The Fortunes (36 page)

Still, maybe Pearl could be the first Chinese American on the moon, or even Mars. The Chinese, he knows, have plans for human exploration of space, even if NASA's mission seems to be faltering. He'd done a little research a while back about the Chinese space program, the brainchild of a brilliant scientist called H. S. Tsien, who'd trained at Caltech before the war, helped recruit Werner von Braun to NASA, but been jailed and then deported in the Red scare of the 1950s. The Chinese already have a rudimentary space station on the drawing board—what was it called? Heavenly Palace. And a moon rover called Jade Rabbit. So why not the first Chinese American on the moon, maybe as part of some joint venture.

Nola's weight softens imperceptibly against him; her breath slowly settles.

He pictures Pearl looking back at the earth, wonders what she'll see. A cloudy blue marble, like a cataracted eye? A place of pollution, overpopulation? Or will China's increasing global influence have extended to inspiring (or enforcing?) one-child policies in other countries? Will the draconian salvation of one nation extend to the world? And will China's own lingering authoritarianism enable the country to belatedly but swiftly curb its emissions?

But really what he wonders is how this future Pearl—this taikonaut!—will think of him and Nola. Will they even be alive still, or still together? Will she resent them for taking her from a resurgent East (at the start of the Chinese century) to a fading West (at the end of the American one)? Or for her name (
Pearl?
Kids will call her Pearl of the Orient, Pearl Harbor, he realizes; she'll have to tell them
I'm not Japanese! or Hawaiian!
)? For her sense of alienation, marginalization?

Or maybe, just maybe, she will belong . . . maybe in 2032, on the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, America would declare a Vincent Chin Day to honor the diversity of Asian America. Maybe the other girls—Celeste, Gertie, and the rest—would go on to be athletes and celebrities, justices and presidents (of Amtrak, of GM, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!).

And maybe she wouldn't look back at the earth anyway but rather at the stars. H. S. Tsien, he recalls now, trained as a railway engineer and ended up as a rocket scientist. Who could possibly tell the future?

Nola is snoring again, her breath gently flaring.

Over her shoulder he sees the clock has slid silently past midnight.

But he's grateful at last for his sleeplessness, glad to be alert, as if standing watch over this new family. Like a terra-cotta warrior. It recalls his dream on the bus back to the hotel of Xi'an, of the terra-cotta army, and of the men—that other army, of artisans—who made them. He'd imagined the cold clay dense and tacky in his fingers as he tried to summon a face to sculpt, one unlike all the others. Who should it be? A friend, a brother? Who among all the possibilities? The choice had paralyzed him in his dream, or at least he'd woken before he could decide, still with a sense of lingering panic.

He thinks now of all those silent figures, rank upon rank of men, waiting patiently underground, invisible and forgotten (“the original ancient Chinese secret,” as Nola whispered) until discovered by local farmers digging a well in the 1970s. John had presumed them buried by time, but in fact they'd been deliberately interred in carefully paved trenches, roofed over with timber and tamped dirt, as if lined up in long lightless tunnels. He'd pictured them being unearthed whole too, but apparently only one among all the thousands had been found intact, all the rest painstakingly reconstructed from pieces and shards sifted and brushed from the soil, the scope of the original undertaking matched only by the scale of the recovery effort.

And what a literal act of representation! Life-sized, and one-to-one, armed with real weapons. That's what really takes the breath away. (That and the megalomania of the first Qin, or Chin, emperor; then again, the country was named after him!) John has seen a handful of touring figures in museums at home, but what he's never appreciated before is how together, en masse, the army—for all the artistry of the individual figures, detailed down to the lines on their hands, the moles on their faces, the weave of their queues—is barely a representation at all, as close to real as possible, each figure standing for precisely one man, representing only himself.

Thousands of figures, maybe hundreds of thousands, crafted by thousands of workers; John suddenly imagines each making a single face. In which case, he thinks, watching Pearl's tiny hands open and close in her sleep and flexing his own in echo, as if to knead the air, imagining the dry clay on his knuckles cracking in gray flakes, what choice but a self-portrait? What else can we represent if not ourselves, however uncertain or contradictory those selves might be? After all, aren't those very contradictions and uncertainties what make us ourselves?

It's just a dream, he knows, based on a tourist's fleeting visit. But this is what he'll tell Pearl first, he thinks, when she asks, as she will ask, as she will
be
asked (
Where are you from?
), about China.

My thanks are due to many for their assistance and encouragement in the completion of this project: to Nicholas Delbanco, Marshall Klimasewiski, Zachary Lazar, and Louisa Lim for reading and commenting on various drafts; to Roland Hwang and Frances Kai-Hwa Wang for talking with me about the Vincent Chin case; to Dan Keane and Jennifer Tomscha for their hospitality in Shanghai; to Angela Healy for the inspiration; to the 2015 Kundiman faculty, fellows, and organizers for welcoming me into their community; to the University of Michigan, in particular the Department of English for research funds, the Institute for the Humanities for writing time, and my colleagues and students in the Helen Zell Writers' Program for their fellowship in our shared endeavor; to my agent, Maria Massie, ever my sure guide through the publishing woods; to Janet Silver and Andrea Schulz, for their help along the way; to my U.S. editor, Jenna Johnson, who made this a better book, and to all at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Lauren, Pilar, Megan, Carla, Lori, Debbie, Bruce, Ken, Rachael, and Liz) who continue to make their publishing house feel like my home; to Carole Welch, my U.K. editor, for her faith and patience, and to all at Sceptre, my house at home. Lastly, my deepest thanks to Lynne for everything, always, and to Owen for giving me hope for the future of reading.

Numerous books and articles were consulted in the course of writing this novel. What follows is only a partial list.

