Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  The child’s name was Li-li. Her English excellent. Her story harrowing.

  “I come from Mukden,” she began, “to the north of China in Manchuria. When the Russians and Japanese invade my homeland, my village is burned and many uncles and neighbors taken away. My family walked many weeks through snow to the port city, Tientsin. But my father have no money. My mother tried to stop him, but he said he have no choice.”

  Then Donaldina took over, alluding to the more distasteful details in such a way that the ladies in the audience covered their mouths. Li-li’s father had sold her and three sisters to a broker who packed the girls into steerage on a freighter bound for San Francisco. The sisters died of dysentery within the first week at sea, but Li-li, the “oldest and fattest” by her own reckoning, survived by clinging to the single vent through which fresh air pierced the sealed compartment. Donaldina, who had been alerted to the child’s arrival by another passenger on the ship, claimed Li-li in a split-second seizure while her Chinatown “father” was distracted paying off his personal customs official. Reprisals were anticipated, but Li-li had lived at the Presbyterian mission for the past three years without incident. She planned to graduate high school and had expressed an interest in becoming a teacher. (A murmur ran through the gathering at these final details, as if they were the most astounding of all.)

  Compassion and courage, Donaldina concluded, spanned all races. “And the evils of slavery and perversion must not—will not be tolerated on our shores.” The combination of saintliness and revulsion produced the desired effect, and hands fluttered like wings over open checkbooks, though, as the guests were leaving, Hope heard more than one mutter, “Cost a whole lot less just to send ’em all back where they come from.”

  Later, as they were cleaning up, Hope asked Donaldina what did happen to her girls after they left the Mission Home.

  “Some get jobs,” she answered. “Others marry or are adopted into families.”

  “White families?”

  “And Chinese.”

  “Then you’re not entirely at war with the Chinese community.”

  “Heavens, no!”

  “But how can you make your peace, when what’s done to these girls—” Hope glanced to the children, giggling on the other side of the garden. “I’ve heard the ones you don’t save die of disease before they’re twenty.”

  Donaldina sighed. “It’s true more often than I can bear to admit. But you know, every race has its evils. Our own enslaved the Negroes; shall we then condemn the white abolitionists along with the cotton growers simply because of their skin color? Many Chinatown residents work harder than I to end these evils. I consider it a sorry side effect of my work that my staunchest white supporters include some of the most rabid anti-Chinese.”

  “And yet you accept their donations.”

  “I do. And I try to educate them.”

  “Are you successful?”

  Donaldina whisked a palmful of crumbs from the table toward an expectant robin. “One man took one of my girls for his wife. I believe he treats her well, but he’s completely cut her off from her race. I’m afraid that’s sometimes the best I can expect.”

  “But you do allow the girls to choose whom they marry?”

  “Of course!” She looked shocked that Hope could think otherwise.

  “Even Chinese men?”

  “Yes, surely.”

  “Then there are Chinese men you would consider honorable,” Hope asked, at last gaining the courage to voice her own personal concern.

  “Oh, many. Especially among the educated—I should say, those who prize education over money. Sadly, money can be an even more powerful engine among the Chinese than among our own, and that makes many of them callous.” She picked up a stack of plates and turned toward the kitchen. “There are no easy answers in such matters, my dear. One thing I have learned from my Chinese friends is to appreciate—and accept—the complexities of life. We Americans have a bad habit of always wanting things in black and white.”

  So Paul had said. Perhaps this was Hope’s downfall, as well. But it seemed there were some matters that brooked no compromise, and the more muddled they were allowed to become, the more harmful the consequences.

  When the others had left, Hope said to Mary Jane, “Donaldina told me that sometimes her girls end up marrying white men, or being adopted into white families. I wonder if the reverse ever happens.”

  “White families being adopted into Chinese girls?”

  “Oh, you!” Hope shook her head. “A white woman marrying a Chinese man.”

