Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  Then Hope announced there would be no Christmas presents. “We must save every bit,” she said, raising her hands at the shrillness of her own voice. “Pearl is sick!” She looked at them pleadingly. “Pearl is sick, you see! And if we save enough, perhaps we can all go back to America with Morris next summer.” They didn’t say a word.

  But they would not know. They must not know. Teddy was too young, and Morris, Hope knew, would feel compelled to avenge his sister—probably by trying to expose Father Desmond. But that would only intensify Pearl’s shame, and who would believe a Eurasian’s word against a Catholic priest—especially when there were no witnesses? As for Jasmine—well, Jasmine was like Sarah. She was as street-smart at fifteen as Pearl had been innocent at twenty. Hope knew that nothing would prevent her younger daughter from rushing headlong into whatever disasters or adventures awaited her, but she had an innate toughness, too, that made her emotionally invulnerable. Hope’s children had been subjected their entire lives to Shanghai’s warning leers, the crude whispers and crass innuendos—Eurasian trash—and they were past masters at denial and dismissal, evasion, distraction, reinvention. She had groomed these skills in them. Brush it aside, she would say. You’re beautiful. You’re brilliant. You’re better than all of them put together, and any day now we’ll get out of here. We’ll go back to America where you’ll be free. She still said these things.

  No, there was no gain in revenge or confrontation, even if either one had been possible. This place, these people were nothing but transients, a whole city of failures and frauds who would descend on innocence like a pack of vultures and rip its very heart out. How could she tell them the real reason she had turned her back on Christmas? This most holy of Christian rituals—she could just see Father Desmond lifting his accursed hand in benediction. Perhaps a better woman would have mounted a charade—the customary tree, the garlands, the smell of roasting meat, and laughter, and the glitter of little surprises filled with promise and love. She recalled the delight of that first Christmas in Shanghai, that stupid bent monkey pine under the laughing Buddha, and the three of them dancing together as Pearl crowed, “Ooh la la!”

  On Christmas day William and Daisy Tan held a gala party. Hope sent the three younger children, dressed in holiday finery, with Pearl’s and her own regrets. Pearl spent the day curled around her pillow. Hope ransacked her closets.

  She turned her purses inside out. She hunted through files of letters, articles, searched old journals, and emptied drawers. Pearl was not the first girl to be defiled by these bastards.

  Think, she told herself. You know you kept it. And now you know why. She could still see the day, the slant of light through the leaves, the twitching silvered death of the trout in Jasmine’s hand. She recalled Sarah’s vehemence, her own defiant repulsion. How many babies had she seen die. To cut off her own lifeblood? Never!

  The black lacquer sewing box she’d brought back from Kuling sat on an open shelf above her desk. Underneath the bottom tray the creamy vellum lay, preserved.

  T. C. Wong, M.D.,

  Ladies’ therapies and remedies.

  6

  Dr. Wong’s office was located in Hongkew, around the corner from the Japanese consulate. It was an immaculate place, startlingly white with gold leaf scrolls painted along the molding of the waiting room and around the rims of the round white tables and matching chairs. The lights were encased in frosted glass, the windows in drifts of snowy damask. On a hunch, Hope had introduced herself as a friend of Mrs. Eugene Chou—which Mrs. Chou she didn’t specify—and the nurse had consented to an appointment after normal office hours. So there were no other patients, only one Chinese nurse and the doctor himself. The nurse was fat, her eyes and mouth squeezed between rolls of pink flesh, but she had a warm and sympathetic smile and nodded confidently as Hope explained their mission. Dr. Wong inspired no less confidence. He was a grandfatherly figure, short and slight, but erect, with thick white hair brushed straight back and alert, incisive eyes. His questions were solely medical in nature. Blood type. Any allergies? Prone to infection? History of seizures or fainting? And discreet. No mention of the father.

