by Malinda Lo
“Go say hello to your grandmother,” Aunt Judy said. “She’s in the living room.”
Lily took off her shoes and went where her aunt told her to go. Her brothers and cousins—eleven-year-old Jack and nine-year-old Minnie—were sprawled on the floor playing marbles. Uncle Francis and Uncle Sam were smoking by the front window, and A P’oh* was sitting in one corner of the sofa, observing the action. She saw Lily as soon as she entered the room.
“阿麗,”* A P’oh called, gesturing for her to join her on the sofa.
“Lily!” Eddie said. “Did you just get back?”
“Everybody was mad,” Frankie said before Eddie shot him a quelling look.
“I’m sorry,” she said to her brothers—to everyone—and then she sat down beside her grandmother, who took her hand. Her grandmother’s skin was loose over her bones and dry as paper, but her grip was quite firm. “阿婆好,” Lily greeted her. “幾時到咖?”*
“我今早到咖,”* A P’oh said. She gave Lily a canny look that made Lily wonder how much she knew about what had happened. “大家好擔心你哬. 千其无再咁做.”* Her grandmother’s tone was soft, but the warning in it was unmistakable.
Lily flushed. “對唔住, 阿婆,”* she said, lowering her gaze. She told herself she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she still felt guilty.
* * *
—
She changed out of the clothes she had slept in. She washed her face and brushed her teeth; she combed her hair and pinned it away from her face. In the bathroom mirror, she looked like a good Chinese girl.
In the kitchen, Aunt Judy and Aunt May were chopping vegetables at the table while her mother fried nien-kao* on the stove. Her father was making a pot of tea, and he saw her first, his face relaxing into sudden relief.
Her mother turned. Her expression softened, but only briefly. “Come and help your aunts,” she said.
Lily pulled out a chair and sat down beside Aunt May at the table, while Aunt Judy, who was about to start mincing ginger, slid the chopping board over to her along with the knobby root.
Her father placed the teapot on a small round tray along with a stack of teacups, and headed out of the kitchen. Lily thought he might say something to her—he even hesitated next to her chair—but he remained silent. A hot shame rose within her. She didn’t know what her family knew, but their silence told her they knew enough.
She focused on the ginger, mincing it as precisely as she could, and eventually her aunts and her mother picked up their conversation. Each time Lily finished a task, Aunt Judy gave her another one: peel and chop garlic, then the scallions, then the water chestnuts. Every surface in the kitchen was crowded with ingredients for the other dishes that would be served: two kinds of dried mushrooms, dried lily flowers and bean thread, all soaking in separate bowls of liquid; a mound of washed lettuce air-drying in the battered metal colander; bottles of soy sauce and oyster sauce and cooking wine. A pot of lotus root soup was simmering on the back of the stove, and Lily’s mother was turning out the nien-kao onto a platter, while Aunt May took a whole fish out of the refrigerator.
It was exactly like every other New Year, and it was that sameness that made Lily feel as if she wasn’t all there. Her fingers were doing the work, but she could prepare vegetables in her sleep. It left her mind plenty of room to wander, and it returned over and over to those last moments in the Telegraph Club with Kath. The running and jostling through the back hallway; the flashing lights and the women shouting at her to move; Kath’s hand squeezing hers before letting go.
Lily’s eyes grew hot and she willed herself not to cry. She should never have let go of Kath’s hand. She should have held on to her and dragged her out the back door.
Her hands trembled, and the cleaver slipped, and the blade nicked the tip of her left index finger. A droplet of blood welled up instantly, bright red. She stared at her finger in shock as the blood splashed onto the cutting board.
Aunt Judy reached for the cleaver, gently easing it out of her grasp, and said quietly, “You’re all right. It’s just a little cut. You’d better go put on a bandage.”
