Paper Daughter (17 page)

He answered, "Because I wished to. How many times are you going to ask?"

"Old fool," she said again. "All these years, and now you put us in danger."

His tone hardened. "I? Are we so old that you forget?" Then, not so hard, "I was only polite. You are upset over nothing."

Footsteps shuffled away, and after a moment I knocked.

"Ah," Mr. Li said to me. "You have come for your wrap. We have brought it inside for safekeeping."

That's one woman I wouldn't want to see again,
I thought as I drove home. Although Mr. Li had been gentle. Well,
gentle
wasn't exactly the right word.
Courtly.
A word no one even used anymore, but it fit.

I wondered what old argument I'd stirred up that had made them speak of danger. It was hard to even put them and the idea of danger together. They were too ancient, too frail.

Maybe they were just mixed-up, like the man who'd thought I was from Meals on Wheels. Maybe their minds rearranged people and places and facts.

I shivered. It would be so scary not to be able to count on your mind. If you couldn't trust yourself, who could you trust?

And when it came to scary—that old woman! What was her name? Sucheng? I wondered if she was as mean as she seemed.

I couldn't help being relieved that Mr. Li and his sister didn't seem to be in any way related to Dad. Their world—the sister's anyway—was not one I would want to step into.

But much more, I was discouraged. I'd needed them to be people Dad had visited.

***

Mom was still out when I got home, and by then I was thinking about the photo again. Maybe the woman in California had remembered the name wrong. Or maybe there was something else written on it that she'd forgotten or hadn't bothered to tell me.

Anyway, I'd thought of a place to look for it.

I went to Mom's bedroom, which was still much the way it had been when Dad shared it. Although Mom had given most of his clothes to the Salvation Army, she'd left on his dresser the items he'd always kept there: a backup alarm clock, a piece of driftwood that looked like a bird in flight, the keepsake box I'd made at camp one summer.

I knew what I'd find inside the box, because Dad had never minded my rummaging through it. There'd be a ribbon I'd won at a fourth grade field day, the pin from a journalism honorary society he'd belonged to, the tag from a Christmas gift from Mom. There'd be odds and ends he'd emptied from his pockets.

And because the box was where he sometimes stashed small items he didn't want to lose, it was where, I thought, he just might have put the photo.

I was right. I found, beneath a hardware store list and a coffee shop punch card, part of a worn and yellowed photograph, with one side and a corner torn raggedly away. It showed a Chinatown street scene, just the way the woman had said.

But when I turned it over, there was enough beyond what she'd told me to make excitement run through me.

Down low, running to the jagged edge, were the words "With best regards." Each letter looked to have been carefully, individually formed.

And under that, the name Li, although it appeared to be a first name. The name that followed it began with an
F
and what might be the start of an
a.
Whatever had followed was missing, gone in the torn-off corner.

And one more word, at the bottom, was partly gone also. But the part that was there had my heart pounding.
Sea.
The first part of
Seattle.

So Dad
had
known to search here. And the picture on the front would have sent him to the International District, just as Jillian had guessed.

Also—I thought back. Hadn't I learned that the Chinese way was to put the last name first? I was pretty sure. Family name, then given name.

Mr. Li's first name started with an
F.
I'd seen it in the phone book, and he'd said it: "I am Fai-yi Li."

But he'd also said he knew nothing of Dad, and I didn't think he'd lied. There'd been something—I tried to define it.
Honorable-seeming
about him.

I turned the photo to the front side. It showed a couple of cars from the early days of automobiles, followed by a horse-drawn wagon. The people on the crowded street—almost all men—had Chinese faces, and while some wore slope-shouldered wool suits, others wore the work clothes I associated with China of long ago. Signs painted in Chinese characters hung above stores.

But then, looking more closely, I spotted a sign with both Chinese characters and English letters. The tear went through the sign, so that all I could read was
HUPIN.

I put Dad's box back on the dresser but kept the picture.

With it, I had something more to go on. But what?
What?

MIDWIFE, 1936

She came to me in the night, to my home in the back streets of San Francisco. Young and alone. She was apprehensive—as are all who are about to give birth—and afraid, I think, of what lay beyond her when the hours of pain were done and the chore of caring for a baby would be added to the need to provide for herself.

But I saw eagerness in her eyes, too, and gentleness. The baby would be loved.

What I did not see were the wrong things inside her body. If I had, I would not have let her in. A woman such as I, foreign, doing work that officials forbade because I did not have the schooling, the papers
—
a woman such as I could not have a death on her hands.

But I could not see the things wrong.

The young woman lived such a little while. Long enough to tell me her name.
An.

Long enough to tell me she had no family. She had hoped her father might understand her having returned to Seattle to see the baby's father. She had come back here when she failed, but by then it was too late. Her father had already lef for China without her.

She lived long enough to extract a promise that I would let the baby's father know he had a daughter.

"
Say he might call her Hope," she said. "Here," she added, handing me a picture. "There on the back, you can see his name written. He lives in Seattle and works in the laundry of Dewei Li.
"

I made the promise in good conscience, to ease her passing, though I knew it was one I would not keep. It might lead to too many questions.

I regretted, though, that the picture got torn and the name mostly lost. But there was so much to do and to think of, and all so quickly, after she died. I only just stopped my neighbor from throwing the picture away entirely.

I doubted that anyone would give much thought to her body when it was found in the alley where he took it for me. Poor people died. It was the way of things.

I carried the infant girl myself to where she would be quickly discovered and cared for. And I tucked the torn picture into the old blanket that I wrapped around her, and I pinned to it a paper with the name her mother had given her, though I had to pay a penny to have it written.

Hope.

Luck
might serve the baby better, I thought. She would need it.

