Shanghai Girls

Beautiful Girls

“OUR DAUGHTER LOOKS like a South China peasant with those red cheeks,” my father complains, pointedly ignoring the soup before him. “Can’t you do something about them?”

Mama stares at Baba, but what can she say? My face is pretty enough-some might even say lovely-but not as luminescent as the pearl I’m named for. I tend to blush easily. Beyond that, my cheeks capture the sun. When I turned five, my mother began rubbing my face and arms with pearl creams, and mixing ground pearls into my morning jook-rice porridge-hoping the white essence would permeate my skin. It hasn’t worked. Now my cheeks burn red-exactly what my father hates. I shrink down into my chair. I always slump when I’m near him, but I slump even more on those occasions when Baba takes his eyes off my sister to look at me. I’m taller than my father, which he loathes. We live in Shanghai, where the tallest car, the tallest wall, or the tallest building sends a clear and unwavering message that the owner is a person of great importance. I am not a person of importance.

“She thinks she’s smart,” Baba goes on. He wears a Western-style suit of good cut. His hair shows just a few strands of gray. He’s been anxious lately, but tonight his mood is darker than usual. Perhaps his favorite horse didn’t win or the dice refused to land his way. “But one thing she isn’t is clever.”

This is another of my father’s standard criticisms and one he picked up from Confucius, who wrote, “An educated woman is a worthless woman.” People call me bookish, which even in 1937 is not considered a good thing. But as smart as I am, I don’t know how to protect myself from my father’s words.

Most families eat at a round dining table, so they will always be whole and connected, with no sharp edges. We have a square teakwood table, and we always sit in the exact same places: my father next to May on one side of the table, with my mother directly across from her so that my parents can share my sister equally. Every meal-day after day, year after year-is a reminder that I’m not the favorite and never will be.

As my father continues to pick at my faults, I shut him out and pretend an interest in our dining room. On the wall adjoining the kitchen, four scrolls depicting the four seasons usually hang. Tonight they’ve been removed, leaving shadow outlines on the wall. They aren’t the only things missing. We used to have an overhead fan, but this past year Baba thought it would be more luxurious to have servants fan us while we ate. They aren’t here tonight and the room is sweltering. Ordinarily an art deco chandelier and matching wall sconces of etched yellow-and-rose-tinted glass illuminate the room. These are missing as well. I don’t give any of this much thought, assuming that the scrolls have been put away to prevent their silken edges from curling in the humidity, that Baba has given the servants a night off to celebrate a wedding or birthday with their own families, and that the lighting fixtures have been temporarily taken down for cleaning.

Cook-who has no wife and children of his own-removes our soup bowls and brings out dishes of shrimp with water chestnuts, pork stewed in soy sauce with dried vegetables and bamboo shoots, steamed eel, an eight-treasures vegetable dish, and rice, but the heat swallows my hunger. I would prefer a few sips of chilled sour plum juice, cold mint-flavored sweet green bean soup, or sweet almond broth.

When Mama says, “The basket repairer charged too much today,” I relax. If my father is predictable in his criticisms of me, then it’s equally predictable that my mother will recite her daily woes. She looks elegant, as always. Amber pins hold the bun at the back of her neck perfectly in place. Her gown, a cheongsam made of midnight blue silk with midlength sleeves, has been expertly tailored to fit her age and status. A bracelet carved from a single piece of good jade hangs from her wrist. The thump of it when it hits the table edge is comforting and familiar. She has bound feet, and some of her ways are just as antiquated. She questions our dreams, weighing the meaning of the presence of water, shoes, or teeth as good or bad omens. She believes in astrology, blaming or praising May and me for one thing or another because we were born in the Year of the Sheep and the Year of the Dragon, respectively.

Mama has a lucky life. Her arranged marriage to our father seems relatively peaceful. She reads Buddhist sutras in the morning, takes a rickshaw to visit friends for lunch, plays mah-jongg until late in the day, and commiserates with wives of similar station about the weather, the indolence of servants, and the ineffectiveness of the latest remedies for their hiccups, gout, or hemorrhoids. She has nothing to fret about, but her quiet bitterness and persistent worry infuse every story she tells us. “There are no happy endings,” she often recites. Still, she’s beautiful, and her lily gait is as delicate as the swaying of young bamboo in a spring breeze.

“That lazy servant next door was sloppy with the Tso family’s nightstool and stunk up the street with their nightsoil,” Mama says. “And Cook!” She allows herself a low hiss of disapproval. “Cook has served us shrimp so old that the smell has made me lose my appetite.”

We don’t contradict her, but the odor suffocating us comes not from spilled nightsoil or day-old shrimp but from her. Since we don’t have our servants to keep the air moving in the room, the smell that rises from the blood and pus that seep through the bandages holding Mama’s feet in their tiny shape clings to the back of my throat.

Mama is still filling the air with her grievances when Baba interrupts. “You girls can’t go out tonight. I need to talk to you.”

He speaks to May, who looks at him and smiles in that beautiful way of hers. We aren’t bad girls, but we have plans tonight, and being lectured by Baba about how much water we waste in our baths or the fact that we don’t eat every grain of rice in our bowls isn’t part of them. Usually Baba reacts to May’s charm by smiling back at her and forgetting his concerns, but this time he blinks a few times and shifts his black eyes to me. Again, I sink in my chair. Sometimes I think this is my only real form of filial piety, making myself small before my father. I consider myself to be a modern Shanghai girl. I don’t want to believe in all that obey, obey, obey stuff girls were taught in the past. But the truth is, May-as much as they adore her-and I are just girls. No one will carry on the family name, and no one will worship our parents as ancestors when the time comes. My sister and I are the end of the Chin line. When we were very young, our lack of value meant our parents had little interest in controlling us. We weren’t worth the trouble or effort. Later, something strange happened: my parents fell in love-total, besotted love-with their younger daughter. This allowed us to retain a certain amount of liberty, with the result that my sister’s spoiled ways are often ignored, as is our sometimes flagrant disregard for respect and duty. What others might call unfilial and disrespectful, we call modern and unbound.

“You aren’t worth a single copper coin,” Baba says to me, his tone sharp. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to-”

“Oh, Ba, stop picking on Pearl. You’re lucky to have a daughter like her. I’m luckier still to have her as my sister.”

We all turn to May. She’s like that. When she speaks, you can’t help listening to her. When she’s in the room, you can’t help looking at her. Everyone loves her-our parents, the rickshaw boys who work for my father, the missionaries who taught us in school, the artists, revolutionaries, and foreigners whom we’ve come to know these last few years.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I did today?” May asks, her demand as light and breezy as a bird’s wings in flight.

With that, I disappear from my parents’ vision. I’m the older sister, but in so many ways May takes care of me.

“I went to see a movie at the Metropole and then I went to Avenue Joffre to buy shoes,” she continues. “From there it wasn’t far to Madame Garnet’s shop in the Cathay Hotel to pick up my new dress.” May lets a touch of reproach creep into her voice. “She said she won’t let me have it until you come to call.”

“A girl doesn’t need a new dress every week,” Mama says gently. “You could be more like your sister in this regard. A Dragon doesn’t need frills, lace, and bows. Pearl ’s too practical for all that.”

“Baba can afford it,” May retorts.

My father’s jaw tightens. Is it something May said, or is he getting ready to criticize me again? He opens his mouth to speak, but my sister cuts him off.

“Here we are in the seventh month and already the heat is unbearable. Baba, when are you sending us to Kuling? You don’t want Mama and me to get sick, do you? Summer brings such unpleasantness to the city, and we’re always happier in the mountains at this time of year.”

May has tactfully left me out of her questions. I prefer to be an afterthought. But all her chattering is really just a way to distract our parents.

My sister catches my eye, nods almost imperceptibly and quickly stands. “Come, Pearl. Let’s get ready.”

I push back my chair, grateful to be saved from my father’s disapproval.

“No!” Baba pounds his fist on the table. The dishes rattle. Mama shivers in surprise. I freeze in place. People on our street admire my father for his business acumen. He’s lived the dream of every native-born Shanghainese, as well as every Shanghailander-those foreigners who’ve come here from around the world to find their fortunes. He started with nothing and turned himself and his family into something. Before I was born, he ran a rickshaw business in Canton, not as an owner but as a subcontractor, who rented rickshaws at seventy cents a day and then rented them to a minor subcontractor at ninety cents a day before they were rented to the rickshaw pullers at a dollar a day. After he made enough money, he moved us to Shanghai and opened his own rickshaw business. “Better opportunities,” he-and probably a million others in the city-likes to say. Baba has never told us how he became so wealthy or how he earned those opportunities, and I don’t have the courage to ask. Everyone agrees-even in families-that it’s better not to inquire about the past, because everyone in Shanghai has come here to get away from something or has something to hide.

May doesn’t care about any of that. I look at her and know exactly what she wants to say: I don’t want to hear you tell us you don’t like our hair. I don’t want to hear that you don’t want us to show our bare arms or too much of our legs. No, we don’t want to get “regular full-time jobs.” You may be my father, but for all your noise you’re a weak man and I don’t want to listen to you. Instead, she just tilts her head and looks down at my father in such a way that he’s powerless before her. She learned this trick as a toddler and has perfected it as she’s gotten older. Her ease, her effortlessness, melts everyone. A slight smile comes to her lips. She pats his shoulder, and his eyes are drawn to her fingernails, which, like mine, have been painted and stained red by applying layers of red balsam blossom juice. Touching-even in families-isn’t completely taboo, but it certainly isn’t accepted. A good and proper family offer no kisses, no hugs, no pats of affection. So May knows exactly what she’s doing when she touches our father. In his distraction and repulsion, she spins away, and I hurry after her. We’ve taken a few steps when Baba calls out.

“Please don’t go.”

But May, in her usual way, just laughs. “We’re working tonight. Don’t wait up.”

I follow her up the stairs, our parents’ voices accompanying us in a kind of discordant song. Mama carries the melody: “I pity your husbands. ‘I need shoes.’ ‘I want a new dress.’ Will you buy us tickets to the opera?’” Baba, in his deeper voice, beats out the bass: “Come back here. Please come back. I need to tell you something.” May ignores them, and I try to, admiring the way she closes her ears to their words and insistence. We’re opposites in this and so many things.

Whenever you have two sisters-or siblings of any number or either sex-comparisons are made. May and I were born in Yin Bo Village, less than a half day’s walk from Canton. We’re only three years apart, but we couldn’t be more different. She’s funny; I’m criticized for being too somber. She’s tiny and has an adorable fleshiness to her; I’m tall and thin. May, who just graduated from high school, has no interest in reading anything beyond the gossip columns; I graduated from college five weeks ago.

My first language was Sze Yup, the dialect spoken in the Four Districts in Kwangtung province, where our ancestral home is located. I’ve had American and British teachers since I was five, so my English is close to perfect. I consider myself fluent in four languages-British English, American English, the Sze Yup dialect (one of many Cantonese dialects), and the Wu dialect (a unique version of Mandarin spoken only in Shanghai). I live in an international city, so I use English words for Chinese cities and places like Canton, Chungking, and Yunnan; I use the Cantonese cheongsam instead of the Mandarin ch’i pao for our Chinese dresses; I say boot instead of trunk; I use the Mandarin fan gwaytze- foreign devils-and the Cantonese lo fan-white ghosts-interchangeably when speaking about foreigners; and I use the Cantonese word for little sister-moy moy-instead of the Mandarin-mei mei-to talk about May. My sister has no facility with languages. We moved to Shanghai when May was a baby, and she never learned Sze Yup beyond words for certain dishes and ingredients. May knows only English and the Wu dialect. Leaving the peculiarities of dialects aside, Mandarin and Cantonese have about as much in common as English and German-related but unintelligible to nonspeakers. Because of this, my parents and I sometimes take advantage of May’s ignorance, using Sze Yup to trick and deceive her.

Mama insists May and I couldn’t change who we are even if we tried. May is supposed to be as complacent and content as the Sheep in whose year she was born. The Sheep is the most feminine of the signs, Mama says. It’s fashionable, artistic, and compassionate. The Sheep needs someone to take care of her, so she’ll always be sure to have food, shelter, and clothing. At the same time, the Sheep is known to smother others with affection. Good fortune smiles on the Sheep because of its peaceful nature and kind heart, but-and it’s a big but, according to Mama-the Sheep sometimes thinks only of itself and its own comforts.

I have a Dragon’s striving desire, which can never be properly filled. “There’s nowhere you can’t go with your big flapping feet,” Mama frequently tells me. However, a Dragon, the most powerful of the signs, also has its drawbacks. “A Dragon is loyal, demanding, responsible, a tamer of the fates,” Mama has told me, “but you, my Pearl, will always be hampered by the vapors that come from your mouth.”

Am I jealous of my sister? How can I be jealous when even I adore her? We share Long-Dragon-as our generational name. I am Pearl Dragon, and May is Beautiful Dragon. She’s taken the Western spelling of her name, but in Mandarin mei is one of the words for beautiful, and she is that. My duty as May’s elder sister is to protect her, make sure she follows the right path, and indulge her for the preciousness of her existence and place of love in our family. Yes, sometimes I get angry with her: for example, when she wore my favorite pink silk Italian high heels without permission and they were ruined in the rain. But here’s the thing: my sister loves me. I’m her jie jie-her elder sister. In the hierarchy of the Chinese family, I will always and forever be above her, even if my family doesn’t love me as much as they love her.

By the time I get to our room, May has already pulled off her dress, leaving it in a limp heap on the floor. I shut the door behind me, enclosing us in our beautiful-girl world. We have matching four-poster twin beds with white linen canopies edged in blue and embroidered in a wisteria design. Most bedrooms in Shanghai have a beautiful-girl poster or calendar, but we have several. We model for beautiful-girl artists, and we’ve chosen our favorite images to hang on our walls: May seated on a sofa in a lime green silk jacket, holding a Hatamen cigarette in an ivory cigarette holder; me wrapped in ermine, my knees tucked up under my chin, staring at the viewer from a framed colonnade before a mythical lake selling Dr. Williams’s pink pills for pale people (who better to sell those pills than someone who has a naturally pink complexion?); and the two of us perched together in a stylish boudoir, each holding a fat baby son-the symbol of wealth and prosperity-and selling powdered baby milk to show we are modern mothers who use the best modern inventions for our modern offspring.

I cross the room and join May at the closet. This is when our day actually begins. Tonight we’ll sit for Z.G. Li, the best of the artists who specialize in beautiful-girl calendars, posters, and advertisements. Most families would be scandalized to have daughters who pose for artists and often stay out all night, and at first my parents were. But once we started making money, they didn’t mind. Baba took our earnings and invested them, saying that, when we meet our husbands, fall in love, and decide to get married, we’ll go to our husbands’ homes with money of our own.

We select complementary cheongsams to show harmony and style, while sending the message of freshness and ease that promises to bring spring happiness to all who use whatever product we’ll be selling. I choose a cheongsam of peach-colored silk with red piping. The dress is tailored so close to my body that the dressmaker cut the side slit daringly high to allow me to walk. Frogs fashioned from the same red piping fasten the dress at my neck, across my breasts, under my armpit, and down my right side. May pours herself into a cheongsam of pale yellow silk patterned in subtle white blossoms with red centers. Her piping and frogs are the same deep red as mine. Her stiff mandarin collar rises so high it touches her ears; short sleeves accentuate the slimness of her arms. While May draws her eyebrows into the shape of young willow leaves-long, thin, and sleek-I dab white rice powder on my face to hide my rosy cheeks. Then we slip on red high heels and paint our lips red to match.

Recently we cut our long hair and got permanents. May now parts my hair down the middle and then slicks the curls behind my ears, where they puff out like black-petaled peonies. Then I comb her hair, letting the curls frame her face. We add pink crystal drop earrings, jade rings, and gold bracelets to complete our outfits. Our eyes meet in the mirror. From the posters on the walls, multiple images of us join May and me in the reflection. We hold that for a moment, taking in how pretty we look.

We are twenty-one and eighteen. We are young, we are beautiful, and we live in the Paris of Asia.

We clatter back downstairs, call out hasty good-byes, and step into the Shanghai night. Our home is in the Hongkew district, just across Soochow Creek. We aren’t part of the official International Settlement, but we’re close enough to believe we’ll be protected from possible foreign invaders. We aren’t terribly rich, but then isn’t that always a matter of comparison? We’re just getting by, according to British, American, or Japanese measures, but we have a fortune by Chinese standards, although some of our countrymen in the city are wealthier than many foreigners combined. We are kaoteng Huajen-superior Chinese-who follow the religion of ch’ung yang: worshipping all things foreign, from the Westernization of our names to the love of movies, bacon, and cheese. As members of the bu-er-ch’iao-ya-bourgeois class-our family is prosperous enough that our seven servants take turns eating their meals on the front steps, letting the rickshaw pullers and beggars who pass know that those who work for the Chins have regular food to eat and a reliable roof over their heads.

We walk to the corner and bargain with several shirtless and shoeless rickshaw boys before settling on a good price. We climb in and sit side by side.

“Take us to the French Concession,” May orders.

The boy’s muscles contract with the effort of getting the rickshaw rolling. Soon he hits a comfortable trot and the momentum of the rickshaw eases the strain on his shoulders and back. There he is, pulling us like a beast of burden, but all I feel is freedom. During the day I use a parasol when I go shopping, visiting, or to tutor English. But at night I don’t have to worry about my skin. I sit up tall and take a deep breath. I glance at May. She’s so carefree that she recklessly lets her cheongsam flap in the breeze and open all the way up her thigh. She’s flirtatious, and she simply couldn’t live in a better city than Shanghai to exercise her skills, her laughter, her beautiful skin, her charming conversation.

We cross a bridge over Soochow Creek and then turn right, away from the Whangpoo River and its dank odors of oil, seaweed, coal, and sewage. I love Shanghai. It isn’t like other places in China. Instead of swallowtail roofs and glazed tiles, we have mo t’ien talou-magical big buildings-that reach into the sky. Instead of moon gates, spirit screens, intricate latticework windows, and red lacquer pillars, we have neoclassical edifices in granite decorated with art deco ironwork, geometric designs, and etched glass. Instead of bamboo groves gracing streams or willows draping their tendrils into ponds, we have European villas with clean façades, elegant balconies, rows of cypress, and cleanly cut lawns lined with immaculate flower beds. The Old Chinese City still has temples and gardens, but the rest of Shanghai kneels before the gods of trade, wealth, industry, and sin. The city has godowns where goods are loaded and unloaded, courses for greyhound and horse racing, countless movie palaces, and clubs for dancing, drinking, and having sex. Shanghai is home to millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords, and the Chin family.

Our puller takes us down alleys just wide enough for pedestrians, rickshaws, and wheelbarrows outfitted with benches for transporting paying customers, before turning onto Bubbling Well Road. He trots onto the elegant boulevard, unafraid of the purring Chevrolets, Daimlers, and Isotta-Fraschinis that hurtle past. At a stoplight, beggar children shoot into the traffic to surround our rickshaw and pull at our clothes. Each block brings us the smells of death and decay, ginger and roast duck, French perfume and incense. The loud voices of native Shanghainese, the steady click-click of the abacus, and the rattle of rickshaws rolling through the streets are the background sounds that tell me this is home.

At the border between the International Settlement and the French Concession, the rickshaw boy stops. We pay him, cross the street, step around a dead baby left on the sidewalk, find another rickshaw puller who has a license for the French Concession, and tell him Z.G.’s address off the Avenue Lafayette.

This puller is even dirtier and sweatier than the last. His tattered shirt barely hides the skeletal protuberances that have become his body. He hesitates before daring his way onto Avenue Joffre. It’s a French name, but the street is the center of life for White Russians. Signs in Cyrillic hang overhead. We breathe in the smells of fresh bread and cakes from the Russian bakeries. Already the sounds of music and dancing pour from clubs. As we near Z.G.’s apartment, the neighborhood changes yet again. We pass Seeking Happiness Lane, home to more than 150 brothels. From this street many of Shanghai ’s Famous Flowers-the city’s most talented prostitutes-are elected and featured on the covers of magazines each year.

Our puller lets us out, and we pay him. As we walk up the rickety stairs to the third floor of Z.G.’s apartment building, I pouf the curls around my ears with my fingertips, run my lips together to smooth my lipstick, and adjust my cheongsam so that the bias-cut silk falls perfectly over my hips. When he opens the door, I’m struck again by how handsome Z.G. is: a thick mop of unruly black hair, a slight frame, big, round wire-rimmed glasses, and an intensity to his gaze and demeanor that speaks of late nights, artistic temperament, and political fervor. I may be tall, but he’s taller still. It’s one of the many things I love about him.

“What you’re wearing is perfect,” he enthuses. “Come! Come!”

We never know exactly what he has planned for our sitting. Young women getting ready to dive into a pool, play mini golf, or pull back a bow to send an arrow across the sky have been extremely popular lately. Being fit and healthy is an ideal. Who best to raise China ’s sons? The answer: a woman who can play tennis, drive a car, smoke a cigarette, and still look as approachable, sophisticated, and beddable as possible. Will Z.G. ask us to pretend we’re about to go out for an afternoon of tea dancing? Or will he compose something entirely fictional, requiring us to change into rented costumes? Will May be Mulan, the great woman warrior, brought back to life to promote Parrot wine? Will I be painted as the fictional maiden Du Liniang from The Peony Pavilion to extol the merits of Lux toilet soap?

He leads us to a scene he’s set up: a cozy corner with an overstuffed chair, an intricately carved Chinese screen, and a ceramic pot decorated in a never-ending knot pattern from which some sprigs of blooming plum give the illusion of outdoor freshness.

“Today we’re selling My Dear cigarettes,” Z.G. announces. “May, I’d like you in the chair.” Once she sits down, he stands back and stares at her intently. I love Z.G. for the gentleness and sensitivity he shows my sister. She’s young after all, and what we’re doing isn’t exactly something most well-bred girls do. “More relaxed,” he directs, “like you’ve been out all night and want to share a secret with your friend.”

After positioning May, he calls me over. He puts his hands on my hips and twists my body until I perch on the backrest of May’s chair.

“I love your long lines and the length of your limbs,” he says, as he brings my arm forward so that my weight rests on my hand while I balance over May. His fingers spread mine, separating the pinkie from the rest. His hand lingers for a moment, and then he edges back to look at his composition. Satisfied, he gives us cigarettes. “Now, Pearl, lean toward May as though you just lit your cigarette from the tip of hers.”

I do as I’m told. He steps forward one last time to move a tendril of hair from May’s cheek and tilt her chin so that the light will dance on her cheekbones. I may be the one Z.G. likes to paint and touch-and how forbidden that feels-but May’s face sells everything from matches to carburetors.

Z.G. moves behind his easel. He doesn’t like us to speak or move when he paints, but he keeps us entertained by playing music on the phonograph and talking to us about this and that.

“Pearl, are we here to make money or have fun?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. He doesn’t want one. “Is it to tarnish or burnish our reputations? I say neither. We’re doing something else. Shanghai is the center of beauty and modernity. A wealthy Chinese can buy whatever he or she sees on one of our calendars. Those who have less money can aspire to have these things. The poor? They can only dream.”

“Lu Hsün thinks differently,” May says.

I sigh impatiently. Everyone admires Lu Hsün, the great writer who died last year, but that doesn’t mean May should be talking about him during our sitting. I keep quiet and hold my pose.

“He wanted China to be modern,” May continues. “He wanted us to get rid of the lo fan and their influence. He was critical of beautiful girls.”

“I know, I know,” Z.G. responds evenly, but I’m surprised by my sister’s knowledge. She’s not a reader; she never has been. She must be trying to impress Z.G., and it’s working. “I was there the night he gave that speech. You would have laughed, May. You too, Pearl. He held up a calendar that just happened to be of the two of you.”

“Which one?” I ask, breaking my silence.

“I didn’t paint it, but it showed the two of you dancing the tango together. Pearl, you were dipping May back. It was very-”

“I remember that one! Mama was so upset when she saw it. Remember, Pearl?”

I remember all right. Mama was given the poster from the store on Nanking Road where she buys napkins for the monthly visit from the little red sister. She cried and railed and yelled that we were embarrassing the Chin family by looking and acting like White Russian taxi dancers. We tried to explain that beautiful-girl calendars actually express filial piety and traditional values. They are given away at Chinese and Western New Years as incentives, special promotions, or gifts to favored clients. From those good homes, they trickle down to street vendors, who sell them for a few coppers to the poor. We told Mama that a calendar is the most important thing in life for every Chinese, even though we didn’t believe it ourselves. Whether rich or poor, people regulate their lives by the sun, the moon, the stars, and, in Shanghai, by the tide of the Whangpoo. They refuse to enter into a business deal, set a wedding date, or plant a crop without considering the auspiciousness of feng shui. All this can be found in the borders of most beautiful-girl calendars, which is why they serve as almanacs for everything good or potentially dangerous in the year to come. At the same time, they are cheap decorations for even the lowest home.

“We’re making people’s lives more beautiful,” May explained to Mama. “That’s why we’re called beautiful girls.” But Mama only calmed down after May pointed out that the advertisement was for cod-liver oil. “We’re keeping children healthy,” May said. “You should be proud of us!”

In the end, Mama hung the calendar in the kitchen next to the phone so she could write important numbers-for the soy-milk vendor, the electrician, Madame Garnet, and the birth dates for all our servants-on our exposed, pale legs and arms. Still, after that incident, we were careful about which posters we brought home and worried about which ones might be given to her by one of the neighborhood tradesmen.

“Lu Hsün said that calendar posters are depraved and disgusting,” May picks up, barely moving her lips so she can keep her smile in place. “He said that the women who pose for them are sick. He said this kind of sickness doesn’t come from society-”

“It comes from the painters,” Z.G. finishes for her. “He considered what we’re doing decadent and said it won’t help the revolution. But tell me, little May, how will the revolution happen without us? Don’t answer. Just sit and be quiet. Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.”

I’m grateful for the silence. In the days before the Republic, I would have already been sent sight unseen to my husband’s home in a red lacquer sedan chair. By now I would have given birth to several children, sons hopefully. But I was born in 1916, the fourth year of the Republic. Footbinding was banned and women’s lives changed. People in Shanghai now consider arranged marriages backward. Everyone wants to marry for love. In the meantime, we believe in free love. Not that I’ve given it freely. I haven’t given it yet at all, but I would if Z.G. asked me to.

He’d positioned me so that my face would be angled to May’s, but he wanted me to look at him. I hold my pose, stare at him, and dream of our future together. Free love is one thing, but I want us to get married. Every night as he paints, I draw on the great festivities I’ve been to and imagine the wedding my father will host for Z.G. and me.

At close to ten, we hear the wonton soup peddler call, “Hot soup to bring sweat, cool the skin and the night.”

Z.G. holds his brush in midair, pretending to consider where next to apply paint, while watching to see which of us will break our pose first.

When the wonton man is just below the window, May jumps up and squeals, “I can’t wait any longer!” She rushes to the window, calls down our usual order, and then lowers a bowl attached to a rope that we’ve made by tying several pairs of our silk stockings together. The wonton man sends up bowl after bowl of soup, which we eat with relish. Then we retake our places and get back to work.

Not long after midnight, Z.G. sets down his brush. “We’re done for tonight,” he says. “I’ll work on the background until the next time you sit for me. Now, let’s go out!”

While he changes into a pin-striped suit, tie, and fedora, May and I stretch to loosen the stiffness from our bodies. We touch up our makeup and run combs through our hair. And then we’re back out on the streets, the three of us linking arms, laughing, and striding down the block, as food vendors call out their special treats.

“Hand-burning hot ginkgo nuts. Every one popped! Every one big!”

“Stewed plums besprinkled with licorice powder. Ah, sweet! Only ten coppers a package!”

