Shanghai Girls Page 25

  What the photo doesn’t show is my father-in-law, standing a few feet away, looking devastated and scared. My feelings about him have changed the past few years. He has almost nothing here in Los Angeles: he’s a third-class citizen, he faces the same discrimination we all do, and he will never break out of Chinatown. Now his adopted country, America, is also fighting Japan. Since the commercial shipping channels are closed, he no longer receives goods from his rattan and porcelain factories in Shanghai or earns money from bringing in paper partners, but he continues to send “tea money” back to his relatives in Wah Hong Village, not only because an American dollar goes a long way in China but because his longing for his home country has never diminished. Yen-yen, Vern, Sam, May, and I have no one to send money to, so Father Louie’s remittances are from all of us—for all the villages, homes, and families we’ve lost.

  “THOSE WHO CAN’T fight need to produce,” Uncle Charley tells us one day. “You know the Lee boys? They’ve gone over to Lockheed to build airplanes. They say there’s a place for me, and it’s not making chop suey They say every blow I strike in building planes is a blow of freedom for the land of our fathers and for the land of our new home.”

  “But your English—”

  “No one cares about my English as long as I work hard,” he says. “You know, Pearl, you could get a job over there too. The Lee boys took their sisters to work with them. Now Esther and Bernice are driving rivets in bomber doors. You want to know how much money they’re making? Sixty cents an hour during the day and sixty-five cents an hour for the night shift. You want to know what I’m going to make?” He rubs his eyes, which look particularly painful and swollen from his allergies.

  “Eighty-five cents an hour. That’s thirty-four dollars a week. I tell you, Pearl-ah, those are good wages.”

  My photograph shows Uncle Charley sitting at the counter, his sleeves rolled up, a piece of pie in front of him, his apron and paper hat discarded on a vacant stool.

  “WHAT CAN MY boy do for the war?” my father-in-law asks when Vern, who graduated the previous June from high school, where they didn’t want him and didn’t bother to educate him, receives his draft notice. “He’s better off at home. Sam, go with him and make sure they understand.”

  “I’ll take him,” Sam says, “but I’m going to enlist. I want to become a real citizen too.”

  Father Louie doesn’t try to change Sam’s mind. Citizenship is one thing and the risks of being questioned can affect many people, but we all know what this war is about. I’m proud of Sam, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried. When Sam and Vern return to the apartment, I know things didn’t go well. Vern was turned down for obvious reasons, but, surprisingly, Sam was classified 4-F.

  “Flat feet, and yet I pulled a rickshaw through the streets and alleyways of Shanghai,” he complains to me when we’re alone in our room. Once again, he’s been belittled and dismissed as a man. In so many ways, he continues to eat bitterness.

  Not long after this, May picks up the camera and takes a photograph. In it, you can see how much the apartment has changed since May, Joy, and I first arrived. Bamboo shades are rolled above the windows, but we can let them down for privacy. On the wall above the couch hang four calendars depicting the four seasons that we received over four years from Wong On Lung Market. Old Man Louie sits on a straight-backed chair, looking cocooned and solemn. Sam gazes out the window. His posture is erect and held up by his iron fan, but his face looks as though he’s been punched. Vern—content in the womb of his family—sprawls on the couch, holding a model airplane. I sit on the floor, painting a banner advertising the sale of war bonds in China City and New Chinatown. Joy hovers nearby, building a ball of rubber bands. Yen-yen scrunches used tinfoil into compact lumps. Later that day we plan to take these things over to Belmont High School and deposit them in the collection boxes.

