Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls 1)

Billings nods to Sanders, who stands. “We’re going to leave you now, Mr. Louie, but we can’t let these discussions go on much longer. Either you tell us what we want to know or we’re going to take a closer look at your kid. Understand?”

After they leave, Joy runs to her father’s chair, sinks beside it, and sobs in his lap. “Why are they doing this to us? Why? Why?”

I kneel next to my daughter, put my arms around her, and search Sam’s face, looking for the hope and strength he’s always carried there.

“I left home to earn a living,” Sam says, his voice far away, his eyes peering into the darkness of despair. “I came to America to make a chance for myself. I did the best I could—”

“Of course you did.”

He looks at me in resignation. “I don’t want to be deported back to China,” he says hopelessly.

“You won’t have to go back.” I put a hand on his arm. “But if it comes to that, I’ll go with you.”

His eyes shift to mine. “You’re a good woman, but what about Joy?”

“I’ll go with you too, Daddy. I know all about China, and I’m not afraid.”

As we huddle together, something Z.G. said long ago comes into my mind. I remember him talking about ai kuo, the love for your country, and ai jen, the emotion you feel for the person you love. Sam fought fate and left China, and even after everything that’s happened he hasn’t stopped believing in America, but he loves Joy above all else.

“I okay,” he says in English, patting his daughter’s head. Then he switches back to his native Sze Yup. “You two go see about Uncle Vern. Hear him in there? He needs help. He’s scared.”

Joy and I stand up. I wipe my daughter’s tears. As Joy starts for Vern’s bedroom, Sam grabs my hand. One of his fingers loops up and through my jade bracelet, holding me in place, showing me how much he loves me. “Don’t worry, Zhen Long,” he says. When he releases me, he stares at his hand for a second, rubbing his daughter’s tears between his fingers.

Vern is terribly upset when I get to his room. He mumbles incoherently about Mao’s Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and how the Chairman’s now condemning to death everyone he encouraged to criticize the government. Vern’s so confused he can’t separate that from what he overheard in our living room. As he rambles and rails—and he’s so distressed that he’s messed his diaper and every time he squirms or pounds his fists on the bed, a disgusting odor fills my nostrils—I wish my sister were here. I wish for maybe the ten thousandth time that she would take care of her husband. It takes Joy and me a long time to calm Vern and get him cleaned. When we leave the room, Sam’s gone.

“We need to talk about this group you’re a member of,” I say to Joy “but let’s wait until your father returns.”

She doesn’t defer to me or apologize. She says with the absolute certainty of youth and being raised in America, “We’re all citizens, and it’s a free country. They can’t do anything to us.”

I sigh. “Later. We’ll do this later with your father.”

I head to my bedroom bathroom to get the smell of Vern off me. I wash my hands and my face in the basin, and when I lift my head I see in the mirror’s reflection over my shoulder into the closet…

“Sam!” I scream.

I run to the closet, where Sam hangs. I put my arms around his swaying legs and lift them to take the weight off his neck. Everything turns black before my eyes, my heart scatters like light dust, and my ears buzz with my horrified screams.

The Boundless Human Ocean

I DON’T LET go of Sam until Joy gets a stool and a knife and cuts him down. I don’t leave his side when the people come and take him to the funeral parlor. I give Sam’s body as much care as possible, touching him with all the love and tenderness I couldn’t show him when he was alive. Then May picks me up from the funeral parlor and takes me home. In the car, she says, “You and Sam were like a pair of mandarin ducks, always together. Like a pair of chopsticks, evenly matched, always in harmony.” I thank her for the traditional words, but they don’t help me.

I stay up all night. I hear Vern tossing in the next room and May quietly comforting my daughter on the screened porch, but eventually the house and everyone in it stills. Fifteen buckets drawing water from the well, seven moving up and eight going down, meaning I’m filled with anxiety, doubts, and an absolute inability to fall asleep, where my dreams will haunt me. I stand at the window, a slight breeze ruffling my nightgown. The moonlight feels as though it shines on me alone. It has been said that marriages are arranged by Heaven, that destiny will bring even the most distantly separated people together, that all is settled before birth, and no matter how much we wander from our paths, no matter how our fortunes change—for good or bad—all we can do is accomplish the decree of fate. This, in the end, is our blessing and our heartbreak.

