Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls 1)

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Later that night, after everyone goes to asleep, I meet my sister on the screened porch. We sit on her bed, holding hands, staring at the magazine. As much as I love Sam, a part of me soars with the knowledge that across the ocean in Shanghai—I have to believe Z.G.’s there—in a country that is closed to me, the man I loved so long ago loves me still.

ONLY ONE WEEK later, we realize that Father’s weakness and lethargy are more than just the usual slowing of age. He’s sick. The doctor tells us it’s lung cancer and there’s nothing anyone can do. Yen-yen’s death was so sudden and it came at such an inconvenient moment that we didn’t have the opportunity to prepare for her death or mourn her properly when she passed. This time each of us in our own way reflects back on the mistakes we’ve made over the years, and we try to make amends in the time we have left. During the coming months, many people visit, and I listen to them speak highly of my father-in-law, calling him a successful Gold Mountain man, but when I look at him during these final days, I see only a ruined man. He worked so hard, only to lose his businesses and property in China and almost everything he’d built for himself here. Now, in the end, he has to rely on his paper son for his housing, food, evening pipe, and copies of China Reconstructs that Sam buys from under the counter at the shop on the corner.

Father’s only consolations in these final months, as the cancer eats his lungs, are the photographs I cut from the magazine and pin to the wall next to his recliner. So many times I see him with tears running down his sunken cheeks, staring at the country he left as a young man: the sacred mountains, the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City. He says he hates the Communists, because that’s what everyone has to say, but he still has a love of the land, art, culture, and people of China that has nothing to do with Mao, the Bamboo Curtain, or fear of the Reds. He isn’t alone in his nostalgia and desire for his homeland. Many of the old-timers, like Uncle Wilburt and Uncle Charley, come to the house and also pore over these captured images of their lost home; that’s how deep their love of China is, no matter what it’s become. But all this happens very fast, and too soon Father dies.

A funeral is the most important event in a person’s life—more significant than a birth, a birthday, or a wedding. Since Father was a man and he lived into his eighties, his funeral is much larger than Yen-yen’s. We hire a Cadillac convertible to drive through Chinatown with a large flower-wreathed photographic portrait of him propped on the backseat. The hearse driver tosses spirit money out the window to pay off malevolent demons and other lowly ghosts who might try to bar the way. A brass band trails behind the hearse, playing Chinese folks songs and military marches. At the hall for the ceremony, three hundred people bow three times to the casket and another three times to us, the grieving family members. We give coins to the mourners to disperse the sa hee— polluted air associated with death—and candy to cleanse the bitter taste of death. Everyone wears white—the color of mourning, the color of death. Then we go to Soochow Restaurant for gaai wai jau—the traditional seven-course “plain” banquet of steamed chicken, seafood, and vegetables, designed to “wash away sorrow,” wish the old man a long next life after this death, and launch us on our healing journey and encourage us to leave behind the vapors of death before returning home.

Over the next three months, women come to the house to play dominoes with May and me as we pass through the official mourning period. I find myself staring at the pictures I pinned to the wall above Father’s recliner. Somehow I can’t take them down.

Inch of Gold

“WHY CAN’T I go?” Joy demands, her voice rising. “Auntie Violet and Uncle Rowland are letting Leon go.”

“Leon’s a boy,” I say.

“It only costs twenty-five cents. Please.”

“Your father and I don’t think it’s right for a girl your age to go around town by yourself—”

“I won’t be by myself All the kids are going.”

“You’re not all the kids,” I say. “Do you want people to look at you and see porcelain with scars? You have to guard your body like a piece of jade.”

“Mom, all I want to do is go to the record hop at the International Hall.”

Yen-yen sometimes said that an inch of gold could not buy an inch of time, but only recently have I begun to understand how precious time is and how quickly it passes. It’s 1956, the summer after Joy’s high school graduation. In the fall, she’ll be attending the University of Chicago, where she plans to study history. It’s awfully far away, but we’ve decided to let her go. Her tuition has turned out to be more than we anticipated, but Joy’s received a partial scholarship and May’s going to help out too. Every day Joy asks if she can go somewhere or other. If I say yes to this record hop—whatever that is—then I’ll have to say yes to something else: the dance with the fifteen-piece orchestra, the birthday celebration in MacArthur Park, the party that will require a bus ride going and coming home.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Joy asks, not giving up. “We’re only going to play records and dance a little.”

May and I said things like that too when we were girls in Shanghai, and it didn’t work out that well for either of us.

“You’re too young for boys,” I say.

“Young? I’m eighteen! Auntie May married Uncle Vern when she was my age—”

And already pregnant, I think to myself.

Sam has tried to pacify me by accusing me of being too strict. “You worry too much,” he’s said. “She’s not aware of boy-girl interests.”

But what girl of Joy’s age isn’t aware of those things? I was. May was. Now when Joy talks back, ignores what I say, or walks out of the room when I tell her to stay, even my sister laughs at me for getting upset, saying, “We did the exact same things at that age.”

And look what it got us, I want to scream at her.

“I’ve never been to a single football game or dance,” Joy resumes her complaints. “The other girls have gone to the Palladium. They’ve gone to the Biltmore. I never get to do anything.”

“We need your help at Pearl’s and in the shop. Your auntie needs your help too.”

“Why should I help? I never get paid.”

“All the money—”

“Goes into the family pot. You’ve been saving for me to go to college. I know. I know. But I only have two months left before I leave for Chicago. Don’t you want me to have fun? This is my last chance to see my friends.” Joy folds her arms over her chest and sighs as though she’s the most burdened person in the world.

“You can do anything you want, but you have to do well in school. If you don’t want to go to school—”

“Then I’m on my own,” she finishes, reciting the line with the fatigue of centuries.