Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  He turned and scrutinized Pearl more closely. Her black curls, caramel cheeks and dark, elongated eyes. Then he squinted at Hope.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said briskly. “Our name is Leon. We’re from Berkeley.” She extended her right hand.

  The man lifted his chin and strode away.

  What difference, Hope wondered watching him flee, between this pompous bigot and her childhood tormentors in Fort Dodge? Only age and accent. And degrees of cowardice.

  She shook the tension from her hands and knelt beside her daughter, whose rapture at the advancing scenery had spared her the Englishman’s contempt. “This is the mouth of the Yangtze,” Hope said. “We’ll be with Papa any minute.”

  Native craft appeared in ghostly formations, barbed with the voices of occupants made invisible by the mist. Hope pointed out the rounded hoods of sampans, slender hulls of slipper boats, the huge square riggings of junks. Houseboats, trawlers, slipshod rafts. “Bird!” Pearl clapped at each new shape, as if expecting it to fly.

  “No, sweet, not birds,” her mother said. “See, they’re boats.” But she could understand Pearl’s confusion as the vessels came closer. Many of the wide, spread sails did resemble wings, and vivid round painted eyes protected the hulls from evil spirits.

  Then, shoving between the small craft, came the obdurate lines of an unmistakably man-made hulk. The gunboat pulled alongside the steamer and a British voice pumped through a megaphone. The SK Korea slowed to follow its escort into the delta, where the passengers would board tenders for the last stretch up the Whangpoo to Shanghai.

  The water thickened now with coastal steamers, barges, and launches flying flags of Japan, France, Russia, Germany—and some stars and stripes. This new activity seemed to clear the air and abruptly heightened the noise level. There were foghorns, sirens, the splash of paddles, and the continuous scrape and suck of dredgers working the banks. Hope lifted her mesmerized daughter, held her so their cheeks pressed together.

  Frank Pearson.

  She nearly dropped Pearl. There on the bridge of the gunboat! Of course, it couldn’t be. This was a mirage—a mistake. Frank was dead, she told herself roughly. But the resemblance … that sandy shag of hair, the height and build, as if constructed of broom sticks, and the angular profile—like Chief Joseph, he used to joke, though he confessed he had no Indian blood, the only man she’d ever met who regretted such a lack. Unlike the sailors around him, this man wore no uniform but a sharp brown suit. Sharp. The image surrounded her like a drop of pond water caught in the twist of a microscope. A split second later, it was gone.

  Pearl, in her excitement, had put her hands to Hope’s cheeks and tugged her face to one side. “Bird!” She was pointing at a boatload of cormorants with irons around their necks.

  Hope twisted back searching among the figures on the bridge, but the uniform whites formed a solid bloom.

  2

  The crowd on the customs jetty had been waiting more than an hour for the Korea’s arriving passengers. The white men were passing the time with flasked whiskey while the women complained of the stench, holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses, drawing veils, lifting elbows, raising parasols against any accidental contact with the native haulers and compradors.

  Up on the Bund a coolie foreman chanted: “See that fat foreign camel-foot there.”

  And his gang answered, “Look at her. Look at the camel-foot cunt!”

  “Just try mounting her jade gate!”

  “What a fate. What a fate! Just try mounting her white jade gate!”

  Paul bit the inside of his cheek. Even if Hope eventually mastered Shanghainese, it was unlikely she would ever be able to decipher coolie vernacular, but the chant galled him nonetheless. It embodied everything that ailed China: the pathetic and irredeemable stupidity of China’s poorest; the arrogance of the Westerners whose contempt for the Chinese invited the same in return; the swift, mindless ease with which one wrong idea was embraced and amplified by the masses. Revolution! Back in his homeland barely two months, already he was bitter and cynical.

  A convoy of tenders was approaching the wharf, but the brims and feathers of foreign hats made it impossible to make out the faces. The waiting crowd surged forward. The first boat emptied, cast off again. He heard a child cry, “Papa!”

