Outrun the Moon (3 page)

The shop occupies one corner of the manufacturing plant, a brick structure that spans the whole block. A bay window provides a view of perfect rounds of chocolate arrayed neatly on cake stands. Jack stares at the bounty without blinking. Each
morsel looks to be dressed for Easter Mass with sugar bows, flowers, and little polka dots. Bet they charge a sweet premium for those bitty flourishes.

“This is the best thing I've ever seen,” says Jack, practically drooling.

“Come on, then.”

The smell of burned sugar assaults us as I open the door. At our entry, Madame Du Lac looks up from behind the counter, and her small mouth seems to recede deeper into her face.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy, and yet her instant dislike puts straw down my back.

The fleshy customer she is with stops jabbering to frown at us, then continues her monologue at a reduced volume. Too bad the marble floors amplify sound.

“Used to cost two dollars to wash 'em. Now she wants three—I'll take five nougats, and four more honeys—and to pile on the agony, she wants a carriage to pick her up. South of the Slot, too! Do I look like I'm swimming in gold?—no need for the ribbon; save yourself the trouble—How are we supposed to eat paying that?”

Jack tugs my dress, and I bend so that our faces are even. “Choose the one you want, but don't touch anything.”

With a solemn nod, he stuffs his hands in his pockets as if he doesn't trust them. He wanders around the room, peering into the glass cases and up at the shelves.

Madame Du Lac passes a look to a girl, who couldn't be older than me, working so quietly behind the counter that I didn't notice her at first. Perfect ears like pink seashells hold back blond
plaits that cascade down her starched apron. Her violet eyes are as insolent as the cow I found chewing up the Garden of Purity at the cemetery. She goes to stand by Jack, probably to make sure he doesn't pinch anything.

My toes curl. Even the shopgirls outrank us.

Finally, the fleshy customer leaves in a cloud of perfume. Madame Du Lac points her chin in my direction and says in an arctic voice, “We are closing.”

Jack crooks his finger at a chocolate that looks like a domino. The shopgirl languidly produces tongs from her apron.

“Just a minute, Elodie,” says Madame Du Lac. “That will be twenty cents,” she says to me.

Twenty cents?
I could buy twenty Li'l Betties for that.

A smile creeps up the girl's face when she sees my expression, and I'm tempted to smack it off her.

“Which ones cost five cents?” I ask stiffly.

Madame Du Lac points to a dish of chocolate-covered peanuts on the counter. “You may get two
cacahouètes
.”

Caca-what? Even the peanuts here are pretentious.

Jack, bless his sweet face, doesn't let his disappointment show but creeps to the counter and tentatively holds out his hand. When the woman makes no move to dispense the treats, I realize she's waiting for me to pay. I begin to cook from the inside out and remind myself that
The Book for Business-Minded Women
says one must remain unsinkable in the face of adversity, like a cork in a barrel of water.

I step to the counter and plunk down my nickel. Thanks to the shoes, I have a good three inches on the shop owner. She
squints at the coin without picking it up. Maybe she thinks it's stolen, or that it will give her the bubonic plague.

After another moment's hesitation, she scoops it up to deposit into her brass register. I gloat. We are not so different after all, you stale old pastry. You might have more lace around your collar, but deep in our basements, we both speak the language of cold hard cash.

Holding an abalone spoon high, as if afraid Jack will contaminate it, Madame Du Lac deposits two minuscule nuts onto his palm. The nuggets nearly drop, but he snatches his fist closed. He offers one to me, but I shake my head, forcing a smile. I want to take those peanuts and stick them up her nose.

For a moment, the only sound is the crunching in Jack's mouth.

I clear my throat, trying to remember the words I prepared and the reason I stuffed my feet into these blasted cages of torture. “Madame, my name is Mercy Wong. I wondered if I might speak to your husband about a matter of personal importance.”

Her eyes ice over. “What matter could someone like you have with my husband?”

