Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(37)
Every morning, embarrassed to be seen naked by the other women, I dress under the blanket on my bed. Then I wait to be called back to the hearing room, but no one comes for us. If we aren’t called by nine, then we know nothing will happen that day. When afternoon arrives, a new feeling of anticipation and dread fills the room. At precisely four, the guard enters and calls, “Sai gaai,” which is a bastardization of one of the Cantonese dialects for hou sai gaai, which means good fortune. Then he lists the names of those allowed to get on the boat to complete the final leg of their journey to America. Once the guard approaches a woman and rubs his eyes as though he were crying. He laughs when he tells her she’s being sent back to China. We never learn the reason for her deportation.
Over the next few days, we watch as the women who arrived the same day we did are allowed to continue to San Francisco. We see new women land, have their hearings, and leave. Still no one comes for us. Every night, after another disgusting meal of pig knuckles or stewed salted fish with fermented bean curd, I take off my dress under the blanket, hang it on the line above me, and try to sleep, knowing I’ll be locked in this room until morning.
But the feeling of being locked in and trapped extends far, far beyond this room. In a different time, in a different place, and with more money maybe May and I could have escaped our futures. But here we don’t have choice or freedom. Our whole lives up to now have been lost to us. We know no one in the United States other than our husbands and our father-in-law. Baba had said that if we went to Los Angeles, we’d live in beautiful houses, have servants, see movie stars, so maybe this is the path May and I were supposed to be on all along. We could consider ourselves lucky we’ve married so well. Women—whether in arranged marriages or not, whether in the past or right now, in 1937—have married for money and all that it brings. Still, I have a secret plan. When May and I get to Los Angeles, we’ll skim money from what our husbands give us to buy clothes and shoes, beautify ourselves, and keep our households running, and use it to escape. I lie on the wire mesh that is my bed, listen to the low, mournful sound of the foghorn and to the women in the room cry snore, or whisper among themselves, and plot how May and I will leave Los Angeles one day and disappear to New ’York or Paris, cities we’ve been told are equal to Shanghai in splendor, culture, and riches.
TWO TUESDAYS LATER, when we’re allowed to retrieve things from our luggage again, May fishes out the peasant clothes she bought for us in Hangchow. We wear them in the afternoons and at night, because it’s too cold and dirty in this place to wear our good dresses, which we put on in the mornings in case we’re called to finish our hearings. In the middle of the following week, May takes to wearing our travel clothes all the time. “What if we’re called for an interview?” I ask. We sit on our top bunks with a little valley of space separating us and clothes hanging like banners all around us. “Do you think this is so different from Shanghai? Our clothes matter. Those who are well dressed leave sooner than those who look like …” My voice trails off.
“Peasants?” May finishes for me. She folds her arms over her stomach and lets her shoulders fall. She doesn’t look like herself. We’ve been here a month now, and it feels like all the courage she showed getting me to safety has somehow been sucked out of her. Her skin looks pasty. She isn’t terribly interested in washing her hair, which, like mine, has grown out into a straggly mess.
“Come on, May, you have to try. We won’t be here much longer. Take a shower and put on a dress. You’ll feel better.”
“Why? Just tell me why. I can’t eat their terrible food, so I rarely use their toilets,” she says. “I don’t do anything, so I don’t sweat. But even if I did, why would I take a shower where people can see me? The humiliation is so great I wish I could wear a sack over my head. Besides,” she adds pointedly, “I don’t see you going to the toilets or showers.”
Which is true. Sadness and despair overwhelm those who stay here too long. The cold wind, the foggy days, the shadows on the walls, depress and frighten all of us. In just this month, I’ve seen many women, some who’ve already come and gone, refuse to take showers during their entire stays, and not just because they don’t sweat. Too many women have committed suicide in the showers by hanging or by sharpening chopsticks and driving them through their ears and into their brains. No one wants to go to the showers not only because no one likes to do her private business with others around but because nearly everyone here is afraid of the ghosts of the dead, who, without proper burial rites, refuse to leave the nasty place where they died.
We decide that, from now on, May will go with me to the communal toilets or showers, check to see if they’re empty, and then stand outside the door to keep the other women out. I’ll do the same for her, although I’m not sure why she’s become so modest since arriving here.
AT LAST THE guard calls us for our interrogations. I run a brush through my hair, take a few sips of cold water to calm myself, and slip on my heels. I glance back to see May trailing after me, looking like a beggar magically dropped here from a Shanghai alley. We wait in the cage until our turns come. This is our last step and then we’ll be transferred to San Francisco. I give May an encouraging smile, which she doesn’t return, and then I follow the guard into the hearing room. Chairman Plumb, Mr. White, and the stenographer are there, but this time I have a new interpreter.