by S. J. Rozan
“Oh. Well, maybe.”
“Uh-huh. What happens next?”
I flipped the pages. “Next is a few days later. You’ll love it. ‘A wonderful thing! Kai-rong’s found me an English tutor! It’s odd, because when General Zhang was here Kai-rong insisted my English was good. Which it is! And now over dinner, he proposed this idea. He’s met a young Jewish refugee he says is very refined and would be good company for me, as well as an excellent teacher. A European woman coming here—I’m so excited! For all I care she can teach me circus juggling. Father waved the proposal away, saying it would put ideas in my head to make me disobedient. But Kai-rong said studying English won’t give me any ideas I can’t get in Chinese. Of course Father disapproves of my having any ideas at all. But I thought of an argument! I suggested—respectfully, of course—that a better command of English could increase my value as a wife. Kairong made a face, and Father asked why. Then I had to force myself to sit still while they argued about marriage instead of my tutor! Kai-rong says I’m too young to think about marriage. Father pointed out Mother was seventeen when Kai-rong was born and I’m very nearly sixteen now. They went back and forth while I obediently ate my meal. By the end of dinner the discussion had turned around! Father became convinced improving my English will make me more marriageable and decreed it should be done at once. Kai-rong looked unsure whether he’d had a victory. But he’s bringing the tutor tomorrow!’
“Now, from tomorrow: ‘My tutor came today! Oh, I do like her. Right from the moment we met, we laughed! She says my English is much more ‘English’ than hers. She’s afraid after a short time with her I’ll sound like an Austrian. I told her that would suit me—if I’m not allowed to travel, at least I can sound as though I had! She brought three books. Two novels—one English and one American—and poems by an American named Walt Whitman. We’ll read them together. It will be such fun! Though today we began the poems and I don’t like them very much. I don’t understand what they’re saying. But it’s not the books, or speaking English, that I’m looking forward to. It’s having a visitor! And such an exotic one! She can tell me—of course in English!—about the country she’s from and the places she’s visited. Also, about the part of Shanghai where she lives and the streets she travels to come here, which are as out of reach as Europe, to me!’ ”
“Sounds like the start of a beautiful friendship.”
“Yes, but it’s not enough for Mei-lin.”
“Why? It turns out they don’t get along?”
“Oh, they do, really well. She loves it when Rosalie comes. Sometimes she brings Paul, and they laugh even more when it’s the three of them. They sit in the garden and drink lemonade and eat red bean cakes.”
“Rosalie doesn’t like red bean cakes.”
“Paul loves them, though. I wonder if he still does? We could go back to New Jersey and take him some.” I flipped through the papers to my next flag. “Okay, this is a few weeks later. Rosalie’s been coming and going, and the general dropped by once more, with his son.”
“C. D.”
“Correct. She and the kid hit it off right away—he’s a live wire, impulsive, but well-mannered and fun. Besides that, nothing much happens. Kai-rong takes her to the theater once, and to dinner a couple of times. She likes it, but each time it reminds her how stuck she is. Still, she’s in a pretty good mood. Then things start to go downhill.”
“Why?”
“Because: ‘Father and Kai-rong had an argument today. I didn’t mean to overhear, but I couldn’t help it. I was in the garden practicing calligraphy. Teacher Lu is coming tomorrow and I haven’t touched my brushes all week! I told Number One Boy to set my table by the acacia tree. Kai-rong and Father were in Father’s study. They must not have seen me through the blossoms. I’d have left, but they might have noticed me getting up, and they’d have been so embarrassed!’ ”
“Considerate of her.”
“As you say. ‘I tried to concentrate on my brushstrokes, but I couldn’t shut out their raised voices. I didn’t make out everything, but I heard enough to know that Kai-rong doesn’t like General Zhang. I don’t know why—he’s so handsome and cultured! But Kai-rong doesn’t want him coming here. Father thinks the general’s connections among the Japanese could be helpful to us. Kai-rong said his connections to the Japanese are exactly the problem, and Father snapped at him in that tone he uses with me all the time, but almost never with Kai-rong. He said Kai-rong’s never been practical and obviously there’s no reason to hope he’s changed.
