Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls 1)

About halfway down the street, she stops abruptly. “Look, there’s Christine Sterling.” She nods toward an elderly but elegantly dressed white woman sitting on the porch of a house that looks like it was made from mud. “She developed Olvera Street. She’s behind China City too. Everyone says she has a big heart. They say she wants to help Mexicans and Chinese have their own businesses during these hard times. She came to Los Angeles with nothing, just like we did. Now she’s about to have two tourist attractions.”

We reach the end of the block. A flock of American cars trawl and beep their way along the roadway. Across Macy Street, I see the wall that surrounds China City.

“I’ll take you over there, if you’d like,” May offers. “All we have to do is cross the street.”

I shake my head. “Maybe another time.”

As we walk back through Olvera Street, May waves and smiles to shop owners, who don’t wave or smile back.

WHILE MAY WORKS with Old Man Louie and Sam is getting things ready in China City, Yen-yen and I do our piecework in the apartment, look after Vernon when he comes home from school, and take turns carrying Joy during the long afternoons, when she cries endlessly for who knows what reason. But even if I could go visiting, who would I meet? There’s only about one woman or girl here for every ten men. Local girls May’s and my age are often forbidden to go out with boys, and the Chinese men living here don’t want to marry them anyway.

“Girls born here are too Americanized,” Uncle Edfred says when he comes to Sunday dinner. “When I get rich, I’ll go back to the home village to get a traditional wife.”

Some men—like Uncle Wilburt—have wives back in China they don’t see for years at a time. “I haven’t done the husband-wife thing with my wife since forever. Too expensive to go to China for that. I’m saving my money to go home for good.”

With thinking like this, most girls remain unmarried. During the week, they go to American school and then Chinese-language school at one of the missions. On weekends, they work in their families’ businesses and go to the missions for Chinese culture instruction. We don’t fit in with those girls, and we’re too young to fit in with the other wives and mothers, who seem backward to us. Even if they were born here, most of them—like Yen-yen—didn’t even complete elementary school. That’s how isolated, guarded, and protected they are.

One evening at the end of May, thirty-nine days after we arrived in Los Angeles and a few days before China City opens, Sam comes home and says, “You can go outside with your sister, if you want. I can give Joy her bottle.”

I’m reluctant to leave her with him, but these past weeks I’ve seen that she responds well to the awkward way he holds her, whispers in her ear, and tickles her tummy

. Seeing her content—and knowing that Sam would just as soon have me gone so he won’t have to make conversation with me—May and I go out into the spring night. We walk to the Plaza, where we sit on a bench, listen to Mexican music wafting over from Olvera Street, and watch children play in Sanchez Alley, using a paper bag plumped with wadded newspapers and tied with a string as their ball.

At last May is no longer trying to show me things or trying to get me to cross this or that street. We can just sit and—for a few minutes—be ourselves. We have no privacy in the apartment, where everyone can hear everything that’s said and everything that’s done. Now, without so many listening ears, we’re able to talk freely and share secrets. We reminisce about Mama, Baba, Tommy, Betsy, Z.G., and even our old servants. We talk about the foods we miss and Shanghai’s scents and sounds, which seem so distant to us now. Finally, we pull ourselves away from the loneliness of lost people and places and force ourselves to focus on what’s happening right around us. I know every time Yen-yen and Old Man Louie do the husband-wife thing from the creaking of their mattress. I know as well that Vern and May haven’t done anything like that yet.

“You haven’t done it with Sam either,” May retorts. “You’ve got to do it. You’re married. You have a baby with him.”

“But why should I do it when you haven’t done it with Vern?”

May makes a face. “How can I? There’s something wrong with him.”

Back in Shanghai, I’d thought she was just being unkind, but now that I’ve lived with Vern and spent far more time with him than May has, I know she’s right. And it’s not just that he hasn’t begun his growth into manhood.

“I don’t think he’s retarded,” I say, trying to be helpful.

May impatiently waves away the idea. “It’s not that. He’s … damaged.” She searches the canopy of tree branches above us, as though she might find an answer there. “He talks, but not much. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening around him. Other times he’s completely obsessed—like with those model airplanes and boats the old man is always buying for him to glue together.”

“At least they take care of him,” I reason. “Remember the boy we saw on the boat on the Grand Canal? His family kept him in a cage.”

Either May doesn’t remember or she doesn’t care, because she goes on without acknowledging me. “They treat Vern like he’s special. Yen-yen irons his clothes and lays them out for him in the morning. She calls him Boy-husband—”

“She’s like Mama that way. She calls everyone by title or rank in the family. She even calls her husband Old Man Louie!”

It feels good to laugh. Mama and Baba had called him that as a sign of respect; we’d always called him that because we didn’t like him; Yen-yen calls him that because that’s how she sees him.

“She has natural feet, but she’s far more backward than Mama ever was,” I continue. “She believes in ghosts, spirits, potions, the zodiac, what to eat and not eat, all that mumbo jumbo—”

May snorts in disgust and irritation. “Remember when I made the mistake of saying I had a cold and she brewed me a tea of ginger and dried scallions to clear my chest and made me breathe steamed vinegar to relieve my congestion? That was disgusting!”

“But it worked.”

“Yes,” May admits, “but now she wants me to go to the herbalist to make me more fertile and attractive to the boy-husband. She tells me that the Sheep and the Boar are among the most compatible of the signs.”

“Mama always said that the Boar has a pure heart, that it has great honesty and simplicity.”

“Vern’s simple all right.” May shudders. “I’ve tried, you know. I mean …” She hesitates. “I sleep in the same bed with him. Some people would say the boy’s lucky to have me there. But he won’t do anything, even though he has everything below that he needs.”

She lets that hang in the air for me to consider. We’re both killing time here in this horrible limbo, but anytime I think things are bad for me, all I have to do is think about my sister in the next room.