We pass watermelon hawkers on nearly every corner, each with his own call, each promising the best, sweetest, juiciest, coldest melon in the city. As tempting as the watermelon sellers are, we ignore them. Too many of them try to make their melons sound heavier by injecting them with water from the river or one of the creeks. Even a single bite could result in dysentery, typhoid, or cholera.

We arrive at the Casanova, where friends will be meeting us later. May and I are recognized as beautiful girls and shown a good table near the dance floor. We order champagne, and Z.G. asks me to dance. I love the way he holds me as we spin across the floor. After a couple of songs, I glance back at our table and see May sitting alone.

“Maybe you should dance with my sister,” I say.

“If you’d like me to,” he answers.

We twirl back to our table. Z.G. takes May’s hand. The orchestra begins a slow tune. May rests her head on his chest as though listening to his heart. Z.G. moves May gracefully through the other couples. Once he catches my eye and smiles. My thoughts are so girlish: our wedding night, our married life together, the children we’ll have.

“Here you are!” I feel a peck on my cheek and look up to see my school friend Betsy Howell. “Have you been waiting long?”

“We just got here. Sit down. Where’s the waiter? We’re going to need more champagne. Have you eaten yet?”

Betsy and I sit shoulder to shoulder, touch glasses, and sip our champagne. Betsy’s an American. Her father works for the State Department. I like her mother and father because they like me and don’t try to prevent Betsy from socializing with Chinese as so many other foreign parents do. Betsy and I got to know each other at the Methodist mission, where she was sent to help the heathens and I’d been sent to learn Western ways. Are we best friends? Not really. May is my best friend. Betsy is a distant second.

“You look nice tonight,” I say. “I love your dress.”

“You should! You helped me buy it. I’d look like an old cow if it weren’t for you.”

Betsy’s a bit on the chunky side, and she’s burdened by one of those practical American mothers who know almost nothing about fashion, so I took Betsy to a seamstress to have some decent clothes made. Tonight she looks quite pretty in a sheath of vermilion satin with a diamond-and-sapphire brooch pinned above her left breast. Blond curls bubble loose on her freckled shoulders.

“Look how sweet they are,” Betsy says, nodding to Z.G. and May.

We watch them dance while we gossip about school friends. When the song ends, Z.G. and May come back to the table. He’s lucky to have three women in his company tonight, and he does the right thing by dancing with one after the other of us. At close to one o’clock, Tommy Hu arrives. Glowing warmth comes to May’s cheeks when she sees him.

Mama has played mah-jongg with his mother for years, and they have always hoped for a match between our families. Mama will be thrilled to hear about this encounter.

At two in the morning, we burst back out onto the street. It’s July, hot and humid. Everyone’s still awake, even children, even the old. It’s time for a snack.

“Will you come with us?” I ask Betsy.

“I don’t know. Where are you going?”

We all look to Z.G. He names a café in the French Concession known as a hangout for intellectuals, artists, and Communists.

Betsy doesn’t hesitate. “Come on then. Let’s take my dad’s car.”

The Shanghai I love is a fluid place, where the most interesting people mingle. Some days Betsy takes me out for American coffee, toast, and butter; sometimes I take Betsy into alleys for hsiao ch’ih-little eats, dumplings of glutinous rice wrapped in reed leaves or cakes made from cassia petals and sugar. Betsy’s adventurous when she’s with me; once she accompanied me into the Old Chinese City to buy cheap holiday gifts. Sometimes I’m nervous about entering parks in the International Settlement, which until I turned ten were prohibited to Chinese other than amahs with foreign children or gardeners who tended the grounds. But I’m never scared or nervous when I’m with Betsy, who’s gone into those parks her whole life.

The café is smoky and dark, but we don’t feel out of place in our fancy clothes. We join a group of Z.G.’s friends. Tommy and May push their chairs away from the table so they can talk quietly together and avoid a heated argument about who “owns” our city-the British, Americans, French, or Japanese? We hugely outnumber foreigners, even in the International Settlement, yet we have no rights. May and I don’t worry about things like whether we can testify in court against a foreigner or if they’ll let us into one of their clubs, but Betsy comes from another world.

“By the end of the year,” she says, her eyes clear and impassioned, “over twenty thousand corpses will have been picked up from the International Settlement’s streets. We step over those bodies every day, but I don’t see any of you doing anything about it.”

Betsy believes in the need for change. The question, I suppose, is why does she tolerate May and me when we so deliberately ignore what happens around us?

“Are you asking if we love our country?” Z.G. asks. “There are two kinds of love, wouldn’t you say? Ai kuo is the love we feel for our country and our people. Ai jen is what I might feel for my lover. One is patriotic, the other romantic.” He glances at me, and I blush. “Can’t we have both?”

We leave the café at close to five in the morning. Betsy waves, gets in her father’s car, and is driven away. We say good night-or good morning-to Z.G. and Tommy, and hail a rickshaw. Once again, we change rickshaws at the border between the French Concession and the International Settlement, and then we clatter down the cobblestones the rest of the way home.

The city, like a great sea, has never gone to sleep. The night ebbs, and now the morning cycles and rhythms begin to flow. Nightsoil men push their carts down the alleyways, calling “Empty your nightstool! Here comes the nightsoil man! Empty your nightstool!” Shanghai may have been one of the first cities to have electricity, gas, telephones, and running water, but we lag behind in sewage removal. Nevertheless, farmers around the country pay premium prices for our nightsoil because it’s known to be rich from our diets. The nightsoil men will be followed by the morning food vendors with their porridges made from the seeds of Job’s tears, apricot kernels, and lotus seeds, their steamed rice cakes made with rugosa rose and white sugar, and their eggs stewed in tea leaves and five spice.

We reach home and pay the rickshaw boy. We lift the latch to the gate and make our way up the path to the front door. The lingering night dampness magnifies the scent of the flowers, shrubs, and trees, making us drunk on the jasmine, magnolia, and dwarf pines our gardener raises. We climb the stone steps and pass under a carved wooden screen that prevents evil spirits from entering the house-in deference to Mama’s superstitions. Our heels sound loud as they hit the parquet floor in the entry. A light is on in the salon to the left. Baba is awake and waiting for us.

“Sit down and don’t speak,” he says, motioning to the settee directly across from him.

I do as I’m told, then fold my hands in my lap and cross my ankles. If we’re in trouble, looking demure will help. The anxious look he’s been wearing these past few weeks has turned into something hard and immobile. The words he next speaks change my life forever.

“I’ve arranged marriages for the two of you,” he says. “The ceremony will take place the day after tomorrow.”

Gold Mountain Men

“THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” May laughs lightly.

“I’m not joking,” Baba says. “I’ve arranged marriages for you.”

I’m still having trouble absorbing what he said. “What’s wrong? Is Mama ill?”

“I already told you, Pearl. You need to listen and you’re going to do as I say. I’m the father and you’re my daughters. This is how things are.”

I wish I could convey how absurd he sounds.

“I won’t do it!” May cries indignantly.

I try reason. “Those feudal days are over. It’s not like when you and Mama married.”

“Your mother and I were married in the second year of the Republic,” he says huffily, but that’s hardly the point.

“Yours was an arranged marriage nevertheless,” I counter. “Have you been answering inquiries from a matchmaker about our knitting, sewing, or embroidery skills?” Ridicule creeps into my voice. “For my dowry, have you bought me a nightstool painted with dragon-and-phoenix motifs to symbolize my perfect union? Will you give May a nightstool filled with red eggs to send her in-laws the message that she will have many sons?”

“Say what you want.” Baba shrugs indifferently. “You’re getting married.”

“I won’t do it!” May repeats. She’s always been good with tears, and she lets them flow now. “You can’t make me.”

When Baba ignores her, I understand just how serious this is. He looks at me, and it’s as though he’s seeing me for the first time.

“Don’t tell me you thought you were going to marry for love.” His voice is oddly cruel and triumphant. “No one marries for love. I didn’t.”

I hear a deep intake of breath, turn, and see my mother, still dressed in her pajamas, standing in the doorway. We watch as she sways across the room on her bound feet and sinks into a carved pearwood chair. She clasps her hands and looks down. After a moment, tears fall into her folded hands. No one speaks.

I sit up as straight as I can, so I can look down at my father, knowing he’ll hate that. Then I take May’s hand. We’re strong together, and we have our investments.

“I speak for both of us when I respectfully ask for the money you’ve put away for us.”

A grimace passes over my father’s face.

“We’re old enough now to be on our own,” I continue. “May and I will get an apartment. We’ll earn our own way. We plan to determine our own futures.”

As I speak, May nods and smiles at Baba, but she’s not her usual pretty self Her tears have turned her face splotchy and swollen.

“I don’t want you girls to be on your own like that,” Mama finds the courage to whisper.

“It’s not going to happen anyway,” Baba says. “There is no money-not yours, not mine.”

Again, stunned silence. My sister and mother leave it to me to ask, “What have you done?”

In his desperation, Baba blames us for his problems. “Your mother goes visiting and plays games with her friends. The two of you spend, spend, spend. None of you see what’s happening right under your noses.”

He’s right. Just last night I’d thought that a kind of shabbiness had settled over our house. I’d wondered about the chandelier, the wall sconces, the fan, and…

“Where are our servants? Where are Pansy, Ah Fong, and-”

“I dismissed them. They’re all gone, except for the gardener and Cook.”

Of course he wouldn’t let them go. The garden would die quickly and our neighbors would know something was wrong. And we need Cook. Mama only knows how to supervise. May and I don’t know how to make a single thing. We’ve never worried about it. We never expected that skill would be necessary. But the houseboy Baba’s valet, the two maids, and Cook’s helper? How could Baba hurt so many?

“Did you lose it gambling? Win it back, for God’s sake,” I spit out. “You always do.”

My father may have a public reputation as an important man, but I’ve always seen him as ineffectual and harmless. The way he looks at me now… I see him stripped to his core.

“How bad is it?” I’m angry-how can I not be?-but I feel a creeping sense of pity for my father and, more important, for my mother. What will happen to them? What will happen to all of us?

His head lowers. “The house. The rickshaw business. Your investments. What little savings I had. Everything is gone.” After a long while he looks back up at me, his eyes filled with hopelessness, misery, and pleading.

“There are no happy endings,” Mama says. It’s as if all her dour predictions have finally come to pass. “You can’t fight fate.”

Baba ignores Mama and appeals to my sense of filial piety and my duty as the elder daughter. “Do you want your mother begging on the street? And what about the two of you? As beautiful girls you’re already this close to becoming girls with three holes. The only question that remains is: Will you be kept by one man or fall as low as the whores who ply Blood Alley looking for foreign sailors? Which future do you want?”

I’m educated, but what skills do I have? I teach English to a Japanese captain three mornings a week. May and I sit for artists, but our earnings don’t begin to cover the cost of our dresses, hats, gloves, and shoes. I don’t want any of us to become beggars. And I certainly don’t want May and me to become prostitutes. Whatever happens, I need to protect my sister.

“Who are these grooms?” I ask. “Can we meet them first?”

May’s eyes widen.

“It’s against tradition,” Baba says.

“I won’t marry someone unless I meet him first,” I insist.

“You can’t think I’ll do it.” May says the words, but her voice tells us that she’s given in. We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can’t escape what we are: obedient Chinese daughters.

“They’re Gold Mountain men,” Baba says. “Americans. They’ve traveled to China to find brides. It’s good news, really. Their father’s family comes from the same district as ours. We’re practically related. You don’t have to go back to Los Angeles with your husbands. American Chinese are happy to leave their wives here in China to care for their parents and ancestors, so they can return to their blond lo fan mistresses in America. Consider this merely a business deal that will save our family. But if you decide to go with your husbands, you’ll have a beautiful house, servants to do the cleaning and washing, amahs to care for your children. You’ll live in Haolaiwu-Hollywood. I know how you girls love movies. You’d like it, May. You really would. Haolaiwu! Just think of it!”

“But we don’t know them!” May shouts at him.

“But you’ve met their father,” Baba responds evenly. “You know Old Man Louie.”

May’s lips twist in revulsion. We have indeed met the father. I’ve never liked Mama’s old-fashioned use of titles, but to May and me the wiry, stern-faced foreign Chinese has always been Old Man Louie. As Baba said, he lives in Los Angeles, but he comes to Shanghai every year or so to look in on the businesses he maintains here. He owns a factory that makes rattan furniture and another for cheap porcelain ware for export. But I don’t care how rich he is. I’ve never liked the way Old Man Louie looks at May and me, like he’s a cat licking us up. I don’t mind for myself-I can take it-but May was only sixteen the last time he came to town. He shouldn’t have drunk her in like that at his age, which had to be mid-sixties at least, but Baba never said a word, just asked May to pour more tea.

And then it hits me. “Did you lose everything to Old Man Louie?”

“Not exactly-”

“Then to whom?”

“These things are always hard to say.” Baba taps his fingers on the table and glances away. “I lost a little here, a little there.”

“I’m sure you did to have lost May’s and my money too. That must have taken you months… maybe even years-”

“ Pearl -” My mother tries to stop me from saying anything more, but deep rage roars out of me.

“This loss had to be something very big. Something that would threaten all this.” I motion to the room, the furniture, the house, everything that my father built for us. “What exactly is your debt and how are you paying it back?”

May stops crying. My mother remains silent.

“I lost to Old Man Louie,” Baba grudgingly admits at last. “He’ll let your mother and me stay in the house if May marries the younger son and you marry the older son. We’ll have a roof to sleep under and something to eat until I get work. You, our daughters, are our only capital.”

May covers her mouth with the back of her hand, stands, and runs from the room.

“Tell your sister I will set up a meeting for this afternoon,” Baba acquiesces. “And be grateful I arranged marriages to a pair of brothers. You’ll always be together. Now go upstairs. Your mother and I have much to discuss.”

Outside the window, the breakfast sellers have moved on and been replaced by a stream of peddlers. Their voices sing to us, enticing us, tempting us.

“Pu, pu, pu, reed root to brighten the eyes! Give to baby and he will be free from all summer rashes!”

“Hou, hou, hou, let me shave your face, trim your hair, cut your nails!”

“A-hu-a, a-hu-a, come out and sell your junk! Foreign bottles and broken glass exchanged for matches!”

A COUPLE OF hours later, I walk into the Little Tokyo area of Hongkew for my noon appointment with my student. Why haven’t I canceled? The world falls apart and you cancel things, right? But May and I need the money.

In a daze, I ride the elevator to Captain Yamasaki’s apartment. He was on the Japanese Olympics team in 1932, so he likes to relive his glories in Los Angeles. He isn’t a bad man, but he’s obsessed with May. She made the mistake of going out with him a few times, so nearly every lesson begins with questions about her.

“Where is your sister today?” he asks in English, after we review his homework.

“She is sick,” I lie. “She is sleeping.”

“Sorry to hear such sad news. Every day I ask you when she will go out with me again. Every day you say you don’t know.”

“Correction. We see each other only three times a week.”

“Please help me marry May. I give you wedding…”

He hands me a piece of paper, which lists his marriage terms. I can see he used his Japanese-English dictionary, but this is too much. And today of all days. I glance at the clock. We still have fifty minutes to go. I fold the paper and put it in my purse.

“I will make the corrections and return this to you at our next lesson.”

“Give to May!”

“I’ll give it to her, but please know she is too young to marry. My father will not allow it.” How easily the lies pour from my mouth.

“He should. He must. This is a time of Friendship, Cooperation, and Co-prosperity The Asian races should unify against the West. Chinese and Japanese are brothers.”

Hardly. We call Japanese dwarf bandits and monkey people. But the captain often returns to this theme, and he’s done a good job of mastering the slogans in English and Chinese.

He stares at me sullenly. “You’re not going to give it to her, are you?” When I don’t respond quickly enough, he frowns. “I don’t trust Chinese girls. They always lie.”

He’s said this to me before, and I don’t like it any more today than I have in the past.

“I don’t lie to you,” I say, even though I have several times just since we started this tutorial.

“Chinese girls never keep promise. They lie in heart.”

“Promises. Their hearts,” I correct. I need to turn the conversation to a new subject. Today it comes easily. “Did you like Los Angeles?”

“It was very good. Soon I will go back to America.”

“For another swimming competition?”

“No.”

“As a student?”

“As a…” He switches back to Chinese and a word he knows very well in our language. “A conqueror.”

“Really? How?”

“We will march to Washington,” he responds, returning to English. “Yankee girls will do our laundry.”

He laughs. I laugh. And on it goes.

As soon as the hour’s up, I take my meager payment and go home. May’s asleep. I lie down beside her, put a hand on her hip, and close my eyes. I long for sleep, but my mind batters me with images and emotions. I thought I was modern. I thought I had choice. I thought I was nothing like my mother. But my father’s gambling has swept all that away. I’m to be sold-traded like so many girls before me-to help my family. I feel so trapped and so helpless that I can hardly breathe.

I try to tell myself things aren’t as bad as they seem. My father even said May and I won’t have to go with these strangers to a city across the world. We can sign the papers, our “husbands” will leave, and life will go on as before, with one big difference. We have to get out of my father’s house and make our own living. I’ll wait until my husband leaves the country, claim desertion, and get a divorce. Then Z.G. and I will get married. (It will have to be a smaller wedding than I imagined-maybe just a party in a café with our artist friends and some of the other beautiful-girl models.) I’ll get a real job during the day. May will live with us until she marries. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll make our way.

I sit up and rub my temples. I’m stupid with dreams. Maybe I’ve lived in Shanghai too long.

I gently shake my sister’s shoulder. “Wake up, May.”

She opens her eyes, and for a moment I see all the gentle and trusting loveliness she’s held inside her since she was an infant. Then her eyes turn dark as she remembers.

“We’ve got to get dressed,” I say. “It’s almost time to meet the husbands.”

What should we wear? The Louie sons are Chinese, so maybe we should wear traditional cheongsams. They’re also Americans, so maybe it would be better to wear something that shows we’re Westernized too. It isn’t to please them, but we can’t ruin the deal either. We slip on rayon dresses with floral patterns. May and I exchange glances, shrug at the uselessness of it all, and leave the house.

We flag down a rickshaw boy and tell him to take us to the place my father has arranged for the rendezvous: the gate to the Yu Yuan Garden in the center of the Old Chinese City. The driver-who has a bald head scarred by ringworm-pulls us through the heat and crowds across Soochow Creek at the Garden Bridge and along the Bund, passing diplomats, schoolgirls in starched uniforms, prostitutes, lords and their ladies, and black-coated members of the notorious Green Gang. Yesterday this mingling seemed exciting. Today it looks sordid and oppressive.

The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin rising, pulsing, slithering. In Shanghai, you can’t escape the river. It’s the dead end for every eastbound street in the city. On this great river float warships from Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Sampans-hung with ropes, laundry, and nets-cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean-liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come from upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.

To our right rise grand five-and six-story edifices-foreign palaces of wealth, greed, and avarice. We wheel past the Cathay Hotel with its pyramid-shaped roof, the Custom House with its great clock tower, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with its majestic bronze lions, who beckon passersby to rub their paws to bring good luck to men and sons to women. At the border of the French Concession, we pay the rickshaw puller and then continue on foot along what becomes the Quai de France. After a few blocks, we turn away from the river and enter the Old Chinese City.

Coming here is ugly and hardly auspicious, like stepping into the past, which is precisely what Baba wants us to do with these marriages. Still, May and I have come, obedient as dogs, stupid as water buffalo. I cover my nose with a lavender-scented handkerchief to help block the smells of death, sewage, rancid cooking oil, and raw meat for sale spoiling in the heat.

Ordinarily I ignore my home city’s ugly sights, but today my eyes are drawn to them. Here are beggars with eyes gouged out and limbs burned into stumps by their parents to make them all the more pitiable. Some have putrefying sores and horrendous growths blown up to disgusting size with bicycle pumps. We make our way through alleys strung with drying bound-foot bandages, diapers, and tattered trousers. In the Old Chinese City, the women who wash these items are too lazy to wring them out. Water drips down on us like rain. Every step reminds us where we might end up if we don’t go through with these marriages.

We find the Louie sons at the gate to the Yu Yuan Garden. We try English, but they don’t seem interested in responding to us in that language. Their father is from the Four Districts of Canton, so naturally they speak the Sze Yup dialect, which May doesn’t know, but I translate for her. Like so many of us, they’ve taken Western names. The older one points to himself and says, “Sam.” Then he gestures to his younger brother and declares in Sze Yup, “His name is Vernon, but the parents call him Vern.”

I love Z.G., so no matter how perfect this Sam Louie is, I’m not going to like him. And May’s groom, this Vern, is only fourteen years old. He hasn’t even begun to grow into manhood. He’s still a little boy Baba neglected to mention that.

We all look from face to face. None of us seems to like what we see. Eyes dart to the ground, to the sky, anywhere. It occurs to me that maybe they don’t want to marry us either. If that’s the case, we can all consider this a commercial transaction. We’ll sign the papers and go back to our regular lives, with no broken hearts or hurt feelings. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t awkward.

“Maybe we should walk,” I suggest.

No one responds, but when I start to walk, the others follow, our shoes scuffing along the labyrinthine pathways past pools, rockeries, and grottoes. Willows sway in the hot air, giving the illusion of coolness. Pavilions of carved wood and gold lacquer evoke the deep past. Everything is designed to create a feeling of balance and unity, but the garden has broiled under the July sun all morning, and the afternoon air hangs heavy and viscous with fecundity.

The boy, Vern, runs to one of the rockeries and scampers up the craggy wall. May looks at me, silently asking Now what? I don’t have an answer and Sam doesn’t volunteer one. She spins away, steps down the slope to the foot of the rockery, and begins calling softly to the boy to coax him back down. I don’t think he understands what she’s saying, because he stays on top, looking a bit like a pirate at sea. Sam and I continue walking until we come to the Exquisite Jade Rock.

“I’ve been here before,” he murmurs tentatively in Sze Yup. “Do you know the story of how the rock came to be here?”

I don’t tell him that I usually avoid the Old Chinese City. Instead, trying to be polite, I say, “Let’s sit down and you can tell it to me.”

We find a bench and stare at the rock, which seems like any other rock to me.

“During the Northern Sung dynasty, Emperor Hui Tsung had a great thirst for curiosities. He sent envoys across the southern provinces to find the best examples in the land. They found this rock and loaded it on a ship. But the rock never made it to the palace. A storm-perhaps a typhoon, perhaps angry river gods-sank the ship on the Whangpoo.”

Sam’s voice is quite pleasant-not too loud, bossy, or superior. As he speaks, I stare at his feet. He stretches his legs out in front of him with his weight resting on the heels of his new leather shoes. I get my nerve up to look from those feet to his face. He’s attractive enough. I’ll go so far as to say he’s handsome. He’s quite thin. His face is long like a rice seed, which seems to exaggerate the sharpness of his cheekbones. His skin tone is darker than I like, but that’s understandable. He comes from Hollywood. I’ve read that movie stars like to bathe in the sunshine until their skin turns brown. His hair isn’t pure black. Touches of red catch the sunlight. Here it’s said that this color variation comes to those too poor to have a proper diet. Perhaps in America the food is so plentiful and rich that it also causes this change. He’s smartly dressed. Even I recognize that his suit has been recently tailored. And he’s a partner in his father’s business. If I weren’t already in love with Z.G., then Sam would seem like a good prospect.

“The Pan family pulled the rock from the river and brought it here,” Sam continues. “You can see that it satisfies all the requirements for a good rock. It looks porous like a sponge, it has a handsome shape, and it makes you think of its thousands of years of history.”

He falls silent again. In the distance, May circles the rockery, hands on her hips, her annoyance radiating across the garden. She calls up one last time, then looks around to find me. She raises her hands in defeat and begins walking toward us.

Next to me, Sam says, “I like you. Do you like me?”

Nodding seems the best response.

“Good. I will tell my father that we will be happy together.”

AS SOON AS we wave good-bye to Sam and Vern, I find a rickshaw. May climbs in, but I don’t follow her.

“You go on home,” I tell her. “I have something I need to do. I’ll catch up to you later.”

“But I need to talk to you.” Her hands grip the rickshaw’s armrests so hard that her knuckles have gone white. “That boy didn’t say a word to me.”

“You don’t speak Sze Yup.”

“It’s not just that. He’s like a little boy. He is a little boy.”

“It doesn’t matter, May.”

“You can say that. You got the handsome one.”

I try to explain that this is just a business deal, but she won’t listen. She stamps her foot, and the puller struggles to keep the rickshaw steady.

“I don’t want to marry him! If we have to do it, let me have Sam.”

I sigh impatiently. These flashes of jealousy and stubbornness are so like May, but they’re as harmless as rain on a summer afternoon. My parents and I know the best way to handle them is to indulge her until they blow away.

“We’ll talk about it later. I’ll see you at home.” I nod to the puller, who gives the rickshaw a heave and trots on his bare feet down the cobblestone road. I wait until they turn the corner and then walk to the Old West Gate, where I find another rickshaw. I give him Z.G.’s address in the French Concession.

When we arrive at Z.G.’s building, I run up the stairs and pound on the door. He answers it wearing a sleeveless undershirt and loose khakis held up with a tie wrapped through the belt loops. A cigarette dangles from his lips. I fall into his arms. All the tears and frustration I’ve held inside pour out. I tell him everything: that my family’s broke, that May and I are to be married to foreign Chinese, and that I love him.

On the ride here, I thought of the different ways he might react. I considered that he might say something along the lines of “I don’t believe in marriage, but I love you and want you to live here with me.” I thought he might be valiant: “We’ll get married. Everything will be fine.” I thought he would ask about May and invite her to live with us. “I love her as a sister,” he would say. I even considered that he might get angry, rush out to find Baba, and give him the beating he deserves. In the end, Z.G. says the one thing I didn’t expect.

“You should marry the man. He sounds like a good match, and you have a duty to your father. When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son. We all know this is true.”

“I don’t believe in any of that! And I didn’t think you did either. That kind of thinking is for my mother, not for you!” I’m hurt, but more than anything I’m angry. “How could you say that to me?” I demand. “We love each other. You don’t say things like that to the woman you love.”

He doesn’t speak, but his expression manages to convey weariness and irritation that he has to deal with someone so childish.

Because I’m bruised, indignant, and too young to know any better, I flee. I make a great show of stomping down the stairs, crying, and making myself look foolish in front of Z.G.’s landlady by acting as spoiled as my sister. It doesn’t make sense, but many women-and men too-have acted just as rashly. I think… I don’t know what I think… That he’ll rush down the stairs after me. That he’ll sweep me into his arms like in the movies. That he’ll whisk me away from my parents’ home tonight and we’ll elope. Even if worse comes to worst, I’ll marry Sam and then have a lifelong affair with the person I love, as so many women in Shanghai do these days. That isn’t such an unhappy ending, is it?

When I tell my sister what happened with Z.G., her face pales in compassion.

“I didn’t know you felt that way about him.” Her voice is so soft and comforting, I barely hear her.

She holds me as I weep. Even after I stop crying, I feel sympathetic trembling coming from deep within her. We couldn’t be closer. Whatever happens, we’ll survive together.

