by Lisa See
Pearl
FOREVER BEAUTIFUL
I LEAVE THE Canton train station expecting to find the car to take me to Wah Hong Village, but it isn’t here. I find no private cars, let alone taxis, in the parking lot either. All I see are bicycles and pedestrians dressed in nearly identical clothes. Everyone looks poor. Canton used to be a thriving city, so the changes are a shock. When some of the other passengers—the returning Overseas Chinese students—are hustled past me on their way to their special reception center, I turn and walk quickly in the opposite direction. I’m not a student, but I don’t want to be caught up in anything official even by accident. I cross the parking lot to get to the sidewalk. The street is filled with bicycles, but again no taxis. I see very few cars or trucks. A couple of buses rumble past, but I don’t know where they go. I ask a passerby how to get to Wah Hong. He’s never heard of it. And neither have the next several people I ask. I stand there, gnawing on a cuticle, not knowing what to do. If the man at the family association messed this up, then how can I count on him to handle my mail?
I’m not off to a good start.
I go back to the train station’s entrance and sit on my suitcase. I try to remain calm, but I don’t feel that way at all. Panicked is more like it. I tell myself to wait a half hour, and if no one comes for me then I’ll try to find a hotel. Finally, a beat-up Ford—a remnant of better days—pulls to a stop in front of me. The driver—a kid, really—rolls down the window and asks, “Are you Pearl Louie?”
Soon enough, we’ve left Canton behind and we’re on a raised dirt road taking us through flooded rice fields for what I’m told will be about a forty-five-minute drive to Wah Hong. Canton seemed like it had stepped back in time under communism, but now I feel like I’m jumping back a century or more. We pass small villages made up of a few peasant shacks clustered together. I shiver. I was raped and my mother killed in a shack like these. All these years I’ve longed for the gay and colorful streets of Shanghai, but I never once missed the Chinese countryside, yet here I am. Bad memories make me put on mental blinders. I’m here, but I’ll do my best not to see it.
When we get to Wah Hong, I ask the first person I come across if he knows Louie Yun. This is another of those tiny villages with at most three hundred inhabitants, all of them with the clan name Louie and all of them related to my father-in-law. I’m taken to Louie Yun’s home. Are they surprised to see me! Tea is poured. Snacks are brought out. Other relatives crowd in to meet me. But as much as I try not to see or feel that I’m in a shack, I am, and all kinds of recollections come rushing back.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles at the end of the Depression, my in-laws and all the people I met were poorer than anyone I’d known in Shanghai. We may have been cramped together in Chinatown—the seven of us in a three-bedroom apartment—but that was positively spacious compared with this two-room shack with what seems like ten or more Louie relatives living here. I hear terrible tales of what happened during so-called Liberation to those in the Louie family who benefited from the money we sent. They were called running dogs of imperialism, beaten, or made to kneel in glass in the public square. Some suffered even worse fates. The stories are just what I imagined, and they fill me with dread. But others praise Chairman Mao, thanking him for the gift of food and land.
The accepted practice would be for me to host a banquet, but I don’t want to be here that long. I pull Louie Yun aside, give him some cash, and promise more if he’ll handle letters for me. I explain the process, ending with “I’m not going to lie. It could be dangerous for you and the rest of the family.”
I don’t know if it’s gratitude for Father Louie’s gifts over the years, desire to stave off poverty, or indifference to the political danger, but he asks, “How much will you pay for this service?”
“How much do you want?”
We negotiate until we reach a fair price—balancing the hazards against the value of American dollars—which May will send to him each month. Then it’s back to Canton. I’m driven to the docks, where I find a ship to take me to Shanghai, which will be faster than taking a train and cheaper than flying. I tell myself I’ve bought Louie Yun’s loyalty, but I have no way of knowing.
