Shanghai Girls (28 page)

“Vern has the soft-bone disease,” she says. “Here they call it tuberculosis of the bone. This is why he’s been shrinking.” She’s always been loose with her tears, but not this time. The way she fights to keep them inside tells me just how much she’s come to love the boy-husband.

“What does this mean?”

“That we’re dirty, that we live like pigs.”

My sister’s voice is as bitter as I’ve ever heard it. We grew up believing that the soft-bone disease and its sister, the blood-lung disease, were markers of poverty and filth. It was considered the most shameful of all the diseases, more terrible than the ones transmitted by prostitutes. This is even worse than my losing a son, because it is a visual and very public message to our neighbors—and to the
lo fan—
that we are poor, polluted, and unclean.

“It usually attacks children, and they die as their spines collapse,” she continues. “But Vern’s not a child, so the doctors can’t say how long he’ll live. They only know that his pain will give way to numbness, weakness, and finally paralysis. He’ll be in bed for the rest of his life.”

“Yen-yen? Father?”

May shakes her head, and her tears break free. “He’s their little boy.”

“And Joy?”

“I’m taking care of her.” Sadness fills my sister’s voice. I understand too clearly what my losing the baby means to her. I will return as Joy’s full-time mother. Maybe I should feel some sense of triumph about this, but I don’t. Instead, I swim in our shared losses.

Later that night Sam comes to talk. He stands at the foot of my bed, looking awkward. His cheeks are gray and his shoulders droop from bearing the weight of two tragedies.

“I thought the boy might be sick. I recognized some of the symptoms from my father. My brother was born with a no-good fate. He never hurt anyone and has only been kind to us, and yet there was no way to change his destiny.”

He says these words about Vern, but he could be speaking about any of us.

THESE TWIN TRAGEDIES
bind us together as a family in ways none of us could have imagined. May, Sam, and Father go back to work; sorrow and despair hang around their necks like cangues. Yen-yen stays in the apartment to take care of me and Vern. (The doctor is very much against this. “Vern will be better off in a sanatorium or some other institution,” he tells us, but if Chinese are treated badly right on the street, where everyone can see, how can we possibly let him go to a place behind gates and closed doors?) Paper partners fill in for us at China City. But fate is not done with us.

In August, a second fire destroys nearly all of China City. A few buildings survive, but all the Golden enterprises are reduced to charred ruins, except for three rickshaws and May’s costume and extras company. Still, no one has insurance. With China enmeshed in a civil war, Father Louie once again can’t go back to the home country to replenish his stock of antiques. He could try to buy antiques here, but everything is too expensive after the world war and much of the savings he squirreled away in China City is ash anyway.

But even if we had the resources to restock the shops, Christine Sterling has no desire to rebuild China City. Convinced the fire was the result of arson, she decides she no longer wants to re-create her ideas of Oriental romance in Los Angeles. In fact, she no longer wants to associate with Chinese in any way whatsoever and doesn’t want them sullying her Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street. She persuades the city to condemn the block of Chinatown between Los Angeles Street and Alameda to make room for a freeway on-ramp. For now all that will remain of the city’s original Chinatown is the row of buildings between Los Angeles Street and Sanchez Alley, where we live. People fight the overall plan, but no one has much hope. We all know the saying that’s so popular here in America: We don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.

Our home is in jeopardy, but we can’t worry about that yet, not when we have to work together to reopen the family businesses. While some people decide to limp along and stay in what remains of China City, Father Louie opens a new Golden Lantern in New Chinatown, stocking it with the cheapest curios he can buy from local wholesalers, who get their goods from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Joy must now spend more time there, selling what she calls “junk” to tourists who don’t know any better, giving her grandfather a break so he can nap. The new shop doesn’t have much business, but she’s a star watcher. And when no one’s in the shop, which is most of the time, she reads.

