The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Zhu snorts, disgusted. There’s one person, and one person only, she’s authorized—ordered to help in 1895. And that’s Wing Sing. She tours the alley, examining every prisoner at every barred window.

  “Wing Sing?” she murmurs. “Is Wing Sing here?”

  “I Wing Sing.”

  Zhu studies the swarthy, broad-cheeked girl. She must be Mongolian. Definitely not the girl she met in Golden Gate Park three months ago. Zhu was certain she’d recognize Wing Sing again but now, with every strange new face, her confidence falters.

  Another voice, “I Wing Sing!”

  And another, “I Wing Sing!”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “No. No.”

  She flees Spofford Alley. The fortune-teller gives her a reproving look, then shrugs. She trudges on to Bartlett Alley, to Brooklyn Alley, to Stout. Always the same shacks, the barred windows, the grim little faces posed behind those bars reciting fee scales in a birdlike monotone.

  So many slave girls. But Wing Sing is nowhere in sight.

  Zhu rejoins the shuffling throng on Dupont, her heart heavy. Maybe Wing Sing is dead. Maybe three months of a life like this has killed her.

  “Careful, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

  With a start she sees them before she registers Muse’s warning, her intuition sounding off alarm bells. They shoulder their way through the crowd, striding directly toward her, the wiry fellow, the fat man, and the eyepatch. Hatchet men. Their hands purposefully shoved in their jacket pockets as they march behind an elderly gentleman in a gold-embroidered cap and an air of self-importance. The Big Boss, he’s got to be. The other men on the street yield to their entourage.

  Zhu stands back, too. Yet instead of striding away in the opposite direction like she ought to, she hesitates, drawn by curiosity. The eyepatch approaches, his good eye peering about with uncanny acuity. She tries to shrink back into the shadows, but he zeroes right in on her. She yanks the fedora over her brow, dons the tinted spectacles, pushes them up her nose so the lenses cover her eyes.

  Too late.

  He practically pounces on her, backing her up against a shop window. “Jade Eyes,” he says in an ominous whisper.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know you,” she says, lowering her voice as best she can. He stands so close she can feel the hard curve of the grip of the gun tucked in his waistband.

  “Oh, you know me,” he says. He taps the frame of the spectacles with a long fingernail. “Jade Eyes, that’s what the girl called you.”

  “Act friendly,” Muse whispers in her ear. “Ask him where the girl is.”

  Great advice from her monitor. At last.

  “We… .we are all strangers here in Gold Mountain, aren’t we,” Zhu says. She tries a little smile. “All far from our homeland, from mother China. You and me and Wing Sing.”

  “So we are,” he says, a glimmer of surprise lighting up his eye. He looks her up and down, checks out her sahm, the fedora, the sandals. He shakes his head, and then an astute look springs into his eye.

  Okay. Maybe he’s not such a thug and a murderer. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, I’m looking for Wing Sing.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “Why?” he says again. The wiry fellow and the fat man gather behind him, peering over his shoulder. The Big Boss waits, annoyance creasing his brow.

  “She’s my friend.”

  The eyepatch shrugs. “She got no friend. She our girl. We pay gold.”

  “I’ve got money.” Zhu fumbles in her pocket for her coins. Jessie gave her a double eagle after their tiff at breakfast. Mr. Parducci tipped her another bit for the large order of wine. “How much for her?”

  The eyepatch laughs when he sees her coins. “We pay two thousand in gold for her, Jade Eyes. She sixteen. And pretty. Pretty girl earn much gold for Chee Song Tong.”

  Zhu gasps. Two thousand dollars in gold for Wing Sing! Zhu has earned exactly fifteen dollars over the past three months as Jessie’s bookkeeper while her services pay off the hundred in gold Jessie paid for her indenture. She shoves the coins back in her pocket, feeling ridiculous. “It’s just that I miss her. I want to talk to her.”

  “Talk of what?”

  “Talk of mother China. Talk of family.”

  “Ah.” Now an unexpected sheen clouds the eyepatch’s eye. Then he frowns, tosses words over his shoulder at the others. Dismissed by him, the wiry fellow and the fat man rejoin the Big Boss, who resumes his haughty promenade.