FOUR MORNINGS LATER, I’m on the deck watching Shanghai come into view. A week ago, I stepped off a plane in Hong Kong and was enveloped by odors I hadn’t smelled in that particular combination in years. Now, as I wait to disembark, I breathe in the scents of home—the oil- and sewage-infused water, rice being cooked on a passing sampan, rotting fish moldering on the dock, vegetables grown upriver wilting in the heat and humidity. But what I see ahead of me looks like a badly rendered drawing of Shanghai. The buildings along the Bund—the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Shanghai Club, the Cathay Hotel, and the Custom House—look gray, neglected, and shabby. It doesn’t help that nets hang like trampolines from the façades. I don’t expect to see coolies. Isn’t this supposed to be the New China? But here they are on the wharf: barely dressed, scurrying back and forth, heavy loads on their backs.
This initial impression doesn’t dampen my mood. I’m home! I can’t wait to get off the boat and onto the streets. For a moment, I wish May were here with me. How many times have we sat together, talking about this or that café or shop, always wanting things to be as they were in our beautiful-girl days?
I, along with the other passengers, am herded into a processing shed. I hand my Certificate of Identity to an inspector, who looks it and then me over. I wear a cotton skirt and a pink blouse, because I can’t imagine entering Shanghai looking like a country bumpkin. Still, I definitely look different from everyone else. This seems to single me out for extra attention. One inspector searches my luggage, while another questions me about my reasons for returning to China, if I’m committed to giving up my capitalist ways, and if I’m here to serve the people. This is short compared with the border stop. Maybe they hear my Wu dialect and recognize me as the Shanghainese I am. Once their interrogation is finished—and I’ve lied repeatedly—one of the men pulls out a camera.
“We like to take photos of returning patriots,” he says, motioning to the framed pictures on the wall.
I hurry to the wall and search the photos, hoping to find my daughter. There she is! My daughter’s alive and she’s here! In the photograph, she stands in the middle of a group of men wearing green uniforms and green hats with red stars. A lovely smile lights her face. I ask the men about her. They remember her. How could they not? It’s not as though pretty young girls from America pass through their building every day.
“Where did she go?” I ask.
“Her father is a cultural worker,” an inspector offers helpfully. “We sent her to the Artists’ Association to find him.”
I smile for the camera. It isn’t hard. I’m happy. Joy found Z.G., which means I ought to be able to find the two of them very quickly. This is going to be much less complicated than I thought.
I pay a nominal fee to leave my bags in the shed and then hurry across the Bund and rush along the boulevards, paying no attention to the sights around me. In the Artists’ Association lobby, I approach a woman sitting behind a desk.
“Can you tell me how to find Li Zhi-ge?”
“He’s not here!” she snaps.
Bureaucrats are the same all over the world.
“Can you tell me where he lives?” I ask.
She eyes my suspiciously. “What do you want with him? You should not try to see Li Zhi-ge. This man has a black mark against him.”
That’s alarming. It seems like the inspector would have mentioned this.
“What did he do?”
“Who are you?” Her voice rises. “What do you want with him?”
“It’s personal business.”
“There’s nothing personal in China. Who are you?” she asks again. “Are you a troublemaker too?”
A troublemaker? What has Z.G. done? And please, God, tell me he hasn’t dragged my daughter into it.
“Have you see
n a girl—”
“If you keep asking questions, I’m going to call the police,” she warns.
For a moment, I’d thought this was going to be easy, but nothing in life is easy, not one single thing. And I’m not myself. This is my hometown, but I feel clumsy and inadequate in the new Shanghai. Still, I have to try one more time.
“Have you seen a girl? She’s my daughter—”
The woman slaps her palm flat on her desk and glares at me. Then she picks up the phone and dials.
“Never mind,” I say, slowly backing away. “I’ll come back another time.”
I walk out the door, down the steps, and keep going for another two blocks before I stop. I sweat from the heat, humidity, and terror. I lean against a wall, fold my arms over my stomach, and take several deep breaths, trying to bring my fear under control. Despite the effortlessness of my disembarkation, I need to remember the problems I had at the border. I must be careful. I can’t end my search before it’s even begun.
