Shanghai Girls (5 page)

It’s all very awkward. Sam seems nervous about touching me, but we both do what’s expected of us. One burst of pain and it’s over. Sam stays on his elbows above me for a moment and looks into my face. I don’t meet his gaze. Instead, I stare at the braided sash that holds back the curtain. I was so intent on getting this over with that I didn’t close the curtains. Does that make me brazen or desperate?

Sam rolls off me and turns onto his side. I don’t move. I don’t want to talk, but I can’t fall asleep either. Maybe this one night and this one time won’t matter out of a lifetime of nights with my real husband, whoever he might be. But what about May?

I get up while it’s still dark, take a bath, and dress. Then I sit in a chair by the window and watch Sam sleep. He wakes with a start just before dawn. He looks around, seemingly unsure of where he is. He sees me and blinks. His features are open, raw somehow. I can guess what he’s feeling: supreme embarrassment at being in this room and something like panic that he’s naked, that I’m sitting a few feet from him, and that he somehow has to get out of the bed and get dressed. As I did the night before, I look away. He slides to what had been my side of the bed, slips out from between the sheets, and pads quickly into the bathroom. The door shuts, and I hear the tap begin to flow.

When we get to the dining room, Vern and May are already seated with Old Man Louie. May’s skin has taken on the color of alabaster—white with a green tint hidden beneath the surface. The boy scrunches the tablecloth with his fists. He doesn’t look up when Sam and I sit down, and I realize I have yet to hear Vernon speak.

“I’ve ordered already,” Old Man Louie says. He turns his attention to the waiter. “Make sure everything arrives at the same time.”

We sip our tea. No one comments on the view or the hotel’s decor or what sights these Chinese from America might take in today.

Old Man Louie snaps his fingers. The waiter returns to our table. My father-in-law—the title alone is strange to consider—motions the waiter to lean down and then whispers in his ear. The waiter straightens, purses his lips, and leaves the room. He returns a few minutes later with two maids, each carrying bundled cloth.

Old Man Louie signals one of the girls to approach and takes the bundle from her. As he pulls the fabric through his hands, I realize with absolute horror that he has the bottom sheet from either May’s or my bed. The diners around us take this in with varying degrees of interest. Most of the foreigners don’t seem to understand what’s happening, although one couple does, and they look appalled. But the Chinese in the room—from the customers to the hotel staff—seem amused and curious.

Old Man Louie’s hands stop when he comes to a bloody splotch.

“What room did this come from?” he asks the maid.

“Room three hundred seven,” the girl answers.

Old Man Louie looks from one son to the other. “Who had that room?”

“It was mine,” Sam answers.

The sheet falls from his father’s hands. He motions for May’s sheet, and he once again begins his nasty pawing. May’s lips part. She breathes softly through her mouth. The sheet keeps moving. People around us stare. Under the table, I feel a hand on my knee. It’s Sam’s. When Old Man Louie comes to the end of the sheet without finding a bloodstain, May leans over and throws up all over the table.

That ends breakfast. A car is ordered, and within minutes May, Old Man Louie, and I are on our way back to our parents’ home. Once we arrive, there’s no small talk, tea served, or words of congratulation, only recriminations. I keep my arm around May’s waist when Old Man Louie begins speaking to my father.

“We had an arrangement.” The tone is harsh and doesn’t allow room for discussion. “One of your daughters failed you.” He holds up a hand to prevent my father from offering an excuse. “I will forgive this. The girl is young and my boy …”

I’m relieved—beyond relieved—that Old Man Louie has made the assumption that my sister and Vern didn’t do what they were supposed to do last night, instead of that they did it and she wasn’t a virgin. The result of that second possibility is almost too gruesome to contemplate: an examination by a doctor. If things were found intact, then we wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now. If they weren’t, there’d be a forced confession from my sister, the dissolution of her marriage on grounds that May had already done the husband-wife thing with someone else, my father’s money problems returned to us and perhaps multiplied, our futures once again unstable, not to mention that May’s reputation would be forever marred—even in these modern times—and the chances of her marrying into a good family—like that of Tommy Hu—destroyed.

