Inch of Gold
“WHY CAN’T I go?” Joy demands, her voice rising. “Auntie Violet and Uncle Rowland are letting Leon go.”
“Leon’s a boy,” I say.
“It only costs twenty-five cents. Please.”
“Your father and I don’t think it’s right for a girl your age to go around town by yourself—”
“I won’t be by myself All the kids are going.”
“You’re not all the kids,” I say. “Do you want people to look at you and see porcelain with scars? You have to guard your body like a piece of jade.”
“Mom, all I want to do is go to the record hop at the International Hall.”
Yen-yen sometimes said that an inch of gold could not buy an inch of time, but only recently have I begun to understand how precious time is and how quickly it passes. It’s 1956, the summer after Joy’s high school graduation. In the fall, she’ll be attending the University of Chicago, where she plans to study history. It’s awfully far away, but we’ve decided to let her go. Her tuition has turned out to be more than we anticipated, but Joy’s received a partial scholarship and May’s going to help out too. Every day Joy asks if she can go somewhere or other. If I say yes to this record hop—whatever that is—then I’ll have to say yes to something else: the dance with the fifteen-piece orchestra, the birthday celebration in MacArthur Park, the party that will require a bus ride going and coming home.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Joy asks, not giving up. “We’re only going to play records and dance a little.”
May and I said things like that too when we were girls in Shanghai, and it didn’t work out that well for either of us.
“You’re too young for boys,” I say.
“Young? I’m eighteen! Auntie May married Uncle Vern when she was my age—”
And already pregnant, I think to myself.
Sam has tried to pacify me by accusing me of being too strict. “You worry too much,” he’s said. “She’s not aware of boy-girl interests.”
But what girl of Joy’s age isn’t aware of those things? I was. May was. Now when Joy talks back, ignores what I say, or walks out of the room when I tell her to stay, even my sister laughs at me for getting upset, saying, “We did the exact same things at that age.”
And look what it got us, I want to scream at her.
“I’ve never been to a single football game or dance,” Joy resumes her complaints. “The other girls have gone to the Palladium. They’ve gone to the Biltmore. I never get to do anything.”
“We need your help at Pearl’s and in the shop. Your auntie needs your help too.”
“Why should I help? I never get paid.”
“All the money—”
“Goes into the family pot. You’ve been saving for me to go to college. I know. I know. But I only have two months left before I leave for Chicago. Don’t you want me to have fun? This is my last chance to see my friends.” Joy folds her arms over her chest and sighs as though she’s the most burdened person in the world.
“You can do anything you want, but you have to do well in school. If you don’t want to go to school—”
“Then I’m on my own,” she finishes, reciting the line with the fatigue of centuries.
I’m Joy’s mother and I see her with mother eyes. Her long black hair holds the blue of distant mountains. Her eyes are the deep black of a lake in autumn. She didn’t have enough to eat in the womb, and she’s smaller than I am, smaller than May. This gives her the appearance of a maiden from ancient times—lithe like willow branches swayed by the breeze, as delicate as the flight of swallows—but inside she’s still a Tiger. I can try to tame her, but my daughter can’t escape her essential nature, just as I can’t escape mine. Since graduation, she’s complained about the clothes I make for her. “They’re so embarrassing,” she says. I made them out of love. I made them because there wasn’t a place in Los Angeles like Madame Garnet’s in Shanghai for me to take her to have dresses molded to her exact shape. What upsets Joy most of all is her perceived lack of freedom, but I know the kinds of things May and I—especially May, really only May—did when we were young.
A lot of this wouldn’t happen if Father Louie were still alive. He’s been gone four years now. Sam, Joy, and I could have used Father’s death as our chance to move out on our own, but we didn’t. Sam had made a promise when Father took him as more than just a paper son. I may not believe in ancestors anymore, but Sam lights incense for the old man and makes offerings of food and paper clothes to him during New Year’s and other festivities. But beyond that, how could we leave Vern, who’s lived longer than anyone expected? Who will explain to him that his parents are gone when he asks for them, as he does every day? How could we leave May to care for her husband, run the Golden Prop and Extras Company and the curio shop, and manage the house? But it goes even past loyalty to the family and promises made. We continue to be deeply afraid.
