The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(38)

Now Afong found herself beaming with happiness. The last time she felt this way, filled with such joy, was when she saw her first snowfall in New York City. The thought that something so magical could fall from the coal-smoke skies and land softly on the spit-tobacco-stained sidewalks gave her hope for something more. All was not lost. She felt that way again when she looked at Nanchoy. He returned the look, staring at her, but at the same time trying not to stare.

She sat down across from him in a rocking chair.

“You must be lonely,” Nanchoy said. “Being the only Chinese woman.”

He pushed the plate toward her.

Afong regarded him for a moment, then nodded.

She pulled the bread apart with her fingers. She had learned to appreciate the dark brown bread that everyone in New England seemed to favor, the kind sweetened with a kiss of molasses or honey. She chewed slowly, trying not to eat too quickly even as she smelled the savory garlic, fennel, and pepper in the sausage. She did not want to seem like a beggar at a feast, but she also knew that once she finished eating, the owner might appear and send her to her room, alone. Without Nanchoy explaining what he whispered to her at the theater.

“When was the last time you were in the Great Qing?” She tried not to talk with her mouth full, but she had to know more. “How did you come to hear about me? You said my family has not forgotten.”

“My last time in China? Many years ago. I grew up in a Christian orphanage outside Canton. That’s where I learned to speak English, to read and write. When I was ten, they sent me to a monastery, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t feel the calling, as they say. So I ran away,” he mused, “before they kicked me out.”

Afong watched as he shrugged. As though escaping and going to an entirely different country was an easy thing to do. She realized that for a man, it was.

“I caught a ship to America. I was just a kitchen steward, loading crates of food, washing pans and cutlery. But when merchants found out that I spoke a bit of English, they spared me from those labors. I’ve been here ever since.”

Afong thought about her ah-ma. I knew that she would eventually find out I had been sent to America. Afong imagined her ah-ma all alone, crying, her heart breaking. A daughter sent to America was a like a child given to the moon.

“I learned about you, my dear, like everyone else, in the newspaper. You’ve become quite a novelty,” Nanchoy said. “I heard about your mother, however, through one of the Chinese traders. He was offering goods to sell after your performances. I was translating for him and he mentioned how your mother had gone to Canton and pleaded with merchants to find you, to bring you home.”

Home.

Afong stopped chewing. She could not believe what she was hearing. Her ah-ma’s words, even quoted by a stranger, made her feel weightless. Made her feel like she could run. She had been in so many newspapers and broadsheets, on so many stages, and in so many lecture halls. Despite the crowds, she always felt abandoned, alone. Now she seemed real again, valued, worthy of something other than this life of sorrow and servitude. She was not forgotten.

“Where is this trader?” Afong asked, wide-eyed. “I would leave right now. I could gather my things. Please tell me where this man is. I would do anything…”

Nanchoy did not say a word. He removed his glasses, put them away.

Afong could see the contentment leave his face. How his gaze, which a moment ago had been filled with such delight, was now laden with concern.

“I’m sorry.” He leaned forward, their knees almost touching. “Even if Mr. Hannington released you, or if you slipped away, I’m afraid there is no way to return. You see, it’s always been illegal for a woman to leave China.”

“How can that be? I am right here.”

“You are. You were brought by men who may have meant well, perhaps they planned to give your family money. Maybe they sought to hire you. It’s possible that they didn’t know, they just saw an opportunity. But I’m certain whoever let you go was well aware that if you ever returned, the punishment would be death.”

Afong remembered Dei Yu’s wives, smiling as men from America escorted her away during the first day of the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. They walked her down the praya in the early morning, past large junks dressed with green and yellow signal flags, to a cargo lighter decorated with lanterns, red and black, bearing Chinese inscriptions that she could not read. She boarded the skiff and watched the sunrise as sailors rowed with the outgoing tide, past hundreds of floating paper lanterns set adrift the night before. When they came alongside a steamship, she was carried aboard and locked in a berth far belowdecks, where she remained for the entirety of the three-week journey. She would have cried, screamed, even pounded on the door, but she quickly became seasick and curled up on the floor, wishing the world would stop moving, rocking, heaving. In that time, she became so used to the smell of salted meat and an ever-ripe chamber pot that when they arrived in a strange city and she was finally taken topside, she thought someone had perfumed the air.

Afong took another bite, but the bread seemed to have lost its sweetness.

“I understand how you must feel. I was profoundly homesick when I arrived in this country.” Nanchoy sighed. “In New York City, there are two hundred thousand people. Seventy thousand are foreigners, but the only Chinese I found were in a boardinghouse. The men who lived there were all seamen and laborers. Their mere appearance—being able to speak to them in our common tongue—was a gift. Though they regarded me warily, with suspicious eyes, because I cut my queue, grew my hair out like American men. I later realized they thought I was sent there as a spy.”