Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(52)
I remember how bold I was the night of our wedding. That person was as audacious and reckless as a woman warrior of ancient times, but that girl was defeated in a shack somewhere between Shanghai and the Grand Canal.
“It’s too soon after the baby,” I manage to say.
Sam looks up at me with his sad, dark eyes. Finally, he says, “I think you’ll prefer the side of the bed closest to our Joy.”
Once he slips under the covers, I pull the string for the light, take off my shoes, and then lie down on top of the blanket. I’m grateful that Sam doesn’t try to touch me. After he falls asleep, I reach into my pockets and finger the lai see.
WHAT’S THE FIRST impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your lai see, as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class, standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth?
What stays with me most are the feelings of loss, unsettlement, unease, and a longing for the past that cannot be relieved. This isn’t just because my sister and I are new to this strange and foreign place. It’s as though every person in Chinatown is a refugee. No one here is a Gold Mountain man—rich beyond imagining—not even Old Man Louie. On Angel Island, I learned about his ventures and the value of his merchandise, but they mean nothing here, where everyone is poor. People lost their jobs during the Depression. Those lucky enough to have families sent them back to China, because it was cheaper to provide for them there than to feed and house them here. When the Japanese attacked, those families returned. But no new money is being made and conditions are even more cramped and unsettled than ever, or so I’m told.
Five years ago, in 1933, most of Chinatown was torn down to make room for a new railroad station, which is being built on that huge construction site we saw when Sam brought us here on the streetcar. People were given twenty-four hours to move—far less than what May and I had when we left Shanghai—but where could they go? The law says that Chinese can’t own property and most landlords won’t rent to Chinese either, so people cram into buildings and squeeze into rooms in the last few buildings of the original Chinatown, where we live, or in the City Market Chinatown, which caters to produce growers and sellers, many blocks and a culture away from here. Everyone—including me—misses their families in China, but when I pin the photographs that May and I brought with us on my bedroom wall, Yen-yen yells at me. “You stupid girl! You want to get us in trouble? What happens if the immigration inspectors come? How are you going to explain who those people are?”
“They’re my parents,” I say. “And that’s May and me when we were little. These things are not a secret.”
“Everything is a secret. You see pictures of anyone here? Now take those down and hide them before I throw them away.”
That’s my first morning, and soon I discover that, although I’m in a new land, in many ways it’s as though I’ve taken a giant step back in time.
The Cantonese word for wife—fu yen—is composed of two elements. One part means woman and the other part means broom. In Shanghai, May and I had servants. Now I am the servant. Why just me? I don’t know. Maybe because I have a baby, maybe because May doesn’t understand when Yen-yen tells her to do something in Sze Yup, or maybe because May isn’t perpetually scared that we’ll be found out, that we’ll be disgraced—she for bearing a child that’s not her husband’s and I for being unable ever to have babies of my own—and that we’ll be discarded in the street. So every morning after Vern goes to his ninth-grade classes at Central Junior High and May, Sam, and the old man go to China City I stay in the apartment to scrub on a washboard sheets, stained underwear, Joy’s diapers, and the sweaty clothes of the uncles, as well as those of the bachelors who stay with us periodically. I empty the spittoon and put out extra containers for the shells of the watermelon seeds my in-laws nibble. I wash the floors and the windows.
While Yen-yen teaches me to make soup by boiling a head of lettuce and pouring soy sauce over it or prepare lunch by taking a bowl of rice, slathering lard on top, and sprinkling on soy sauce to cover the taste, my sister goes exploring. While I shell walnuts with Yen-yen to sell to restaurants or swab the bathtub ring the old man leaves after his daily soak, my sister meets people. While my mother-in-law teaches me how to be a wife and mother—-jobs she does with a frustrating combination of ineptitude, good cheer, and fierce protectiveness—my sister learns where everything is.
Even though Sam said he’d take me to China City—a tourist attraction that’s being built two blocks from here—I have yet to go. But May walks over there every day to help get things ready for the Grand Opening. She tells me that soon I’ll work in the café, the antiques store, the curio shop, or whatever place Old Man Louie has told her that afternoon; I listen with a kind of wariness, knowing that I don’t have a choice about where I’ll work but that I’ll be grateful not to be doing any more piecework with Yen-yen: tying scallions in bunches, separating strawberries by size and quality, shelling those damn walnuts until my fingers are stained and cracked, or—and this is truly disgusting—growing bean sprouts in the tub in between the baths the old man takes. I stay home with my mother-in-law and Joy; my sister returns at the end of every day with tales of people with names like Peanut and Dolly. At China City, she looks through our boxes of clothes. We agreed that if we were going to live in America, then we should dress like Americans, but she stubbornly brings only cheongsams. She picks the prettiest ones for herself Maybe this is as it should be. As Yen-yen says, “You’re a mother now. Your sister still has to make my boy give her a son.”