I’VE DREAMED OF my wedding to Z.G. for so long, but what I get with Sam is nothing like what I imagined. No Chantilly lace, no veil eight yards long, no fragrant cascades of flowers for the Western ceremony. For the Chinese banquet, May and I don’t change into red embroidered gowns and phoenix headdresses that quiver when we walk. There’s no big gathering of the families, no gossiping or jokes traded, no small children running, laughing, and hollering. At two in the afternoon, we go to the courthouse and meet Sam, Vern, and their father. Old Man Louie is just as I remembered him: wiry and stern-faced. He clasps his hands behind his back and watches the two couples sign the papers: married, July 24, 1937. At four, we go to the American Consulate and fill out forms for nonquota immigration visas. May and I check boxes verifying that we’ve never been in prison, an almshouse, or a hospital for the insane, that we’re not alcoholics, anarchists, professional beggars, prostitutes, idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded, epileptic, tubercular, illiterate, or suffering from psychopathic inferiority (whatever that is). As soon as we sign our forms, Old Man Louie folds them and tucks them into his jacket. At six, we meet our parents at a nondescript hotel that caters to Chinese and foreigners down on their luck, and then we have dinner in the main dining room: four newlyweds, my parents, and Old Man Louie. Baba tries to keep the conversation going, but what can anyone say? The orchestra plays, but none of us dance. Dishes come and go, but even the rice seems to choke me. Baba tells May and me to pour tea, as is the custom for brides, but Old Man Louie waves away the offer.

Finally, it’s time for us to retire to our respective bridal chambers. My father whispers in my ear, “You know what you need to do. Once it’s done, all this will be over.”

Sam and I go to our room. He seems more tense than I am. He sits on the edge of the bed, hunched over, staring at his hands. If I’ve spent hours imagining my wedding to Z.G., then I’ve also spent hours envisioning our wedding night and how romantic it would be. Now my mother comes into my mind, and I realize at last why she always speaks so poorly of the husband-wife thing. “You just do it and then you forget about it,” she’s often said.

I don’t wait for Sam to come to me, hold me in his arms, or soften me with kisses on my neck. I stand in the middle of the room, unbutton the frog at my neck, move my fingers to the one above my breast, and then undo the top one under my armpit. Sam looks up and watches as I open all thirty frogs that go from my armpit down my right side. I let my dress slip off my shoulders. I sway unsteadily, chilled even on this hot night. My courage has brought me this far, but I’m unsure what to do next. Sam stands, and I bite my lip.

It’s all very awkward. Sam seems nervous about touching me, but we both do what’s expected of us. One burst of pain and it’s over. Sam stays on his elbows above me for a moment and looks into my face. I don’t meet his gaze. Instead, I stare at the braided sash that holds back the curtain. I was so intent on getting this over with that I didn’t close the curtains. Does that make me brazen or desperate?

Sam rolls off me and turns onto his side. I don’t move. I don’t want to talk, but I can’t fall asleep either. Maybe this one night and this one time won’t matter out of a lifetime of nights with my real husband, whoever he might be. But what about May?

I get up while it’s still dark, take a bath, and dress. Then I sit in a chair by the window and watch Sam sleep. He wakes with a start just before dawn. He looks around, seemingly unsure of where he is. He sees me and blinks. His features are open, raw somehow. I can guess what he’s feeling: supreme embarrassment at being in this room and something like panic that he’s naked, that I’m sitting a few feet from him, and that he somehow has to get out of the bed and get dressed. As I did the night before, I look away. He slides to what had been my side of the bed, slips out from between the sheets, and pads quickly into the bathroom. The door shuts, and I hear the tap begin to flow.

When we get to the dining room, Vern and May are already seated with Old Man Louie. May’s skin has taken on the color of alabaster-white with a green tint hidden beneath the surface. The boy scrunches the tablecloth with his fists. He doesn’t look up when Sam and I sit down, and I realize I have yet to hear Vernon speak.

“I’ve ordered already,” Old Man Louie says. He turns his attention to the waiter. “Make sure everything arrives at the same time.”

We sip our tea. No one comments on the view or the hotel’s decor or what sights these Chinese from America might take in today.

Old Man Louie snaps his fingers. The waiter returns to our table. My father-in-law-the title alone is strange to consider-motions the waiter to lean down and then whispers in his ear. The waiter straightens, purses his lips, and leaves the room. He returns a few minutes later with two maids, each carrying bundled cloth.

Old Man Louie signals one of the girls to approach and takes the bundle from her. As he pulls the fabric through his hands, I realize with absolute horror that he has the bottom sheet from either May’s or my bed. The diners around us take this in with varying degrees of interest. Most of the foreigners don’t seem to understand what’s happening, although one couple does, and they look appalled. But the Chinese in the room-from the customers to the hotel staff-seem amused and curious.

Old Man Louie’s hands stop when he comes to a bloody splotch.

“What room did this come from?” he asks the maid.

“Room three hundred seven,” the girl answers.

Old Man Louie looks from one son to the other. “Who had that room?”

“It was mine,” Sam answers.

The sheet falls from his father’s hands. He motions for May’s sheet, and he once again begins his nasty pawing. May’s lips part. She breathes softly through her mouth. The sheet keeps moving. People around us stare. Under the table, I feel a hand on my knee. It’s Sam’s. When Old Man Louie comes to the end of the sheet without finding a bloodstain, May leans over and throws up all over the table.

That ends breakfast. A car is ordered, and within minutes May, Old Man Louie, and I are on our way back to our parents’ home. Once we arrive, there’s no small talk, tea served, or words of congratulation, only recriminations. I keep my arm around May’s waist when Old Man Louie begins speaking to my father.

“We had an arrangement.” The tone is harsh and doesn’t allow room for discussion. “One of your daughters failed you.” He holds up a hand to prevent my father from offering an excuse. “I will forgive this. The girl is young and my boy…”

I’m relieved-beyond relieved-that Old Man Louie has made the assumption that my sister and Vern didn’t do what they were supposed to do last night, instead of that they did it and she wasn’t a virgin. The result of that second possibility is almost too gruesome to contemplate: an examination by a doctor. If things were found intact, then we wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now. If they weren’t, there’d be a forced confession from my sister, the dissolution of her marriage on grounds that May had already done the husband-wife thing with someone else, my father’s money problems returned to us and perhaps multiplied, our futures once again unstable, not to mention that May’s reputation would be forever marred-even in these modern times-and the chances of her marrying into a good family-like that of Tommy Hu-destroyed.

“Never mind all that,” the old man says to my father, but it feels as if he’s responding to my thoughts. “What matters is that they are married. As you know, my sons and I have business in Hong Kong. We are leaving tomorrow, but I’m concerned. What guarantee do I have that your daughters will meet us? Our ship sails to San Francisco on August tenth. That’s only seventeen days from now.”

My insides feel like they’ve fallen through the floor. Baba lied to us again! May breaks away from me and runs up the stairs, but I don’t follow her. I stare at my father, hoping he’ll say something. But he doesn’t. He wrings his hands, acting as subservient as a rickshaw puller.

“I’m taking their clothes,” Old Man Louie announces.

He doesn’t wait for Baba to argue or for me to object. When he starts up the stairs, my father and I follow. Old Man Louie opens each door until he finds the room with May crying on her bed. When she sees us, she runs into the bathroom and slams the door. We hear her vomit again. The old man opens the closet, grabs an armload of dresses, and tosses them on the bed.

“You can’t take those,” I say. “We need them for modeling.”

The old man corrects me: “You’ll need them in your new home. Husbands like to see pretty wives.”

He’s cold but unsystematic, ruthless but unknowledgeable. He either ignores our Western dresses or throws them on the floor, probably because he doesn’t know what’s fashionable in Shanghai this year. He doesn’t take the ermine wrap, because it’s white, the color of death, but he pulls out a fox stole that May and I bought used several years ago.

“Try these on,” he orders, handing me a stack of hats he’s pulled from the closet’s upper shelf. I do as I’m told. “That’s enough. You can keep the green one and that thing with the feathers. The rest are coming with me.” He glares at my father. “I’ll send people later to pack these things. I suggest that neither you nor your daughters touch anything. Do you understand?”

My father nods. The old man turns to me. Wordlessly, he appraises me from my face to my shoes and then back again.

“Your sister is ill. Be good and help her,” he says, and then he leaves.

I knock on the bathroom door and call softly. May opens the door a crack, and I let myself in. She lies on the floor, her cheek against the tile. I sit beside her.

“Are you all right?”

“I think it was the crab from dinner last night,” she answers. “It’s the wrong season and I shouldn’t have eaten it.”

I lean against the wall and rub my eyes. How is it that two beautiful girls have fallen so low so quickly? I let my hands drop and stare at the repeating pattern of yellow, black, and turquoise tile that climbs the wall.

LATER THAT DAY, coolies come to pack our clothes in wooden crates. These are loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck as our neighbors watch. In the midst of this, Sam arrives. Instead of approaching my father, he walks directly to me.

“You are to take the boat to meet us in Hong Kong on August seventh,” he says. “My father has booked passage for us to sail together to San Francisco three days later. These are your immigration papers. He says everything is in order and that we’ll have no problems landing, but he also wants you to study what’s in this coaching book-just in case.” What he hands me isn’t a book but a few pieces of folded paper held together by hand stitching. “These are the answers you’ll need to give the inspectors if we have any trouble getting off the ship.” He pauses and frowns. He probably has the same thought as I: Why do we need to read the coaching book if everything’s in order? “Don’t worry about anything,” he goes on confidently as though I need my husband’s reassurance and will be comforted by his tone. “As soon as we’re through immigration, we’ll take another boat to Los Angeles.”

I stare at the papers.

“I’m sorry about this,” he adds, and I almost believe him. “I’m sorry about everything.”

As he turns to leave, my father-suddenly remembering to be the gracious host-asks, “May I find you a rickshaw?”

Sam looks back at me and answers, “No, no, I think I’ll walk.”

I watch him until he turns the corner, and then I go inside the house and toss the papers he gave me in the trash. Old Man Louie, his sons, and my father have made a terrible mistake if they think this is going any further. Soon the Louies will be on a ship that will take them thousands of miles from here. They won’t be able to push or trick us into doing anything we don’t want to do. We’ve all paid a price for my father’s gambling. He’s lost his business. I’ve lost my virginity. May and I have lost our clothes and perhaps our livelihoods as a result. We’ve been hurt, but we’re not remotely poor or wretched by Shanghai standards.

A Cicada in a Tree

NOW THAT THIS whole upsetting and exhausting episode is over, May and I retreat to our room, which faces east. This usually leaves the room a little cooler in summer, but it’s so hot and sticky that we wear practically nothing-just thin pink silk slips. We don’t cry. We don’t clean up the clothes Old Man Louie threw on the floor or the mess he left of our closet. We eat the food Cook leaves on a tray outside our door, but other than that we do nothing. We’re both too shaken to voice what happened. If the words come out of our mouths, won’t that mean that we’ll have to face how our lives have changed and figure out what to do next when at least for me my mind is in such a turmoil of confusion, despair, and anger that I feel like gray fog has invaded my skull? We lie on our beds and try to… I don’t even know the word. Recover?

As sisters, May and I share a particular kind of intimacy. May is the one person who’ll stand by me no matter what. I never wonder if we’re good friends or not. We just are. During this time of adversity-as it is for all sisters-our petty jealousies and the question of which one of us is loved more dissolve. We have to rely on each other.

Once I ask May what happened with Vernon, and she says, “I couldn’t do it.” Then she begins to weep. After that, I don’t ask about her wedding night and she doesn’t ask about mine. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, that we’ve just done something to save our family. But no matter how many times I tell myself it wasn’t important, there’s no getting around the fact that I lost a precious moment. In truth, my heart is more broken by what happened with Z.G. than by my family losing its standing or by having had to do the husband-wife thing with a stranger. I want to bring back my innocence, my girlishness, my happiness, my laughter.

“Remember when we saw The Ode to Constancy?” I ask, hoping the memory will remind May of when we were still young enough to believe we were invincible.

“We thought we could put on a better opera,” she answers from her bed.

“Since you were younger and smaller, you got to play the beautiful girl. You always played the princess. I always had to be the scholar, prince, emperor, and bandit.”

“Yes, but look at it this way: You got to play four roles. I only got one.”

I smile. How many times have we had this same disagreement about the productions we used to stage for Mama and Baba in the main salon when we were young? Our parents clapped and laughed. They ate watermelon seeds and drank tea. They praised us but never offered to send us to opera school or to the acrobatic academy, because we were pretty terrible, with our squeaky voices, our heavy tumbling, and our improvised sets and costumes. What mattered was that May and I had spent hours plotting and staging in our room or running to Mama to borrow a scarf to use as a veil or begging Cook to make a sword from paper and starch for me to fight whatever ghost demons were causing trouble.

I remember winter nights when it was so cold that May crawled into my bed and we snuggled together to keep warm. I remember how she slept: her thumb resting on her jaw, the tips of her forefinger and middle finger balanced on the edges of her eyebrows just above her nose, her ring finger lightly placed on an eyelid, and her pinkie delicately floating in the air. I remember that in the morning she’d be cuddled against my back with her arm wrapped around me to hold me close. I remember exactly how her hand looked-so small, so pale, so soft, and her fingers as slender as scallions.

I remember the first summer I went to camp in Kuling. Mama and Baba had to bring May to see me, because she was so lonely. I was maybe ten and May only seven. No one had told me they were coming, but when they arrived and May saw me, she ran to me, stopping just in front of me to stare at me. The other girls teased me. Why did I need to bother with this little baby? I knew enough not to tell them the truth: I longed for my sister too and felt like a part of me was missing when we were separated. After that, Baba always sent the two of us to camp together.

May and I laugh about these things, and they make us feel better. They remind us of the strength we find in each other, of the ways we help each other, of the times that it was just us against everyone else, of the fun we’ve had together. If we can laugh, won’t everything be all right?

“Remember when we were little and we tried on Mama’s shoes?” May asks.

I’ll never forget that day. Mama had gone visiting. We’d sneaked into her room and pulled out several pairs of her bound-foot shoes. My feet were too big for the shoes, and I’d carelessly discarded them as I tried to squeeze my toes into pair after pair. May could get her toes in the slippers, and she’d tiptoed to the window and back, imitating Mama’s lily walk. We’d tittered and frolicked, and then Mama came home. She was furious. May and I knew we’d been bad, but we had a hard time suppressing our giggles as Mama tottered around the room, trying to catch us to pull our ears. With our natural feet and our unity, we escaped, running down the hall and out into the garden, where we collapsed in laughter. Our wickedness had turned into triumph.

We could always trick Mama and outrun her, but Cook and the other servants had little patience for our mischief, and they didn’t hesitate to punish us.

“Pearl, remember when Cook taught us to make chiao-tzu?” May sits cross-legged on her bed across from me, her chin resting on her bunched fists, her elbows balanced on her knees. “He thought we should know how to make something. He said, ‘How are you girls going to get married if you don’t know how to make dumplings for your husbands?’ He didn’t know how hopeless we’d be.”

“He gave us aprons to wear, but they didn’t help.”

“They did when you started throwing flour at me!” May says.

What began as a lesson turned into a game and then finally into an all-out flour battle, with both of us getting really mad. Cook, who has lived with us since we moved to Shanghai, knew the difference between two sisters working together, two sisters playing, and two sisters fighting, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“Cook was so angry that he didn’t let us back in the kitchen for months,” May continues.

“I kept telling him I was just trying to powder your face.”

“No treats. No snacks. No special dishes.” May laughs at the memory. “Cook could be so stern. He said sisters who fight are not worth knowing.”

Mama and Baba knock on our door and ask us to come out, but we decline, saying we prefer to stay in our room awhile longer. Maybe it’s rude and childish, but May and I always deal with conflicts in the family this way-by holing up, and building a barricade between us and whatever has harmed us or we don’t like. We’re stronger together, united, a force that can’t be argued with or reasoned with, until others give in to our desires. But this calamity isn’t like wanting to visit your sister at camp or protecting each other from an angry parent, servant, or teacher.

May gets off her bed and brings back magazines, so we can look at the clothes and read the gossip. We comb each other’s hair. We look through our closet and drawers and try to assess how many new outfits we can make from what we have left. Old Man Louie seems to have taken almost all our Chinese clothes, leaving behind an assortment of Western-style dresses, blouses, skirts, and trousers. In Shanghai, where appearances are nearly everything, it will be important for us to look smart and not dowdy, fashionable and not last year. If our clothes seem old, not only will artists no longer hire us but streetcars won’t stop for us, doormen at hotels and clubs might not let us in, and attendants at movie theaters will double-check our tickets. This affects not only women but men too; they, even if they’re in the middle class, will sleep in lodgings plagued by bedbugs so they can afford to buy a nicer pair of trousers, which they put under their pillows each night to create sharp creases for the new day.

Does it sound like we lock ourselves away for weeks? Hardly. Just two days. Because we’re young, we’re easily cured. We’re also curious. We’ve heard noises outside the door, which we’ve ignored for hours at a time. We tried not to pay attention to the hammering and thumping that shook the house. We heard strange voices but pretended they belonged to the servants. When we finally open the door, our home has changed. Baba has sold most of our furniture to the local pawnshop. The gardener is gone, but Cook has stayed because he has nowhere else to go and he needs a place to sleep and food to eat. Our house has been chopped apart and walls added to make rooms for boarders: a policeman, his wife, and two daughters have moved into the back of the house; a student lives in the second-floor pavilion; a cobbler has taken the space under the stairs; and two dancing girls have moved into the attic. The rents will help, but they won’t be enough to care for us all.

WE THOUGHT OUR lives would go back to normal, and in many ways they do. Mama still orders around everyone, including our boarders, so we aren’t suddenly burdened with carrying out the nightstool, making beds, or sweeping. Still, we’re very aware of how far and how quickly we’ve fallen. Instead of soy milk, sesame cakes, and fried dough sticks for breakfast, Cook makes p’ao fan-leftover rice swimming in boiled water with some pickled vegetables on top for flavor. Cook’s austerity campaign shows in our lunch and dinner dishes too. We’ve always been one of those families who have wu hun pu ch’ih fan-no meal without meat. We now eat a coolie’s diet of bean sprouts, salt fish, cabbage, and preserved vegetables accompanied by lots and lots of rice.

Baba leaves the house every morning to look for work, but we don’t encourage him or ask him questions when he returns at night. In failing us, he’s become insignificant. If we ignore him-demeaning him by our inattention and lack of concern-then his downfall and ruin can’t harm us anymore. It’s our way of dealing with our anger and hurt.

May and I try to find jobs too, but it’s hard to get hired. You need to have kuang hsi, connections. You have to know the right people-a relative or someone you’ve courted for years-to get a recommendation. More important, you need to give a substantial gift-a leg of pork, a bedroom set, or the equivalent of two months’ salary-to the person who will make the introduction and another to the person who will hire you, even if it’s only to make matchboxes or hairnets in a factory. We don’t have money for that now, and people know it. In Shanghai, life flows like an endlessly serene river for the wealthy, the lucky, the fortunate. For those with bad fates, the smell of desperation is as strong as a rotting corpse.

Our writer friends take us to Russian restaurants and treat us to bowls of borscht and cheap vodka. Playboys-our countrymen who come from wealthy families, study in America, and go to Paris on vacation-take us to the Paramount, the city’s biggest nightclub, for joy, gin, and jazz. We hang out in dark cafés with Betsy and her American friends. The boys are handsome and adamant, and we soak them up. May disappears for hours at a time. I don’t ask where she goes or with whom. It’s better that way.

We can’t escape the sense that we’re slipping, dropping, falling.

May never stops sitting for Z.G., but I’m uncomfortable going back to his studio after having made such a scene. They finish the advertisement for My Dear cigarettes, with May doing double duty, modeling for Z.G. in her original spot and then taking my position on the back of the chair. She tells me this and encourages me to help with another calendar Z.G.’s been commissioned to do. I sit for other artists instead, but most of them just want to shoot a quick photo and work from that. I make money, but not much. Now, instead of getting new students, I lose my only student. When I tell Captain Yamasaki that May won’t accept his marriage proposal, he fires me. But that’s only an excuse. Across the city, the Japanese are acting strangely. Those who live in Little Tokyo pack up and leave their apartments. Wives, children, and other civilians return to Japan. When many of our neighbors desert Hongkew, cross Soochow Creek, and take temporary quarters in the main part of the International Settlement, I attribute it to the usual superstitious nature of my countrymen, especially the poor, who fear the known and the unknown, the worldly and the unworldly, the living and the dead.

To me, it feels as if everything has changed. The city I always loved pays no attention to death, despair, disaster, or poverty. Where once I saw neon and glamour, I now see gray: gray slate, gray stone, the gray river. Where once the Whangpoo appeared almost festive with its warships from many nations, each flying colorful flags, now the river seems choked by the arrival of over a dozen imposing Japanese naval vessels. Where once I saw wide avenues and shimmering moonlight, I now see piles of garbage, rodents boldly scurrying and scavenging, and Pockmarked Huang and his Green Gang thugs roughing up debtors and prostitutes. Shanghai, as grand as it is, is built on shifting silt. Nothing stays where it’s supposed to. Coffins buried without lead weights drift. Banks hire men to check their foundations daily to make sure that the tonnage of silver and gold hasn’t caused the building to tilt. May and I have slid from safe, cosmopolitan Shanghai to a place that’s as sure as quicksand.

May’s and my earnings are our own now, but it’s hard to save. After giving Cook money to buy food, we’re left with practically nothing. I can’t sleep for all the worry I feel. If things continue this way, soon we’ll be subsisting on bone soup. If I’m to save anything, I’ll have to go back to Z.G.’s.

“I’m over him,” I tell May. “I don’t know what I ever saw in him. He’s too thin, and I don’t like his glasses. I don’t think I’ll ever marry for real. That’s so bourgeois. Everyone says so.”

I don’t mean a word I say, but May, who I think knows me so well, responds, “I’m glad you’re feeling better. I really am. True love will find you. I know it will.”

But true love has found me. Inside I continue to suffer with thoughts of Z.G., but I hide my feelings. May and I get dressed, then pay a few coppers to ride in a passenger wheelbarrow to Z.G.’s apartment. On the way, as the wheelbarrow pusher picks up and drops off others, I agonize that seeing Z.G. in his rooms, where I held such girlish dreams, will leave me shredded with embarrassment. But once we arrive, he acts as if nothing’s happened.

“Pearl, I’m almost finished with a new kite. It’s a flock of orioles. Come take a look.”

I go to his side, feeling awkward to be standing so close to him. He chats on about the kite, which is exquisite. The eyes of each oriole have been fashioned so that they’ll spin in the wind. On each segment of the body Z.G. has attached articulated wings that will flap in the breeze. On the tips are little feathers that will quiver in the air.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“The three of us are going to fly it once it’s done,” Z.G. announces.

It isn’t an invitation, just a statement of fact. I think, if it doesn’t bother him that I made a fool of myself, then I can’t let it bother me either. I have to be tough to bear my deeper feelings, which threaten to overwhelm me.

“I’d love to do that,” I say. “May and I both would.”

They smile at each other, clearly relieved. “Great,” Z.G. says, rubbing his hands together. “Now let’s get to work.”

May steps behind a screen and changes into red shorts and a cropped yellow top that ties behind her neck. Z.G. puts a scarf over her hair and ties it beneath her chin. I slip into a red bathing suit decorated with butterflies. It has a little skirt and a belt cinched at the waist. Z.G. pins a red and white bow in my hair. May gets onto a bicycle, one foot on a pedal, the other balancing on the floor. I place one hand over hers on the handlebar. My other hand steadies the bike on the back of May’s seat. She glances over her shoulder at me, and I stare at her. When Z.G. says, “That’s perfect. Hold it,” not once am I tempted to look at him. I stay focused on May, smile, and pretend that I couldn’t be happier than to push my sister’s bike along a grassy hill overlooking the ocean to promote Earth fly and mosquito spray.

Z.G. recognizes that holding this particular pose is difficult, so after a while he lets us have a break. He works on the background for a time, painting a sailboat on the waves, and then he asks, “May, shall we show Pearl what we’ve been working on?”

While May goes behind the screen to change, Z.G. puts away the bike, rolls up the backdrop, and then pulls a low chaise to the middle of the room. May returns, wearing a light robe, which she drops when she gets to the chaise. I don’t know what’s more startling-that she’s naked or that she seems utterly at ease. She lies on her side, her elbow bent and her head resting on her hand. Z.G. drapes a piece of diaphanous silk over her hips and so lightly across her breasts that I can see her nipples. He disappears for a minute and returns with some pink peonies. He snips the stems and carefully places the blossoms around May. He then unveils the painting, which has been hidden under a cloth on an easel.

It’s almost finished, and it’s exquisite. The soft texture of the peony petals echoes that of May’s flesh. He’s used the rub-and-paint technique, working carbon powder over May’s image and then applying watercolors to create a rosy complexion on her cheeks, arms, and thighs. In the painting, she looks as though she’s just stepped from a warm bath. Our new diet of more rice and less meat and her paleness from the events of the past days give her an air of languorous lassitude. Z.G. has already dotted the eyes with dark lacquer so they seem to follow the viewer, beckoning, luring, and responding. What’s May selling? Watson’s lotion for prickly heat, Jazz hair pomade, Two Baby cigarettes? I don’t know, but looking from my sister to the painting, I see that Z.G. has achieved the effect of hua chin i tsai-a finished painting with lingering emotions-that only the great masters of the past realized in their work.

But I’m shocked, deeply shocked. I may have done the husband-wife thing with Sam, but this seems far more intimate. Yet again, it shows just how far May and I have fallen. I suppose this is just an inevitable part of our journey. When we first sat for artists, we were encouraged to cross our legs and hold sprays of flowers in our laps. This pose was a wordless reminder of courtesans from feudal times whose bouquets had been between their legs. Later we were asked to clasp our hands behind our heads and expose our armpits, a pose used since the beginning of photography to capture the allure and sensuous availability of Shanghai ’s Famous Flowers. One artist painted us chasing butterflies in the shade of willow trees. Everyone knows that butterflies are symbols for lovers, while “willow shade” is a euphemism for that hairy place on women down low. But this new poster is a long way from any of that and further still from the one of the two of us doing the tango that so upset Mama. This is a beautiful painting; May has to have lain naked for hours before Z.G.’s eyes.

But I’m not just shocked. I’m also disappointed in May for allowing Z.G. to talk her into this. I’m angry at him for preying on her vulnerability. And I’m heartsick that May and I have to take it. This is how women end up on the street selling their bodies. But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you’ll go, in what you’ll accept, and pretty soon you’re at the bottom. You’ve become a girl with three holes, the lowest form of prostitute, living on one of the floating brothels in Soochow Creek, catering to Chinese so poor they don’t mind catching a loathsome disease in exchange for a few humping moments of the husband-wife thing.

As disheartened and disgusted as I am, I go back to Z.G.’s the next day and the day after that. We need the money. And soon enough, there I am practically naked. People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse-anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation-is far worse and much harder to survive. This is the first time that May and I have ever experienced anything like this, and it saps our energy. While I find it almost impossible to sleep, May retreats to those numbing depths. She dozes in bed until noon. She takes naps. Some days at Z.G.’s she even starts to nod off as he paints. He lets her out of her pose so she can sleep on the couch. While he paints me, I look at May, her fingers placed just so but still not entirely covering her face, which is pensive even in sleep.

We’re like lobsters slowly boiling to death in a pot of water. We sit for Z.G., attend parties, and drink absinthe frappés. We go to clubs with Betsy, and let others pay for us. We go to movies. We window-shop. We simply don’t understand what’s happening to us.

THE DATE NEARS when we’re supposed to leave for Hong Kong to meet our husbands. May and I have no intention of getting on that boat. We couldn’t even if we wanted to because I threw away the tickets, but our parents don’t know that. May and I go through the motions of packing so they won’t be suspicious. We listen to Mama’s and Baba’s travel advice. The night before our scheduled departure, they take us out for dinner and tell us how much they’ll miss us. May and I wake up early the next morning, get dressed, and leave the house before anyone else rises. When we return home that evening-long after the ship has sailed-Mama weeps with pleasure that we are still here and Baba yells at us for not doing our duty.

“You don’t understand what you’ve done,” he shouts. “There’s going to be trouble.”

