The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(72)
Everyone nodded, except for two of the Chinese businessmen. Mr. Cappis waited as one of the other stewards who spoke rudimentary Chinese did his best to translate, which included gestures so pronounced they were almost comical and reminded Lai King of playing charades in school. She watched the Chinese men and saw the exact moment when they guessed right and gravely understood.
“If the winds are favorable,” Mr. Cappis said, smiling for the first time, “we will be in the Orient in forty-five days, with a brief stop in the Hawaiian Islands.”
A junior officer proceeded to escort the new passengers to their quarters. While the rich merchants and their wives went in one direction, Lai King descended a series of ladders, slipping through narrow hatches that took her deep into the belly of the ship. There she found a servant’s pantry and an old woman polishing the wooden cabinetry.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron when she saw Lai King. “I heard there was a China girl coming my way. I’m Miss Anna, the steerage matron, but the passengers down here all just call me Mama.”
Lai King wasn’t ready to call anyone Mama. “Can I call you Auntie Anna?”
“Auntie? Oh, that’s fine too,” the woman said as she tucked a thick wad of chewing tobacco inside her cheek and picked bits off her tongue.
Auntie noticed the look on Lai King’s face. “No smoking down here.”
She turned and led Lai King into a large barnlike space divided into doorless staterooms on either side, each with barely enough room for a skeletal set of double bunks and a small sink below an even smaller mirror. A dozen women in various stages of undress occupied the bunks, lolling about like alley cats. Others sat on the floor playing cards or reading. The only illumination came from a flicker of a gas lamp in each berth and what little sunlight found its way down through the shaft of the mainmast that jutted through the ceiling as though someone had planted a great, limbless conifer.
“Don’t worry. Your eyes will adjust,” Auntie Anna said. “This area here is for single women like us.” She winked at Lai King. “Families are quartered behind me. Beyond them are the single men. And in between is a dining parlor. Food’s not so bad. In fact, Captain Ward eats from the steerage kitchen once a week to make sure.”
Lai King tried to listen as she was introduced to some of the ladies. The other passengers looked genial and kind. Some even offered her a cup of beef tea, but it had the steamy aroma of stale sweat. Auntie Anna continued on about what to do in case of bad weather, how the hatches would be sealed and it would become even darker. Lai King saw the privy, which smelled so bad it turned her stomach. Or perhaps that was the slow rocking of the ship, which seemed worse when she was deprived of a view of the ocean. She looked at the portholes on either side, which were so close to the waterline they were practically submerged. No fresh air would be coming through them.
It was still midday, but Lai King was exhausted. She thanked the matron and the ladies and curled up in her assigned bunk, the blanket stiff and scratchy. She felt queasy and closed her eyes, realizing she was getting seasick. Auntie Anna placed a bucket near Lai King’s bunk. She spoke kindly, but Lai King was too overcome to say anything. She closed her eyes, tried to escape into her imagination, but all she saw were her parents in bed, in their night clothes, holding each other, safe beneath blankets that did not move.
* * *
Lai King woke in the middle of the night, her stomach churning. She immediately reached in the darkness for the wooden bucket and vomited. Her eyes watered from the smell and the loss of bodily control, and she vomited again. She wiped her chin and lay back, feeling the ship rock, rise and fall, the sound of the ocean against the hull, the groaning of the timbers reminding her that was all that stood between her and the unfathomable deep. She heard the ladies around her snoring, the occasional mumble, grateful that the bunk directly above her was unoccupied, though a part of her longed for company. She listened in the dark, the sounds reminding her of her final days with her parents. That’s when she pulled the blanket over her head, curled into a ball, and finally broke down crying. She tried to be silent, but the more she tried, the more her shoulders shook as she sobbed into her pillow, the more the tears came, the more her blanket felt like a funeral shroud.
She cried until she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Ah-ma?”
“Shhh, it’s going to be okay.”
Auntie Anna wrapped her arms around her, and Lai King sobbed into her bosom until she felt completely depleted, exhausted. Then fear replaced sorrow and she bit her lip. Her stomach still turning, her heart somewhere buried in the burned-out rubble of the home she’d left behind. Auntie Anna rocked her gently in the darkness, until Lai King could no longer determine if her eyes were open or closed, if she were awake or dreaming, if she were alive or had failed as a ghost hero.
* * *
Four days later, after subsisting on broth, tea, and ship’s biscuits, which were as hard as rocks, Lai King’s head cleared and her stomach settled. With little else to do but wallow, she dried her eyes and resigned herself to follow the rest of the passengers in steerage up the ladders for her first hour of sky liberty.
“I knew you’d come around,” Auntie Anna said as she gave Lai King a hug that was as warm and soft as it was smothering. Then the woman helped her up the ladder. “That fresh air will do you good. You’ll see.”