Shanghai Girls

Haolaiwu

WE ARE BACK in Shanghai. Rickshaws clatter past. Beggars squat on the ground, their arms outstretched, their palms open. Barbecued ducks hang in the windows. Street vendors hover over carts, boiling noodles, roasting nuts, frying bean curd. Peddlers sell bok choy and melons from baskets. Farmers have come into the city, carrying bundles of live chickens, ducks, and pig parts hanging from poles slung over their shoulders. Women drift past in skintight cheongsams. Old men sit on upturned crates, smoking pipes, their hands tucked into their sleeves for warmth. Thick fog drapes itself around our feet, oozing into alleys and dark corners. Red lanterns hang above us, turning everything into an eerie dream.

“Places! Places, everyone!”

Home vanishes from my mind, and I’m back on the movie set I’m visiting with May and Joy. Bright lights turn on the fake scene. A camera rolls across the floor. A man positions a sound boom overhead. It’s September 1941.

“You should be proud of Joy,” May says, brushing a loose strand of hair from my daughter’s face. “No matter what studio we go to, everyone loves her.”

Joy sits on her aunt’s lap, looking content but alert. She’s three and a half years old and beautiful; “just like her aunt,” people always say. And what a perfect auntie May is, getting Joy jobs, taking her to movie sets, making sure she has good costumes and is always in the exact right spot when the director looks for an innocent face on which to focus his camera lens. This past year or so, Joy has spent so much time with her auntie that being with me is like spending time with a bowl of rancid milk. I discipline Joy and make her eat her supper, dress properly, and show respect to her grandparents, her uncles, and every other person older than she. May prefers to indulge Joy with treats, kisses, and letting her stay up all night on shoots like this.

People have always called me the smart one-even my father-in-law says so-but what seemed like a good idea a couple of years ago has turned out to be a big mistake. When I said May could take Joy to movie sets, I didn’t fully understand that my sister was going to provide my daughter with a different world, which was fun and completely separate from me. When I mentioned this to May, she frowned and shook her head. “It’s not like that. Come with us and watch what we do. You’ll see how good she is, and you’ll change your mind.” But this isn’t just about Joy. May wants to show off her importance, and I’m supposed to tell her how proud of her I am. We’ve followed this same pattern since we were children.

So today, in the late afternoon, we boarded a bus with neighbors for whom May had also gotten jobs. When we reached the studio, we drove through a gate and straight to the wardrobe department, where women shoved clothes at us with no regard to our sizes. I was handed a filthy jacket and a wrinkled pair of loose trousers. I hadn’t worn clothes like these since May and I crept out of China and then languished on Angel Island. When I tried to exchange them, the wardrobe girl said, “You’re supposed to look dirty, plenty dirty, understand?” May, who usually plays someone glamorous and naughty, also took a set of peasant clothes so we’d be together in the scene.

We changed in a big tent with no privacy and no heating. Somehow, although I dress my daughter every day, her auntie took charge, slipping off Joy’s felt jumper and helping her step into trousers that were as dark, dirty, and loose as the ones May and I wore. Then we went to hair and makeup. They hid our hair under black cloths wrapped tightly around our heads. They tied Joy’s hair with several rubber bands until her head looked like it was sprouting exotic black plants. They smeared our faces with brown makeup, bringing back memories of May coating my face with the mixture of cocoa and cold cream. Then we went back outside, so we could be spattered with mud from a spray gun. After that, we waited in the fake Shanghai, our wide black trousers fluttering in the breeze like dark spirits. For those born here, this is as close as they’ll ever get to the land of their ancestors. For those born in China, the set allows us a moment to feel as though we’ve been transported across the water and back in time.

I have to admit I love seeing how much the crew likes my sister and the way the other extras respect her. May is happy, smiling, greeting friends, reminding me of the girl she used to be back in Shanghai. And yet, as the night drags on, I see more and more things that disturb me. Yes, a man sells live chickens, but behind him a group of men squat on their haunches and gamble. In another part of the scene, men pretend to smoke opium-right on the fake street! Nearly all the men have pigtails, even though the story not only takes place after the Republic was formed but has as its background the dwarf bandits’ invasion twenty-five years later. And the women…

I think about The Shanghai Gesture, which May, Sam, Vern, and I saw earlier this year at the Million Dollar. Josef von Sternberg, the director, had spent time in Shanghai, so we thought we might see something that would remind us of our home city, but it was just another one of those stories where a white girl was led into gambling, alcohol, and who knew what else by a dragon lady. We laughed at the movie posters, which read, “People live in Shanghai for many reasons…most of them bad.” Toward the end of my days in Shanghai, I’d thought that was true, but it still hurt to see my home city-the Paris of Asia-painted in such an evil light. We’ve seen this kind of thing in movie after movie, and now we’re in one.

“How can you do this, May? Aren’t you ashamed?” I ask.

She looks genuinely confused and hurt. “About what?”

“Every single Chinese in this film is portrayed as backward,” I answer. “We’re made to giggle like idiots and show our teeth. They make us pantomime because we’re supposed to be stupid. Or they make us speak the worst sort of pidgin English-”

“I suppose, but are you telling me this doesn’t remind you of Shanghai?” She looks at me, hopeful.

“That’s not the point! Don’t you have any pride in the Chinese people?”

“I don’t know why you have to complain about everything,” she replies. Her disappointment is palpable. “I brought you here so you could see what Joy and I do. Aren’t you proud of us?”

“May-”

“Why can’t you have a good time?” she asks. “Why can’t you take pleasure in watching Joy and me earn money? I admit we don’t make as much as those guys over there.” She points to a gaggle of fake rickshaw pullers. “I got them a guaranteed seven fifty a day for a week, so long as they kept their heads completely shaved. Not bad-”

“Rickshaw drivers, opium smokers, and prostitutes. Is that what you want people to think we are?”

“If by people you mean lo fan, what do I care what they think?”

“Because these things are insulting-”

“To whom? They aren’t slurs against us, you and me. Besides, this is just part of an evolution for us. Some people”-meaning me, I suppose-“would rather be unemployed than take a job they feel is beneath them. But a job like this gives us a start, and it’s up to us to go from here.”

“So today those men will play rickshaw pullers and tomorrow they’ll own the studio?” I ask skeptically.

“Of course not,” she says, finally annoyed. “All they want is a speaking role. There’s a lot of money in that, Pearl, as you know.”

Bak Wah Tom has been enticing May with the dream of a speaking role for a couple of years now and it still hasn’t happened, although Joy has already had a few lines on different films. The bag where I keep Joy’s earnings has gotten quite fat, and she’s still a small child. In the meantime, Joy’s auntie yearns to make her own twenty dollars for a line, any line. By now she’d settle for something as simple as “Yes, ma’am.”

“If sitting around pretending all night to be a bad woman offers such opportunity,” I say rather pointedly, “then why haven’t you gotten a speaking role?”

“You know why! I’ve told you a thousand times! Tom says I’m too beautiful. Every time the director chooses me, the female star shoots me down. She doesn’t want my face to fight with hers because I’ll win. I know that sounds immodest, but that’s what everyone says.”

The crew finishes positioning people and adding a few more props for the next part of the scene. The film we’re working on is a “warning” movie about the Japanese threat; if the Japanese can invade China and disrupt foreign interests, shouldn’t we all be worried? So far, from my perspective, having spent a couple of hours shooting the same street scene over and over, it has little to do with what May and I experienced on our way out of China. But when the director describes the next scene to us, my stomach tightens.

“Bombs are going to drop,” he explains through a megaphone. “They aren’t real, but they’re going to sound real. Next the Japs are going to rush into the market. You have to run that way. You, over there with the cart, tip it over on your way out. And I want the women to scream. Scream really loud-like you think you’re going to die.”

When the camera begins to roll, I hold Joy on my hip, give what I think is a pretty good fake scream, and run. I do it again and again and again. Even though I’d had a momentary fear that this would bring bad memories, it doesn’t. The fake bombs don’t shake the ground. My ears don’t go deaf from the concussions. No one loses their limbs. Blood doesn’t spurt. It’s all just a game and fun in the way it had been years ago when May and I used to put on plays for our parents. And May was right about Joy. She’s good at following directions, waiting between shots, and crying when the camera starts rolling, just as she was instructed.

At two in the morning, we’re sent back to the makeup tent, where they daub fake blood on our faces and clothes. When we return to the set, some of us are positioned on the ground-legs splayed, clothes twisted and bloody, eyes unseeing. Now the dead and dying lie around us. As the Japanese soldiers advance, the rest of us are supposed to run and scream. This isn’t hard for me. I see the yellow uniforms and hear the stomp of boots. One of the extras-a peasant like me-bumps into me, and I scream. When the fake soldiers run forward with their bayonets before them, I try to get away, but I fall. Joy scrambles to her feet and continues to run, tripping over corpses, getting farther away from me, leaving me. One of the soldiers pushes me down when I try to get up. I’m paralyzed with fear. Even though the men around me have Chinese faces, even though they’re my neighbors dressed up to look like the enemy, I scream and scream and scream. I’m no longer on a movie set; I’m in a shack outside Shanghai. The director yells, “Cut.”

May comes to my side. Her face is etched with concern. “Are you all right?” she asks as she helps me up.

I’m still so upset that I can’t speak. I nod, and May gives me a questioning look. I don’t want to talk about what I’m feeling. I didn’t want to talk about it in China, when I woke up in the hospital, and I still don’t. I take Joy from May’s arms and hug my baby tight. I’m still shaking when the director saunters over to us.

“That was terrific,” he says. “I could have heard you scream two blocks away. Could you do it again?” He eyes me appraisingly “Could you do it several more times?” When I don’t answer right away, he says, “There’s extra money in it for you, and the kid too. A great scream is a speaking part as far as I’m concerned, and I can always use a face like hers.”

May’s fingers tighten on my arm.

“So you’ll do it?” he asks.

I push the memory of the shack out of my mind and think about my daughter’s future. I could put a little extra money aside for her this month.

“I’ll try,” I manage to say.

May’s fingers dig into my arm. As the director strolls back to his chair, May pulls me away from the others. “You have to let me do this,” she implores desperately under her breath. “Please, please let me do it.”

“I’m the one who screamed,” I say. “I want to make something worthwhile come out of this night.”

“This could be my only chance-”

“You’re only twenty-two-”

“I was a beautiful girl in Shanghai,” May pleads. “But this is Hollywood, and I don’t have much time left.”

“We all have fears of getting older,” I say. “But I want this too. Have you forgotten I was also a beautiful girl?” When she doesn’t respond, I use the one argument I’m sure will work. “I’m the one who remembered what happened in the shack-”

“You always use that excuse to get your way.”

I step back, stunned by her words. “You don’t mean that.”

“You just don’t want me to have anything of my own,” she says forlornly.

How can she possibly say that when I’ve sacrificed so much for her? My resentment has grown over the years, but it has never stopped me from giving May everything she wants.

“You’re always being given opportunities,” May continues, her voice gathering strength.

Now I understand what’s happening. If she can’t have her way, she’s going to fight me. But I’m not going to give in so easily this time.

“What opportunities?”

“Mama and Baba sent you to college-”

That’s going way back in time, but I say, “You didn’t want to go.”

“Everyone likes you more than they like me.”

“That’s ridiculous-”

“Even my own husband prefers you to me. He’s always nice to you.”

What’s the point in arguing with May? Our disagreements have always been about the same things: our parents liked one or the other of us more, one of us has something better-whether it’s a better flavor ice cream, a prettier pair of shoes, or a more companionable husband-or one of us wants to do something at the expense of the other.

“I can scream just as well as you,” May persists. “I’m asking again. Please let me do it.”

“What about Joy?” I ask softly, attacking my sister’s vulnerable spot. “You know Sam and I are saving for her to go to college one day.”

“That’s fifteen years away, and you’re assuming an American college will take Joy-a Chinese girl.” My sister’s eyes, which earlier tonight had sparkled with pleasure and pride, suddenly glare at me. For an instant I’m thrown back in time to our kitchen in Shanghai when Cook tried to teach us how to make dumplings. It had started out as something fun for May and me to do and had ended in a terrible fight. Now, all these years later, what was supposed to be an enjoyable outing has turned bitter. When I look at May, I see not just jealousy but hate. “Let me have this part,” she says. “I earned it.”

I think about how she works for Tom Gubbins, how she doesn’t have to stay confined in one of the Golden enterprises all day, how she gets to come to sets like these with my daughter and be out of Chinatown and China City for a while.

“May-”

“If you’re going to start in with all your grudges against me, I don’t want to hear them. You refuse to see how lucky you are. Don’t you know how jealous I am? I can’t help it. You have everything. You have a husband who loves you and talks to you. You have a daughter.”

There! She said it. My reply comes out of my mouth so fast, I don’t have a chance to think about it or stop it.

“Then why is it that you spend more time with her than I do?” As I speak, I’m reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

“Joy prefers being with me because I hug and kiss her, because I hold her hand, because I let her sit on my lap,” May snaps back.

“That’s not the Chinese way to raise a child. Touching like that-”

“You didn’t believe that when we lived with Mama and Baba,” May says.

“True, but I’m a mother now and I don’t want Joy to grow up to be porcelain with scars.”

“Being hugged by her mother won’t cause her to become a loose woman-”

“Don’t tell me how to raise my daughter!” At the sharp tone in my voice, some of the extras peer at us curiously.

“You won’t let me have anything, but Baba promised that if we agreed to our marriages I would get to go to Haolaiwu.”

That’s not how I remember it. And she’s changing the subject. And she’s confusing things.

“This is about Joy,” I say, “not your silly dreams.”

“Oh? A few minutes ago you were accusing me of embarrassing the Chinese people. Now you’re saying it’s bad for me but fine if you and Joy do it?”

This is a problem for me and one I don’t know how to reconcile in my mind. I’m not thinking properly, but I don’t think my sister is either.

“You have everything,” May repeats as she begins to weep. “I have nothing. Can’t you let me have this one thing? Please? Please?”

I shut my mouth and let the heat of my anger burn my skin. I refuse to believe or acknowledge any of her reasons for why she-and not I-should have this part in the movie, but then I do what I’ve always done. I give in to my moy moy. It’s the only way for her jealousy to dissipate. It’s the only way for my resentment to go back to its hiding place while giving me time to think about how to get Joy out of this business without creating more friction. May and I are sisters. We’ll always fight, but we’ll always make up as well. That’s what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other’s frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we’ve had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.

May takes my daughter and my place in the scene. The director doesn’t notice that my sister isn’t me. To him, it seems one Chinese woman dressed in black trousers, smeared with fake mud and blood, and carrying a little girl is interchangeable with the next. For the next few hours, I listen to my sister scream again and again. The director’s never satisfied, but he doesn’t replace May either.

Snapshots

ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, three months after my night on the film set, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war. The very next day, the Japanese attack Hong Kong. On Christmas Day, the British surrender the island. Also on December 8, at precisely 10:00 A.M., the Japanese seize the International Settlement in Shanghai and raise their flag atop the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the Bund. During the next four years, foreigners imprudent enough to have remained in Shanghai live in internment camps, while in this country, the Angel Island Immigration Station is turned over to the U.S. Army to house Japanese, Italian, and German prisoners of war. Here in Chinatown, Uncle Edfred-without giving any of us a chance to weigh in-joins the first group of men to enlist.

“What! Why would you do that?” Uncle Wilburt demands in Sze Yup when his birth son announces the news.

“Because I feel patriotic!” comes Uncle Edfred’s jubilant answer. “I want to fight! Number one reason: I want to help defeat our shared enemy-the Jap. Number two reason: If I enlist, I can become a citizen. A real citizen. Down the line, of course.” If he lives, the rest of us think. “All the laundrymen are doing it,” he adds when he sees our lack of enthusiasm.

“Laundrymen! Bah! Some people will do anything not to be laundrymen.” Uncle Wilburt sucks air through his teeth in worry.

“What did you do when they asked about your citizenship status?” This comes from Sam, who’s always anxious that one of us will be caught and we’ll all be sent back to China. “You’re a paper son. Are they going to come looking for the rest of us?”

“I admitted my status straight out. I told them I came over on fake papers,” Edfred answers. “But they didn’t seem too interested. When they asked anything that I thought might come back to the rest of you, I said, ‘I’m an orphan. Now do you want me to fight or not?’”

“But aren’t you too old?” Uncle Charley asks.

“On paper I’m thirty, but I’m really only twenty-three. I’m fit and I’m willing to die. Why wouldn’t they take me?”

A few days later, Edfred enters the café and announces, “The Army told me to buy my own socks. Where do I do that?” He’s lived in Los Angeles for seventeen years, but he still doesn’t know where or how to get even the most basic necessities. I offer to take him to the May Company, but he says, “I need to go by myself. I’ve got to learn to be on my own now.” He returns a couple of hours later scraped up and with holes in the knees of his baggy pants. “I bought the socks all right, but when I left the store, some men pushed me in the street. They thought I was a Jap.”

While Edfred is at boot camp, Father Louie and I go through the store to check each item, removing stickers that say MADE IN JAPAN and replacing them with new stickers that read 100% CHINESE PRODUCT. He starts to buy curios made in Mexico, which puts us in direct competition with the merchants on Olvera Street. Oddly, our customers don’t seem to notice the difference between something made in China, Japan, or Mexico. It’s foreign, simple as that.

We too are forever foreign, which makes us suspect. The family associations in Chinatown print up signs that read CHINA: YOUR ALLY for us to hang in the windows of our businesses, homes, and automobiles to announce that we aren’t Japanese. They make armbands and badges, which we wear to make sure we aren’t attacked in the street or rounded up, stuck on a train, and sent to one of the internment camps. The government, aware that most Occidentals think all Orientals look alike, issues special registration certificates that verify that we’re “members of the Chinese Race.” None of us can let down our guard.

But when Edfred comes to Los Angeles to visit after his military training, people salute him on the street. “When I wear my uniform, I know I’m not going to be kicked around. It tells folks I have as much right to be here as anyone else,” he explains. “Now I have number three reason: in the Army I’m getting a fair chance-one that’s based not on my being Chinese but on my being a man in uniform fighting for the United States.”

That day I buy a camera and take my first photograph. I still keep my photographs of Mama and Baba hidden for when the immigration inspectors make their periodic checks, but seeing Uncle Edfred go to war is different. He’ll be fighting for America… and for China. The next time the inspectors come, I’ll proudly show my snapshot of Uncle Edfred, forever China-skinny dressed in his uniform, beaming at the camera, his cap tilted at a jaunty angle, and having just told us, “From now on, just call me Fred. No more Edfred. Got it?”

What the photo doesn’t show is my father-in-law, standing a few feet away, looking devastated and scared. My feelings about him have changed the past few years. He has almost nothing here in Los Angeles: he’s a third-class citizen, he faces the same discrimination we all do, and he will never break out of Chinatown. Now his adopted country, America, is also fighting Japan. Since the commercial shipping channels are closed, he no longer receives goods from his rattan and porcelain factories in Shanghai or earns money from bringing in paper partners, but he continues to send “tea money” back to his relatives in Wah Hong Village, not only because an American dollar goes a long way in China but because his longing for his home country has never diminished. Yen-yen, Vern, Sam, May, and I have no one to send money to, so Father Louie’s remittances are from all of us-for all the villages, homes, and families we’ve lost.

“THOSE WHO CAN’T fight need to produce,” Uncle Charley tells us one day. “You know the Lee boys? They’ve gone over to Lockheed to build airplanes. They say there’s a place for me, and it’s not making chop suey They say every blow I strike in building planes is a blow of freedom for the land of our fathers and for the land of our new home.”

“But your English-”

“No one cares about my English as long as I work hard,” he says. “You know, Pearl, you could get a job over there too. The Lee boys took their sisters to work with them. Now Esther and Bernice are driving rivets in bomber doors. You want to know how much money they’re making? Sixty cents an hour during the day and sixty-five cents an hour for the night shift. You want to know what I’m going to make?” He rubs his eyes, which look particularly painful and swollen from his allergies.

“Eighty-five cents an hour. That’s thirty-four dollars a week. I tell you, Pearl-ah, those are good wages.”

My photograph shows Uncle Charley sitting at the counter, his sleeves rolled up, a piece of pie in front of him, his apron and paper hat discarded on a vacant stool.

“WHAT CAN MY boy do for the war?” my father-in-law asks when Vern, who graduated the previous June from high school, where they didn’t want him and didn’t bother to educate him, receives his draft notice. “He’s better off at home. Sam, go with him and make sure they understand.”

“I’ll take him,” Sam says, “but I’m going to enlist. I want to become a real citizen too.”

Father Louie doesn’t try to change Sam’s mind. Citizenship is one thing and the risks of being questioned can affect many people, but we all know what this war is about. I’m proud of Sam, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried. When Sam and Vern return to the apartment, I know things didn’t go well. Vern was turned down for obvious reasons, but, surprisingly, Sam was classified 4-F.

“Flat feet, and yet I pulled a rickshaw through the streets and alleyways of Shanghai,” he complains to me when we’re alone in our room. Once again, he’s been belittled and dismissed as a man. In so many ways, he continues to eat bitterness.

Not long after this, May picks up the camera and takes a photograph. In it, you can see how much the apartment has changed since May, Joy, and I first arrived. Bamboo shades are rolled above the windows, but we can let them down for privacy. On the wall above the couch hang four calendars depicting the four seasons that we received over four years from Wong On Lung Market. Old Man Louie sits on a straight-backed chair, looking cocooned and solemn. Sam gazes out the window. His posture is erect and held up by his iron fan, but his face looks as though he’s been punched. Vern-content in the womb of his family-sprawls on the couch, holding a model airplane. I sit on the floor, painting a banner advertising the sale of war bonds in China City and New Chinatown. Joy hovers nearby, building a ball of rubber bands. Yen-yen scrunches used tinfoil into compact lumps. Later that day we plan to take these things over to Belmont High School and deposit them in the collection boxes.

To me, this photograph shows how we sacrifice in big and small ways. We can finally afford to buy a washing machine, but we don’t because metal is so scarce. We promote the boycott of Japanese silk stockings and wear cotton stockings instead, using the motto “Be in style, wear lisle,” and, sure enough, women all over the city join the Non-Silk Movement. Everyone suffers from shortages of coffee, beef, sugar, flour, and milk, but in the café and in Chinese restaurants all over the city, we suffer even more because ingredients like rice, ginger, tree-ear mushrooms, and soy sauce no longer cross the Pacific. We learn to substitute sliced apple for water chestnuts. We buy rice grown in Texas instead of fragrant jasmine rice from China. We use oleo, squirt yellow food coloring in it, knead it, and press it into bar-shaped molds so it will look like butter when we cut it into pats for the café. Sam gets eggs on the black market, paying five dollars for a case. We save our bacon grease in a coffee can under the sink to take to the collection center, where we’re told it will be used in the production of armaments. I stop feeling resentful that I have to spend so much time stringing peas and peeling garlic in the restaurant, because now we’re serving our boys in uniform and we need to do everything we can for them. And at home we begin to eat American dishes-pork and beans, grilled Spam sandwiches with cheese and sliced onion, creamed tuna, and casseroles made with Bisquick-that will spread our ingredients the furthest.

SNAP: THE CHINESE New Year Fund-raiser. Snap: Double-ten Fundraiser. Snap: China Night, with your favorite movie stars. Snap: the Rice Bowl Parade, where the women of Chinatown carry a gigantic Chinese flag by its edges and ask bystanders to throw coins onto the flag. Snap: the Moon Festival, where Anna May Wong and Keye Luke serve as the mistress and master of ceremonies. Barbara Stanwyck, Dick Powell, Judy Garland, Kay Kyser, and Laurel and Hardy wave to the crowd. William Holden and Raymond Massey stand around, looking debonair, while the girls in the Mei Wah Drum Corps march in their V for Victory formation. The monies raised buy medical supplies, mosquito nets, gas masks, and other necessities for refugees, as well as ambulances and airplanes, which are sent across the Pacific.

