Lisa See - Shanghai Girls

We live in a hotel on Hong Kong ’s waterfront. It’s dirty, dusty, and louse-ridden. The mosquito netting is sooty and ripped. The things we ignored in Shanghai are all too vivid here: families crouched on street corners with their worldly goods spread on a blanket before them, hoping someone will stop to buy. Nevertheless, the British act as though the monkey people will never come to the colony. “We aren’t involved in this war,” they say in their crisp accents. “The Japs dare not attack here.” With so little money, we’re reduced to eating stewed rice bran, a meal often given to pigs. The bran scratches the throat on the way in and is ruinous on the way out. We have no skills, and no one has need for beautiful girls, because there’s no point in promoting beautiful girls when the world’s turning ugly.

Then one day we see Pockmarked Huang get out of a limousine and bound up the steps of the Peninsula Hotel. There’s no mistaking him. We go back to our hotel and lock ourselves in our room. We try to figure out what his presence in Hong Kong means. Has he come here to escape the war? Has he moved the Green Gang’s operations here? We don’t know, and we don’t have a safe way to find out. But no matter what, his reach his great. If he’s here in the south, then he’ll find us.

Out of options, we go to the Dollar Steamship Line office, exchange our original tickets, and procure spots in special second class on the President Coolidge for the twenty-day voyage to San Francisco. We don’t think about what will happen once we get there, finding our husbands, or anything like that. We’re just trying to stay out of the Green Gang’s net and stay ahead of the Japanese.

ON THE SHIP, my fever comes back. I stay in our cabin and sleep for most of the journey. May’s plagued with seasickness, so she spends most of her time outside in the fresh air on the second-class deck. She speaks of a young man who’s going to Princeton to study.

“He’s in first class, but he comes to our deck to see me. We walk and talk, and walk and talk some more,” she reports. “I’ve fallen for him like a ton of bricks.” It’s the first time I’ve heard the American phrase, and it strikes me as odd. This boy must be very Westernized. No wonder May likes him.

Sometimes May doesn’t come back to the room until very late at night. Sometimes she climbs to the top bunk and goes right to sleep, but sometimes she crawls into the narrow bed with me and wraps her arms around me. She matches her breathing to mine and falls asleep. I lie awake then, afraid to move out of fear of waking her, and worrying, worrying, worrying. May seems very smitten with this boy, and I wonder if she’s doing the husband-wife thing with him. But how could she when she’s so seasick? How could she, period? And then my thoughts spiral to even darker places.

Many people wish to go to America. Some will do anything to get there, but going to America was never my dream. For me, it’s just a necessity, another move after so many mistakes, tragedies, deaths, and one foolish decision after another. All May and I have left is each other. After everything we’ve been through, our tie is so strong that not even a sharp knife could sever it. All we can do now is continue down the road we’re on, wherever it takes us.

THE NIGHT BEFORE we land, I pull out the coaching book Sam gave me and leaf through it. The book says that Old Man Louie was born in America and that Sam, one of five brothers, was born in China in 1913, the Year of the Ox, during one of his parents’ visits to their home village of Wah Hong, which makes him an American citizen because he was born to one. (He’d have to be an Ox, I think dismissively. Mama said that those born under this sign lack imagination and are forever pulling the burdens of the world.) Sam went back to Los Angeles with his parents, but in 1920, the old man and his wife decided to go China again and then leave their son, only seven years old, in Wah Hong with his paternal grandparents. (This is something different from what I’d been led to believe. I had thought Sam came to China with his father and brother to find a bride, but he was already there. I suppose this explains why he spoke to me in the Sze Yup dialect instead of English on the three occasions we met, but why hadn’t the Louies told us any of that?) Now Sam has returned to America for the first time in seventeen years. Vern was born in Los Angeles in 1923, the Year of the Boar, and has lived there all his life. The other brothers were born in 1907, 1908, and 1911-all of them born in Wah Hong, all of them now living in Los Angeles. I do my best to memorize the tiny details-the various birth dates, the addresses in Wah Hong and Los Angeles, and the like-tell May the things I think are important, then put the rest out of my mind.

The next morning, November 15, we get up early and put on our best Western-style dresses. “We’re guests in this country,” I say. “We should look like we belong.” May agrees, and she slips into a dress that Madame Garnet made for her a year ago. How is it that the silk and buttons made it all the way here without being soiled or ruined, while I…? I have to stop thinking that way.

We gather our things and give our two bags to the porter. Then May and I go outside and find a spot by the rail, but we can’t see much in the rain. Above us, the Golden Gate Bridge is draped in clouds. To our right, the city perches on the shore-wet, dreary, and insignificant compared with Shanghai ’s Bund. Below us on the open-air steerage deck, what seems like hundreds of coolies, rickshaw pullers, and peasants push and shove against one another in a writhing mass, the smell of their wet and stinking clothes wafting up to us.

The ship docks at a pier. Little family groups from first and second class-laughing, jostling, and happy to have arrived-show their papers and then walk down a gangplank covered to protect them from the rain. When our turn comes, we hold out our papers. The inspector looks them over, frowns, and motions to a crew member.

“These two need to go to the Angel Island Immigration Station,” he says.

We follow the crewman through the corridors of the ship and down flights of stairs to where the air is dank. I’m relieved when we step outside again until I see that we’re now with the steerage passengers. Naturally, no umbrellas or awnings cover this deck. Cold wind blows rain into our faces and soaks our clothes.

Around us people frantically pore over their coaching books. Then the man next to us tears a page from his book, stuffs it in his mouth, chews for a bit, and swallows it. I hear someone else say that he dropped his book into the waves the night before and another boast that he threw his into the latrine. “Good luck to anyone who wants to look for it now!” Anxiety clenches my stomach. Was I supposed to get rid of the book? Sam didn’t tell me that. Now I have no way to get to it, because it’s tucked in my hat in our luggage. I take a deep breath and try to reassure myself We have nothing to be afraid of. We’re out of China, away from the war, and in the land of the free and all that.

May and I elbow our way through the smelly laborers to the railing. Couldn’t they have washed before we landed? What kind of an impression do they want to give our hosts? May has something else on her mind altogether. She watches the people still filing off the first-and second-class decks, searching for the young man she’s been spending time with on the voyage. She grips my arm excitedly when she sees him.

“There he is! That’s Spencer.” She raises her voice and calls. “Spencer! Spencer! Look up here! Can you help us?”

She waves and calls a few more times, but he doesn’t turn to look for her standing at the rail of the third-class deck. Her face tightens as he tips the porters and then strolls with a group of Caucasian passengers into a building to the right.