“You worry too much,” May says in her lightest voice. “Old Man Louie and his sons have left Shanghai, and in a few days they’ll leave China for good. They can’t do anything to us now.”

Baba’s face roils with anger. For a moment I think he’s going to hit May, but then he squeezes his hands into fists, marches off to the salon, and slams the door. May looks at me and shrugs. Then we turn ourselves over to our mother, who takes us into the kitchen and orders Cook to make tea and give us a couple of precious English butter cookies he has saved in a tin.

Eleven days later, it rains in the morning, so the heat and humidity are not as bad as usual. Z.G. splurges and hires a taxi to take us to the Lunghua Pagoda on the outskirts of the city to fly his kite. It isn’t the most beautiful place. There’s an airstrip, an execution ground, and a camp for Chinese troops. We tromp across the field until Z.G. finds a spot to stage the flight. Some soldiers-wearing ripped tennis shoes and faded, ill-fitting uniforms with insignia pinned to their shoulders-abandon a puppy they’re playing with to help us.

Each oriole is attached by a hook and separate string to the main line. May picks up the lead oriole and lifts it into the air. With the soldiers’ assistance, I add a new oriole and its string to the main line. One oriole after the other takes off, until pretty soon a flock of twelve orioles swoosh, swoop, and dip in the sky. They look so free up there. May’s hair flies in the breeze. Her hand shields her eyes as she gazes into the sky. Light glints off Z.G.’s glasses, and he grins. He motions me to him and hands me the control of the kites. The orioles are made from paper and balsa, but the pull of the wind and the sky is strong. Z.G. moves behind me and puts his hands over mine to steady the control. His thighs lie against mine and my back against his torso. I breathe in the sensation of being so close to him. Surely he has to be aware of what I feel for him. Even with him there to hold me, the pull from the kite is so powerful that I think I might be lifted up to fly away with the orioles into the clouds and beyond.

Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn’t know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but it’s unaware of the boy who’s come into the garden with a net. Three creatures-the cicada, the mantis, and the oriole-all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.

Later that afternoon, the first shots are exchanged between Chinese and Japanese soldiers.

White Plum Blossoms

THE NEXT MORNING, August 14, we wake late to the sounds of movement, people, and animals outside our walls. We draw back the curtain and see streams of people passing the house. Are we curious about them? Not at all, because our minds are on how to get the most out of the one dollar we have to spend during the shopping expedition we’re planning. This isn’t some shallow thing. As beautiful girls, we require fashionable ensembles. May and I have done what we can to mix and match the Western outfits Old Man Louie left behind, but we need to keep current. We aren’t thinking about the new fall fashions, because the artists we work for are already creating calendars and advertisements for next spring. How will Western designers modify the dress in the new year? Will a button be added to a cuff, the hem shortened, the neckline lowered, the waist nipped? We decide to go to Nanking Road to look in the windows and try to imagine what the changes will be. Then we’ll stop by the notions department in the towering Wing On Department Store to buy ribbons, lace, and other trim to freshen our clothes.

May puts on a dress with a pattern of white plum blossoms against a robin’s egg blue background. I wear loose white linen trousers and a navy blue short-sleeved top. Then we pass the morning looking through what’s left in our closet. It’s in May’s nature to spend hours at her toilette, choosing the right scarf to tie at her throat or purse to match her shoes, so she tells me what we should look for and I write it down.

It’s late afternoon when we pin on hats and pick up our parasols to protect us from the summer sun. August, as I’ve said, is miserably hot and humid in Shanghai, the sky white and oppressive with heat and clouds. This day, however, is hot but clear. It might have even passed for pleasant if not for the thousands of people who crowd the streets. They carry baskets, chickens, clothes, food, and ancestor tablets. Grandmothers and mothers with bound feet are supported by sons and husbands. Brothers lug poles across their shoulders coolie-style. In the baskets at the ends are their little brothers and sisters. Wheelbarrows transport the aged, sick, and deformed. Those who can afford it have paid coolies to bear their suitcases, trunks, and boxes, but most of the people are poor and from the country. May and I are happy to get in a rickshaw and separate ourselves from them.

“Who are they?” May asks.

I have to think about it. That’s how disconnected I am from what’s happening around me. I mull over a word I’ve never before spoken aloud.

“They’re refugees.”

May frowns as she takes that in.

If I make this sound like this sudden turbulence has come out of nowhere, that’s because it has for us. May doesn’t pay much attention to the world, but I know a few things. Back in 1931, when I was fifteen, the dwarf bandits invaded Manchuria in the far north and installed a puppet government. Four months later, at the beginning of the new year, they crossed into the Chapei district across Soochow Creek right next to Hongkew, where we live. At first we thought it was fireworks. Baba took me to the end of North Szechuan Road, and we saw the truth. It was horrible to see the bombs exploding and worse still to see Shanghailanders in their evening clothes, drinking liquor from flasks, nibbling on sandwiches, smoking cigarettes, and laughing at the spectacle. With no help from the foreigners, who got rich off our city, the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army fought back. Japan didn’t agree to a cease-fire for another eleven weeks. Chapei was rebuilt, and we let the incident go out of our minds.

Then last month shots were fired on the Marco Polo Bridge in the capital. The official war began, but no one thought the dwarf bandits would come this far south so fast. Let them take Hopei, Shantung, Shansi, and a bit of Honan, the thinking went. The monkey people would need time to digest all that territory. Only after establishing control and snuffing out uprisings would they consider marching southward into the Yangtze delta. The sorry people who would live under foreign rule would be wang k’uo nu- lost-country slaves. We don’t grasp that the trail of refugees crossing the Garden Bridge with us extends for ten miles into the countryside. There is so much we don’t know.

We view the world very much as peasants in the countryside have for millennia. They’ve always said the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, meaning palace intrigues and imperial threats have no impact on their lives. They’ve acted as though they could do whatever they wanted without fear of retribution or consequence. In Shanghai, we also assume that what happens elsewhere in China will never touch us. After all, the rest of the country is big and backward, and we live in a treaty port governed by foreigners, so technically we aren’t even part of China. Besides, we believe, truly believe, that even if the Japanese reach Shanghai, our army will beat them back as they did five years ago. But Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has a different idea. He wants the fight with the Japanese to come to the delta, where he can arouse national pride and resistance, and at the same time consolidate feelings against the Communists, who have been talking about civil war.

Of course, we have no inkling of that as we cross the Garden Bridge and enter the International Settlement. The refugees drop their loads, lie on sidewalks, sit on the steps of the big banks, and crowd onto the wharves. Sightseers gather in clusters to watch our planes try to drop bombs on the Japanese flagship, the Idzumo, and the destroyers, mine sweepers, and cruisers that surround it. Foreign businessmen and shoppers determinedly step around what’s at their feet and ignore what’s happening in the air, as though things like this go on every day. The mood is at once desperate, festive, and indifferent. If anything, the bombings are an entertainment, because again the International Settlement-as a British port-isn’t under any threat from the Japanese.

Our puller stops at the corner of Nanking Road. We pay the agreed-upon price and join the throng. Each plane that sweeps overhead brings whoops of encouragement and applause, but when every single bomb misses its target and falls harmlessly into the Whangpoo, cheers turn to boos. Somehow it all seems a funny game and eventually a dull one.

May and I stroll up Nanking Road, avoiding the refugees and eyeing Shanghainese and Shanghailanders to see what they’re wearing. Outside the Cathay Hotel we run into Tommy Hu. He wears a white duck suit and a straw hat tilted back on his head. He seems thrilled to see May, and she melts into her flirtatious mode. I can’t help wondering if they arranged to meet.

I cross the street, leaving May and Tommy with their heads together and hands gently touching. I’m just in front of the Palace Hotel when I hear a loud rat-a-tat coming from behind me. I don’t know what it is, but I duck instinctively. Around me, others fall to the ground or run for doorways. I look back toward the Bund and see a silver plane flying low. It’s one of ours. Antiaircraft fire sprouts from one of the Japanese ships. At first, it seems like the dwarf bandits missed their target, and a few people cheer. Then we see smoke spiral out of the plane.

Crippled by the antiaircraft fire, the plane veers over Nanking Road. The pilot must know he’s going to crash, because suddenly he lets the two bombs attached to the wing drop. They seem to take a very long time to fall. I hear whistling and then feel a sickening lurch accompanied by a shattering explosion as the first bomb lands in front of the Cathay Hotel. My eyes go white, my eardrums go silent, and my lungs stop working, as if the explosion has punched out my body’s knowledge of how to operate. A second later, another bomb goes through the roof of the Palace Hotel and explodes. Debris-glass, paper, bits of flesh, and body parts-hurtles down on me.

It’s said that the worst part of the bombing experience is the seconds of total paralysis and silence that immediately follow the initial concussion. It’s as though-and I think this is an expression used in every culture-time stands still. That’s how it is for me. I’m frozen in place. Smoke and plaster dust billow. Eventually I hear the tinkle of glass falling from the hotel’s windows. Someone moans. Someone else screams. And then total panic engulfs the street as another bomber wobbles through the air above us. A minute or two later, we hear and feel the impact of two more bombs. They land, I find out later, in the intersection of Avenue Edouard VII and Thibet Road near the racecourse, where many refugees have gathered to receive free rice and tea. Altogether the four bombs wound, maim, or kill thousands of people.

My immediate thought is for May. I have to find her. I stumble across a couple of mangled bodies. Their clothes have been ripped, shredded, and bloodied. I can’t tell if they were refugees, Shanghainese, or Shanghailanders. Severed arms and legs litter the street. A stampede of hotel guests and staff pushes and shoves through the Palace’s doors and pours out onto the street. Most of them are screaming, many of them bleeding.

People run over the injured and the dead. I join the panicked scramble, needing to make my way back to where I left May and Tommy. I can’t see anything. I rub my eyes, trying without success to rid them of dust and terror. I find what’s left of Tommy. His hat is gone and so is his head, but I still recognize the white of his suit. May isn’t with him, thank God, but where is she?

I turn back toward the Palace Hotel, believing I missed her in my rush. Nanking Road is carpeted with the dead and dying. A few badly injured men lurch drunkenly down the middle of the street. Several cars burn, while others have had their windows blown out. Inside them are more injured and dead. Cars, rickshaws, trams, wheelbarrows, and the people inside them have been pitted by shrapnel. Buildings, billboards, and fences are spattered with flecks of humanity. The sidewalk is slippery with clotted blood and flesh. Shattered glass glitters on the street like so many diamonds. The stench in the August heat burns my eyes and clogs my throat.

“May!” I call and take a few steps. I keep shouting her name, trying to hear her response through the panic that whirls around me. I stop to examine every injured or dead body. With so many dead, how can she have survived? She’s so delicate and easily hurt.

And then, amid all the blood and gore, I see through the crowd a patch of robin’s egg blue with a white plum blossom pattern. I run forward and find my sister. She’s partially buried in plaster and other debris. She’s either unconscious or dead.

“May! May!”

She doesn’t move. Fear grips my heart. I kneel beside her. I don’t see any wounds, but blood has soaked into her dress from a gruesomely injured woman lying next to her. I brush the debris from May’s dress and lean down close to her face. Her skin is as white as candle wax. “May,” I say softly. “Wake up. Come on, May, wake up.”

She stirs. I coax her again. Her eyes blink open, she groans, and closes her eyes again.

I pelt her with questions. “Are you hurt? Do you feel pain? Can you move?”

When she answers with a question of her own, my whole body relaxes in relief.

“What happened?”

“There was a bomb. I couldn’t find you. Tell me you’re all right.”

She twists first one shoulder and then the other. She winces, but not in agony.

“Help me up,” she says.

I put a hand behind her neck and pull her into a sitting position. When I let go, my hand is sticky with blood.

All around us people moan from their injuries. Some cry for help. Some gurgle final, tortured gasps for life. Some scream from the horror of seeing a loved one in pieces. But I’ve been on this street many times, and there’s an underlying silence that’s chilling, as if the dead are sucking sound into their dark emptiness.

I put my arms around May and get her to her feet. She sways, and I worry she’ll lose consciousness again. With my arm around her waist, we take a few steps. But where are we going? Ambulances haven’t arrived yet. We can’t even hear them in the distance, but from neighboring streets come people-unhurt and in surprisingly clean clothes. They rush from corpse to corpse, from injured to injured.

“Tommy?” May asks. When I shake my head, she says, “Take me to him.”

I don’t think that’s a good idea, but she insists. When we reach his body, May’s knees crumple. We sit on the curb. May’s hair is white with plaster dust. She looks like a ghost spirit. I probably look the same.

“I need to make sure you aren’t hurt,” I say, partly to take May’s attention away from Tommy’s body. “Let me take a look.”

May turns her back to me and away from Tommy. Her hair’s matted with already clotting blood, which I take to be a good sign. I carefully part the curls until I find a gash on the back of her head. I’m not a doctor, but it doesn’t look like it needs stitches. Still, she’s been knocked out. I want someone to tell me it’s safe to take her home. We wait and wait, but even after the ambulances come no one helps us. Too many others need immediate attention. As dusk settles, I decide we should go home, but May won’t leave Tommy.

“We’ve known him our entire lives. What would Mama say if we left him here? And his mother…” She trembles, but she doesn’t cry. Her shock is too deep for that.

Just as furniture vans arrive to take away the dead, we feel the concussion of bombs being dropped and hear the rattle of machine guns in the distance. None of us in the street has any illusions about what this means. The dwarf bandits are attacking. They won’t bomb the International Settlement or any of the foreign concessions, but Chapei, Hongkew, the Old Chinese City, and the outlying Chinese areas have to be under fire. People scream and cry, but May and I fight our fear and stay with Tommy’s body until it’s loaded onto a stretcher and put in the back of one of the vans.

“I want to go home now,” May says as the van pulls away. “Mama and Baba will be worried. And I don’t want to be out when the Generalissimo puts more of our planes back in the air.”

She’s right. Our air force has already proven it’s inept, and we won’t be safe on the streets tonight if they take to the skies again. So we walk home. We’re both splattered with blood and plaster dust. Passersby pull away from us as though we’re bringing death with every step we take. I know Mama will lose control when she sees us, but I long for her concern and tears, followed by her inevitable anger that we placed ourselves in such danger.

We walk in the door and turn in to the salon. The dark green foreign-style drapes fringed with little velvet balls have been pulled shut. The bombing has disrupted the power lines, and the room is lit by soft, warm, and comforting candlelight. In the craziness of the day, I forgot about our boarders, but they haven’t forgotten about us. The cobbler sits on his haunches next to my father. The student hovers over Mama’s chair, trying to look reassuring. The two dancers stand with their backs against the wall nervously twisting their fingers. The policeman’s wife and two daughters perch on the stairs.

When Mama sees us, she covers her face and begins to cry. Baba pushes his way across the room, puts his arms around May, and half carries her to his chair. People cluster around her, pawing at her to make sure she’s unhurt-touching her face and patting her thighs and arms. Everyone chatters at once.

“Are you injured?”

“What happened?”

“We heard it was an enemy plane. Those monkey people are worse than turtles’ egg abortions!”

With all attention on May, the policeman’s wife and daughters come to me. I see dread in the woman’s eyes. The older girl pulls on my blouse. “Our baba hasn’t come home yet.” Her voice is hopeful and brave. “Tell us you saw him.”

I shake my head. The girl takes her little sister’s hand and skulks back to the stairs. Their mother’s eyes close in fear and worry.

Now that May and I are safe, the day’s events tumble through me. My sister’s fine and we made it home. The fear and excitement that kept me strong disappear. I feel empty, weak, and dizzy. The others must have noticed, because all of a sudden I feel hands on me, leading me to a chair. I let myself sink into the cushions. Someone brings a cup to my lips, and I sip lukewarm tea.

May, now standing, proudly lists what she considers to be my accomplishments. “ Pearl didn’t cry. She didn’t give up. She looked for me and she found me. She took care of me. She brought me home. She-”

Someone or something pounds on the front door. Baba bunches his hands into balls, as if he knows what’s coming. We no longer have a houseboy to answer the door, but no one moves. We’re all afraid. Is it refugees begging for help? Have the dwarf bandits already marched into the city? Has the looting begun? Or have some clever souls already figured out they can get rich during the war by demanding protection money? We watch as May walks to the door-her hips swaying lightly-opens it, and then slowly takes several steps backward, her hands held before her as if in surrender.

The three men who enter are not in military uniform, but they’re immediately recognizable as dangerous nevertheless. They wear pointed leather shoes, the better to inflict damage with their kicks. Their shirts are made from fine black cotton, the better to hide bloodstains. They wear felt fedoras pulled low to shadow their features. One holds a pistol; another grips a club of some sort. The third carries his menace in his body, which is short but solid. I’ve lived in Shanghai almost my entire life and can spot-and then avoid-a member of the Green Gang on the street or in a club, but I never expected to see one, let alone three, in our home. I’ll say this: You’ve never seen a room empty faster. Our boarders-from the policeman’s daughters to the student and the dancing girls-scatter like leaves.

The three toughs ignore May and casually stroll into the salon. As warm as it is, I shiver.

“Mr. Chin?” the stocky man asks as he plants his feet in front of my father.

Baba-and I’ll never forget this-gulps and swallows, gulps and swallows again, like a fish gasping for air on a slab of hot concrete.

“You have a growth in your throat or what?”

The intruder’s mocking tone causes me to avert my eyes from my father’s face, and I see worse. His pants darken as his bladder lets go. The stocky man, the apparent leader of this small group, spits on the floor in disgust.

“You have failed to pay your debt to Pockmarked Huang. You cannot borrow money from him over many years to provide an extravagant life for your family and not pay it back. You cannot gamble in his establishments and not pay for your losses.”

This couldn’t be worse news. Pockmarked Huang’s control is so great that it’s said if a watch is stolen anywhere in the city, his minions will make sure it’s restored to its rightful owner within twenty-four hours-for a price, of course. He’s known to deliver coffins to people who have displeased him. He usually kills those who have cheated him in some way. We’re lucky we received this visit instead.

“Pockmarked Huang made a good arrangement for you to pay him back,” the gangster goes on. “It was complicated, but he was amenable. You had a debt and he was trying to decide what to do with you.” The thug pauses and stares at my father. “Are you going to explain this to them”-he motions to us casually, but somehow it still feels threatening-“or shall I?”

We wait for Baba to speak. When he doesn’t, the thug shifts his attention to the rest of us.

“There was an outstanding debt that needed to be paid,” he explains. “At the same moment, a merchant from America came to us looking to buy rickshaws for his business and wives for his sons. So Pockmarked Huang put together a three-way deal to benefit everyone.”

I don’t know about Mama and May, but I’m still hoping Baba will do or say something to make this horrible man and his sidekicks leave our home. Shouldn’t Baba do that-as a man, a father, and a husband?

The leader leans over Baba menacingly. “Our boss ordered you to fill Mr. Louie’s procurement needs by giving him your rickshaws and your daughters. No money would be paid by you, and you and your wife would be allowed to stay in your house. Mr. Louie would pay your debt to us with American dollars. Everyone would get what they needed, and everyone would live.”

I’m furious with my father for not telling us the truth, but that’s insignificant compared with the terror I feel, because now it’s not just my father who didn’t do what he was supposed to do. May and I were part of the deal. We too have crossed Pockmarked Huang. The gangster wastes no time getting to that point.

“While it’s true that our boss has profited nicely, there remains a problem,” he says. “Your daughters didn’t get on the boat. What kind of message will this send to others who owe Pockmarked Huang if he lets you get away with this?” The thug takes his eyes from my father and scans the room. He gestures first to me and then to May. “These are your daughters, yes?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “They were supposed to meet their husbands in Hong Kong. Why didn’t that happen, Mr. Chin?”

“I-”

It’s a sad thing to know your father is weak, but it’s terrible to realize he’s pathetic.

Without thinking, I blurt, “It’s not his fault.”

The man’s cruel eyes turn to me. He comes to my chair, squats before me, puts his hands on my knees, and squeezes them hard. “How can this be, little girl?”

I hold my breath, petrified.

May darts across the room to my side. She begins to speak. Every statement of fact comes out as a question. “We didn’t know our father owed money to the Green Gang? We thought he only owed money to an Overseas Chinese? We thought Old Man Louie was unimportant, just a visitor?”

“Good daughters to a worthless man are a waste,” the leader declares conversationally. He stands and strides to the middle of the room. His helpers come to his side. To Baba, he says, “You were allowed to stay in this house as long as you sent your daughters to their new homes. Since you have not done so, this is no longer your home. You must leave. And you must pay your debt. Shall I take your daughters with me now? We will find a good use for them.”

Afraid of what Baba will say, I jump in. “It’s not too late for us to go to America. There are other ships.”

“Pockmarked Huang doesn’t like liars. You have already been dishonest, and you are probably lying to me now.”

“We promise we’ll do what you say,” May mutters.

Like a cobra, the leader’s hand strikes out, grabs May’s hair, and yanks her to him. He brings her face close to his. He smiles and says, “Your family is broke. You should be living on the street. Please, I ask you again, wouldn’t it be better to come with us now? We like beautiful girls.”

“I have their tickets” comes a small voice. “I’ll make sure they leave and the deal you arranged for my husband to honor his debts is completed.”

At first I’m not even sure who spoke. None of us are. We all look around until we come to my mother, who has not said a word since the men entered our home. I see hardness in her that I’ve never seen before. Maybe we’re all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they’re extraordinary.

“I have the tickets,” she repeats. She has to be lying. I threw them out, along with our immigration papers and the coaching book Sam gave me.

“What good are those tickets now? Your daughters missed their boat.”

“We will exchange them and the girls will go to their husbands.” Mama wrings a handkerchief in her hands. “I will see to it. And then my husband and I will leave this house. You tell that to Pockmarked Huang. If he doesn’t like it, then let him come here and discuss it with me, a woman-”

The sickening sound of a pistol being cocked stops my mother’s words. The leader holds up a hand, alerting his men to be ready. Silence hangs like a shroud over the room. Outside, ambulances scream and machine guns rattle and cough.

Then he snorts lightly. “Madame Chin, you know what will happen if we find you’re lying to us.”

When neither of our parents says anything, May finds the courage to ask, “How long do we have?”

“Until tomorrow,” he growls. Then he laughs roughly as he realizes the near impossibility of his demand. “It won’t be easy to leave the city though. If one good thing has come from today’s disaster, it is that many of the foreign devils will leave us. They will have first priority on the ships.”

His men begin to move toward May and me. This is it. We’re going to be the Green Gang’s property now. May grabs my hand. Then a miracle: the leader grinds out a new offer.

“I will give you three days. Be on your way to America by then, even if you have to swim. We will return tomorrow-and every day-to make sure you don’t forget what you must do.”

With the threat laid down and a deadline given, the three men leave, but not before they tip over a couple of lamps and use the club to smash Mama’s few vases and trinkets that have not yet been taken to the pawnshop.

As soon as they’re gone, May sinks to the floor. None of us move to help her.

“You lied to us,” I say to Baba. “You lied to us about Old Man Louie and the reason for our marriages-”

“I didn’t want you to worry about the Green Gang,” he admits feebly.

This response maddens and exasperates me. “You didn’t want us to worry?”

He flinches, but then he deflects my anger with a question of his own. “What difference does it make now?”

There’s a long moment of silence as we think about that. I don’t know what goes through Mama’s and May’s minds, but I can think of many things we might have done differently if we’d known the truth. I still believe that May and I wouldn’t have gotten on the ship to take us to our husbands, but we would have done something: run away, hidden ourselves at the mission, begged Z.G. until he agreed to help us…

“I’ve had to carry this burden too long.” Baba turns to my mother and asks pitiably, “What will we do now?”

Mama looks at him with scathing contempt. “We’re going to do what we can to save our lives,” she says, looping her handkerchief through her jade bracelet.

“Are you going to send us to Los Angeles?” May’s voice quavers.

“She can’t,” I say. “I threw away the tickets.”

“I pulled them out of the trash,” Mama announces.

I slip down next to May. I can’t believe Mama is willing to ship us to America to cure my father’s and her problems. But then isn’t that the kind of thing Chinese parents have done with worthless daughters for thousands of years-abandoned them, sold them, used them?

Seeing the looks of betrayal and fear on our faces, Mama hurries on. “We’re going to trade in your tickets to America and buy passage to Hong Kong for all of us. We’ve got three days to find a ship. Hong Kong is a British colony, so we don’t have to worry about the Japanese attacking there. If we decide it’s safe to come back onto the mainland, we’ll take the ferry or train to Canton. Then we’ll go to Yin Bo, your father’s home village.” Her jade bracelet hits the side table with a resolute thunk. “The Green Gang won’t find us there.”

Moon Sisters

THE NEXT MORNING, May and I start out for the Dollar Steamship Line’s office, hoping to exchange our tickets-from Shanghai to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and from San Francisco to Los Angeles-for just four tickets to Hong Kong. Nanking Road and the area around the racecourse remain closed so workers can clear away the mangled corpses and body parts, but this is the least of the city’s concerns. Thousands upon thousands of refugees continue to arrive, trying to stay ahead of the advancing Japanese. So many infants have been left to die on the streets by desperate parents that the Chinese Benevolent Association has established a special “baby patrol” to pick up the forsaken remains, pile them onto trucks, and take them to the countryside to be burned.

But for all the people coming into the city, thousands more try to leave. Many of my countrymen take trains back to their home villages in the interior. Friends we’ve known in the cafés-writers, artists, and intellectuals-make choices that will determine the rest of their lives: to go to Chungking, where Chiang Kai-shek has established his wartime capital, or to Yunnan to join the Communists. The wealthiest families-foreign and Chinese-leave by international steamers, which chug defiantly past the Japanese warships anchored off the Bund.

We wait for hours in a long queue. By five o’clock, we’ve moved perhaps ten feet. We return home with nothing resolved. I’m worn out; May looks distraught and depleted. Baba spent the day visiting friends, hoping to borrow money to help with our escape, but in these suddenly uncertain times, who can afford to be generous to an ill-fated man? The trio of toughs isn’t surprised by our lack of progress, but they’re hardly happy. Even they seem unnerved by the chaos surrounding us.

That night the house jumps from explosions in Chapei and Hongkew. Billowing ashes from these neighborhoods mingle with the smoke from the baby fires and the great pyres the Japanese use to burn their own dead.

IN THE MORNING, I get up quietly so I won’t disturb my sister. Yesterday she accompanied me without complaint. But a few times, when she thought I wasn’t looking, I’d caught her rubbing her temples. Last night she’d taken some aspirin and promptly thrown them up. She must have a concussion. I hope it’s mild, but how can I know for sure? At the very least, after everything that’s happened the last two days, she needs to sleep, because today is going to be another hard one. Tommy Hu’s funeral is at ten.

I go downstairs and find Mama in the salon. She motions for me to join her. “Here’s a little money.” An unusual steeliness has taken over her voice. “Go out and bring back some sesame cakes and dough sticks.” This is more than we’ve eaten for breakfast since the morning our lives changed. “We should eat well. The funeral-”

I take the money and leave the house. I hear the din from naval guns bombarding our shore positions, the incessant rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, explosions in Chapei, and battles raging in outlying districts. Pungent ashes from last night’s funerary fires blanket the city so clothes that were hung out to dry will need to be rewashed, stoops swept, and cars doused. My throat chokes on the taste. Plenty of people crowd the street. War may be happening, but we all have things we need to do. I walk to the corner, but instead of doing Mama’s errands I board a wheelbarrow to take me to Z.G.’s apartment. I may have acted girlishly before, but that was one moment out of years of friendship. He has to have some affection for May and me. Surely he’ll help us find a way to put our lives back together.

I knock on his door. When no one answers, I go back downstairs and find his landlady in the central courtyard.