Snap: the Chinatown Canteen. May poses with soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, who leave Union Station during their layovers, cross Alameda, and visit the canteen. These boys have come from all over the country.

Many of them have never seen a Chinese before, and they say things like “golly” and “gee whillikers,” which we adopt and use ourselves. Snap: I’m surrounded by airmen sent by Chiang Kai-shek to train in Los Angeles. It’s wonderful to hear their voices, learn news of our home country, and know that China still fights hard. Snap, snap, snap: Bob Hope, Frances Langford, and Jerry Colonna come to the canteen to put on shows. Girls between sixteen and eighteen years old-wearing white pinafores, red blouses, and saddle shoes with red socks-volunteer as hostesses to jitterbug with the boys, hand out sandwiches, and listen with sympathetic ears.

My favorite photograph shows May and me chaperoning at the canteen just before closing time on a Saturday night. We wear gardenias pinned in our hair, which falls in soft curls around our shoulders. Our sweetheart necklines show a lot of pale flesh but somehow look girlish and chaste. Our dresses are short, and our legs are bare. We may be married women, but we look pretty and cheerful. May and I know what it means to live through war, and being in Los Angeles isn’t that.

OVER THE NEXT fifteen months, many people pass through the city: servicemen going to or coming from the Pacific Theater, wives and children journeying to see husbands and fathers in military hospitals, and diplomats, actors, and salesmen of every sort involved in the war effort. I never think I’ll see someone I know, but one day in the café a man’s voice calls my name.

“Pearl Chin? Is that you?”

I stare at the man sitting at the counter. I know him, but my eyes refuse to recognize him because my humiliation is instantaneous and deep.

“Aren’t you the Pearl Chin who used to live in Shanghai? You knew my daughter, Betsy.”

I set down his plate of chow mein, turn away, and wipe my hands. If this man truly is Betsy’s father-and he is-he’s the first and only person from my past to see just how far I’ve fallen. I was once a beautiful girl, whose face decorated walls in Shanghai. I was smart and clever enough to be allowed into this man’s home. I turned his daughter from a dowdy mess into someone half fashionable. Now I’m mother to a five-year-old, wife to a rickshaw puller, and waitress in a café in a tourist attraction. I paste a smile on my face and turn to look at him.

“Mr. Howell, it’s wonderful to see you again.”

But he doesn’t look so happy to see me. He looks sad and old. I may be humbled, but his grief is elsewhere.

“We came looking for you.” He reaches across the counter and grabs my arm. “We thought you were dead in one of the bombings, but here you are.”

“Betsy?”

“She’s in a Jap camp out by the Lunghua Pagoda.”

A memory of flying kites with Z.G. and May flashes through my mind, but I say, “I thought most Americans left Shanghai before-”

“She got married,” Mr. Howell says sadly. “Did you know that? She married a young man who works for Standard Oil. They stayed in Shanghai after Mrs. Howell and I left. The oil business, you know how it is.”

I come around the counter and sit on the stool next to Mr. Howell, aware of the curious looks Sam, Uncle Wilburt, and the other café helpers shoot my way. I wish they’d stop staring at us like that-their mouths hanging open like they’re street beggars-but Betsy’s father doesn’t notice. I want to say my feeling of disgrace is hard to find, but I’m ashamed to admit it’s hidden just beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve been in this country for almost five years and still haven’t been fully able to accept my situation. It’s as if in seeing this face from the past all the goodness in my life is reduced to nothing.

Betsy’s father probably still works for the State Department, so maybe he’s aware of my discomfort. At last he fills the silence between us. “We heard from Betsy after Shanghai became the Lonely Island. We thought she was safe, since she was in British territory. But after December eighth, there was nothing we could do to get her back. Diplomatic channels don’t work so well now.” He stares into his cup of coffee and smiles ruefully.

“She’s strong,” I say, trying to bolster Mr. Howell’s spirits. “Betsy’s always been smart and brave.” Is that even true? I remember her as being passionate about politics when May and I just wanted to have another glass of champagne or another twirl around the dance floor.

“That’s what Mrs. Howell and I tell ourselves.”

“All you can do is hope.”

He lets out a knowledgeable snort. “That’s so like you, Pearl. Always looking at the bright side. That’s why you did so well in Shanghai. That’s why you got out before bad things happened. All the smart people got out in time.”

When I don’t say anything, he stares at me. After a long while, he says, “I’m here for Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit. I’ve been traveling with her on her American tour. Last week we were in Washington, where she appealed to Congress for money to help China in its fight against our common enemy and reminded the men who listened that China and the United States cannot be true allies with the Exclusion Act still on the books. This week she’s going to speak at the Hollywood Bowl and-”

“Participate in a parade here in Chinatown.”

“It sounds like you know all about it.”

“I’m going to the Bowl,” I say. “We’re all going, and we’re looking forward to having her here.”

Hearing the word we, for the first time he seems to absorb his surroundings. I watch as his cheerless eyes see past his memories of a girl who perhaps never existed. He takes in the grease on my clothes, the tiny wrinkles around my eyes, and my chapped hands. Then his understanding expands as he assesses the smallness of the café, the walls painted baby-shit yellow, the dusty fan spinning overhead, and the wiry men wearing ME NO JAP armbands gawking at him as though he were a creature from beneath the waves.

“Mrs. Howell and I live in Washington now,” he says carefully. “Betsy would be angry with me if I didn’t invite you to come home with me. I could get you a job. With your language skills, there’s a lot you could do to help the war effort.”

“My sister’s here with me,” I respond, without thinking.

“Bring May too. We have room.” He pushes away his plate of chow mein. “I hate to think of you here. You look…”

It’s funny how in that moment I see things clearly. Am I beaten down? Yes. Have I allowed myself to become a victim? Somewhat. Am I afraid? Always. Does some part of me still long to fly away from this place? Absolutely. But I can’t leave. Sam and I have built a life for Joy. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a life. My family’s happiness means more to me than starting over again.

If in the canteen photos I’m smiling, the one from this day shows me at my worst. Mr. Howell-wearing an overcoat and a fedora-and I are posed next to the cash register, onto which I’ve taped a handmade sign that reads: ANY RESEMBLANCE TO LOOKING JAPANESE IS PURELY OCCIDENTAL. Usually our customers get a big kick out of that, but no one’s showing teeth in the photograph. Even though it’s in black and white, I can almost see the redness of shame on my cheeks.

A FEW DAYS later, the whole family gets on a bus and rides to the Hollywood Bowl. Because Yen-yen and I have worked so hard raising money for China Relief, our family has good seats just behind the fountain that separates the stage from the audience. When Madame Chiang steps on the stage wearing a brocade cheongsam, we applaud like crazy people. She’s splendid and beautiful.

“I implore the women here today to become educated and take an interest in politics both here and in the home country,” she proclaims. “You can churn the wheel of progress without jeopardizing your roles as wives and mothers.”

We listen attentively as she asks us and the Americans to help raise money and support for the Women’s New Life Movement, but the whole time she speaks we ooh and aah over her appearance. My thoughts about my clothes change once again. I see that the cheongsam, which I’ve had to wear to please the tourists in China City and meet Mrs. Sterling’s lease requirements, can be a patriotic, and fashionable, symbol.

When May and I go home, we bring our most precious cheongsams out of their chests and put them on. Inspired by Madame Chiang, we want to be as stylish and as loyal to China as possible. Instantly, we’re once again beautiful girls. Sam takes our picture, and for a moment it feels as though we’re back in Z.G.’s studio. But why, I wonder later, didn’t we ask Sam to take a photograph of Yen-yen and me when we were invited to shake Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s hand?

TOM GUBBINS RETIRES and sells his business to Father Louie. It becomes the Golden Prop and Extras Company. Father Louie puts May in charge, even though she doesn’t know beans about running a business. She now earns as much as $150 a week as a technical director, supplying extras, costumes, props, translation, and advice. She continues to work in countless films, which are now sent around the world and viewed by millions of people to show how bad the Japanese are. Her parts are small: a hapless Chinese maiden, a servant to some colonel or other, a villager being saved by white missionaries. But May is best known for her screaming roles, and, with the war on, she’s played victim after victim in films like Behind the Rising Sun, Bombs over Burma, The Amazing Mrs. Holliday, in which an American woman tries to smuggle Chinese war orphans into the United States, and China, with its tagline, “Alan Ladd and twenty girls-trapped by the rapacious Japs!” May seems to be well liked by the various studios, especially MGM. “They call me the Cantonese ham,” she boasts. She brags that she once earned one hundred dollars in one day for her screaming abilities.

Then May gets the call to supply MGM with extras for the filming of Dragon Seed, which will be released next summer in 1944. She contacts the Chinese Cinema Club on Main and Alameda, where members of the Chinese Screen Extras Guild hang out, to hire people, making a commission of ten percent for each extra, and she works in the motion picture herself.

“I tried to get Metro to let Keye Luke play one of the Jap captains, but the studio doesn’t want to ruin his image as Charlie Chan’s Number One Son,” she says. “They have the prize Chinese egg, and they don’t want it to go bad. It isn’t easy to fill all the roles. I need hundreds of people to play Chinese peasants. For the Jap soldiers, the studio told me to hire Cambodians, Filipinos, and Mexicans.”

Ever since my night on the movie set, I’ve been torn between my distaste for Haolaiwu and my desire to put money aside for my little girl. Joy has worked steadily since the war began, and I’ve made a good start on what I imagine she’ll need for an education. My chance to pull her away from that world comes one night when Joy and May return from the set. Joy’s crying and goes straight to our room, where she now has a little cot in the corner. May’s furious. I’ve gotten mad at Joy sometimes. What mother doesn’t get upset with her children on occasion? But this is the first time I’ve seen May angry at Joy, ever.

“I had a great role for Joy as Third Daughter,” May fumes. “I made sure she got a good costume, and she looked darling. But just before the director called her, Joy went to the toilet. She missed her opportunity! She embarrassed me. How could she do that to me?”

“How?” I ask. “She’s five years old. She needed to use the pot.”

“I know, I know,” May says, shaking her head. “But I really wanted this for her.”

Grasping at my opportunity before it disappears, I continue. “Let’s have Joy work in one of the stores with her grandparents for a while. That way she’ll learn to be more appreciative of everything you do for her.” I don’t say that I won’t let her go back to Haolaiwu, that in September Joy will start American school, or that I don’t know how I’ll save enough for Joy to go to college, but May’s so mad she agrees with me.

Dragon Seed remains a highlight of May’s career. One of her most precious possessions becomes the photo of her with Katharine Hepburn on the set. They’re both wearing Chinese peasant clothes. Miss Hepburn’s eyes have been taped back and heavily lined with black. The famous actress doesn’t look even a little bit Chinese, but then neither do Walter Huston or Agnes Moorehead, who also star in the picture.

ON MY DRESSER, I put a photo of Joy at the orange juice stand we’ve set up for her outside the Golden Dragon Café. She’s surrounded by servicemen, who crouch around her, smiling and giving her a thumbs-up. The photograph captures a single moment but one that’s repeated day after day, night after night. The boys in uniform love to see my little girl-wearing cute silk pajamas and her hair in pigtails-squeezing oranges. They get to drink all they want for ten cents. Some of those boys will drink three or four glasses just to watch our Joy, her lips pursed in concentration, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Sometimes I look at that photograph and wonder if she knows how hard she’s working. Or does she see it as a break from all-night calls and her aunt’s demands? An added bonus: if men stop to look at this little Chinese girl-a curiosity-and drink her orange juice, which doesn’t poison them, then they might come in for a meal.

IN SEPTEMBER I get Joy ready for kindergarten. She wants to go to Castelar School in Chinatown with Hazel Yee and the other neighbor kids. But Sam and I don’t want her to go to the school that passed Vern from grade to grade even though he couldn’t read, write, or do sums. We want her to have a step up in the world. We want her to attend school outside Chinatown, which means Joy has to say she lives in that district. She also has to be taught the official family story. Father Louie’s lies about his status were passed to Sam, the uncles, and me. Now those lies go to a third generation. Joy will forever need to be careful when she applies for school, a job, or even her marriage certificate. All that starts now. For weeks we rehearse her as though she’s about to go through Angel Island: Where do you live? What’s the cross street? Where was your father born? Why did he return to China as a boy? What is your father’s job?

Not once do we tell her what’s true or what’s false. It’s better if she knows only fake truth.

“All little girls need to know these things about their parents,” I explain to Joy as I tuck her in her cot the night before school starts. “Don’t tell your teacher anything except what we’ve told you.”

The next day Joy puts on a green dress, a white sweater, and pink tights. Sam takes a photo of Joy and me standing on a step outside our building. She carries a new lunch box with a smiling and waving cowgirl sitting astride her trusty horse. I gaze at Joy with mother love. I’m proud of her, proud of all of us, for having come so far.

Sam and I take Joy by streetcar to the elementary school. We fill out the forms and lie about where we live. Then we walk Joy to her classroom. Sam stretches out Joy’s hand to the teacher, Miss Henderson, who stares at it and then asks, “Why can’t you foreigners just go back to your own countries?”

Just like that! Can you believe it? I have to respond before Sam works out what she’s said. “Because this is her home country,” I say, imitating the British mothers I used to see walking along the Bund with their children. “This is where she was born.”

We leave our daughter with that woman. Sam doesn’t say a word as we ride the streetcar back to China City, but when we reach the café, he pulls me to him and speaks to me in a voice ragged with emotion. “If they do something to her, I’ll never forgive them and I’ll never forgive myself.”

A week later, when I go to the school to pick up Joy, I find her crying on the curb. “Miss Henderson sent me to the vice principal’s office,” she says, tears dripping down her face. “She asked a lot of questions. I answered like you told me, but she called me a liar and said I can’t go here anymore.”

I walk to the vice principal’s office, but what can I do or say to change her mind?

“We keep an eye out for these infractions, Mrs. Louie,” the heavyset woman intones. “Besides, your daughter doesn’t belong here. Anyone can see that. Take her to the school in Chinatown. She’ll be happier there.”

The next day I walk Joy the couple of blocks to Castelar School, right in the heart of Chinatown. I see children from China, Mexico, Italy, and other European countries. Her teacher, Miss Gordon, smiles as she takes Joy’s hand. She escorts Joy into the classroom and shuts the door. In the weeks and months that follow, Joy-who’s been raised to be obedient, and refrain from doing something as wild as ride a bicycle, and been scolded by our neighbors for laughing too much and too loudly-learns to play hopscotch, jacks, and leapfrog. She’s happy to be in the same class with her best friend, and Miss Gordon seems like a nice enough person. We do the best we can at home. For me, this means making Joy speak English as much as possible, because she’s going to have to make a living in this country and because she’s an American. When her father, grandparents, or uncles speak to her in Sze Yup, she answers in English. Along the way Sam’s understanding of English-but not his pronunciation-improves. Still, the uncles constantly tease her about going to school. “Education is only trouble for a girl,” Uncle Wilburt cautions. “What do you want to do? Run away from us?” I find an ally in her grandfather. Not so long ago, he threatened May and me, telling us we’d have to put a nickel in a jar if we spoke any language other than Sze Yup in front of him. Now he tells Joy a variation of the same thing: “If I hear you speak something other than English, you will put a nickel in my jar.” Her English is almost as good as mine, but I still can’t imagine how she’ll break out of Chinatown completely.

IN LATE FALL we gather around the radio to hear that President Roosevelt has asked Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act: “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes. We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and correct them.” A few weeks later, on December 17, 1943, all exclusion laws are overturned, just as Betsy’s father hinted they would be.

We listen to Walter Winchell’s broadcast when he announces, “Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, just missed being number one Chinese naturalized U.S. citizen.” Since Keye Luke is working in a picture that day, a Chinese doctor in New York becomes the first. Sam commemorates that moment of happiness by taking a picture of his daughter standing with one hand on her hip and her other hand resting on top of the radio. No cheongsams for her! Since Joy started school and we gave her that lunch box, she’s decided she loves cowgirls and cowgirl dresses. Her grandfather has even bought her a pair of cowgirl boots on Olvera Street, and once she has her outfit on, there’s no getting it off. She grins happily. Even though the rest of the family is not in the picture, I will always remember that we all smiled with her.

After that day, Sam and I talk about applying for naturalization, but we’re afraid, as are so many paper sons and the wives who squeaked in with them. “I have my fake citizenship from masquerading as Father’s real son. You have your Certificate of Identity through being married to me. Why should we risk losing what we have? How can we trust the government when our Jap neighbors are sent to internment camps?” Sam asks. “How can we trust the government after everything it’s done to us? How can we trust the government when the lo fan look at us funny-like we’re Japs too?” May is in a different situation than Sam and I. She’s married to a real American citizen, and she’s lived in the country for five years. She becomes the first person in our building to become a citizen through the naturalization process.

THE WAR DRAGS on month after month. We try to keep life as normal as possible for Joy, and it pays off She does so well in school that her kindergarten and first-grade teachers recommend her for a special second-grade program. I work with Joy all summer to get her prepared, and even Miss Gordon-who’s taken a continuing interest in our girl-comes to the apartment once a week to help my daughter with her sums and reading comprehension.

Maybe I push Joy too hard, because she gets a bad summer cold. Then, two days after the bomb drops on Hiroshima, her cold takes a turn. Her fever rages, her throat burns red, and she coughs so hard and long that she throws up. Yen-yen goes to the herbalist, who makes a bitter tea for Joy to drink. The next day, when I’m working, Yen-yen takes Joy back to the herbalist, who blows an herb powder into her throat with the cap of a calligraphy brush. On the radio Sam and I hear that another bomb has been dropped-this one on Nagasaki. The broadcaster says that the destruction is terrible and vast. Government officials in Washington are optimistic that the war will end soon.

Sam and I close up the café and hurry to the apartment, wanting to share the news. When we get there, we see that Joy’s throat has become so swollen she’s starting to turn blue. Somewhere people are rejoicing-sons, brothers, and husbands will be coming home-but Sam and I are so afraid for Joy that we can’t think beyond our own fear. We want to take her to a Western doctor, but we don’t know one and we don’t have a car. We’re talking about how to find and hire a taxi when Miss Gordon arrives. In the chaos of the news of the bombs and the anxiety we feel for Joy, we’ve forgotten about the tutorial. As soon as Miss Gordon sees Joy, she helps me wrap her in a sheet, and then she drives us to General Hospital, where, she says, “They treat people like you.” Within minutes of our arriving at the hospital, a doctor cuts a hole in my daughter’s throat so she can breathe.

Less than a week after Joy’s encounter with death, the war ends and Sam-shaken by almost losing his little girl-takes three hundred dollars of our savings and buys a very used Chrysler. It’s old and dented, but it’s ours. In our last photograph from the war years, Sam sits in the Chrysler’s driver’s seat, Joy perches on the fender, and I stand by the passenger door. We’re about to go for a Sunday drive, our first.

Ten Thousand Happinesses

“FIFTEEN CENTS FOR one gardenia,” a melodious voice rings out. “Twenty-five cents for a double.” The little girl standing behind the table is adorable. Her black hair shimmers under the colored lights, her smile beckons, her fingers look like butterflies. My daughter, my Joy, has her own “place of business,” as she calls it, and she runs it wonderfully well for a child of ten. On weekend nights she sells gardenias from six to midnight outside the café, where I can keep watch on her, but she doesn’t need me or anyone else to protect her. She’s a Tiger-brave. She’s my daughter-persistent. She’s her aunt’s niece-beautiful. I have exciting news. I want to get May alone to tell her, but seeing Joy sell gardenias has us entranced and paralyzed.

“Look how precious she is,” May coos. “She’s good at this. I’m glad she likes it and that she earns a little money. It’s a good thing all the way around, isn’t it?”

May looks lovely tonight: like a millionaire’s wife in vermilion silk. She dresses well, because she can afford to spend the money she earns frivolously. She recently turned 29. Oh, the tears! As if she turned 129. But to me she hasn’t changed one bit since our beautiful-girl days. Still, every day she worries about gaining weight and forming wrinkles. Lately, she’s been stuffing her pillow with chrysanthemum leaves so she’ll wake with her eyes clear and moist.

“ China City is a tourist place, so who do you think should be the seller? The smallest and the cutest, that’s who,” I agree. “And Joy’s smart. She watches to make sure nothing’s stolen.”

“For an extra penny, I’ll sing ‘God Bless America,’” Joy says to a couple who stop at her table. She doesn’t wait for an answer but begins to sing in a clear, high, and earnest voice. At American school, she’s learned all the patriotic songs-“My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”-as well as songs like “My Darling Clementine” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” At the Chinese Methodist Mission on Los Angeles Street, she’s learned to sing “Jesus Is All the World to Me” and “Jesus Loves Even Me” in Cantonese. Between work, regular school, and Chinese school-which she attends Monday through Friday from 4:30 to 7:30 and Saturdays from 9:00 to 12:00-she’s a busy but happy little girl.

Joy glances at me and smiles as she holds out her hand to the couple. She’s learned this trick-getting people to pay for things they may not want-from her grandfather. The husband puts some change in Joy’s palm, and she closes her hand around it as fast as a monkey. She drops the change into a can and gives the woman a gardenia. Once done with these customers, Joy moves them along. She’s learned this from her grandfather too. Every night she counts the money and then turns it over to her father, who converts the change into dollars, which he then gives to me to hide with Joy’s college money.

“Fifteen cents for one gardenia,” Joy trills, a serious but endearing look on her face. “Twenty-five cents for a double.”

I link my arm through my sister’s. “Come on. She’s fine. Let’s get a cup of tea.”

“But not in the café, all right?” May doesn’t like to be seen in the café. It isn’t glamorous enough for her. Not these days.

“That’s fine,” I say. I nod to Sam, who’s behind the counter in the café, stir-frying an order in a wok. He’s the second cook now, but he can keep an eye on our daughter while I visit with May.

My sister and I swing through China City ’s alleyways toward the costume and prop shop that came to her through Tom Gubbins. It’s been ten years since we arrived in Los Angeles, ten years since we stepped into China City. When I first passed through the miniature Great Wall, I felt no connection to this place. Now it feels like home: familiar, comfortable, and much loved. This isn’t the China of my past-the busy streets of Shanghai, the beggars, the fun, the champagne, the money-but I see reminders of it here in the laughing tourists, the traditionally costumed shop owners, the smells that come from the cafés and restaurants, and the stunning woman at my side, who happens to be my sister. As we stroll, I catch glimpses of us in the shopwindows and I’m transported to our girlhoods: the way we dressed in our room and stared at our reflections and those of our beautiful-girl images that hung on the walls around us, the way we walked together along Nanking Road and smiled at ourselves in store windows, and the way Z.G. captured and painted our perfect selves.

And yet we’ve both changed. Now I see myself-thirty-two years old, no longer a new mother but a woman content with herself My sister is a flower in full bloom. The desire to be looked at and admired still burns from deep within her. The more she feeds it, the more she needs. She’ll never be satisfied. This malady is in her bones-from birth, her essential character, her Sheep that wants to be taken care of, petted, and admired. She isn’t Anna May Wong and she never will be, but she gets more movie work and more varied roles-as a whimsical cashier, the giggly but ineffectual maid, or the stoic wife of a laundryman-than anyone else in Chinatown. This makes her a star in our neighborhood and a star to me.

May opens the door to her shop and flips on a light, and there we are-surrounded by the silks, embroideries, and kingfisher feathers of the past. She makes tea, pours it, and then asks, “So what’s this thing you’re so eager to tell me?”

“Ten thousand happinesses,” I say. “I’m pregnant.”

May clasps her hands together. “Really? Are you sure?”

“I went to the doctor.” I smile. “He says it’s true.”