Sam and I decide to start our own business with some of our savings. He looks for a new café location and finds one on Ord Street just a half block west of China City, but Uncle Wilburt won’t be coming with us. He decides to take advantage of the
lo fans’
increased interest in Chinese food since the war ended by opening his own chop-suey joint in Lakewood. We’re sad to see the last of the uncles leave, even though this means that Sam will be the head cook at last.

We prepare for our Grand Opening, doing renovations, creating menus, and thinking about advertising. The café has a little office behind glass in the back where May will manage her business. She stores the props and costumes in a small warehouse over on Bernard Street, saying that she doesn’t need to sit among those things every day and that getting jobs for herself and for other extras is more profitable than the rental business anyway. She encourages Sam to produce a calendar to promote the café. She asks a local photographer to come and take a picture. Even though the restaurant is named after me, the image shows May and Joy standing at the counter next to the pie spinner:
EAT AT PEARL’S COFFEE SHOP: QUALITY CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD
.

At the beginning of October 1949, Pearl’s Coffee Shop opens, Mao Tse-tung establishes the People’s Republic of China, and the Bamboo Curtain falls. We don’t know how permeable this curtain will be or what any of it means for our home country, but our opening is successful. The calendar is popular, and so is our menu, which combines American and Chinese-American specialties: roast beef, apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and coffee, or sweet-and-sour pork, almond cookies, and tea. Pearl’s Coffee Shop is clean. The food is fresh and consistent. Day and night a line extends out the door.

FATHER LOUIE CONTINUES
sending money to his home village by wiring funds to Hong Kong and then hiring someone to walk the money into the People’s Republic of China and on to Wah Hong Village. Sam warns him against this. “Maybe the Communists will confiscate it. Maybe this will be bad for the family in the village.”

I have different fears. “Maybe the American government will call us Communists. That’s why most families aren’t sending home remittances anymore.”

And it’s true. Many people in Chinatowns across the country have stopped sending money home because everyone is afraid and perplexed. The letters we receive from China confuse us even further.

“We are happy with the new government,” writes my father-in-law’s cousin twice removed. “Everyone is equal now. The landlord has been made to share his wealth with the people.”

If they’re so happy, we ask ourselves, then why are so many trying to get out? These are men, like Uncle Charley, who went back to China with their savings. Here in America, they’d suffered and been humiliated as low and unworthy of citizenship, but they’d withstood it, believing that great happiness, prosperity, and respect awaited them in the country of their birth, only to discover bitter fates upon their return to China, which treats them as dreaded landlords, capitalists, and running dogs of imperialism. The unlucky ones die in the fields or in the village squares. The fortunate ones escape to Hong Kong, where they die broken and broke. A few lucky ones come
home
to America. Uncle Charley is one of these.

“Did the Commies take everything from you?” Vern asks from his bed.

“They didn’t have a chance,” Uncle Charley answers, rubbing his swollen eyes and scratching his eczema. “When I got there, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were still in power. They asked everyone to exchange their gold and foreign currency for government certificates. They printed billions of Chinese
yuan
, but it wasn’t worth anything. A sack of rice, which once cost twelve
yuan
, soon cost sixty-three million
yuan
. People took their money in wheelbarrows to go shopping. You wanted to buy a postage stamp? It cost the equivalent of six thousand U.S. dollars.”

“Are you saying bad things about the Generalissimo?” Vern asks nervously. “You better not do that.”

“All I’m saying is that by the time the Communist soldiers came, I had nothing left.”

All those years of labor with the promise of returning to China a Gold Mountain man, and now he’s back where he started—working as a glass washer for the Louie family.

I regain my strength and go to work with Sam, which is wonderful in many ways. I get to see my husband, but I also get to be with May every day until five, when I go home to make dinner and she goes to General Lee’s or Soochow, which have moved to New Chinatown, to meet with casting directors and the like. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’re sisters at all. I cling to memories of our home in Shanghai; May clings to memories of being a beautiful girl. I wear my greasy apron and little paper hat; she wears beautiful dresses made from fabrics the colors of the earth—sienna, amethyst, celadon, and mountain lake blue.