“Never mind all that,” the old man says to my father, but it feels as if he’s responding to my thoughts. “What matters is that they are married. As you know, my sons and I have business in Hong Kong. We are leaving tomorrow, but I’m concerned. What guarantee do I have that your daughters will meet us? Our ship sails to San Francisco on August tenth. That’s only seventeen days from now.”

My insides feel like they’ve fallen through the floor. Baba lied to us again! May breaks away from me and runs up the stairs, but I don’t follow her. I stare at my father, hoping he’ll say something. But he doesn’t. He wrings his hands, acting as subservient as a rickshaw puller.

“I’m taking their clothes,” Old Man Louie announces.

He doesn’t wait for Baba to argue or for me to object. When he starts up the stairs, my father and I follow. Old Man Louie opens each door until he finds the room with May crying on her bed. When she sees us, she runs into the bathroom and slams the door. We hear her vomit again. The old man opens the closet, grabs an armload of dresses, and tosses them on the bed.

“You can’t take those,” I say. “We need them for modeling.”

The old man corrects me: “You’ll need them in your new home. Husbands like to see pretty wives.”

He’s cold but unsystematic, ruthless but unknowledgeable. He either ignores our Western dresses or throws them on the floor, probably because he doesn’t know what’s fashionable in Shanghai this year. He doesn’t take the ermine wrap, because it’s white, the color of death, but he pulls out a fox stole that May and I bought used several years ago.

“Try these on,” he orders, handing me a stack of hats he’s pulled from the closet’s upper shelf. I do as I’m told. “That’s enough. You can keep the green one and that thing with the feathers. The rest are coming with me.” He glares at my father. “I’ll send people later to pack these things. I suggest that neither you nor your daughters touch anything. Do you understand?”

My father nods. The old man turns to me. Wordlessly, he appraises me from my face to my shoes and then back again.

“Your sister is ill. Be good and help her,” he says, and then he leaves.

I knock on the bathroom door and call softly. May opens the door a crack, and I let myself in. She lies on the floor, her cheek against the tile. I sit beside her.

“Are you all right?”

“I think it was the crab from dinner last night,” she answers. “It’s the wrong season and I shouldn’t have eaten it.”

I lean against the wall and rub my eyes. How is it that two beautiful girls have fallen so low so quickly? I let my hands drop and stare at the repeating pattern of yellow, black, and turquoise tile that climbs the wall.

LATER THAT DAY
, coolies come to pack our clothes in wooden crates. These are loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck as our neighbors watch. In the midst of this, Sam arrives. Instead of approaching my father, he walks directly to me.

“You are to take the boat to meet us in Hong Kong on August seventh,” he says. “My father has booked passage for us to sail together to San Francisco three days later. These are your immigration papers. He says everything is in order and that we’ll have no problems landing, but he also wants you to study what’s in this coaching book—-just in case.” What he hands me isn’t a book but a few pieces of folded paper held together by hand stitching. “These are the answers you’ll need to give the inspectors if we have any trouble getting off the ship.” He pauses and frowns. He probably has the same thought as I: Why do we need to read the coaching book if everything’s in order? “Don’t worry about anything,” he goes on confidently as though I need my husband’s reassurance and will be comforted by his tone. “As soon as we’re through immigration, we’ll take another boat to Los Angeles.”

I stare at the papers.

“I’m sorry about this,” he adds, and I almost believe him. “I’m sorry about everything.”

As he turns to leave, my father—suddenly remembering to be the gracious host—asks, “May I find you a rickshaw?”

Sam looks back at me and answers, “No, no, I think I’ll walk.”

