China Dolls

GRACE: A Measly Girl

I traveled west-alone-on the cheapest bus routes I could find. Every mile took me farther from Plain City, Ohio, where I’d been a flyspeck on the wallpaper of small-town life. Each new state I passed through loosened another rope around my heart, my legs, my arms, yet my whole body ached and I couldn’t shake my vertigo. I lived on aspirin, crackers, and soda pop. I cried and cried and cried. On the eighth day, California. Many hours after crossing the boundary, I got off the bus and pulled my sweater a little more tightly around me. I expected sun and warmth, but on that October afternoon, fog hung over San Francisco, damp, and shockingly cold.

Picking up my suitcase, I left the bus station and started to walk. The receptionists at the cheap hotels I visited told me they were full. “Go to Chinatown,” they suggested. “You can get a room there.” I had no idea where Chinatown was, so that didn’t help me. And I’ll say this about San Francisco: lots of hills, water on practically every side, and, it seemed to me, not a single street ran purely in any one direction. Finally, a man at a fleabag took my money-a dollar a day, in advance-and gave me a key to a room.

I washed my hair in the basin and put it up in pin curls, then leaned in to the mirror to examine what remained of my injuries. My forehead had healed completely, but the inside of my skull continued to swim from being banged against the kitchen floor. The skin over my ribs was mottled green, gray, and purple. My shoulder still felt swollen and stiff from being dislocated and then jammed back into place, but the cut on my lip had nearly disappeared. I turned away and sat on the edge of the bed, hungry but too frightened to go out, and listening to the sound of God knows what coming through the walls.

I opened my purse and pulled out the magazine clipping Miss Miller, who’d taught me dance from the age of four, had torn from a magazine and given to me a few months earlier. I smoothed the advertisement with my palm so I could study the artist’s sketch of the Golden Gate International Exposition. Even its location on Treasure Island seemed to beckon. “See, Grace, they’re looking for six thousand workers,” Miss Miller had said. “Dancers, singers, welders, carpenters. The whole works.” She’d sighed then. “I wanted to go so many places when I was young, but it takes guts-and talent-to leave everything and everyone you know. You could do it, though.” Her few words and that slip of paper had given me the courage to believe I actually could. After all, I’d won first prize at the Plain City Fair for my tap dancing and singing when I was seven and had held the title ever since.

You always planned to leave home, I told myself. Just because you had to escape sooner than expected doesn’t mean you can’t still fly to the stars.

But my pep talk-in a scary hotel room, in a strange city, in the middle of the night-did little to ease my fears. Once in bed, I could practically see the walls closing in around me. To calm myself, I began a routine I’d invented as a small child, running my hands the length of my arms (a broken tibia when I was three; my mom told Doc Haverford I fell down the stairs), slipping along my sides (several broken and fractured ribs over the years), and then lifting each leg and squeezing all the way to my feet (my legs had been a frequent target until I started dancing). The ritual both strengthened and soothed me. I was now alone in the world, with no home to return to and no one to rely on, but if I could survive my father’s beatings and the petty prejudices of my hometown, then I could triumph over whatever obstacles the future threw my way. Maybe. Hopefully.

THE NEXT MORNING, I combed out my hair, sweeping up the sides and letting the curls billow below, the way Carole Lombard did in My Man Godfrey. I put on the dress my dad bought for me when he took us to Cincinnati to buy supplies for the laundry. I’d chosen a dusty-rose-colored cotton frock, with a geometric print composed of interlocking mustard-yellow and steel-gray squares. Mom said the pattern of the fabric and cut of the dress looked too mature for me-and maybe that was so-but now I considered myself lucky to be wearing something so sophisticated.

Filled with a sense of determination, I went downstairs and onto the street. I asked directions on nearly every corner and managed to find my way to the Ferry Building, where I boarded the boat to Treasure Island, about halfway across the bay and just under the Bay Bridge. I imagined everyone onboard was seeking a job at the Golden Gate International Exposition. As excited as I was, the pulse of the ferry through the choppy water roused my vertigo and my hunger until I felt, once again, dizzy and sick. Once we reached the dock, everyone walked fast, wanting to be first in line for interviews. Me too. I spotted my first palm trees, which was thrilling because they meant I surely was in California. I’d never seen anything like the fair’s entrance. Giant towers composed of stacked cubes crowned by stylized elephants bookended the gate. Beyond, I glimpsed spires still clothed in scaffolding. My ears pounded from the sounds of hammers, the buzz of electric saws, the rumble of tractors, bulldozers, and flatbed trucks, and the shouts of men calling out orders and cursing the way they do on construction sites.

“Will they be done on time?” a man’s voice asked very close to my ear.

I jumped, spiraling into the terror I experienced around my dad. I swung around to find a young Occidental man about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and sandy-colored hair. He put up his hands in surrender.

“I’m sorry I scared you.” His mouth spread into a contrite smile as I met his deep blue eyes. He looked older than I-maybe around twenty. He extended his hand. “My name’s Joe.”

“I’m Grace.” No last names. I liked that.

“I’m looking for a job as a rolling-chair boy.” He didn’t bother to explain what that was. “But the real reason I’m here is that I love planes, and I love to fly.”

Up ahead, the others from the ferry disappeared through the gate.

“I love planes so much that my parents told me if I got straight As in high school they’d let me take flying lessons,” Joe continued, sure of my interest. “I trained in a Piper Cub. I learned how to take off, land, what to do in a stall, and how to pull out of a spin. Now I have my pilot’s license.”

This told me, among other things, that his family had to be pretty well-off.

“What does that have to do with rolling chairs?”

He laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “Pan Am’s Clipper ships are going to be taking off and landing right here at Treasure Island!”

I nodded, pretending interest when I didn’t know what in the heck he was talking about.

“I’ve been chewing your ear off,” Joe acknowledged. “Sorry about that. What are you doing here?”

“I’m a dancer.”

“Neat.” He pointed his chin toward the gate. “We’d better catch up.”

When I stumbled a bit in my low-slung heels, he grabbed my arm to steady me, and I instinctively pulled away. His eyes went banjo big. I could tell he was about to apologize again.

“Where are you from?” I blurted, hoping to shift his attention.

“Winnetka, Illinois. I’m going to Cal.” Seeing my confusion, he explained, “The University of California. It’s over there.” He pointed east. “In Berkeley. I live in a fraternity house. How about you?”

“Plain City, Ohio.”

“Haven’t heard of it, but we’re both from the Midwest, and our states are practically neighbors. Friends?”

I nodded. He sure was a nice guy-good-looking, and I liked the way the left side of his mouth tweaked up when he smiled.

“Whew!” He wiped his forehead in mock relief.

He was funny too.

When we had all reached the trailer, a man-wearing gray flannel trousers, a leather jacket zipped halfway up his chest, and a charcoal-colored trilby pulled down to shield his eyes from the sun-jumped on a crate and spoke above the din around us: “A lot of you have come from far away. That’s great! We need plenty of folks to get this place up and running. If you’re a painter, electrician, or plumber, head over to the Court of the Seven Seas. Harry will lead the way.”

Half the folks followed the man pointed out as Harry.

“I figure the rest of you are here to apply for either service or performance jobs,” the man in the trilby continued. “If you want to drive one of the elephant trams, work in a concession, become a rolling-chair boy, barker, waitress, fireman, or cop, then go to the Court of Flowers. No flowers there yet, just another trailer like this one.”

“That’s my cue,” Joe whispered. Then, “Good luck!”

He peeled away with a large group. He turned to look back at me, gave me a thumbs-up and another smile, both of which I returned. He strode with such confidence that dust kicked up around his shoes. Through the racket around me, I could just make out him whistling “All of Me.” I loved that song.

The man in the hat sized up those who remained. “All right then,” he said. “If you’re here to be models, dancers, or musicians, you’re with me. I’ll see you one at a time. After a preliminary look-see, I’ll send you on to auditions. If you make the cut… Aw, hell,” he said with a casual wave of his hand. “You know the drill. Line up here.”

One person after another entered the trailer and then exited five or so minutes later with either a grin or a grimace. I tried to prepare myself for the questions I might be asked about my dance experience, and once again my father came into my mind. He may have beat me at home, but he liked to boast to others about how many ribbons and apple-pie prizes I’d won. He’d pushed me to be an “all-American girl,” which meant that he let me go to the Rialto to watch musicals to inspire me to practice even harder. I adored Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1936, in which she danced without music. I saw that movie maybe ten times, and then tried to re-create her steps at every opportunity: on the sidewalk outside the theater, at Miss Miller’s studio, and in our family’s laundry. Of course, the kids in school made fun of me when I said I wanted to be a star. “You? An Oriental girl?” They had a point. It wasn’t like there were any famous Chinese movie stars apart from Anna May Wong, and she didn’t sing or dance as far as I knew. Then I saw Dorothy Toy and Paul Wing-a Chinese dance team-in the whimsically titled With Best Dishes. I decided if they could make it, why not me? But would any of that help me now? I suddenly felt very apprehensive and very alone.

When my turn came, I entered the trailer and closed the door behind me as I’d seen others do. The man motioned for me to sit.

“Your name?”

“Grace Lee.”

“How old are you?”

“Old enough to sing and dance,” I answered pertly. I wanted to be a star, so no matter how desperate I was, I had to act like one. “I’m good.”

The man pinched his chin as he considered my response.

“You’re Oriental,” he observed, “and you’re quite the knockout. Problem is, I don’t have anything for you.”

I opened my purse, pulled out Miss Miller’s clipping, and pushed it across the desk. “It says here you need performers for the Cavalcade of the Golden West-”

“That’s a big show. Hundreds of performers. But I don’t need an Oriental girl.”

“What about at the Japanese Pavilion?” I asked, my false confidence instantly eroding. “I came from so far away. I really need a job.”

“It’s the Depression, kid. Everyone needs a job.” He glanced again at my application. “And I hate to break it to you, but you aren’t Japanese. Grace Lee, that’s Chinese, right?”

“Will anyone know?”

“Kid, I doubt anyone can tell the difference. Can you?”

I shrugged. I’d never seen a Japanese. I’d never seen a Chinese either other than my mother, my father, and my own reflection in the mirror-and Anna May Wong, Toy and Wing, and a couple of Orientals playing maids and butlers on the silver screen, but those weren’t in real life-so how could I be certain of the difference between a Japanese and a Chinese? I only knew my mother’s thin cheeks and chapped hands and my father’s weathered face and wiry arms. Like that, my eyes began to well. What if I failed? What if I had to go home?

“We don’t have Orientals where I’m from,” I admitted, “but I’ve always heard that they all look alike.”

“Be that as it may, I’ve been told to be authentic…” He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. There’s going to be a Chinese Village. Those folks are doing their own hiring. Maybe I can get you set as a dancer from China.”

“I’m not from China. I was born here.”

Unconcerned, he picked up the phone. I listened as he suggested me to the person I assumed was in charge of the Chinese Village. He dropped the receiver back in the cradle. “They aren’t hiring dancers in a permanent way. With all the troubles in China, it wouldn’t be right.”

Troubles in China? I’d read about Germany’s aggression in Europe in the Plain City Advocate, but the newspaper came out only once a week. It barely covered events in Europe and never in Asia, so I was ignorant about all things Chinese except Chinese rice wine, which my mom made and sold out our back door on Friday and Saturday nights to the men in Plain City-a place as dry as chalk even after Prohibition ended. My mind pondered these things, but they were just a diversion from my panic.

“What about on the Gayway?” I remembered that from Miss Miller’s advertisement.

“That’s a carnival. I don’t see you there at all.”

“I’ve been to a carnival before-”

“Not like this one.”

“I can do it,” I insisted, but he’d better not try sending me to a hoochie-coochie tent like they had for men at the Plain City Fair. I’d never do that.

He shook his head. “You’re a regular China doll. If I put you in the Gayway, the men would eat you up.”

My five minutes were done, but the man didn’t dismiss me. Instead, he stared at me, taking in my dress, my shoes, the way I’d curled and combed my hair. I lowered my eyes and sat quietly. Perhaps it was proof of how the most innocent can remain safe-or that the man really was of good character-that he didn’t try or even suggest any funny business.

“I’ll do anything,” I said, my voice now shaking, “even if it’s boring or menial-”

“That’s not the way to sell yourself, kid.”

“I could work in a hamburger stand if I had to. Maybe one of the performers in the Cavalcade of the Golden West will get sick. You should have someone like me around, just in case.”

“You can try the concessions,” he responded dubiously. “But you’ve got a big problem. Your gams are good, and your contours and promontories are in the right places. You’ve got a face that could crush a lily. But your accent-”

“My accent?”

“Yeah. You don’t have one. You’ve got to stop talking all perfect. You need to do the ching-chong thing.”

Never! My father spoke in heavily accented English, even though he was born here. He always blamed it on the fact that he’d grown up in a lumber camp in the Sierras, where he lived with his father, who conversed only in Chinese. My mother’s English was flawless. She was born in China but came to America so early that she’d lost her accent entirely. How she was raised-somehow living far enough from other Chinese that she didn’t have an accent-was never discussed. The one time I asked, my father smacked me. In any case, the three of us could understand each other only if we communicated in English. And even if we all had spoken the same dialect, my father would never have allowed us to use it. Speaking English means you are American, and we must be American at all times. Reciting sentences like I hear you cut school again and what’s the big deal? showed we were assimilated. But all that didn’t mean Dad wouldn’t exaggerate his accent for his customers if he calculated it would make them happy.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t do what you ask.”

With nothing left to add, I got up to leave. In just these few minutes I’d learned two things about myself: I would never lower myself by faking an accent like my dad did (or Charlie Chan did in the movies), nor would I work naked as a hoochie-coochie dancer. All right, so I had pride. But what price would I have to pay for it? I felt sick with fear and despair.

“Hey, kid, wait a sec.” The man reached into a drawer, pulled out a brown paper bag, and then met me at the door. “A ham sandwich and an apple.”

Heat crept up my face. I already hadn’t gotten the job. Did he have to humiliate me further? Did I appear that down at the heels?

“Take it,” he said, pressing the bag into my hands. “From the wife and me.”

“Thank you.” It would be my first real meal since leaving home.

He gave me a last pitying look. “Have you tried the new nightclubs in Chinatown? I hear they’re looking for ponies and canaries.” Seeing my confused expression, he explained, “I’m talking about dancers and singers-ponies and canaries. Aw, don’t worry about it. You’ll learn soon enough. Now head on back to your side of town. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you where to go to find an audition.” He gave me a gentle push out the door and called, “Next.”

On my way back to the dock, I conjured a nightclub in my mind. Top Hat, Swing Time, and A Star Is Born all had nightclubs, so I knew just what they looked like: white banquettes, hatcheck and cigarette girls, champagne bubbling in thin-stemmed glasses, men wearing top hats, white ties, and tails, and women swanning about in satin slip gowns cut on the bias that draped over their bodies like whispered kisses. My heart had been set on getting a job at the exposition, but working in a nightclub would be even better. A dollop of confidence: I will succeed.

But I still didn’t have an inkling about where Chinatown was or where to look once I got there, and that knowledge brought on a horrible wave of anxiety that all but drowned my momentary optimism. For now, I had nowhere to go except back to my hotel room. I already hated that place, with its cockroaches, women with their too-rouged cheeks, and men in their dirty undershirts who came and went, but I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t give up, because that would mean going home to my father.

THE NEXT DAY, I put on my same rose-colored dress, bought a map, and followed its lines toward Chinatown. The clammy air was depressing. Passing all the soup lines and people-Okies, I guessed-dressed in tattered clothes, gaunt, just standing around, didn’t help either. I could end up like them if I wasn’t careful. And my body ached from the damp. My ribs and shoulder throbbed when I breathed or raised my arms, but I reminded myself that I’d danced through pain more times than I could count. I swallowed three aspirin dry and silently prayed that I wouldn’t have to do a ton of turns if I got an audition, which would be nearly impossible with my lingering vertigo.

At the corner of California Street and Grant Avenue, two peculiar-looking multiple-storied edifices with green-glazed tile roofs sat like guards: Sing Chong Bazaar and Sing Fat Bazaar. What crazy names! Behind the big plate-glass windows were things I’d never seen before: Chinese furniture, silks, and vases. Then I turned onto Grant and into another world. Coiling dragons painted in bright green, red, and gold decorated the streetlamps. Eaves curled skyward. I passed markets with produce stacked in baskets right on the sidewalk and restaurants advertising chop suey-whatever that was. And the smells! I couldn’t tell if they were good or bad-just odd.

But nothing unnerved me more than encountering so many Chinese eyes, mouths, noses, arms, and legs. Here were hundreds-maybe thousands-of Chinese men. They were tall and short, fat and thin, some light-skinned and some very dark. None of them looked like my father. I spotted a couple of older women, moving furtively along the sidewalk, doing their best to be invisible. Farther along, I saw five high school girls, wearing matching uniforms and carrying books. My knowledge of Chinese hair was limited to three examples: my mother’s tresses, which she kept in a bun; my father’s close-shaved head; and my own manufactured curls. So even the hair was different-long and silky, short bobs, permanent waves, marcels, spiky, wispy, balding, and in so many variations of black. Everything was as foreign and strange as if I’d just disembarked from a boat in Hong Kong, Canton, or Shanghai-not that I’d been to any of those places-making me both elated and petrified. Chinatown felt frighteningly enchanted in the way certain fairy tales had once left me unable to sleep. Was that why my parents had insisted on living so far from all this?

I needed help.

“Can you direct me to a nightclub?” I asked a woman wearing what looked like black pajamas and carrying two bags overflowing with onion greens. She refused to acknowledge me. Next I tried to stop a newspaper boy, but he ignored me too. I gazed up the street: so many men here-some dressed as laborers, others as businessmen. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, moving much faster than folks ever did back home, except for that time the Smith house caught fire and we all rushed to watch the volunteer fire department try to put it out. Now that was a night.

At the corner of Grant and Washington, I found three boys I guessed to be between ten and twelve years old playing in a sandpile dumped in the middle of the intersection. Their pants were rolled up to their knees, their sleeves smashed to their elbows, and their caps askew from roughhousing. Workmen shoveled the perimeter of the pile as cars and trucks honked at the traffic obstacle as though the added noise would cure the problem. I watched it all from the curb for a few minutes. Finally, I stepped into the street. My shoes sank into the sand as I delicately made my way to the little trio, who stopped their horseplay to watch me approach. The oldest boy grabbed two handfuls of sand and let the grains flow through his fingers.

“No one said we couldn’t be out here,” he said by way of greeting.

“I didn’t say they did,” I replied.

“Then what do you want, lady?”

My face crinkled. I’d never been called lady before. Measly girl. Hog face. Chink. Chinaman. Little one. Apple-pie winner. Heart dumpling. Kid and China doll just yesterday, but never lady. Act the part!

“I’m hoping you can assist me,” I said.

“What’s in it for us?” the oldest boy asked impudently.

“A nickel each, if you help me.” I pulled out my coin purse, picked through it for three nickels, and held them in my palm. “I’m looking for a nightclub-”

“Oh,” he said, his voice rising and falling knowingly. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

I dropped one of the nickels back into the coin purse.

“So you’re familiar with the clubs,” I said. Every boy was curious about the forbidden, and my comment set off all three boys.

“They’re barely better than bars-”

“No one wants them in the neighborhood-”

“My dad says they’re just a rat’s hair above a speakeasy-”

I dropped another nickel into my coin purse.

“You win, lady,” the ringleader conceded. “You want to work in a big-thigh show, that’s your headache.”

“Big-thigh show?”

“Don’t you know anything?” he asked. “You really want to let people see your legs?”

As long as it’s just my legs…

“Please tell me where to go,” I said.

I waited while he exchanged looks with his buddies. All I needed was one name to give me a start.

At last, he said, “Wilbert Wong has the Li Po-a cocktail lounge on the next block. He’s changing it into more of a club. Andy Wong-not related-runs the Chinese Penthouse. It opened last December with all-Chinese entertainment.”

He rattled this off like a town booster. This place was turning out to be a lot more like Plain City than it looked on the surface: a small town, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, especially when it came to the taboo.

“I heard Andy Wong is going to change the name to the Sky Room,” the smallest boy ventured, which earned him an elbow to the ribs.

“There’s Charlie Low’s new club. It’s not even open yet,” the oldest boy continued. “Two years ago, he opened a bar here on Grant Avenue. No Chinese girls or women allowed. What am I saying? No Chinese went, period!”

“How would you know?” I asked, challenging him.

“I know,” he responded.

Any boy could spout off about the birds and the bees-and other naughty things-but he often got the details wrong. It would now be up to me to figure out how much of what this little boy said was accurate and how much was gobbledygook picked up from listening to the whispers of older kids.

“Charlie Low’s wife is a singer,” he continued, “and he’s giving her a showplace called the Forbidden City. It’s on Sutter Street-”

“Not even in Chinatown,” the smallest boy interrupted again.

That appealed to me, because Chinatown was too scary for me.

“Can you point the way?” I asked.

“First, you go…”

His voice trailed off, and his eyes widened. The other two boys stared gape-mouthed at something over my shoulder. I turned to see what they were ogling and saw a girl about my age gingerly step off the curb and come toward us. She wore a practical outfit: a gray wool pleated skirt, a long-sleeved black sweater, charcoal-gray wool stockings, and oxfords. She was Chinese, with flawless porcelain skin. She looked rich, like out of a movie, except that I’d never seen a Chinese who looked like her in the darkness of the Rialto.

“I know how to get to the Forbidden City,” she said in melodious voice. “I’ll take you.”

Although Joe and the man on Treasure Island had both been perfectly nice to me, I wasn’t accustomed to kindness. Now here was a girl, offering to help, as if magically sent. I glanced down at the boys, trying to get a sense of what I should do.

“She’s Helen Fong,” the ringleader said in awe. “If she wants to help you, let her!”

The other two boys, acting their young ages at last, covered their mouths and giggled. The girl named Helen gave them an unyielding look, and they went quiet but fast.

“Kew, Chuen, Yee, I don’t think your mothers will be too happy to hear you aren’t in school,” she observed coolly. “You’d better hurry along now.”

The boys stood and brushed the sand off themselves. When they held out their palms, I paid them their promised nickels. Once they scampered off, I turned to Helen.

“Where to?”

HELEN: Calling to the Heavens

“This way,” I answered, but what in the world was I thinking-skipping work, walking through Chinatown unescorted, and talking to a total stranger?

My pace was brisk, and I felt the girl wordlessly tagging along behind me as I wove down Grant. She caught up at a red light.

“My name’s Grace,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks so much for helping me,” she went on, trying to appear composed, I thought, but actually sounding as scared as a fawn panting in fear at the sight of the moon.

“It’s nothing,” I responded, but it was everything. This morning, my brother Monroe had walked me to the door of the Chinese Telephone Exchange, where I worked. After he left me, I’d simply stood there, unable to bring myself to enter the building. I couldn’t face another day of listening to the other women talk between calls about what they were going to make for dinner that night for their husbands, how clever their children were, or how hard it was to make ends meet. Those women just weren’t pleasant to me. I understood, I suppose. I earned the same five dollars a week they earned and gave every dime to my father for my “upkeep,” but everyone knew my family was one of the best and most important in Chinatown.

So there I’d been, outside the telephone exchange, daydreaming about how the thousands of women-wives and concubines-in China’s imperial court had once spent their entire lives hidden inside the walls of the palace with no family or friends to love them. To amuse themselves, the women used to catch crickets and keep them in cages near their pillows. The crickets’ songs-haunting, calling to the heavens of their loneliness-told not only of their own lives but also of the women who were cared for, but equally helpless, in the cage of the palace. I lived in a traditional Chinese compound right in the heart of Chinatown, with twenty-nine of my closest relatives. A sense of futility had nearly overwhelmed me as I realized my life wasn’t all that different from those of the crickets who belonged to the women, who, in turn, belonged to the emperor. Right then, I’d noticed the girl in the street, talking to those silly boys. She looked as lost and lonely as I felt. She wasn’t fresh off the boat from China, but she was new to town, of that I was certain-a country bumpkin in her tatty store-bought dress. I’d edged to the intersection. As I’d listened to her conversation with the boys… I don’t know… I felt compelled to help her.

