild—takes us from table to table to make introductions. Almost everyone here is a Louie, and they all speak Sze Yup.

  “This is Uncle Wilburt. This is Uncle Charley. And here’s Uncle Edfred,” she says to Joy.

  These men in nearly matching suits made from cheap fabric are Sam and Vern’s brothers. Are these the names they were born with? Not possible. They’re the names they took to sound more American, just as May, Tommy, Z.G., and I took Western names to sound more sophisticated in Shanghai.

  Since May and I have been married for a while already instead of the usual wedding banter about our husbands’ coming fortitude in the bedchamber or how my sister and I are about to be plucked, the teasing revolves around Joy.

  “You cook baby fast, Pearl-ah!” Uncle Wilburt says in broken English. From the coaching book, I know he’s thirty-one, but he looks much older. “That baby many weeks early!”

  “Joy big for her age!” Edfred, who’s twenty-seven but looks a lot younger, chimes in. He’s quite emboldened by the mao tai he’s been drinking. “We can count, Pearl-ah.”

  “Sam give you son next time!” Charley adds. He’s thirty, but it’s hard to tell because his eyes are red, swollen, and watery from allergies. “You cook next baby so good he come out even earlier!”

  “You Louie men. All same!” Yen-yen scolds. “You think you count so good? You count how many days my daughters-in-law run from monkey people. You think you have hardship here? Bah! Baby lucky to be born at all! She lucky to be alive!”

  May and I pour tea for each guest and receive wedding gifts of lai see— red envelopes embossed with gold good-luck characters and filled with money that will be ours alone—and more gold in the form of earrings, pins, rings, and enough bracelets to climb our arms to our elbows. I can barely wait for us to be alone so we can count the first of our escape money and figure out how to sell our jewelry.

  Naturally, there are the predictable comments about Joy being a girl, but most people are delighted to see a baby—any baby. That’s when I realize that the majority of the guests are men, with very few wives and almost no children. What we experienced on Angel Island begins to make sense. The American government does everything possible to keep out Chinese men. It makes it even harder for Chinese women to enter the country. And in a lot of states it’s against the law for Chinese to marry Caucasians. All this ends in the desired result for the United States: with few Chinese women on American soil, sons and daughters can’t be born, saving the country from having to accept undesirable citizens of Chinese descent.

  At table after table, the men want to hold Joy. Some of them cry when they take her in their arms. They examine her fingers and toes. I can’t help it, but I fairly shine with my new status as mother. I’m happy—not in-the-stars happy but relieved happy. We survived. We made it to Los Angeles. Apart from Old Man Louie’s disappointment in Joy—and not in ten thousand years will I ever call her Pan-di—he’s arranged this celebration and we’re being welcomed. I glance at May hoping she’s feeling what I’m feeling. But my sister—even as she performs her new-bride duties—seems pensive and withdrawn. My heart tightens. How cruel all this is for her, but she didn’t push me in a wheelbarrow for miles and nurse me back to health by being weak. Somehow my little sister has found a way to keep going forward.

  I remember back on Angel Island before the baby was born talking with May about the importance of the special mother’s soup and whether or not we should ask someone to see if the chefs would make it for us. “I’ll need it to help with my bleeding,” May had decided practically, while knowing it would also bring in her milk. So May and I had shared the soup. Then, when Joy was three days old, May went to the showers and didn’t return. I left the baby with Lee-shee and went to look for my sister. My fear was great. I worried what May might do if left alone. I found her in the shower, crying not from sorrow but from the agony in her breasts. “It’s worse than when the baby came out,” she said between sobs. Yes, her womb had shrunk, and even naked she barely looked like she’d had a baby, but her breasts were swollen and hard as rocks from milk that had nowhere to go. The hot water helped, and the milk streamed out, dripping from her nipples and mingling in the water before disappearing down the drain.

  Some might say, Well, how stupid could you have been to let her eat a soup that would make her milk come in like that? But remember, we didn’t know about having babies. We didn’t know enough about the milk or how painful it would be. A few days later, when May discovered that every time the baby cried, milk would start to empty out of her breasts, she moved to a bunk at the far end of the room. “That baby cries too much,” she told the others. “How can I help my sister at night if I don’t get some sleep during the day?”

  Now I watch May pour tea for a table of lonely men and scoop up the red envelopes and tuck them in her pocket. The men do their duty by joking, teasing, and mocking her, and she does hers by putting on a smiling face.

  “Your turn next, May,” Wilburt hoots when we circle back to the uncles’ table.

