Authors: Lisa See
Yen-yen joins in the laughter, but before we move to the next table she hands Joy to me. Then she takes May’s arm and begins to walk, rattling off several sentences in Sze Yup. “Don’t let all these men bother you. They’re lonely for their wives back home. They’re lonely for wives they don’t even have! You came here with your sister. You helped bring this baby to us. You’re a brave girl.” Yen-yen stops in the aisle and waits for me to finish translating. When I come to the end, she takes May’s hands in her own. “You can be freed from one thing, but that only puts you in a tight spot somewhere else. Understand?”
It’s late by the time we get back to the apartment. We’re all tired, but Old Man Louie isn’t done with us.
“Give me your jewelry,” he says.
His demand shocks me. Wedding gold belongs to the bride alone. It’s the secret treasure she can draw on to buy herself a special treat without her husband’s criticism or use in times of emergency, as our mother did when Baba lost everything. Before I can protest, May says, “These things are ours. Everyone knows that.”
“I think you are mistaken,” he asserts. “I’m your father-in-law. I’m the master here.” He could say he doesn’t trust us, and he’d be right. He could accuse us of wanting to use the gold to find a way out of here, and he’d be right. Instead, he adds, “Do you think you and your sister—smart and clever as you think you are with your Shanghai city ways—will know where to go tonight with that baby girl? Will you know where to go tomorrow? The blood of your father has ruined you both. This is why I can buy you for such a low price, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to lose my goods so easily.”
May looks at me. I’m the older sister. I’m supposed to know what to do, but I’m completely confused by what we’re seeing and experiencing. Not once has anyone asked why we didn’t meet the Louies in Hong Kong on the appointed date, what we’ve been through, how we survived, or how we got to America. All Old Man Louie and Yen-yen care about is the baby and the bracelets, Vernon is in a world of his own, while Sam seems oddly removed from his family’s interactions. They appear to have no concern for us one way or the other, yet it feels as if we’ve been caught in a fisherman’s net. We can wiggle and continue to breathe, but there’s no escape that I can see. Not yet anyway.
We let the old man take our jewelry, but he doesn’t ask for the money hidden in our
lai see
. Maybe he knows that would be too much. But I feel no sense of triumph, and I can see May doesn’t either. She stands in the middle of the room, looking defeated, sad, and very much alone.
Everyone takes a turn going down the hall to the toilet. Old Man Louie and Yen-yen go to bed first. May stares at Vern, who pulls on the ends of his hair. When he leaves the room, May follows.
“Is there a place for the baby?” I ask Sam.
“Yen-yen prepared something. I hope—” He juts his chin and lets out his breath.
I trail after him down the dark hall. Sam’s room has no windows. A single bare lightbulb hangs from the center of the ceiling. A bed and a dresser take up most of the space. The bottom drawer has been pulled open and packed with a soft blanket for Joy to sleep on. I lay her down and look around. I see no closet, but a corner has been draped with a piece of cloth to offer a little privacy.
“My clothes?” I ask. “The ones your father took after we were married?”
Sam stares at the floor. “They’re already at China City. I’ll take you there tomorrow and maybe he’ll let you have some things.”
I don’t know what China City is. I don’t know what he means about my maybe being allowed to take my clothes, because my mind is stuck on something else altogether: I have to get in bed with the man who is my husband. Somehow in all of May’s and my planning, we didn’t think about this part. Now I stand in the room as paralyzed as May had just been.
Even in the cramped space, Sam busies himself He opens a jar of something pungent, gets on his hands and knees, and pours it into four tin lids wedged under the bed legs. When he’s done, he sits back on his haunches, screws the jar shut, and says, “I use kerosene to keep away the bedbugs.”
Bedbugs!
He takes off his shirt and belt and drapes them on a hook behind the curtain. He plops on the edge of the bed and stares at the floor. After what seems a long while, he says, “I’m sorry about today.” After several more minutes, he adds, “I’m sorry about everything.”
I remember how bold I was the night of our wedding. That person was as audacious and reckless as a woman warrior of ancient times, but that girl was defeated in a shack somewhere between Shanghai and the Grand Canal.