Once Grace and I were clearly out of Chinatown, my spirits lifted. No one from the neighborhood was watching me, hoping to curry favor with my father by reporting on my actions. We crossed the street, turned right on Sutter, and continued until we reached a sign that read FORBIDDEN CITY AUDITIONS. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. Music wafted down the stairs, enveloping us right on the street.

“Here it is,” I said.

“Come with me. Try out with me.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve never had a dance lesson.”

“It says no experience needed. We’ll stick together. I promise.”

Before I could protest further, Grace took my hand. I never would have expected that from a Chinese girl. I shivered. Didn’t she know it was rude to touch like that? I guess not, because she gave me an encouraging smile and pulled me up the stairs. I had leapt so far out of my cage-out of myself-that I followed Grace like I was the one who was lost and she was now leading the way. Or maybe she was desperate and afraid to go in alone.

In the entry hall, workers-dressed in baggy pants, sleeveless undershirts, and painters’ caps-carried lumber and other construction materials. A Chinese woman, sitting at a table made from two-by-fours and a sheet of plywood, handed us forms with spaces for our names, heights, weights, and ages. I wrote down the address of my family’s compound. I glanced over Grace’s shoulder as she scribbled the name of a hotel in a seedy part of town.

The woman, who I was sure recognized me, took Grace’s form and scanned it. “You’re seventeen?” she asked, not bothering to look up.

“Is that all right?”

“We’ve got younger inside. We just don’t want you to be too young.” She pointed down the hall. “You can change in that room on the right. After that, sit with the other girls trying out today. They’ll call you when they’re ready.” She didn’t specify who “they” were.

I lingered by the table when Grace walked down the hall.

“If I get the job, how much will you pay?” I inquired.

“Twenty a week,” the receptionist answered. I could almost hear additional words pouring out of her mouth. As though you need it. Then she bent back to her paperwork.

I could have walked out right then, but I was intrigued. Maybe I could do this. I traced the path Grace had taken and entered the half-finished ladies’ room. She had changed into a soft pink one-piece playsuit with short puffed sleeves and little shorts.

“I made this,” she boasted, “after I saw Eleanor Powell wear something like it in Born to Dance. I couldn’t tell the color of the playsuit in the film, but I thought this fabric would look pretty against my skin.”

I hadn’t been to many movies, so I didn’t know what to say.

She glanced in the mirror, squished her curls a couple of times to perk them up, and covered a cut with lipstick. I’d never be so rude as to ask her what had happened, but then she turned in my direction, frowned, and asked me a totally inappropriate question.

“You don’t know how to doll up, do you?” she said with a laugh. She poked around in her bag and fished out a slippery thin pink hair ribbon, which she tucked between her lips. She turned me toward the mirror, ran her fingers through my hair, and then whisked the ribbon from her lips, passed it behind my neck, and pulled the satin strips to the top of my head, where she tied a bow. “That’s better!” And it was, because the pink lifted my cheeks’ natural color.

We exited the restroom and followed the sound of music and rhythmic tapping. At the end of the hallway, I saw construction framing-for what looked like a bar to the left and a large central room. The stage looked done, though. The place was still a skeleton, but as my mind put flesh on it I began to see a nightclub like the one in Shanghai where I’d once danced the fox-trot…

Onstage, as if testing it for the first time, a Chinese man, twenty-six or twenty-seven, or maybe older, wearing cream-colored pants and a blue button-down linen shirt, slid across the floor, spun, and then resumed tapping. His arms appeared simultaneously loose and taut. The slap of his shoes as they hit the parquet-tat-a-tat-reverberated through the floorboards and shivered up my spine. His hair was slicked back with pomade, but his athletic steps-rattling now foot over foot across the front of the stage-caused strands to break loose and flop across his forehead. This, in turn, made him flip his head back after every dance phrase to clear his vision. And he was tall-almost six feet-which was extraordinary for a Chinese. He had no musical accompaniment, but his feet tapped out a rhythm that continued to build. Rah-cha, rah-cha, tat, tat, tat. Spin. Slide. Now his arms and legs flew-like a windmill. A group of forty or so girls, who sat cross-legged on the floor before the stage, clapped and cheered. Next to me, Grace radiated delight. I couldn’t help feeling the same way, because this was a lot better than the Chinese Telephone Exchange.

When the performance ended, the dancer picked up a towel and wiped the sweat from his face. He loped down the stairs, dropped onto a folding chair next to a woman and two men, all of whom had their backs to us. I focused on the girls by the stage. A couple of them were attired in playsuits like Grace, but the rest wore street clothes. I didn’t recognize a single girl. Not one of them was from Chinatown. The air I sucked in felt clean and free.

That’s when I saw her, one particular girl, who had a spot to herself. Suddenly I wanted out of there, but Grace gripped my hand tightly and pulled me across the floor toward the creature, who was strikingly different from all the rest. Light seemed to glow out of her skin. Her black hair was highlighted by a pair of shockingly white gardenias pinned just above her left ear. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips formed a perfect bow. She wore tap pants and a pale pink blouse with puffed sleeves not all that different from Grace’s, only hers had embroidery on the collar and cuffs. Her bare legs ended in ankle socks with delicate lace ruffles and basic black shoes with two-inch heels.

“Sit with me,” she trilled when we reached her. “I don’t know anyone either. I’m Ruby Tom.”

“Helen.” Grace pointed to me before putting her hand on her chest. “Grace.”

Ruby, excited, continued, “Can you believe Eddie Wu?”

“Eddie Wu?” Grace echoed even as the three of us scrutinized each other to see where we fit in. Ruby and Grace looked poor in their homemade outfits; I was better-dressed than anyone in the room. Ruby’s features were willow-delicate, Grace had perfect cheekbones, while my face was a little rounder and softer. Ruby sparkled; Grace could be summed up in four words-skinny legs, big bosom. Otherwise, we looked quite similar: petite, slim, with black curls falling over our shoulders, except that Ruby wore those gardenias in her hair, which made her look like a glamorous crane amidst a flock of chickens. We shifted slightly. We’d finished with our evaluations. No wind; no waves.

“The guy who was just dancing,” Ruby picked up as though no time had passed. “Isn’t Eddie amazing? He’s a regular Fred Astaire.”

“But he’s Chinese,” Grace pointed out in a low voice.

“That’s why they call him the Chinese Fred Astaire!” Ruby slapped her thigh. Then, “Are you two trying out to be chorus girls? I don’t remember either of you from the auditions at Li Po or the Sky Room, though. But you know how it is. New girls are coming every day. Everyone wants a chance-if not here, then at one of the other clubs that are opening.”

“Have the other clubs already hired dancers?” Grace asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Ruby answered. “They just didn’t want me. A couple of other new girls are here today too. There might even be more by the end of the day or tomorrow.”

“You seem to know a lot about it. Are you from here?” Grace asked.

“Hardly.” Ruby tossed her hair. “I was born in Los Angeles. My parents owned a curio shop across from the Orpheum Theater-a hot place for vaudeville when I was a tot. I used to dance and sing outside our store-just for kicks. People would stop, and my brothers would circulate through the crowd with hats, asking for change. We had a wild time!”

Ruby glanced at me. Well? But I couldn’t fathom what I was supposed to say to someone like her. Among other things, she was what you’d have to call cheung hay, a blabbermouth. I elected to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Later we beat it to Terminal Island in Long Beach,” Ruby went on, “because my pop wanted to return to fishing. My mom is a teacher. She said she could go wherever children need her, but my parents still weren’t happy. They decided we should move to Hawaii.”

“Hawaii?” Grace burbled. “So exciting! That’s not even the United States. Is that why you talk the way you do?”

“Talk the way I do?”

“Hot? Kicks? Beat it?”

“Sailors! As for Hawaii, it’s a protectorate or a territory or something like that.” Ruby shrugged. “My family has been there about five years. Now my parents say they want to go all the way home. Beat it while the beating is good. But I told my pop I love glitter. I told him I want to be famous.”

“I want to be a star-” Grace began.

“My pop asked why I would want to be in America at all,” Ruby continued, once again speaking right over Grace. “He says we’ll never be accepted as Americans.”

“My dad says that too,” I volunteered hesitantly.

But Ruby didn’t seem all that interested in what I had to say either. “I went with them to Hawaii,” she chattered. “I kept up with my ballet and tap, but I also learned hula. I’ll show you how to do it.” She took a breath before zeroing in on Grace. “What about you?”

“I’ve studied ballet, tap, piano, and voice-”

Just then, one of the men sitting next to the male dancer stood and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. Now that I got a good look at him, I knew who he was: Charlie Low. He’d built the first grand apartment building for Chinese-the Low Apartments-up on Powell. He probably deemed himself the grandest man in Chinatown, but if he was, then he would have identified me on sight, and he didn’t. He was just a middle-aged lucky so-and-so with a healthy girth that proclaimed to all that he could eat well even in these hard times. But, as they say, the fish is the last to realize he lives in the water, meaning Charlie was just another creature in the pond until someone bigger and better-like my baba-pulled him out and showed him what was what.

“I’m Charlie Low,” he announced. “This is my wife, a little gal with a big voice, Li Tei Ming.” Then he motioned to the two other men still sitting on their chairs. “These two cowboys are Walton Biggerstaff and Eddie Wu. One is your choreographer, and the other is a dancer. You can guess who is who.” That earned some giggles, and Charlie threw his shoulders back in response. “This will be the best nightclub San Francisco has ever seen. Okay, so it won’t be the first Chinese nightclub, but it will be the first Chinese nightclub outside Chinatown. We’ll appeal to the most discriminating San Franciscans. I’m talking about lo fan.”

Grace frowned. Her ignorance of even the most basic Chinese words amazed me. I whispered, “He’s talking about Occidentals-white ghosts.”

When Charlie said, “I want girls who can sing and dance,” I started to rise as did a couple of others. Grace and Ruby pulled me back to the floor.

“Wait!” Ruby whispered. “Just listen!”

Charlie chuckled at the reaction he’d gotten. “You kids got me wrong,” he went on. “We know most of you don’t know how to dance. How could you? You’re proper Chinese daughters. Am I right?” The other girls, who’d gotten up, sat down again too. “We want to see if you can move. If you can move and you’re pretty, then we’ll teach you to dance. It won’t be hard, I swear. The main thing I want is pretty. Got it?”

“Well, then, we don’t have anything to worry about,” Ruby whispered again. “We can’t miss!”

“I won’t have a lot of rules around here, except for one,” Charlie continued. “I’m going to hire only Chinese for my floor show. This is our chance, and we’re going to make this place unique… and fun! Now, here’s Walton. Consider him your maestro and call him Mr. Biggerstaff.”

The tall and lanky lo fan got to his feet and spoke in a voice as smooth as caramel. “I want to see you all onstage.”

My stomach churned nervously as I followed Ruby and Grace. They moved like dancers, which I wasn’t. I was clumsy and scared, but a girl a couple of rows over lumbered like an old water buffalo. Even a crow loses its gait when attempting to roam like a swan.

“Let’s start with each of you walking toward me,” Mr. Biggerstaff said.

This part went fast. Either a girl could walk in a straight line or she couldn’t. Either she had biggish breasts or she didn’t. Either she was short or she wasn’t. (Not that any of us was all that big-barely five feet or so, and not one over one hundred pounds.) Either she was pretty or she wasn’t. Fifteen girls were thanked and dismissed on the spot. They were told to send other Chinese girls who were new to town and wanted work.

“Now give me four lines,” Mr. Biggerstaff ordered. Ruby, Grace, and I ended up in the back. “Three steps forward, toe tap, two steps, kick, and turn to the right. We’ll do four bars. Start on the right foot. One, two…”

Ruby moved well-delicate, like an ibis-but Grace was completely transformed. She was terrific, truly gifted. Charlie, Eddie, and Mr. Biggerstaff could barely take their eyes off her. She shone with each step, kick, and turn. At the other end of the spectrum, I was pathetic, and my dark and heavy clothes made me look even worse. Was I washing my face in a whirl of dust and disappointing myself needlessly?

After several run-throughs, Mr. Biggerstaff asked everyone to get offstage except for the first line. Ruby, Grace, and I went back to the spot on the floor where we’d been earlier, only this time, instead of sitting cross-legged, Ruby slid down into splits and began to stretch. She was unbelievably limber. She was showing off, clearly, doing her best so that Mr. Biggerstaff, Charlie Low, and the others might notice her. I watched as Grace’s eyes narrowed, calculating. She held Ruby with her gaze and slowly spread her legs until she, too, was in a complete split, and then she raised her arms over her head and lowered her torso to the floor. Oh, yes, she was better than Ruby. From her impossible position, Grace inclined her head to look up at me. I plopped down next to them.

“I’ll never get the steps,” I admitted mournfully.

“And you have no natural talent either,” Ruby observed. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to me, and it was to say something that sounded pretty mean. But Grace elbowed Ruby, who grinned to show she hadn’t actually meant me any harm. “This isn’t real dancing. You’re plenty beautiful, but you need to put some feeling into your walk.”

“Quiet over there.” Mr. Biggerstaff stared at us sternly. “If you want to talk, go outside. If you go outside, don’t come back.”

I pulled my lips between my teeth and bit down hard. My fingers twisted in my lap. The longer I was here, the more I wanted this.

“One more time, girls,” Mr. Biggerstaff said to the line onstage. “Five, six, seven, eight…”

“You can dance if you can count,” Grace whispered. “Miss Miller, my dance teacher back home, drilled that into me. One, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight. Come. I’ll show you.” She led me to a corner, where we’d have space to practice. “It’s an easy routine-one I could have taught the second and third graders in Miss Miller’s school.”

Grace explained that we were simply forming a big square. That I could hold in my head, even if my feet were still disobedient.

Ruby came over to watch. She crossed her arms as she studied my movements. “Have you ever seen a woman with bound feet?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I have. In Hawaii. You need to try walking like those women do-like you don’t want to put too much weight on your feet.”

This time, when I took the first three steps, I pretended that my toes and the bones in my midfoot were broken and wrapped in binding cloth. I imagined myself floating across the floor, avoiding the anguish that any pressure would cause, sending the illusion of fragility, of a cloud drifting over moss. I dreamed I was happy and in love.

Ruby beamed. “Better.”

“Much better!” Grace agreed.

Over the next half hour, girls in the first, second, and third lines did their routines twice and then were either chosen for the next round or dismissed. Those who looked sweet and dainty made it through, even if they hadn’t mastered all the moves. A feeling hovered over the room: If you aren’t pretty, then it doesn’t matter how talented you are. When our line was called, Grace reminded me to smile, and count in my mind, and not with my lips. (Only problem: I’d been taught never to show my teeth. If I had to smile, then I should cover my mouth with a demure hand.) Ruby told me to relax. (Aiya! Like that would be possible.) But as the music played, I saw myself by a pond with weeping willows dripping their tendrils in the water, cranes flying across the sky, and soft fingers on my cheek. Ruby’s advice was working. We did the routine twice, and then Mr. Biggerstaff told us to come to the front of the stage. He spoke quietly with Charlie, Li Tei Ming, and Eddie Wu, and then asked me to step forward.

“What kind of legs do you have?”

The question took me aback. I glanced at Ruby and Grace, who gave me encouraging nods. I lifted my wool skirt to just above my knees.

“Higher, please.”

I edged the skirt up my thighs. When I’d woken in my bed this morning, I never thought I’d end up here, doing this.

“Perfect!” Mr. Biggerstaff proclaimed. “I hoped you might have something useful under there.”

Ruby, Grace, and I made it through to the next round. Ruby squealed and hugged Grace and me. (I wasn’t raised to be touched so freely, not even by family members, but I was brave about it.) Of the forty or so girls who started out that morning, fifteen made it to the next round for the eight dancers needed.

“Thanks so much for trying out and better luck next time,” Charlie addressed those who’d been cut. “The girls who’ve made it, congratulations. We’ll be auditioning again tomorrow and the day after that for additional ponies. On Monday, we’ll all meet here again. We’re going to see if we can teach you to do a simple tap routine. If you have tap shoes, bring them. If you don’t, then I’m afraid you’re done here. Oh, and you’ll be singing too. That’s it for today. Monday then.”

“One last thing,” Eddie Wu called out. “You, the babe with the gardenias in your hair. I like them. The smell is intoxicating. I’m drunk on you.”

Li Tei Ming playfully swatted the back of Eddie’s head, Ruby waved him off as though men spoke to her like that all the time, and the other girls in the room covered their mouths to hide their giggles. But I understood what he meant. She had a similar effect on me-as though I’d been sipping mao tai from thimble-size porcelain cups at a wedding banquet.

Grace and I clambered downstairs behind the still-glowing Ruby and out onto the street. We were so different from one another, and we could have easily broken apart right then. I could have gone back to the Chinese Telephone Exchange to meet my brother to take me home; Grace could have gone back to her hotel; and Ruby could have gone back to wherever it was she came from. One of us needed to speak. An act of kindness had started me on this road this morning; an act of kindness from Grace now propelled us forward on this new journey.

“I’m guessing you haven’t learned how to tap, and you don’t own a pair of tap shoes either,” she ventured. “What if we take you to buy proper shoes?”

“That would be great-”

“As long as we’re shopping,” Ruby cut in, “we should get you some dance clothes too. You look more like an old widow than a chorus girl. I want to have an entourage when I’m famous, but you’ve got to dress the part.”

“I accept, but you’ll have to let me buy you dinner in return,” I offered, figuring neither of them had much money or would know where to eat even if they did.

“Sure!” Ruby answered a little too eagerly. “Shall we go?”

I shook my head. “I can’t right now. First I need to go back to where I met Grace this morning. I work near there. My brother always picks me up and takes me home.”

Ruby gave me a sideways look, trying to figure me out.

“You need your brother to take you home?” she asked. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” I answered.

“I’m nineteen, and I walk wherever I want to walk,” she said.

“But if I walk from one end of Chinatown to the other unescorted,” I explained, “the grapevine will have sent out word before I get halfway there. Once someone saw me eating cherries on the street. Why did I get in trouble? Because it wasn’t ladylike for me to eat on the street. Mama and Baba always say I have to guard my reputation like a piece of jade. Otherwise”-how did I get going on this path?-“who will marry me?” I managed to finish.

“Who wants to get married?” Ruby hooted.

Grace dissolved into giggles. I made myself giggle too, but the sound was bitter in my ears. Neither of the other girls noticed.

“My brother picks me up at five,” I said. “Will you wait with me?” What was I thinking? Monroe would be taken aback to see me with two outsiders, to say the least. Nothing to do about it now.

We walked into Chinatown. Immediately, I felt eyes on me. At last it occurred to me that someone might have already told my father I hadn’t shown up for work today. Nothing to do about that now either. I wanted to push the boundaries. I wanted to see if he’d actually notice me… and, if he did, do something about it.

The three of us sat on the curb outside the telephone exchange-our knees pressed together, getting to know each other, and discussing what songs to pick for the next round of auditions. This was a new experience for me, at once exhilarating and sickening. A sudden panicked desire to run home and shut the door to my room nearly overwhelmed me. The cage that usually held me came as much from deep inside me as it did from my father. But when I saw Monroe approaching, his strength gave me courage. He wore his usual outfit: dungarees, a T-shirt, and a blue college jacket with CAL written in script on the left breast. I knew the effect he had on girls with his smooth skin, wide eyes, and longish black hair that brushed across his forehead. Ruby would never have a chance, but Grace might do. What would it be like to have someone like Grace live in the compound with us? I let that idea flitter across my mind. I smiled as I rose to my feet. Ruby and Grace got up too.

“Monroe, I want you to meet my new friends. Grace, Ruby.” I tugged on my brother’s arm. “This is Monroe.”

I could read the concern on his face as he stared at the two strangers, especially Ruby.

“Monroe,” I went on in a pleading voice, “can you give me another couple of hours? Grace and Ruby are going to take me shopping.”

“I’m not sure about this, Helen,” he said.

“Please?”

“What’ll I tell our ba?” he asked.

“Tell him I had to stay late at work-”

“But you aren’t at work-”

“Then I’ll take the blame.”

He glanced warily from Ruby to Grace. He took his responsibility as my older brother very seriously.

“Please, Monroe, please?” I begged as hard as when I was five and he had a bag of sesame candies I wanted him to share.

It was his duty to watch out for me, but he loved me too. More important, Grace seemed to have caught his eye, just as I’d hoped. He’d want to impress her with his openness.

“You promise she’ll be safe?” he asked, his voice demanding truth.

“Absolutely,” the two girls replied in unison.

“All right then.” He addressed me directly again. “I’ll cover for you this one time. I’ll see you back here at seven o’clock.” He tucked his hands in his pants pockets and nodded at Grace. “Nice to meet you.” With that, he pulled his shoulders up under his ears and sauntered back the way he’d come.

We found a telephone booth and looked up the address for a dance shop, then walked several blocks out of Chinatown until we found it. We made it just before closing time, but the clerk volunteered to stay late. Ruby and Grace helped me pick out navy satin shorts and a long-sleeved white blouse to wear for the audition, as well as two pairs of dance shoes-one for regular dancing and the other for tap. Their eyes thinned into slits when I opened my wallet. Cash! I ignored them, saying, “I hope this won’t be a waste of money.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Ruby seemed sure of everything. “We’ve got two full days to teach you the basics.”

• • •

I TOOK THEM to a noodle shop on Grant that I promised was one of the best in Chinatown, but Grace looked as jittery as a wet mouse.

“What should I get?” she asked.

“Pick your favorite. Remember, I’m buying.”

Grace blinked. “What I mean is, I don’t know what these things are. I’ve never eaten Chinese food.”

“Where did you say you’re from?” Ruby pried.

“I didn’t say, but I’m from Plain City, Ohio,” she answered, guarded.

“Is it one of those places that’s too small to have a Chinese restaurant?” I inquired.

“Only about two thousand people live there, so I guess so,” she replied.

“Cripes!” Ruby exclaimed.

I shook my head in disbelief. The population of San Francisco’s Chinatown was ten times that, and the larger city surrounded it.

“I’ve never been to a place where you couldn’t get Chinese food.” After a pause, I asked, “Didn’t your mother make it?”

“No.”

“That’s shocking!”

Grace put her purse on the floor.

“My mother says you must never do that,” Ruby chastised.

“Mine too,” I agreed. “Do you want all your money to run out of your purse?”

Grace blushed and quickly set the purse back on her lap. “We don’t have that custom in Plain City,” she said. After an uncomfortable silence, she added, “You haven’t told us anything about you yet, Helen.”

“I grew up a block from here,” I answered. “Baba’s in the laundry business-”

Grace brightened. “My family has a laundry too.”

“My father doesn’t run a laundry.” That came out haughtier than I intended, and I could see the change in Grace’s expression. I tried again, flecking my voice with jasmine petals. “My baba is a merchant. He sells supplies to laundries: claim tickets, washboards, irons. Things like that. Not just to the mom-and-pops in this city, but to laundries all around the country.”

The whole time I spoke, I searched Grace’s face. She’d pulled away, but the look in her eyes! Her family’s laundry was probably some little hole in the wall in that dinky town of hers.

“My parents are very traditional,” I continued. “Filial piety begins with serving your parents, which leads to serving the emperor (in our case, the president), which ends in establishing your character.” Apparently, Grace wasn’t familiar with that aphorism either. “I wasn’t allowed to take dance classes, as you know. My brothers and I could speak only Chinese at home. I wasn’t permitted to play on the street or in the park. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never even had a girl from school come to my house.”

“I’m practically in the same boat friend-wise,” Grace admitted.

We glanced at Ruby. She lifted a shoulder. Agreement?

“I have seven brothers, and my dad wished for an eighth son,” I told them. “He hoped to get the sound ba-for eight, which sounds the same as good luck. He wanted to walk through Chinatown and have everyone recognize him for his successful business and his eight sons. Instead, I came along and ruined everything.”

