The Gilded Age

February 22, 1896

Tong Yan Sun Neen





12

Gung Hay Fat Choy

Clash of cymbals, brass on brass, and the high thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd sound like some creature in heat keening. Bang, bang, bang! Zhu runs to her bedroom window. Those are fireworks, of course. Was it really only nine months ago when she last heard fireworks? Oh, marvelous, that means the parade is approaching. The parade for the New Year—Chinese New Year—wends its way down Dupont Street below her window. Quite a hustle-bustle. What a sight! She’s seen New Year’s parades a dozen times in Changchi, but never like this. Never in the Gilded Age.

Never like this.

The great dragon, Gum Lum, bows and snorts and undulates, the huge puppet carried aloft on poles borne by exuberant bachelors. His massive papier-mache head glitters with gold leaf, red silk streamers, black and yellow spangles, little mirrors reflecting the gaslight like jewels. Gum Lum snaps his hinged jaws at the pearl of everlasting life, a large paper lantern carried by three laughing boys. The Eight Immortals stalk by on stilts, twice as tall as a man. Acrobats turn handsprings, flipping over, leaping high. Shaggy lions, also called fu dogs—puppets manned by two fellows, one working the head, one the tail—roar at the children lining the street and scratch at imaginary fleas. Then the Monkey himself makes his royal appearance, cavorting and leaping as the crowd roars with delight. For this, 1896, is the Year of the Monkey.

The Year of the Trickster.

Zhu has mixed feelings about the clever Trickster. The Monkey with his quick intelligence often outwits the gods themselves.

“Gung hay fat choy!” Zhu calls from her window. “Happy New Year!”

A dark sorrow lies beneath the festive air. Zhu senses it, darkness tumbling in her heart.

A premonition is just a memory.

A memory of what? A memory of the future?

It is done.

Tonight’s the night when her t-port ends. Muse recites her instructions.

“California and Mason Streets,” she says. “Right, I got it. Of course I know the spot. Of course I know that’s where my rendezvous is to be.”

Muse scoffs, “How do you know?”

“You told me before.”

Alphanumerics jitter in her peripheral vision. “No, I never told you, Z. Wong.”

“Of course you did. The private ecostructure over Nobhill Park. The luxury hotels. Will the LISA techs arrange a room for me at the Grande Dome when I return?”

“Oh, I doubt it. Back to jail for you, Z. Wong. You’ll be charged and stand trial within the week.”

Grief and anger strike her like a blow. Everything she’s done for the Gilded Age Project, everything she’s sacrificed. Does it all amount to nothing? She argues with Muse. She always argues with Muse. They argue like an old married couple whose love is long gone.

“I’ve been used,” she declares. That’s why she resented Chiron. Why she hated him, feared him. She knew right from the start. She’s been used by the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications as a mere courier for an enigma whirling in a CTL. A pawn to patch up the mistake made by one of their elite. The CTL is an artifact of tachyportation, unstable, destabilizing all of spacetime. The aurelia is more important than Wing Sing or Wing Sing’s daughter or Zhu or whoever the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman is who hands the aurelia to Chiron in Golden Gate Park in the summer of 1967.

She goes to the wardrobe, riffles through the clothes hangers. The gray silk dress, of course. The cosmicists love symbolic gestures. She will return as she went, in the gray silk dress. From jail to jail, from this When to that When, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. She sorts through her fragrant silk dresses. So pretty. The cerulean blue, the mauve.

“Muse, where is my gray dress?”

“You gave it to Wing Sing. You took the dress down to Morton Alley, as Jessie suggested. The girl is just your size. What used to be your size. Remember?”

“I did no such thing,” Zhu snaps. “She escaped from the cribs by the time I got there.”

“But I’m telling you, you did. Anyway, you can hardly fit into that dress now, Z. Wong.” Muse is prim. “Considering your condition.”

Her condition. Zhu goes and stands before the watery glass of her mirror, studies her swollen breasts, her swollen belly. Even the tightly laced corset can’t conceal her bulges. Shock reverberates through her blood.

“What condition? I’ve just grown fat. All that rich food and drink Jessie serves.”

“For pity’s sake, stop denying it, Z. Wong,” Muse says. “You’ve indulged yourself in an ill-starred relationship with a questionable young man and now you’re pregnant.”

“Indulge! I love Daniel!”

“You lust for him, nothing more.”

“He adores me and I. . . .” What does she feel for Daniel? “I want to help him. I want to save him.”

“Nevertheless, now you’re pregnant. Go put on those other clothes.”

“What other clothes?”

“The clothes you bought yesterday.”

