Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  Yes, but what about you, Hope? I can just hear you, Sarah. I can, but I honestly don’t know how to answer. Paul is full of beans over Chiang’s rebuilding campaign, says the new government is turning Nanking into a fully up-to-date city, and—now that the Western nations have recognized the Nationalist government—a very cosmopolitan center, as well. Chinese and English are spoken interchangeably and, much more than in Shanghai, there is respect among the races. So he says. Perhaps this will form the subject for another article, but we will see if it persuades me to uproot the children yet again so that we can move there, as Paul claims he wishes.

  I say claims because I can’t believe he really cares a whit. No use pretending, you know how things have been with us since Jin died. It’s as though he’s on one side of the looking glass, and I’m on the other, and even if we put our hands up and press our palms together, all we can feel is the cold flat line between us. You laugh, I know, and say more the fool I for thinking it was ever otherwise, and maybe you’re right. All I know is, it’s this way now, and I don’t know whether to feel more sad or angry. Paul is as good a man as ever. Dear, kind, gentle, patient in his way, and generous to a fault. But his distance now is hard and obdurate, and his addiction to this country’s political intrigues and upheavals seems even still to grow unabated. No matter how corrupt, savage, deceitful, or tyrannical its leaders might be, he would rather see his son murdered and decried than be excluded from its government.

  I should not go on. The pen can be a treacherous weapon, and I do not want to compromise you. It is just that, even within four walls—palm-to-palm, as it were—Paul and I are so far apart that we might as well be in different cities. I no longer see the point in pretending otherwise, unless it is for the children’s good, but their lives are firmly planted in Shanghai. And there is some protection there, is there not?

  It is late. We have a comfortable wagon-lit, and the children are in their bunks fast asleep. Outside, it is so dark we could be traveling through the high Sierras and I would be none the wiser. Can you believe that was twenty-three years ago? I can still see that fiercely determined expression on your face after Kathe tumbled into those coolies in Oakland! And feel the tension of your back when we were bunked together in the train. I wonder if, ten years from now, I’ll have equally powerful memories of sitting here, rocking through Kiangsu with my sleeping children, my pen slipping and jerking as I write these words?

  But I must close. I’ll post this from the station when we arrive and call you as soon as we return—the fifth or sixth of June.

  My best to Ken, and love to you always,

  Hope

  June 1, 1929

  I am in hiding tonight. It has been a brutal day, and, I fear, irreparably damaging.

  I should have expected as much when I first laid eyes on the mausoleum that we came to celebrate. Chiang Kai-shek has built in Dr. Sun’s “honor” a horror of marble ugliness and excess—eighty thousand square meters of hard, blistering stone. But as inappropriate and brutal as this tomb may be for a man of Sun’s naive modesty, the ceremonies that Chiang ordered for the reinterment were, quite simply, a travesty. Thousands stood for hours in the suffocating heat, waving flags and singing Nationalist anthems, listening to interminable speeches by anyone and everyone in Chiang’s circle who stood to profit by association with the Father of the Republic. Jasmine’s badgering and Teddy’s questions were almost as incessant as the ceremonial noise, but far more sympathetic, as far as I’m concerned. Dr. Sun may have always desired to be buried in the Purple Mountain, but I’m sure he would rather have had an unmarked grave than be dragged out and used as he was today. I begin to wonder if there isn’t something innate in Chinese society that grinds all truly noble ambition to dust.

  At length Paul climbed up on the dais and made his own speech in Sun’s memory. He was perfectly genuine, heartfelt in his words and expression, yet whatever came out of his mouth was overpowered by the sight of the Generalissimo behind him nodding, squeezing those glittering eyes down into a benevolent viper’s smile. Sarah tells me Chiang’s personal gain has risen into the tens of millions since he’s come to power, yet Paul is paid as irregularly as ever, and the government debt climbs almost as fast as the Generalissimo’s wealth. I remember Paul’s tirades against the Manchus for stealing China’s riches, against Yüan Shih-k’ai for pocketing money borrowed at the people’s expense, against the warlords for building palaces and buying concubines with the farmers’ taxes. Can my husband honestly believe that anything has changed?

