“Our dresses are beautiful!” she cries indignantly. “They’re part of who we are! Our cheongsams were made in Shanghai. The material came f
rom Paris. They’re elegant—more elegant than anything I’ve seen here.”
“But if we sell some of our cheongsams, then we can buy new dresses—American dresses,” I say. “I’m tired of looking unfashionable, of looking like I’m fresh off the boat.”
“If we sell them,” May inquires shrewdly, “what will happen when China City reopens? Won’t Old Man Louie notice that our clothes are gone?”
Tom waves away that worry as inconsequential. “He’s a man. He won’t notice.”
But of course he will. He notices everything.
“He won’t care as long as we give him a portion of what Tom pays us,” I say, hoping I’m right.
“Just don’t give him too much.” Tom scratches his beard. “Let him think you’ll make more money if you keep coming back here.”
We sell Tom one cheongsam apiece. They’re our oldest and ugliest, but they’re splendid compared with what he has in his collection. Then we take the money and walk south on Broadway until we come to the Western department stores. We buy rayon dresses, high heels, gloves, new undergarments, and a couple of hats—all from the sale of two dresses, with enough left over that our father-in-law isn’t angry with us when we put the remaining money in his palm. That’s when May begins her campaign, teasing him, cajoling him, and, yes, even flirting with him, trying to get him to surrender to her desires just as our father did in the past.
“You like us to keep busy,” she says, “but how can we keep busy now? Bak Wah Tom says I can make five dollars a day if I work in Haolaiwu. Think how much that will be in a week! Add to that the extra I’ll make if I wear my own costume. I have plenty of costumes!”
“No,” Old Man Louie says.
“With my beautiful clothes, I might get a close-up. I’ll earn ten dollars for that. If I get to say a line—just one single line—I’ll make twenty dollars.”
“No,” Old Man Louie says again, but this time I can practically see him counting the money in his mind.
Her lower lip trembles. She crosses her arms. Her body shrinks into itself, making her appear pitiful. “I was a beautiful girl in Shanghai. Why can’t I be a beautiful girl here?”
The mountain crumbles one grain at a time. After several weeks, he finally gives in. “Once. You may do it once.”
To which Yen-yen sniffs and walks out of the room, Sam shakes his head in disbelief, and blood rushes to my face in pleasure that May’s beaten the old man just by being herself.
I don’t catch the title of May’s first movie, but since she has her own clothes, she gets to play a singsong girl instead of a peasant. She’s gone for three nights and she sleeps during the days, so I don’t hear about her experience until the shoot ends.
“I sat in a fake teahouse all night and nibbled on almond cakes,” she recalls dreamily. “The assistant director called me a cute tomato. Can you imagine?”
For days she calls Joy a cute tomato, which doesn’t make much sense to me. The next time May works as an extra, she comes back with a new phrase: “What in the H,” as in “What in the H did you put in this soup, Pearl?”
Often she comes home bragging about the food she’s eaten. “They give us two meals a day, and it’s good food—American food! I have to be careful, Pearl, truly I do or I’m going to get fat. I won’t fit into a cheongsam then. If I don’t look perfect, they’ll never give me a speaking part.” After that, she takes to dieting—dieting for someone so tiny, for someone who knows what it means not to eat because of war, poverty, and ignorance—before Tom sends her out for a job and then for days afterward to lose the imagined weight she’s gained. All this in hopes that a director will give her a line. Even I know that—except for Anna May Wong and Keye Luke, who plays Charlie Chan’s Number One Son—speaking parts go only to lo fan, who wear yellow makeup, have their eyes taped back, and affect chop-suey English.
In June, Tom comes up with a new idea, May gobbles it and then spits it out to our father-in-law, who embraces it as his own.
“Joy’s a beautiful baby,” Tom tells May. “She’ll make a perfect extra.”
“You can make more money from her than you can from me,” May relays to Old Man Louie.
“Pan-di is lucky for a girl,” the old man confides to me. “She can earn her own way and she’s only a baby.”
I’m not sure I want Joy spending so much time with her auntie, but once Old Man Louie sees he can make money from a baby, well…
“I will let her do it on one condition.” I can make a requirement because, as Joy’s mother, only I can sign the paper allowing her to work all day and sometimes at night under the supervision and care of her aunt. “She will keep everything she makes.”
Old Man Louie doesn’t like this. Why would he?
“You will never again have to buy her clothes,” I press. “You will never again pay for her food. You will never again pay one single penny for this Hope-for-a-Brother.”
The old man smiles at that.
WHEN MAY AND Joy aren’t working, they stay in the apartment with Yen-yen and me. Often, in the long afternoons as we wait for China City to reopen, I think back to stories Mama told me about when she was a girl and confined to the women’s chambers in her natal home with her bound-footed grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins, and sisters. They’d been trapped to maneuver for position, harbor resentments, and snipe at one another. Now, in America, May and Yen-yen fight like turtles in a bucket about anything and everything.