“ ‘But apparently he has changed, because I heard the next part clearly, and I didn’t like it at all: Kai-rong’s leaving soon! He wants to go to the north, on business! He says there are opportunities there. I hoped Father would stop him, but though he’s skeptical, he’s pleased Kai-rong’s showing an interest in business—something he never cared about before! So he’s letting him go. When I heard that, my hand jerked and my calligraphy was ruined. What will I do? To be locked up here again without even Kai-rong’s news from the world? No conversation, no outings, even the few I’ve been allowed? Just Father, Amah, calligraphy, embroidery—I can’t bear it! How can he leave again so soon? How can he leave me here to suffocate like this?’ ”
As I flipped the pages, I waited for a wisecrack from Bill, but it didn’t come. So I read the next flagged entry, from two weeks later. “ ‘It’s been a week since Kai-rong left. No one’s come here. The sun’s an exhausted orange glow in an unchanging gray sky. The nights are moonless, starless. The air’s thick with moisture but there’s no rain, just languid drizzle. A storm with wind, lightning, thunder—even a monsoon, oh how welcome that would be! But the air feels as I do: trapped, weary, barely able to move.’ ”
That brought the delayed wisecrack. “Uh-oh. Prose getting purple there. Wonder whose books those were that Rosalie brought?”
“Not Hemingway’s, I bet.” I lowered the papers and looked out the window. The sky over Long Island seemed a changeless gray itself. I couldn’t argue with Bill about Mei-lin’s heavyhandedness, though I had a feeling she wasn’t exaggerating how she felt. “She snaps out of it a little whenever Rosalie comes, and she’s really touching when she hears about Rosalie’s terrible news. But generally, she’s so desperate that the world’s going on without her, she doesn’t focus on much else. How close are we?”
“To Lake Grove? Another half hour, I think.”
“This is tiring, this reading and translating. And I want to get to the part I haven’t read. Can I paraphrase like you did? You can probably guess, anyway.”
“Kai-rong keeps coming and going, General Zhang keeps showing up, coincidentally when Kai-rong’s out of town, and finally he asks her to marry him?”
“He doesn’t ask her anything. He asks her father. Her father’s delighted and so’s she. She can’t wait to have her own home, her own servants, her own car to go wherever she wants in. Rosalie’s not enthusiastic. She wants Mei-lin to hold out until she falls in love. Mei-lin’s impatient with that whole idea. In fact she’s surprised to hear it from a woman in Rosalie’s position, which she admits is worse than hers in a lot of ways.”
“A lot of ways? What ways isn’t it worse in?”
“Rosalie can come and go anywhere she wants in Shanghai. Don’t worry, the irony isn’t lost on me.”
“It is on Mei-lin, I’ll bet.”
“Entirely. So Kai-rong rushes back and tries to stop her from marrying the general, but their father orders him to shut up and get with the program. In the end he doesn’t have much choice. After a certain amount more grousing, he behaves like a filial son and brother and stays in Shanghai for the wedding banquet. Which apparently was the social event of the season.”
“Was it, um, ‘grand’?”
“You liked the Cathay, you’d have loved this. Billowing silk tents in the garden, red lanterns everywhere, mounds of lilies. Clear sky, full moon. A ten-course banquet with gallons of whiskey, and champagne supplied by the Frenchman. A Chinese orch
estra taking turns with the Filipino jazz band from the nightclub at the Cathay.”
“So she finally got to dance to it.”
“She did. It’s not traditional at Chinese weddings for the bride to dance, but strictly speaking it’s not traditional for her to have met the groom, either.”
“That’s why there are so many of you! Because brides don’t know what they’re getting into.”
“You’re not so far wrong. Anyway, Rosalie and Paul were there, and Kai-rong’s school friends, and the Feng sisters. In fact, most of Shanghai, it sounds like. The best man was the general’s German buddy, Major Ulrich.”
“They have a best man at Chinese weddings?”
