by Aimee E. Liu
He would withdraw to the Nantao house for days at a stretch, and seemed hardly to notice his children, except to criticize the shortness of their dresses, demand why they were not studying, or admonish them to show some respect. No more was said of his proposal to send Morris to college in America, but one day he called the family into the drawing room, and there was Old Yu, the doctor who Paul now maintained had “cured” him of meningitis. Yu was to be the children’s Chinese tutor, Paul announced. He would come for one hour every evening to teach them their native language. Yu Hu-hsu, the children mockingly called him, for his long trickling beard. His voice was like the squeak of chalk on blackboard and he had the disgusting habit of picking his nose with the three-inch scholar’s nail on his little finger. Soon he had the children parroting classical verses from the Tang and Ming Dynasties, though when Hope tested them they retained not a word.
She supposed, in some twisted way that defied her understanding, this cultural reversion was Paul’s means of grieving, his compensation for the fact that the political climate deprived him of a proper funeral and mourning for his son. He would accept no other comfort, refused to talk of Jin’s death. He left Hope to her business as the mother of his children, and once or twice a week she would awake to see him disrobing at the end of the bed, or to the weight of his hand on her breast, and he would take her without a kiss, without tenderness. He would take her with the same inattentive greed with which he now drank his wine. On other nights he either slept in his study or stayed out at his meetings and banquets until morning. She did not oppose him. She did not complain even when she noticed the sticky green scent of opium on his clothes, or when, one morning after a particularly drunken night, he fell asleep in the rickshaw and “lost” ten thousand dollars he’d won at the gambling table.
The truth was, Hope envied his ability to retreat, however destructively, however incomprehensibly. She thought, if only she’d known her mother or Seneca grandmother, they might have taught her some native rituals of her own to answer the horror, the sorrow, the impossibility of what had happened. But the one thing she had accomplished by coming to China was to erase that piece of her heritage finally and completely. She was no longer American at all. She was a white Chinese. What was it Jin had said? When a negative is combined with its positive, the result is zero.
In July, Mikhail Borodin fled Hankow and returned to the Soviet Union. Paul immediately went to Wuchang to reclaim his home. “It is well,” he reported on his return. “Workers lived in some courts, but the library survives, and my father’s sedan chair.” For the first time in weeks, he looked at her as if he expected some reply, but Hope could find no words to answer him.
She knew now, the family had to leave, else the weight of this madness would crush them. But when she suggested to Paul that the time had come for her to take the children home, he would not hear of it. Steamship fares had escalated sharply with the demand of the inland refugees fleeing back to the States. A new government post for him had not yet been found, and with all the strikes and disruption of classes, his university pay had been halved. Besides, it was impossible for Chinese citizens to get visas.
She had only one way out, but that ironically would force her back into the very business she now wanted desperately to escape. After the Borodin article, Cadlow offered to raise her rate to one hundred dollars or more per article—on condition she write about the “guts of China’s civil war.” Word of the White Terror, as the April 12 slaughter was now called, had excited a great deal of interest across the Pacific. To the Americans, the blood that had streamed from her stepson’s head was far enough away and “exotic” enough to be titillating.
So for weeks she forced herself to listen with widened ears whenever William or Eugene came to visit. She searched the North China Daily, Shen Bao, the Kuowen ch’ou-p’ao, the China Weekly Review for the discrepancies that revealed hidden truth. She kept notes on the gossip her children brought back via school chums. But the men did most of their talking behind closed doors. The editorials swam together. And the children were hardly reliable sources. She knew that the kind of reporting Cadlow wanted would require her to take her notepad and camera to the streets, to the parts of town Jin and Jed used to show her, to hotel lobbies and bars such as the Cathay, to the docks and mills and godowns and the ruins of Chapei, where once she had attempted to escape with Stephen Mann—where Jin had been shot in cold blood. She could not bring herself to set foot outside the Concession.