The waiter set down three bowls of steaming soup noodles. Ruby and I picked up our chopsticks and used them to bring the long noodles to our lips.

“Mama had eight children in ten years,” I picked up after the waiter left. “She kept trying for an eighth son, but after me she only had miscarriages and stillborns. It’s hard for girls like us. Boys can go to college, but Baba says, ‘A woman without education is better than a woman with education.’ ” Neither of them seemed to recognize the Confucian saying. “We also aren’t allowed to drive. We shouldn’t show our arms. We can’t show our legs. We’re supposed to learn to cook, clean, sew, embroider-”

“Then how can you dance now?” Grace asked, fingering her chopsticks. “Didn’t you say you can’t do anything in Chinatown without people finding out about it?”

“And what about your brother?” Ruby chimed in. “Won’t he tell?”

I had to think about how to answer them. Today was my first foray into the world of lying. Tell the truth, but not too much of it.

“If Baba finds out, I’ll be in real hot water,” I answered at last. “But Monroe won’t tell on me, because he wants to change his life too. He’s studying to be an engineer, but he’s worried he’s going to end up working as a janitor or a houseboy. Something like that happened to another of my older brothers. Jackson was the first in our family to go to college. He graduated two years ago-one of twenty-eight American-born Chinese to graduate from Cal that year-as a dentist. Now the only job he can get is as a chauffeur for a woman who lives in Pacific Heights.”

A look passed between Ruby and Grace. College? An engineer? A dentist? I bet the chauffeur part sounded pretty good to them too, but I didn’t see it that way.

“Baba makes plenty of sweat money in this country, but he says this isn’t our real home and that we shouldn’t live where we aren’t welcome. If one of my brothers gets upset because someone on the street taunted him, calling ‘chink, chink, chink,’ then Baba says, ‘See? I told you so. Go look in the mirror. Your eyes automatically tell you this is not your home.’ ”

Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but I rolled right over her. “Baba complains that my brothers are too Americanized. He says, ‘You might be Americanized, but you’ll never be accepted as Americans, even though you were born here.’ After that, he criticizes them for not being Chinese enough, because they were born here. We all were.”

Look who was cheung hay now!

“But you can’t argue with my baba,” I continued, unable to stop myself. “It wouldn’t be right. He said he wanted my brothers and me to learn proper Chinese for when we went back to China for good. For months, he went around to the laundries that he supplies. He asked for their old rags, clothes that hadn’t been collected, worn-out shoes, hardware, and junk-”

“I had to wear unclaimed laundry too,” Grace cut in. “In elementary school, the girls taunted me when they recognized their castoffs. Once the kids caught me wearing Freddie Thompson’s old shirt under my jumper-”

“I bet they made fun of you then,” Ruby said.

“I’ll say. I went in the girls’ room, took off the shirt, and tried to give it back to Freddie, but he tossed it in the dirt, saying he didn’t want to touch anything that had been on a girl.”

“That’s what he said. He probably didn’t want to touch anything worn by an Oriental,” Ruby assessed shrewdly.

Grace nodded. “The boys spent the rest of recess throwing the shirt back and forth, teasing me, but teasing Freddie even worse. Freddie was a tough customer even when he was eight. He fought back.”

Grace was trying hard to fit in to the conversation-and Ruby was doing a good job making her feel comfortable-but I had to set them both straight. “I told you, we don’t have a laundry. I’ve never worn people’s leftovers, or anyone’s hand-me-downs for that matter. My baba packed all that trash in trunks, and we took it to China to give to our relatives.”

“Why would you do that?” Grace asked, sounding as unpolished as a servant-one brought in from the rice paddies to work in the landowner’s house: dumb, without an ounce of knowledge of how real people lived. But she’d been so nice to me and so open that I liked her despite her country innocence.

“The more trunks we had, the richer we looked,” I explained. “The more we gave away, the more important my father appeared. But fortune like that can be won and lost very quickly.” I turned and spoke directly to Ruby. “We were only there a year and a half before the Japanese invaded. Baba said it was better for us to come back here and be poor than stay there and be dead. President Roosevelt says times are getting better, but they still aren’t that good around here.”

“Not where I’m from either,” Grace said.

“Or me either,” Ruby allowed, the corner of her lip twitching. “That’s one of the reasons my parents wanted to move to Hawaii. They could live cheaply, and they’d be closer to getting home-”

“Baba wants all of us to work,” I interrupted, and Ruby went back to her noodles. “My other brothers and I are all supposed to chip in for Monroe’s tuition, but there aren’t a lot of jobs for girls like me. Baba says that no matter how bad off we are, he’ll never let me work in a garment factory. Being a maid or working as an elevator operator in one of the department stores on Union Square doesn’t appeal to him either.”

“But you have a good job already,” Grace blurted.

I sighed. “The manager at the Chinese Telephone Exchange is indebted to my father. I’ve been working there for six months. I hate it, and I’m only making five dollars a week. If I get the job at the Forbidden City, I’ll make twenty dollars a week.”

Grace croaked, “That much?”

The sum must have seemed fantastical to her. Ruby ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth. Twenty dollars must have sounded like a fortune to her too.

“Didn’t either of you ask what the pay was going to be?” When they shook their heads, I said, “But that’s the most important piece of information.”

Ruby ignored the criticism. “What happens when your father finds out you’re dancing?”

I jutted my chin. “Fathers like to give orders and tell you what to do. The next minute? Who are you? Get out of my way! Having a worthless daughter isn’t just something Chinese say. It’s been in our culture for-”

Grace cleared her throat. “My father said I could have anything and do anything I want in America. That’s why he forced me to take dance and singing lessons with the other girls in town. He made me do everything they did.”

I wanted to ask, If he’s so great, then what are you doing here? But I didn’t, because her talent and her pluck couldn’t hide the fact that offstage she seemed barely above a frightened street urchin. But then Ruby saw only her own light and heard her own music, and I was happy to be anywhere but in the compound. Yet as dissimilar as we were, it was as clear to me as chrysanthemum jelly that all three of us were alone in the world-each in our own ways. I saw, felt, an invisible string of connection tying us together.

Since the conversation seemed to have reached its end, Grace went back to fingering her chopsticks. Finally, she asked, “Could one of you gals teach me how to use these?”

“You don’t use chopsticks?” The idea was astounding.

“I’ve never seen them before, so how could I know how to use them? Plain City…” Grace hunched her shoulders, humbled, embarrassed. “How do you eat soup with sticks?”

“Cripes!” Ruby exclaimed again.

We showed Grace how to pick up the noodles with the chopsticks and dangle them over her porcelain soupspoon before lifting them to her mouth. She was beyond hopeless, but she ate like she hadn’t had a meal in a year.

“You’ll get better,” I promised. “If you can teach me how to tap, then I can certainly teach you how to eat like a proper Chinese.”

After dinner, we walked back to the telephone exchange, where we spotted Monroe waiting for us. “If you were going to have noodles here in Chinatown, you should have told me,” he said, proving what I’d said about Chinatown’s gossip mill to be true. “Next time, we’ll all meet there. Okay?”

Grace, excited, grabbed Ruby’s and my hands. What was it about these girls and all their touching? Didn’t they have any manners?

“Thank you,” Grace said to Monroe, whose cheeks went crimson. “Thank you so much for letting us see each other again.”

I waved goodbye to my new friends and let Monroe escort me home. Most people rented apartments, but not my family. Our home took up nearly a whole block. We occupied an American version of a Chinese compound, with four sides, each with two stories, surrounding an interior courtyard. My six oldest brothers, already married with wives and children, inhabited the side wings. Monroe and I lived with our parents in the back of the compound, where we also had the public rooms. The laundry-supply business faced the street.

Monroe opened the gate, and we walked across the inner courtyard, which was littered with tricycles, balls, and other toys. Suddenly, he stopped and turned to me.

“What are you doing?” he asked gently.

“I’m trying to start my life again-”

“After everything our family has been through, especially you… I’m worried you’re going to get hurt.”

A lot of responses ran through my head, but I wisely didn’t speak them.

“You’re only just beginning to recover,” he went on. “You have a good job. I come and get you every day. Let things return to normal-”

“Nothing will ever be normal again.”

“Helen-”

“Don’t worry about me. This gets me out of the compound. That’s what you all want, isn’t it?”

Monroe stared hard at me. I loved him best of all my brothers, but his concern wouldn’t help me or change my fate. He sighed. Then he continued to the back of the courtyard and entered a door that led to the dining room. Everyone would just be gathering for dinner, but I didn’t want to see all those babies and small children. I also wanted to avoid the kitchen, where my sisters-in-law would ignore me and my mother would struggle for something to say as though anything she could utter could possibly change my status in the household or the world. How could I live in a compound with three generations of my relatives-all so alive with all their breathing, eating, and siring-and still be so lonely?

I ducked through a side entrance, went upstairs, threaded my way along the deserted hallway to my room, and shut the door behind me, but I could still hear the bustle and noise of the family. On a small table next to the window was a plate of oranges-neatly stacked-unlit candles set in pewter dishes, an incense burner, and a photograph. I began to weep.

RUBY: A Real Chinese Girl

On Saturday morning, I left my aunt and uncle’s house, took a ferry from Alameda to San Francisco, and walked to the Chinatown playground. Grace and Helen were already there. Sitting on a bench. Talking. Time for work! Grace and I taught Helen steps with one sound-the ball tap, heel tap, brush, and scuff. Every so often, mothers entered the park with their strollers, whispered when they saw us, and then rolled right back out.

“What are they saying?” Grace asked.

“They’re calling us no-no girls,” Helen answered.

No kidding. But Grace didn’t get it. She was a great dancer, better than me by far, which was downright irksome, but she truly acted like she’d just fallen off the turnip truck. I liked her even so. I saw in her what she probably saw in me-that we’d been hit by hard times, that we’d put cardboard in our shoes when the soles had worn out, and that we were on the thin side from too many dinners of watery soup.

On Sunday, same travel time to get to the Chinatown playground. I arrived first. Then Grace. We got to watch Monroe drop off his sister.

“This is the busiest day of the week in Chinatown,” he yakked, kicking and complaining, “and you’re in the playground!” He gestured to the apartment buildings that surrounded the park. “Lots of eyes up there… and everywhere. Ba’s going to find out.”

He was right, but either Helen wasn’t able to think of a better place to go or she was choosing to be deliberately defiant. I couldn’t get a read on her. Monroe beat it to the library, reminding Helen with a call over his shoulder that he’d “fetch” her at Fong Fong Chinese Tea Pavilion at five. Then Grace and I spent the morning showing Helen taps with two sounds-the shuffle, scuffle, slap, and flap. She was pretty, which was hard for me to admit, but, man, she was a real cement mixer. By noon, it was clear she simply wasn’t catching on.

“It’s hard to learn to move well without music,” Grace said. “What if I show you something my dance instructor choreographed back home? Every so often, she’d bring out a record of novelty songs. Our favorite was ‘Let Me Play with It.’ ” She started to sing and do the simple routine her teacher had put to the tune. “You let me play with your little yo-yo. I’ll let you play with mine.”

I grinned at the lyrics, but Helen and Grace seemed to take them at face value. The song was about as easy as could be, though, with those two cracked lines repeated again and again. Helen practiced with steely determination. Aided by the melody, she followed along, pointing her right index finger at an imaginary audience and then at herself at the appropriate spots, putting a little enthusiasm into her footwork, even smiling. And she had a swell voice. In fact, we harmonized quite well together. By four, we’d reached the end of the song-“I’ll let you play with mine. I mean it! I’ll let you play with mine”-and Helen had learned a passable three-sound tap called the riffle and slurp. And still the mothers who came through the park turned away, muttering under their breath. So what? I was used to that kind of thing.

We sat on a bench and changed out of our taps. Through the open windows around us came the clatter of dinners being prepared, the whines of musical instruments being practiced-badly-and squalls of colicky babies. Men sat on their haunches on fire-escape landings-drinking tea from used jelly jars, smoking cigarettes, and watching us with expressions that combined disdain and desire. I was used to that too.

After Helen fixed my collar-“so you look nicer”-she led the way to Fong Fong. The streets were lively. Laundry workers and waiters, dressed in their Sunday best, took advantage of their one night off, strutting to poolrooms, burlesque shows, and dime-a-dance halls. Helen said some of those men visited the open-air herb shop to buy deer antler, bear gall, and shaved rhinoceros horn to improve and prolong their potency in case good fortune-in the form of a woman-should shine on them in the coming hours. Other men, in business suits, gathered to blab about politics on corners. Women roamed the shops.

Helen pulled us into Fong Fong and bought three Coca-Colas.

“You two have helped me so much,” she said. “Thank you-”

Grace and I spoke over each other.

“No thanks are necessary-”

“We were happy to help-”

Helen held up a hand. “Listen.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “I’ve heard of an apartment close to here. It’s not too big or too expensive. If you two become roommates, the rent won’t be bad, especially if I negotiate it for you.”

“An apartment?” I squinted, doubtful. Hanging around with girls wasn’t my idea of a clambake. Especially with either of these two. Grace was a knockout, but so sweet and innocent she hadn’t yet kenned onto using what she had. And Helen? She was pretty, like I said, but something was off with her. How could she be so swift on the effect Chinese herbs had on men when she supposedly lived such a sheltered life with her family? Beyond that, I wasn’t sure I liked the way she stared at me.

“It’s not the cleanest,” Helen went on, “but it’s not the dirtiest either.”

“In Chinatown?” Grace asked nervously.

“Of course it’s in Chinatown.” Helen sure could be bossy-a regular Miss Know-it-all. “You two need a place to live. The YWCA is full. Cameron House is right around the corner, but that’s not right for you. Donaldina Cameron rescues bad girls.” She lowered her voice. “If you become roommates, you’ll be close to where I live, and you’ll be even closer to the telephone exchange.”

“You won’t be working there much longer,” I said, confident.

“What if we aren’t hired? How will we pay the rent?” People could probably smell Grace’s fear all the way in Timbuktu.

“You’ll be hired,” Helen told her. “You’ll be hired before I am!”

Helen didn’t mention me, but I had to be a sure thing after the little visit I’d paid to Charlie Low in his office. Nothing happened, and he did a bang-up job of acting like he wasn’t thrilled-not with his wife in the building, but she wouldn’t always be there. A man is a man is a man. Yeah, I’d wised up after not getting hired at the other auditions. This time I’d get the gig and the dough.

“Do you want to share an apartment?” Grace asked me.

My mother always said it was rude for someone to be so direct, but I answered anyway. “Why not?” Because, really, why not? There had to be a first time for everything. “Anyplace would be better than staying with my aunt and uncle in Alameda. It’ll be good to get away from my little cousins too.”

I watched as they took in those nuggets of information. We’d bumped gums some, talking a bit about this and that. Nothing serious. Nothing too revealing. It was fine by me if we practiced “Oriental silence”-hanging on to information that was no one else’s business-but things were bound to leak out.

“You’re sure you want to do it?” Grace’s voice rose with expectation.

“I’d love to,” I answered. “And thank you, Helen. Thank you so much.”

“I’m happy to help,” she responded. “It will be good to have you nearby.”

THE NEXT DAY, Grace and I met Helen at the Forbidden City, where we big-eyed the new girls who’d made it through the weekend auditions. We were back up to forty or so girls for the eight spots, which knocked some of the wind out of my panties. We auditioned in groups of six, and we sang something we’d all learned in elementary school-“Oh My Darling Clementine”-which put us on equal footing and made it instantly clear who could carry a tune. A quarter of the girls were gone by noon. Then Walton-no man was a mister to me-introduced us to the tap routine, which was a lot easier than anything we’d shown Helen over the weekend. He wanted to see how we moved onstage. Did we have presence? Could we hit our marks? Did our simple taps sound crisp or muddled? Did we have nice smiles?

“You, you, and you are in.”

Helen, Grace, and I made it through to the next round.

At the end of the day, we found Monroe on the sidewalk. We were physically tired but also exhilarated. We were so close to getting chosen as the Forbidden City’s first ponies… and now the apartment. Monroe walked with us to a run-down building on Waverly, a block from the playground where Grace and I had taught Helen to tap. Mrs. Hua, the elderly manager, showed us the tiny two-room furnished flat, which had a hot plate and a sink. If we got the place, we’d have to take turns sleeping on the sofa and the bed. Showers would be courtesy of the YWCA. We searched the cupboards and found four plates, three cups, a frying pan, and a wok. It all looked good to me.

I was grateful when Helen took charge. She knew the ins and outs of Chinatown-a place where Grace and I were total strangers. And it turned out she was great at bargaining.

“You want to charge ten dollars a week? For this?” Helen asked Mrs. Hua. “Impossible!”

“Nine dollars,” Mrs. Hua countered in heavily accented English.

“It isn’t worth five.”

“Eight fifty.”

“Five. Take it or leave it.”

Monroe regarded his sister with embarrassment tinged with grudging admiration. Grace seemed eager for Helen to accept the asking price.

“Eight dollars. No lower,” Mrs. Hua came back.

Helen shook her head. “Let’s go.”

Monroe, Grace, and I started for the door. Mrs. Hua grabbed Helen’s sleeve. “Six dollars. Okay?”

Helen pursed her lips as she thought about it. Finally, she said, “All right. Six dollars a week. But I’m not going anywhere until I see the contract. I don’t want you changing things after I leave, Mrs. Hua.”

As soon as the manager left to get the paperwork, Grace squealed and jumped up and down. “Helen! I can’t believe you just did that! My hotel room costs a dollar a day. This is a lot better and for a lot less money.”

“Really, Helen, that was pretty neat,” I agreed. “Thanks again.”

Helen waved us off. “It’s the least I can do after everything you’ve done for me.”

Yes, we’d scratched her back, and now she was scratching ours. That’s how people get ahead… and make “friends.” But Helen and Grace were making a mistake if they thought I was “nice” too. I was nice enough, but I was ambitious. I wanted the adoration that comes from being famous and not just a pretty girl from the islands.

Mrs. Hua came back through the door and set the contract on the table. Grace picked up the pen, hesitated, and turned to Helen. “Would you like to live with us? Maybe Mrs. Hua has an even bigger apartment.”

Helen nipped the idea in the bud, glancing at her brother. “It’s safer for me to be in the compound with my family.”

I wasn’t sure how she’d be “safer” there, but maybe she could do only so much. She could defy her father by walking through Chinatown with Grace and me, and tempt fate by learning to tap in a very public place, but being on her own-away from her family-might have been the one line she couldn’t cross. I might not cross it either if I lived in a “compound”!

The next morning, Helen was sitting on the stairs outside the apartment when I arrived. She had a bag of groceries and some flowers wrapped in butcher paper. Once upstairs, she got straight to work-putting the blooms in a vase she’d brought with her and setting the bouquet on a doily she’d tatted herself. Next, she shelved the groceries. When Grace thumped into the room with her suitcase, the apartment already looked more livable. Grace and I divvied up the space in the closet and dresser. (When Grace thought I wasn’t watching, she put five sawbucks in an envelope and tucked it under a sweater in her drawer. Emergency money, no doubt.) Neither of us knew how to cook, so Helen scrambled eggs and toasted bread by holding it over the hot plate. After breakfast, Grace and I brushed our teeth in the sink. Then we went together down the hall and waited in line with tenants from the other five apartments on our floor to use the toilet.

At 10:00, we beat it to the Forbidden City for final auditions. I had this in the bag. Walton asked to see the routine we’d learned the previous week, but this time we had to sing another old-fashioned song-“Let Me Call You Sweetheart”-while we danced. A cinch. Helen did well too. What she lacked in dance experience, she more than made up for with her pretty singing voice. When we finished, a few girls were asked to step forward, thanked, and dismissed. The remaining twelve of us rearranged ourselves onstage. I took a place in the front row, wanting to be seen. Walton signaled for the music.

We were making the third turn when Grace came to a dead stop. We were still in the opening part of the routine! I shot an encouraging look in her direction. Dance! She struggled to fight back tears. By the time I made my next turn, they were rolling down her cheeks. I liked Grace-my roommate now-but if she were dismissed, then my spot would be sealed for sure.

Eddie Wu bounded onstage, took Grace’s hand, and pulled her stage front. “Five, six, seven, eight,” he counted loud enough for all of us to hear. “Let me call you sweetheart…” They danced the last half of the routine together, adding a flourish or two. They were spectacular, outshining everyone else. When the music ended, Walton and some of the others clapped. Eddie dropped Grace’s hand, chucked her chin, and then went back to his folding chair.

Walton, Charlie, and Eddie conferred in low voices, while everyone else tried to cover their apprehensions by adjusting the trim on a sock, going over a move again, or fluffing curls. I stayed perfectly still, with one leg slightly bent and a hand on my hip. Walton asked us to form a single line. Grace stood with her head bowed.

“Irene Liu,” Walton said. “Congratulations. You made it.”

The second spot went to May Bing. Helen nodded when her name was called. (She’d never be one to show excitement.) Other girls were dropped or accepted until just three of us were left for the last two spots. Grace, another girl, and I held hands.

“Grace Lee, you’re in-”

She made it after freezing, then lucking in to Eddie helping her?

“You’re our best dancer,” Walton added as she walked offstage to where the other new hires clustered together. “Today your nerves showed. Never let anyone see you’re scared. Never let anyone guess you’ve messed up the dance or forgotten the lyrics. You have the potential to be a star, Grace. Act that way, and it will come true.”

Only two of us were left standing.

“Ida Wong, step forward please.” Walton looked at his clipboard. “Congratulations-”

My stomach lurched, and the room whooshed with shocked exhales. How could Ida have been chosen over me? No one could believe it, not even Ida, who was pretty in that cute-as-a-button kind of way. I glanced at Charlie out of the corner of my eye. He lifted a shoulder in halfhearted acknowledgment. My attempt to cozy up to him-a married man-had completely backfired. He must have seen me as trouble. Well, nothing to do about it now. I hopped down off the stage, packed my things, and beat it for the door.

“Abyssinia!” I called to Helen and Grace. Silence. “I’ll be seeing ya,” I translated.

Grace started to come toward me, but she was stopped by Charlie’s call. “You’re my glamour girls now. Please gather around…”

My eyes swept across the room one last time, and then I left the Forbidden City. I waited for Grace and Helen on the sidewalk, wondering what in the hell I was going to do now. And I’ll be honest. I hurt like mad, and I was scared.

Soon enough, Grace and Helen came down the stairs.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Grace said when she saw me. “You should have gotten hired too.”

I looked away. I wasn’t about to start busting out the waterworks. I had a little money, but when that ran out and I couldn’t pay the rent on my new apartment, then what? Stand in a soup line? Sleep on the street? Beg? Go back to my aunt and uncle’s place with all their bawling brats? “It’s all right. I’ll try at one of the other clubs-”

“Finally,” Helen muttered, interrupting me.

It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t speaking to me. I followed her gaze and saw a middle-aged Chinese man approaching. He wore a well-tailored suit and carried a copy of The Chinese Digest folded and tucked under his arm. He reminded me a bit of Charlie, actually. Black hair, neatly trimmed. Well fed. An air of importance.

“So what the gossips say is true,” he said, stopping before Helen. “My daughter has disgraced me.”

“I haven’t disgraced you, Ba-”

“No? Then what do you call not showing up to work at a job I arranged for you? What do you call dancing in the playground? And then there’s this!” He pointed at the entrance to the Forbidden City.

“It’s a better job. Besides, how can I disgrace you any more than I have already?”

Next to me, Grace looked frightened, like she thought he was going to wallop her. I sensed she might bolt, so I grabbed her arm and held her in place. Helen’s father stood there-dignified, his hands clasped before him, aware that people-white pedestrians-watched us. And the way he stared at me? I understood it right away, because he wasn’t the first person to see me for what I was, even if it was rare. The disgust in his eyes made me want to push right back. I struck a pose-a hip thrust forward, my eyes staring defiantly into his face, the fingers of my left hand barely caressing the petals of my gardenias. Grace was a quivering mess, but I wasn’t afraid or intimidated at all. And Helen?

