Shanghai Girls

A Single Rice Kernel

WE PAY FOURTEEN dollars to take the Harvard steamship to San Pedro. On the voyage, having learned our lesson at Angel Island, we rehearse our stories for why we missed the ship all those months ago, how hard we tried to get out of China to come to our husbands, and how difficult our interrogations were. But we don’t need to tell any stories, real or otherwise. When Sam meets us at the dock, he says simply, “We thought you were dead.”

We’ve seen each other only three times: in the Old Chinese City, at our wedding, and when he gave me our tickets and other traveling papers. After Sam’s single sentence, he stares at me wordlessly. I look at him wordlessly. May hangs back, carrying our two bags. The baby sleeps in my arms. I don’t expect hugs or kisses, and I don’t expect him to acknowledge Joy in an extravagant way. That would be inappropriate. Still, our meeting after all this time is very awkward.

On the streetcar, May and I sit behind Sam. This is not a city of “magical tall buildings” like the ones we had in Shanghai. Eventually, I see one white tower to my left. After a few more blocks, Sam gets up and motions to us. Outside the window to the right is a huge construction zone. To the left stands a long block of two-story brick buildings, some of which have signs in Chinese. The streetcar stops, and we get off We walk up and around the block. A sign reads LOS ANGELES STREET. We cross the street, skirt a plaza with a bandstand in the center, walk past a firehouse, and then make a left down Sanchez Alley, which is lined by more brick buildings. We step through a door with the words GARNIER BLOCK carved above it, walk down a dark passageway, climb a flight of old wooden stairs, and wend our way along a musty corridor that reeks of cooked food and dirty diapers. Sam hesitates before the door to the apartment he shares with his parents and Vern. He turns and gives May and me a look that I read as sympathy. Then he opens the door and we enter.

The first thing that strikes me is just how poor, dirty, and shabby everything is. A couch covered in stained mauve material leans glumly against a wall. A table with six wooden chairs of no particular design or craftsmanship takes up space in the center of the room. Next to the table, not even tucked into a corner, sits a spittoon. A quick glance shows that it hasn’t been emptied recently. No photographs, paintings, or calendars hang on the walls. The windows are filthy and without coverings. From where I stand just inside the front door I can see into the kitchen, which is little more than a counter with some appliances on it and a niche for the worship of the Louie family ancestors.

A short, round woman with her hair pinned into a small bun at the back of her neck rushes to us, squealing in Sze Yup. “Welcome! Welcome! You’re here!” Then she calls over her shoulder. “They’re here! They’re here!” She flicks her wrist at Sam. “Go get the old man and my boy.” As Sam slumps through the main room and down a hall, she turns her attention back to us. “Let me have the baby! Oh, let me see! Let me see! I’m your yen-yen,” she trills to Joy, using the Sze Yup diminutive for grandmother. Then to May and me, she adds, “You can call me Yen-yen too.”

Our mother-in-law is older than I expected, given that Vernon is just fourteen. She looks like she’s in her late fifties-ancient compared with Mama, who was thirty-eight when she died.

“I am the one who will see the child” comes a stern voice, also speaking in Sze Yup. “Give it here.”

Old Man Louie, dressed in a long mandarin robe, enters the room with Vern, who hasn’t grown much since we last saw him. Again, May and I expect questions about where we’ve been and why it took so long to get here, but the old man has no interest in us whatsoever. I hand Joy to him. He sets her on a table and roughly undresses her. She begins to cry-alarmed by his bony fingers, her grandmother’s exclamations, the hardness of the table against her back, and the sudden shock of being naked.

When Old Man Louie sees she’s a girl, his hands draw back. Distaste wrinkles his features. “You didn’t write that the child is a girl. You should have done that. We wouldn’t have prepared a banquet if we’d known.”

“Of course she needs a one-month party,” my mother-in-law chirps. “Every baby-even a girl-needs a one-month party. Anyway, no going back now. Everyone is coming.”

“You’ve planned something already?” May asks.

“Now!” Yen-yen rings out. “You took longer to get here from the harbor than we thought. Everyone is waiting at the restaurant.”

“Now?” May echoes.

“Now!”

“Shouldn’t we change?” May asks.

Old Man Louie scowls. “No time for that. You don’t need anything. You’re not so special now. No need to try to sell yourselves here.”

If I were braver, I’d ask why he’s so deliberately rude and mean, but we haven’t even been in his home ten minutes.

“She will need a name,” Old Man Louie says, nodding to the baby.

“Her name is Joy,” I say.

He snorts. “No good. Chao-di or Pan-di is better.”

The redness of anger creeps up my neck. This is exactly what the women on Angel Island warned us about. I feel Sam’s hand on the small of my back, but his gesture of comfort sends a ripple of anxiety along my spine and I step away from his touch.

Sensing something’s wrong, May asks in our Wu dialect, “What’s he saying?”

“He wants to name Joy Ask-for-a-Brother or Hope-for-a-Brother.”

May’s eyes narrow.

“You will not speak a secret language in my home,” Old Man Louie declares. “I need to understand everything you say.”

“May doesn’t know Sze Yup,” I explain, but inside I reel from what he’s proposing for Joy, whose cries are shrill in the disapproving silence around her.

“Only Sze Yup,” he says, emphasizing his point by sharply rapping the table. “If I hear the two of you speak another language-even English-then you’ll put a nickel in a jar for me. Understand?”

He isn’t a tall or heavily built man, but he stands with his feet planted as if daring any of us to defy him. But May and I are new here, Yen-yen has edged to a wall seemingly trying to make herself invisible, Sam has barely said a word since we got off the boat, and Vernon stands to the side, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Get Pan-di dressed,” Old Man Louie orders. “The two of you brush your hair. And I want you to wear these.” He reaches into one of the deep pockets of his mandarin robe and brings out four gold wedding bracelets.

He grabs my hand and locks a solid gold, three-inch-wide bracelet on my wrist. Then he attaches one to the other wrist, roughly pushing my mother’s jade bracelet up my arm and out of his way. While he locks May’s bracelets in place, I look at mine. They’re beautiful, traditional, and very expensive wedding bracelets. Here at last is material evidence of the wealth I expected. If May and I can find a pawnshop, then we can use the money…

“Don’t just stand there,” Old Man Louie snaps. “Do something to make that girl stop crying. It’s time to go.” He looks at us in disgust. “Let’s get this over with.”

WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES we’ve gone around the corner, crossed Los Angeles Street, climbed some stairs, and entered Soochow Restaurant for a combination wedding banquet and one-month party. Platters of hard-boiled eggs dyed red to represent fertility and happiness are set on a table just inside the entrance. Wedding couplets hang on the walls. Thin slices of sweet pickled ginger to symbolize the continued warming of my yin after the strain of birth are set on each table. The banquet, while not as lavish as I imagined in my romantic days in Z.G.’s studio, is still the best meal we’ve seen in months-a cold platter with jellyfish, soy-sauce chicken, and sliced kidneys, bird’s nest soup, a whole steamed fish, Peking duck, noodles, shrimp and walnuts-but May and I don’t get to eat.

Yen-yen-carrying her new grandchild-takes us from table to table to make introductions. Almost everyone here is a Louie, and they all speak Sze Yup.

“This is Uncle Wilburt. This is Uncle Charley. And here’s Uncle Edfred,” she says to Joy.

These men in nearly matching suits made from cheap fabric are Sam and Vern’s brothers. Are these the names they were born with? Not possible. They’re the names they took to sound more American, just as May, Tommy, Z.G., and I took Western names to sound more sophisticated in Shanghai.

Since May and I have been married for a while already instead of the usual wedding banter about our husbands’ coming fortitude in the bedchamber or how my sister and I are about to be plucked, the teasing revolves around Joy.

“You cook baby fast, Pearl-ah!” Uncle Wilburt says in broken English. From the coaching book, I know he’s thirty-one, but he looks much older. “That baby many weeks early!”

“Joy big for her age!” Edfred, who’s twenty-seven but looks a lot younger, chimes in. He’s quite emboldened by the mao tai he’s been drinking. “We can count, Pearl-ah.”

“Sam give you son next time!” Charley adds. He’s thirty, but it’s hard to tell because his eyes are red, swollen, and watery from allergies. “You cook next baby so good he come out even earlier!”

“You Louie men. All same!” Yen-yen scolds. “You think you count so good? You count how many days my daughters-in-law run from monkey people. You think you have hardship here? Bah! Baby lucky to be born at all! She lucky to be alive!”

May and I pour tea for each guest and receive wedding gifts of lai see- red envelopes embossed with gold good-luck characters and filled with money that will be ours alone-and more gold in the form of earrings, pins, rings, and enough bracelets to climb our arms to our elbows. I can barely wait for us to be alone so we can count the first of our escape money and figure out how to sell our jewelry.

Naturally, there are the predictable comments about Joy being a girl, but most people are delighted to see a baby-any baby. That’s when I realize that the majority of the guests are men, with very few wives and almost no children. What we experienced on Angel Island begins to make sense. The American government does everything possible to keep out Chinese men. It makes it even harder for Chinese women to enter the country. And in a lot of states it’s against the law for Chinese to marry Caucasians. All this ends in the desired result for the United States: with few Chinese women on American soil, sons and daughters can’t be born, saving the country from having to accept undesirable citizens of Chinese descent.

At table after table, the men want to hold Joy. Some of them cry when they take her in their arms. They examine her fingers and toes. I can’t help it, but I fairly shine with my new status as mother. I’m happy-not in-the-stars happy but relieved happy. We survived. We made it to Los Angeles. Apart from Old Man Louie’s disappointment in Joy-and not in ten thousand years will I ever call her Pan-di-he’s arranged this celebration and we’re being welcomed. I glance at May hoping she’s feeling what I’m feeling. But my sister-even as she performs her new-bride duties-seems pensive and withdrawn. My heart tightens. How cruel all this is for her, but she didn’t push me in a wheelbarrow for miles and nurse me back to health by being weak. Somehow my little sister has found a way to keep going forward.

I remember back on Angel Island before the baby was born talking with May about the importance of the special mother’s soup and whether or not we should ask someone to see if the chefs would make it for us. “I’ll need it to help with my bleeding,” May had decided practically, while knowing it would also bring in her milk. So May and I had shared the soup. Then, when Joy was three days old, May went to the showers and didn’t return. I left the baby with Lee-shee and went to look for my sister. My fear was great. I worried what May might do if left alone. I found her in the shower, crying not from sorrow but from the agony in her breasts. “It’s worse than when the baby came out,” she said between sobs. Yes, her womb had shrunk, and even naked she barely looked like she’d had a baby, but her breasts were swollen and hard as rocks from milk that had nowhere to go. The hot water helped, and the milk streamed out, dripping from her nipples and mingling in the water before disappearing down the drain.

Some might say, Well, how stupid could you have been to let her eat a soup that would make her milk come in like that? But remember, we didn’t know about having babies. We didn’t know enough about the milk or how painful it would be. A few days later, when May discovered that every time the baby cried, milk would start to empty out of her breasts, she moved to a bunk at the far end of the room. “That baby cries too much,” she told the others. “How can I help my sister at night if I don’t get some sleep during the day?”

Now I watch May pour tea for a table of lonely men and scoop up the red envelopes and tuck them in her pocket. The men do their duty by joking, teasing, and mocking her, and she does hers by putting on a smiling face.

“Your turn next, May,” Wilburt hoots when we circle back to the uncles’ table.

Charley appraises her up and down, and then says, “You small, but hips good.”

“You give the old man the grandson he wants, you’ll become his favorite,” promises Edfred.

Yen-yen joins in the laughter, but before we move to the next table she hands Joy to me. Then she takes May’s arm and begins to walk, rattling off several sentences in Sze Yup. “Don’t let all these men bother you. They’re lonely for their wives back home. They’re lonely for wives they don’t even have! You came here with your sister. You helped bring this baby to us. You’re a brave girl.” Yen-yen stops in the aisle and waits for me to finish translating. When I come to the end, she takes May’s hands in her own. “You can be freed from one thing, but that only puts you in a tight spot somewhere else. Understand?”

It’s late by the time we get back to the apartment. We’re all tired, but Old Man Louie isn’t done with us.

“Give me your jewelry,” he says.

His demand shocks me. Wedding gold belongs to the bride alone. It’s the secret treasure she can draw on to buy herself a special treat without her husband’s criticism or use in times of emergency, as our mother did when Baba lost everything. Before I can protest, May says, “These things are ours. Everyone knows that.”

“I think you are mistaken,” he asserts. “I’m your father-in-law. I’m the master here.” He could say he doesn’t trust us, and he’d be right. He could accuse us of wanting to use the gold to find a way out of here, and he’d be right. Instead, he adds, “Do you think you and your sister-smart and clever as you think you are with your Shanghai city ways-will know where to go tonight with that baby girl? Will you know where to go tomorrow? The blood of your father has ruined you both. This is why I can buy you for such a low price, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to lose my goods so easily.”

May looks at me. I’m the older sister. I’m supposed to know what to do, but I’m completely confused by what we’re seeing and experiencing. Not once has anyone asked why we didn’t meet the Louies in Hong Kong on the appointed date, what we’ve been through, how we survived, or how we got to America. All Old Man Louie and Yen-yen care about is the baby and the bracelets, Vernon is in a world of his own, while Sam seems oddly removed from his family’s interactions. They appear to have no concern for us one way or the other, yet it feels as if we’ve been caught in a fisherman’s net. We can wiggle and continue to breathe, but there’s no escape that I can see. Not yet anyway.

We let the old man take our jewelry, but he doesn’t ask for the money hidden in our lai see. Maybe he knows that would be too much. But I feel no sense of triumph, and I can see May doesn’t either. She stands in the middle of the room, looking defeated, sad, and very much alone.

Everyone takes a turn going down the hall to the toilet. Old Man Louie and Yen-yen go to bed first. May stares at Vern, who pulls on the ends of his hair. When he leaves the room, May follows.

“Is there a place for the baby?” I ask Sam.

“Yen-yen prepared something. I hope-” He juts his chin and lets out his breath.

I trail after him down the dark hall. Sam’s room has no windows. A single bare lightbulb hangs from the center of the ceiling. A bed and a dresser take up most of the space. The bottom drawer has been pulled open and packed with a soft blanket for Joy to sleep on. I lay her down and look around. I see no closet, but a corner has been draped with a piece of cloth to offer a little privacy.

“My clothes?” I ask. “The ones your father took after we were married?”

Sam stares at the floor. “They’re already at China City. I’ll take you there tomorrow and maybe he’ll let you have some things.”

I don’t know what China City is. I don’t know what he means about my maybe being allowed to take my clothes, because my mind is stuck on something else altogether: I have to get in bed with the man who is my husband. Somehow in all of May’s and my planning, we didn’t think about this part. Now I stand in the room as paralyzed as May had just been.

Even in the cramped space, Sam busies himself He opens a jar of something pungent, gets on his hands and knees, and pours it into four tin lids wedged under the bed legs. When he’s done, he sits back on his haunches, screws the jar shut, and says, “I use kerosene to keep away the bedbugs.”

Bedbugs!

He takes off his shirt and belt and drapes them on a hook behind the curtain. He plops on the edge of the bed and stares at the floor. After what seems a long while, he says, “I’m sorry about today.” After several more minutes, he adds, “I’m sorry about everything.”

I remember how bold I was the night of our wedding. That person was as audacious and reckless as a woman warrior of ancient times, but that girl was defeated in a shack somewhere between Shanghai and the Grand Canal.

“It’s too soon after the baby,” I manage to say.

Sam looks up at me with his sad, dark eyes. Finally, he says, “I think you’ll prefer the side of the bed closest to our Joy.”

