Love and Other Consolation Prizes(3)

Yung swallowed the lump in his throat and became a statue. At five years old, he could do nothing else. The bastard son of a white missionary and a Chinese girl, he was an outcast in both of their worlds. He and his mother were desperately poor, and a drought had only made their bad situation worse. For months they’d been eating soups made from mossy rocks and scraps of boiled shoe leather his mother had scavenged from the dying. When she turned and saw what Yung had witnessed she didn’t seem shocked, or apologetic. She didn’t bother to wipe away the ashen tears that framed the pockmarked hollows of her cheeks, or the dust and grime that had settled into her scalp where her hair had thinned and fallen out. She merely placed a filigreed hairpin in his hand and folded his tiny fingers around the tarnished copper and jade phoenix that represented the last of their worldly possessions. She knelt and hugged him, squeezed him, ran her dirty fingers through his hair. He felt her bony limbs, the sweet smell of her cool skin as she kissed his face.

“Only two kinds of people in China,” she said. “The too rich and the too poor.”

He’d remembered combing the harvested fields for single grains of rice, gathering enough to make a tiny handful that they would share while the well-fed children flew kites overhead. His empty stomach reminded him of who he was.

“Stay here and wait for your uncle,” she said. “He’s going to take care of you now. He’s going to take you to America. He’s going to show you a new world. This is my gift to you.”

Yung’s mother addressed him in Cantonese and then in the little bit of English they both understood. She told him he had his father’s eyes. And she spoke about a time when they would be together again. But when she tried to smile her lips trembled.

“Mm-goi mow hamm,” Yung said as she turned away. “Don’t cry, Mama.”

Yung wasn’t sure if the man he was supposed to wait for was truly his uncle, but he doubted it. The best he could hope was that the man might be one of the rich merchants who specialized in the poison trade or the pig trade, because dealing with men who smuggled opium or people would be preferable to members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the Chinese boxers who had been slaughtering missionaries, foreigners, and their offspring. Equally dangerous were the colonial soldiers sent to put down the rebellion. The villagers, including Yung’s father, had been caught in the siege, the melee, and now the maelstrom. That’s when his mother must have known that the end of their world was near—when they saw the starving fishermen hauling in their nets, filled with the bodies of the dead.

As Yung watched his mother disappear, leaving him alone in the cemetery, he wanted to yell, “Ah-ma! Don’t leave me!” He wanted to run to her, to cling to her legs, to cry at her feet, begging. But he resisted, even as he whimpered, yearning. He did what he was told as he ached with sadness and loneliness. He had always obeyed her—trusted her. But it seemed as if she had died months earlier, and all that remained was a ghost, a skeleton—a hopeless broken spirit with no place left to wander and no one to haunt.

What little hope she had, she’d bequeathed to him.

So he waited, grieving, as the sun set upon the place where his mei mei had been interred. He remembered his Chinese grandmother and how she’d once talked about the Lolos, the tribal people of Southern China who believed that there was a star in the sky for every person on Earth. When that person died, their star would fall.

His ears popped and he heard the familiar booming of mortars and the rattle of gunfire. He watched as the horizon lit up with flares and the flash of cannons. Then the sky was dark again and everywhere he looked, it was raining stars.





UNBOUND


(1902)



The man who was not his uncle came for Yung in the morning. A white merchant with a ruddy beard, he removed his elegant suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal an array of old tattoos. He squeezed Yung’s arm, pulled his hair, looked in his ears. He then smiled and nodded as his translator, a remarkably fat Chinese man, clapped his hands and shouted, “Hay sun la!” waking other children—a host of girls and a handful of boys, who had gathered in and around the cemetery during the night. All of them seemed older than Yung, grade school age at least, or well into their teens. Some had rolls of bedding and carried their belongings in bamboo baskets attached to long sticks, topped with netting, while a few of the older girls wore modest, hand-sewn dresses and tied their hair with red strings. But just as many were like him, in rags, barefoot. And all of them stared at Yung when they realized he was a mixed-blood child. He recognized the look, not one of curiosity or contempt, but an expression that said, I may have nothing, I may be homeless and starving, but at least I’m not him.

Yung ignored their attention and tried not to think about his mother as they followed the men away from pillars of black smoke and the sounds of gunfire that were rising in the distance. They walked for hours, Yung taking two steps with his little legs for every one of theirs, as he struggled to keep up. A tributary of sadness flowing into a greater stream of refugees that became a flood of humanity, traveling away from the sound of thunder in a cloudless sky. They boarded a boat, which took them to a city on the Pearl River. When they arrived, in the shadow of a great ship, the salty air made Yung’s mouth water, though the only signs of food were the bones of fish that had been recently caught, cooked, and eaten, on the banks of the murky water.