  So we quarreled. We’d come back to this hotel, where Paul lives in a suite that is as plain and utilitarian as the outer lobbies are gaudy with red carpets and gilt. The children were in their room. I had collapsed in the sitting room, and Paul was pacing around in obvious agitation. He said he wanted me to accompany him to the reception and banquet tonight. He’d arranged for a woman to come and stay with the children. Now, I was soaked with sweat and limp with exhaustion. My head ached so that I felt it was being split with a cleaver, and I would rather have spit on most of the people attending these festivities than speak to them. Besides, this was the first notice he’d given me. I refused.

  “You are my wife,” he said. “You must come.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “If you like.”

  “I don’t like. I am not your servant. And I want nothing to do with this city or the people who rule here.”

  Then he said, “This is my business. It is what I do. Who I am.”

  “It’s been your business since before we were married, and you’ve consistently done everything in your power to exclude me from it. Now I see why. And I want no part of it.”

  His face darkened the way it does, as if his rage is trapped and cooking inside him. I braced myself for him to slap his cheeks at the same time that I prayed he would not. At some core point I would rather he throw a chair out the window, rather he plunge his fist through the wall, rather, even, that he strike me if I am what has enraged him than that he turn all fury, all frustration and humiliation first and only against himself. At least if he struck me, we could have it out. It would be out, this awful, invisible tension between us. We could brawl and claw and scream—and perhaps in the process we might remember what it is to feel each other.

  He did not slap himself or me. He simply shrank away. His face seemed to wither before my eyes. He let out a single tremulous sigh, and two tears broke and slid down his cheeks. His fists were clenched, his arms cocked, but it was the pose of a paralyzed child rather than a threatening man.

  So many words came into my throat that I choked on them and no sound at all would come out. He sickened me. I pitied him. I hated him. But more than anything, his palpable fear of me terrified me.

  “Let us go, Paul,” I said at last, with as much effort as if I had been lifting a concrete block by breath alone. “I haven’t been back to my country in seventeen years. I want Morris to attend university in America and for all the children to know their other home.”

  Paul drew himself up, slowly and with almost enough dignity to command me. “My children are Chinese,” he said. “And you, my wife, a Chinese citizen.”

  “China is not my home, Paul. It never will be.”

  But suddenly I felt unmoored. My legs rocked beneath me. His tears had dried and his face pulled into a strange, down-turned grimace that seemed at once cloying and shamed. He laid a hand against my cheek, just for an instant, but he didn’t look at me and I felt no connection, no emotion in his touch. I realized this is the way he now touches our children and what I was feeling was what they feel for him. I couldn’t respond, and after a moment he passed into the bedroom. I went in to the children and a few minutes later we heard the succession of doors opening and closing, signaling his departure.

  June 4, 1929

  En route

  Dearest, peachiest, squarest Hope,

  You must (tho I know you won’t) forgive me for not saying goodbye. I’ve met the dreamie
st boy. Jimmy Marlowe. He’s from San Diego, California, and he has the loveliest blue-green eyes and arms like twists of train tracks. You can see I’m quite gone on him, and in spite of the age gap (I daren’t tell you how wide!), he says the same of me. We met at the Casanova just a few weeks ago, tho he’s been in Shanghai almost two years. Lucky, lucky timing. He’s a sailor, you know, and most conveniently he’s due for home leave. Yes’m, we sail tonight. I’ve written Gerry all about it and asked him to meet us on the other side—did I tell you Gerry has a girl, and they’re living in Dallas, Texas, of all places?

