Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(53)
Every day May tells me of her adventures, her cheeks pink from fresh air, her face lit with pleasure. I’m the older sister, and I’m suffering from red-eye disease, envy. I’ve always been the first to discover new things, but now May’s the one who reports about the shops and stores and fun things that are being planned at China City. She tells me that a lot of it is being built from used movie sets, which she describes in such detail that I’m sure I’ll recognize them all and know their backstories when I finally see them. But I can’t lie. It bothers me that she gets to be a part of the excitement, while I have to stay with my mother-in-law and Joy in the grimy apartment, where the dust floating in the air leaves me feeling suffocated and dizzy. I tell myself this is just temporary, like Angel Island was temporary, and soon—somehow—May and I will escape.
In the meantime, Old Man Louie continues to punish me for having a daughter by ignoring me. Sam mopes about with a sullen look on his face, because I refuse to do the husband-wife thing with him. Every time he approaches, I cross my arms and clasp my elbows. He slinks away as though I’ve wounded him deeply. He rarely speaks to me, and when he does it’s in the Wu dialect of the streets, like I’m beneath him. Yen-yen responds to my obvious unhappiness and frustration with a lesson on marriage: “You must get used to it.”
At the beginning of May, after we’ve been here for two weeks, my sister asks for and receives permission from Yen-yen to take Joy and me outside for a walk. “Across the Plaza is Olvera Street, where Mexican people have little shops for tourists,” May says, pointing in the general direction. “Beyond that is China City. From there, if you walk up to Broadway and turn north, you’ll feel like you’ve entered a postcard of Italy. Salami hangs in the windows and … Oh, Pearl, it’s as foreign and strange as how the White Russians lived in the French Concession.” She pauses and laughs to herself. “I almost forgot. There’s a French Concession here too. They call it French Town, and it’s on Hill Street just up one block from Broadway. They have a French hospital and cafés and … Never mind all that for now. Let’s just talk about Broadway. If you go south on Broadway, you’ll come to American movie palaces and department stores. If you go north through Little Italy, you’ll come to a whole other Chinatown that’s being built. It’s called New Chinatown. I’ll take you there whenever you want to go.”
But I don’t feel like going right then.
“This isn’t like Shanghai, where we were separated by race, money, and power but still saw each other every day,” May makes clear the next week, when she takes Joy and me around the block again. “We walked on the streets together, even if we didn’t go to the same nightclubs. Here everyone is separated from everyone else—Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, blacks, and Chinese. White people are everywhere, but the rest of us are at the bottom. Everyone wants to be a single rice kernel better than his neighbor. Remember in Shanghai how important it was to know English and how people prided themselves on their American or British accents? Here people are split by whose Chinese is better and where and from whom they learned it. Did you learn it in one of the missions here in Chinatown? Did you learn it in China? You know how it is between Sze Yup and Sam Yup speakers? One won’t talk to the other. One won’t do business with the other. If that weren’t enough, the American-born Chinese look down on people like us, calling us fresh off the boat and backward. We look down on them, because we know that American culture isn’t as good as Chinese culture. People stick together by name too. If you’re a Louie, you have to buy from a Louie, even if you have to pay five cents more. Everyone knows no help will come from the lo fan, but even a Mock, Wong, or SooHoo won’t help a Louie.”
She points out the filling station, although we have yet to meet anyone who owns a car. She walks me past Jerry’s Joint—a bar with Chinese food and a Chinese atmosphere but not owned by a Chinese. Every non-business space is a flophouse of one sort or another: tiny apartments like the one we live in for families, boardinghouses for a few dollars a month for Chinese bachelor-laborers like the uncles, and rooms lent out by the missions, where men truly down on their luck can sleep, eat, and make a couple of dollars a month in exchange for keeping the place tidy.
After a month of these excursions around the block, May takes me into the Plaza. “This used to be the heart of the original Spanish settlement. Did we have Spanish people in Shanghai?” May asks lightly, almost gaily. “I don’t remember meeting any.”
She doesn’t give me a chance to answer, because she’s so intent on showing me Olvera Street, which is just opposite Sanchez Alley on the other side of the Plaza. I don’t want to see it particularly, but after many days of her complaining and insisting, I cross the open space with her and venture into the pedestrian way filled with colorfully painted plywood stalls displaying embroidered cotton shirts, heavy clay ashtrays, and lollipops shaped like pointed spires. People in lacy costumes make candles, blow glass, and hammer soles for sandals, while others sing and play instruments.
“Is this how people in Mexico really live?” May asks.
I don’t know if it’s at all like Mexico, but it’s festive and vibrant compared with our dingy apartment. “I have no idea. Maybe.”
“Well, if you think this is funny and cute, wait until you see China City.”