On Christmas Eve, Frankie played a shepherd in the Christmas Nativity tableau at church. He had acquired a fake brown beard and tied it around his head with kitchen twine. Due to his role, Lily and her family had to arrive at church early. While she waited outside the sanctuary with Eddie and her father—her mother had gone off with Frankie—she wondered whether Kath was attending a mass at Saints Peter and Paul. She wondered if Kath was thinking about her. What if they were thinking of each other at the same time? The idea made her pulse quicken.
It wasn’t long before friends began to arrive, and she had to pretend she was glad to see them. First, her father’s colleagues from the Chinese Hospital and their families, and then a group of students from China who were studying at Cal and wanted to be introduced to her father. She had to shake their hands and speak to them in her terrible Mandarin. At last, everyone dispersed among the pews: Lily with her father and Eddie; Shirley with her family across the aisle; the Chinese students at the back. Her mother slid in next to Lily a moment before the choir began to sing, and Lily raised her eyes to the altar to watch.
She fidgeted as young Joseph and Mary took their places. Her coat was laid over her knees and it was too much like a blanket. She tried to fold it up, but she elbowed her mother in the process. “Sorry,” she whispered, and her mother frowned as she took the coat and folded it for her as if she were a little girl.
Lily glanced across the church at Shirley, who was watching the tableau with a blank expression on her face, as if her mind was elsewhere too. Lily realized that Shirley had changed her hair. She had done it subtly, but somehow she had combed it back and pinned it in a way that made her look older, more sophisticated. There was something in Shirley’s posture—shoulders back, head lifted—that reminded Lily of Lana Jackson.
Instantly Lily remembered the smell of the Telegraph Club, the sound of the piano and glasses knocking against the table. Her thoughts turned to Kath and the last time she’d seen her; the feel of their hands twined together; their promise to meet on the night before New Year’s Eve.
No one in this church knew she had been to the Telegraph Club or that she would go again. No one. The thought was disorienting, as if she had lived a second life in a separate dimension, and she had to curl her fingers over the hard wooden edge of the pew in order to remind herself of where she was.
One of the children was reading from the book of Luke in a high, childish voice: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” Young Mary—a Chinese girl in a brown peasant-style dress with a blue cloth over her hair—carefully set a swaddled baby doll inside a wooden manger lined with hay. Someone had built that manger years ago; Lily recognized it from Christmases past.
Lily had played the part of a shepherd once in the Christmas tableau, when she was about nine or ten. She had been the only girl to play a shepherd, and in fact she had argued her way into the role, because Shirley had been cast as Mary and that was the only role for a girl. She remembered saying to the Sunday school teacher: “It’s not fair if Shirley’s the only girl in the play!” The teacher relented and told her that she could be a shepherdess, but Lily insisted that she was a shepherd, just like the boys. She had been so proud.
Now she wondered, a bit tensely, if it had meant something. Had Kath also played a shepherd in her church’s pageant? She suddenly envisioned all the women she had met at the Telegraph Club as little girls, every one of them dressed up as a shepherd boy or even a wise king, boys’ robes hiding their dresses, false beards covering their girlish faces.
The shepherds were moving across the front of the sanctuary, surrounding Mary and Joseph and the baby doll Jesus. Frankie was gripping his shepherd’s crook fiercely, completely invested in his role. Lily noticed that none of the shepherds were girls this year; they were all boys.
—1937
Japan invades China.
—1940
Edward Chen-te Hu (胡振德) is born.
—1941
United States enters World War II.
—1942
Joseph joins the U.S. Army and becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen.
—1943
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed.
—Mar. 25, 1943
GRACE and her family attend the parades in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to San Francisco.
—1944
The “Suicide Squad” is formalized as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operating under the Army.
—1945
World War II ends.
GRACE
Eleven Years Earlier
Chinatown was thick with flags and streamers and flowers: red, white, and blue American and Chinese flags; long red ribbons fluttering from lampposts; white-petaled apricot blossoms with their soft pink hearts blushing in polished windows. Madame Chiang Kai-shek was visiting San Francisco, and the sun itself seemed to glow with particular warmth to mark her arrival, slanting between the buildings to gild every flag and streamer in golden light.
Grace Hu had caught the fever that gripped the entire city. Earlier that morning she staked out a spot on Grant Avenue between a corner kiosk and a lamppost to watch China’s first lady process through Chinatown. Grace’s mother had dragged an empty crate onto the curb and sat there with two-year-old Eddie perched on her lap, miraculously calm for the moment. Lily, who was six, leaned back against Grace as they waited. That afternoon, Lily would join thousands of Chinatown’s children in a parade through Civic Center, and Grace would march with her, one of dozens of volunteer mothers who would corral the children through the city. Now, Grace imagined, was the calm before that storm.
“佢話佢好虚弱,” Grace’s mother said. “無論佢走到邊度, 都有白車跟住佢.”*