“I’ll still put my earnings in the family pot,” she said matter-of-factly, as if her disobedience and lying would mean nothing to her father. “Now I can give more toward Monroe’s tuition.”

“If you dance here, you will be one notch above a prostitute,” he proclaimed. “Is that how you want people to regard me in Chinatown-as the father of a no-no girl?”

Next to me, a light flipped on in Grace’s eyes as she finally put two and two together.

“I won’t be hurting the family,” Helen insisted calmly. “I’ll be helping more than before. And besides, this isn’t a reflection on you-”

“Don’t be stupid! You have a choice to bring shame or honor on your family. Which is it going to be?”

Helen met her father’s disapproval with surprising stubbornness. “You always say you expect me to maintain the proprieties, recognize right from wrong, and not bring embarrassment on our family.”

“That’s right. Embarrassment!”

“I’m going to make twenty dollars a week,” Helen said.

Her father blinked. “Twenty dollars? A week?”

“Are any of my brothers making that much?” she asked.

He grumbled a bit more-“What will our neighbors say?”-but it was clear Helen had won. I guess the money had convinced him. Still, he’d gone down a lot easier than I expected.

“You can do this on one condition,” he said, acting like he’d once again gained control over his daughter. “I won’t have you walking all over Chinatown… at night… unescorted. Monroe will drop you off and bring you home.”

“Yes, Ba,” she answered, sounding both contrite and disappointed, as though he’d failed a test she’d given him.

“All right,” he said. “I expect you to be home in time for dinner.” As he gathered himself to leave, he ran his eyes over me again. “And, Helen…”

Here it comes, I thought. Now my new friends would know the truth about me. I didn’t have a clue about how they would take it.

“One word of warning. Watch out for this one. She’s a Jap,” he said, nodding in my direction.

Helen acted unimpressed. She gave him a bland look: As if I didn’t know.

Faced again with his daughter’s coolness, he squeezed the newspaper a little more tightly to his ribs and continued down the street. It was a moment of triumph for Helen, utter bewilderment for Grace, and the icing on what had already become a crappy day for me. Grace was the first to speak.

“Why would he say that about Ruby?”

Helen frowned. “You really are a bumpkin,” she said. “Ruby is Japanese. Can’t you tell?” She pointed to the sign above our heads. “It’s the Forbidden City. Like Charlie said, it’s for Chinese. The Japs have invaded China, so no Japs allowed. Naturally, Baba wouldn’t want me to spend time with someone like her.”

My being Japanese wasn’t why I didn’t get hired, but I said nothing to square the error. Grace stared at Helen-shocked, shocked, shocked. “What are you talking about?”

Helen spelled it out again. “Ruby is Japanese.”

Grace looked like someone had bopped her one. “Why would you-he-say that?”

“Because it’s true,” Helen insisted, her tone superior.

“It’s also mean.” Grace turned to me. “You’re Ruby Tom,” she said, positive as could be. “That’s a Chinese name. You’re a real Chinese girl.”

“Ethel Zimmerman changed her name,” I said, “because she thought it wouldn’t look good on a marquee. Now she’s Ethel Merman. My real name is Kimiko Fukutomi. Ruby suits me better, and Fukutomi… well… I shortened it to Tom.”

“That’s a Chinese name, right?” Grace repeated weakly. Then she lightly tapped her head with her fingertips-another light going on. “When you said your family wanted to go home, you meant to Japan.”

I nodded.

“Oh!” The surprised syllable came out like the first time you put a hand down a boy’s pants. “I get it. You’re like a Negro pretending to be white.” She sighed. “Where I grew up… Prejudice, you know-”

“I’ve always been able to pass,” I said, trying to put an end to the commiseration. “I’m good at it. In the Occidental world, no one can tell that I’m different. Even here in Chinatown, most people don’t see me as different.”

“I did,” Helen pointed out. “And my father and brother did too.”

Three people out of this entire enclave? I couldn’t be too worried about that.

“I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt,” Grace said.

I shrugged. “I’m not hurt.”

“We all have secrets,” she went on, still trying to comfort me.

I figured that meant I was supposed to ask about her secret, but I wasn’t fast enough, because she blurted, “I ran away from home. My dad beat me…”

Hardly a big surprise, given the bruises her clothes didn’t quite cover and the cut she tried unsuccessfully to hide under lipstick, but I nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure you did the right thing.”

Neither Helen nor I followed up with additional questions. I can’t speak for Helen, but I didn’t want Grace to lose any more face than she already had, poor thing. Grace and I now turned to Helen.

“Japanese and Chinese have always been against each other. And it’s not just this war,” Helen said, her voice as distant yet impassioned as my mother’s. “Japan is powerful. It can face any country-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I mean, really. Like this was news? “You want to know what my parents taught me? They say all you Chinese think you’re great because your culture is so much older than our culture. You accuse us of stealing your language-”

“You did,” she responded, not wanting to let it go. “Japan has long held a grudge against China. Japan wants to dominate China politically and militarily. It wants to take control of China’s raw materials, food, and labor-”

“I hate all that,” I said, repeating what I told my father when he boasted about Japan’s imperialistic aspirations. “Those things have nothing to do with me.”

“I lived in China, as I’ve already told you,” Helen went on. “When the Jap bombers came, we…” She took a breath and held it. “I mean, Monroe and I were walking on the road. We saw the red sun on the sides of the planes. We heard a warning gong from a nearby village, but what could we do? We saw a pilot in one of the cockpits. He shot at us.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “But those things still have nothing to do with me.”

“Really, Helen, you can’t blame Ruby for events that happened in another country,” Grace threw in, defending me.

“Because it’s not my country,” I added. Again, I’d often said that to my parents, which drove them nearly crazy. “I was born here. I’m an American, just like you and Grace.”

Helen stared in the direction her father had gone.

Grace, still anxious, fumbled for something to say. “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

Helen gave herself a small shake. Even I-who had known her less than a week-could see that somewhere deep inside a struggle was going on. She shifted her gaze to me, and we locked eyes. Finally, she spoke.

“I will keep your secret.”

Was her change of heart a little too quick? My entire life I’d heard about the centuries-long animosity between Japanese and Chinese, but I knew almost nothing about Chinese girls or how one like Helen might think and act.

“What about your father, Helen?” Grace asked. “You’ll be disobeying him if you see Ruby.”

“How am I disobeying him? He said watch out for her, not don’t ever see her. I went to school with Negroes and Mexicans. He didn’t like that either, but he had to live with it. Besides,” she added, “Ruby won’t be working at the Forbidden City, so it’s not like I’ll be with her every day.”

Grace needed to know one more thing. “Are you really going to give all your money to your father?”

“Of course,” Helen answered. “My brothers and I all do. He provides for us. We live with him. And he gives us spending money. Anything else you want to know?” The way she asked seemed designed to put an end to the conversation. “Are we set then? Good. Now let’s get some noodles.”

We began to walk, with Helen in the middle. I peered around her and into Grace’s face. She still looked a bit numb from shock and confusion. Between us, Helen wore an expression I couldn’t decipher. The three of us were as different as could be, and-despite the sudden revelations-I had a hunch that the two of them were harboring deeper truths, just as I was. In the same way I sensed that Helen and Grace had attached themselves to me like sucking sea creatures, I understood that I had glued myself to them too. The realization shook me something fierce. This was stranger than moving to Hawaii with my parents; defying them with my attitude, smart mouth, and boys; returning to the mainland to live with Aunt Haru and Uncle Junji; or abandoning the identity I was born with for one that might be more practical. Friendship was uncharted territory for me, maybe for all of us. Would the three of us end up as good companions or as vicious enemies?

None of that mattered to me if I didn’t get a job.

GRACE: A Few Glorious Minutes

“Smile, damn you. Smile!” Mr. Biggerstaff yelled. It was late November, and we were at his studio, about midway through rehearsals for the Forbidden City’s opening. He’d explained that we’d be doing three one-hour shows each night with five acts of dancing, singing, and what he called novelties. In between those acts would be short bridge routines by the ponies, culminating in a big production number for the finale.

“Do it again! One, two, three, four… Again! Five, six, seven, eight!” He made us practice at the barre to build our strength: “Keep your knees directly above your feet.” He ordered us to do crawling splits across the floor to increase our flexibility: “Wider, wider!” He had us twist into pretzels-all edges erased-to improve our agility: “Stretch. And keep smiling, damn it. Didn’t anyone teach you to smile? Show your teeth! Teeth! Teeth! More teeth!”

Mr. Biggerstaff put me in charge of the line. I kept an eye on the other girls-especially Ida Wong, who could be a real nuisance-making sure they hit their marks, didn’t get lazy with their turns or kicks, and stayed in time to the music. This caused jealousy among some of the gals, and they stopped talking to me for a few days, but I had to be tough on them, because they were now my responsibility.

“Rehearse, perspire, perfection!” Mr. Biggerstaff encouraged us. “Rehearse, perspire, perfection!” He made us dance and dance and dance. “I want your hop to come on the drummer’s downbeat. The kick is on the upbeat. Listen! Don’t you hear it?”

Everything he asked us to do was easy for me, but most of the other girls had never danced before. They were getting my thirteen years of experience in six weeks. If a girl didn’t learn the routine quickly, he went after her, cutting her down, making her cry, but ultimately forcing her to improve. It was hard work and long hours. I forgot the time. I forgot to eat. And for a few glorious minutes each day I forgot to miss my mother or feel bad that I couldn’t write to her, knowing that, if I did, my father would find out, track me here, and drag me back to Plain City.

“Take five, girls,” Mr. Biggerstaff called.

Helen and I sat on the floor a little apart from the other ponies, who massaged one another’s feet, stretched, and gossiped. Every day Helen arrived at rehearsal in a dark wool skirt, long-sleeved black sweater, and charcoal-gray wool stockings, but she quickly changed out of them. To my eyes, it seemed like she was shedding not just layers of clothing but layers of tradition. Now we huddled together-inseparable-watching Eddie warm up for his routine by entertaining us with little combos. He ended with his left leg tipped behind his right, his elbows close to his torso, and his fingers spread wide. He winked flirtatiously, and we clapped. He’d taken a couple of ponies on dates, but he’d never asked Helen or me. When I pointed that out to her, she wrinkled her face like she’d just smelled a glass of sour milk.

After rehearsal, we poured into the street. Fog draped heavy and white over the city, leaving the sidewalks eerily quiet. The melodies of chattering young girls rang through the night like police sirens. As the other ponies melted into the fog, Helen and I headed to Chinatown. For all of Mr. Fong’s insistence that Helen always be escorted by her brother, the practice was haphazard at best.

Ruby waited for us in Sam Wo, our favorite café. “I’m starved,” she announced.

That first night on the street outside the Forbidden City, something invisible but very strong had clicked between us like cogs catching and holding a tractor wheel. Now, as we ate, we talked about insignificant things.

“The hair on the left side of my head is fine and won’t hold a curl,” Ruby revealed. “That’s why I pin gardenias above that ear.”

“My feet are too long,” Helen complained, even though they were smaller than Ruby’s or mine.

I told them my bosoms were growing too big, to which Ruby agreed, saying, “They’re whopping for a Chinese girl.”

We ate-I was now adept at using chopsticks-and laughed as Ruby told us about her latest job.

“I don’t know anything about housekeeping,” she chirped. “The apartment was so nice I was afraid to touch anything. The lady released me. And after only one day! But that wasn’t a good position for me, because I’m not neat, and I can barely wash a plate.”

We never talked about deep things-why I’d run away, how scared Helen must have been when the Japanese pilot tried to shoot her, or when Ruby had made up her mind to pretend she was something she wasn’t. Instead, Ruby taught Helen and me how to hula, Helen taught Ruby and me how to make simple soups on our hot plate, and I taught them things I’d learned from the movies, like how use makeup to make our eyes look more dramatic. Ruby and I had to watch our money, so we showed Helen how to make false eyelashes by taking strands of hair from our brushes, winding them around our fingers, snipping them with scissors, and gluing them onto strips, which we then applied to our eyelids. We copied my favorite actresses’ hairdos and the way they plucked their eyebrows. We didn’t spend a cent, but, along the way, we fell in love with each other. The show kids said we went together like ginger, scallions, and garlic: put us in a pot and you get the perfect dish.

Now, as we lingered at our table, sipping tea and waiting for Monroe to pick up Helen, I got up my nerve to share a little more about myself. I told them about three girls back in Plain City whom I’d named the evil triplets. Velma, who was Finnish by blood, had once been my best friend. When we started kindergarten, we met another girl named Ilsa, also Finnish. The three of us played together all the time, but at the end of first grade, Maude-another Finnish girl-got taken in by Velma and Ilsa, and I was pushed out for good. Soon, their sole pleasure came from teasing and bullying me.

“In fourth grade, the evil triplets told the class not to give me a card on Valentine’s Day,” I confided, “even though the teacher said that kids needed to give cards to every child in class or not give them at all. The evil triplets argued that I wasn’t a proper Christian, even though I was baptized in the same church they were. When I tried to fight back, they chanted, ‘Ching chong Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents.’ ”

Helen got steamed-“That’s awful!”-and Ruby shook her head sympathetically. To have these girls hear me and feel for me made me like them all the more.

“It must have been easy for you to have friends,” Ruby said to Helen, “since you grew up in Chinatown.”

“Hardly. When I was little, I was supposed to stay inside with my mother.” Helen tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “When I got to school, the other girls only played with me because their parents said they had to. Those girls are all married now. They have babies.” Her voice hitched, and she shrugged. “Plus I now work in a big-thigh show. If I see one of those girls on the street, she looks away. None of them wants to associate with me. Their husbands wouldn’t like it. Of the three of us, I’ll bet you’re the one who’s had the most friends.”

Ruby nodded slowly, pretending deep thought. Finally, she said, “I’ve had friends. Lots of friends. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry!”

Helen looked aghast, and then her face cracked as she burst out laughing. Ruby and I joined in. One of the waiters rolled his eyes. Here we go again.

“I’ve never had friends like you,” I said after we regained our composure.

“I’ve never had friends, period!” Helen softly slapped the table for emphasis.

“The three of us are like the Three Musketeers,” I said. “We get strength from each other, and we have adventures together. We’re all for one and one for all.”

“I don’t plan on being in any duels!” Ruby scoffed good-naturedly.

“Did you ever hear of the Boswell Sisters? Maybe you’re like them.” This came from a man at a neighboring table, which sent us into a cataclysmic fit of giggles. A man(!) just talked to us. He’d been eavesdropping on us! We could flirt with him all we wanted, because we were three girls together. So we broke into song, piecing together the lyrics to “Someone to Watch Over Me” and throwing in some exaggerated arm movements for the benefit of our audience of one, who clapped appreciatively and scooted his stool a little closer to our table.

“Maybe it’s better to say we’re like the Andrews Sisters,” Ruby announced when we came to the end of the song.

“Three friends are better than sisters,” I said, even though I’d been dumped by Velma and the other evil triplets. I never wanted a day to come when I’d be excluded by Ruby and Helen in favor of someone like Ida. “Besides, we aren’t sisters.”

“And it’s a good thing,” Ruby agreed. “Sisters are stuck with each other, whether they like it or not. We chose each other. We wouldn’t be here now if Helen hadn’t found our apartment. So thank you, Helen, again, for being right there when we needed someone.” She gave a smart two-finger salute to our benefactor. “Anyway, all that makes us better than sisters, like Grace said.” Her eyes sparkled. “Hey, what if we put an act together and called ourselves the Swinging Sensations or the Oriental Wonders-”

“How about the Swing Sisters?” Helen suggested.

“We aren’t-”

“Sisters,” Ruby finished for me. “But so what? We’re singers and dancers-”

“You’re dancers too?” The man on the stool leaned forward, skeptical.

Ruby stiffened. “Of course! We’ll show you.”

The customer regarded us in unveiled delight as we jumped up and started pushing tables and stools out of the way. The cooks came out from the kitchen to see what all the hubbub was about, wiping their hands on their aprons, shoving their folded paper hats back on their foreheads. We lined up. I counted, “Five, six, seven…” And we broke into “Let Me Play with It.”

Halfway through the number, Monroe came in the door, bringing with him a rush of damp air. He scowled as he took in the scene. Our voices trailed off, the man on the stool slid back to his own table, and the cooks slinked into the kitchen.

“Time to go,” Ruby said to Helen.

Monroe was clearly upset to see his sister and her friends dancing in a neighborhood restaurant, but he didn’t yell or anything like that. Instead, he radiated disapproval. That was fine for Helen; he was her brother. But to me, his attitude was upsetting. He was younger than Eddie Wu and just about the most darling boy I’d ever seen-almost as cute as that boy I’d met on Treasure Island. It probably helped that Monroe was the first Chinese boy I’d seen up close.

We waved to the man on his stool as Monroe herded us out the door. When we reached the Fong family compound, he dashed through the main entrance and into the courtyard-his chore done for the night.

“He likes you,” Helen said after her brother disappeared from view. “He’s always staring at you.”

“It’s true,” Ruby agreed. “Which one do you like more-Monroe or Eddie?”

I shrugged, trying to pretend indifference when I’d never been on a single date. Now, any time I saw Eddie or Monroe, a slightly seasick sensation roiled my stomach and I blushed. (If dreaming about a boy and a man at the same time seems like something only a bad girl would do, then I told myself that I wasn’t in Plain City anymore, and I had some catching up to do.) Eddie appeared to regard my silly comments, hard work in the line, and girlishness with casual indifference, while Monroe…

“Sometimes it feels like your brother is taking in every movement, every word, every outfit I wear, and analyzing them-”

“Maybe he’s deciding if you’re wife material,” Helen said.

“Oh, stop!”

Helen’s lips formed a gentle smile, and then she slowly backed away from us as though she were a grain of wheat being sucked into a silo. She didn’t want to leave us, and we didn’t want to let her go, but she never once hinted that she might invite us into the compound to sit on her bed and talk until we all fell asleep. That was something I still missed-and longed for-from when Velma and I were friends.

After the gate swung shut, Ruby and I slowly continued to our apartment. We weren’t in a hurry, because nothing and no one waited for us.

“Marry Monroe?” I mused. “He doesn’t even know me.”

Ruby lifted her shoulders and let them drop. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it. Despite her funny stories, being jobless weighed on her. I worried for her too.

With sudden clarity, I understood that Ruby might be more outgoing and Helen might be from a better family, but I linked the three of us together. I was the Velma of the group! Only nicer.

MY FATHER SCREAMED, “Measly girl! Worthless girl! You aren’t going anywhere!” He bore down on me, trapping me in the corner of our living room. He unbuckled his belt and drew it through his pants loops in a single fast flourish. I had no way to escape… The leather lashed through the air before landing on my skin… The terrible familiar sting…

I jolted awake and lurched into a sitting position. Panting… Sweaty… I hung my head as I pushed at my fear and feeling of helplessness.

After a few moments, my hands still shaking, I wiped my hair off my face so I could see the clock. It was 9:30 in the morning. I’d gotten to bed from rehearsal only five hours earlier. I lay back down, stared at the ceiling, and let tears run from my eyes to my ears. But I had to pull myself together. In forty-five minutes, I would be going on my first date ever.

I pulled on the silk robe I’d purchased at a curio shop on Grant and padded out to the main room. Ruby had already left to go job hunting, but last night we’d talked about what I should wear, and if Monroe would like me better with or without makeup. I made myself a cup of tea, took it back to the bedroom, and began to get ready. I’d need to spend extra time on my face now to hide the splotches and swelling. By the time I went downstairs, I thought I looked pretty.

Monroe picked me up at 10:15 outside my building and we walked to the corner of Stockton and Clay, joining another two hundred or so people. He told me we were going to a “protest.” This was a surprise and hardly the date I’d imagined, but I decided to let the day unfold the way Monroe wanted it to. As soon as we climbed onto the bed of a pickup truck, I knew this was going to be a real adventure. We joined a convoy of cars and stake-back trucks and drove down to Pier 45-singing, yelling, and cheering the whole way-to where a Greek ship, the SS Spyros, was docked. Monroe told me the vessel had been charted by Mitsui Company to transport 8,500 tons of scrap iron to Japan. We were there to picket against the shipment. Monroe’s decision to bring me here showed him perfectly. He was an ABC-an American-born Chinese, like me. His American birthright gave him the freedom to state his views publicly. He was, as Helen put it, one of those new brooms who wanted to sweep the world clean of all inequities.

“Girls like you need to join the embargo against Japan by no longer wearing silk stockings.” Monroe’s hair blew in the wind and his eyes shone with fervor. “But everyone can help by keeping scrap metal out of the Japs’ mitts so they can’t turn it into bombs and bullets to use against China.”

Monroe and I grabbed signs, then he boldly took my hand and squeezed it. Together we joined the picket line before the pier. “Victory! Victory! Victory!” Word traveled. More people streamed down the hill from Chinatown to the Embarcadero. Mothers sent drinks, sandwiches, oranges, Chinese buns, and dumplings. One family delivered an entire roast pig! Soon people carried their placards in one hand and roast pork in the other. It was the largest demonstration of Chinese the United States had ever seen. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I guess no one else had either. Monroe had given me this once-in-a-lifetime event. I was glad he’d brought me.

At the climax, the gathering was five thousand people strong. Lieutenant Governor-elect Ellis Patterson, whom Monroe called a liberal and a statesman, addressed the crowd: “Speeches have been made, the press has denounced the shipment of war materials to Japan, all the progressives have expressed themselves for democracy against the aggressor, but you are doing something about it!”

Two hours later, after the demonstration ended, Monroe and I decided to stroll along the Embarcadero rather than get on one of the trucks to go back to Chinatown. He led me onto one of the piers. We silently-nervously-stared into each other’s faces until he finally got up the nerve to kiss me. His lips felt thin on mine. For so long I’d dreamed of my first romantic moment with a boy I liked, but this kiss didn’t light a fire in me like I had expected it would. Maybe it was unsatisfying for Monroe too, because he didn’t try to do it again. He put his hands in his pockets and looked out at the water. I stood there awkwardly, searching for the right thing to say.

“Will you come to opening night?” I asked.

He shook his head and said he wouldn’t come-not for Helen, not for me. After a long pause, he added, “I guess I’d better get you home.” All the zest he’d exhibited during the demonstration had gone out of him.

So, it was an exciting and adventurous day but a disappointing first date. I felt miserable because I’d failed to please him when I’d let myself hope for so much. I couldn’t talk to Ruby about it, because I would have had to tell her that Monroe and I had spent most of our time together at an anti-Japanese rally. I couldn’t tell Helen about it either, because he was her brother. All I could hope to do was be a better date next time, if there was a next time, because I wanted to get kissing right.

HELEN: White Snow Blossoms

Mama often liked to recite one of her favorite sayings-Reshape one’s foot to fit a new shoe-and she expected me to follow her wishes for my life by accepting whatever fate brought me. The peasants in our home village in China lived close to the earth and the cycles of seasons and crops. They believed that age and time do not wait for people. And then there was Buddha, who taught May all that have life be delivered from suffering. By getting hired at the Forbidden City, I had managed to adhere to all these aphorisms. It was December 22, 1938, and the club would have its grand opening in just a few hours. When I left the compound, Mama and my sisters-in-law were decorating a Christmas tree-an American concession to the little ones in our household. I carried a small bag in which I’d packed a floor-length cheongsam that Mama had commissioned for me from one of the finest tailors in Shanghai. I didn’t know if I’d have a chance to wear the dress tonight, but you can never be too prepared.

When I arrived at the club, the neon sign that trickled down the face of the building glowed red, gold, and green in lettering that looked like chopsticks: FORBIDDEN CITY. I hurried upstairs. Ornate silk hangings and embroidered tapestries decorated the walls. Chinese urns stuffed shelves and idle corners. Hexagonal lanterns hung from the ceiling. To the left stood the bar, with stools upholstered in red leather and walls covered in bamboo paneling. Just ahead, the main room offered a large open space for our floor show and for customers to dance. Tables-with sparkling place settings lit by little lamps with red glass shades shaped like coolie hats-surrounded the dance floor on three sides.