Sympathetic Sarah was a frequent visitor, bringing “intelligence from the field,” as she called it. Eugene’s nights with her now were not frequent enough to yield much more than Hope overheard between him and Paul, but Sarah’s own adventures were more colorful. She had been present for sailors’ brawls in Blood Alley, could describe all the newest, gaudiest nightclubs down to the last pink-tinted chandelier and which of Tu’s mistresses sang or danced where. She had tales—through the woman who dyed her hair—about Shanghai’s most fantastic perversions and illicit liaisons, in varying sexual, animal, and drug-induced combinations. Hope tried to sponge up Sarah’s prurient delight and pour it through her pen, but the resulting articles turned her stomach. While she spoke at length of Shanghai’s nightlife, Sarah never mentioned young Ken’s forced engagement to one of Chiang Kai-shek’s cousins.
Gradually, reluctantly, Hope gave up trying to satisfy Cadlow and earn the cash to go home. Instead, she began to write for herself. She wrote about idealistic young men catching the thrill of revolution, about a tragic young wife who poisoned herself rather than submit to her husband’s brutality. She wrote of a lonely, alienated doctor who deluded himself into thinking he was in love with a married woman, and of a beautiful Irishwoman who had become a Chinese gangster’s concubine. She told the story of a father forced to abandon his son to execution by the White Terror.
September 14, 1927
Harper’s
Dear Miss Newfield:
Imagine my surprise on opening your latest collection. After your searing portrait of Borodin last spring, I thought we had agreed you should pursue this more aggressive political reporting. I wish you had mentioned your desire to write fiction, as we could then have taken it step by step.
I’m afraid these stories, while poignant and full of colorful detail, are both too fantastic and too overwrought for our readers to “buy” them. Please understand, we do publish short fiction pieces, but far fewer than articles and essays, and they generally must follow a certain arching form, with a beginning, a middle, and a surprise at the end. They must be as focused and controlled as your photographs (which were also missed in this collection), the emotion contained rather than bursting, the details judiciously selected rather than thrown out scattershot.
I have the sense, Miss Newfield, that you are somehow unburdening yourself in these pieces rather than crafting them into literature. If you care to refine them into proper stories I will be only too glad to review them. However, I’m afraid, as they stand, they are unpublishable, and under the circumstances, I am unable to forward the advance of five hundred dollars you have requested.
I hope this has been helpful rather than hurtful, and that you do not discontinue your journalistic efforts while you experiment in other directions.
Sincerely,
William Cadlow
She replied to Cadlow’s letter by mashing it into a ball and throwing it across the room. Damn him. She could no more write a straight, clinical report on this massacre or Chiang’s farcical government than she could have suppressed the hysteria that gripped her when she heard in July that Chiang had awarded Gangster Tu the Order of the Brilliant Jade and appointed him Chief of Opium Suppression. Cadlow was right. She was an amateur. She was overwrought. And he was right, too, that she had done the stories for other reasons. They had released some of the chaos bottled up inside her. At least she could now speak Jin’s name aloud, could remember Jed’s pure, painful stammer without weeping. She could forgive Paul his mystifying tran
sformation, even if she would never be able to accept it. And she could go on as mother to her children without her heart leaping into her throat every time they left the house. Though this came the hardest.
That first morning, within hours after the machine guns subsided, Morris had slipped away. Hope immediately sent Yen in pursuit, but Morris had met a couple of neighborhood boys and they ducked under some shrubbery and disappeared. When Morris finally returned, nearly two hours later, Hope slapped him across the face and boxed his ears. It was the first time she had struck any of her children since that awful night leaving Peking. Much later Morris confessed that he had seen a Chinese boy no older than himself pinned under the barbed-wire barricades—his mouth sliced back from ear to ear and bullet holes punched in his chest. Though he became a Boy Scout that summer, Morris never again spoke of joining the Eurasian Volunteer Corps, and whenever the subject of his future came up, he said he would very much like to attend university in America.