May gets up, comes to me, and hugs me. Then she pulls away. “But how? I thought-”

“I had to try, didn’t I? The herbalist has been giving me wolfberry fruit, Chinese yam, and black sesame to put in our soup and other dishes.”

“It’s a miracle,” May says.

“Beyond a miracle. Unlikely, impossible-”

“Oh, Pearl, I’m so pleased.” Her joy mirrors mine. “Tell me everything. How far along are you? When is the baby coming?”

“I’m about two months.”

“Have you told Sam yet?”

“You’re my sister. I wanted to tell you first.”

“A son,” May says, smiling. “You’re going to have a precious son.”

Everyone has this desire, and I flush with pleasure just hearing the word-son.

Then a shadow crosses May’s face. “Can you do this thing?”

“The doctor says I shouldn’t be so old, and I have my scars.”

“Women older than you have babies,” she says, but this isn’t the best thing to say given that Vern’s problems are often blamed on Yen-yen’s age. May winces at the insensitivity of her remark. She doesn’t ask about the scars, because we never talk about how I came to get them, so she shifts to more traditional questions about my condition. “Are you sleepy all the time? Are you sick to your stomach? I remember…” She shakes her head as if ridding herself of those memories. “They always say that life is extended only by having children.” She reaches over and touches my jade bracelet. “Think how happy Mama and Baba would have been.” May suddenly grins, and our sad feelings melt. “Do you know what this means? You and Sam have to buy a house.”

“A house?”

“You’ve been saving all these years.”

“Yes, for Joy to go to college.”

My sister brushes away that worry with a wave of her hand. “You have plenty of time to save for that. Besides, Father Louie will help you with the house.”

“I don’t see why. We have an arrangement-”

“But he’s changed. And this is for his grandson!”

“Maybe, but even if he does decide to help us, I wouldn’t want to be separated from you. You’re my sister and my closest friend.”

May gives me a reassuring smile. “You’re not going to lose me. You couldn’t even if you tried. I have my own car now. Wherever you move, I’ll come and visit.”

“But it won’t be the same.”

“Sure it will. Besides, you’ll come to China City every day to work. Yen-yen will want to take care of her grandson. I’ll need to see my nephew too.” She takes my hands. “ Pearl, buying a house is the right thing to do. You and Sam deserve this.”

SAM IS BEYOND thrilled. He may have once told me he didn’t care if he had a son, but he’s a man, and, for all his words, he’s needed and wanted a son very badly. Joy hops up and down with excitement. Yen-yen weeps, but my age concerns her. Father Louie, wanting to behave as a patriarch should, tries to capture his emotions in his clenched fists, but he can’t stop beaming. Vern stands by me, a kind but small protector. I don’t know if my posture is taller and straighter because I’m happy or if Vern is just shy around me, but he seems shorter and thicker-as though his spine is collapsing and his chest broadening. He should have grown out of the slouch of his teen years by now, but I often notice that he will lean over and put his hands on his thighs as though propping himself up from fatigue or boredom.

On Sunday the uncles come for dinner to celebrate. Our family-like so many in Chinatown -is growing. The Chinese population in Los Angeles has more than doubled since we first arrived. This isn’t because the Exclusion Act was overturned. We thought that was going to be wonderful when it happened, but only 105 Chinese a year are allowed to enter the country under the new quota. As always, people find ways to get around the law. Uncle Fred brought in his wife under the War Brides Act. Mariko’s a pretty girl, quiet, and Japanese, but we don’t hold it against her. (The war is over and she’s part of our family now, so what else can we do?) Other men have brought in wives through other acts, and when you have men and women together, you’re going to get children. Mariko had two babies one right after the other. We love Eleanor and Bess, even though they’re half-and-half, even though we don’t see them as much as we’d like. Fred and Mariko don’t live in Chinatown. They took advantage of the G.I. Bill to buy a house in Silver Lake, not far from downtown.

The men wear sleeveless undershirts and drink bottles of beer. Yen-yen-in loose black trousers, a black cotton jacket, and a really fine jade necklace-dotes on Joy and Mariko’s daughters. May swishes through the main room in a full-skirted American-style dress of polished cotton belted at the waist. Father Louie snaps his fingers, and we sit down to eat. My family use their chopsticks to snap up the best morsels to drop in my bowl. Everyone has advice. And surprisingly, everyone agrees that we should look for a house in which to raise the Louie grandson. And May was right. Father not only volunteers to help but says he’ll match us dollar for dollar as long as his name’s on the title too.

“Married people are starting to live away from their in-laws,” he says. “It will look strange if you don’t have your own home.” (Because after ten years he’s no longer afraid we’ll run away. We’re his true family now, just as he and Yen-yen are ours.)

“This apartment-too much bad air,” Yen-yen says. “The boy will need a place to play outside, not in an alley.” (Which had been fine for Joy.)

“I hope there’s room for a pony,” Joy says. (She isn’t getting a pony, no matter how much she wants to be a cowgirl.)

“With the war over, everything’s changed,” chimes in Uncle Wilburt, for once wholly optimistic. “You can go to the Bimini Pool to swim. You can sit wherever you want at the movie show. You could even marry a lo fan if you wanted to.”

“But who’d want to?” Uncle Charley asks. (So many laws have changed, but that doesn’t mean attitudes-Oriental or Occidental-have changed with them.)

Joy reaches her chopsticks across the table, looking for a piece of pork. Her grandmother smacks her hand. “Only take food from the dish directly in front of you!” Joy’s hand retreats, but Sam dips his chopsticks into the pork dish and fills his daughter’s bowl. He’s a man-soon to be the father of a precious grandson-and Yen-yen won’t correct his manners, but later she’ll give Joy a talking-to about being virtuous, graceful, courteous, polite, and obedient, which means, among other things, learning to sew and embroider, take care of the house, and use her chopsticks properly. All this from a woman who barely knows these things herself.

“So many doors have opened,” Uncle Fred says. He came back from the war with a box full of medals. His English, which had been pretty good to begin with, improved in the service, but he still speaks Sze Yup with us. We thought he’d return to China City and the Golden Dragon Café to work, but no. “Look at me. The government is helping me with my college tuition and housing.” He raises his beer. “Thank you, Uncle Sam, for helping me become a dentist!” He takes a swig, then adds, “The Supreme Court says we can live wherever we want. So where do you want to live?”

Sam runs a hand through his hair and then scratches the back of his neck. “Wherever they’ll accept us. If they don’t want us, I don’t want to live there.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Uncle Fred says. “The lo fan are more open to us now. A lot of guys were in the service. They met and fought with people who looked like us. You’ll be welcome wherever you go.”

Later that night, after everyone goes home and Joy has been tucked into her permanent sleeping place on the couch in the main room, Sam and I talk more about the baby and a possible move.

“With our own place, we could do what we want,” Sam says in Sze Yup. Then he adds in English, “In privacy.” No single word in Chinese conveys the concept of privacy, but we love the idea of it. “And all wives want to be away from their mothers-in-law.”

I don’t suffer under Yen-yen’s thumb, but the thought of moving out of Chinatown and giving Joy and our baby new opportunities brightens my heart. But we aren’t like Fred. We can’t use the G.I. Bill to buy a house. No bank will give just any Chinese a loan, and we don’t trust American banks because we don’t want to owe money to Americans. But Sam and I have been saving, hiding our money in his sock and in the lining of the hat I wore out of China. If we keep our desires modest, then we might just be able to buy something.

But it isn’t as easy as Uncle Fred said. I look in Crenshaw, where I’m told we can buy only south of Jefferson. I try Culver City, where the real estate agent won’t even show me property. I find a house I like in Lake-wood, but the neighbors sign a petition saying they don’t want Chinese to move in. I go to Pacific Palisades, but the land covenants still say that houses can’t be sold to someone of Ethiopian or Mongolian descent. I hear every excuse: “We don’t rent to Orientals.” “We won’t sell to Orientals.” “As Orientals, you won’t like that house.” And the old standby: “On the phone we thought you were Italian.”

Uncle Fred-who was in the war and earned his bravery-encourages us not to give up, but Sam and I are not the kind to holler and cry that we’ve been robbed, beaten, or discriminated against. The only way we can hope to buy a house outside Chinatown is to find a seller so desperate he doesn’t mind offending his neighbors, but by now I’m nervous about moving at all. Or maybe I’m not nervous; maybe I’m feeling homesick in advance. After Shanghai, how can I lose what we’ve built for ourselves in Chinatown?

I WORK HARD to grow my baby the Chinese way. I have the worries of every expectant mother, but I also know that my baby’s home environment was once invaded and nearly destroyed. I go to the herbalist, who looks at my tongue, listens to the many pulses in my wrist, and prescribes An Tai Yin-Peaceful Fetus Formula. He also gives me Shou Tai Wan- Fetus Longevity Pills. I don’t shake hands with strangers, because Mama once told a neighbor woman this would cause her baby to be born with six fingers. When May buys a camphor chest for me to store the clothes I’m making for the baby, I remember Mama’s beliefs and refuse to accept it, because it resembles a casket. I begin to question my dreams, recalling what Mama said about them: if you dream of shoes, then bad luck is coming; if you dream of losing teeth, then someone in the family will die; and if you dream of shit, then big trouble is about to arrive. Every morning I rub my belly, happy that my dreams have been free from these bad omens.

During the New Year festivities I visit an astrologer, who tells me my son will be born in the Year of the Ox, just like his father. “Your son will have the purest of hearts. He will be filled with innocence and faith. He will be strong and never whimper or complain.” Every day, when the tourists leave China City, I go to the Temple of Kwan Yin to make offerings to assure that the baby will be safe and well. As a beautiful girl in Shanghai, I looked down on those mothers who went to the temples in the Old Chinese City, but now that I’m older I understand that my baby’s health is more important than girlish ideas of modernity.

On the other hand, I’m not stupid. No matter what, I’ll be an American mother, so I go to an American doctor too. I still don’t like that Western doctors dress in white and paint their offices white-the color of death-but I accept these things because I’ll do anything for my baby. Anything means having the doctor examine me. The only men who have been in that area are my husband, the doctors who repaired me in Hangchow, and the men who raped me. I’m not happy to have this man feeling around and looking in there. And I really don’t like what he says: “Mrs. Louie, you will be lucky to carry this baby to term.”

Sam understands the dangers, and he quietly goes to each family member to warn them. Immediately, Yen-yen refuses to let me cook, wash dishes, or iron clothes. Father orders me to stay in the apartment, put my feet up, sleep. And my sister? She takes more responsibility for Joy, walking her to American school and Chinese school. I don’t know quite how to explain this. My sister and I have fought over Joy for many years. May gives her niece beautiful clothes bought in department stores-a sky blue party dress in dotted swiss, another with exquisite smocking, and a blouse with ruffles-while I sew practical clothes for my daughter-jumpers made with two pieces of felt, Chinese jackets with raglan sleeves made with cotton bought from the remnant bin, and smocks made from seersucker (what we call atomic fabric, because it never wrinkles). May buys Joy patent leather shoes, while I insist on saddle shoes. May is fun, while I’m the maker of rules. I understand why my sister wants to be the perfect auntie; we both do. But right now I don’t worry about that, and I let Joy drift away from me and into her auntie’s arms, believing I’ll never have to compete with May for my son’s love.

Perhaps realizing she’s stealing Joy from me, my sister gives me Vern. “He’ll be with you all the time,” she says, “to make sure nothing bad happens. He can take care of simple things, like getting you tea. And if there’s an emergency-and there won’t be-he can come and get one of us.”

Anyone would think May’s offer would please Sam, but he doesn’t like the idea one bit. Is Sam jealous? How can he be? Vern is a grown man, but as we spend our days together, he seems to shrink while my belly grows. Still, Sam won’t let Vern sit next to me at dinner or any other meal. As a family we accept this, because Sam is going to be a father.

We spend a lot of time talking about names. This isn’t like when May and I named Joy. Father Louie will have the honor and duty of naming his grandson, but that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t have an opinion or try to sway him.

“You should name the baby Gary for Gary Cooper,” my sister says.

“I like my name. Vernon.”

We smile and say that’s a nice idea, but no one wants to name a baby after a person so defective that if he’d been born in China he would have been left outside to die.

“I like Kit for Kit Carson or Annie for Annie Oakley.” This of course comes from my cowgirl daughter.

“Let’s name him after one of the ships that brought the Chinese to California -Roosevelt, Coolidge, Lincoln, or Hoover,” Sam says.

Joy giggles. “Oh, Dad, those are presidents, not boats!”

Joy often makes fun of her father for his poor understanding of English and American ways. At the very least, this should hurt his feelings. At the most, he should punish her for being unfilial. But he’s so happy about his coming son that he pays no attention to his daughter’s tart tongue. I tell myself I have to stop this trait in our girl. Otherwise she’ll end up like May and me when we were young: rude to our parents and flagrantly disobedient.

Some of our neighbors also give suggestions: One named a son after the doctor who delivered the baby. Another named a daughter after a nurse who’d been particularly kind. The names of midwives, teachers, and missionaries fill cribs throughout Chinatown. I remember how Miss Gordon saved Joy’s life, so I suggest the name Gordon. Gordon Louie sounds like a smart, successful, non-Chinese man.

When my fifth month comes, Uncle Charley announces that he’s returning to his home village as a Gold Mountain man, saying, “The war’s over and the Japanese are gone from China. I’ve saved enough and I can live well there.” We host a banquet, we shake his hand, and we drive him to the port. It seems that for every wife who arrives in Chinatown, another man goes home. Those who’ve always seen themselves as sojourners are now finding their happy endings. But not once does Father Louie, who always said he wanted to return to Wah Hong Village, bring up the idea of closing the Golden enterprises and taking us back to China. Why would he retire to his home village when at last he’s going to get his grandson, who will be an American citizen by birth, venerate his grandfather when he goes to the afterworld, and learn to hit baseballs, play the violin, and become a doctor?

At the beginning of my sixth month, I receive a piece of mail with stamps from China. I eagerly rip open the envelope and find a letter from Betsy. I can’t believe she’s alive. She survived her time in the Japanese camp by the Lunghua Pagoda, but her husband didn’t. “My parents want me to join them in Washington to regain my health,” she writes, “but I was born in Shanghai. It’s my home. How can I leave it? Don’t I owe it to the city of my birth to help with the rebuilding efforts? I’ve been working with orphans…”

Her letter reminds me that there’s one person I would like to hear from or about. Even after all these years, Z.G. still comes into my mind. I put a hand on my belly-which protrudes like a steamed bun-feel the baby move inside me, and visit my artist and Shanghai in my mind. I’m not lovesick or homesick. I’m just pregnant and sentimental, because my past is simply that-past. My home is here with this family I’ve built from the scraps of tragedy. My hospital bag is packed and sitting by the door to our room. In my purse I carry fifty dollars in an envelope to pay for the delivery. Once the baby’s born, he’ll come home to a place where everyone loves him.

The Air of This World

SO OFTEN WE’RE told that women’s stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby’s illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We’re told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life-my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son-faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts-so fragile-wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day. As men, they have to put a brave face on tragedy and obstacles, but they are as easily bruised as flower petals.

If we hear that women’s stories are insignificant, then we’re also told that good things always come in pairs and bad things happen in threes. If two airplanes crash, we wait for a third to fall from the sky. If a motion-picture star dies, we know that another two will succumb. If we stub a toe and lose our car keys, we know that another bad thing must happen to complete the cycle. All we can hope is that it will be a bent fender, a leaky roof, or a lost job rather than a death, a divorce, or a new war.

The Louie family’s tragedies arrive in a long and devastating cascade like a waterfall, like a dam burst open, like a tidal wave that breaks, destroys, and then pulls the evidence back to sea. Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame.

IT’S THE BEGINNING of summer 1949, and the June gloom is worse than usual, especially at night. Damp fog creeps in from the ocean and hangs over the city like a soggy blanket. The doctor tells me that the pains will start any day now, but maybe the weather has lulled my baby into inactivity or maybe he doesn’t want to come into a world so gray and cold when he is surrounded by warmth where he is. I don’t worry. I stay at home and wait.

Tonight Vern and Joy keep me company. Vern hasn’t been feeling well lately, so he’s asleep in his room. Joy has just one more week of fifth grade. From where I sit at the dining table, I can see her curled up on the couch and frowning. She doesn’t like practicing her times tables or seeing how fast she can complete the pages of long division her teacher has given her to increase her speed and accuracy.

I look back down at the newspaper. Today I’ve returned to it again and again, believing and then refusing to believe what I’ve read. Civil war is tearing apart my home country. Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army has been pushing across China as steadily and as relentless as the Japanese once did. In April, his troops seized control of Nanking. In May, he grabbed Shanghai. I remember the revolutionaries from the cafés I used to frequent with Z.G. and Betsy. I remember how Betsy used to get more riled up than they did, but for them to take over the country? Sam and I have talked a lot about this. His family were peasants. They had nothing. If they had lived, they would have had everything to gain from a Communist system, but I came from the bu-er-ch’iao-ya-bourgeois class. If my parents were still alive, they’d be suffering. Here, in Los Angeles, no one knows what will happen, but we hide our worries behind forced smiles, no-meaning words, and a constant false face presented to Occidentals, who are far more terrified of the Communists than we are.

I go to the kitchen to make tea. I’m standing in front of the sink, filling the teakettle, when I feel a rush of wetness down my legs. This is it! My water’s finally broken. Grinning, I look down, but what I see running down my legs and pooling on the floor is not water but blood. The fear that grips me starts somewhere in that down-below area and comes all the way up to my heart, which pounds in my chest. But this is like a small tremor compared with what happens next. A contraction wraps from my back to my belly button and pushes down with such ferocity that I think the baby will fall out in one fast whoosh. That doesn’t happen. I don’t even know if that could happen. But when I reach under my belly and pull up, more liquid gushes down my legs. Squeezing my thighs together, I shuffle to the kitchen door and call to my daughter.

“Joy, go find your auntie.” I hope May’s in her office and not out with the studio people she entertains to keep her business connections strong. “If she’s not in her office, go to the Chinese Junk. She likes to meet people there for dinner.”

“Ah, Mom-”

“Now! Go now.”

She looks at me. She can see only my head peeking out of the kitchen. For this I’m thankful. Still, my face must betray something, because she doesn’t try to fight me as she usually does. As soon as she leaves the apartment, I grab dish towels and press them between my legs. I sit back in my chair and grip the armrests to keep from screaming every time another contraction hits. I know they’re coming too fast. I know something is terribly wrong.

When Joy returns with May, my sister takes one look at me, grabs my daughter before she can see anything, and pulls her out of sight.

“Go to the café. Find your father. Tell him to meet us at the hospital.”

Joy leaves, and my sister comes to my side. Creamy red lipstick has turned her mouth into an undulating sea flower. Eyeliner widens her eyes. She wears an off-the-shoulder dress of periwinkle satin that hugs her body as closely as a cheongsam. I smell gin and steak on her breath. She looks in my face for a moment, then lifts my skirt. She tries not to reveal anything that will be less than a comfort, but I know her too well. Her head tilts as she takes in the blood-soaked towels. She sucks a tiny bit of her lip into her mouth and holds it between her right front tooth and the tip of her tongue. She smoothes my skirt carefully back over my knees.

“Can you walk to my car, or do you want me to call an ambulance?” she asks, her voice as calm as if she’s asking if I prefer her pink hat or the blue one with the ermine trim.

I don’t want to be any trouble, and I don’t like to waste money. “Let’s go in your car, so long as you don’t mind the mess.”

“Vern,” May calls. “Vern, I need you.” He doesn’t answer, and May goes down the hall to get him. They come back a minute or so later. The boy-husband’s hair is tousled and his clothes wrinkled from sleep. When he sees me, he starts to whimper.

“You take one side,” May instructs, “I’ll take the other.”

Together they help me up, and we walk downstairs. My sister’s grip is strong, but Vern feels like he’s crumbling under my weight. There’s some kind of fiesta on the Plaza tonight, and people pull away when they see me with my hand pressing something between my legs and my sister and Vern holding me up. No one likes to see a pregnant woman; no one likes to see such private business made public. May and Vern put me in the backseat of her car, and then she drives me the few blocks to the French Hospital. She parks in the porte cochere and runs inside for help. I stare out the window at the lights that illuminate the parking area. I breathe slowly, methodically. My stomach sits on my hands. It feels heavy and still. I remind myself that my baby is an Ox, just like his father. Even as a child, the Ox has willpower and inner stamina. I tell myself that my son is following his nature right now, but I’m very afraid.

Another contraction, the worst one yet.

May returns to the car with a nurse and a man, both dressed in white. They shout orders, put me on a gurney and wheel me into the hospital as fast as they can. May stays by my side, staring down at me, talking to me. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.”

I grasp the metal bars on the sides of the gurney and grind my teeth. Sweat drenches my forehead, my back, my chest, and I shiver from cold.

The last thing my sister says as I’m wheeled into the delivery room is “Fight for me, Pearl. Fight to live like you did before.”

My baby son comes out, but he never breathes the air of this world. The nurse wraps him in a blanket and brings him to me. He has long lashes, a high nose, and a tiny mouth. While I hold my son, staring into his lonely face, the doctor works on me. Finally, he stands up and says, “We need to perform surgery, Mrs. Louie. We’re going to put you under.” When the nurse takes the baby away, I know I’ll never see him again. Tears run down my face as a mask is put over my nose and mouth. I’m grateful for the blackness that comes.

I OPEN MY eyes. My sister sits by my bed. The remnants of her red lipstick are just a stain. The eyeliner has muddied her face. Her luxurious periwinkle dress looks tired and wrinkled. But she’s still beautiful, and in my mind I’m transported to another time when my sister was with me in a hospital room. I sigh, and May takes my hand.

“Where is Sam?” I ask.

“He’s with the family. They’re down the hall. I can get them for you.”

I want my husband badly, but how can I face him? May you die sonless-the worst insult you can give.

The doctor comes in to check on me. “I don’t know how you carried the baby as long as you did,” he says. “We almost lost you.”

“My sister is very strong,” May says. “She’s been through worse than this. She’ll have another baby.”

The doctor shakes his head. “I’m afraid she won’t be able to have another child.” He turns to look at me. “You’re lucky you have your daughter.”

May squeezes my hand confidently. “The doctors told you that before and look what happened. You and Sam can try again.”

I think these are among the worst words I’ve ever heard. I want to scream, I’ve lost my baby! How can my sister not know what I’m feeling? How can she not understand what it is to have lost this person who’s been swimming inside me for nine months, whom I’ve loved with my whole heart, whom I’ve steeped with so many hopes? But May’s words are not the worst I can hear.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” The doctor covers the horror of his words with his strange lo fan cheerfulness and reassuring smile. “We took out everything.”

I can’t bear to cry in front of this man. I focus my eyes on my jade bracelet. All these years and for all the years after I die, it will remain unchanged. It will always be hard and cold-just a piece of stone. Yet for me it is an object that ties me to the past, to people and places that are gone forever. Its continued perfection serves as a physical reminder to keep living, to look to the future, to cherish what I have. It reminds me to endure. I’ll live one morning after another, one step after another, because my will to continue is so strong. I tell myself these things and I tamp steel around my heart to cover my sorrow, but they don’t help me when the family comes into the room.

Yen-yen’s face sags like a sack of flour. Father’s eyes are as dull and dark as lumps of coal. Vern takes the news physically, wilting before the rest of us like a cabbage after a terrible storm. But Sam… Oh, Sam. That night ten years ago when he confessed his life to me, he said he didn’t need a son, but these last months I’ve seen how much he wanted-needed-a son who would carry on his name, who would venerate him as an ancestor, who would live all the dreams that Sam has but will never achieve. I’d given my husband hope, and now I’ve destroyed it.

May pushes the others out of the room so Sam and I can be alone. But my husband-this man with his iron fan, who looks so strong, who can lift and carry anything, who can absorb humiliation upon humiliation-cannot spread open his chest to bear my pain.

