Paper Daughter

by Jeanette Ingold

  Paper Daughter

  Jeanette Ingold

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York 2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Jeanette Ingold

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Harcourt is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Text set in Garamond

  Book design by Susanna Vagt

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ingold, Jeanette.

  Paper daughter / Jeanette Ingold.

  p. cm.

  Includes historical notes on Chinese immigration to the United States,

  "paper sons," and the Exclusion Era laws.

  Summary: When her father, a respected journalist in Seattle, is killed

  in a hit-and-run accident, Maggie Chen, a high school intern at her

  father's newspaper, searches for clues to the mysterious circumstances

  surrounding his death, an investigation that forces her to confront her

  ethnicity and a family she never knew.

  Includes bibliographical resources (p. ).

  ISBN 978-0-15-205507-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Chinese

  Americans—Juvenile fiction. [1. Chinese Americans—Fiction. 2.

  Identity—Fiction. 3. Journalism—Fiction. 4. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.

  5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.I533Pap 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009023855

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  4500211906

  * * *

  For Troy James

  * * *

  A writer's job is to tell the truth, even when it is put into a story. Perhaps especially then.

  This is the story of a boy—a man—called Fai-yi Li and of me, Margaret Wynn Chen, and of the true, hard things we learned because of each other.

  I will tell you what I know of Fai-yi Li and leave him to tell you more if he chooses.

  The important thing to understand about me is that I am Steven Chen's daughter, along with all that means.

  CHAPTER 1

  "Yours, Maggie." Mom pushed an envelope from the Herald down the counter where I was putting out bread for sandwiches.

  I scanned the letter inside: "Now that school's out ..."

  "It's about things to bring on my first day," I told her.

  "You're not still going?"

  "I think so. I know it won't be the same—"

  I broke off because Mom, who'd continued to sort through the mail, wasn't listening.

  Unsettling doubt swept through me as I looked again at the letter from the newspaper, so businesslike, as though my summer internship were a real job. Which it was, of course, but this was written as though I were a regular employee instead of a high school student.

  Mom, please! I wanted to say.I'm kind of alone here!

  If Dad had still been there, he'd have said, So you've got some paperwork to gather, and then let me talk out my jitters one more time.

  But Dad wasn't there. He never again would be, no matter how much I missed him and wanted him back. And whatever envelope Mom had just opened had triggered an annoyed "Humph."

  With an effort, I smothered a twinge of resentment and focused on what she was saying. "Problem?" I asked.

  She handed over a message printed on ivory-colored letterhead. "Please accept our condolences ... However ... Perhaps Mr. Chen attended a school with a similar name?"

  "Must be a computer glitch," I said.

  "And one more thing to take care of." The left corner of Mom's mouth twitched in a way it never had when Dad was alive.

  A month earlier, in the days immediately after he died—no, not died, was killed by a hit-and-run driver—Mom had seemed so strong, moving from task to task. She'd notified old friends and dealt with police and lawyers.

  But then she'd begun losing focus, becoming less and less able to separate the things that mattered from those that didn't. Fretting over small stuff and not remembering what was big.

  Like my internship in the Herald's newsroom. She'd even forgotten that, when it was the last thing Dad and I had planned together. I could understand, sort of. A summer job probably wasn't very important, considered against all the other changes in our lives. But still...

  "As though I don't know perfectly well what prep school my husband attended."

  "Don't worry about it," I told her. "If you want, I'll call next week and straighten things out."

  "Things shouldn't need straightening out," she said. "They shouldn't have written as though one of their own students was some unknown person." Her face was drawn tight, its fine creases like the crackled lines of a glazed plate on the verge of breaking.

  Dad would have known how to make her feel better. He always had known how to fix whatever needed fixing, whether it was a leaky faucet or a sad heart. But Dad couldn't make this trouble right, because his being gone was the trouble, for Mom and me both.

  And we didn't have anyone else to help us, either. No family except for Mom's parents, scientists doing research half a world away. No close friends, because we hadn't lived in Seattle long enough to make any. Bett and Aimee, the girls I knew best, had left for summer places as soon as vacation started, and for Mom, the whole idea of allowing in anyone new was "Not yet, not now."

  On impulse I said, "Let's skip the tuna sandwiches. We can go to a movie and out for pizza, after. Please?"

  Mom shook her head, but then something—maybe my voice held an odd note I hadn't intended that said how much I needed things to be different—made her look at me the way she used to. The planes of her face briefly softened, as though she'd glimpsed that I was lonely and mixed-up. Scared and not certain of anything anymore. And although she hesitated, she finally said, "Sure. I'll be ready in half a shake."

  Only she wasn't, and I searched both floors before finally finding her in the basement, peering into the washing machine.

  "Mom, we've got to hurry if we want to make the early show."

  "I thought I had time to run this," she said. "I don't know why the machine's filling so slowly."