“He’s gone,” she says. “But what do you care? Your beautiful-girl days are over. Do you think we can hold back the monkey people forever?

Once they have control, no one will need or want your beautiful-girl calendars.” Her hysteria grows. “Those monkey people might want you for something else though. Is that what you want for you and your sister?”

“Just tell me where he is,” I say wearily.

“He left to join the Communists,” she yaps, each syllable coming out like a bullet.

“He wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye,” I say, doubtful.

The old woman cackles. “What a stupid girl you are! He left without paying his rent. He left behind his paints and brushes. He left without taking a single thing.”

I bite my lip to keep from crying. I have to focus on my own survival now.

Still mindful of my money, I hire a wheelbarrow to take me home, squeezing on with three other riders. As we bump along the road, I make a mental list of people who might help us. The men we dance with? Betsy? One of the other artists we pose for? But everyone has their own worries.

I return to an empty house. I’ve been gone so long I missed going to Tommy’s funeral.

May and Mama come home a couple of hours later. They’re both dressed in funeral white. May’s eyes are as swollen as overripe peaches from crying, and Mama looks old and tired, but they don’t ask where I was or why I didn’t go to the memorial. Baba isn’t with them. He must have lingered with the other fathers at the funeral banquet.

“How was it?” I ask.

May shrugs, and I don’t press. She leans against the doorjamb, crosses her arms, and stares at her feet. “We have to go back to the docks.”

I don’t want to go out. I’m heartsick over Z.G. I want to tell May he’s gone, but what good will it do? I despair over what’s happening to us. I want to be rescued. If not that, then I want to go back to bed, lie under the covers, and sob until I have no tears left. But I’m May’s older sister. I have to be braver than my emotions. I have to help us fight our bad fates. I take a deep breath and stand. “Let’s go. I’m ready.”

We return to the Dollar Steamship Line. The queue moves today, and when we get to the front we understand why. The clerk is useless. We show him our tickets, but exhaustion has robbed him of grammar and his temper.

“What you want me do with these?” he demands loudly.

“Can we exchange them for four tickets to Hong Kong?” I ask, sure that he’ll see this as a good deal for the company.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he waves to the people behind us. “Next!”

I don’t move.

“Can we get on a new ship?” I ask.

He hits the grate that separates us. “You stupid!” It seems everyone feels the same way about me today. Then he grabs the grate and shakes it. “No tickets left! All gone! Next! Next!”

I see in him the same frustration and hysteria I saw in Z.G.’s landlady. May reaches out and puts her fingers on his. Touching between sexes-strangers!-is frowned upon. Her act stuns him into silence. Or maybe he’s suddenly calmed by the beautiful girl who speaks to him in a mellifluous voice.

“I know you can help us.” She tilts her head and lets a small smile transform her face from desperation to serenity. The effect is immediate.

“Let me see your tickets,” the clerk says. He studies them intently and checks a couple of logbooks. “I’m sorry, but these won’t help you leave Shanghai,” he says at last. He pulls out a pad, fills in a form, and then passes it and our tickets back to May. “If you can get to Hong Kong, go to our office there and give them this. You’ll be able to trade your tickets for new berths to San Francisco.” After a long pause, he repeats, “If you can get to Hong Kong.”

We thank him, but he hasn’t helped us at all. We don’t want to go to San Francisco. We want to go south to escape the Green Gang’s reach.

Feeling defeated, we start home. Never has the traffic noise, the smell of exhaust, and the stink of perfume seemed so oppressive. Never has the unscratchable itch for money, the flagrant openness of criminal behavior, and the dissolution of the spirit seemed so forlorn and futile.

We find Mama sitting on the front steps, where once our servants pridefully ate their meals.

“Did they come back?” I ask. I don’t have to specify who. The only people we’re truly afraid of are the Green Gang thugs. Mama nods. May and I let that sink in. What Mama says next sends a ripple of dread down my spine.

“And your father still hasn’t returned.”

We sit on either side of our mother. We wait, searching both ends of the street, hoping to see Baba turn the corner. But he doesn’t come home. Darkness falls and with it intensified bombardment. The night glows from fires raging in Chapei. Searchlights streak across the sky. Whatever happens, the International Settlement and the French Concession, as foreign territories, will be safe.

“Did he say if he was going somewhere after the funeral?” May asks, her voice as tiny as a girl’s.

Mama shakes her head. “Maybe he’s looking for a job. Maybe he’s gambling. Maybe he’s seeing a woman.”

Other options flash through my mind, and when I look over Mama’s head to May, I see she shares them with me. Has he deserted us, leaving his wife and daughters to deal with the consequences? Has the Green Gang decided to kill Baba before the deadline as a warning to us? Or has antiaircraft fire or shrapnel fallen to earth and found him?

At about two in the morning, Mama pats her thighs decisively. “We should get some sleep. If your father doesn’t come home-” Her voice catches. She takes a deep breath. “If he doesn’t come home, then we’ll still go ahead with my plan. Your father’s family will take us in. We belong to them now.”

“But how are we going to get there? We can’t change our tickets.”

Desperation grips Mama’s features as she hastily tosses out an idea. “We could go to Woosong. That’s only a few miles from here. I could walk it if I had to. Standard Oil has a wharf there. With your marriage papers, maybe they’ll give us space on one of their launches to some other city. From there we could go south.”

“I don’t think that will work,” I say. “Why would the oil company want to help us?”

Mama comes back with another proposal. “We could try to find a boat to take us up the Yangtze-”

“What about the monkey people?” May asks. “There are a lot of them on the river. Even the lo fan are leaving the interior to come here.”

“We could go north to Tientsin and look for passage on a ship,” Mama tries again, but this time she holds up a hand to keep my sister and me from speaking. “I know. The monkey people are there already. We could go east, but how long before those areas are invaded?” She pauses to think. It’s as though I can see through her skull and into her brain as she anticipates the dangers of different ways out of Shanghai. Finally, she leans forward and confides in a low but steady voice, “Let’s go southwest to the Grand Canal. Once we reach the canal, we ought to be able to get a boat-a sampan, anything-and continue on to Hangchow. From there we can hire a fishing boat to take us to Hong Kong or Canton.” She looks from me to May and then back. “Do you agree?”

My head swims. I have no idea what we should do.

“Thank you, Mama,” May whispers. “Thank you for taking such good care of us.”

We go inside. Moonlight streams through the windows. Only when we say good night does Mama’s voice break, but then she goes into her room and shuts the door.

In the darkness, May looks at me. “What are we going to do?”

I think the better question is, What’s going to happen to us? But I don’t ask it. As May’s jie jie, I have to hide my fears.

The next morning, we hurriedly pack what we consider to be practical and useful: sanitary supplies, three pounds of rice per person, a pot and eating utensils, sheets, dresses, and shoes. At the last minute, Mama calls me to her room. From a dresser drawer she pulls out some papers, including our coaching book and marriage certificates. On her vanity, she’s gathered together our photo albums. They’ll be too heavy to carry so I think Mama’s going to take a few photos as memories. She pulls one from the black paper. Behind it is a folded bill. She repeats the process again and again until she’s put together a small stack of bills. She tucks the cash in her pocket, then asks me to help her move the dresser away from the wall. Hanging from a nail is a small bag, which she takes. “This is all that remains of my bride-price,” she tells me.

“How could you have kept these things hidden?” I ask indignantly. “Why didn’t you offer to pay off the Green Gang?”

“It wouldn’t have been enough.”

“But it might have helped.”

“My mother always said, ‘Keep something for yourself,’” Mama explains. “I knew I might have to use these things one day. Now that day is here.”

She leaves the room. I linger, staring at the photos: May as a baby, the two of us dressed for a party, Mama and Baba’s wedding photo. Happy memories, silly memories, dance before me. My eyes blur, and I blink back tears. I grab a couple photos, put them in my bag, and go downstairs. Mama and May wait for me on the front steps.

“Pearl, find us a wheelbarrow man,” Mama orders. Because she’s my mother and we don’t have any other options, I obey her-a bound-footed woman who never before had a plan for anything beyond her mah-jongg strategy.

I wait on the corner, watching for a wheelbarrow pusher who looks strong and whose cart appears sturdy and large. Wheelbarrow pushers are below rickshaw pullers and just slightly above nightsoil men. They’re considered part of the coolie class-poor enough that they’ll do anything to make a little money or receive a few bowls of rice. After several attempts, I find a pusher, so thin the skin on his belly seems to meet his spine, willing to enter serious negotiations.

“Who would try to leave Shanghai now?” he asks wisely. “I don’t want to be killed by the monkey people.”

I don’t tell him that the Green Gang is after us. Instead, I say, “We’re going home to Kwangtung province.”

“I’m not pushing you that far!”

“Of course not. But if you could get us to the Grand Canal…”

I agree to pay double his daily take.

We go back to the house. He packs our bags into the wheelbarrow. We prop the cloth-wrapped satchels filled with our dresses on the back of the wheelbarrow so Mama will have something to lean on.

“Before we go,” Mama says, “I want to give you girls these.” She loops a tiny cloth pouch hanging from a string around May’s neck and another around mine. “I bought them from a diviner. They hold three coppers, three sesame seeds, and three green beans. He said they will keep you safe from evil spirits, illness, and the dwarf bandits’ flying machines.”

My mother’s so susceptible, gullible, and old-fashioned. How much did she pay for this nonsense-fifty coppers apiece? More?

She climbs in the wheelbarrow and wiggles her bottom to get comfortable. In her hands she clasps our papers-the boat tickets, our marriage certificates, and the coaching book-wrapped in a piece of silk and tied with silk tape. Then we take one last look at the house. Neither Cook nor our boarders have come outside to wave good-bye or wish us luck.

“Are you sure we should leave?” May asks anxiously. “What about Baba? What if he comes home? What if he’s hurt somewhere?”

“Your father has a hyena’s heart and a python’s lungs,” Mama says. “Would he stay here for you? Would he come looking for you? If so, then why isn’t he here?”

I don’t believe Mama means to be so callous. Baba has lied to us and put us in a desperate situation, but he’s still her husband and our father. But Mama is right. If Baba is alive, he probably isn’t thinking about us. We can’t worry about him either, if we’re going to have any chance at survival.

The pusher grabs the wheelbarrow’s handles, Mama grips the sides, and they begin to move. For now, May and I walk on either side. We have a long way to go, and we don’t want the boy to tire too quickly. As they say, there is no light load if one has to carry it for a hundred paces.

We cross the Garden Bridge. Around us men and women dressed in thickly padded cotton carry everything they own: birdcages, dolls, sacks of rice, clocks, rolled up posters. As we walk along the Bund, I stare across the Whangpoo. Foreign cruisers gleam in the sun, black clouds streaming from their smokestacks. The Idzumo and her accompaniment sit on the water-solid, gray and still undamaged by Chinese fire. Junks and sampans bob on wakes. Everywhere, even now that war is upon us, coolies trudge back and forth, carrying heavy loads.

We turn right on Nanking Road, where sand and disinfectant have been used to clean away the blood and stink of death. Eventually, Nanking Road turns into Bubbling Well Road. The tree-shaded street is busy and hard to navigate all the way to the West Train Station, where we see people loaded onto railroad cars on four levels: the floors, the seats, the berths, and the roofs. Our pusher keeps going. Surprisingly quickly, concrete and granite give way to rice and cotton fields. Mama pulls out snacks for us to eat, making sure to give our pusher a generous portion. We stop a few times to relieve ourselves behind a bush or a tree. We walk through the heat of the day. I look back every once in a while and see smoke billowing from Chapei and Hongkew, and I wonder idly when the fires will burn themselves out.

Blisters form on our heels and toes, but we haven’t thought to bring bandages or medicine. When the shadows grow long, the pusher-without asking our opinions-turns down a dirt path that leads to a small farmhouse with a thatched roof. A tethered horse nibbles yellow beans from a bucket, and chickens peck the ground before the open door. As the pusher sets down the wheelbarrow and shakes out his arms, a woman emerges from the house.

“I have three women here,” our pusher says in his rough country dialect. “We need food and a place to sleep.”

The woman doesn’t speak but motions us to come inside. She pours hot water into a tub and points to May’s and my feet. We take off our shoes and put our feet in the water. The woman returns with an earthenware jar. She uses her fingers to slather a foul-smelling homemade poultice on our broken blisters. Then she turns her attention to Mama. She helps my mother to a stool in the corner of the room, pours more hot water into a tub, and then stands in such a way that she shields Mama from us. Even so, I can see Mama bend over and begin to unwrap her bindings. I turn away. Mama’s care of her feet is the most private and intimate thing she can do. I’ve never seen them naked, and I don’t want to.

Once Mama’s feet are washed and wrapped in clean bindings, the woman sets to making dinner. We give her some of our rice, which she pours into a pot of boiling water, and she begins the constant stirring that will turn the two ingredients into jook.

For the first time, I allow myself to look around. The place is filthy and I dread eating or drinking anything in this room. The woman seems to sense this. She puts empty bowls and tin soupspoons on the table along with a pot of hot water. She gestures to us.

“What does she want us to do?” May asks.

Mama and I don’t know, but our wheelbarrow pusher picks up the pot, pours it into the bowls, dips our spoons in the hot water, swirls the liquid, and then tosses the water on the hard-packed earthen floor, where it’s absorbed. The woman then serves us the jook, onto which she floats some stir-fried carrot greens. The greens are bitter in the mouth and sour on swallowing. The woman steps away and returns a moment later with some dried fish, which she drops into May’s bowl. Then she stands behind May and kneads her shoulders.

I have a flash of irritation. This woman-poor, obviously uneducated, and a total stranger-gave the wheelbarrow pusher the largest bowl of jook, provided Mama with privacy, and now frets over May. What is it about me that even strangers recognize as not being worthy?

After dinner, our pusher goes outside to sleep by his wheelbarrow, while we stretch out on straw mats laid on the floor. I’m exhausted, but Mama seems to burn with a deep fire. The petulance that’s always been so much a part of her character disappears as she talks about her own childhood and the house where she was raised.

“In the summer when I was a girl, my mama, aunties, my sisters, and all my girl cousins used to sleep outside on mats just like this,” Mama remembers, speaking low so as not to disturb our hostess, who rests on a raised platform by the stove. “You’ve never met my sisters, but we were a lot like the two of you.” She laughs ruefully. “We loved each other and we knew how to argue. But on those summer nights when we were out under the sky we didn’t fight. We listened to my mother tell us stories.”

Outside cicadas hum. From the far distance comes the concussion of bombs being dropped on our home city. The explosions reverberate through the ground and into our bodies. When May whimpers, Mama says, “I guess you’re not too old to hear one now…”

“Oh, yes, Mama, please,” May urges. “Tell us the one about the moon sisters.”

Mama reaches over and pats May lovingly. “In ancient days,” she begins in a voice that transports me back to my childhood, “two sisters lived on the moon. They were wonderful girls.” I wait, knowing exactly what she’ll say next. “They were beautiful like May-slender as bamboo, graceful as willow branches swaying in the breeze, with faces like the oval seeds of a melon. And they were clever and industrious like Pearl -embroidering their lily shoes with ten thousand stitches. All night the sisters embroidered, using their seventy embroidery needles. Their fame grew, and soon people on earth gathered to stare at them.”

I know by heart the fate that awaits the two mythical sisters, but I feel Mama wants us to hear the story differently tonight.

“The two sisters knew the rules for maidenly conduct,” she goes on. “No man should see them. No man should stare at them. Each night, they became more and more unhappy. The older sister had an idea. We shall change places with our brother.’ The younger sister wasn’t so sure, for she had a tiny bit of vanity in her, but it was her duty to follow her jie jie’s instructions. The sisters put on their most beautiful red gowns embroidered with dragons dashing through fiery blooms and went to visit their brother, who lived in the sun. They asked to trade places with him.”

May, who’s always liked this part, picks up the story. “‘More people walk the earth by day than by night,’ their brother scoffed. ‘You will have more eyes on you than ever before.’”

“The sisters wept, much like you used to, May, when you wanted something from your father,” Mama continues.

Here I am, lying on a dirt floor in some hovel, listening to my mother trying to comfort us with childhood stories, and my heart wrinkles with bitter thoughts. How can Mama talk about Baba so easily? As bad as he is-was?-shouldn’t she be grieving? And, worse, how can she choose this time to remind me that I’m less precious to him? Even when I cried, Baba never gave in to my tears. I shake my head, trying to expel the unkind thoughts I have about my father when I should be worrying about him, and telling myself that I’m too tired and scared to be thinking properly. But it hurts, even in this moment of hardship, to know I’m not as loved as my sister.

“The brother adored his sisters and finally agreed to change places with them,” Mama says. “The sisters packed up their embroidery needles and went to their new home. Down on earth, the people looked up and saw a man in the moon. ‘Where are the sisters?’ they asked. ‘Where have they gone?’ Now when anyone looks at the sun, the sisters use their seventy embroidery needles to stab at those who dare to stare too long. Those who refuse to turn away go blind.”

May lets her breath out slowly. I know her so well. In moments she’ll be asleep. From the platform in the corner, our hostess grunts. Did she not like the story either? I ache all over, and now my heart aches too. I close my eyes to keep the tears from falling.

Soaring Through the Night Sky

THE NEXT MORNING, the woman boils water so we can wash our faces and hands. She makes tea and gives us each another bowl of jook. She smears more of her country medicine on our feet. She gives us old but clean footbinding cloths to use as bandages. Then she follows us outside and helps my mother back into the wheelbarrow. Mama tries to pay her, but she waves it away, refusing even to look at us again she’s so insulted.

All that morning we walk. Mist hovers above the fields. The smell of rice cooking over straw fires wafts to us from the villages we pass. May’s green hat and my hat with the feathers-both saved during Old Man Louie’s rampage-were carefully packed, so as the day wears on our skin parches and burns. Eventually May and I join Mama in the wheelbarrow. Our pusher never complains, never threatens to abandon us, never asks for more money. He stoically just keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

In the late afternoon, just as the day before, he turns down a pathway toward a farm that seems even poorer than the last one. The wife sorts seeds with a sleeping baby tied to her back. A couple of sickly children do other chores with extreme lassitude. The husband looks us over, calculating how much he should charge. When his eyes find my mother’s feet, he grins toothlessly. We pay more than we should for some dry patties made from ground corn.

Mama and May fall asleep before I do. I stare at the ceiling. I listen to a rat skitter along the walls of the room, stopping to gnaw on this and that. My whole life I was spoiled with what I ate, what I wore, where I slept, how I moved from one place to another. Now I think how easy it would be for May, my mother, me, and people like us-privileged and cared for-to die out here on the road. We don’t know what it means to get by on almost nothing. We don’t know what it takes to survive day to day. But the family that lives here and the woman who took us in last night do. When you don’t have much, having less isn’t so bad.

The next morning we walk around a village that’s been burned to the ground. On the road we see those who tried unsuccessfully to escape: men bayoneted and shot, babies abandoned, and women, wearing only tunics, with the bottom halves of their bodies exposed and their bloody legs splayed at odd angles. Just after noon, we pass dead Chinese soldiers moldering in the hot sun. One is curled into a ball. The back of his hand rests in his mouth as if in his last moments he was biting back pain.

How far have we gone? I don’t know. Maybe fifteen miles a day? How far do we have to go? None of us knows that either. But we have to keep going and hope that we don’t encounter any Japanese before we reach the Grand Canal.

That evening, our pusher repeats his pattern of turning down a dirt path toward a shack, only this time the people are gone, as though they just stepped out. But all of their belongings seem to be here, including their chickens and ducks. Our pusher rummages through the shelves until he finds a jar of salted turnips. We watch-useless and helpless-as he makes the rice. How is it that after three full days together we still don’t know his name? He’s older than May and me but younger than my mother. Still, we call him Boy, and he responds with the respect his low position requires. After we’ve eaten, he looks around until he finds some mosquito incense, which he lights. Then he goes outside to sleep by the wheelbarrow. We go into the other room, which has a bed made from two sawhorses and three wooden planks. Mats stretch across the boards, and a quilt stuffed with cotton batting lies at the foot of the bed. It’s too hot to sleep under the quilt, but we roll it out over the mats so we’ll have a little padding between our bones and hardness.

That night the Japanese come. We hear the scuffling of their boots, their harsh, guttural voices, and the wheelbarrow pusher’s cries for mercy. Whether on purpose or not, his suffering and death give us time to hide. But we’re in a two-room shack. Where can we conceal ourselves? Mama tells us to take the planks from the sawhorses and lean them against the wall.

“Slide in behind,” she orders. May and I look at each other. What’s Mama thinking? “Do it!” she hisses. “Do it now!”

Once May and I get behind the planks, Mama reaches in. She holds her bride-price bag and our papers wrapped in silk. “Take these.”

“Mama-”

“Shhh!”

She grabs my hand and wraps it around the bag and package. We hear her scrape one of the sawhorses across the floor. The planks push up against my sister and me, forcing us to turn our faces to the side. That’s how tight a space Mama has made. But we’re hardly hidden. It will be only a matter of time before the soldiers find us.

“Stay here,” she whispers. “Don’t come out no matter what you hear.” She grabs my wrist and shakes it. She switches to the Sze Yup dialect, not wanting May to understand. “I mean it, Pearl. Stay here. Don’t let your sister move from this place.”

We hear Mama leave the room and shut the door. Next to me May takes shallow breaths. Each exhale falls on my face warm and moist. My heart thumps in my chest.

From the other room we hear the door being kicked open, the stomp of boots, loud military voices, and soon enough Mama pleading and bargaining with the soldiers. At one point, the door to this room swings open. Lantern light flickers in from the sides of our hiding place. Mama screams-sharp and shrill-the door shuts, and the light goes away.

“Mama,” May mewls.

“You have to be quiet,” I whisper.

We hear grunting and laughing, but nothing from our mother. Is she already dead? If she is, then they’ll come in here. Don’t I have to do something to give my sister a chance? I drop the things Mama gave me, and then I slide to my left.

“No!”

“Quiet!”

In our flattened space, May holds on to my arm with one hand.

“Don’t go out there, Pearl,” she pleads. “Don’t leave me.”

I jerk my arm, and May’s hand falls away. As quietly as possible, I edge out from behind the planks. Without hesitation I walk to the door, open it, step into the main room, and close the door behind me.

Mama’s on the floor with a man inside her. I’m struck by how thin her calves are, the result of nearly a lifetime of walking-rather, not walking-on her bound feet. Another dozen or so soldiers in yellow uniforms, leather shoes, and carrying rifles slung over their shoulders stand around, watching, waiting their turns.

Mama groans when she sees me.

“You promised you would stay where you were.” Her words are weak with pain and sorrow. “It was my honor to save you.”

The dwarf bandit atop my mother slaps her. Strong hands grab me and pull me this way and that. Who will get me first? The strongest? The man in my mother suddenly stops what he’s doing, pulls up his trousers, and bullies his way through the others to try to seize me for his prize.

“I told them I was alone,” Mama mutters in despair. She tries to stand but gets only as far as her knees.

In the insanity of the moment, somehow I remain calm.

“They can’t understand you,” I say, coolly, unfazed, not thinking for fear.

“I wanted you and May to be safe,” Mama says as she weeps.

Someone pushes me. A couple of the soldiers go back to Mama and hit her on the head and shoulders. They shout at us. Maybe they don’t want us talking, but I’m not sure. I don’t know their language. Finally one of the soldiers tries English.

“What is the old woman saying? Who else are you hiding?”

I see greed in his eyes. There are so many soldiers and only two women, one of whom is a mother.

“My mother is upset because I didn’t stay hidden,” I answer in English. “I am her only child.” I don’t have to pretend to weep. I begin to sob, terrified of what’s going to happen next.

There are certain moments when I fly away, when I leave my body, the room, the earth, and just soar through the night sky searching for people and places I love. I think of Z.G. Would he see what I’ve done as a supreme act of filial piety? I think of Betsy. I even think of my Japanese student. Is Captain Yamasaki nearby, aware that it’s me, hoping that May will be discovered? Is he thinking about how he wanted her as a wife but now he could have her as a war trophy?

My mother’s beaten, but even her blood and her screams don’t stop the soldiers. They unwrap her feet, the bindings swirling through the air like acrobats’ ribbons. Her feet look the color of a corpse gone cold-bluish white with shades of green and purple beneath the crushed flesh.

The soldiers pull and prod them. Then they stomp on her feet to try to bring them back into “normal” shape. Her cries are not those of footbinding or childbirth. They’re the deep, anguished screams of an animal experiencing agony beyond comprehension.

I close my eyes and try to ignore everything they’re doing, but my teeth itch to bite the man on top of me. In my mind I keep seeing the bodies of the women we passed on the road earlier today, not wanting to see my own legs in those unnatural, inhuman angles. I feel tearing-not like on my wedding night-but something much worse, something searing, as though my insides are being torn apart. The air is thick and gummy with the suffocating smells of blood, mosquito incense, and Mama’s exposed feet.

A few times-when Mama’s cries are the worst-I open my eyes and see what they’re doing to her. Mama, Mama, Mama, I want to cry out, but I don’t. I won’t give these monkey people the pleasure of hearing my terror. I reach out and grab her hand. How can I describe the look that passes between us? We’re a mother and daughter being raped repeatedly, for all we know until we both die. I see in her eyes my birth, the endless tragedies of mother love, a total absence of hope, and then somewhere deep, deep in those liquid pools a fierceness I’ve never seen before.

The whole time I silently pray that May will stay hidden, that she won’t make a sound, that she won’t be tempted to peek out the door, that she won’t do anything stupid, because the one thing I won’t be able to bear is for her to be in this room with these… men. Pretty soon I don’t hear Mama anymore. I lose all awareness of where I am and even what’s happening to me. All I feel is pain.

The front door scrapes open, and I hear the sound of more boots tramping on the hard-packed earth. The whole thing is horrible, but this is my worst moment, knowing that there’s more to come. But I’m wrong. A voice-angry, authoritative, and as rough as grating gears-bellows at the men. They scramble to their feet. They adjust their trousers. They smooth their hair and wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands. Then they stand at attention and salute. I lie as still as possible, hoping they’ll think I’m dead. The new voice yelps out orders-or is it a reprimand? The other soldiers bluster.

The cold edge of a bayonet or a saber presses against my cheek. I don’t react. A boot kicks me. Again, I don’t want to react-be dead, be dead, be dead, and maybe it won’t begin again-but my body curls in on itself like a wounded caterpillar. No laughing this time, only terrible silence. I wait for the stab of the bayonet.

I feel a wave of cool air and then the soft settling of cloth over my naked body. The gruff soldier-directly above me, I realize, as he shouts his orders and I hear the shuffling of boots when the others file out-reaches down, adjusts the cloth over my hip, and then leaves.

For a long while, black silence fills the room. Then I hear Mama shift her weight and moan. I’m still afraid, but I whisper, “Be still. They may come back.”

Maybe I only think I whisper this, because Mama doesn’t seem to pay attention to my warning. I hear her creep closer, and then I feel her fingers on my cheek. Mama, whom I’ve always thought of as physically weak, pulls me onto her lap. She leans back against the mud wall of the shack.

“Your father named you Pearl Dragon,” Mama says, as she smoothes my hair, “because you were born in the Year of the Dragon and the Dragon likes to play with a pearl. But I liked the name for another reason. A pearl grows when a piece of sand lodges in the oyster. I was young, just fourteen, when my father arranged my marriage. That husband-wife thing we have to do was my duty and I did it, but what your father put inside me was as unpleasant as sand. But look what happened. My Pearl came out.”

She hums for a while. I feel drowsy. My whole body aches. Where is May?