“While we were waiting…” His voice trails off. He clasps his hands behind him and paces back and forth, struggling to maintain his composure. At last he tries again. “While we were waiting, I asked a doctor to examine Vernon. I told the doctor my brother has weak breath and thin blood,” Sam explains, as though our Chinese ideas would mean anything to the doctor.

I want to bury my face in his warm and fragrant chest, absorb the strength of his iron fan, hear the steadiness of his heartbeat, but he refuses to look at me.

He stops at the foot of the bed and stares at a spot somewhere above my head. “I should go back to them. Make the doctors do their tests on Vern. Maybe there’s something they can do.”

This, even though they couldn’t save our son. Sam leaves the room, and I cover my face with my hands. I’ve failed in the worst way a woman can, while my husband, to bury his grief, has shifted his concern to the weakest member of our family. My in-laws don’t come back, and even Vern stays away. This is common practice when a woman has lost a precious son, but it hurts me nevertheless.

May does everything for me. She sits with me when I cry. She helps me to the toilet. When my breasts become painfully swollen and the nurse comes in to squeeze out the milk and throw it away, my sister pushes her out of the room and does the job herself Her fingers are gentle, loving, and tender. I miss my husband; I need my husband. But if Sam has abandoned me when I’ve needed him the most, then May has abandoned Vern. On my fifth day in the hospital, May finally tells me what’s happened.

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

“What does this mean?”

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

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

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

“Yen-yen? Father?”

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

“And Joy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But, Mom-”

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

“But why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are my favorite girls?” she asks.

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

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

“Can we go, Mom?” Joy asks eagerly.

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

“And so does Joy,” I add.

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

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

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

Joy looks at me, her eyes bright and questioning.

“You can go if you finish your homework.”

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

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

“About the war,” Hazel finishes for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hearing her words, I know I have to try harder to protect my daughter. But how? We’ve never learned how to fight against evil stares or sidewalk ruffians.

“Walk together to and from school like I told you,” I say. “Keep doing your classwork and-”

“That’s so like your mother,” May says. “Worry, worry, worry. Our mama was like that too. But look at us now!” She reaches across the table and takes one of each of the girls’ hands. “Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that. Now, let’s finish your assignment so we can get some ice cream.”

The girls smile. As they work on the project, May keeps talking to them, pushing them to look deeper into the issues brought up in the article. Maybe she’s taking the right approach with them. Maybe they’re too young to be so scared. And maybe if they do their current events report, they won’t be as ignorant about what’s happening around them as May and I once were in Shanghai. But do I like it? Not one bit.

That night after dinner, Father Louie opens the letter from Wah Hong Village: “We have no wants. Your money is not needed,” it says.

“Do you think it’s real?” Sam asks.

Father Louie passes it to Sam, who examines it before passing it on to me. The calligraphy is simple and clear. The paper looks properly worn and tattered, as have the letters we’ve received in the past.

“The signature looks the same,” I say, handing the letter to Yen-yen.

“It must be real,” she says. “It traveled very hard to get here.”

A week later we learn that this cousin tried to escape, was captured, and then was killed.

I tell myself that a Dragon shouldn’t be so afraid. But I am. If something happens here-and my mind reels with the possibilities-I don’t know what I’ll do. America is our home, and I fear every day that somehow the government will find a way to push us out of the country.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, we receive an eviction notice. We need a new place to live. Sam and I could continue to save money for Joy and rent a place just for ourselves, but the one thing we have-our strength-comes from the family. It’s old-fashioned Chinese, but Yen-yen, Father, Vern, and Sam are the only people May and I have left in the world. Everyone but Vern and Joy chips in, and I’m given the task of finding a new home for all of us.

Not so long ago, filled with optimism about the birth of our son, I’d gone looking for a place for Sam and me to buy and had been turned away by real estate agents who wouldn’t show me houses even though the laws had changed. I’d spoken to people who’d bought houses and moved in at night, only to have garbage thrown in their yards. Back then Sam said he wanted to go “wherever they’ll accept us.” We’re Chinese, and we’re a family of three generations choosing to live together. I know of only one place that will accept us completely: Chinatown.

I see a small bungalow off Alpine Street. I’m told it has three small bedrooms, a screened porch that can be used for sleeping, and two bathrooms. A low chain-link fence covered with dormant Cecile Brunner roses surrounds the property. A huge pepper tree sways gently in the backyard. The lawn is a dried-out rectangle. Marigolds left over from summer lie shriveled and brown. Some chrysanthemums, which look like they’ve never been pruned, languish in a wilted heap. Above me, endless blue sky holds the promise of another sunny winter. I don’t even have to enter the house to know I’ve found our home.

By now I understand that for every good thing that happens, something bad will happen too. When we’re packing, Yen-yen says she’s tired. She sits down on the couch in the main room and dies. Heart attack, her doctor says, because she’s been working too hard taking care of Vern, but we know better. She died of a broken heart: her son melting before her eyes, a grandson born dead, most of her family wealth built over too many years turned to ash, and now this move. Her funeral is small. After all, she was not a person of importance, rather just a wife and mother. The mourners bow to her casket three times. Then we have a banquet of ten tables of ten at Soochow Restaurant, where the proper and plainly flavored dishes are served.

Her death is terrible for all of us. I can’t stop crying, while Father Louie has retreated into pitiable silence. But none of us has time to spend our mourning period confined, quiet, and playing dominoes, as everyone does here in Chinatown, because the following week we move into our new home. May announces that she can’t sleep in the same bed with Vern, and everyone understands. No one-no matter how loving or loyal-would want to sleep next to someone who’s plagued by night sweats and a festering abscess on his spine that reeks of pus, blood, and decay the way Mama’s bound feet once did. Two twin beds are put on the screened porch-one for my sister, one for my daughter. I hadn’t considered this eventuality, and it worries me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. May keeps her clothes in Vern’s closet, where her rainbow of silk, satin, and brocade dresses bulge through the door, her matching purses spill from a high shelf, and her colorfully dyed shoes litter the floor; Joy is allotted two bottom drawers in the built-in linen closet in the hallway next to the bathroom shared by her, Father Louie, and May and to deal with Vern’s needs.

Now each of us must find a way to help the family. I’m reminded of one of Mao’s sayings that has been mocked in the American press: “Everybody works, so everybody eats.” We’re each given a task: May continues hiring extras for films and the new television shows, Sam runs Pearl’s, Father Louie manages the curio shop, Joy studies hard in school and helps her family when she has free time. Yen-yen was supposed to take care of her ailing son, but that job comes to me. I like Vern well enough, but I don’t want to be a nursemaid. When I walk into his room, the warm odor of sickly flesh hits my face. When he sits, his spine slides down until he looks like a toddler. His flesh feels soft and heavy, like when your feet go numb. I last one day, and then I go to my father-in-law to appeal the decision.

“When you don’t want to help the family, you sound like you live in America,” he says.

“I do live in America,” I answer. “I care for my brother-in-law very much. You know that. But he’s not my husband. He’s May’s husband.”

“But you have a heart inside you, Pearl-ah.” His voice chokes with emotion. “You’re the only one I can trust to take care of my boy.”

I tell myself that fate is inevitable and that the only provable fate is death, but I wonder why fate always has to be tragic. We Chinese believe that there are many ways to improve our fates: sewing amulets onto our children’s clothes, asking for help from feng shui masters to pick propitious dates, and relying on astrology to tell us whether we should marry a Rat, a Rooster, or a Horse. But where is my fortune-the good that’s supposed to come to us in the form of happiness? I’m in a new home, but instead of a baby son to dote on, I have to take care of Vern. I’m just so tired and worn down. And I’m afraid all the time. I need help. I need someone to hear me.

The following Sunday, I go to church with Joy as I usually do. Listening to the reverend, I remember the first time God came into my life. I was a little girl, and a lo fan man dressed in black came up to me on the street outside our house in Shanghai. He wanted to sell me a Bible for two coppers. I went home and asked Mama for the money. She pushed me away, saying, “Tell that one-Goder to worship his ancestors instead. He’ll be better off in the afterworld.”

I went back outside, apologized to the missionary for keeping him waiting, and gave him Mama’s message. At that, he gave me the Bible for free. It was my first book, and I was excited to have it, but that night, after I went to sleep, Mama threw it away. The missionary didn’t give up on me though. He invited me to the Methodist mission. “Just come and play,” he said. Later he asked me to attend the mission’s school, also for free. Mama and Baba couldn’t turn down a bargain like that. When May was old enough, she began coming with me. But none of that Jesus-thinking sank into us. We were rice Christians, taking advantage of the foreign devils’ food and classes while ignoring their words and beliefs. When we became beautiful girls, whatever tendrils of Christianity had wormed their way into us shriveled and died. After what happened to China, Shanghai, and my home during the war, after what happened to Mama and me in the shack, I knew there couldn’t be a one-God who was benevolent and kind.

And now we have all of our recent trials and losses, the worst of which was the death of my son. All the Chinese herbs I took, all the offerings I made, all the questioning about the meaning of my dreams, did not, could not, save him, because I was looking for help in the wrong direction. As I sit on the hard bench in the church, I smile to myself as I remember the missionary I met on the street all those years ago. He always said that true conversion was inevitable. Now it has come at last. I begin to pray-not for Father Louie, whose lifetime of hard work is coming to an end; not for my husband, who bears the family’s burdens on his iron fan; not for my baby in the afterworld; not for Vern, whose bones are collapsing before my eyes; but to bring peace of mind, to make sense of all the bad things in my life, and to believe that maybe all this suffering will be rewarded in Heaven.

Forever Beautiful

I WATER THE eggplants and the tomatoes, then pull the hose to the cucumber vine that engulfs the trellis by the incinerator. When I’m done, I roll up the hose, duck under the clothesline, and head back toward the porch. It’s still early on this Sunday morning in the summer of 1952, and it’s going to be a scorcher. I love that American word-scorcher- because it makes so much sense in this desert of a city. Shanghai always felt like we were being steamed to death in the humidity.

When we first moved into this house, I told Sam, “I want us to have food to eat, and I also want to bring a little China here.” So Sam and a couple of the uncles dug up the lawn and I planted a vegetable garden. I brought back to life the chrysanthemums, which bloomed beautifully last fall, and have nursed some geranium cuttings into thriving plants against the screened porch. During the past two years, I’ve added pots with cymbidiums, a kumquat tree, and azaleas. I tried peonies-the most beloved of Chinese flowers-but it never gets cold enough here for them to grow properly. My rhododendrons failed too. Sam asked for a patch of bamboo; now we’re forever hacking it back and seeing new shoots come up in places where we don’t want it.

I climb the steps and enter the screened porch, where I toss my apron on the washing machine, straighten May’s and Joy’s beds, and then go to the kitchen. Sam and I are co-owners of the property with the rest of the family, but I’m the eldest woman in the household. The kitchen is my territory, and this room literally holds my wealth. Under the sink are now two coffee cans: one for bacon grease, the other for Sam’s and my savings for Joy to go to college. An oilcloth covers the table, and a thermos filled with hot water sits ready to make tea. A wok is set permanently on the stove; in a pot on one of the back burners some herbs boil for a tonic for Vern. I prepare a breakfast tray and take it through the living room and down the hall.

Vern’s room belongs to a man forever a small child. Other than the closet with May’s clothes-the one reminder that Vern is married-the many models that he’s glued together and painted decorate the room. Fighter jets hang from fishing line from the ceiling. Ships, submarines, and race cars line floor-to-ceiling shelves.

He’s awake, listening to a radio commentary about the war in North Korea and the threat of Communism, and working on one of his models. I set down his tray, pull up the bamboo shades, and open the window so the glue won’t go to his head too much.

“Can I get you anything else?”

He smiles at me sweetly. After three years of the soft-bone disease, he looks like a little boy, staying home sick from school for a day. “Paints and brushes?”

I put them within arm’s reach. “Your father will stay with you today. If you need anything, just call and he’ll come.”

I refuse to worry that something bad will happen if we leave the two of them home alone, because I know exactly what their day will be: Vern will work on his model, eat a simple lunch, mess his pants, and work on his model some more. Father Louie will do light chores around the house, make that simple lunch, avoid his son’s messy bottom by walking to the corner to buy his newspapers, and nap until we come home.

I give Vern a wave, and then I go to the living room, where Sam tends the family altar. He bows before Yen-yen’s photograph. Since we don’t have photographs of everyone who’s left us, he’s put one of Mama’s pouches on the altar and a miniature rickshaw to represent Baba. In a tiny box, there’s a clip of my son’s hair. Sam honors his entire family with ceramic fruit made in the country style.

I’ve grown to love this room. I’ve framed and hung family photos on the wall above the couch. Each winter since we’ve lived here, we’ve set up a flocked Christmas tree in the corner and decorated it with red balls. We outline our front windows with Christmas lights so that this room glows with the news of Jesus’ birth. On cold nights, May, Joy, and I take turns standing over the heater grate until our flannel nightgowns balloon out like we’re snow creatures.

I watch as Joy helps her grandfather to his recliner and serves him tea. I’m proud that Joy is a proper Chinese girl. She defers to her grandfather, the eldest in our family above everyone else, including her father and me. She understands that everything she does is not only her grandfather’s business but also his right to decide. He wants her to learn embroidery, sewing, cleaning, and cooking. In the curio shop after school, she does many of the jobs I once did-polishing, sweeping, and dusting. “Her training as a future wife and mother of my great-grandsons is important,” Father Louie says, and we all try to honor that. And even though all hope of returning to China is lost, he still says, “We don’t want Pan-di to become too Americanized. We’ll all go back to China one day.” Sentiments like this tell us he’s slipping. It’s hard to believe that he once ruled us with such authority or that we were all so afraid of him. We used to call him Old Man, but now he’s a very old man, slowly weakening, slowly drifting away from us, slowly losing his memories, his strength, and his connection to the things that have always driven him: money, business, and family.

Joy gives a half bow to her grandfather, and then the two of us walk to the Methodist church for the Sunday service. As soon as the sermon ends, Joy and I go to the Central Plaza in New Chinatown to meet Sam, May, and Uncle Fred, Mariko, and their daughters at one of the district association halls. We’ve joined a group-a union of sorts-composed of members from the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches in Chinatown. We meet once a month. We stand erect and proud, place our hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Then all the families troop out to Bamboo Lane and pile into sedans for the drive to Santa Monica Beach. Sam, May, and I sit together in the front seat of our Chrysler, Joy and the two Yee girls-Hazel and her younger sister, Rose-squeeze together in the backseat, and then we head west in a caravan along Sunset Boulevard. Cars with huge fins shoot ahead of us, their windshields flashing in the summer glare. We go by old-fashioned clapboard houses in Echo Park and pink stucco mansions and rat-proofed palms in Beverly Hills, where we cut over to Wilshire Boulevard and continue west past supermarkets as massive as B-29 hangars, parking lots and lawns as big as football fields, and cascades of bougainvillea and morning glories.

Joy’s voice rises as she presses a point to Hazel and Rose, and I smile to myself. Everyone says my daughter has my gift for languages. At age fourteen, her Sze Yup and Wu dialects are as perfect as her English, and her mastery of written Chinese is excellent too. Each Chinese New Year or if someone is celebrating a happy occasion, people ask Joy to write appropriate couplets in her fine calligraphy, which is said by all to be tong gee-uncorrupted by adulthood. This praise isn’t enough for me. I know Joy can obtain more spiritual growth and learn more about Caucasians by going to church outside Chinatown, which we do once a month.

“God loves everyone,” I often remind my daughter. “He wants you to make a good living and have a happy life. This is true about America too. You can do anything in the U.S. You can’t say that about China.”

I tell Sam things like this too, because the Christian words and beliefs have taken deep root in me. My faith in God and Jesus is also very much a part of the patriotism and loyalty I feel for my daughter’s home country of America. And of course, being Christian these days is deeply tied to anti-Communist sentiment. No one wants to be accused of being a godless Communist. When asked about the war in Korea, we say we’re against Red China’s interference; when asked about Taiwan, we say we support the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. We say we’re for moral rearmament, Jesus, and freedom. Going to a Western church is a practical thing to do, just as my going to a mission in Shanghai was. “You have to be sensible about these things,” I’ve told Sam, but inside I’ve become a one-Goder and he knows it.

Sam may not like it, but he comes to our church gatherings because he loves me, our family, Uncle Fred and his brood of girls, and these picnics. Our outings make him feel American. In fact, although our daughter has finally grown out of her cowgirl infatuation, almost everything we do makes us feel more American. On days like today, Sam ignores the God aspects and embraces the things he likes: preparing the food, eating slices of watermelon that we don’t have to worry have been injected with foul river water, and celebrating family fellowship. He considers these adventures purely social and purely for the children.

Sam pulls into a parking spot by the Santa Monica Pier, and we unload the car. Our feet burn as we cross the sand, roll out blankets, and set up umbrellas. Sam and Fred help the other men dig a pit for the barbecue. May, Mariko, and I assist the other wives and mothers setting out bowls of potato, bean, and fruit salads; Jell-O molds with marshmallows, walnuts, and grated carrots; and plates of cold cuts. As soon as the fire is ready, we give the men trays of chicken wings marinated in soy, honey and sesame seeds, and pork ribs steeped in hoisin sauce and five spice. The ocean air mixes with the scent of the roasting meat, children play in the surf, the men bend their heads over the barbecue, and the women sit on blankets and gossip. Mariko stands apart from us. She holds baby Mamie on her hip, while keeping a close eye on her other half-and-half daughters, Eleanor and Bess, who are building a sand castle.

My sister, childless, is known as Auntie May to everyone. Like Sam, she isn’t a one-Goder. Far from it! She works hard, sometimes staying up late to arrange extras for a shoot or staying out all night on a set herself At least that’s what she says. I honestly don’t know where she goes, and I don’t ask. Even when she’s home and asleep, the phone might ring at four or five in the morning, a call from someone who’s just lost all his money gambling and needs a job. None of this, none of this, matches well with my one-God beliefs, which is one reason I like to bring her on these excursions to the seashore.

“Look at that FOB,” May says, adjusting her sunglasses and big hat. She tips her head delicately toward Violet Lee, who shades her eyes with her long, tapered fingers and peers out to the ocean, where Joy and her friends hold hands and jump over waves. Plenty of women here, including Violet, are fresh off the boat. Now almost forty percent of the Chinese population in Los Angeles is made up of women, but Violet wasn’t a war bride or a fiancée. She and her husband came to UCLA to study: she bioengineering, Rowland engineering. When China closed, they were trapped here with their young son. They aren’t paper sons, paper partners, or laborers, but they’re still wang k’uo nu- lost-country slaves.

Violet and I get along well. She has narrow hips, which Mama always said marked a woman with the gift of gab. Are we best friends? I sneak a glance at my sister. Never. Violet and I are good friends, like Betsy and I once were. May will always be not only my sister and my sister-in-law but also my best friend, forever. That said, May doesn’t know what she’s talking about. While it’s true that many of the new women do seem FOB-just as we once did-most of them are exactly like Violet: educated, arriving in this country with their own money, not having to spend even a single night in Chinatown but buying bungalows and homes in Silver Lake, Echo Park, or Highland Park, where Chinese are welcomed. Not only do they not live in Chinatown, but they don’t work there either. They aren’t laundrymen, houseboys, restaurant workers, or curio-shop clerks. They’re the cream of China -the ones who could afford to leave. Already they’ve gone further than we ever could. Violet now teaches at USC, and Rowland works in the aerospace industry. They come to Chinatown only to go to church and to buy groceries. They’ve joined our group so their son can meet other Chinese children.

May eyes a young man. “You think that FOB wants our ABC?” She asks suspiciously. The FOB she’s speaking of is Violet’s son; the ABC is my American-born Chinese daughter.

“ Leon ’s a sweet boy and a good student,” I say, watching as the boy dives smoothly into the surf. “He’s at the top of his class at his school, just as our Joy is at the top of hers.”

“You sound like Mama talking about Tommy and me,” May teases.

“It’s not so bad if Leon and Joy get to know each other,” I respond steadily, for once not offended that she’s compared me with our mother. After all, the reason this union exists is that we want the boys and girls to get to know each other, hoping they’ll marry one day. Implicit in this is the expectation that they’ll marry someone Chinese.

“She’s lucky she won’t have an arranged marriage.” May sighs. “But even with animals, you want a thoroughbred, not a mongrel.”

When you lose your home country, what do you preserve and what do you abandon? We’ve saved only those things that are possible to save: Chinese food, Chinese language, and sneaking what money we can back to the Louie relatives in the home village. But what about an arranged marriage for my girl? Sam isn’t Z.G., but he’s a good and kind man. And Vern, forever damaged, has never beaten May or lost money gambling.

“Just don’t push for marriage,” May continues. “Let her get an education.” (Something I’ve been working toward practically from the moment Joy was born.) “I didn’t have what you had in Shanghai,” my sister complains, “but she should go to college, like you did.” She pauses, letting that sink in, as though I haven’t heard this before too. “But it’s nice she has such good friends,” May adds as the girls cling to one another when a big wave approaches. “Remember when we could laugh like that? We thought nothing bad could happen to us.”

“The essence of happiness has nothing to do with money,” I say, and I believe it. But May bites her lip, and I see I’ve said the exact wrong thing. “We thought the world ended when Baba lost everything-”

“It did,” May says. “Our lives would have been very different if he’d saved our money instead of lost it, which is why I work so hard to make it now.”

Make it and spend it on clothes and jewelry for yourself, I think but don’t say. Our differing attitudes about money are among the many things that aggravate my sister.

“What I mean is,” I try again, hoping not to further darken May’s mood, “Joy’s lucky to have friends, just as I’m lucky to have you. Mama married out and never saw her sisters again, but you and I will have each other forever.” I put my arm around her shoulder and jiggle it affectionately. “Sometimes I think that one day we’ll end up sharing a room just like when we were girls, only we’ll be in the old folks’ home. We’ll have our meals together. We’ll sell raffle tickets together. We’ll make crafts together-”

“We’ll go to matinees together,” May adds, smiling.

“And we’ll sing psalms together.”

May frowns at that. I’ve made another mistake, and I hurry on.

“And we’ll play mah-jongg! We’ll be two retired ladies, fat and round, playing mah-jongg, and complaining about this and that.”

May nods as she stares wistfully west across the sea to the horizon.

WHEN WE GET home, we find Father Louie asleep in his recliner. I give Joy, Hazel, and Rose some straws and send them out to the backyard, where they gather peppercorns off the ground, load up their straws, and blow the harmless pink pellets at one another, laughing, squealing, and running through the yard between the plants. Sam and I go to Vern’s bedroom to change his diaper. The open window does little to blow away the smells of sickness, shit, urine, and pus. May comes in with tea. We sit together for a few minutes to tell Vern about the day, and then I go back to the kitchen. I unpack and begin getting things ready for dinner, washing the rice, chopping ginger and garlic, and slicing beef.

Just before I start cooking, I send the Yee girls home. As I make curried tomato beef lo mein, Joy sets the table-a job that back in Shanghai had always been done by our servants under Mama’s close watch. Joy lines up the chopsticks just so, making sure not to set out any uneven pairs, which would mean that the person using them will miss a boat, a plane, or a train (not that any of us are going anywhere). While I put the food on the table, Joy gets her aunt, father, and grandfather. I’ve tried to teach my daughter the things that Mama tried to teach me. The big difference is that my daughter has paid attention and learned. She never speaks at dinner-something May and I failed at miserably. She never drops her chopsticks for fear of bad luck, nor does she leave them upright in her rice bowl, because that’s something done only at funerals and is impolite to her grandfather, who’s been thinking about his own mortality lately.

When dinner’s over, Sam helps Father back to his chair. I clean the kitchen, while May takes a plate of food to Vern. I’m standing with my hands in soapy water, staring out at the garden aglow in the last of the summer evening’s light, when I hear my sister coming back through the living room. The sound of her steps is familiar and comforting. Then I hear her gasp-a breath so deep and sharp that I’m suddenly very afraid. Is it Vern? Father? Joy? Sam?