“This was a mixed affair, a civil ceremony with a judge and then the banquet. Very modern. Mei-lin danced like crazy. She danced with her husband, and his son—”
“That must have been cute.”
“He’d had lessons and could do all the new dances, which the general couldn’t. And she danced with Major Ulrich, and with Kai-rong. And she noticed Rosalie dancing with Kai-rong, more than once. And she also noticed that neither Rosalie nor Kai-rong seemed able to stop smiling while they danced. Which she puts down to happiness for her.”
“Well, it was her wedding day.”
That was not only not a wisecrack, it was downright sympathetic.
“Plus,” he added, “she was no doubt tipsy again.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid you were getting all warm and fuzzy on me.”
“What? When?”
“Never mind. You understand it takes her three or four days to report on all this.”
“Because it takes her that long to get over the hangover.”
“Partly that,” I conceded. “But also, no one had prepared her for her wedding night.”
“Wasn’t that her Amah’s job?”
“Her amah just told her she wouldn’t like it but it wouldn’t kill her.”
“There’s a ringing endorsement.”
“Can I get points for not making any of the obvious remarks?”
“How many do you want?”
“How many do I need to make up for not bringing you a written translation?”
He threw me a quick glance. “That’s Chinese guilt working. I hadn’t even noticed.”
“There’s no such thing as Chinese guilt. Anyway, Mei-lin might have been better off just with her amah’s advice. At least she wouldn’t have been looking forward to it and she wouldn’t have felt duped. Unfortunately, the Feng sisters told her it was fun.”
“From experience?”
“I doubt it. I think they were repeating what they’d heard in the Shanghai equivalent of the locker room.”
“Women talk like that in locker rooms?”
“You cannot really think men have a monopoly on baseless boasting?”
“Don’t disillusion me. I liked my image of women linking arms in sisterhood, unencumbered by the foolish need to impress one another.”
“Oh, get real! You think we wear four-inch heels to impress you? Anyway, the general did not impress Mei-lin.”
“He couldn’t—?”
“Oh, he sure could. Fast and rough. He was drunk, he hurt her, it was over before she figured out exactly what they were supposed to be doing. He rolled off and fell asleep, snoring. Like the rumble of a delivery van, she says.”
“She sounds almost amused.”
“She sounds like that for the next six months. Desperately amused. Trying to convince herself life’s wonderful and marrying the general was a great idea. She goes on about how marvelous it is to be mistress of an elegant villa. Practically catalogues its treasures. And all the places she goes. Shanghai’s best department stores. The racetrack, the one they let Chinese into. Theaters, restaurants, nightclubs. She makes the rounds in her chauffeured car. She hangs out with other Chinese officers’ wives, with Japanese and German women, and wealthy British women who compliment her English.”
“Sounds great.”
“No, it sounds like something that gets old fast. The women treat her like an amusing child. They play cards and mah-jongg and don’t seem interested in much. Most of their conversation is gossip, except for their complaints about their husbands, and even when they’re complaining they’re bored. Half of them are having affairs with the husbands of the other half. The general lets her spend all the money she wants, but either he doesn’t notice what she buys or he doesn’t like it. She has a big house with servants, but she feels like a ghost there. No one listens to her about where to move the furniture or what to have for dinner. The servants beg her not to worry about matters of such insignificance, and the general orders her to stop interfering with the servants.
“Her buddies, the Feng sisters, are so jealous that she can’t bring herself to admit to them life is anything less than fabulous. After a while, when she starts to acknowledge she’s not ecstatic, the only one she’ll talk to about it is Rosalie.”
“Rosalie still comes to tutor her?”
“That’s one of the many things the general doesn’t seem to care whether she does, so yes. And she goes with Rosalie and Paul to concerts by refugee musicians and to the Yiddish theater and the Jewish coffeehouses. She has a favorite table at the Café Falbaum. You can’t see the street from it, and all you hear around you is German and Yiddish. Even the signs and the menu are in Yiddish. Everyone is European, and it smells of cinnamon, exotic to her. She pretends she’s far away from China and she loves it. A couple of times she spends the general’s money to buy coffee and pastry for everyone there.”