* * *
—
There were eight dishes, plus lotus root soup and rice: poached whole chicken with ginger sauce; roast duck from a Chinatown deli; lo-han chai, a vegetarian dish traditionally eaten by monks; hsün yü, the cold Shanghai-style fish; steamed whole fish Cantonese style; the nien-kao; oyster sauce lettuce; and for dessert, pa pao fan, a steamed sticky rice filled with sweet bean paste.
Lily had been starving all afternoon—it felt like an eternity had passed since her scrambled eggs at Lana’s apartment—but although the food was delicious, she had lost her appetite. Aunt Judy, who was sitting next to Lily at the makeshift table for twelve, noticed. She selected some pieces of hsün yü and deposited them in Lily’s bowl, urging her to eat.
At least no one was making an effort to talk to her. Lily’s mother, Uncle Sam, Aunt May, and her grandmother spoke Cantonese together at one end of the table, while Lily’s father and Aunt Judy fell into Shanghainese. Uncle Francis, who had grown up in Los Angeles, stuck to English with the kids. Sometimes she caught her mother or father glancing at her, but they didn’t speak to her.
She began to feel as if she had been split in two, and only one half of her was here in this living room. That was the good Chinese daughter who was delicately chewing her way around the bones in each piece of hsün yü, carefully extracting them from her mouth and laying the tiny white spines on the edge of her plate with her chopsticks. The other half had been left out on the sidewalk before Lily walked in the front door. That was the girl who had spent last night in the North Beach apartment of a Caucasian woman she barely knew. Everything would be all right, Lily understood, as long as she kept that girl out of this Chinese family.
Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick. Her stomach rebelled against it, and her head hurt, and she was so tired she felt as if she were in danger of falling unconscious there at the table, her head dropping right into her bowl of rice. The image struck her as ridiculously funny, and she had to swallow hard to prevent herself from breaking into hysterical laughter.
* * *
—
Finally, dinner was over, and A P’oh was calling for the lei shi* to be distributed. Uncle Sam went out to the hall, and when he returned his hands were full of red envelopes. Minnie and Frankie both squealed as the adults laughed indulgently. Lily’s father produced several lei shi from his jacket pocket; Uncle Francis went and got his from his coat; and A P’oh instructed Frankie to bring her purse from Lily’s bedroom.
The red envelopes were handed out to all the children, Lily included: four each, stuffed with crisp new bills. The little ones got only a dollar in each envelope, but Lily received thirty-five dollars this year, with twenty coming from her parents. The money was a gift, but it also felt like a warning. It came with the expectation that Lily would do as she was told.
The lei shi marked the end of dinner, and Lily helped her mother clear the dishes away. Afterward, the men disassembled the temporary table and lit up cigarettes. Aunt Judy opened the living room windows to let out the smoke, and the sound of firecrackers popping could be heard coming from Grant Avenue.
Frankie ran to the window to peer outside, his brother and cousins close behind. “Can we go see the firecrackers, Papa?” Frankie asked.
It was the New Year, after all, so the adults agreed, and Uncle Sam, Uncle Francis, and Lily’s father put on their jackets to accompany the children down the block. They asked Lily if she wanted to come, but she shook her head and went to help her mother and aunts wash the dishes.
> When they finished, and her mother and aunts put the kettle on for tea, Lily said she would go to bed. Her mother looked at her—really looked at her for the first time all day—and Lily looked away.
“Take some blankets from my room so you can sleep on the floor in your brothers’ room,” her mother said.
“I’ll help you,” Aunt Judy said, rising quickly.
They found a quilt and the old army blanket and took one of the pillows from Lily’s bed, arranging everything on the floor between her brothers’ beds. She said good night to her grandmother, who would sleep in Lily’s room during her visit. She brushed her teeth; she changed into her nightgown; she took clean clothes for tomorrow into her brothers’ room, and closed the door. The floor felt very hard beneath her, and immediately she remembered the soft give of Lana’s sofa.