  Her focus was gone again, and she sounded as though we had no plans for the evening except to do laundry. Maybe because she didn't want to remember that the last time we had gone to a movie together, Dad had taken us.

  "Come on," I said, putting my arm around her. "Let's watch a chick flick he wouldn't have gone to in a million years. And we'll order anchovies on our pizza. For sure he wouldn't have eaten those!"

  ***

  We saw a picture so bad it was perfect, and we came home still laughing—laughing hard for the first time since Dad had been around to laugh with us.

  "Chocolate sundaes," Mom said. "That's what we need now. You want to make them while I move the laundry to the dryer?"

  Then, moments later, voice panicky, she yelled, "Maggie!" She'd stopped partway down the basement stairs. Below her, water covered the floor.

  "I'll cut the power," I said, and I ran to the electrical box in the garage.

  With flashlights to guide us, we waded to the laundry room. Water gushed from a split washing machine hose. It stopped when we turned the valves off, but the mess!

  ***

  By midnight, an outfit that specialized in cleanup emergencies had sucked the water away, sprayed mildew retardant, and provided fans to hurry the drying-out. The damage wasn't
too bad, as most of the basement was unfinished.

  Dad's office was the exception. There, studs were exposed where the cleanup crew had cut away the buckled bottoms of wallboard, and the flat-weave blue carpet, though it no longer squished when we stepped on it, was still damp.

  But the worst thing about the room was that it was now empty. Dad's furniture had been moved out, and his stacks of loose papers and boxes of files had been carried upstairs to the kitchen, making it smell of wet cardboard and glue.

  Dad's work was Dad, and for it to be gone, too...

  How could we keep losing more and more of him? Would a day come when there'd be a final loss and then, poof, he'd be gone completely? The fact of him disappeared?

  ***

  It took us a long two hours to take everything out to the garage for drying. By the time we were done, we had newspaper clippings dangling from wires stretched overhead, business papers spread on plastic sheets, and reporter's notebooks fanned out atop tools.

  I began peeling Dad's favorite photo of us away from the wet glass of its frame. Dye in the ten-year-old brown matting had run, fingering rust across our black hair and splotching Mom's delicate features and my little-girl face, with my round cheeks and eyes full of questions.

  "This must have been taken with our old film camera," I said. "Maybe we still have the negative."

  I was just talking, trying to fill the damp, sad air, and I didn't expect Mom to answer. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin, squeezed tight, knuckles pale. She said, "I don't know how I'm going to sort all this out."

  In recent days I'd seen Mom look stunned and seen her at a loss, seen her cry and seen her gather her will. Now, surrounded by broken cartons and soaked papers, with even the dry things in disordered piles, she sagged back, eyes closed. "I can't," she said. "I just can't."

  Her words scared me because they expressed how I felt, too: like sagging back, giving up. Yet I was even more frightened by what would happen if we did give up.

  So I said, "I can do some. I still have a week before I start my internship."

  ***

  I went to my room dead tired but too wound up to sleep, and instead of trying to, I booted my computer and watched the Herald's homepage pulse onto the screen. Shapes interlaced into columns of type, and headlines dissolved one into another. A photo of a migrant workers' camp became a picture of an immigration agent, which became images of a reporter asking, listening, writing. The display promised the kind of story my dad might have worked on, about real people with different views of what was needed and what was fair. The kind of story I could picture myself writing one day. All I had to do was squint to imagine that it was my photo on the screen, that I was the reporter stepping into an unfamiliar place and getting to know its truths.

  I had an idea what that would mean, because I knew what newspapering had meant to Dad, whose news service stories had appeared in print and electronic media across the country. Along with Mom and me, Dad's work had been his life.

  And I knew how proud he'd been that I wanted a news career, too.

  When the Herald notified me that I'd been chosen to be one of the paper's high school interns, he'd been as excited as I was. Even at breakfast the next morning he kept talking about it, until he noticed the time.

  "Whoa!" he exclaimed. "My plane!" And after a last gulp of coffee he grabbed his carry-on, gave us fast kisses, and headed out.

  "Where's he off to this time?" I asked as Mom and I followed him outside.

  "Boise, and then Spokane."

  Dad, backing down the driveway, made the "okay" sign with his thumb and forefinger. All's okay with the Chens. Mom, waving back, made the sign, too, completing the ritual. Yes, all's okay.

  I just waved, but then, suddenly, I ran barefoot to his car, motioning for the window to be opened. "Dad, what if I can't do the job?"

  "You'll do fine," he said. "I guarantee it."

  He backed a few feet more and then stopped again. And even though he had Seattle traffic to fight and the airport hassle to deal with, he spoke to me as though he had all the time in the world. "That answer wasn't fair," he said. "I can't guarantee anything, but I can tell you what I believe. And that's that you're going to be the best intern the Herald has ever hired."

  I nodded, understanding that he wouldn't have been Dad if he'd let even the best-meant half-truth go uncorrected. But my question needed fixing, too. "The thing is," I said, "what if I don't like working there? Don't like the news? When journalism is all I've ever thought about doing?"

