The Immigrants (18 page)

Lavette, which in English is ‘begger’s hash.’ You see, my mother is Shanghainese—”

“Not really,” Feng Wo interrupted. “She comes from a tiny village to the south of the city. My grandfather was from Canton, and not only is the language different but the cooking too. I taught her to cook Cantonese, but her best dishes are Shanghainese.”

May Ling exploded her breath. “I said nothing. It would be disrespectful if I did.”

“You are disrespectful beyond belief,” Feng Wo said. “My ancestors shrink in their graves in horror.” Then he spoke in Chinese to his wife, who was still piling food onto the plates, and she smiled and nodded.

In all the years he had worked for Dan, he had never spoken this much. “Please eat,” May Ling said to Dan. “You see, my father is a very educated man, and from his father, he learned Mandarin, otherwise he could not speak to my mother at all, since in her village they spoke Shanghainese and she would not understand a single word of Cantonese.”

“You mean they speak more than one language in China?”

“Oh, many more than one language, Mr. Lavette, ex cept that the educated people everywhere speak Man darin, and my father is excellently educated, and when you have left, he will lecture me for at least an hour on my unmaidenly lack of modesty. But I am liberated—not at all easy for a Chinese woman.”

“You are certainly liberated,” Feng Wo said. “To my sorrow.”

She was laughing, and again Dan found her laughter irresistible.

Then Feng Wo and May Ling both began to speak in Chinese to So-toy, who covered her mouth to suppress her giggles.

“You speak Chinese,” Dan said to May Ling in amazement.

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“Do you think I grew up without ever talking to my mother?

I was speaking Shanghainese and Mandarin before I ever knew a word of English. But I can’t speak Cantonese very well.”

“What am I eating?” Dan asked her. “It’s delicious. I never ate anything like this before. God, it’s good!”

Feng Wo spoke to his wife, who nodded in delight and heaped more food on Dan’s plate. “That’s stewed beef with tara root, wine, and sugar,” May Ling said. “We call it
hon sau yo zo
, and the fish is whitefish, with tomatoes, green pepper, pineapple, ginger, green on ions, and shrimp.
Tan soan yo
. The shredded pork is sauteéd with Chinese stringbeans—that’s a peasant dish that they eat everywhere—don’t they?” she asked her father.

“I guess so. It’s a simple peasant dish, but very good. It’s called
tzal do tzu zo
.”

Dan tried to pronounce it, and So-toy giggled and covered her mouth again. “And this?” Dan asked.

“Bean curd,” Feng Wo said. “You never tasted it?”

“Never. But I like it. I thought it was some kind of custard.”

“It is, sort of,” May Ling said. “It’s made of soy beans, and they used to import them from China. But now some Chinese farmers down on the Peninsula have started to grow the beans, and they’re much cheaper. It’s very hot and peppery, a real Shanghai dish, made with tomato sauce, red pepper, and garlic.”

“
Ma paw do foo
,” So-toy said with pride.

“I like Mexican food,” Dan said. “It reminds me of that.”

So-toy filled a side dish with cabbage, and May Ling said, “That’s my mother’s pride and joy.
Kai yan bai tzi
, sautéed cabbage with sweet cream and chopped dried shrimp. So if you just keep eating it and eating it, her day will be complete.”

“May Ling!” her father said disapprovingly, and then translated for her mother, who again covered her mouth to hide her laughter.

Dan emptied his plate, and So-toy filled it again. He ate without

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shame, great quantities of food, washing it down with cup after cup of the green tea. “
Tsa foo
,” he ventured, May Ling laughing at his attempt to pronounce it. “Better if you just say green tea.” When So-toy came in from the kitchen bearing a royal mold of what May Ling de scribed as eight precious rice pudding, or
ba bau fa
, he threw up his hands in despair and pleaded. “No more, no, please.

I’ll never walk out of here.”

“But everyone said you are so brave, Mr. Lavette, fighting the pirates and sinking them with a shotgun, and now you surrender.

You know, really, this is the triumph of all. I must sound like a Chinese cookbook by now.”

“You do,” her father agreed.