Once he slips under the covers, I pull the string for the light, take off my shoes, and then lie down on top of the blanket. I’m grateful that Sam doesn’t try to touch me. After he falls asleep, I reach into my pockets and finger the lai see.

WHAT’S THE FIRST impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your lai see, as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class, standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth?

What stays with me most are the feelings of loss, unsettlement, unease, and a longing for the past that cannot be relieved. This isn’t just because my sister and I are new to this strange and foreign place. It’s as though every person in Chinatown is a refugee. No one here is a Gold Mountain man-rich beyond imagining-not even Old Man Louie. On Angel Island, I learned about his ventures and the value of his merchandise, but they mean nothing here, where everyone is poor. People lost their jobs during the Depression. Those lucky enough to have families sent them back to China, because it was cheaper to provide for them there than to feed and house them here. When the Japanese attacked, those families returned. But no new money is being made and conditions are even more cramped and unsettled than ever, or so I’m told.

Five years ago, in 1933, most of Chinatown was torn down to make room for a new railroad station, which is being built on that huge construction site we saw when Sam brought us here on the streetcar. People were given twenty-four hours to move-far less than what May and I had when we left Shanghai -but where could they go? The law says that Chinese can’t own property and most landlords won’t rent to Chinese either, so people cram into buildings and squeeze into rooms in the last few buildings of the original Chinatown, where we live, or in the City Market Chinatown, which caters to produce growers and sellers, many blocks and a culture away from here. Everyone-including me-misses their families in China, but when I pin the photographs that May and I brought with us on my bedroom wall, Yen-yen yells at me. “You stupid girl! You want to get us in trouble? What happens if the immigration inspectors come? How are you going to explain who those people are?”

“They’re my parents,” I say. “And that’s May and me when we were little. These things are not a secret.”

“Everything is a secret. You see pictures of anyone here? Now take those down and hide them before I throw them away.”

That’s my first morning, and soon I discover that, although I’m in a new land, in many ways it’s as though I’ve taken a giant step back in time.

The Cantonese word for wife-fu yen-is composed of two elements. One part means woman and the other part means broom. In Shanghai, May and I had servants. Now I am the servant. Why just me? I don’t know. Maybe because I have a baby, maybe because May doesn’t understand when Yen-yen tells her to do something in Sze Yup, or maybe because May isn’t perpetually scared that we’ll be found out, that we’ll be disgraced-she for bearing a child that’s not her husband’s and I for being unable ever to have babies of my own-and that we’ll be discarded in the street. So every morning after Vern goes to his ninth-grade classes at Central Junior High and May, Sam, and the old man go to China City I stay in the apartment to scrub on a washboard sheets, stained underwear, Joy’s diapers, and the sweaty clothes of the uncles, as well as those of the bachelors who stay with us periodically. I empty the spittoon and put out extra containers for the shells of the watermelon seeds my in-laws nibble. I wash the floors and the windows.

While Yen-yen teaches me to make soup by boiling a head of lettuce and pouring soy sauce over it or prepare lunch by taking a bowl of rice, slathering lard on top, and sprinkling on soy sauce to cover the taste, my sister goes exploring. While I shell walnuts with Yen-yen to sell to restaurants or swab the bathtub ring the old man leaves after his daily soak, my sister meets people. While my mother-in-law teaches me how to be a wife and mother-jobs she does with a frustrating combination of ineptitude, good cheer, and fierce protectiveness-my sister learns where everything is.

Even though Sam said he’d take me to China City -a tourist attraction that’s being built two blocks from here-I have yet to go. But May walks over there every day to help get things ready for the Grand Opening. She tells me that soon I’ll work in the café, the antiques store, the curio shop, or whatever place Old Man Louie has told her that afternoon; I listen with a kind of wariness, knowing that I don’t have a choice about where I’ll work but that I’ll be grateful not to be doing any more piecework with Yen-yen: tying scallions in bunches, separating strawberries by size and quality, shelling those damn walnuts until my fingers are stained and cracked, or-and this is truly disgusting-growing bean sprouts in the tub in between the baths the old man takes. I stay home with my mother-in-law and Joy; my sister returns at the end of every day with tales of people with names like Peanut and Dolly. At China City, she looks through our boxes of clothes. We agreed that if we were going to live in America, then we should dress like Americans, but she stubbornly brings only cheongsams. She picks the prettiest ones for herself Maybe this is as it should be. As Yen-yen says, “You’re a mother now. Your sister still has to make my boy give her a son.”

Every day May tells me of her adventures, her cheeks pink from fresh air, her face lit with pleasure. I’m the older sister, and I’m suffering from red-eye disease, envy. I’ve always been the first to discover new things, but now May’s the one who reports about the shops and stores and fun things that are being planned at China City. She tells me that a lot of it is being built from used movie sets, which she describes in such detail that I’m sure I’ll recognize them all and know their backstories when I finally see them. But I can’t lie. It bothers me that she gets to be a part of the excitement, while I have to stay with my mother-in-law and Joy in the grimy apartment, where the dust floating in the air leaves me feeling suffocated and dizzy. I tell myself this is just temporary, like Angel Island was temporary, and soon-somehow-May and I will escape.

In the meantime, Old Man Louie continues to punish me for having a daughter by ignoring me. Sam mopes about with a sullen look on his face, because I refuse to do the husband-wife thing with him. Every time he approaches, I cross my arms and clasp my elbows. He slinks away as though I’ve wounded him deeply. He rarely speaks to me, and when he does it’s in the Wu dialect of the streets, like I’m beneath him. Yen-yen responds to my obvious unhappiness and frustration with a lesson on marriage: “You must get used to it.”

At the beginning of May, after we’ve been here for two weeks, my sister asks for and receives permission from Yen-yen to take Joy and me outside for a walk. “Across the Plaza is Olvera Street, where Mexican people have little shops for tourists,” May says, pointing in the general direction. “Beyond that is China City. From there, if you walk up to Broadway and turn north, you’ll feel like you’ve entered a postcard of Italy. Salami hangs in the windows and… Oh, Pearl, it’s as foreign and strange as how the White Russians lived in the French Concession.” She pauses and laughs to herself. “I almost forgot. There’s a French Concession here too. They call it French Town, and it’s on Hill Street just up one block from Broadway. They have a French hospital and cafés and… Never mind all that for now. Let’s just talk about Broadway. If you go south on Broadway, you’ll come to American movie palaces and department stores. If you go north through Little Italy, you’ll come to a whole other Chinatown that’s being built. It’s called New Chinatown. I’ll take you there whenever you want to go.”

But I don’t feel like going right then.

“This isn’t like Shanghai, where we were separated by race, money, and power but still saw each other every day,” May makes clear the next week, when she takes Joy and me around the block again. “We walked on the streets together, even if we didn’t go to the same nightclubs. Here everyone is separated from everyone else-Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, blacks, and Chinese. White people are everywhere, but the rest of us are at the bottom. Everyone wants to be a single rice kernel better than his neighbor. Remember in Shanghai how important it was to know English and how people prided themselves on their American or British accents? Here people are split by whose Chinese is better and where and from whom they learned it. Did you learn it in one of the missions here in Chinatown? Did you learn it in China? You know how it is between Sze Yup and Sam Yup speakers? One won’t talk to the other. One won’t do business with the other. If that weren’t enough, the American-born Chinese look down on people like us, calling us fresh off the boat and backward. We look down on them, because we know that American culture isn’t as good as Chinese culture. People stick together by name too. If you’re a Louie, you have to buy from a Louie, even if you have to pay five cents more. Everyone knows no help will come from the lo fan, but even a Mock, Wong, or SooHoo won’t help a Louie.”

She points out the filling station, although we have yet to meet anyone who owns a car. She walks me past Jerry’s Joint-a bar with Chinese food and a Chinese atmosphere but not owned by a Chinese. Every non-business space is a flophouse of one sort or another: tiny apartments like the one we live in for families, boardinghouses for a few dollars a month for Chinese bachelor-laborers like the uncles, and rooms lent out by the missions, where men truly down on their luck can sleep, eat, and make a couple of dollars a month in exchange for keeping the place tidy.

After a month of these excursions around the block, May takes me into the Plaza. “This used to be the heart of the original Spanish settlement. Did we have Spanish people in Shanghai?” May asks lightly, almost gaily. “I don’t remember meeting any.”

She doesn’t give me a chance to answer, because she’s so intent on showing me Olvera Street, which is just opposite Sanchez Alley on the other side of the Plaza. I don’t want to see it particularly, but after many days of her complaining and insisting, I cross the open space with her and venture into the pedestrian way filled with colorfully painted plywood stalls displaying embroidered cotton shirts, heavy clay ashtrays, and lollipops shaped like pointed spires. People in lacy costumes make candles, blow glass, and hammer soles for sandals, while others sing and play instruments.

“Is this how people in Mexico really live?” May asks.

I don’t know if it’s at all like Mexico, but it’s festive and vibrant compared with our dingy apartment. “I have no idea. Maybe.”

“Well, if you think this is funny and cute, wait until you see China City.”

About halfway down the street, she stops abruptly. “Look, there’s Christine Sterling.” She nods toward an elderly but elegantly dressed white woman sitting on the porch of a house that looks like it was made from mud. “She developed Olvera Street. She’s behind China City too. Everyone says she has a big heart. They say she wants to help Mexicans and Chinese have their own businesses during these hard times. She came to Los Angeles with nothing, just like we did. Now she’s about to have two tourist attractions.”

We reach the end of the block. A flock of American cars trawl and beep their way along the roadway. Across Macy Street, I see the wall that surrounds China City.

“I’ll take you over there, if you’d like,” May offers. “All we have to do is cross the street.”

I shake my head. “Maybe another time.”

As we walk back through Olvera Street, May waves and smiles to shop owners, who don’t wave or smile back.

WHILE MAY WORKS with Old Man Louie and Sam is getting things ready in China City, Yen-yen and I do our piecework in the apartment, look after Vernon when he comes home from school, and take turns carrying Joy during the long afternoons, when she cries endlessly for who knows what reason. But even if I could go visiting, who would I meet? There’s only about one woman or girl here for every ten men. Local girls May’s and my age are often forbidden to go out with boys, and the Chinese men living here don’t want to marry them anyway.

“Girls born here are too Americanized,” Uncle Edfred says when he comes to Sunday dinner. “When I get rich, I’ll go back to the home village to get a traditional wife.”

Some men-like Uncle Wilburt-have wives back in China they don’t see for years at a time. “I haven’t done the husband-wife thing with my wife since forever. Too expensive to go to China for that. I’m saving my money to go home for good.”

With thinking like this, most girls remain unmarried. During the week, they go to American school and then Chinese-language school at one of the missions. On weekends, they work in their families’ businesses and go to the missions for Chinese culture instruction. We don’t fit in with those girls, and we’re too young to fit in with the other wives and mothers, who seem backward to us. Even if they were born here, most of them-like Yen-yen-didn’t even complete elementary school. That’s how isolated, guarded, and protected they are.

One evening at the end of May, thirty-nine days after we arrived in Los Angeles and a few days before China City opens, Sam comes home and says, “You can go outside with your sister, if you want. I can give Joy her bottle.”

I’m reluctant to leave her with him, but these past weeks I’ve seen that she responds well to the awkward way he holds her, whispers in her ear, and tickles her tummy. Seeing her content-and knowing that Sam would just as soon have me gone so he won’t have to make conversation with me-May and I go out into the spring night. We walk to the Plaza, where we sit on a bench, listen to Mexican music wafting over from Olvera Street, and watch children play in Sanchez Alley, using a paper bag plumped with wadded newspapers and tied with a string as their ball.

At last May is no longer trying to show me things or trying to get me to cross this or that street. We can just sit and-for a few minutes-be ourselves. We have no privacy in the apartment, where everyone can hear everything that’s said and everything that’s done. Now, without so many listening ears, we’re able to talk freely and share secrets. We reminisce about Mama, Baba, Tommy, Betsy, Z.G., and even our old servants. We talk about the foods we miss and Shanghai ’s scents and sounds, which seem so distant to us now. Finally, we pull ourselves away from the loneliness of lost people and places and force ourselves to focus on what’s happening right around us. I know every time Yen-yen and Old Man Louie do the husband-wife thing from the creaking of their mattress. I know as well that Vern and May haven’t done anything like that yet.

“You haven’t done it with Sam either,” May retorts. “You’ve got to do it. You’re married. You have a baby with him.”

“But why should I do it when you haven’t done it with Vern?”

May makes a face. “How can I? There’s something wrong with him.”

Back in Shanghai, I’d thought she was just being unkind, but now that I’ve lived with Vern and spent far more time with him than May has, I know she’s right. And it’s not just that he hasn’t begun his growth into manhood.

“I don’t think he’s retarded,” I say, trying to be helpful.

May impatiently waves away the idea. “It’s not that. He’s… damaged.” She searches the canopy of tree branches above us, as though she might find an answer there. “He talks, but not much. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening around him. Other times he’s completely obsessed-like with those model airplanes and boats the old man is always buying for him to glue together.”

“At least they take care of him,” I reason. “Remember the boy we saw on the boat on the Grand Canal? His family kept him in a cage.”

Either May doesn’t remember or she doesn’t care, because she goes on without acknowledging me. “They treat Vern like he’s special. Yen-yen irons his clothes and lays them out for him in the morning. She calls him Boy-husband-”

“She’s like Mama that way. She calls everyone by title or rank in the family. She even calls her husband Old Man Louie!”

It feels good to laugh. Mama and Baba had called him that as a sign of respect; we’d always called him that because we didn’t like him; Yen-yen calls him that because that’s how she sees him.

“She has natural feet, but she’s far more backward than Mama ever was,” I continue. “She believes in ghosts, spirits, potions, the zodiac, what to eat and not eat, all that mumbo jumbo-”

May snorts in disgust and irritation. “Remember when I made the mistake of saying I had a cold and she brewed me a tea of ginger and dried scallions to clear my chest and made me breathe steamed vinegar to relieve my congestion? That was disgusting!”

“But it worked.”

“Yes,” May admits, “but now she wants me to go to the herbalist to make me more fertile and attractive to the boy-husband. She tells me that the Sheep and the Boar are among the most compatible of the signs.”

“Mama always said that the Boar has a pure heart, that it has great honesty and simplicity.”

“Vern’s simple all right.” May shudders. “I’ve tried, you know. I mean…” She hesitates. “I sleep in the same bed with him. Some people would say the boy’s lucky to have me there. But he won’t do anything, even though he has everything below that he needs.”

She lets that hang in the air for me to consider. We’re both killing time here in this horrible limbo, but anytime I think things are bad for me, all I have to do is think about my sister in the next room.

“And then when I go to the kitchen in the morning,” May says, “Yen-yen asks, ‘Where’s your son? I need a grandson.’ When I came home from China City last week, she pulled me aside and said, ‘I see the visit from the little red sister has come again. Tomorrow you will eat sparrow kidneys and dried tangerine peel to strengthen your chi. The herbalist tells me this will make your womb welcome my son’s vital essence.’”

The way she imitates Yen-yen’s high-pitched, squeaky voice makes me smile, but May doesn’t see the humor.

“Why don’t they make you eat sparrow kidneys and tangerine peel? Why don’t they send you to the herbalist?” she demands.

I don’t know why Old Man Louie and his wife treat Sam and me differently. Yen-yen may have a title for everyone, but I’ve never heard her call Sam anything-not by title, not by his American name, not even by his Chinese name. And except for that first night, my father-in-law rarely speaks to either of us.

“Sam and his father don’t get along,” I say. “Have you noticed that?”

