In March, Joy suddenly cheers up. “Maybe it’s because the winter is over,” Sam suggests. But that’s not it, because she still complains about the endless winter. Rather, there’s a boy …
My friend Joe asked me to join the Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association. I like the kids in the group. We discuss integration, interracial marriage, and family relationships. I’m learning a lot and it’s nice to see friendly faces, cook together, and eat together.
Quite apart from this Joe, whoever he is, I’m happy that she’s joined a Christian group. I know she’ll find companionship there. After reading the letter to everyone, I write our reply:
Your dad wants to know about your classes this semester. Are you keeping up? Auntie May wants to know ’what the girls are ’wearing in Chicago and if she can send you anything. I don’t have much to add. Things are the same or nearly the same. We closed the curio shop—not enough business to hire someone to sell that “junk,” as you always called it. Business at Pearl’s is good and your dad’s busy. Uncle Vern wants to know more about Joe.
Actually, he hasn’t said a thing about Joe, but the rest of us are itching with curiosity.
And you know your auntie—always working. What else? Oh, you know the kind of things that go on around here. Everyone’s afraid of being called a Communist. During troubles in business or rivalries in love, one person can find a solution by labeling the other a Communist. “Did you hear so-and-so’s a Commie?” You know how it is, people gossiping, chasing the wind and catching shadows. Someone sells more curios; he must be a Communist. She spurned my affections; she must be a Communist. Fortunately, your father doesn’t have any enemies, and no one is ‘wooing your aunt.
This is my around-the-corner-and-down-the-block way of trying to get Joy to write more about this Joe. But if I’m Joy’s mother, then she’s definitely my daughter. She sees right through me. As usual, I wait to read the letter until everyone’s home and we can gather around Vern’s bed.
“You’d like Joe,” she writes.
He’s in premed. He goes to church with me on Sundays. You want me to say my prayers, but we don’t say them at my Christian association. You’d think that Jesus would be all we’d talk about at those meetings, but we don’t talk about Him. We talk about the injustices that were done to people like you and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa. We talk about what happened to the Chinese in the past and what’s continuing to happen to black people. Just last weekend we picketed Montgomery Ward because they won’t hire blacks. Joe says that minorities need to stick together. Joe and I have been getting people to sign petitions. It’s nice to think about other people’s problems for a change.
When I come to the end of the letter, Sam asks, “Do you think this Joe speaks Sze Yup? I don’t want her to marry someone outside our dialect.”
“Who says he’s Chinese?” May asks.
That sets us to twittering like birds.
“They’re in a Chinese organization,” Sam says. “He has to be Chinese.”
“And they go to church together,” I add.
“So? You always encouraged her to go to church outside Chinatown so she could meet other kinds of people,” May says, and three accusatory pairs of eyes glare at me.
“His name is Joe,” I say. “That’s a good name. It sounds Chinese.”
As I stare at the name written in Joy’s even hand and try to decide exactly what this Joe might be, my sister—forever my devilish little sister—ticks off other Joes. “Joe DiMaggio, Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy—”
“Write her back,” Vern interrupts. “Tell her Commies are no-good friends. She’ll get in trouble.”
But that’s not what I write. What I write is not at all subtle: “What’s Joe’s family name?”
In mid-May I receive Joy’s reply.
Oh, Mom, you’re so funny. I can just imagine you and Dad, Auntie May, and Uncle Vern sitting around and worrying about this. Joe’s family name is Kwok, OK? Sometimes we talk about going to China to help the country. Joe says we Chinese have a saying: Thousands upon thousands of years for China. Being Chinese and carrying that upon your shoulders and in your heart can be a heavy burden but also a source of pride and joy. He says, “Shouldn’t we be a part of what’s happening in our home country?” He even took me to get a passport.
I worried about Joy when she left us. I worried about her when she got homesick. I worried about her hanging out with a boy when we had no idea who or what he was. But this is something different. This is truly scary.
“China’s not her home country,” Sam grumbles.
“He’s a Commie,” Vern says, but then he thinks everyone’s a Commie.
“It’s just love,” May says lightly, but I hear worry in her voice. “Girls say and do stupid things when they’re in love.”
I fold the letter and put it back in its envelope. There’s nothing we can do about any of this from so far away, but I begin a chant—something more than a prayer, something more like a desperate plea: Bring her home, bring her home, bring her home.
Dominoes
SUMMER ARRIVES AND Joy comes home. We bask in the soft music of her voice. We try to stop ourselves from touching her, but we pat her hand, smooth her hair, and straighten her collar. Her auntie gives her signed movie magazines, colorful headbands, and a pair of purple ostrich mules. I make her favorite home-cooked foods: steamed pork with salted duck eggs, curried tomato beef lo mein, chicken wings with black beans, and almond tofu with canned fruit cocktail for dessert. Every day Sam brings her one treat or another: barbecued duck from the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, whipped-cream cake with fresh strawberries from Phoenix Bakery, and pork bao from the little place she likes so much on Spring Street.
But how Joy has changed these last nine months! She wears pedal pushers and sleeveless cotton blouses that nip in at her tiny waist. She’s lopped off her hair and styled it into a pixie cut. Inside she’s changed too. I don’t mean that she challenges us or insults us as she did in her last months before she left for Chicago. Rather, she’s come back believing that she’s more knowledgeable than we are about travel (she’s been to Chicago and back on the train, and none of us have been on one in years), about finances (she has her own bank account and a checkbook, while Sam and I still hide our money at home, where the government—or whoever—can’t get it), but most of all about China. Oh, the lectures we hear!