On the building of the railroads, I'm indebted to David Haward Bain's
Empire Express
and
The Old Iron Road
(and to David's enthusiasm for the project when he heard me read from it in early form at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2011). Stephen Ambrose's
Nothing Like It in the World
and Richard White's
Railroaded
were also valuable sources.

Bury My Bones in America,
by Lani Ah Tye Farkas, and
Canton Footprints,
by Philip P. Choy, were helpful in imagining the experience of early Chinese immigrants in California.

Two biographies in particular,
Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong,
by Anthony B. Chan, and
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend,
by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, informed my understanding of the actress.

The following greatly contributed to my understanding of the Vincent Chin case:
Asian American Dreams,
by Helen Zia; the documentary
Who Killed Vincent Chin?
directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña;
Building Our Legacy: The Murder of Vincent Chin,
a trial reenactment scripted by the Asian American Bar Association of New York, Dean Frank H. Wu, and the Honorable Denny Chin; and the article “The Man Who Killed Vincent Chin,” by Michael Moore in the
Detroit Free Press.

Adoption texts that were especially informative include
Intercountry Adoption from China: Examining Cultural Heritage and Other Postadoption Issues,
by Jay W. Rojewski and Jacy L. Rojewski;
The Lucky Ones: Our Stories of Adopting Children from China,
edited by Ann Rauhala;
West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children,
by Richard Tessler, Gail Gamache, and Liming Liu; and the article “I Met My Daughter at the Wuhan Foundling Hospital,” by Bruce Porter, in the
New York Times Magazine.

Finally, for their resources and holdings I'm grateful to the University of Michigan Library, the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco, and the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

None of the above, naturally, are responsible for any inaccuracies in the text or the many fictional liberties I've taken with the material.

O
UTSIDE, THE TECHNICOLOR
sunset is giving way to the silvery sweep of searchlights over distant Cardiff as a hand tugs the blackout curtain across the sky. There's a scraping of chairs, then the snap of a switch as the projector starts up. The room fills with the sharp chemical smell of acetate, the ionized stink of scorched dust.

“Lights,” Rotheram calls, and the lamps are extinguished. On the makeshift screen—a bed sheet tacked to the wall, ironed creases still visible—an image blooms, blurred at first, then twisted into focus. Clouds. Wispy, cotton-wool clouds slide across the screen, and then the camera dips beneath them, and there's the city, spread out like a map. The screen fills with gothic script,
Triumph des Willens,
and beneath it in shaky subtitles,
Triumph of the Will.

The watching men flicker in the reflected light. They're seated in a rough semicircle, a handful of dining chairs flanking a cracked leather armchair. Only the armchair faces the screen squarely. The men in the dining chairs are half turned from the film, looking back towards the projector, their eyes narrowed against its glare, studying the figure at their center.

On the screen behind them, Adolf Hitler rides through the streets of Nuremberg in an open car. Crowds throng the side of the road, arms thrusting into the air, the salute rising and falling like a great wave. In the car the Führer himself holds his arm up, not at the same sharp angle as the rest, but tipped back at the wrist, fingers slightly arched, as if balancing a silver salver.

The screen dissolves to a shot of Hitler on a podium as a battalion of men, glinting spades on their shoulders, march past in powdery sunlight. Beside and a little behind him on the stage is a severely handsome man, slimmer and taller than the Führer. In the next scene, this same figure is at a lectern, a glinting microphone before him, passionately exhorting the crowd. His hand saws the air; a shining lock of hair falls across his brow. He ends his speech crying “Sieg heil” over and over until the crowd rings with it.

The reel runs out, and as the film is being changed a hand reaches out of the gloom and offers the figure in the armchair a cigarette. He fumbles it out of the pack and bows his head to take a light. There is the flash then flutter of flame, and in it his face is momentarily visible. Older, gaunter, and more disheveled, it is still recognizably the man from the screen: Rudolf Hess, former deputy führer of the Third Reich.

THE FILM HAD BEEN
Rotheram's idea. He'd seen it first in 1936 in Berlin, taking a tram across town to a cinema in a district where he didn't think anyone would know him, not telling his mother where he was going.

She had been pressing for them to leave Germany for months by then, ever since his grandparents had fled to France the previous year. “But they're Jewish,” he'd told her, as if she might have overlooked the fact. “It's disgraceful how they've been hounded. But we aren't.” His father, long dead, had been, but his mother was the daughter of German Lutherans, who'd settled in Canada and made a fortune in timber. They'd sent her back to the motherland to study in Göttingen, where she'd met his father in 1912. In the eyes of Jews—the eyes of his father's family, say, who had spurned his marriage and supported his son and widow only from a distance—Rotheram wasn't one of them. Yet in the eyes of the Nazis he was. A
mischling,
at least: a half-Jew.

He'd been dead set against leaving, even after seeing a fellow beaten in the street. It had happened so fast: the slap of running feet, a man rounding the corner, hand on his hat, chased by three others. Rotheram had no idea what was going on even as the boots went in, and then it was over, the thugs charging off, their victim curled on the wet cobbles. It was a busy street and no one moved, just watched the man roll onto one knee, pause for a moment, taking stock of his injuries, then pull himself to his feet and limp hurriedly away, not looking at any of them.
As if ashamed,
Rotheram thought. He'd barely realized what was happening, yet he felt as if he'd failed. Not a test of courage, not that, he told himself, but a test of comprehension. He felt stupid standing there gawking like all the rest. Too slow on the uptake to have time to fear for himself. When he told his mother, she clutched his hand and made him promise not to get involved in such things. He shook her off in disgust, repeated that he hadn't been afraid, but she told him sharply, “You should have been.”