A Paper Son (29 page)

The ship continues to slow until it is drifting, and then the Coast Guard ship comes into view. On the trip over she has heard dozens of accounts of how this encounter could go for passengers, but being an American, with American children and American papers, she knows she has little reason for concern. The passengers grow quiet as the patrol ship pulls alongside the
Crystal Gypsy
and suddenly there are crewmen everywhere, shouting at one another and tossing ropes back and forth. Within minutes the two ships are bound together.

A while later several officials enter the bunkroom. Some of them are in uniforms, and some are not. Li-Yu sits quietly with her children, one pressed against either side of her, and watches the team sweep through the room. Doctors listen to heartbeats and examine eyes and ears. Customs agents dig through bags and suitcases. Others inspect papers and ask questions through translators. Each person is given a marked form and then the men move along. They arrive at Li-Yu's bed, and the translator greets them in Cantonese. “We speak English,” Li-Yu says, with a smile. “We're Americans.”

“Papers, please,” says an officer. He reads them over while the doctors examine first the children, and then Li-Yu.

“What are you bringing in?” another man asks.

“Just some clothes,” Li-Yu says. She indicates their little bags, on the floor beside the bed. One of the uniformed men pokes through them. “What's this?” he asks, holding up a thick piece of bamboo.

“That's mine,” Rose says, and then Li-Yu remembers her daughter's last-minute dash to the shed, just before they fled Xinhui. The man turns the tube and looks into its core, and then with his thumb and first finger he reaches inside and pulls out a thick stack of rolled paper. There are hundreds of sheets, all covered in tiny pencil script.

“You're a writer,” he says to Rose, with a smile.

Rose nods.

“Good,” he said. “So is my daughter.” He flips through the first few sheets and then looks up at the officer. “It's all in English,” he says. The officer nods, makes a mark on their tickets, hands them back, and then he and his men move on to the next stack of beds.

“You had that in the shed?” Li-Yu asks her daughter.

Rose nods.

“What do they say? What are they?”

“Just stories,” she says.

“Stories about what?”

She shrugs. “Lots of things.”

There are hundreds of hours of work there, Li-Yu can see, hundreds of hours her daughter spent in hiding, bent over this manuscript, when Li-Yu thought she was working somewhere on the property, or roaming the village. Could she really have lost track of so much of her daughter's life? And what else might there be? What other secrets had the emptiness of the last five years pulled into being?

After several hours the officials return to the Coast Guard ship. The crewmen untie the thick ropes and wrestle them back into neat coils. The engines roar back to life and the ship pushes toward the shoreline again. She thinks again of her parents, standing at a railing like this one, waiting for this same shoreline to rise into view. But that had been before the immigration station on Angel Island had been built. This part of the story would be her own.

***

“Your time's up,” I said to Eva. “That must have been at least an hour.” After the glow of my laptop screen she and Lucy were little more than dark shapes on the couch, illuminated faintly by the glow of the television. I might have continued writing but my computer was misbehaving in protest over the demands I was putting on it. I'd been reading about steamships and steerage quarters, about immigration to California. I'd also been scrolling through some public television documentaries on a website about Angel Island. Like most people I knew, I tended to think of the island as a nice place for a summertime day trip. There were some old forts and battlements out there, left over from long ago. Until recently, I'd only had a vague awareness of the role the island had played. I wondered if the immigration station there had even been a waypoint in my mom's family history. The more I learned the more likely it seemed.

“Actually it's been closer to three hours,” Lucy said.

“Good. So?”

Eva sat forward. “Can I read what you wrote first?”

“No,” I said. “It isn't going to change. The book. You need to tell me something.”

She shifted on the couch and seemed about to say something, but then hesitated. She reached out and took the book from the coffee table. “It's a book of poems.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what?”

“It's the guide's book. The soldiers' guide who walked with them on the way to Henry's first day of school.”

“That's nonsense,” I said.

She opened the pages and held the book up and showed me where one page had been ripped out, and then another. “I told you I had one of the poems, until the flood. I recognize the paper, the print, everything. It's the same book.”

“You could have ripped those out, just now,” I said.

“It's been sitting here in front of your sister this whole time.”

“That just can't be,” I said, quietly. “How can that possibly be true?”

“You tell me,” she said. “Now can I read what you wrote?”

I stood and began pacing, trying to think. She handed me the book as she passed me on the way to my desk. I stood there while she read, staring at it, feeling its heat against my palms. After a few minutes she rose. “Then what?” she asked.

I could see the coast rising into view. I could see it more clearly than I could see the storm-smudged outlines of my own city.

***

The headlands of Marin rise in the north, and San Francisco's peninsula rises to the south, and the
Crystal Gypsy
sails through the narrow gap between the two and into the bay's embrace. All the passengers gather on deck, pointing things out to one another, talking excitedly. Alcatraz lies directly ahead of them, crouching menacingly in the bay. Orderly streets and homes reach over San Francisco's northernmost ridge, where the sights of moving cars and pedestrians seem like alien life after weeks of ocean.

The
Gypsy
veers away from the city, passes Alcatraz, and circles the southern edge of Angel Island, heading for its leeward corner. There is the shouting of the crewmen again, the throwing of ropes, and then the engines drop again into a low hum. Li-Yu and her children shoulder their bags and join the crowd, which grows dense and pinches together as they reach the gangway. She bangs her shins on somebody's steamer trunk. A man swings a bag from one shoulder to the other and hits Henry in the head, and he cries out in surprise. Once down the gangway they enter immediately into a series of fenced walkways. In the open space stand several uniformed agents, guns on their waists. The pathway diverges, and when Li-Yu reads the signs her heart sinks. She squats down in front of Henry. “Okay, little man. You're going to have to go with the other men, for just a little while. Rosie and I have to go with the other women. They just need to see our papers, and when they realize we're Americans, they're going to put us all right back together and we'll go see your aunts and
po
and
gung.
Okay?”