“It’s too soon after the baby,” I manage to say.
Sam looks up at me with his sad, dark eyes. Finally, he says, “I think you’ll prefer the side of the bed closest to our Joy.”
Once he slips under the covers, I pull the string for the light, take off my shoes, and then lie down on top of the blanket. I’m grateful that Sam doesn’t try to touch me. After he falls asleep, I reach into my pockets and finger the
lai see
.
WHAT’S THE FIRST
impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your
lai see
, as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class, standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth?
What stays with me most are the feelings of loss, unsettlement, unease, and a longing for the past that cannot be relieved. This isn’t just because my sister and I are new to this strange and foreign place. It’s as though every person in Chinatown is a refugee. No one here is a Gold Mountain man—rich beyond imagining—not even Old Man Louie. On Angel Island, I learned about his ventures and the value of his merchandise, but they mean nothing here, where everyone is poor. People lost their jobs during the Depression. Those lucky enough to have families sent them back to China, because it was cheaper to provide for them there than to feed and house them here. When the Japanese attacked, those families returned. But no new money is being made and conditions are even more cramped and unsettled than ever, or so I’m told.
Five years ago, in 1933, most of Chinatown was torn down to make room for a new railroad station, which is being built on that huge construction site we saw when Sam brought us here on the streetcar. People were given twenty-four hours to move—far less than what May and I had when we left Shanghai—but where could they go? The law says that Chinese can’t own property and most landlords won’t rent to Chinese either, so people cram into buildings and squeeze into rooms in the last few buildings of the original Chinatown, where we live, or in the City Market Chinatown, which caters to produce growers and sellers, many blocks and a culture away from here. Everyone—including me—misses their families in China, but when I pin the photographs that May and I brought with us on my bedroom wall, Yen-yen yells at me. “You stupid girl! You want to get us in trouble? What happens if the immigration inspectors come? How are you going to explain who those people are?”
“They’re my parents,” I say. “And that’s May and me when we were little. These things are not a secret.”
“Everything is a secret. You see pictures of anyone here? Now take those down and hide them before I throw them away.”
That’s my first morning, and soon I discover that, although I’m in a new land, in many ways it’s as though I’ve taken a giant step back in time.
The Cantonese word for
wife—fu yen—
is composed of two elements. One part means
woman
and the other part means
broom
. In Shanghai, May and I had servants. Now I am the servant. Why just me? I don’t know. Maybe because I have a baby, maybe because May doesn’t understand when Yen-yen tells her to do something in Sze Yup, or maybe because May isn’t perpetually scared that we’ll be found out, that we’ll be disgraced—she for bearing a child that’s not her husband’s and I for being unable ever to have babies of my own—and that we’ll be discarded in the street. So every morning after Vern goes to his ninth-grade classes at Central Junior High and May, Sam, and the old man go to China City I stay in the apartment to scrub on a washboard sheets, stained underwear, Joy’s diapers, and the sweaty clothes of the uncles, as well as those of the bachelors who stay with us periodically. I empty the spittoon and put out extra containers for the shells of the watermelon seeds my in-laws nibble. I wash the floors and the windows.
While Yen-yen teaches me to make soup by boiling a head of lettuce and pouring soy sauce over it or prepare lunch by taking a bowl of rice, slathering lard on top, and sprinkling on soy sauce to cover the taste, my sister goes exploring. While I shell walnuts with Yen-yen to sell to restaurants or swab the bathtub ring the old man leaves after his daily soak, my sister meets people. While my mother-in-law teaches me how to be a wife and mother—-jobs she does with a frustrating combination of ineptitude, good cheer, and fierce protectiveness—my sister learns where everything is.
