Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(27)
We turn right on Nanking Road, where sand and disinfectant have been used to clean away the blood and stink of death. Eventually, Nanking Road turns into Bubbling Well Road. The tree-shaded street is busy and hard to navigate all the way to the West Train Station, where we see people loaded onto railroad cars on four levels: the floors, the seats, the berths, and the roofs. Our pusher keeps going. Surprisingly quickly, concrete and granite give way to rice and cotton fields. Mama pulls out snacks for us to eat, making sure to give our pusher a generous portion. We stop a few times to relieve ourselves behind a bush or a tree. We walk through the heat of the day. I look back every once in a while and see smoke billowing from Chapei and Hongkew, and I wonder idly when the fires will burn themselves out.
Blisters form on our heels and toes, but we haven’t thought to bring bandages or medicine. When the shadows grow long, the pusher—without asking our opinions—turns down a dirt path that leads to a small farmhouse with a thatched roof. A tethered horse nibbles yellow beans from a bucket, and chickens peck the ground before the open door. As the pusher sets down the wheelbarrow and shakes out his arms, a woman emerges from the house.
“I have three women here,” our pusher says in his rough country dialect. “We need food and a place to sleep.”
The woman doesn’t speak but motions us to come inside. She pours hot water into a tub and points to May’s and my feet. We take off our shoes and put our feet in the water. The woman returns with an earthenware jar. She uses her fingers to slather a foul-smelling homemade poultice on our broken blisters. Then she turns her attention to Mama. She helps my mother to a stool in the corner of the room, pours more hot water into a tub, and then stands in such a way that she shields Mama from us. Even so, I can see Mama bend over and begin to unwrap her bindings. I turn away. Mama’s care of her feet is the most private and intimate thing she can do. I’ve never seen them naked, and I don’t want to.
Once Mama’s feet are washed and wrapped in clean bindings, the woman sets to making dinner. We give her some of our rice, which she pours into a pot of boiling water, and she begins the constant stirring that will turn the two ingredients into jook.
For the first time, I allow myself to look around. The place is filthy and I dread eating or drinking anything in this room. The woman seems to sense this. She puts empty bowls and tin soupspoons on the table along with a pot of hot water. She gestures to us.
“What does she want us to do?” May asks.
Mama and I don’t know, but our wheelbarrow pusher picks up the pot, pours it into the bowls, dips our spoons in the hot water, swirls the liquid, and then tosses the water on the hard-packed earthen floor, where it’s absorbed. The woman then serves us the jook, onto which she floats some stir-fried carrot greens. The greens are bitter in the mouth and sour on swallowing. The woman steps away and returns a moment later with some dried fish, which she drops into May’s bowl. Then she stands behind May and kneads her shoulders.
I have a flash of irritation. This woman—poor, obviously uneducated, and a total stranger—gave the wheelbarrow pusher the largest bowl of jook, provided Mama with privacy, and now frets over May. What is it about me that even strangers recognize as not being worthy?
After dinner, our pusher goes outside to sleep by his wheelbarrow, while we stretch out on straw mats laid on the floor. I’m exhausted, but Mama seems to burn with a deep fire. The petulance that’s always been so much a part of her character disappears as she talks about her own childhood and the house where she was raised.
“In the summer when I was a girl, my mama, aunties, my sisters, and all my girl cousins used to sleep outside on mats just like this,” Mama remembers, speaking low so as not to disturb our hostess, who rests on a raised platform by the stove. “You’ve never met my sisters, but we were a lot like the two of you.” She laughs ruefully. “We loved each other and we knew how to argue. But on those summer nights when we were out under the sky we didn’t fight. We listened to my mother tell us stories.”
Outside cicadas hum. From the far distance comes the concussion of bombs being dropped on our home city. The explosions reverberate through the ground and into our bodies. When May whimpers, Mama says, “I guess you’re not too old to hear one now …”
“Oh, yes, Mama, please,” May urges. “Tell us the one about the moon sisters.”
Mama reaches over and pats May lovingly. “In ancient days,” she begins in a voice that transports me back to my childhood, “two sisters lived on the moon. They were wonderful girls.” I wait, knowing exactly what she’ll say next. “They were beautiful like May—slender as bamboo, graceful as willow branches swaying in the breeze, with faces like the oval seeds of a melon. And they were clever and industrious like Pearl—embroidering their lily shoes with ten thousand stitches. All night the sisters embroidered, using their seventy embroidery needles. Their fame grew, and soon people on earth gathered to stare at them.”
I know by heart the fate that awaits the two mythical sisters, but I feel Mama wants us to hear the story differently tonight.
“The two sisters knew the rules for maidenly conduct,” she goes on. “No man should see them. No man should stare at them. Each night, they became more and more unhappy. The older sister had an idea. We shall change places with our brother.’ The younger sister wasn’t so sure, for she had a tiny bit of vanity in her, but it was her duty to follow her jie jie’s instructions. The sisters put on their most beautiful red gowns embroidered with dragons dashing through fiery blooms and went to visit their brother, who lived in the sun. They asked to trade places with him.”