  “We are all strangers in Gold Mountain. Yes. And you pretty girl, too, Jade Eyes,” he says. “You should not walk about in rags.” He touches her cheek, her lip. “I should not sell girl like you to Jessie Malone. I should keep you for myself.”

  Suddenly she’s aware of his fierce masculinity. Aware of the value in gold he places on her femininity. He’s one of the bachelors, too, after all.

  “Where is Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “Please tell me.”

  “She not in Tangrenbu,” the eyepatch says. “You go to Selena’s. You go to Terrific Street.”

  He turns on his heel and rejoins his entourage.

  *

  “Muse,” Zhu whispers as the hatchet men stride away, “look up ‘Terrific Street.’ Look up ‘Selena’s.’”

  “I’m on it,” Muse whispers back. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision as Muse scans its Archives. Zhu watches a directory zoom by, dizzying. All kinds of file and folder names, with strange extensions. She glimpses her instructions holoid, Zhu.doc, thirty-six GB. She blinks. Wait, that can’t be right. The holoid is thirty-five GB. Muse locates and opens a file, San Francisco.1895.geography, and searches the data.

  “’Terrific Street.’ He means Pacific Street,” Muse reports back. “And Selena’s? He means a ‘chop suey palace’ on the border of Tangrenbu and the Barbary Coast. The women are Chinese or Japanese, maybe some Koreans or Filipinas. But the male clientele is all white. Your disguise won’t work there, Z. Wong.”

  “Hah. I won’t be a client.”

  Zhu hikes north on Dupont to Pacific, turns east. Bang, bang, bang. She whirls at the muffled sound of gunfire, crouches against a shop. She sniffs for gun powder, but there’s only a faint whiff of it. Okay. There must be a shooting gallery in a basement below the cobblestone street, one of the cavernous illegal halls where white men mingle with Chinese to practice their skill with firearms. And there. Denim-clad bachelors in an uncharacteristically jovial mood stream in and out of another doorway set below the street level, jingling coins in their fists. A sentry stands watch at the door. Oh, yeah. Must be a gambling den down in that basement.

  Once again Zhu approaches the invisible boundary between Tangrenbu and the rest of San Francisco. No longer does she see colorful touches of Oriental splendor. No longer can she smell that distinctive stench. From here, the Barbary Coast stretches down to the docks and the waterfront, a dense collection of dancehalls, saloons, gambling dens, opium dens, hideouts, low-end brothels, and bagnios.

  Poised near the corner of Dupont Street and Columbus Avenue like a halfway house between Oriental and Occidental vice is the plug-ugly Stick Victorian with its brass plaque announcing “Miss Selena.” The sporting house boasts neither the excesses of the Parisian Mansion nor the calligraphy above the cribs on Spofford Alley. The red lamp over the door is not lit, and Miss Selena hasn’t yet stationed a red lampshade by the window. Zhu does notice lace bloomers dangling from the sill of a second-story window.

  Right. She knows her way around a brothel by now. She pulls the fedora low over her forehead, pushes up the spectacles. She seizes the heavy brass door knocker cast in the shape of a rooster, squares her shoulders, and tries on a manly frown.

  A middle-aged Chinese woman, her golden skin tight over her cheekbones and chin, peers suspiciously out the door, still secured inside by a chain lock. “What you want?”

  “You Miss Selena?” Zhu mutters. “I need to see Wing Sing.”

  “This place not for yo
u, boy. You go to Tangrenbu. You go to Spofford Alley.”

  “No, I’m her brother. Cousin. I’m her cousin from Shanghai. I have news of our family. May I speak with her, please?”

  “Her time not free, brother cousin.”

  “I have money.” Zhu produces the double eagle.

  Selena studies her contemptuously, then slams the door. The chain lock clangs. She swings the door open and stands aside.

  Zhu enters a parlor far more elegant than she would have expected from the street. There’s rosewood furniture, painted porcelains, the usual red velvet drapes mixed with unusual swathes of pink and purple silk. Chinese carpets with calligraphic and floral designs in muted pastel shades. The heady scent of plum incense makes Zhu’s head swim. A musician sits cross-legged in a corner on the floor, softly playing a moon fiddle, the strange lilting keen like mother China herself singing.

