And then it hits me. “Did you lose everything to Old Man Louie?”
“Not exactly—”
“Then to whom?”
“These things are always hard to say.” Baba taps his fingers on the table and glances away. “I lost a little here, a little there.”
“I’m sure you did to have lost May’s and my money too. That must have taken you months … maybe even years—”
“Pearl—” My mother tries to stop me from saying anything more, but deep rage roars out of me.
“This loss had to be something very big. Something that would threaten all this.” I motion to the room, the furniture, the house, everything that my father built for us. “What exactly is your debt and how are you paying it back?”
May stops crying. My mother remains silent.
“I lost to Old Man Louie,” Baba grudgingly admits at last. “He’ll let your mother and me stay in the house if May marries the younger son and you marry the older son. We’ll have a roof to sleep under and something to eat until I get work. You, our daughters, are our only capital.”
May covers her mouth with the back of her hand, stands, and runs from the room.
“Tell your sister I will set up a meeting for this afternoon,” Baba acquiesces. “And be grateful I arranged marriages to a pair of brothers. You’ll always be together. Now go upstairs. Your mother and I have much to discuss.”
Outside the window, the breakfast sellers have moved on and been replaced by a stream of peddlers. Their voices sing to us, enticing us, tempting us.
“Pu, pu, pu, reed root to brighten the eyes! Give to baby and he will be free from all summer rashes!”
“Hou, hou, hou, let me shave your face, trim your hair, cut your nails!”
“A-hu-a, a-hu-a, come out and sell your junk! Foreign bottles and broken glass exchanged for matches!”
A COUPLE OF hours later, I walk into the Little Tokyo area of Hongkew for my noon appointment with my student. Why haven’t I canceled? The world falls apart and you cancel things, right? But May and I need the money.
In a daze, I ride the elevator to Captain Yamasaki’s apartment. He was on the Japanese Olympics team in 1932, so he likes to relive his glories in Los Angeles. He isn’t a bad man, but he’s obsessed with May. She made the mistake of going out with him a few times, so nearly every lesson begins with questions about her.
“Where is your sister today?” he asks in English, after we review his homework.
“She is sick,” I lie. “She is sleeping.”
“Sorry to hear such sad news. Every day I ask you when she will go out with me again. Every day you say you don’t know.”
“Correction. We see each other only three times a week.”
“Please help me marry May. I give you wedding …”
He hands me a piece of paper, which lists his marriage terms. I can see he used his Japanese-English dictionary, but this is too much. And today of all days. I glance at the clock. We still have fifty minutes to go. I fold the paper and put it in my purse.
“I will make the corrections and return this to you at our next lesson.”
“Give to May!”
“I’ll give it to her, but please know she is too young to marry. My father will not allow it.” How easily the lies pour from my mouth.
“He should. He must. This is a time of Friendship, Cooperation, and Co-prosperity The Asian races should unify against the West. Chinese and Japanese are brothers.”
Hardly. We call Japanese dwarf bandits and monkey people. But the captain often returns to this theme, and he’s done a good job of mastering the slogans in English and Chinese.
He stares at me sullenly. “You’re not going to give it to her, are you?” When I don’t respond quickly enough, he frowns. “I don’t trust Chinese girls. They always lie.”
He’s said this to me before, and I don’t like it any more today than I have in the past.
“I don’t lie to you,” I say, even though I have several times just since we started this tutorial.
“Chinese girls never keep promise. They lie in heart.”
“Promises. Their hearts,” I correct. I need to turn the conversation to a new subject. Today it comes easily. “Did you like Los Angeles?”
“It was very good. Soon I will go back to America.”
“For another swimming competition?”
“No.”
“As a student?”
“As a…” He switches back to Chinese and a word he knows very well in our language. “A conqueror.”
“Really? How?”
“We will march to Washington,” he responds, returning to English. “Yankee girls will do our laundry.”
He laughs. I laugh. And on it goes.
As soon as the hour’s up, I take my meager payment and go home. May’s asleep. I lie down beside her, put a hand on her hip, and close my eyes. I long for sleep, but my mind batters me with images and emotions. I thought I was modern. I thought I had choice. I thought I was nothing like my mother. But my father’s gambling has swept all that away. I’m to be sold—traded like so many girls before me—to help my family. I feel so trapped and so helpless that I can hardly breathe.
I try to tell myself things aren’t as bad as they seem. My father even said May and I won’t have to go with these strangers to a city across the world. We can sign the papers, our “husbands” will leave, and life will go on as before, with one big difference. We have to get out of my father’s house and make our own living. I’ll wait until my husband leaves the country, claim desertion, and get a divorce. Then Z.G. and I will get married. (It will have to be a smaller wedding than I imagined—maybe just a party in a café with our artist friends and some of the other beautiful-girl models.) I’ll get a real job during the day. May will live with us until she marries. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll make our way.
I sit up and rub my temples. I’m stupid with dreams. Maybe I’ve lived in Shanghai too long.
I gently shake my sister’s shoulder. “Wake up, May.”
