Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(81)

SNAP: THE CHINESE New Year Fundraiser. Snap: Double-ten Fundraiser. Snap: China Night, with your favorite movie stars. Snap: the Rice Bowl Parade, where the women of Chinatown carry a gigantic Chinese flag by its edges and ask bystanders to throw coins onto the flag. Snap: the Moon Festival, where Anna May Wong and Keye Luke serve as the mistress and master of ceremonies. Barbara Stanwyck, Dick Powell, Judy Garland, Kay Kyser, and Laurel and Hardy wave to the crowd. William Holden and Raymond Massey stand around, looking debonair, while the girls in the Mei Wah Drum Corps march in their V for Victory formation. The monies raised buy medical supplies, mosquito nets, gas masks, and other necessities for refugees, as well as ambulances and airplanes, which are sent across the Pacific.

Snap: the Chinatown Canteen. May poses with soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, who leave Union Station during their layovers, cross Alameda, and visit the canteen. These boys have come from all over the country.

Many of them have never seen a Chinese before, and they say things like “golly” and “gee whillikers,” which we adopt and use ourselves. Snap: I’m surrounded by airmen sent by Chiang Kai-shek to train in Los Angeles. It’s wonderful to hear their voices, learn news of our home country, and know that China still fights hard. Snap, snap, snap: Bob Hope, Frances Langford, and Jerry Colonna come to the canteen to put on shows. Girls between sixteen and eighteen years old—wearing white pinafores, red blouses, and saddle shoes with red socks—volunteer as hostesses to jitterbug with the boys, hand out sandwiches, and listen with sympathetic ears.

My favorite photograph shows May and me chaperoning at the canteen just before closing time on a Saturday night. We wear gardenias pinned in our hair, which falls in soft curls around our shoulders. Our sweetheart necklines show a lot of pale flesh but somehow look girlish and chaste. Our dresses are short, and our legs are bare. We may be married women, but we look pretty and cheerful. May and I know what it means to live through war, and being in Los Angeles isn’t that.


OVER THE NEXT fifteen months, many people pass through the city: servicemen going to or coming from the Pacific Theater, wives and children journeying to see husbands and fathers in military hospitals, and diplomats, actors, and salesmen of every sort involved in the war effort. I never think I’ll see someone I know, but one day in the café a man’s voice calls my name.

“Pearl Chin? Is that you?”

I stare at the man sitting at the counter. I know him, but my eyes refuse to recognize him because my humiliation is instantaneous and deep.

“Aren’t you the Pearl Chin who used to live in Shanghai? You knew my daughter, Betsy.”

I set down his plate of chow mein, turn away, and wipe my hands. If this man truly is Betsy’s father—and he is—he’s the first and only person from my past to see just how far I’ve fallen. I was once a beautiful girl, whose face decorated walls in Shanghai. I was smart and clever enough to be allowed into this man’s home. I turned his daughter from a dowdy mess into someone half fashionable. Now I’m mother to a five-year-old, wife to a rickshaw puller, and waitress in a café in a tourist attraction. I paste a smile on my face and turn to look at him.

“Mr. Howell, it’s wonderful to see you again.”

But he doesn’t look so happy to see me. He looks sad and old. I may be humbled, but his grief is elsewhere.

“We came looking for you.” He reaches across the counter and grabs my arm. “We thought you were dead in one of the bombings, but here you are.”

“Betsy?”

“She’s in a Jap camp out by the Lunghua Pagoda.”

A memory of flying kites with Z.G. and May flashes through my mind, but I say, “I thought most Americans left Shanghai before—”

“She got married,” Mr. Howell says sadly. “Did you know that? She married a young man who works for Standard Oil. They stayed in Shanghai after Mrs. Howell and I left. The oil business, you know how it is.”

I come around the counter and sit on the stool next to Mr. Howell, aware of the curious looks Sam, Uncle Wilburt, and the other café helpers shoot my way. I wish they’d stop staring at us like that—their mouths hanging open like they’re street beggars—but Betsy’s father doesn’t notice. I want to say my feeling of disgrace is hard to find, but I’m ashamed to admit it’s hidden just beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve been in this country for almost five years and still haven’t been fully able to accept my situation. It’s as if in seeing this face from the past all the goodness in my life is reduced to nothing.

Betsy’s father probably still works for the State Department, so maybe he’s aware of my discomfort. At last he fills the silence between us. “We heard from Betsy after Shanghai became the Lonely Island. We thought she was safe, since she was in British territory. But after December eighth, there was nothing we could do to get her back. Diplomatic channels don’t work so well now.” He stares into his cup of coffee and smiles ruefully.

“She’s strong,” I say, trying to bolster Mr. Howell’s spirits. “Betsy’s always been smart and brave.” Is that even true? I remember her as being passionate about politics when May and I just wanted to have another glass of champagne or another twirl around the dance floor.

“That’s what Mrs. Howell and I tell ourselves.”

“All you can do is hope.”