  Charley appraises her up and down, and then says, �
�You small, but hips good.”

  “You give the old man the grandson he wants, you’ll become his favorite,” promises Edfred.

  Yen-yen joins in the laughter, but before we move to the next table she hands Joy to me. Then she takes May’s arm and begins to walk, rattling off several sentences in Sze Yup. “Don’t let all these men bother you. They’re lonely for their wives back home. They’re lonely for wives they don’t even have! You came here with your sister. You helped bring this baby to us. You’re a brave girl.” Yen-yen stops in the aisle and waits for me to finish translating. When I come to the end, she takes May’s hands in her own. “You can be freed from one thing, but that only puts you in a tight spot somewhere else. Understand?”

  It’s late by the time we get back to the apartment. We’re all tired, but Old Man Louie isn’t done with us.

  “Give me your jewelry,” he says.

  His demand shocks me. Wedding gold belongs to the bride alone. It’s the secret treasure she can draw on to buy herself a special treat without her husband’s criticism or use in times of emergency, as our mother did when Baba lost everything. Before I can protest, May says, “These things are ours. Everyone knows that.”

  “I think you are mistaken,” he asserts. “I’m your father-in-law. I’m the master here.” He could say he doesn’t trust us, and he’d be right. He could accuse us of wanting to use the gold to find a way out of here, and he’d be right. Instead, he adds, “Do you think you and your sister—smart and clever as you think you are with your Shanghai city ways—will know where to go tonight with that baby girl? Will you know where to go tomorrow? The blood of your father has ruined you both. This is why I can buy you for such a low price, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to lose my goods so easily.”

  May looks at me. I’m the older sister. I’m supposed to know what to do, but I’m completely confused by what we’re seeing and experiencing. Not once has anyone asked why we didn’t meet the Louies in Hong Kong on the appointed date, what we’ve been through, how we survived, or how we got to America. All Old Man Louie and Yen-yen care about is the baby and the bracelets, Vernon is in a world of his own, while Sam seems oddly removed from his family’s interactions. They appear to have no concern for us one way or the other, yet it feels as if we’ve been caught in a fisherman’s net. We can wiggle and continue to breathe, but there’s no escape that I can see. Not yet anyway.

  We let the old man take our jewelry, but he doesn’t ask for the money hidden in our lai see. Maybe he knows that would be too much. But I feel no sense of triumph, and I can see May doesn’t either. She stands in the middle of the room, looking defeated, sad, and very much alone.

  Everyone takes a turn going down the hall to the toilet. Old Man Louie and Yen-yen go to bed first. May stares at Vern, who pulls on the ends of his hair. When he leaves the room, May follows.

  “Is there a place for the baby?” I ask Sam.

  “Yen-yen prepared something. I hope—” He juts his chin and lets out his breath.

  I trail after him down the dark hall. Sam’s room has no windows. A single bare lightbulb hangs from the center of the ceiling. A bed and a dresser take up most of the space. The bottom drawer has been pulled open and packed with a soft blanket for Joy to sleep on. I lay her down and look around. I see no closet, but a corner has been draped with a piece of cloth to offer a little privacy.

  “My clothes?” I ask. “The ones your father took after we were married?”

  Sam stares at the floor. “They’re already at China City. I’ll take you there tomorrow and maybe he’ll let you have some things.”

  I don’t know what China City is. I don’t know what he means about my maybe being allowed to take my clothes, because my mind is stuck on something else altogether: I have to get in bed with the man who is my husband. Somehow in all of May’s and my planning, we didn’t think about this part. Now I stand in the room as paralyzed as May had just been.

  Even in the cramped space, Sam busies himself He opens a jar of something pungent, gets on his hands and knees, and pours it into four tin lids wedged under the bed legs. When he’s done, he sits back on his haunches, screws the jar shut, and says, “I use kerosene to keep away the bedbugs.”

  Bedbugs!

  He takes off his shirt and belt and drapes them on a hook behind the curtain. He plops on the edge of the bed and stares at the floor. After what seems a long while, he says, “I’m sorry about today.” After several more minutes, he adds, “I’m sorry about everything.”

  I remember how bold I was the night of our wedding. That person was as audacious and reckless as a woman warrior of ancient times, but that girl was defeated in a shack somewhere between Shanghai and the Grand Canal.

  “It’s too soon after the baby,” I manage to say.

  Sam looks up at me with his sad, dark eyes. Finally, he says, “I think you’ll prefer the side of the bed closest to our Joy.”