“St. Clare's School for Girls. I am most interested in becoming a student, and as your husband is president of the board”—which I learned after requesting a brochure under a false name—“I was hoping to—”

“
You?
” She looks me up and down.

I wonder which part she objects to most: the slant of my eyes, the look of the only dress I own, or the cast of my “bilious” skin, as some have called it.

“St. Clare's does not take riffraff. They have standards.” Her eyes flick to my calloused hands resting on the counter, and I snatch them away. The shopgirl, Elodie, returns to her chair but keeps an eye on me.

I remind myself to be unsinkable. “I can do the work. I graduated from the Oriental Public School with the highest marks.”

“
Impossible,
” Madame Du Lac pronounces in French. “It is time for you to leave.”

Jack looks to me for guidance.

I strain to keep my emotions in check and produce the small bundle from my pocket. “It's a pity”—I untie the handkerchief, letting the corners drop open just enough to give her a peek at the
chuen pooi
bulb inside—“after bringing this all the way here.”

The woman's crinkled lids peel back, and she draws in a breath. “Is that—?”

“Yes, it is. A nice chunk like this is hard to come by.” I owe Tom at least a year's worth of haircuts for this.

Her carriage loosens like parchment unrolling. She glances uneasily toward the shopgirl, who has given up the pretense of writing. “Elodie, leave us,
s'il te plaît
.”

Elodie peaks an eyebrow, then sets down her quill and exits through a back door.

Despite the gray streaking her mostly blond hair and the wrinkles around her mouth, Madame is still a daisy, with delicate cheekbones and the kind of slender neck that was made for a pearl choker. Most women who seek
chuen pooi
already possess more than their share of beauty, a gift that becomes a crutch to them in later years.

Used primarily for coughs,
chuen pooi
is also known to fade freckles and lighten the complexion. Madame Du Lac twice asked Tom's father to sell her some, but he refused. It is against his principles to sell the expensive herb for vanity's sake. According to Tom, Madame even faked a cough.

“How do I know that's the real thing?” she says regally, her aquiline nose flaring.

“You don't. Let's go, Jack.” I pocket the
chuen pooi
and pull him to the door. It is an act, but one I take great pleasure in delivering. We have suffered too much insult not to milk this moment for all the cream.

Before I touch the door handle, Madame says, “
Arrêtez.
”

I exhale a pretend sigh and crook my ear in her direction without turning around.

“Perhaps there is room for a discussion.”

Not good enough by a mile. I clasp the brass knob. Her shoes clack toward us.

She favors one side when she walks, the way people do when they are nursing an injury. “Surely you can't expect my husband to admit you just like that.”

“No. All I ask is for a meeting to introduce myself.”

As I peer down at her, she crosses her arms and bristles. “He will be at the school Monday at noon. I shall tell him to expect you.”

I begin to leave, but she clears her throat loudly. “The herb, please. You will understand if I do not trust you.”

Smiling, I pluck the bulb from my handkerchief and drop it into her waiting hand.

She colors when she sees the full glory of its suggestive shape. “But how do I make a preparation?”

“I will give instructions to your husband on Monday. You will understand if I do not trust you.”

Creases form around her mouth. She casts a dark look at Jack, as if he must be to blame. For that, I needle her further. “And my brother really wanted this one.” I cross to the plate with the domino bonbon and lift off the glass lid. “You don't mind, do you?”

Madame Du Lac's bony chest pigeons, probably filling her lungs for a good spouting off. But then she nods, lips pursed tight.

I'm about to pick out the nicest one with my bare fingers when Jack says, “N-n-no, thank you.” He tugs at his collar. “They're not as good as Li'l Betties.”

Madame turns as red as a strawberry. I do not laugh, though the effort gives me a stitch in the side. Replacing the lid, I chirp, “Good day, Madame.”

Mrs. Lowry says a good businesswoman should always leave with a smile, even when her company looks fit to spit.

JACK'S LUNGS GROW WHEEZY ON THE return trek, and I lift him onto my back.

“I want to walk,” he gasps.

