To me, this photograph shows how we sacrifice in big and small ways. We can finally afford to buy a washing machine, but we don’t because metal is so scarce. We promote the boycott of Japanese silk stockings and wear cotton stockings instead, using the motto “Be in style, wear lisle,” and, sure enough, women all over the city join the Non-Silk Movement. Everyone suffers from shortages of coffee, beef, sugar, flour, and milk, but in the café and in Chinese restaurants all over the city, we suffer even more because ingredients like rice, ginger, tree-ear mushrooms, and soy sauce no longer cross the Pacific. We learn to substitute sliced apple for water chestnuts. We buy rice grown in Texas instead of fragrant jasmine rice from China. We use oleo, squirt yellow food coloring in it, knead it, and press it into bar-shaped molds so it will look like butter when we cut it into pats for the café. Sam gets eggs on the black market, paying five dollars for a case. We save our bacon grease in a coffee can under the sink to take to the collection center, where we’re told it will be used in the production of armaments. I stop feeling resentful that I have to spend so much time stringing peas and peeling garlic in the restaurant, because now we’re serving our boys in uniform and we need to do everything we can for them. And at home we begin to eat American dishes—pork and beans, grilled Spam sandwiches with cheese and sliced onion, creamed tuna, and casseroles made with Bisquick—that will spread our ingredients the furthest.
SNAP: THE CHINESE New Year Fundraiser. Snap: Double-ten Fundraiser. Snap: China Night, with your favorite movie stars. Snap: the Rice Bowl Parade, where the women of Chinatown carry a gigantic Chinese flag by its edges and ask bystanders to throw coins onto the flag. Snap: the Moon Festival, where Anna May Wong and Keye Luke serve as the mistress and master of ceremonies. Barbara Stanwyck, Dick Powell, Judy Garland, Kay Kyser, and Laurel and Hardy wave to the crowd. William Holden and Raymond Massey stand around, looking debonair, while the girls in the Mei Wah Drum Corps march in their V for Victory formation. The monies raised buy medical supplies, mosquito nets, gas masks, and other necessities for refugees, as well as ambulances and airplanes, which are sent across the Pacific.
Snap: the Chinatown Canteen. May poses with soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, who leave Union Station during their layovers, cross Alameda, and visit the canteen. These boys have come from all over the country.
Many of them have never seen a Chinese before, and they say things like “golly” and “gee whillikers,” which we adopt and use ourselves. Snap: I’m surrounded by airmen sent by Chiang Kai-shek to train in Los Angeles. It’s wonderful to hear their voices, learn news of our home country, and know that China still fights hard. Snap, snap, snap: Bob Hope, Frances Langford, and Jerry Colonna come to the canteen to put on shows. Girls between sixteen and eighteen years old—wearing white pinafores, red blouses, and saddle shoes with red socks—volunteer as hostesses to jitterbug with the boys, hand out sandwiches, and listen with sympathetic ears.
My favorite photograph shows May and me chaperoning at the canteen just before closing time on a Saturday night. We wear gardenias pinned in our hair, which falls in soft curls around our shoulders. Our sweetheart necklines show a lot of pale flesh but somehow look girlish and chaste. Our dresses are short, and our legs are bare. We may be married women, but we look pretty and cheerful. May and I know what it means to live through war, and being in Los Angeles isn’t that.
OVER THE NEXT fifteen months, many people pass through the city: servicemen going to or coming from the Pacific Theater, wives and children journeying to see husbands and fathers in military hospitals, and diplomats, actors, and salesmen of every sort involved in the war effort. I never think I’ll see someone I know, but one day in the café a man’s voice calls my name.
“Pearl Chin? Is that you?”
I stare at the man sitting at the counter. I know him, but my eyes refuse to recognize him because my humiliation is instantaneous and deep.
“Aren’t you the Pearl Chin who used to live in Shanghai? You knew my daughter, Betsy.”
I set down his plate of chow mein, turn away, and wipe my hands. If this man truly is Betsy’s father—and he is—he’s the first and only person from my past to see just how far I’ve fallen. I was once a beautiful girl, whose face decorated walls in Shanghai. I was smart and clever enough to be allowed into this man’s home. I turned his daughter from a dowdy mess into someone half fashionable. Now I’m mother to a five-year-old, wife to a rickshaw puller, and waitress in a café in a tourist attraction. I paste a smile on my face and turn to look at him.
“Mr. Howell, it’s wonderful to see you again.”
But he doesn’t look so happy to see me. He looks sad and old. I may be humbled, but his grief is elsewhere.
“We came looking for you.” He reaches across the counter and grabs my arm. “We thought you were dead in one of the bombings, but here you are.”
“Betsy?”
“She’s in a Jap camp out by the Lunghua Pagoda.”
A memory of flying kites with Z.G. and May flashes through my mind, but I say, “I thought most Americans left Shanghai before—”
“She got married,” Mr. Howell says sadly. “Did you know that? She married a young man who works for Standard Oil. They stayed in Shanghai after Mrs. Howell and I left. The oil business, you know how it is.”
