They all smiled and kowtowed. He snapped his fingers and said, “That one.” He pointed to a girl in a lavender dress as a sailor stepped forward with a key and opened the groaning iron door.
The merchant’s daughters seemed shocked, confused, and then compliant as they stepped away from the tall, slender girl.
“But…Sir Doctor, I’m not ill—not even seasick anymore,” the girl in lavender protested, pleading in her native tongue. “I feel fine, look at me, my skin is perfect, and my hair is shiny and clean.” She tilted her chin as she shook her head and her tasseled earrings swayed back and forth. “I haven’t coughed once.”
The crewman translated as the doctor dropped his cigarette on the deck and snuffed it out with the tip of his shoe. “I know. That’s why you’re coming with us.” He smiled politely as his words were translated into Cantonese. “We will take care of you upstairs. We wouldn’t want you wasting away down here.”
The color drained from the girl’s face. She smoothed out the lace on her dress and nodded, seemingly resigned. Yung heard the doctor ask the girl, as he led her away, if she liked the taste of baiju, rice wine. And then they were gone, leaving nothing but the pregnant silence.
“They’re not going to throw her overboard, are they?” Yung asked the girl in the blue robe. She didn’t answer or seem to understand the question. But the boys snickered.
—
THAT NIGHT, AFTER Yung and the girls finished dinner, they piled onto their mattress and played a whisper game. One would whisper something to the person next to her and then that phrase would be passed down the line and back again. It never came back unchanged, and that was the fun. Yung had seen the game played before in his village, but he’d never been included.
He waited, and the girl next to him finally turned and whispered, “I’m a hairy dog that bites,” in Cantonese. He clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. He collected himself and then passed the message along to the Japanese girl in the blue robe. She looked confused, furrowed her brow, and did her best to whisper something on to the girl next to her.
The messages went back and forth, from “My diaper is full” and “Whipped with a cane” to “You’re my pretty servant” and “Jun is your ugly lady-boss.” That one made Yung laugh out loud. When it was Yung’s turn to make up a phrase, he thought of the silliest thing possible. He said to the girl in blue, “I’m going to marry you.”
The Japanese girl crinkled her nose, then her eyes grew wide and she laughed.
But the phrase was taken more seriously as the words moved further down the line. The girls murmured it solemnly, sighed wearily, shook their heads, and eventually returned the message as though relaying a bit of bad news. To Yung it felt as though all the joy, all the laughter, had been snuffed out like a candle.
Yung didn’t understand the sadness he had caused, even as the Japanese girl turned back and relayed the message that had only slightly changed. She looked embarrassed as she confessed, “I am sorry. No one will ever marry us.”
JUJU REPORTING
(1962)
Ernest touched the tarnished band of gold on his ring finger and felt the groove worn into his skin from years of wearing it. He pondered the seaborne episode of his childhood, sipping a cup of oolong tea that had grown cold.
Ernest sighed as he gazed out the third-floor window of his tiny one-room apartment at the Publix Hotel. One aspect of Gracie’s dementia was that she didn’t tolerate men very well—she had even punched a male orderly at the hospital. Even Ernest was not exempt. As a result, Ernest and Gracie had lived apart for almost three years now. Not the retirement he’d imagined. He visited as often as possible on sunny days—that’s what Juju called Gracie’s happier, lucid moments—and he wrote to her on cloudy days, when she didn’t feel like company. He missed her terribly, even when he was by her side—he ached for who she used to be. He longed for who he used to be as well.
Ernest finished his tea. He could hear passenger trains coming and going, as well as the wind through cracks in the panes of glass that had been covered with masking tape to hold the pieces together and ward off the chill. King Street Station was one block away, and he imagined nattily dressed people streaming from the velvet-curtained Pullman cars, to be embraced by loved ones—the warmth, the smell of familiar cologne or perfume, the rush and excitement that came with a long-awaited reunion. But he also recalled the haunting emptiness of waving goodbye. The sunrise colored by thick, ashy smoke from torched fields and burning buildings. And the depth of sadness plumbed by the remembrance of falling asleep among dozens of seasick children in the belly of a ship that smelled like fear and despair.
Ernest could almost feel the rain and the mist in the evening sky, as much as the melancholy. He stretched his back as he noticed an illuminated spire in the distance that could only be the top of the Space Needle.
He thought about his long-lost mother as he regarded the hairpin she’d given him so many decades before. That tarnished bit of copper—the jade phoenix he now knew as Fenghuang—made him feel guilty for not missing her more, as though sixty years later he had somehow failed her as a son. At least he’d survived. And the sad truth was, he just couldn’t remember what she looked like. He didn’t possess a single photograph. He could always remember how she smelled, though—sweet, like fresh watermelon, mangoes, and bayberries. While reading a science book years later, he learned that’s what a body smells like when it’s starving.
Over the years Ernest had always thought more about the many girls on that ship and what might have happened to them—especially whenever he saw an elderly woman in a market in Chinatown, the story of her life written in the lines on her face.
He imagined that if they’d been fortunate, the ones who could walk probably ended up as servants in fancy, ivy-covered manors in Broadmoor or Laurelhurst. Or perhaps they’d found work in a laundry or a sewing factory. The choice few might have been able to earn or marry their way out of their contracts, to eventually have a home on Beacon Hill, and children who would have attended school at Franklin or Garfield High. They would have enjoyed all the trappings of a relatively normal life.
The merchants’ daughters, in all likelihood, had ended up as picture brides, married to strangers they’d never seen except in black-and-white photographs.
Unlike the least fortunate of all—the sorrowful girls who had been so kind to him. Like him, they’d been sold by their parents because their families couldn’t feed them or didn’t want them, or they were mere runaways tricked into thinking they’d get rich in America by working as maids. Many of those girls who came to Seattle ended up at the Aloha, the Tokyo, or the Diamond House, or perhaps the old Eastern Hotel—low-rent brothels. The girls were indentured servants with unfair contracts, who might run away to the police only to be returned, like stray animals, to their owners.
All of these women, Ernest thought—the poor, the merchants’ daughters, and the handful of working girls who survived—they’d all be grandmothers by now. With secrets kept, stories hidden, and respectful children who would never dare to ask about their youth.
Ernest’s reverie was interrupted by footsteps in the hallway.
He listened as the radiator pinged and hot water pipes rattled within the walls. As he waited, he drew a deep breath, and then relaxed when he heard the tromping of work boots in the groaning, creaking mahogany stairwell of the old Chinatown hotel.
Perhaps it was his old friend, Pascual Santos, a longtime resident of the Publix who’d helped Ernest move in when he lost his home.