by Aimee E. Liu
Half an hour before the appointed time, as Pearl and Morris, fully dressed and decked out in party hats, stood hovering at the front door, Hope was seized with terror that no one would come. The chits had all been dutifully returned, all accepting the invitation, but now that the moment was at hand, Hope had all she could do not to pull Pearl away, warn her not to wish for too much, prepare her for disaster. It will be all right—Hope bit her tongue—even if it’s only us, we’ll have our own party. Papa will come. You’ll see.
But Paul was not due until that evening. This party was for the children. And if no children appeared, Pearl would be heartbroken.
“Missy no worry,” Yen assured her. “All children like party.”
Hope looked up and, in spite of her dark convictions, burst into laughter. Yen had replaced his accustomed felt bowler with one of the glittery cone party hats. He pulled his arm from behind his back and, grinning, handed her the Kodak. She was posing him with the children on the front stoop when the first guests arrived—a set of Standard Oil twins from Minnesota, escorted by their amah. The others appeared as if by prearrangement—Americans first, then the Germans, then British, and lastly, dribbling in late, the French.
Though the guests had a tendency to cluster by nationality, all sang a lusty “Happy Birthday” to Pearl and cheered as she blew out the candles. They competed fiercely at the party games—none more so than the little Englishmen—and were just settling down for the present unwrapping, when a familiar shout went up out front. The front door opened and Paul strode into the parlor, clapping and shouting for his daughter.
The children stared in mass confusion. Pearl looked as if she’d been struck. Through the youngsters’ eyes Hope saw her husband as she had never seen him before. His skin was shiny with the day’s heat. The stub of a cigarette glowed between his knuckles. He wore a striped linen jacket, rumpled after the long train journey and mismatched with a mustard shirt. His black hair lay damp with perspiration, and his eyes were dark as a pirate’s. He coughed and laughed and shouted again.
Hope came up out of her chair to take his arm. “They’re just opening the presents, dearest.” She applied pressure to steer him around.
“Is that reason I should not wish my daughter happy birthday?” He was obliviously jolly. “Presents, ah?”
The children were whispering among themselves, wide-eyed and snickering. What they had thought, what they’d been told of Pearl’s parentage, Hope did not know, but none had seen Paul before. He did not come to the beach on his visits. He did not take the children to the playground, and they never went about as a family. Perhaps the children thought Pearl and Morris were Spanish. Perhaps they thought they were adopted.
Slowly, Paul met his daughter’s shocked gaze. Slowly he surveyed the scene, took in each small face in the circle below him, the starched pinafores, seersucker shorts and suspenders, the yellow and brown and orange tresses, the freckles and deep golden tans. He turned a bleak, shamed face to Hope as she searched for some word that would soften or undo the wrong, but her mouth opened and closed on dead air. He left.
Three weeks passed. Pearl and Morris were shunned by all the British children and most of the others. Hope had discovered at the opposite end of town a cluster of homes rented out to Chinese, and she now took the children to that beach, though they were only marginally better received there. They were tolerated. Perhaps, she thought bitterly, that was the best they could expect, and anything else had been an illusion all along. But it was her fault, not Paul’s, for raising that illusion in her children’s eyes—and for seeing it smashed. She should have known better. Hadn’t she learned anything from her own childhood? No, in a word, because she kept stubbornly dreaming, wishing that things could be different, that she could make them different for her children.
Paul returned, finally, one evening at dusk as the family was finishing supper. He gave no indication of displeasure, did not mention the ill-fated party, only kissed his son and daughter on the forehead, invited them to pick his pockets for sweets.
Then he turned to Hope. “Come walk.”
Leaving the children to Ah-nie—and ignoring Pearl’s apprehensive stare—Hope gathered up her shawl. Paul clapped his hat back on his head, and they set off along the shore. The darkening ocean spread at their feet, the mist sharp with wood smoke from the Chinese village, and as they walked, without speaking or touching, the sky turned from violent pink to gray.
