Shanghai Girls Read online

  I have to admit I love seeing how much the crew likes my sister and the way the other extras respect her. May is happy, smiling, greeting friends, reminding me of the girl she used to be back in Shanghai. And yet, as the night drags on, I see more and more things that disturb me. Yes, a man sells live chickens, but behind him a group of men squat on their haunches and gamble. In another part of the scene, men pretend to smoke opium—right on the fake street! Nearly all the men have pigtails, even though the story not only takes place after the Republic was formed but has as its background the dwarf bandits’ invasion twenty-five years later. And the women …

  I think about The Shanghai Gesture, which May, Sam, Vern, and I saw earlier this year at the Million Dollar. Josef von Sternberg, the director, had spent time in Shanghai, so we thought we might see something that would remind us of our home city, but it was just another one of those stories where a white girl was led into gambling, alcohol, and who knew what else by a dragon lady. We laughed at the movie posters, which read, “People live in Shanghai for many reasons …most of them bad.” Toward the end of my days in Shanghai, I’d thought that was true, but it still hurt to see my home city—the Paris of Asia—painted in such an evil light. We’ve seen this kind of thing in movie after movie, and now we’re in one.

  “How can you do this, May? Aren’t you ashamed?” I ask.

  She looks genuinely confused and hurt. “About what?”

  “Every single Chinese in this film is portrayed as backward,” I answer. “We’re made to giggle like idiots and show our teeth. They make us pantomime because we’re supposed to be stupid. Or they make us speak the worst sort of pidgin English—”

  “I suppose, but are you telling me this doesn’t remind you of Shanghai?” She looks at me, hopeful.

  “That’s not the point! Don’t you have any pride in the Chinese people?”

  “I don’t know why you have to complain about everything,” she replies. Her disappointment is palpable. “I brought you here so you could see what Joy and I do. Aren’t you proud of us?”

  “May—”

  “Why can’t you have a good time?” she asks. “Why can’t you take pleasure in watching Joy and me earn money? I admit we don’t make as much as those guys over there.” She points to a gaggle of fake rickshaw pullers. “I got them a guaranteed seven fifty a day for a week, so long as they kept their heads completely shaved. Not bad—”

  “Rickshaw drivers, opium smokers, and prostitutes. Is that what you want people to think we are?”

  “If by people you mean lo fan, what do I care what they think?”

  “Because these things are insulting—”

  “To whom? They aren’t slurs against us, you and me. Besides, this is just part of an evolution for us. Some people”—meaning me, I suppose—“would rather be unemployed than take a job they feel is beneath them. But a job like this gives us a start, and it’s up to us to go from here.”

  “So today those men will play rickshaw pullers and tomorrow they’ll own the studio?” I ask skeptically.

  “Of course not,” she says, finally annoyed. “All they want is a speaking role. There’s a lot of money in that, Pearl, as you know.”

  Bak Wah Tom has been enticing May with the dream of a speaking role for a couple of years now and it still hasn’t happened, although Joy has already had a few lines on different films. The bag where I keep Joy’s earnings has gotten quite fat, and she’s still a small child. In the meantime, Joy’s auntie yearns to make her own twenty dollars for a line, any line. By now she’d settle for something as simple as “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If sitting around pretending all night to be a bad woman offers such opportunity,” I say rather pointedly, “then why haven’t you gotten a speaking role?”

  “You know why! I’ve told you a thousand times! Tom says I’m too beautiful. Every time the director chooses me, the female star shoots me down. She doesn’t want my face to fight with hers because I’ll win. I know that sounds immodest, but that’s what everyone says.”

  The crew finishes positioning people and adding a few more props for the next part of the scene. The film we’re working on is a “warning” movie about the Japanese threat; if the Japanese can invade China and disrupt foreign interests, shouldn’t we all be worried? So far, from my perspective, having spent a couple of hours shooting the same street scene over and over, it has little to do with what May and I experienced on our way out of China. But when the director describes the next scene to us, my stomach tightens.

