China Dolls

by Lisa See

  “Doumo arigatou gozaimasu, Auntie,” I said, using the most polite form of Japanese. “You honor me with your kindness. I’m forever grateful.”

  My aunt and uncle—as I hoped they would—sent me home with a basket filled with fresh fruits, vegetables, and a five-pound sack of rice, which was a start toward repaying Grace.

  And I thought coming here would be a breeze.

  I hadn’t won any apple-pie prizes or ribbons like Grace had, but even as a little girl I could attract a crowd. That first day at the auditions for the Forbidden City, I told Grace and Helen that I’d always been a dancer, but it was more like I was born to be famous. People saw something in me. They were attracted to me. They came to me like bees to a flower or moths to a flame. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t have a lot of talent, but I had plenty of ba-zing.

  Way back, when we still lived in Los Angeles, a dancer from the Orpheum Theater came across the street to visit our family’s curio shop. She wanted to buy a black lacquer box decorated with flying cranes, but she didn’t have enough money, so my mother said, “If you give my girl dance lessons, I’ll give you the box.” People told my mother that our family had gone to the dogs. Mom, who was about as traditional and strict a woman as you could find on either side of the Pacific, shot them down.

  “It’s better to be a lone wolf with talent than a monkey dancing for an organ-grinder,” she said. “Better to be independent than bow to the Occidental.”

  But I had to be a proper Japanese girl too. She showed me how to mince when I walked so I’d look delicate and smile behind pressed fingers so I’d look more alluring. She taught me to speak in a high voice, making sure no air—no life—came out of my throat. She instructed me to begin each sentence as though everything were my fault: sumimasenga—I’m sorry but, or osoremasuga—I fear offending you but.

  Naturally, I attended my mother’s Japanese-language classes. Japanese was of no interest to me, whether at home or in school, and I wished I had a nickel for every time she criticized my use of prepositions. (My pop always said her voice was as beautiful as cherry blossoms floating through the air on a perfect spring morning. On this one thing I couldn’t argue. Her voice was beautiful … for a nag.) My mother drilled me on honorifics and declensions. I learned the difference between what a woman could say and what a man could say. Shizukani—quiet—could politely come from a woman’s mouth. But a man could be more forceful: Damare! Shut up! I listened when people spoke the common name for a wife—ka-nai—which literally meant house inside. A husband was called the shu-jin—person in charge. But I wanted to be in charge of my own life.

  My mother started each class by having her students sing the Japanese national anthem before a portrait of Emperor Hirohito, spiffy in his uniform, sitting astride his white horse, Shirayuki. (This probably wasn’t much different than Helen going to Chinese-language school and singing the Republic of China’s anthem to a photo of Dr. Sun Yatsen.) Mom taught class like we were in Japan, stressing single-minded loyalty to our superiors: parents, teachers, anyone older, and, of course, the emperor. The greatest virtues, she told us, were sincerity, loyalty, and obedience. (This couldn’t have been all that off the mark from what Helen had learned through her sayings.) My mother educated us about Japan and China’s first altercation, back in 663, and taught us that Japan had retaliated with a long chain of invasions that continued to today. (Helen had probably learned the yin-yang version, in which the Japanese were always the villains.) What I’m saying is, we all follow traditions that we believe are right and just, but there are two sides to every story. Still, when I called last year’s rape of Nanking a war crime, my mother slapped me and said, “That didn’t happen! People made that up!” And then she called me an ungrateful daughter, as though that were more evil than raping and killing thousands of innocent women in China.

  “I’m not ungrateful or unpatriotic,” I fought back. “I love America, and I believe in peace.”

  “The emperor believes in peace too,” Mom said. “He cries for the other countries in Asia that have been crushed beneath the boot of Western imperialism. The Japanese will help our less fortunate brothers and sisters in Manchuria, China, and Korea. This is a time of Friendship, Cooperation, and Co-prosperity.”

  “Don’t you mean the Three Alls policy—burn all, kill all, loot all?”