  “Can’t,” said Mary Jane flatly. “It’s against the law. ‘Course, I’ve heard there’s a few do live in sin. Lower-class women. Laundresses and divorcees. Gives me the shivers to think about.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Ugh. Something about a man without body hair. Like making love to a child, I imagine. It just seems … unnatural. And their food and all those strange evil smells.”

  “But what if the man were American in his ways?”

  “An American Chinese! Really, Hope. There’s a reason the Chinese are called Celestials. They belong to a different universe.”

  Like making love to a child, Hope repeated to herself as she walked the darkened block to the trolley, and over and over again through the long ride home.

  In the morning she telephoned Paul’s boarding house and left a message that she was ill, canceling their lesson.

  II

  RESCUE

  BERKELEY

  (APRIL 1906)

  1

  The morning of Tuesday, April 17, brought more heat and humidity under a sky the color of sea glass. As Hope braced for Collis’s visit, Eleanor Layton readied herself for a trip to San Francisco and a cousin’s society wedding. The carriage had been summoned for eleven o’clock to take her to the noon ferry. Unfortunately, it overturned on the way. Another cart was sent, but when Eleanor smelled whiskey on the driver’s breath, she ordered him away and began babbling about this being a sign she should not go at all.

  Hope offered her landlady sherry for her nerves and called for a mule-drawn hack. By the time it arrived she had succeeded in persuading Eleanor that her cousin’s wedding was sure to be San Francisco’s event of the season, and Eleanor would never forgive herself if she didn’t attend. The landlady, two drinks for the better, even allowed herself to be persuaded that the unfortunate green tint her hair had acquired when she colored it for the occasion was actually quite becoming. She clamped Hope in a weepy embrace as if she were going off to the South Seas instead of across the Bay for four days.

  “Do be careful, dear girl. I feel horrible leaving you like this—” The driver snapped his whip. Eleanor fell back. “Goodbye!” she sang out with a feeble wave.

  Hope stared at the garden. Not a blade of grass, not a leaf moved. It was like the stillness before a storm. Maybe that had contributed to Eleanor’s jitters, and Hope had been too harsh in shooing her away. But she couldn’t let her stay.

  There was Collis now, whistling, arms full of stall-bought gladiolus. Funeral flowers, to Hope’s mind. But expensive and well meant. She slipped into the kitchen.

  As she entered the parlor with a tray of lemonade, he pressed his nose to the screen. “You look beautiful.”

  “Come in, Collis. It’s cooler inside.” She put down the tray. “Thank you. So are the flowers.”

  She escaped to plunge the stalks into water, leaving him to pour out their glasses, but in the kitchen, the scarlet packaging of Paul’s jasmine tea caught her eye. She stood wavering for several seconds, then tossed the box into the trash.

  “Eleanor here?” he asked when she returned.

  “She’s gone to a—” Hope checked herself. “No.”

  “Well, all right. I’ll have you alone, then. Sit here beside me?”

  They sat on balding velveteen upholstery and inhaled the parlor’s overlapping scents—lavender sachets, the oil that lubricated Eleanor’s Graphophone, the v
apors of her chicken soup. The hallway clock punctuated every second.

  Hope took a glass from the tray and rolled it against her cheek. She moved her eyes around the pieces of Collis’s face. The metallic curl of his mustache and sideburns. The mole above his right eye. His soft pink mouth and the beads of perspiration beneath his lower lip.

  He thrust a hand into his jacket pocket. “Close your eyes.”

  She hardly needed to look to know the ring was exquisite. Gold set with rubies encircling a teardrop diamond. When she said nothing, he slid it awkwardly onto her right ring finger.

  “It fits!” A boyish grin.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Why, Hope, you’re crying! Here.” He wiped her face with his own pale yellow monogrammed handkerchief, edging closer and closer until his features blurred. She shut her eyes and held her breath against the smell of him, then pushed away on the pretext of looking at the stones by the window’s light. He followed, dropped a hand to her shoulder. “Yes, then?”

  She turned the gleaming gems. They were hard and smooth and unmoving as rock, yet leapt with the illusion of life.

