Shanghai Girls (21 page)

After he finishes and a proper amount of time has passed, I get up and go into the main room to get Joy. Vern and May have already gone to their room, but knowing glances pass between Old Man Louie and Yen-yen.

“You bring me a grandson now?” Yen-yen asks as she hands me Joy. “You’re a good daughter-in-law.”

“You’d be a better daughter-in-law if you told your sister to do her job,” the old man adds.

I don’t respond. I just take Joy back to our room and lay her in her drawer in the bottom of the dresser. Then I reach around my neck and take off the pouch Mama gave me. I open the top drawer and tuck the pouch together with the one that May gave Joy. I don’t need it anymore. I close the drawer and turn back to Sam. I take off my clothes and slip naked back into the bed. As his hand runs up my side, I find the courage to ask one more question.

“Sometimes you disappear in the afternoons too,” I say. “Where do you go?”

His hand stops on my hip. “Pearl.” My name comes out long and soft. “I didn’t go to those places in Shanghai, and I’ll never go to them here.”

“Then where—”

“I go back to the temple, but this time it’s to make offerings to my family, to your family, and even to the Louie ancestors—”

“To
my
family?”

“You just told me how your mother died, but I knew she had to be gone, and your father too. You wouldn’t have come here to us if they’d still been living.”

He’s smart. He knows me well and he understands me.

“I also made offerings to our ancestors after we were married,” he adds.

I nod to myself. He’d answered the Angel Island interrogators honestly about that.

“I don’t believe in these things,” I confess.

“Maybe you should. We’ve done them for five thousand years.”

As we do the husband-wife thing again, sirens sound in the distance. In the morning we wake to learn that a fire has swept through China City. Some people say it was an accident that flared in the smoldering firecracker remains behind George Wong’s fish market, while others insist it was arson set by people in New Chinatown who don’t like Christine Sterling’s idea of a “native Chinese village” or by people in Olvera Street who don’t like the competition. The gossips will go on and on, but no matter who started the fire, a good part of China City has been destroyed or damaged.

Even the Best of Moons

THE FIRE GOD
is indiscriminate. He lights lamps, he makes fireflies glow, he reduces villages to ash, he burns books, he cooks food, and he warms families. All people can hope for is that a dragon—with its watery essence—will douse unwanted fires when they come. Whether you believe in these things or not, making offerings is probably wise. As Americans would say, it’s better to be safe than sorry. In China City, where no one has insurance, no offerings are made to appease the Fire God or inspire a dragon to be benevolent. These are not good omens, but I tell myself that people in America also say lightning never strikes twice.

It will take almost six months for the parts of China City damaged by smoke and water to be repaired and the destroyed sections to be rebuilt. Old Man Louie is in an even worse position than most, since not only did some of the cash he’d hidden in his various enterprises burn but some of his real wealth—his merchandise—turned to ash. No money fills the family pot, but plenty goes out for the rebuilding effort, to order new goods from his factories in Shanghai and from antiques emporiums in Canton (and hope that they can leave those cities on foreign ships and pass safely through the Japanese-infested waters), and to feed, house, and clothe his household of seven, as well as support his paper partners and paper sons, who live in bachelor boardinghouses nearby. None of this sits well with my father-in-law.

Although he insists that May and I stay with our husbands and work at their sides, there’s nothing for us to do. We don’t know how to use a hammer or saw. We have no merchandise to unpack, polish, or sell. There are no floors to sweep, windows to wash, or customers to feed. Still, May, Joy, and I walk over to China City every morning to see how construction is progressing. May isn’t unhappy with Sam’s plan to stay together and save our money. “They feed us here,” she’s told me, finally it seems to me, showing some maturity. “Yes, let’s wait until the four of us can leave together.”

In the afternoons, we often visit Tom Gubbins in the Asiatic Costume Company, which escaped fire damage. He rents props and costumes, and acts as an agent for Chinese extras to movie studios, but otherwise he’s a bit of a mystery. Some say he was born in Shanghai. Some say he’s a quarter Chinese. Some say he’s half and half Some say he doesn’t have a single drop of Chinese in him. Some call him Uncle Tom. Some call him Lo Fan Tom. We call him Bak Wah Tom, Motion Pictures Tom, which is how he introduced himself to me at China City’s Grand Opening. From Tom, I learn that mystery, confusion, and exaggeration can build your reputation.

He helps a lot of Chinese—buying them clothes, buying
their
clothes, finding them rooms, getting them jobs, making arrangements for expectant mothers at hospitals unfriendly to Chinese, sitting for interviews by the immigration inspectors, who are always on the lookout for paper merchants and paper sons—but few like him. Maybe it’s because he once worked as an interpreter at Angel Island, where he’d been accused of getting a woman pregnant. Maybe it’s because he has a fondness for young girls, although others say he has a fondness for young men. All I know is that his Cantonese is near perfect and his Wu dialect is very good. May and I love to hear the sounds of our home dialect coming from his mouth.

