I remember Chairman Plumb showing me a picture of a little boy and thinking that it didn’t look all that much like Sam. Why hadn’t I questioned that more? I need to hear the truth. I need it for me, for my sister, and for Joy. And I need him to tell me everything—without having him close up and slump away as he usually does. I use a tactic I learned from my weeks of interrogations at Angel Island.
“Tell me about your village and your real family,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t shake too much from the emotions I feel and believing if he talks about these comfortable things, then maybe he’ll tell me the truth about how he came to be a paper son to the Louies. He doesn’t answer right away. He stares at me in the way he has so many times since the first day we met. Always I’ve seen that look as sympathy for me, but maybe he’s been trying to show compassion for our shared troubles and secrets. Now I try to match his expression. The funny thing is, I mean it.
“We had a pond in front of our house,” he murmurs at last. “Anyone could throw fish in it and raise them. You could dip a crock in the water, pull it out, and there’d be fish in your crock. No one had to pay. When the pond ran dry, you could pick up fish sitting in the mud. Still, no one had to pay. In the field behind our house, we grew vegetables and melons. We raised two pigs a year. We were not rich, but we were not poor either.”
It sounds poor to me. His family had lived from dirt to mouth. He seems to sense my understanding as he goes on haltingly.
“When the drought came, my grandfather, father, and I worked hard, trying to make the ground yield to our desires. Mama went to other villages to earn money by helping others plant or harvest rice, but those places also suffered from no rain. She wove cloth and took it to market. She tried to help our family, but it wasn’t enough. You can’t live on air and sunshine. When two of my sisters died, my father, my second brother, and I went to Shanghai. We wanted to earn enough to go back to Low Tin Village and farm again. Mama stayed home with my youngest brother and sister.”
In Shanghai, they found not promise but hardship. They didn’t have connections, so they couldn’t get factory jobs. Sam’s father took work as a rickshaw puller, while Sam, who’d just turned twelve, and his brother, who was two years younger, scavenged for small jobs. Sam sold matches on street corners; his brother ran after coal trucks to pick up pieces that fell from the beds to sell to the poor. They ate watermelon rinds plucked from trash pits in summer and watered down jook in winter.
“My father pulled and pulled,” Sam continues. “At first he drank tea with two lumps of sugar to restore his strength and cool his skin. When money ran low, he could only afford cheap tea made from dust and stems and no sugar. Then, like so many pullers, he began smoking opium. Not real opium! He couldn’t afford that! And not for pleasure either. He needed it for stimulation, to keep pulling in the hottest weather or if there was a typhoon. He bought the dregs left over from the rich and sold by servants. The opium gave my father false vigor, but his strength was eaten and his heart shriveled. Pretty soon he began to cough blood. They say that you never see a rickshaw puller reach age fifty and that most pullers are already past their best days by the time they turn thirty. My father died when he was thirty-five. I wrapped him in a straw mat and put him on the street. Then I took his place, selling my sweat by pulling a rickshaw. I was seventeen and my brother was fifteen.”
As he talks, I think about all the rickshaws I’ve ridden in and how I never really thought about the men who pulled them. I hadn’t considered pullers actual people. They’d seemed barely human. I remember how many of them had not owned shirts or shoes, the way their spines and shoulder blades had protruded from their skin, and the sweat that had oozed from their bodies even in winter.
“I learned all the tricks,” Sam goes on. “I learned I could get an extra tip if I carried a man or woman from my rickshaw to the door during typhoon season so they wouldn’t ruin their shoes. I learned to bow to women and men, invite them to ride in my li-ke-xi, call them Mai-da-mu for Madame or Mai-se-dan for Master. I hid my shame when they laughed at my bad English. I made nine silver dollars a month, but I still couldn’t afford to send money home to my family in Low Tin. I don’t know what happened to them. They’re probably dead. I couldn’t even take care of my brother, who joined other poor children helping to push rickshaws over the arched bridges at Soochow Creek for a few coppers a day. He died of the blood-lung disease the next winter.” He pauses, his mind back in Shanghai. Then he asks, “Did you ever hear the rickshaw pullers’ song?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer but begins to sing:
“To buy rice, his cap is the container.
To buy firewood, his arms are the container.
He lives in a straw hut.
The moon is his only lamplight.”
The melody comes back to me, and my mind is transported to Shanghai’s streets and rhythms. Sam is talking about his hardship, but I feel loneliness for my home.
