by Sky Lee
However, there’s an expression that pertains to Beatrice:
You can take the girl out of Chinatown,
but you can’t take Chinatown out of the girl.
Racial prejudice helped disconnect Beatrice from the larger community outside of Chinatown. Then, the old chinamen added their two cents’ worth by sneering at the canadian-born: “Not quite three, not quite four, nowhere.” Everyone had a hand at drawing circles around Beatrice and telling her to stay in. But what Fong Mei did not understand about Beatrice was how fiercely loyal she was to the little circle of local-born friends left to her. Friends growing up in Chinatown were allies, necessary for survival; for those times they ventured out of “their place,” and came back fractured. They nursed each other, offered each other protection; their comminuted humiliation not easily forgotten; their bonds against it sinewy and strong. Together, Beatrice and Keeman could stand firm, and keep reaching for validity. And because Fong Mei did not understand the strong tie between Beatrice and Keeman, she ultimately made the mistake of underestimating it.
Fong Mei bullied Beatrice with all of her might. In fact, by 1950, she had almost succeeded in bullying apart this almost perfect devotion between Keeman and Beatrice for four years. Also that year, Beatrice finally agreed to steam back to Hong Kong with her mother on an Empress ocean liner, naively believing she would be allowed to come back to her beloved. Luckily, like her mother when she was the same age, Beatrice was also saved from unnecessary travel in the nick of time. This time too, the reason was pregnancy.
“YOU AND SUE were awfully young, weren’t you?” My comment flung carelessly out of my thoughts. “Babies really, to have gotten into so much trouble!”
Morgan stirred, moving away from me in bed. I was surprised by his face, which could express a thousand shades of shame and confusion in a split second. Irresistibly touching! But I realized my tactless choice of words too late. His bedroom was filled with the heaviness of her ghost. She possessed us like the heat wave pressing down on us, shimmering off the cars and pavement. The din of the sidewalk clamoured through the window, along with the smell of frying grease and seared meat. All this made us perspire. I felt sickish.
“We weren’t the troublemakers,” he answered, immediately on the defensive, “we were just fucking around!”
But I was insistent. “I meant . . . I just wondered if you still blamed yourself, that’s all. I mean, you were just a seventeen-year-old kid when this happened. And you couldn’t have known very much about Suzie’s family, or anything.”
“Oh sweet Jesus! I have been redeemed,” ejaculated Morgan. “And here, for eighteen years, I thought I had waited in vain for a member of the Wong family to come and forgive me. To pat me on the head and say, ‘ ’Twasn’t your fault you banged up my aunt. Just don’t do it again, boy!’ He, he, he.”
Then I clued in; I realized how much he hated me—as much as he hated himself. I thought maliciously, I know you Morgan. You’re a runaway slave, with one bare foot on floating ice, the other on another chunk swirling in the opposite direction. But you like it there.
Suddenly, all the anger and disgust I had been harbouring against him came flooding out.
“You’re so emotionally clueless!” I cried. “I bet you still look back and think that it was two horny kids pounding flesh!” I could see the guilt smeared over his mouth, like a kid eating a stolen chocolate bar, but I couldn’t stop myself. “What did you think? Not enough Guidance in school, right? You go right ahead and use that excuse! Blame yourself! Drink yourself to death over it!” I gloated when I added, “You didn’t even scratch the surface. I don’t think you knew anything about Suzie! So why bother drowning in guilt?”
It felt good being one up on him, and I didn’t care that it was a creepy thing to say. Neither did I care that I didn’t have a clue about what I was suggesting at the time. After an exchange of a few more colourful words, I found myself half-dressed and my suitcase half-packed, thrown out on the filthy stairwell.
That was eighteen years ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from Morgan since. I know he’s still alive, probably. All I can say is he sure gets nasty hangovers!
After a breakup like that, it’s usually best to submerge oneself in work. In my line of work, I have learned that prosperity is an illusory thing. One can be enormously rich and still have no easy sense of it. But what is scarier—that or slipping into bankruptcy in total flamboyance and ignorance?