“One day, I'll be an old woman, and I'll need you to carry me. I'm paying my debts in advance.”

When Jack was barely three and I was twelve, I overheard Ma say that Jack's life would be short. That was the only time I'd ever seen Ba almost cuff her. “Never speak of such nonsense again,” he roared before storming out of our flat.

Despite Ma's reputation, the odds of her fortune-telling being accurate were even worse than winning at the
fan-tan
, a popular game of chance, but her pronouncement gathered the scattered ends in my still-developing brain into one tight fist. I would never let anything happen to Jack. And as he grew older and his lungs failed to develop, I grew even more determined that he should not inherit the launderer's life, whose hard labor was surely a shortcut to an early grave.

But what could a mere girl, a
Chinese
girl no less, do?

Mrs. Lowry's book gave me the answer. It wasn't just a book on how to run a business; it was a philosophy. She said that your
circumstances don't determine where you can go, only your starting point. Despite being mostly blind, she managed to get her family's sharecropping debt paid off by the time she was sixteen. If a blind woman could become the wealthiest female landowner in Texas, surely I could make enough money for Ba to retire and my family to live in comfort.

By the time we reach Montgomery Street, I no longer feel my toes. Fog has rolled in, blotting out the last dregs of sunlight. The Ferry Building's spire at the Embarcadero points a challenging finger at a low-lying cloud. It must be near six o'clock. Ba will already be eating dinner. I limp down Stockton, hoping Ma hasn't started worrying. She always says all the rodents come out of their holes at night.

The front door to our flat looks east toward the Ferry Building a mile away and is unpainted so as not to hide the elemental wood. An eight-sided mirror is placed above the door to ward off evildoers.

Jack raps on the door.
“A-Ma!”

We hear Ma fumble with the rope that ties our door to the wall. The old cigar man squints down from three stories above, sucking on a pipe that hasn't been lit since 1904. Ma insisted we live in this particular flat because of the good feng shui, not to mention we don't have to haul water upstairs. But our Catholic Ba couldn't care less about feng shui. He thought our ground-floor location made it easier for burglars to access. We've never had a burglar in the years we've lived here, but we've had worse—tourists who barge in for a peep of how the barbarians
live. Once, they caught Ma cutting her toenails, and she chased them out with a cleaver, which I'm sure only confirmed their suspicions about us.

The door pushes open, and Ma greets us with her usual cluck of the tongue. Like most fortune-tellers, her round face never betrays much emotion, but her clucks are a gauge of her mood. Today they say she's glad to see us.

“So late,” she says in Cantonese, patting the sweat off my brow with her dish towel. She speaks some English but never with us, since she doesn't want us to forget our village dialect.

Behind her, Ba methodically shovels in his dinner at our only table, a simple teakwood square where Ma reads fortunes. Jack and I call greetings to him, and he grunts in response. Every day, he works from one to five, comes home for dinner, then returns to the laundry for a twelve-hour shift, six to six, before sleeping from six to one. It's illegal to operate a laundry after six p.m.—just another of the absurd laws enacted to make life as difficult as possible for Chinese. But there's no other way to make ends meet.

“How was the chocolate?” Ma casts me a sideways glance.

“Bittersweet,” I say in English.

“Close the door.” A door open too long depletes a room of its energy.

After retying the door closed, I collapse onto a thin bench while Ma works off my boots. The citrusy scent of our pomelo, a cabbage-sized grapefruit, floats from its seat on the offering mantel.

Ma frowns when she sees the state of my feet. “You should
not have worn these. You need cold water.” I let her fetch it, not sure my feet can be pushed any further now that they've had a taste of the cool cement floors.

“I'm hungry.” Jack stares longingly at the bowls of
juk
.

Ma inspects Jack's hands front and back. They're still damp from where we washed them at the community pump. “Hungry enough to eat a cow or a bear?”

“Hungry enough to eat a cow
and
a bear.”

“Too bad,
dai-dai
,” says Ma, using the word for “little brother.” She shakes out his jacket with a snap of her wrist. “We have only rice.”