I pushed through the kitchen’s swinging doors into total chaos. The cooks all knew each other, having worked together previously in clubs and cafés in the area, and it showed in their bickering and bantering. Plates and bowls clattered, cleavers clack-clacked against chopping blocks, and cooking utensils slapped the sides of woks. Steam billowed in the air. All this, and not a single meal had been ordered yet.

“Get out! Get out!” one of the cooks shouted. “We don’t want you in here.” He held up a cleaver. “I’ll chop you up if you don’t get out!”

I passed through the kitchen to backstage and up a few steps to the dressing rooms. The early birds had secured spots in front of the mirror. I saw Grace, who was extending a leg to slip on opera hose-fishnet stockings so thick they left marks if you sat in them too long. She waved me over, and I waded through other girls patting powder on their cheeks, gluing on false eyelashes, applying lipstick. Irene and May had already changed into their first costumes: long red satin off-the-shoulder Gay Nineties gowns with a slit up the thigh. The necklines and hems were edged with ruffles, which matched the ruffles on the oversize hats.

“I saved you a place next to me,” Grace said in greeting. “We can get ready together.”

I wished I could change in private, but that wasn’t possible, so I began getting into my costume from the bottom up. I slipped on my opera hose under my skirt, then pulled up the corset until it bunched just under my waistband. I unzipped my skirt, let it fall to the floor, and took off my sweater and blouse. I didn’t own a brassiere-my mother would have died on the spot if she found one in my bureau, and my sisters-in-law would have gossiped until my brothers condemned me for wearing such an indecent lo fan garment-so I wore an undershirt. I turned to the wall and drew it over my head, hoping to avoid prying eyes. Impossible.

“Waaaa! What is that?” Ida squealed.

The chatter instantly silenced, and everyone stopped what they were doing to stare. I turned crimson and folded my arms over my breasts.

“Mind your own business,” I said.

“But what happened? What is that?” Ida repeated.

“It’s a scar. You’ve seen a scar before, haven’t you?”

“But on your tittie? It’s so red!”

Ida was the coarsest person-man or woman-I’d ever encountered, in addition to being the nosiest. She had piqued everyone else’s interest. Even Grace looked at me questioningly.

“I was in a car accident a year ago,” I said with a casual shrug.

Fortunately, that seemed to satisfy them, and they went back to getting ready. I kept the scar covered with one hand and used my other to pull my costume up and over my breasts. A second later, somebody called, “Everyone!” followed by a loud knock at the door. Then again, “Everyone”-only this time it must have been addressed to the men’s dressing room across the hall. “Charlie wants to see everyone out on the floor.”

“Now?” Ida cried out. “I’m not decent yet.”

“Now!” came the reply.

We filed out of the dressing room, downstairs to the backstage alley, and then split up-with some of us passing through a velvet curtain on the right side of the stage and others going through a velvet curtain on the left side. Cooks, dishwashers, waiters, and waitresses mingled restlessly on the dance floor. Girls from the front of the house-who worked in the hatcheck room and as hostesses and photographers-lingered near the step to the first raised tier. Van Meisner, our bandleader, and the other members of the Forbidden Knights perched on the edge of the stage, their legs dangling, cigarettes hanging loose from their lips. The Lim Sisters, a new act that had been hired at the last minute, sat at what Charlie had dubbed “the best table in the house.” (Bessie, Ella, and Dolores, “the warbling trio,” had performed in vaudeville since they were seven, five, and three. None of us had seen their routine, but it was supposed to be a showstopper. We hadn’t met them yet either. They were headliners, and we were all curious about them. It was hard not to stare.) Eddie came out in his tuxedo pants, slippers, and a T-shirt with holes at the neck. He leaned against a pillar with his hands in his pockets. Li Tei stood next to her husband.

“This is it,” Charlie began. He was dressed for the opening number in a wild double-breasted yellow and blue plaid suit with bright blue velvet lapels and collar. A straw boater balanced on his head, and he kept smoothing the fake mustache pasted to his upper lip with a finger and thumb to make sure it stayed put. “You all made it, and we’re all here!”

People applauded, but I was nervous. I not only had to worry about the routines we’d practiced for weeks but also had to remember the last-minute changes Mr. Biggerstaff had made to the production to accommodate the Lim Sisters.

“We’re going to show them”-Charlie gestured toward the entrance and all the lo fan beyond the door-“that we can accomplish more than just wash dishes, do laundry, sweep floors, or work on the railroad.” The men, even the dishwashers, clapped for this. “We’re going to show them that you girls have arms and legs.” The ponies around me applauded. “Everyone has first-night jitters. Even I have them. Just remember that most of our customers have never seen a Chinese perform. We’re going to be great, and we’re going to open big.” He glanced at his watch. “Finish getting ready. And then have a fabulous night! Let’s show the world our stuff!”

“Break a leg, everyone,” Eddie called as we dispersed.

We returned to the dressing room to wait for our curtain call. I caught some of the ponies furtively spying on the Lim Sisters as they did their makeup. One of the cigarette girls came back to tell us that customers had started to arrive. The women, she reported, were dropping their furs in the cloakroom to reveal glittering jewels and silk gowns that swept the floor, while the men were shrugging out of overcoats to display perfectly cut evening dress.

“I wish I could see them,” Ida said.

“You will,” Grace said. “We’ll be out there soon enough.”

Despite my friend’s calm words, anticipation-hers included-made the room feel as though we didn’t have enough air to breathe. It was hard to sit still. I tried to focus my mind on the basics of the evening.

At a staff meeting a week ago, Charlie had walked us through what the Forbidden City experience would be like for our customers. The maître d’ would escort glamorous couples through the moon gate to floor-side tables. The less well heeled would be seated on the second or third tier, which hugged the main level on three sides. Waiters and waitresses dressed in red silk uniforms would hand out menus-the right side listed Chinese dishes, the left American. Those who didn’t have reservations would pay a one-dollar cover charge and line up at the bar. Ruby, if she wasn’t there already, would arrive soon. Grace and I had staked her to the evening.

We could hear the Forbidden Knights’ tunes all the way in our dressing room. Grace told me the name of each song: “Begin the Beguine,” “Heart and Soul,” and “Cheek to Cheek.” The melodies were beautiful and romantic, and I could practically see couples dancing in my imagination.

“As soon as the set ends,” Grace reminded us, “we’ll be on.”

My stomach lurched. Nerves!

A couple of minutes later, someone rapped his knuckles on the door. “Fiedee, fiedee, fiedee!” It was Charlie. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! It’s showtime!” Grace grabbed my hand, and together we led the other ponies to the stage-right velvet curtain. Our faces were bone-tight with anxiety. We shifted our feet-some to shake off stage fright, others practicing the moves one last time. We fingered our parasols, praying they’d open on cue. A drum rolled. Charlie stepped through the curtain to greet his guests:

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Forbidden City, where we’ll give you a new slant on entertainment.” The lo fan laughed at the insulting pun. Charlie knew what he had to say to make them happy. “You won’t see any yellow face here. No, siree. We’re already yellow! So off we go to yesteryear-when the music was light, times were easy, and the girls were beautiful.”

Van Meisner brought down his baton, and the Forbidden Knights began to play “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Grace went through the velvet curtain first, opened her parasol, glided across the stage, and sashayed down to the dance floor. I followed right behind her with the other ponies behind me. The room oozed rich elegance, reminding me of my favorite club in Shanghai. Everyone was drinking; everyone was happy. We twirled our parasols and tilted our heads just so. We looked exquisite. We looked delicate and breakable-like dolls, like little China dolls. Then we broke into a simple combination-leisurely and rhythmic, in time with the gentle tune. Together, working as a unit where every move and every note were in accord, we supported each other and lifted each other to create a glorious and colorful spectacle. The concentration made me forget the world, made me forget that my father cared so little for me that he let me dance here at all.

We swayed around Charlie, who stood in the middle of the floor, holding his microphone. The dance was slow enough and the lights were such that with each orbit around him I glimpsed people’s faces in the audience. They had come as they might go to a curio shop: to encounter the exotic, to glimpse the scandalous, to see a real “curiosity.” So far we weren’t delivering. But before the audience’s mood could coalesce into anything negative, the tempo abruptly changed. The band launched into a rousing “Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay.” We shouted out the opening syllables, tore off our hats, and tossed them into the audience. We ripped away our gowns to reveal red satin corsets edged with the same fringe that hung from our parasols. Even Charlie got into the act, yanking off his plaid suit to reveal a tuxedo.

This was more like it! Charlie had promised the audience legs and arms, and here they were! Who would have guessed a Chinese girl could move like that? Chinese were supposed to be bowlegged and clumsy. And weren’t the women supposed to be submissive? Everyone knew the type. They’d seen her on the street sometimes…

“Those women in Chinatown won’t even meet my eyes,” I heard a man seated next to the dance floor whisper to his friend. (Those would have to be women like my mother, sisters-in-law, or me, who would have preferred to die than look at an ugly lo fan like him.)

“I’ve seen plenty who will meet my eyes, if you catch my drift.” The other man winked conspiratorially.

The stereotypes about Chinese women were tiresome… and predictable. I swirled to the next table and overheard…

“They’ll give you a disease if you get too close. Have you gotten that close? I’ve heard that their privates are as different as their eyes.”

“You mean slanted, going from side to side instead of front to back?”

It made me sick the way they talked, but I was still glad to be here, happy to have made my choice to be in this world and not caged in the compound.

When the first number ended and we filed offstage, Charlie Low introduced Li Tei. Everyone could feel his pride. “She’s a torch singer and good at grand opera too,” he promised. I lingered by the curtain to watch as he put a hand to the side of his mouth to confide, “But she’ll also sing a Chinese number on request. Ladies and gentlemen, I present my wife, the beautiful and talented Li Tei Ming.”

Her cheongsam was made of yellow silk with large lipstick-red flowers like giant handprints touching every part of her body. Van Meisner nodded to the band, and the familiar notes of “Loch Lommond” floated through the club. Li Tei sang just one bar-combining a fake Scots accent with her way-down-south Cantonese accent-and once again a feeling of utter disbelief settled over the crowd. When she sang “Sì, Mi Chiamano Mimi”-Yes, They Call Me Mimi-from La Bohème, it was just too, too much. Unbelievable, really and truly unbelievable.

I hurried back to the dressing room. Irene had changed into her costume for the next number, so she went out to catch Jack Mak’s act. After she left, Ida smirked knowingly. “She’s so gone on that guy.” Once the rest of the ponies were ready, we joined Irene stage left. I guess it hadn’t occurred to anyone in the audience that a Chinese man could be a magician either. I could see guests actually scratching their heads, as puzzled by Jack Mak as they were by his illusions. Did he really just shoot into a box? Now he’s opening it! Hey! A dove flew out and over my head!

We ponies paraded out for a short interlude. This time I dared to look up to the windows into the bar, hoping to spot Ruby, but all I saw were well-dressed men leaning on the sills, watching the show. Charlie passed from table to table with his microphone, joking with customers, teasing them about how many drinks they’d had, asking if the women were wives, fiancées, girlfriends, or something else…

As we dipped back behind the curtain, the band broke into “Minnie the Moocher” for the Merry Mahjongs-an acrobatic troupe recently returned from a European tour. When the line “He took her down to Chinatown, he showed her how to kick the gong around” arrived, the acrobats mugged it up for all it was worth. From that night on, they’d be known for literally kicking a gong around, solidifying their reputations as the best Chinese acrobats in America. Aiya! As if that meant anything!

Another interlude. We wore miniature tuxedos-collars and ties, top hats, gloves, black opera hose, and little sequined corsets. Grace led us through a simple tap number. If a male customer wanted, he could touch a girl’s bottom as it twitched by. I managed to stay just out of reach. The spotlight moved to one of the velvet curtains. Expectations rose. Who-what-was coming next? The curtain swung open. Eddie stood there in top hat and tails. We kept dancing, hitting such a low and relentless rhythm that I finally understood why we were called ponies. Eddie was smooth and debonair. This wasn’t like seeing someone on the big screen. This was real, it was live, and it was happening just a few feet away.

We waited backstage since we didn’t have another change. Li Tei Ming returned for a torch song. My nerves hadn’t ebbed much and neither had those of any of the other ponies, but it felt like everything was going well. Then it was time for the main attraction. Our crowd made way for the Lim Sisters, who wore white baptismal gowns and big bonnets. Maybe that had worked for them when they were little girls doing vaudeville, but to my eyes they looked ridiculous now that they were grown women.

“Straight from the Palace in London,” Charlie proclaimed, “I give you the Lim Sisters.”

The Lims tottered out. I thought their act was strange-who wants to see big babies singing?-but the audience loved them. People here in San Francisco had witnessed so much change the past few years. In the twenties: flappers, alcohol, and money flowing like water. And then the crash: families in breadlines, Okies arriving with all their possessions piled on top of their trucks, and people like those in the audience selling off jewels and property. But as customers watched the sisters perform, you could almost see their hope. It seemed we all wanted to forget.

The big finale: We formed a conga line-with Li Tei at the front-and wove through the club, picking up customers, who hung on to the waists in front of them. Shake those hips from side to side, and kick! It’s the Chinaconga!

The first show was flawless-like a perfect piece of jade. The audience demonstrated their appreciation by ordering more drinks. Champagne corks popped. Women sipped frothy cocktails from high-stemmed glasses. Men waved to Flo, the cigarette girl, to come to their table to sell her wares. Dinners arrived on big silver trays, with each dish topped by its own silver dome. In the dressing room, the girls jumped up and down, hugged each other, and laughed. How many times had Grace and the others sat in a darkened movie theater and wished and hoped and pined to be up on the screen in that movie, in that scene, in that world? Now they’d brought the illusion off the screen and into this building. The air crackled with adrenaline, excitement, and happiness. Even I felt something…

As some of the ponies changed back into their costumes for the first number, I opened the bag I’d brought from home and pulled out my cheongsam. The silk was the color of a robin’s egg and was printed with white snow blossoms. “You’re an unmarried girl,” Mama had said when we ordered the dress. “This will make you look fresh and young, while still evoking the frostiness of winter.” The dress had marked the beginning of a new phase of my life. Now here I was, starting another chapter. I put it on and buttoned the highest frog to hold the mandarin collar in place. I closed the frogs across my breast, under my armpit, and down my side. It wasn’t my best cheongsam-not by a long shot-but the girls in the dressing room stared. Until this minute I was the one they distrusted because they could see I had more money than they did. They’d also made it pretty clear they thought that I had won out over dancers better than I was and that I considered myself special because I had Grace-the girl in charge of the line-as my best friend. Resentment threatened to dampen their exuberant moods, but Grace regarded me with eyes of love.

“Look how beautiful you are!”

I waved off the compliment. “I’m going to see if I can find Ruby. I’ll be right back.”

I left the dressing room before Grace could stop me, then slipped through the velvet curtain and into the club. I sensed Grace behind me, but she didn’t follow. As I picked my way through the tables, customers-particularly men-offered their congratulations. I found Ruby in the bar. She wore a bias-cut dress-inexpensive but clinging to every curve. The group of men who clustered around her parted when I approached.

“Wasn’t she great, boys?” Ruby asked.

The men all chatted at once, vying for my attention.

“Join us.”

“Sit with us.”

“Let me buy you a drink.”

The men tried to one-up each other. Did I want a champagne cocktail, pink lady, gin fizz, or dry martini? After that, they got down to serious proposals.

“Let me buy you dinner.”

“Are you free later tonight?”

“Do you have other girlfriends who’d like to tag along?”

I did my best to be entertaining and polite, but inside I was swooning through the ether of happiness. Then Charlie announced that the second show would start momentarily. I wasn’t close to being ready!

I hurried back through the tables but was slowed again and again by admirers. Panic began to well in me. If I didn’t get back in time… Once backstage, I ran to the dressing room. “Fiedee, fiedee, fiedee.” Grace glared at me as a praying mantis would eye a cricket, but she didn’t have time to scold me, not when she had to worry about her own performance, her own position, her own life. As Grace and the others filed out of the dressing room, I peeled off my cheongsam and threw on my Gay Nineties costume. I went backstage, desperate to join the number. Suddenly, surprisingly, someone yanked my shoulder. It was Eddie-dressed in his tails and top hat. He was furious.

“You stupid bitch!” he hissed. “Are you trying to jam this up for all of us?”

He went on to curse me with words I’d never before heard. When the ponies whisked through the curtain, they ducked their heads and edged around Eddie and me, up the stairs, and into the dressing room. They had to change and be ready for the next routine no matter what happened to me. Only Grace stayed by my side.

“I’m sorry, Eddie.” My voice trembled. “This is my first show. I didn’t pay attention-”

“Jesus Christ.” He drawled out the syllables to emphasize his disgust.

Tears rolled down my cheeks, prompting Eddie to throw up his hands in frustration. Then he gestured to Grace. “Clean her up, for God’s sake. We’re on in a couple of minutes.”

Grace pulled me into the dressing room, where it felt like we were in the middle of a tornado. Girls pitched aside their skimpy undercostumes from the Gay Nineties number and pulled on their black-sequined tuxedo corsets for the routine with Eddie as fast as possible.

“Zip me up, will ya?”

“Is my top hat cocked at a good angle?”

“Do I look fat in this?”

“I’ve got a run!”

“A seam just split. What am I going to do now?”

Small dramas happened all around us, but not a single pony wasn’t aware of my lapse-my irresponsibility-when this job was so precious. But if I got fired, they’d follow the old saying: Step on her bones to climb the ladder. And I would just be a lonely girl ignored by the wives and mothers at the Chinese Telephone Exchange.

Grace hastily slipped out of her costume and into her tuxedo outfit. I sat on a bench, weeping. Once Grace was ready, she shooed Ida and the other girls out of the room and kneeled before me.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together.”

That Grace was upset with me was almost more than I could bear. I fought my tears, sucking in my upper lip and biting down hard enough that I tasted blood. Grace grabbed a tissue, and I watched in the mirror as she wiped away the worst of the streaks down my cheeks.

“You need to have a sense of humor about these things,” Grace counseled, even as she tried to erase the irritation that chewed at the edges of her voice. “If you don’t, you’ll never survive in show business. If you miss a step, fall down, or get yelled at, you’ve got to”-here she began to sing-“pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”

I didn’t know what in the world she was singing, and it must have showed on my face.

“It’s from Swing Time,” Grace explained. “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie?”

I stared at her blankly.

Grace attempted a new approach, reminding me that she was the head of the line and needed to get me out on the floor or her job was in jeopardy.

“Stop crying right now,” she ordered. Then she pinched my thigh as hard as she could.

“Oow!” I rubbed my leg. Grace blotted my cheeks with foundation and then used the powder puff so enthusiastically that little clouds of white dust swirled around us. Once my face looked passable, she brought me to my feet to undress and then dress me like I was a small child. Her eyes briefly rested on my scar. Daring for a Chinese girl to stare at another girl’s naked breast that way; immodest for a Chinese girl to let another girl so closely examine something so private.

“This isn’t just a scar, is it? A whole piece was gouged out.” Her eyes met mine. “I feel so bad for you. It must have been a rough time.”

“It was, but I don’t like to talk about it.” I hoped that would put an end to any other questions.

The call came for Eddie’s number. I quickly wiggled into my sequined corset, tipped my top hat at a jaunty angle, and started for the door. “You coming?”

This time all eight girls were at one or the other velvet curtain. I spread my mouth into what I’d created to serve as my performance smile and tapped my way through the curtain.

The rest of the second show ran perfectly, as did the third. At close to four in the morning, the last customer disappeared into the night. Charlie met us on the landing between the dressing rooms, where an air of jubilation filled the cramped space.

“Good job, everyone,” he said. “But we learned some things tonight. You girls are going to need long gowns or cheongsams like the one Helen wore tonight. I want to see all my glamour girls on the floor between shows. Let the customers buy you drinks. Have dinner with them. Dance with them. Make them happy.”

The other ponies and I heard this with mixed emotions: I wouldn’t be fired (a disappointment to some, a huge relief to me); a lot of us, including Grace and me, were not old enough to drink (Charlie told us not to worry about that); and we were all going to join the party that happened in the club every night. I had forgotten myself for a minute, true. But my few moments of enjoyment-for which I could have paid a terrible price-clarified that it wasn’t right for me to put happiness first. What had I gotten myself into?

Later, when Grace and I exited onto Sutter, we discovered that the evening wasn’t quite over. Ruby waited for us, but there were also men-stage-door Johnnies-making their first appearances to invite ponies out for coffee, breakfast, a hotel room. We weren’t about to take them up on any of those propositions.

It was either too late or too early for sleep, so we found a place to get bowls of jook and wait for the sun to come up. Ruby bubbled, but I couldn’t tell if she was truly excited for us or just wanted to show she hadn’t fallen behind. Grace wasn’t nearly as thrilled as I’d expected her to be. She’d dreamed of having an opening night…

“I need to spend some of my salary to buy a gown,” she confessed when prodded.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I have a closet full of them. I’ll give you one of mine.”

Grace’s shoulders tightened, and she looked away. My offer had made her lose face. Better to die a beggar than to live as a beggar. But weren’t we supposed to be friends? Didn’t friends help each other? Beyond that, we were in the chorus line together. She’d saved me tonight. Lending her a dress was the least I could do.

“Will you give me one too?” Ruby piped up eagerly.

Ruby’s reminder that she was in worse shape-without a permanent job-snapped Grace out of her gloom.

RUBY: A Lone Wolf

Two weeks after the Forbidden City’s bang-up opening, the three of us were in the apartment, spending Monday, the only day Grace and Helen had off, painting each other’s toenails, pinning new hairstyles, and trying on each other’s clothes, while I entertained them with my oh-so-humorous Adventures in Unemployment. I was good at getting jobs but not at keeping them.

“So he tells me, ‘You move like an angel, but I need an angel who can shine a floor. I said to use elbow grease, not grease!’ You can guess the end. Fired!”

I could amuse Grace and Helen for hours with my stories. I was placed as a maid in a tony home in Pacific Heights, only I hadn’t been taught that using Ajax wasn’t the best way to polish silver. A family on Russian Hill engaged me as a mother’s helper, but the children didn’t particularly ken to me, and I sure as hell didn’t care for them. The father liked me, though, and we had fun until his wife found out. But honestly, why did she have to make such a big stink about a hug and a bump in a laundry room? I signed on as an elevator operator at a department store on Union Square-a highlight in what had been a sorry string of jobs-where I used different accents to entertain the shoppers. “Second floor, gentlemen’s suits and other bespoke wear,” growled like a Japanese samurai. “Fifth floor, ladies’ lingerie,” sung as a girl from the islands. “Mezzanine, notions, books, and candy,” recited as one of the Mexican girls from my elementary school in Los Angeles. Customers said I was a hoot; management gave me the bounce. On to cafés in North Beach, Cow Hollow, and the Tenderloin. I knew less about being a waitress than about cleaning a house, unpacking boxes in storage rooms, or selling flowers. It took me a while to catch the brain waves and understand that when someone asked for a bride and groom on a life raft he wanted two eggs and toast, or that a bride and groom on the rocks meant scrambled eggs. Once someone asked for a “rare” waffle. I brought him a plate of batter with a pat of butter on top. Quick as a wink, I was out on my can. “Sorry, slim, but you just aren’t working out.” Rain off a duck’s back, I always say.

“Remember when that customer asked for fried watermelon?” Grace cued me. “He was teasing you, but you went to the kitchen and asked the short-order cook to make it!”

Grace and Helen loved that story for some reason. Fried watermelon. Ha! Ha! Yes, the joke sure was on me. “Fired again!” the three of us sang out in harmony. I laughed as hard as they did. The blues were not in my repertoire.

I didn’t want to put the bite on my roommate and ask her for money, but when I couldn’t chip in my share of the rent, Grace voluntarily made up the extra amount. “That’s what friends do for each other,” she said, which was pretty funny given how bent out of shape she’d gotten when Helen offered to give her a dress to wear between shows at the Forbidden City. I didn’t see the big deal about taking Grace’s money or wearing Helen’s castoffs. A girl needs a place to sleep and something snazzy to wear, after all.