“They fight quite a bit. The old man calls Sam toh gee and chok gin. I don’t know what they mean, but they aren’t compliments.”

“He’s saying Sam’s lazy and empty-headed.” I don’t spend much time with Sam, so I ask, “Is he?”

“Not that I’ve seen. The old man keeps insisting Sam run the rickshaw rides when China City opens. He wants Sam to be a puller. Sam doesn’t want to do it.”

“Who would?” I shudder.

“Not here, not anywhere,” May agrees. “Not even if it’s just an entertainment for people.”

I wouldn’t mind talking about Sam a bit more, but May circles back to the problem of her husband.

“You’d think they’d treat him like the other boys around here and have him work with his father after school. He could help Sam and me unpack crates and put merchandise on the shelves for when China City opens, but the old man insists that Vern go straight home to the apartment to do his homework. I think all he does is go to his room and work on his models. And not very well from what I can see.”

“I know. I see more of him than you do. I’m with him every day.” I don’t know if May hears the sourness in my voice, but I do and I hurry to hide it. “Everyone knows a son is precious. Maybe they’re preparing him to take over the businesses one day.”

“But he’s the youngest son! They aren’t going to let him do that. It wouldn’t be right. But Vern’s got to learn how to do something. It’s like they want to keep him a little boy forever.”

“Maybe they don’t want Vern to leave. Maybe they don’t want any of us to leave. They’re just so backward. The way we all live together, the way the businesses are kept within the family, the way they keep their money hidden and protected, the way they don’t give us any spending money.”

That’s right. May and I don’t receive a household allowance. Of course, we can’t say that we want our own money to escape from this place and start over again.

“It’s like they’re a bunch of bumpkins from the countryside,” May says bitterly. “And the way Yen-yen cooks,” she adds almost as an afterthought. “What kind of a Chinese woman is she?”

“We don’t know how to cook either.”

“But we were never expected to cook! We were going to have servants for that.”

We sit and think about that for a while, but what’s the point of dreaming about the past when it’s gone? May looks over to Sanchez Alley. Most of the children have returned to their apartments. “We’d better get back before Old Man Louie locks us out.”

We walk back to the apartment arm in arm. My heart feels lighter. May and I are not only sisters but sisters-in-law as well. For thousands of years, daughters-in-law have complained about the hardship of life in their husbands’ homes, living under the iron fists of their fathers-in-law and under the calloused thumbs of their mothers-in-law. May and I are very lucky to have each other.

Dreams of Oriental Romance

ON JUNE 8, almost two months after we arrived in Los Angeles, I cross the street at last and enter China City for the Grand Opening. China City is enclosed by a miniature Great Wall-although it’s hard to call it “Great” when it looks just like cardboard cutouts placed on top of a narrow wall. I pass through the main gate and encounter a thousand or so people grouped together in a big open area called the Court of the Four Seasons. Dignitaries and movie stars give speeches, firecrackers spit and crackle, a dragon parades, and lion dancers frolic. The lo fan look glamorous and fashionable: the women in silks and furs, gloves and hats, and shiny lipstick; the men in suits, wing tips, and fedoras. May and I wear cheongsams, but as sleek and beautiful as we look in them, I feel we appear outdated and foreign compared with the American women.

“Dreams of Oriental romance are woven like silk threads through the little fabric that is China City,” Christine Sterling proclaims from the stage. “We ask Your Honorable Person to see the brilliant colors of its hopes and ideals and to forget the imperfections in its creation, because these will fade with the passing years. Let those who have peopled the generations of China’s existence, who have survived catastrophes of every kind in their motherland, find a new haven, where they can perpetuate their desire for collective identity, follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, and ply the trades and arts of their heritage in all tranquillity.”

Oh, brother.

“Leave the new world of rush and confusion behind,” Christine Sterling goes on, “and enter the old world of languorous enchantment.”

Really?

The shops and restaurants will open their doors for business as soon as the speeches finish, and those who work here-Yen-yen and me included-will need to hurry to take their positions. As we listen, I hold Joy in my arms so she can see what’s happening. With the undulating crowds and all the jostling, we get separated from Yen-yen. I’m supposed to go to the Golden Dragon Café, but I don’t know where it is. How can I get lost in just one block surrounded by a wall? But with so many blind alleys and narrow paths that twist and turn, I’m completely confused. I walk through doorways only to find myself in a courtyard with a goldfish pond or in a stand selling incense. I press Joy tight against my chest and squeeze up against the wall as the rickshaws-emblazoned with the Golden Rickshaws’ logo-haul laughing lo fan through the alleys, the pullers calling, “Coming through! Coming through!” These aren’t like any rickshaw pullers I’ve ever seen. They’re all dolled up in silk pajamas, embroidered slippers, and brand-new coolie hats made from straw. And they aren’t Chinese. They’re Mexican.

A little girl costumed like a street urchin-only cleaner-wiggles through the crowd, handing out maps. I take one and open it, looking for where I need to go. The map shows the big sights: the Steps of Heaven, the Harbor of Whangpoo, the Lotus Pool, and the Court of the Four Seasons. At the bottom of the map, two men dressed in Chinese robes and slippers drawn in black ink bow to each other. The caption reads: “If you will condescend your august self to enlighten our humble city, we greet you with sweetmeats, wines, and music rare, and also objets d’art that will delight your noble eyes.” Nothing on this map shows any of Old Man Louie’s enterprises, each of which has Golden in its name.

China City isn’t like Shanghai. It isn’t like the Old Chinese City either. It isn’t even like a Chinese village. It looks a lot like the China May and I used to see in movies brought to Shanghai from Hollywood. Yes, it’s all exactly as May described during our walks together. Paramount Studios has donated a set from Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, which has now been converted into the Chinese Junk Café. Workmen from MGM have meticulously reassembled Wang’s Farmhouse from The Good Earth, right down to the ducks and chickens in the yard. Behind Wang’s Farmhouse winds the Passage of One Hundred Surprises, where those same MGM carpenters have converted an old blacksmith shop into ten novelty boutiques, selling jewel trees, scented teas, and fringed and embroidered “Spanish” shawls made in China. The tapestries in the Temple of Kwan Yin are reputed to be thousands of years old, and the statue was supposedly saved from the bombing of Shanghai. In fact, like so many things at China City, the temple was constructed from more leftover sets from MGM. Even the Great Wall came from a movie, although it must have been a western in which a fort needed defending. Christine Sterling’s determination to repackage her Olvera Street concept into something Chinese has been matched by her total lack of understanding of our culture, history, and taste.

My brain tells me I’m safe. Too many people mill about for anyone to try to trap or hurt me, but I’m nervous and scared. I hurry down another blind alley. I hold Joy so tightly she starts to cry. People stare at me as though I’m a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother, I want to shout. This is my baby. In my panic I think, if I can find the front entrance, then I’ll be able to find my way back to the apartment. But Old Man Louie locked the door on our way out and I don’t have a key. Agitated and apprehensive, I put my head down and shove through the people.

“Are you lost?” A voice addresses me in the pure tones of the Wu dialect of Shanghai. “Do you need help?”

I look up to see a lo fan with white hair, glasses, and a full white beard.

“I think you must be May’s sister,” he says. “Are you Pearl?”

I nod.

“I’m Tom Gubbins. Most people call me Bak Wah Tom-Motion Pictures Tom. I have a shop here, and I know your sister. Tell me where you need to go.”

“They want me at the Golden Dragon Café.”

“Ah, yes, one of the many Golden enterprises. Anything that’s worth five cents around here is run by your father-in-law,” he says knowingly. “Come along. I’ll take you there.”

I don’t know this man and May has never mentioned him, but perhaps he’s just one of many things she hasn’t told me. Still, the sounds of Shanghai coming from his mouth give me all the assurance I need. On our way to the café, he points out the various shops my father-in-law owns. The Golden Lantern, Old Man Louie’s original store from Old Chinatown, sells cheap curios: ashtrays, toothpick holders, and back scratchers. Through the window, I see Yen-yen talking to customers. Farther along, Vern sits by himself in a tiny shop, the Golden Lotus, selling silk flowers. I’ve heard Old Man Louie boast to our neighbors about how little it cost him to open this business: “Silk flowers cost almost nothing in China. Here I can sell them for five times their original price.” He scoffed at another family that opened a live-flower stand. “They paid eighteen dollars for the icebox at the secondhand store. Every day they’ll spend fifty cents to buy a hundred pounds of ice. They have to buy cans and vases to put the flowers in. Altogether fifty dollars! Too much! Too wasteful! And it isn’t hard to sell silk flowers, because even my son can do it.”

I see the top of the Golden Pagoda before we reach it and know that from now on I can always look up to get my bearings. The Golden Pagoda is housed in a fake pagoda five tiers high. From here, Old Man Louie-dressed in a midnight blue mandarin gown-plans to sell his best merchandise: cloisonné, fine porcelains, mother-of-pearl inlay carved teakwood furniture, opium pipes, ivory mah-jongg sets, and antiques. Through the window, I see May standing a little to his left, chatting with a family of four, gesturing animatedly, and smiling so broadly I can see her teeth. She looks different and yet very much the sister I’ve always known. Her cheongsam clings to her like a second skin. Her hair swirls around her face, and I realize she’s gotten her hair cut and styled. How have I not noticed that before? But it’s the old radiance that shines out of her that really surprises me. I haven’t seen her like this in a long time.

“She’s very beautiful,” Tom observes, as if reading my thoughts. “I’ve told her I could get her work, but she’s afraid you won’t approve. What do you think, Pearl? You can see I’m not a bad man. Why don’t you think about it and talk it over with May?”

I understand his words, but I can’t take in their meaning.

Seeing my confusion, he shrugs. “All right then. On to the Golden Dragon.”

When we get there, he glances in the window and says, “It looks like they could use your help, so I won’t keep you. But if you ever need anything, come see me at the Asiatic Costume Company. May will show you where it is. She visits me every day.”

With that, he turns away and melts into the crowd. I pull open the door to the Golden Dragon Café and enter. There are eight tables and a counter with ten stools. Behind the counter Uncle Wilburt, wearing a white undershirt and a paper hat folded from plain newsprint, sweats over a sizzling wok. Next to him Uncle Charley chops ingredients with a cleaver. Uncle Edfred carries a load of dishes to the sink, where Sam rinses dirty glasses under a steaming tap.

“Hey, can we get some help over here?” a man calls out.

Sam wipes his hands, hurries over, hands me a notepad, takes Joy from my arms, and places her in a wooden crate behind the counter. For the next six hours, we work without stop. By the time the Grand Opening officially ends, Sam’s clothes are smeared with food and grease, and my feet, shoulders, and arms ache, but Joy’s sound asleep in her crate. Old Man Louie and the others come to fetch us. The uncles head to wherever it is Chinatown bachelors go at night. After my father-in-law locks the door, we set out for the apartment. Sam, Vern, and their father walk ahead, while Yen-yen, May, and I stay a proper ten paces behind them. I’m exhausted and Joy feels as heavy as a sack of rice, but no one offers to take her from me.

Old Man Louie told us not to use a language he can’t understand, but I speak to May in the Wu dialect, hoping Yen-yen won’t tell on us and trusting we’re far enough from the men that they won’t hear.

“You’ve been keeping things from me, May.”

I’m not angry. I’m hurt. May has been building a new life in China City, while I’ve been locked in the apartment. She’s even gotten a haircut! Oh, how that burns now that I’ve noticed it.

“Things? What things?” She keeps her voice low-so we won’t be heard? So I won’t raise mine?

“I thought we decided we would wear only Western clothes once we got here. We said we would try to look like Americans, but all you bring me are these.”

“That’s one of your favorite cheongsams,” May says.

“I don’t want to wear these anymore. We agreed-”

She slows, and as I pass her she reaches for my shoulder to hold me back. Yen-yen keeps walking, obediently following her husband and sons.

“I haven’t wanted to tell you, because I knew you’d be upset,” May whispers. She taps her lips hesitantly with three knuckles.

“What is it?” I sigh. “Just tell me.”

“Our Western dresses are gone. He”-she nods toward the men, but I know she’s referring to our father-in-law-“doesn’t want us to wear anything but our Chinese clothes.”

“Why-”

“Just listen to me, Pearl. I’ve been trying to tell you things. I’ve been trying to show you things, but sometimes you’re as bad as Mama. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to listen.”

Her words stun and wound me, but she isn’t finished.

“You know how the people who work on Olvera Street have to wear Mexican costumes? That’s because Mrs. Sterling insists on it. It’s in their rental agreements, just as it’s in our leases at China City. We have to wear our cheongsams to work there. They-Mrs. Sterling and her lo fan partners-want us to look like we’ve never left China. Old Man Louie must have known that when he took our clothes in Shanghai. Think about it, Pearl. We thought he had no taste, no discernment, but he knew exactly what he was looking for and he took only what he thought would be useful here. He left everything else behind.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“How could I? You’re barely here. I’ve been trying to get you to go places with me, but usually you don’t want to leave the apartment. I had to drag you out just to sit in the Plaza. You don’t say anything about it, but I know you blame me and Sam and Vern and all of us for keeping you inside. But no one’s keeping you inside. You won’t go anywhere. I couldn’t even get you to cross the street to go to China City until today!”

“What do I care about these places? We aren’t going to be here forever.”

“But how are we going to escape if we don’t know what’s out there?”

Because it’s easier not to do anything, because I’m scared, I think but don’t say.

“You’re like a bird that’s been freed from a cage,” May says, “but doesn’t remember how to fly. You’re my sister, but I don’t know where you’ve gone in your mind. You’re so far away from me now.”

We climb the stairs back to the apartment. At the door, she holds me back once again. “Why can’t you be the sister I knew in Shanghai? You were fun. You weren’t afraid of anything. Now you act like a fu yen.” She pauses. “I’m sorry. That sounded terrible. I know you’ve been through a lot, and I realize you have to give all your attention and care to the baby. But I miss you, Pearl. I miss my sister.”

From inside we hear Yen-yen coo to her son. “Boy-husband, it’s time for you to go to bed. Go get your wife and go to bed now.”

“I miss Mama and Baba. I miss our home. And this”-she gestures around the dark hallway-“is all so hard. I can’t do it without you.” Tears roll down her cheeks. She wipes them away roughly, takes a breath, and enters the apartment to go to her room with her boy-husband.

A few minutes later, I lay Joy in her drawer and get in bed. Sam rolls away from me, as he usually does, and I cling to the edge of the bed as far from him and as close to Joy as I can get. My feelings and thoughts are confused. The clothes are yet another unanticipated blow, but what about the other things May said? I hadn’t realized she was suffering too. And she was right about me. I have been afraid: to leave the apartment, to go to the end of Sanchez Alley, to enter the Plaza, to walk down Olvera Street, and to cross the street to China City. These past weeks, May had offered many times: “I’ll take you to China City whenever you want to go.” But I hadn’t gone.

I grab the pouch Mama gave me through my clothes. What’s happened to me? How have I become such a scared fu yen?.

ON JUNE 25, just a few blocks away and less than three weeks later, New Chinatown has its Grand Opening. Big traditional Chinese carved gates stand stately and colorful at each end of the block. Anna May Wong, the glamorous movie star, leads the parade. A Chinese all-girl drum corps gives a rousing performance. Neon lights outline gaily painted buildings decorated with all manner of Chinese froufrou on the eaves and balconies. Everything seems bigger and better there. They have more firecrackers, more important politicians to cut the ribbons and make speeches, more sinuous and acrobatic crews to perform the dragon and lion dances. Even the people who’ve opened shops and restaurants there are considered better, wealthier, and more established than those of us in China City.