He wants my sister to work as an extra in the movies; naturally, Old Man Louie objects, saying, “That’s a job for a woman with three holes.” He can be so predictable, but in this he’s just voicing the sentiments of many old-timers who believe that actresses—whether in operas, plays, or motion pictures—are little better than prostitutes.

“Keep talking to your father-in-law,” Tom instructs May. “Tell him that one out of every fourteen of his neighbors works in the movies. It’s a good way to make extra income. I could even get him a job. I promise he’ll make more money in a week than he did in three months sitting in his antiques shop.” The idea makes us laugh.

People in Chinatown are often called “acting conscious.” When the studios realized they could hire Chinese for as little as “five dollars a Chink,” they used our neighbors for crowd scenes and to fill all kinds of nonspeaking roles in films like
Stowaway, Lost Horizon, The General Died at Dawn, The Adventures of Marco Polo
, the Charlie Chan series, and of course
The Good Earth
. The Depression may be receding, but people need money and will work for it in any way possible. Even people in New Chinatown, who are wealthier than we are, like to work as extras. They do it because they want to have fun and see themselves on the silver screen.

I don’t want to work in
Haolaiwu
. Not for any old-fashioned reasons but because I understand I’m not beautiful enough. My sister is, though, and she wants this badly. She idolizes Anna May Wong, even though everyone around here talks about her as though she’s a disgrace, because she always plays singsong girls, maids, and murderers. But when I see Anna May on the screen, I think back to the way Z.G. used to paint my sister. Like Anna May, May glows like a ghost goddess.

For weeks Tom begs us to sell him our
cheongsams
. “I usually buy clothes from people who bring them back after a visit to China, because they’ve gained too much weight at home. Or I buy them from people who’ve come here for the first time, because they’ve lost so much weight on the ship and on Angel Island. But these days no one’s going home because of the war, and those lucky enough to make it out of China have usually left everything behind. But you two are different. Your father-in-law looked out for you and brought your clothes.”

I don’t mind selling our clothes—I chafe at having to wear them for the sake of China City’s tourists—but May doesn’t want to part with them.

“Our dresses are beautiful!” she cries indignantly. “They’re part of who we are! Our
cheongsams
were made in Shanghai. The material came from Paris. They’re elegant—more elegant than anything I’ve seen here.”

“But if we sell some of our
cheongsams
, then we can buy new dresses—American dresses,” I say. “I’m tired of looking unfashionable, of looking like I’m fresh off the boat.”

“If we sell them,” May inquires shrewdly, “what will happen when China City reopens? Won’t Old Man Louie notice that our clothes are gone?”

Tom waves away that worry as inconsequential. “He’s a man. He won’t notice.”

But of course he will. He notices everything.

“He won’t care as long as we give him a portion of what Tom pays us,” I say, hoping I’m right.

“Just don’t give him too much.” Tom scratches his beard. “Let him think you’ll make more money if you keep coming back here.”

We sell Tom one
cheongsam
apiece. They’re our oldest and ugliest, but they’re splendid compared with what he has in his collection. Then we take the money and walk south on Broadway until we come to the Western department stores. We buy rayon dresses, high heels, gloves, new undergarments, and a couple of hats—all from the sale of two dresses, with enough left over that our father-in-law isn’t angry with us when we put the remaining money in his palm. That’s when May begins her campaign, teasing him, cajoling him, and, yes, even flirting with him, trying to get him to surrender to her desires just as our father did in the past.

“You like us to keep busy,” she says, “but how can we keep busy now? Bak Wah Tom says I can make five dollars a day if I work in
Haolaiwu
. Think how much that will be in a week! Add to that the extra I’ll make if I wear my own costume. I have plenty of costumes!”

“No,” Old Man Louie says.

“With my beautiful clothes, I might get a close-up. I’ll earn ten dollars for that. If I get to say a line—just one single line—I’ll make twenty dollars.”

“No,” Old Man Louie says again, but this time I can practically see him counting the money in his mind.

Her lower lip trembles. She crosses her arms. Her body shrinks into itself, making her appear pitiful. “I was a beautiful girl in Shanghai. Why can’t I be a beautiful girl here?”

The mountain crumbles one grain at a time. After several weeks, he finally gives in. “Once. You may do it once.”

To which Yen-yen sniffs and walks out of the room, Sam shakes his head in disbelief, and blood rushes to my face in pleasure that May’s beaten the old man just by being herself.

I don’t catch the title of May’s first movie, but since she has her own clothes, she gets to play a singsong girl instead of a peasant. She’s gone for three nights and she sleeps during the days, so I don’t hear about her experience until the shoot ends.

“I sat in a fake teahouse all night and nibbled on almond cakes,” she recalls dreamily. “The assistant director called me a cute tomato. Can you imagine?”

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.”