  ’Course, I can’t say a word to anyone else. Oh, I know Eugene will be in a stew. The really hard part is, I can’t take Ken. If I did, the Chou clan would send out all their posses—they’ve got cousins in every Chinatown in America—and I’m sure I’d be dead in a month and Ken right back where he started. Oh dear, Hope. I know what you’re thinking. I know you could never do anything like this. But please try to understand. For twenty years I’ve been kept like some creature in a bottle. I’ve survived, and I’ve managed to have some fun, and my boys are good boys, both of them. But I haven’t been free, and I really haven’t been living, and this is a chance that won’t come again. I hate this country. It’s squalid, it’s twisted, and it’s cruel.

  I think of America. I think of the space, the color, the taste of the air. It’s freedom I remember, Hope.

  So please look in on my dear Ken. As I write this he’s studying for his exams with Morris. They are both nearly grown men, you know. They hardly need us at all anymore, and as I haven’t any other little ones I mustn’t delude myself that I’m indispensable. I’m not. Not to anyone but me.

  I do hope you understand a little. I’ll write when I land and have an address. Perhaps someday you’ll come back as well, and we’ll reminisce about our Shanghai Days and think them all perfectly ducky. I’d like that.

  Good luck, Hope. And love.

  Sarah

  She could feel herself hardening. Her skin, her spine, even her hair, now streaked with heavy branches of silver—seemed to have become stiff and tough. She hated this change. It made her think of the coffin at Nainai’s house. That coffin had been there for more than fifteen years, waiting for Nainai to die, and every autumn it was relacquered to strengthen it for death. But her own hardening promised no strength. It promised a grave and permanent loss.

  There was no one now in whom she could confide such feelings. Sarah had vanished without a trace. Not even Ken, whose wedding the Leons attended just weeks after his mother’s flight, had heard any word of her whereabouts. In any case, Sarah had gone too far this time for Hope ever to confide in her again. Leaving Eugene she could understand better than she could Sarah’s submission to him all these years. But leaving her son, running off with a man she barely knew—a sailor half her age!

  Hope tried to bury her emotions in writing and the photographs she had resumed taking in a haphazard way—more of an excuse to get out of the house and be alone than to capture “the essence of Shanghai,” as Cadlow kept exhorting her to do. But it was all slipping. Though Cadlow was sympathetic, he now rejected one or two out of every three articles—virtually everything Hope submitted under her real name. Only the pseudonymous pieces held up, in his view. “If you are afraid, for some reason,” he urged, “we will let Hope Newfield slip away and welcome our new contributor Isabelle Wayland—as long as the work is consistent.” But identity was only part of the problem.

  “Come to church, Mama,” Pearl would beg. “It’s so grand and mystical. You can’t help but feel a part of something larger than your own problems.”

  Pearl had started going to St. Joseph’s Cathedral after Trevor Noble died. His family was in the congregation, and his funeral had been there. Several of Pearl’s friends went to mass on Sundays, and over time she had taken to going along. “It’s a comfort,” she had explained after Trevor, then later, “It’s smashing pageantry. The Catholics give even the Chinese festivals a run for their money.” Sometimes she dragged Jasmine and Teddy along, enticing them with the prospect of joining her friends for socials afterward. There was a young priest whose mission seemed to be to attract the “lost” Eurasian youth of Shanghai into the Catholic fold, and he had hit on the highly successful strategy of treating these youths to ice cream and soda pop after mass. The circle widened, and soon poor Trevor Noble was all but forgotten as Pearl and Jasmine squabbled over which of the young men they’d met at church was the most handsome, the better dancer, dresser, or prankster. Hope reasoned that there was no harm in their going, better the Catholics than Shanghai’s gangsters. But she herself had spent too many years listening to Paul’s harangues against the missionaries and especially the Catholics, who had cut privileged land and taxation deals with the Manchus, carving out their own fiefdoms and brutalizing nonconverts in the name of the church (that running joke about all the blue-eyed Chinese unique to the inland mission villages). Hope despised hypocrisy, and it seemed that the Christian religions specialized in the art of preaching one thing and doing another. So, although she kept the children well supplied with Sunday dresses and suits and some small change for the collection plate, she refused Pearl’s pleas to join them.