  To me, this photograph shows how we sacrifice in big and small ways. We can finally afford to buy a washing machine, but we don’t because metal is so scarce. We promote the boycott of Japanese silk stockings and wear cotton stockings instead, using the motto “Be in style, wear lisle,” and, sure enough, women all over the city join the Non-Silk Movement. Everyone suffers from shortages of coffee, beef, sugar, flour, and milk, but in the café and in Chinese restaurants all over the city, we suffer even more because ingredients like rice, ginger, tree-ear mushrooms, and soy sauce no longer cross the Pacific. We learn to substitute sliced apple for water chestnuts. We buy rice grown in Texas instead of fragrant jasmine rice from China. We use oleo, squirt yellow food coloring in it, knead it, and press it into bar-shaped molds so it will look like butter when we cut it into pats for the café. Sam gets eggs on the black market, paying five dollars for a case. We save our bacon grease in a coffee can under the sink to take to the collection center, where we’re told it will be used in the production of armaments. I stop feeling resentful that I have to spend so much time stringing peas and peeling garlic in the restaurant, because now we’re serving our boys in uniform and we need to do everything we can for them. And at home we begin to eat American dishes—pork and beans, grilled Spam sandwiches with cheese and sliced onion, creamed tuna, and casseroles made with Bisquick—that will spread our ingredients the furthest.

  SNAP: THE CHINESE New Year Fund-raiser. Snap: Double-ten Fundraiser. Snap: China Night, with your favorite movie stars. Snap: the Rice Bowl Parade, where the women of Chinatown carry a gigantic Chinese flag by its edges and ask bystanders to throw coins onto the flag. Snap: the Moon Festival, where Anna May Wong and Keye Luke serve as the mistress and master of ceremonies. Barbara Stanwyck, Dick Powell, Judy Garland, Kay Kyser, and Laurel and Hardy wave to the crowd. William Holden and Raymond Massey stand around, looking debonair, while the girls in the Mei Wah Drum Corps march in their V for Victory formation. The monies raised buy medical supplies, mosquito nets, gas masks, and other necessities for refugees, as well as ambulances and airplanes, which are sent across the Pacific.

  Snap: the Chinatown Canteen. May poses with soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, who leave Union Station during their layovers, cross Alameda, and visit the canteen. These boys have come from all over the country.

  Many of them have never seen a Chinese before, and they say things like “golly” and “gee whillikers,” which we adopt and use ourselves. Snap: I’m surrounded by airmen sent by Chiang Kai-shek to train in Los Angeles. It’s wonderful to hear their voices, learn news of our home country, and know that China still fights hard. Snap, snap, snap: Bob Hope, Frances Langford, and Jerry Colonna come to the canteen to put on shows. Girls between sixteen and eighteen years old—wearing white pinafores, red blouses, and saddle shoes with red socks—volunteer as hostesses to jitterbug with the boys, hand out sandwiches, and listen with sympathetic ears.

  My favorite photograph shows May and me chaperoning at the canteen just before closing time on a Saturday night. We wear gardenias pinned in our hair, which falls in soft curls around our shoulders. Our sweetheart necklines show a lot of pale flesh but somehow look girlish and chaste. Our dresses are short, and our legs are bare. We may be married women, but we look pretty and cheerful. May and I know what it means to live through war, and being in Los Angeles isn’t that.

  OVER THE NEXT fifteen months, many people pass through the city: servicemen going to or coming from the Pacific Theater, wives and children journeying to see husbands and fathers in military hospitals, and diplomats, actors, and salesmen of every sort involved in the war effort. I never think I’ll see someone I know, but one day in the café a man’s voice calls my name.

  “Pearl Chin? Is that you?”

  I stare at the man sitting at the counter. I know him, but my eyes refuse to recognize him because my humiliation is instantaneous and deep.

  “Aren’t you the Pearl Chin who used to live in Shanghai? You knew my daughter, Betsy.”

  I set down his plate of chow mein, turn away, and wipe my hands. If this man truly is Betsy’s father—and he is—he’s
the first and only person from my past to see just how far I’ve fallen. I was once a beautiful girl, whose face decorated walls in Shanghai. I was smart and clever enough to be allowed into this man’s home. I turned his daughter from a dowdy mess into someone half fashionable. Now I’m mother to a five-year-old, wife to a rickshaw puller, and waitress in a café in a tourist attraction. I paste a smile on my face and turn to look at him.

  “Mr. Howell, it’s wonderful to see you again.”

  But he doesn’t look so happy to see me. He looks sad and old. I may be humbled, but his grief is elsewhere.

  “We came looking for you.” He reaches across the counter and grabs my arm. “We thought you were dead in one of the bombings, but here you are.”