I have another idea of where to go. I start to walk toward the French Concession. This used to be a lively area—with brothels, nightclubs, and Russian bakeries—but somehow it all looks grim and depressed. Many street names have changed too, but even after all these years I remember the way to Z.G.’s old apartment, where May and I used to model. His landlady is still there, and she’s as mean and cantankerous as she always was.
“You!” she exclaims when she sees me. “What do you want this time?”
This, after not having seen me for twenty years.
“I’m looking for Z.G.”
“You’re still looking for him? He doesn’t want you. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Only your sister, see?”
The words she speaks are like needles jabbing into my eyes. Why would she say this now, when she never said it back then?
“Just tell me where he is.”
“Not here. Even if he were, you’re too old now. Look in the mirror. You’ll see.”
All the while she’s staring at my clothes, my face, my hands, my haircut. She’s probably been taking in my smell too, since years of a Western diet of beef and milk come out in my sweat. She may be a cruel old woman, but she’s not stupid. It’s not hard for her to deduce I’m a foreigner.
“He returned to Shanghai after Liberation,” she recounts. “He paid the rent he owed me and gave me more money for the items I’d stored for him—his paints, brushes, clothes, and the rest of it. He paid my grandson to deliver everything to his new home. Then he paid me even more—”
She’s hinting pretty strongly. Maybe some of the old China ways still work.
“How much for his address?”
She probably thinks she’s proposing an astronomical sum, but it’s little more than one U.S. dollar.
Z.G. lives not far from here on a pretty pedestrian lane lined with graceful Western-style houses built in the twenties. I stop to put on lipstick and run a comb through my hair. Then I smooth my hands over my hips to make sure all my seams are straight and my skirt hangs perfectly. I can’t help it. I want to look beautiful.
“He’s not here,” the pretty servant girl who answers the door tells me.
“May I come in? I’m an old friend.”
The servant girl stares at me curiously, but she lets me in, which is surprising until I step inside. My breath catches, and I’m frozen in place by what I see. Old posters of my sister and me are on the walls. They’ve been hidden from public view and protected from the grimness of the streets. They are for Z.G.’s eyes only. None of this is what I expected—not the posters, wealth, sophistication, or the three servant girls, who line up before me nervously and stare down into their folded hands.
I motion to the posters on the walls. “You can see your”—what would be the right word in the New China?—“employer and I knew each other well many years ago. Please tell me where he is.”
The girls shift their feet, refusing either to meet my eyes or to respond to my request. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with servants. I do what I did with Z.G.’s former landlady. I open my purse and bring out my wallet.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“He was sent to the countryside,” the girl I assume to be in charge answers. She appears to be the oldest, although I doubt she’s more than twenty-five. The other two girls continue to fidget.
I don’t remember Z.G. having ties to the countryside. I’ve also read that being sent to the countryside is a common punishment in the New China.
“Is it because he lives like this? Or …” I look again at the young faces before me. Has there been a problem with him living with these three women? All kinds of improprieties used to happen in the past. I’m calculating how to broach that subject when the servant with a short bob volunteers new information.
“Guns always shoot the leading bird,” she says in a low voice. “Master Li is in trouble.”
“Things always change to the opposite,” the third servant pipes in.
“Dog today, cat tomorrow,” the girl with the bob adds. “They could have sent him to a labor camp.”
“Or killed him,” the third servant says, raising anxious eyes to mine.
“Has he been arrested?” I ask. When the girls don’t respond, I say, “I want the truth. All of it.”
“He’s gone of his own choice to the countryside to redeem himself, learn from the peasants to be more humble, and remember the goals of socialist art,” the head girl quickly recites before the other servants can start in again with their gibberish.
“When will he come home?” I ask.
“Don’t you mean, will he come home?” the girl with the bob asks. “A big tree catches the wind, after all.”
