by Malinda Lo
“All we can do is cooperate with them,” her mother said. “I’m trying to persuade him to sign the statement.”
“What will happen if he doesn’t?” She instantly wished she hadn’t asked; she felt as if saying it out loud would make it come true.
Her mother looked worried. “Let’s not think about that now. What we need to do is make sure we show we’re a proper American family—because we are. That means you study hard, and you don’t have anything to do with the Man Ts’ing.” Her mother stood up. “I’m going to get Frankie, and after Eddie comes home I’m going to talk to both of them about this. You focus on your homework.”
Her mother paused in the doorway and added, “If you suspect that Shirley or any of your friends are still involved with that group, you tell me right away.”
She thought about how Shirley had denied being interested in Calvin. She wondered whether Shirley knew about the Communist connection. The possibility was unsettling.
“Lily, will you tell me?”
She looked up at her mother and said, “I will.”
—1931
Japan invades Manchuria.
—1932
Joseph Hu arrives in San Francisco to attend the Stanford School of Medicine.
—Sept. 23, 1934
GRACE WING meets her future husband, Joseph Hu.
—1936
Grace Wing marries Joseph Hu.
Chinese graduate student Hsue-shen Tsien joins the “Suicide Squad,” a group of rocket scientists at the California Institute of Technology.
—1937
Lily Hu (胡麗麗) is born.
Japan invades China.
—1940
Edward Chen-te Hu (胡振德) is born.
—1941
United States enters World War II.
GRACE
Twenty Years Earlier
The first time Grace Wing noticed him, she accidentally caught his eye while she was waiting to pour herself a cup of coffee in the fellowship hall after the Sunday service. He was standing halfway across the room, eating a sandwich. He didn’t look like the other Chinese men she knew. His shiny black hair had a Clark Gable–like wave at the front, and he wore a gold signet ring on the little finger of his right hand. She thought he was handsome.
When their eyes met, he was still chewing, and Grace was embarrassed to be caught watching. She turned away immediately, wondering who he was. She didn’t think she had seen him during the service. She focused on fixing her cup of coffee, pouring in extra milk and two spoonfuls of sugar, and then took her time selecting a sandwich for herself. As she settled on egg salad on white bread, Mrs. B. Y. Woo waylaid her to ask advice about an ailment she had been experiencing. Grace was only a twenty-two-year-old nursing student, but Mrs. Woo always enjoyed sharing her complaints while Grace listened sympathetically and offered suggestions for treatment, which Mrs. Woo inevitably refused because she didn’t trust Western medicine. Grace was about to launch into her advice when Reverend Hubbard came over to greet them. That wasn’t surprising, but he also had the strange new man in tow. He had finished his sandwich, but Grace noticed a stray crumb clinging to the lapel of his gray flannel suit. Her fingers itched to brush it off.
“Miss Wing, Mrs. Woo, I want to introduce you to one of our newcomers,” Reverend Hubbard said. He was a middle-aged Caucasian man with a balding pate; the skin of the top of his head was particularly bright and shiny that day. “This is Mr. Joseph Hu, newly arrived from China. Mr. Hu is a medical student at Stanford. Miss Grace Wing is a nursing student, so you have something in common.”
“I’m honored, Miss Wing,” Joseph said, and extended his hand to Grace in the American way.
“Welcome to San Francisco,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Thank you,” Joseph said. “It’s wonderful to be here at last. I’ve heard so much about your city.”
“Oh, I’m not a San Francisco native,” Grace replied. “I only arrived here myself a few months ago. Mrs. Woo has been here much longer.”
“Almost my whole life,” Mrs. Woo said. “I came here as a girl from Kwangtung. Where are you from?”
“Shanghai.”
Mrs. Woo looked at him more curiously. “Shanghai! Is your family all there?”
“Yes. My father is a friend of one of Reverend Hubbard’s acquaintances.”
Reverend Hubbard smiled. “I’m glad that Paul told you about our church here. We’re happy to have you.”
They traded a few more pleasantries about their church connections while Grace sipped her coffee and tried not to appear as if she were staring. She guessed that he was a few years older than she was. There was something slightly mischievous about the expression on Joseph Hu’s face, as if he were containing himself in response to Reverend Hubbard’s and Mrs. Woo’s commentary on their mutual acquaintances and, then, the differences between San Francisco and Shanghai weather at this time of year. (San Francisco, he allowed, was much more pleasant in late summer.) Grace had nothing to contribute to the conversation, so she stayed quiet. She didn’t know this Paul, and she’d never been to Shanghai, though she knew it was supposed to be glamorous. In fact, just that morning in the Chronicle she had seen a story about two rival Shanghai actresses, said to be so beautiful that they somehow brought about the downfall of Manchuria to Japan. She hadn’t had time to finish reading the article, and she considered mentioning it in case Joseph had seen it, but she couldn’t work out how to insert it into the discussion. Besides, the fellowship hall seemed the wrong place to bring up such a scandalous story.
