“我係唐人,”* she said in Cantonese, a little pertly.
“你們老家在哪裡?”* Joseph asked in Mandarin.
“你話咩話?”* Grace asked. She did not understand.
His smile turned regretful. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak your dialect.”
She knew only a little about the Chinese scholars who came to America to study. They were mostly from Shanghai, usually from well-connected or wealthy families, and they didn’t mingle much with the American Chinese—at least not the American Chinese that Grace knew. Joseph was the first such student she had spoken to directly, and she found him difficult to categorize. He didn’t fulfill her image of a mandarin; he was too young and too Westernized. Nor did he seem American, exactly, though he spoke English with hardly a trace of an accent.
“How are you liking San Francisco?” he asked her. “Do you miss Santa Barbara? I’ve never been there. Is it far?”
“It’s a few hours south on the train,” Grace answered. “It’s warmer than San Francisco, and of course I miss my family.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Only two. Two younger brothers. We’re a small family because my father died when I was eleven.”
“That must have been hard for your mother.”
“She’s a strong woman. She took over running my father’s export-import store in the little Chinatown there, and I helped her until my brothers were old enough to do more, and now they run the store with her.”
“What does your family store sell?”
“A little of everything. Products from China—we have to serve the local population. You know, dried vegetables, herbs. Medicines. Some chinaware, silks, everything.” Grace fell silent, wondering if she was boring him. The store had always bored her.
He gave her an encouraging smile, and asked, “Do you want to go home after nursing school, to continue helping with the family business?”
Grace couldn’t imagine going back to work in their store. She had barely escaped by getting into nursing school. “I’ll have to see what my mother needs,” she said diplomatically. “Will you go back? To China?”
“Of course. China needs Western-trained doctors. And engineers and architects—and nurses, too. We’re in a difficult situation right now, as you probably know.”
She nodded sympathetically, though her knowledge of China’s current situation was minimal. She knew that Japan was constantly threatening invasion, and the Chinese government, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was struggling to fight back. China had always seemed both impossibly distant and uncomfortably near to her, a land of silk-robed emperors in ancient palaces, but also of hardscrabble villages that lived on in her mother’s stories. We didn’t have running water, her mother said when Grace complained about their family store’s leaky plumbing. We slept six to a bed, her mother said when Grace wished for her own bedroom.
“Have you ever wanted to go to China?” Joseph asked.
“Maybe, to visit my mother’s family.” There had been a time when Grace’s mother constantly lamented being separated from her family, but in recent years she had given up the complaints. Grace wondered if she had forgotten them, or if she had resigned herself to a kind of exile.
“When you finish nursing school, your skills will be in high demand in China,” Joseph said. “Many Chinese people need modern medical treatment.”
Grace had never considered this possibility. She had a sudden vision of herself in a modern hospital somewhere in China: bright and clean, with Chinese patients lying serenely in white beds. She was wearing a white nursing cap and rolling a tray of medicines down a pale green hallway.
“Is that what you will do?” she asked. “Go back and treat patients?”
“I hope so. Also I want to use my training from here to train other doctors in China—those who can’t afford to come to America for medical school.”
He sounded so selfless, so upright. She was ashamed of her earlier desire to bring up Shanghai actresses. Their conversation continued in a stilted fashion, moving into and away from China, medicine, and San Francisco, the way so many first conversations went, but neither of them attempted to escape from it. She found him fascinating, and the way he thoughtfully asked about her interest in nursing was flattering. She also liked the little creases around his eyes when he smiled at her. It made her skin tingle; she wanted him to smile at her again.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, when she returned to the nursing students’ dormitory, she remembered the article about the Shanghai actresses.
She went into the living room to see if the Sunday Chronicle was still there. It had been read by now, and the sections were loosely scattered across the console table beside the door, but she found the article quickly. It was the cover story of the Sunday Magazine (“Such a Row in China Over the Two Rival Movie Queens”), illustrated with photographs of two women gazing seductively at the camera. One of them wore a striped Chinese dress and was seated on a pouf, her legs crossed with one hand draped casually over a knee. The other was smiling at the camera with darkly painted lips and arched brows. Coiling between the two photographs was an illustration of Chinese men fighting, presumably over the actresses; they had slanted eyes and slashes for eyebrows that made them look comically menacing.