I rush to the kitchen door and peer around the jamb. May stands in the middle of the room, Vern’s empty plate in her hand, her face flushed and with a look I can’t comprehend. She’s staring at Father’s chair, and I think the old man must have died. I think if death has come today, then that’s not so bad. He lived to be eighty-something, he spent a quiet day with his son, he had dinner with his family, and none of us can feel bad anymore about the relations between us.

I step into the room to face this sadness and then freeze, as shocked into immobility as my sister. The old man is alive all right. He sits there with his feet up on his lounger, his long pipe in his mouth, and a copy of China Reconstructs held in his hands so the two of us can see it. It’s shocking enough to see him with this magazine. It comes out of Red China, and it’s a piece of Communist propaganda. There’ve been rumors that the government has spies in Chinatown keeping track of who buys things like this. Father Louie, who cannot be called a supporter of the Communist regime by any measure, has told us to avoid the tobacconist and the paper goods store where the magazine is sold from under the counter.

But it’s not the magazine that’s the real shock; it’s the front cover, which my father-in-law is displaying to us with such pride. The image is one that, even if we avoid these products, is familiar to us: the glory of New China as exemplified by two young women dressed in country clothes, their cheeks full of life, their arms loaded with fruits and vegetables, practically singing the glories of the new regime-all rendered in glowing red tones. Those two beautiful girls are instantly recognizable as May and me. The artist, who without hesitation has embraced the heightened, exuberant style favored by the Communists, is also clearly identifiable by the delicacy and precision of his brushstrokes. Z.G. is alive, and he hasn’t forgotten me or my sister.

“I went to the tobacconist when Vern was sleeping. Look,” Father Louie says, the pride in his voice unmistakable as he looks at the cover with May and me-not one question in my mind that it’s us-selling not soap, face powder, or baby formula but a glorious harvest out by the Lunghua Pagoda, where Z.G., May, and I once flew kites. “You’re still beautiful girls.” Father sounds almost triumphant. He worked his whole life, and for what? He never went back to China. His wife died. His birth son is like a dried-up bedbug and about as companionable. He never had a grandson. His businesses have shriveled to one mediocre curio shop. But he did do one thing really, really well. He procured two beautiful girls for Vern and Sam.

May and I take a few tentative steps toward him. It’s hard to say how I feel: surprised and stunned to see May and me looking the same as we did fifteen years ago with our pink cheeks, happy eyes, and luscious smiles, a bit fearful that these magazines are in the house, and almost overwhelmed by joy that Z.G. is still alive.

The next thing I know Sam is at my side, exclaiming, and gesturing in excitement. “It’s you! It’s you and May!”

My cheeks flush, as though I’ve been caught. I have been caught. I lift my eyes to May, looking for help. As sisters, we’ve always been able to say so much to each other with just a glance.

“Z.G. Li must have painted this,” May says evenly. “How lovely that he has remembered us in this way. He made Pearl look especially beautiful, don’t you think?”

“He’s painted both of you exactly as I see you,” says Sam, forever the good husband and appreciative brother-in-law. “Always beautiful. Forever beautiful.”

“Beautiful enough,” May agrees lightly, “although neither of us ever looked that good in peasant clothes.”

Later that night, after everyone goes to asleep, I meet my sister on the screened porch. We sit on her bed, holding hands, staring at the magazine. As much as I love Sam, a part of me soars with the knowledge that across the ocean in Shanghai -I have to believe Z.G.’s there-in a country that is closed to me, the man I loved so long ago loves me still.

ONLY ONE WEEK later, we realize that Father’s weakness and lethargy are more than just the usual slowing of age. He’s sick. The doctor tells us it’s lung cancer and there’s nothing anyone can do. Yen-yen’s death was so sudden and it came at such an inconvenient moment that we didn’t have the opportunity to prepare for her death or mourn her properly when she passed. This time each of us in our own way reflects back on the mistakes we’ve made over the years, and we try to make amends in the time we have left. During the coming months, many people visit, and I listen to them speak highly of my father-in-law, calling him a successful Gold Mountain man, but when I look at him during these final days, I see only a ruined man. He worked so hard, only to lose his businesses and property in China and almost everything he’d built for himself here. Now, in the end, he has to rely on his paper son for his housing, food, evening pipe, and copies of China Reconstructs that Sam buys from under the counter at the shop on the corner.

Father’s only consolations in these final months, as the cancer eats his lungs, are the photographs I cut from the magazine and pin to the wall next to his recliner. So many times I see him with tears running down his sunken cheeks, staring at the country he left as a young man: the sacred mountains, the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City. He says he hates the Communists, because that’s what everyone has to say, but he still has a love of the land, art, culture, and people of China that has nothing to do with Mao, the Bamboo Curtain, or fear of the Reds. He isn’t alone in his nostalgia and desire for his homeland. Many of the old-timers, like Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, come to the house and also pore over these captured images of their lost home; that’s how deep their love of China is, no matter what it’s become. But all this happens very fast, and too soon Father dies.

A funeral is the most important event in a person’s life-more significant than a birth, a birthday, or a wedding. Since Father was a man and he lived into his eighties, his funeral is much larger than Yen-yen’s. We hire a Cadillac convertible to drive through Chinatown with a large flower-wreathed photographic portrait of him propped on the backseat. The hearse driver tosses spirit money out the window to pay off malevolent demons and other lowly ghosts who might try to bar the way. A brass band trails behind the hearse, playing Chinese folks songs and military marches. At the hall for the ceremony, three hundred people bow three times to the casket and another three times to us, the grieving family members. We give coins to the mourners to disperse the sa hee- polluted air associated with death-and candy to cleanse the bitter taste of death. Everyone wears white-the color of mourning, the color of death. Then we go to Soochow Restaurant for gaai wai jau-the traditional seven-course “plain” banquet of steamed chicken, seafood, and vegetables, designed to “wash away sorrow,” wish the old man a long next life after this death, and launch us on our healing journey and encourage us to leave behind the vapors of death before returning home.

Over the next three months, women come to the house to play dominoes with May and me as we pass through the official mourning period. I find myself staring at the pictures I pinned to the wall above Father’s recliner. Somehow I can’t take them down.

Inch of Gold

“WHY CAN’T I go?” Joy demands, her voice rising. “Auntie Violet and Uncle Rowland are letting Leon go.”

“ Leon ’s a boy,” I say.

“It only costs twenty-five cents. Please.”

“Your father and I don’t think it’s right for a girl your age to go around town by yourself-”

“I won’t be by myself All the kids are going.”

“You’re not all the kids,” I say. “Do you want people to look at you and see porcelain with scars? You have to guard your body like a piece of jade.”

“Mom, all I want to do is go to the record hop at the International Hall.”

Yen-yen sometimes said that an inch of gold could not buy an inch of time, but only recently have I begun to understand how precious time is and how quickly it passes. It’s 1956, the summer after Joy’s high school graduation. In the fall, she’ll be attending the University of Chicago, where she plans to study history. It’s awfully far away, but we’ve decided to let her go. Her tuition has turned out to be more than we anticipated, but Joy’s received a partial scholarship and May’s going to help out too. Every day Joy asks if she can go somewhere or other. If I say yes to this record hop-whatever that is-then I’ll have to say yes to something else: the dance with the fifteen-piece orchestra, the birthday celebration in MacArthur Park, the party that will require a bus ride going and coming home.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Joy asks, not giving up. “We’re only going to play records and dance a little.”

May and I said things like that too when we were girls in Shanghai, and it didn’t work out that well for either of us.

“You’re too young for boys,” I say.

“Young? I’m eighteen! Auntie May married Uncle Vern when she was my age-”

And already pregnant, I think to myself.

Sam has tried to pacify me by accusing me of being too strict. “You worry too much,” he’s said. “She’s not aware of boy-girl interests.”

But what girl of Joy’s age isn’t aware of those things? I was. May was. Now when Joy talks back, ignores what I say, or walks out of the room when I tell her to stay, even my sister laughs at me for getting upset, saying, “We did the exact same things at that age.”

And look what it got us, I want to scream at her.

“I’ve never been to a single football game or dance,” Joy resumes her complaints. “The other girls have gone to the Palladium. They’ve gone to the Biltmore. I never get to do anything.”

“We need your help at Pearl ’s and in the shop. Your auntie needs your help too.”

“Why should I help? I never get paid.”

“All the money-”

“Goes into the family pot. You’ve been saving for me to go to college. I know. I know. But I only have two months left before I leave for Chicago. Don’t you want me to have fun? This is my last chance to see my friends.” Joy folds her arms over her chest and sighs as though she’s the most burdened person in the world.

“You can do anything you want, but you have to do well in school. If you don’t want to go to school-”

“Then I’m on my own,” she finishes, reciting the line with the fatigue of centuries.

I’m Joy’s mother and I see her with mother eyes. Her long black hair holds the blue of distant mountains. Her eyes are the deep black of a lake in autumn. She didn’t have enough to eat in the womb, and she’s smaller than I am, smaller than May. This gives her the appearance of a maiden from ancient times-lithe like willow branches swayed by the breeze, as delicate as the flight of swallows-but inside she’s still a Tiger. I can try to tame her, but my daughter can’t escape her essential nature, just as I can’t escape mine. Since graduation, she’s complained about the clothes I make for her. “They’re so embarrassing,” she says. I made them out of love. I made them because there wasn’t a place in Los Angeles like Madame Garnet’s in Shanghai for me to take her to have dresses molded to her exact shape. What upsets Joy most of all is her perceived lack of freedom, but I know the kinds of things May and I-especially May, really only May-did when we were young.

A lot of this wouldn’t happen if Father Louie were still alive. He’s been gone four years now. Sam, Joy, and I could have used Father’s death as our chance to move out on our own, but we didn’t. Sam had made a promise when Father took him as more than just a paper son. I may not believe in ancestors anymore, but Sam lights incense for the old man and makes offerings of food and paper clothes to him during New Year’s and other festivities. But beyond that, how could we leave Vern, who’s lived longer than anyone expected? Who will explain to him that his parents are gone when he asks for them, as he does every day? How could we leave May to care for her husband, run the Golden Prop and Extras Company and the curio shop, and manage the house? But it goes even past loyalty to the family and promises made. We continue to be deeply afraid.

Every day the news from the government is bad. The U.S. consul in Hong Kong has accused the Chinese community of being inclined to fraud and perjury, since we “lack the equivalent of the Western concept of an oath.” He says that everyone who comes through his office looking to go to the United States is using fake papers. Angel Island has long been closed, but he’s devised new procedures requiring the answering of hundreds of questions, the filling out of dozens of forms, and the procurement of affidavits, blood tests, X-rays, and fingerprints, all in an effort to keep Chinese from coming to America. He says that almost every Chinese already in America-going all the way back to those who panned for gold more than a hundred years ago and helped build the transcontinental railroad eighty-some years ago-entered illegally and is not to be trusted. He says that we’re responsible for trafficking in drugs, using fraudulent passports and other papers, counterfeiting American dollars, and illegally collecting Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Worse, he claims that for decades the Communists have sent paper sons-like Sam, Wilburt, Fred, and so many others-to America as spies. Every single Chinese living in America must be investigated, he insists.

For years, Joy has come home from school with stories about her duck-and-cover drills. Now it’s as though we want to live each day in that coiled position-cocooned in our houses with our families, hoping the windows, walls, and doors won’t be shattered, immolated, and turned to bitter ashes. For all these reasons-love for one another, fear for one another-we’ve stayed together, and we’ve struggled to find balance and order, but with Father Louie gone, we’re all slightly adrift, especially my daughter.

“You don’t have to wash clothes for lo fan, make their meals, clean their houses, or answer their doors,” I say. “You don’t have to be an office girl or a clerk in a store either. When your baba and I first came here, all we could ever hope for was to have our own café and maybe one day live in a house.”

“You and Dad got that-”

“Yes, but you can have and do so much more. Back when your aunt and I first arrived, only a handful of people could go into a profession. I can count them on one hand.” And I do. “Y. C. Hong, the first Chinese-American lawyer in California; Eugene Choy the first Chinese-American architect in Los Angeles; Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American doctor in the country-”

“You’ve told me this a million times-”

“All I’m saying is you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or an accountant. You can do anything.”

“Even climb a telephone pole?” she asks tartly.

“We just want you to get to the top of the heap,” I reply calmly.

“That’s why I’m going to college. I never want to work in the café or the shop.”

I don’t want her to either, which is exactly what I’ve been saying. Still, there’s a part of me that hates that our family businesses-the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed-are so embarrassing to her. I try-not for the first time-to make her understand.

“The sons in the Fong family have become doctors and lawyers, but they still help out at Fong’s Buffet,” I point out. “That one boy goes to trial in the courthouse during the day. At night the judges go to the restaurant to eat. They say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ And what about that Wong boy? He went to USC, but he’s not too proud to help his father at the filling station on weekends.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me about Henry Fong. Usually you complain he’s become ‘too continental,’ because he married that girl whose family came from Scotland. And Gary Wong is only trying to make up for the fact that he broke his family’s heart by marrying a lo fan and moving to Long Beach so he can live a Eurasian life. I’m glad you’ve become so open-minded.”

This is how Joy’s last summer at home unfolds-with one petty argument after another. At one of our church meetings, Violet tells me she’s experiencing the same things with Leon, who’ll be going to Yale in the fall. “Sometimes he’s as unpleasant as a fish left behind the couch for too many days. Here they talk about the bird leaving the nest. Leon wants to fly away all right. He’s my son and my heart’s blood, but he doesn’t understand that a part of me wants to see him leave too. Go! Go! Take your stinkiness with you!”

“It’s our own fault,” I tell Violet on the phone another night when she calls in tears after her son complained that her accent means she will be forever labeled a foreigner and that if anyone asks where she’s from she should answer Taipei in Taiwan and not Peking in the People’s Republic of China, otherwise J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI agents might accuse her of being an undercover agent on an intelligence mission. “We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.”

May, aware of the discord in the household, offers Joy work as an extra. Joy flutters with excitement. “Mom! Please! Auntie May says if I go to work with her, then I’ll have my own money for books, food, and warm clothes.”

“We already saved enough for that.” This isn’t quite true. The extra money would be welcome, but having Joy go off with May is the last thing I want.

“You never let me have any fun,” my daughter complains.

I notice that May isn’t saying a word, just watching us, knowing that the impish Tiger will have its way in the end. So my daughter goes off with her aunt for several weeks. Every night when she comes home she treats her father and uncle with stories of her adventures on the set, but she still finds ways to criticize me. May tells me I should ignore Joy’s rebelliousness, that it’s just part of the culture these days, and that she’s only trying to fit in with American kids her age. May doesn’t understand how confused I feel. Every day I have an inner battle: I want my daughter to be patriotic and have all the opportunities that being an American will give her. At the same time, I worry that I’ve failed to teach Joy to be filial, polite, and Chinese.

Two weeks before Joy leaves for the University of Chicago, I go out to the screened porch to say good night. May’s in her bed at one end of the porch, flipping through a magazine. Joy sits on top of the covers of her bed, brushing her hair and listening to that awful Elvis Presley on her record player. The wall above her bed is covered with pictures she’s cut from magazines of Elvis and James Dean, who died last year.

“Mom,” Joy says, after I kiss her, “I’ve been thinking.”

I know by now to beware this opening.

“You always said that Auntie May was the most beautiful of the beautiful girls in Shanghai.”

“Yes,” I say, glancing at my sister, who looks up from her magazine. “All the artists loved her.”

“Well, if that’s so, why is your face always the main focus on those magazines Dad buys, you know, the ones that come from China?”

“Oh, that’s not true,” I say, but I know it is. In the four years since Father Louie bought that issue of China Reconstructs, Z.G. has designed another six covers in which May’s and my faces are absolutely recognizable. In the old days, artists like Z.G. used beautiful girls to advertise the luxurious life. Now artists use posters, calendars, and advertisements to communicate the Communist Party’s vision to the illiterate masses, as well as to the outside world. Scenes in boudoirs, salons, and baths have been replaced by patriotic themes: May and me with our arms outstretched as though reaching for the bright future, the two of us with kerchiefs in our hair, pushing wheelbarrows filled with rocks to help build a dam, or standing in a shallow paddy, tending rice shoots. On every cover, my face, with its rosy cheeks, and my body, with its long lines, is the central figure, while my sister takes the secondary position behind me, holding a basket into which I put vegetables, steadying my bicycle, or bending her head from the burden she carries while I gaze skyward. Always there’s some hint of Shanghai in the painting: the roll of the Whangpoo outside a factory window, the Yu Yuan Garden in the Old Chinese City for uniformed soldiers to practice their rifle drills, the glorious Bund made drab and utilitarian for marching workers. The subtle hues, romantic poses, and soft edges that Z.G. once loved have been replaced by everything outlined in black and filled with flat color-especially red, red, red.

Joy hops up and walks the length of the porch. She examines the magazine covers that May has on the wall next to her bed.

“He must have really loved you,” my daughter says.

“Oh, I hardly think that’s possible,” May says, covering for me.

“You should look at these more closely,” Joy says. “Don’t you see what the artist has done? Thin, pale, and fashionable girls, like you must have been, Auntie May, have been replaced by robust, healthy, strong working women, like Mom. Didn’t you tell me that your father always used to complain that Mom had a face like a peasant-ruddy and red? Her face is perfect for the Commies.”

Daughters can sometimes be cruel. They sometimes say things they don’t mean, but that doesn’t mean her words don’t sting. I turn away and stare out to the vegetable patch, hoping to hide my feelings.

“That’s why I think he loves you, Auntie May. Surely you see it.”

I take a breath, one part of my brain listening to my daughter, the other part reinterpreting what she said before. When she said, “He must have really loved you,” she didn’t mean me. She meant May.

“Because look,” I hear my daughter say. “Here’s Mom, all peasant-perfect for the country, but look how he painted your face, Auntie May. It’s beautiful, like you’re a fairy goddess or something.”

May doesn’t say anything, but I sense her examining the pictures.

“You know, if he saw you now,” my daughter continues, “he probably wouldn’t recognize you.”

Like that, my daughter manages to wound both her mother and her aunt, poking at our softest, most vulnerable, parts. I press my fingernails into my palms to bring my emotions under control. I lift the corners of my mouth, exposing my teeth, and then spin around and put my hands on my daughter’s shoulders.

“I came out here to say good night. You should climb in bed. And, May,” I say lightly, “can you help me with the books from the café? I can’t seem to make the numbers work.”

My sister and I have had a lifetime together of false smiles and escaping things we don’t like. We leave the porch, acting as if Joy hasn’t hurt us, but as soon as we get to the kitchen, we hold each other for strength and comfort. How can Joy’s words be so painful after all these years? Because inside we still carry the dreams of what could have been, of what should have been, of what we wish we could still be. This doesn’t mean we aren’t content. We are content, but the romantic longings of our girlhood have never entirely left us. It’s like Yen-yen said all those years ago: “I look in the mirror and I’m surprised by what I see.” I look in the mirror and still expect to see my Shanghai-girl self-not the wife and mother I’ve become. And May? To my eyes, she hasn’t changed at all. She’s still beautiful-Chinese-beautiful, ageless.

“Joy’s just a girl,” I tell my sister. “We said and did stupid things when we were that age too.”

“Everything always returns to the beginning,” May responds, and I wonder if she’s thinking about the original meaning of the aphorism-that no matter what we do in life, we will always return to the beginning, that we will have children who’ll disobey, hurt, and disappoint us just as we once disobeyed, hurt, and disappointed our own parents-or is she thinking about Shanghai and how in a sense we’ve been trapped in our final days there ever since we left, forever destined to relive the loss of our parents, our home, Z.G., and carry the consequences of my rape and May’s pregnancy?

“Joy says these mean things so you and I will come together,” I say, repeating something Violet said to me the other day. “She knows how lonely we’ll be without her.”

May looks away, her eyes glistening.

The next morning when I go out to the porch, the covers of China Reconstructs have been taken down and put away.

WE STAND ON the platform at Union Station, saying good-bye to Joy. May and I wear full skirts fluffed by petticoats and cinched with little patent leather belts. Last week we dyed our stiletto heels to match our dresses, gloves, and handbags. We went to the Palace Salon to have our hair curled and teased to impressive heights, which we now protect with gaily colored scarves tied smartly under our chins. Sam wears his best suit and a somber face. And Joy looks… joyful.

May reaches into her handbag and pulls out the pouch with the three coppers, three sesame seeds, and three green beans that Mama gave her all those years ago. My sister asked if she could give it to Joy. I didn’t object, but I wish I’d thought of it first. May loops the string around Joy’s neck and says, “I gave this to you on the day you were born to protect you. Now I hope you’ll wear it when you’re away from us.”

“Thank you, Auntie,” my daughter says, clasping the pouch. “I’m not going to squeeze another orange or sell another gardenia as long as I live,” she vows when she hugs her baba. “I’m never going to wear atomic fabric or one of your felt jumpers,” she promises after she kisses me. “I never again want to see another back scratcher or a piece of Canton ware.”

We listen to her giddiness and respond with our best advice and final thoughts: we love her, she should write every day, she can call if there’s an emergency, she should eat the dumplings her baba made first and then switch to the peanut butter and crackers packed in her food basket. Then she’s on the train, separated from us by a window, waving and mouthing, “I love you! I’ll miss you!” We walk along the platform next to the train as it leaves the station, waving and crying until she’s out of sight.

When we go home, it’s like the electricity has been shut off Only four of us live in the house now, and the quiet, especially during the first month, is so unbearable that May buys herself a brand-new pink Ford Thunderbird and Sam and I buy a television set. May comes home after work, eats a quick dinner, says good night to Vern, and then goes out. Remembering Joy’s love of cowgirls when she was younger, the rest of us sit in the main room and watch Gunsmoke and Cheyenne.

“DEAR MOM, DAD, Auntie May, and Uncle Vern,” I read aloud. We sit on chairs around Vern’s bed. “You wrote and asked if I’m homesick. How can I answer this question and not make you feel bad? If I tell you I’m having fun, then I’ll hurt your feelings. If I say I’m lonely, then you’ll worry about me.”

I look at the others. Sam and May nod in agreement. Vern twists his sheet in his fingers. He doesn’t completely understand that Joy is gone, just as he hasn’t completely understood that his parents are gone.

“But I think Dad would want me to tell the truth,” I continue reading. “I’m very happy and I’m having a lot of fun. My classes are interesting. I’m writing a paper on a Chinese writer named Lu Hsün. You probably haven’t heard of him-”

“Ha!” This comes from my sister. “We could tell her stories. Remember what he wrote about beautiful girls?”

“Keep reading, keep reading,” Sam says.

JOY DOESN’T COME home for Christmas. We don’t bother to put up a big tree. Instead Sam buys a tree no more than eighteen inches high, which we put on Vern’s dresser.

By late January, Joy’s initial enthusiasm has finally given way to homesickness:

Why would anyone live in Chicago? It’s so cold. The sun never comes out and the wind always blows. Thank you for the long underwear from the army surplus store, but even it doesn’t make me warm. Everything is white-the sky, the sun, people’s faces-and the days are too short up here. I don’t know what I miss most-going to the beach or hanging out with Auntie May on film sets. I even miss the sweet-and-sour pork Dad makes in the coffee shop.

This last is really bad. That sweet-and-sour pork is the worst kind of lo fan dish: too sweet and too breaded. In February, she writes:

I’ve been hoping to get a job with one of my professors during spring break. How can every single one of them not have work for me? I sit in the front row in my history class, but the professor gives handouts to everyone else first. If he runs out, too bad for me.

I write back:

People will always tell you that you can’t do things, but don’t forget you can do whatever you want. Make sure you go to church. You’ll always be accepted there and you can talk about Bible times. It’s good for people to know you’re a Christian.