  Hope stayed, holding Pearl’s hand throughout the procedure. She made sure every instrument had been sterilized, every surface of the operating room was antiseptically clean. She noted with approval the gallon jug of Jeyes’ Liquid, the vat of boiling water, the laundered towels and spotless masks with which both doctor and nurse covered their mouths and noses. She saw that the hypodermic was wiped with alcohol and made sure that Pearl’s grip had relaxed, her breathing steadied before they began. She smiled. Oh, she smiled into those young, glazed eyes, and she talked about Berkeley, the beautiful white cottage where Pearl was born, the way the mists would pull over the hills in the evening like the world’s softest, thickest blankets.

  An hour later they were in a taxi heading home. Pearl was moaning a little, a faint perspiration breaking across her forehead, in Hope’s pocket a vial of sedatives. She had her arm around the girl’s shoulder so that the bobbed black hair fanned across her sleeve. Pearl’s eyes were closed, and every few seconds she would wince with a spasm of pain. Dr. Wong had said everything “went textbook,” that she would bleed for about a week, discomfort only one day or two. “Then good as new.” Dr. Wong, it seemed, had many American patients and had picked up some of their phrases.

  It was nearly seven o’clock, and cold. The moon was blocked by thick quilted clouds, so the reflections of electric light on the hoods and chrome of surrounding automobiles had an even more artificial quality than usual. Many of the nearby cotton and paper mills had just changed shift, and the streets were thronged with wagons and tramcars packed with workers. Traffic crawled.

  Suddenly several dozen Japanese pickets streamed around the corner, waving banners and lighted torches, screaming anti-Chinese rhetoric. The taxi stalled as people dashed in front of it. Pearl groaned, and Hope wiped her forehead.

  The pickets were heading toward a Chinese towel factory a hundred yards or so ahead. Chinese workers tried to block their path, pushing and shoving, yelling curses. The mob was multiplying. The driver lay on his horn, but it did no good, and the noise seemed to aggravate Pearl’s pain. Hope begged the man to move forward, but he turned in his seat at that, loathing in his face. She tried to tell him that she hadn’t meant he should drive over the Chinese workers, but, of course, that’s precisely what she had meant. Drive over anyone necessary to get her daughter safely out of here.

  Now eyes and lips and flat swatches of cheek and forehead pressed against the glass. Hope laid her hand across Pearl’s eyes, shielded her with her own body. The driver had locked the doors, but people were drumming on the hood and windows. A terrifying jungle sort of drumming, primitive and insatiable. The faces had pulled back by inches, but the car was ringed with outstretched arms. It began rocking violently from side to side. A brick skittered across the hood. Hope heard screams through the cries of the Japanese pickets, and ahead orange flames started licking from the lower windows of the San Yu factory. Still sheltered by her sedation and pain, Pearl curled deeper into Hope’s arms. Her words slurred as she asked what was happening. The driver was yelling at them to get down as he tried to back up, now frightened enough for his own life that he didn’t care whom he ran over, but the street was jammed behind, as well, not only with the rioters but abandoned trucks and rickshaws. Beyond them now appeared an armored car, black with the rising-sun insignia of the Japanese Army. The driver threw open his door and was instantly swallowed into the seething darkness.

  Now a flurry of hands began to dance through the open door. The windshield seemed to be liquefying. The cab rang with a metallic splash as shots burst overhead. Machine gunfire. Hope lifted the lock, grabbed Pearl by the shoulders, and fell out of the car. A cry went up as three boys pushed past them, climbing onto the vehicle’s hood and pouring something from a canister. They ignored the two women. Hope was dragging Pearl, who could hold her weight but moved in
a daze and kept asking if this was a nightmare. They had covered barely twenty feet when someone threw a match, and the cab exploded in two-story flames. The heat sucked at their clothes. Hope could feel her stockings melting. Another concussion shook the ground and pitched them forward, toward the creek.

  “Mama,” Pearl moaned. “Mama, please stop.”