  Once he slips under the covers, I pull the string for the light, take off my shoes, and then lie down on top of the blanket. I’m grateful that Sam doesn’t try to touch me. After he falls asleep, I reach into my pockets and finger the lai see.

  WHAT’S THE FIRST impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your lai see, as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class, standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth?

  What stays with me most are the feelings of loss, unsettlement, unease, and a longing for the past that cannot be relieved. This isn’t just because my sister and I are new to this strange and foreign place. It’s as though every person in Chinatown is a refugee. No one here is a Gold Mountain man—rich beyond imagining—not even Old Man Louie. On Angel Island, I learned about his ventures and the value of his merchandise, but they mean nothing here, where everyone is poor. People lost their jobs during the Depression. Those lucky enough to have families sent them back to China, because it was cheaper to provide for them there than to feed and house them here. When the Japanese attacked, those families returned. But no new money is being made and conditions are even more cramped and unsettled than ever, or so I’m told.

  Five years ago, in 1933, most of Chinatown was torn down to make room for a new railroad station, which is being built on that huge construction site we saw when Sam brought us here on the streetcar. People were given twenty-four hours to move—far less than what May and I had when we left Shanghai—but where could they go? The law says that Chinese can’t own property and most landlords won’t rent to Chinese either, so people cram into buildings and squeeze into rooms in the last few buildings of the original Chinatown, where we live, or in the City Market Chinatown, which caters to produce growers and sellers, many blocks and a culture away from here. Everyone—including me—misses their families in China, but when I pin the photographs that May and I brought with us on my bedroom wall, Yen-yen yells at me. “You stupid girl! You want to get us in trouble? What happens if the immigration inspectors come? How are you going to explain who those people are?”

  “They’re my parents,” I say. “And that’s May and me when we were little. These things are not a secret.”

  “Everything is a secret. You see pictures of anyone here? Now take those down and hide them before I throw them away.”

  That’s my first morning, and soon I discover that, although I’m in a new land, in many ways it’s as though I’ve t
aken a giant step back in time.

  The Cantonese word for wife—fu yen—is composed of two elements. One part means woman and the other part means broom. In Shanghai, May and I had servants. Now I am the servant. Why just me? I don’t know. Maybe because I have a baby, maybe because May doesn’t understand when Yen-yen tells her to do something in Sze Yup, or maybe because May isn’t perpetually scared that we’ll be found out, that we’ll be disgraced—she for bearing a child that’s not her husband’s and I for being unable ever to have babies of my own—and that we’ll be discarded in the street. So every morning after Vern goes to his ninth-grade classes at Central Junior High and May, Sam, and the old man go to China City I stay in the apartment to scrub on a washboard sheets, stained underwear, Joy’s diapers, and the sweaty clothes of the uncles, as well as those of the bachelors who stay with us periodically. I empty the spittoon and put out extra containers for the shells of the watermelon seeds my in-laws nibble. I wash the floors and the windows.

  While Yen-yen teaches me to make soup by boiling a head of lettuce and pouring soy sauce over it or prepare lunch by taking a bowl of rice, slathering lard on top, and sprinkling on soy sauce to cover the taste, my sister goes exploring. While I shell walnuts with Yen-yen to sell to restaurants or swab the bathtub ring the old man leaves after his daily soak, my sister meets people. While my mother-in-law teaches me how to be a wife and mother—-jobs she does with a frustrating combination of ineptitude, good cheer, and fierce protectiveness—my sister learns where everything is.

  Even though Sam said he’d take me to China City—a tourist attraction that’s being built two blocks from here—I have yet to go. But May walks over there every day to help get things ready for the Grand Opening. She tells me that soon I’ll work in the café, the antiques store, the curio shop, or whatever place Old Man Louie has told her that afternoon; I listen with a kind of wariness, knowing that I don’t have a choice about where I’ll work but that I’ll be grateful not to be doing any more piecework with Yen-yen: tying scallions in bunches, separating strawberries by size and quality, shelling those damn walnuts until my fingers are stained and cracked, or—and this is truly disgusting—growing bean sprouts in the tub in between the baths the old man takes. I stay home with my mother-in-law and Joy; my sister returns at the end of every day with tales of people with names like Peanut and Dolly. At China City, she looks through our boxes of clothes. We agreed that if we were going to live in America, then we should dress like Americans, but she stubbornly brings only cheongsams. She picks the prettiest ones for herself Maybe this is as it should be. As Yen-yen says, “You’re a mother now. Your sister still has to make my boy give her a son.”