The postwar years were very prosperous ones for my grandparents. Not that they did very badly during the war. The shipping blockade just made Choy Fuk look elsewhere to spend his tightfisted family fortune. He chose Texas long grain rice. Up until then, China rice, from China of course, was the popular staple to import. Again, due to circumstances beyond him, Choy Fuk stumbled upon a better quality, cleaner, cheaper commodity. The rest is local history.
Fong Mei and real estate didn’t do too badly in the postwar years either. There was a cheap-housing boom happening, and the lure of easy money was too tempting. That was why Fong Mei hung on for four more years, when she should have refugeed out of the Wong household long before disaster caved it in. Her intuition surely must have told her to flee with her money and children right after the waitress’s story collapsed one side of the crumbling walls. True, she did try to make plans to wrap up her business ventures, but she was too greedy, wasting more time trying to keep as much of the family holdings out of Mui Lan’s grasp as possible. Then, in 1949, China closed—no, slammed—its doors to the west. Fong Mei never did accept this separation from her beloved sister. I like to imagine Fong Mei as this cold war cartoon character I once saw in a magazine, with no other option than to stand in front of those bamboo curtains, banging her fists on them, with what she didn’t realize was an empty suitcase at her side.
BEATRICE
1950
By and by, Mui Lan came to hear about the waitress’s story too. She went a bit crazy. She heaped a mountain of abuse onto the dead-boy, traitor-bitch’s head. She threatened to cut Choy Fuk out of her will. That’s what one does to one’s own rotten flesh, isn’t it? Amputate! Her pain! Her wounded pride was too painful to endure.
For two days, Mui Lan locked herself in her bedroom. Fong Mei dutifully brought in her congee and pretended to be concerned about the old lady’s health, her long eyes mockingly innocent against her mother-in-law’s cold, stony silence. Whenever she could, she listened intently at the door as Mui Lan whimpered into her thin gruel and moaned sporadically in her sleep. She swayed in her bed, making it creak, oftentimes a screech or two for effect. And what effect! Choy Fuk was so traumatized that even Fong Mei could take no pleasure in bullying him. He wandered about with a weird vacancy in his eyes, and Fong Mei was forced to be kind to him because she couldn’t take the chance of pushing him over the edge completely. Embarrassed, the children scuttled off wherever they could. They ate at the restaurant.
In her abandonment, Mui Lan started to imagine things. She began to get suspicious. If Keeman, then who else! No, she made herself stop though. She could see for herself that her grandson John was the spitting image of Gwei Chang. It was obvious that John was his grandson. Everyone said so, but nagging doubts still bit all over and made her skin crawl until she couldn’t stand any more.
One morning, they found her gone. Her royal bedroom torn apart. Clothes and photographs strewn all over. She had signed a promissory suicide note with her tears, then taken one of the cars and a hired driver to San Francisco. She vowed she would die there. Thus, the whole household was hurtled into noisy chaos.
Choy Fuk had no choice but to doggedly follow his spiteful mother and try to persuade her to come home. He knew she still had some “outside” relatives in the Chinatown there, although he suspected that, with his mother’s knack for antagonism, they were a lot closer than she claimed. Under more normal circumstances, she would have avoided them like a plague of locusts. These, however, were not normal circumstances. Fong Mei thought of this crisis
as an opportunity for a shopping spree. Beatrice and Sue could come too.
“You come.” She spoke harshly to Beatrice, who of course felt guilty. “You started all this. You’re to blame if the old bitch dies.”
Actually, Fong Mei was more anxious about their future inheritance. Ever since Gwei Chang’s death, Mui Lan had gripped the family fortune with an iron fist. One didn’t carelessly leave a broken-hearted old money-bag just anywhere, and especially not with greedy relatives. More than that, Fong Mei was enjoying herself immensely. During times like these, she found miserly satisfaction in consorting with Choy Fuk and Mui Lan’s troubles. After all, a bad relationship with the family she hated and had never felt a part of was infinitely better than no relationship at all.