“There was a typhoon the day you were born,” Mama suddenly goes on, switching to Sze Yup, the language of my childhood and the language that keeps secrets from May. “It is said that a Dragon born in a storm will have a particularly tempestuous fate. You always believe you are right, and this makes you do things you shouldn’t-”

“Mama-”

“Just listen to me this one time… and then try to forget… everything.” She leans down and whispers in my ear. “You’re a Dragon, and of all the signs only a Dragon can tame the fates. Only a Dragon can wear the horns of destiny, duty, and power. Your sister is merely a Sheep. You have always been a better mother to her than I have.” I stir, but Mama holds me still. “Don’t argue with me now. We don’t have time for that.”

Her voice sounds beautiful. Never before have I felt her mother love so strongly. My body relaxes in her arms, slowly drifting into darkness.

“You have to take care of your sister,” Mama says. “Promise me, Pearl. Promise me right now.”

I promise. And then, after what seems like days and weeks and months, blackness comes over my eyes.

Eating Wind and Tasting Waves

I WAKE ONCE to find a moist cloth wiping my face. I open my eyes and there’s May-as pale, beautiful, and tremulous as a spirit. I see the sky above her. Are we dead? I close my eyes again and feel myself lurching and bumping.

The next thing I know I’m on a boat of some kind. I fight hard to stay awake this time. I look to my left and see netting. I look to my right and see land. The boat moves in a steady pull, pull, pull. The lack of waves tells me we aren’t on the ocean. I lift my head and see a cage just beyond my feet. Inside, a boy of about six-retarded, insane, diseased?-twitches and shimmies. I close my eyes and let myself be lulled by the steady rhythm of the boat as it’s rowed through the water.

I don’t know how many days we travel. Momentary images tear across my eyes and echo in my ears: the moon and the stars above, the incessant croaking of frogs, the sorrowful sound of a pi-pa being played, the splash of an oar, the raised voice of a mother calling to a child, the crack of rifle shots. Into the anguished hollows of my mind, I hear a voice say, “Is it true that dead men float facedown in water but women look to the sky?” I don’t know who asked the question or if it was asked at all, but I’d prefer to stare down into an eternity of watery blackness.

Once I lift my arm to block the sunlight and feel something heavy slide toward my elbow. It’s my mother’s jade bracelet, and I know she’s dead. My insides boil with fever, while my skin shivers uncontrollably with cold. Gentle hands lift me. I’m in a hospital. Soft voices say words like “morphine,” “lacerations,” “infection,” “vagina,” and “surgery.” Whenever I hear my sister’s voice, I feel safe. When I don’t, I despair.

Finally, I come back from my wandering among the nearly dead. May dozes in a chair by the hospital bed. Her hands are so thickly bandaged that she looks like she has two huge white paws lying in her lap. A doctor-a man-stands over me and puts a forefinger to his lips. He jerks his head in May’s direction and whispers, “Let her sleep. She needs it.”

When he leans over me, I try to pull away, but my wrists have been tied to the bed rails.

“You’ve been delirious for some time and you fought us pretty hard,” he says gently. “But you’re safe now.” He puts a hand on my arm. He’s Chinese, but a man nevertheless. I fight the urge to scream. He looks into my eyes, searching, and then he smiles. “Your fever’s gone. You’re going to live.”

In the coming days, I learn that May put me in the wheelbarrow and pushed me herself until we reached the Grand Canal. Along the way, she discarded or sold much of what we’d brought with us. Now our sole possessions are three outfits apiece, our papers, and what remains of Mama’s dowry. At the Grand Canal, May used some of Mama’s money to hire a fisherman and his family to take us on their sampan to Hangchow. I was near death by the time she got me to the hospital. When they took me in for surgery, other doctors worked on May’s hands, which were blistered and worn raw from pushing the wheelbarrow. She paid for our treatment by selling some of Mama’s wedding jewelry at a local pawnshop.

Gradually May’s hands heal, but I require another two surgeries. One day the doctors come in with grim faces to tell me they doubt I’ll ever be able to have children. May weeps, but I don’t. If having a baby means doing the husband-wife thing again, I’d rather die. Never again, I tell myself Never ever again will I do that thing.

After nearly six weeks in the hospital, the doctors finally agree to discharge me. With this news, May disappears to make arrangements for us to go to Hong Kong. On the day she’s to pick me up, I step into the bathroom to change. I’ve lost a lot of weight. The person who stares back at me in the mirror looks no more than twelve years old-tall, gawky, and skinny-but with hollowed-out cheeks and dark circles under the eyes. My bob has grown out, and my hair hangs limp and dull. The days spent under the sun without benefit of an umbrella or a hat have left my skin ruddy and tough. How infuriated Baba would be if he saw me now. My arms are so emaciated that my fingers look overly long, like talons. The Western-style dress I put on hangs on me like loose drapery.

When I come out of the bathroom, May’s sitting on my bed, waiting. She takes one look at me and tells me to take off the dress.

“A lot has happened while you’ve been recovering,” she says. “The monkey people are like ants looking for syrup. They’re everywhere.” She hesitates. She hasn’t wanted to talk about what happened that night in the shack, for which I’m grateful, but it hangs between us with every word, every look. “We need to fit in,” she goes on with false brightness. “We need to look like everyone else.”

She sold one of Mama’s bracelets and used the money to buy two changes of clothes: native black linen trousers, loose blue jackets, and kerchiefs to cover our hair. She hands me a set of the rough peasant clothes. I’ve never had any shyness around May. She’s my sister, but I don’t think I can bear for even her to see me naked now. I take the clothes and go back into the bathroom.

“And I have one other idea,” she calls from the opposite side of the closed and locked door. “I can’t say it’s my own and I don’t know if it will work. I heard it from two Chinese missionary ladies. I’ll wait until you get out here to show you.”

This time when I stare in the mirror I almost laugh. In the last two months I’ve changed from a beautiful girl into a pitiful peasant, but when I come out of the bathroom, May doesn’t comment on how I look. She just motions me to the bed. She pulls out a jar of cold cream and a tin of cocoa powder and sets them on my night table. From my breakfast tray-she frowns when she sees I haven’t eaten anything again-she takes the spoon, scoops out some of the cold cream, and drops two big dollops of it on the tray.

“Pearl, pour some of the cocoa powder in here.” I look at her quizzically. “Trust me,” she says and smiles. I shake the powder into the jar, and she begins to stir the disgusting combination. “We’re going to wear this on our hands and faces, so we’ll look darker, more country.”

It’s a clever idea, but my skin is already dark and that didn’t save me from the soldiers’ madness. Still, from the moment I leave the hospital, I wear May’s concoction.

WHILE I WAS in the hospital, May found a fisherman who’s discovered a new and better way of making a fortune than looking beneath the waves by transporting refugees on the waves from Hangchow to Hong Kong. When we board his boat, we join another dozen or so passengers in a small and very dark hold once used for storing fish. Our only light comes from between the slats of the deck above us. The lingering smell of fish is overpowering, but we set to sea, tossing in the tail of a typhoon. It doesn’t take long before people get seasick. May has it the worst.

On our second day out, we hear shouts. A woman next to me begins to weep. “It’s the Japanese,” she cries. “We’re all going to die.”

If she’s right, I won’t give them a chance to rape me again. I’ll throw myself overboard first. The hold echoes with the sound of heavy boots above us. Mothers hug their babies to their breasts to muffle any sounds. Across from me, an infant’s arm jerks desperately as he struggles to take a breath.

May rummages through our bags. She pulls out the last of our cash and divides it into three stacks. One she folds and wedges into the wooden slats of the ceiling. She hands me a few of the bills. I follow her lead as she tucks her money up under her kerchief. Hurriedly, she pulls Mama’s bracelet off my wrist, takes off her earrings, and adds them to what’s left in Mama’s dowry bag. This she jams into a crack between the hull and the platform on which we sit. Finally, she reaches into our travel bag and brings out her cold-cream mixture. We smear an extra coating on our faces and hands.

The hatch opens, and light streams down on us.

“Come up here!” a voice demands in Chinese.

We do as we’re told. Fresh, salty air blows on my face. The sea thrums under my feet. I’m too frightened to look up.

“It’s all right,” May whispers. “They’re Chinese.”

But these aren’t sea inspectors, fishermen, or even other refugees being transferred from one boat to another. They’re pirates. On land our countrymen are taking advantage of the war by looting areas under attack. Why should the sea be any different? The other travelers are terrified. They don’t yet realize that the theft of money and belongings is nothing.

The pirates search the men and take whatever jewels and money they find. Unsatisfied, the head pirate orders the men to strip. At first they hesitate, but when he shakes his rifle, the men do as they’re told. More money and jewels are found tucked into the cracks of rear ends, sewn into the hems or linings of clothes, or hidden in the soles of shoes.

It’s hard to explain how I feel. The last time I saw men naked… But here are my countrymen-cold, scared, trying to cover their private parts with their hands. I don’t want to look at them, but I do. I feel confused, bitter, and strangely triumphant to see men reduced to such weakness.

Then the pirates ask the women to hand over whatever they’re hiding. Having seen what happened to the men, the women promptly obey. Without regret, I reach into my kerchief and pull out the bills. Our valuables are gathered, but the pirates aren’t dumb.

“You!”

I jump, but he isn’t addressing me.

“What are you hiding?”

“I work on a farm,” a girl standing to my right says, her voice trembling.

“A farm girl? Your face, hands, and feet deny that!”

It’s true. She wears peasant clothes, but her face is pale, her hands pretty, and she wears new saddle oxfords. The pirate helps the girl off with her clothes until all she wears is a napkin and belt. That’s when we all know for sure that she’s lying. A farm girl can’t afford Western-style napkins. She’d use coarse grass paper like any other poor woman.

How is it that in times like these we can’t help but look? I don’t know, but again I look-partly afraid for myself and May, partly curious. The pirate takes the napkin and slits it open with his knife. He comes away with just fifteen dollars Hong Kong money.

Disgusted by his measly haul, the pirate tosses the napkin into the sea. He looks from woman to woman, decides we aren’t worth the bother, and then motions to a couple of his men to search the hold. They return a few minutes later, say a few menacing words, jump back onto their boat, and chug away. People rush to be first to scramble down into the stinky hold to see what’s been taken. I stay on the deck. Soon enough, faster than I could imagine, I hear cries of dismay.

A man rushes back up the ladder, takes three giant steps across the deck, and flings himself overboard. Neither the fisherman nor I have a chance to do anything. The man bobs in the waves for a minute or so, and then he disappears.

Every day since waking up in the hospital I’ve wanted to die, but watching that man sink below the waves, I feel something inside me rise up. A Dragon doesn’t surrender. A Dragon fights fate. This is not some loud, roaring feeling. It feels more like someone blew on an ember and found a slight orange glow. I have to hang on to my life-however ruined and useless. Mama’s voice comes floating to me, reciting one of her favorite sayings, “There is no catastrophe except death; one cannot be poorer than a beggar.” I want-need-to do something braver and finer than dying.

I go to the hatch and climb down the ladder. The fisherman clamps and locks the hatch. In the sepulchral light I find May. I sit down next to her. Wordlessly, she shows me Mama’s dowry bag, and then she glances up. I follow her gaze. The last of our money is still safe in the crevice.

A FEW DAYS after we arrive in Hong Kong, we read that the areas surrounding Shanghai have been under attack all this time. The reports are almost too much to bear. Chapei has been bombed and burned to the ground. Hongkew, where we lived, hasn’t fared much better. The French Concession and the International Settlement-as foreign territories-are still safe. In a city where there isn’t room for another rat, more and more refugees arrive. According to the paper, the foreign concessions’ quarter-million residents are flummoxed by the crowding caused by three and a half million refugees living on the streets and in converted movie theaters, dance halls, and racecourses. Those concessions-surrounded as they are on all sides by the dwarf bandits-are now being called the Lonely Island. The terror hasn’t been limited to Shanghai. Every day brings news of women being abducted, raped, or killed throughout China. Canton, not so far from us here in Hong Kong, suffers from heavy air raids. Mama wanted us to go to Baba’s home village, but what will we find once we get there? Will it be burned to the ground? Will anyone be alive? Will our father’s name mean anything anymore in Yin Bo?

We live in a hotel on Hong Kong ’s waterfront. It’s dirty, dusty, and louse-ridden. The mosquito netting is sooty and ripped. The things we ignored in Shanghai are all too vivid here: families crouched on street corners with their worldly goods spread on a blanket before them, hoping someone will stop to buy. Nevertheless, the British act as though the monkey people will never come to the colony. “We aren’t involved in this war,” they say in their crisp accents. “The Japs dare not attack here.” With so little money, we’re reduced to eating stewed rice bran, a meal often given to pigs. The bran scratches the throat on the way in and is ruinous on the way out. We have no skills, and no one has need for beautiful girls, because there’s no point in promoting beautiful girls when the world’s turning ugly.

Then one day we see Pockmarked Huang get out of a limousine and bound up the steps of the Peninsula Hotel. There’s no mistaking him. We go back to our hotel and lock ourselves in our room. We try to figure out what his presence in Hong Kong means. Has he come here to escape the war? Has he moved the Green Gang’s operations here? We don’t know, and we don’t have a safe way to find out. But no matter what, his reach his great. If he’s here in the south, then he’ll find us.

Out of options, we go to the Dollar Steamship Line office, exchange our original tickets, and procure spots in special second class on the President Coolidge for the twenty-day voyage to San Francisco. We don’t think about what will happen once we get there, finding our husbands, or anything like that. We’re just trying to stay out of the Green Gang’s net and stay ahead of the Japanese.

ON THE SHIP, my fever comes back. I stay in our cabin and sleep for most of the journey. May’s plagued with seasickness, so she spends most of her time outside in the fresh air on the second-class deck. She speaks of a young man who’s going to Princeton to study.

“He’s in first class, but he comes to our deck to see me. We walk and talk, and walk and talk some more,” she reports. “I’ve fallen for him like a ton of bricks.” It’s the first time I’ve heard the American phrase, and it strikes me as odd. This boy must be very Westernized. No wonder May likes him.

Sometimes May doesn’t come back to the room until very late at night. Sometimes she climbs to the top bunk and goes right to sleep, but sometimes she crawls into the narrow bed with me and wraps her arms around me. She matches her breathing to mine and falls asleep. I lie awake then, afraid to move out of fear of waking her, and worrying, worrying, worrying. May seems very smitten with this boy, and I wonder if she’s doing the husband-wife thing with him. But how could she when she’s so seasick? How could she, period? And then my thoughts spiral to even darker places.

Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it’s just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we’ve been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we’re on, wherever it takes us.

Shadows on the Walls

THE NIGHT BEFORE we land, I pull out the coaching book Sam gave me and leaf through it. The book says that Old Man Louie was born in America and that Sam, one of five brothers, was born in China in 1913, the Year of the Ox, during one of his parents’ visits to their home village of Wah Hong, which makes him an American citizen because he was born to one. (He’d have to be an Ox, I think dismissively. Mama said that those born under this sign lack imagination and are forever pulling the burdens of the world.) Sam went back to Los Angeles with his parents, but in 1920, the old man and his wife decided to go China again and then leave their son, only seven years old, in Wah Hong with his paternal grandparents. (This is something different from what I’d been led to believe. I had thought Sam came to China with his father and brother to find a bride, but he was already there. I suppose this explains why he spoke to me in the Sze Yup dialect instead of English on the three occasions we met, but why hadn’t the Louies told us any of that?) Now Sam has returned to America for the first time in seventeen years. Vern was born in Los Angeles in 1923, the Year of the Boar, and has lived there all his life. The other brothers were born in 1907, 1908, and 1911-all of them born in Wah Hong, all of them now living in Los Angeles. I do my best to memorize the tiny details-the various birth dates, the addresses in Wah Hong and Los Angeles, and the like-tell May the things I think are important, then put the rest out of my mind.

The next morning, November 15, we get up early and put on our best Western-style dresses. “We’re guests in this country,” I say. “We should look like we belong.” May agrees, and she slips into a dress that Madame Garnet made for her a year ago. How is it that the silk and buttons made it all the way here without being soiled or ruined, while I…? I have to stop thinking that way.

We gather our things and give our two bags to the porter. Then May and I go outside and find a spot by the rail, but we can’t see much in the rain. Above us, the Golden Gate Bridge is draped in clouds. To our right, the city perches on the shore-wet, dreary, and insignificant compared with Shanghai ’s Bund. Below us on the open-air steerage deck, what seems like hundreds of coolies, rickshaw pullers, and peasants push and shove against one another in a writhing mass, the smell of their wet and stinking clothes wafting up to us.

The ship docks at a pier. Little family groups from first and second class-laughing, jostling, and happy to have arrived-show their papers and then walk down a gangplank covered to protect them from the rain. When our turn comes, we hold out our papers. The inspector looks them over, frowns, and motions to a crew member.

“These two need to go to the Angel Island Immigration Station,” he says.

We follow the crewman through the corridors of the ship and down flights of stairs to where the air is dank. I’m relieved when we step outside again until I see that we’re now with the steerage passengers. Naturally, no umbrellas or awnings cover this deck. Cold wind blows rain into our faces and soaks our clothes.

Around us people frantically pore over their coaching books. Then the man next to us tears a page from his book, stuffs it in his mouth, chews for a bit, and swallows it. I hear someone else say that he dropped his book into the waves the night before and another boast that he threw his into the latrine. “Good luck to anyone who wants to look for it now!” Anxiety clenches my stomach. Was I supposed to get rid of the book? Sam didn’t tell me that. Now I have no way to get to it, because it’s tucked in my hat in our luggage. I take a deep breath and try to reassure myself We have nothing to be afraid of. We’re out of China, away from the war, and in the land of the free and all that.

May and I elbow our way through the smelly laborers to the railing. Couldn’t they have washed before we landed? What kind of an impression do they want to give our hosts? May has something else on her mind altogether. She watches the people still filing off the first-and second-class decks, searching for the young man she’s been spending time with on the voyage. She grips my arm excitedly when she sees him.

“There he is! That’s Spencer.” She raises her voice and calls. “Spencer! Spencer! Look up here! Can you help us?”

She waves and calls a few more times, but he doesn’t turn to look for her standing at the rail of the third-class deck. Her face tightens as he tips the porters and then strolls with a group of Caucasian passengers into a building to the right.

From deep within the ship, cargo is brought up in big netted bundles and deposited on the pier. From there, most of the cargo goes straight on to the customshouse. Pretty soon, we see those same crates and boxes leave customs and get loaded onto trucks. Duties have been paid and the goods go on their way to new destinations, but we continue to wait in the rain.

Some crewmen hoist another gangplank-this one with no protection from the weather-onto the lower deck, where we are. A lo fan in a slicker bounds up the gangplank and climbs onto a crate. “Take everything you brought with you,” he shouts in English. “Anything you leave will be thrown away.”

People around us mumble, confused.

“What’s he saying?”

“Be quiet. I can’t hear.”

“Hurry up!” the man in the slicker demands. “Chop! Chop!”

“Do you understand him?” a soaked and shivering man next to me asks. “What does he want us to do?”

“Take your belongings and get off the boat.”

As we begin doing what we’re told, the man in the slicker puts his balled fists on his hips and yells, “And stay together!”

We disembark, with everyone pushing against one another as though it’s the most important thing in the world to be the first off the ship. When our feet touch ground, we’re marched not into the building to the right, where the other passengers went, but to the left, along the pier, and then across a tiny gangplank and onto a small boat-all without explanation. Once on board, I see that, although there are a few Caucasians and even a handful of Japanese, almost everyone here is Chinese.

The lines are let go, and we pull back into the bay.

“Where are we going now?” May asks.

How can May be so disconnected from what’s happening around us? Why can’t she pay attention? Why couldn’t she have read the coaching book? Why can’t she accept what’s become of us? That Princeton student, whatever his name is, understood her position perfectly, but May refuses to consider it.

“We’re going to the Angel Island Immigration Station,” I explain.

“Oh,” she says lightly. “All right.”

The rain gets heavier and the wind colder. The little boat bobs in the waves. People throw up. May hangs her head over the rail and gulps in wet air. We pass an island in the middle of the bay, and for a few minutes it looks like we’re going to chug back under the Golden Gate Bridge, out to sea, and return to China. May moans and tries to stay focused on the horizon. Then the boat veers to the right, curves around another island and into a small inlet, where it pulls up to a wharf at the end of a long dock. Low-slung white wooden buildings nestle on the hillside. Ahead, four stubby palm trees shiver in the wind and the wet flag of the United States slaps noisily against its pole. A large sign reads NO SMOKING. Again everyone pushes to be first off the boat.

“Whites without satisfactory paperwork first!” that same man in the slicker shouts, as though his higher decibels will somehow make the people who don’t understand English suddenly fluent, but of course most of the Chinese don’t know what he’s saying. The white passengers are pulled out of the line and brought forward, while a couple of squat and very solid guards push away the Chinese who’ve made the mistake of standing at the front of the line. But these lo fan don’t understand much of what the man in the slicker is saying either. They are, I realize, White Russians. They’re lower than the poorest Shanghainese, and yet they’re given special treatment! They’re led off the boat and escorted into the building. What happens next is even more shocking. The Japanese and Koreans are grouped together and politely led to a different door in the building. “We’re ready for you now,” the man in the slicker instructs. “When you get off the boat, line up in two lines. Men on the left. Women and children under twelve on the right.”

There’s a lot of confusion and a lot of manhandling by the guards, but once they line us up the way they want, we’re led in the driving rain along the dock to the Administration Building. When the men are sent through one door and the women and children through another-separating husbands from wives and fathers from families-cries of consternation, fright, and worry fill the air. None of the guards shows any sympathy. We are treated more poorly than the cargo that traveled with us.

The separation of Europeans (meaning all whites), Asiatics (meaning anyone from across the Pacific who isn’t Chinese), and Chinese continues as we’re marched up a steep hill to a medical facility in one of the wooden buildings. A white woman wearing a white uniform and a starched white cap folds her hands in front of her and begins speaking in English in that same loud voice that’s somehow supposed to make up for the fact that no one except May and I understands what she’s saying.

“Many of you are trying to enter our country with loathsome and dangerous parasitic diseases,” she says. “This is unacceptable. The doctors and I are going to check you for trachoma, hookworm, filariasis, and liver fluke.”

The women around us start to cry. They don’t know what this woman wants, but she’s wearing white-the color of death. A Chinese woman in a long white (again!) cheongsam is brought in to translate. I’ve been moderately calm up to now, but as I listen to what these people plan to do to us, I start to tremble. We’re to be picked over like rice being prepared for cooking. When we’re told to undress, murmurs of distress ripple through the room. Not so long ago I would have snickered with May about the other women’s prudishness, because we hadn’t been like most Chinese women. We’d been beautiful girls. Good or bad, we’d shown our bodies. But most Chinese women are very private, never exposing themselves publicly and rarely even in private before their husbands or even their daughters.

But whatever looseness I had in the past has disappeared for good. I can’t bear to be unclothed. I can’t stand to be touched. I cling to May, and she steadies me. Even when the nurse tries to separate us, May stays with me. I bite my lips to keep from screaming when the doctor approaches. I look over his shoulder and out the window. I’m afraid that if I close my eyes I’ll be back in that shack with those men, hearing Mama’s screams, feeling… I keep my eyes wide open. Everything’s white and clean… well, cleaner than my memories of the shack. I pretend I don’t feel the icy chill of the doctor’s instruments or the white softness of his hands on my flesh; I stare out across the bay. We face away from San Francisco now, and all I see is gray water disappearing into gray rain.

Land has to be out there, but I have no idea how far it is. Once he’s done with me, I allow myself to breathe again.

One by one, the doctor makes his examinations while we all wait-shivering from cold and fear-until everyone has given a stool sample. So far we’ve been separated from other races, then men separated from women, and now we women are separated yet again: one group to go to the dormitory, one to stay in the hospital for treatment for hookworm, which can be cured, and one for those with liver fluke, to be instantly and without appeal deported back to China. Now the tears really flow.

May and I are in the group that goes to the women’s dormitory on the second floor of the Administration Building. Once we’re inside, the door is locked behind us. Rows of bunks two across and three high are connected to one another by iron poles attached to the ceiling and floor. There are no “beds” to sleep on, just wire mesh. This means that the frames can be folded up to create more space in the room, but apparently no one wants to sit on the floor. The distance between bunks is barely eighteen inches. The vertical gaps between the bunks are so tight that at first glance I can see I won’t be able to extend my arm without hitting the one above. Only the top bunk has enough space to sit upright, but that area is cluttered with drying laundry of the women already here, which hangs on strings tied between the poles at the ends of the bunks. On the floor beneath each occupied tier of bunks are a few tin bowls and cups.

May leaves my side and hurries down the center aisle. She claims two top bunks next to each other near the radiator. She climbs up, lies down, and promptly goes to sleep. No one brings our luggage. All we have with us are the clothes we’re wearing and our handbags.

THE NEXT MORNING May and I straighten up as best we can. The guards tell us we’re going to a hearing before the Board of Special Inquiry, but the women in the dormitory call it an interrogation. Just the word sounds ominous. One of the women suggests we sip cold water to calm our fear, but I’m not afraid. We have nothing to hide, and this is just a formality.

We’re herded with a small group of women into a room that looks like a cage. We sit on benches and stare at one another pensively. We Chinese have a phrase-eating bitterness. I tell myself that, whatever happens with our hearings, it won’t be as bad as the physical inspection, and it can’t be as bad as what has happened to May and me day after day since the moment Baba announced he had arranged marriages for us.

“Tell them what I told you to say and everything will be fine,” I whisper to May as we wait in the cage. “Then we’ll be able to leave this place.”

She nods thoughtfully. When the guard calls her name, I watch her enter a room and the door close. A moment later, the same guard motions me to another room. I put on a false smile, straighten my dress, and stride in with what I hope is an air of confidence. Two white men-one nearly bald, one with a mustache, and both wearing glasses-sit behind a table in the windowless room. They don’t return my smile. At a table set to the side, another white man busily cleans the keys on his typewriter. A Chinese man in an ill-fitting Western-style suit studies a file in his hands, looks at me and then back at the file.

“I see you were born in Yin Bo Village,” he says to me in Sze Yup as he passes the file to the bald man. “I am happy to speak to you in the dialect of the Four Districts.”

Before I can say that I know English, the bald man says, “Tell her to sit down.”

The interpreter motions to a chair. “I am Louie Fon,” he goes on in Sze Yup. “Your husband and I share the same clan name and the same home district.” He sits to my left. “The bald one before you is Chairman Plumb. The other one is Mr. White. The recorder is Mr. Hemstreet. You don’t have to concern yourself with him-”

“Let’s get on with it,” Chairman Plumb cuts in. “Ask her…”

Things go well at first. I know the date and year of my birth in both the Western and the lunar calendars. They ask the name of the village where I was born. Then I name the village where Sam was born and the day we were married. I recite the address where Sam and his family live in Los Angeles. And then…

“How many trees are in front of your alleged husband’s home in his village?”

When I don’t answer right away, four sets of eyes stare at me-curious, bored, triumphant, snide.

“Five trees stand before the house,” I answer, remembering what I read in the coaching book. “The right side of the house has no trees. A ginkgo tree grows on the left.”

“And how many rooms are in the house where your natal family lives?”

I’ve been so focused on the answers from Sam’s coaching book that I haven’t considered they’d ask anything so detailed about me. I try to think what the right answer would be. Count the bathrooms or not? Count before or after the rooms were divided for our boarders?

“Six main rooms-”

Before I can explain myself, they ask how many guests were at my “alleged” wedding.

“Seven,” I answer.

“Did you and your guests have anything to eat?”

“We had rice and eight dishes. It was a hotel dinner, not a banquet.”

“How was the table set?”

“Western style but with chopsticks.”

“Did you serve betel nuts to the guests? Did you pour tea?”