After a few more minutes of banal conversation, Reverend Hubbard excused himself to continue on his rounds, and Mrs. Woo invited Joseph to join her and Grace. Grace was sure he would politely decline—a man like him surely had more important things to do—but he agreed without hesitation, and soon the three of them were seated together in the corner, sipping their coffees.
“Reverend Hubbard said you are a nursing student?” Joseph said, turning to Grace.
“Yes. Up at Parnassus,” Grace said. They talked about her nursing program for a few minutes while Mrs. Woo watched the two of them cannily.
“Tell me about your family, Mr. Hu,” Mrs. Woo said when they came to a pause. “Your father—he is a . . . ?”
“He is a professor at Nan Yang College in Shanghai.”
Grace imagined a mandarin wearing a round cap and sporting a long white beard, but then she chastised herself; he probably wore modern suits like Joseph.
“And you are the oldest son?” Mrs. Woo asked.
Joseph nodded. “I have two younger brothers and two younger sisters.”
“Are any of them in the United States?”
“No. It’s only me right now. But my younger brother Arthur hopes to come over in the next year or two.”
“To study medicine as well?”
“Perhaps. He is also considering engineering.” Joseph gave Grace a brief glance, and once again she suspected that he was containing himself. She began to think he might enjoy discussing scandalous Shanghai actresses more than his brother’s educational goals.
“Ah. And are you here on a Boxer scholarship?”
Joseph smiled. “No, I’m afraid I am not.”
“Some other scholarship, then?” Mrs. Woo pressed.
Grace shot Joseph a pained smile as Mrs. Woo continued to question him about his financial situation, but Joseph either didn’t mind or he was doing a good job of pretending. It turned out that his travel to the United States was supported by a scholarship from a Presbyterian mission in Shanghai, which explained why he had come to the Chinese Presbyterian Church today. But his tuition was privately funded, which meant Joseph Hu’s family was probably well-off. Grace thought again about glamour, about Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, her seductive silk gowns and coy dark eyes wreathed in cigarette smoke. She’d liked the film
a lot when she saw it a few years ago, though she couldn’t admit that at church. (Her mother refused to see it because their Chinese minister condemned it as immoral.) But Joseph’s family was likely extremely respectable and had nothing to do with the dramatic world of warlords and fallen women depicted onscreen. She felt a slight disappointment at the self-inflicted puncturing of her fantasy.
Mrs. Woo turned to Grace and said, “Miss Wing, you are the oldest daughter in your family, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Grace said, though Mrs. Woo knew this already.
“Grace is the star of her family,” Mrs. Woo said to Joseph. “Not many girls graduate from college, and even fewer enter nursing school.”
“Mrs. Woo, you’re flattering me.”
“But it’s true. Mr. Hu should know he is speaking with one of San Francisco’s smartest young ladies.”
Mrs. Woo beamed at the two of them, and Grace was both embarrassed and a little pleased by how obvious Mrs. Woo’s matchmaking attempts were. “I’ve only tried to make my parents proud,” Grace said, attempting humility.
“And I’m sure they are,” Joseph said.
Did he sound admiring or amused? Grace wasn’t sure.
Mrs. Woo abruptly said, “Oh, look at the time! I must go and see Mrs. Leong before she leaves today. It was wonderful to meet you, Mr. Hu. And, Miss Wing, thank you for your medical advice.”
Grace and Joseph both stood as Mrs. Woo rose to leave, and then they looked at each other, holding their empty coffee cups awkwardly, and Joseph said, “Well, now that you know everything about me, do you feel safe sitting down with me alone?”
She saw the corner of his mouth twitch and thought, He’s definitely amused now. “Of course, let’s sit,” Grace said. He made her a little nervous, but in a pleasant way.
They took their seats again, and she put her empty cup and saucer on Mrs. Woo’s abandoned chair, and Joseph set his down beside it. She glanced around the fellowship hall, where the rest of the congregation was milling about with their coffees and sandwiches. None of them seemed to be looking at her and Joseph in their corner, but Grace had the feeling that everyone knew they were there. When she turned back to Joseph, his expression had changed to one of curiosity.
“You said you came here only a few months ago,” Joseph said. “Where did you move from? Not China?”
“No, Santa Barbara. I was born there.”
“An American girl,” he said. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled.
“我係唐人,”* she said in Cantonese, a little pertly.
“你們老家在哪裡?”* Joseph asked in Mandarin.
“你話咩話?”* Grace asked. She did not understand.
His smile turned regretful. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak your dialect.”
She knew only a little about the Chinese scholars who came to America to study. They were mostly from Shanghai, usually from well-connected or wealthy families, and they didn’t mingle much with the American Chinese—at least not the American Chinese that Grace knew. Joseph was the first such student she had spoken to directly, and she found him difficult to categorize. He didn’t fulfill her image of a mandarin; he was too young and too Westernized. Nor did he seem American, exactly, though he spoke English with hardly a trace of an accent.
“How are you liking San Francisco?” he asked her. “Do you miss Santa Barbara? I’ve never been there. Is it far?”
“It’s a few hours south on the train,” Grace answered. “It’s warmer than San Francisco, and of course I miss my family.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Only two. Two younger brothers. We’re a small family because my father died when I was eleven.”