“Good,” May Ling said. “Mother and I will clear and do the dishes, and that will give your stomach a chance to empty itself. Aren’t you pleased? Look at it—sweet rice, sweet red bean paste, raisins, ginger pre serve, orange peel, lotus seeds, cherries, pineapple, kumquats, almond paste—oh, when you were a little boy, Mr. Lavette, did you ever eat the banana split su preme at Bundy’s ice cream parlor on Sacramento Street? I never did. I always dreamed of it, but we were much too poor then, but this is a sort of Oriental ver sion—”

Feng Wo rose. “I have matters to discuss with your mother.” He looked at his daughter as if he had not seen her before.

“You’re a dear sweet man,” said May Ling, and then told Dan, “I am the most improper, badly bred Chinese daughter in this entire city. I manipulate my father and I avoid household duties that are the ordained lot of a woman. I am a feminist. Do you like feminists, Mr. Lavette?”

Dan nodded, grinning. “If you’re one, yes. I’m pretty ignorant, May Ling. I never went back to school after the earthquake.”

Both her mother and her father were in the kitchen now, with the door closed behind them, and May Ling leaned over to Dan and said softly, “I don’t always be have like this, Mr. Lavette. Let

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me explain. We never had a Caucasian in our home before. My father, poor man, was terrified. He worships the ground you walk on, and so do I, believe me, and I’m speaking quite seri ously now.

You are the great hero of my life, and I’ve heard stories about you for the past four years, so I feel I know you very well. My mother and father planned and discussed this evening for weeks, and I have been talking my head off to put them at ease. They both feel that I am a bona fide American product, a true barbar ian, which is not true at all. You cannot grow up as a Chinese girl in San Francisco and deceive yourself into imagining that you are American. But perhaps I am more at ease with Caucasians since I work in a library.

What I am trying to say is just that we all admire you and love you, and we want you to feel relaxed here and happy.”

“I don’t remember a better evening,” Dan said.

A week later, at breakfast, Mary Seldon said to her hus band, “It would appear that your son-in-law has a habit of making the front page of the
Chronicle
.”

“He’s your son-in-law too.”

“‘Shipping line sold,’” she read. “‘The firm of Levy and Lavette, local ship operators, has purchased the five cargo ships of Transoceanic Freight. The selling price is said to be upwards of three million dollars. For some months now, there have been rumors of the im pending bankruptcy of Transoceanic’—shall I read more?” she asked.

“No. I know all about it.”

“Where did the money come from?”

“Cassala, I expect,” Seldon said. “Of course, the cash payment must have been considerably less. You know, he came to us for the money first.”

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“Did he? And you turned him down?”

“Not at all. We wanted time to consider it, but he stalked out in a high dudgeon. I think it was the sight of Grant Whittier that he couldn’t tolerate.”

“What does he have against Grant?”

“Ah. You would have to understand Dan to answer that—which you don’t.”

“But you do?”

“Somewhat, I think. I like him, but he’s a young bull and he can’t bear to be crossed. Sooner or later, he’ll stumble, I’m afraid. He has a habit of biting off more than he can chew.”

In 1906, before the earthquake and the fire struck San Francisco, literate residents of the city could boast that they possessed the finest public library west of the Rocky Mountains. If the railroad kings and the placer kings had done little reading, no one could accuse them of lacking a veneration for books. By 1878, Andrew S. Hallidie, who invented the cable car, and Henry George, the economist, got together with nine other prominent citizens and established a public library and reading room. Starting in a rented meeting hall, by 1906

the library had mushroomed out into an entire wing of city hall, one hundred and forty thousand volumes and almost thirty-two thousand library card hold ers. And all of it, the dreams and efforts of book lovers, went up in flames in a few hours. Undaunted, a library committee organized itself within weeks after the earth quake. Forty thousand dollars was appropriated by the city, and a frame building was constructed between Van Ness and Franklin on Hayes Street.

Almost immedi ately, twenty-five thousand books were donated, and in the decade that followed, the temporary frame building filled to overflowing.

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All of this May Ling told to Dan, making the point that to be a librarian in San Francisco was a little more than simply being a librarian.