People say that the opening of these two Chinatowns is the beginning of good times for Chinese in Los Angeles. I say it’s the beginning of hard feelings. In China City, we have to do more and make a better effort. My father-in-law uses his iron fist to make us all work even longer hours. He’s relentless and often cruel. None of us disobey him, but I don’t see how we’ll ever catch up. How can you compete when others have a larger advantage? And with things the way they are, how are we ever going to make our own money to leave this place?

Scents of Home

I SHOULD BE plotting where May, Joy, and I will go, but I find that nothing drives me to explore more than my stomach, where my loneliness has settled. I miss things like honey-covered dough confections, sugared rose cakes, and spiced eggs boiled in tea. Having lost even more weight from Yen-yen’s cooking than I did on Angel Island, I watch Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, the first and second cooks at the Golden Dragon, and try to learn from them. They let me go with them to the Sam Sing Butcher Shop with its gold-leafed pig in the window to buy pork and duck. They take me to George Wong’s fish market, which backs up to China City on Spring Street, to teach me to buy only what’s still breathing. We cross the street to the International Grocery, and for the first time since being here, I smell the scents of home. Uncle Wilburt uses some of his own money to buy me a bag of salted black beans. I’m so grateful that after that the uncles take turns buying me other little treats: jujubes, honeyed dates, bamboo shoots, lotus buds, and mushrooms. Every few days, if we have a lull in the café, they let me join them behind the counter to show me how to cook a single and very quick dish using these special ingredients.

The uncles come to the apartment for dinner every Sunday night. I ask Yen-yen if she’ll let me make the meal. The family eats it. After that, I make every Sunday dinner. Pretty soon I can make dinner in thirty minutes, as long as Vern washes the rice and Sam chops the vegetables. At first, Old Man Louie isn’t pleased. “Why should I let you squander my money on food? Why should I let you out to buy food?” (This, although he doesn’t mind that we walk to and from work, where we cater to total strangers, white ones at that.)

I say, “I don’t waste your money, because Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley pay for the food. And I don’t walk alone, because I’m always with Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley.”

“This is even worse! The uncles are saving their money to go home. Everyone-including me-has the desire to return to China, if not to live then to die, if not to die then to have his bones buried there.” Like so many men, Old Man Louie wants to save ten thousand dollars and return a rich man to his ancestral village, where he’ll acquire a few concubines, have more sons, and spend his days sipping tea. He also wants to be recognized as a “big man,” which can’t be more American. “Every time I go back, I buy more fields. If they won’t let me own land here, then I’ll own it in China. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Pearl. You’re thinking, But you were born here! You’re an American! I tell you, I may have been born here, but I’m Chinese in my heart. I will go back.”

He’s so predictable in his complaints and the way he can turn something about the uncles or anyone else into something about him, but I accept them, because he likes my cooking. He’ll never say that, but he does something even better. After a few Sundays, he announces, “I will give you money every Monday to buy food for all our meals.” Sometimes I’m tempted to put a little aside for myself, but I know how closely he watches every penny and receipt, and that he periodically checks with the people at the butcher, fish market, and dry goods store. He’s so careful with his money that he refuses to keep it in a bank. It’s all hidden, distributed in separate caches in the various Golden establishments to protect it from disaster and from lo fan bankers.

Now that I can go to the stores by myself, the shop owners begin to know me. They like my business-small as it is-and reward my loyalty to their roast duck, live fish, or pickled turnips by giving me calendars. The images are Chinafied, with brash reds, blues, and greens against harsh white backgrounds. Instead of beautiful girls reclining in their boudoirs, sending a feeling of ease, relaxation, and eroticism, the artists have chosen to paint uninspired landscapes of the Great Wall, the sacred mountain of Emei, the mystical karsts of Kweilin, or insipid-looking women wearing cheongsams made from shiny cloth in geometric patterns and sitting in poses meant to convey the virtues of moral rearmament. The artists’ technique is garish and commercial, with no delicacy or emotion, but I hang the calendars on the walls of the apartment, just as the poorest of the poor in Shanghai hung them in their sad little huts to bring a little color and wishful hoping into their lives. These things brighten the apartment as much as my meals, and as long as they’re given free, my father-in-law is satisfied.

CHRISTMAS EVE MORNING I wake at five, get dressed, give Joy to my mother-in-law, and then walk with Sam to China City. It’s still early but strangely warm. Hot winds blew all night, leaving broken branches, dried leaves, confetti, and other trash from Olvera Street ’s holiday revelers scattered on the Plaza and along Main Street. We cross Macy, enter China City, and follow our usual route, starting by the rickshaw stand in the Court of the Four Seasons and then edging around the chickens and ducks that peck at the ground in front of Wang’s Farmhouse. I still haven’t seen The Good Earth, but Uncle Charley has told me I should, saying, “It’s just like China.” Uncle Wilburt also wants me to see the movie. “If you go, watch for the mob scene. I’m in that one! You’ll see lots of uncles and aunties from Chinatown in that picture show.” But I don’t go to the movie and I don’t enter the farmhouse, because every time I pass it I’m reminded of the shack outside Shanghai.

From Wang’s Farmhouse, I follow Sam down Dragon Road. “Walk next to me,” he invites me in Sze Yup, but I don’t because I don’t want to encourage him. If I make small talk with him during the day or do something like walk next to him, then he’ll want to do the husband-wife thing.

Apart from the rickshaw rides, all the other Golden businesses are in the oval, where Dragon and Kwan Yin Roads meet. It’s along this route that the rickshaws make their serpentine loop. Only twice in the six months I’ve worked here have I ventured over to the Lotus Pool or into the covered area that houses a theater for Chinese opera, a penny arcade, and Tom Gubbins’s Asiatic Costume Company. China City may be one oddly shaped block bordered by Main, Macy, Spring, and Ord Streets-with over forty shops crammed together with all the cafés, restaurants, and other “tourist attractions” like Wang’s Farmhouse-but there are distinct enclaves inside the walls, and the people within them rarely associate with their neighbors.

Sam unlocks the door to the café, flips on the lights, and starts brewing coffee. As I refill the salt and pepper shakers, the uncles and the other workers straggle in and begin their chores. By the time the pies are sliced and put on display, the early-bird customers have arrived. I chat with our regulars-truck drivers and postal workers-take orders, and call them out to the cooks.

At nine, a pair of policemen come in and sit at the counter. I smooth my apron and allow my teeth to show in grinning welcome. If we don’t fill their bellies for free, they follow our customers to their cars and give them tickets. These last two weeks have been particularly bad as the police walked from one store to the next, collecting Christmas “presents” until their arms were loaded. A week ago, after they decided they hadn’t received enough gifts, they blocked the auto park, preventing customers from coming at all. Now everyone’s cowed, obedient, and willing to give whatever the policemen ask for so long as they let us keep our doors open.

Just as the police leave, a truck driver calls out to Sam, “Hey, buddy get me a piece of that blueberry pie to go, will ya?”

Maybe Sam’s still nervous about the policemen’s visit, because he ignores the request and continues washing glasses. By now it seems like an eternity ago that I learned from my coaching book that Sam was to be the manager of the café, but actually his position is somewhere between a glass washer and a dish washer. I watch him as I serve eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee for thirty-five cents or a jelly roll and coffee for a nickel. Someone asks Sam for a coffee refill, but he doesn’t go over with the pot until the man taps the edge of his cup impatiently. A half hour later, that same man asks for his bill, and Sam points to me. Not once does he say a word to any of our customers.

The breakfast rush slows. Sam gathers dirty plates and silverware, while I follow after him with a wet cloth to wipe the tables and counters.

“Sam,” I say in English, “why don’t you talk to our customers?” When he doesn’t respond, I go on, still in English. “In Shanghai, the lo fan always said that Chinese waiters were surly and bad-mannered. You don’t want our customers to think that about you, do you?”

His look fades into nervousness, and he gnaws his lower lip.

I switch to Sze Yup. “You don’t know English, do you?”

“I know some,” he says. Then he amends this, smiling sheepishly. “A little. Very little.”

“How can that be?”

“I was born in China. Why would I know it?”

“Because you lived here until you were seven.”

“That was a long time ago. I don’t remember the words from then.”

“But didn’t you study it in China?” I ask. Everyone I knew in Shanghai learned English. Even May who was a very poor student, knows the language.

Sam doesn’t respond directly. “I can try to speak English, but the customers refuse to understand me. And when they talk to me, I don’t understand them either.” He nods to the wall clock. “You’d better go.”

He’s always pushing me out the door. I know he goes somewhere in the mornings and in the late afternoons, just as I do. As a fu yen it’s not my place to ask where he goes. If Sam is gambling or has hired someone to do the husband-wife thing with him, what can I do? If he’s one of those womanizer types, what can I do? If he’s a gambler like my father, what can I do? I learned to be a wife from my mother and from watching Yen-yen, and I know there’s nothing you can do if your husband wants to walk out on you. You don’t know where he goes. He comes back when he comes back, and that’s it.

I wash my hands and take off my apron. As I walk to the Golden Lantern, I think about what Sam said. How can he not know English? My English is perfect-and I’ve learned it’s polite to say Occidental instead of lo fan or fan gwaytze and Oriental instead of Chinaman or Chink-but I understand that isn’t the way to get a tip or make a sale. People come to China City to be entertained. Customers like me to speak wantee-chop-suey English-and how easy that is, after I’ve listened to Vern, Old Man Louie, and so many others, who were born here but speak crooked, misshapen English. For me, it’s an act; for Sam, it’s ignorance-country, and as distasteful to me as his secret dalliances with who knows who.

I reach the Golden Lantern, where Yen-yen sells curios and babysits Joy. Together we polish, dust, and sweep. When I finish, I play with Joy for a while. At 11:30, I once again leave Joy with Yen-yen and go back to the café, where as fast as I can I serve hamburgers for fifteen cents. Our hamburgers aren’t as popular as the Chinaburgers at Fook Gay’s Café, with their stir-fried bean sprouts, black mushrooms, and soy sauce, but we do well with our bowls of salted fish with pork for ten cents, and plain bowls of rice and tea for five cents.

After lunch, I work at the Golden Lotus, selling silk flowers until Vern arrives from school. Then I go to the Golden Pagoda. I want to talk to my sister about our plans for Christmas Day, but she’s busy convincing a customer that a piece of lacquer was painted on a raft in the middle of a lake lest a speck of dust mar the perfection of its surface, and I’m busy sweeping, dusting, polishing, and shining.

Before heading back to the café, I return to the Golden Lantern, pick up Joy, and take her for a short walk through China City ’s alleys. Much like the tourists, she loves to watch the rickshaws. Golden Rickshaw rides are hugely popular-they’re Old Man Louie’s most successful enterprise. Johnny Yee, one of the local boys, pulls rickshaws for celebrities or for promotional photographs, but usually Miguel, Jose, and Ramon do the job. They earn tips and a small percentage of the twenty-five-cent fare for each ride. They get a little more if they can persuade a customer to buy a photo for an extra twenty-five cents.

Today a woman passenger kicks Miguel and then swats him with her purse. Why would she do that? Because she can. The way pullers were treated in Shanghai never bothered me. Was it because my father owned the business? Because I was like this white woman-above the pullers? Because in Shanghai pullers were barely better than dogs, whereas here May and I are now in their class? I have to say yes, yes, and yes again.

I drop Joy back with her grandmother, kiss my baby good night because I won’t see her again until I go home, and then spend the rest of the evening serving sweet-and-sour pork, cashew chicken, and chop suey-all dishes I never saw or even heard of in Shanghai-until closing time at ten. Sam stays to lock up, and I start out for the apartment alone, wending my way through the festive Christmas Eve crowds on Olvera Street rather than walk alone on Main.

I’m ashamed that May and I have ended up here. I blame myself that we work so hard and never receive even one of the lo fan dimes. Once when I held out my hand to Old Man Louie and asked for pay, he spit on my palm. “You have food to eat and a place to sleep,” he said. “You and your sister don’t need any money.” And that was the end of that, except that I’m starting to get a sense of what we might be worth. Most people in China City make thirty to fifty dollars a month. Glass washers make only twenty dollars a month, while dish washers and waiters take home between forty and fifty dollars a month. Uncle Wilburt earns seventy dollars a month, which is considered a very good wage.

“How much money did you make this week?” I ask Sam every Saturday night. “Have you put any money aside?” I hope that someday, somehow, he will give me some of those funds to leave this place. But he never tells me what he earns. He just bends his head, cleans a table, scoops Joy off the floor, or goes down the hall to the bathroom and shuts the door.

Looking back, I can see how Mama, Baba, May, and I believed Old Man Louie was wealthy. In Shanghai, our family had been well-to-do. Baba had his own business. We had a house and servants. We thought the old man had to be considerably richer than we were. Now I see things differently. An American dollar went a long way in Shanghai, where everything from housing and clothes to wives like us was cheap. In Shanghai, we looked at Old Man Louie and saw what we chose to see: a man who bragged through money. He made us look and feel insignificant by treating Baba with great disdain during his visits. But it was all a lie, because here in the Land of the Flowery Flag, Old Man Louie is better off than most in China City but poor nevertheless. Yes, he has five businesses, but they’re small-minuscule really, at fifty square feet here and a hundred square feet there-and even together don’t add up to much. After all, his fifty thousand dollars in merchandise has zero value if no one buys it. But if my family had come here, we would have been at the bottom of the heap with the laundrymen, glass washers, and vegetable peddlers.

On that dreary thought, I climb the stairs to the apartment, strip off my smelly clothes, and leave them in a pile in a corner of the room. I get in bed and try to stay awake to enjoy a few minutes of quiet and stillness with my baby already asleep in her drawer.

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, we dress and join the others in the main room. Yen-yen and Old Man Louie repair broken vases that arrived in a shipment from a curio shop in San Francisco that went out of business. May stirs a pot of jook on the hot plate in the kitchen. Vern sits with his parents, looking around, hopeful yet forlorn. He’s grown up here and goes to American school, so he knows about Christmas. In the last two weeks, he’s brought home a few Christmas decorations that he made in art class, but other than these there isn’t a single thing to suggest the holiday: no stockings, no tree, and no gifts. Vern looks like he wants to celebrate, but what can he do or say? He’s a son in his parents’ home and he has to accept their rules. May and I glance at each other, then at Vern, and back at each other. We understand how he feels. In Shanghai, May and I celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus at the mission school, but it wasn’t a holiday Mama and Papa acknowledged in any way. Now that we’re here, we want to celebrate like lo fan.

“What shall we do today?” May asks optimistically. “Shall we go to the Plaza church and Olvera Street? They’ll have festivities.”

“We don’t do things with those people,” Old Man Louie says.

“I’m not saying we have to do something with them,” May responds. “I just think it would be interesting to see how they celebrate.”

But by now May and I have learned there’s no point in arguing with our in-laws. We just have to be happy that we have a day off from work.

“I want to go to the beach,” Vern suggests. He so rarely speaks that when he does we know he really wants something. “Take the streetcar.”

“Too far,” the old man objects.

“I don’t need to see their ocean,” Yen-yen scoffs. “Everything I want is right here.”

“You stay home,” Vern says, startling everyone in the room.

May raises her eyebrows. I can see she really wants to go, but I have no intention of dipping into our wedding money for something so frivolous, and I’ve never seen Sam with money in his hands other than at the restaurant.

“We can have a nice time here,” I say. “We can walk along the lo fan part of Broadway and look in the department store windows. Everything is decorated for Christmas. You’ll like that, Vern.”

