FATHER LOUIE CONTINUES sending money to his home village by wiring funds to Hong Kong and then hiring someone to walk the money into the People’s Republic of China and on to Wah Hong Village. Sam warns him against this. “Maybe the Communists will confiscate it. Maybe this will be bad for the family in the village.”
I have different fears. “Maybe the American government will call us Communists. That’s why most families aren’t sending home remittances anymore.”
And it’s true. Many people in Chinatowns across the country have stopped sending money home because everyone is afraid and perplexed. The letters we receive from China confuse us even further.
“We are happy with the new government,” writes my father-in-law’s cousin twice removed. “Everyone is equal now. The landlord has been made to share his wealth with the people.”
If they’re so happy, we ask ourselves, then why are so many trying to get out? These are men, like Uncle Charley, who went back to China with their savings. Here in America, they’d suffered and been humiliated as low and unworthy of citizenship, but they’d withstood it, believing that great happiness, prosperity, and respect awaited them in the country of their birth, only to discover bitter fates upon their return to China, which treats them as dreaded landlords, capitalists, and running dogs of imperialism. The unlucky ones die in the fields or in the village squares. The fortunate ones escape to Hong Kong, where they die broken and broke. A few lucky ones come home to America. Uncle Charley is one of these.
“Did the Commies take everything from you?” Vern asks from his bed.
“They didn’t have a chance,” Uncle Charley answers, rubbing his swollen eyes and scratching his eczema. “When I got there, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were still in power. They asked everyone to exchange their gold and foreign currency for government certificates. They printed billions of Chinese yuan, but it wasn’t worth anything. A sack of rice, which once cost twelve yuan, soon cost sixty-three million yuan. People took their money in wheelbarrows to go shopping. You wanted to buy a postage stamp? It cost the equivalent of six thousand U.S. dollars.”
“Are you saying bad things about the Generalissimo?” Vern asks nervously. “You better not do that.”
“All I’m saying is that by the time the Communist soldiers came, I had nothing left.”
All those years of labor with the promise of returning to China a Gold Mountain man, and now he’s back where he started—working as a glass washer for the Louie family.
I regain my strength and go to work with Sam, which is wonderful in many ways. I get to see my husband, but I also get to be with May every day until five, when I go home to make dinner and she goes to General Lee’s or Soochow, which have moved to New Chinatown, to meet with casting directors and the like. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’re sisters at all. I cling to memories of our home in Shanghai; May clings to memories of being a beautiful girl. I wear my greasy apron and little paper hat; she wears beautiful dresses made from fabrics the colors of the earth—sienna, amethyst, celadon, and mountain lake blue.
I feel bad about how I look until the day my old friend Betsy—who, now that China’s closed, is on her way east to be with her parents—walks through the door of the coffee shop. We’re the same age, thirty-three, but she looks twenty years older. She’s thin, almost skeletal, and her hair has gone gray. I don’t know if this is from her time spent in the Japanese camp or from the hardships of recent months.
“Our Shanghai is gone,” she says when I take her to May’s office at the back of Pearl’s so the three of us can share a pot of tea. “It will never again be what it was. Shanghai was my home, but I’ll never see it again. None of us will.”
My sister and I exchange glances. We had dark moments when we thought we’d never be able to go home because of the Japanese. After the war ended, we had our hopes revived that one day we might go back for a visit, but this feels different. It feels permanent.