  “Bakatare!” My mother spat out the most insulting form of stupid.

  My parents stopped speaking to me for two weeks after that. Hideo and Yori, my brothers, steered clear of me too. “You were born to be bad,” Hideo told me one day, sounding like a gangster he’d seen at the picture show in Honolulu. I wasn’t particularly bad, but I did have my own opinions. As a result, I was komaru ne—an embarrassment and an annoyance.

  Worse, I liked boys and boys liked me, which made my parents crazier than bedbugs. Mom may have encouraged me to dance, but she hadn’t properly thought it through. More than three thousand Japanese—Issei, Nisei, and Sansei—lived on Terminal Island, but the sailors at the naval reserve shared the island with us. By the time I turned fourteen, I knew where I liked to spend my time. So, yes, my pop wanted to fish in Hawaii and my mother wanted to go back to Japan, but they were really getting me out of trouble before I got in trouble. But they hadn’t thought this through either. The trade winds blew away all orders. White teachers came to school with hibiscus behind their ears and picked them for me to wear. Ocean waves dashed my parents’ culture against rocky shoals. Rustling palm fronds whispered freedom and choice. Smooth-skinned local boys spoke with even smoother voices. And more sailors! They couldn’t tell if I was Japanese, Chinese, or Hawaiian, and they didn’t care.

  “Shikata ga nai,” my mother moaned. “It cannot be helped.”

  Mom said I was a moga—a modern girl. That was not a compliment. My parents couldn’t figure out what to do with me. When my aunt and uncle offered to take me in, my parents gladly let me return to the Land of Rice—mainland America—and I most happily went. And guess what. They lived and worked right next to the naval air station! Shikata ga nai! And how!

  I’d shattered the mold for a typical Japanese girl. So what? I wasn’t like Grace, Helen, or the other girls either, worrying about opinions or dwelling on past disappointments. My desires in life were simple: float above the noise of the world, live in my body, and be seen as anything other than just Japanese.

  ON A FRIDAY at the very beginning of February, I walked down Market Street, stopping in every shop and café, asking if they needed help. I got the usual brush-off: “We’re sorry, but the position has been filled,” meaning they wouldn’t hire me because I was Oriental. I passed a theater with girls going in and coming out. Curious as a cat, I went inside to find a shapely blond woman of a certain age, interviewing girls for a job at the Golden Gate International Exposition. I filled out an application and took a seat. When my turn came, the woman looked me up and down.

  “Are you shy about getting naked?” she asked.

  “I’ve never thought about it before,” I answered.

  “Think about it now,” she said.

  Warm days and nights in Hawaii, where I didn’t own a sweater, let alone a coat. Humidity so sticky that my parents, brothers, and I would peel down to our underwear and sit in the shallows of the ocean outside our home. Bathing naked in a wooden tub with my mother after my pop and brothers had their turn. The girls in my school, who taught me the hula and told me that their mothers and grandmothers never wore tops when they danced and relied only on their hair and homemade leis for modesty.

  “I have nothing against it,” I told the woman.

  “Nudity is very natural. Consider it art.”

  If she’d been a man, if the setup had seemed slimy at all, if the job had been for anyplace other than the exposition, I would have skedaddled right on out of there. But when she said, “I could use a Chinese girl,” I felt like a big fish caught in one of my father’s nets.

  “How much you paying?” I asked, trying to sound che
eky.

  The woman gave a cunning nod. “Thirty-five berries a week.”

  That was fifteen dollars more than Grace and Helen made!

  “Where do I sign?”

  Rehearsals—such as they were—started the next day. I kept what I was doing a secret for now. Grace was a good kid, but she was so wet behind the ears it was flooding back there. And even though I could tell Helen had been around some, she acted much too prim to hear the truth. Besides, with my track record, I still might get fired. I’d have some good stories to tell Grace and Helen then.