  He elbowed his way among the shoulders and parasols, bellowing in that peremptory way of the Westerners. They stepped back automatically, not realizing until they yielded that the speaker was Chinese, and in seconds he was through to the front. The next boat slammed and tilted, passengers scrambling to keep their footing. Through the weaving bodies he spotted them huddled in the farthest seat.

  He could have cried out, eased the anxiety in Hope’s eyes and given Pearl’s roving gaze a focus. He could, and perhaps should have done this, but instead he held still, savoring the sight of them. Pearl’s red tam-o’-shanter was like a flame, her little mouth gulping the wind. Next to her Hope sat quietly, almost pensive beneath the familiar gray fedora, a single black and white feather tucked into its band. Though her cheeks, like Pearl’s, were bright from the wind and cold, there was a hollowness to her eyes that seemed more haunted than weary. For a moment he was afraid, but then she lifted up, and he was reassured by the fullness these ten weeks had added to her figure. He remembered his own feelings upon arriving in America, knowing no one, unable to speak the language—that sensation of exile. This must be what his wife was feeling as she searched for the one connection that would make sense of her presence here. The thought aroused an almost unbearable tenderness within him.

  He waved, and suddenly her eyes came alive. Pearl was up and wobbling, Hope bending to catch the child’s arm as the tender bumped the dock. They fell forward. Paul reached and scooped his daughter onto his shoulder, cupped his free hand beneath Hope’s elbow. She stepped up.

  “Paul, I—Oh!” She stumbled against him. “Sea legs.” She laughed, her lashes dark and lacy against those flushed cheeks.

  He longed to sweep her into his arms, but instead gently pressed her away. He kissed only his daughter, but he kissed her greedily and so loudly that her shrieks of laughter drowned out his grateful murmur. “You are safe.”

  Hope gave him a hurt and curious look. “Paul?”

  He winked one eye as he had seen American boys do, a signal of secret intimacy, and returned Pearl to her mother while he hailed a porter for their hand baggage. The trunks would come the next day. The house he had rented was not far. Hope and Pearl should rest, meet the servants; tomorrow he would show them the city. He talked, resisting Hope’s disappointment even as he hurried them up the crowded ramp and the city assaulted them. Beggar children pressed dirt-black fingers against the hems of their clothing. Trams hurtled past. The smells of European colognes and pig leather competed with the dead-fish stink and fumes from the Pootung mills across the river. Two bar girls in plum-colored satin fought over a grinning Portuguese sailor, and all the while, the coolies continued chanting their abuse.

  At last they were seated in their carriage and off, though Paul wished now he had hired a closed cab. Hope had shrunk back from the onslaught of the wharf and sat staring at the foreign buildings along the Bund, above them the iron sky.

  Pearl, though bewildered, was easily distracted with a gift from his pocket. While she busied herself with unwrapping, Paul brought Hope’s hand into his lap and peeled down the top of her glove. Then he bent, as if to reach something by his feet, instead pressing his cheek to this uncovered skin. He shut his eyes at the familiar scent, like lilies.

  “So it’s against the law to touch here, too,” she said when he came back up.

  He pushed their joined hands down between their coats. “In public only.”

  “Always in public.”

  “Even if you are Chinese.”

  “But not if you were American, I’ll bet.”

  “Ah, but if we both were British, yes.”

  And suddenly she was smiling, relaxing
into him. Pearl gave a shout. Her gift was a bear with clapping cymbals, and they were three, nearly four, a family again on their way home.

  The house stood at the intersection of two broad tree-lined boulevards, Avenue Foch and Avenue Petain, in the French Concession. French in name, French in architecture, French in government and attitude, and thus more hospitable to Chinese revolutionaries than the British-dominated International Settlement, the Concession had been Paul’s haven when he escaped Chang Chih-tung in the summer of 1900 and again after his expulsion from Japan in 1903. Now he had borrowed a house here from a fellow revolutionary who was currently studying in Paris.

  A tall plaster wall ran around the compound, broken only by a round red-lacquered gate which swung open at the carriage’s approach. They did not drive in but alighted outside, while the driver, or mafoo, attended to their baggage and a small man with bristling black hair and a wrinkled grin appeared through the gate, bowing deeply. “Huanying. Huanying”

  “This is our gatekeeper, Lin,” Paul said.

