For days she calls Joy a cute tomato, which doesn’t make much sense to me. The next time May works as an extra, she comes back with a new phrase: “What in the H,” as in “What in the H did you put in this soup, Pearl?”
Often she comes home bragging about the food she’s eaten. “They give us two meals a day, and it’s good food—American food! I have to be careful, Pearl, truly I do or I’m going to get fat. I won’t fit into a cheongsam then. If I don’t look perfect, they’ll never give me a speaking part.” After that, she takes to dieting—dieting for someone so tiny, for someone who knows what it means not to eat because of war, poverty, and ignorance—before Tom sends her out for a job and then for days afterward to lose the imagined weight she’s gained. All this in hopes that a director will give her a line. Even I know that—except for Anna May Wong and Keye Luke, who plays Charlie Chan’s Number One Son—speaking parts go only to lo fan, who wear yellow makeup, have their eyes taped back, and affect chop-suey English.
In June, Tom comes up with a new idea, May gobbles it and then spits it out to our father-in-law, who embraces it as his own.
“Joy’s a beautiful baby,” Tom tells May. “She’ll make a perfect extra.”
“You can make more money from her than you can from me,” May relays to Old Man Louie.
“Pan-di is lucky for a girl,” the old man confides to me. “She can earn her own way and she’s only a baby.”
I’m not sure I want Joy spending so much time with her auntie, but once Old Man Louie sees he can make money from a baby, well…
“I will let her do it on one condition.” I can make a requirement because, as Joy’s mother, only I can sign the paper allowing her to work all day and sometimes at night under the supervision and care of her aunt. “She will keep everything she makes.”
Old Man Louie doesn’t like this. Why would he?
“You will never again have to buy her clothes,” I press. “You will never again pay for her food. You will never again pay one single penny for this Hope-for-a-Brother.”
The old man smiles at that.
WHEN MAY AND Joy aren’t working, they stay in the apartment with Yen-yen and me. Often, in the long afternoons as we wait for China City to reopen, I think back to stories Mama told me about when she was a girl and confined to the women’s chambers in her natal home with her bound-footed grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins, and sisters. They’d been trapped to maneuver for position, harbor resentments, and snipe at one another. Now, in America, May and Yen-yen fight like turtles in a bucket about anything and everything.
“The jook is too salty,” May might say.
“It isn’t salty enough” comes Yen-yen’s predictable reply.
When May twirls through the main room in a sleeveless dress, stockingless legs, and open-toed sandals, Yen-yen complains, “You shouldn’t be seen in public like that.”
“Women in Los Angeles like bare legs and arms,” May counters.
“But you aren’t a lo fan,” Yen-yen points out.
But nothing and no one is better to fight over than Joy. If Yen-yen says, “She should wear a sweater,” May responds with “She’s roasting like corn on a fire.” If Yen-yen observes, “She should learn to embroider,” my sister argues back, “She should learn to roller-skate.”
More than anything Yen-yen hates that May works in motion pictures and exposes Joy to such low-class activities, and she blames me for letting it happen.
“Why do you let her take Joy to those places? You want your girl to marry one day, don’t you? You think anyone will want a bride who puts her shadow self in trash stories?”
Before I can say anything—and I’m probably not meant to anyway—my sister comes back with her objection: “They aren’t trash stories. They just aren’t for people like you.”
“The only real stories are the old ones. They tell us how to live.”
“Movies tell us how to live too,” May retorts. “Joy and I help tell stories of heroes and good women that are romantic and new. They aren’t about moon maidens or ghost girls languishing for love.”
“You’re too simple,” Yen-yen chides. “That’s why it’s a good thing you have your sister to look out for you. You need to learn from your jie jie. She understands that those way-back stories have something to teach us.”
“What does Pearl know about it?” May asks, as though I’m not in the room. “She’s as old-fashioned as our mother.”
How can she call me old-fashioned? How can she compare me with Mama? I admit that, in my longing for home, for the past, and for our parents, I’ve become like Mama in many ways. All those old ideas about the zodiac, food, and other traditions give me comfort, but I’m not the only one looking backward for consolation. May is bright, effervescent, and undeniably exquisite at twenty, but her life—even though she gets to go to movie sets and dress up—is not what she envisioned back when we were beautiful girls in Shanghai. We both have our disappointments, but I wish she could show me a little more sympathy.
“If your movies teach you to be romantic, then why is it that your sister, who stays with me every day, has done a much better job at this than you?” Yen-yen asks.
“I’m romantic!” May fights back, haplessly falling into Yen-yen’s trap.
My mother-in-law smiles. “Not romantic enough to bring me a grandson! You should have a baby already …”
I sigh. These kinds of arguments between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are as old as humankind. With conversations like this, I’m happy that most days May and Joy are on a film set and I’m alone with Yen-yen.
On Tuesdays, after delivering lunch to our husbands in China City, Yen-yen and I go door to door to every boardinghouse, apartment, and business along Spring Street, where people buy their groceries, and even over to New Chinatown to raise money for United China Relief and national salvation. We’ve gone beyond picketing. Now we carry empty vegetable cans and use them as beggars’ bowls, walking down Mei Ling, Gin Ling, and Sun Mun Ways, agreeing that we can’t go home until our cans are at least half full with pennies, nickels, and dimes. People are starving in China, so we also visit groceries and make the owners donate imported Chinese food, which we pack and send back to where it came from: China, home.