They reached an outcropping where someone hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before had carved a bench out of a boulder. Paul waved for her to sit.
“Our daughter is seven now,” he said as if changing the subject.
“Paul, I have—”
He cut her off, not harshly but firmly. “Do you not think Pearl should have proper schooling?”
“School? I—I’ve taught her …” Hope floundered. “Yes, I suppose … She ought to be in school.”
“The only schools in Peking are mission schools or the ones in the Legation.”
“And,” she said carefully, “the children in the Legation schools would all be European or American. Or Japanese.”
“That is true. But this is not the problem. Things are very unstable in the capital now. I will worry to have Pearl away from us.”
“What’s happened?”
“Yüan is becoming Emperor. But he is losing his support. His generals are splitting into camps for and against. The Japanese are playing games. Sun is trying to curry favor with Japanese sources of money and weapons outside the government, but he is making little progress, and without a unified resistance I am afraid each general will attack the throne for himself.”
“In other words, civil war.”
He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched his legs. “I do not think this will happen right away. Maybe the foreign powers will come to their senses and persuade Yüan not to do this thing. But he is a fool for pomp and glory.”
“Trussing up his soldiers like the Kaiser’s army.”
Paul sighed. “He has dismissed me.”
“Paul!”
“I am to retire.” There was just enough light for her to see him smile. “He plans to crown Li Yüan-hung prince and I will be one of several marquises.”
“You’re joking,” Hope said weakly. “Oh, Paul, no. Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I only wish so. Your great revolutionist husband, marquis to the crown puppet of Japan.”
“You’ve agreed, then.”
“I have little choice, Hope. This is Yüan’s way of pardoning me for my revolutionary history and my association with the Kuomintang. If I refuse, I am announcing as his enemy.”
“But you are his enemy,” she murmured.
“Sh. The trees have ears.”
“I feel as if we’re in a Shakespearean tragedy.”
“Or farce.” He laughed, reaching now and pulling her fingers to his lips. He nibbled them thoughtfully for a moment or two, then said, “We shall stay in Peking as long as it is safe. This may be some months, perhaps another year or more. With this uncertainty, I think it is not good to send Pearl to school. But in China, most children learn at home. I myself study with home teacher many years before entering school with other boys.”
“I remember.” Hope recalled Paul’s story of old Fong thrashing his hands with a bamboo stick. She shivered. “But what kind of a tutor—”
“Your hands always cold,” Paul said, tucking them inside his jacket. She uncurled her fingers over his heart, but could not bring herself to move closer.
“A Chinese tutor, then?”
He gave her a deliberate kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Hsin-hsin, but no. I have learned of a young woman who comes from South Africa to marry a soldier at the British Legation. When she arrive, he has been called back to fight in the war. Now, she must find work. In South Africa she is a governess.”
“But what can she teach?”
“You interview her. Decide if she is qualified.”
“Why?”
“She was looking forward to going to a real school, meeting other children.”
“Yes.” Paul’s voice was low and restrained. “I can see she enjoys other children. But this will have to wait.”
Miss Anna Van Zyl arrived for her interview promptly at two o’clock on a warm breezy afternoon the week following their return to Peking. She smelled like orange blossoms and made soft, energetic exclamations at the courtyard’s botanic marvels.
“Punica granatum! Solanum jasminoides. Pontederia cordata. Firmiana simplex! What a charming garden.” Tall, slender as a twig, she had wispy ginger hair and aquamarine eyes that shimmered when they caught the light at certain angles. Pearl was immediately enthralled.
“I studied botany in school, you know. I think that somewhere in this peculiar country I should find a plant no one has yet named and I shall achieve immortality as the Jasminum or Lilium Van Zyl. What do you think?” Her laughter had an electric quality. She seemed inclined to hold nothing back, and as soon as she was equipped with a cup of tea and a biscuit, she poured out more than Hope could ever want to know about her thwarted engagement and precarious finances.