ON THE WEEKEND, I visited Aunt Haru and Uncle Junji in Alameda. They filled me with soba and natto-sticky fermented soybeans-slivers of toro, and cups of matcha. They asked me questions:

“Have you heard from your mother and father?”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Won’t you come back and stay with us? We can give you a job in the grocery.”

They were the nicest people. They had a small shop not far from the Alameda naval air station. Their customers were lookers, as you might imagine, so working there wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen. But I didn’t want to spend my life drinking beer and necking with servicemen-I’d already done a fair amount of that in Hawaii-and even earlier when we lived on Terminal Island not far from the naval reserve, so I turned down Aunt Haru’s offer, bowing deeply and repeatedly as my mother would have wanted me to do to show proper respect and humility.

“Doumo arigatou gozaimasu, Auntie,” I said, using the most polite form of Japanese. “You honor me with your kindness. I’m forever grateful.”

My aunt and uncle-as I hoped they would-sent me home with a basket filled with fresh fruits, vegetables, and a five-pound sack of rice, which was a start toward repaying Grace.

And I thought coming here would be a breeze.

I hadn’t won any apple-pie prizes or ribbons like Grace had, but even as a little girl I could attract a crowd. That first day at the auditions for the Forbidden City, I told Grace and Helen that I’d always been a dancer, but it was more like I was born to be famous. People saw something in me. They were attracted to me. They came to me like bees to a flower or moths to a flame. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t have a lot of talent, but I had plenty of ba-zing.

Way back, when we still lived in Los Angeles, a dancer from the Orpheum Theater came across the street to visit our family’s curio shop. She wanted to buy a black lacquer box decorated with flying cranes, but she didn’t have enough money, so my mother said, “If you give my girl dance lessons, I’ll give you the box.” People told my mother that our family had gone to the dogs. Mom, who was about as traditional and strict a woman as you could find on either side of the Pacific, shot them down.

“It’s better to be a lone wolf with talent than a monkey dancing for an organ-grinder,” she said. “Better to be independent than bow to the Occidental.”

But I had to be a proper Japanese girl too. She showed me how to mince when I walked so I’d look delicate and smile behind pressed fingers so I’d look more alluring. She taught me to speak in a high voice, making sure no air-no life-came out of my throat. She instructed me to begin each sentence as though everything were my fault: sumimasenga-I’m sorry but, or osoremasuga-I fear offending you but.

Naturally, I attended my mother’s Japanese-language classes. Japanese was of no interest to me, whether at home or in school, and I wished I had a nickel for every time she criticized my use of prepositions. (My pop always said her voice was as beautiful as cherry blossoms floating through the air on a perfect spring morning. On this one thing I couldn’t argue. Her voice was beautiful… for a nag.) My mother drilled me on honorifics and declensions. I learned the difference between what a woman could say and what a man could say. Shizukani-quiet-could politely come from a woman’s mouth. But a man could be more forceful: Damare! Shut up! I listened when people spoke the common name for a wife-ka-nai-which literally meant house inside. A husband was called the shu-jin-person in charge. But I wanted to be in charge of my own life.

My mother started each class by having her students sing the Japanese national anthem before a portrait of Emperor Hirohito, spiffy in his uniform, sitting astride his white horse, Shirayuki. (This probably wasn’t much different than Helen going to Chinese-language school and singing the Republic of China’s anthem to a photo of Dr. Sun Yatsen.) Mom taught class like we were in Japan, stressing single-minded loyalty to our superiors: parents, teachers, anyone older, and, of course, the emperor. The greatest virtues, she told us, were sincerity, loyalty, and obedience. (This couldn’t have been all that off the mark from what Helen had learned through her sayings.) My mother educated us about Japan and China’s first altercation, back in 663, and taught us that Japan had retaliated with a long chain of invasions that continued to today. (Helen had probably learned the yin-yang version, in which the Japanese were always the villains.) What I’m saying is, we all follow traditions that we believe are right and just, but there are two sides to every story. Still, when I called last year’s rape of Nanking a war crime, my mother slapped me and said, “That didn’t happen! People made that up!” And then she called me an ungrateful daughter, as though that were more evil than raping and killing thousands of innocent women in China.

“I’m not ungrateful or unpatriotic,” I fought back. “I love America, and I believe in peace.”

“The emperor believes in peace too,” Mom said. “He cries for the other countries in Asia that have been crushed beneath the boot of Western imperialism. The Japanese will help our less fortunate brothers and sisters in Manchuria, China, and Korea. This is a time of Friendship, Cooperation, and Co-prosperity.”

“Don’t you mean the Three Alls policy-burn all, kill all, loot all?”

“Bakatare!” My mother spat out the most insulting form of stupid.

My parents stopped speaking to me for two weeks after that. Hideo and Yori, my brothers, steered clear of me too. “You were born to be bad,” Hideo told me one day, sounding like a gangster he’d seen at the picture show in Honolulu. I wasn’t particularly bad, but I did have my own opinions. As a result, I was komaru ne-an embarrassment and an annoyance.

Worse, I liked boys and boys liked me, which made my parents crazier than bedbugs. Mom may have encouraged me to dance, but she hadn’t properly thought it through. More than three thousand Japanese-Issei, Nisei, and Sansei-lived on Terminal Island, but the sailors at the naval reserve shared the island with us. By the time I turned fourteen, I knew where I liked to spend my time. So, yes, my pop wanted to fish in Hawaii and my mother wanted to go back to Japan, but they were really getting me out of trouble before I got in trouble. But they hadn’t thought this through either. The trade winds blew away all orders. White teachers came to school with hibiscus behind their ears and picked them for me to wear. Ocean waves dashed my parents’ culture against rocky shoals. Rustling palm fronds whispered freedom and choice. Smooth-skinned local boys spoke with even smoother voices. And more sailors! They couldn’t tell if I was Japanese, Chinese, or Hawaiian, and they didn’t care.

“Shikata ga nai,” my mother moaned. “It cannot be helped.”

Mom said I was a moga-a modern girl. That was not a compliment. My parents couldn’t figure out what to do with me. When my aunt and uncle offered to take me in, my parents gladly let me return to the Land of Rice-mainland America-and I most happily went. And guess what. They lived and worked right next to the naval air station! Shikata ga nai! And how!

I’d shattered the mold for a typical Japanese girl. So what? I wasn’t like Grace, Helen, or the other girls either, worrying about opinions or dwelling on past disappointments. My desires in life were simple: float above the noise of the world, live in my body, and be seen as anything other than just Japanese.

ON A FRIDAY at the very beginning of February, I walked down Market Street, stopping in every shop and café, asking if they needed help. I got the usual brush-off: “We’re sorry, but the position has been filled,” meaning they wouldn’t hire me because I was Oriental. I passed a theater with girls going in and coming out. Curious as a cat, I went inside to find a shapely blond woman of a certain age, interviewing girls for a job at the Golden Gate International Exposition. I filled out an application and took a seat. When my turn came, the woman looked me up and down.

“Are you shy about getting naked?” she asked.

“I’ve never thought about it before,” I answered.

“Think about it now,” she said.

Warm days and nights in Hawaii, where I didn’t own a sweater, let alone a coat. Humidity so sticky that my parents, brothers, and I would peel down to our underwear and sit in the shallows of the ocean outside our home. Bathing naked in a wooden tub with my mother after my pop and brothers had their turn. The girls in my school, who taught me the hula and told me that their mothers and grandmothers never wore tops when they danced and relied only on their hair and homemade leis for modesty.

“I have nothing against it,” I told the woman.

“Nudity is very natural. Consider it art.”

If she’d been a man, if the setup had seemed slimy at all, if the job had been for anyplace other than the exposition, I would have skedaddled right on out of there. But when she said, “I could use a Chinese girl,” I felt like a big fish caught in one of my father’s nets.

“How much you paying?” I asked, trying to sound cheeky.

The woman gave a cunning nod. “Thirty-five berries a week.”

That was fifteen dollars more than Grace and Helen made!

“Where do I sign?”

Rehearsals-such as they were-started the next day. I kept what I was doing a secret for now. Grace was a good kid, but she was so wet behind the ears it was flooding back there. And even though I could tell Helen had been around some, she acted much too prim to hear the truth. Besides, with my track record, I still might get fired. I’d have some good stories to tell Grace and Helen then.

GRACE: Pistols and a Cowboy Hat

I went ahead and accepted one of Helen’s old prom dresses, which I wore until the gown I bought on layaway at the Emporium was paid off. (I sure as heck wasn’t going to sneak into my envelope with my fifty dollars. That money was the barricade between me and going home.) At night, between shows, we looked as pretty as spring flowers in our long dresses as we passed through the velvet curtains and into the dining room. Charlie directed us to particular tables by whispering in our ears. It all seemed innocent enough, so we sat with total strangers. If we still had more shows to do, we’d sip ginger ale or fairy-water tea, which was tea served with a fancy name and a fancier price, but we also ordered the most expensive drink on the menu-a Singapore sling for forty cents-so the customer had to pay.

All we really wanted to do was eat. Most customers ordered for us off the Chinese menu. But me? Given a choice? A steak, of course! As soon as dinner was over, I’d announce I needed to leave for the next show and thank them for their generosity. And that was that… at least for Helen and me.

“You girls are so green,” Ida ribbed us one night. She was a tiny thing, and she reminded me of a chipmunk-twitchy in her movements and reedy in her speech.

“Look who’s calling who green!” Helen shot back. “At least I grew up in a city. The city.”

“Besides, being green is nothing to be ashamed of,” I added, but I wasn’t as green as when I’d first started at the Forbidden City. Back then I’d never heard of a no-no girl. Now I knew those were the types of girls Donaldina Cameron rescued. I knew that a free Coca-Cola could turn into something else pretty fast, and I could recognize the particular worried look a girl got when her time of month approached or she was late. I vowed to follow Helen’s advice: Guard your body like a piece of jade. But I also learned it was easier to spend my salary than to save it. I developed a fondness for lingerie-corsets constructed with Lastex, brassieres made from lace handkerchiefs (which admittedly didn’t do much), and cami-knickers in pink or peach crepe for day or black satin or lace for evening. With each passing day, I became less frightened that my father would come searching for me, and my nightmares receded. I no longer had to act like I was carefree because I was sincerely happy, and I didn’t have to pretend bravery because I had no one to be afraid of.

After the last show, many ponies met stage-door Johnnies and disappeared into the night; Helen and I met Ruby. Every evening she came to the club, sat at the bar, and let men buy her drinks until Helen and I were free and we could all be together again. Sometimes Helen and I were still so high from performing that we needed to shake things up, so we’d take Ruby to the Pitt Club or the Variety Club, which catered to entertainers after hours, to listen to Harry James blow “All or Nothing at All” when he passed through town, and it was a long jam session with boozing and gambling until six in the morning. Or we might visit the Sky Room for the club’s special drink. “What girl doesn’t like an angel’s tits?” Ruby asked. (And, really, what girl didn’t? It was made with white crème de cacao, cherry liqueur, cream chilled in layers, and topped with a maraschino cherry.) Sometimes we just wanted to dance. Jitterbug. Conga. Rumba. And sometimes Ruby bought each of us a gardenia-“So we match”-which we wore over our left ears, showing everyone we were true friends. We found strength in being together, which allowed us to be daring and adventurous. We flirted with men and giggled when they flirted back. We shared clothes-a hair ribbon, a scarf, a sweater, a dress, a gown-and we promised never to let a man come between us like we’d seen happen to girls in high school.

I WENT OUT with Monroe a few more times. He took me to see Chinese opera. (I can’t say I enjoyed the caterwauling, but I did like the acrobatics and the way performers seemed to float across the stage like ghosts or butterflies.) Another time he picked me up in one of the family cars and drove me to Mount Tamalpais for a picnic. On our way back, we stopped at the wharf in Tiburon so he could show me Angel Island just offshore-a place he told me was like an Ellis Island for this side of the country.

“People come to America from all over the world,” he explained, “but our government is trying to keep all Chinese from entering the country.” We couldn’t see the immigration station from our vantage point, but he told me about it. “They asked us all sorts of questions when we passed through on our way home from China. They treated my brothers, Helen, and me like foreigners, but we were born here.”

We hadn’t learned about Angel Island at my school in Plain City, and my mom and dad had never mentioned it, but Monroe spoke with such passion that I could envision every detail. He made the place sound like a jail.

“People accept the humiliation because they desperately want to be in America and they want to be American,” he said. “You and I are lucky. We don’t have a desire to be American. We are American.”

I stared out at the island and felt sad-for the secrets my parents had apparently kept from me and for the folks on the island right then who, Monroe said, sometimes were held as long as two years before they were deported back to China or were finally allowed to land in San Francisco-if they hadn’t already committed suicide. He must have sensed my melancholy, because he pulled me to him.

Things had “progressed.” We’d kissed-and we’d both gotten better at it-but never in Chinatown, not even on my apartment building’s stoop when we said good night. Monroe said it was because he didn’t want to ruin my reputation. Even so, I could tell he liked kissing me. I wanted to enjoy it more, but all the time his lips were on mine I was thinking about how I should be acting. He was rich, cute, and my friend’s brother, but I felt nervous and insecure around him, like I wasn’t good enough.

One day he drove me through Golden Gate Park straight to the ocean. I’d never seen anything so open or so beautiful or so wild. Monroe parked by the side of the road.

“I thought you might like to see this,” he said, “being from Ohio and all.”

I’d seen enough movies to know I was supposed to wait until he came around to my side and opened my door. He held out his hand, and I took it. The wind cut through my clothes, but I didn’t care. We walked down to the water, where the waves crashed, sending up frothy foam and icy mist. He took off his jacket for us to sit on. He started kissing me. The more insistent he got, the more resistant I became. When he started to put a hand up my skirt, I pushed him away. His fumbling was doing nothing to open my heart.

All the way home, he lectured me on rules about Chinese family life that I’d never heard before and concluded were awful. He recited the Three Obediences-When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son-and said that he’d expect that from his wife and daughters. Ruby got huffy when I told her about it: “He’s trying to get in your pants one minute and bossing you around the next? What a hypocrite!”

I kept going out with him anyway, because I didn’t want to hurt Helen’s feelings, and, if I’m honest, because he took me places I couldn’t afford on my own. The next time I went out with him, he praised me: “You’re as American as pink lemonade at a Kansas fair.” Then he went on, proving Ruby right. “But, Grace, you’ll be better off behaving like a proper Chinese girl.”

Helen heard what her brother said very differently than Ruby. “Wear a cheongsam the next time you see him, and he’ll sing a different tune,” Helen counseled. “And it’s true. If you want to be a proper Chinese wife, you’ll follow the Three Obediences.”

Monroe and I went dancing down by the Embarcadero, because at the parties he usually went to all the Chinese girls sat on one side of the room and all the boys sat on the other. “No one would be so brazen as to dance with the opposite sex in public,” he said. “If I’m in Chinatown and I see a girl I grew up with,” he confided on another occasion, “I have to cross the street so I don’t have to tip my hat or say hello. If I went out with her three times, her parents would ask me how much I expect to earn. I have to play for keeps. No fooling around.”

What a butt. He was as rigid and disapproving as my father, except he didn’t hit me. Helen, again, had a polar opposite interpretation. “A proposal has to be in the air,” she proclaimed. “He’ll be such a good catch for you. And the best part? If you marry Monroe, you’ll be my sister-in-law, and we’ll live together in the compound.”

But no matter what she said, Monroe and I weren’t right for each other. I allowed Helen to indulge in her fantasy, because I was happy she wanted me with her that much. Eventually, though, I’d have to get up the courage to tell her the truth. In the meantime, I was seeing the city on the arm of a respectable young man and getting plenty of free meals. Not true love, but not bad either.

“HAPPY CHINESE NEW Year!” Ruby prodded me awake.

I didn’t bother to open my eyes. “Happy New Year to you too,” I mumbled. “Now let me sleep.” I rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head.

“I have news.” She nudged me again. “I finally have a job.”

That got me to sit up. “You what?”

“I’m working at the Golden Gate International Exposition.” She gave a high, melodious giggle. “The exposition opened last night. I was there!”

“Is that so?” When I’d gotten home at three in the morning, Ruby was still out, but that wasn’t unusual. Ruby and her boys… Those relationships weren’t serious, so Helen and I never had to worry that there might be someone who would try to horn in on our friendship with her. “But how? And what are you doing?” How did she get hired at the fair when I couldn’t?

“Being Oriental counted in my favor this time. The fair is all about Pacific harmony-”

“Are you in the Japanese Pavilion?” I remembered that it was supposed to be the biggest and best of the country-sponsored pavilions.

Ruby shook her head. “Not there.”

“The Cavalcade of the Golden West?”

“The big pageant? Nah, not that either.”

Finally, it hit me. “Are you working in the Gayway?”

Ruby wrinkled her nose. “Don’t be upset.”

“But, Ruby, the Gayway?”

“It’s an amusement park.” She let that rattle around in her noggin before changing her mind. “Or maybe a carnival.”

“The man who interviewed me when I went there for a job said the Gayway wasn’t a place for a girl like me. If it isn’t right for a girl like me, then it can’t be right for a girl like you-”

She waved that off. “It’s Helen I’m worried about,” she said. “I know this will be a problem for her.”

“For her? I don’t like it!”

“Grace, be a sport, will ya? I needed a job. You understand that.” She stared at me earnestly. “Will you please help me with Helen?”

I put my hands on my head. “Oh, brother!”

“Tomorrow’s your day off. Come to Treasure Island and bring Helen. You’ll see it’s not so bad.”

I swallowed hard and agreed.

“Let’s go to Chinatown and see the festivities. I’ve got money now. The day will be on me! Happy New Year!”

“I’ve never celebrated Chinese New Year,” I admitted.

Ruby glowed, triumphant. “Now’s your chance. Get dressed.”

We spent the morning pushing through crowds, getting a good spot to watch the dragon dance, sampling treats sold from vendor carts, covering our ears when strings of firecrackers crackled and popped on corners. A little before two, Ruby headed to her new job. I continued to explore. At the corner of Grant and Commercial, I saw Helen’s family coming toward me on the sidewalk. Mr. Fong strode a yard ahead of the rest of the family, and his demeanor-his importance-sent other pedestrians scurrying out of the way. His seven sons followed behind him. I spotted Monroe and waved. He nodded but didn’t wave back. Helen came next, wearing a lavender silk cheongsam embroidered with white peonies. A tiny woman, dressed in a navy blue tunic over black pants, with her hair pulled back into a severe bun at the nape of her neck, hung on to Helen’s arm for support. She had to be Helen’s mother. A group of young women, some carrying babies and others with small children clustered around their legs, brought up the rear. I’d learned a lot in my few months in Chinatown, and I recognized Helen’s sisters-in-law as FOBs-fresh off the boat. They were dressed up like Helen, but the way they’d styled their hair and left their skin unembellished by lipstick or rouge made them seem foreign. They kept their eyes modestly downcast and maintained a respectful distance not only behind their husbands but also behind their mother- and sister-in-law.

When the group reached me, I saw why Helen’s mother was having such a hard time walking. She had bound feet! I’d heard about bound feet from my dad. He said they were a sign of status. (Whenever he said that, my mom lowered her head.) What I saw looked like deformed stumps. Just then, Helen caught my eyes. The two of us held steady for a fraction of a second, and then she glanced away. Was she embarrassed that I saw the prosperity and status (but also the backwardness) of her family or that she saw me, a common chorus girl? She passed me, didn’t say a word, and proceeded on with her kin, with the sisters-in-law and their children trailing behind-squeaking and peeping like chickens with their just-hatched chicks.

THE NEXT DAY, Helen and I met at 3:00, walked down to the Ferry Building, and paid twenty cents each for round-trip tickets on a Key System ferry to the Golden Gate International Exposition. I figured if I worked up to the Gayway after Helen and I saw a few attractions-the place was huge-she’d be a lot less judgmental. I hoped she’d be able to weave the Gayway and whatever Ruby was doing there into a bigger vision of the world’s fair.

When we got to Treasure Island, we investigated the idea of riding on one of the trams, the fronts of which had been decorated to look like elephants, or hiring one of the rolling chairs, which looked like oversize wheelchairs that were pushed by handsome young men, but Helen was too excited to sit. We hurried from attraction to attraction, from pavilion to pavilion, exhibit to exhibit. We ate hot dogs, bags of popcorn, cotton candy, and drank five-cent Coca-Colas. Finally, Helen began to complain about her feet. We collapsed on a bench next to a lagoon, too exhausted to walk another step. It was after 11:00, and the place was lit with beautiful colored lights. I was just about to spill the beans about Ruby when a sandy-haired young man pushing a rolling chair came to a stop before us.

“I recognize you.” His smile tweaked up on the left. His eyes were the same bachelor-button blue I remembered, and, of course, he was still tall and fit.

“Joe?”

His lopsided smile spread wider. He nodded at the rolling chair. “I got the job!”

“I didn’t.”

Joe and I laughed. Helen looked at me questioningly.

“We met four months ago, on my first day in San Francisco,” I explained after I introduced them.

“The exhibits are going to close soon.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Do you girls want a ride back to the ferry dock?”

I tipped my head slightly to stare at him. “Actually, I was just about to tell Helen about another friend of ours who works in the Gayway.”

Helen raised her eyebrows. “What’s this all about?” she asked suspiciously.

“Ruby has a job here,” I went on. “I thought we could see her together.”

“There’s only one Oriental girl in the Gayway,” Joe interjected helpfully. “I hoped it might be you, Grace, when I first heard about her. It sure wasn’t!”

As soon as he said that, I realized I hadn’t asked Ruby exactly where she worked. This was going to be a surprise for me too. I noticed that Helen’s eyes had narrowed. As happy as I was to see Joe again, introducing Helen to the idea of Ruby working on the Gayway wasn’t going quite as I’d hoped.

“How much will it cost if you take us to her?” Helen asked.

“Ordinarily fifty cents each for a half hour,” he answered, “but it’s on the house for you two.”

We settled into the chair. I twisted around in my seat to look up and back at Joe. He gave me that crooked grin again. “Gayway, here we come.” He took us past the Columbian, Netherlands East Indies, and Argentine pavilions and straight into the Gayway. Here was a man with rubber arms. There was a sword swallower. Just around the bend: a glass eater, a snake charmer, and a fellow who swallowed a neon tube that lit up his innards; a fat lady, a bearded lady, and a lady with no arms, who did everything with her feet, even play instruments! There were arcades, shooting galleries, a flea circus, carnival rides, and a racetrack for monkeys. If the main part of the exposition portrayed the elegant and tasteful, then the Gayway appealed to baser instincts-vulgar, but so much fun.

Joe pulled to a stop in front of what looked like a western saloon with a hitching post. He pointed to a sign that ran across the width of the building: SALLY RAND’S NUDE RANCH.

Oh, God. This was worse than I’d imagined. Why hadn’t I asked Ruby what she was doing out here?

“Ruby won’t be in there,” Helen stated with certainty.

“An Oriental girl works inside,” Joe said. “You’ll see.”

“Not Ruby,” Helen insisted. “Besides, I doubt we’d be allowed in there.”

“This is for families, I swear,” Joe vowed.

“But it says ‘nude.’ ”

“It’s not that nude,” Joe said. “Sally Rand was one of the most famous performers at the Chicago World’s Fair. Now she’s here.”

“Have you been inside?” I asked.

“You bet!” he answered a bit too enthusiastically.

Helen and I paid twenty-five cents apiece and then waited in a line that moved very slowly. Joe was right. There were people of all ages-even little kids-in the line, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the majority were men on their own. Joe said he’d made enough money for the day, so he stayed with us. Finally, we entered the building, following the people herded ahead and shoved by those behind. Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again” blared from speakers attached to the ceiling. We peered to our right through plate-glass windows and into a large room. Inside, about twenty girls-wearing cowboy boots, holsters with fake pistols (one in front and one in back, placed at strategic places), bandannas tied around their breasts (or no bandannas at all-just hair taped, glued, or swinging long and loose to meet the decency codes), Stetsons, and nothing else-paraded back and forth in front of the window, posed with a hand behind an ear, whispered to each other. Some of them played badminton, which caused their breasts to jump and wiggle. They may have called this a place for families, but I hadn’t seen anything like it in Plain City. I caught sight of a little boy with his eyes bugged out to here. Boing!-like in a cartoon. His mother finally noticed and dragged him out.

