Outrun the Moon(7)

Mrs. Lowry says a good businesswoman should always leave with a smile, even when her company looks fit to spit.





3



JACK’S LUNGS GROW WHEEZY ON THE return trek, and I lift him onto my back.

“I want to walk,” he gasps.

“One day, I’ll be an old woman, and I’ll need you to carry me. I’m paying my debts in advance.”

When Jack was barely three and I was twelve, I overheard Ma say that Jack’s life would be short. That was the only time I’d ever seen Ba almost cuff her. “Never speak of such nonsense again,” he roared before storming out of our flat.

Despite Ma’s reputation, the odds of her fortune-telling being accurate were even worse than winning at the fan-tan, a popular game of chance, but her pronouncement gathered the scattered ends in my still-developing brain into one tight fist. I would never let anything happen to Jack. And as he grew older and his lungs failed to develop, I grew even more determined that he should not inherit the launderer’s life, whose hard labor was surely a shortcut to an early grave.

But what could a mere girl, a Chinese girl no less, do?

Mrs. Lowry’s book gave me the answer. It wasn’t just a book on how to run a business; it was a philosophy. She said that your circumstances don’t determine where you can go, only your starting point. Despite being mostly blind, she managed to get her family’s sharecropping debt paid off by the time she was sixteen. If a blind woman could become the wealthiest female landowner in Texas, surely I could make enough money for Ba to retire and my family to live in comfort.

By the time we reach Montgomery Street, I no longer feel my toes. Fog has rolled in, blotting out the last dregs of sunlight. The Ferry Building’s spire at the Embarcadero points a challenging finger at a low-lying cloud. It must be near six o’clock. Ba will already be eating dinner. I limp down Stockton, hoping Ma hasn’t started worrying. She always says all the rodents come out of their holes at night.

The front door to our flat looks east toward the Ferry Building a mile away and is unpainted so as not to hide the elemental wood. An eight-sided mirror is placed above the door to ward off evildoers.

Jack raps on the door. “A-Ma!”

We hear Ma fumble with the rope that ties our door to the wall. The old cigar man squints down from three stories above, sucking on a pipe that hasn’t been lit since 1904. Ma insisted we live in this particular flat because of the good feng shui, not to mention we don’t have to haul water upstairs. But our Catholic Ba couldn’t care less about feng shui. He thought our ground-floor location made it easier for burglars to access. We’ve never had a burglar in the years we’ve lived here, but we’ve had worse—tourists who barge in for a peep of how the barbarians live. Once, they caught Ma cutting her toenails, and she chased them out with a cleaver, which I’m sure only confirmed their suspicions about us.

The door pushes open, and Ma greets us with her usual cluck of the tongue. Like most fortune-tellers, her round face never betrays much emotion, but her clucks are a gauge of her mood. Today they say she’s glad to see us.

“So late,” she says in Cantonese, patting the sweat off my brow with her dish towel. She speaks some English but never with us, since she doesn’t want us to forget our village dialect.

Behind her, Ba methodically shovels in his dinner at our only table, a simple teakwood square where Ma reads fortunes. Jack and I call greetings to him, and he grunts in response. Every day, he works from one to five, comes home for dinner, then returns to the laundry for a twelve-hour shift, six to six, before sleeping from six to one. It’s illegal to operate a laundry after six p.m.—just another of the absurd laws enacted to make life as difficult as possible for Chinese. But there’s no other way to make ends meet.

“How was the chocolate?” Ma casts me a sideways glance.

“Bittersweet,” I say in English.

“Close the door.” A door open too long depletes a room of its energy.

After retying the door closed, I collapse onto a thin bench while Ma works off my boots. The citrusy scent of our pomelo, a cabbage-sized grapefruit, floats from its seat on the offering mantel.

Ma frowns when she sees the state of my feet. “You should not have worn these. You need cold water.” I let her fetch it, not sure my feet can be pushed any further now that they’ve had a taste of the cool cement floors.

“I’m hungry.” Jack stares longingly at the bowls of juk.

Ma inspects Jack’s hands front and back. They’re still damp from where we washed them at the community pump. “Hungry enough to eat a cow or a bear?”

“Hungry enough to eat a cow and a bear.”

“Too bad, dai-dai,” says Ma, using the word for “little brother.” She shakes out his jacket with a snap of her wrist. “We have only rice.”

Minutes later, I’m sitting at the table with Ma, Jack, and Ba, feet planted in a bowl of cold water and shoveling in my own dinner. Jack stirs his juk, looking for any surprise bits of meat. His brow crimps when he finds only vegetables, but he dives in nonetheless. We used to eat more meat before I lost my job at the cemetery. Cups of ox bone broth, always simmering on our community stoves, help to fill any remaining spaces in our stomachs.

“What’s that mean, bittersweet?” asks Ba in Cantonese, his voice soft but gravelly. “You get into that school or not?”