Paul’s version of Miss Van Zyl’s history proved accurate. She was twenty-one, a graduate of a Johannesburg normal school, and had spent four years as governess in Pretoria, where she met her fiancé, a British Army lieutenant. They courted in secret, as she was a Boer and hostilities between the Afrikaners and the British were still at a fever pitch ten years after the Vereeniging Treaty, and when her lieutenant was reassigned to the British Legation in Peking, they both saw his move as the solution to her family’s disapproval. The following year he sent for her to join him, but while she was sailing across the Indian Ocean, the Great War broke out. By the time Miss Van Zyl arrived in Tientsin, her fiancé had been sent off to Delhi to train the Indian Corps then being groomed to join colonial forces in France. For the past year the young governess had been bumping around the Legation, taking jobs as stenographer or typist, but the British in Peking were hardly more charitable toward a struggling Boer than those in Pretoria had been. “When Mrs. Morrison mentioned that your family was in need of a governess, I thought this could be the answer to my prayer,” she said, tilting the last word into a question.
“Your prayer and ours,” Hope said warmly. “I know from my own experience what a lonely place this country can be. We’re no substitute for your young man, I’m sure, but you will be welcome here.”
“Oh, thank you so. Mrs. Morrison didn’t tell me how lovely you’d be.”
“No, I don’t imagine she would.” Hope stopped there. Jennie Morrison, wife of Yüan Shih-k’ai’s special advisor George Morrison, was one of Peking’s White Beauties and a reigning Legation socialite. Hope had met her once at a garden party with Paul, but the two women had exchanged no more than ten words. She assumed Mrs. Morrison had referred Anna only at her husband’s behest, as a political favor to Paul. “Anyway,” she said brightly. “When can you start?”
They set school hours from nine to three, with Miss Van Zyl joining the family for tiffin, five days a week. The curriculum consisted of arithmetic, spelling, history, geography, and penmanship.
Hope, reluctant to loosen the ties too completely, would continue Pearl’s instruction in literature on her own.
“I think perhaps we should be friends, Miss Van Zyl,” Hope said as they parted.
“I would like that, Madame Leon.” She took Hope’s hands in a warm, firm grip. “And I shall certainly do all that I can toward that end.”
Los Angeles
September 19, 1915
Dearest Hope,
I have been presumptuous. Your father called me a “damn fool,” the closest he’s come to pure invective in all the time we’ve been together. I understand, though. This is a foolish thing I’ve done, and typical of me only to question what I’ve asked for after I’ve got it.
Oh, best get it out and over with. You see, I was so filled with admiration after receiving your letter about that Shen Chow madness that I retyped the whole story as an article and sent it off to Harper’s under your name—with the photographs and myself named as agent.
Dear Hope, I now cannot imagine what possessed me. When your father learned what I’d done he pointed out fifty ways the article could be compromising to Paul and to the image of China as a whole. I don’t necessarily agree. I think perhaps his indignation was caused as much by my identifying myself under my maiden name as by any injustice I’ve done Paul. Personally, I believe the story offers a wonderful, human antidote to the wooden tracts one ordinarily reads about China. The editors, it seems, take my side.
Now I must eat crow and send this explanation at all speed. It will reach you by October, I imagine, and I’ve wangled a delay until November for you to return your signature on the enclosed publication contract. I beg you to put me out of my misery by cabling whether you will ever speak to me again (and, incidentally, whether you consent to this publication). I do believe in my heart, Hope, that this kind of reporting and camera work may be your true calling.
I must hurry and mail this “post haste” while your father is busy with patients. I know he’ll forgive me once you’ve made your decision, and there’s an end to my role in it. Apart from this one collision, we are as happy as schoolchildren, your dad and I—even if we are grandparents! Love is a rich and peculiar business. But then, you’ve always known that.
