At this, Mr. White leans over and whispers in his superior’s ear. They both shuffle through the files. Mr. White then points to something on one of the pages. Chairman Plumb nods and says, “Your alleged mother-in-law has five sons. Why did she have only sons? Why were they all born in China? Doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?”
“Actually, the youngest son was born in Los Angeles,” I offer helpfully.
Chairman Plumb gives me a look. “Why would your in-laws leave four sons in China before bringing them here?”
I’ve wondered the same thing, but I recite what I memorized: “My husband’s brothers grew up in Wah Hong Village because it was cheaper than Los Angeles. My husband was sent back to China to meet his grandparents, learn the home language and traditions, and make offerings to the Louie family ancestors on his father’s behalf.”
“Have you met the brothers?”
“Only the one named Vernon. The rest not.”
Chairman Plumb asks, “If your in-laws were together in Los Angeles, why did they wait eleven more years to have a last child?”
I don’t know the answer to this, but I pat my stomach and say, “Some women don’t take the proper herbs, eat the proper foods, or follow the proper rules for their chi to accept sons from their husbands.”
My backward-village answer satisfies my questioners for the day, but a week later their thoughts turn to my father-in-law’s occupation, trying to make sure he isn’t in the prohibited class of laborer. During the past twenty years, Old Man Louie opened several businesses in Los Angeles. Currently, he has just one store.
“What’s the name of the shop and what does he sell?” Chairman Plumb asks.
I dutifully recite my answer. “It’s called the Golden Lantern. He sells Chinese and Japanese goods, including furniture, silks, rugs, slippers, and porcelains, with a value of fifty thousand dollars.” Just having that number in my mouth is like sucking on sugarcane.
“Fifty thousand dollars?” Chairman Plumb marvels, equally impressed. “That’s a lot of money.”
Again, he and Mr. White put their heads together, this time to talk about the severity of their country’s depression. I pretend not to listen. They check Old Man Louie’s file, and I hear them say that, later this year, he plans to move his original store and open an additional two shops, a ride for tourists, and a restaurant. I rub my fake belly and feign disinterest when Mr. White explains the Louie family’s situation.
“Our colleagues in Los Angeles visit the Louies every six months,” he says. “They’ve never seen a connection between your father-in-law and a laundry, lottery, lodging house, barbershop, pool or gambling hall, or anything else objectionable. Nor has anyone ever reported seeing him do manual labor. In other words, he appears to be a merchant of good standing in the community.”
What I learn in my next interrogation, as Mr. White reads aloud in English portions of Sam’s and his father’s transcripts, which are translated into Sze Yup by yet another interpreter who’s been sent to cover the hearing, absolutely stuns me. Old Man Louie reported to inspectors that his business lost two thousand dollars a year from 1930 through 1933. That was a huge amount of money in Shanghai. Just one year’s worth of that money would have saved my family: my father’s business, the house, and May’s and my savings. Yet Old Man Louie still managed to come to China to buy wives for his sons.
“The family has to be rich with hidden wealth,” May says that night.
Still, it all seems muddled and deliberately confused and confusing. Is Old Man Louie, whose file is only slightly larger than mine after having passed through this station numerous times, as much of a liar as May and I are?
One day Chairman Plumb finally loses his patience, slams his fist on the table, and demands, “How is it that you’re claiming to be the wife of a legally domiciled merchant and the wife of an American citizen? These are two different things, and only one is needed.”
I’ve asked myself the same question many times these past months, and I still don’t know the answer.
Sisters in Blood
A COUPLE OF weeks later, I wake in the middle of the night from one of my bad dreams. Usually May is at my side, comforting me. But she isn’t there. I roll over, expecting to see her in the bunk across from mine. She isn’t there either. I lie still and listen. I don’t hear anyone weeping, whispering protective incantations, or padding across the dormitory floor, which means it has to be very late. Where’s May?
Lately, she’s had as much trouble sleeping as I do. “Your son likes to kick me as soon as I lie down and there’s no room inside me anymore for him and me. I need to go to the toilet all the time,” she confided a week ago with such tenderness—as if peeing is such a precious gift—that I couldn’t help but love her and the infant she carried for me. Still, we’ve promised each other that we won’t go alone to the toilets. I reach for my clothes and my pillow baby. Even this late at night, I can’t risk being seen not looking pregnant. I button my jacket over my fake belly and get up.
r /> She isn’t in the toilets, so I move on to the showers. When I enter, my chest freezes and my stomach clenches. The room couldn’t look more different from the one in my dreams, but there on the floor is my sister with her pants off, her face white with pain, and her private parts … exposed, bulging, frightening.
May reaches an arm out to me. “Pearl—”
I run to her side, slipping on the watery tiles.
“Your son is coming,” she says.
“You were supposed to wake me up—”
“I didn’t realize things had gone so far.”
Many times late at night or when we could separate ourselves just a bit when the missionary ladies took us for our weekly walks around the property, we’ve discussed what we’d need when the time came. We’ve made plan after plan and gone over detail after detail. In my mind I tick off the things the women we quizzed had said: you experience pains until pretty soon you feel like you’re going to fart a winter melon, you go to a corner, squat, the baby falls out, you clean it, wrap it, and then rejoin your husband in the paddies with your baby tied to you by a long cloth. Of course, all this is very different from how things were done in Shanghai, where for months women retreated from parties, shopping, and dancing before going to a Western-style hospital, where they were put to sleep. When they woke up, they’d be handed their babies. Then, for the next two or three weeks, they’d stay in the hospital, entertaining visitors and being cherished for bringing a son to the family. Finally, they’d go home in time for the one-month party to introduce the baby to the world and receive praise from family, neighbors, and friends. The Shanghai way isn’t possible here, but as May has said so many times these past few weeks, “Country women have been having babies by themselves forever. If they can do it, I can too. And we’ve been through a lot. I haven’t had a lot to eat, and what I’ve eaten, I’ve thrown up. The baby won’t be big. It will come out easily.”
We’d talked about where the baby could be born and had settled on the showers as the one place where the other women were most afraid to venture. Even so, women sometimes took showers during the day. “I won’t let the baby come out then,” May had promised.