  “Bombs are going to drop,” he explains through a megaphone. “They aren’t real, but they’re going to sound real. Next the Japs are going to rush into the market. You have to run that way. You, over there with the cart, tip it over on your way out. And I want the women to scream. Scream really loud—like you think you’re going to die.”

  When the camera begins to roll, I hold Joy on my hip, give what I think is a pretty good fake scream, and run. I do it again and again and again. Even though I’d had a momentary fear that this would bring bad memories, it doesn’t. The fake bombs don’t shake the ground. My ears don’t go deaf from the concussions. No one loses their limbs. Blood doesn’t spurt. It’s all just a game and fun in the way it had been years ago when May and I used to put on plays for our parents. And May was right about Joy. She’s good at following directions, waiting between shots, and crying when the camera starts rolling, just as she was instructed.

  At two in the morning, we’re sent back to the makeup tent, where they daub fake blood on our faces and clothes. When we return to the set, some of us are positioned on the ground—legs splayed, clothes twisted and bloody, eyes unseeing. Now the dead and dying lie around us. As the Japanese soldiers advance, the rest of us are supposed to run and scream. This isn’t hard for me. I see the yellow uniforms and hear the stomp of boots. One of the extras—a peasant like me—bumps into me, and I scream. When the fake soldiers run forward with their bayonets before them, I try to get away, but I fall. Joy scrambles to her feet and continues to run, tripping over corpses, getting farther away from me, leaving me. One of the soldiers pushes me down when I try to get up. I’m paralyzed with fear. Even though the men around me have Chinese faces, even though they’re my neighbors dressed up to look like the enemy, I scream and scream and scream. I’m no longer on a movie set; I’m in a shack outside Shanghai. The director yells, “Cut.”

  May comes to my side. Her face is etched with concern. “Are you all right?” she asks as she helps me up.

  I’m still so upset that I can’t speak. I nod, and May gives me a questioning look. I don’t want to talk about what I’m feeling. I didn’t want to talk about it in China, when I woke up in the hospital, and I still don’t. I take Joy from May’s arms and hug my baby tight. I’m still shaking when the director saunters over to us.

  “That was terrific,” he says. “I could have heard you scream two blocks away. Could you do it again?” He eyes me appraisingly “Could you do it several more times?” When I don’t answer right away, he says, “There’s extra money in it for you, and the kid too. A great scream is a speaking part as far as I’m concerned, and I can always use a face like hers.”

  May’s fingers tighten on my arm.

  “So you’ll do it?” he asks.

  I push the memory of the shack out of my mind and think about my daughter’s future. I could put a little extra money aside for her this month.

  “I’ll try,” I manage to say.

  May’s fingers dig into my arm. As the director strolls back to his chair, May pulls me away from the others. “You have to let me do this,” she implores desperately under her breath. “Please, please let me do it.”

  “I’m the one who screamed,” I say. “I want to make something worthwhile come out of this night.”

  “This could be my only chance—”

  “You’re only twenty-two—”

  “I was a beautiful girl in Shanghai,” May pleads. “But this is Hollywood, and I don�
�t have much time left.”

  “We all have fears of getting older,” I say. “But I want this too. Have you forgotten I was also a beautiful girl?” When she doesn’t respond, I use the one argument I’m sure will work. “I’m the one who remembered what happened in the shack—”

  “You always use that excuse to get your way.”

  I step back, stunned by her words. “You don’t mean that.”

  “You just don’t want me to have anything of my own,” she says forlornly.

  How can she possibly say that when I’ve sacrificed so much for her? My resentment has grown over the years, but it has never stopped me from giving May everything she wants.

  “You’re always being given opportunities,” May continues, her voice gathering strength.

  Now I understand what’s happening. If she can’t have her way, she’s going to fight me. But I’m not going to give in so easily this time.

  “What opportunities?”

