Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1)(92)
He says these words about Vern, but he could be speaking about any of us.
THESE TWIN TRAGEDIES bind us together as a family in ways none of us could have imagined. May, Sam, and Father go back to work; sorrow and despair hang around their necks like cangues. Yen-yen stays in the apartment to take care of me and Vern. (The doctor is very much against this. “Vern will be better off in a sanatorium or some other institution,” he tells us, but if Chinese are treated badly right on the street, where everyone can see, how can we possibly let him go to a place behind gates and closed doors?) Paper partners fill in for us at China City. But fate is not done with us.
In August, a second fire destroys nearly all of China City. A few buildings survive, but all the Golden enterprises are reduced to charred ruins, except for three rickshaws and May’s costume and extras company. Still, no one has insurance. With China enmeshed in a civil war, Father Louie once again can’t go back to the home country to replenish his stock of antiques. He could try to buy antiques here, but everything is too expensive after the world war and much of the savings he squirreled away in China City is ash anyway.
But even if we had the resources to restock the shops, Christine Sterling has no desire to rebuild China City. Convinced the fire was the result of arson, she decides she no longer wants to re-create her ideas of Oriental romance in Los Angeles. In fact, she no longer wants to associate with Chinese in any way whatsoever and doesn’t want them sullying her Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street. She persuades the city to condemn the block of Chinatown between Los Angeles Street and Alameda to make room for a freeway on-ramp. For now all that will remain of the city’s original Chinatown is the row of buildings between Los Angeles Street and Sanchez Alley, where we live. People fight the overall plan, but no one has much hope. We all know the saying that’s so popular here in America: We don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.
Our home is in jeopardy, but we can’t worry about that yet, not when we have to work together to reopen the family businesses. While some people decide to limp along and stay in what remains of China City, Father Louie opens a new Golden Lantern in New Chinatown, stocking it with the cheapest curios he can buy from local wholesalers, who get their goods from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Joy must now spend more time there, selling what she calls “junk” to tourists who don’t know any better, giving her grandfather a break so he can nap. The new shop doesn’t have much business, but she’s a star watcher. And when no one’s in the shop, which is most of the time, she reads.
Sam and I decide to start our own business with some of our savings. He looks for a new café location and finds one on Ord Street just a half block west of China City, but Uncle Wilburt won’t be coming with us. He decides to take advantage of the lo fans’ increased interest in Chinese food since the war ended by opening his own chop-suey joint in Lakewood. We’re sad to see the last of the uncles leave, even though this means that Sam will be the head cook at last.
We prepare for our Grand Opening, doing renovations, creating menus, and thinking about advertising. The café has a little office behind glass in the back where May will manage her business. She stores the props and costumes in a small warehouse over on Bernard Street, saying that she doesn’t need to sit among those things every day and that getting jobs for herself and for other extras is more profitable than the rental business anyway. She encourages Sam to produce a calendar to promote the café. She asks a local photographer to come and take a picture. Even though the restaurant is named after me, the image shows May and Joy standing at the counter next to the pie spinner: EAT AT PEARL’S COFFEE SHOP: QUALITY CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD.
At the beginning of October 1949, Pearl’s Coffee Shop opens, Mao Tse-tung establishes the People’s Republic of China, and the Bamboo Curtain falls. We don’t know how permeable this curtain will be or what any of it means for our home country, but our opening is successful. The calendar is popular, and so is our menu, which combines American and Chinese-American specialties: roast beef, apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and coffee, or sweet-and-sour pork, almond cookies, and tea. Pearl’s Coffee Shop is clean. The food is fresh and consistent. Day and night a line extends out the door.
FATHER LOUIE CONTINUES sending money to his home village by wiring funds to Hong Kong and then hiring someone to walk the money into the People’s Republic of China and on to Wah Hong Village. Sam warns him against this. “Maybe the Communists will confiscate it. Maybe this will be bad for the family in the village.”
I have different fears. “Maybe the American government will call us Communists. That’s why most families aren’t sending home remittances anymore.”
And it’s true. Many people in Chinatowns across the country have stopped sending money home because everyone is afraid and perplexed. The letters we receive from China confuse us even further.
“We are happy with the new government,” writes my father-in-law’s cousin twice removed. “Everyone is equal now. The landlord has been made to share his wealth with the people.”
If they’re so happy, we ask ourselves, then why are so many trying to get out? These are men, like Uncle Charley, who went back to China with their savings. Here in America, they’d suffered and been humiliated as low and unworthy of citizenship, but they’d withstood it, believing that great happiness, prosperity, and respect awaited them in the country of their birth, only to discover bitter fates upon their return to China, which treats them as dreaded landlords, capitalists, and running dogs of imperialism. The unlucky ones die in the fields or in the village squares. The fortunate ones escape to Hong Kong, where they die broken and broke. A few lucky ones come home to America. Uncle Charley is one of these.