Helen grabbed my arm. “Look!”

One girl behind the window had set her cowboy hat on the floor so she could swing a lariat above her head. Her black hair swished back and forth across her breasts, concealing her nipples but shimmering like satin against her pale skin. It was Ruby. Our Ruby. We gripped the handrail, trying to maintain our position in front of the window as new visitors pushed against us. From where we stood, Helen and I could hear a woman’s voice calling orders: “Get off your duff, Betty. Jump a little higher, Sue. Keep that rump up when you bend down to get the ball, Alice.”

I rapped on the glass with my knuckles. A girl with curly red hair looked toward the sound. I pointed to Ruby, sending a message that I wanted her attention.

“Hey, Ruby. You have visitors!”

Ruby dropped the lariat-and let’s just say she’d never be a whiz at rope tricks-came to the window, and put her hands on the glass. “Helen! Grace! I have a break in ten minutes. When you exit, come around to the side door. I’ll meet you there.”

Even through my shock, I perceived the energy coming off Joe. I saw the way he stared at Ruby. At first I thought he was embarrassed, but then I realized he couldn’t take his eyes off her. His desire jarred open something startling in me. My yearning for him was so deep I could barely breathe. Not once had I felt that way with Monroe. I didn’t want to be Ruby, but I wanted Joe to want me like that.

The crowd surged against us, and we were pushed back outside and into the night. The lights teased my eyes. The cold air nipped my face, but with so many people crowded together it felt as though a thousand hands caressed me.

“I wouldn’t call that appropriate for children!” Helen declared. “How could she?”

I shrugged, striving to appear responsive. I stood so close to Joe his clothes brushed against mine and his breath warmed my cheek.

“Will you introduce me to your friend?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Helen blinked. Had both her friends gone crazy?

A few minutes later, Ruby-dressed in slacks and a sweater-oozed through a door and onto the Gayway. “You found me!”

Helen started in with a thousand questions: “Do you realize you’re practically naked in there? And in front of all those people? What will your parents say if they find out?”

“You looked beautiful,” I said. Did I mean it? Not a word, but I was trying to show Joe I could be adult about such things. I took his hand. I’d never behaved so boldly in my life. My fingers lay cold in his palm, but he didn’t pull away.

“Ruby, I want you to meet my friend, Joe… Joe…”

“Joe Mitchell,” he said. “I’m a big fan.”

“I’ve only got twenty minutes,” Ruby said, not bothering to acknowledge him. I was relieved he hadn’t caught her interest. “Forty minutes on, twenty minutes off, from three in the afternoon until two in the morning. Here, let me show you around.”

“You three are so tiny,” Joe inserted hopefully. “I bet you can all fit on my rolling chair.”

Ruby sized him up. “Sure. Take us for a spin.”

Joe pushed us hither, thither, and yon, denying Helen and me the chance to grill our friend. The twenty minutes went by quickly. We dropped Ruby back at Sally Rand’s and decided to wait for her set to be over. Helen remained quiet, hiding her thoughts, while I gave Joe the third degree. What was his full name? Joseph Eldon Mitchell. How old was he? Twenty. (That’s what I’d guessed when I first met him.) His openness encouraged me to ask more questions.

“Are you still going to Cal?”

“Yep! I’m studying political science,” he answered. “I want to go to law school eventually and become a lawyer like my dad.”

“Do you like California?”

“You bet! I don’t miss the seasons in Winnetka one bit.” And flying was still his favorite thing in the world. “I’ll love it forever.” His voice had an endearing way of rising at the end of a sentence as though asking a question. “Not that I’ve been able to fly since coming to California-”

A little more than forty minutes later, Ruby opened the side door and held it ajar. She wore a kimono. Her nipples pushed against the thin silk. “Sally got mad at me for being late last time. I can’t go out with you again. I don’t have time to get out of my costume, get dressed, then undressed, and back into my costume again.” She laughed at the absurdity of what she’d just said. “It takes time to get those pistols just right! Will you come and get me later? We can go home together on the ferry.” Without waiting for an answer, she gave a wave and closed the door.

Joe said, “I’ve got to leave you too. I need to turn in the rolling chair. But will you come again? We could all meet after Ruby and I get off. I could even come out here one day when I don’t have classes or work. Would you like that?”

“I’d love it,” I answered, because I really wanted to see him again.

After he pushed off, we found a spot to wait for Ruby near the Headless Woman display. Helen had already spoken her mind, but what was I going to say to Ruby?

I shouldn’t have worried, because she started talking as soon as we boarded the ferry to cross the bay back to the city.

“I don’t want you girls to zing me from two sides,” she began. “I needed a job, and this was the best I could get.”

“But how can you be-” I didn’t want to say the word naked. “You had to have known about this job for a while.”

“Ummm.” A confirmation of sorts.

“Those nights you were out late the last couple of weeks-”

“Ummm.”

“Were you rehearsing?”

“Not a lot to rehearse,” Helen quipped.

“We’re supposed to be friends,” I said, “and you didn’t tell us.”

“Of course I didn’t!” Ruby flared. “Look how you’re taking it!”

I peered at her, disbelieving.

“It’s not a big deal,” she insisted.

“Ruby!” I exclaimed. “You’re n-k-d in there!”

“I’m not naked-naked. Sally is very careful about what we show. Besides, we aren’t the only nudes on the Gayway. Go to that studio where girls pose without a stitch on, and people can sketch or photograph them for a fee. Go to the movie house that plays reels of nudists playing volleyball. Or go to the Palace of Fine Arts in the main part of the fair, and you’ll find a naked woman re-creating a painting by Manet.”

“Manet?” Helen burst out, indignant. “Who in the hell is Manet?”

Ruby’s and my eyes widened. It was the first time we’d heard Helen curse.

“Well?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” Ruby answered with a pixie shrug. “We were told to say that.”

She started to giggle, I joined in, and Helen covered her mouth. But what were we thinking? There are consequences to everything.

CONSEQUENCE ONE OF visiting Treasure Island: I now had an honest-to-goodness crush on someone… and it absolutely wasn’t Monroe. I needed to do the right thing and tell him, even if it disappointed Helen. He picked me up the following Sunday, took me to the Eastern Bakery, and ordered me an ice cream soda I didn’t want. I was just getting up my nerve when, surprise! The tables were turned-but definitely!

“I had once hoped my father might approve of you, even though you’re a dancer,” he began. “But when I saw you on New Year’s Day, I realized he never would.” Monroe then spent the next half hour telling me why he could never marry me: that I didn’t cook Chinese food, that I was an only child so I hadn’t learned to care for children, that I didn’t embroider, darn, or tat. I wasn’t sufficiently political either. I didn’t show enough sympathy for what our people in China were enduring at the hands of the Japanese, I didn’t appreciate the deprivations of Chinese in this country, and I hadn’t been through Angel Island, so I would never understand the terrible things that happened to our people there.

“And you’re American-born,” he said, as he came to the end of his list. “You’ll never act like a proper Chinese wife. You’re too lo fan for me to marry.”

“Have you considered that you might be too Chinese for me to marry?” I asked, but inside I smarted at being called a white ghost like any tourist who entered Chinatown.

“My father will find a proper girl in China to be my wife. He says he’ll take me there to pick her out as soon as the Japanese are vanquished.”

“You mean like buying the right apple?” I could barely get out the words.

“If you mean no blemishes, then yes.” His eyes narrowed as he appraised me. “You’ll never be more than a big-thigh girl.”

And that was that. Whether he was dropping me or I was dropping him no longer mattered. I pushed myself away from the table.

“Thank you for the ice cream soda.”

“I’ll walk you to your apartment. Only prostitutes walk through Chinatown by themselves. I don’t want you to be branded a no-no girl. No man in his right senses would want to marry you then.”

I thanked him again but turned down his offer. “I’ll walk where I want to walk,” I said stiffly. “I’ll be fine.”

As I headed back to my apartment, I felt lucky. I loved Helen, but I could never live in that family, in that compound, and in constant subservience to Monroe with his Three Obediences and all.

“I thought he was American like me,” I told my friends later. “But he’s much too Chinese. My mom married someone like that-American on the outside but traditional on the inside-and look how it turned out for her.”

Ruby agreed, but Helen was very disappointed. She even cried.

Consequences everywhere.

GRACE: Let the Boy Talk

All through the spring, Helen and I went to the exposition whenever possible. We loved the bustle and jumble, the shills and their ballyhoo. Once we got over the shock of seeing Ruby that first time, we saw that, in fact, she wasn’t entirely naked. We still didn’t “approve” of what she was doing, but she was our friend, and we wanted to show our support, so we always visited her at Sally Rand’s. The girls inside the window were constantly doing new things. One time they took turns riding a burro, while the barker called, “Come and see Sally Rand’s ass.” Joe often came along. Ruby, Helen, and I loved to dance, and he jitterbugged with us to the royalty of the radio “live and in person”: Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Kay Kyser, and the Dorseys. You haven’t lived until you’ve been in front of bands like those and danced all out, and Joe and I outshone every couple on the dance floor, cutting loose with our spins, flips, and other tricks. Surprising he could dance so well? Nope. He’d learned his social moves at debutante balls in and around Chicago and the fancier combos at the hotter gatherings that took place late at night after the girls had been presented.

The more I learned about Joe, the more I adored him. He was smart, with all his classes. He pushed a rolling chair from noon to midnight on weekends, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from four until midnight, or later if he picked up a good fare. He’d been raised in Winnetka, which was only about three hundred miles from Plain City. The geographic proximity of our hometowns had to mean something about our values and about who we were as people, didn’t it?

“We’re a little more open about Orientals in Illinois,” he told me one day. “An Oriental and an Occidental can even get married where I live, not like here in California, where it’s against the law.”

I had no idea laws existed anywhere that barred Chinese and Caucasians from marrying. That was rotten news. Seeing my expression, Joe reached over and ruffled the hair on the top of my head.

“Don’t worry, squirt,” he said. “If you ever decide to hitch your wagon to someone like me, he’ll figure it out. Where there’s a will there’s a way. He might even take you to Mexico to tie the knot… Now let’s check to see if Ruby’s in the window. That Sally Rand sure is something, but it’s fun to see your friend too.”

I went with Joe, and he still stared at Ruby the way he had that first time, so I also invited him to the Forbidden City to watch me dance.

“When that Li Tei Ming started to sing, I couldn’t believe it,” he said after the first time he came. “She’s Oriental, but when she opens her mouth she sounds just like my aunt Myrtle.”

How many times had I heard lines like those from customers, who were trying to be polite and complimentary but were really showing their ignorance and prejudice?

“Li Tei was born here,” I responded. “Just like I was born here.”

“I guess that’s what makes you all novelty acts,” he said. “Just like Ruby is a novelty-being Oriental and all-over at Sally Rand’s.”

His comment hurt down to my bones. “We aren’t novelties,” I said as I bristled. “We’re just American girls who like to sing and dance.”

“It’s true,” he agreed. “You’re a real hoofer. You’re better than the rest of them. You should have your own act. You should be a headliner.”

When he said that, I forgave all the other things he’d said and knew that in his eyes, I was special-Oriental or not.

• • •

IN MAY ’39, Sally Rand’s place got raided, and the headlines splashed across newspapers. That didn’t keep people away, however. Everyone wanted to see what the hullabaloo was all about. Ruby gobbled up the attention. But the raid was the last straw for Helen, and she began to stay away. She claimed to be a homebody, and maybe she was, because she never dated, and didn’t wear lipstick or makeup except onstage. Ruby attracted men like ants to spilled Coca-Cola. Her attitude: “Men are nothing to get het up about as long as you don’t get in trouble.” I was saving myself for someone special. That someone was Joe.

My days started to revolve around him. I went to the exposition before I had to be at work, and he joined me before his shift. I dragged him to see special dance performances hosted by countries that didn’t have their own pavilions: Cambodia, Siam, and Burma. He took me to see new inventions: electric razors, nylon hosiery, and a television.

“Grace, soon these products will be in our homes. We’ll sit on the couch and watch television all night instead of going to a nightclub or the picture show. Entertainment will come to us-all at once, all across the country. Think of the reach that will have. Think of the fame it will bring to the entertainers. And the wealth…”

He may have been a college boy, and I loved him, but in some ways, his head was in the clouds. Those DuPont nylon stockings looked neat, though.

I learned the supreme lesson: let the boy talk. Within a few weeks, I knew everything about Joe. He believed in the tooth fairy until he was eight; he hated algebra almost as much as I did; he played football in high school; he couldn’t stand lima beans but he loved his mom’s rhubarb pie. Blue was his favorite color. He had diphtheria when he was three, and his mom stayed up with him every night until he was out of the woods. His favorite hobby when he was a boy was making model airplanes. He loved his mom and dad, but he wanted to stay in California for the rest of his life. He didn’t like taking visitors in his rolling chair to the Japanese Pavilion, because he didn’t approve of what that nation was doing in China-which made me glad that we’d decided to keep Ruby’s background a secret. She could pass, and I didn’t want Joe to hate my best friend. He was moral and concerned about politics-but not a stuffed shirt about it like Monroe.

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t impress Joe when the opportunity arose. In an effort to attract more business to the Forbidden City, Charlie got the ponies booked to do a dance in a newsreel. On the big day, a bus drove us to the beach. We lined up in the sand, wearing big headdresses that tinkled and glittered with every movement, and embroidered Chinese opera gowns with long water sleeves made of the lightest silk, which draped over our hands a good twelve inches. Our feet dragged in the sand, but our water sleeves floated and blew in the ocean breeze. We sidestepped until we were behind a coromandel screen set up incongruously on the sand to discard our headdresses and gowns, and toss them toward the camera in a manner bound to provoke good-natured chuckles. The music changed to a jitterbug. Now in bathing suits, we swung out from behind the screen. “Well, well, well,” the announcer intoned with proper surprise. “What would Confucius say?”

A few weeks later, when Ruby was in bed with cramps, Joe took me to a matinee-the first picture I’d seen in ages-and we saw the newsreel. I sensed what others in the audience felt when we stripped down to our swimsuits. We had moved from foreign Oriental maidens to homespun American gals in a few frames.

“What a great opportunity for you,” Joe told me later. “Pretty soon you’ll be a genuine motion-picture star.”

Now wasn’t that better than seeing an electric razor or a television?

JOE GAVE ME a fan from the Chinese Village. A landscape of soaring mountains, pavilions with upturned eaves, and trees bent by the wind spread across the fan’s folds. Every night when I got ready for bed, I took it out of my dresser drawer, where I kept the other trinkets he’d given me-a pickle pin from the Heinz exhibit, aluminum coins from the Union Pacific railroad exhibit, and a pair of 3-D glasses. Sure, they were all giveaways-except for the fan and my first precious pair of nylon stockings-but whenever I opened the fan, I thought of Joe. On my days off, I stayed at the exposition all through his shifts, so I could be there during his breaks.

“Grace, you’re still a kid,” he announced matter-of-factly one afternoon as we walked to the White Star Tuna Resturant to buy a lunch of hot tuna turnovers with frozen peas-the latest in fancy foods. “You’re too young for me, and I’m too old for you. Maybe in another ten years…”

Even when I surprised him, he always seemed glad to see me. “You again! Great!” Sometimes we sat by the Port of the Trade Winds to watch the China Clipper seaplanes, which offered the first commercial flights between the United States and Asia, taking off and landing in the bay.

“It takes three weeks to travel from here to Hong Kong on an ocean liner,” he told me. “The China Clipper has shortened it to a couple of days.”

That seemed wondrous, but then I’d never been on a ship, let alone an airplane.

“Maybe one day I’ll get to fly a China Clipper,” he said. But I didn’t see how, especially if he wanted to go to law school.

Joe taught me to drink homemade Cuba libres, which we made by pouring rum into our Coca-Cola bottles. He told me he’d rather have me learn to drink properly with him than from the men in the club, where I might forget how to handle myself.

In August-five months after Joe first approached Helen and me with his rolling chair-he took me to see The Wizard of Oz. Sure, it was a kids’ movie, but those flying monkeys scared the dickens out of me. Watching Auntie Em and Uncle Henry search for Dorothy made me think about my parents. Does Mom miss me? What about Dad? Do they wonder where I am and how I’m doing? But those questions puffed away when Joe whispered in my ear. “The Land of Oz looks just like Treasure Island, doesn’t it?”

Just hearing his voice could wash away even the darkest thoughts.

ON A SATURDAY in early September, I sat in the Court of Flowers, watching for him. I could tell as soon as he came into view that he was cross. My stomach tightened: beware. “I had a single fare for the entire day,” he complained. “Then the guy stiffed me.” Joe burned in a way I recognized from my dad. I got up and followed as he shouldered his way through the throngs, pushing people aside. Of course, trouble finds trouble, and Joe knocked into the wrong person.

“Hey, bub!” the man shouted when Joe didn’t stop to apologize. “Are you looking for a beef?”

Joe answered by spinning around and shoving his accuser in the chest. The man lowered his head and heaved himself at Joe, who was thrown into the crowd. People peeled away, making room for the show. Joe regained his balance, planted his feet, and curled his hands into fists.

“Joe! Don’t!” I cried.

He shuffled forward. The other man was ready. I had to stop this. I reached out and touched Joe’s shoulder.

“Joe-”

He whipped around with his arms raised, ready to lay into me. I closed my eyes and cowered, preparing myself for the blow. It didn’t come. I opened my eyes and saw Joe staring at me, horrified.

“I could have hit you.” His voice shook, but his hands were still up and clenched.

Behind Joe, passersby pulled the other man away. The space around us quickly filled as the masses resumed their fun, while Joe and I remained frozen. Without breaking his gaze, I slowly straightened my body. The terrible tension melted from Joe as his fists loosened, followed by his arms, and finally his shoulders.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Grace.”

I put a hand over my mouth and ran through the crowd until I found a trash can. I threw up. I was still heaving when Joe’s fingers began to smooth my hair from my forehead. I flinched; he pulled away. I retched again; he placed a hand on the small of my back. I shook from fright.

“I’m sorry,” he crooned. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Usually, at the end of our time together, Joe headed to Berkeley and I returned to the city. But on that night, he escorted me back to San Francisco on the ferry. He was still twitchy, but so was I. I hadn’t felt this way since the last time my father beat me to mash almost a year ago. I couldn’t stop shivering. Joe wrapped his jacket around my shoulders and took me to Foster’s on Jones Street for something to eat. He tried to get me to talk, but what could I say? I was too embarrassed to tell him my father had walloped me for years and that for one terrifying second Joe had reminded me of him. I could never hurt Joe’s feelings that way, not when he hadn’t actually hit me.

“You’re a good egg,” he said, heartbreakingly apologetic. “My mom and dad would love you.”

Just like that, pure joy erased my fear. We still hadn’t kissed on the lips, but I could wait.

When we arrived at my building, Joe glanced up and saw that the lights were off in Ruby’s and my apartment. He said good night without asking to come up.

A MONTH LATER, the exposition closed. Some said it was for the winter; some said it was because the fair was in such financial trouble that the organizers needed to come up with an improved vision. Now, Joe came to the city on Saturday nights to see me dance. Sometimes he sat with Ruby-who’d gone back to job hopping-and they watched all three shows. Other than that, I rarely saw my roommate, and I didn’t see Joe as much as I would have liked either. No kisses. No proposal. Nothing. I told myself Joe was taking his time, because I was young, and he was still a student.

With fewer tourists in town for the fair, the Forbidden City’s prospects began to dim. People gossiped that Charlie was bankrupt and that the club was in receivership. Once a week, everyone lined up outside his office to get paid. He hated to part with his cash-whether at the racetrack, in a kitchen poker game, or to compensate his employees. It’s true what they said about him: he wept when he paid you. One night he bawled so hard that Ida griped, “He cried so much, I wanted to give him back his money.”

I’d seen Charlie weep and had him plead with me too: “You don’t really need this, do you? Let me keep it for you.” But I always pocketed my pay without an ounce of guilt or sympathy. I had things to buy and things to do. I couldn’t contemplate the idea that the club might close.

FEBRUARY ARRIVED. I’D been in San Francisco for sixteen months. It had been five months since that night on Treasure Island when Joe almost hit me, but we’d both gotten over that, and my feelings for him had only grown. Today was the first anniversary of the day we met again at the exposition. One year! That was a lot of jitterbugging and talking. I was ready for something more, and I’d decided that tonight would be the night with Joe. I was going to kiss him and tell him exactly how I felt.

I arrived at work and was ready when Charlie called, “Fiedee, fiedee, fiedee! Hurry, hurry, hurry! It’s showtime!”

I was a bit distracted by my decision, so I had to force myself to concentrate as we lined up behind the velvet curtain. Charlie opened the evening: “I want to introduce you to some lovely southern belles… from South China! Grace, Helen, Ida, May…”

We began the promenade, our umbrellas twirling just as they had on opening night, only now Charlie put up a hand to stop me, as he did during every show.

“Now hold on a second, little lady,” he drawled. “How y’all doin’ t’nite?”

“Ah, hawney,” I purred back, “I’m all riled up with no place to go.” I glanced at the audience. “Will you kindly gentlemen-and ladies too,” I added with a tiny curtsy, “allow this gal to show y’all a good time?”

Our customers chortled. They just couldn’t make sense of what they were hearing and seeing, but they absolutely loved it. (I earned an extra five dollars a week for speaking my few lines and for bringing tea to the Lim Sisters at the start of the evening. It seemed like a fortune, and yet I spent every dime.)

That night-as every night-we danced close to the patrons, who drank, smoked, and ate by the red-tinged light of their coolie-hat table lamps. They ogled us in our satin peep-toe sandals, skimpy outfits, and amusing headdresses perched at improbable angles. We swished, wiggled, and writhed. We pranced with a single forefinger raised in the air-jazz style-as we gazed heavenward like naughty angels. I scanned the room and found Joe at a table on the second tier.

When the number ended, the ponies and I went backstage, elbowing past the Juggling Jins, who’d replaced the Merry Mahjongs when they’d gone on tour to “kick the gong around” other cities. These weren’t the only changes we’d had in the fourteen months since the club opened. When Jack Mak decided he needed an assistant, he’d chosen Irene, one of the chorines, to help him. They’d gotten married two months later. (“I told him no funny business until I have a ring on my finger,” Irene said at the wedding. “I couldn’t risk getting knocked up.”) A new girl, Ruthie, had replaced Irene in the line, and she was nice enough. Tonight, after the last show, she would leave real fast, trying to escape before she had to deal with persistent stage-door Johnnies. Other girls-like Ida-would change slowly, guaranteeing that someone would be outside to take them out.

In the top-hat number, I made a turn, zeroing in on Joe to use as my focal point, and spotted Ruby next to him. The way they stared at each other… The way their heads were tilted toward each other so intimately… I finally saw it: Ruby and Joe were a couple! My breath caught. I missed a step, stumbled slightly, and stopped dead in the middle of the number. Helen sashayed in front of me to cover my mistake. I began to count in my head-one, two, three, four-and my body, trained as it was, obeyed, but my heart was frozen.

As soon as the routine ended, I ran offstage. A hand clamped down on my shoulder.

“What’s wrong with you?” Charlie demanded.

I bowed my head, praying that this wasn’t happening, that perhaps I’d fallen asleep and was having a guilty dream after what I’d hoped to say to Joe tonight.

“It was my fault,” I heard Helen answer. “I’m so clumsy and careless. Grace tripped over my feet.”

“Is this true?” Charlie asked.

I refused to look up. I saw Charlie’s alligator loafers-the ones he always wore on Saturday nights-and my black satin shoes. In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed several pairs of shoes that matched my own, belonging to Helen and the other ponies.