I watch him until he turns the corner, and then I go inside the house and toss the papers he gave me in the trash. Old Man Louie, his sons, and my father have made a terrible mistake if they think this is going any further. Soon the Louies will be on a ship that will take them thousands of miles from here. They won’t be able to push or trick us into doing anything we don’t want to do. We’ve all paid a price for my father’s gambling. He’s lost his business. I’ve lost my virginity. May and I have lost our clothes and perhaps our livelihoods as a result. We’ve been hurt, but we’re not remotely poor or wretched by Shanghai standards.

A Cicada in a Tree

NOW THAT THIS
whole upsetting and exhausting episode is over, May and I retreat to our room, which faces east. This usually leaves the room a little cooler in summer, but it’s so hot and sticky that we wear practically nothing—-just thin pink silk slips. We don’t cry. We don’t clean up the clothes Old Man Louie threw on the floor or the mess he left of our closet. We eat the food Cook leaves on a tray outside our door, but other than that we do nothing. We’re both too shaken to voice what happened. If the words come out of our mouths, won’t that mean that we’ll have to face how our lives have changed and figure out what to do next when at least for me my mind is in such a turmoil of confusion, despair, and anger that I feel like gray fog has invaded my skull? We lie on our beds and try to … I don’t even know the word. Recover?

As sisters, May and I share a particular kind of intimacy. May is the one person who’ll stand by me no matter what. I never wonder if we’re good friends or not. We just are. During this time of adversity—as it is for all sisters—our petty jealousies and the question of which one of us is loved more dissolve. We have to rely on each other.

Once I ask May what happened with Vernon, and she says, “I couldn’t do it.” Then she begins to weep. After that, I don’t ask about her wedding night and she doesn’t ask about mine. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, that we’ve just done something to save our family. But no matter how many times I tell myself it wasn’t important, there’s no getting around the fact that I lost a precious moment. In truth, my heart is more broken by what happened with Z.G. than by my family losing its standing or by having had to do the husband-wife thing with a stranger. I want to bring back my innocence, my girlishness, my happiness, my laughter.

“Remember when we saw
The Ode to Constancy?”
I ask, hoping the memory will remind May of when we were still young enough to believe we were invincible.

“We thought we could put on a better opera,” she answers from her bed.

“Since you were younger and smaller, you got to play the beautiful girl. You
always
played the princess. I always had to be the scholar, prince, emperor, and bandit.”

“Yes, but look at it this way: You got to
play four
roles. I only got one.”

I smile. How many times have we had this same disagreement about the productions we used to stage for Mama and Baba in the main salon when we were young? Our parents clapped and laughed. They ate watermelon seeds and drank tea. They praised us but never offered to send us to opera school or to the acrobatic academy, because we were pretty terrible, with our squeaky voices, our heavy tumbling, and our improvised sets and costumes. What mattered was that May and I had spent hours plotting and staging in our room or running to Mama to borrow a scarf to use as a veil or begging Cook to make a sword from paper and starch for me to fight whatever ghost demons were causing trouble.

I remember winter nights when it was so cold that May crawled into my bed and we snuggled together to keep warm. I remember how she slept: her thumb resting on her jaw, the tips of her forefinger and middle finger balanced on the edges of her eyebrows just above her nose, her ring finger lightly placed on an eyelid, and her pinkie delicately floating in the air. I remember that in the morning she’d be cuddled against my back with her arm wrapped around me to hold me close. I remember exactly how her hand looked—so small, so pale, so soft, and her fingers as slender as scallions.

I remember the first summer I went to camp in Kuling. Mama and Baba had to bring May to see me, because she was so lonely. I was maybe ten and May only seven. No one had told me they were coming, but when they arrived and May saw me, she ran to me, stopping just in front of me to stare at me. The other girls teased me. Why did I need to bother with this little baby? I knew enough not to tell them the truth: I longed for my sister too and felt like a part of me was missing when we were separated. After that, Baba always sent the two of us to camp together.

May and I laugh about these things, and they make us feel better. They remind us of the strength we find in each other, of the ways we help each other, of the times that it was just us against everyone else, of the fun we’ve had together. If we can laugh, won’t everything be all right?

