Shanghai Girls (24 page)

“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 basic 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?”

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.