She closed her eyes. She thought about the first time she had seen Lana, in the hallway of the Telegraph Club outside the bathroom, but the memory was disjointed and vague, with snatches of color and disembodied voices. It seemed so unbelievable now—the idea that she, Lily Hu, had ever snuck out of her house and gone to this homosexual club in the middle of the night. How could she ever have done such a thing? A few hours at home and the Telegraph Club seemed more like a fantasy than a real thing. This troubled her. It felt as if someone had taken an eraser to her memory—to her very self—and rubbed at it, then blown away the remains.
She tried to think back, to remember what was real. The shy look on Kath’s face as she gave her that issue of Collier’s on top of Russian Hill. The tentative softness of Kath’s lips, the first time they kissed. The heat of Kath’s breath on her neck as Lily held her in the corner of Miss Weiland’s classroom. Lily had never felt closer to anyone in her life.
It hurt to remember these things because they reminded her of Kath and her fears of what might have happened to her. But the hurt felt real—much more real than the entire afternoon of staying silent. So she lay on the hard wooden floor between her brothers’ beds and let that ache fill her.
47
Lily woke before dawn. The room was dark, and she heard her brothers breathing on either side of her, their lungs rising and falling almost in unison. When they had come back the night before, they had stood over her—she had heard them but pretended to be asleep—and whispered, Is she all right? Why was Mama so angry at her? Did she do something wrong? Shh, don’t wake her. And then Eddie tucked the blanket up beneath her chin and brushed his hand over her forehead as if he were their father checking her temperature. His touch had brought tears to her eyes, and they slid silently down her temples while he and Frankie climbed into their beds, their sheets rustling as they settled down for the night.
She didn’t want to wake them, but she remembered that the flat now contained an additional five people, and she didn’t want to be last in line for the bathroom. She got up as quietly as she could and snuck out of the room.
She could almost pretend it was a normal day. She washed up quickly and got dressed. In the kitchen, her mother was already brewing coffee and making porridge from the leftover rice.
“Will you set out the dishes?” her mother asked.
Lily went to the cabinet, wondering if their conversations would only be transactional from now on. She felt dull inside, like a tarnished silver bowl.
She heard little Minnie chirping from the other end of the flat as everyone else began to wake up, and soon the kitchen was crowded. It was Monday, but because it was New Year week and family was visiting, Lily’s parents were taking a couple of days off from work. Eddie and Frankie still had to go to school, of course, and Lily—Lily stopped short, about to butter a piece of toast, alarmed by the thought of having to go to school. With Shirley. With everyone who must already know about her and Kath.
Thankfully, there was breakfast to distract her. Eddie and Frankie tried to argue their way out of school, but failed. Minnie and Jack tried to swallow their glee at not having to go to school themselves, but also failed. After A P’oh woke up, Lily was charged with taking her a tray of porridge and tea. When she returned to the landing to pick up her book bag, her mother appeared as if she had been waiting for her and said, “You’re not going to school today.”
Lily’s relief was cut short by instant wariness. “Why not?”
Her father came out of the kitchen holding his coffee cup. “We need to talk.”
It didn’t happen right away. First, Eddie and Frankie had to be taken to school. Everyone had to finish their breakfast. Uncle Sam and Aunt May decided to take Minnie and Jack to the Chinese playground for the morning. A P’oh declared her intention to go to the Tin How Temple. Aunt Judy arrived just as they were all leaving; she said that Uncle Francis had gone to meet a friend for breakfast. Lily was sure this had all been carefully planned.
At last, the four of them—Lily, her parents, and Aunt Judy—took their seats at the kitchen table. Her mother hadn’t put on makeup, and her face seemed colorless in the overhead light, her lips pressed together thinly. Her father looked more tired than usual, and he was smoking cigarettes one after another, rather than his pipe. Aunt Judy’s eyebrows were drawn together in a permanent expression of worry as she glanced around the table.
“You won’t be going back to school,” her mother said. “I won’t have you anywhere near that girl.”