Zhu dashes to the wardrobe, the wood planks squeaking beneath her feet. The new boarder in the suite below hers bangs on his ceiling with a broom handle, and an odd buoyant feeling rises in her lungs like the first rush of a black patch. Or like a breath of fresh air.

There, hanging in the wardrobe, is a sahm of apple-green silk. A lovely tunic and trousers, a green silk bandeau. At the bottom of the wardrobe, green-threaded sandals with platforms of straw.

“That’s better, Z. Wong.” Muse is solicitous. “The sahm will conceal your condition. Much more comfortable for you, too. It’s Chinese New Year. Gung hay fat choy.”

“Gung hay fat choy to you too, Muse.” Zhu unlaces and flings the corset away, and slips on the sahm, which fits her perfectly in spite of her burgeoning pregnancy. She finds the aurelia on her dressing table, pins the brooch on her collar.

She stands at the threshold of her bedroom for the last time. Nostalgia leaks into her heart. I’ll never see this place again. She knows this is true. A premonition is just a memory of the future.

“Hurry,” Muse whispers.

* * *

Zhu flees into the night, Jessie and Daniel dogging her heels. Four bruisers follow them up Montgomery Street to the Barbary Coast, and three shadows slip out of Tangrenbu. She feels a hand on her shoulder, a hand on her elbow. She stops and whirls, facing Daniel J. Watkins and Jessie Malone. “I’m leaving you tonight,” she tells them, gratified at their look of despair. How on earth did she ever get involved with these people? These ignorant misguided people of the Gilded Age?

YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SURROUNDED BY LOVING FRIENDS

That was her fortune in the Japanese Tea Garden. Daniel and Jessie, loving friends? The very idea is outrageous. Yet seeing their despair at her announced departure, she can’t help but think there’s some truth to it. Jessie rescued her from the hatchet men, took her into the boardinghouse, fed and clothed her and gave her a chance to survive. And Daniel? He’s her lover, the most compelling lover she’s ever known. The father of her unborn child.

Zhu loves the Gilded Age, how can she deny it? The pleasures and debaucheries of this ancient night are beautiful, wild and free. Free in a way Zhu has never known freedom before. She wasn’t free as a Daughter of Compassion. She was empty, emaciated, gripped with the blind yearning to belong to something. Gripped always, ever since she could remember, with the need to numb the deep apprehension of incipient disaster. Burdened with a presentiment of doom, a premonition. She was brutalized, and became brutal.

Daniel and Jessie love her in the only way they know how, she knows this now. Why did she stay in the employ of the Queen of the Underworld? Why have an affair with Daniel? This has got to be the final, irrational answer. They have always loved her, and she has always loved them.

Not a pattern of pain, of atrocity. No! Zhu won’t accept that.

“Don’t you make fun of no mermaids,” Jessie is shouting at the peepshow entrepreneur with his sad little pickled monkey, and he mutters, “Sorry, lady. It’s just a peepshow.”

“Watch out for that Muldoon,” Jessie says in Zhu’s ear, pointing out the weasel of a man in the scarlet cutaway. “He’s a crimp.”

Daniel slings his arm around her shoulders, grins at her, and Zhu smiles back. In the golden glow of the gaslight, he’s so beautiful, his dark hair spilling over his collar, his pale skin stretched over his cheekbones. He’s going to die. And there’s nothing she can do.

But why? Why must that be? Are they all like the aurelia, human beings trapped on the cross of destiny? No! Zhu will not accept that.

Daniel had a life before the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications decided to t-port her six centuries into the past. He must have a life now. He must go to Paris to see the Lumiere brothers’ moving picture machine. Perhaps he’ll work with Thomas Edison. Perhaps he’ll return to California, to Los Angeles next time. He’ll know the work of another Charles Chaplin, not the painter of broken-back nymphs, but an actor who goes by Charlie and will make people laugh.

They stride past the Lively Flea, the most debased showcase on the Barbary Coast. Zhu stares at the nightmarish shows, live on stage. She presses her fingertips to her throat.

Temperance women crowd outside the swinging doors to the Lively Flea, commence a song, ring brass bells, bang on drums. “Shall we gather by the river, the beautiful, beautiful river? Shall we gather by the river. . . .”

A temperance woman approaches Zhu and hands her a leaflet. “Turn away from sin, my child. Turn away from the degradation of women and children. Turn away from the oppression of the colored races. Turn away from cruelty to God’s creatures.”

“Thank you,” Zhu says and hands the leaflet to Jessie. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision.

“Heads up, Z. Wong,” Muse says urgently.

Striding along the waterfront, there she is.

Wing Sing.