Minutes later, I'm sitting at the table with Ma, Jack, and Ba, feet planted in a bowl of cold water and shoveling in my own dinner. Jack stirs his
juk
, looking for any surprise bits of meat. His brow crimps when he finds only vegetables, but he dives in nonetheless. We used to eat more meat before I lost my job at the cemetery. Cups of ox bone broth, always simmering on our community stoves, help to fill any remaining spaces in our stomachs.

“What's that mean,
bittersweet
?” asks Ba in Cantonese, his voice soft but gravelly. “You get into that school or not?”

I cringe a little at his disapproving tone. “Not yet. But I have an appointment with the school board president on Monday. Don't worry, Ba. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part.” I project more confidence than I feel.

“Do not get your foot stuck. It is easier to catch a phoenix feather than to get into that school.” Ba's eyes become smaller, and it's hard to see the shape of his thoughts.

After my graduation from the Oriental Public School, he slipped me a red envelope with a quarter in it and said, “You may no longer be in school, but you must never stop learning. We need to be as smart as the white ghosts.”

I started work right after graduation—first sweeping graves, and then, when that ended, helping Ba at the laundry during the hours his assistant wasn't there. While I worked, I schemed for ways to break Jack free from the cycles of rinse, wash, and repeat. Hard work wasn't enough to get rich, or else we'd already be living in a mansion on Nob Hill with cut-glass windows like those of Leland Stanford or Mark Hopkins. No, the key to wealth was opportunity. And if opportunity didn't come knocking, then Mrs. Lowry says you must build your own door.

“How will we get the money for this fancy school?”

“I am going to propose they offer me a scholarship.”

“I don't want
their
money. I just want the white ghosts to stop taking
our
money. Every day they find something new to tax. Tax the clothespins, tax the socks, tax the holes in the socks.” Ba glares at his cracked red hands.

Jack sits very still, glancing between us. Ma stirs her bowl of fortune-telling beans with her finger, taking in everything with a look of serenity.

I stifle my annoyance, which jabs like a bone in my craw. “You told me to keep learning.”

“Yes, keep learning, but not at the white ghosts' school.”

“There are no high schools in Chinatown.”

The two grooves between his nose and mouth flatten.

“Do you want us to be stuck here all our lives?” I press. “The
brochure says St. Clare's is on par with the Men's Wilkes College. Think of the things I'll learn—”

“If you get in.”

“When I graduate—”

“
If
you graduate
 . . .”
His hand curls up on the table, like a crouching spider.

“I
will
graduate. And then I will start a fine company.”

Unlike some of my other ideas, Tom thinks my plan to bring Chinese herbs to the American market is sound. With his herbal expertise, I want to develop a line of American-friendly herbal teas with catchy names like “Strong as an Elephant Heart” and “Float Away like Dandelion Puff.” For all their disdain of Chinese people, Americans certainly like our goods—silks, teas, porcelain—and Ah-Suk gets a fair share of tourists poking around his store for alternatives to the laudanum that Western doctors prescribe for everything. “Once my business takes off, you and Ma can buy a house on Nob Hill.”

He laughs. “What makes you think they'd let us move to Nob Hill?”

“The shrimp peeler did it.” One of Ma's old clients found a gold nugget the size of a baby's foot after she told him to expect metal in his future. It was enough to pry a three-story house off a Dutchman.

Ba snorts. “The shrimp peeler died before he signed the papers and saved himself much heartache.” He looks pointedly at Ma, who hadn't predicted that part of his fortune. She shrugs.

“Why?” squeaks Jack, wispy eyebrows shaped into question marks. “Why can't we move to Nob Hill?”

Ma places our empty dishes into a wooden bucket. “To bed,
dai-dai
.”

Jack hesitates. But after one look at our parents, with their lips clamped tight as crab pincers, he scampers into the room where he sleeps with Ma. Because of his irregular schedule, Ba sleeps there only after Jack has awoken, while I always sleep on a bedroll by the stove.