“That must have been hard for your mother.”
“She’s a strong woman. She took over running my father’s export-import store in the little Chinatown there, and I helped her until my brothers were old enough to do more, and now they run the store with her.”
“What does your family store sell?”
“A little of everything. Products from China—we have to serve the local population. You know, dried vegetables, herbs. Medicines. Some chinaware, silks, everything.” Grace fell silent, wondering if she was boring him. The store had always bored her.
He gave her an encouraging smile, and asked, “Do you want to go home after nursing school, to continue helping with the family business?”
Grace couldn’t imagine going back to work in their store. She had barely escaped by getting into nursing school. “I’ll have to see what my mother needs,” she said diplomatically. “Will you go back? To China?”
“Of course. China needs Western-trained doctors. And engineers and architects—and nurses, too. We’re in a difficult situation right now, as you probably know.”
She nodded sympathetically, though her knowledge of China’s current situation was minimal. She knew that Japan was constantly threatening invasion, and the Chinese government, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was struggling to fight back. China had always seemed both impossibly distant and uncomfortably near to her, a land of silk-robed emperors in ancient palaces, but also of hardscrabble villages that lived on in her mother’s stories. We didn’t have running water, her mother said when Grace complained about their family store’s leaky plumbing. We slept six to a bed, her mother said when Grace wished for her own bedroom.
“Have you ever wanted to go to China?” Joseph asked.
“Maybe, to visit my mother’s family.” There had been a time when Grace’s mother constantly lamented being separated from her family, but in recent years she had given up the complaints. Grace wondered if she had forgotten them, or if she had resigned herself to a kind of exile.
“When you finish nursing school, your skills will be in high demand in China,” Joseph said. “Many Chinese people need modern medical treatment.”
Grace had never considered this possibility. She had a sudden vision of herself in a modern hospital somewhere in China: bright and clean, with Chinese patients lying serenely in white beds. She was wearing a white nursing cap and rolling a tray of medicines down a pale green hallway.
“Is that what you will do?” she asked. “Go back and treat patients?”
“I hope so. Also I want to use my training from here to train other doctors in China—those who can’t afford to come to America for medical school.”
He sounded so selfless, so upright. She was ashamed of her earlier desire to bring up Shanghai actresses. Their conversation continued in a stilted fashion, moving into and away from China, medicine, and San Francisco, the way so many first conversations went, but neither of them attempted to escape from it. She found him fascinating, and the way he thoughtfully asked about her interest in nursing was flattering. She also liked the little creases around his eyes when he smiled at her. It made her skin tingle; she wanted him to smile at her again.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, when she returned to the nursing students’ dormitory, she remembered the article about the Shanghai actresses.
She went into the living room to see if the Sunday Chronicle was still there. It had been read by now, and the sections were loosely scattered across the console table beside the door, but she found the article quickly. It was the cover story of the Sunday Magazine (“Such a Row in China Over the Two Rival Movie Queens”), illustrated with photographs of two women gazing seductively at the camera. One of them wore a striped Chinese dress and was seated on a pouf, her legs crossed with one hand draped casually over a knee. The other was smiling at the camera with darkly painted lips and arched brows. Coiling between the two photographs was an illustration of Chinese men fighting, presumably over the actresses; they had slanted eyes and slashes for eyebrows that made them look comically menacing.
The caption beneath the illustrated melee declared: “It
all started when Miss Cheng won the crown in a big popularity contest, whereupon the adherents of that radiant siren, Miss Wu, got mad—and the war was on!”
Grace sat down on the sofa to read the rest of the article. The passions stirred by Miss Wu’s singing and dancing were said to have inspired Chinese military officials to ignore their duties and thus allow Manchuria to be invaded by Japan. (That’s ridiculous, Grace thought.) This was followed by a threatening letter written in human blood (How could they have known it was human?) demanding that Miss Wu leave China. But the author of the article was most amazed by the idea that China, perceived as a rural backwater by most of America, had a film industry at all. (Grace rolled her eyes.) And then, in the last column, the article took an unexpected twist.
“You have no doubt heard that heroes and heroines in Chinese pictures do not kiss, as there is no such thing as a kiss in Chinese behavior.” The author explained, rather slyly, that instead of kissing, Chinese women “make love with their hands” by kissing with their fingertips instead of their lips.
Grace flushed. The sensationalism—the tasteless lingering on the alluring qualities of Chinese girls—the bizarre idea that Chinese people don’t kiss! Thank goodness she hadn’t mentioned this story to Joseph Hu. She shuddered with embarrassment and quickly went to bury the Sunday Magazine beneath the other newspapers on the console.
She tiptoed upstairs to her room, irrationally worried that one of her dorm-mates would see her and know by looking at her face that she’d been reading that lurid article. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was true that she had never seen Chinese lovers kiss each other, but Chinese lovers would never kiss in public! She tried to dash the queer thought from her mind, but the feeling wouldn’t go away: a sick twist in her stomach, sour as vinegar, as she contemplated Americans’ prurient interest in things that should be private. What must Joseph Hu think of this country, she wondered.