She opens her eyes, and for a moment I see all the gentle and trusting loveliness she’s held inside her since she was an infant. Then her eyes turn dark as she remembers.
“We’ve got to get dressed,” I say. “It’s almost time to meet the husbands.”
What should we wear? The Louie sons are Chinese, so maybe we should wear traditional cheongsams. They’re also Americans, so maybe it would be better to wear something that shows we’re Westernized too. It isn’t to please them, but we can’t ruin the deal either. We slip on rayon dresses with floral patterns. May and I exchange glances, shrug at the uselessness of it all, and leave the house.
We flag down a rickshaw boy and tell him to take us to the place my father has arranged for the rendezvous: the gate to the Yu Yuan Garden in the center of the Old Chinese City. The driver—who has a bald head scarred by ringworm—pulls us through the heat and crowds across Soochow Creek at the Garden Bridge and along the Bund, passing diplomats, schoolgirls in starched uniforms, prostitutes, lords and their ladies, and black-coated members of the notorious Green Gang. Yesterday this mingling seemed exciting. Today it looks sordid and oppressive.
The Whangpoo River slinks past us to our left like an indolent snake, its grimy skin rising, pulsing, slithering. In Shanghai, you can’t escape the river. It’s the dead end for every eastbound street in the city. On this great river float warships from Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Sampans—hung with ropes, laundry, and nets—cluster together like insects on a carcass. Nightsoil boats jostle for right-of-way through ocean-liner tenders and bamboo rafts. Sweating coolies stripped to the waist clutter the wharves, unloading opium and tobacco from merchant ships, rice and grain from junks that have come from upriver, and soy sauce, baskets of chickens, and great rolls of rattan matting from flat-bottomed riverboats.
To our right rise grand five-and six-story edifices—foreign palaces of wealth, greed, and avarice. We wheel past the Cathay Hotel with its pyramid-shaped roof, the Custom House with its great clock tower, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with its majestic bronze lions, who beckon passersby to rub their paws to bring good luck to men and sons to women. At the border of the French Concession, we pay the rickshaw puller and then continue on foot along what becomes the Quai de France. After a few blocks, we turn away from the river and enter the Old Chinese City.
Coming here is ugly and hardly auspicious, like stepping into the past, which is precisely what Baba wants us to do with these marriages. Still, May and I have come, obedient as dogs, stupid as water buffalo. I cover my nose with a lavender-scented handkerchief to help block the smells of death, sewage, rancid cooking oil, and raw meat for sale spoiling in the heat.
Ordinarily I ignore my home city’s ugly sights, but today my eyes are drawn to them. Here are beggars with eyes gouged out and limbs burned into stumps by their parents to make them all the more pitiable. Some have putrefying sores and horrendous growths blown up to disgusting size with bicycle pumps. We make our way through alleys strung with drying bound-foot bandages, diapers, and tattered trousers. In the Old Chinese City, the women who wash these items are too lazy to wring them out. Water drips down on us like rain. Every step reminds us where we might end up if we don’t go through with these marriages.
We find the Louie sons at the gate to the Yu Yuan Garden. We try English, but they don’t seem interested in responding to us in that language. Their father is from the Four Districts of Canton, so naturally they speak the Sze Yup dialect, which May doesn’t know, but I translate for her. Like so many of us, they’ve taken Western names. The older one points to himself and says, “Sam.” Then he gestures to his younger brother and declares in Sze Yup, “His name is Vernon, but the parents call him Vern.”
I love Z.G., so no matter how perfect this Sam Louie is, I’m not going to like him. And May’s groom, this Vern, is only fourteen years old. He hasn’t even begun to grow into manhood. He’s still a little boy Baba neglected to mention that.
We all look from face to face. None of us seems to like what we see. Eyes dart to the ground, to the sky, anywhere. It occurs to me that maybe they don’t want to marry us either. If that’s the case, we can all consider this a commercial transaction. We’ll sign the papers and go back to our regular lives, with no broken hearts or hurt feelings. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t awkward.
“Maybe we should walk,” I suggest.
No one responds, but when I start to walk, the others follow, our shoes scuffing along the labyrinthine pathways past pools, rockeries, and grottoes. Willows sway in the hot air, giving the illusion of coolness. Pavilions of carved wood and gold lacquer evoke the deep past. Everything is designed to create a feeling of balance and unity, but the garden has broiled under the July sun all morning, and the afternoon air hangs heavy and viscous with fecundity.
The boy, Vern, runs to one of the rockeries and scampers up the craggy wall. May looks at me, silently asking Now what? I don’t have an answer and Sam doesn’t volunteer one. She spins away, steps down the slope to the foot of the rockery, and begins calling softly to the boy to coax him back down. I don’t think he understands what she’s saying, because he stays on top, looking a bit like a pirate at sea. Sam and I continue walking until we come to the Exquisite Jade Rock.
“I’ve been here before,” he murmurs tentatively in Sze Yup. “Do you know the story of how the rock came to be here?”