Lily pretended to misunderstand. “What girl? You mean Shirley?”
Her mother’s nostrils flared. “You know who I mean. I talked to Shirley yesterday—”
“You—what?”
“Shirley told me everything. About how that girl Kathleen Miller went after you. How she is a homosexual and took you to that place. Shirley told me she tried to get you to stop being friends with her, but you refused.”
“That’s not what happened! Shirley’s lying.”
“If that’s not what happened, tell me what did. Don’t lie to me!”
“Grace,” Lily’s father said. “Give her a chance. Is anything that Shirley said true?”
He seemed to have trouble looking at her. His reluctance to meet her eyes made her feel worst of all.
“Shirley doesn’t like me to be friends with other people.” There, she’d said it: the thing she’d been thinking practically her entire life.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother said.
“It’s true. We all know it’s true. She didn’t like it when I became friends with Kath.”
“Then you do know that girl,” her mother said.
“Yes, I know her, but she didn’t—she didn’t do whatever awful thing Shirley said. She didn’t go after me. We—we’ve been in the same math classes for years.” Lily looked at her aunt pleadingly. “I told her about your job, and she was interested. She wants to fly planes. She’s so smart. She’s the one who gave me that magazine I told you about.”
Aunt Judy smiled at her gently, and Lily knew it sounded ridiculous, as if she’d had a schoolgirl crush on Kath. The thought that her parents and Aunt Judy would think that very same thing was mortifying. She didn’t want them to think of her as someone who had feelings like that for anyone, girl or boy, but at the same time, characterizing her relationship with Kath as a crush was completely inadequate. It had been so much more. She wished she had realized it sooner.
“Girls don’t fly planes,” her mother snapped. “What did she do to make you go to that nightclub?”
Lily rubbed her hot forehead with her cold fingers, trying to ease the pressure that was building inside her. Every sentence she spoke was a choice. She had an infinite number of chances to turn back, but she refused to turn her back on Kath.
“I wanted to go,” Lily said finally. Her voice was remarkably steady. “She didn’t take me. I asked.”
The kitchen was silent but for the ticking of the clock. Her father was staring at the cigarette burning between his fingers. Aunt Judy was gazing at her with that same
worried expression.
Her mother began to shake her head, as if she could shake off Lily’s words. “No. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Yes I do.”
“No you don’t! And this just proves that you can’t go back to Galileo. You can’t go anywhere near that girl. I was afraid of this. Lily, if you’d only admit that you’ve made a mistake, we could help you get over this. We won’t let you throw your life away like this.”
“There are studies,” her father said. “You’re too young for this. This is a phase.”
“There, you hear your father. It’s going to pass. It may not seem that way now, but when you’re older you’ll understand. Lily, look at me. We looked the other way when you went to that Man Ts’ing picnic. We know you didn’t mean anything by it, but this—this can’t be excused. You’re already on the record as sympathizing with the Man Ts’ing. If word gets out that you’ve been voluntarily in the company of homosexuals—”
Her mother looked anguished. Her arms were barricaded across her stomach as she leaned forward to make her point, deep lines grooved in her forehead. “Your father still doesn’t have his papers back. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
With a twist in her gut, Lily did understand. Being linked to the Man Ts’ing was bad, but if she never had anything to do with them again, it could be overlooked. Adding in the corrupting influence of homosexuals made it exponentially worse, and not only for her, but also potentially for her father. Her behavior could further endanger him with the immigration authorities because it reflected poorly on him. She looked at him. He inhaled so deeply on his cigarette that a good inch of the paper burned away at once, and dark shadows pulled at the skin beneath his eyes. He still wouldn’t look at her.
“Tell us you’ll accept that you’ve made a mistake and we’ll help you,” her mother said.
Her mother was practically begging her to lie, and the temptation to give in was strong. It would be so much easier, and she didn’t want to endanger her father. But something stubborn in her balked at what her mother was asking for.