“I want the beach,” he insists. “I want the ocean.” When no one says anything, he scrapes back his chair, trudges to his room, and slams the door. He emerges a few minutes later with several dollars crushed in his fist. “I will pay,” he says shyly.

Yen-yen tries to take the money, telling the rest of us, “A Boar and his money are easily parted, but you shouldn’t take advantage of him.”

Vern shakes her hands off his and then holds his arm above his head so she can’t reach the money. “It is a Christmas present for my brother, May, Pearl, and the baby. Mama and Baba, you stay home.”

Not only is it the most I’ve ever heard him say, but it may be the most any of us have heard him say. So we do as he wants. The five of us go to the beach, stroll on the pier, and dip our toes in the freezing Pacific. We take care not to let Joy get burned by the unseasonably bright winter sun. The water shimmers against the sky. In the distance, green hills roll into the sea. May and I go for a walk by ourselves. We let the wind and sounds of the waves wash away our worries. On the way back to where Vern and Sam sit with the baby under an umbrella, May says, “It’s sweet of Vern to do this for us.” It’s the first nice thing she’s said about him.

TWO WEEKS LATER, a group of women from United China Relief invite Yen-yen to go to Wilmington to picket the shipyards for sending scrap iron to Japan. I’m sure Old Man Louie will say no when she asks permission to accompany them, but he surprises us all. “You can go if you take Pearl and May.”

“It will leave you with too few workers,” Yen-yen says, hope that this might happen and fear that he will change his mind glossing the edges of her voice.

“No matter. No matter,” he says. “I’ll have the uncles work extra hours.”

Yen-yen would never do anything like smile broadly to let us see how happy she is, but we all hear the lilt in her voice as she asks May and me, “Will you come?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I’ll do everything I can to raise money to fight the Japanese, who’ve been brutal and systematic in their policy of “the three alls”-kill all, burn all, and destroy all. It’s my duty to help women who are being raped and killed. I turn to May. Surely she’ll want to join us, if for nothing else than that she’ll get out of China City for a day, but she shrugs off the invitation.

“What can we do? We’re only women,” she says.

But it’s because I’m a woman that I dare to go. Yen-yen and I walk to the meeting place and board a bus to drive us to the shipyards. The organizers hand us printed placards. We march, we shout our slogans, and I experience a sense of freedom, which I owe entirely to my mother-in-law.

“ China is my home,” she says on the bus back to Chinatown. “It will always be my home.”

After that day, I keep a cup on the counter in the café for people to put their change. I wear a United China Relief pin on my dress. I picket to stop those scrap-iron shipments and join other demonstrations to stop the sale of aviation fuel for the monkey people’s planes. I do all this because Shanghai and China are never far from my heart.

Eating Bitterness to Find Gold

CHINESE NEW YEAR arrives. We follow all the traditions. Old Man Louie gives us money to buy new clothes. I put together an outfit for Joy that will celebrate her Tiger sign: a pair of baby slippers shaped like Tiger cubs and an orange-and-gold baby hat with little ears on top and a tail made from twisted embroidery thread coming out the back. May and I pick out American cotton dresses in floral prints. Then we have our hair washed and styled. At home, we take down the picture of the Kitchen God and burn it in the alley so he’ll travel to the afterworld to report on our activities during the past year. We put away knives and scissors to make sure we won’t cut our good fortune. Yen-yen makes offerings to the Louie ancestors. Her wishes and prayers are simple. “Bring a son to Boy-husband. Make that wife of his pregnant. Give me a grandson.”

In China City, we hang red gauze lanterns and couplets in red and gold paper. We arrange for dancers, singers, and acrobats to entertain children and their parents. We search out special ingredients to make holiday dishes in the café that will be Chinese in feeling but appeal to Occidental palates. We expect big crowds, so Old Man Louie hires extra help for his various enterprises, but he needs even more people to assist with what he anticipates will be the most profitable business on New Year’s Day: the rickshaw rides.

“We have to beat the people in New Chinatown,” he tells Sam on New Year’s Eve. “How can we do that if I have Mexican boys pulling my rickshaws on the most Chinese day of the year? Vern’s not strong enough, but you are.”

“I’ll be too busy in the café,” Sam says.

My father-in-law has asked Sam to pull rickshaws other times, and he always has some excuse not to do it. I can’t say what it will be like on New Year’s, but I know how busy we’ve been on other festival days. We’ve never been so overwhelmed that I haven’t been able to follow my usual routine of working in the café, the flower shop, the curio shop, and the antiques store. I know Sam’s lying, and so does Old Man Louie. Ordinarily my father-in-law’s anger would be great, but this is New Year’s, when no harsh words should be spoken.

On New Year’s morning, we dress in our new clothes, putting Chinese custom above Mrs. Sterling’s rules about wearing costumes to work. These things are factory-made, but it’s wonderful to have something fresh and Western on our skins again. Joy, who’s eleven months old, looks adorable in her Tiger hat and slippers. I’m her mother, so of course I think she’s beautiful. Her face is round like the moon. White as clean as new snow circles the black of her eyes. Her hair is wispy and soft. Her skin is as pale and translucent as rice milk.

I didn’t believe in the Chinese zodiac when Mama talked about it, but the more time that’s passed since her death, the more I understand that the things she said about May and me might have been true. Now when I hear Yen-yen talk about a Tiger’s traits, I see my daughter very clearly. Like a Tiger, Joy can be temperamental and volatile. One minute she’s brimming over with giddiness; the next she can dissolve into tears. A minute later, she might try to climb up her grandfather’s legs, wanting and getting his attention. She may be a worthless girl in his eyes-forever Pan-di, Hope-for-a-Brother-but the Tiger in her has pounced into his heart. Her temper is greater than his. I think he respects that.

I know the exact moment when New Year’s Day starts to turn rotten. While May and I fix each other’s hair in the main room, Yen-yen has Joy on her back on the floor, tickling her stomach, building anticipation by zooming in and out with her fingers and by raising and lowering her voice, only the words that come out of her mouth do not match her happy actions.

“Fu yen or yen fu?” Yen-yen asks, as Joy squeals in expectation. “Would you rather be a wife or a servant? Women everywhere would rather be a servant.”

Joy’s giggles do not have their usual melting effect on her grandfather, who watches sourly from a chair.

“A wife has a mother-in-law,” Yen-yen trills. “A wife has the despair of her children. She must obey her husband even when he is wrong. A wife must work and work but never receive a word of thanks. It’s better to be a servant and the mistress of yourself. Then, if you want, you can jump in the well. If only we had a well…”

Old Man Louie pushes himself away from the table. Wordlessly, he gestures to the door, and we leave the apartment. It’s still early morning, and already ill-omened words have been spoken.

Thousands of people come to China City, and the festivities are great. The firecrackers are loud and plentiful. The dragon and lion dancers wiggle and squirm from shop to shop. Everyone wears such bright colors it’s as if a great rainbow has come to earth. In the afternoon even more people come. Whenever I look out the window, another rickshaw rushes past. By evening, the Mexican pullers look exhausted.

During dinner, the Golden Dragon is completely full, and perhaps two dozen people stand just inside the door, waiting for a table to become free. Around 7:30, my father-in-law enters and pushes his way through the clustered customers.

“I need Sam,” he says.

I look around and spot Sam setting a table for eight. Old Man Louie follows my glance, strides across the room, and speaks to Sam. I can’t hear what he says, but Sam shakes his head no. Old Man Louie says something else, and Sam shakes his head again. At the third refusal, my father-in-law grabs Sam’s shirt. Sam pushes his hand away. Our customers stare.

The old man raises his voice, spitting the Sze Yup dialect out of his mouth like phlegm. “Don’t disobey me!”

“I told you I won’t do it.”

“Toh gee! Chok gin!”

I’ve been working at Sam’s side for months now, and I know he’s neither lazy nor empty-headed. Old Man Louie yanks his son across the room, bumping past tables and through the crowd by the door. I follow them outside, where my father-in-law shoves Sam to the ground.

“When I tell you to do something, you do it! Our other pullers are tired, and you know how to do this.”

“No.”

“You’re my son and you’ll do as I say,” my father-in-law pleads. His face quavers, and then his moment of weakness hardens. When he next speaks, his voice sounds like grinding rocks. “I’ve promised everything to you.”

This is not one of the pretty dramas with singing and dancing that are happening elsewhere in China City as part of tonight’s festivities. The tourists don’t understand what’s being said. Still, this is a captivating and entertaining spectacle. When my father-in-law begins to kick Sam down the alley, I trail along with the others. Sam doesn’t fight or cry out. He just takes it. What kind of man is he?

When we reach the rickshaw stand in the Court of the Four Seasons, Old Man Louie looks down at Sam and says, “You’re a rickshaw puller and an Ox. That’s why I brought you here. Now do your job!”

Fear and shame wash the color from Sam’s face. Slowly he gets to his feet. He’s taller than his father, and for the first time I see that this is as distressing to the old man as my height was to Baba. Sam takes a step toward his father, looks down at him, and says in a trembling voice, “I won’t pull your rickshaw. Not now. Not ever.”

Then it’s as though both men become aware of the silence around them. My father-in-law brushes at his mandarin robe. Sam’s eyes dart about uncomfortably. When he sees me, his whole body cringes. Then he takes off, sprinting through the gawking tourists and our curious neighbors. I run after him.

I find him in our windowless room in the apartment. His fists are bunched. His face is red with anger and hurt, but his shoulders are back, his posture upright, and his tone defiant.

“For so long I’ve been embarrassed and ashamed before you, but now you know,” he says. “You married a rickshaw puller.”

In my heart I believe him, but my mind thinks otherwise. “But you’re the fourth son-”

“Only a paper son. Always in China people ask, ‘Kuei hsing?’-What’s your name?-but really it means, ‘What is your precious family name?’ Louie is just a chi ming-a paper name. I’m actually a Wong. I was born in Low Tin Village, not far from your home village in the Four Districts. My father was a farmer.”

I sit on the edge of the bed. My mind spins: a rickshaw puller and a paper son. This makes me a paper wife, so we’re both here illegally. I feel sick to my stomach. Still, I recite the facts from the coaching book: “Your father is the old man. You were born in Wah Hong. You came here as a baby-”

Sam shakes his head. “That boy died in China many years ago. I traveled here using his papers.”

I remember Chairman Plumb showing me a picture of a little boy and thinking that it didn’t look all that much like Sam. Why hadn’t I questioned that more? I need to hear the truth. I need it for me, for my sister, and for Joy. And I need him to tell me everything-without having him close up and slump away as he usually does. I use a tactic I learned from my weeks of interrogations at Angel Island.

“Tell me about your village and your real family,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t shake too much from the emotions I feel and believing if he talks about these comfortable things, then maybe he’ll tell me the truth about how he came to be a paper son to the Louies. He doesn’t answer right away. He stares at me in the way he has so many times since the first day we met. Always I’ve seen that look as sympathy for me, but maybe he’s been trying to show compassion for our shared troubles and secrets. Now I try to match his expression. The funny thing is, I mean it.

“We had a pond in front of our house,” he murmurs at last. “Anyone could throw fish in it and raise them. You could dip a crock in the water, pull it out, and there’d be fish in your crock. No one had to pay. When the pond ran dry, you could pick up fish sitting in the mud. Still, no one had to pay. In the field behind our house, we grew vegetables and melons. We raised two pigs a year. We were not rich, but we were not poor either.”

It sounds poor to me. His family had lived from dirt to mouth. He seems to sense my understanding as he goes on haltingly.

“When the drought came, my grandfather, father, and I worked hard, trying to make the ground yield to our desires. Mama went to other villages to earn money by helping others plant or harvest rice, but those places also suffered from no rain. She wove cloth and took it to market. She tried to help our family, but it wasn’t enough. You can’t live on air and sunshine. When two of my sisters died, my father, my second brother, and I went to Shanghai. We wanted to earn enough to go back to Low Tin Village and farm again. Mama stayed home with my youngest brother and sister.”

In Shanghai, they found not promise but hardship. They didn’t have connections, so they couldn’t get factory jobs. Sam’s father took work as a rickshaw puller, while Sam, who’d just turned twelve, and his brother, who was two years younger, scavenged for small jobs. Sam sold matches on street corners; his brother ran after coal trucks to pick up pieces that fell from the beds to sell to the poor. They ate watermelon rinds plucked from trash pits in summer and watered down jook in winter.

“My father pulled and pulled,” Sam continues. “At first he drank tea with two lumps of sugar to restore his strength and cool his skin. When money ran low, he could only afford cheap tea made from dust and stems and no sugar. Then, like so many pullers, he began smoking opium. Not real opium! He couldn’t afford that! And not for pleasure either. He needed it for stimulation, to keep pulling in the hottest weather or if there was a typhoon. He bought the dregs left over from the rich and sold by servants. The opium gave my father false vigor, but his strength was eaten and his heart shriveled. Pretty soon he began to cough blood. They say that you never see a rickshaw puller reach age fifty and that most pullers are already past their best days by the time they turn thirty. My father died when he was thirty-five. I wrapped him in a straw mat and put him on the street. Then I took his place, selling my sweat by pulling a rickshaw. I was seventeen and my brother was fifteen.”

As he talks, I think about all the rickshaws I’ve ridden in and how I never really thought about the men who pulled them. I hadn’t considered pullers actual people. They’d seemed barely human. I remember how many of them had not owned shirts or shoes, the way their spines and shoulder blades had protruded from their skin, and the sweat that had oozed from their bodies even in winter.

“I learned all the tricks,” Sam goes on. “I learned I could get an extra tip if I carried a man or woman from my rickshaw to the door during typhoon season so they wouldn’t ruin their shoes. I learned to bow to women and men, invite them to ride in my li-ke-xi, call them Mai-da-mu for Madame or Mai-se-dan for Master. I hid my shame when they laughed at my bad English. I made nine silver dollars a month, but I still couldn’t afford to send money home to my family in Low Tin. I don’t know what happened to them. They’re probably dead. I couldn’t even take care of my brother, who joined other poor children helping to push rickshaws over the arched bridges at Soochow Creek for a few coppers a day. He died of the blood-lung disease the next winter.” He pauses, his mind back in Shanghai. Then he asks, “Did you ever hear the rickshaw pullers’ song?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer but begins to sing:

“To buy rice, his cap is the container.

To buy firewood, his arms are the container.

He lives in a straw hut.

The moon is his only lamplight.”

The melody comes back to me, and my mind is transported to Shanghai ’s streets and rhythms. Sam is talking about his hardship, but I feel loneliness for my home.

“I listened to riders who were Communists,” he continues. “I heard them complain that since ancient times poor men have been urged to find contentment in poverty. That was not my life. That was not why my father and brother died. I wish I could have changed their fates, but once they were gone all I could think about was my own mouth. I thought, if the leaders of the Green Gang got their starts pulling rickshaws, then why couldn’t I? I had no schooling in Low Tin. I was a farmer’s son. But even pullers understood the importance of education, which is why the rickshaw guild sponsored schools in Shanghai. I learned the Wu dialect. I learned more English-not the ABCs but some words.”

The more Sam talks, the more my heart opens to him. When I first met him in the Yu Yuan Garden, I hadn’t thought he was so bad. Now I see just how hard he’s tried to change his life and how little I’ve understood. He speaks Sze Yup fluently and the Wu dialect of the streets, while his English is practically nonexistent. He’s always looked uncomfortable in his clothes. I remember the day we met noticing his shoes and suit were new. They must have been the first he owned. I remember the red tinge to his hair and mistakenly believing it had something to do with the fact that he was from America and not recognizing it as the well-known sign of malnutrition. And then there is his manner. He’s always been deferential to me, treating me not as a fu yen but as a customer who must be pleased. He’s always bowed down to Old Man Louie and Yen-yen-not because they’re his parents but because he’s like a servant to them.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” my husband says. “My father would have died anyway. Farming is not a good life when you have to carry a two-hundred-fifty-jin load on a bamboo pole balanced on your shoulders or you have to stoop in the rice fields all day. The only riches I’ve earned have come from working with my hands and feet. I started out as so many rickshaw pullers, not knowing what to do, my bare feet slapping the road like a pair of palm fronds. I learned to hold my stomach in, expand my chest wide, raise my knees high, and stretch my head and neck forward. As a rickshaw puller, I earned an iron fan.”