I feel bad about how I look until the day my old friend Betsy—who, now that China’s closed, is on her way east to be with her parents—walks through the door of the coffee shop. We’re the same age, thirty-three, but she looks twenty years older. She’s thin, almost skeletal, and her hair has gone gray. I don’t know if this is from her time spent in the Japanese camp or from the hardships of recent months.

“Our Shanghai is gone,” she says when I take her to May’s office at the back of Pearl’s so the three of us can share a pot of tea. “It will never again be what it was. Shanghai was my home, but I’ll never see it again. None of us will.”

My sister and I exchange glances. We had dark moments when we thought we’d never be able to go home because of the Japanese. After the war ended, we had our hopes revived that one day we might go back for a visit, but this feels different. It feels permanent.

Fear

IT’S ALMOST NOON
on the second Saturday in November 1950. I don’t have much time before I need to pick up Joy and her friend Hazel Yee at the new Chinese United Methodist Church, where they attend Chinese-language classes. I rush downstairs, get the mail, and then hurry back up to the apartment. I quickly sort through the bills and pull out two letters. One has a postmark from Washington, D.C. I recognize Betsy’s handwriting on the envelope and tuck it in my pocket. The other letter is addressed to Father Louie, and it’s from China. I leave it and the bills on the table in the main room for him to look at when he gets home tonight. Then I grab my shopping bag and a sweater, go back downstairs, and walk to the church, where I wait outside for Joy and Hazel.

When Joy was little, I wanted her to learn proper written and spoken Chinese. The only place to do it—and you have to admit the missionaries were clever about this—was at one of the missions in Chinatown. It wasn’t enough that we had to pay a dollar a month for Joy’s lessons five and a half days a week or that she had to go to Sunday school, but one of her parents also had to attend Sunday services, which I’ve done regularly for the last seven years. Although many parents grumble about this rule, it seems like a fair exchange to me. And sometimes I rather like listening to the sermons, which remind me of those I heard as a girl in Shanghai.

I open Betsy’s letter. It’s been thirteen months since Mao took power in China and four and a half months since North Korea—with help from China’s People’s Liberation Army—invaded South Korea. Only five years ago China and the United States were allies. Now, seemingly overnight, Communist China has become—after Russia—the second most hated enemy of the United States. These last couple of months, Betsy has written several times to tell me that her loyalty has been questioned because she stayed in China so long and that her father is one of many people at the State Department accused of being a Communist and an old China hand. Back in Shanghai, calling someone an old China hand was a compliment; now, in Washington, it’s like calling someone a baby killer. Betsy writes:

My father’s in real hot water. How can they blame him for things he wrote twenty years ago criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and ’what he was doing to China? They’re calling Dad a Communist sympathizer, and they reproach him for helping to “lose China.” Mom and I are hoping he’ll be able to keep his job. If they end up pushing him out, I hope they let him keep his pension. Luckily, he still has friends at the State Department ‘who know the truth about him.

As I fold the letter and put it back in its envelope, I wonder what I should write back. I don’t think it will help Betsy to say that we’re all frightened.

Joy and Hazel burst out onto the street. They’re twelve years old and have been in sixth grade for all of seven weeks. They think they’re practically grown up, but they’re Chinese girls and still completely undeveloped physically. I follow behind them as they swing down the street, holding hands and whispering conspiratorially on our way to Pearl’s. We make a quick stop at a butcher shop on Broadway to pick up two pounds of fresh
char siu
, the fragrant barbecued pork that’s the secret ingredient in Sam’s chow mein. The shop is crowded today, and everyone is fearful, as they have been since this new war started. Some people have retreated into silence. Some have sunk into depression. And some, like the butcher, are angry.

“Why don’t they just leave us alone?” he demands in Sze Yup of no one in particular. “You think it’s my fault that Mao wants to spread Communism? That has nothing to do with me!”

No one argues with him. We all feel the same way.