“Suzanne-ah,” Fong Mei said to her adored one, who could do no wrong, “you pack a few things too.”
“No, Mummy,” answered her prettiest favourite. “You know how carsick I get.” It was true that she suffered a great deal on long car rides. “And I’ve got school and things. Can’t I stay home? I’ll cook for Johnny!”
Since Johnny was in the throes of medical school, he certainly couldn’t be expected to take care of himself. Fong Mei was touched by little Suzie’s thoughtfulness. It showed maturity, and she made a point of saying this to Beatrice, who kept quiet.
That evening, however, in the adjacent rooms they shared, Bea said to Sue, “Come with us, please!”
“No, I won’t. And you shouldn’t either! But I know you, you’ll go! You do everything they tell you to do.” Alone with her sister, Suzie’s disguise dropped to the floor in an unkempt heap.
Beatrice paused to think about that. In her self-conscious way, she knew she gave in to her parents too much. By parents, she naturally meant her mother and her grandmother—two powerful women, like bone-crushing “Iron Chink” machines. Yet wasn’t it the most sensible thing to do? She hated hysterics, especially after a whole lifetime of being made to watch their grandmother’s soulless pettiness day after day, to witness their mother’s terrible bitterness translated into endless bickering.
“I don’t think it’s very safe to leave you behind,” Bea said unswervingly.
With a metamorphosis as spectacular as swift, her little sister’s eyes sharpened. “You couldn’t possibly be thinking of suggesting that to Mom, could you?”
To pay her back, Bea changed the subject. “And you won’t consider doing anything crazy, would you?”
Oooh, Suzie hated that word. But she was too easy for Beatrice to read—the way she gripped the railing at the foot of the bed and leaned over her sister, both arms supplely pivoted, fully displaying the white undersides with their arbores-cent blue veins.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you could possibly mean!” Suzanne’s elegant contempt to the bitter end; magnificent with her chiselled neck stretched over a chopping block.
They looked alike, except one was so intact, the other scattered; one so safe, the other so dangerously suggestive.
“I mean that I don’t trust you alone in this house with that Morgan what’s-his-name hanging around. And you’d better promise me that you’ll behave, or you can just bet that you’ll be coming to San Francisco with Mom and me tomorrow!”
At this, Sue did not have a ready answer. She touched her long fingers to her lips and looked off vaguely, her eyes trailing out the dark window as though there were someone or something waiting out there. Beatrice had been undressing, and she suddenly felt menaced for no apparent reason; she didn’t dare cross the room to close the window and draw the curtains. A cold dread seemed to brush against her skin.
“Suzie, will you please close that window?” she asked. “It’s getting chilly.”
Sue popped up and did as she was told, her face brilliantly happy again.
“Oh Bea Bea,” Suzie gushed, “why do you always think the worst of people? Morgan’s not at all like that. People think he’s a hoodlum, but he’s not.”
“I don’t think anything of him in particular. I’ve never met him, have I? I just go by what you tell me.” Bea tore a hairbrush through her waved hair, a hundred-times dedication to beauty. “Did you see him today?”
“Sure! We met in the park . . . and talked. Bea Bea, you believe me, don’t you? We just talk . . .” Sue didn’t want to say “fool around,” since it sounded childish. “Gee, the way you act, I sometimes think I’m a criminal or a mental case or something like that!”
The hand holding the hairbrush stopped against hair so black that it glowed bluish; static made it crackle in the silent room.
“I believe you, Suzanne,” the voice reserved but reassuring; the voice swept out of her mouth and was lost in a great wind.