Zhu would know her moon face anywhere, her delicate cheekbones, the bow of her mouth. Her tall slim figure in the gray silk dress, a Newport hat pinned over the shiny black braid that swings down her back. Wing Sing strides freely on fashionable lady’s button boots with daring broad square toes. Beside her strides a blond woman. Li’l Lucy? Maybe, though if she is, Lucy has lost a lot of weight. Wing Sing and her companion duck into Kelly’s Saloon & Eye-Wink Ballroom.

Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Of course Zhu gave the gray silk dress to Wing Sing. Of course Zhu wears a sahm of apple-green silk. She had the garment custom-made at Lucky Gold Trading Company so she can be comfortable during her pregnancy. It’s nine minutes after eleven. Zhu has less than an hour to return downtown, catch the cable car up California Street to the intersection at Mason. She can’t miss this rendezvous. Not this one.

“Let’s have a drink!” Daniel declares and charges in through Kelly’s swinging doors.

Jessie grips Zhu’s elbow, her face taut and pale. “Let’s don’t go in there, missy.”

“Why?”

“I got a bad feeling. What do you call it? A premonition.”

“Hurry,” Muse whispers.

“Jessie, I can’t wait.”

Daniel charges back out and sweeps them into Kelly’s. “Come along, ladies. It’s on me.”

Crummy bar, smoke and sawdust. The four bruisers sashay in through the swinging doors, Harvey strolls in with Muldoon the crimp, and they all exchange ribaldries with the barkeep, Mr. Kelly himself. Now three hatchet men drift through the swinging doors. The eyepatch turns his glittering eye on the crowd.

Wing Sing stands joking with a gang of sailors, who shout prices and what they’d like her to do to them. Zhu takes her arm, leads her to the table where the skinny blond sits.

Zhu peers. “Li’l Lucy? Is that really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Miss Wong. I know, I’m so ugly,” Li’l Lucy says sadly, concealing her bony face and black-rimmed eyes behind a fluttering fan. “Hop is awful hard on a gal’s bloom.”

But Wing Sing is hard, contemptuous. “Just look at you, Jade Eyes. Fat with your baby, huh?”

Zhu studies Wing Sing’s slim belly. “You will be, too. Fat with your new daughter.”

Li’l Lucy giggles but Wing Sing is furious, her eyes slick with tears. “No, no, I not make baby. I lose Rusty’s baby, my monthlies stop. Hop stops monthlies, that why singsong girls smoke hop. Maybe hop make me lose baby, too. Anyway, good for the biz.” Wing Sing reaches over and slaps Li’l Lucy on her sallow cheek. “Shut up, you. I sad.”

Li’l Lucy stops giggling.

“You so clever, Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing says. “Have fancy explanation for everything.” She leans so close, Zhu can smell the sickly sweet reek of opium on her breath. “You know what ‘Wing Sing’ mean in the tongue of my village?”

“It means ‘everlasting life,’” Zhu says impulsively. Now how did she know that?

“So clever, like I say. You think I want to live forever? Like this? Huh.” Wing Sing’s face is a mask of sorrow. “Forget it. I go off and die.”

Daniel strides to Zhu’s side, glancing coldly at Wing Sing and Li’l Lucy. “You’re supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss.”

“So what you want with me, Jade Eyes?”

This is when Zhu is supposed to give the aurelia to Wing Sing. For the future. For Wing Sing’s daughter. Wing Sing will get pregnant again. She must.

“The aurelia,” Muse whispers in her ear. The monitor isn’t helping. The monitor is defective. She’ll have to think for herself.

Zhu turns away from them all and bows her head.

“Why, Muse?” she whispers. “Why should I give her the aurelia? Wing Sing never had it. I have it. And Wing Sing isn’t pregnant, I am. If the aurelia is an enigma, a time anomaly with no beginning and no end, what difference does it make who gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967? Maybe Donaldina Cameron had a premonition when she asked if the old green-eyed Chinese woman in the holoid is me.”

“The aurelia,” Muse repeats stupidly, as if the monitor is jammed.

“What difference does it make under the resiliency principle? The principle Chiron is so afraid of? If, under the resiliency principle, we can actually create reality then I, Zhu Wong, choose. I’ll be a hundred and one years old in 1967. With my gene-tweaking, I’ll easily live that long. That is my sacrifice, Muse. I’ll stay.”

Muse is silent, and Daniel shakes her arm. “Come along, my little lunatic. Enough of this talking to yourself.”

“I want you to take care of yourself, Wing Sing,” Zhu says, a deep foreboding rising in her chest. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what, Jade Eyes? I bad luck to you.”

Muse whispers urgently, “The aurelia.”

The aurelia. Zhu conceals the brooch with her hand. This is Kelly’s, after all. The place is crawling with thieves, cutpurses, desperados, and crimps. A small, tightly corseted woman conspicuously faints near the cooch booths. Fanny Spiggot is working the crowd.

