Lisa See - Shanghai Girls

May pushes the others out of the room so Sam and I can be alone. But my husband-this man with his iron fan, who looks so strong, who can lift and carry anything, who can absorb humiliation upon humiliation-cannot spread open his chest to bear my pain.

“While we were waiting…” His voice trails off. He clasps his hands behind him and paces back and forth, struggling to maintain his composure. At last he tries again. “While we were waiting, I asked a doctor to examine Vernon. I told the doctor my brother has weak breath and thin blood,” Sam explains, as though our Chinese ideas would mean anything to the doctor.

I want to bury my face in his warm and fragrant chest, absorb the strength of his iron fan, hear the steadiness of his heartbeat, but he refuses to look at me.

He stops at the foot of the bed and stares at a spot somewhere above my head. “I should go back to them. Make the doctors do their tests on Vern. Maybe there’s something they can do.”

This, even though they couldn’t save our son. Sam leaves the room, and I cover my face with my hands. I’ve failed in the worst way a woman can, while my husband, to bury his grief, has shifted his concern to the weakest member of our family. My in-laws don’t come back, and even Vern stays away. This is common practice when a woman has lost a precious son, but it hurts me nevertheless.

May does everything for me. She sits with me when I cry. She helps me to the toilet. When my breasts become painfully swollen and the nurse comes in to squeeze out the milk and throw it away, my sister pushes her out of the room and does the job herself Her fingers are gentle, loving, and tender. I miss my husband; I need my husband. But if Sam has abandoned me when I’ve needed him the most, then May has abandoned Vern. On my fifth day in the hospital, May finally tells me what’s happened.

“Vern has the soft-bone disease,” she says. “Here they call it tuberculosis of the bone. This is why he’s been shrinking.” She’s always been loose with her tears, but not this time. The way she fights to keep them inside tells me just how much she’s come to love the boy-husband.

“What does this mean?”

“That we’re dirty, that we live like pigs.”

My sister’s voice is as bitter as I’ve ever heard it. We grew up believing that the soft-bone disease and its sister, the blood-lung disease, were markers of poverty and filth. It was considered the most shameful of all the diseases, more terrible than the ones transmitted by prostitutes. This is even worse than my losing a son, because it is a visual and very public message to our neighbors-and to the lo fan- that we are poor, polluted, and unclean.

“It usually attacks children, and they die as their spines collapse,” she continues. “But Vern’s not a child, so the doctors can’t say how long he’ll live. They only know that his pain will give way to numbness, weakness, and finally paralysis. He’ll be in bed for the rest of his life.”

“Yen-yen? Father?”

May shakes her head, and her tears break free. “He’s their little boy.”

“And Joy?”

“I’m taking care of her.” Sadness fills my sister’s voice. I understand too clearly what my losing the baby means to her. I will return as Joy’s full-time mother. Maybe I should feel some sense of triumph about this, but I don’t. Instead, I swim in our shared losses.

Later that night Sam comes to talk. He stands at the foot of my bed, looking awkward. His cheeks are gray and his shoulders droop from bearing the weight of two tragedies.

“I thought the boy might be sick. I recognized some of the symptoms from my father. My brother was born with a no-good fate. He never hurt anyone and has only been kind to us, and yet there was no way to change his destiny.”

He says these words about Vern, but he could be speaking about any of us.

THESE TWIN TRAGEDIES bind us together as a family in ways none of us could have imagined. May, Sam, and Father go back to work; sorrow and despair hang around their necks like cangues. Yen-yen stays in the apartment to take care of me and Vern. (The doctor is very much against this. “Vern will be better off in a sanatorium or some other institution,” he tells us, but if Chinese are treated badly right on the street, where everyone can see, how can we possibly let him go to a place behind gates and closed doors?) Paper partners fill in for us at China City. But fate is not done with us.

In August, a second fire destroys nearly all of China City. A few buildings survive, but all the Golden enterprises are reduced to charred ruins, except for three rickshaws and May’s costume and extras company. Still, no one has insurance. With China enmeshed in a civil war, Father Louie once again can’t go back to the home country to replenish his stock of antiques. He could try to buy antiques here, but everything is too expensive after the world war and much of the savings he squirreled away in China City is ash anyway.

But even if we had the resources to restock the shops, Christine Sterling has no desire to rebuild China City. Convinced the fire was the result of arson, she decides she no longer wants to re-create her ideas of Oriental romance in Los Angeles. In fact, she no longer wants to associate with Chinese in any way whatsoever and doesn’t want them sullying her Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street. She persuades the city to condemn the block of Chinatown between Los Angeles Street and Alameda to make room for a freeway on-ramp. For now all that will remain of the city’s original Chinatown is the row of buildings between Los Angeles Street and Sanchez Alley, where we live. People fight the overall plan, but no one has much hope. We all know the saying that’s so popular here in America: We don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.

Our home is in jeopardy, but we can’t worry about that yet, not when we have to work together to reopen the family businesses. While some people decide to limp along and stay in what remains of China City, Father Louie opens a new Golden Lantern in New Chinatown, stocking it with the cheapest curios he can buy from local wholesalers, who get their goods from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Joy must now spend more time there, selling what she calls “junk” to tourists who don’t know any better, giving her grandfather a break so he can nap. The new shop doesn’t have much business, but she’s a star watcher. And when no one’s in the shop, which is most of the time, she reads.

Sam and I decide to start our own business with some of our savings. He looks for a new café location and finds one on Ord Street just a half block west of China City, but Uncle Wilburt won’t be coming with us. He decides to take advantage of the lo fans’ increased interest in Chinese food since the war ended by opening his own chop-suey joint in Lakewood. We’re sad to see the last of the uncles leave, even though this means that Sam will be the head cook at last.

We prepare for our Grand Opening, doing renovations, creating menus, and thinking about advertising. The café has a little office behind glass in the back where May will manage her business. She stores the props and costumes in a small warehouse over on Bernard Street, saying that she doesn’t need to sit among those things every day and that getting jobs for herself and for other extras is more profitable than the rental business anyway. She encourages Sam to produce a calendar to promote the café. She asks a local photographer to come and take a picture. Even though the restaurant is named after me, the image shows May and Joy standing at the counter next to the pie spinner: EAT AT PEARL’S COFFEE SHOP: QUALITY CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD.

At the beginning of October 1949, Pearl ’s Coffee Shop opens, Mao Tse-tung establishes the People’s Republic of China, and the Bamboo Curtain falls. We don’t know how permeable this curtain will be or what any of it means for our home country, but our opening is successful. The calendar is popular, and so is our menu, which combines American and Chinese-American specialties: roast beef, apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and coffee, or sweet-and-sour pork, almond cookies, and tea. Pearl ’s Coffee Shop is clean. The food is fresh and consistent. Day and night a line extends out the door.