  But before Hope could respond, Mr. Lin raced off, shouting to the rest of the household, “Laoyeh! Laoyeh!” Master!

  Hope helped Pearl over the wooden threshold, and they entered a sheltered entryway facing a massive stone tablet, which Hope identified from Paul’s stories as a spirit wall. A carved dragon writhed from bottom to top, spitting flames against evil spirits. Evil, she recalled, traveled only in straight lines and could not lift its legs, hence the knee-high doorsill and spirit screen blocking the full width of the gate. Humans, wily creatures that they were, could step over and around and thus be safe from evil when inside their homes. If only it were so.

  “Ready?” Paul asked.

  “I suppose,” Hope answered. He seemed oddly apprehensive, nodding for her and Pearl to follow him into the courtyard. It was only when she saw the waiting line of servants that she understood his hesitancy. There was doubtless a protocol to follow.

  Paul strode to the head of the line and began introductions with a man whose most remarkable of several unnerving features was his height. He was inches taller than Paul, which meant he towered over Hope. His face was wedge-shaped—very broad and flat at the cheekbones, then tapering to a dimpled chin. He was thin, but had powerful shoulders, and his dark eyes glittered beneath wide bandy lids. Above his plain cotton jacket he wore a perfectly domed black bowler.

  “Yen Ching-san is our majordomo,” said Paul. “He will take care of you.”

  As Pearl hid her face in her mother’s skirt, Hope nodded with what she hoped was appropriate respect, and delivered the words she had practiced with Li-li in preparation for this moment. “Ni hao ma?”

  A vast and instantaneous grin took hold of Yen Ching-san’s face. The large block head ducked, and ducked again. The wide lips drew back, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth, like old piano keys. The three other faces beamed on cue. Paul, too, was smiling expectantly.

  “Tui pu ch’i,” she apologized, and spread her hands to preclude saying more.

  Paul cleared his throat as the servants smirked. “Yen is our Number One. He has been with me a long time. But Pearl, this is your new amah, Joy.”

  Pearl peered around Hope’s leg. The nut-faced girl blinking back at her looked no older than fifteen. She wore a starched blue jacket and white collar, loose pants, and shocking pink satin slippers. Her mouth formed a tight rosette. Pearl stayed where she was, but smiled.

  “Dahsoo,” Paul continued, “is our cook, and Lu-mei his wife.” The two faces split into grins. The woman’s graying hair was held in a low, tight knot. The man’s was shorn as if someone that morning had cut it with a knife. They wore identical black jackets and trousers.

  “Taitai,” they greeted her in unison. “Liang Taitai.” Mistress Liang.

  “We are pleased to meet all of you,” Hope said in halting Mandarin. She didn’t know what a Number One majordomo did. She had never had a cook or gatekeeper. What work was she expected to assign the cook’s wife? And how could they afford all this?

  The answers would come, she told herself as Paul, in a series of quick, pointed commands, dismissed all the servants but Joy. If she labored over the questions raining down on her now she would be buried within seconds.

  She looked up, feeling through her still rocking legs the slickness of the stones beneath her. The square courtyard was bounded on two sides by low Chinese houses with white plaster walls and curling black-tiled roofs. An aged ginkgo tree dominated one end of the court, a spreading maple the other. All this was perfectly quaint, as appropriately picturesque as a scene from a gazetteer. The main house, however, was confounding.

  A pink Italianate villa. Two stories of meringue offset with white shutters on arching windows, a pitched terra-cotta roof and columned portico. Plaster cherubim under the cornices. Swan-shaped corbels. Polished brass trim.

  “What do you think?” Paul’s soft voice unaccountably alarmed her.

  “I’m too amazed to think. This can’t be real.”

  “It is not real. It is Shanghai. I tried to warn—Here, you are cold. Come inside.”

  Hope nodded, shivering. “Pearl?”

  But while Hope was distracted, Joy had lured Pearl with a fistful of pretty stones. Already they were laughing together in what appeared to be a secret language, neither English nor Chinese, but nonsense noises as they gazed down into a low porcelain vat.