After the door closes, Ba says, “Why can't you start your
fine
company without that school?”

“If I graduate from one of the white ghosts' best schools, doors will open. It will give me credibility. Also, I'd make connections, and Mrs. Lowry says connections are like roots that help a tree—”

“Mrs. Low-ree.” Ba says her name in English. “This does not sound Chinese.”

“She's not Chinese.”

“Exactly.” Ba plucks up one of Ma's red beans and spins it on the table. “You go to that school, you will start wanting what you cannot have. One day, you will marry the herbalist's son. It is not prudent for wives to be better than their husbands. People will believe you are trying to outshine him, or worse, that he is not a good provider. Wives should be meek.”

My argument dies on my tongue. Was it possible Tom grew strange on me because he, in fact,
does
want a meek wife? Someone with tiny “lotus blossom” feet who will confine herself to the home, fold dumplings, and chop the knots out of his back?

Ma's face has become as expressionless as cardboard.

“You don't think she should go there, do you?” Ba asks.
Chinese men don't usually solicit the opinion of their wives, but Ba respects Ma's wisdom, even if he doesn't respect her fortune-telling.

She glances at my burning face. “I think jade needs polishing before it can become useful.”

His eyes flit around while he thinks, and then he shakes his head. “Too much polishing risks cracking, and then it becomes useless.”

I sit very still in my chair, though anger seeps through my every pore. “This is important. Jack deserves to be more than a launderer.” I know my words will wound, but it is the only way I can make him hear me.

Ba winces. The few remaining hairs on his head quiver, and his face starts to match his hands. “This is not the way to do it!” He pounds his fist down, and his cup of broth falls to the floor with a sickening crack. He pushes away from the table and strides out the door.

“Ay, his hat!” Ma grabs his wool knit cap from the table and rushes out after him.

A bitter taste spreads over my mouth, and my own warm broth does little to soothe my irritation. With a sigh, I grab a rag and clean up the broken glass.

It can't be easy for Ba to have a headstrong daughter like me. And in some ways, I am lucky. Of the five girls who stayed in school until the eighth grade, three already have auspicious dates chosen for their weddings. But Ba never pushes me to settle down, perhaps because he's happy to have my help, or because Ma has convinced him there will be time for marriage
later. Wives are highly sought after in Chinatown, even one with cheeks like mine. But though he might be unconventional, that does not mean Ba wants me associating with whites. After all,
they
are the reason we are packed tight as cigars in Chinatown. They are the reason Jack's lungs didn't develop.

Ma returns, the cap still in her hands. She hangs it on a hook, then pulls another rag from a drawer to give the floor a second wiping.

“I'm sorry, Ma. I will cancel the meeting.”

She sits heavily on her chair,
tsk
ing her tongue. With the blunt end of a chopstick, she pushes at trigger points in her palm. “Your father wants you to go to school. He is just afraid for you.”

“He doesn't have to be. I can handle myself.” Just this morning, I dangled a hundred feet up in the air and somehow landed on my feet.

I think she's about to chastise me, but to my surprise, her gaze turns thoughtful. “Yes, I believe you can. I have foreseen that something propitious will happen for you this year. Maybe you will accomplish something great and bring prestige to your ancestors.” Chinese believe that our actions in this life affect the quality of our ancestors' afterlives. “Maybe it is the school. I will speak to your father.”

“Thank you, Ma,” I murmur gratefully, even though neither Ba nor I take Ma's fortunes seriously. When I was seven, I dropped my chopsticks on the floor, and Ma told me that doing so disturbed the ancestors buried in the earth. I wasted a whole year walking in zigzag lines to trick them into not following me.

Ma brightens. “Or maybe you will get a job at the Chinese Telephone Exchange.” To her, our lives would be set if I nabbed one of the highly coveted positions. To me, pulling switches sounded as exciting as pulling weeds. “Whatever happens, remember to be strong for your father. He will need the iron in your eyes.” She searches my metal-gray irises for the inner strength she has assured me lies in them.