The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(14)

“Nei uk kei mou mong gei nei,” he whispered to Afong as he set down the tray.

She froze, unsure of what she had just heard: That her family has not forgotten. Afong pursed her lips as she stared at the man, bangs tilted as he leaned in. She could see his eyes, which revealed nothing more. Afong’s heart asked a million silent questions, but he remained stoic as he performed his duties and left the stage.

Afong snapped to attention as Mr. Hannington took her cane and handed her a bowl and a pair of the utensils. He did the same for each man.

“If either of you strong and corpulent men can consume this small measure of rice using these peculiar sticks of the Orient faster than the Chinese Lady, I will give you…” The showman paused for effect. “Five hundred cash dollars!” He turned to the audience. “Do you want to see one of these men get rich here tonight?”

The crowd roared and the spectators in the back rose to their feet.

Afong looked at the rice in her bowl. Her hand was shaking and she felt light-headed at the possibility of hearing from her ah-ma, her family. That and she had not eaten all day, since Mr. Hannington had forbidden her from taking meals until her performance was done. Though that never stopped her managers from lavishly dining in her presence, enjoying lamb, ham soup, and salmon pie, while only allowing her to sip black tea and smoke an occasional cigarette, which was illegal, to stave off hunger.

“Commence!” Mr. Hannington shouted, and the men began fumbling with their chopsticks, trying to use them as a thin spoon, or stabbing their bowls of rice in vain.

The orchestra proceeded to play “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which drove the crowd wild, laughing and heckling as one man kept dropping his utensils.

Chopsticks in hand, Afong began to feast on the rice with precision. As she ate, the audience cheered her on as though she were a trained seal bouncing a ball through a hoop in the circus of Pépin and Breschard. She knew that her life onstage, while loathsome in the company of the Hanningtons, was better than the life of a ghost bride. She had traveled so much that now the idea of being a housebound servant to the family of a dead husband—forever unseen and friendless—that life was now inconceivable. But she missed her ah-ma, her sisters, and still dreamt of Yao Han. She longed for the times he would meet her at the well and they would steal away together, lie in the cool grass, and share fresh lychee in season, savoring the sweetness.

“I will pray that you pass your tests,” Afong had said, though she knew that meant he would be sent to an elite academy in a faraway prefect. But he would not spend the rest of his days in poverty, tending to another man’s field. Yao Han would finally be able to pursue his art. At last, his words would have a canvas worthy of them.

“What if I don’t want to leave?” Yao Han looked up at the streaming clouds, searching for the sun that had disappeared. “What if I want to stay?”

They both left those questions unanswered, holding hands and letting the fog of silence fill the valley between them. Neither needed reminding that her father, a salt merchant, would never let his daughter marry the son of a servant. Afong knew she could never ask her father for anything, let alone for him to change his mind. Her thoughts, her wishes, her presence in his life, carried the weight of thistledown in the wind.

“If I leave, I will come back for you,” Yao Han said, but she heard resignation in his voice. His affirmation was more of an aspiration, filled more with doubt than belief.

“I will be right here,” Afong had said as her bound feet began to ache.

Where would I go?

Now in America, a day did not pass that she did not imagine Yao Han returning to their village someday as a scholar, a magistrate, a merchant of words with provincial glory. But now she imagined that the boy who used to leave flowers on her windowsill would do so one last time and the flowers would wilt, dry up, and blow away.

Afong remembered the last words her ah-ma said to her. Her mother tried to pass on what little hope she had. “Women are born to lead lives of inconsistency.” She tried not to cry as she held Afong’s hands. “While it is our curse, it can also be our strength.”

Afong finished her bowl and raised it high, exclaiming, “Sik yeun!” as one man began eating with his hands and the other threw rice at the heckling congregation.



* * *



When the show ended and the applause faded, Afong sat backstage on a wooden stool thinking about what the man in the golden waistcoat had said, daydreaming that one day she might be able to buy her freedom, and with that independence, passage back to China, to her village, to her family, to Yao Han.

Unfortunately, the Hanningtons paid her only two dollars and fifty cents per week, so she tried not to entertain such hopes. Whenever she had come close to saving up even a portion of the eighteen dollars needed for a third-class ticket on a steamship to Canton, they found ways to garnish her wages, leaving her with a handful of pennies. “Five dollars for your meals, for your transportation, for your lodging,” Mr. Hannington would say, smiling benevolently as he went over a ledger that Afong could not read. “Ten dollars for our priceless stewardship and boundless support.”

Tonight, that support would be escorting her to a boardinghouse.

“Only the bawdiest, most tawdry of women are seen on the streets without an escort,” Mrs. Hannington reminded Afong. “You don’t want people to think you’re one of those girls.” She held up a flask, drained the last of its contents, then laughed and slapped Afong on the knee as though someone had told a joke. “It’s trouble enough that you’re a foreigner, but with those silly feet of yours you couldn’t even run away. You’d fall prey to the worst sort of people. I would know.”