SUZANNE BO SYANG WONG
1950
I wanted to tell you how we talked, my dear sister. Just saying that Morgan and I talked was a lie, flat and purposely kept so. Because how we talked . . . but you already know that, my antimatter twin, don’t you? How could you not know? After all that we’ve been through together! There was no escape, Sister! Our little balancing acts; two little girls, glued to a seesaw in the park by the seat of their pants! When you were up, Sister, I was down! And it made you nervous, didn’t it? Your face averted, as though it had been disfigured by what you and I faced every day in this house! You must have known how Morgan and I talked. We chattered endlessly. We couldn’t take our eyes off each other. We talked without speaking. And how we played on words, with ideas; we fairly frolicked over everything and everywhere. We talked as if we’d known each other a hundred years ago. Isn’t that how children play? As though there wasn’t ever a time when we didn’t know each other?
On cold, wet days, Morgan and I huddled on benches, eavesdropping on what people said. Sometimes we’d whisper to each other, and sometimes they’d whisper to each other. Other people’s lives seemed so meagre compared to the enchantment that overflowed within us.
When we got too cold, we’d go into every little shop and business we could find and look carefully over everything from plumbing joints to carnations. We didn’t buy, we never repeated, and we kept track of the faces—the thin, tight lips completely powdered in, the pale glass eyes, the huge cheeky smiles.
On sunny days, we romped all over the city and delighted in the places we visited. Like the huge graveyard we found, totally deserted, high up on a hill! Perhaps from the shock of stumbling across an entire segment of the earth devoted to sweet, eternal rest, I felt drawn to this new idea of death. That day was windy; a strong breeze swept in from the horizon. It was sharply scented and had a strong cleansing effect on me. For a minute, I could almost believe it would topple all the ridiculous ideas that people had been foisting on me year after dreadful year. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a continuation of a strong wind from another dimension that I could only guess at.
Then, there were days when I didn’t dare play any more hooky from chinese school, and Morgan would wait for me at MacLean Park. There, we could meet for a few precious moments before dusk crept in around us. You know, Morgan never stepped into Chinatown. He crouched outside, on the fringes, parked on a park bench by the cement wading pool. There’s nothing more dismal than a wading pool in the middle of a grey winter, but he was more afraid he might get mistaken for a chinaman himself.
We were hanging around one day, keeping to ourselves, when some white boys came by and called me “chink” to challenge him. Morgan tried to lure them closer for a fight.
“Come closer and say that, toilet-face!” he snarled. “I want to piss on it when it’s down!” Boy talk.
They backed off, sensing Morgan’s fierceness, intimidated by his good looks, shy of me.
After a few more sightings of Morgan waiting alone in the park, they skirted a little closer each time. Muscled in on a bit of territory, he on one park bench, they on another, nearby enough to brag loud and big-shot to each other. Pretty soon, they shared a cigarette, played some basketball under the ring. Morgan made friends easily. When I cam
e along, they watched, fascinated that he would walk out of their game to be with me.
Why me, I’ll never know! Morgan could have had anybody. Droves of white girls hung around him. With them, he wouldn’t have to be chinese, but he said that he couldn’t talk to them. That made sense to me. If he had said that they weren’t his type, I would have been worried. There was a way in which he refused to be sucked in. He could see that I wouldn’t play the game either. Bea, you could play their game, but I couldn’t. Remember when Mom told us to smile, you used to smile the widest? Nope, for me, it was too much like selling my soul!
Morgan said that his father was dead. When did he die, I asked, but Morgan refused to talk about his father. And the strange way he said “dead” made me wonder if he had even lived. I met his mother, saw that sad, sloppy expression of hers that made Morgan bristle, then finally brittle. I saw his baby pictures in her parlour, layered with dust and grime; the whole house smothered in the same. There was a time, Morgan said, when she mustered enough energy from her hate to tear photos of his dad into a million little pieces. He didn’t think it was such a good idea for me to meet his mother. But I had to. I told Morgan that I had a very good idea of who my enemies were, that I had already made up my mind to face them relentlessly and fearlessly. And part of that meant witnessing what they did to themselves, what they did to corrupt their love. He looked at me funny, but I knew he’d be my confederate.