“Seven years!” he shouts as he whacks his cleaver through a piece of meat. “It’s been only seven years since the Exclusion Act was overturned. Now the
lo fan
government has passed a new law so they can lock up Communists if there’s a national emergency. Anyone who has ever said one single word against Chiang Kai-shek is suspected of being a Communist.” He waves his cleaver at us. “And you don’t even have to say anything bad. All you have to be is a Chinese living in this pit of a country! You know what that means? Every single one of you is a suspect!”

Joy and Hazel have stopped chatting and stare at the butcher with wide eyes. All a mother wants to do is protect her children, but I can’t shield Joy from everything. When we walk together, I can’t always distract her from the newspaper headlines that shout out at us in English and Chinese. I can ask the uncles not to talk about the war when they come for Sunday dinner, but the news is everywhere, and so is gossip.

Joy is too young to understand that, with the suspension of habeas corpus rights, anyone—including her father and mother—can be detained and held indefinitely. We don’t know what will make a national emergency either, but the internment of the Japanese is still very much in our minds. Recently, when the government asked our local organizations—from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association to the China Youth Club—to hand over their membership rosters within twenty-four hours, a lot of our neighbors panicked, knowing their names would show up on the list of at least one of the forty groups targeted. Then we read in the Chinese newspaper that the FBI had bugged the headquarters of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and had decided to investigate all subscribers to the
China Daily News
. I’ve been grateful ever since that Father Louie subscribes to
Chung Sai Yat Po
, the pro-Kuomintang, pro-Christian, pro-assimilation newspaper, and buys only the occasional copy of the
China Daily
.

I don’t know where the butcher will go next in his rant, but I don’t want the girls listening to it. I’m just about to take them out of there when the butcher calms down enough for me to place my order. As he wraps the
char siu
in pink paper, he confides to me in a more temperate tone, “It’s not so bad here in Los Angeles, Mrs. Louie. But I had a cousin up in San Francisco who committed suicide rather than face arrest. He hadn’t done anything wrong. I’ve heard of others who’ve been sent to jail and are now awaiting deportation.”

“We’ve all heard these stories,” I say. “But what can we do?”

He hands me the pork. “I’ve been afraid for so long, and I’m tired of it. I’m just plain tired of it. And frustrated …”

As his voice begins to grow in intensity again, I lead the girls out of the shop. They’re silent for the rest of the short walk to Pearl’s. Once we get inside, the three of us go straight to the kitchen. May, who’s in her office talking on the phone, smiles and waves. Sam’s mixing the batter for the sweet-and-sour pork that’s so popular with our customers. I can’t help noticing that he’s using a smaller bowl than he did a year ago, when we opened. This new war has caused much of our clientele to stay away; some businesses in Chinatown have closed completely. While outside of Chinatown, there’s so much fear about Chinese in China that many Chinese Americans have lost their jobs or can’t get hired.

We may not be getting as many customers as we used to, but we don’t have it as rough as some people. At home we’ve been economizing, making our meals stretch by eating more rice and less meat. We also have May, who still runs her rental business, works as an agent, and appears in the occasional film or television show herself. Any minute now the studios are going to start making films about the threat of Communism. Once that happens, May will be very busy. The money she’ll make will go into the family pot, to be shared by all of us.

I hand Sam the
char siu
, and then I put together a tray for the girls that combines Chinese and Western sensibilities about what a snack should be: some peanuts, a few orange wedges, four almond cookies, and two glasses of whole milk. The girls drop their books on the worktable. Hazel sits down and folds her hands in her lap to wait, while Joy goes over to the radio we keep in the kitchen to amuse the staff and turns it on.

I flick my wrist at her. “No radio this afternoon.”

“But, Mom—”

“I don’t want to argue. You and Hazel need to do your homework.”

“But why?”