“I listened to riders who were Communists,” he continues. “I heard them complain that since ancient times poor men have been urged to find contentment in poverty. That was not my life. That was not why my father and brother died. I wish I could have changed their fates, but once they were gone all I could think about was my own mouth. I thought, if the leaders of the Green Gang got their starts pulling rickshaws, then why couldn’t I? I had no schooling in Low Tin. I was a farmer’s son. But even pullers understood the importance of education, which is why the rickshaw guild sponsored schools in Shanghai. I learned the Wu dialect. I learned more English—not the ABCs but some words.”
The more Sam talks, the more my heart opens to him. When I first met him in the Yu Yuan Garden, I hadn’t thought he was so bad. Now I see just how hard he’s tried to change his life and how little I’ve understood. He speaks Sze Yup fluently and the Wu dialect of the streets, while his English is practically nonexistent. He’s always looked uncomfortable in his clothes. I remember the day we met noticing his shoes and suit were new. They must have been the first he owned. I remember the red tinge to his hair and mistakenly believing it had something to do with the fact that he was from America and not recognizing it as the well-known sign of malnutrition. And then there is his manner. He’s always been deferential to me, treating me not as a fu yen but as a customer who must be pleased. He’s always bowed down to Old Man Louie and Yen-yen—not because they’re his parents but because he’s like a servant to them.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” my husband says. “My father would have died anyway. Farming is not a good life when you have to carry a two-hundred-fifty-jin load on a bamboo pole balanced on your shoulders or you have to stoop in the rice fields all day. The only riches I’ve earned have come from working with my hands and feet. I started out as so many rickshaw pullers, not knowing what to do, my bare feet slapping the road like a pair of palm fronds. I learned to hold my stomach in, expand my chest wide, raise my knees high, and stretch my head and neck forward. As a rickshaw puller, I earned an iron fan.”
I’d heard my father use the term about his best pullers. It suggested a hard, straight back and a chest as wide, spread open, and strong as a fan made from iron. I also remember what Mama said about being born in the Year of the Ox: that the Ox is capable of great sacrifices for his family’s welfare, that he’ll pull his own load and more, and that—while he may be as plain and serviceable as the beast of burden he emulates—he is forever worth his weight in gold.
“If I could make forty-five coppers from a fare, I was happy,” Sam goes on. “I would exchange those coppers for fifteen cents. I would keep turning my coppers into silver coins, and my silver coins into silver dollars. If I could pocket an extra tip, I was happier still. I thought, if I could save ten cents a day, I would have one hundred dollars in a thousand days. I was willing to eat bitterness to find gold.”
“Did you work for my father?”
“At least I didn’t have that humiliation.” He touches my jade bracelet. When I don’t flinch, he loops a forefinger through the bracelet, his flesh barely grazing mine.
“Then how did you find the old man? And why did you have to marry me?”
“The Green Gang owned the largest of the rickshaw businesses,” he answers. “I worked for it. The gang often served as matchmaker between those who wanted to become paper sons and those seeking to sell paper-son slots. In our case, they acted as a traditional matchmaker too. I wanted to change my fate. Old Man Louie had a paper-son slot to sell—”
“And he needed rickshaws and brides,” I finish for him, shaking my head at the memories all this brings back. “My father owed the Green Gang money. All he had left to sell were his rickshaws and his daughters. May and I are here. My father’s rickshaws are here, but that still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”
“For me, the price to buy the paper was one hundred dollars for each year of my life. I was twenty-four, so the cost was twenty-four hundred dollars for boat passage, plus room and board once I got to Los Angeles. I would never be able to earn that amount at nine dollars a month. Today I work to pay off the old man—not only for myself but for you and Joy too.”
“Is this why we’re never paid?”
He nods. “He’s keeping our money until my debt is paid. This is why the uncles aren’t paid either. They’re paper sons too. Only Vern is a blood son.”
“But you’re different from the other uncles—”
“That’s right. The Louies want me as a true replacement for the son who died. This is why we live with them and why I’m the manager of the café, even though I know less than nothing about food or business. If the immigration people ever discover I’m not who I say I am, they could put me in jail and deport me. But I might have a way to stay, because the old man made me a paper partner too.”
“But I still don’t understand why you needed to marry me. What does he want from us?”
“Only one thing: a grandson. That’s why he bought you and your sister. He wants a grandson one way or another.”
My chest tightens. The doctor in Hangchow said I’d probably never be able to have children, but to say that to Sam would mean I’d have to tell him why. Instead I ask, “If he wants you as his true son, then why do you have to pay him back?”