  There followed an intimate celebration lunch, one-sided discussion of dates, guest lists, reception sites, services (Collis, though Episcopalian, was solicitous of Hope’s Presbyterian upbringing), and, of course, dangling like a poisoned carrot at the end of the stick, their European honeymoon. Somehow she made it through the afternoon. But once he had finally gone, her teeth began to chatter. In spite of the day’s lingering heat, in spite of sweaters, scarves, woolen socks, and, later, her heaviest flannel gown, she could not seem to get warm.

  Alone in the empty house, she turned every lock and checked each one twice before retiring upstairs. She sought refuge in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Solitude of Self, but her brain refused to absorb the proud and confident words. Her engagement notwithstanding, Paul’s dark eyes appeared between the lines. And the sight tormented her.

  She considered the stones sparking against her skin, saw in them Collis’s numbing gray gaze, his thick white fingers with their tufts of hair. She slipped off the ring, hid it as Mother Wayland had taught her to do with all jewels, in a stocking in her underwear drawer. What would her real mother have advised, she wondered. But diphtheria had killed her mother when Hope was just two months old.

  Now, abruptly, she was hot. She peeled away all the layers she’d piled on until her gown rode against naked skin. She decided a cup of cold milk would help and started down through the empty house with a smile at the updraft, like cooling hands between her legs. In the kitchen she hauled open the ice chest, found the milk bottle, its polished, sweating surface against her palm. She skated the glass up the inside of her free wrist, then to the elbow, and on, pushing her sleeve all the way up over her shoulder. She closed her eyes. The sensation, as if her skin were itself becoming liquid, unleashed a different sort of thirst. Not an unfamiliar one—she had quelled its kind more than once before. But this time she put up no resistance. She lifted her nightdress and rode the bottle over the flat of her belly, now into the hollows between her ribs. She brought it down smooth against her hip and lowered herself to the chair, then, suddenly impatient, she flung her gown above her waist. She raised the moist surface to her sternum and across each breast, grazing the bluish tips lightly, again with more pressure, and again, cold and hard so her nipples tightened into knots. The curtains were open. Any backyard trespasser could see her, watch her exploring herself, but the spell was such that she did not notice, indeed, could not have stopped if she wanted. She slid the instrument of this strange luxury downward, slowing along the inside of her thighs. From knee to knee, she pulled against the contraction of muscle and nerve, slowly—still more slowly—until the pressure reached her very center. And the cold hard whiteness melted into her and gave silence to what she only at this instant understood was her despair.

  She let her gown fall back into place, then fastidiously wiped the bottle clean and returned it, with an ironic smile, to Eleanor’s hardwood ice chest.

  She dreamed, that night, of a high, gateless wall snaking for miles under stars that flowed like an ocean.

  2

  When Hope next opened her eyes she was flying. For the briefest of seconds she actually believed she had magical powers. Then she slammed into a wall. But the pain was barely noticeable for the violence she now felt and heard around her. Shattering. Shaking. The darkened room heaved, floor rippling beneath a cascade of glass and crockery and books. A nightmare. Must be. Trapped in a ship inside a gray bottle that some giant was rattling—hard—while the surrounding seas erupted with pounding and clanging, animal screams and yelps.

  She had to get up, pull herself together, and go help whoever—whatever—was making those ghastly noises. But when she lifted her head the floor tipped again and the massive oak bed that had sent her flying hurtled into the closet, missing her shoulder by inches. Sobered and profoundly awake, she tucked herself into a ball and made a helmet of her hands. She would wait this out. But the seconds stretched on these monstrous waves. The house would not stop swaying. She heard the rain of chimney bricks, and within the frame of her busted window a crescent moon jittered across a smoky green sky.

  It seemed to go on and on, and even after the shaking finally subsided she did not trust the stillness. The room had filled with unrecognizable shadows and the sinister glint of night glass. She extended her arm and felt the wall, lifted the ghostly shape of her hand as if it were a foreign object. It was a relief when the swirling dust made her sneeze, the first familiar sensation since she’d awakened. Now she recognized the clang of church bells and the patter of hoofbeats outside. The animal screaming had ceased.

