Night Angels(96)

On the ship crowded with many Americans going home, Monto was excited, asking about this and that, and Fengshan had answers for everything; I had none. Once again, I was the irrelevant parent, a stepmother, but Monto was happy; that was all that mattered.

The cabin was small, and there was limited access for people in wheelchairs. So for a good amount of time during the day, I stayed inside the cabin with a porthole the size of my hand, learning the sway of the boat, avoiding the risk of falling and tearing my muscles. Fengshan and Monto took daily walks on the deck, where they mused, read, and played.

When we stopped at the ports, we went sightseeing. Greece, Naples, Genoa and Gibraltar, and then Portugal. Always a father intent on education, Fengshan took the opportunity to teach Monto about everything, the volcano Mount Vesuvius, the Gibraltar sea lane under the watch of the British warships, and Lisbon with terraces and hills just like the Nationalist capital Chongqing.

Fengshan was polite to me, sometimes pushing my wheelchair on the gangway and assisting me with sitting in a chair at dinner. Other than that, we talked about the food on the liner, the heat in the cabin, and the spiffy Chinese man who was engaged to an heiress of the du Pont family and awaiting a visa to the US.

We didn’t talk about the last argument we had; we never talked about Lola.



We landed in New York on a quiet, foggy morning. It had been almost six years since I left my home country; everything, the one and only Statue of Liberty, the towering skyscrapers, the Pepsi-Cola sign in neon light, and even the giant toothpaste on the billboard, was a sight of pleasure. New York, America. English. Home.

I wheeled down the gangway, beaming at Monto, pointing at the skyscrapers here and there. I did not need to look at Fengshan to know how he felt. He had appeared to be in a somber mood since we’d docked, frowning. Before our disembarkation, he had heard the war in Europe had taken another turn. It seemed that France had been fighting with Germany when we left Vienna, and by our arrival, Paris had been lost to the Nazis.

At the pier, Fengshan complained about the mist and the bleak weather and the loud traffic noise in New York, but, capable as he was, and strategic, he booked a room at the Hotel Victoria in Brooklyn and went to rent an apartment. When he found an apartment with a For Rent sign, he called to express his interest. But when he went to put down the deposit the next day, the landlord rejected him on the grounds that colored people couldn’t be his tenants. Fengshan was stunned—this was the first time he had encountered racism. This encounter was repeated until he met a custodian who had visited Hong Kong and Shanghai and believed that he, a Chinese, was not a man of color and agreed to lease to him. The rent was expensive, sixty dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment; for my convenience, Fengshan asked for the ground floor. We moved in the next day.

It felt like we were in Vienna again with the moving and packing, except I was happier, and Fengshan was disinterested. What mattered now, he said, was that I would regain my health.

Always concerned about education, Fengshan enrolled Monto in a public school in the neighborhood near the apartment, and then Fengshan spent his days in the library researching whether President Roosevelt would join the war in Europe—his topic. As he had agreed with his friend, he would write a report about the president and the public opinion in the US every two weeks. So each day, he perused the newspapers and listened to the radio. He was to be financed by his friend’s institute, which would be our only income. His salary as a diplomat had ended in May.

Brooklyn, with many redbrick buildings, felt different from Vienna. There were no policemen in Nazi uniforms or street signs in long, indiscernible German. Each morning, listening to the chatter from the neighbors’ radios, all in easy, familiar English, I freed myself of my wheelchair, held on to the wall, and took small steps.

The day I edged away from the bedroom, entered the small kitchen, and reached for the door’s handle was the first day of July in 1940. I opened the door and gazed at a wooden fence on top of which sat a pot of colorful zinnias in an explosion of red, yellow, and orange, their slim stems straight toward the sun. I took a step, a small step to the street, but a giant leap in my life. Start anew.





CHAPTER 68


FENGSHAN


A year after his arrival in America, on a cool afternoon in May 1941, Fengshan walked out of Prospect Park, perspiring. He had just jogged in the park for hours to clear his mind. This morning he had read a telegram from his friend in China; it had indicated that the consulate of the Republic of China in Vienna had been abolished and relations between China and Germany were officially severed. And Ambassador Chen, who had so doggedly pursued ties with Germany, had been reassigned.

Out of the park, on the pavement, Fengshan stared at the busy street teeming with taxis and pedestrians. When he had heard the news that Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September last year, forming the Axis alliance, he had predicted the inevitable fate of the consulate in Vienna. But still, to hear of the abolition of the consulate was a shock. For three years, his Nationalist government had resisted the unrelenting Japanese assault in Chongqing, depleting the twenty-five-million-dollar loan received from the US, but he had remained hopeful that his country would reemerge on the world diplomatic stage. This sad retreat was a hopeless setback, a heartbreaking defeat, and, to him, a reminder that a chapter of his life had been forever closed.

What would happen to China’s diplomatic future?