“Remember when we were little and we tried on Mama’s shoes?” May asks.

I’ll never forget that day. Mama had gone visiting. We’d sneaked into her room and pulled out several pairs of her bound-foot shoes. My feet were too big for the shoes, and I’d carelessly discarded them as I tried to squeeze my toes into pair after pair. May could get her toes in the slippers, and she’d tiptoed to the window and back, imitating Mama’s lily walk. We’d tittered and frolicked, and then Mama came home. She was furious. May and I knew we’d been bad, but we had a hard time suppressing our giggles as Mama tottered around the room, trying to catch us to pull our ears. With our natural feet and our unity, we escaped, running down the hall and out into the garden, where we collapsed in laughter. Our wickedness had turned into triumph.

We could always trick Mama and outrun her, but Cook and the other servants had little patience for our mischief, and they didn’t hesitate to punish us.

“Pearl, remember when Cook taught us to make
chiao-tzu
?” May sits cross-legged on her bed across from me, her chin resting on her bunched fists, her elbows balanced on her knees. “He thought we should know how to make something. He said, ‘How are you girls going to get married if you don’t know how to make dumplings for your husbands?’ He didn’t know how hopeless we’d be.”

“He gave us aprons to wear, but they didn’t help.”

“They did when you started throwing flour at me!” May says.

What began as a lesson turned into a game and then finally into an all-out flour battle, with both of us getting really mad. Cook, who has lived with us since we moved to Shanghai, knew the difference between two sisters working together, two sisters playing, and two sisters fighting, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“Cook was so angry that he didn’t let us back in the kitchen for months,” May continues.

“I kept telling him I was just trying to powder your face.”

“No treats. No snacks. No special dishes.” May laughs at the memory. “Cook could be so stern. He said sisters who fight are not worth knowing.”

Mama and Baba knock on our door and ask us to come out, but we decline, saying we prefer to stay in our room awhile longer. Maybe it’s rude and childish, but May and I always deal with conflicts in the family this way—by holing up, and building a barricade between us and whatever has harmed us or we don’t like. We’re stronger together, united, a force that can’t be argued with or reasoned with, until others give in to our desires. But this calamity isn’t like wanting to visit your sister at camp or protecting each other from an angry parent, servant, or teacher.

May gets off her bed and brings back magazines, so we can look at the clothes and read the gossip. We comb each other’s hair. We look through our closet and drawers and try to assess how many new outfits we can make from what we have left. Old Man Louie seems to have taken almost all our Chinese clothes, leaving behind an assortment of Western-style dresses, blouses, skirts, and trousers. In Shanghai, where appearances are nearly everything, it will be important for us to look smart and not dowdy, fashionable and not last year. If our clothes seem old, not only will artists no longer hire us but streetcars won’t stop for us, doormen at hotels and clubs might not let us in, and attendants at movie theaters will double-check our tickets. This affects not only women but men too; they, even if they’re in the middle class, will sleep in lodgings plagued by bedbugs so they can afford to buy a nicer pair of trousers, which they put under their pillows each night to create sharp creases for the new day.

Does it sound like we lock ourselves away for weeks? Hardly. Just two days. Because we’re young, we’re easily cured. We’re also curious. We’ve heard noises outside the door, which we’ve ignored for hours at a time. We tried not to pay attention to the hammering and thumping that shook the house. We heard strange voices but pretended they belonged to the servants. When we finally open the door, our home has changed. Baba has sold most of our furniture to the local pawnshop. The gardener is gone, but Cook has stayed because he has nowhere else to go and he needs a place to sleep and food to eat. Our house has been chopped apart and walls added to make rooms for boarders: a policeman, his wife, and two daughters have moved into the back of the house; a student lives in the second-floor pavilion; a cobbler has taken the space under the stairs; and two dancing girls have moved into the attic. The rents will help, but they won’t be enough to care for us all.