With admiration and affection.
Always,
Mary Jane
[enclosed]
William Cadlow
Senior Editor
Harper’s
September I, 1915
Dear Miss Lockyear:
I am much obliged to you for sending us this extraordinary article by your client Miss Newfield about the Shen Chow affair in Peking. Our editorial board has never seen anything like it—with the exception of myself. I confess that I was on the staff of The Independent when Miss Newfield submitted several pieces about an earlier era in Chinese history which my senior editor rejected—over my hearty objections. You can imagine my delight on learning that this able reporter is still “on the China beat” and that I am now in a position to publish her work under my own masthead.
I will need the enclosed contract returned to me as quickly as possible—I assume you have power of attorney—and then we can set a publication date.
My one request relates to future submissions. It is evident from these photographs that Miss Newfield has an artist’s eye and a real feel for her subject matter, but her work could be greatly improved by a less amateur camera than she has used here. The new high-speed pocket Premo and folding reflex models are quite popular with many of our reporters.
In any case, I look forward to regular contributions from Miss Newfield, and I hope she will forgive me for not having enough clout at The Independent to see her launch fulfilled years ago.
Most sincerely,
William Cadlow
“What do you think,” Hope asked when Paul’s eyes had dropped to the final line.
He spat into the porcelain spittoon by his desk and tapped his cigarette thoughtfully. The late sun filtering through the papered windows cast a glow over the cluttered office, but there was a chill in his voice when he spoke. “I think Americans are very ignorant about China.”
“Yes, but here you have people like Mr. Cadlow showing such interest. He’s right, you know, the dry political reports do nothing for America’s understanding of the people or the feel of this world. Sun Yat-sen’s manifestos aren’t exactly heartwarming, either.”
“But your stories of our brothel games and hysterical women are.” He regarded her through the cigarette smoke with that infuriating expressionless expression he used when he wanted her to show her hand first.
“Honestly, Paul! What I wrote to Mary Jane is real. It’s human. It’s silly and bold and remarkably modern, in a way that American
s just don’t associate with China. That’s why I was interested enough to sit through all those days when you were on the stand, why I couldn’t help write her about it, and why she sent it off as she did. You act as though I’ve shamed you, but you came out the hero. You can’t sweep everything under the rug, you know.”
He tossed the cigarette into the spittoon and pulled off his spectacles with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. His “retirement” was due to begin as soon as Yüan Shih-k’ai officially declared his intention to become Emperor. In the meantime, he was charged with overseeing the propaganda campaign that would garner both foreign and Chinese support for this monarchy. Four and five nights each week he was out at banquets or meetings in the Legation Quarter sounding out foreign diplomats and, while appearing to support Yüan’s bid himself, providing them with ample justification for opposing it. Often the evenings would stretch into mah-jongg or poetry parties with his revolutionary friends—parties at which the loud singsong of recitation or the fervor of gambling disguised the political strategizing. But the late hours and strain of the masquerade were starting to take their toll. Paul looked heavier, older, and more tired than Hope had ever seen him. Her plea for truth and honesty now rang in her ears as it must sound to him. Inanity.
She leaned forward with her hands flat on his desk. “Paul, please. I will not send Cadlow a word that you haven’t reviewed and approved. I won’t write anything serious or political. I won’t write anything that could compromise you or Sun.”
“What else is there to write?”
The dullness of his voice startled her. “Why,” she answered, “I’ll write about the crowds of people coughing and talking and cracking nuts and throwing hot towels back and forth in the moving picture houses of Peking. I’ll write about the moss that grows on the Great Wall, the smells of markets and how the Manchu women wrap their hair. I’ll tell why the children here wear split pants, and how it feels for a woman like Daisy Tan to unbind her feet, and—” She threw her hands in the air, laughing. “I don’t know, but out of the fifteen billion interesting things that I see every time I set foot out of the house, I am sure I can find at least a few things that will not offend you!”