“I count on you, Grace,” Charlie chastised. “If you can’t do the job, then-”

Helen pulled me away before he could finish. When we got to the dressing room, she said to the other girls, “We’ve got to help her. Hazel, be a doll, will you, and grab her corset? May, make sure those buckles are tight. Ida, what am I forgetting?”

I was numb as they wrestled me out of one costume and pushed me into another.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“About what?” Helen may not have been the best dancer, but she sure could act innocent.

“Ruby and Joe.”

“Don’t imagine things,” Helen said, but her voice gave her away.

The ponies were uncustomarily silent, soaking in the drama.

Helen sighed. “I figured something might be going on with those two.”

“Fiedee, fiedee, fiedee.”

It was time for our next number. Helen balanced my hat on my head.

“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.

“I hoped you’d never find out. I hoped even more I was wrong.” She led me through the door to the backstage area. “The truth is, I could be wrong. You could be wrong. They’ve met at the club before. You’ve seen them sit together before.”

“But did you see how they looked at each other?”

How long had I been making a fool of myself? From that night a year ago, when I introduced them outside Sally Rand’s?

At the curtain, I closed my eyes, preparing myself to go onstage. The music for the finale started. I wanted so bad to bolt out of there.

“Grace, you can’t lose your job,” Helen whispered behind me. “He’s just a boy. I take it back. He’s not a boy. If what we suspect is true, he’s a two-timer who led you on. Mama says a man like that is worse than a horse trying to pull two carts, meaning…”

When we went out for the number, Ruby and Joe were gone.

You know the expression “the show must go on”? Forget that! But I did my best to follow the music. When we came offstage, Charlie was right there, his face flushed with irritation.

“Grace is sick,” Ida said before he could speak. “She needs to go home.”

“Not possible,” Charlie said. “We have two more shows-”

“You don’t want all of us to get sick, do you?” Ida asked.

Helen put a hand on her stomach. “I’m queasy already.”

Charlie sized up the situation, weighing the loss of two girls for the last two shows against the possibility that we all might get sick and he’d lose his entire line for a night or two, or that we were lying. Then he pursed his lips and waved us off with the back of his hand.

The ponies brought me to the dressing room. As they changed into the gowns they wore between shows, Helen and I threw on our street clothes. Ruby has stolen Joe pounded in my head. Joe had hurt me, but that Ruby had deceived me was even worse. Anger began to replace my anguish.

“Where do you want to go?” Helen asked when we reached the street. “Do you want to come to my house?”

The invitation was a first. I smiled ruefully. I’d wanted to see the inside of Helen’s compound since forever.

“Thanks for the offer, but let’s go to my apartment.”

“What if Ruby and Joe are there?”

“Good! I’ll tear her eyes out,” I said, repeating something I’d seen in a movie years ago.

My building was quiet as we went upstairs. I put the key in the lock and opened the door. The lights were off, but I could hear something. I fortified myself, walked to the bedroom, and flipped on the light. Joe and Ruby were naked on top of the covers. He was pushing himself into her. All notions of tearing out eyeballs disappeared as my blood drained out of my head in a sickening whoosh. I averted my gaze and saw Helen. Her face was as pale as cream, and her lips were whiter still. I had to look worse. I mean, there we were-two virgins faced with something we’d only imagined. And what I’d imagined was not what was on the bed. I was stunned, destroyed, heartbroken. Joe reached for his shorts. Ruby slipped her arms into her kimono. I covered my eyes and began to weep.

“I’m sorry,” Ruby’s pretty voice sang to me. “I’m so, so sorry. We never wanted you to find out this way.”

Joe kept his eyes down and his mouth shut. He pulled on his pants and grabbed his shirt and socks from the clothes scattered on the floor. As soon as he had his belongings, he rushed past Helen and me and out the door. He’d played me for a sap, and he didn’t even have the courage to apologize. He didn’t have the conviction to stand by Ruby either. He’d made suckers of both of us. My humiliation was beyond anything I could have imagined. For the first time, I fully understood what it meant to lose face.

“Well,” I said at last, “this stinks.”

“Grace-”

Hearing Ruby say my name hit me like an electric shock.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she went on. “We realize you don’t know much about sex. Joe and I have always tried to be careful. You usually don’t come home until much later.”

“You mean this isn’t the first time?”

“We waited a long time before I let anything happen, so we’ve only been together for a few months. We were just celebrating the first-year anniversary of when we met. I’ll always be grateful to you for introducing us.”

Helen grabbed my arm to hold me steady.

“But I love him,” I mumbled.

“We knew you were sweet on him. That’s why we waited,” Ruby said sympathetically. “But you kept following him around all the time.”

I needed to get out of there.

“Joe was worried about you,” Ruby confided in a gentle but straightforward voice. “We both were. You’re so nice, but you didn’t even graduate from high school. You’re not in the same world as we are. You can’t play at the same level.” She paused. “Oh, honey, you’re out of your league. It’s time you learned that.”

Here’s how I heard what she said: I was some dumb rube from the sticks, while she was gorgeous and half-naked all the time.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“Don’t be such a kid,” she answered like she was trying to be helpful and teach me what was what. “You work in a nightclub. I work in a nudie show. You need to grow up.”

When I recoiled, Ruby finally had the decency to glance away.

“We’re like the Three Musketeers, remember?” For the first time, I heard a hint of anxiety in her voice. “We promised we’d never let a man come between us, and I meant it.”

“How could I have ever liked you?” I asked.

“We thought, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,” she continued, going back to sounding like a know-it-all big sister. “We hoped you’d get over Joe and develop a crush on someone else. Maybe get back together with Monroe, or meet another boy your own age.”

I was only two years younger than Ruby! I fought the urge to smack her.

“We wanted you to be happy,” she went on. “We wanted you to come to a place-on your own-that you would be able to look back at your silly little crush as just that. We kept the secret precisely so this wouldn’t happen.”

“What about me?” Helen suddenly asked. “What’s your excuse for not telling me?”

“You’re not even supposed to walk through Chinatown by yourself,” Ruby answered. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear that I was making love with a boy. But really, neither of you should make a big deal about this. Joe and I have been playing around. So what? It’s not that serious.”

Her excuses made me angrier. She’d lied to Helen and me. Her reasons seemed to be based on our being too innocent to accept the truth. I so hated her in that moment.

I turned to Helen. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We should talk about this some more,” Ruby appealed to me. “Please, you need to understand-”

“There’s nothing to talk about!” I screamed from a place inside me that I hadn’t known existed. “I love Joe, and now you’ve ruined everything!”

“For heaven’s sake, Grace. He’s a man. A man doesn’t want puppy love.”

I thought I’d been humiliated. Now I was HUMILIATED.

Perhaps Ruby sensed she’d gone too far. “Try to forgive me-”

“Forgive you? I never want to see you again!”

With that, I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed.

“Don’t go.” Her eyes welled with tears. I’d never seen her cry before, but my usual compassion had been shredded to nothing.

I opened my dresser drawers and stuffed my purse with brassieres, panties, and the envelope with Mom’s emergency money. I packed my newly bought frocks, the dance shoes and practice clothes I’d brought with me from Plain City, and the evening gown that had taken six months to pay off, but I left the trinkets Joe had given me rattling in the bottom of my drawer.

Ruby kept apologizing. Helen waited quietly. I snapped the suitcase shut and picked it up. Ruby flew to the door to block me from leaving.

“Move aside, or I’ll move you.” I sounded just like my father.

The steel in my voice was such that Ruby edged out of the way. Helen took my arm. Her grip was stable and reassuring as we walked through the streets, but I was a whimpering mess. When we reached the Fong compound, Helen led me through a door, up some stairs, and along a hallway. Her room was neat, fairly empty, and not all that different from my room at home: a bed, a side table with a lamp, a dresser, and a mirror. I collapsed on the bed. Helen gave me a handkerchief. I cried, and Helen kept up a commentary-which didn’t cheer me any.

“First she said it was their anniversary,” Helen stewed. “Then she said they’d been doing it for a while. Then she said it wasn’t a big deal. Then she practically said she didn’t even care for him. If all that wasn’t enough, she then tried to make it sound like Joe was forced into babysitting you. Did she change her story because she thought that’s what you wanted to hear?”

I blubbered some more.

Helen disappeared, then shortly returned with a pot of jasmine tea and a plate of cold barbecued-pork dumplings.

“I can’t stay here.” My voice caught-like I was being suffocated.

“Sure you can. We have plenty of room.”

I shook my head. “I mean I can’t stay in San Francisco.”

“Just a minute! You have a job. You have friends. You have me. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

But running away was how I knew to protect myself.

“Hollywood,” I murmured. “I’m going to Hollywood. I should have gone there in the first place, because life is in movies, movies are life, and movies are greater than life.”

“You don’t make a decision just like that!”

“I do,” I said as a hard protective shell came down over me. “If I didn’t, I’d still be in Plain City.”

I stood. Done here.

“At least sleep on it,” Helen pleaded.

But nothing she said-and, boy, did she try-changed my mind, forcing her pleas to become more desperate. “The day we first met you promised we’d stick together.”

Around four in the morning she finally accepted defeat. “All right then,” she said. “Wait here.”

Once I was alone, my fidgety desire to run was even stronger. It was all I could do not to sneak out of Helen’s room and the compound by myself. I closed my eyes and saw Ruby and Joe naked. His thing. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Across the room on a little table was a framed photograph, fruit on a blue cloisonné dish, and a couple of candles. Grateful for a momentary distraction, I went to get a better look at the photo. It was Helen and a Chinese man, probably one of her brothers with the presidential names-Washington, Jefferson, or…

Helen returned with Monroe. He didn’t show surprise that I was there, and he didn’t ask any questions. In his mind, I’d probably come to the end I deserved, what with my lo fan thinking. It took only a few minutes to drive to the bus station, where Helen revved up her campaign again: “There will be consequences if you run away.”

I held her hand in mine. “Thank you, Helen, for helping me… again. You’ve been a good friend, but I’ve made my decision.”

“And your decision does not include me.”

I boarded the first bus heading south. I had lived the last sixteen months with joy in my heart, but now my mind ran from the memory of seeing Joe and Ruby in bed together. I’d lived as though I would never cry again, but now I couldn’t stop crying. I hoped to find refuge in sleep, but I was unable to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. All those times I thought Ruby had been out with boys from the Gayway, she’d been with Joe. And she hadn’t bothered to tell me because she’d decided I’d “get over him” on my own? The bus driver stopped for gas, and I went to the restroom. I stared at myself in the mirror and saw a pale ghost. My red lacquered nails seemed morbidly alive against my dead skin.

I DON’T KNOW what I expected. Movie stars greeting me on the sidewalk when I got off the bus in downtown Los Angeles? Chauffeur-driven Packards and Auburns tooling along palm-lined boulevards? Mansions with sprawling lawns? Diamonds in the pavement? Glamour everywhere? What I saw as I took a local bus west along Sunset Boulevard looked drab-little bungalows with peeling paint, geraniums wilting in the sun, and regular working stiffs plodding along the sidewalks. After moving into a furnished room on Ivar in Hollywood, I taped my envelope with my mom’s fifty dollars under a drawer, with a promise to myself not to spend my money frivolously as I had in San Francisco. I was nineteen years old now and determined to make myself into a star: reward for my heartbreak.

I went to Paramount Studios first. The gate looked just like it did in the movies.

“I’d like to go to your casting department, please,” I told the guard.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Then I’m sorry, miss. I can’t let you in.”

I went to other studios-Warner Bros., RKO Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, and more-but I couldn’t get past those guard gates either.

I needed a new strategy. With the listings of theatrical agents torn out of the yellow pages in hand, I started with the As and went to the office of a man named Abel Aaron.

“Aaron isn’t my real last name,” the balding man said as he waved me into his private office. “But it guarantees that young aspirants like you will visit me first. Now, please, sit on the couch.”

I wasn’t that dumb, but as I worked my way down the list-visiting the Bronstein Agency, Carrell Talent, and Discover New Faces-I heard that request more times than I could count. My response was always the same-“No, thank you”-so of course I didn’t get representation. My refusal to have sex wasn’t the only reason I didn’t make progress. I looked up casting calls in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, but the white girl always got the job. I went to Chinatown, but it didn’t have a single nightclub. My sorrow deepened. I was on my own now without a soul to help me. I had to toughen up-grow up, as Ruby had put it. I slept in very little clothing, trying to discipline myself to take whatever cold might come my way. I walked miles to save the nickel bus fare. And if Ruby or Joe entered my thoughts, I’d distract myself by stretching or doing a barre routine by holding the back of my chair in my room. I gave myself pep talks. I’d bounced back from adversity before. I’d do it again. But life isn’t that simple or easy.

The worse things got, the more I thought about my mom and dad, and why I could never give up and return to them in Plain City. My waking hours in Los Angeles started and ended the same way: with good and bad memories of them. I’d often asked my mom how and why we’d ended up in Plain City. Her story was always the same, and it had to do with my birth. Mom and Dad had been living in San Francisco. They’d been doing pretty well, well enough to own one of the first closed Model Ts-used, of course. One weekend they drove north to Sebastopol to pick apples. “I went into labor,” Mom liked to recount. “The contractions were far apart so I wasn’t frightened. We started driving back to San Francisco. By the time we reached San Rafael, I had to get to a hospital. We went, but they turned us away. They said they didn’t service Chinese.”

What kinds of people would turn away a woman in labor? The kinds of people I now met every day in Los Angeles.

“You were born by the side of the road,” she’d go on. “That’s why your feet move all the time. We looked at you, our precious little girl, and your father said, ‘Why would she walk when she can dance across the room?’ He saw your special talent. He decided we should go where people weren’t used to hating Chinese.”

So we’d piled in the car and headed east. The car broke down in Plain City. Dad dropped it at the Ford dealership on Main Street and went looking for a hotel, but there wasn’t one. (Because Plain City was just a place to pass through.) Reverend Reynolds at the Methodist church took us in. Dad eventually rented a two-story building on Chillicothe-the only other major thoroughfare in town. We lived upstairs; Dad opened the laundry downstairs. He was a dreamer, so he sunk a ton of money into a neon sign that blazed MR. LEE’S LAUNDRY gaudy and bright into my room all night. Dreamers are born to be disappointed. My dad was, certainly, and in this single regard I now understood him in a way I never had before.

My parents cut themselves off from their culture and replaced it with the reddest, whitest, and bluest. Some of my earliest memories were of playing with Velma, going to church on Sundays, and dancing at Miss Miller’s dance studio. My life changed when I started school. It didn’t happen all at once. It takes training to learn how to be a bigot. Velma dropped me and adopted Ilsa and Maude as her friends. Slowly I began to understand why they hung out together and why they always picked on me. The evil triplets were beyond beautiful with their blond hair and perfect skin, but they were just as much outsiders as I was even though they looked like they belonged. But how could they belong with their strange holidays-Pikkujoulu and Laskiaistiistai-and their stranger foods-Janssonin kiusaus and kylmäsavu stettu lohi? That Ilsa, for example, assumed she was going to marry Henry Billups. Didn’t she understand that the minute a young man dated someone like her, his parents would become agitated?

Sometimes when I was waiting to go in for an audition, I’d run through the events of one day in particular. In seventh grade-a normal day, I’d thought at the time-I went to school and discovered Velma at the entrance, saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “Grace Lee thinks she’s gonna be a movie star.” Word circulated fast, and soon every kid who thought he or she was better than me, which is to say every kid from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade, found the idea hilarious. Henry Billups pantomimed a buck-toothed, cross-eyed Chinese laundryman he’d seen in a movie… or maybe he was just making fun of my dad. Harold Jones followed me around for days, chanting, “Take a look in the mirror, take a look in the mirror, take a look in the mirror,” and laughing cruelly. After a while, the craze faded and my classmates fell back on the tried and true: “Chinky, chinky China. Chinky, chinky China.”

The evil triplets left me feeling isolated and alone, but they weren’t as bad as my dad. He’d beaten my mom and me for as long as I could remember. But when I started to fill out he focused his anger entirely on yours truly, and Mom could do nothing to stop it. I never could tell what would set him off. Did I happen to glance out the laundry’s plate-glass window when a man walked by? Did I spend too much time talking to a customer when he came to pick up his shirts? Did I turn up the radio when the song “Love Walked In” came on? Was my sweater too tight? I don’t recall how young I was-young, though-when Mom told me another future lay ahead of me. “You’re going to leave here one day, Grace,” she’d said. “Look around church on Sunday. You’ll see that all the best people have left. For you to do that, you’ll need to work hard and save money.”

So I did. I labored in the laundry, sorting, marking, folding, wrapping clothes in blue paper and tying the package with string, and waiting on customers. For this, my father paid me two dollars a week. “A lot of money,” he griped, “when I still have to wash, dry, starch, and iron everything.” At Miss Miller’s studio, I earned five cents for each student I taught in my Tuesday and Thursday classes for girls from the elementary grades. When my mom was laid low with the flu, I took over selling her rice wine out our back door. The customers liked me, so I pocketed large tips. In the summer, the Methodist church ladies hired Mom and me to make paper cups for two cents a dozen for the lemonade that would be sold at the Plain City Fair. It was boring, tedious work, but I saved and saved.

I’d always planned on leaving, but that final beating was too much. Dad called me “a whore, just like your mother,” which was about the worst thing he could have said. He would have killed me too, if Mr. Tubbs hadn’t stopped by for a pint when he did and pulled my father off me. That night I waited until my parents were asleep and then packed a bag by the illumination of the laundry sign outside my window. Then I quietly made my way to the door that led down to the street. When I stepped onto the landing, I heard my mom’s voice.

“Grace.”

She sat on a riser halfway down the stairs. I was caught. My stomach clenched.

“You’re leaving,” she said, rising to her feet. “I knew it was coming.”

“How?”

“I’m your mother. You’re the breath of my lungs and the beat of my heart. I know you very well.”

“I can’t stay here-”

“I understand. It’s not safe for you any longer.” She paused, then hurried on. “You should try San Francisco.” I swallowed. Miss Miller had given me that idea when she’d shown me the advertisement for the Golden Gate International Exposition. “It’s time you know the truth. I came to this country when I was five years old. I met your father in San Francisco when he was on his way to China to get a traditional wife. I was twenty-five-a spinster. I told him I wasn’t familiar with Chinese beliefs or customs. He took my hand anyway. We went to the lumber camp, where I had you the next year.”

I loved her, and a part of me wanted to learn more, but she was talking too long when I needed to get going. I started again down the stairs. When I reached her, she grabbed my arm.

“Wait!” she begged. “Oh, Grace, there’s so much I want to tell you.”

I hesitated again. If Dad heard us…

“Grace, always remember that a woman must take care of herself. Don’t depend on a man.” (Now, when I thought about what she’d said, I cursed myself for not listening or obeying.) “Never rely on a husband. You need to run away now, but I hope that one day you’ll find a way to stop running.”

Tears had blurred my vision. My mother was not only letting me go but giving me instructions for a lifetime.

“You’d better hurry,” she advised. With that, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a wad of bills neatly folded in half, and pressed it into my hand. “It’s seventy-two dollars.”

Together with what I’d saved, I had one hundred and five dollars.

“Come with me,” I said urgently.

Tears filled my mother’s eyes. “I can’t.”

“You’ll be free of him. We’ll have each other-”

Mom shook her head. “It won’t work. You barely have enough money for yourself.” Her fingers caressed my wet cheek. “Now go, and don’t ever look back. Don’t write to me either. We don’t want him to find out where you’ve gone.” Then she walked up the stairs. She stopped at the door and turned to gaze down at me. “I barely remember my mother, but the last thing she said to me I’ll say to you. When fortune comes, do not enjoy all of it; when advantage comes, do not take all of it.” Then she entered the apartment and quietly shut the door.

I hurried down the stairs and onto the deserted street, carrying my suitcase in one hand and cupping my sore ribs with the other. After a few minutes, I arrived at Miss Miller’s studio. It was the middle of the night, and her lights were off. I went upstairs, knocked, and waited. She wasn’t all that surprised to see me. I nervously stood with my back against the wall as she got dressed and grabbed her car keys. She drove us the twenty-four miles to Columbus. We sat together on a bench at the Trail-ways station until it was time for the first bus heading west to depart.

“Take care of yourself,” she said. “Send me a postcard from the exposition.”

We hugged, and she cried. She’d been so much more to me than just a dance teacher. She’d also trained me to focus, to think beyond Plain City, and to believe in myself. As the bus pulled out, I peered through the window, craning my neck, until she disappeared from sight. Then I turned in my seat and folded my hands tightly in my lap. I’d promised my mother I’d never look back, but I wouldn’t forget a single kindness or moment of love that she’d shown me. Her courage and sacrifice were what sustained and nourished me-first in San Francisco and now here in Los Angeles.

I NEEDED TO be seen, so sometimes I tap-danced on the street outside the Brown Derby or Musso & Frank. A couple of men approached me to offer jobs in the movies. I realized right quick that they were just Hollywood smarties, trying to take advantage. I even had a couple of men saunter up to me and say things like “I have a Chrysler, cream-white, with red seats. Want to come to my place and read for me?” Ruby would have jumped at the chance to go to some man’s bungalow in the hills, but not me.

At auditions, I overheard girls talk about the classes they were taking-dance, acting, singing, and locution to erase traces of accents so that they’d sound Hollywood bland. I used up the money in my wallet on four hours of classes a day. I got locked out of my room because I didn’t pay the rent on time. I told the manager that if he let me in, then I could pay in full. I had the money so I shouldn’t have let things get that bad, right? Except I’d vowed I wouldn’t go into my envelope. Once I opened it, I easily returned to it a second, third, fourth time. I was crushed by my failure.

Twice a week, I rode the bus to Chinatown, where I could buy a bowl of soup, a salad, three pork chops, rice, vegetables, a big piece of apple pie, and a glass of milk for twenty cents at the Sam Yuen Café on Alameda. That meal could last in my stomach a day or two. (The rest of the time I ate mayonnaise sandwiches.) I learned that anti-Japanese sentiment was as strong here as it was in San Francisco Chinatown. Every time I was asked to give money to support Chinese war orphans, Ruby flooded my mind. Because no matter how much I fought it and no matter how many pliés I did, I couldn’t stop myself from replaying that night again and again and again.

The worse I felt about the situation I’d put myself in here in Los Angeles, the more I held myself accountable for what had happened with Joe. He’d never seen me the way I’d seen him. He must have thought of me as Ruby’s kid sister, which is why he’d taken me to see The Wizard of Oz. Weren’t boys supposed to be nice to a little sister-buy her treats, take her to a fair, show interest in her activities-to impress the girls they were sweet on? Even at the time, I saw it, but I didn’t let what was right in front of me sink in: the way Joe always stared at Ruby, the slightly weary tone in which he said, “You again. Great!” whenever I surprised him at Treasure Island, the way they sat together for three shows back to back at the Forbidden City. I thought he’d come to the club because of me, when it was all about her. I was still hurt, but the blame I put on myself was crushing, because Ruby had been right that night. They hadn’t set out to hurt me. I’d acted like a dopey, lovesick kid and they’d both been trying to protect me, hoping I’d grow up enough so they could tell me the truth, like Ruby had said. I’d sure been unsuccessful in that department. Now I was friendless and failing-in a new city. Helen was right. Consequences. I never should have left San Francisco, but I was too ashamed to go back or even write to Helen. I was horribly lonely, but I refused to make new friends. When you’re so poor you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, I told myself in my fuzziness of hunger and disappointment, you can’t afford to have friends.

In July-after I’d been in Los Angeles for five months-I fainted in ballet class. “I’m just tired,” I explained to Maestro Kolmakov when I opened my eyes and found him hovering over me. When you’re poor, you don’t tell anyone.

“You’re a good dancer,” the maestro said as he helped me to a sitting position, “but your body is your instrument. You must take care of it. If you have a beautiful car and you don’t put gas in it, it won’t run. If you have a Lincoln Zepher convertible coupe and you put inferior gas in it, you’ll ruin the engine. I live four blocks from here with my wife and sons. Have dinner with us tonight or you can’t come to class tomorrow.” He didn’t want anything in return. I was reminded, once again, of human kindness.