Her response:

People keep asking me why I don’t return to China. I tell them I can’t return to a place I’ve never been.

In March, Joy suddenly cheers up. “Maybe it’s because the winter is over,” Sam suggests. But that’s not it, because she still complains about the endless winter. Rather, there’s a boy…

My friend Joe asked me to join the Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association. I like the kids in the group. We discuss integration, interracial marriage, and family relationships. I’m learning a lot and it’s nice to see friendly faces, cook together, and eat together.

Quite apart from this Joe, whoever he is, I’m happy that she’s joined a Christian group. I know she’ll find companionship there. After reading the letter to everyone, I write our reply:

Your dad wants to know about your classes this semester. Are you keeping up? Auntie May wants to know ’what the girls are ’wearing in Chicago and if she can send you anything. I don’t have much to add. Things are the same or nearly the same. We closed the curio shop-not enough business to hire someone to sell that “junk,” as you always called it. Business at Pearl ’s is good and your dad’s busy. Uncle Vern wants to know more about Joe.

Actually, he hasn’t said a thing about Joe, but the rest of us are itching with curiosity.

And you know your auntie-always working. What else? Oh, you know the kind of things that go on around here. Everyone’s afraid of being called a Communist. During troubles in business or rivalries in love, one person can find a solution by labeling the other a Communist. “Did you hear so-and-so’s a Commie?” You know how it is, people gossiping, chasing the wind and catching shadows. Someone sells more curios; he must be a Communist. She spurned my affections; she must be a Communist. Fortunately, your father doesn’t have any enemies, and no one is ‘wooing your aunt.

This is my around-the-corner-and-down-the-block way of trying to get Joy to write more about this Joe. But if I’m Joy’s mother, then she’s definitely my daughter. She sees right through me. As usual, I wait to read the letter until everyone’s home and we can gather around Vern’s bed.

“You’d like Joe,” she writes.

He’s in premed. He goes to church with me on Sundays. You want me to say my prayers, but we don’t say them at my Christian association. You’d think that Jesus would be all we’d talk about at those meetings, but we don’t talk about Him. We talk about the injustices that were done to people like you and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa. We talk about what happened to the Chinese in the past and what’s continuing to happen to black people. Just last weekend we picketed Montgomery Ward because they won’t hire blacks. Joe says that minorities need to stick together. Joe and I have been getting people to sign petitions. It’s nice to think about other people’s problems for a change.

When I come to the end of the letter, Sam asks, “Do you think this Joe speaks Sze Yup? I don’t want her to marry someone outside our dialect.”

“Who says he’s Chinese?” May asks.

That sets us to twittering like birds.

“They’re in a Chinese organization,” Sam says. “He has to be Chinese.”

“And they go to church together,” I add.

“So? You always encouraged her to go to church outside Chinatown so she could meet other kinds of people,” May says, and three accusatory pairs of eyes glare at me.

“His name is Joe,” I say. “That’s a good name. It sounds Chinese.”

As I stare at the name written in Joy’s even hand and try to decide exactly what this Joe might be, my sister-forever my devilish little sister-ticks off other Joes. “Joe DiMaggio, Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy-”

“Write her back,” Vern interrupts. “Tell her Commies are no-good friends. She’ll get in trouble.”

But that’s not what I write. What I write is not at all subtle: “What’s Joe’s family name?”

In mid-May I receive Joy’s reply.

Oh, Mom, you’re so funny. I can just imagine you and Dad, Auntie May, and Uncle Vern sitting around and worrying about this. Joe’s family name is Kwok, OK? Sometimes we talk about going to China to help the country. Joe says we Chinese have a saying: Thousands upon thousands of years for China. Being Chinese and carrying that upon your shoulders and in your heart can be a heavy burden but also a source of pride and joy. He says, “Shouldn’t we be a part of what’s happening in our home country?” He even took me to get a passport.

I worried about Joy when she left us. I worried about her when she got homesick. I worried about her hanging out with a boy when we had no idea who or what he was. But this is something different. This is truly scary.

“ China ’s not her home country,” Sam grumbles.

“He’s a Commie,” Vern says, but then he thinks everyone’s a Commie.

“It’s just love,” May says lightly, but I hear worry in her voice. “Girls say and do stupid things when they’re in love.”

I fold the letter and put it back in its envelope. There’s nothing we can do about any of this from so far away, but I begin a chant-something more than a prayer, something more like a desperate plea: Bring her home, bring her home, bring her home.

Dominoes

SUMMER ARRIVES AND Joy comes home. We bask in the soft music of her voice. We try to stop ourselves from touching her, but we pat her hand, smooth her hair, and straighten her collar. Her auntie gives her signed movie magazines, colorful headbands, and a pair of purple ostrich mules. I make her favorite home-cooked foods: steamed pork with salted duck eggs, curried tomato beef lo mein, chicken wings with black beans, and almond tofu with canned fruit cocktail for dessert. Every day Sam brings her one treat or another: barbecued duck from the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, whipped-cream cake with fresh strawberries from Phoenix Bakery, and pork bao from the little place she likes so much on Spring Street.

But how Joy has changed these last nine months! She wears pedal pushers and sleeveless cotton blouses that nip in at her tiny waist. She’s lopped off her hair and styled it into a pixie cut. Inside she’s changed too. I don’t mean that she challenges us or insults us as she did in her last months before she left for Chicago. Rather, she’s come back believing that she’s more knowledgeable than we are about travel (she’s been to Chicago and back on the train, and none of us have been on one in years), about finances (she has her own bank account and a checkbook, while Sam and I still hide our money at home, where the government-or whoever-can’t get it), but most of all about China. Oh, the lectures we hear!

She slaps her paws at the gentlest among us, her uncle. If the Boar-with its innocent nature-has a fault, it’s that he trusts everyone and will believe almost everything that’s told to him, even by strangers, even by swindlers, even by a voice on the radio. Years of listening to anti-Communist broadcasts have forever colored Vern’s opinions about the People’s Republic of China. But what kind of a target is he? Not a very good one. When Joy proclaims, “Mao has helped the people of China,” about all her uncle can do is say, “No freedom there.”

“Mao wants the peasants and workers to have the very chances that Mom and Dad want for me,” Joy presses adamantly. “For the first time, he’s letting people from the countryside go to colleges and universities. And not just boys. He says women should receive ‘equal pay for equal work.’”

“You’ve never been there,” Vern says. “You don’t know anything about it-”

“I do so know about China. I was in all those China movies when I was a little girl.”

“ China isn’t like the movies,” her father, who usually stays out of these disagreements, says. Joy doesn’t smart-tongue him. It’s not because he tries to control her as a proper Chinese father should or that she’s an obedient Chinese daughter. Instead, she’s like a pearl in his palm-forever precious; to Joy, he’s the solid ground on which she walks-forever steady and reliable.

Sensing a momentary lull, May tries to put a final stop to Joy’s line of thinking. “ China isn’t like a movie set. You can’t leave it when the cameras stop rolling.”

This is one of the harshest things I’ve ever heard my sister say to Joy, but this most mild of reprimands acts like a nettle in my daughter’s heart. Suddenly her attention focuses on May and me-two sisters who have never been apart, who are the closest of friends, and whose bond is deeper than Joy could ever imagine.

“In China, girls don’t wear dresses like you and Auntie May want me to wear,” she tells me a couple of mornings later as I iron shirts on the screened porch. “You can’t wear a dress when you’re driving a tractor, you know. Girls don’t have to learn how to embroider either. They don’t have to go to church or Chinese school. And there’s none of that obey, obey, obey stuff that you and Dad are always bugging me about.”

“That may be so,” I say, “except that they have to obey Chairman Mao. How is that different from obeying the emperor or your parents?”

“In China, there are no wants. Everyone has food to eat.” Her response is not an answer, just another slogan that she picked up in one of her classes or from that Joe boy.

“Maybe they can eat, but what about freedom?”

“Mao believes in freedom. Haven’t you heard about his new campaign? He’s said, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ Do you know what that means?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “He’s invited people to criticize the new society-”

“And it’s not going to end well.”

“Oh, Mom, you’re so…” She stares at me, considering. Then she says, “You always follow the other birds. You follow Chiang Kai-shek, because people in Chinatown do. And they follow him because they think they have to. Everyone knows he’s no better than a thief He stole money and art as he fled China. Look at how he and his wife live now! So why does America support the Kuomintang and Taiwan? Wouldn’t it be better to have ties to China? It’s a much bigger country, with a lot more people and resources. Joe says it’s better to talk to people than to ignore them.”

“Joe, Joe, Joe.” I sigh wearily. “We don’t even know this Joe and you’re listening to him about China? Has he ever been there?”

“No,” Joy grudgingly admits, “but he’d like to go. I’d like to go too one day to see where you and Auntie lived in Shanghai and go to our home village.”

“Go to mainland China? Let me tell you something. It’s not easy for a snake to go back to Hell once he’s tasted Heaven. And you are not a snake. You’re just a girl who doesn’t know anything about it.”

“I’ve been studying-”

“Forget that classroom business. Forget what some boy told you. Go outside and look around. Haven’t you noticed the new strangers in Chinatown?”

“There will always be new lo fan,” she says dismissively.

“They aren’t the usual lo fan. They’re FBI agents.” I tell her about one who’s recently been walking through Chinatown every day and asking questions. He makes a loop that starts at the International Grocery on Spring, passes Pearl ’s on Ord, and goes along Broadway to the Central Plaza in New Chinatown, where he visits General Lee’s Restaurant. From there he continues to Jack Lee’s grocery on Hill, then over to the newest part of New Chinatown across the street to visit the Fong family’s businesses, and finally back downtown.

“What are they looking for? The Korean War is over-”

“But the government’s fear of Red China hasn’t gone away. It’s worse than ever. In your school haven’t they taught you about the domino theory? One country falls to Communism, then another, and another. These lo fan are scared. When they’re scared, they do bad things to people like us. That’s why we have to support the Generalissimo.”

“You worry too much.”

“I said the same thing to my mother, but she was right and I was wrong. Bad things are already happening. You just don’t know about them because you’ve been gone.” I sigh again. How can I make her understand? “While you were away, the government started something called the Confession Program. It’s all across the country, probably in your Chicago too. They’re asking, no, trying to scare us into confessing who came here as paper sons. They give people citizenship if they report on their friends, their neighbors, their business associates, and even their family members who came here as paper sons. They want to know who earned money bringing in paper sons. The government talks about the domino effect. Well, here in Chinatown, if you give one name, that also creates a domino effect, which touches not just one family member but all the paper partners and papers sons and relatives and neighbors you know. But what they want most are Communists. If you report that someone is a Communist, then you’ll get your citizenship for sure.”

“We’re all citizens. We aren’t guilty of anything.”

For years Sam and I have been torn between the American desire to share, be honest, and tell the truth to Joy and our deeply held Chinese belief that you never reveal anything. Our Chinese way has won, and we’ve kept Sam’s and my status, as well as that of her uncles and her grandfather, a secret from our daughter for two very simple reasons: we haven’t wanted her to worry and we haven’t wanted her to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. She’s much older than she was back in kindergarten, but we learned then that even the smallest mistake can have bad consequences.

I put Sam’s ironed shirt on a hanger and then sit next to my daughter. “I want to tell you how they’re looking for people, so you’ll know in case anyone approaches you. They’re looking for people who sent tea money back to China -”

“Grandpa Louie did that.”

“Exactly. And they’re looking for people who’ve tried-legally-to get their families out of China since it closed. They want to know where people’s loyalties lie-in China or in the United States?” I pause to see if she’s following me. Then I say “Our Chinese way of thinking doesn’t always apply here in America. We believe that being humble, respectful, and truthful will give us a better understanding of every situation, prevent others from being hurt, and result in an all-good end. That way of thinking could hurt us and many other people now.”

I take a deep breath and tell her something I was afraid to write to her. “You remember the Yee family?” Of course she does. She was great friends with the oldest girl, Hazel, and spent plenty of time with the other Yee kids at our union gatherings. “Mr. Yee is a paper son. He brought Mrs. Yee in through Winnipeg.”

“He’s a paper son?” Joy asks, surprised, maybe impressed.

“He decided to confess so he could stay here with his family, since the four children are American citizens. He told the INS he had brought in his wife using his false status. Now he’s an American citizen, but the INS has started deportation proceedings against Mrs. Yee, because she’s a paper wife. They still have two children at home who are not yet ten years old. What will they do without their mama? The INS wants to send her back to Canada. At least she won’t be going to China.”

“Maybe she’d be better off in China.”

When I hear this, I don’t know who’s talking-a silly parrot who must repeat everything this Joe has told her or from somewhere deep inside an eruption of her blood-mother’s deliberate childish stupidity.

“That’s Hazel’s mother you’re talking about! Is that how you would want them to feel if I was sent back to China?” I wait for an answer. When she doesn’t give me one, I get up, fold and put away the ironing board, and go check on Vern.

That night Sam carries Vern out to the couch so we can have dinner and watch Gunsmoke together. The evening’s hot, so dinner is cool and simple-just big wedges of watermelon made as cold as possible in our Frigidaire. We’re trying to follow what Miss Kitty is telling Matt Dillon when Joy starts up about the People’s Republic of China all over again. For nine months her absence felt like a hole in our family. We missed the sound of her voice and her beautiful face. But during that time we filled that hole with the television, with quiet conversation among the four of us, and with little projects that May and I did together. After Joy’s been home for two weeks, it’s like she takes up too much space with her opinions, her desire for attention, her need to tell us how wrong and backward we are, and the practiced way she has always divided her auntie and me, when all we want to do is find out if the marshal is ever going to kiss that Miss Kitty or not.

Sam, usually accepting of whatever comes out of his daughter’s mouth, finally can’t take any more and asks in Sze Yup in his quietest and calmest manner, “Are you ashamed of being Chinese? Because a proper Chinese daughter would be quiet and let her parents, auntie, and uncle watch their show.”

It is the absolute wrong question, because suddenly terrible things pour out of Joy’s mouth. She mocks our frugality: “Being Chinese? I don’t see why being Chinese means having to save gallon-size soy sauce containers to turn into waste bins.” She makes fun of me: “Only superstitious Chinese believe in the zodiac. Oh, Tiger this, Tiger that.” She hurts her aunt and uncle: “And what about arranged marriages? Look at Auntie May, married forever to someone who… who…” She hesitates as we all have from time to time until she settles on “never touches her with love or affection.” Her face rumples into an expression of distaste. “And look at how you all live together.”

Listening to her, I hear May and me twenty years ago. I’m sad for how we treated our parents, but when Joy starts hurting her father…

“And if Chinese means being like you… The food you cook in the café stinks your clothes. Your customers insult you. And the dishes you make are too greasy, too salty, and have too much MSG.”

These words hit Sam hard. Unlike May and me, he’s loved Joy without regret, without conditions, without once holding back his heart.

“Take a look in the mirror,” he says slowly. “What do you think you are? What do you think the lo fan see when they look at you? You’re nothing but a piece of jook sing-hollow bamboo.”

“Dad, you should speak to me in English. You’ve lived here for almost twenty years. Can’t you speak it yet?” She blinks a few times and then says, “You’re just so… so… so FOB.”

The silence in the living room is cruel and deep. Realizing what she’s done, she tilts her head, ruffles her pixie cut, and then smiles in what I immediately recognize as May’s from long ago. It’s a smile that says, I’m naughty, I’m disobedient, but you can’t help but love me. I see, even if Sam can’t, that all this has less to do with Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, Korea, the FBI, or how we’ve chosen to live our lives these last twenty years than it does with how our daughter feels about her family. May and I once thought Mama and Baba were old-fashioned, but Joy is embarrassed by and ashamed of us.

“Sometimes you think you have all of tomorrow ahead of you,” Mama often said. “When the sun is shining, think of the time it won’t be, because even when you’re sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above.” I ignored her when she was alive and I didn’t pay enough attention as I got older, but after all these years I have to accept that Mama’s foresight is what saved us. Without her hidden savings, we all would have died right there in Shanghai. Some deep instinct motivated her and kept her going when May and I were nearly paralyzed with fear. She was like a gazelle who, under hopeless circumstances, still tried to save her calves from the lion. I know I have to protect my daughter-from herself, from this Joe boy and his romantic ideas about Red China, from making the kinds of mistakes that so dampened May’s and my choices-but I don’t know how.

I’M GOING TO Pearl ’s to pick up takeout for Vern when I see the FBI agent stop Uncle Charley on the sidewalk. I pass the two men-with Uncle Charley ignoring me as though he doesn’t know me-and enter the café, leaving the door wide open. Inside, Sam and our workers go about their business while listening as hard as they can to what floats through the door. May comes out of her office, and we linger by the counter, pretending to talk but watching and listening to everything.

“So, Charley, you went back to China,” the agent says suddenly in Sze Yup in a voice so loud I look at my sister in surprise. It’s as though he wants not only to have us hear what he’s saying but also to let us know that he’s fluent in the dialect of our district.

“I went to China,” Uncle Charley admits. We can barely hear him, his voice quavers so. “I lost my savings, and I came back here.”

“We hear you’ve said bad things about Chiang Kai-shek.”

“I haven’t.”

“People say you have.”

“What people?”

The agent doesn’t answer that question. Instead he asks, “Isn’t it true you blame Chiang Kai-shek for losing your money?”

Charley scratches at his rash-covered neck and sucks on his lips.

The agent waits and then asks, “Where are your papers?”

Uncle Charley glances through the plate-glass window, looking for help, for encouragement or possible escape.

The agent-a big lo fan with sandy-colored hair and freckles on his nose and cheeks-smiles and says, “Yes, let’s go inside. I’d like to meet your family.”

The agent enters the café, and Uncle Charley follows with his head hung down. The lo fan walks right up to Sam, flashes his badge, and says in Sze Yup, “I’m Special Agent Jack Sanders. You’re Sam Louie, right?” When Sam nods, the agent goes on. “I always say there’s no point in wasting time on these things. Someone told us you used to buy the China Daily News.”

Sam stands absolutely still, measuring the stranger, thinking about his answer, emptying his face of emotion. The few customers, who can’t possibly understand the words but certainly know that the flashing badge can’t mean anything good, seemingly hold their breath to see what Sam will do.

“I bought the paper for my father,” Sam says in Sze Yup, and I see the disappointment on our customers’ faces that they aren’t going to be able to follow this as closely as they’d like. “He died five years ago.”

“That paper is sympathetic to the Reds.”

“My father read it sometimes, but he subscribed to Chung Sai Yat Po.”

“Seems like your father was sympathetic to Mao though.”

“Not at all. Why would he support Mao?”

“Then why did he buy China Reconstructs too? And why have you continued to buy it after his passing?”

I have a sudden desire to use the toilet. Sam can’t possibly answer with the truth-that his wife’s and sister-in-law’s faces have appeared on the covers of those magazines. Or does the FBI man already know that those are our faces? Or does he look at the pretty girls in the drab green uniforms with red stars on their caps and think all Chinese look alike?

“I’m told that in your living room above your couch you have pages from the magazine taped to the wall-pictures of the Great Wall and the Summer Palace.”

This means someone-a neighbor, a friend, a competitor who has been inside our home-has reported this. Why didn’t we take the pictures down after Father died?

“In his last months, my father liked to look at those attractions.”

“Maybe he had so much sympathy for Red China he wanted to go back home-”

“My father was an American citizen. He was born here.”

“Then show me his documents-”

“He’s dead,” Sam repeats, “and I don’t have them here.”

“Then perhaps I should pay a visit to your home, or would you prefer to come to our office? That way you can bring your documents too. I want to believe you, but you have to prove your innocence.”

“Prove my innocence or prove I’m a citizen?”

“They are the same, Mr. Louie.”

When I get home with Vern’s lunch, I don’t say anything to him or to Joy. I don’t want them to worry. When Joy asks if she can go out that night, I say as lightly as I can, “Fine. Just try to be back by midnight.” She thinks she’s finally triumphed over her mother, but I want her out of the house.

As soon as Sam and May come home, we strip the pictures the agent talked about off the walls. Sam bags up every copy of the China Daily News that my father-in-law saved because of some article or other. I order May to go into her drawer and pull out the magazine covers that Z.G. painted of the two of us.

“I don’t think this is necessary,” May says.

I respond sharply: “Please, for once, don’t argue with me.” When May doesn’t move, I sigh impatiently. “They’re only pictures on magazine covers. Now if you won’t get them, I will.”

May purses her mouth and turns to go out to the screened porch. Once she’s left, I look for photographs that I think might be-and here’s a word I never thought I’d use-incriminating.

While Sam makes another tour through the house, May and I take what we’ve gathered to burn in the incinerator. I set fire to my pile of photographs and wait for May to throw in the magazine covers, which she hugs to her chest. When she doesn’t move, I wrest them from her arms and drop them in the fire. As I watch the face-my face-that Z.G. so beautifully and perfectly painted curl in the flames, I wonder why we let any of these things creep into the house. I know the answer. Sam, May, and I are no better than Father Louie. We’ve become American with our clothes, our food, our language, our desire for Joy’s education and future, but not once in all these years have we stopped missing our home country.

“They don’t want us here,” I say softly my eyes on the flames. “They’ve never wanted us. They’re going to try to trick us, but we need to trick them in return.”

“Maybe Sam should confess and get it over with,” May suggests. “That way he’ll get his citizenship and we won’t have to worry about any of this.”

“You know it’s not enough for him just to confess his own status. He’ll have to expose others-Uncle Wilburt, Uncle Charley, me-”

“You should all confess together. Then you can all get your legal citizenship. Don’t you want it?”

“Of course I want it. But what if the government is lying?”

“Why would the government lie?”

“When hasn’t it lied?” And then, “What if they decide to deport us? If Sam is proved to be illegal, then I’ll be eligible for deportation too.”

My sister considers that. Then she says, “I don’t want to lose you. I promised Father Louie that I wouldn’t let them send you away. Sam has to confess for Joy, for you, for all of us. This is a chance for amnesty, to bring the family together, and to rid ourselves finally of our secrets.”

I don’t understand why my sister doesn’t-won’t-see the problems, but then she’s married to an actual citizen, came here as his legal wife, and isn’t facing the same threat that Sam and I are.

My sister puts an arm around my shoulder and pulls me close. “Don’t worry, Pearl,” she reassures me, as if I’m the moy moy and she’s the jie jie. “We’ll hire a lawyer to take care of things-”

“No! We’ve gone through this before, you and I, at Angel Island. We won’t let them do anything to Sam, to me, to any of us. We’re going to work together to turn their accusations against them, like we did on Angel Island. We’ve got to confuse them. What’s important is to keep our story straight.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Sam says, stepping through the darkness and feeding another stack of newspapers and memories into the incinerator. “But more than anything we have to prove we’re the most loyal Americans who ever existed.”

May doesn’t like this, but she’s my moy moy and a sister-in-law, and she has to obey.

JOY-WHOM WE’VE told as little as possible, believing her ignorance helps hold our story together-and May aren’t called in for questioning, and no one comes to the house to interview Vern. But over the next four weeks, Sam and I-often together, so I can translate for my husband when we’re transferred from Special Agent Sanders to Agent Mike Billings, who works for the INS, speaks not one word of any Chinese dialect, and is about as friendly as Chairman Plumb all those years ago-are called in for numerous interrogations. I’m questioned about my home village, a place I’ve never been. Sam’s questioned about why his so-called parents left him in China when he was seven. We’re questioned about Father Louie’s birth. We’re asked-with condescending smiles-if we’re acquainted with anyone who earned money selling paper slots.

“Someone profited from this,” Billings says knowingly. “Just tell us who.”

Our responses don’t help his investigation. We tell him we collected tinfoil during the war and sold war bonds. We tell him I shook hands with Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

“Do you have a photograph to prove it?” Billings asks, but of all the photos we took that day, that’s the one we missed.

