The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(31)

“I don’t like this,” her father said.

Lai King imagined that perhaps winter really was about to emerge from the belly of the ship, that the men were bundling up in preparation for a swirling blizzard, or would soon be dashing home to get heavy wool coats, mittens, and hats. She smiled eagerly as she pictured a frozen cargo net, dripping with icicles, lifting a snowy, cloud-covered mountain peak above the bulkheads. She’d been taught that white bears lived on top of the world. She pictured one of those great creatures climbing out of the hold with a salmon in its mouth, dropping the fish to announce his presence with a frightening roar.

But as the ship sounded its horn again and again, a few of the dockworkers pointed up to where a thin veil of black smoke floated out of one of the freighter’s giant, funneled stacks. Lai King cocked her head as she watched two British sailors hastily lower the ship’s ensign, the red duster of Great Britain. Then the men on the docks stepped back even farther as a broad sheet of yellow fabric was hoisted to the top of the foremast. The makeshift flag was plain, boring, unremarkable, yet as men on nearby piers saw it waving in the wind they too began shouting, pointing, panic in their voices.

“What does a yellow flag mean?” she asked.

A man aboard the ship, bald and round in the middle and wearing a leather apron, stepped out of a metal door with something dark on the end of a long pole. She squinted as she tried to see. The men on deck stepped back as the lump on the end began moving, writhing. The man shook the end of the pole over the edge of the ship, banging it until the lump fell. The dark shape wasn’t one thing, it was three—enormous rats, hissing, their tails whipping wildly as they tumbled to the water below. Lai King gasped as the bodies of two men, loosely wrapped in sheets, were dragged topside.

She heard the word stowaways as she stared at their limp corpses.

“It means we need to go,” her father snapped. “Right now.”

She followed her father, scrambling down the stack of old crates, trying not to get slivers as the ship’s horn sounded. When she looked back, more British sailors and Chinese workers emerged from belowdecks, this time amid smoke, followed by a mischief of rats that scurried in every direction. Men were hastily climbing the masts and rigging, or running for the gangway. Others threw themselves over the wooden taffrail and began furiously climbing down the cargo nets to escape.

“The yellow flag means something bad.” Her father spoke in Cantonese as he took her hand. As a translator for the Kong Chow Association, he’d always encouraged Lai King to practice her English. But she also knew that whenever he was upset, he would revert to his mother tongue. “Jau gam faai, dak gam faai! Let’s go. Let’s go.”

They ran through the pandemonium, his hand clasped over hers. She could barely keep up. As workers and sailors swarmed in all directions, she tripped over a loose board on the pier and fell, skinning her knees and tearing the hem of her dress.

She sniffled as a tear ran down her face. “What’s going on?” She winced as she brushed bits of dirt and gravel from a bloody knee.

“We’ll talk when we get home,” her father said, picking her up.

Lai King had seen him this upset, talking this frantically, only once before, when he ran out into the darkness late one night and helped the other men in Chinatown put out a fire. He came home exhausted, blackened with soot, coughing but smiling, because the fire had claimed only one home and not the entire neighborhood.

As her father carried her down a darkened side street, the cobblestones seemed to light up as though the sun were coming out of hiding. Lai King looked skyward and saw that the long clotheslines that hung between the buildings, from the second, third, and fourth floors—fifty, sixty, maybe one hundred lines in all—were quickly being reeled back in by the residents on either side. Thousands of garments parted the sky like clouds of white cotton, dappled with pink, red, and yellow. Most of the laundry was dry and merely blew in the wind, while the rest dripped upon them like falling rain.

To Lai King it looked as though Chinatown was closing down early. Flower carts were being covered. Merchants hurried to bring all their barrels of fruits and vegetables inside. Windows were shuttered. She looked over her father’s shoulder and watched officers from the Chinese Six Companies, in traditional riding jackets, directing people to their homes. Even the beggars had migrated elsewhere. Lai King saw a plump rat with a long pink tail scurry beneath the boardwalk. She shuddered and hugged her father’s neck as she looked away.

At their tenement, he carried her up the stairs and into their one-room apartment.

“Zum mo liu?” Lai King’s mother asked as she turned from their open window. “Is it another fire? Have the Knights of Labor come back?”

Lai King’s father set her down. He stretched his back for a moment, catching his breath, then closed the window and drew the curtain.

“They found two stowaways. Both dead,” her father whispered. “Syu jik.”

Her mother paused for a moment as the news sank in. Then she knelt down and rolled up Lai King’s sleeves, her pant legs, appraising her skin, her scraped knee. She touched the sides of Lai King’s neck. She touched her own.

Lai King felt scared, sensing fear and worry in her parents, but she didn’t understand. She didn’t know what the black death was. She imagined a dark cloud covering all of Chinatown, bolts of lighting, striking down men, women, children in the street. She imagined the fallen people, lying in the gutters. Then she swallowed and recalled the words of Li Qingzhao. In school, Lai King had been taught that in times of trouble one should become a ghost hero, as the poetess implored.