Paper Daughter (3 page)

Yet along with learning not to lie to others, I'd grown up being taught not to lie to myself. Dad had been particularly big on that.

"Don't ever deny what you know," he once told me. He'd been talking about a business that had gone bankrupt because its owner had closed his eyes to problems he hadn't wanted to see. But Dad had made the point seem personal, a lesson for me. I shouldn't ever refuse to look at the truth.

And eventually a truth that I couldn't ignore emerged from my circling thoughts. Dad had never adequately explained his decision to bring us to Seattle, and now I had a reason. The move made sense if it had nothing to do with coming here and everything to do with avoiding New York and the East Coast, where he'd be closer to a phony background. Where he'd be at more risk for his lies being discovered.

I stayed by the phone a long time, thinking. I turned around and around the heirloom jade ring Dad had given me one Christmas, saying it was to remind me to be proud of who I was. Was it just a stage prop, bought from some jeweler who sold antique pieces?

I didn't care what family Dad came from. And I cared even less whether he came from a ton of money or from no money at all.

I just wanted him to have been honest about it.

Then another idea occurred to me. Maybe Dad didn't
know
where he came from. Didn't know
who
he came from.

That last morning, he told me I didn't have to decide, at sixteen years old, who I'd be the rest of my life.

Is that what he'd done? At some point, did he pick who he'd be? Because he didn't know?

I remembered the notebook entries I'd read just that morning, and I went out to the garage and read them again.

"Progress on family project, finally? Possible search..."

What if that didn't refer to a story Dad had been working on, but was about looking for the unknown persons who were his own family? What if he'd started a search to find out who he was, but had kept it to himself? Maybe he'd wanted to tell Mom and me, but hadn't known how.

That would explain the next entry, about lies leading to tangled webs and hurting people. Because if what I'd learned from my phone calls was true—and if the truth was that the most basic stuff Mom and I had always believed was really false—

I broke off, ensnared by my own web of illogic.

I was holding myself so rigidly my stomach muscles hurt. I felt angry and mixed-up. Off kilter. Felt, most of all, betrayed.

Nobody likes to be lied to, not by strangers trying to sell things or by casual friends making excuses for promises not kept. But lies like those are part of life. You guard against them, and if you get taken in anyway, the person you're most annoyed with is yourself.

Which is different from when you're taken in by a lie told by somebody you trust one hundred percent.

And it's especially different when that somebody is your father and the lie is so huge you can hardly comprehend the questions it raises.

I huddled on the garage floor, arms around my legs, chin on my knees, not able to get past the two biggest ones.

First: If Dad wasn't who he'd always said, then who was he?

And second: Who did that make me?

The harder I concentrated, the more blank my mind seemed to go. And then, somehow, the questions shifted just enough that I finally came up with sort of an answer. It didn't matter about Dad. I didn't need to be anyone other than who I'd always been.

Really, nothing had changed except that I'd made a few phone calls and learned a few things I didn't want to know. Things I could choose to forget.

I wouldn't even have to tell my mother. When she asked how my call to Dad's school had gone, I could tell her the school records were correct now, which would be the absolute truth.

Qualms fluttered through me—an inkling that forgetting might not be that easy, a twinge of guilt that maybe I owed my father more.

But I flooded out the qualms with a sudden, flat-out rage.

It wasn't right for Dad to have built our family on a lie. It was selfish and mean, and I hated him for all the hurt I was feeling. And I wished he were there with me so I could tell him. So I could yell every mean thing I could think of and hurt him more than he'd hurt me.

Well, he'd got one thing right, anyway. Telling me I didn't have to decide right now who I'd be for the rest of my life. That meant that I
could
decide, if I wanted to.

I shoved the jade ring into a pocket of my jeans, and I ripped every page from the notebook. Then I tore the pages and even the notebook cover into shreds, which I buried deep in the trash.

I'd made my decision. I would be just exactly who I'd always been.

FAI-YI LI

The old man waited at the door for his sister, listening to the sound of her walker on the pavement. "What took you so long?" he asked.

"
Lines at the stores," she said. "If you shopped, you would know.
"

"
Was someone just here? I heard a car.
"

"
No." She pushed by, threatening his balance. "Go sit. You are in my way.
"

He opened the living-room blinds to let in the afternoon sun, although he knew she would soon close them. The brightness created orange-veined patterns on the insides of his eyelids, as jagged as the remembered pictures he often saw and as branched as the words that went with them.

More and more often these days, he lived in those scenes.

SEATTLE,1932

"
What is your name?
"

"
Li Fai-yi," I answer.

"
We do not believe you.
"

"
Li Fai-yi." The name comes strangely to my tongue, stranger still to my mind. But I have to remember. That is who I must say I am.

"
And your sister's?
"

"
Li Sucheng.
"

Two men sit across a table from me. One asks questions in words I do not understand, and the other puts them into my language so that I will. He does not say why he sometimes turns the names around, Fai-yi Li, Sucheng Li, putting the family name last.

"
And your age?
"

"
Fifteen. We are both fifteen. Twins.
"

"
And why do you wish to be admitted to the United States?
"

"
To be with our father, Li Dewei." I wonder if I should give other reasons also. To work. Togo to school. I cannot tell them,
To keep Sucheng from being arrested.

"
You say he is your father. How do we know?
"

"
There are papers. You have papers from him. Please look.
"

The man in charge flicks through a file. His stomach growls, and he mutters to the other man, the bad-smelling one who translates. "We're going for lunch. Wait here, boy.
"

So I wait alone in the small room, sitting straight-backed, elbows in, at the scarred white table. My own stomach growls, sounding loud over the
muffled, crying-out, calling-sharp, despairing, ordering, submitting, many-languaged voices coming from the other side of the thin wall.