  She had no experience of earthquakes, but she had heard the temblors could continue, with varying intensity, for days. This house didn’t feel as if it would stand through another upheaval. She needed to get out and away. But everything she owned was here, and Eleanor had gone off entrusting her with all her worldly possessions as well—Eleanor. Was it conceivable the quake had struck only this side of the Bay? The thought of all San Francisco being twisted and thrown as she had been, of her landlady perhaps dying or maimed—and she had insisted Eleanor leave, all but roped her into that hack. Eleanor, Mary Jane, Collis—Paul. Hope crushed her palms to her eyes. She must keep control of herself. Get out and see what needed to be done. What she could do to help.

  She climbed to her feet and pulled open the door. The hall was pitch black and quiet except for the creak of fractured wood. She moved cautiously, sliding barefoot through rubble, but had covered only a yard or two when the giant hand seized the house again, then twisted and tore at it, ravaging. Plaster showered from the ceiling, knocking her to her knees. She heard the staircase shimmy. The floor buckled, walls tilted. Then a sudden deafening reverberation, like the explosion of solid stone.

  When the aftershock subsided she was crouching farther down the hallway, a little more bruised but otherwise intact. The air had turned ghostly with dust so thick she could feel its grain in her throat, against the surface of her eyes. She pulled up the neck of her gown to mask her nose and mouth and berated herself for the childish pique that had left her exposed underneath. No time to find clothes and change, she’d have to face the world like this. At least, she reminded herself, she was alive. But she had to get downstairs.

  From the corner where the hallway turned she was able to make out a few familiar shapes. The dark plane of the opposite wall. The striped shadow of the balustrade. The paler expanse of the open stairwell. But what was that draft? She took a step. Another. The floorboards groaned beneath her weight. She flattened herself against the wall and stared.

  The falling chimney had obliterated the staircase, leaving a three-story drop.

  The recognition that she was trapped stopped the rocking in her legs, banished all concern for her friends, modesty, the screams outside, and reeled her back toward her room. She was the one who needed help. She had to get to a window.
Someone would come. Surely someone would come. But now, though she shoved with all her force, the door refused to open. The bed or dresser must have wedged against it during the last seizure.

  Again she hurled herself at the panel. And again it repelled her. On the third futile assault she thought, I am going to die here.

  In Chinese superstition, the earth rests on the back of a sleeping dragon. When this Earth Dragon is irritated he responds by squirming and scratching. Sometimes he awakens, stretches high and wide, rolls over. Chinese call this ti lung chen. Earth Dragon shake.

  That morning, when he was tossed from sleep in the greening dark before dawn, Paul’s first thought was that the Earth Dragon must be very angry. His second was that he must rid himself of such feudal superstitions. His third thought, as the Dragon gave another stretch and the residents of his boarding house began yelling, was for Hope Newfield.

  He did not pause to question this impulse or even to dress himself. He regretted the lack of shoes when he finally noticed the street was laced with shattered glass. But, as in a dream, he was immune to injury, ran from Addison to Telegraph to Stuart Street seeing the houses as cutouts—broken squares of gray and terracotta roofs, the blood-red and brown of dropped chimneys, falling waves of purple vines. Paul was familiar with the colors and designs of nature’s fury. He had been in Japan ten years ago when the great earthquake and tsunami had killed twenty-eight thousand. Berkeley, it appeared, had been lucky. If only this luck would extend to Hsin-hsin.

  He passed dozens of distraught people out in robes and wrappers staring up at their broken roofs or talking among themselves, but on Stuart Street the houses were farther apart, and no one was outside. His teacher’s house, like the others, had lost its chimney and the surrounding patch of roof, but otherwise was standing. The front door had sunk inward off its jamb, giving access to the parlor. Walls smoking dust, furnishings split and cast aside, the room might have been ransacked by bandits. At the back, where the staircase should have been, a pile of tumbled bricks and timbers rose higher than his head. The well above was empty.