  “Mama and Baba sent you to college—”

  That’s going way back in time, but I say, “You didn’t want to go.”

  “Everyone likes you more than they like me.”

  “That’s ridiculous—”

  “Even my own husband prefers you to me. He’s always nice to you.”

  What’s the point in arguing with May? Our disagreements have always been about the same things: our parents liked one or the other of us more, one of us has something better—whether it’s a better flavor ice cream, a prettier pair of shoes, or a more companionable husband—or one of us wants to do something at the expense of the other.

  “I can scream just as well as you,” May persists. “I’m asking again. Please let me do it.”

  “What about Joy?” I ask softly, attacking my sister’s vulnerable spot. “You know Sam and I are saving for her to go to college one day.”

  “That’s fifteen years away, and you’re assuming an American college will take Joy—a Chinese girl.” My sister’s eyes, which earlier tonight had sparkled with pleasure and pride, suddenly glare at me. For an instant I’m thrown back in time to our kitchen in Shanghai when Cook tried to teach us how to make dumplings. It had started out as something fun for May and me to do and had ended in a terrible fight. Now, all these years later, what was supposed to be an enjoyable outing has turned bitter. When I look at May, I see not just jealousy but hate. “Let me have this part,” she says. “I earned it.”

  I think about how she works for Tom Gubbins, how she doesn’t have to stay confined in one of the Golden enterprises all day, how she gets to come to sets like these with my daughter and be out of Chinatown and China City for a while.

  “May—”

  “If you’re going to start in with all your grudges against me, I don’t want to hear them. You refuse to see how lucky you are. Don’t you know how jealous I am? I can’t help it. You have everything. You have a husband who loves you and talks to you. You have a daughter.”

  There! She said it. My reply comes out of my mouth so fast, I don’t have a chance to think about it or stop it.

  “Then why is it that you spend more time with her than I do?” As I speak, I’m reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

  “Joy prefers being with me because I hug and kiss her, because I hold her hand, because I let her sit on my lap,” May snaps back.

  “That’s not the Chinese way to raise a child. Touching like that—”

  “You didn’t believe that when we lived with Mama and Baba,” May says.

  “True, but I’m a mother now and I don’t want Joy to grow up to be porcelain with scars.”

  “Being hugged by her mother won’t cause her to become a loose woman—”

  “Don’t tell me how to raise my daughter!” At the sharp tone in my voice, some of the extras peer at us curiously.

  “You won’t let me have anything, but Baba promised that if we agreed to our marriages I would get to go to Haolaiwu.”

  That’s not how I remember it. And she’s changing the subject. And she’s confusing things.

  “This is about Joy,” I say, “not your silly dreams.”

  “Oh? A few minutes ago you were accusing me of embarrassing the Chinese people. Now you’re saying it’s bad for me but fine if you and Joy do it?”

  This is a problem for me and one I don’t know how to reconcile in my mind. I’m not thinking properly, but I don’t think my sister is either.

  “You have everything,” May repeats as she begins to weep. “I have nothing. Can’t you let me have this one thing? Please? Please?”

  I shut my mouth and let the heat of my anger burn my skin. I refuse to believe or acknowledge any of her reasons for why she—and not I—should have this part in the movie, but then I do what I’ve always done. I give in to my moy moy. It’s the only way for her jealousy to dissipate. It’s the only way for my resentment to go back to its hiding place while giving me time to think about how to get Joy out of this business without creating more friction. May and I are sisters. We’ll always fight, but we’ll always make up as well. That’s what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other’s frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we’ve had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.

  May takes my daughter and my place in the scene. The director doesn’t notice that my sister isn’t me. To him, it seems one Chinese woman dressed in black trousers, smeared with fake mud and blood, and carrying a little girl is interchangeable with the next. For the next few hours, I listen to my sister scream again and again. The director’s never satisfied, but he doesn’t replace May either.