I wonder if I will ever again know days when no one is a stranger, no word unknown, when the next moment is predictable and unthreatening. I know I must remain alert, but I am so tired from struggling to understand the men's questions.

How long will they be gone? I should be remembering what I have said, so that I will say it exactly the same way again, but my mind separates from my will, roving across real pictures instead of the ones I have memorised.

I see the village where my sister and I and our parents and grandparents were born. A place where one did not have to look very far back to find one life becoming another, or dream very far forward to find life stretching out that way. Only along the sides of a person's life were there fixed boundaries, and beyond them an unknown of half-believed tales.

I think of how one night I sat apart, smelling the food my mother and sister were cooking, trying to understand the laughter of men talking about crops and weather and politics andpeople. A second cousin from the city told of planning to go to America, which he called the Gold Mountain. There, he said, there was so much wealth—gold for the picking up—that nothing else mattered.

"
Gold will not keep you warm at night," a neighbor said. "I hear there are few Chinese women in America.
"

"
After I am rich, I will bring over a wife to rub my back when it aches from bending over to gather the nuggets," the cousin says. "Perhaps Sucheng there.
"

This caused more laughter, for it was well known my beautiful twin thought much of herself.

"
And how will you get there to begin with?" asked my father.

"
I will pay a Gold Mountain firm to arrange that," the cousin replied. "Those firms know more ways to slip past laws than a cat by a lazy dog.
"

"
And you have this money?
"

"
No. That is why I am only planning]." The cousin laughed as hard as the others.

Afterward I asked my father why it was funny that the cousin wanted to go someplace he could not.

"
Because he knows he'll never have to test his dreams," my father said. "There's noplace on earth where gold erupts like boulders in a frost heave.
"

"
The teacher's family lives well on money a son in America sends back," I argued.

"
Not that well," my father said. "If riches were free for the taking, the son would send more.
"

I glimpsed Sucheng's face above the dishpan. She wanted to believe that the cities our cousin had spoken of had golden streets, just as she wanted to believe she would do more than marry a village man and live out the life that was before her.

It was the difference between us. I did not wish to be anyone but who I was.

***

The door opens. A man looks in and then goes away. It is another tiny piece added to my bewilderment.

The officials at this reception center do no explaining. They order you,"In this line. Open your bag. Bend your head." They mean
now,
and they do not tell you why you are to do a thing or what you will be told to do next. But you know you must do it right.

I wonder if Sucheng is being interrogated also, and if she will remember to say it is forty-three steps from our house to the privy. She was not as
good as I at learning the details to prove we are Li Dewei's children. But perhaps they will not think a girl worth questioning.

My thoughts drift back into memories, and now, not such good ones. Soon after that evening of laughter I was sent to relatives to be safe from a sickness moving through our village, while Sucheng was kept at home to help our parents, who did not want to leave their store. When I returned, her face was no longer as smooth as porcelain but pocked like lava rock, and her bitterness pervaded every corner of our house.

And then came another evening and another visitor, a worn-looking, thin stranger whose bony shoulders carried hardness and need, and again, Sucheng and I listened to men's talk. We heard the man speak of a wife who had died and of children who needed care.

Aferward she whispered in a choked fury of impotence, "I won't go with such a poor person. I'll run away first.
"

I knew it for an empty threat, for where could she go? "Perhaps he is better off than he seems," I said.

With an impatient chop of her hand, she dismissed that. "If he could afford better, he wouldn't want to marry me.
"

"
I am sorry," I said, for I had no other answer to give.

***

Two nights later, just past moonrise, I watched blood from a scalp wound seep into rocky earth. It came from the stranger's sprawled body, half hidden under Sucheng's small jacket.

Terrified, she flung incoherent words at me. "I didn't mean ... I didn't recognize him. He attacked ... I only pushed, and he fell. Fai-yi, you have to believe me! You do?
"

"
Of course," I answered as I struggled to think clearly.

"
But what if no one else does? What if people say I killed him on purpose so I would not have to go with him?
"

"
They will not," I told her, though even to myself I sounded unconvincing. The village might well think Sucheng would murder rather than be hauled off to be field hand, cook, and servant to someone else's children.

"
But if they do, if I'm arrested, I might be killed.
"

She huddled close, the way she did when we were little and thunderstorms or Father's anger or a snake in a grain bagfrightened her. "Fai-yi, I don't want to be put to death. Take me away.
"

"
Where to?" My eyes searched the dark, familiar wooded path as though a branch to a new place might suddenly appear. "There's nowhere that we wouldn't eventually be found.
"

Her toe nudged the jacket covering the gaping gash in the man's head. The bloody, pointed rock that he must have fallen on lay nearby. "There's the Gold Mountain.
"

I stared at her. "We don't know anything about America, or how to get there.
"

"
There are those firms that arrange things.
"

"
For money. We don't have any.
"

"
He might," she said. Her foot pushed aside the jacket. "He was going to pay for me. Check his pockets.
"

When I refused, she checked them herself, and she found a good amount. Not wealth, but far more than I'd have expected, though what did I know of such things?

"
That money is not ours," I protested.

"
He no longer needs it.
"

"
His family will.
"

"
And if they don't get this money, will anyone go after them and execute them for a crime they didn't commit?
"

"
It's stealing.
"