Zhu lurches to her feet. She’s got to get out of this place fast!

But Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers surround her and Daniel. Smiling, Harvey brandishes two tall tumblers brimming with drink. “So you’re takin’ me to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins? Well, have a drink with me first.”

“Thank you, sir, don’t mind if I do. You’ll get due your justice.” Daniel, smiling back, takes a tumbler. Kelly guffaws. Daniel raises the tumbler to his lips.

Now suddenly the eyepatch glimpses Zhu. He and his hatchet men stride across Kelly’s, heading toward her.

Zhu kicks, moving easily in the sahm, and plants a hard heel in the gut of one of the Harvey’s thugs. She whips her fist like a snake striking and knocks the doped drink from Daniel’s hand. The tumbler falls to the floor and shatters. Now the trapdoor flips up, waiting like an open grave, Kelly’s confederates waiting in a boat below the pier, ready to kidnap the next drugged man and take him out to a clipper ship bound for Shanghai.

Jessie yells at the sailors, “Do something, ya deadbeats! You gonna let them crimps shanghai an honest gentleman?”

Someone seizes Zhu, and she whirls and strikes. She gasps at the sharp sting of a knife cutting the skin of her arm.

“No one cross Chee Song Tong,” the eyepatch says. “No woman cross me, Jade Eyes.”

“I never crossed you.”

“You steal from us. You steal from me.”

“Then summon a policeman. Have me arrested.”

“This our law, Jade Eyes.” He lunges at her with the knife.

Daniel yells, seizes a shard of glass from the shattered tumbler, swings it at Harvey’s thugs. They descend on him, fists flying, the awful thud of skin on skin. Daniel falls into the filthy sawdust, arms and legs flailing. Two thugs drag him by his ankles to the trapdoor. Harvey holds up a hypodermic needle, a narcotic spurting from its gleaming tip.

Jessie screams, “No, no, no, no!”

Zhu leaps at the eyepatch, infuriated, heedless of his knife, and whips the side of her hand across his throat. He staggers, and she seizes a gun—a Smith and Wesson revolver—right out of his waistband. She fires off two rounds, aiming wildly. Harvey disappears like a counterfeit coin. The thugs drop Daniel’s legs and slink away in the smoke and confusion.

Jessie yanks Daniel to his feet, slings his arm over her shoulder. The trapdoor flips shut, a grave denied its corpse.

The eyepatch stares at Zhu, choking from her blow, his face a mask of malice. But, wait. An inexplicable look of betrayal pierces that mask, some connection Zhu didn’t know they shared. Two Chinese struggling to survive in San Francisco, maybe? We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

Ah, forget it. Forget it! He’s a goddamn gangster.

She trains the Smith and Wesson on him, gripping the gun in both hands. He looks around, determined to satisfy Zhu’s debt, and seizes Wing Sing, who screams and staggers, awkward in her Western dress and fashion boots. He wrestles her in front of him, a human shield. Zhu aims for his feet—she’s an excellent shot after Changchi—and squeezes the trigger. If she wounds him, maybe he’ll lose his hold on Wing Sing. Click! And nothing happens. The gun needs reloading, and she has no ammunition. She flips the barrel into her palm and leaps toward him, intent on inflicting a serious dent in his ugly skull with the grip.

The eyepatch whips the knife and cuts Wing Sing’s throat, ear to ear. She shrieks, a terrible gurgling cry, and blood sprays all over the gray silk dress. The eyepatch shoves her away, and Wing Sing falls to her hands and knees, then collapses facedown on the floor.

Police whistles shriek, and the crowd stampedes for the swinging doors, pushing and shoving. The eyepatch joins the exodus, vanishing from Zhu’s sight. She flings the Smith and Wesson into the sawdust, kneels over Wing Sing, gently turns the girl over, and pulls out her mollie knife.

But it’s too late to heal such a mortal wound. Wing Sing’s life hemorrhages away.

“I’m sorry, Wing Sing,” Zhu whispers, sick to her soul, and presses the girl’s glassy eyes shut with gentle fingertips. “I’m so very sorry.”

Jessie and Daniel yank her to her feet, pull her out through the swinging doors to the street.

“Ain’t nothin’ you can do for her now, missy,” Jessie says.

“You got that right,” Zhu whispers.

“Let’s scram outta this joint before the bulls raise holy hell.”

“Does this mean you’re not leaving me for the future?” Daniel says, smiling in spite of his his split lip and black eye. He plants a bloodstained kiss on her cheek. “I’m so glad, my angel. You know how much I adore you.”

Muse whispers, “Hurry.”