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AS YUNG SLEPT that night he dreamed about his mother. In his dream he’d come home early from his chores. Hungry and bored, he rummaged through the old opium tin that served as his mother’s memory box. Inside was a collection of dried flowers, feathers, shell buttons, and one of his teeth that had fallen out. She’d put it on the roof of their house for a month, an old superstition she believed might make his permanent tooth grow in faster. He was sniffing her empty perfume bottles when he heard his mother’s laughter downstairs and that of a strange man. Yung searched frantically for a place to hide as they stumbled into the tiny one-room apartment. In his dream Yung dashed beneath his mother’s bed, just in time, as two pairs of shoes entered the room, heavy leather boots and his mother’s faded yellow lotus slippers. Yung could smell a mixture of alcohol, tobacco, and sweat. He remained motionless. Silent as clothing fell to the floor, his mother’s old mandarin dress and the man’s starched white collar. Ernest heard the dance of metal as her hairpin fell in front of him. He reached out and grabbed it while the steel springs above him bent as the couple fumbled about the bed. Yung heard muffled sounds that seemed like crying amid the heavy, pained breathing. He gripped the hairpin and imagined shoving the long, sharp needle up into the mattress.
In the darkened hold, Yung opened his eyes, smelled the musty woolen blanket, and heard the thrum of the ship’s steam engine. He felt the gentle rocking.
It was only a dream. My mother is gone.
Then Yung heard a timid cry and felt movement next to him. He rolled over and rubbed his eyes, thinking that perhaps he was still dreaming as he saw that Jun had climbed on top of the girl next to him. She was struggling, whimpering, and his hand covered her mouth, while his other hand fumbled with the buttons on her shirt. His large frame draped over her like a blanket, pressing her tiny body into the straw mattress.
Yung’s eyes met the larger boy’s gaze in the dim lamplight. “Look away, baby brother,” the boy hissed.
Yung closed his eyes, then opened them. It wasn’t a nightmare; it was real.
“And if you tell, I’ll do this to the rest of your big sisters. Then I’ll do it to you.”
Yung’s heart raced. He was confused, terrified as he slowly turned away. Jun was three times his age and five times his size. But Yung’s hand moved as though it had a mind of its own as he reached beneath his pillow and pulled out the long brass hairpin. He felt tightness in his chest and a sick sensation of dread in his stomach as he heard the girl struggle, but he was paralyzed with fear. Then Yung saw that the Japanese girl next to him was stirring in the gloaming. He watched her eyes widen, then she snatched the hairpin from his hand and scrambled over him, her bluish robe a blur, flowing water. She raised her arm as though reaching for the ceiling, then she brought it down like a hammer and drove the long copper needle into the flesh of the boy’s posterior. It made a sound that could have come from a butcher shop, the slap of a fist on a haunch of meat. The boy screamed. Yung watched as Jun stumbled out of bed, landed hard on the floor, where he curled and writhed in pain, cursing and shouting, crying as tears streamed down his face, “Lou geoi! Dirty lou geoi!” He continued shouting that she was lower than an alley whore who sold her body for scraps of food.
And as the boy rolled to his knees, Yung watched his mother’s keepsake swing about, stuck like a dragonfly on flypaper. He reached for the hairpin, pulling it free as Jun limped about the room clutching the back of his pants.
“I’m not lou geoi!” the Japanese girl shouted, spittle flying from her mouth. She was being restrained by the girls who had now woken in equal proportions of confusion, shock, and amusement. Others tended to the girl Jun had attacked.
“I’m Fahn!” the Japanese girl yelled, despite being half as tall—a menacing, ferocious eight-year-old screaming in the face of the teenage boy. She shouted again and gritted her teeth as Jun retreated behind the curtain and sailors burst into the room. Then she pointed at her chest. “I’m Fahn.”
Yung didn’t know if that was a nickname. It was a strange word, in a strange dialect. To him the words meant: I’m girl.
As the others let her go, she sat next to Yung and caught her breath. Her eyes welling with emotion, she smiled at him and said, “Are you still going to marry me?”
EVERYONE PLAYS, NOBODY WINS
(1962)
The morning after Juju had visited, Ernest found himself dwelling on memories of that night in the cargo hold. He remembered how a few days later the ship finally reached Victoria, British Columbia, where the boys and girls were separated with little fanfare or explanation. I lost my baby sister after two days, Ernest thought. Then I lost my new big sisters in less than four weeks. I didn’t even get to tell them goodbye.
Beneath a sliver of a moon he’d been transferred with the other boys to a small sloop, presumably bound for Port Townsend, Washington—a gateway to the salmon canneries and sawmills. Or perhaps the oyster fields. The boys watched as the dark city slid by in the night a few hundred yards away. But they had only a glimpse before they were tied into burlap bags and laid on the deck. The sailors had told them the subterfuge was for the boys’ own good, in case the Coast Guard stopped the boat and customs officials wanted to inspect the cargo. They’d been told to lie perfectly still, silent, and not to worry. But on that first night, amid a flurry of ships’ horns, yelling, and what sounded like firecrackers, Ernest remembered clutching his mother’s hairpin.
In his mind’s eye the smugglers were the infamous Ben Ure and Lawrence “Pirate” Kelly, men known for bringing illegal Chinese workers into Washington via Deception Pass. But now, as a grown man, Ernest knew he’d probably been projecting. Maybe that was something he’d read in a history book—something to explain away the horrible, helpless feeling of being hoisted up and tossed overboard, falling through the air, crashing into the frigid water and tasting the salt. He heard cries for help and then the muffled gurgles of the other boys as they sank. Somehow he’d managed to use that hairpin to rip a hole large enough to fit his fingers through, then his hands, large enough to tear his way free. The other boys had drowned by the time Ernest reached the surface, their shrouded bodies bumping him gently in the darkness, bobbing on the incoming tide like driftwood.
Ernest closed his eyes and remembered lights flickering on the horizon, rising and falling beneath the waves as he dog-paddled to the nearest shore, shivering, his lips and fingers numb. The black water was so cold his skin tingled and then burned.
He saw the search beacon of a Coast Guard vessel in the distance, moving away from him. He was terrified and exhausted, at the point of drowning when a policeman on shore patrol must have spotted him—dove in and pulled him to shore. The policeman shivered as he wrapped Ernest in his coat, which smelled like coffee and cigarettes.
The policeman’s name was Ernest, and so Yung had been given his rescuer’s name, though he never saw the man again. But he never forgot his words: “You’re a lucky kid. In my twenty years on the job, Dead Man’s Bay has always lived up to its title.”
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