At first he had no thought or intention of seeing her again.

Fourteen hours a day were simply not enough hours to do what he had to do: put five oceangoing ships into operation. Mark took over a good deal of the work, booking cargo, dealing with the British and French trade commissions, working through the legalities of what could and could not be done as a neutral in a world at war; but that still left Dan with the problems of operation and crew and supply and loading and coal ing and a thousand other details that he had neither an ticipated nor provided for. He thanked God for Feng Wo, who could do almost anything, and he rose at six in the morning and stumbled into bed at ten or eleven at night—and found himself increasingly a stranger to his wife and his children.

Yet his thoughts turned more and more frequently, not to Jean, whose aloofness had become a fact of his life, but to the Chinese girl and to the single evening of laughter and joy that he had experienced with her. Then, one day at three o’clock in the afternoon, he dropped everything and walked out of the warehouse that contained their offices and shipping depot, got into his car, and drove over to Van Ness and Hayes. He sat in his car and brooded a while, telling himself that what he intended was pointless and senseless.

Then he went into the library.

A stout, friendly woman at the checkout desk looked at him with interest and informed him that May Ling Wo could be found straight back, all the way back, and then to the right. He went straight back, all the way back, picking his way through the stacks, and then to the right, and at a tiny desk hidden in a cave of books, he found her, scribbling on a pad with an enormous open book in front of her. He waited until she looked up, asking himself,
Will she
be annoyed, angry, pro voked?

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No one of them. She looked up and smiled. “Mr. Lavette. What a pleasant surprise!”

“I got no reason to be here,” he blurted out. “I just wanted to see you again.”

“That’s a reason, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“This,” she said, motioning to the limits of her little cave, “is the Oriental Reference Department. That’s such an imposing name, and I am it, and if you were wondering how the city of San Francisco became so liberal as to hire a Chinese, well, that’s the answer. They simply couldn’t find a Caucasian who could read and write Chinese. I would love to ask you to sit down, Mr. Lavette.

They promised another chair weeks ago but never delivered.”

“That’s all right. I won’t stay.”

“Please. Don’t let me drive you away. If I were a proper Chinese lady I’d give you my seat. But as you know, I’m not.”

“Sure. Look, May Ling, when do you finish work?”

“At five, when we close. Why?”

“Well—look, I don’t know how to say this—”

“Just say it,” she said gently. “You want to see me after I finish work?”

“Right. I’m parked outside. It’s not much more than an hour. I’ll wait there in my car, and then maybe you’d go for a drive with me and have dinner? Only if you want to.”

“I know that.”

“I mean I want to talk to you. I just want to talk to you.”

“All right.”

“You don’t have to go home?”

“I can telephone my mother. But you don’t have to sit there for an hour. You can come back at five.”

“I’ll be there. It’s a yellow car. You can’t miss it.” Then he made his escape, so that she would not have time to think about it or

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change her mind. He sat in the car, rehearsing in his mind what he would say to her and looking at his watch, the minutes dragging end lessly, feeling increasingly the fool, trying to understand what he was doing, what drove him, because it was not sex; he had not even thought of this slight, flat-chested girl in terms of sex; and he was not in love with her. He was in love with Jean; he never had Jean and he wanted her; nothing would change that; he kept telling himself that nothing would change that.

And then, suddenly, she was there, standing by his car in her black dress, a pink shawl around her shoul ders, the oval-shaped face tilted, her dark eyes inquir ing. He got out of the car and opened the door for her.

“I’m really very excited, Mr. Lavette,” she said. “I’ve never been in an automobile before.”

“It’s safe enough. You mustn’t be afraid.”

“I’m not. It’s hard to be afraid with you. You’re a very reas-suring person.”

She watched with interest as he swung the crank and started the car. “We’ll drive across to the Presidio, if you like that, and there’s a place where we can park and get a good view of the ocean.”

“I would like that.”

He began the drive across town toward the ocean, groping in his mind for words, explanations, subjects, May Ling all the while sitting silently beside him, until at last he said desperately, “I’m trying to think of what I should say to you, and I can’t.”