At the beginning of August, Billings changes direction. “If your so-called father was actually born here, then why did he keep sending funds back to China even after he should have stopped?”

I don’t wait for Sam’s response but answer this myself “The money went to his ancestral village. His family has fifteen generations there.”

“Is that why your husband has continued to send money out of the country?”

“We do what we can for our relatives who are trapped in a bad place,” I translate for Sam.

At that Billings comes around the table, pulls Sam up by the lapels, and shouts in his face, “Admit it. You send money because you’re a Communist!”

I don’t have to translate this sentence for Sam to understand what the man is saying, but I do in the same even voice I’ve used all along to show that nothing Billings says will throw us from our story, our confidence, and our truth. But suddenly Sam-who has not been himself since the night Joy made fun of him for his cooking and his English and has not slept well since the day Agent Sanders entered Pearl ’s Coffee Shop-jumps up, sticks his finger in Billings ’s face, and calls him a Communist. Then they’re shouting back and forth-No, you’re a Communist! No, you’re a Communist!-and I’m sitting there echoing the accusations in both languages. Billings gets angrier and angrier, but Sam is steady and firm. Finally, Billings clamps his mouth shut, collapses in his chair, and glares at us. He has no evidence against Sam, just as Sam has no evidence against the INS agent.

“If you don’t want to confess,” he says, “and you won’t say who’s sold false papers in Chinatown, then perhaps you can tell us a little something about your neighbors.”

Sam serenely recites an aphorism, which I translate: “Sweep the snow in front of your own doorstep, and do not bother about the frost on top of another family’s house.”

We seem to be winning, but in twisting and in struggle, thin arms will not win out over thick legs. The FBI and INS question Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, who refuse to confess, say anything about us, or rat out Father Louie, who sold them their papers. Those who don’t push the drowning dogs are already the decent ones.

When Uncle Fred brings his family to the house for Sunday dinner, we ask Joy to take the little girls outside to play so he can tell us about Agent Billings’s visit to his home in Silver Lake. Fred’s stint in the service, his college years, and his dental practice have nearly erased his accent. He’s lived a good life with Mariko and their half-and-half daughters. His face is full and round, and he has a bit of a belly.

“I told him I’m a veteran, that I served in the Army and fought for the United States,” he recounts. “He looks at me and says, And you got your citizenship.’ Well, of course I got my citizenship! That’s what the government promised. Then he pulls out a file and invites me to take a look at it. It’s my immigration file from Angel Island! Remember all that stuff from our coaching books? Well, it’s all in the file. It has information about the old man and Yen-yen. It lists all of our birth dates and outlines our whole story, since we’re all connected. He asks me why I didn’t tell the truth about my so-called brothers when I enlisted. I didn’t tell him anything.”

He takes Mariko’s hand. She’s white with the fear we all feel. “I don’t mind if they pick on us,” he continues. “But when they go after my children, who were born here…” He shakes his head in disgust. “Last week Bess came home crying. Her fifth-grade teacher showed a film to the class on the Communist threat. It showed Russians in fur hats and Chinese, well, looking like us. At the end of the film, the narrator asked the students to call the FBI or the CIA if they saw anyone who looked suspicious. Who looked suspicious in the class? My Bess. Now her friends won’t play with her. I have to worry about what’s going to happen to Eleanor and little Mamie too. I remind the girls that they’re named after the First Ladies. They don’t have to be afraid.”

But of course they have to be afraid. We’re all afraid.

When you’re held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed-how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlorn, dissolute, and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn’t be more different. The palm trees, the fruits and vegetables in my garden, the geraniums in pots in front of stores and on porches all seem to shimmer and shiver with life, even in the heat of summer. I look down streets and I see promise. Instead of smog, corruption, and ugliness, I see magnificence, freedom, and openness. I can’t bear that the government is persecuting us with its terrible-and God help me, true-accusations about our citizenship, but I can bear even less the thought that my family and I might lose this place. Yes, it’s only Chinatown, but it’s my home, our home.

In these moments, I regret the years of homesickness and loneliness I’ve felt for Shanghai: the way I turned it into so many golden-hued remembrances of people, places, and food that, as Betsy has written me so many times, no longer exist and will never again exist. I berate myself: How could I not have seen what was right in front of me all these years? How could I not have sucked in all the sweetness instead of pining for memories that were only ashes and dust?

In desperation, I call Betsy in Washington to see if there’s anything her father can do for us. Although he’s suffering from his own persecution, Betsy promises he’ll look into Sam’s case.

“MY FATHER BORN San Flancisco-ah,” Sam says in his badly accented English.

Four days have passed since we had dinner with Fred, and now Sanders and Billings have come unannounced to our house. Sam perches on the end of Father Louie’s recliner. The other men sit on the couch. I’m seated on a straight-backed chair, wishing that Sam would let me speak for him. I have the same feeling I did when the Green Gang thug gave May and me his ultimatum in my family’s salon all those years ago: This is it.

“Then prove it. Show me his birth certificate,” Agent Billings demands.

“My father born San Flancisco-ah,” Sam insists firmly.

“San Flancisco-ah,” Billings repeats in a mocking tone. “Of course it would be San Francisco, because of the earthquake and fire. We aren’t stupid, Mr. Louie. It’s said that for there to be so many Chinese born in the United States before 1906, every Chinese woman who was here back then would have had to have given birth to five hundred sons. Even if by some miracle that could have happened, how is it that only sons were born and no girls? Did you kill them?”

“I wasn’t born yet,” Sam answers, switching to Sze Yup. “I didn’t live here-”

“I have your file from Angel Island. We want you to look at some photographs.” Billings puts two photos on the coffee table. The first is of the little boy that Chairman Plumb tried to trick me with all those years ago. The other shows Sam upon his arrival at Angel Island, in 1937. With the two images side by side, it’s clear that the people in them can’t possibly be the same. “Confess, and then tell us about your fake brothers. Don’t let your wife and daughter suffer because of loyalty to men who won’t come forward to help you.”

Sam examines the photographs, leans back in the recliner, and says, his voice shaking, “I Father’s real son. Brother Vern will say you.”

It’s as if his iron fan is collapsing before my eyes, but I don’t know why. When I get up, move to behind his chair, and put my hands on the backrest so he’ll know I’m there, I understand why. Joy stands in the kitchen doorway directly in Sam’s line of vision. He’s afraid for her and embarrassed for himself.

“Daddy,” Joy cries as she scurries into the room. “Do what they ask. Tell them the truth. You have nothing to hide.” Our daughter knows not one thing about what the truth actually is, but she’s so innocent-and here, I’ll say it, stupid like her auntie-that she says, “If you tell the truth, good things will happen. Isn’t that what you taught me?”

“See, even your daughter wants you to tell the truth,” Billings prods.

But Sam doesn’t waver from his story. “My father born San Flancisco-ah.”

Joy continues to cry and plead. Vern whimpers in the other room. I stand there helpless. And my sister is out working on a movie or shopping for a new dress or I don’t know what.

Billings opens his briefcase, pulls out a piece of paper, and hands it to Sam, who can’t read the English words. “If you sign this paper saying you came illegally,” he says, “we’ll take away your citizenship, which isn’t real to begin with. Once you’ve signed the paper and confessed, we’ll give you immunity, new citizenship, real citizenship, on condition that you tell us about every friend, relative, and neighbor you know who came illegally. We’re particularly interested in the other paper sons your so-called father brought in.”

“He dead. What it matter now?”

“But we have his file. How could he have so many sons? How could he have so many partners? Where are they now? And don’t bother telling us about Fred Louie. We know all about him. He got his citizenship fair and square. Just tell us about the others and where to find them.”

“What you gonna do to them?”

“Don’t worry about that. Only worry about yourself.”

“And you give me papers?”

“You’ll get legal citizenship, like I said,” Billings says. “But if you don’t confess, then we’ll have to deport you back to China. Don’t you and your wife want to stay with your daughter, so you can keep her out of trouble?”

Joy’s shoulders pull back in surprise as she hears this.

“She may be an A student, but she goes to the University of Chicago,” Billings goes on. “Everyone knows that’s a den of Communism. Do you know the kind of people she’s been seeing? Do you know what she’s been doing? She’s a member of the Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association.”

“That’s a Christian group,” I say, but when I glance at my daughter, a shadow crosses her face.

“They say they’re Christian, Mrs. Louie, but it’s a Communist front. Your daughter’s connection to that group is why we looked into your husband’s case in the first place. She’s been picketing and getting people to sign petitions. If you help us, we can overlook these infractions. She was born here, and she’s just a kid.” He looks over at Joy, who weeps in the middle of our living room. “She probably didn’t know what she was doing, but if the two of you are sent back to China, how will you help her? Do you want to ruin her life too?”

Billings nods to Sanders, who stands. “We’re going to leave you now, Mr. Louie, but we can’t let these discussions go on much longer. Either you tell us what we want to know or we’re going to take a closer look at your kid. Understand?”

After they leave, Joy runs to her father’s chair, sinks beside it, and sobs in his lap. “Why are they doing this to us? Why? Why?”

I kneel next to my daughter, put my arms around her, and search Sam’s face, looking for the hope and strength he’s always carried there.

“I left home to earn a living,” Sam says, his voice far away, his eyes peering into the darkness of despair. “I came to America to make a chance for myself. I did the best I could-”

“Of course you did.”

He looks at me in resignation. “I don’t want to be deported back to China,” he says hopelessly.

“You won’t have to go back.” I put a hand on his arm. “But if it comes to that, I’ll go with you.”

His eyes shift to mine. “You’re a good woman, but what about Joy?”

“I’ll go with you too, Daddy. I know all about China, and I’m not afraid.”

As we huddle together, something Z.G. said long ago comes into my mind. I remember him talking about ai kuo, the love for your country, and ai jen, the emotion you feel for the person you love. Sam fought fate and left China, and even after everything that’s happened he hasn’t stopped believing in America, but he loves Joy above all else.

“I okay,” he says in English, patting his daughter’s head. Then he switches back to his native Sze Yup. “You two go see about Uncle Vern. Hear him in there? He needs help. He’s scared.”

Joy and I stand up. I wipe my daughter’s tears. As Joy starts for Vern’s bedroom, Sam grabs my hand. One of his fingers loops up and through my jade bracelet, holding me in place, showing me how much he loves me. “Don’t worry, Zhen Long,” he says. When he releases me, he stares at his hand for a second, rubbing his daughter’s tears between his fingers.

Vern is terribly upset when I get to his room. He mumbles incoherently about Mao’s Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and how the Chairman’s now condemning to death everyone he encouraged to criticize the government. Vern’s so confused he can’t separate that from what he overheard in our living room. As he rambles and rails-and he’s so distressed that he’s messed his diaper and every time he squirms or pounds his fists on the bed, a disgusting odor fills my nostrils-I wish my sister were here. I wish for maybe the ten thousandth time that she would take care of her husband. It takes Joy and me a long time to calm Vern and get him cleaned. When we leave the room, Sam’s gone.

“We need to talk about this group you’re a member of,” I say to Joy “but let’s wait until your father returns.”

She doesn’t defer to me or apologize. She says with the absolute certainty of youth and being raised in America, “We’re all citizens, and it’s a free country. They can’t do anything to us.”

I sigh. “Later. We’ll do this later with your father.”

I head to my bedroom bathroom to get the smell of Vern off me. I wash my hands and my face in the basin, and when I lift my head I see in the mirror’s reflection over my shoulder into the closet…

“Sam!” I scream.

I run to the closet, where Sam hangs. I put my arms around his swaying legs and lift them to take the weight off his neck. Everything turns black before my eyes, my heart scatters like light dust, and my ears buzz with my horrified screams.

The Boundless HumanOcean

I DON’T LET go of Sam until Joy gets a stool and a knife and cuts him down. I don’t leave his side when the people come and take him to the funeral parlor. I give Sam’s body as much care as possible, touching him with all the love and tenderness I couldn’t show him when he was alive. Then May picks me up from the funeral parlor and takes me home. In the car, she says, “You and Sam were like a pair of mandarin ducks, always together. Like a pair of chopsticks, evenly matched, always in harmony.” I thank her for the traditional words, but they don’t help me.

I stay up all night. I hear Vern tossing in the next room and May quietly comforting my daughter on the screened porch, but eventually the house and everyone in it stills. Fifteen buckets drawing water from the well, seven moving up and eight going down, meaning I’m filled with anxiety, doubts, and an absolute inability to fall asleep, where my dreams will haunt me. I stand at the window, a slight breeze ruffling my nightgown. The moonlight feels as though it shines on me alone. It has been said that marriages are arranged by Heaven, that destiny will bring even the most distantly separated people together, that all is settled before birth, and no matter how much we wander from our paths, no matter how our fortunes change-for good or bad-all we can do is accomplish the decree of fate. This, in the end, is our blessing and our heartbreak.

Regrets scorch my skin and burrow into my heart. I didn’t do enough of the husband-wife thing with Sam. I looked at him too often as a mere rickshaw puller. I let my longing for the past make him feel that he was never enough, that our life together was never enough, that Los Angeles was never enough. Worst, I didn’t help him enough in his final days. I should have fought harder against the FBI, the INS, and this whole immigration mess. Why didn’t I see that he could no longer carry the weight of our burdens across his iron fan?

In the early morning, avoiding the screened porch, I go out the front door and around to the back of the house. I know that too many suicides haunt our community, but it feels like Sam’s death has added a new grain of salt to the boundless human ocean of misery and sorrow. Beyond my rose-covered chain-link fence, I imagine my neighbors languishing and expressing the sorrows of the ages. In that moment of quiet and grief I know what I have to do.

I go back to my room, find a photograph of Sam, and take it to the family altar that he cared for in the living room. I place his picture next to those of Yen-yen and Father. I look at the other things Sam placed on the altar to represent the others we’ve lost: my parents, his parents, brothers and sisters, and our son. I hope for Sam that his version of the afterworld exists and that he’s with all of them now, looking down from the Viewing Terrace, watching me, Joy, May, and Vern. I light incense and bow three times. No matter what I feel about my one God, I promise that I’ll do this every day until I die and I meet Sam either in his Heaven or in mine.

I’m a one-Goder, but I’m Chinese too, so I follow both traditions for Sam’s funeral. A Chinese funeral-that most significant of rites-is the last time we show respect to the person who’s left us, give him the honor to save face, and tell the young about the accomplishments and deeds of their newest ancestor. I want all that for Sam. I choose the suit he’ll wear to rest in his coffin. I place photographs of Joy and me in his pockets, so he’ll have us with him when he goes to Chinese Heaven. I make sure that Joy, May, Vern, and I all wear black-not Chinese white. We say prayers of thanks for the gift of Sam, blessings and forgiveness for the living, and mercy for all. There’s no brass band, just Bertha Hom at the organ, playing “Amazing Grace,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and “ America the Beautiful.” Then we have a simple, modest, mournful banquet at Soochow of five tables-just fifty people, minuscule compared with Father Louie’s funeral, even smaller than Yen-yen’s memorial, all a result of the fear our neighbors, friends, and customers feel. You can always count on people to crowd your party when you are in glory, but you should never dream of people sending you charcoal in the snow. I sit at the main table between my sister and my daughter. They do and say all the right things, but both of them ooze guilt: May for not being there when it happened, Joy for believing that she caused her father’s suicide. I know I should tell them not to feel these things. No one, no one, could have predicted Sam would do this crazy thing. But in doing it, he released Joy, the uncles, and me from further investigation. As Agent Billings told me when he came by the house after Sam died, “With your husband and father-in-law gone, we can’t prove anything one way or the other. And it turns out we may have been wrong about that group your daughter joined. This has to be good news for you, but a little advice: when your daughter goes back to school in September, tell her to stay away from all Chinese organizations, just to be on the safe side.” I looked at him and said, “My father-in-law was born in San Francisco. My husband was always a citizen.”

How could I be so clear with the INS man but not know how to talk to my sister or console my daughter? I know they’re both in pain, but I can’t help them. I need them to help me. But even when they try-by bringing me cups of tea, by showing me their red and puffy eyes, by sitting on my bed as I weep-I find myself filled with immense sadness and… rage. Why did my daughter have to join that group? Why didn’t she show her father proper respect in his last few weeks? Why did my sister always encourage Joy’s American side about clothes and haircuts and attitudes? Why didn’t my sister help Sam and me more during these difficulties? Why didn’t she take care of her husband-for all these years but especially on the day of Sam’s death? If she’d been taking care of him, as a proper wife should, then I would have been able to stop Sam. I know this is just my grief speaking. It’s easier to feel anger at them than agony at Sam’s death.

Violet and her husband, also at our table, pack up the leftover food for me to take home. Uncle Wilburt says good-bye. Uncle Fred, Mariko, and the girls go home. Uncle Charley lingers for a long time, but what can he say? What can any of them say? I nod, shake their hands in the American way, and thank them for coming, doing my best to be a proper widow. A widow…

DURING THE MOURNING period, people are supposed to visit, bring food, and play dominoes, but just as with the funeral, most of our friends and neighbors stay away. The gossips smack their lips, but they don’t understand that my troubles could become their troubles at any time. Only Violet dares to visit. For the first time in my life I’m grateful that there’s someone besides May to comfort me.

In so many ways Violet-with her job and her house in Silver Lake-is more assimilated than we are, but she’s taking a risk coming here, since she and Rowland have more to be afraid of than Sam and I ever did. After all, Violet and her family were trapped here when China closed. Violet’s and Rowland’s jobs-which once seemed so impressive-now make them targets. Perhaps they’re spies left here to collect the United States ’ technology and knowledge. And yet she overcomes her fear to see me.

“Sam was a good Ox,” Violet says. “He had integrity and bore the burdens of righteousness. He followed the rules of nature, patiently pushing the wheel of fate. He was not afraid of his destiny. He knew what he had to do to save you and Joy. An Ox will always do whatever is needed to protect his family’s welfare-”

“My sister doesn’t believe in the Chinese zodiac,” May cuts in.

I don’t know why she says this. Sure, there was a time when I didn’t believe in these things, but that was a long time ago. I know in my heart that my sister is forever a Sheep, that I’m forever a Dragon, that Joy is forever a Tiger, and that my husband was an Ox-dependable, methodical, calm, and, as Violet said, the bearer of so many burdens. This comment, like so much of what comes out of May’s mouth anymore, shows how little she knows about me. Why haven’t I seen it before?

Violet doesn’t react to May. Instead, she pats my knee and recites an old saying. “All things light and pure float upward to become Heaven.”

In my life, no three miles have been flat and no three days have had sun. I’ve been brave in the past, but now I’m beyond devastated. My grief is like dense clouds that cannot be dispersed. I can’t think beyond the blackness of my clothes and heart.

Later that evening-after Vern has been fed and his lights turned out and Joy has gone out with a couple of the Yee girls to talk and drink tea-May knocks on the door to my room. I get up and answer it. I’m wearing a nightgown, my hair is a mess, and my face is splotched from mourning. My sister wears a slim sheath of emerald green satin, her hair is teased into an improbably high bouffant, and diamond and jade earrings dangle from her ears. She’s going somewhere. I don’t bother to ask where.

“The second cook didn’t show up at the café,” she says. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you decide is fine.”

“I know this is a hard time for you, and I’m sorry about that. I really am. But I need you. You don’t understand the pressure I have now with the café, Vern, the responsibility for the house, and my business. Things are so busy right now.”

I listen as she wonders aloud how much to charge a production company for extras, costumes, and props like wheelbarrows, food carts, and rickshaws.

“I always base my rentals on a ten percent value of the article,” May continues. I understand she’s trying to get me to come out of my room, reconnect with life, help her as I always have, but truly, I don’t know one damn thing about her rental business, and right now I don’t care. “They want to rent some pieces for several months, perhaps as much as a year, and some of what they want-like the rickshaws-is irreplaceable. So how much do you think I should charge to rent them? They each cost about two hundred and fifty dollars, so I could charge twenty-five dollars a week. But I’m thinking I should charge more, because where will we buy replacements if something happens to them?”

“Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

I start to close the door, but she grabs it and pulls it open. “Why don’t you let me in? You could take a shower. I could do your hair. Maybe you could put on a dress and we could take a walk-”

“I don’t want to upset your plans,” I say, but I’m thinking, How many times in the past did she leave me at home with our parents in Shanghai, in the apartment with Yen-yen, and now with Vern so that she could go out to do… whatever it is she does?

“You need to rejoin the living-”

“It’s only been two weeks-”

May gives me a hard stare. “You need to come out and be with your family. Joy will be going back to Chicago soon. She needs you to talk to her-”

“Don’t tell me how to mother my daughter-”

She takes hold of my wrist, wrapping her hand around Mama’s bracelet. “Pearl.” She gives my wrist a little shake. “I know this is terrible for you. A great sadness. But you’re still young. You’re still beautiful. You have your daughter. You have me. And you’ve had everything. Look how Joy loves you. Look how Sam loved you.”

“Yes, and he’s dead.”

“I know, I know,” she says sympathetically. “I was trying to be helpful. I didn’t think he’d kill himself.”

Her words hang like elegantly calligraphed characters in the air before my eyes, the silence thick as I read them again and again, until finally I ask, “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I didn’t mean anything.”

My sister has never been a good liar.

“May!”

“All right! All right!” She lets go of my wrist, raises both of her hands, and shakes them in frustration. Then she pivots on one of her high heels and sways into the living room. I’m right behind her. She stops, turns, and quickly spills the words. “I told Agent Sanders about Sam.”

“You did what?” My ears refuse to understand the depth of her betrayal.

“I told the FBI about Sam. I thought it would help.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask, still not willing to believe what she’s saying.

“I did it for Father Louie. Before he died, he seemed to sense what was coming. He made me promise to do whatever was necessary to keep you and Sam safe. He didn’t want the family separated-”

“He didn’t want Vern to be left only with you,” I say. But this is far off the point. What she’s saying about Sam can’t be true. Please let it not be true.

“I’m sorry. Pearl, I’m so sorry.” And with that, May lets the rest of her confession fall from her lips in a jumble. “Agent Sanders used to walk with me sometimes when I was coming back to the house after work. He asked about Joy, and he wanted to know about you and Sam too. He said this was an opportunity for amnesty. He said if I told him the truth about Sam’s paper-son status, then we could work together to get his citizenship and yours. I thought if I could show Agent Sanders I was a good American, then he would see that you were good Americans too. Don’t you see? I had to protect Joy, but I was also afraid of losing you, my sister, the only one in my life who’s loved me for who I am, who’s stood by me and taken care of me. If you’d just done as I’d said-hired a lawyer and confessed-then the two of you could have become citizens. You never again would have had to be afraid, and you and I never again would have had to worry about being separated. Instead, you and Sam continued to lie. The idea that Sam would hang himself never entered my mind.”

I’ve loved my sister from the moment she was born, but for too long I’ve been like a moon spinning around her entrancing planet. Now I whirl away as the anger of a lifetime boils out of me. My sister, my stupid, stupid sister.

“Get out.”

She stares at me in that Sheep way of hers-complacent and uncomprehending.

“I live here, Pearl. Where do you want me to go?”

“Get out!” I scream.

“No!” It’s one of the few times in our lives that she’s so directly disobeyed me. Then, in a heavy but raspy voice, she repeats, “No. You’re going to listen to me for once. Amnesty made sense. It was the safe thing to do.”

I shake my head, refusing to listen. “You’ve ruined my life.”

“No, Sam ruined his life.”

“That’s so like you, May, placing fault on someone other than yourself.”

“I never would have spoken to Agent Sanders if I’d thought there was any danger to Sam or you. I can’t believe you’d think that about me.” She seems to gather strength, standing there in her emerald satin. “Agent Sanders and the other one gave you every chance-”

“If you call intimidation a chance.”