  The wall hangings and painted screens are also a departure from Jessie’s obsession with female nudes. Here Oriental couples copulate on mountainsides, by brooks, in barnyards, in the midst of battlefields strewn with bloody corpses. Zhu knows from her t-port training that the European erotic art of the fin de siècle seldom shows the Caucasian man explicitly engaged in carnal pursuits. Asian art, apparently, doesn’t have a problem with that.

  She hears whispers, soft laughter. Slowly—feeling just like the country bumpkin she actually is six hundred years in the future—she turns away from the pornographic scenes. Now she faces golden-skinned girls lounging about in embroidered silk robes of scarlet or black, the half-open robes showing plenty of décolleté and leg. They wear thick white pancake makeup, glossy black eye paint, vermilion lip paint so shiny it looks like lacquer. Their shiny ebony hair is impeccably styled in astonishing waves and winglike coiffures.

  Dolls. They look just like Chinadolls.

  A black door maid in uniform serves plum wine, coconut pastries, bits of meat or fish wrapped in wontons. A portly gray-haired gentleman relaxes in his shirt and vest on a scarlet velvet divan, drinking and smoking, snacking on the hors d’oeuvres as he makes his selection from among the Chinadolls. Zhu glances at him. Oh, no! Could that be Mr. Heald? Jessie will be miffed! She keeps her head down. He can’t possibly recognize her in this getup, can he? She pushes the spectacles up her nose again, peers at the girls more closely.

  “Wing Sing?” she says in a husky voice. “I want to see Wing Sing,” she repeats to Miss Selena.

  “She right there in front of your face, brother cousin,” Selena says sarcastically. The madam points to a girl. “You pay five dollar now.”

  Zhu pulls out more coins. She goes to the girl and anxiously studies her. White makeup is spread so thickly over her face, red lip lacquer defines her mouth so falsely, her hair is so bizarrely styled that Zhu isn’t sure it’s the girl she’s searching for. After that dirty little face, that disheveled braid? She’s not sure, at all. The girl barely looks human, let alone sixteen years old.

  There’s a ping inside Zhu’s forehead, and the strange events of the day fast-forward through her memory in a kaleidoscope of images—Daniel stalking her, Daniel making love to her. The sign on the cigar wagon changing—she’s sure it changed!—and the driver of the wagon, first skinny, then stout. She herself in a long silk dress nibbling on buttered toast. And now this, the girl who is the object of her project, dolled up beyond recognition.

  Reality changing. Reality changing right before her eyes. And she’s aware of it. She’s seeing it!

  “Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “May I speak with you?”

  This fantastic creature called Wing Sing shrugs disdainfully. The other girls giggle and whisper, their dark eyes darting back and forth. The gray-haired gentleman—it is Mr. Heald—yawns, exposing his big yellow teeth, and holds out his goblet for more plum wine. Wing Sing dutifully takes Zhu by the hand and leads her upstairs to her bedroom. She lies down on the bed like a mannequin and awaits her fate.

  Zhu closes the door and locks it with the flimsy little chain lock that could easily be kicked apart by someone wanting in. She takes off the fedora, shakes out her hair, takes the spectacles off her face, and reveals her eyes, gene-tweaked green. “Hi. Remember me?”

  The girl sits up. Her painted mouth drops open, her painted eyes widen. “Oy! Jade Eyes?”

  “Thank goodness! Don’t yell. Call me ‘brother cousin,’ okay?” Zhu breathes a sigh of relief. “So you do remember me?”

  Wing Sing nods—at least that part of reality hasn’t changed—and glances fearfully at the door. “Sure, I remember you.” Someone listening at the keyhole, apparently.

  Zhu pulls the girl to the farthest corner of the room. They crouch on the floor beside a chamber pot.

  “Are you all right? How are they treating you?”

  As if it isn’t obvious how the madam is treating one of her girls. But Wing Sing says, “I do okay, Jade Eyes.” In fact, she looks well-fed, healthy, even sleek beneath the doll mask. No bruises, as far as Zhu can see. No disease. Not yet. “Chee Song Tong pay much gold for me,” she says, glowing with pride. “Miss Selena treat me nice. I lucky. I sign good contract. One day I go home.”

  Go home. Yes. Zhu has got to get this girl to the home, to the Presbyterian mission where she’ll be safe. But how, now that she’s working at Selena’s? How, now that she believes she’s lucky, working at Selena’s?

  “How many johns do you see in a day?”

  “Oh, ten, maybe. Maybe ten more after that.”