Because I don’t want you hearing any more bad news
is what I think but don’t say. I hate lying to my daughter, but these last few months I’ve come up with excuse after excuse for why I don’t want her listening to the radio: I have a migraine or her father is in a bad mood. I’ve even tried a sharp “Because I said so,” which seems to work, but I can’t use it every day. Since Hazel is here, I try something new:

“What would Hazel’s mother think if I let you girls listen to the radio? We want you girls to get straight As. I don’t want to tell Mrs. Yee that I let her down.”

“But you always let us listen before.” When I shake my head, Joy turns to her father for help. “Dad?”

Sam doesn’t bother to look up. “Just do what your mother says.”

Joy turns the radio off, goes to the table, and plops down next to Hazel. Joy’s an obedient child, and I’m grateful for that, because these last four months have been difficult. I’m a lot more modern than many of the mothers in Chinatown but not nearly as modern as Joy would like me to be. I’ve told her that pretty soon she’ll be getting a visit from the little red sister and what that means in terms of boys, but I can’t find a way to talk to her about this new war.

May sweeps into the kitchen. She kisses Joy, gives Hazel a pat, and sits down across from them.

“How are my favorite girls?” she asks.

“We’re fine, Auntie May,” Joy answers glumly.

“That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic. Cheer up. It’s Saturday. You’re done with Chinese school and you have the rest of the weekend free. What would you like to do? Can I take the two of you to a movie?”

“Can we go, Mom?” Joy asks eagerly.

Hazel, who anyone can see would love to spend the afternoon at the movies, says, “I can’t go. I have homework for regular school.”

“And so does Joy,” I add.

May defers to me without hesitation. “Then the girls had better finish it.”

Since my baby died, my sister and I have been very close. As Mama might have said, we’re like long vines with entwined roots. When I’m down, May’s up. When I’m up, she’s down. When I gain weight, she loses weight. When I lose weight, she still stays perfect. We don’t necessarily share the same emotions or ways of looking at the world, but I can love her just as she is. My resentments are gone—at least until the next time she hurts my feelings or I do something that irritates or frustrates her so much that she pulls away from me.

“I can help, if you want,” May says to the girls. “If we get it done quickly, then maybe we could go out for ice cream.”

Joy looks at me, her eyes bright and questioning.

“You can go
if
you finish your homework.”

May puts her elbows on the table. “So what do you have? Math? I’m pretty good at that.”

Joy answers, “We have to present a current event to the class—”

“About the war,” Hazel finishes for her.

Now I really do feel a headache coming on. Why can’t the girls’ teacher be a little more sensitive about this subject?

Joy opens her bag, pulls out a folded
Los Angeles Times
, and spreads it on the table. She points to one of the stories. “We were thinking of doing this one.”

May looks at the story and starts to read aloud: “Today the United States government issued orders restraining Chinese students who are studying in America from returning to their home country fearing that they’ll take scientific and technological secrets with them.” May pauses, glances at me, and goes back to reading: “The government has also banned all remittances to mainland China and even the British colony of Hong Kong, so that money can no longer be walked across the border. Those caught trying to send funds to relatives in China will be fined up to $10,000 and jailed for up to ten years.”

My hand goes to my pocket, and I finger Betsy’s letter. If things are dangerous for someone like Mr. Howell, then they could get a lot worse for people like Father Louie, who’ve been sending tea money back to their families and villages in China for years.

“In response,” I hear May reading, “the Six Companies, the most powerful Chinese-American organization in the United States, has mounted a virulent anti-Communist campaign in hopes of halting criticism and curtailing attacks in Chinatowns across the country.” May looks up from the paper and asks, “Are you girls scared?” When they nod, she says, “Don’t be. You were born here. You’re Americans. You have every right to be here. You don’t have to be afraid.”

I agree that they have a right to be here, but they should be scared. I try to match the tone I took when I first warned Joy about boys: steady but serious.

“You need to be careful though. Some people are going to look at you and see girls who are yellow in race and red in ideology.” I frown. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” Joy answers. “We’ve been talking about that in class with our teacher. She says that because of how we look, some people might see us as the enemy, even though we’re citizens.”