WE THOUGHT OUR
lives would go back to normal, and in many ways they do. Mama still orders around everyone, including our boarders, so we aren’t suddenly burdened with carrying out the nightstool, making beds, or sweeping. Still, we’re very aware of how far and how quickly we’ve fallen. Instead of soy milk, sesame cakes, and fried dough sticks for breakfast, Cook makes
p’ao fan—
leftover rice swimming in boiled water with some pickled vegetables on top for flavor. Cook’s austerity campaign shows in our lunch and dinner dishes too. We’ve always been one of those families who have
wu hun pu ch’ih fan—
no meal without meat. We now eat a coolie’s diet of bean sprouts, salt fish, cabbage, and preserved vegetables accompanied by lots and lots of rice.

Baba leaves the house every morning to look for work, but we don’t encourage him or ask him questions when he returns at night. In failing us, he’s become insignificant. If we ignore him—demeaning him by our inattention and lack of concern—then his downfall and ruin can’t harm us anymore. It’s our way of dealing with our anger and hurt.

May and I try to find jobs too, but it’s hard to get hired. You need to have
kuang hsi
, connections. You have to know the right people—a relative or someone you’ve courted for years—to get a recommendation. More important, you need to give a substantial gift—a leg of pork, a bedroom set, or the equivalent of two months’ salary—to the person who will make the introduction and another to the person who will hire you, even if it’s only to make matchboxes or hairnets in a factory. We don’t have money for that now, and people know it. In Shanghai, life flows like an endlessly serene river for the wealthy, the lucky, the fortunate. For those with bad fates, the smell of desperation is as strong as a rotting corpse.

Our writer friends take us to Russian restaurants and treat us to bowls of borscht and cheap vodka. Playboys—our countrymen who come from wealthy families, study in America, and go to Paris on vacation—take us to the Paramount, the city’s biggest nightclub, for joy, gin, and jazz. We hang out in dark cafés with Betsy and her American friends. The boys are handsome and adamant, and we soak them up. May disappears for hours at a time. I don’t ask where she goes or with whom. It’s better that way.

We can’t escape the sense that we’re slipping, dropping, falling.

May never stops sitting for Z.G., but I’m uncomfortable going back to his studio after having made such a scene. They finish the advertisement for My Dear cigarettes, with May doing double duty, modeling for Z.G. in her original spot and then taking my position on the back of the chair. She tells me this and encourages me to help with another calendar Z.G.’s been commissioned to do. I sit for other artists instead, but most of them just want to shoot a quick photo and work from that. I make money, but not much. Now, instead of getting new students, I lose my only student. When I tell Captain Yamasaki that May won’t accept his marriage proposal, he fires me. But that’s only an excuse. Across the city, the Japanese are acting strangely. Those who live in Little Tokyo pack up and leave their apartments. Wives, children, and other civilians return to Japan. When many of our neighbors desert Hongkew, cross Soochow Creek, and take temporary quarters in the main part of the International Settlement, I attribute it to the usual superstitious nature of my countrymen, especially the poor, who fear the known and the unknown, the worldly and the unworldly, the living and the dead.

To me, it feels as if everything has changed. The city I always loved pays no attention to death, despair, disaster, or poverty. Where once I saw neon and glamour, I now see gray: gray slate, gray stone, the gray river. Where once the Whangpoo appeared almost festive with its warships from many nations, each flying colorful flags, now the river seems choked by the arrival of over a dozen imposing Japanese naval vessels. Where once I saw wide avenues and shimmering moonlight, I now see piles of garbage, rodents boldly scurrying and scavenging, and Pockmarked Huang and his Green Gang thugs roughing up debtors and prostitutes. Shanghai, as grand as it is, is built on shifting silt. Nothing stays where it’s supposed to. Coffins buried without lead weights drift. Banks hire men to check their foundations daily to make sure that the tonnage of silver and gold hasn’t caused the building to tilt. May and I have slid from safe, cosmopolitan Shanghai to a place that’s as sure as quicksand.