I want to say I’m not a country bumpkin, so under no circumstances would I have served betel nuts. I would have poured tea if I’d had the wedding I’d dreamed of, but that night was hardly festive. I remember how dismissively Old Man Louie waved away my father’s suggestion that May and I perform the ritual.

“It was a civilized wedding,” I say. “Very Western-”

“Did you worship your ancestors as part of the ceremony?”

“Of course not. I’m Christian.”

“Do you have any documentary evidence for your alleged marriage?”

“In my luggage.”

“Is your husband expecting you?”

This question momentarily takes me aback. Old Man Louie and his sons know we didn’t show up in Hong Kong to take the ship here with them. They certainly notified the Green Gang that we failed to fulfill our part of the contract, but did they tell the Angel Island inspectors any of that? And do the old man and his sons still expect us to arrive?

“My sister and I were delayed in our travels because of the monkey people,” I say. “Our husbands long for our arrival.”

After the interpreter relays this, the two inspectors speak between themselves, not knowing I understand every word.

“She seems honest enough,” Mr. White says. “But her papers claim she’s the wife of a legally domiciled merchant and the wife of an American citizen. She can’t be both.”

“This could be an error in past paperwork. Either way, we’d have to let her in.” Chairman Plumb grimaces sourly. “But she hasn’t proven either status. And look at her face. Does she look like a merchant’s wife to you? She’s so dark. I bet she’s worked in rice paddies her entire life.”

There it is. The same old complaint. I look down, afraid they’ll see the flush creep up my neck. I think of the girl on the boat we took to Hong Kong and how the pirate appraised her. Now these men are doing the same with me. Do I really appear that country?

“But consider how she’s dressed. She doesn’t look like a laborer’s wife either,” Mr. White points out.

Chairman Plumb thrums his fingers on the table. “I’ll let her through, but I want to see her marriage certificate showing she’s married to a legitimate merchant or something proving her husband’s citizenship.” He looks at the interpreter. “On what day are the women allowed to go to the wharf to get things from their luggage?”

“Tuesdays, sir.”

“All right then. Let’s hold her over until next week. Tell her to bring her marriage certificate next time.” He nods to the recorder and begins dictating a synopsis, ending with “We are deferring the case for further investigation.”

FOR FIVE DAYS May and I wear the same clothes. At night we wash our underwear and hang it to dry with the laundry the other women drape above our heads. We still have a little money to buy toothpaste and other toiletries from a small concession stand open during mealtimes. When Tuesday arrives, we line up with women who want to get things from their luggage and are escorted by white missionary women to a warehouse at the end of the wharf May and I get our marriage papers, and then I check to see if the coaching book is still hidden. It is. No one has bothered to search inside my hat with the feathers. I now pull at the lining and hide it properly. Then I grab fresh undergarments and a change of clothes.

Every morning, embarrassed to be seen naked by the other women, I dress under the blanket on my bed. Then I wait to be called back to the hearing room, but no one comes for us. If we aren’t called by nine, then we know nothing will happen that day. When afternoon arrives, a new feeling of anticipation and dread fills the room. At precisely four, the guard enters and calls, “Sai gaai,” which is a bastardization of one of the Cantonese dialects for hou sai gaai, which means good fortune. Then he lists the names of those allowed to get on the boat to complete the final leg of their journey to America. Once the guard approaches a woman and rubs his eyes as though he were crying. He laughs when he tells her she’s being sent back to China. We never learn the reason for her deportation.

Over the next few days, we watch as the women who arrived the same day we did are allowed to continue to San Francisco. We see new women land, have their hearings, and leave. Still no one comes for us. Every night, after another disgusting meal of pig knuckles or stewed salted fish with fermented bean curd, I take off my dress under the blanket, hang it on the line above me, and try to sleep, knowing I’ll be locked in this room until morning.

But the feeling of being locked in and trapped extends far, far beyond this room. In a different time, in a different place, and with more money maybe May and I could have escaped our futures. But here we don’t have choice or freedom. Our whole lives up to now have been lost to us. We know no one in the United States other than our husbands and our father-in-law. Baba had said that if we went to Los Angeles, we’d live in beautiful houses, have servants, see movie stars, so maybe this is the path May and I were supposed to be on all along. We could consider ourselves lucky we’ve married so well. Women-whether in arranged marriages or not, whether in the past or right now, in 1937-have married for money and all that it brings. Still, I have a secret plan. When May and I get to Los Angeles, we’ll skim money from what our husbands give us to buy clothes and shoes, beautify ourselves, and keep our households running, and use it to escape. I lie on the wire mesh that is my bed, listen to the low, mournful sound of the foghorn and to the women in the room cry snore, or whisper among themselves, and plot how May and I will leave Los Angeles one day and disappear to New ’York or Paris, cities we’ve been told are equal to Shanghai in splendor, culture, and riches.

TWO TUESDAYS LATER, when we’re allowed to retrieve things from our luggage again, May fishes out the peasant clothes she bought for us in Hangchow. We wear them in the afternoons and at night, because it’s too cold and dirty in this place to wear our good dresses, which we put on in the mornings in case we’re called to finish our hearings. In the middle of the following week, May takes to wearing our travel clothes all the time. “What if we’re called for an interview?” I ask. We sit on our top bunks with a little valley of space separating us and clothes hanging like banners all around us. “Do you think this is so different from Shanghai? Our clothes matter. Those who are well dressed leave sooner than those who look like…” My voice trails off.

“Peasants?” May finishes for me. She folds her arms over her stomach and lets her shoulders fall. She doesn’t look like herself. We’ve been here a month now, and it feels like all the courage she showed getting me to safety has somehow been sucked out of her. Her skin looks pasty. She isn’t terribly interested in washing her hair, which, like mine, has grown out into a straggly mess.

“Come on, May, you have to try. We won’t be here much longer. Take a shower and put on a dress. You’ll feel better.”

“Why? Just tell me why. I can’t eat their terrible food, so I rarely use their toilets,” she says. “I don’t do anything, so I don’t sweat. But even if I did, why would I take a shower where people can see me? The humiliation is so great I wish I could wear a sack over my head. Besides,” she adds pointedly, “I don’t see you going to the toilets or showers.”

Which is true. Sadness and despair overwhelm those who stay here too long. The cold wind, the foggy days, the shadows on the walls, depress and frighten all of us. In just this month, I’ve seen many women, some who’ve already come and gone, refuse to take showers during their entire stays, and not just because they don’t sweat. Too many women have committed suicide in the showers by hanging or by sharpening chopsticks and driving them through their ears and into their brains. No one wants to go to the showers not only because no one likes to do her private business with others around but because nearly everyone here is afraid of the ghosts of the dead, who, without proper burial rites, refuse to leave the nasty place where they died.

We decide that, from now on, May will go with me to the communal toilets or showers, check to see if they’re empty, and then stand outside the door to keep the other women out. I’ll do the same for her, although I’m not sure why she’s become so modest since arriving here.

AT LAST THE guard calls us for our interrogations. I run a brush through my hair, take a few sips of cold water to calm myself, and slip on my heels. I glance back to see May trailing after me, looking like a beggar magically dropped here from a Shanghai alley. We wait in the cage until our turns come. This is our last step and then we’ll be transferred to San Francisco. I give May an encouraging smile, which she doesn’t return, and then I follow the guard into the hearing room. Chairman Plumb, Mr. White, and the stenographer are there, but this time I have a new interpreter.

“I’m Lan On Tai,” he says. “From now on you will have a different interpreter for each hearing. They don’t want us to become friends. I will speak to you in Sze Yup. Do you understand, Louie Chin-shee?”

In the old Chinese tradition a married woman is known by her clan name with shee attached to it. This practice can be traced back three thousand years to the Chou dynasty and it’s still common with farmers, but I’m from Shanghai!

“That is your name, isn’t it?” the interpreter asks. When I don’t answer right away, he glances at the white men and then back at me. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but your case has problems. It’s best if you accept what’s in your record. Don’t change your story now.”

“But I never said my name was-”

“Sit down!” Chairman Plumb orders. Even though I pretended not to know English during our last meeting and now, after the interpreter’s warning, feel sure I should stick to my feigned ignorance, I obey, hoping that the chairman will believe the tone in his voice scared me. “In your last interview you said you had a civilized wedding, which is why you didn’t worship your ancestors as part of the ceremonies. We have your husband’s file right here, and he says you did worship your ancestors.”

I wait for the interpreter to relay this, then reply, “I told you before, I’m a Christian. I don’t worship ancestors. Perhaps my husband worshipped his after we parted.”

“How long were you together?”

“One night.” Even I know this sounds bad.

“Do you expect us to believe you were married for one day and now your husband has sent for you?”

“Our marriage was arranged.”

“By a matchmaker?”

I try to think how Sam would have responded to this question in his interrogation.

“Yes, a matchmaker.”

The interpreter gives a subtle nod to let me know I answered correctly.

“You said you didn’t serve betel nuts and tea, but your sister says you did,” Chairman Plumb says, tapping another file, which I assume covers May’s case.

As I look at the bald man before me, waiting for the interpreter to finish the translation, I wonder if this is a trick. Why would May have said that? She wouldn’t.

“Neither my sister nor I served tea or betel nuts.”

This is not the answer the two men want. Lan On Tai looks at me with a combination of pity and aggravation.

Chairman Plumb moves on. “You said you had a civilized wedding, but your sister says that neither of you wore a veil.”

I’m torn between berating myself and May for not being more diligent in working on our stories and questioning why any of this matters.

“We had civilized weddings,” I say, “but neither of us wore veils.”

“Did you raise your veil during the wedding banquet?”

“I already told you I didn’t wear a veil.”

“Why do you say only seven people came to the banquet, when your husband, father-in-law, and sister say there were many occupied tables in the room?”

I feel sick to my stomach. What’s happening here?

“We were a small party in a hotel restaurant where other guests were dining.”

“You said your family home consists of six rooms, but your sister says many more and your husband stated the house is grand.” Chairman Plumb’s face turns crimson as he demands, “Why are you lying?”

“There are different ways to count the rooms and my husband-”

“Let’s go back to your wedding. Was your wedding banquet on the first floor or upstairs?”

And on it goes: Did I take a train after my marriage? Did I ride on a boat? Are the houses where I lived with my parents built in rows? How many houses stood between our house and the main street? How do I know if I was married according to the old custom or the new custom if I had a matchmaker and didn’t wear a veil? Why don’t my alleged sister and I speak the same dialect?

The questioning continues for eight straight hours-with no break for lunch or to use the toilet. By the end, Chairman Plumb is red-faced and weary. As he recites his synopsis for the stenographer, I boil with frustration. Every other sentence begins “The applicant’s alleged sister states…” I can understand-barely-how my responses might be taken to mean something different from those given by Sam or Old Man Louie, but how could May have given such completely different answers from mine?

The interpreter shows no emotion as he translates Chairman Plumb’s conclusion: “It would appear that there are many contradictions which should not exist, particularly concerning the home the applicant shared with her alleged sister. While the applicant adequately answers the queries concerning her alleged husband’s home village, her alleged sister seems to have no knowledge whatsoever of her husband, his family, or his family home, either in Los Angeles or in China. Therefore it is the unanimous opinion of the board that this applicant, as well as her alleged sister, be reexamined until the contradictions can be resolved.” The interpreter then looks at me. “Have you understood everything that’s been asked of you?”

I answer, “Yes,” but I’m furious-with these awful men and their persistent questioning, with myself for not being smarter, but most of all with May. Her laziness has caused us to be detained even longer on this horrible island.

She isn’t in the holding cage when I leave the room and I have to sit there and wait for another woman whose interrogation also hasn’t gone well. After another hour, the woman is pulled from her hearing room by her arm. The cage is unlocked and the guard motions to me, but we don’t go back to the dormitory on the second floor of the Administration Building. Rather, we walk across the property to another wood-framed building. At the end of the hall is a door with a small window covered with fine mesh and ROOM NO. I printed above it. We may feel like we are in jail on this island and in our locked dormitory, but this is the real door to imprisonment. The woman wails and tries to pull away from the guard, but he’s far stronger than she could ever be. He opens the door, pushes her into the darkness, and locks her inside.

I’m now alone with a very large white man. I have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape. I shake uncontrollably. And then the strangest thing happens. His contemptuous sneer melts into something resembling compassion.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he says. “We’re just short-handed tonight.” He shakes his head. “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?” He gestures back toward the door we entered. “We need to go that way, so I can take you back to the dormitory,” he goes on, elongating and exaggerating the words so that his lips stretch into the twisted features of a temple demon statue. “Got it?”

Later, as I walk the length of the dormitory back to May’s and my bunks, my emotions are in a frenzy-yes, that’s the word-of anger, fear, and frustration. The other women’s eyes follow each step as my high heels click on the linoleum floor. Some of us have lived together for a month now and in very close quarters. We’re attuned to one another’s moods and know when to back off or offer comfort. Now I feel the women ripple away from me, as though I’m a large boulder that’s been dropped into a very peaceful pond.

May perches on the edge of her bunk, her legs dangling. She cocks her head in the way she has since she was a small girl and knew she was in trouble.

“What took so long? I’ve been waiting for you for hours.”

“What have you done, May? What have you done?”

She ignores my questions. “You missed lunch. But I brought you some rice.”

She opens her hand and shows me a misshapen ball of rice. I slap it from her palm. The women around us look away.

“Why did you lie in there?” I ask. “Why would you do that?”

Her legs swing back and forth like she’s a child whose feet don’t yet reach the floor. I stare up at her, breathing heavily through my nose. I’ve never been this angry with her. This isn’t a pair of muddied shoes or a borrowed blouse that’s been stained.

“I didn’t understand what they were saying. I don’t know that singsong Sze Yup. I only know the northern song of Shanghai.”

“And that’s my fault?” But even as I say it, I realize I share some responsibility for this. I know she doesn’t understand the dialect of our ancestral home. Why didn’t I think of that? But the Dragon in me is still stubborn and mad.

“We’ve been through so much, but you couldn’t take five minutes on the ship to look at the coaching book.”

When she shrugs, a wave of fury sweeps through me.

“Do you want them to send us back?”

She doesn’t respond, but the predictable tears form.

“Is that what you want?” I persist.

Now those predictable tears fall and drip onto her baggy jacket, staining the cloth with slowly spreading blue splotches. But if she’s predictable, so am I.

I shake her legs. The older sister, who’s always right, demands, “What’s wrong with you?”

She mumbles something.

“What?”

She stops swinging her legs. She keeps her face tucked low, but I’m looking up at her and she can’t avoid me. She mumbles again.

“Say it so I can hear it,” I rasp impatiently.

She tilts her head, meets my eyes, and whispers just loud enough for me to hear. “I’m pregnant.”

Isle of the Immortals

MAY ROLLS OVER and buries her face in her pillow to stifle her sobs. I look around, and it seems like the other women are either ignoring us or pretending to ignore us. It’s the Chinese way.

I kick off my shoes and climb up the bunk’s tiers and onto May’s bed.

“I thought you didn’t do the husband-wife thing with Vernon,” I whisper.

“I didn’t,” she manages to get out. “I couldn’t.”

A guard comes in and announces it’s time for dinner, and the women scurry to be first out the door. As bad as the food is, dinner is more important than an argument between two sisters. If any edible pieces exist in tonight’s meal, they want to be first to get them. After a few minutes, we’re alone and no longer have to whisper.

“Was it that boy you met on the ship?” I can’t even remember his name.

“It was before that.”

Before that? We were in the hospital in Hangchow and then the hotel in Hong Kong. I don’t see how anything could have happened during that time, unless it was when I was sick, or earlier, when I was unconscious. Was it one of the doctors who took care of me? Was she raped when we were trying to get to the Grand Canal? I’ve been too ashamed to talk about what happened to me. Has she kept a similar secret all this time? I creep around the topic by asking what seems like a practical question.

“How long has it been?”

She sits up, rubs her eyes with both hands, and then stares at me with sorrow, humiliation, and pleading. She pulls her legs under her so our knees touch, and then she slowly unbuttons the frogs of her peasant jacket and smoothes her hands over her shirt to reveal her belly. She’s pretty far along, which explains why she’s been hiding under baggy clothes almost from the moment we arrived at Angel Island.

“Was it Tommy?” I ask, hoping it was.

Mama always wanted May and Tommy to marry. With Tommy and Mama dead, wouldn’t this be a gift? But when May says, “He was just a friend,” I don’t know what to think. My sister went out with a lot of different young men in Shanghai, especially in those last days, when we were so desperate to forget our circumstances. But I don’t know their names, and I don’t want to interrogate her with questions like “Was it that young man that night at the Venus Club?” or “Was it that American Betsy used to bring around sometimes?” Wouldn’t that approach be as ridiculous and stupid as what I’ve gone through today? But I can’t keep my tongue from flapping.

“Was it that student who came to live in the second-floor pavilion?” I don’t remember much about him other than that he was thin, wore gray and kept to himself. What did he study? I can’t say, but I haven’t forgotten how he hovered over Mama’s chair the day of the bombing. Did he do that because he was in love with May, as so many young men were?

“I was already pregnant then,” May confesses.

A disgusting thought enters my mind. “Tell me it wasn’t Captain Yamasaki.” If May’s going to have a half-Japanese baby, I don’t know what I’ll do.

She shakes her head, and I’m relieved.

“You never met him,” May says in a quavering voice. “I barely met him. It was just a thing I did. I didn’t think this would happen. If I’d had more time, I would have asked an herbalist to give me something to expel the baby. But I didn’t. Oh, Pearl, everything’s my fault.” She grabs my hands and begins to weep again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” I say, trying to sound comforting but knowing it’s an empty promise.

“How could we possibly be all right? Haven’t you thought about what this means?”

To tell the truth, I haven’t. I haven’t had months to think about May’s condition. I’ve had barely two minutes.

“We can’t go to Los Angeles right away.” May pauses and stares at me appraisingly “You understand we have to go there, right?”

“I haven’t seen another way. But even forgetting about this”-I point to her belly-“we don’t know if they’ll want us anymore.”

“Of course they will. They bought us! But there’s the problem of the baby. At first I thought I’d be able to get away with it. I didn’t do the husband-wife thing with Vernon, but he wasn’t going to say anything. Then Old Man Louie went through our sheets-”

“You knew even then?”

“You were there when I threw up in the restaurant. I was so scared. I thought someone would figure it out. I thought you would guess.”

Now, as I think about it, I realize many people understood what I was too ignorant and blind to see. The old woman whose house we stopped at on our first night out of Shanghai had taken particular care with May. The doctor in Hangchow had been very solicitous, wanting May to sleep. I’m May’s jie jie, and I’ve always thought we are as close as can be, but I’ve been so concerned with my own miseries-losing Z.G., leaving home, being raped, almost dying, getting here-that I haven’t paid attention every time May has thrown up these past weeks and months. I haven’t noticed whether or not the little red sister has visited May. And I can’t even remember the last time I saw her completely undressed. I’ve abandoned my sister when she needed me most.

“I’m so sorry-”

“Pearl! You aren’t paying attention to what I’m saying! How can we go to Los Angeles now? That boy is not the father and Old Man Louie knows it.”

All this is happening too fast, and it’s been a long, hard day. I haven’t eaten since the bowl of jook at breakfast, and I’m not going to get dinner. But I’m not so tired and worn out that I don’t see May has something in mind. After all, she told me she was pregnant only because I’d gotten mad at her because…

“You lied to the board on purpose. You did at the first interview.”

“The baby needs to be born here on Angel Island,” she says.

I’m the smart sister, but my mind races to keep up with her.

“You were already prepared to lie when the ship sailed into San Francisco,” I say finally. “That’s why you didn’t study the coaching book. You didn’t want to answer correctly. You wanted to end up here.”

“That’s not quite right. I hoped Spencer would help me-us. He made promises on the ship. He said he would take care of things so we wouldn’t have to go to Los Angeles. He lied.” She shrugs. “Does it surprise you after Baba? My next option was coming here. Don’t you see? If I have the baby here, they’ll never know it was mine.”

“They?”

“The Louies,” she says impatiently. “You have to take it. I’m giving him to you. You did the husband-wife thing with Sam. The timing is almost right.”

I pull my hands from hers and lean away from her.

“What are you saying?”

“The doctors said you probably can’t have a baby. This could save me and help you.”

But I don’t want a baby-not now, perhaps not ever. I don’t want to be married either-at least not through an arrangement or to pay my father’s debts. There has to be another way.

“If you don’t want it, then give it to the missionaries,” I suggest. “They’ll take him. They’ve got that Chinese Babies Aid society they’re always talking about. They’ll keep it separate from diseased women.”

“Pearl! This is my baby! What other ties do we have to Mama and Baba? We’re daughters-the end of the line. Couldn’t my son be the beginning of a new line here in America?”

Of course we assume the baby is a boy. Like Chinese everywhere, we can’t imagine a child other than a son, who will bring great happiness to his family and guarantee that the ancestors are fed in the afterworld. Nevertheless, May’s plan will never work.

“I’m not pregnant and I can’t have the baby for you,” I say, pointing out the obvious.

Once again, May shows how much she’s been thinking about all this.

“You’ll have to wear the peasant clothes I bought for you. They cover everything. Those country women don’t want anyone to see their bodies-not to attract a man, not to show they’re with child. You didn’t notice how big my stomach had gotten, did you? Later, if you need to, you can put a pillow in your pants. Who’s going to look? Who’s going to care? But we do have to string out our time here.”

“For how long?”

“Another four months or so.”

I don’t know what else to do or say. She’s my sister, my only living relative as far as I know, and I promised Mama I’d take care of her. And like that, I make a decision that will affect the rest of my life… and May’s too.

“All right. I’ll do it.”

I’m so overwhelmed by everything that’s happened today that I don’t have the sense to ask how she’s going to deliver the baby and not have the authorities know about it.

THE HARSH REALITY of what we did by leaving China and coming here hits us hard in the coming weeks. Hopeful-stupid-people call Angel Island the Ellis Island of the West. Those who want to keep the Chinese out of America call it the Guardian of the Western Gate. We Chinese refer to it as the Isle of the Immortals. Time passes so slowly it feels as if we’re in the afterworld, that’s for sure. The days are long and staggered by a routine that is as expected and unremarkable as evacuating our bowels. Everything’s regulated. We have absolutely no choice about when or what we eat, when the lights are turned on or off, when we go to bed or get up. When you’re in prison, you lose all privileges.

When May’s belly gets larger, we move to a pair of adjacent lower bunks so she won’t have to climb so high. Every morning we wake up and dress. The guards escort us to the dining hall-a surprisingly small room given that on some days meals are served to over three hundred people. Like everything else on Angel Island, the dining hall is segregated. The Europeans, Asiatics, and Chinese all have their own cooks, food, and dining times. We have a half hour to eat breakfast and be completely out of the hall before the next group of detainees arrives. We sit at long wooden tables and eat bowls of jook, and then the guards escort us back to our dormitory and lock us in. Some women make tea using hot water from a pot kept atop the radiator. Others munch on food sent by family members in San Francisco: noodles, pickles, and dumplings. Most go back to sleep, waking only when the missionary ladies come to talk to us about their one God and teach us how to sew and knit. One matron feels sorry for me: pregnant and stranded on Angel Island. “Let me send a telegram to your husband,” she offers. “Once he knows you’re here and in the family way, he’ll come and sort out everything for you. You don’t want your baby to be born in this place. You’ll need a proper hospital.”

But I don’t want that kind of help, not yet anyway.

For lunch, we go to the dining hall for cold rice topped by bean sprouts that have been steamed to a soggy mess, jook with slivered pork, or tapioca soup with crackers. Dinner consists of one large dish-dried tofu and pork, potatoes and beef, lima beans and pork knuckles, or dried greens and sand dabs. They sometimes give us course red-grain rice barely fit to eat. Everything looks and tastes like it’s been chewed and swallowed once already. Some women take to putting pieces of meat from their bowls into mine. “For your son,” they say. I then have to find a way to transfer these luxuries to May.

“Why don’t your husbands come to visit?” a woman asks us one night at dinner. Her given name is Dustpan, but she goes by the married name of Lee-shee. She’s been detained even longer than May and I. “They could hire a lawyer for you. They could explain everything to the inspectors. You could leave tomorrow.”

May and I don’t answer that our husbands don’t know we’ve arrived and that they can’t know until the baby’s born, but sometimes I have to admit it would be a comfort to see them-even those nearly total strangers.

“Our husbands are far away,” May explains to Lee-shee and the other pitying women. “It’s very hard for my sister, especially at this time.”

Afternoons pass slowly. While the other women write to their families-people can send and receive as many letters as they want, although they have to pass through a censor’s hands-May and I talk. Or we look out a window-covered in wire mesh to make sure we don’t escape-and dream of our lost home. Or we work on our sewing and knitting, skills our mother never taught us. We sew diapers and little shirts. We try to knit baby sweaters, caps, and booties.

“Your son will be born a Tiger and will be influenced by the Earth element, which is strong this year,” a woman returning from a trip to her home village tells me during her three-day stay on Angel Island. “Your Tiger child will bring happiness and worry at the same time. He’ll be charming and bright, curious and inquisitive, affectionate and athletic. You’ll have plenty of exercise just keeping up with him!”

May usually remains silent during the advice given to us by the women, but this time she can’t help herself. “Will he truly be joyful? Will he have a happy life?”

“Happiness? Here in the Land of the Flowery Flag? I don’t know if happiness is possible in this country, but the Tiger has special attributes that could be helpful to your sister’s son. If he’s disciplined and loved equally, then a Tiger will respond with warmth and understanding. But you can never lie to a Tiger, because he will bound and thrash and do things that are wild and daring.”

“But aren’t those good characteristics?” May asks.

“Your sister is a Dragon. The Dragon and the Tiger will always fight for dominance. She must hope for a son-and what mother doesn’t wish for this thing?-because then their deeper positions will be clear. Every mother must obey her son, even if she is a Dragon. If your sister was a Sheep, I’d be concerned. The Tiger will usually protect its Sheep mother, but they are compatible only during good weather and easy times. Otherwise, the Tiger will leap away from the Sheep or he’ll tear her apart.”

May and I look at each other. We didn’t believe these things when Mama was alive. Why should we start now?

I TRY TO be sociable with detainees who speak the Sze Yup dialect, and my vocabulary improves as I remember words from my childhood, but truly, what’s the point in making conversation with these strangers? They never stay long enough for us to become friends, May can’t participate because she doesn’t understand them, and we both think it best if we keep to ourselves. We continue going to the communal toilets and the showers by ourselves, explaining that we don’t want to expose my son to the ghost spirits who linger in those areas. This, of course, doesn’t make sense. I’m not safer from ghosts when I go to the showers or toilet with just my sister instead of the group, but the women let it pass, agreeing I have the typical worries of an expectant mother.

The only changes in pattern come with our twice weekly excursions out of the Administration Building. On Tuesdays, we’re allowed to retrieve things from our bags on the wharf, and even though we never take anything new, it’s a relief to be in the fresh air. On Fridays, the missionary ladies lead us on a walk around the grounds. Angel Island is beautiful in many ways. We see deer and raccoons. We learn the names of the trees: eucalyptus, California live oak, and Torrey pine. We walk past the men’s barracks, which are segregated by race not only in the wings or floors but in the exercise yard as well. And while fences topped with barbed wire surround the entire Immigration Station, keeping it separated from whatever else is on the island, the men’s exercise yard has double fencing to keep them from escaping. But where could they escape to? Angel Island has been designed like Alcatraz, the island we passed on our way here. That too is an escape-proof prison. Those foolish or daring enough to swim for freedom are usually found days later washed up on a shore far from here. The difference between us and the inmates on the neighboring island is that we’ve done nothing wrong. Except that we have in the eyes of the lo fan.