Even though Sam said he’d take me to China City—a tourist attraction that’s being built two blocks from here—I have yet to go. But May walks over there every day to help get things ready for the Grand Opening. She tells me that soon I’ll work in the café, the antiques store, the curio shop, or whatever place Old Man Louie has told her that afternoon; I listen with a kind of wariness, knowing that I don’t have a choice about where I’ll work but that I’ll be grateful not to be doing any more piecework with Yen-yen: tying scallions in bunches, separating strawberries by size and quality, shelling those damn walnuts until my fingers are stained and cracked, or—and this is truly disgusting—growing bean sprouts in the tub in between the baths the old man takes. I stay home with my mother-in-law and Joy; my sister returns at the end of every day with tales of people with names like Peanut and Dolly. At China City, she looks through our boxes of clothes. We agreed that if we were going to live in America, then we should dress like Americans, but she stubbornly brings only
cheongsams
. She picks the prettiest ones for herself Maybe this is as it should be. As Yen-yen says, “You’re a mother now. Your sister still has to make my boy give her a son.”
Every day May tells me of her adventures, her cheeks pink from fresh air, her face lit with pleasure. I’m the older sister, and I’m suffering from red-eye disease, envy. I’ve always been the first to discover new things, but now May’s the one who reports about the shops and stores and fun things that are being planned at China City. She tells me that a lot of it is being built from used movie sets, which she describes in such detail that I’m sure I’ll recognize them all and know their backstories when I finally see them. But I can’t lie. It bothers me that she gets to be a part of the excitement, while I have to stay with my mother-in-law and Joy in the grimy apartment, where the dust floating in the air leaves me feeling suffocated and dizzy. I tell myself this is just temporary, like Angel Island was temporary, and soon—somehow—May and I will escape.
In the meantime, Old Man Louie continues to punish me for having a daughter by ignoring me. Sam mopes about with a sullen look on his face, because I refuse to do the husband-wife thing with him. Every time he approaches, I cross my arms and clasp my elbows. He slinks away as though I’ve wounded him deeply. He rarely speaks to me, and when he does it’s in the Wu dialect of the streets, like I’m beneath him. Yen-yen responds to my obvious unhappiness and frustration with a lesson on marriage: “You must get used to it.”
At the beginning of May, after we’ve been here for two weeks, my sister asks for and receives permission from Yen-yen to take Joy and me outside for a walk. “Across the Plaza is Olvera Street, where Mexican people have little shops for tourists,” May says, pointing in the general direction. “Beyond that is China City. From there, if you walk up to Broadway and turn north, you’ll feel like you’ve entered a postcard of Italy. Salami hangs in the windows and … Oh, Pearl, it’s as foreign and strange as how the White Russians lived in the French Concession.” She pauses and laughs to herself. “I almost forgot. There’s a French Concession here too. They call it French Town, and it’s on Hill Street just up one block from Broadway. They have a French hospital and cafés and … Never mind all that for now. Let’s just talk about Broadway. If you go south on Broadway, you’ll come to American movie palaces and department stores. If you go north through Little Italy, you’ll come to a whole other Chinatown that’s being built. It’s called
New
Chinatown. I’ll take you there whenever you want to go.”
But I don’t feel like going right then.
“This isn’t like Shanghai, where we were separated by race, money, and power but still saw each other every day,” May makes clear the next week, when she takes Joy and me around the block again. “We walked on the streets together, even if we didn’t go to the same nightclubs. Here everyone is separated from everyone else—Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, blacks, and Chinese. White people are everywhere, but the rest of us are at the bottom. Everyone wants to be a single rice kernel better than his neighbor. Remember in Shanghai how important it was to know English and how people prided themselves on their American or British accents? Here people are split by whose
Chinese
is better and where and from whom they learned it. Did you learn it in one of the missions here in Chinatown? Did you learn it in China? You know how it is between Sze Yup and Sam Yup speakers? One won’t talk to the other. One won’t do business with the other. If that weren’t enough, the American-born Chinese look down on people like us, calling us fresh off the boat and backward. We look down on them, because we
know
that American culture isn’t as good as Chinese culture. People stick together by name too. If you’re a Louie, you have to buy from a Louie, even if you have to pay five cents more. Everyone knows no help will come from the
lo fan
, but even a Mock, Wong, or SooHoo won’t help a Louie.”