  Snapshots

  ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, three months after my night on the film set, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war. The very next day, the Japanese attack Hong Kong. On Christmas Day, the British surrender the island. Also on December 8, at precisely 10:00 A.M., the Japanese seize the International Settlement in Shanghai and raise their flag atop the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the Bund. During the next four years, foreigners imprudent enough to have remained in Shanghai live in internment camps, while in this country, the Angel Island Immigration Station is turned over to the U.S. Army to house Japanese, Italian, and German prisoners of war. Here in Chinatown, Uncle Edfred—without giving any of us a chance to weigh in—joins the first group of men to enlist.

  “What! Why would you do that?” Uncle Wilburt demands in Sze Yup when his birth son announces the news.

  “Because I feel patriotic!” comes Uncle Edfred’s jubilant answer. “I want to fight! Number one reason: I want to help defeat our shared enemy—the Jap. Number two reason: If I enlist, I can become a citizen. A real citizen. Down the line, of course.” If he lives, the rest of us think. “All the laundrymen are doing it,” he adds when he sees our lack of enthusiasm.

  “Laundrymen! Bah! Some people will do anything not to be laundrymen.” Uncle Wilburt sucks air through his teeth in worry.

  “What did you do when they asked about your citizenship status?” This comes from Sam, who’s always anxious that one of us will be caught and we’ll all be sent back to China. “You’re a paper son. Are they going to come looking for the rest of us?”

  “I admitted my status straight out. I told them I came over on fake papers,” Edfred answers. “But they didn’t seem too interested. When they asked anything that I thought might come back to the rest of you, I said, ‘I’m an orphan. Now do you want me to fight or not?’”

  “But aren’t you too old?” Uncle Charley asks.

  “On paper I’m thirty, but I’m really only twenty-three. I’m fit and I’m willing to die. Why wouldn’t they take me?”

  A few days later, Edfred enters the café and announces, “The Army told me to buy my own socks. Where do I do that?” He’s lived in Los Angeles for seventeen years, but he still doesn’t know where or how to get even the most b
asic necessities. I offer to take him to the May Company, but he says, “I need to go by myself. I’ve got to learn to be on my own now.” He returns a couple of hours later scraped up and with holes in the knees of his baggy pants. “I bought the socks all right, but when I left the store, some men pushed me in the street. They thought I was a Jap.”

  While Edfred is at boot camp, Father Louie and I go through the store to check each item, removing stickers that say MADE IN JAPAN and replacing them with new stickers that read 100% CHINESE PRODUCT. He starts to buy curios made in Mexico, which puts us in direct competition with the merchants on Olvera Street. Oddly, our customers don’t seem to notice the difference between something made in China, Japan, or Mexico. It’s foreign, simple as that.

  We too are forever foreign, which makes us suspect. The family associations in Chinatown print up signs that read CHINA: YOUR ALLY for us to hang in the windows of our businesses, homes, and automobiles to announce that we aren’t Japanese. They make armbands and badges, which we wear to make sure we aren’t attacked in the street or rounded up, stuck on a train, and sent to one of the internment camps. The government, aware that most Occidentals think all Orientals look alike, issues special registration certificates that verify that we’re “members of the Chinese Race.” None of us can let down our guard.

  But when Edfred comes to Los Angeles to visit after his military training, people salute him on the street. “When I wear my uniform, I know I’m not going to be kicked around. It tells folks I have as much right to be here as anyone else,” he explains. “Now I have number three reason: in the Army I’m getting a fair chance—one that’s based not on my being Chinese but on my being a man in uniform fighting for the United States.”

  That day I buy a camera and take my first photograph. I still keep my photographs of Mama and Baba hidden for when the immigration inspectors make their periodic checks, but seeing Uncle Edfred go to war is different. He’ll be fighting for America … and for China. The next time the inspectors come, I’ll proudly show my snapshot of Uncle Edfred, forever China-skinny dressed in his uniform, beaming at the camera, his cap tilted at a jaunty angle, and having just told us, “From now on, just call me Fred. No more Edfred. Got it?”