“Sam was a paper son,” May goes on. “He was here illegally. For the rest of my life I’m going to blame myself for Sam’s suicide, but that doesn’t change the fact that what I did was right for the both of you and for our family. All you and Sam had to do was tell the truth-”

“Didn’t you consider what the consequences of that would be?”

“Of course I did! I’ll say it again: Agent Sanders said that if you and Sam confessed, then you’d receive amnesty. Amnesty! Your papers would have been stamped, you would have become legal citizens, and that would have been that. But you and Sam were too stubborn, too country-Chinese and ignorant to be Americans.”

“So now you’re blaming me for everything that’s happened?”

“I don’t want to say that, Pearl.”

But she just did say it! I’m so angry I can’t think straight. “I want you to move out of my house,” I seethe. “I never want to see you again. Not ever.”

“You’ve always blamed me for everything.” Her voice is calm, calm.

“Because everything that’s been bad in my life is because of you.”

My sister stares at me, waiting, as if she’s ready to hear what I have to say. If that’s what she wants…

“Baba loved you more,” I say. “He had to sit next to you. Mama loved you so much she had to sit right across from you, so she could stare at her beautiful daughter and not the one with the ugly red face.”

“You’ve always suffered from red-eye disease.” My sister sniffs, as though my accusations are insignificant. “You’ve always been jealous and envious of me, but you were the one who was cherished by Mama and Baba. Who loved who more? I’ll tell you. Baba liked to look at you. Mama had to sit next to you. The three of you always spoke in Sze Yup. You had your own secret language. You always left me out.”

This freezes me in place for a moment. I’ve always believed they spoke to me in Sze Yup to shield May from this or that, but what if they’d been doing it as an endearment, as a way of showing I was special to them?

“No!” I say as much to her as to myself “That’s not how it was.”

“Baba cared enough about you to criticize you. Mama cared enough about you to buy you pearl cream. She never gave me anything precious-not pearl cream, not her jade bracelet. They sent you to college. No one asked if I wanted to go! And even though you went, did you do anything with it? Look at your friend Violet. She did something, but you? No. Everyone wants to come to America for the opportunities. They came your way, but you didn’t take them. You preferred to be a victim, a fu yen. But what does it matter who Baba and Mama loved more or whether or not I had the same opportunities as you? They’re dead, and that was a long time ago.”

But it isn’t to me, and I know it isn’t to May either. Just consider how our competition for our parents’ affection has been repeated in our battle for Joy. Now, after our whole lives together, we say what we truly feel. The tones of our Wu dialect rise and fall, shrill, caustic, and accusatory as we empty all the evil we’ve stored up on each other’s heads, blaming each other for every single wrong and misfortune that’s happened to us. I haven’t forgotten about Sam’s death and I know she hasn’t either, but neither of us can help ourselves. Maybe it’s easier to fight about the injustices we’ve carried for years than to face May’s betrayal and Sam’s suicide.

“Did Mama know you were pregnant?” I ask, voicing a suspicion I’ve harbored for years. “She loved you. She made me promise to take care of you, my moy moy, my little sister. And I have. I brought you to Angel Island, where I was humiliated. And since then I’ve been stuck in Chinatown, taking care of Vern, and working here in the house while you’ve been in Haolaiwu, going to parties, having fun, doing whatever you do with those men.” Then, because I’m so angry and hurt, I say something I know I’ll regret forever, but there’s enough truth in it that it flies out of my mouth before I can stop it. “I had to take care of your daughter even when my own baby died.”

“You’ve always been bitter about having to care for Joy, but you’ve also done everything possible to keep me away from her. When she was a baby, you left her in the apartment with Sam when I took you out for walks-”

“That wasn’t the reason.” (Or was it?)

“Then you blamed me and everyone else for making you stay home with her. But when any of us offered to take Joy for a while, you turned us down.”

“That’s not true. I let you take her to film sets-”

“And then you wouldn’t allow me even that happiness anymore,” she says sadly. “I loved her, but she was always a burden to you. You have a daughter. I have nothing. I’ve lost everyone-my mother, my father, my child-”

“And I was raped by too many men to protect you!”

My sister nods as though she was expecting me to say this. “So now I get to hear about that sacrifice? Again?” She takes a breath. I can see she’s trying to calm down. “You’re upset. I understand that. But none of this has anything to do with what happened to Sam.”

“But of course it does! Everything between us has to do with either your illegitimate child or what the monkey people did to me.”

The muscles in May’s neck tighten and her anger roars back, matching mine. “If you really want to talk about that night, then fine, because I’ve been waiting a lot of years for this. No one asked you to go out there. Mama very clearly told you to stay with me. She wanted you to be safe. You’re the one she talked to in Sze Yup, whispering her love to you, as she always did, so I wouldn’t understand. But I understood that she loved you enough to say loving words to you and not to me.”

“You’re changing the truth, like you always do, but it won’t work. Mama loved you so much she faced those men alone. I couldn’t let her do that. I had to help her. I had to save you.” As I speak, memories of that night fill my eyes. Wherever Mama is now, is she aware of everything I sacrificed for my sister? Did Mama love me? Or had Mama in her last moments been disappointed in me one final time? But I don’t have time for these questions when my sister is standing before me, her hands on her hips, her beautiful face contorted in exasperation.

“That was one night. One night out of a lifetime! How long have you used it, Pearl? How long have you used it to keep distance between you and Sam, between you and Joy? When you were in and out of consciousness, you told me some things you obviously don’t remember. You said that Mama groaned when you stepped into the room with the soldiers. You said you thought she was upset because you weren’t protecting me. I think you were wrong. She must have been heartbroken that you weren’t saving yourself. You’re a mother. You know what I say is true.”

This hits me like a slap to my face. May’s right. If Joy and I were in the same situation…

“You think you’ve been brave and given up so much,” May continues. I don’t hear condemnation or taunting in her voice, just relentless anguish, as though she’s the one who’s suffered. “But really you’ve been a coward: afraid, weak, and uncertain all these years. Never once have you asked what else happened in the shack that night. Never once have you thought to ask me what it was like to hold Mama in my arms as she died. Did you ever once think to ask where, how, or if she was buried? Who do you think took care of that? Who do you think got us away from that shack when the sensible thing would have been to leave you behind to die?”

I don’t like her questions. I like the answers that run through my mind even less.

“I was only eighteen years old,” May goes on. “I was pregnant and terrified. But I pushed you in the wheelbarrow. I got you to the hospital. I saved your life, Pearl, but you’re still carrying resentment and fear and blame after all these years. You believe you’ve sacrificed so much to take care of me, but your sacrifices have only been excuses. I’m the one who sacrificed to take care of you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Is it?” She pauses briefly and then says: “Have you ever once thought what life has been like for me here? To see my daughter every day but always be kept at a distance? Or do the husband-wife thing with Vern? Think about that, Pearl. He could never be a real husband.”

“What are you saying?”

“That we never would have ended up here in this place that seems to have caused you so much misery if it hadn’t been for you.” As the fight falls from her voice, her words dig deep into me, unsettling my blood and bones. “You let one night, one terrible, tragic night, make you run and run and run. And I, as your moy moy, followed. Because I love you, and I knew you were forever damaged and would never be able to see the beauty and fortune in your life.”

I close my eyes, trying to steady myself I never want to hear her voice again. I never want to see her again. “Won’t you please just leave?” I beg.

But she comes right back at me. “Just answer me honestly. Would we be here in America if it hadn’t been for you?”

Her question thrusts into me sharp as a knife, because so much of what she’s been saying is true. But I’m still so angry and hurt that she turned Sam in that I respond with the one thing that will be most spiteful. “Absolutely not. We wouldn’t be here in America if you hadn’t done the husband-wife thing with some nameless boy! If you hadn’t made me take your baby-”

“He wasn’t nameless,” May says, her voice as soft as clouds. “It was Z.G.”

I thought I’d been hurt as much as I could and still survive. I was wrong.

“How could you? How could you hurt me that way? You know I loved Z.G.”

“Yes, I know,” she admits. “Z.G. thought it was funny-the way you stared at him during our sittings, the way you went begging to him-but I felt terrible about it.”

I stagger back. Betrayal upon betrayal upon betrayal.

“This is another of your lies.”

“Really? Joy saw it: Who had the red face of a peasant on the covers of China Reconstructs and whose face was painted with love?”

As she speaks, images from the past tumble through my mind: May resting her head against Z.G.’s heart as they danced, Z.G. painting every last strand of her hair, Z.G. placing peonies around her naked body…

“I’m sorry,” she says. “That was cruel. I know you’ve held him in your heart all these years, but that was a girlish crush from long ago. Can’t you see that? Z.G. and I…” Her voice catches. “You had a lifetime with Sam. Z.G. and I had a few weeks.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I knew you had feelings for him. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

And like that I understand what’s been before me for the last twenty years. “Z.G. is Joy’s father.”

“Who is Z.G.?”

It’s the one voice that neither my sister nor I want to hear. I turn and there’s Joy, standing in the kitchen doorway, her eyes like black pebbles at the bottom of a bowl of narcissus. Her look-cold, expressionless, and unforgiving-tells me she’s been listening far too long. I’m devastated by Sam’s death and my sister’s version of our lives, but I feel absolute horror that my daughter has heard any of this. I take two steps toward Joy but she edges away from me.

“Who is Z.G.?” she asks again.

“He is your real father,” May answers, her voice gentle and filled with love. “And I am your real mother.”

The three of us stand in the living room like statues. I see May and me through Joy’s eyes: a mother-who has tried to teach her daughter to be filial in the Chinese way and brilliant in the American way-wearing an old nightgown, with a face red from tears, sorrow, and anger; and another mother-who has indulged her daughter with treats and exposed her to the glamour and money of Haolaiwu-looking radiant and elegant. Freed from two decades of secrets, May seems at peace, despite everything that’s happened tonight. My sister and I have fought over shoes, over who’s had the better life, and over who’s smarter and prettier, but this time I don’t have a chance. I know who will win. For so long I’ve wondered about my destiny. It wasn’t enough for me to lose my baby son and my husband. Now the tears of the greatest loss of my life roll down my cheeks.

When Our Hair Is White

I LIE ON my bed, a huge hole in my chest where my heart used to be. Destroyed, that’s how I feel. I listen to May and Joy murmur together. Later, I hear raised voices and doors slam, but I don’t go back out there and fight for my daughter. I don’t have any fight left in me. But then maybe I never did. Maybe May was right about me. I am weak. Maybe I’ve always been afraid, a victim, a fu yen. May and I grew up in the same home with the same parents, and yet my sister has always been able to look out for herself She grabbed at opportunities: my willingness to take Joy, Tom Gubbins’s offer of a job and what that turned into, her constant striving to go out and have fun, while I accepted the bad as merely my unlucky fate.

Later still, I hear water running in the bathroom and the toilet flush. I hear Joy opening and shutting her drawers in the linen closet. As silence finally settles over the house, my mind goes to deeper and darker places. My sister has made me think about things in a whole new way, but none of that changes what happened to Sam. I’ll never forgive her for that! Except… except… maybe she was right about seeking amnesty. Maybe not voluntarily stepping forward was a dreadful mistake on Sam’s and my parts, which resulted in terrible tragedy for Sam. But why hadn’t May told us she was going to report us, even if it was for our own good? I know the answer too well: Sam and I were always afraid of anything new. We were afraid to leave the family and go out on our own, afraid to leave Chinatown, afraid to let our daughter become what we said we wanted her to be: American. If May had tried to tell us, we wouldn’t have been able to hear her.

I know that, in the worst of my Dragon aspects, I can be stubborn and proud. Cross a female Dragon and the sky will fall. Indeed, tonight the sky has fallen, but I need to tell Joy that she is and will always be my daughter and that no matter what she feels about me or Sam or her auntie, I will love her forever and ever. I will make her understand how much she’s been loved and protected and how much pride I have in her as she begins her life. I have ten thousand hopes that she’ll forgive me. As for May, I don’t know if I can find a way to absolve her or even if I want to. I don’t know if I want to have a relationship with her at all, but I’m willing to give her a chance to explain everything to me again.

I should go out to the screened porch, wake them up, and do all this right now, but it’s late and it’s quiet out there and too much has happened on this terrible night.

“WAKE UP! Wake up! Joy is gone!”

I open my eyes to my sister shaking me. Her face is frantic. I sit up, fear pulsing through my body.

“What?”

“It’s Joy. She’s gone.”

I’m up, out of the room, and running to the screened porch. Both beds look to me like they’ve been slept in. I take a breath and try to relax.

“Maybe she’s gone for a walk. Maybe she went to the cemetery.”

May shakes her head. Then she looks down at a piece of crumpled paper she holds in her hand. “I found this on her bed when I woke up.”

May smoothes the paper and hands it to me. I begin to read:

Mom,

I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t understand this country anymore. I hate that it killed Dad. I know you’ll think I’m confused and foolish. Maybe I am, but I have to find answers. Maybe China is my real home after all. After everything Auntie May told me last night, I think I should meet my real father. Don’t worry about me, Mom. I have great belief in China and everything Chairman Mao is doing for the country.

Joy

I take a breath, and the pounding in my heart slows. I know that Joy can’t possibly mean what she’s written. She’s a Tiger. It’s her nature to flail and strike out, which is exactly what she’s done in her note, but there’s no possible way she’s done what she’s written here. May seems to believe it though.

“Has she really run away?” May asks when I look up from the letter.

“I’m not worried and you shouldn’t be either.” I’m irritated with May for starting the day with more drama when I hoped to talk things through, but I put a reassuring hand on her arm, trying to keep some semblance of calm between us. “Joy was upset last night. We all were. She probably went over to the Yees’ house to talk to Hazel. I bet she’ll be home for breakfast.”

“Pearl.” My sister swallows and then inhales before continuing. “Last night Joy asked about Z.G. I told her I think he still lives in Shanghai since his magazine covers always show something about the city. I’m pretty sure that’s where she’s gone.”

I wave off the idea. “She’s not going to China to look for Z.G. She can’t just get on a plane and fly to Shanghai.” I tick off the reasons on my fingers, hoping logic will soothe May’s concerns. “Mao took over the country eight years ago. China is closed to Westerners. The United States doesn’t have diplomatic relations-”

“She could fly to Hong Kong,” May cuts in haltingly. “It’s a British colony. From there she could walk into China, just like Father Louie used to hire people to walk tea money in to his family in Wah Hong Village.”

“Don’t even think that. Joy is not a Communist. All that talk has been just that-talk.”

May points to the note. “She wants to meet her real father.”

But I refuse to accept what my sister is saying. “Joy doesn’t have a passport.”

“Yes, she does. Don’t you remember? That Joe boy helped her get one.”

At that, my knees buckle. May grabs me and helps me to the bed, where we sit down. I begin to weep. “Not this. Not after Sam.”

May tries to comfort me, but I’m inconsolable. It’s not long before guilt takes over.

“She hasn’t just gone to find her father.” My words come out ragged and broken. “Her whole world has been split apart. Everything she thought she knew was wrong. She’s running away from us. Her real mother… and me.”

“Don’t say that. You are her real mother. Look at the letter again. She called me Auntie and you Mom. She’s your daughter, not mine.”

My heart throbs with grief and fear, but I grab on to one word: Mom.

May dabs away my tears. “She is your daughter,” she repeats. “Now stop crying. We have to think.”

May’s right. I have to regain control of my emotions, and we have to figure out how to stop my daughter from making this terrible mistake.

“Joy will need a lot of money if she wants to get to China,” I say thinking aloud.

May seems to understand what I mean. She’s been modern for a long time and has kept her money in a bank, but Sam and I followed Father Louie’s tradition of keeping our earnings nearby. We hurry to the kitchen and look under the sink for the coffee can where I keep most of my savings. It’s empty. Joy’s taken the money, but I don’t lose hope.

“When do you think she left?” I ask. “The two of you stayed up talking-”

“Why didn’t I hear her get up? Why didn’t I hear her pack?”

I have these same self-recriminations, and a part of me is still angry and confused about everything I learned last night, but I say, “We can’t worry about things like that right now. We have to concentrate on Joy. She can’t have gone far. We can still find her.”

“Yes, of course. Let’s get dressed. We’ll take two cars-”

“What about Vern?” Even in this moment of terror and bereavement, I can’t forget my responsibilities.

“You drive to Union Station and see if she’s there. I’ll get Vern situated, and then I’ll drive to the bus station.”

But Joy isn’t at the train station, and she isn’t at the bus station either. May and I meet back at the house. We still don’t know for sure where Joy has gone. It’s hard to believe that she’ll really try to go to China, but we have to act as though that’s what she’s doing if we’re to have any chance at stopping her. May and I make a new plan. I drive to the airport, while May stays at home and makes phone calls: to the Yee family to see if Joy said anything to the girls; to the uncles on the chance she sought their advice about getting into mainland China; and to Betsy and her father in Washington to check if there’s an official way to catch Joy before she leaves the country. I don’t find Joy at the airport, but May receives two distressing pieces of information. First, Hazel Yee said that early this morning Joy called in tears from the airport to say she was leaving the country. Hazel didn’t believe Joy and didn’t ask where she was going. Second, May learned from Betsy’s father that Joy can apply for and receive a visa to Hong Kong upon landing.

Since we haven’t eaten, May opens two cans of Campbell ’s chicken noodle soup and begins to heat them on the stove. I sit at the table, watching my sister and worrying about my daughter. My beautiful, wild Joy is running headlong to the one place she shouldn’t go: the People’s Republic of China. But Joy-as much as she thinks she’s learned about China from the movies, that boy Joe, that dumb group she joined, and whatever her professors might have taught her in Chicago-doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s followed her Tiger nature, acting out of anger, confusion, and misplaced enthusiasm. She’s acted out of last night’s passions and confusions. As I told May, I believe that Joy’s rushing off to China is as much a flight from us-the two women who have fought over her from birth-as it is about finding her real father. And Joy can’t possibly understand how traumatic-not to mention dangerous-finding Z.G. could be.

But if Joy can’t avoid her essential nature, then I can’t escape mine either. The pull of motherhood is strong. I think of my own mother and all she did to save May and me from the Green Gang and protect us from the Japanese. Mama may have agonized over her decision to leave my father behind, but she did it. Surely she was terrified to step into the room with the soldiers, but she didn’t hesitate then either. My daughter needs me. No matter how perilous the journey or how great the risks, I have to find her. She needs to know that I’ll stand by her, unconditionally, without question, whatever the situation.

A small smile comes to my lips as I realize that for once not being a U.S. citizen is going to help me. I don’t have a U.S. passport. I have only my Certificate of Identity, which will allow me to leave this country that has never wanted me. I have some money tucked in the lining of my hat, but it isn’t enough to get me to China. It will take too long to sell the café. I could go to the FBI and confess everything and more, say I’m a rabid Communist of the worst kind, and hope to be deported…

May pours the soup into three bowls, and we go to Vern’s room. He’s pale and confused. He ignores the soup and nervously twists his bed-sheets.

“Where is Sam? Where is Joy?”

“I’m sorry, Vern. Sam died,” May tells him for what I know must be the twentieth time today. “Joy has run away. Do you understand, Vern? She isn’t here. She’s gone to China.”

“ China ’s a bad place.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

“I want Sam. I want Joy.”

“Try to eat your soup,” May says.

“I need to go after Joy,” I announce. “Maybe I can find her in Hong Kong, but I’ll go into China if I have to.”

“ China ’s a bad place,” Vern repeats. “You die there.”

I put my bowl on the floor. “May, can you lend me the money?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Of course, but I don’t know if I have enough.”

How could she when she’s spent her money on clothes, jewelry, entertaining, and her fancy car? I shove those feelings aside, reminding myself that she also helped buy this house and pay for Joy’s tuition…

“I do,” Vern says. “Bring me boats. Lots of boats.”

May and I look at each other, not understanding.

“I need boats!”

I hand him the closest one. He takes it and throws it on the floor. The model shatters, and inside is a roll of bills held together with a rubber band.

“My money from the family pot,” Vern says. “More boats! Give me more!”

Soon the three of us are smashing Vern’s collection of ships, planes, and race cars on the floor. The old man had been stingy and cheap but always fair. Of course he gave Vern a portion of the family pot, even after he became an invalid. But Vern, unlike the rest of us, never spent his money. I can remember only one time I saw him use money: when he took May, Sam, Joy, and me to the beach on the streetcar our first Christmas in Los Angeles.

May and I gather up the wads of cash and count the money on Vern’s bed. There’s more than enough for a plane ticket and even bribes, if I need them.

“I’ll come with you,” May says. “We’ve always done better when we’re together.”

“You need to stay here. You need to take care of Vern, the coffee shop, the house, and the ancestors-”

“What if you find Joy and then the authorities won’t let you leave?” May asks.

She’s worried about this. Vern’s worried about this. And I’m terrified. We’d be stupid if we weren’t. I allow myself a wan smile.

“You’re my sister, and you’re very smart. You’re going to start working from this end.”

As my sister absorbs this, I can practically see her forming a list in her mind.

“I’m going to call Betsy and her father again,” she says. “And I’ll write Vice President Nixon. He helped other people get out of China when he was a senator. I’ll make him help us.”

I think but don’t say: This isn’t going to be easy. Again, I’m not a U.S. citizen, and I don’t have a passport for any country. And we’re dealing with Red China. But I have to believe she’ll do everything she can to get Joy and me out of China, because she got us out once before.

“I spent my first twenty-one years in China and my last twenty in Los Angeles,” I say, my voice as steady as my resolve. “I don’t feel like I’m going home. I feel like I’m losing my home. I’m counting on you to make sure Joy and I have something to come back to.”

The next day I pack the Certificate of Identity I was given on Angel Island and the peasant clothes May bought me to wear out of China. I take photos of Sam to give me courage and of Joy to show to people I meet. I go to the family altar and say good-bye to Sam and the others. I remember something May said a few years ago: Everything always returns to the beginning. I finally understand what she meant now as I begin this new journey-not only will mistakes be repeated but we will also be given chances to fix them. Twenty years ago I lost my mother as we fled China; now I’m returning to China, as a mother, to make things-so many things-right. I open the little box where Sam placed the pouch Mama gave me. I put it around my neck. It protected me in my travels once before, just as I hope that the one May gave Joy before she went away to college is protecting her now.

I say good-bye and thank you to the boy-husband, and then May drives me to the airport. As palm trees and stucco houses drift past my window, I go back over my plan: I’ll go to Hong Kong, put on my peasant clothes, and walk across the border. I’ll go to the Louie and Chin home villages-both places Joy has heard about-to make sure she isn’t there, but my mother’s heart tells me she won’t be there. She’s gone to Shanghai to find her real father and learn about her mother and her aunt, and I’m going to be right behind her. Of course I’m afraid I’ll be killed. But more than that, I’m afraid for all the things we still could lose.

I glance at my sister, who sits behind the wheel of the car with such determination. I remember that look from when she was a toddler. I remember it from when she hid our money and Mama’s jewelry on the fisherman’s boat. We still have so much to say to each other to make things right between us. There are things I’ll never forgive her for and things I need to apologize for. I know for sure that she was dead wrong about how I feel about being in America. I may not have my papers, but after all these years, I am an American. I don’t want to give that up-not after everything I’ve gone through to have it. I’ve earned my citizenship the hard way; I’ve earned it for Joy.

At the airport, May walks me to my gate. When we get there, she says, “I can never apologize enough about Sam, but please know I was trying to help the two of you.” We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that’s been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, and, yes, even our moments of happiness and triumph. My sister is the one person who truly knows me, as I know her. The last thing May says to me is “When our hair is white, we’ll still have our sister love.”

As I turn away and board the plane, I wonder if there was anything I could have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That’s the meaning of fate. But if some things are fated and some people are luckier than others, then I also have to believe that I still haven’t found my destiny. Because somehow, some way, I’m going to find Joy, and I’m going to bring my daughter, our daughter, home to my sister and me.