  “Wing Sing, ten or twenty? There’s a big difference.”

  She only shrugs, no longer the frightened teenager. Even to herself, she’s become a commodity. “I earn much gold.”

  “Wing Sing, do you still have your dowry box of jewelry?”

  The girl nods. She reaches beneath the bed, pulls out the rosewood box.

  Zhu inhales sharply, her breath catching in her throat. Oh! The aurelia? Is it finally there?

  Wing Sing flips open the lid, flashes the contents at Zhu. “This jade, this gold.”

  Is that the curve of a golden wing? Zhu reaches for the box, but Wing Sing claps the lid shut and shoves the box under the bed.

  “Let me see.”

  “No.” Wing Sing gives her a suspicious look. “Why you want to see my dowry, anyway?”

  Zhu sighs. Could the aurelia appear in the dowry box now, like it was supposed to be there in the first place? Well, why not? Reality is shifting and changing all around her, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Why can’t something go right for a change?

  “I could give you an appraisal. An idea of what it’s worth. With such a fine dowry, you’ll surely find a husband, a man who will be happy to marry you. You’ll have your own daughter, your own place in life. Your own home.”

  Wing Sing only stares, her dark eyes revealing nothing.

  “Wing Sing,” Zhu says, “isn’t that what you really want?”

  The girl shifts uncomfortably, and her eyes dart away.

  “It’s a lot to think about, I know.” Win her over. She’s got to win her over. “Why don’t you tell me your story. How did you get to Gold Mountain?”

  “Oh, I like many northern girls,” she says, leaning back against the bed. “One day a man come to my mama. He say he want to marry me. She cry, but she say okay. She give me dowry box and I go. Then this man sell me in Shanghai to another man, who take me to San Francisco. It is the way, Jade Eyes. It is my fate. Same for many, many girls here.” There’s a little noise at the door. “Okay, brother cousin,” Wing Sing calls out. “Listen, Jade Eyes, at first I scared. At first I want to run away from Miss Selena. Now I see what I must do. I very, very lucky! I finish contract with Miss Selena, then I go home, okay? I go home rich, Jade Eyes.”

  “Listen to me, Wing Sing. You’re never going to get rich working here. If you stay here, you’ll never go home. You’ll never have your own daughter. You’ll never have your own home. It’s going to wear you out, Wing Sing. It’s going to make you sick and sad and desper
ate. You’ll die before your contract is finished.”

  The girl’s face darkens. She plugs her fingers in her ears. “No. No!”

  “You’ve got to get out of here, Wing Sing. Get out before it’s too late.”

  “But how? Chee Song Tong kill me!”

  “If I could arrange it, if I could get you safely out of here and find a new life for you, would you come with me?”

  “I do not know, Jade Eyes.”

  “A new life, Wing Sing. Where you’ll be safe from Chee Song Tong. Where you’ll learn about this country and grow up like a normal girl. Where you’ll eventually meet a good husband and have a family of your own. You want that, don’t you? Oh, I know you want that!”

  Wing Sing stares at Zhu, trembling, as if she’s just offered her the moon. “Yes, I go. You really take me?”

  “Of course!”

  Someone knocks furiously on the bedroom door. Wing Sing shrinks back against the bed, curling up her legs. “Okay, brother cousin!” she calls out in a quavering voice.

  Zhu raises her hands—stay calm—and tidies her queue. “I can’t take you now. I’ve got to go get help. But I’ll be back for you.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Oh, but Jade Eyes, I cannot run. You have to carry me.”

  She stretches out her legs.

  And that’s when Zhu sees her feet.

  In the Japanese Tea Garden, Wing Sing’s feet were unfashionable peasant’s feet, sturdy and whole. Feet made for standing while planting peas or millet. Feet made for walking across the whole country if she had to, to find work. Zhu clearly recalls the straw sandals threaded with green silk. Her big bare feet, her knobby toes.

  Zhu rubs her forehead, and that little ping thumps behind her eyes again.

  No. No. No no no no no no.

  Yes. There is no mistaking the awful crippling inflicted on a girl-child in the China of 1895 and in centuries past. Her toes have been broken and bent under the rest of her foot and brutally tied there with strips of cloth. The bone of her arch has been slowly bowed and broken over long torturous years so that the whole of her foot resembles a clenched fist.