Every day the news from the government is bad. The U.S. consul in Hong Kong has accused the Chinese community of being inclined to fraud and perjury, since we “lack the equivalent of the Western concept of an oath.” He says that everyone who comes through his office looking to go to the United States is using fake papers. Angel Island has long been closed, but he’s devised new procedures requiring the answering of hundreds of questions, the filling out of dozens of forms, and the procurement of affidavits, blood tests, X-rays, and fingerprints, all in an effort to keep Chinese from coming to America. He says that almost every Chinese already in America—going all the way back to those who panned for gold more than a hundred years ago and helped build the transcontinental railroad eighty-some years ago—entered illegally and is not to be trusted. He says that we’re responsible for trafficking in drugs, using fraudulent passports and other papers, counterfeiting American dollars, and illegally collecting Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Worse, he claims that for decades the Communists have sent paper sons—like Sam, Wilburt, Fred, and so many others—to America as spies. Every single Chinese living in America must be investigated, he insists.
For years, Joy has come home from school with stories about her duck-and-cover drills. Now it’s as though we want to live each day in that coiled position—cocooned in our houses with our families, hoping the windows, walls, and doors won’t be shattered, immolated, and turned to bitter ashes. For all these reasons—love for one another, fear for one another—we’ve stayed together, and we’ve struggled to find balance and order, but with Father Louie gone, we’re all slightly adrift, especially my daughter.
“You don’t have to wash clothes for lo fan, make their meals, clean their houses, or answer their doors,” I say. “You don’t have to be an office girl or a clerk in a store either. When your baba and I first came here, all we could ever hope for was to have our own café and maybe one day live in a house.”
“You and Dad got that—”
“Yes, but you can have and do so much more. Back when your aunt and I first arrived, only a handful of people could go into a profession. I can count them on one hand.” And I do. “Y. C. Hong, the first Chinese-American lawyer in California; Eugene Choy the first Chinese-American architect in Los Angeles; Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American doctor in the country—”
“You’ve told me this a million times—”
“All I’m saying is you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or an accountant. You can do anything.”
“Even climb a telephone pole?” she asks tartly.
“We just want you to get to the top of the heap,” I reply calmly.
“That’s why I’m going to college. I never want to work in the café or the shop.”
I don’t want her to either, which is exactly what I’ve been saying. Still, there’s a part of me that hates that our family businesses—the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed—are so embarrassing to her. I try—not for the first time—to make her understand.
“The sons in the Fong family have become doctors and lawyers, but they still help out at Fong’s Buffet,” I point out. “That one boy goes to trial in the courthouse during the day. At night the judges go to the restaurant to eat. They say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ And what about that Wong boy? He went to USC, but he’s not too proud to help his father at the filling station on weekends.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me about Henry Fong. Usually you complain he’s become ‘too continental,’ because he married that girl whose family came from Scotland. And Gary Wong is only trying to make up for the fact that he broke his family’s heart by marrying a lo fan and moving to Long Beach so he can live a Eurasian life. I’m glad you’ve become so open-minded.”
This is how Joy’s last summer at home unfolds—with one petty argument after another. At one of our church meetings, Violet tells me she’s experiencing the same things with Leon, who’ll be going to Yale in the fall. “Sometimes he’s as unpleasant as a fish left behind the couch for too many days. Here they talk about the bird leaving the nest. Leon wants to fly away all right. He’s my son and my heart’s blood, but he doesn’t understand that a part of me wants to see him leave too. Go! Go! Take your stinkiness with you!”
“It’s our own fault,” I tell Violet on the phone another night when she calls in tears after her son complained that her accent means she will be forever labeled a foreigner and that if anyone asks where she’s from she should answer Taipei in Taiwan and not Peking in the People’s Republic of China, otherwise J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI agents might accuse her of being an undercover agent on an intelligence mission. “We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.”
May, aware of the discord in the household, offers Joy work as an extra. Joy flutters with excitement. “Mom! Please! Auntie May says if I go to work with her, then I’ll have my own money for books, food, and warm clothes.”
“We already saved enough for that.” This isn’t quite true. The extra money would be welcome, but having Joy go off with May is the last thing I want.
“You never let me have any fun,” my daughter complains.