In the Methodist mission school in Shanghai, our teachers talked about the one God and sin, about the virtues of Heaven and the horrors of Hell, but they hadn’t been completely forthright about how their compatriots felt about us. Between the women detainees and the interrogators, we learn that America doesn’t want us. Not only can we not become naturalized citizens but the government passed a law in 1882 barring the immigration of all Chinese, except those in four exempt classes: ministers, diplomats, students, and merchants. Whether a Chinese in these exempt classes or an American citizen of Chinese descent, you need to have a Certificate of Identity to land. This document needs to be carried at all times. Are the Chinese singled out for this special treatment? It wouldn’t surprise me.

“You can’t pretend to be a minister, a diplomat, or a student,” Lee-shee explains, as we eat our first Christmas dinner in the new land. “But it’s not hard to fake being a merchant.”

“That’s right,” agrees Dong-shee, another married woman, who arrived a week after May and me. She’s the one who told us the reason we have brittle wire mesh to sleep on instead of mattresses is that the lo fan don’t think we’ll find beds comfortable. “They don’t want farmers like us. They don’t want coolies or rickshaw pullers or nightsoil collectors either.”

And I think, What country would? Those people are a necessity, but did we even want them in Shanghai? (See how sometimes I still don’t realize my place in world?)

“My husband bought a spot in a store,” Lee-shee boasts. “He paid five hundred dollars to become a partner. He’s not a real partner, and he didn’t pay the money either. Who has money like that? But he promised the owner he’d work until he paid his debt. Now my husband can claim he’s a merchant.”

“And that’s why they question us?” I ask. “They’re looking for fake merchants? It seems like a lot of trouble-”

“What they really want to catch are paper sons.”

Seeing the stupid expression on my face, the two women chuckle. May looks up from her bowl.

“Tell me,” she says. “Do they have a joke?”

I shake my head. May sighs and goes back to poking at the pig’s foot in her bowl. Across the table, the two women exchange knowing looks.

“You two don’t know very much,” Lee-shee observes. “Is that why you and your sister have been here for so long? Didn’t your husbands explain what you needed to do?”

“We were supposed to travel with our husbands and my father-in-law,” I answer truthfully. “We got separated. The monkey people-”

They nod sympathetically.

“You can also enter America if you’re the son or daughter of an American citizen,” Dong-shee goes on. She’s barely touched her food, and the heavily starched sauce congeals in her bowl. “My husband is a paper son. Is your husband one too?”

“Forgive me, but I don’t know what that is.”

“My husband bought the paper to become the son of an American. Now he can bring me in as his paper wife.”

“What do you mean he bought a paper?” I ask.

“Haven’t you heard of paper sons and paper-son slots?” When I shake my head, Dong-shee puts her elbows on the table and leans forward. “Suppose a Chinese man born in America travels to China to get married. When he comes back to America, he tells the authorities that his wife had a baby.”

I’m listening carefully for the loopholes, and I think I’ve found one. “Did she actually have the baby?”

“No. He only tells them that, and the officials at the embassy in China or here on Angel Island aren’t going to go to some village to check if he’s telling the truth. So this man, who is a citizen of the United States, is given a paper saying that he has a new son, who is also a citizen because of his father. But remember, this son was never born. He only exists on paper. So now the man has a paper-son slot to sell. The man waits ten years, twenty years. He then sells the paper-the slot-to a young man in China, who adopts his new family name and comes to America. He’s not a real son. He’s only a paper son. The immigration officials here on Angel Island will try to trick him into admitting the truth. If he’s caught, he’ll be sent back to China.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then he’ll go to his new home and live as a paper son with false citizenship, a false name, and a false family history. These lies will stay with him for as long as he remains here.”

“Who would want to do that?” I ask, skeptical because we come from a country where family names are hugely important and can sometimes be traced back twelve or more generations. The idea that a man would willingly change his family name to come here just doesn’t seem plausible.

“Plenty of young men in China would love to buy that paper and pretend to be the son of someone else if it meant they could come to America-the Gold Mountain, the Land of the Flowery Flag,” Dong-shee answers. “Believe me, he will suffer many indignities and work hard, but he’ll make money, save it, and return home rich one day.”

“It sounds easy-”

“Look around! It’s not that easy!” Lee-shee interrupts. “The interrogations are bad enough, and the lo fan are always changing the rules.”

“What about a paper daughter?” I ask. “Do women come here that way too?”

“What family would waste an opportunity so precious on a daughter? We’re lucky we can take advantage of our husbands’ fake status to come here as paper wives.”

The two women laugh until tears gather in the corners of their eyes. How is it that these illiterate peasants know more about these things and are clearer about what has to be done to get into this country than we are? Because they’re the targeted class, while May and I shouldn’t be here. I sigh. Sometimes I wish we could just be sent back, but how can we go back? China is lost to the Japanese, May’s pregnant, and we have no money and no family.

Then, as usual, the talk turns to the foods we miss: roast duck, fresh fruit, and black bean sauce-anything other than the overcooked garbage they feed us.

AS MAY PLANNED, I wear the loose clothes I’d worn to escape from China. Most women aren’t here long enough to notice that both May and I seem to be growing plumper by the day. Or maybe they do but are as reticent as our own mother would have been about something so private.

My sister and I grew up in a cosmopolitan city. We acted like we knew a lot, but we were ignorant in many ways. Mama-typical for those days-had been unforthcoming about anything that had to do with our bodies. She never even warned us about the visit from the little red sister, and when it first came I was terrified, thinking I was bleeding to death. Even then Mama didn’t explain what was happening. She sent me to the servants’ quarters to have Pansy and the others teach me what to do to take care of myself and how a woman could get pregnant. Later, when the little red sister visited May, I told her what I’d learned, but we still didn’t know much about pregnancy or the process of giving birth. Fortunately, we’re now housed with women who know all about it and have all kinds of hints for me, but I grow to count on Lee-shee’s advice.

“If your nipples are small like the seeds of a lotus,” she counsels, “then your son will rise in society. If your nipples are the size of dates, then your son will sink into poverty.”

She tells me to strengthen my yin by eating pears cooked in syrup, but we don’t have any of those in the dining hall. When May starts having pains in her abdomen, I tell Lee-shee that I am having these pains, and she explains that this is a common ailment for women whose chi is stagnating around the womb.

“The best cure is to eat five slices of daikon radish sprinkled with a little sugar three times a day,” she recommends. But I have no way to get fresh daikon, and May continues to suffer. This prompts me to sell the last piece of jewelry from Mama’s dowry bag to a woman from a village near Canton. From now on, whenever May needs something, I’ll be able to buy it outright at the concession stand or pay a bribe to one of the guards or cooks to get it for me. So, when May develops indigestion, I complain accordingly. The women in our dormitory argue over the best remedy for me, suggesting that I suck on whole cloves. These I procure easily, but Lee-shee isn’t satisfied.

“ Pearl either has a weak stomach or a weak spleen-both signs of deficiencies in her Earth functions,” Lee-shee tells the other women. “Does anyone here have any tangerines or fresh ginger we could use to make a tea for her?”

These items are bought without difficulty and bring May relief, which makes me happy, which in turn pleases the other detainees for being able to help a pregnant woman.

MORE TIME GROWS between our interrogations. This is common practice for those whose hearings have problems. The inspectors think that long hours spent in the dormitory will weaken us, intimidate us into forgetting our memorized stories, and trick us into making mistakes. After all, if you’re interrogated only once a month for eight hours straight, how can you remember exactly what you said one, two, six, or eighteen months ago, how that conforms to the coaching book that you destroyed, or what your relatives and acquaintances, who aren’t on the island, said about you in their hearings?

Husbands and wives remain separated throughout their stays. In this way, they aren’t allowed to comfort each other or, more important, share information about their interrogations and the questions asked. On their wedding day, did the sedan chair stop at the front gate or the front door? Was it overcast or drizzling when they buried their third daughter? Who can remember these things when the questions and their answers can be interpreted in different ways? After all, in a village of two hundred people, aren’t a front gate and a front door one and the same? Can it matter how damp the weather was when they put that worthless daughter in the ground? Apparently it does to the interrogators, and a family whose answers to these questions don’t agree might be detained for days, weeks, and sometimes months.

But May and I are sisters and can compare stories before our hearings. The questions asked of us became increasingly difficult as the files for Sam, Vernon, their brothers, Old Man Louie, and his wife, business associates, and people in the neighborhood-other merchants, the policeman on the beat, and the man who makes deliveries for our father-in-law-are brought in. How many chickens and ducks does my husband’s family keep in their home village? Where is the rice bin kept in our home in Los Angeles and in the Louie family home in Wah Hong Village?

If we dawdle with our answers, the inspectors get impatient and shout, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” This tactic works well for other detainees, scaring them into making crucial errors, but we use it to appear as though we’re confused and stupid. Chairman Plumb grows increasingly annoyed with me, staring silently at me sometimes for a full hour in an effort to intimidate me into coming up with a new answer, but I’m stalling for a reason, and his attempts to bully and threaten me just make me calmer and more focused.

May and I use the complexity, simplicity, or idiocy of these questions to prolong our stays. To the question “Did you have a dog in China?” May answers yes and I answer no. At our hearings two weeks later, the inspectors for each of our interrogations confront us with this discrepancy. May sticks with our story that we owned a dog, while I explain that we once had a dog but our father killed it so we could eat it for our last meal in China. In the next hearing, the inspectors announce that we’re both right: the Chin family owned a dog but it was eaten before our departure. The truth is we never had a dog and Cook never served dog-ours or anyone else’s-in our home. May and I laugh for hours about our tiny triumph.

“Where did you keep the kerosene lamp in your home?” Chairman Plumb asks one day. We had electricity in Shanghai, but I tell him that we kept the kerosene lamp on the left side of the table, while May says that it was kept on the right.

Let’s just say these are not the brightest men. In our Chinese jackets, they don’t notice the baby growing inside May or the pillow and bunched up clothes I shove into my pants. After Chinese New Year, I begin to waddle in and out of the interrogation room and exaggerate my efforts at sitting and rising. Naturally, this brings a new round of questions. Am I sure I got pregnant on the one night I spent with my husband? Am I positive of the date? Mightn’t there have been someone else? Was I a prostitute in my home country? Is my baby’s father who I say he is?

Chairman Plumb opens Sam’s file and shows me a photograph of a boy of seven. “Is this your husband?”

I study the photograph. It’s a little boy. It could be Sam when he went back to China with his parents in 1920; it could be someone else. “Yes, that’s my husband.”

The recorder keeps typing, our files keep expanding, and along the way I learn quite a bit about my father-in-law, Sam, Vernon, and the Louie family’s businesses.

“It says here that your father-in-law was born in San Francisco in 1871,” Chairman Plumb says as he leafs through Old Man Louie’s file. “That would make him sixty-seven years old. His father was a merchant. Are these facts correct?”

From the coaching book, I’d learned everything but the year of Old Man Louie’s birth. I take a chance and answer “Yes.”

“It says here he married a natural-footed woman in San Francisco in 1904.”

“I haven’t met her yet, but I’ve heard she has natural feet.”

“In 1907 they went to China, where their first son was born. They left him in the home village for eleven years before bringing him here.”

At this, Mr. White leans over and whispers in his superior’s ear. They both shuffle through the files. Mr. White then points to something on one of the pages. Chairman Plumb nods and says, “Your alleged mother-in-law has five sons. Why did she have only sons? Why were they all born in China? Doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?”

“Actually, the youngest son was born in Los Angeles,” I offer helpfully.

Chairman Plumb gives me a look. “Why would your in-laws leave four sons in China before bringing them here?”

I’ve wondered the same thing, but I recite what I memorized: “My husband’s brothers grew up in Wah Hong Village because it was cheaper than Los Angeles. My husband was sent back to China to meet his grandparents, learn the home language and traditions, and make offerings to the Louie family ancestors on his father’s behalf.”

“Have you met the brothers?”

“Only the one named Vernon. The rest not.”

Chairman Plumb asks, “If your in-laws were together in Los Angeles, why did they wait eleven more years to have a last child?”

I don’t know the answer to this, but I pat my stomach and say, “Some women don’t take the proper herbs, eat the proper foods, or follow the proper rules for their chi to accept sons from their husbands.”

My backward-village answer satisfies my questioners for the day, but a week later their thoughts turn to my father-in-law’s occupation, trying to make sure he isn’t in the prohibited class of laborer. During the past twenty years, Old Man Louie opened several businesses in Los Angeles. Currently, he has just one store.

“What’s the name of the shop and what does he sell?” Chairman Plumb asks.

I dutifully recite my answer. “It’s called the Golden Lantern. He sells Chinese and Japanese goods, including furniture, silks, rugs, slippers, and porcelains, with a value of fifty thousand dollars.” Just having that number in my mouth is like sucking on sugarcane.

“Fifty thousand dollars?” Chairman Plumb marvels, equally impressed. “That’s a lot of money.”

Again, he and Mr. White put their heads together, this time to talk about the severity of their country’s depression. I pretend not to listen. They check Old Man Louie’s file, and I hear them say that, later this year, he plans to move his original store and open an additional two shops, a ride for tourists, and a restaurant. I rub my fake belly and feign disinterest when Mr. White explains the Louie family’s situation.

“Our colleagues in Los Angeles visit the Louies every six months,” he says. “They’ve never seen a connection between your father-in-law and a laundry, lottery, lodging house, barbershop, pool or gambling hall, or anything else objectionable. Nor has anyone ever reported seeing him do manual labor. In other words, he appears to be a merchant of good standing in the community.”

What I learn in my next interrogation, as Mr. White reads aloud in English portions of Sam’s and his father’s transcripts, which are translated into Sze Yup by yet another interpreter who’s been sent to cover the hearing, absolutely stuns me. Old Man Louie reported to inspectors that his business lost two thousand dollars a year from 1930 through 1933. That was a huge amount of money in Shanghai. Just one year’s worth of that money would have saved my family: my father’s business, the house, and May’s and my savings. Yet Old Man Louie still managed to come to China to buy wives for his sons.

“The family has to be rich with hidden wealth,” May says that night.

Still, it all seems muddled and deliberately confused and confusing. Is Old Man Louie, whose file is only slightly larger than mine after having passed through this station numerous times, as much of a liar as May and I are?

One day Chairman Plumb finally loses his patience, slams his fist on the table, and demands, “How is it that you’re claiming to be the wife of a legally domiciled merchant and the wife of an American citizen? These are two different things, and only one is needed.”

I’ve asked myself the same question many times these past months, and I still don’t know the answer.

Sisters in Blood

A COUPLE OF weeks later, I wake in the middle of the night from one of my bad dreams. Usually May is at my side, comforting me. But she isn’t there. I roll over, expecting to see her in the bunk across from mine. She isn’t there either. I lie still and listen. I don’t hear anyone weeping, whispering protective incantations, or padding across the dormitory floor, which means it has to be very late. Where’s May?

Lately, she’s had as much trouble sleeping as I do. “Your son likes to kick me as soon as I lie down and there’s no room inside me anymore for him and me. I need to go to the toilet all the time,” she confided a week ago with such tenderness-as if peeing is such a precious gift-that I couldn’t help but love her and the infant she carried for me. Still, we’ve promised each other that we won’t go alone to the toilets. I reach for my clothes and my pillow baby. Even this late at night, I can’t risk being seen not looking pregnant. I button my jacket over my fake belly and get up.

She isn’t in the toilets, so I move on to the showers. When I enter, my chest freezes and my stomach clenches. The room couldn’t look more different from the one in my dreams, but there on the floor is my sister with her pants off, her face white with pain, and her private parts… exposed, bulging, frightening.

May reaches an arm out to me. “Pearl-”

I run to her side, slipping on the watery tiles.

“Your son is coming,” she says.

“You were supposed to wake me up-”

“I didn’t realize things had gone so far.”

Many times late at night or when we could separate ourselves just a bit when the missionary ladies took us for our weekly walks around the property, we’ve discussed what we’d need when the time came. We’ve made plan after plan and gone over detail after detail. In my mind I tick off the things the women we quizzed had said: you experience pains until pretty soon you feel like you’re going to fart a winter melon, you go to a corner, squat, the baby falls out, you clean it, wrap it, and then rejoin your husband in the paddies with your baby tied to you by a long cloth. Of course, all this is very different from how things were done in Shanghai, where for months women retreated from parties, shopping, and dancing before going to a Western-style hospital, where they were put to sleep. When they woke up, they’d be handed their babies. Then, for the next two or three weeks, they’d stay in the hospital, entertaining visitors and being cherished for bringing a son to the family. Finally, they’d go home in time for the one-month party to introduce the baby to the world and receive praise from family, neighbors, and friends. The Shanghai way isn’t possible here, but as May has said so many times these past few weeks, “Country women have been having babies by themselves forever. If they can do it, I can too. And we’ve been through a lot. I haven’t had a lot to eat, and what I’ve eaten, I’ve thrown up. The baby won’t be big. It will come out easily.”

We’d talked about where the baby could be born and had settled on the showers as the one place where the other women were most afraid to venture. Even so, women sometimes took showers during the day. “I won’t let the baby come out then,” May had promised.

Now, thinking back on it, I realize that May has probably been in labor most of the day, resting on her bunk, her knees up, her legs crossed, keeping the baby inside.

“When did the pains start? How long between them?” I ask, remembering that these are clues to how much longer it will be until the baby breathes air.

“They started this morning. They weren’t so bad, and I knew I had to wait. Suddenly, I started feeling like I needed to use the toilet. The water came out when I came in here.”

That has to be the water soaking my feet and knees.

She clutches my hand when a contraction grips her. Her eyes shut and her face reddens as she swallows her agony. She squeezes my hand, digging her nails into my palm so deeply that I’m the one who wants to scream. When the contraction ends, she takes a breath and her hand relaxes in mine. An hour later, I see the top of the baby’s head.

“Do you think you can squat?” I ask.

May whimpers in response. I get behind her and pull her to a wall so she can prop herself against it. I get between her legs. I clasp my hands before me and close my eyes to gather my courage. I open my eyes, look into my sister’s pained face, and try to put as much conviction as I can into my voice as I repeat to her what she’s said to me so many times these past weeks. “We can do this, May. I know we can.”

When the baby slips out, it isn’t the son that we talked about. It’s a wet, mucus-covered girl-my daughter. She’s tiny, even smaller than I expected. She doesn’t cry. Instead, she makes little sounds like the plaintive calls of a baby bird.

“Let me see.”

I blink and look at my sister. Her hair hangs in wet strings, but all traces of pain have faded from her face. I hand her the baby and stand.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, but May isn’t listening to me. She’s wrapped her arms around the baby, protecting it from the shock of cold air and wiping away the goo from its face with her sleeve. I stare at them for a moment. This is all the time they’ll have together before I take the baby for my own.

As quickly and quietly as I can, I scurry back to the dormitory. I pull out one of the outfits May and I made, a ball of yarn, a small pair of scissors the missionary ladies gave us to help with our handiwork projects, some sanitary supplies, and two towels we bought from the concession stand. I grab the teapot from atop the radiator and hurry back to the showers. By the time I get there, May has expelled the afterbirth. I tie yarn around the umbilical cord and cut it. Then I dampen one end of the clean towel with hot water from the teapot and hand it to May to clean the baby. I use some of the water and the other towel to clean May. The baby was small, so the tearing isn’t all that bad compared with what happened to me down in that area. I hope she’ll heal without stitches. But in truth, what else can I do? I barely know how to sew a seam. How can I stitch my sister’s private parts?

While May dresses the baby, I wipe the floor and wrap the afterbirth in the towels. When everything’s as clean as I can make it, I stuff the soiled things in the trash.

Outside the sky turns pink. We don’t have much time.

“I don’t think I can get up by myself,” May says from the floor. Her pale legs tremble from cold and the exertion she’s been through. She scoots away from the wall, and I lift her to her feet. Blood trickles down her legs and spots the floor.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Don’t worry. Here. Take her.”

She gives me the baby. I forgot to bring the blanket May knit, and the baby’s arms jerk awkwardly in their sudden freedom. I haven’t carried her inside me all these months, but I instantly love her as my own. I hardly pay attention to May as she puts a belt and napkin in place and pulls on her underwear and pants.

“I’m ready,” she says.

We look around the room. It won’t be a secret that a woman gave birth here. What matters is that no one suspect it was anything out of the ordinary, because I won’t be able to be examined by the station’s doctors.

I’M PROPPED IN bed, holding my daughter, with May nestled beside me-dozing lightly, her head on my shoulder-when the other women rise. It takes a while before anyone notices us.

“Aiya! Look who’s come in the night!” Lee-shee squeals excitedly.

The other women and their small children gather around, gently pushing against one another to get a better look.

“Your son arrived!”

“No son. A daughter,” May corrects. Her voice sounds so dreamy from exhaustion that for a second I worry she’ll give us away.

“A little happiness,” Lee-shee says sympathetically, using the traditional phrase to convey the disappointment in the birth of a girl. Then she grins. “But look around. Almost everyone here is a woman, except for the little boys who need their mothers. We must look at this as an auspicious occurrence.”

“It won’t remain auspicious if the baby stays dressed like that,” one of the women says forebodingly.

I look at the baby. Her clothes are the first May and I ever made. The buttons are crooked and the knit hat is lopsided, but apparently these aren’t the problems. The baby needs to be protected from bad elements. The women go away and return with gifts of coins to represent the care of “one hundred friends of the family.” Someone ties a red string in her black hair to give her luck. Then, one after the other, the women sew tiny charms depicting the animals of the zodiac onto her hat and the other clothes we made to protect her from evil spirits, bad omens, and sickness.

A collection is taken up, and someone is elected to give the money to one of the Chinese cooks to make a bowl of mother’s soup of pickled pigs’ feet, ginger, peanuts, and whatever hard liquor he can find. (Shaohsing wine is best, but whiskey will do if that’s all he has.) A new mother is depleted and suffers from too much cold yin. Most of the soup’s ingredients are considered hot and builders of yang. I’m told they will help shrink my womb, rid my body of stagnant blood, and bring in my milk.

Suddenly, one of the women reaches over and starts to unbutton my jacket. “You’ve got to feed the baby. We’ll show you how.”

I gently push away her hand.

“We’re in America now, and my daughter is an American citizen. I will do as the Americans do.” And modern Shanghainese women too, I think, remembering all the times May and I modeled for companies advertising powdered baby milk. “She will have baby formula.”

As usual, I translate the exchange from Sze Yup into the Wu dialect so May will understand.

“Tell her the bottles and the formula are in a package under the bed,” May rattles off quickly. “Tell her I don’t want to leave you, but if one of them could help us, I’d be grateful.”

While one of the women takes a bottle and mixes some of the powdered formula we bought from the concession stand with water from the teapot and places it on the windowsill to cool, Lee-shee and the others discuss the problem of the baby’s name.

“Confucius said that if names are not correct, then language and society are not in accordance with the truth of things,” she explains. “The child’s grandfather or someone of great distinction needs to name your baby.” She purses her lips, looks around, and observes theatrically, “But I don’t see anyone around here like that. Perhaps it’s just as well. You have a daughter. Such a disappointment! You wouldn’t want her to be named Flea, That Dog, or Dustpan, like my father named me.”

Naming is important, but it doesn’t belong to women. Now that we have the opportunity to name a child-a girl at that-we find it’s a lot harder than it seems. We can’t name the girl after my mother or even use our family name as her given name to honor my father, because these options are considered taboo. We can’t name her after a heroine or goddess either, because that’s presumptuous and disrespectful.

“I like Jade, because it conveys strength and beauty,” suggests a young detainee.

“The flower names are pretty. Orchid, Lily, Iris-”

“Oh, but they’re such common names and too frail,” Lee-shee objects. “Look where this baby was born. Shouldn’t she be named something like Mei Gwok?”

Mei Gwok means Beautiful Country, which is the official Cantonese name for the United States, but it doesn’t sound melodious or pretty.

“You can’t go wrong using a two-character generational name,” another woman offers. This appeals to me, since May and I share the generational name Long-Dragon. “You could use De-Virtue-as the base and then name each daughter Kind Virtue, Moon Virtue, Wise Virtue-”

“Too much trouble!” Lee-shee exclaims. “I named my daughters Girl One, Girl Two, Girl Three. My sons are Son One, Son Two, Son Three. Their cousins are Cousins Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and so on. Giving numbers reminds everyone where a child fits in the family.”

What she leaves unsaid is, Who wants to be bothered with names when too often children die? I don’t know how much of this May follows or how much she understands, but when she speaks the others quiet.

“Only one name is right for this baby,” May says in English. “She should be called Joy. We’re in America now. Let’s not burden her with the past.”

When May moves her head to look up at me, I realize that all this time she’s been staring at the baby. Even though I cradle Joy, May has managed to be physically closer to her than I have. She draws herself up, reaches around her neck, and takes off the pouch with the three coppers, three sesame seeds, and three green beans Mama gave her to keep her safe. My hand goes to the pouch I still wear. I don’t believe it protected me, but I still wear it and the jade bracelet as physical reminders of my mother. May places the leather string around Joy’s head and tucks the pouch inside her clothes.

“To keep you safe wherever you go,” May whispers.

The women around us weep at the beauty of her words and gesture, calling her a good auntie, but we all know this gift will be taken off Joy to keep her from strangling.

When the missionary ladies come, I refuse to let them escort me to the station’s hospital. “It’s not the Chinese way,” I say. “But if you could send a telegram to my husband, I would be most grateful.”

The message is short and to the point: MAY AND PEARL ARRIVED ANGEL ISLAND. SEND TRAVEL FUNDS. BABY BORN. PREPARE ONE-MONTH BIRTHDAY.

That night, the women return from dinner with the special mother’s soup. Over the objections of the women who cluster around, I share the soup with my sister, saying that she worked as hard as I did. They tsk-tsk and shake their heads, but May needs the soup far more than I do.

CHAIRMAN PLUMB IS thoroughly stumped when I walk into my next hearing wearing one of my prettiest silk dresses and my hat with the feathers-with the coaching book well studied by both May and me hidden inside the lining-speaking perfect English and carrying a baby decorated with charms. I answer every question correctly and without hesitation, knowing that in another room May is doing the exact same thing. But my actions and those of May are irrelevant, as is the whole legally domiciled merchant/wife of an American citizen question. What are the officials going to do with this baby? Angel Island is part of the United States, yet no one’s citizenship or status is acknowledged until that person leaves the island. It’s easier for the officials to release us than for them to deal with the bureaucratic problems Joy presents.

Chairman Plumb gives his usual synopsis at the end of the interrogation, but he’s hardly happy when he comes to his concluding words: “The submission of this case has been delayed for over four months. While it is clear that this woman has spent very little time with her husband, who claims to be an American citizen, she has now given birth at our station. After considerable deliberation, we have come to agreement on the essential points. I therefore move that Louie Chin-shee be admitted to the United States as the wife of an American citizen.”

“I concur,” Mr. White says.

“I also concur,” the recorder says in the first and only time I hear him speak.

At four that same afternoon, the guard comes in and calls two names: Louie Chin-shee and Louie Chin-shee-May’s and my old-fashioned married names. “Sai gaai,” he announces loudly in his usual mangling of the phrase that means good fortune. We’re handed our Certificates of Identity. I’m given a United States birth certificate for Joy, stating that she is “too small to be measured”-which means only that they didn’t bother to examine her. I hope these words will be useful in erasing any suspicions about dates and Joy’s size when Old Man Louie and Sam see her. The other women help us pack our things. Lee-shee weeps when she says good-bye. May and I watch the guard lock the dormitory door behind us, and then we follow him out of the building and down the path to the dock, where we pick up the rest of our luggage and board the ferry to take us to San Francisco.