“The general doesn’t mind?”
“He doesn’t care where she goes. What he likes is showing her off. He wants her to dress well and impress his friends. At first she’s flattered, but then she starts complaining the general thinks everything about her reflects on him—her English, her calligraphy, her legs. He takes credit when she does something well and gets mad when she screws up. He lets her get in a few sentences when they go out, like a talking dog, while he beams. Then he tells her to shut up. She wonders whether being ignored the way her father did might not have been better.”
“The grass is greener.”
“Well, maybe. Though the general does seem to be getting more and more short-tempered. He wants her to do everything right, but she can’t figure out what everything is or how to know if she’s doing it right. The only bright spot is the general’s son. He makes her laugh.”
“She’s not that much older than he is, is she?”
“By now he’s ten. She’s just turned seventeen. She helps him with his schoolwork, especially his calligraphy, showing him the different styles. The boy’s tutor compliments her. She writes how she can’t wait to have children of her own. But they won’t have tutors, she says. She’ll send them to school, so they can be out in the world. Then she gets pregnant.”
“When are we up to?”
“Spring 1940.”
“What does the general think?”
“He’s pleased and very proud—of himself. And he tells her now she’ll stay home until the baby’s born.”
“Oh, no.”
“ ‘Oh, no’ is right. Her whole reason for marrying him flies out the window. To be stuck at home was bad enough, but to be stuck at his home! But he absolutely won’t have her seen in public in her condition. They fight about it more than once. Finally he doesn’t want to fight anymore, so he smacks her.”
“Shit.”
“It’s the first time, but not the last. She gets more and more desperate. She’s alternately belligerent and weepy. He doesn’t think either is charming. In fact, he doesn’t think she’s charming at all, with her big belly and swollen feet. He leaves her locked up at the villa and starts tomcatting around with some White Russian torch singer from the Cathay’s nightclub.”
“From the Cathay? That’s particularly low.”
“When the baby’s born he gives Mei-lin an emerald bracelet. Within two weeks he’s demanding sex again. She writes
how beautiful the bracelet is, all sparkling and glamorous, but she can’t bear to wear it unless he orders her to. She’d give it, and everything else, to have her old life back. The only thing she wouldn’t give is the baby. They name him Li. It’s a word with a lot of meanings, but the character she writes it with means ‘power.’ She’s allowed to go out again, and mostly she goes to her father’s house. Rosalie comes over and they play with the baby in the garden. Sometimes Paul comes, sometimes she brings the general’s son along—he adores his little brother, too—and sometimes Kai-rong’s there. Kai-rong never says ‘I told you so,’ but one day he goes to the general’s villa and, I gather, threatens bad things if he ever sees another mark on his sister.”
“How does the general react?”
“Like any coward. From then on when he’s mad he storms around and curses Kai-rong, but he doesn’t hit Mei-lin again. She can’t stop being scared, though. That’s pretty much it for a long time, I mean years. The entries get shorter and fewer, more time between them. There are a couple of high points, especially Rosalie and Kai-rong’s wedding in ’forty-two, but Mei-lin just gets lonelier and sadder and the whole thing is pretty depressing.”
“Is that why you stopped?”
“No, I stopped because you were early.”
“By ten minutes. You’d have had the rest done in the next ten minutes?”
“Of course I would have. First of all, I’m a genius. Second, I only had half a dozen left, and most of them are short.”
“Well, genius, you have just about those ten minutes now, if my navigation’s right.”
“Then shush.”
I scanned the last diary pages. The first four were more of the same: Mei-lin unhappy, trapped, and frightened. Then came the next to last. I could see the sharp change even before I read the words: Elegant calligraphy suddenly melted into shaky trails of characters. “This is February 23, 1943. She writes Kai-rong’s been arrested as a Communist spy. Even her father can’t get him out. They’ve taken him to Number 76, and she knows what that means. She’s begged the general to do something, but he won’t.”