  “Betsy?”

  “She’s in a Jap camp out by the Lunghua Pagoda.”

  A memory of flying kites with Z.G. and May flashes through my mind, but I say, “I thought most Americans left Shanghai before—”

  “She got married,” Mr. Howell says sadly. “Did you know that? She married a young man who works for Standard Oil. They stayed in Shanghai after Mrs. Howell and I left. The oil business, you know how it is.”

  I come around the counter and sit on the stool next to Mr. Howell, aware of the curious looks Sam, Uncle Wilburt, and the other café helpers shoot my way. I wish they’d stop staring at us like that—their mouths hanging open like they’re street beggars—but Betsy’s father doesn’t notice. I want to say my feeling of disgrace is hard to find, but I’m ashamed to admit it’s hidden just beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve been in this country for almost five years and still haven’t been fully able to accept my situation. It’s as if in seeing this face from the past all the goodness in my life is reduced to nothing.

  Betsy’s father probably still works for the State Department, so maybe he’s aware of my discomfort. At last he fills the silence between us. “We heard from Betsy after Shanghai became the Lonely Island. We thought she was safe, since she was in British territory. But after December eighth, there was nothing we could do to get her back. Diplomatic channels don’t work so well now.” He stares into his cup of coffee and smiles ruefully.

  “She’s strong,” I say, trying to bolster Mr. Howell’s spirits. “Betsy’s always been smart and brave.” Is that even true? I remember her as being passionate about politics when May and I just wanted to have another glass of champagne or another twirl around the dance floor.

  “That’s what Mrs. Howell and I tell ourselves.”

  “All you can do is hope.”

  He lets out a knowledgeable snort. “That’s so like you, Pearl. Always looking at the bright side. That’s why you did so well in Shanghai. That’s why you got out before bad things happened. All the smart people got out in time.”

  When I don’t say anything, he stares at me. After a long while, he says, “I’m here for Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit. I’ve been traveling with her on her American tour. Last week we were in Washington, where she appealed to Congress for money to help China in its fight against our common enemy and reminded the men who listened that China and the United States cannot be true allies with the Exclusion Act still on the books. This week she’s going to speak at the Hollywood Bowl and—”

  “Participate in a parade here in Chinatown.”

  “It sounds like you know all about it.”

  “I’m going to the Bowl,” I say. “We’re all going, and we’re looking forward to having her here.”

  Hearing the word we, for the first time he seems to absorb his surroundings. I watch as his cheerless eyes see past his memories of a girl who perhaps never existed. He takes in the grease on my clothes, the tiny wrinkles around my eyes, and my chapped hands. Then his understanding expands as he assesses the smallness of the café, the walls painted baby-shit yellow, the dusty fan spinning overhead, and the wiry men wearing ME NO JAP armbands gawking at him as though he were a creature from beneath the waves.

  “Mrs. Howell and I live in Washington now,” he says carefully. “Betsy would be angry with me if I didn’t invite you to come home with me. I could get you a job. With your language skills, there’s a lot you could do to help the war effort.”

  “My sister’s here with me,” I respond, without thinking.

  “Bring May too. We have room.” He pushes away his plate of chow mein. “I hate to think of you here. You look…”

  It’s funny how in that moment I see things clearly. Am I beaten down? Yes. Have I allowed myself to become a victim? Somewhat. Am I afraid? Always. Does some part of me still long to fly away from this place? Absolutely. But I can’t leave. Sam and I have built a life for Joy. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a life. My family’s happiness means more to me than starting over again.

  If in the canteen photos I’m smiling, the one from this day shows me at my worst. Mr. Howell—wearing an overcoat and a fedora—and I are posed next to the cash register, onto which I’ve taped a handmade sign that reads: ANY RESEMBLANCE TO LOOKING JAPANESE IS PURELY OCCIDENTAL. Usually our customers get a big kick out of that, but no one’s showing teeth in the photograph. Even though it’s in black and white, I can almost see the redness of shame on my cheeks.