  GRACE

  Pistols and a Cowboy Hat

  I went ahead and accepted one of Helen’s old prom dresses, which I wore until the gown I bought on layaway at the Emporium was paid off. (I sure as heck wasn’t going to sneak into my envelope with my fifty dollars. That money was the barricade between me and going home.) At night, between shows, we looked as pretty as spring flowers in our long dresses as we passed through the velvet curtains and into the dining room. Charlie directed us to particular tables by whispering in our ears. It all seemed innocent enough, so we sat with total strangers. If we still had more shows to do, we’d sip ginger ale or fairy-water tea, which was tea served with a fancy name and a fancier price, but we also ordered the most expensive drink on the menu—a Singapore sling for forty cents—so the customer had to pay.

  All we really wanted to do was eat. Most customers ordered for us off the Chinese menu. But me? Given a choice? A steak, of course! As soon as dinner was over, I’d announce I needed to leave for the next show and thank them for their generosity. And that was that … at least for Helen and me.

  “You girls are so green,” Ida ribbed us one night. She was a tiny thing, and she reminded me of a chipmunk—twitchy in her movements and reedy in her speech.

  “Look who’s calling who green!” Helen shot back. “At least I grew up in a city. The city.”

  “Besides, being green is nothing to be ashamed of,” I added, but I wasn’t as green as when I’d first started at the Forbidden City. Back then I’d never heard of a no-no girl. Now I knew those were the types of girls Donaldina Cameron rescued. I knew that a free Coca-Cola could turn into something else pretty fast, and I could recognize the particular worried look a girl got when her time of month approached or she was late. I vowed to follow Helen’s advice: Guard your body like a piece of jade. But I also learned it was easier to spend my salary than to save it. I developed a fondness for lingerie—corsets constructed with Lastex, brassieres made from lace handkerchiefs (which admittedly didn’t do much), and cami-knickers in pink or peach crepe for day or black satin or lace for evening. With each passing day, I became less frightened that my father would come searching for me, and my nightmares receded. I no longer had to act like I was carefree because I was sincerely happy, and I didn’t have to pretend bravery because I had no one to be afraid of.

  After the last show, many ponies met stage-door Johnnies and disappeared into the night; Helen and I met Ruby. Every evening she came to the club, sat at the bar, and let men buy her drinks until Helen and I were free and we could all be together again. Sometimes Helen and I were still so high from performing that we needed to shake things up, so we’d take Ruby to the Pitt Club or the Variety Club, which catered to entertainers after hours, to listen to Harry James blow “All or Nothing at All” when he passed through town, and it was a long jam session with boozing and gambling until six in the morning. Or we might visit the Sky Room for the club’s special drink. “What girl doesn’t like an angel’s tits?” Ruby asked. (And, really, what girl didn’t? It was made with white crème de cacao, cherry liqueur, cream chilled in layers, and topped with a maraschino cherry.) Sometimes we just wanted to dance. Jitterbug. Conga. Rumba. And sometimes Ruby bought each of us a gardenia—“So we match”—which we wore over our left ears, showing everyone we were true friends. We found strength in being together, which allowed us to be daring and adventurous. We flirted with men and giggled when they flirted back. We shared clothes—a hair ribbon, a scarf, a sweater, a dress, a gown—and we promised never to let a man come between us like we’d seen happen to girls in high school.

  I WENT OUT with Monroe a few more times. He took me to see Chinese opera. (I can’t say I enjoyed the caterwauling, but I did like the acrobatics and the way performers seemed to float across the stage like ghosts or butterflies.) Another time he picked me up in one of the family cars and drove me to Mount Tamalpais for a picnic. On our way back, we stopped at the wharf in Tiburon so he could show me Angel Island just offshore—a place he told me was like an Ellis Island for this side of the country.

  “People come to America from all over the world,” he explained, “but our government is trying to keep all Chinese from entering the country.” We couldn’t see the immigration station from our vantage point, but he told me about it. “They asked us all sorts of questions when we passed through on our way home from China. They treated my brothers, Helen, and me like foreigners, but we were born here.”