The one in charge pinches her subordinate to get her to stop talking, apparently not liking the lesser servants stepping out of their places.
“I remain hopeful,” the head servant says. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have left money for me to take care of the house.”
“And to feed us too,” the quiet one mutters.
I glance from girl to girl. They’re all about Joy’s age. What kind of man is Z.G.? Is he still falling for any pretty face?
“Have you had any visitors?” I ask. “A young woman perhaps.”
“We get those all the time,” chirps the girl with the bob.
My jaw clenches. For so long, I felt I lived like a servant, but I wasn’t a servant. I wasn’t impudent…
“I’m looking for my daughter,” I say sternly. I start to put my wallet away.
“We know the one!”
“Yes! We do!”
“Tell me,” I say.
“She came the day Master Li was leaving. We heard her say she was his daughter. She came from a different place …”
“Like you.”
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“She went with him to the countryside.”
It’s not the worst thing I could hear, but it’s not the best either.
“Do you know where they went? To which village?”
They shake their heads. Even when I offer more money, they can’t help me.
After they let me out, I stand in the lane for some time. I’ve run up against a blank wall, and I’m unsure what to do next. I’m desperate and terrified for my daughter, who is with someone in such trouble that he appears to have chosen banishment over arrest. In my hopelessness, I find myself speaking to May, as though she could hear me so far away in Los Angeles. I haven’t found our girl yet. She’s with Z.G., and he could cause problems for her—things we haven’t even thought of.
I shake my head as Shanghai begins to push itself into my thoughts. I hear the sound of a trolley and the rumble of a bus or truck in the distance, but otherwise there’s very little traffic noise. All the elegant, low-slung foreign cars of the past have been replaced by pedicabs, bicycles, and donkey-drawn carts and wagons. I hear a food vendor calling out a treat. “Crisp and spicy olives! Fresh olives! Buy my olives!” I haven’t eaten Shanghai o
lives in twenty years, and I follow the cries to the corner and down the street to the left. I find a man with a basket hoisted on his shoulder. When I approach, he lowers the basket and lifts a damp towel off the contents. He has three types—fat, thin, and brown. I ask for some of the fat olives. I pop one in my mouth even before I pay the man. My eyes close in appreciation as the alkaline taste blossoms into something light, refreshing, and invigorating. I’m instantly transported back in time, eating olives with May and our friends—Tommy, Betsy, and Z.G.
Somehow this burst of flavor clarifies my mind. I’ll have to go back to the Artists’ Association to ask more questions, but first I need to figure out the best way either to get information from that woman in the lobby or to get past her. For now, though, I need a place to stay. I’m sure I can find someone to rent me a room, if I pay double or triple the standard rate, but I don’t want to do that.
Home. Los Angeles is my home now—and how strange that is after all my years of homesickness for this place—but the word reminds me that I had a home here too. To get there, I’ll have to go to the Hongkew district across Soochow Creek. I don’t see any rickshaws, but I doubt I could ride in one now after being married to Sam. If I saw one, my heart might collapse in grief. Still, I can’t help wondering where the pullers are. What happened to them?
I hurry back to the Bund. I speak again to the inspector who helped Joy. I even slip him a bribe, but he insists he doesn’t know anything more, so this is just money down the drain. Then I have to pay what he calls a handling fee to watch my belongings overnight. I take my one travel bag and ask directions to a bus stop. The streets were crowded when I arrived. Now that work is done, the sidewalks are jammed with people and the roadways are a swelling mass of bicycles. The rings of all those bicycle bells sound almost calming, like cicadas on a hot summer night. I board the bus to take me to Hongkew. For years, May has picked up American phrases and used them until the rest of us were nearly crazy. One of those phrases was about being crowded together like sardines. Now I understand what she meant. People press against me on all sides. I feel the familiar panic rising, force myself to swallow it, and sway with the bony mass of humanity as the bus accelerates or stops.