Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(101)

May and I take a few tentative steps toward him. It’s hard to say how I feel: surprised and stunned to see May and me looking the same as we did fifteen years ago with our pink cheeks, happy eyes, and luscious smiles, a bit fearful that these magazines are in the house, and almost overwhelmed by joy that Z.G. is still alive.

The next thing I know Sam is at my side, exclaiming, and gesturing in excitement. “It’s you! It’s you and May!”

My cheeks flush, as though I’ve been caught. I have been caught. I lift my eyes to May, looking for help. As sisters, we’ve always been able to say so much to each other with just a glance.

“Z.G. Li must have painted this,” May says evenly. “How lovely that he has remembered us in this way. He made Pearl look especially beautiful, don’t you think?”

“He’s painted both of you exactly as I see you,” says Sam, forever the good husband and appreciative brother-in-law. “Always beautiful. Forever beautiful.”

“Beautiful enough,” May agrees lightly, “although neither of us ever looked that good in peasant clothes.”

Later that night, after everyone goes to asleep, I meet my sister on the screened porch. We sit on her bed, holding hands, staring at the magazine. As much as I love Sam, a part of me soars with the knowledge that across the ocean in Shanghai—I have to believe Z.G.’s there—in a country that is closed to me, the man I loved so long ago loves me still.



ONLY ONE WEEK later, we realize that Father’s weakness and lethargy are more than just the usual slowing of age. He’s sick. The doctor tells us it’s lung cancer and there’s nothing anyone can do. Yen-yen’s death was so sudden and it came at such an inconvenient moment that we didn’t have the opportunity to prepare for her death or mourn her properly when she passed. This time each of us in our own way reflects back on the mistakes we’ve made over the years, and we try to make amends in the time we have left. During the coming months, many people visit, and I listen to them speak highly of my father-in-law, calling him a successful Gold Mountain man, but when I look at him during these final days, I see only a ruined man. He worked so hard, only to lose his businesses and property in China and almost everything he’d built for himself here. Now, in the end, he has to rely on his paper son for his housing, food, evening pipe, and copies of China Reconstructs that Sam buys from under the counter at the shop on the corner.

Father’s only consolations in these final months, as the cancer eats his lungs, are the photographs I cut from the magazine and pin to the wall next to his recliner. So many times I see him with tears running down his sunken cheeks, staring at the country he left as a young man: the sacred mountains, the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City. He says he hates the Communists, because that’s what everyone has to say, but he still has a love of the land, art, culture, and people of China that has nothing to do with Mao, the Bamboo Curtain, or fear of the Reds. He isn’t alone in his nostalgia and desire for his homeland. Many of the old-timers, like Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, come to the house and also pore over these captured images of their lost home; that’s how deep their love of China is, no matter what it’s become. But all this happens very fast, and too soon Father dies.

A funeral is the most important event in a person’s life—more significant than a birth, a birthday, or a wedding. Since Father was a man and he lived into his eighties, his funeral is much larger than Yen-yen’s. We hire a Cadillac convertible to drive through Chinatown with a large flower-wreathed photographic portrait of him propped on the backseat. The hearse driver tosses spirit money out the window to pay off malevolent demons and other lowly ghosts who might try to bar the way. A brass band trails behind the hearse, playing Chinese folks songs and military marches. At the hall for the ceremony, three hundred people bow three times to the casket and another three times to us, the grieving family members. We give coins to the mourners to disperse the sa hee— polluted air associated with death—and candy to cleanse the bitter taste of death. Everyone wears white—the color of mourning, the color of death. Then we go to Soochow Restaurant for gaai wai jau—the traditional seven-course “plain” banquet of steamed chicken, seafood, and vegetables, designed to “wash away sorrow,” wish the old man a long next life after this death, and launch us on our healing journey and encourage us to leave behind the vapors of death before returning home.

Over the next three months, women come to the house to play dominoes with May and me as we pass through the official mourning period. I find myself staring at the pictures I pinned to the wall above Father’s recliner. Somehow I can’t take them down.





Inch of Gold





“WHY CAN’T I go?” Joy demands, her voice rising. “Auntie Violet and Uncle Rowland are letting Leon go.”

“Leon’s a boy,” I say.

“It only costs twenty-five cents. Please.”

“Your father and I don’t think it’s right for a girl your age to go around town by yourself—”

“I won’t be by myself All the kids are going.”

“You’re not all the kids,” I say. “Do you want people to look at you and see porcelain with scars? You have to guard your body like a piece of jade.”

“Mom, all I want to do is go to the record hop at the International Hall.”