I jump, but he isn’t addressing me.
“What are you hiding?”
“I work on a farm,” a girl standing to my right says, her voice trembling.
“A farm girl? Your face, hands, and feet deny that!”
It’s true. She wears peasant clothes, but her face is pale, her hands pretty, and she wears new saddle oxfords. The pirate helps the girl off with her clothes until all she wears is a napkin and belt. That’s when we all know for sure that she’s lying. A farm girl can’t afford Western-style napkins. She’d use coarse grass paper like any other poor woman.
How is it that in times like these we can’t help but look? I don’t know, but again I look—partly afraid for myself and May, partly curious. The pirate takes the napkin and slits it open with his knife. He comes away with just fifteen dollars Hong Kong money.
Disgusted by his measly haul, the pirate tosses the napkin into the sea. He looks from woman to woman, decides we aren’t worth the bother, and then motions to a couple of his men to search the hold. They return a few minutes later, say a few menacing words, jump back onto their boat, and chug away. People rush to be first to scramble down into the stinky hold to see what’s been taken. I stay on the deck. Soon enough, faster than I could imagine, I hear cries of dismay.
A man rushes back up the ladder, takes three giant steps across the deck, and flings himself overboard. Neither the fisherman nor I have a chance to do anything. The man bobs in the waves for a minute or so, and then he disappears.
Every day since waking up in the hospital I’ve wanted to die, but watching that man sink below the waves, I feel something inside me rise up. A Dragon doesn’t surrender. A Dragon fights fate. This is not some loud, roaring feeling. It feels more like someone blew on an ember and found a slight orange glow. I have to hang on to my life—however ruined and useless. Mama’s voice comes floating to me, reciting one of her favorite sayings, “There is no catastrophe except death; one cannot be poorer than a beggar.” I want—need—to do something braver and finer than dying.
I go to the hatch and climb down the ladder. The fisherman clamps and locks the hatch. In the sepulchral light I find May. I sit down next to her. Wordlessly, she shows me Mama’s dowry bag, and then she glances up. I follow her gaze. The last of our money is still safe in the crevice.
A FEW DAYS after we arrive in Hong Kong, we read that the areas surrounding Shanghai have been under attack all this time. The reports are almost too much to bear. Chapei has been bombed and burned to the ground. Hongkew, where we lived, hasn’t fared much better. The French Concession and the International Settlement—as foreign territories—are still safe. In a city where there isn’t room for another rat, more and more refugees arrive. According to the paper, the foreign concessions’ quarter-million residents are flummoxed by the crowding caused by three and a half million refugees living on the streets and in converted movie theaters, dance halls, and racecourses. Those concessions—surrounded as they are on all sides by the dwarf bandits—are now being called the Lonely Island. The terror hasn’t been limited to Shanghai. Every day brings news of women being abducted, raped, or killed throughout China. Canton, not so far from us here in Hong Kong, suffers from heavy air raids. Mama wanted us to go to Baba’s home village, but what will we find once we get there? Will it be burned to the ground? Will anyone be alive? Will our father’s name mean anything anymore in Yin Bo?
We live in a hotel on Hong Kong’s waterfront. It’s dirty, dusty, and louse-ridden. The mosquito netting is sooty and ripped. The things we ignored in Shanghai are all too vivid here: families crouched on street corners with their worldly goods spread on a blanket before them, hoping someone will stop to buy. Nevertheless, the British act as though the monkey people will never come to the colony. “We aren’t involved in this war,” they say in their crisp accents. “The Japs dare not attack here.” With so little money, we’re reduced to eating stewed rice bran, a meal often given to pigs. The bran scratches the throat on the way in and is ruinous on the way out. We have no skills, and no one has need for beautiful girls, because there’s no point in promoting beautiful girls when the world’s turning ugly.
Then one day we see Pockmarked Huang get out of a limousine and bound up the steps of the Peninsula Hotel. There’s no mistaking him. We go back to our hotel and lock ourselves in our room. We try to figure out what his presence in Hong Kong means. Has he come here to escape the war? Has he moved the Green Gang’s operations here? We don’t know, and we don’t have a safe way to find out. But no matter what, his reach his great. If he’s here in the south, then he’ll find us.
Out of options, we go to the Dollar Steamship Line office, exchange our original tickets, and procure spots in special second class on the President Coolidge for the twenty-day voyage to San Francisco. We don’t think about what will happen once we get there, finding our husbands, or anything like that. We’re just trying to stay out of the Green Gang’s net and stay ahead of the Japanese.
ON THE SHIP, my fever comes back. I stay in our cabin and sleep for most of the journey. May’s plagued with seasickness, so she spends most of her time outside in the fresh air on the second-class deck. She speaks of a young man who’s going to Princeton to study.
“He’s in first class, but he comes to our deck to see me. We walk and talk, and walk and talk some more,” she reports. “I’ve fallen for him like a ton of bricks.” It’s the first time I’ve heard the American phrase, and it strikes me as odd. This boy must be very Westernized. No wonder May likes him.
Sometimes May doesn’t come back to the room until very late at night. Sometimes she climbs to the top bunk and goes right to sleep, but sometimes she crawls into the narrow bed with me and wraps her arms around me. She matches her breathing to mine and falls asleep. I lie awake then, afraid to move out of fear of waking her, and worrying, worrying, worrying. May seems very smitten with this boy, and I wonder if she’s doing the husband-wife thing with him. But how could she when she’s so seasick? How could she, period? And then my thoughts spiral to even darker places.
Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it’s just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we’ve been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we’re on, wherever it takes us.