I’d heard my father use the term about his best pullers. It suggested a hard, straight back and a chest as wide, spread open, and strong as a fan made from iron. I also remember what Mama said about being born in the Year of the Ox: that the Ox is capable of great sacrifices for his family’s welfare, that he’ll pull his own load and more, and that-while he may be as plain and serviceable as the beast of burden he emulates-he is forever worth his weight in gold.

“If I could make forty-five coppers from a fare, I was happy,” Sam goes on. “I would exchange those coppers for fifteen cents. I would keep turning my coppers into silver coins, and my silver coins into silver dollars. If I could pocket an extra tip, I was happier still. I thought, if I could save ten cents a day, I would have one hundred dollars in a thousand days. I was willing to eat bitterness to find gold.”

“Did you work for my father?”

“At least I didn’t have that humiliation.” He touches my jade bracelet. When I don’t flinch, he loops a forefinger through the bracelet, his flesh barely grazing mine.

“Then how did you find the old man? And why did you have to marry me?”

“The Green Gang owned the largest of the rickshaw businesses,” he answers. “I worked for it. The gang often served as matchmaker between those who wanted to become paper sons and those seeking to sell paper-son slots. In our case, they acted as a traditional matchmaker too. I wanted to change my fate. Old Man Louie had a paper-son slot to sell-”

“And he needed rickshaws and brides,” I finish for him, shaking my head at the memories all this brings back. “My father owed the Green Gang money. All he had left to sell were his rickshaws and his daughters. May and I are here. My father’s rickshaws are here, but that still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”

“For me, the price to buy the paper was one hundred dollars for each year of my life. I was twenty-four, so the cost was twenty-four hundred dollars for boat passage, plus room and board once I got to Los Angeles. I would never be able to earn that amount at nine dollars a month. Today I work to pay off the old man-not only for myself but for you and Joy too.”

“Is this why we’re never paid?”

He nods. “He’s keeping our money until my debt is paid. This is why the uncles aren’t paid either. They’re paper sons too. Only Vern is a blood son.”

“But you’re different from the other uncles-”

“That’s right. The Louies want me as a true replacement for the son who died. This is why we live with them and why I’m the manager of the café, even though I know less than nothing about food or business. If the immigration people ever discover I’m not who I say I am, they could put me in jail and deport me. But I might have a way to stay, because the old man made me a paper partner too.”

“But I still don’t understand why you needed to marry me. What does he want from us?”

“Only one thing: a grandson. That’s why he bought you and your sister. He wants a grandson one way or another.”

My chest tightens. The doctor in Hangchow said I’d probably never be able to have children, but to say that to Sam would mean I’d have to tell him why. Instead I ask, “If he wants you as his true son, then why do you have to pay him back?”

When he takes my hands, I don’t pull away, even though I’m terrified I’m about to be caught.

“Zhen Long,” he intones earnestly. Even my parents rarely called me by my Chinese name-Pearl Dragon. Now I hear it as an endearment. “A son must pay his debts, for himself and his wife and child. Back in Shanghai, when I was considering this whole arrangement, I thought, When the old man dies I will become a Gold Mountain man with many businesses. Then I came here. There were days in the beginning when I just wanted to go home. Passage only costs a hundred and thirty dollars in steerage. I thought I could make that by hiding my tips, but then you and Joy came. What kind of a husband would I be if I left you here? What kind of a father would I be?”

From the moment May and I arrived in Los Angeles, we’ve been thinking of ways to escape. If only we-I-had known Sam felt the same way.

“I began to think you, Joy, and I could go home together, but how could I allow our baby to travel in steerage? She could die down there.” He squeezes my hands in his. He stares directly into my eyes, and I don’t look away. “I’m not like the others. I don’t want to go back to China anymore. Here, I suffer every day, but it’s a good place for Joy.”

“But China ’s our home. The Japanese will tire eventually-”

“But what is there for Joy in China? What is there for any of us? In Shanghai, I was a rickshaw puller. You were a beautiful girl.”

I hadn’t realized he’d known this about May and me. The way he says it strips me of the pride I’ve always felt for what we’d done.

“I don’t care to hate anyone, but I can hate my fate-and yours too,” he says. “We can’t change the people we are or what’s happened to us, but shouldn’t we try to change our daughter’s fate? What road awaits her in China? Here, I can pay back the old man and eventually earn our freedom. Then we will give Joy a proper life-a life of opportunities that you and I will never have. Maybe she could even go to college one day.”

He speaks to my mother’s heart, but the practical part of me that survived my father losing everything and my body being torn apart by monkey people doesn’t see how his dreams can become real.

“We’ll never be able to break away from this place and these people,” I say. “Look around. Uncle Wilburt has worked for the old man for twenty years and he still hasn’t paid his debt.”

“Maybe he’s paid his debt and is saving his treasure to return home a wealthy man. Or maybe he’s happy where he is. He has a job, a place to live, a family to have dinner with on Sunday nights. You don’t know what it’s like to live in a village with no electricity or running water. Maybe you have one room for the whole family, maybe two. You eat only rice and vegetables, unless there’s a festival or a celebration, but even that takes great sacrifice.”

“All I’m saying is that one man by himself is barely able to support himself. How are you going to help the four of us?”

“Four? You mean May.”

“She’s my sister, and I promised my mother I’d take care of her.”

He considers that for a moment. Then he says, “I’m patient. I can wait and I can work hard.” He smiles shyly and then says, “In the morning when you go to the Golden Lantern to help Yen-yen and see Joy, I work at the Temple of Kwan Yin, where I have an extra job selling incense to the lo fan to stick in the big bronze burners. I’m supposed to say, Your dreams will come true, for the blessings of this graceful deity are limitless,’ but my mouth can’t form those words in English. Still, the people seem to take pity on me and buy my incense.”

He gets up and walks to the dresser. He’s such a sadly thin man, but I don’t know how I didn’t recognize his iron fan before this. He rummages through the top drawer and then returns to the bed with a sock that bulges at the toe. He turns the sock upside down, and nickels, dimes, quarters, and a few dollar bills spill on the mattress.

“This is what I’ve saved for Joy,” he explains.

I run my hands over the money. “You are a good man,” I say, but it’s hard to imagine this pittance changing Joy’s life.

“I know it isn’t much,” he admits, “but it’s more than I made as a rickshaw puller, and it will add up. And maybe, in another year or so, I can become a second cook. If I learn to be a first cook, I might make as much as twenty dollars a week. Once we can afford to go out on our own, I will become a fish peddler or maybe a gardener. If I’m a fish peddler, then we can always eat fish. If I’m a gardener, then we can always eat vegetables.”

“My English is good,” I offer tentatively. “Maybe I could look for a job outside Chinatown.”

But honestly, what makes either of us think Old Man Louie will ever release us? And even if he does, don’t I have to tell Sam the truth too? Not the part about Joy not being his! That secret belongs to May and me, and I’ll never reveal it, but I have to tell him what the monkey people did to me and how they killed Mama.

“I’ve been smeared with mud that I’ll never be able to wipe clean,” I tentatively begin, hoping that what Mama said about the Ox is true: that he won’t abandon you in times of trouble, that he’ll stick by you faithfully, and that he is charitable and good. Don’t I have to believe her now? Still, the emotions that play across his face-anger, disgust, and pity-don’t make it easy for me as I tell my story.

When I’m done, he says, “You went through all that and still Joy came out perfectly. She must have a precious future.” He puts a finger to my lips to keep me from saying anything more. “I would rather be married to broken jade than flawless clay. And my father used to say that anyone can add an extra flower to brocade, but how many women will fetch the coal in winter? He was talking about my mother, who was a good and loyal woman, just as you are.”

We hear the others enter the apartment, but neither of us moves. Sam leans close and whispers in my ear. “On the bench in Yu Yuan Garden, I said I liked you and I asked if you liked me. You only nodded. In an arranged marriage this is more than we can hope for. I never expected happiness, but shouldn’t we try to look for it?”

I turn to him. Our lips nearly touch as I whisper, “What about more children?” As close as I feel to him now, I find it hard to tell him the whole truth. “After Joy came out, the doctors at Angel Island told me I’d never be able to have another baby.”

“As boys, we are told that if we don’t have a son by age thirty, we are unlucky. The worst insult you can yell on the street is ‘May you die son-less!’ We are told that if we don’t have a son, we should adopt one to carry on the family name and care for us when we become ancestors. But if you have a son who is… who has… who can’t…” He struggles, as May and I often have, to put a name to Vernon ’s problem.

“You buy a son, as Old Man Louie bought you,” I finish for him, “so that you can care for him and Yen-yen when they become ancestors.”

“And if not me, then the son we might give them one day. A grandson would ensure them a happy existence here and in the afterworld.”

“But I can’t give them that.”

“They don’t have to know, and I don’t care. And who knows? Maybe Vern will give your sister a son, and all debts and obligations will be paid.”

“But, Sam, I can’t give you a son.”

“People say a family is incomplete without a son, but I am happy with Joy. She is my heart’s blood. Every time she smiles at me, grasps my finger, or stares at me with her black eyes, I know I’m lucky.” As he speaks, I bring his hand to my cheek, and then I kiss his fingertips. “ Pearl, you and I may have been given bad fates, but she is our future. With just one child, we can give her everything. She can have the education I didn’t have. Maybe she will be a doctor or… These things don’t matter so much, because she will always be our consolation and our joy.”

When he kisses me, I kiss him back. We’re sitting on the edge of the bed, so all I have to do is put my arms around him and bring him with me as I lie down. Even though people are in the apartment and even though they hear every squeak of the bed and stifled moan, Sam and I do the husband-wife thing. It isn’t easy for me. I keep my eyes squeezed shut and terror clenches my heart. I try to concentrate on the muscles that labored in the fields, pulled rickshaws through my home city, and so recently cradled our Joy. For me, the husband-wife thing will never bring great feelings of enjoyment, the release of clouds and rain, the taste of ecstasy of a hundred years, or any of the things the poets write about. For me, it’s about being close to Sam, the loneliness we feel for our home country, the way we miss our parents, and the hardship of our daily lives here in America, where we are wang k’uo nu-lost-country slaves, forever living under foreign rule.

After he finishes and a proper amount of time has passed, I get up and go into the main room to get Joy. Vern and May have already gone to their room, but knowing glances pass between Old Man Louie and Yen-yen.

“You bring me a grandson now?” Yen-yen asks as she hands me Joy. “You’re a good daughter-in-law.”

“You’d be a better daughter-in-law if you told your sister to do her job,” the old man adds.

I don’t respond. I just take Joy back to our room and lay her in her drawer in the bottom of the dresser. Then I reach around my neck and take off the pouch Mama gave me. I open the top drawer and tuck the pouch together with the one that May gave Joy. I don’t need it anymore. I close the drawer and turn back to Sam. I take off my clothes and slip naked back into the bed. As his hand runs up my side, I find the courage to ask one more question.

“Sometimes you disappear in the afternoons too,” I say. “Where do you go?”

His hand stops on my hip. “Pearl.” My name comes out long and soft. “I didn’t go to those places in Shanghai, and I’ll never go to them here.”

“Then where-”

“I go back to the temple, but this time it’s to make offerings to my family, to your family, and even to the Louie ancestors-”

“To my family?”

“You just told me how your mother died, but I knew she had to be gone, and your father too. You wouldn’t have come here to us if they’d still been living.”

He’s smart. He knows me well and he understands me.

“I also made offerings to our ancestors after we were married,” he adds.

I nod to myself. He’d answered the Angel Island interrogators honestly about that.

“I don’t believe in these things,” I confess.

“Maybe you should. We’ve done them for five thousand years.”

As we do the husband-wife thing again, sirens sound in the distance. In the morning we wake to learn that a fire has swept through China City. Some people say it was an accident that flared in the smoldering firecracker remains behind George Wong’s fish market, while others insist it was arson set by people in New Chinatown who don’t like Christine Sterling’s idea of a “native Chinese village” or by people in Olvera Street who don’t like the competition. The gossips will go on and on, but no matter who started the fire, a good part of China City has been destroyed or damaged.

Even the Best of Moons

THE FIRE GOD is indiscriminate. He lights lamps, he makes fireflies glow, he reduces villages to ash, he burns books, he cooks food, and he warms families. All people can hope for is that a dragon-with its watery essence-will douse unwanted fires when they come. Whether you believe in these things or not, making offerings is probably wise. As Americans would say, it’s better to be safe than sorry. In China City, where no one has insurance, no offerings are made to appease the Fire God or inspire a dragon to be benevolent. These are not good omens, but I tell myself that people in America also say lightning never strikes twice.

It will take almost six months for the parts of China City damaged by smoke and water to be repaired and the destroyed sections to be rebuilt. Old Man Louie is in an even worse position than most, since not only did some of the cash he’d hidden in his various enterprises burn but some of his real wealth-his merchandise-turned to ash. No money fills the family pot, but plenty goes out for the rebuilding effort, to order new goods from his factories in Shanghai and from antiques emporiums in Canton (and hope that they can leave those cities on foreign ships and pass safely through the Japanese-infested waters), and to feed, house, and clothe his household of seven, as well as support his paper partners and paper sons, who live in bachelor boardinghouses nearby. None of this sits well with my father-in-law.

Although he insists that May and I stay with our husbands and work at their sides, there’s nothing for us to do. We don’t know how to use a hammer or saw. We have no merchandise to unpack, polish, or sell. There are no floors to sweep, windows to wash, or customers to feed. Still, May, Joy, and I walk over to China City every morning to see how construction is progressing. May isn’t unhappy with Sam’s plan to stay together and save our money. “They feed us here,” she’s told me, finally it seems to me, showing some maturity. “Yes, let’s wait until the four of us can leave together.”

In the afternoons, we often visit Tom Gubbins in the Asiatic Costume Company, which escaped fire damage. He rents props and costumes, and acts as an agent for Chinese extras to movie studios, but otherwise he’s a bit of a mystery. Some say he was born in Shanghai. Some say he’s a quarter Chinese. Some say he’s half and half Some say he doesn’t have a single drop of Chinese in him. Some call him Uncle Tom. Some call him Lo Fan Tom. We call him Bak Wah Tom, Motion Pictures Tom, which is how he introduced himself to me at China City ’s Grand Opening. From Tom, I learn that mystery, confusion, and exaggeration can build your reputation.

He helps a lot of Chinese-buying them clothes, buying their clothes, finding them rooms, getting them jobs, making arrangements for expectant mothers at hospitals unfriendly to Chinese, sitting for interviews by the immigration inspectors, who are always on the lookout for paper merchants and paper sons-but few like him. Maybe it’s because he once worked as an interpreter at Angel Island, where he’d been accused of getting a woman pregnant. Maybe it’s because he has a fondness for young girls, although others say he has a fondness for young men. All I know is that his Cantonese is near perfect and his Wu dialect is very good. May and I love to hear the sounds of our home dialect coming from his mouth.