  But it was too dangerous. They were caught in a screaming sea, not attacked directly but shunted and thrown, swept along by the violent motions of the riot. Around them, rickshaw pullers were being trampled and beaten. Beggars were kicked, shop windows stoned. The Chinese workers who tried to leave the burning building were driven back inside. Uniformed Japanese stood on street corners watching, doing nothing to stop the madness.

  They had reached the Garden Bridge before the first klaxons and fire sirens sounded. Suddenly Pearl jerked violently and twisted over the bridge’s railing, vomiting into the blackness.

  “Mama,” she whispered in an agonized voice. “I’ve wet myself.

  XIII

  FATE

  SHANGHAI

  (1932)

  1

  The earth will open and swallow us. The wars will ignite and surround us. There is always danger outside the walls beckoning at the gates. We will perish or persevere. Fate will decide.

  These words became Hope’s private canticle through the endless days and nights that followed, as she stood watch over her unconscious daughter. As she struggled to follow her husband’s example, to accept.

  But Paul embraced fate as instinctively as he did the presence of spirits, the inevitability of warlords, the power of gangsters, the rise of Chiang Kai-shek and his thugs. He was trained in the arts of compromising with evil, learned early to value the humiliation of knocking his head on the stone floor or feeling the knife in his back. At the same time, he understood the inherent treachery of pride, would refute each triumph and understate each gain with the same cunning by which his own mother gave him a girl’s name on the day of his birth, berated him during infancy that the spirits would consider him worthless and not bother stealing him away. He knew to keep his true heart secret, that it should not betray him—or his family.

  Hope had clung too long to her faith in safety, that place she once promised Pearl, where there was no right or wrong and truth was all that mattered. She had told her the danger lay outside, in what others would think or do, that the truest safety lies with those we love and trust absolutely. But the gravest danger to Pearl had come through those she trusted the most, and Hope now saw that no truth was more duplicitous than the truth of her own heart.

  All she wanted was to protect Pearl, to strip away the horror she’d suffered and restore her to the life for which she was intended. To save her. But something had gone wrong. Pearl had become infected. She would not stop bleeding. The panic of fighting erupting around them, toxic drugs she’d been given, the madness starting all over again, and no escape … She’d collapsed on the Garden Bridge and gone into shock before Hope could get her to the hospital. The hemorrhage was severe, and within hours Pearl had developed septicemia, required massive transfusions. But for Stephen Mann, she’d have died before dawn. As it was, she lay in a coma.

  Outside, Japan’s assault on Hongkew had expanded, become official, and Shanghai once again had turned into a war zone. Armored trucks rumbled past the hospital. Bombardments rippled the walls. The night sky was a haze of ocher, the day black with smoke from the fires that raged across Chapei.

  Hope stayed at her daughter’s bedside, torturing herself with blame and regret and the new memories being etched in her heart—the deadly white of Pearl’s unconscious face, the lifeless weight of her hand, the anguish in Stephen’s eyes when he said there was nothing more he could do. And the gentle cadence of Paul’s voice as he sought to draw her away. Mei fatse.

  As her vigil stretched into weeks, Hope would hear the two men talking at the entrance to the ward, exchanging details about the bombardments, troop movements, prospects for truce between the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army, which was defending Chapei, and the commander of the Japanese forces, Admiral Shiozawa. Apparently Mann had postponed his departure for America, though whether because of the fighting or because of Pearl or some other reason, Hope didn’t think to ask. She gathered that Paul, when he wasn’t at the hospital, was seeing to the children at home or making diplomatic missions to the Japanese consulate. He was supposedly in Shanghai to negotiate a truce.

  Hope was grateful for both men, she welcomed the murmur of their voices, and sipped from the bowls of tea and soup they urged on her at intervals, but her guilt pushed into the distance everything but Pearl. She had vowed after burying her last baby that she would kill herself before she watched another of her children die. There had been so many bodies since then, so many senseless deaths, yet she would still have given her own life for Pearl’s gladly, if it were possible. It was possible, though in a different way than she imagined.