But Pearl’s future was more imminent. In spite of the Terror—or more likely because of it—neither her incomplete record nor her dubious grades had prevented her from graduating that June, a month shy of her nineteenth birthday. Yet Pearl remained a child. Seemingly immune to the horrors and hardships around her, she was given to bursts of tittering laughter, expressions such as “skidoo” and “toodles” and “Oh, you kid!” She marcelled her hair, turned down her stockings, and rouged her knees and cheeks. And though she kept a diligent scrapbook from the North China Daily, she ignored all news of politics, instead clipping articles about U.S. Marine Corps parades, the annual race club meetings, drownings of coolies in Soochow Creek, and colorful car accidents and fires along Bubbling Well Road. While she spoke of Jin with sadness and a kind of awe, talked of praying for his soul, there was no depth to her grief. It was as if she did not quite believe that he was—could he—dead.
In much the same way her father retreated to his Chinese traditions, Pearl had responded to the Terrors by immersing herself in Shanghai’s social whirl. Parties and boys, she joked, were her new religion. She had wormed her way into a circle of silly but well-to-do girls whose fathers were American or French Catholics and whose suitors were the boys of the Concession Volunteer Corps. The Volunteers, she said, were “just swell” when you got to chatting with them. When Hope tried to explain precisely why those boys would act so particularly “swell” to a pretty little Eurasian girl, Pearl cried, “Mama, these are boys from the best families, and they’re only being friendly. Besides, why would they trouble me with all that when they can have an experienced White Russian princess for a song!” Finally, Hope had no alternative but to tell Pearl bluntly that neither her sweet, but rather unassuming looks nor her father’s “position” made her more than a marginal marriage prospect. Besides, if they were ever to get out of China, they would need more money than Hope’s writing could bring, even if she did get it back on track. And Pearl had neither the inclination nor the grades to go to college. So that summer, while fighting kept the river—and Kuling—closed to civilians, Hope taught her daughter how to hunt for a job.
They circled ads in the North China Daily, telephoned for appointments, bought American patterns and sewed trim linen suits and collared “work dresses.” They rehearsed her presentation for interviews (discovering in the process that eleven-year-old Jasmine had an uncanny eye for the nuance of smile or turn of phrase that would make Pearl seem more sophisticated), and within two weeks Pearl had landed a secretarial position with Asia Realty, typing and answering the telephone for a rotund cigar-smoking Cockney named Jim Yeardley. Pearl was so naive that she thought her new boss was just being friendly when he offered her whiskey at the end of the day, but those bedroom eyes lost their luster when Pearl, while tidying the back storeroom, stumbled on some old account books stuffed with Yeardley’s pilfered cash. Mr. Pedersen, the company’s mild goggle-eyed owner, became Pearl’s eternal champion, but the poor girl was terrified for weeks by the booted Yeardley’s threat of revenge. She insisted either Hope or Yen walk her to work and pick her up every day, and though there was no further trace of the dreaded Cockney, by the following spring Hope suspected her daughter might make a better bride than working girl after all.
There was no shortage of beaux. Eurasians, Frenchmen, Americans, and Italians. The problem had to do with their intentions. Hope insisted that Pearl introduce any boy who meant to take her out, and she restricted her to double or group dates. Pearl scoffed at her mother’s cautiousness, but she did not disobey. Yeardley had taught her a lesson. She narrowed her escorts finally to one. Trevor Noble was a sweet if consumptive boy whose father worked at the American Mail Line and whose sister Googoo was an old school chum of Pearl’s.
Paul did not approve. “She should be married,” he growled. “How can she spend so much time with him, still they do not marry?”
“They’re getting to know each other.”
“She can know him after marriage!”
“She’s only twenty,” Hope reminded him. “I was twenty-five when you married me.”
“That is different,” he said. “You were American girl.”
“According to her passport, so is Pearl.”
He reached for his cap from the stand by the door. They were having this conversation, like most lately, in passing.
“She should be married,” he repeated, and left.