I come around the counter and sit on the stool next to Mr. Howell, aware of the curious looks Sam, Uncle Wilburt, and the other café helpers shoot my way. I wish they’d stop staring at us like that—their mouths hanging open like they’re street beggars—but Betsy’s father doesn’t notice. I want to say my feeling of disgrace is hard to find, but I’m ashamed to admit it’s hidden just beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve been in this country for almost five years and still haven’t been fully able to accept my situation. It’s as if in seeing this face from the past all the goodness in my life is reduced to nothing.
Betsy’s father probably still works for the State Department, so maybe he’s aware of my discomfort. At last he fills the silence between us. “We heard from Betsy after Shanghai became the Lonely Island. We thought she was safe, since she was in British territory. But after December eighth, there was nothing we could do to get her back. Diplomatic channels don’t work so well now.” He stares into his cup of coffee and smiles ruefully.
“She’s strong,” I say, trying to bolster Mr. Howell’s spirits. “Betsy’s always been smart and brave.” Is that even true? I remember her as being passionate about politics when May and I just wanted to have another glass of champagne or another twirl around the dance floor.
“That’s what Mrs. Howell and I tell ourselves.”
“All you can do is hope.”
He lets out a knowledgeable snort. “That’s so like you, Pearl. Always looking at the bright side. That’s why you did so well in Shanghai. That’s why you got out before bad things happened. All the smart people got out in time.”
When I don’t say anything, he stares at me. After a long while, he says, “I’m here for Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit. I’ve been traveling with her on her American tour. Last week we were in Washington, where she appealed to Congress for money to help China in its fight against our common enemy and reminded the men who listened that China and the United States cannot be true allies with the Exclusion Act still on the books. This week she’s going to speak at the Hollywood Bowl and—”
“Participate in a parade here in Chinatown.”
“It sounds like you know all about it.”
“I’m going to the Bowl,” I say. “We’re all going, and we’re looking forward to having her here.”
Hearing the word we, for the first time he seems to absorb his surroundings. I watch as his cheerless eyes see past his memories of a girl who perhaps never existed. He takes in the grease on my clothes, the tiny wrinkles around my eyes, and my chapped hands. Then his understanding expands as he assesses the smallness of the café, the walls painted baby-shit yellow, the dusty fan spinning overhead, and the wiry men wearing ME NO JAP armbands gawking at him as though he were a creature from beneath the waves.
“Mrs. Howell and I live in Washington now,” he says carefully. “Betsy would be angry with me if I didn’t invite you to come home with me. I could get you a job. With your language skills, there’s a lot you could do to help the war effort.”
“My sister’s here with me,” I respond, without thinking.
“Bring May too. We have room.” He pushes away his plate of chow mein. “I hate to think of you here. You look…”
It’s funny how in that moment I see things clearly. Am I beaten down? Yes. Have I allowed myself to become a victim? Somewhat. Am I afraid? Always. Does some part of me still long to fly away from this place? Absolutely. But I can’t leave. Sam and I have built a life for Joy. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a life. My family’s happiness means more to me than starting over again.
If in the canteen photos I’m smiling, the one from this day shows me at my worst. Mr. Howell—wearing an overcoat and a fedora—and I are posed next to the cash register, onto which I’ve taped a handmade sign that reads: ANY RESEMBLANCE TO LOOKING JAPANESE IS PURELY OCCIDENTAL. Usually our customers get a big kick out of that, but no one’s showing teeth in the photograph. Even though it’s in black and white, I can almost see the redness of shame on my cheeks.
A FEW DAYS later, the whole family gets on a bus and rides to the Hollywood Bowl. Because Yen-yen and I have worked so hard raising money for China Relief, our family has good seats just behind the fountain that separates the stage from the audience. When Madame Chiang steps on the stage wearing a brocade cheongsam, we applaud like crazy people. She’s splendid and beautiful.
“I implore the women here today to become educated and take an interest in politics both here and in the home country,” she proclaims. “You can churn the wheel of progress without jeopardizing your roles as wives and mothers.”
We listen attentively as she asks us and the Americans to help raise money and support for the Women’s New Life Movement, but the whole time she speaks we ooh and aah over her appearance. My thoughts about my clothes change once again. I see that the cheongsam, which I’ve had to wear to please the tourists in China City and meet Mrs. Sterling’s lease requirements, can be a patriotic, and fashionable, symbol.
When May and I go home, we bring our most precious cheongsams out of their chests and put them on. Inspired by Madame Chiang, we want to be as stylish and as loyal to China as possible. Instantly, we’re once again beautiful girls. Sam takes our picture, and for a moment it feels as though we’re back in Z.G.’s studio. But why, I wonder later, didn’t we ask Sam to take a photograph of Yen-yen and me when we were invited to shake Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s hand?