  The house was now routinely deserted on Sundays. Morris, having graduated in the spring of 1930 (and having even less enthusiasm for church than his mother), had taken a job as cub reporter for the Evening Mercury, and was assigned to the Concession police beat every weekend. The servants had always had every Sunday off, and though Yen used to idle around the house, he now was gone for good. For years Paul’s friends had given Yen tips for serving them his special roast pork and for keeping them well lubricated at their mah-jongg and poetry parties. For years Yen’s only indulgence had been the picture show he treated himself to each week or the occasional toy he bought from his own pocket for the children. Everything else had been carefully saved until, one day in late 1929, he announced that he had bought a small inn in Hongkew. Ah-nie would help him run it. The children no longer needed tending, they said, and Laoyeh did not require Yen’s service in Nanking. There was a tearful goodbye, and several weeks later Yen invited the family to come see their establishment. As soon as she entered, Hope let out a cry. Then the tears streamed down her face. Dear, dear Yen and Ah-nie. There, above the desk in the narrow, dimly lit lobby, hung a huge grainy enlargement of a photograph Jed Israel had taken of Hope the year after Morris was born.

  Ordinarily, she fended off the dismal mood she had come to call her Sunday blues by hiding in the darkroom she’d set up in Yen’s old quarters under the stairs. Or she’d work on an article, or sew, or write in her journal. In good weather, she might work in the garden. Certainly, she was never without tasks to occupy her hands and mind, if not her heart. But there came a Sunday in mid-November of 1931 when the emptiness of the house threatened to engulf her. It was a bleak day, nothing inviting about it except that it offered an alternative to her own solitude. And Shanghai’s guarantee that by stepping outside she would be reminded of her own comparative good fortune.

  She set off toward Hongkew with a vague notion of stopping to visit Yen. A new miniature Leica was tucked into the pocket of her old tweed coat. The traffic was brisk, whole families jammed into wheelbarrows on the way to market, the usual flow of street merchants waving their handmade toys and confections, touring cars and rickshaws streaming to and from the Bund. In the middle of Route Pere Robert the red-turbaned Sikh on his pedestal still performed his curious traffic dance. Colonial puppets, Jed used to call the Sikhs.

  She turned up the velvet collar of her coat, tugged her jersey cloche down low, and took the policeman’s picture. A few minutes later she photographed a group of uniformed Boy Scouts in front of a toy shop burning wooden cars and airplanes while their leader harangued the sullen merchant for disobeying China’s latest boycott against Japanese goods.

  At the entrance to French Park she stopped again, for a very different display: the Sunday promenade. Formal
Europeans in full plumage, tight-lipped and strolling compulsively; clusters of young Chinese dressed like flappers; lovers who clung to the shadows. Odd, thought Hope, how it was the lovers who wanted so to be discreet who stood out most of all. Like that middle-aged man going off on the side path with his young girlfriend—he in his sharp-brimmed hat and pin stripes, she with her shingled hair and red silk. She so very animated, he almost paternal in his bearing. But not quite.

  Hope edged behind a nearby yew, debating whether to photograph the pair. The man was removing his gold-rimmed spectacles, slipping them carefully into his breast pocket as he whispered into the girl’s ear. She laughed and tipped her head up, turning so that his lips could not help but brush her cheek. He caught her elbow and their bodies tensed, moving against each other, but at the precise moment Hope lifted her camera, the man straightened abruptly, looked right and left, showing his full face. Hope was sheltered. He did not see her, and after a moment the couple drifted away. But she could not move.

  The man was William Tan.

  She took a deep breath. She should hardly be surprised. She’d sensed as much about William from the very first, yet she had so thoroughly mastered the art of suspending assumption that she was as shocked as if it were not William but Paul having an affair. She would be shocked, she realized with a start, even now, if it were Paul.

  She turned, pocketing the Leica, her eyes still pulling toward the two figures disappearing behind the shrubbery. Only when William and the girl had completely vanished and she started back toward the street did she realize that she had been seen, after all. But not by William.