The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(3)
“It comes with the territory,” Faye said as she worried about her parents, whom she hadn’t heard from in two years.
She finished her drink, leaving only a mint leaf.
The mountains will protect us, Faye had been told when she first arrived, even after Shanghai, Nanking, and Hankow fell. Then word spread that the defenses around Chunking had collapsed and the wind began carrying the malodorous smell she’d learned to recognize as the fetor of burning bodies. Japanese bombers killed thousands of civilians in last week’s raids, along with six American pilots. President Roosevelt, who had sent planes and men, publicly denied US involvement in the war between China and Japan. But after Pearl Harbor there was no need for the pretense, and now everyone in Kunming knew who the Americans were.
“I can’t believe they made all the nurses swear we’d never marry,” Lois said as an aviator walked by with eyes like Gary Cooper and a smile like Jin Yan.
Faye shook her head, grumbling, “They should have made the men swear an oath as well.” Faye felt invisible compared to Lois, who was so young and fetching and her periwinkle blouse so tight its buttons seemed ready to burst.
“Why would you want that? It would lessen our chances,” Lois said. “But I guess at your age you could probably care less that the AVG is run like a seventh-grade church dance—after all, you must be close to retirement.”
Faye cringed inside. She wished she’d cut Lois off two drinks ago.
“But for the rest of us girls, we’re still in the game,” Lois yammered. “You’re so lucky. I always wondered what it would be like to live alone. To be able to choose how to spend my evenings and my days.”
“I thought you had a boyfriend back home in… Kansas?” Faye asked.
Lois shrugged. “What if I do?”
Faye tilted her head and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, please, don’t Mother Hen me,” Lois laughed. “We could all die over here at any moment. From bombs or malaria or sheer boredom.”
Faye understood that all too well. Orders arrived like the tropical rains along the Burma Road—all at once, or not at all. When the downpour of wounded came, the nurses gave up wearing white shoes because they were standing in so much blood. Those long days were followed by an idle stew of melancholy, lassitude, and homesickness.
Lois kept talking. “If I’d wanted to settle down I wouldn’t have traveled halfway around the world to take this job. It’s not paradise, but it’s more exciting than watching the tumbleweed races back home. Besides, you only get one life, you know?”
Faye remembered feeling just as eager, years ago. Restless and weary of her parents’ disappointment, she left her hospital job and sailed from Canton to Rangoon aboard the Jagersfontein, an ocean liner with a swimming pool and an orchestra. That’s where she met and was hired by Dr. Gentry, a US army flight surgeon who was traveling with a group of pilots and aircraft mechanics. All of them with fake IDs in case they were stopped by the Japanese. Faye had been excited, but also nervous to join the Americans, especially when she heard the Japanese had issued an order to kill all Chinese doctors and nurses caught fleeing the occupied cities. Once she stepped off the ship, however, she felt at ease, as though the broken compass of her heart was now working. She traveled with Dr. Gentry’s team on the Burma Road over the Himalayas to Yunnan Province. There her magnetic north led her on muddy roads, past water buffalo and roadside statues of the Buddha, toward something unknown, but oddly hopeful. Here in Kunming she almost felt complete, even as the world around her was on fire, falling to pieces.
“I thought you were gonna buy me another drink?” Lois said.
Faye cocked her head, eyes toward the ceiling.
“Fine,” Lois said. “I’ll go get one myself. Or maybe one of these handsome young fellas will come to my rescue…”
“Wait.” Faye grabbed Lois’s arm. “Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear a thing.”
Faye watched as the bartender quickly unplugged the jukebox, which elicited a round of groans and complaints from drunken patrons. Their protests diminished, however, as one by one they heard the sound of a distant air raid siren.
“Oh God, not again.” Lois knelt down, nearly tipping the table over in the process.
As pilots and crewmen began running for the door, Faye listened for the sound of explosions. Or the heavy thud of passive bombs filled with yellow wax and maggots designed to spread cholera. Instead, she heard the wail change into a long blaring tone.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Faye urged Lois, pulling her up and toward the exit. “That’s the all clear. It means we’re safe, but a plane is inbound.”
Outside the club and into the street, villagers and merchants, beggars and monks all searched the late afternoon sky. Faye looked as well, hearing the all-too-familiar roar and sputter of a damaged P-40 engine—one of theirs. Then a shark-nosed fighter-plane sailed overhead, leaving a contrail of black oil smoke in its wake. The underbelly was painted sky blue with white stars, the colors of Nationalist China, but Faye knew the man trying to land the burning plane would be an American.
She sprinted in the direction of the new airstrip, a large clearing of land that used to be a sugarcane field, which sat beneath a slope of rolling hills covered in acacia trees. Lois stumbled behind, pausing and muttering as she removed her high heels.