Love and Other Consolation Prizes(34)

“Avoid the law baak tau at all costs,” she’d told him with a stern look, even though the War of Jiawu had been fought before he’d been born. He’d never seen a Japanese man until he’d come to America, and those he’d met didn’t look like daikon heads at all. They looked like him, in a way. If anyone looked like ugly potato heads, they were the bald sailors who’d brought him here.

Ernest felt his chest flood with warmth as Fahn said, “I like holding your hand. We make a good pair, don’t you think?”

He tried to say something charming in response but could muster only “Thanks.”

He remembered sleeping next to her, a little boy among so many big sisters. She seemed older now, in more than just years. Ernest peeked at her, expecting to see disappointment, but she merely smiled, showing off her perfect cheekbones.

That’s when Ernest noticed all the men staring at Fahn as they walked through Chinatown, past baskets of dried fish and wooden casks filled with ice and blue rock crabs. Even the ones playing cards and swimming their hands through mah-jongg tiles, smoking, drinking, all took a moment to let their eyes linger on her. Ernest watched as they gazed from her to him, and then back to her again—some smiled, showing crooked or missing teeth. Others pointed, while many laughed and called out to them in their thick Cantonese accents. Ernest wished he knew what they were saying.

“There aren’t many women in Chinatown—just old ladies and a handful of girls, Chinese and Japanese,” Fahn said. “So that makes me a vaudeville attraction whenever I come here, like the women on display at the Japanese Village at the fair. But my American dress sets me apart. They always think I’m the daughter of Goon Dip, who built most of these buildings, or the teenage bride of some other wealthy merchant, or a businessman’s new concubine—wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

Ernest nodded as though all of this made perfect sense.

“That’s why I’m glad you’re here—I feel safer with you as my gentleman companion. Usually it’s Professor True who escorts me through this part of town.”

Ernest felt flattered and somewhat disappointed at the same time.

Before he’d begun to wallow in that thought, Fahn pointed to a nearby building on a hill. “That’s the Tangerine—it’s strictly low-rent. That’s the crib where I was supposed to spend my days…and nights, eventually.”

Ernest looked at her quizzically.

“After my employer died in China, I came over with dozens of other girls, poor Japanese picture brides, Chinese from the Pearl River, all of us sold by our parents as mui tsai or karayuki-san—contracted to be little sisters, house servants. They gave us some other girls’ passports to get into America. They had us all sign our names with only our thumbprints, since most of the girls couldn’t read or write. And then the sailors herded us into a barracoon on the waterfront, where they cleaned us up. Then they moved us to the basement of some other building and stripped us naked.”

Ernest’s eyes widened and he fidgeted, unsure if he wanted to hear more.

“At best, our parents thought they were sending us to be contracted servants in fancy houses or, at worst, workers in some garment factory. And the girls without contracts, the rich ones who looked down on the rest of us, they thought they were meeting their new husbands, who turned out to be the same old men in charge of the rest of us. The same men who auctioned all of us off like cattle. I was only eight years old and ended up over there as a servant and a cleanup girl.” She pointed back to the Tangerine.

“On the ship, the Chinese all called me Fahn, which I guess means girl or something, and the name stuck,” she said. “So that’s what they called me at the Tangerine, where I did laundry, I shined shoes and stuffed them with newspaper, I bathed the older working girls, kept bottles of vinegar near the privy, I even did some cooking. Until Madam Flora had the place raided by the police and she took me in.”

Ernest wanted to know more, but just then the pungent aroma of dried ginger and wormwort overwhelmed them.

“Here we are,” Fahn said, as they walked through an open door.

The small shop felt like a lost chapter of his childhood, though this place was larger and much nicer than the one in his village his mother used to visit for dried yarrow to treat colds and fevers. Ernest watched and listened as Fahn ordered two ounces of dracaena and paid for the red herbs with a new silver dollar. The herbalist carefully measured the dried leaves, weighing them on a druggist’s scale, and then spooned them into a cone that he’d rolled from a small piece of newspaper. He folded over the top and handed her the herbs.

“These are flowers from lucky bamboo plants,” Fahn said as she waved the packet beneath Ernest’s nose. “Madam Flora mixes them with red wine and drinks it.”

“Why?”

“To treat an old war wound, she says—nervousness from the job. She has headaches. Dizziness. Forgetfulness.” Fahn shrugged. “She’s tried the latest remedies—Horsford’s acid phosphate, tinctures of mercury, and even long, hot baths in mineral salts from Soap Lake, but nothing seems to help. So she read about a Chinese doctor in San Francisco who could cure certain maladies with dried herbs. She wrote and told him about her fits of melancholy, and this is what he recommended.” She lowered the tone of her voice. “If you ask me, I think she caught the big casino back when she was just a working girl. Syphilis is supposed to make you do crazy things as you get older.”