He wants my sister to work as an extra in the movies; naturally, Old Man Louie objects, saying, “That’s a job for a woman with three holes.” He can be so predictable, but in this he’s just voicing the sentiments of many old-timers who believe that actresses-whether in operas, plays, or motion pictures-are little better than prostitutes.

“Keep talking to your father-in-law,” Tom instructs May. “Tell him that one out of every fourteen of his neighbors works in the movies. It’s a good way to make extra income. I could even get him a job. I promise he’ll make more money in a week than he did in three months sitting in his antiques shop.” The idea makes us laugh.

People in Chinatown are often called “acting conscious.” When the studios realized they could hire Chinese for as little as “five dollars a Chink,” they used our neighbors for crowd scenes and to fill all kinds of nonspeaking roles in films like Stowaway, Lost Horizon, The General Died at Dawn, The Adventures of Marco Polo, the Charlie Chan series, and of course The Good Earth. The Depression may be receding, but people need money and will work for it in any way possible. Even people in New Chinatown, who are wealthier than we are, like to work as extras. They do it because they want to have fun and see themselves on the silver screen.

I don’t want to work in Haolaiwu. Not for any old-fashioned reasons but because I understand I’m not beautiful enough. My sister is, though, and she wants this badly. She idolizes Anna May Wong, even though everyone around here talks about her as though she’s a disgrace, because she always plays singsong girls, maids, and murderers. But when I see Anna May on the screen, I think back to the way Z.G. used to paint my sister. Like Anna May, May glows like a ghost goddess.

For weeks Tom begs us to sell him our cheongsams. “I usually buy clothes from people who bring them back after a visit to China, because they’ve gained too much weight at home. Or I buy them from people who’ve come here for the first time, because they’ve lost so much weight on the ship and on Angel Island. But these days no one’s going home because of the war, and those lucky enough to make it out of China have usually left everything behind. But you two are different. Your father-in-law looked out for you and brought your clothes.”

I don’t mind selling our clothes-I chafe at having to wear them for the sake of China City ’s tourists-but May doesn’t want to part with them.

“Our dresses are beautiful!” she cries indignantly. “They’re part of who we are! Our cheongsams were made in Shanghai. The material came from Paris. They’re elegant-more elegant than anything I’ve seen here.”

“But if we sell some of our cheongsams, then we can buy new dresses-American dresses,” I say. “I’m tired of looking unfashionable, of looking like I’m fresh off the boat.”

“If we sell them,” May inquires shrewdly, “what will happen when China City reopens? Won’t Old Man Louie notice that our clothes are gone?”

Tom waves away that worry as inconsequential. “He’s a man. He won’t notice.”

But of course he will. He notices everything.

“He won’t care as long as we give him a portion of what Tom pays us,” I say, hoping I’m right.

“Just don’t give him too much.” Tom scratches his beard. “Let him think you’ll make more money if you keep coming back here.”

We sell Tom one cheongsam apiece. They’re our oldest and ugliest, but they’re splendid compared with what he has in his collection. Then we take the money and walk south on Broadway until we come to the Western department stores. We buy rayon dresses, high heels, gloves, new undergarments, and a couple of hats-all from the sale of two dresses, with enough left over that our father-in-law isn’t angry with us when we put the remaining money in his palm. That’s when May begins her campaign, teasing him, cajoling him, and, yes, even flirting with him, trying to get him to surrender to her desires just as our father did in the past.

“You like us to keep busy,” she says, “but how can we keep busy now? Bak Wah Tom says I can make five dollars a day if I work in Haolaiwu. Think how much that will be in a week! Add to that the extra I’ll make if I wear my own costume. I have plenty of costumes!”

“No,” Old Man Louie says.

“With my beautiful clothes, I might get a close-up. I’ll earn ten dollars for that. If I get to say a line-just one single line-I’ll make twenty dollars.”

“No,” Old Man Louie says again, but this time I can practically see him counting the money in his mind.

Her lower lip trembles. She crosses her arms. Her body shrinks into itself, making her appear pitiful. “I was a beautiful girl in Shanghai. Why can’t I be a beautiful girl here?”

The mountain crumbles one grain at a time. After several weeks, he finally gives in. “Once. You may do it once.”

To which Yen-yen sniffs and walks out of the room, Sam shakes his head in disbelief, and blood rushes to my face in pleasure that May’s beaten the old man just by being herself.

I don’t catch the title of May’s first movie, but since she has her own clothes, she gets to play a singsong girl instead of a peasant. She’s gone for three nights and she sleeps during the days, so I don’t hear about her experience until the shoot ends.

“I sat in a fake teahouse all night and nibbled on almond cakes,” she recalls dreamily. “The assistant director called me a cute tomato. Can you imagine?”

For days she calls Joy a cute tomato, which doesn’t make much sense to me. The next time May works as an extra, she comes back with a new phrase: “What in the H,” as in “What in the H did you put in this soup, Pearl?”

Often she comes home bragging about the food she’s eaten. “They give us two meals a day, and it’s good food-American food! I have to be careful, Pearl, truly I do or I’m going to get fat. I won’t fit into a cheongsam then. If I don’t look perfect, they’ll never give me a speaking part.” After that, she takes to dieting-dieting for someone so tiny, for someone who knows what it means not to eat because of war, poverty, and ignorance-before Tom sends her out for a job and then for days afterward to lose the imagined weight she’s gained. All this in hopes that a director will give her a line. Even I know that-except for Anna May Wong and Keye Luke, who plays Charlie Chan’s Number One Son-speaking parts go only to lo fan, who wear yellow makeup, have their eyes taped back, and affect chop-suey English.

In June, Tom comes up with a new idea, May gobbles it and then spits it out to our father-in-law, who embraces it as his own.

“Joy’s a beautiful baby,” Tom tells May. “She’ll make a perfect extra.”

“You can make more money from her than you can from me,” May relays to Old Man Louie.

“Pan-di is lucky for a girl,” the old man confides to me. “She can earn her own way and she’s only a baby.”

I’m not sure I want Joy spending so much time with her auntie, but once Old Man Louie sees he can make money from a baby, well…

“I will let her do it on one condition.” I can make a requirement because, as Joy’s mother, only I can sign the paper allowing her to work all day and sometimes at night under the supervision and care of her aunt. “She will keep everything she makes.”

Old Man Louie doesn’t like this. Why would he?

“You will never again have to buy her clothes,” I press. “You will never again pay for her food. You will never again pay one single penny for this Hope-for-a-Brother.”

The old man smiles at that.

WHEN MAY AND Joy aren’t working, they stay in the apartment with Yen-yen and me. Often, in the long afternoons as we wait for China City to reopen, I think back to stories Mama told me about when she was a girl and confined to the women’s chambers in her natal home with her bound-footed grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins, and sisters. They’d been trapped to maneuver for position, harbor resentments, and snipe at one another. Now, in America, May and Yen-yen fight like turtles in a bucket about anything and everything.

“The jook is too salty,” May might say.

“It isn’t salty enough” comes Yen-yen’s predictable reply.

When May twirls through the main room in a sleeveless dress, stockingless legs, and open-toed sandals, Yen-yen complains, “You shouldn’t be seen in public like that.”

“Women in Los Angeles like bare legs and arms,” May counters.

“But you aren’t a lo fan,” Yen-yen points out.

But nothing and no one is better to fight over than Joy. If Yen-yen says, “She should wear a sweater,” May responds with “She’s roasting like corn on a fire.” If Yen-yen observes, “She should learn to embroider,” my sister argues back, “She should learn to roller-skate.”

More than anything Yen-yen hates that May works in motion pictures and exposes Joy to such low-class activities, and she blames me for letting it happen.

“Why do you let her take Joy to those places? You want your girl to marry one day, don’t you? You think anyone will want a bride who puts her shadow self in trash stories?”

Before I can say anything-and I’m probably not meant to anyway-my sister comes back with her objection: “They aren’t trash stories. They just aren’t for people like you.”

“The only real stories are the old ones. They tell us how to live.”

“Movies tell us how to live too,” May retorts. “Joy and I help tell stories of heroes and good women that are romantic and new. They aren’t about moon maidens or ghost girls languishing for love.”

“You’re too simple,” Yen-yen chides. “That’s why it’s a good thing you have your sister to look out for you. You need to learn from your jie jie. She understands that those way-back stories have something to teach us.”

“What does Pearl know about it?” May asks, as though I’m not in the room. “She’s as old-fashioned as our mother.”

How can she call me old-fashioned? How can she compare me with Mama? I admit that, in my longing for home, for the past, and for our parents, I’ve become like Mama in many ways. All those old ideas about the zodiac, food, and other traditions give me comfort, but I’m not the only one looking backward for consolation. May is bright, effervescent, and undeniably exquisite at twenty, but her life-even though she gets to go to movie sets and dress up-is not what she envisioned back when we were beautiful girls in Shanghai. We both have our disappointments, but I wish she could show me a little more sympathy.

“If your movies teach you to be romantic, then why is it that your sister, who stays with me every day, has done a much better job at this than you?” Yen-yen asks.

“I’m romantic!” May fights back, haplessly falling into Yen-yen’s trap.

My mother-in-law smiles. “Not romantic enough to bring me a grandson! You should have a baby already…”

I sigh. These kinds of arguments between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are as old as humankind. With conversations like this, I’m happy that most days May and Joy are on a film set and I’m alone with Yen-yen.

On Tuesdays, after delivering lunch to our husbands in China City, Yen-yen and I go door to door to every boardinghouse, apartment, and business along Spring Street, where people buy their groceries, and even over to New Chinatown to raise money for United China Relief and national salvation. We’ve gone beyond picketing. Now we carry empty vegetable cans and use them as beggars’ bowls, walking down Mei Ling, Gin Ling, and Sun Mun Ways, agreeing that we can’t go home until our cans are at least half full with pennies, nickels, and dimes. People are starving in China, so we also visit groceries and make the owners donate imported Chinese food, which we pack and send back to where it came from: China, home.

Doing this work, I meet people. Everyone wants to know my natal family name and which village I’m from. I meet more Wongs than I can count. I meet lots of Lees, Fongs, Leongs, and Moys. Through it all, Old Man Louie never once complains that I’m traipsing from Chinatown to Chinatown or that I’m meeting strangers day after day, because I’m always with my mother-in-law, who begins to confide in me not as a despised daughter-in-law but as a friend.

“I was kidnapped from my village as a small girl,” she tells me one Tuesday as we walk back from New Chinatown along Broadway. “Did you know that?”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” I say, which doesn’t begin to cover what I feel. I was expelled from my home, but I can’t imagine being taken from it forcibly. “How old were you?”

“How old was I? How can I know? I don’t have anyone to tell me that. Maybe I was five. Maybe I was older, maybe younger. I remember I had a brother and a sister. I remember there were water chestnut trees along the main road to my village. I remember a fishpond, but I guess every village has one of those.” She pauses before going on. “I left China long ago. I long for it every day and suffer when she suffers. That’s why I work so hard to raise money for China Relief.”

No wonder she doesn’t know how to cook. She wasn’t taught by her mother, just as I wasn’t taught by mine-but for different reasons. Yen-yen has no desire for something better to eat, because she doesn’t have memories of shark’s fin soup, crisp Yangtze River eel, or braised pigeon in lettuce leaves. She’s grabbed on to old traditions-outdated traditions-in the same way I latch on to them now: as a means of soul survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories. Perhaps it’s better to treat a cough with winter melon tea than by putting a mustard plaster on your chest. Yes, her way-back stories and her old ways are sinking into me, changing me, instilling more “Chinese” into me, as surely as the flavor of ginger seeps into soup.

“What happened after they took you?” I ask, my heart in a great sympathy of understanding.

Yen-yen stops on the sidewalk, bags filled with donations hanging from her hands. “What do you think happened? You’ve seen unmarried girls without families. You know what happens to them. I was sold as a servant in Canton. As soon as I was old enough, I became a girl with three holes.” She juts her chin. “Then one day, maybe I was thirteen, I was bundled in a sack and put on a boat. The next thing I knew I was in America.”

“What about Angel Island? Didn’t they ask you questions? Why weren’t you sent back?”

“I came before Angel Island opened. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I’m surprised by what I see. I still expect to see that girl, but I don’t like to remember those days. What do they matter to me now? You think I want to remember being a wife to many men?” She shuffles down the street, and I hurry to keep up with her. “I’ve done the husband-wife thing too many times. People make such big talk about it, but why worry so much? The man goes in. The man goes out. As women, we stay the same. Do you know what I mean, Pearl-ah?”

Do I? Sam’s different from those men in the shack, that I know. But have I stayed the same? I remember all the times I’ve seen Yen-yen sleeping on the couch. Usually some new bachelor-an immigrant from China, who appears on Old Man Louie’s partnership list until his debt is paid by someone who needs a laborer at a cheap price-sleeps there. But whenever they aren’t there, Yen-yen can be found in the main room in the morning, folding blankets and reciting one excuse or another: “That old man snores like a water buffalo.” Or “My back hurts. This place is more comfortable.” Or “That old man tells me I move around in the bed like a mosquito. He can’t sleep. If he doesn’t sleep, then everyone is unhappy the next day, no?” Now I understand that her reasons for sleeping on the couch are the same ones I had when I wished I could escape Sam’s bed. Too many men did things to her that she doesn’t want to remember.

I put a hand on her arm. Our eyes meet and something passes between us. I don’t tell her what happened to me. How can I? But I think she understands… something, because she says, “You’re lucky you have Joy and that she’s healthy. My boy…” She sucks in a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Maybe I spent too long in that business. I’d worked almost ten years by the time the old man bought me. There were so few Chinese women here back then-maybe less than one for every twenty men-but he got me for a cheap price anyway because of my job. I was happy, because I finally left San Francisco and came here. But even then he was like he is now-old and stingy in heart. All he wanted was a son, and he worked hard to give me one.”

She nods to a man sweeping the sidewalk before his business. He looks the other way, afraid we’ll ask him for a donation.

“When the old man went back to his home village to see his parents, I went with him,” Yen-yen continues. I’ve heard her say this before, but this time I hear it differently. “When he traveled around China to buy merchandise, he left me behind. I don’t know what he thought: that maybe I would stay in the house for the weeks he was gone with his essence inside me, my legs up, waiting for a son to grab hold. But as soon as he left, I walked from village to village. I speak Sze Yup. My home village has to be in the Four Districts, right? Every day I looked for a village with chestnut trees and a fishpond. I never found it, and I didn’t have a son. I got pregnant, but the babies all refused to breathe the air of this world. Every trip back to Los Angeles, we reported that I had had a son in China and left him with his grandparents. This is how we brought in the uncles. Wilburt was my first paper son. He was eighteen, but we said he was eleven to match the papers we filed claiming he was born one year after the San Francisco earthquake. Charley came next. He was easy. We’d gone back to China the next year, so I had a certificate for a son born in 1908, and Charley was born that same year.”

My father-in-law had had to wait a long time for his investment-his crop-to ripen, but it had worked for him, providing cheap labor for his enterprises and easily lining his pockets.

“And Edfred?” Yen-yen smiles in amusement. “He’s Wilburt’s son, you know.”

No, I didn’t know. Until recently I had thought all these men were Sam’s brothers.

“We had a paper for a son born in 1911,” Yen-yen continues, “but Edfred wasn’t born until 1918. Edfred was only six when we brought him here, but his paper said he was thirteen.”

“And no one noticed?”

“They didn’t notice that Wilburt wasn’t eleven either.” Yen-yen shrugs at the stupidity of the immigration inspectors. “With Edfred, we said he was small and undeveloped for his age, that he’d been starving in the home village. The inspectors appreciated the idea that he hadn’t benefited from ‘proper nutrition.’ They assured me he would ‘plump up’ now that he was in his proper country.”