Doing this work, I meet people. Everyone wants to know my natal family name and which village I’m from. I meet more Wongs than I can count. I meet lots of Lees, Fongs, Leongs, and Moys. Through it all, Old Man Louie never once complains that I’m traipsing from Chinatown to Chinatown or that I’m meeting strangers day after day, because I’m always with my mother-in-law, who begins to confide in me not as a despised daughter-in-law but as a friend.
“I was kidnapped from my village as a small girl,” she tells me one Tuesday as we walk back from New Chinatown along Broadway. “Did you know that?”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” I say, which doesn’t begin to cover what I feel. I was expelled from my home, but I can’t imagine being taken from it forcibly. “How old were you?”
“How old was I? How can I know? I don’t have anyone to tell me that. Maybe I was five. Maybe I was older, maybe younger. I remember I had a brother and a sister. I remember there were water chestnut trees along the main road to my village. I remember a fishpond, but I guess every village has one of those.” She pauses before going on. “I left China long ago. I long for it every day and suffer when she suffers. That’s why I work so hard to raise money for China Relief.”
No wonder she doesn’t know how to cook. She wasn’t taught by her mother, just as I wasn’t taught by mine—but for different reasons. Yen-yen has no desire for something better to eat, because she doesn’t have memories of shark’s fin soup, crisp Yangtze River eel, or braised pigeon in lettuce leaves. She’s grabbed on to old traditions—outdated traditions—in the same way I latch on to them now: as a means of soul survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories. Perhaps it’s better to treat a cough with winter melon tea than by putting a mustard plaster on your chest. Yes, her way-back stories and her old ways are sinking into me, changing me, instilling more “Chinese” into me, as surely as the flavor of ginger seeps into soup.
“What happened after they took you?” I ask, my heart in a great sympathy of understanding.
Yen-yen stops on the sidewalk, bags filled with donations hanging from her hands. “What do you think happened? You’ve seen unmarried girls without families. You know what happens to them. I was sold as a servant in Canton. As soon as I was old enough, I became a girl with three holes.” She juts her chin. “Then one day, maybe I was thirteen, I was bundled in a sack and put on a boat. The next thing I knew I was in America.”
“What about Angel Island? Didn’t they ask you questions? Why weren’t you sent back?”
“I came before Angel Island opened. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I’m surprised by what I see. I still expect to see that girl, but I don’t like to remember those days. What do they matter to me now? You think I want to remember being a wife to many men?” She shuffles down the street, and I hurry to keep up with her. “I’ve done the husband-wife thing too many times. People make such big talk about it, but why worry so much? The man goes in. The man goes out. As women, we stay the same. Do you know what I mean, Pearl-ah?”
Do I? Sam’s different from those men in the shack, that I know. But have I stayed the same? I remember all the times I’ve seen Yen-yen sleeping on the couch. Usually some new bachelor—an immigrant from China, who appears on Old Man Louie’s partnership list until his debt is paid by someone who needs a laborer at a cheap price—sleeps there. But whenever they aren’t there, Yen-yen can be found in the main room in the morning, folding blankets and reciting one excuse or another: “That old man snores like a water buffalo.” Or “My back hurts. This place is more comfortable.” Or “That old man tells me I move around in the bed like a mosquito. He can’t sleep. If he doesn’t sleep, then everyone is unhappy the next day, no?” Now I understand that her reasons for sleeping on the couch are the same ones I had when I wished I could escape Sam’s bed. Too many men did things to her that she doesn’t want to remember.
I put a hand on her arm. Our eyes meet and something passes between us. I don’t tell her what happened to me. How can I? But I think she understands … something, because she says, “You’re lucky you have Joy and that she’s healthy. My boy …” She sucks in a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Maybe I spent too long in that business. I’d worked almost ten years by the time the old man bought me. There were so few Chinese women here back then—maybe less than one for every twenty men—but he got me for a cheap price anyway because of my job. I was happy, because I finally left San Francisco and came here. But even then he was like he is now—old and stingy in heart. All he wanted was a son, and he worked hard to give me one.”
She nods to a man sweeping the sidewalk before his business. He looks the other way, afraid we’ll ask him for a donation.
“When the old man went back to his home village to see his parents, I went with him,” Yen-yen continues. I’ve heard her say this before, but this time I hear it differently. “When he traveled around China to buy merchandise, he left me behind. I don’t know what he thought: that maybe I would stay in the house for the weeks he was gone with his essence inside me, my legs up, waiting for a son to grab hold. But as soon as he left, I walked from village to village. I speak Sze Yup. My home village has to be in the Four Districts, right? Every day I looked for a village with chestnut trees and a fishpond. I never found it, and I didn’t have a son. I got pregnant, but the babies all refused to breathe the air of this world. Every trip back to Los Angeles, we reported that I had had a son in China and left him with his grandparents. This is how we brought in the uncles. Wilburt was my first paper son. He was eighteen, but we said he was eleven to match the papers we filed claiming he was born one year after the San Francisco earthquake. Charley came next. He was easy. We’d gone back to China the next year, so I had a certificate for a son born in 1908, and Charley was born that same year.”