  We hadn’t learned about Angel Island at my school in Plain City, and my mom and dad had never mentioned it, but Monroe spoke with such passion that I could envision every detail. He made the place sound like a jail.

  “People accept the humiliation because they desperately want to be in America and they want to be American,” he said. “You and I are lucky. We don’t have a desire to be American. We are American.”

  I stared out at the island and felt sad—for the secrets my parents had apparently kept from me and for the folks on the island right then who, Monroe said, sometimes were held as long as two years before they were deported back to China or were finally allowed to land in San Francisco—if they hadn’t already committed suicide. He must have sensed my melancholy, because he pulled me to him.

  Things had “progressed.” We’d kissed—and we’d both gotten better at it—but never in Chinatown, not even on my apartment building’s stoop when we said good night. Monroe said it was because he didn’t want to ruin my reputation. Even so, I could tell he liked kissing me. I wanted to enjoy it more, but all the time his lips were on mine I was thinking about how I should be acting. He was rich, cute, and my friend’s brother, but I felt nervous and insecure around him, like I wasn’t good enough.

  One day he drove me through Golden Gate Park straight to the ocean. I’d never seen anything so open or so beautiful or so wild. Monroe parked by the side of the road.

  “I thought you might like to see this,” he said, “being from Ohio and all.”

  I’d seen enough movies to know I was supposed to wait until he came around to my side and opened my door. He held out his hand, and I took it. The wind cut through my clothes, but I didn’t care. We walked down to the water, where the waves crashed, sending up frothy foam and icy mist. He took off his jacket for us to sit on. He started kissing me. The more insistent he got, the more resistant I became. When he started to put a hand up my skirt, I pushed him away. His fumbling was doing nothing to open my heart.

  All the way home, he lectured me on rules about Chinese family life that I’d never heard before and concluded were awful. He recited the Three Obediences—When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son—and said that he’d expect that from his wife and daughters. Ruby got huffy when I told her about it: “He’s trying to get in your pants one minute and bossing you around the next? What a hypocrite!”

  I kept going out with him anyway, because I didn’t want to hurt Helen’s feelings, and, if I’m honest, because he took me places I couldn’t afford on my own. The next time I went out with him, he praised me: “You’re as American as pink lemonade at a Kansas fair.” Then he went on, proving Ruby right. “But, Grace, you’ll be better off behaving like a proper Chinese girl.”

  Helen heard what her brother said very differently than Ruby. “Wear a cheongsam the next time you see him, and he’ll sing a different tune,” Helen counseled. “And it’s true. If you want to be a proper
Chinese wife, you’ll follow the Three Obediences.”

  Monroe and I went dancing down by the Embarcadero, because at the parties he usually went to all the Chinese girls sat on one side of the room and all the boys sat on the other. “No one would be so brazen as to dance with the opposite sex in public,” he said. “If I’m in Chinatown and I see a girl I grew up with,” he confided on another occasion, “I have to cross the street so I don’t have to tip my hat or say hello. If I went out with her three times, her parents would ask me how much I expect to earn. I have to play for keeps. No fooling around.”

  What a butt. He was as rigid and disapproving as my father, except he didn’t hit me. Helen, again, had a polar opposite interpretation. “A proposal has to be in the air,” she proclaimed. “He’ll be such a good catch for you. And the best part? If you marry Monroe, you’ll be my sister-in-law, and we’ll live together in the compound.”

  But no matter what she said, Monroe and I weren’t right for each other. I allowed Helen to indulge in her fantasy, because I was happy she wanted me with her that much. Eventually, though, I’d have to get up the courage to tell her the truth. In the meantime, I was seeing the city on the arm of a respectable young man and getting plenty of free meals. Not true love, but not bad either.

  “HAPPY CHINESE NEW Year!” Ruby prodded me awake.

  I didn’t bother to open my eyes. “Happy New Year to you too,” I mumbled. “Now let me sleep.” I rolled over and pulled the pillow over my head.