But naming her baby Hope was the last thing the young woman, An, ever did, except to die. I would not undo it.

In the morning, as early as I could decently call someone on a Sunday, I phoned Jillian. Once I was done apologizing—I could tell from her yawns that I'd woken her up—I said, "You remember the old Seattle photos Lynch had you go through?"

"Yeah. And after all my work, he didn't use any."

"Where were they?"

"They're cataloged online. Or do you mean the originals?169Those are at the library. The big one downtown. Why do you want to know?"

"Because I've got an old Chinatown photo that Dad had when he was little. There's a rip right through the only sign that's in English, but if I could find a scene like it, maybe I could read the rest. It might not mean anything, of course."

"But it's all you've got, right?"

"Right."

"So I'll meet you at the library after lunch. I think it's open Sunday afternoons."

A man at the Central Library's information desk sent us to the hushed Seattle Room, a soaring space with a balcony overlooking the general reading area. It seemed special even in a building as spectacular as the library itself, with its swooping glass walls and rising lines of books that invited you up and up. I paused at the room's entrance, uncertain.

"Whoa! Pretty fancy!" Jillian said.

A woman wearing a library badge joined us. "Beautiful, isn't it? You're welcome to come in and look around. Or are you girls here for something in particular?"

I handed her the torn photo. "It's got the start of
Seattle
written on the back, so I'm hoping it was taken here," I said. "I was wondering if the library might have another photograph of the same street. One that would show the rest of that sign that's partly in English."

"It looks like a professional shot," the librarian said. Turning it over, she pointed to faint marks on the back, so faded I hadn't noticed them. "A postcard, maybe? The stock's heavy enough. And we do have historical postcards. You might go through those, on the chance you'll find a match."

She brought out two long boxes, but before she let us get into them, she asked if we'd ever handled archival materials. When we said we hadn't, she gave us throwaway cotton gloves and put on a pair herself.

"Even with these, you need to be careful not to touch the images," she said. "Handle the postcards by the edges. Don't set anything down on them. One card out at a time, and keep them in order."

At first, cowed by the white gloves and warnings, we worked slowly, pulling out and putting back waterfront scenes and pictures of Pike Place Market as it used to be.

Then, as we got the feel of the work, we sped up. And Jillian, of course, started talking.

"So, did you used to read
Nancy Drews
?" she asked. "Because this is kind of like you're Nancy and I'm George. Or maybe Bess. No, George, I think, although of course I don't look like her. I mean, didn't she always keep her hair short? And I don't remember curls. But you're Nancy, definitely, even if I'm closer to blond than you. It's a style thing, and..."

Despite her chatter, Jillian worked efficiently, barely glancing at postcards that clearly weren't a match, pausing occasionally to compare a street scene with the picture I'd brought.

And for a while I made good progress, too. I slowed down, though, once I discovered that many of the cards had actually been written and mailed. Reading them was like riding a train at night, catching brief glimpses into lighted rooms where people you don't know are eating or washing dishes, watching television, arguing.

"Will be out for the new baby..."

"The teacherage is drafty and the size of a closet, but it's better than rooming about..."

Dad, I thought, would have been fascinated.

"More salmon to eat than you ever did see..."

"Aiming to walk around Mt. Rainier. Can you imagine?"

I got so involved that I was startled when the librarian came over to ask how we were coming along.

"I'm coming along fine," Jillian said. "My friend's bogged down."

The librarian laughed. "We probably ought to put up a warning sign:
CAUTION-DANGER ZONE FOR INQUISITIVE MINDS.
"

***

We reached the end of the postcards without having found even a partial match, and I went back to my original idea of going through the library's collection of historical photos.

"Grab a couple of computers and get comfortable," the librarian said. "We've got more than thirty thousand images. And hang on to the gloves, in case you want to see an actual print."

I was even slower going through the cataloged photographs than I'd been with the postcards, but now the problem was with the pictures themselves. Many of them showed Chinatown streets lined with shops that were confusingly similar, with signs that were hard to make out, and I had just that one fragment of an English word to look for.

Jillian even stopped talking so she could concentrate, and for a couple of hours we worked in such quiet that her sudden "Got it!" made me jump about a mile.

"I think I do, anyway," she added.

The picture on her screen had been taken from a different angle, but most of the shops were the same as those in my photo. And the building she was pointing to had the same brick cornices and the same heavy woodwork around the windows.

She zoomed in on a sign, but it was too fuzzy to read.

The librarian, who'd come over at Jillian's "Got it!" said she'd get the original.

***

It was beautiful, an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white enlargement, crystal sharp and full of detail.

The sign, examined with a magnifying glass, was clear. The part in English said
HUPING HUANG, HERBALIST,
the words stacked one atop another.

I wrote it down and then asked the librarian, "If I wanted to find out about Huping Huang, how could I do it?"

"You might check our genealogy collection, although it's so near to closing time you'd need to come back another day."

She pursed her lips. "Or you might want to begin at NARA—the National Archives and Records Administration. Its regional depository is near the university."

"What would be there?" I asked.

"Immigration records."

***

When Jillian suggested going for food before leaving downtown, I told her my mom was expecting me home for dinner. I said I had time for a soda, though.

As we walked, looking for a place that was open, she asked, "When will you try that National Archives place? Since it's government, it probably shuts down right at five p.m, and you're not off again till Friday."

"I'm going tomorrow," I told her. "I think Fran will let me take some time, and if not, I guess I'll take it anyway."

Jillian gave me a quick look. "That doesn't sound like you."

"It's not," I said. "But with all that's happening, or that could happen, Friday's just too far away to follow up on the only idea I've got for clearing Dad."