She slaps her paws at the gentlest among us, her uncle. If the Boar—with its innocent nature—has a fault, it’s that he trusts everyone and will believe almost everything that’s told to him, even by strangers, even by swindlers, even by a voice on the radio. Years of listening to anti-Communist broadcasts have forever colored Vern’s opinions about the People’s Republic of China. But what kind of a target is he? Not a very good one. When Joy proclaims, “Mao has helped the people of China,” about all her uncle can do is say, “No freedom there.”
“Mao wants the peasants and workers to have the very chances that Mom and Dad want for me,” Joy presses adamantly. “For the first time, he’s letting people from the countryside go to colleges and universities. And not just boys. He says women should receive ‘equal pay for equal work.’”
“You’ve never been there,” Vern says. “You don’t know anything about it—”
“I do so know about China. I was in all those China movies when I was a little girl.”
“China isn’t like the movies,” her father, who usually stays out of these disagreements, says. Joy doesn’t smart-tongue him. It’s not because he tries to control her as a proper Chinese father should or that she’s an obedient Chinese daughter. Instead, she’s like a pearl in his palm—forever precious; to Joy, he’s the solid ground on which she walks—forever steady and reliable.
Sensing a momentary lull, May tries to put a final stop to Joy’s line of thinking. “China isn’t like a movie set. You can’t leave it when the cameras stop rolling.”
This is one of the harshest things I’ve ever heard my sister say to Joy, but this most mild of reprimands acts like a nettle in my daughter’s heart. Suddenly her attention focuses on May and me—two sisters who have never been apart, who are the closest of friends, and whose bond is deeper than Joy could ever imagine.
“In China, girls don’t wear dresses like you and Auntie May want me to wear,” she tells me a couple of mornings later as I iron shirts on the screened porch. “You can’t wear a dress when you’re driving a tractor, you know. Girls don’t have to learn how to embroider either. They don’t have to go to church or Chinese school. And there’s none of that obey, obey, obey stuff that you and Dad are always bugging me about.”
“That may be so,” I say, “except that they have to obey Chairman Mao. How is that different from obeying the emperor or your parents?”
“In China, there are no wants. Everyone has food to eat.” Her response is not an answer, just another slogan that she picked up in one of her classes or from that Joe boy.
“Maybe they can eat, but what about freedom?”
“Mao believes in freedom. Haven’t you heard about his new campaign? He’s said, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ Do you know what that means?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “He’s invited people to criticize the new society—”
“And it’s not going to end well.”
“Oh, Mom, you’re so …” She stares at me, considering. Then she says, “You always follow the other birds. You follow Chiang Kai-shek, because people in Chinatown do. And they follow him because they think they have to. Everyone knows he’s no better than a thief He stole money and art as he fled China. Look at how he and his wife live now! So why does America support the Kuomintang and Taiwan? Wouldn’t it be better to have ties to China? It’s a much bigger country, with a lot more people and resources. Joe says it’s better to talk to people than to ignore them.”
“Joe, Joe, Joe.” I sigh wearily. “We don’t even know this Joe and you’re listening to him about China? Has he ever been there?”
“No,” Joy grudgingly admits, “but he’d like to go. I’d like to go too one day to see where you and Auntie lived in Shanghai and go to our home village.”
“Go to mainland China? Let me tell you something. It’s not easy for a snake to go back to Hell once he’s tasted Heaven. And you are not a snake. You’re just a girl who doesn’t know anything about it.”
“I’ve been studying—”
“Forget that classroom business. Forget what some boy told you. Go outside and look around. Haven’t you noticed the new strangers in Chinatown?”
“There will always be new lo fan,” she says dismissively.
“They aren’t the usual lo fan. They’re FBI agents.” I tell her about one who’s recently been walking through Chinatown every day and asking questions. He makes a loop that starts at the International Grocery on Spring, passes Pearl’s on Ord, and goes along Broadway to the Central Plaza in New Chinatown, where he visits General Lee’s Restaurant. From there he continues to Jack Lee’s grocery on Hill, then over to the newest part of New Chinatown across the street to visit the Fong family’s businesses, and finally back downtown.
“What are they looking for? The Korean War is over—”
“But the government’s fear of Red China hasn’t gone away. It’s worse than ever. In your school haven’t they taught you about the domino theory? One country falls to Communism, then another, and another. These lo fan are scared. When they’re scared, they do bad things to people like us. That’s why we have to support the Generalissimo.”
“You worry too much.”
“I said the same thing to my mother, but she was right and I was wrong. Bad things are already happening. You just don’t know about them because you’ve been gone.” I sigh again. How can I make her understand? “While you were away, the government started something called the Confession Program. It’s all across the country, probably in your Chicago too. They’re asking, no, trying to scare us into confessing who came here as paper sons. They give people citizenship if they report on their friends, their neighbors, their business associates, and even their family members who came here as paper sons. They want to know who earned money bringing in paper sons. The government talks about the domino effect. Well, here in Chinatown, if you give one name, that also creates a domino effect, which touches not just one family member but all the paper partners and papers sons and relatives and neighbors you know. But what they want most are Communists. If you report that someone is a Communist, then you’ll get your citizenship for sure.”
“We’re all citizens. We aren’t guilty of anything.”
For years Sam and I have been torn between the American desire to share, be honest, and tell the truth to Joy and our deeply held Chinese belief that you never reveal anything. Our Chinese way has won, and we’ve kept Sam’s and my status, as well as that of her uncles and her grandfather, a secret from our daughter for two very simple reasons: we haven’t wanted her to worry and we haven’t wanted her to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. She’s much older than she was back in kindergarten, but we learned then that even the smallest mistake can have bad consequences.