  A FEW DAYS later, the whole family gets on a bus and rides to the Hollywood Bowl. Because Yen-yen and I have worked so hard raising money for China Relief, our family has good seats just behind the fountain that separates the stage from the audience. When Madame Chiang steps on the stage wearing a brocade cheongsam, we applaud like crazy people. She’s splendid and beautiful.

  “I implore the women here today to become educated and take an interest in politics both here and in the home country,” she proclaims. “You can churn the wheel of progress without jeopardizing your roles as wives and mothers.”

  We listen attentively as she asks us and the Americans to help raise money and support for the Women’s New Life Movement, but the whole time she speaks we ooh and aah over her appearance. My thoughts about my clothes change once again. I see that the cheongsam, which I’ve had to wear to please the tourists in China City and meet Mrs. Sterling’s lease requirements, can be a patriotic, and fashionable, symbol.

  When May and I go home, we bring our most precious cheongsams out of their chests and put them on. Inspired by Madame Chiang, we want to be as stylish and as loyal to China as possible. Instantly, we’re once again beautiful girls. Sam takes our picture, and for a moment it feels as though we’re back in Z.G.’s studio. But why, I wonder later, didn’t we ask Sam to take a photograph of Yen-yen and me when we were invited to shake Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s hand?

  TOM GUBBINS RETIRES and sells his business to Father Louie. It becomes the Golden Prop and Extras Company. Father Louie puts May in charge, even though she doesn’t know beans about running a business. She now earns as much as $150 a week as a technical director, supplying extras, costumes, props, translation, and advice. She continues to work in countless films, which are now sent around the world and viewed by millions of people to show how bad the Japanese are. Her parts are small: a hapless Chinese maiden, a servant to some colonel or other, a villager being saved by white missionaries. But May is best known for her screaming roles, and, with the war on, she’s played victim after victim in films like Behind the Rising Sun, Bombs over Burma, The Amazing Mrs. Holliday, in which an American woman tries to smuggle Chinese war orphans into the United States, and China, with its tagline, “Alan Ladd and twenty girls—trapped by the rapacious Japs!” May seems to be well liked by the various studios, especially MGM. “They call me the Cantonese ham,” she boasts. She brags that she once earned one hundred dollars in one day for her screaming abilities.

  Then May gets the call to supply MGM with extras for the filming of Dragon Seed, which will be released next summer in 1944. She contacts the Chinese Cinema Club on Main and Alameda, where members of the Chinese Screen Extras Guild hang out, to hire people, making a commission of ten percent for each extra, and she works in the motion picture herself.

 
“I tried to get Metro to let Keye Luke play one of the Jap captains, but the studio doesn’t want to ruin his image as Charlie Chan’s Number One Son,” she says. “They have the prize Chinese egg, and they don’t want it to go bad. It isn’t easy to fill all the roles. I need hundreds of people to play Chinese peasants. For the Jap soldiers, the studio told me to hire Cambodians, Filipinos, and Mexicans.”

  Ever since my night on the movie set, I’ve been torn between my distaste for Haolaiwu and my desire to put money aside for my little girl. Joy has worked steadily since the war began, and I’ve made a good start on what I imagine she’ll need for an education. My chance to pull her away from that world comes one night when Joy and May return from the set. Joy’s crying and goes straight to our room, where she now has a little cot in the corner. May’s furious. I’ve gotten mad at Joy sometimes. What mother doesn’t get upset with her children on occasion? But this is the first time I’ve seen May angry at Joy, ever.

  “I had a great role for Joy as Third Daughter,” May fumes. “I made sure she got a good costume, and she looked darling. But just before the director called her, Joy went to the toilet. She missed her opportunity! She embarrassed me. How could she do that to me?”

  “How?” I ask. “She’s five years old. She needed to use the pot.”

  “I know, I know,” May says, shaking her head. “But I really wanted this for her.”

  Grasping at my opportunity before it disappears, I continue. “Let’s have Joy work in one of the stores with her grandparents for a while. That way she’ll learn to be more appreciative of everything you do for her.” I don’t say that I won’t let her go back to Haolaiwu, that in September Joy will start American school, or that I don’t know how I’ll save enough for Joy to go to college, but May’s so mad she agrees with me.