  Feeling her mother’s eyes on her, Pearl looked up. “Fiss, Mama!”

  She pointed delightedly to the sluggish oranges and blacks in the water. “Look, fiss!”

  “We’re going inside now, Pearl.”

  The small face crumpled.

  “You like to stay with Joy, watch the fish?” Paul asked.

  The little girl pursed her mouth. Then she looked at her mother and slipped her hand into her new amah’s. “Fiss,” she answered decisively.

  Hope hesitated. It was chilly and damp, and Pearl had not left her side for two weeks. “The water is only for looking, Pearl. Don’t get wet.”

  “Come.” Paul held the door open. “You were not so protective in Berkeley.”

  Hope chose not to answer. She was on Paul’s territory now, and she could feel the rules subtly changing. “Oh, Paul!”

  Just inside the foyer, he had erected a monkey pine. The anemic, drooping branches were strung with garlands of dried jasmine blossoms and dotted with gold and red paper stars. A tinsel crown perched precariously at the top.

  “You see,” said Paul. “Christmas comes even in China. But only by special permission.” She followed his voice up the wall to a rotund gold Buddha sitting in an alcove with one hand raised, a beneficent smile.

  “You know,” she turned back to her husband’s pleased eyes, “I’m dying to kiss you.”

  “Yes?” He pretended confusion. “I bring my wife ten thousand li to have her die for a kiss?”

  Then he took her hand and led her upstairs, down a narrow hallway and through an open door, which he closed softly behind them.

  Supper, like the house, was a conscious collision of East and West. Steamed pork ribs, Chinese broccoli, baked potatoes, and butter from a tin—chopsticks and silverware.

  Hope toyed with the stalk of broccoli between her chopsticks. “Have you been in touch with your mother?”

  “I have been to Wuchang.”

  “You told them we were coming.”

  “My mother will come to Shanghai maybe after our baby is born.”

  “If it’s a son.”

  A smile crept into his eyes. She blushed. As they had lain together that afternoon, he had examined her swollen belly with lavish, uninhibited care.

  “I think he will be,” he said.

  But Hope was not so easily mollified. “Has she changed her mind, then?”

  The smile faded, and he picked up his rice bowl. For several minutes the sounds of his eating filled the room. Dahsoo came in with a bowl of spicy soup, but Hope was no longer hungry.

  She said, more out of obli
gation than interest, “The captain on the Korea said Dr. Sun is on his way here.”

  “Two days, he will arrive.”

  “On Christmas?”

  “He is overdue.”

  A new, grimmer strain in his voice caught her attention. “What do you mean?”

  He put down his half-gnawed sparerib. He picked up his chopsticks, then put them down, too, and wiped his hands. “If he had come last month maybe everything will be different. Instead, he thinks only about money, investors from America, Europeans. Meantime, China has no leader.” His hands struck the table with accidental violence. “Senator from Hupei—wah!”

  “Paul.” Hope leaned forward, thoroughly contrite now, and alarmed. “I’m new here. I need you to explain.”

  So, in a voice fluctuating between despair and fury, he told what his life had been these two months. He told of shuttling between Shanghai, Wuhan, and Nanking, trying to mediate between warlords and bureaucrats, monarchists and revolutionaries. He told about the uncertainty and confusion that dominated the leaderless “provisional parliament,” the endless wrangling over trivialities, the evasion of critical decisions. The senators could not even agree on a capital for the new government!

  Too many years in the West had deluded Paul into believing that knowledge and determination could catapult his country from revolution to instant democracy. He returned home to find instead that the Manchus had been toppled by bandits with the revolution footing the bill. Most of the gentry and scholarly literati who were Paul’s peers had no interest in democracy at all but clung to the fantasy that China could be united under a new Han Chinese Emperor who would honor their traditional claims to power and wealth. Meanwhile, the local warlords whose peasant soldiers had actually carried out the rebellion were intent on dividing the nation among themselves into personal fiefdoms. Paul’s country was no more receptive to true revolution than his mother was to her foreign daughter-in-law.