Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(10)

In a daze, I ride the elevator to Captain Yamasaki’s apartment. He was on the Japanese Olympics team in 1932, so he likes to relive his glories in Los Angeles. He isn’t a bad man, but he’s obsessed with May. She made the mistake of going out with him a few times, so nearly every lesson begins with questions about her.

“Where is your sister today?” he asks in English, after we review his homework.

“She is sick,” I lie. “She is sleeping.”

“Sorry to hear such sad news. Every day I ask you when she will go out with me again. Every day you say you don’t know.”

“Correction. We see each other only three times a week.”

“Please help me marry May. I give you wedding …”

He hands me a piece of paper, which lists his marriage terms. I can see he used his Japanese-English dictionary, but this is too much. And today of all days. I glance at the clock. We still have fifty minutes to go. I fold the paper and put it in my purse.

“I will make the corrections and return this to you at our next lesson.”

“Give to May!”

“I’ll give it to her, but please know she is too young to marry. My father will not allow it.” How easily the lies pour from my mouth.

“He should. He must. This is a time of Friendship, Cooperation, and Co-prosperity The Asian races should unify against the West. Chinese and Japanese are brothers.”

Hardly. We call Japanese dwarf bandits and monkey people. But the captain often returns to this theme, and he’s done a good job of mastering the slogans in English and Chinese.

He stares at me sullenly. “You’re not going to give it to her, are you?” When I don’t respond quickly enough, he frowns. “I don’t trust Chinese girls. They always lie.”

He’s said this to me before, and I don’t like it any more today than I have in the past.

“I don’t lie to you,” I say, even though I have several times just since we started this tutorial.

“Chinese girls never keep promise. They lie in heart.”

“Promises. Their hearts,” I correct. I need to turn the conversation to a new subject. Today it comes easily. “Did you like Los Angeles?”

“It was very good. Soon I will go back to America.”

“For another swimming competition?”

“No.”

“As a student?”

“As a…” He switches back to Chinese and a word he knows very well in our language. “A conqueror.”

“Really? How?”

“We will march to Washington,” he responds, returning to English. “Yankee girls will do our laundry.”

He laughs. I laugh. And on it goes.

As soon as the hour’s up, I take my meager payment and go home. May’s asleep. I lie down beside her, put a hand on her hip, and close my eyes. I long for sleep, but my mind batters me with images and emotions. I thought I was modern. I thought I had choice. I thought I was nothing like my mother. But my father’s gambling has swept all that away. I’m to be sold—traded like so many girls before me—to help my family. I feel so trapped and so helpless that I can hardly breathe.

I try to tell myself things aren’t as bad as they seem. My father even said May and I won’t have to go with these strangers to a city across the world. We can sign the papers, our “husbands” will leave, and life will go on as before, with one big difference. We have to get out of my father’s house and make our own living. I’ll wait until my husband leaves the country, claim desertion, and get a divorce. Then Z.G. and I will get married. (It will have to be a smaller wedding than I imagined—maybe just a party in a café with our artist friends and some of the other beautiful-girl models.) I’ll get a real job during the day. May will live with us until she marries. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll make our way.

I sit up and rub my temples. I’m stupid with dreams. Maybe I’ve lived in Shanghai too long.

I gently shake my sister’s shoulder. “Wake up, May.”

She opens her eyes, and for a moment I see all the gentle and trusting loveliness she’s held inside her since she was an infant. Then her eyes turn dark as she remembers.

“We’ve got to get dressed,” I say. “It’s almost time to meet the husbands.”

What should we wear? The Louie sons are Chinese, so maybe we should wear traditional cheongsams. They’re also Americans, so maybe it would be better to wear something that shows we’re Westernized too. It isn’t to please them, but we can’t ruin the deal either. We slip on rayon dresses with floral patterns. May and I exchange glances, shrug at the uselessness of it all, and leave the house.

We flag down a rickshaw boy and tell him to take us to the place my father has arranged for the rendezvous: the gate to the Yu Yuan Garden in the center of the Old Chinese City. The driver—who has a bald head scarred by ringworm—pulls us through the heat and crowds across Soochow Creek at the Garden Bridge and along the Bund, passing diplomats, schoolgirls in starched uniforms, prostitutes, lords and their ladies, and black-coated members of the notorious Green Gang. Yesterday this mingling seemed exciting. Today it looks sordid and oppressive.

The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin rising, pulsing, slithering. In Shanghai, you can’t escape the river. It’s the dead end for every eastbound street in the city. On this great river float warships from Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Sampans—hung with ropes, laundry, and nets—cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean-liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come from upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.