To make matters worse, when Gracie had been in the hospital, agents from the Washington State Highway Department had showed up on Ernest’s doorstep. “Hello, Mr. Young,” they’d said. “We have some difficult news to share. May we come in?”
The officials were kind and respectful—apologetic even. As they informed him that his three-bedroom craftsman home overlooking Chinatown, along with his garden and a row of freshly trimmed lilacs in full bloom—the only home he’d ever owned and the place where his daughters took their first steps—all of it was in the twenty-mile urban construction zone of the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma Freeway. The new interstate highway was a ligature of concrete designed to bind Washington with Oregon and California. In less than a week, he and his neighbors had been awarded fair-market value for their properties, along with ninety days to move out, and the right-of-way auctions began.
The government had wanted the land, Ernest remembered, and our homes were a nuisance. So he’d moved his ailing wife in with his older daughter, Juju, and watched from the sidewalk as entire city blocks were sold. Homes were scooped off their foundations and strapped to flatbed trucks to be moved or demolished. But not before vandals and thieves stripped out the oak paneling that Ernest had installed years ago, along with the light fixtures, the crystalline doorknobs, and even the old hot-water heater that leaked in wintertime. The only thing left standing was a blur of cherry trees that lined the avenue. Ernest recalled watching as a crew arrived with a fleet of roaring diesel trucks and a steam shovel. Blossoms swirled on the breeze as he’d turned and walked away.
As a young man, Ernest had carved his initials onto one of those trees along with Gracie’s—and those of another girl too. He hadn’t seen her in forever.
As an aerialist rode a motorcycle on a taut cable stretched from the stadium to the Space Needle, Ernest listened to the whooshing and mechanical thrumming of carnival rides. He caught the aroma of freshly spun cotton candy, still warm, and remembered the sticky-sweet magic of candied apples. He felt a pressing wave of déjà vu.
The present is merely the past reassembled, Ernest mused as he pictured the two girls and how he’d once strolled with them, arm in arm, on the finely manicured grounds of Seattle’s first world’s fair, the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, back in 1909. When the city first dressed up and turned its best side to the cameras of the world. He remembered a perfect day, when he fell in love with both girls.
But as Ernest walked to the gate and leaned on the cold metal bars, he also smelled smoke. He heard fussy children crying. And his ears were still ringing with the echoes of the celebratory cannons that had scared the birds away.
He drew a deep breath. Memories are narcotic, he thought. Like the array of pill bottles that sit cluttered on my nightstand. Each dose, carefully administered, use as directed. Too much and they become dangerous. Too much and they’ll stop your heart.
RAINING STARS
(1902)
Yung Kun-ai watched his little mei mei struggle to breathe. His newborn sister was only two days old—a half-breed like him, without a father. She mostly slept, but when she did wake, she coughed until she cried. Then cried until she was desperately gasping for air. Her raspy wailing made her seem all the more out of place, unwelcome; not unloved, just tragically unfit for this world.
Yung understood that feeling as his sister stirred and keened again, scaring away a pair of ring-necked crows from a barren lychee tree. The birds cawed, circling. Yung’s mother should have been observing her zuoyuezi, the traditional time of rest and recovery after childbirth. Instead, she’d staggered into the village cemetery, dug a hole in the earth with her bare hands, and placed his sister’s naked, trembling body inside. As Yung stood nearby, he imagined that the ground must have been warm, comforting, since it hadn’t rained in months, the clay soil surrounding his unnamed sibling like a blanket. Then he watched his mother pour a bucket of cold ash from the previous night’s fire over his sister’s body and she stopped crying. Through a cloud of black soot he saw tiny legs jerk, fragile arms go still. Yung didn’t look away as his lowly parent smothered his baby sister, or while his mother wearily pushed the dirt back into the hole, burying his mei mei by scoops and handfuls. His mother tenderly patted the soil and replaced the sod before pressing her forehead into the grass and dirt, whispering a prayer, begging forgiveness.
Yung swallowed the lump in his throat and became a statue. At five years old, he could do nothing else. The bastard son of a white missionary and a Chinese girl, he was an outcast in both of their worlds. He and his mother were desperately poor, and a drought had only made their bad situation worse. For months they’d been eating soups made from mossy rocks and scraps of boiled shoe leather his mother had scavenged from the dying. When she turned and saw what Yung had witnessed she didn’t seem shocked, or apologetic. She didn’t bother to wipe away the ashen tears that framed the pockmarked hollows of her cheeks, or the dust and grime that had settled into her scalp where her hair had thinned and fallen out. She merely placed a filigreed hairpin in his hand and folded his tiny fingers around the tarnished copper and jade phoenix that represented the last of their worldly possessions. She knelt and hugged him, squeezed him, ran her dirty fingers through his hair. He felt her bony limbs, the sweet smell of her cool skin as she kissed his face.
“Only two kinds of people in China,” she said. “The too rich and the too poor.”
He’d remembered combing the harvested fields for single grains of rice, gathering enough to make a tiny handful that they would share while the well-fed children flew kites overhead. His empty stomach reminded him of who he was.
“Stay here and wait for your uncle,” she said. “He’s going to take care of you now. He’s going to take you to America. He’s going to show you a new world. This is my gift to you.”
Yung’s mother addressed him in Cantonese and then in the little bit of English they both understood. She told him he had his father’s eyes. And she spoke about a time when they would be together again. But when she tried to smile her lips trembled.
“Mm-goi mow hamm,” Yung said as she turned away. “Don’t cry, Mama.”
Yung wasn’t sure if the man he was supposed to wait for was truly his uncle, but he doubted it. The best he could hope was that the man might be one of the rich merchants who specialized in the poison trade or the pig trade, because dealing with men who smuggled opium or people would be preferable to members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the Chinese boxers who had been slaughtering missionaries, foreigners, and their offspring. Equally dangerous were the colonial soldiers sent to put down the rebellion. The villagers, including Yung’s father, had been caught in the siege, the melee, and now the maelstrom. That’s when his mother must have known that the end of their world was near—when they saw the starving fishermen hauling in their nets, filled with the bodies of the dead.
As Yung watched his mother disappear, leaving him alone in the cemetery, he wanted to yell, “Ah-ma! Don’t leave me!” He wanted to run to her, to cling to her legs, to cry at her feet, begging. But he resisted, even as he whimpered, yearning. He did what he was told as he ached with sadness and loneliness. He had always obeyed her—trusted her. But it seemed as if she had died months earlier, and all that remained was a ghost, a skeleton—a hopeless broken spirit with no place left to wander and no one to haunt.
What little hope she had, she’d bequeathed to him.