Regrets scorch my skin and burrow into my heart. I didn’t do enough of the husband-wife thing with Sam. I looked at him too often as a mere rickshaw puller. I let my longing for the past make him feel that he was never enough, that our life together was never enough, that Los Angeles was never enough. Worst, I didn’t help him enough in his final days. I should have fought harder against the FBI, the INS, and this whole immigration mess. Why didn’t I see that he could no longer carry the weight of our burdens across his iron fan?

In the early morning, avoiding the screened porch, I go out the front door and around to the back of the house. I know that too many suicides haunt our community, but it feels like Sam’s death has added a new grain of salt to the boundless human ocean of misery and sorrow. Beyond my rose-covered chain-link fence, I imagine my neighbors languishing and expressing the sorrows of the ages. In that moment of quiet and grief I know what I have to do.

I go back to my room, find a photograph of Sam, and take it to the family altar that he cared for in the living room. I place his picture next to those of Yen-yen and Father. I look at the other things Sam placed on the altar to represent the others we’ve lost: my parents, his parents, brothers and sisters, and our son. I hope for Sam that his version of the afterworld exists and that he’s with all of them now, looking down from the Viewing Terrace, watching me, Joy, May, and Vern. I light incense and bow three times. No matter what I feel about my one God, I promise that I’ll do this every day until I die and I meet Sam either in his Heaven or in mine.

I’m a one-Goder, but I’m Chinese too, so I follow both traditions for Sam’s funeral. A Chinese funeral—that most significant of rites—is the last time we show respect to the person who’s left us, give him the honor to save face, and tell the young about the accomplishments and deeds of their newest ancestor. I want all that for Sam. I choose the suit he’ll wear to rest in his coffin. I place photographs of Joy and me in his pockets, so he’ll have us with him when he goes to Chinese Heaven. I make sure that Joy, May, Vern, and I all wear black—not Chinese white. We say prayers of thanks for the gift of Sam, blessings and forgiveness for the living, and mercy for all. There’s no brass band, just Bertha Hom at the organ, playing “Amazing Grace,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and “America the Beautiful.” Then we have a simple, modest, mournful banquet at Soochow of five tables—-just fifty people, minuscule compared with Father Louie’s funeral, even smaller than Yen-yen’s memorial, all a result of the fear our neighbors, friends, and customers feel. You can always count on people to crowd your party when you are in glory, but you should never dream of people sending you charcoal in the snow. I sit at the main table between my sister and my daughter. They do and say all the right things, but both of them ooze guilt: May for not being there when it happened, Joy for believing that she caused her father’s suicide. I know I should tell them not to feel these things. No one, no one, could have predicted Sam would do this crazy thing. But in doing it, he released Joy, the uncles, and me from further investigation. As Agent Billings told me when he came by the house after Sam died, “With your husband and father-in-law gone, we can’t prove anything one way or the

other. And it turns out we may have been wrong about that group your daughter joined. This has to be good news for you, but a little advice: when your daughter goes back to school in September, tell her to stay away from all Chinese organizations, just to be on the safe side.” I looked at him and said, “My father-in-law was born in San Francisco. My husband was always a citizen.”

How could I be so clear with the INS man but not know how to talk to my sister or console my daughter? I know they’re both in pain, but I can’t help them. I need them to help me. But even when they try—by bringing me cups of tea, by showing me their red and puffy eyes, by sitting on my bed as I weep—I find myself filled with immense sadness and … rage. Why did my daughter have to join that group? Why didn’t she show her father proper respect in his last few weeks? Why did my sister always encourage Joy’s American side about clothes and haircuts and attitudes? Why didn’t my sister help Sam and me more during these difficulties? Why didn’t she take care of her husband—for all these years but especially on the day of Sam’s death? If she’d been taking care of him, as a proper wife should, then I would have been able to stop Sam. I know this is just my grief speaking. It’s easier to feel anger at them than agony at Sam’s death.

Violet and her husband, also at our table, pack up the leftover food for me to take home. Uncle Wilburt says good-bye. Uncle Fred, Mariko, and the girls go home. Uncle Charley lingers for a long time, but what can he say? What can any of them say? I nod, shake their hands in the American way, and thank them for coming, doing my best to be a proper widow. A widow …

DURING THE MOURNING period, people are supposed to visit, bring food, and play dominoes, but just as with the funeral, most of our friends and neighbors stay away. The gossips smack their lips, but they don’t understand that my troubles could become their troubles at any time. Only Violet dares to visit. For the first time in my life I’m grateful that there’s someone besides May to comfort me.