Last Night at the Telegraph Club(36)
—1943
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed.
Grace and her family attend the parades in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to San Francisco.
—1944
The “Suicide Squad” is formalized as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operating under the army.
—1945
World War II ends.
Joseph is discharged from the U.S. Army.
—Nov. 16, 1945
JOSEPH takes Grace to the Forbidden City nightclub.
—1946
Franklin Chen-yeh Hu (胡振業) is born.
—1947
Judy Hu arrives in San Francisco to begin graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley.
JOSEPH
Nine Years Earlier
Organizing a night on the town was much more work than Joseph Hu imagined. By the time the children were settled with the Lums (Eddie had the misfortune to bump his knee on the edge of a packing crate, which led to tears and then a tantrum), and he and Grace had changed into their evening wear (he in his old but freshly pressed gray flannel suit; she in a navy-blue dress that he couldn’t remember if he’d seen before), they were running late for their reservation. He called a taxi, which Grace protested because of the cost, but he did it anyway. She was wearing new shoes, and he could tell they were already pinching her feet. The taxi driver took the hills too swiftly, causing Grace to lurch toward him on the back seat, and the pink silk flowers she had pinned to her hair smashed into his face. She had to re-pin the flowers blindly as the car sped down Powell Street.
It was not an auspicious beginning to the night, and he was certain that Grace was noting all these little errors in her mental ledger, as if toting up harbingers of bad luck. It was one of her most Chinese traits, something that surprised him when he first discovered it, not expecting to find such Old World superstition in an American girl.
When they arrived at the Forbidden City, the nightclub’s red neon sign cast a devilish glow over the scalloped awning advertising the “All-Chinese Floor Show.” Joseph helped his wife out of the taxi and she gave him a pained smile, as if she was trying to brush off the unfortunate beginning to their night.
Inside, they stopped at the hat check first, where a young Chinese woman dressed in a red-and-gold cheongsam took their coats and his hat. Then they passed through a circular archway decorated with sinuous dragons on a sky-blue background and entered the front bar, where the ceiling was painted with fluffy white clouds and patrons were ordering drinks from the Chinese bartender. Joseph went to the ma?tre d’, who checked their reservation and handed them off to a waiter, who took them through another archway (it was decorated with matching dragons) to a white cloth-covered table on the edge of the rectangular dance floor. The experience was like a ritual or a ceremony, Joseph thought, amused, and now that they’d gone through three doorways (four if you counted the taxi door) and circumnavigated the ceremonial performance space, they sat down at their table for two and opened their menus to make a freighted choice: American Deluxe dinner or Special Chinese?
He saw Grace reading the menu with consternation, and when he examined the menu himself, he understood immediately. The Special Chinese dinner sounded terrible; it was all egg foo yung and chop suey. “I think we should have the American one,” he said. “I’d like to have the steak.”
Her expression relaxed and she nodded, folding the menu and setting it down. “Of course, steak it is.”
He glanced around the restaurant as they waited to make their order. There was a small stage for the band, and Chinese paintings of beautiful maidens hung on the walls. Cocktail waitresses were coming around with trays of drinks: mai tais and Singapore slings, zombies and tropical punches. When their waiter arrived, Joseph ordered a rum concoction called the Flying Tiger solely for its name; he had known one of those pilots during the war. When the drink was delivered, he was disappointed to discover it was 70 percent crushed ice with a smattering of pineapple on top. Grace liked it more than he did, so he offered it to her and ordered himself a mai tai.
The dinner was a well-oiled machine: each course delivered in succession, the waiters swooping through the restaurant almost like dancers, their wide round trays held high overhead before they descended to table level. The couple at the table beside them had ordered the Special Chinese dinner, and the smell of sweet and sour sauce wafted over to Joseph as he cut into his steak. Wielding his knife and fork reminded him, suddenly, of surgery in a tent out near the Burma Road, and for a moment he stopped eating. He saw again the makeshift surgical table where the soldier was lying, dosed with morphine, and the ragged flesh of the man’s arm where it had been punctured with shrapnel from a Japanese bomb.
He blinked and saw his steak again, sitting in a puddle of thin brown juice, and he raised his eyes to his wife, who was chewing her own first bite. “How is it?” he asked, though he still felt partially enmeshed in his memory (the clang of the scalpel against the metal tray). He wasn’t sure why the memories came when they did; he wondered what triggered the neurons in his brain to fire. How incredible that electricity surged through his nerves; how strange that they called up these fragments of memory.
“Are you all right?” Grace was saying.