August 3, 1928
c/o Noble
Lot 112, Mokanshan
Dear Mama,
Well, we got here safely, and it’s lovely. The swimming pool is just beside the garden, and the tennis court is on the left side of the house. My room is on the ground floor.
The first night something woke me up and I listened and listened till I couldn’t hear a thing, then as clear as anything, I hear something at my shutter, just as tho someone lifted it to try and get in. Oh my! I was scared. I flashed Trevor’s big torch onto the shutters and said, “Get out.” Then the dog that sleeps outside my verandah shutters barked like blazes. I told Trevor and he came down the second night without telling anyone (in case it was someone playing a joke), and caught the morning coolie trying to see what he could steal. Just like that bearer Yen caught in Kuling! Only Mr. Noble handled it in stride and merely kicked the old boy out for being so cheeky. Not like Papa.
I’m not wearing my nice dresses as I’d look too foolish. Mrs. Noble changes off and on with only two dresses. We have to make our own beds as there are no amahs, and I wouldn’t let her make my bed for me. Also I shall have to wash my own things.
I wonder what Papa says about things?
Love you!
Pearl
Pass. 125 Rue de Grouchy
Shanghai
August 9, 1928
Dearest Pearl,
Card and letter both received. I certainly hope your adventures are over now, as it sounds quite an alarming welcome!
We do miss you a lot, but never mind that. Enjoy yourself all you can. Watch out that Trevor doesn’t get overfatigued, though. TB is nothing to kid about, as you must realize.
As for how Mrs. Noble dresses, that’s her business and no gauge for you. You are young and sweet and attractive, and you’ve no reason not to flaunt it. Trevor will get tired always seeing you in the same old dress. Besides, I went to considerable trouble to get that red voile and the organdy ready in time for you to take with you. I’ll be put out if they come back unworn.
Papa hasn’t said anything except, “Blossom has only two weeks?” So he doesn’t mind. By the time you return he’ll be up in Kuling, where he’s stopping to check on the house before he goes to Nanking. He’s been appointed to the Supervisory Yüan, which means that he’s supposed to keep all Chiang’s bureaucrats in line and the government free of corruption. At least he’ll have a salary again. But it also means that he’ll be spending most of his time in Nanking. I don’t know, maybe for all our sakes, it’s best. Anyway, don’t you worry. Just take good care of yourself.
Lovingl
y,
Mama
4
May 15, 1929
En route to Nanking
Dear Sarah,
I have tried several times these past weeks to reach you, but you have not returned my calls. I suppose this must mean Eugene is favoring you again, or are you busy making arrangements for Ken’s wedding? At any rate, I have a favor to ask. I am taking Jasmine and Teddy up to Nanking to join Paul for the ceremonies at Dr. Sun’s new mausoleum, and we’ve left Morris (has to finish his exams) and Pearl (couldn’t get leave from her job) home with Yen. Would you mind awfully looking in on them? I know that Pearl’s a grown woman and Morris is practically a man, but in Shanghai, how can a mother not worry? Especially since Trevor Noble died at Christmas, Pearl’s been in a keen state of nerves, giddy gay one moment and sobbing the next, and the only thing that seems to calm her is going to church, but then her friends will take her out nightclubbing “to cheer her up,” and … well, you understand. Indulge me, Sarah, and make sure they don’t get into trouble.
As for yours truly … You are doubtless wondering why, given the current state of things, we are winding our way to Nanking. Well, as always, I hope to get some photographs and make a story out of it. Generalissimo Chiang is reportedly taking between three and six million dollars from the national coffers to pay for Sun’s new mausoleum, and I’m sure there will be plenty of colorful pomp and what-not when our hero’s body is dragged down from Peking. The children are wound up because Paul’s promised they can ride ponies along the top of the old city wall the way Pearl remembers doing with Yen in Peking. They’re very pleased at last to have an adventure that excludes their older brother and sister, and Jasmine will doubtless lord this over them for the rest of their lives.