  "Then you'll have learned something about yourself while all the choices are still in front of you."

  It briefly looked as if a shadow crossed Dad's face, though there wasn't enough sunlight leaking through the overcast sky to make one. And anyway, in another instant the corners of his eyes crinkled and his voice held laughter. "And as for the news business being your only ambition—I seem to recall plans to be just like your kindergarten teacher, and an earlier ambition to raise elephants."

  "Giraffes," I corrected.

  "Giraffes, then. Maggie, the point is, you don't have to decide, at sixteen, what you want to be for the rest of your life. Or who."

  "What do you mean,who?" I asked, because the word didn't seem to exactly follow, and another thing that defined Dad was the logical way his mind worked. But by then he was looking at his watch, and I didn't get an answer.

  I never saw my father again. A few days after that, driving home from Sea-Tac Airport, he stopped at a convenience store, and as he was getting out of his car, another car hit him.

  And now the dad who had been part of every day of my life was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  I didn't get to the sorting right away. Mom worked at a local college, filling in for an English professor on maternity leave, so I was the one who had to be around for the insurance company agent, the plumber, the drywaller, and the carpet store man. And then see them again when they returned with estimates for repairing the basement damage.

  The drywaller had just left on Tuesday afternoon when Mom phoned to say she needed to stay at school for an evening reading and reception for an author.

  "No problem," I told her. "I can get myself something to eat."

  Our old dog, Pepper, followed me to the kitchen, her body wiggling with pleasure and her nose nudging me to the treat jar. I rubbed behind her ears and measured out her dinner instead. And then I put cold cuts on a cheese bagel and took it out to the garage.

  In the couple of days since the water disaster, I'd put off looking in here, and now I took a step back from the mess of stuff hanging down, laid out, and stacked up on all sides. Where was I ever going to start?

  I leafed through a file folder of utility and phone bills, each marked with the date Dad had paid them. The ones on the bottom were still damp, so I turned the pile over and spread it out. Then I did the same with a couple of other files that were also in need of additional drying.

  Oh, Dad, do we really need to keep all this? I thought, as though he might actually answer.

  Sometimes it still didn't seem quite real that he was gone, any more than it had the night we heard.

  It had been a Friday. I'd stayed late with rest of the journalism club, getting out the school newspaper, and afterward we'd gone for ice cream. Racing the evening chill, I'd hurried into the house calling ahead, "Mom! I'm home, and..."

  My words had trailed off when I caught sight of her standing by a living-room window, talking on her cell phone. It was how still she stood that stopped me. How motionless her body and how quiet her face.

  "I see," she said. "No, I understand."

  I watched, then moved closer. "What's wrong?" I whispered. I asked, "Is it Dad?" although I already knew because of how Mom was looking at me.

  After the call she held me for a long time, so tight, before telling me what and when, and she kept holding me while I tried to understand.

  But then, and even now, what I couldn't quite fit my mind around was the time ga
p between Dad's dying, which had been in the afternoon, and my learning of it that night. For those few hours, even though he'd been physically dead, he continued to be alive to me because I didn't know any different. And so, I sometimes thought, if I'd never found out otherwise...

  But of course, I had.

  Earlier that day two policemen had come to tell Mom what had happened. Even before notifying her, they called the news agency bureau where Dad worked, and it was his boss who had identified Dad's body and who was talking to Mom when I got home.

  The next morning, I'd searched through the newspaper to learn more, but I didn't. I had to hunt even to find the story at all, bypassing headlines about an airline strike, school budgets, a drive-by shooting. Finally, on an inside page with other late-breaking news, I'd found just one paragraph. "Respected journalist Steven Chen was the victim..."

  Blinking back the tears that always welled up when I remembered that night, I pulled a dry clipping off the line. Maybe, I thought, I should start a keeper pile. I decided to put things we'd definitely want to save in one place, where they couldn't get thrown away by accident.

  Such as this clipping, an article not by Dad but about him: a story about the last big journalism award he'd gotten. Of all the awards he'd received, it was the most important to him, and Mom and I had gone to the banquet where he'd received it. He'd worn a tux, and we'd worn new dresses.

  The picture above the story showed the three of us, and even without reading the caption, people would know we were a family—it was the way we stood with no space between us and how similar we looked, Dad and me especially. A Chinese family, they might think, not realizing that our China-born ancestors on both sides were more generations back than we knew.

  Now, looking at our smiles in that press photo, I remembered how proud I'd been listening to the presenter's speech. "Steven Chen is a reporter's reporter," she'd said. "He writes the truth honestly, without omission or slant."

  Mainly because of that award, the news agency that Dad wrote for had offered him a transfer to New York and a national/international beat. He surprised everyone by choosing to come here instead, to cover regional business news. He didn't give much of a reason—just, "The Northwest is growing in importance. It's a good spot for a newshound."