  Pearl was still unconscious on March 8 when the fighting stopped. For almost three months the Nineteenth Route Army, which consisted of some thirty thousand scrappy, mostly unpaid boy soldiers under the command of a defiant Cantonese general, had held Chapei in the name of China. According to Stephen, they had persisted with rifles and machine guns against continuous Japanese airborne and artillery bombardments. But they had received no support from Chiang Kai-shek, who had all but ordered Paul to surrender Shanghai if it would appease the Japanese, and finally the young, battered heroes (as Stephen viewed them) had been forced to withdraw. Now, while the Japanese bluejacket Marines advanced to take possession of North Station, Paul had gone aboard the warship Azumo, where Japan’s Admiral Shiozawa was entertaining the foreign press.

  Though Hope was paying scant attention, Stephen went on to explain that Paul’s diplomacy was largely responsible for containing the fighting to Chapei and Hongkew and limiting weapons to bayonets, machine guns, and thirty-pound bombs. If the Japanese officers had had their way, Stephen said, those Cantonese boys would have been pulverized by heavy artillery of the five-hundred-pound variety. But in exchange for yielding to Paul’s containment policy, the Admiral had demanded Paul’s presence at this press briefing following the cease-fire. He wanted to make sure the Western correspondents understood that Japan had exercised humane restraint.

  “Paul has an absolute genius for self-effacement,” Mann was saying. “The irony is that he accomplishes far more with it than most of his countrymen accomplish with guns.”

  Hope leaned back against the hospital wall, staring at Stephen and for the first time fully comprehending that the two men she had so long cast as opponents had become allies. But in the next instant this thought was wiped from her mind by the struggled groan of her daughter.

  Pearl’s eyes were open, her lips moved. As Hope leaned over her, clutching her hands, she smiled and asked for water.

  2

  That night Hope came home, and she and Paul sat together, alone for the first time since their showdown before Christmas. She had no more tears left. Pearl was going to survive. Paul had seen her briefly after she woke, kissed her forehead, squeezed her hand. That simply, the siege had ended. Now he was going to tell Hope what must be done. And, this time, she would consent.

  “You know,” he began, “I always want the family together.”

  She bent her head. The radio was on in Jasmine’s room, and the ceiling above them creaked with her dancing. Jazz and Morris had brought Teddy to the hospital this evening. They had laughed and told stories and nibbled chocolates, and Pearl had smiled at them.

  “I know you are never happy in Shanghai.” Paul squinted suddenly and reached to switch off the lamp beside the sofa. The hallway lights were still on, and outside, the moon was full, but the parlor was now dark enough that his cigarette glowed where he had abandoned it in the ashtray. “I have wished you come to Nanking.”

  A moment passed. Two. “All right,” she said. “But Pearl? Do you still think …” She didn’t recogn
ize her own voice, couldn’t finish the thought.

  “No.” Paul picked up the cigarette, turned it between his fingers, and put it back down. “No more. I am saying, you were right. From now on, Nanking is too dangerous. Japanese, Communists. Maybe few months, maybe one, two years, who can know? What has happened to Pearl… China is being eaten now, inside and out.”

  She could feel his eyes on her, through the darkness. “And so are we,” she said.

  “Hsin-hsin,” he said softly. “You are my wife.”

  She tried to recall the slim young man who had appeared before her on that stifling spring day twenty-six years earlier, to fit him into the broad, bulky shape that loomed across from her now. But Paul was hidden beneath his winter layers of cotton and silk, behind his thick lenses, his swallowed grief. She had never understood. He was right about that. Until now.

  “I am your wife,” she answered.

  “Then you will do as I ask?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Mann.”

  She looked up.

  “He has friend from Chungking with American Tobacco, can arrange passage, visas. I pay for your ticket and Pearl and babies. Morris already is arranged through government scholarship. Best you go as soon as Pearl is well. Dr. Mann says he can take care of you.”

  Suddenly she understood why he had extinguished the lights. The shadow of the room was like water, enveloping and sedative. “You are sending us away.”