Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls 1)

“I want to go to the beach,” Vern suggests. He so rarely speaks that when he does we know he really wants something. “Take the streetcar.”

“Too far,” the old man objects.

“I don’t need to see their ocean,” Yen-yen scoffs. “Everything I want is right here.”

“You stay home,” Vern says, startling everyone in the room.

May raises her eyebrows. I can see she really wants to go, but I have no intention of dipping into our wedding money for something so frivolous, and I’ve never seen Sam with money in his hands other than at the restaurant.

“We can have a nice time here,” I say. “We can walk along the lo fan part of Broadway and look in the department store windows. Everything is decorated for Christmas. You’ll like that, Vern.”

“I want the beach,” he insists. “I want the ocean.” When no one says anything, he scrapes back his chair, trudges to his room, and slams the door. He emerges a few minutes later with several dollars crushed in his fist. “I will pay,” he says shyly.

Yen-yen tries to take the money, telling the rest of us, “A Boar and his money are easily parted, but you shouldn’t take advantage of him.”

Vern shakes her hands off his and then holds his arm above his head so she can’t reach the money. “It is a Christmas present for my brother, May, Pearl, and the baby. Mama and Baba, you stay home.”

Not only is it the most I’ve ever heard him say, but it may be the most any of us have heard him say. So we do as he wants. The five of us go to the beach, stroll on the pier, and dip our toes in the freezing Pacific. We take care not to let Joy get burned by the unseasonably bright winter sun. The water shimmers against the sky. In the distance, green hills roll into the sea. May and I go for a walk by ourselves. We let the wind and sounds of the waves wash away our worries. On the way back to where Vern and Sam sit with the baby under an umbrella, May says, “It’s sweet of Vern to do this for us.” It’s the first nice thing she’s said about him.

TWO WEEKS LATER, a group of women from United China Relief invite Yen-yen to go to Wilmington to picket the shipyards for sending scrap iron to Japan. I’m sure Old Man Louie will say no when she asks permission to accompany them, but he surprises us all. “You can go if you take Pearl and May.”

“It will leave you with too few workers,” Yen-yen says, hope that this might happen and fear that he will change his mind glossing the edges of her voice.

“No matter. No matter,” he says. “I’ll have the uncles work extra hours.”

Yen-yen would never do anything like smile broadly to let us see how happy she is, but we all hear the lilt in her voice as she asks May and me, “Will you come?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I’ll do everything I can to raise money to fight the Japanese, who’ve been brutal and systematic in their policy of “the three alls”—kill all, burn all, and destroy all. It’s my duty to help women who are being raped and killed. I turn to May. Surely she’ll want to join us, if for nothing else than that she’ll get out of China City for a day, but she shrugs off the invitation.

“What can we do? We’re only women,” she says.

But it’s because I’m a woman that I dare to go. Yen-yen and I walk to the meeting place and board a bus to drive us to the shipyards. The organizers hand us printed placards. We march, we shout our slogans, and I experience a sense of freedom, which I owe entirely to my mother-in-law.

“China is my home,” she says on the bus back to Chinatown. “It will always be my home.”

After that day, I keep a cup on the counter in the café for people to put their change. I wear a United China Relief pin on my dress. I picket to stop those scrap-iron shipments and join other demonstrations to stop the sale of aviation fuel for the monkey people’s planes. I do all this because Shanghai and China are never far from my heart.

Eating Bitterness to Find Gold

CHINESE NEW YEAR arriv

es. We follow all the traditions. Old Man Louie gives us money to buy new clothes. I put together an outfit for Joy that will celebrate her Tiger sign: a pair of baby slippers shaped like Tiger cubs and an orange-and-gold baby hat with little ears on top and a tail made from twisted embroidery thread coming out the back. May and I pick out American cotton dresses in floral prints. Then we have our hair washed and styled. At home, we take down the picture of the Kitchen God and burn it in the alley so he’ll travel to the afterworld to report on our activities during the past year. We put away knives and scissors to make sure we won’t cut our good fortune. Yen-yen makes offerings to the Louie ancestors. Her wishes and prayers are simple. “Bring a son to Boy-husband. Make that wife of his pregnant. Give me a grandson.”

In China City, we hang red gauze lanterns and couplets in red and gold paper. We arrange for dancers, singers, and acrobats to entertain children and their parents. We search out special ingredients to make holiday dishes in the café that will be Chinese in feeling but appeal to Occidental palates. We expect big crowds, so Old Man Louie hires extra help for his various enterprises, but he needs even more people to assist with what he anticipates will be the most profitable business on New Year’s Day: the rickshaw rides.

“We have to beat the people in New Chinatown,” he tells Sam on New Year’s Eve. “How can we do that if I have Mexican boys pulling my rickshaws on the most Chinese day of the year? Vern’s not strong enough, but you are.”

“I’ll be too busy in the café,” Sam says.

My father-in-law has asked Sam to pull rickshaws other times, and he always has some excuse not to do it. I can’t say what it will be like on New Year’s, but I know how busy we’ve been on other festival days. We’ve never been so overwhelmed that I haven’t been able to follow my usual routine of working in the café, the flower shop, the curio shop, and the antiques store. I know Sam’s lying, and so does Old Man Louie. Ordinarily my father-in-law’s anger would be great, but this is New Year’s, when no harsh words should be spoken.

On New Year’s morning, we dress in our new clothes, putting Chinese custom above Mrs. Sterling’s rules about wearing costumes to work. These things are factory-made, but it’s wonderful to have something fresh and Western on our skins again. Joy, who’s eleven months old, looks adorable in her Tiger hat and slippers. I’m her mother, so of course I think she’s beautiful. Her face is round like the moon. White as clean as new snow circles the black of her eyes. Her hair is wispy and soft. Her skin is as pale and translucent as rice milk.

I didn’t believe in the Chinese zodiac when Mama talked about it, but the more time that’s passed since her death, the more I understand that the things she said about May and me might have been true. Now when I hear Yen-yen talk about a Tiger’s traits, I see my daughter very clearly. Like a Tiger, Joy can be temperamental and volatile. One minute she’s brimming over with giddiness; the next she can dissolve into tears. A minute later, she might try to climb up her grandfather’s legs, wanting and getting his attention. She may be a worthless girl in his eyes—forever Pan-di, Hope-for-a-Brother—but the Tiger in her has pounced into his heart. Her temper is greater than his. I think he respects that.

I know the exact moment when New Year’s Day starts to turn rotten. While May and I fix each other’s hair in the main room, Yen-yen has Joy on her back on the floor, tickling her stomach, building anticipation by zooming in and out with her fingers and by raising and lowering her voice, only the words that come out of her mouth do not match her happy actions.

“Fu yen or yen fu?” Yen-yen asks, as Joy squeals in expectation. “Would you rather be a wife or a servant? Women everywhere would rather be a servant.”