“It’s all so complicated.”

“It’s supposed to be complicated. The lo fan try to keep us out with their changing laws, but the more complicated they make them, the easier it is for us to trick them.” She pauses to let that sink in. “I had only two sons of my own. My first son was born in China. We brought him here and we had a peaceful life. We took him back to the home village when he turned seven, but he had an American stomach, not a village stomach. He died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago now,” Yen-yen says, almost matter-of-factly “But I tried and tried and tried to have another son. Finally, finally, I got pregnant. The old man was happy. I was happy. But happiness doesn’t change your fate. The midwife came to catch Vernon. She could tell right away something was wrong. She said this happens sometimes when a mother is old. I must have been over forty when he was born. She had to use-”

She stops before a shop that sells lottery tickets and sets down her packages so she can shape her hands into claws. “She pulled him out of me with these things. His head was bent when he came out. She squeezed on this side and then the other to make it into a better shape, but…”

She picks up her bags again. “When Vern was a tiny baby, the old man wanted to go back to China to get one more paper son. We had the certificate, see? Our last one. I didn’t want to go. My Sam died in the home village. I didn’t want my new baby to die too. The old man said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll nurse the baby the whole time.’ So we went to China, picked up Edfred, got on a boat, and brought him back here.”

“And Vern?”

“You know what they say about marriage. Even a blind man can get a wife. Even a man with no sense can get a wife. Even a man with palsy can get a wife. All those men have one duty and one duty alone. To have a son.” She looks up at me as pathetic as a bird but with a will as strong as jade. “Who will take care of the old man and me in the afterlife if we don’t have a grandson who will make offerings to us? Who will take care of my boy in the afterworld if your sister doesn’t give him a son? If not her, Pearl, then it has to be you, even if he is just a paper grandson. This is why we keep you here. This is why we feed you.”

My mother-in-law steps into the dry goods store to buy her weekly lottery ticket-the eternal hope of the Chinese-but I’m filled with great concern.

I CAN BARELY wait for May to come home. As soon as she walks in the door, I insist that she go with me to China City, where Sam is working on the rebuilding effort. The three of us sit on crates, and I tell them what I learned from Yen-yen. They aren’t surprised by anything I say.

“Then either you didn’t hear me or I didn’t tell it the right way. Yen-yen said they used to go back to the old man’s home village to see his parents. He always says he was born here, but if his parents lived in China, then how could that be?”

Sam and May look at each other and then back at me.

“Maybe his parents lived here, had the old man, and then retired to China,” May suggests.

“That’s possible,” I say. “But if he was born here and lived here for almost seventy years, why isn’t his English better?”

“Because he’s never left Chinatown,” reasons Sam.

I shake my head. “Think about it. If he was born here, then why is he so loyal to China? Why did he let Yen-yen and me out to picket and raise money for China? Why does he always say he wants to retire ‘home’? Why is he so desperate to keep us close? It’s because he’s not a citizen at all. And if he’s not a citizen, then the consequences for us-”

Sam stands. “I want to know the truth.”

We find Old Man Louie at a noodle shop on Spring Street, having tea cakes and tea with his friends. When he sees us, he gets up and comes to the entrance.

“What do you want? Why aren’t you working?”

“We need to talk to you.”

“Not now. Not here.”

But the three of us aren’t going anywhere without answers. Old Man Louie motions us to a booth far enough from his friends that they won’t hear the conversation. It’s been months since the New Year’s Day fight, but Chinatown ’s gossips haven’t stopped murmuring about it. Old Man Louie has tried to be more congenial, but an awkwardness lingers between him and Sam, who doesn’t waste time with niceties.

“You were born in Wah Hong Village, weren’t you?”

The old man’s lizard eyes narrow. “Who told you that?”

“It doesn’t matter who told us. Is it true?” Sam asks.

The old man doesn’t respond. We wait. Around us, we hear laughing, chatting, and the sounds of chopsticks against bowls. Finally, the old man grunts.

“You’re not the only ones here on a lie,” he says in Sze Yup. “Look at the people in this restaurant. Look at the people who work in China City. Look at the people on our block and in our building. Everyone has a lie of some sort. Mine is I wasn’t born here. When the earthquake and fire in San Francisco destroyed all birth records, I was here and thirty-five years old by American counting. Like many others, I went to the authorities and told them I was born in San Francisco. I couldn’t prove I was, and they couldn’t prove I wasn’t. So now I am a citizen… on paper, just as you are my son on paper.”

“What about Yen-yen? She also came here before the earthquake. Does she claim to be a citizen too?”

The old man’s eyebrows furrow in disgust. “She’s a fu yen. She’s bad at telling lies and she can’t keep a secret. Obviously. Or you wouldn’t be here.”

Sam rubs his forehead as he absorbs the implications of all this. “If someone finds out you aren’t a real citizen, then Wilburt, Edfred-”

“Yes, all of us, including Pearl here, will be in trouble. This is why I hold you like this.” He closes his hand into a tight fist. “There can be no mistakes, no slips, eh?”

“What about me?” May asks, her voice tentative.

“Vern was born here, so you, my May, are the wife of a true citizen. You came legally and you are forever safe. But you need to watch your sister and her husband. One bad report from someone and they’ll be sent back. We could all be sent back, except for you, Vern, and Pan-di-although I’m sure the baby would go back to China with its parents and grandparents. I trust you, May, to help make sure that doesn’t happen.”

May pales at his words. “What could I ever do?”

A slight smile curls the corners of Old Man Louie’s lips, but for the first time I don’t see it as heartless. “Don’t worry too much,” he says. He turns to Sam. “Now you know my secret, and I know yours. Like a true father and son, we are bound together forever. The two of us not only protect each other but we also protect the uncles.”

“Why me?” Sam asks. “Why not one of them?”

“You know why. I need someone to care for my businesses, take care of my real son when I’m dead, and look after me as an ancestor when I go to the afterworld because Vern won’t be able to do that for me. I know you think I’m a cruel man and you probably don’t believe me, but I truly did choose you to be my replacement son. I will always look at you as my eldest son, my first son, which is why I’m so hard on you. I’m trying to be a proper father! I’m giving you everything, but you have to do three things. First, you must give up your plans to run away.” He puts up a hand to prevent any of us from speaking. “Don’t bother denying it. I’m not stupid, I know what’s happening in my home, and I’m tired of worrying about it all the time.” He pauses and then says, “You have to stop working at the Temple of Kwan Yin. That’s an embarrassment to me. My son shouldn’t need to do that job. And finally, you must promise to care for my boy when the time comes.”

Sam, May, and I look from one to the other of us. May sends me a message, almost pleading: I don’t want to keep moving. I want to stay in Haolaiwu. Sam, whom I still don’t know that well, takes my hand: Maybe this is an opportunity after all. He says he’ll treat me as the true first son. For myself… I’m tired of running. I’m not very good at it, and I have a baby to care for. But are we selling ourselves for less than what the old man already bought us for?

“If we stay,” Sam says, “you have to give us more freedom.”

“This is not a negotiation,” the old man shoots back. “You have nothing to bargain with.”

But Sam doesn’t surrender. “May is already working as an extra. This makes her happy. Now you must do the same for the sister. Let Pearl see what’s outside China City. And if you won’t let me work at the temple, then you need to pay me. If I am to be your first son, then you must treat me the same as my brother-”

“You two are not the same-”

“That’s right. I work much harder than he does. He gets paid from the family pot. I need to get paid too. Father,” Sam adds deferentially, “you know this is right.”

The old man’s knuckles tap on the table, weighing, weighing, weighing. He gives one final decisive rap, and then he stands. He reaches out his hand and squeezes Sam’s shoulder. Then he walks back to his tea cakes, tea, and friends.

The next day, I buy a newspaper, circle a classified ad, and walk to a phone booth, where I make a call about a position as a clerk in a refrigerator repair shop.

“You sound perfect, Mrs. Louie,” a pleasant voice says on the line. “Please come in for an interview.”

But when I get there and the man sees me, he says, “I didn’t realize you were Chinese. I thought you were Italian because of your name.”

I don’t get the job, and variations of this happen again and again. Finally, I put in an application at Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store. I’m hired to work in the storeroom, where no one will see me. I make eighteen dollars a week. After my time in China City, moving from the café to the various shops throughout the day, staying in one place is easy. I dress better than the other storeroom clerks and work harder too. One day the assistant manager releases me into the store proper to stack merchandise and keep it in order. After a couple of months-and intrigued by my British accent, which I use because it seems to please my Occidental boss-he promotes me to elevator operator. It can’t be easier or more mindless-just up and down from ten in the morning until six at night-and I earn a few dollars more a month.

Then one day the assistant manager has a new idea. “We just got in a shipment of mah-jongg sets,” he says. “You’re going to help me sell them. You’re going to provide atmosphere.”

He has me change into a cheap cheongsam sent by the game’s manufacturer, and then he takes me to the ground floor just inside the main entrance and shows me a table-my table. By the end of the afternoon, I’ve sold eight sets. The following day, I come to work wearing one of my most beautiful cheongsams-bright red with embroidered peonies. I sell two dozen mah-jongg sets. When customers announce they want to learn how to play the game, the assistant manager asks me to teach a class once a week-for a fee, of which I receive a percentage. I’m doing so well that I ask the assistant manager if he’ll let me take the written test for another promotion. When his boss grades me down because of my Chinese hair, skin, and eyes, I know I’ve gone as far as I can at Bullock’s, even though I sell more mah-jongg sets than the other girls sell gloves or hats.

But what can I do? For now I’m happy with the money I make. I give a third to Father Louie, as we all have called him since he and Sam came to their agreement, for the family pot. Another third is put aside for Joy. And I keep a third to spend as I please.

SIX MONTHS AFTER the fire, on August 2, 1939, China City has its second Grand Opening, with an opera, dragon parade, lion dance, magicians, devil dancers, and carefully monitored firecrackers. In the months that follow, the fragrances of incense and gardenias perfume the air. Soft Chinese music wafts down the alleyways. Children dart among tourists. Mae West, Gene Tierney and Eleanor Roosevelt visit. Shriners host events, and fraternities come to rush. Other groups go to the Chinese Junk Café-modeled on the command ship of a pirate fleet led by the greatest pirate in the world, who just happened to be a Chinese woman-“docked” in the Harbor of Whangpoo to eat “pirate chow” and drink “pirate grog” prepared by “an expert mixologist, a man of soft words but loud concoctions.” The alleyways are full of Occidentals, but China City will never be what it was.

Perhaps people begin to stay away because many of the original sets that had been a big draw are now reproductions. Maybe they stay away because New Chinatown is seen as more modern and fun. While we were closed, New Chinatown and its neon lights seduced visitors with the promise of late nights, dancing, and amusement, while China City -no matter how much pirate grog you imbibe-is peaceful, quiet, and quaint, with its little alleyways and people dressed as villagers.

I quit my job at Bullock’s and resume my old routine of cleaning and serving in China City. This time I’m properly paid for the work I do. May, however, doesn’t want to go back to the Golden Pagoda.

“Bak Wah Tom has offered me a full-time job,” she tells Father Louie, “helping him find extras, making sure everyone arrives on time for the bus to take them to the studio, and translating on sets.”

I listen to this in surprise. I’d be better at that job. I’m fluent in Sze Yup, for one thing-something even my father-in-law understands.

“What about your sister? She’s the smart one. She should do this work.”

“Yes, my jie jie is very smart, but-”

Before she can make her arguments, he tries a different tack. “Why do you want to be apart from the family? Don’t you want to stay with your sister?”

“ Pearl doesn’t mind,” May answers. “I’ve given her plenty of things she would never have otherwise.”

Lately, whenever May wants something, she reminds me that she gave me a child and all the many secrets that go with that. Is this meant to be a threat-that if I don’t let her do this she’ll tell the old man Joy isn’t mine? Not at all. This is one of those times when May has thought things through very clearly. This is her way of reminding me that I have a beautiful daughter, a husband who loves me, and a little home for the three of us in our room, while she has no one and nothing. Shouldn’t I help her get something to make her life more bearable?

“May already has experience with people from Haolaiwu,” I tell my father-in-law. “She’ll be good at this.”

So May goes to work for Tom Gubbins, and I take her place in the Golden Pagoda. I dust from one end of the store to the other. I wash the floor and windows. I make lunch for Father Louie and then scrub his dishes in a tub, throwing the dirty water outside the door as if I’m a peasant’s daughter. And I take care of Joy.

Like women everywhere, I wish I were a better mother. Joy is seventeen months old and still in diapers that have to be washed by hand. She often cries in the afternoons, and I have to walk her back and forth for what seems like hours to calm her. It isn’t her fault. Because of her filming schedules, she doesn’t sleep well at night and she barely naps during the day. She eats American food on the sets and spits out the Chinese food I make for her. I try to hold her, snuggle her, and do all the things a mother’s supposed to do, but there’s a part of me that still doesn’t like to touch or be touched. I love my daughter, but she’s a Tiger child and not easy. And then there’s May, who now spends a lot of time with Joy. A kernel of bitterness begins to grow, which Yen-yen feeds and nourishes. I shouldn’t listen to that old woman, but I can’t get away from her.

“That May thinks only of herself. Her beautiful face hides a devious heart. She has just one thing to do and she doesn’t do it. Pearl, Pearl, Pearl, you sit here and take care of a worthless girl all day. But where is your sister’s child? Why won’t she bring us a son? Why, Pearl, why? Because she’s selfish, because she doesn’t think of helping you or anyone else in the family.”

I don’t want to believe these things are true, but I can’t deny that May is changing. As her jie jie, I should try to stop it, but my parents and I didn’t know how to do it when May was a little girl and I don’t know how to do it now.

To make things more difficult, May often calls me from the set, lowers her voice, and then asks, “How in the H do I tell these people they have to carry their firearms over their shoulders?” Or “How in the H do I tell them to huddle together when they’re being beaten?” And I tell her the Sze Yup words, because I don’t know what else to do.

By Christmas, our lives have settled. May and I have been here twenty months. Making our own money allows us to slip away for excursions and treats. Father Louie calls us spendthrifts, but we always weigh how to spend our cash. I want a more stylish haircut than I can get in Chinatown, but every time I go to a beauty parlor in the Occidental part of town, they say, “We don’t cut Chinese hair.” I finally get someone to cut my hair after hours, when white customers won’t be offended by my presence. A car would be nice too-we could get a used four-door Plymouth for five hundred dollars-but we have a long way to save for that.

In the meantime, we go to the movie palaces on Broadway. Even if we pay for the best seats, we have to sit in the balcony. But we don’t care, because movies perk up the spirits. We cheer when we glimpse May as a fallen woman begging a missionary for forgiveness or Joy as an orphan being handed onto a sampan by Clark Gable. Seeing my daughter’s beautiful face on the screen, I’m embarrassed by my dark skin. I take some of my money to the apothecary and buy face cream embellished with ground pearls, hoping to make my face as fair as Joy’s mother’s should be.

During our time here, May and I have changed from beautiful girls buffeted by fate and looking for escape to young wives not completely happy with our lots-but what young wives are? Sam and I are doing the husband-wife thing, but so are May and Vern. I know because the walls are thin and I can hear everything. We have accepted and adapted to what’s safe, and we do our best to find pleasure where we can. On New Year’s Eve, we dress up and go to the Palomar Dance Hall, only to be turned away because we’re Chinese. Standing on the street corner, I gaze up and see a full moon that looks worn and blurred, dulled by the lights and the exhaust that hang in the air. As one poet wrote, Even the best of moons will be tinged with sadness.