Henry's forehead bunches together but he nods.

Rose comes over to him and gives him a quick hug. “See you in a little bit, Spider,” she says. “You be a good kid.”

They continue up the pathways. Li-Yu watches Henry go for as long as she can, and then a cold wooden building with a concrete floor swallows him up. She and Rose are shown to a bunkroom, very much like the one on the ship. “No,” she says, to the official. “This isn't right. We're Americans. My sisters, my parents—they live in San Francisco. We're coming home.”

The official is polite but uninterested. “It can take a little time,” he says, softening his words with a smile and a friendly nod. “We just want you to be comfortable while you're waiting.”

“When does the ferry leave?” she asks.

“The end of the day,” he says, and slips out. He returns a minute later with another distraught woman and shows her to a nearby bunk.

She and Rose file to a dining room for lunch, and then again later, for dinner, and then they are taken out into a concrete yard. There is a fence that separates the men's side from the women's and they find Henry waiting there, searching for them. Li-Yu touches his fingers through the metal grate. “How is it?” she asks. “It's not bad,” he says with a shrug, and gives her a smile that almost convinces her. “There are some other boys, and everyone's being nice to us.” They hear a ferry sound its horn as it pulls into the pier, and they do not talk about their mutual realization that they will not be on it when it departs. The thought of Henry sleeping by himself among strangers keeps Li-Yu awake until morning, when an official comes for her. “Long, Li-Yu?” he calls out, standing in the doorway. She pats Rose on the knee and rises. They lead her to a large room, which is empty but for a small desk, covered with files and stacks of papers. There are two men sitting at the desk, and an armed guard standing behind them. On Li-Yu's side of the desk is an empty metal chair. She sits and finds the metal still warm from the heat of the previous occupant.

“It says here you were born in America,” one of the men says.

“That's right,” Li-Yu says, relaxing. “Right here in San Francisco.”

“What was your father's name?”

“Hsu Bai.”

“Mother's?”

“Hsu Xiaoli.”

“Address where you grew up?”

“689 Grant Avenue.”

“And how many windows were on the north side of your house?”

This question throws Li-Yu off; she isn't sure she has heard right. The man asks her again. She remembers the apartment where she lived—it was on the corner of Pacific, and the north side ran along Pacific. She goes through the rooms in her mind, counting, and then answers, “Four.”

He goes on to ask her many more questions: What did your father do? What did your mother do? What school did you go to? What were your teachers' names? What are the names of your brothers and sisters? Your neighbors? What were the names of the shops on the ground floor? What were the names of the shopkeepers? Li-Yu tries to answer each question, but there are some things she can't remember. Finally there is a pause in the questioning and Li-Yu thinks the interrogation might be over, but then the guard knocks on a metal door and another man enters the room, his face impassive. He is wearing a black suit and his hair is oiled carefully, tightly against his head, revealing the exact shape of his skull. He replaces one of the two men at the desk. The men shuffle papers. Some of them appear to be telegrams; the men point at their messages, exchange looks, and then the new interrogator looks at Li-Yu a long time.

“Who is Henry Long,” he asks. His voice does not rise into the end of the question.

“My son,” Li-Yu says.

“And where is his father?”

“He is dead,” she says.

“Where?” he says.

“In China. A town called Xinhui, in Guangdong.”

“Where was he born?”

“Henry or his father?”

“We are discussing Henry.”

“Stockton.”

“Where?”

“At my home.”

“Not at a hospital?”

“No, at my home.”

“What day?”

“July seventeenth, 1921.”

“And what was the weather like that day?”

Li-Yu is not sure she has heard correctly. “The weather?”

“The weather. Outside,” the man says impatiently. When he is not talking he grits his teeth; Li-Yu can see the muscles on the side of his head pulsing through his oily shell of hair.

“It was sunny,” she says.

“Aren't all days sunny in Stockton in July?” he asks.

“Yes, mostly,” she says quietly, confused.

“And who is his father?”

“My husband, Bing Long,” she says.

“The deceased?”

“Yes,” she says, remembering him wasting away in his dirty bed.

“Where was Bing born?”

“In Xinhui.”

“Did he ever have another wife?”

The air vacates her lungs; her veins feel suddenly as if they are full of lead. The man glances down at the papers in front of them. He is holding them with their tops curled back so she cannot see what is on them.

“Yes,” she says, trying to control her anguish.

“And what was her name?”

“Mae,” she says.

“Louder, please. First and last name.”

“Mae Long,” she says.

“And when did they divorce?”

“They didn't,” she says.

“Speak up, please,” the man says.

“They didn't divorce,” she says.

“So he had two wives?”

“Yes.” Even if these are formalities, Li-Yu still feels some measure of defeat. In the weeks since fleeing Xinhui she has expunged Mae from her mind, leaving the bitter woman on her wooden couch far behind, in a land that no longer exists. But now Li-Yu can feel her presence again, as if she has entered this interrogation room, and if she turns and looks into the back corner she will see those hard black eyes, that little mound of robes and blankets.

Papers are shuffled, consulted. “You have a daughter?”

“Yes. Rose Long. Born October thirtieth, 1918, in—”

The man holds up his hand. “Just answer the questions you're asked,” he says. “What is her relationship to the boy?”

“The boy?”

“Henry.”

“It's fine,” she says.

The sides of his head twitch. “No,” he says. “How are they related?”

“They are brother and sister,” she says, wondering now if she has missed something, if there is some piece of information that would make this line of questioning sensible.

“Full brother, full sister?”

“Yes, of course. Bing was their father and I am their mother.”