Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(85)

Less than a week after Joy’s encounter with death, the war ends and Sam—shaken by almost losing his little girl—takes three hundred dollars of our savings and buys a very used Chrysler. It’s old and dented, but it’s ours. In our last photograph from the war years, Sam sits in the Chrysler’s driver’s seat, Joy perches on the fender, and I stand by the passenger door. We’re about to go for a Sunday drive, our first.





Ten Thousand Happinesses





“FIFTEEN CENTS FOR one gardenia,” a melodious voice rings out. “Twenty-five cents for a double.” The little girl standing behind the table is adorable. Her black hair shimmers under the colored lights, her smile beckons, her fingers look like butterflies. My daughter, my Joy, has her own “place of business,” as she calls it, and she runs it wonderfully well for a child of ten. On weekend nights she sells gardenias from six to midnight outside the café, where I can keep watch on her, but she doesn’t need me or anyone else to protect her. She’s a Tiger—brave. She’s my daughter—persistent. She’s her aunt’s niece—beautiful. I have exciting news. I want to get May alone to tell her, but seeing Joy sell gardenias has us entranced and paralyzed.

“Look how precious she is,” May coos. “She’s good at this. I’m glad she likes it and that she earns a little money. It’s a good thing all the way around, isn’t it?”

May looks lovely tonight: like a millionaire’s wife in vermilion silk. She dresses well, because she can afford to spend the money she earns frivolously. She recently turned 29. Oh, the tears! As if she turned 129. But to me she hasn’t changed one bit since our beautiful-girl days. Still, every day she worries about gaining weight and forming wrinkles. Lately, she’s been stuffing her pillow with chrysanthemum leaves so she’ll wake with her eyes clear and moist.

“China City is a tourist place, so who do you think should be the seller? The smallest and the cutest, that’s who,” I agree. “And Joy’s smart. She watches to make sure nothing’s stolen.”

“For an extra penny, I’ll sing ‘God Bless America,’” Joy says to a couple who stop at her table. She doesn’t wait for an answer but begins to sing in a clear, high, and earnest voice. At American school, she’s learned all the patriotic songs—“My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”—as well as songs like “My Darling Clementine” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” At the Chinese Methodist Mission on Los Angeles Street, she’s learned to sing “Jesus Is All the World to Me” and “Jesus Loves Even Me” in Cantonese. Between work, regular school, and Chinese school—which she attends Monday through Friday from 4:30 to 7:30 and Saturdays from 9:00 to 12:00—she’s a busy but happy little girl.

Joy glances at me and smiles as she holds out her hand to the couple. She’s learned this trick—getting people to pay for things they may not want—from her grandfather. The husband puts some change in Joy’s palm, and she closes her hand around it as fast as a monkey. She drops the change into a can and gives the woman a gardenia. Once done with these customers, Joy moves them along. She’s learned this from her grandfather too. Every night she counts the money and then turns it over to her father, who converts the change into dollars, which he then gives to me to hide with Joy’s college money.

“Fifteen cents for one gardenia,” Joy trills, a serious but endearing look on her face. “Twenty-five cents for a double.”

I link my arm through my sister’s. “Come on. She’s fine. Let’s get a cup of tea.”

“But not in the café, all right?” May doesn’t like to be seen in the café. It isn’t glamorous enough for her. Not these days.

“That’s fine,” I say. I nod to Sam, who’s behind the counter in the café, stir-frying an order in a wok. He’s the second cook now, but he can keep an eye on our daughter while I visit with May.

My sister and I swing through China City’s alleyways toward the costume and prop shop that came to her through Tom Gubbins. It’s been ten years since we arrived in Los Angeles, ten years since we stepped into China City. When I first passed through the miniature Great Wall, I felt no connection to this place. Now it feels like home: familiar, comfortable, and much loved. This isn’t the China of my past—the busy streets of Shanghai, the beggars, the fun, the champagne, the money—but I see reminders of it here in the laughing tourists, the traditionally costumed shop owners, the smells that come from the cafés and restaurants, and the stunning woman at my side, who happens to be my sister. As we stroll, I catch glimpses of us in the shopwindows and I’m transported to our girlhoods: the way we dressed in our room and stared at our reflections and those of our beautiful-girl images that hung on the walls around us, the way we walked together along Nanking Road and smiled at ourselves in store windows, and the way Z.G. captured and painted our perfect selves.

And yet we’ve both changed. Now I see myself—thirty-two years old, no longer a new mother but a woman content with herself My sister is a flower in full bloom. The desire to be looked at and admired still burns from deep within her. The more she feeds it, the more she needs. She’ll never be satisfied. This malady is in her bones—from birth, her essential character, her Sheep that wants to be taken care of, petted, and admired. She isn’t Anna May Wong and she never will be, but she gets more movie work and more varied roles—as a whimsical cashier, the giggly but ineffectual maid, or the stoic wife of a laundryman—than anyone else in Chinatown. This makes her a star in our neighborhood and a star to me.