Paper Daughter

by Jeanette Ingold

  "Gold will not keep you warm at night," a neighbor said. "I hear there are few Chinese women in America."

  "After I am rich, I will bring over a wife to rub my back when it aches from bending over to gather the nuggets," the cousin says. "Perhaps Sucheng there."

  This caused more laughter, for it was well known my beautiful twin thought much of herself.

  "And how will you get there to begin with?" asked my father.

  "I will pay a Gold Mountain firm to arrange that," the cousin replied. "Those firms know more ways to slip past laws than a cat by a lazy dog."

  "And you have this money?"

  "No. That is why I am only planning]." The cousin laughed as hard as the others.

  Afterward I asked my father why it was funny that the cousin wanted to go someplace he could not.

  "Because he knows he'll never have to test his dreams," my father said. "There's noplace on earth where gold erupts like boulders in a frost heave."

  "The teacher's family lives well on money a son in America sends back," I argued.

  "Not that well," my father said. "If riches were free for the taking, the son would send more."

  I glimpsed Sucheng's face above the dishpan. She wanted to believe that the cities our cousin had spoken of had golden streets, just as she wanted to believe she would do more than marry a village man and live out the life that was before her.

  It was the difference between us. I did not wish to be anyone but who I was.

  ***

  The door opens. A man looks in and then goes away. It is another tiny piece added to my bewilderment.

  The officials at this reception center do no explaining. They order you,"In this line. Open your bag. Bend your head." They mean now, and they do not tell you why you are to do a thing or what you will be told to do next. But you know you must do it right.

  I wonder if Sucheng is being interrogated also, and if she will remember to say it is forty-three steps from our house to the privy. She was not as good as I at learning the details to prove we are Li Dewei's children. But perhaps they will not think a girl worth questioning.

  My thoughts drift back into memories, and now, not such good ones. Soon after that evening of laughter I was sent to relatives to be safe from a sickness moving through our village, while Sucheng was kept at home to help our parents, who did not want to leave their store. When I returned, her face was no longer as smooth as porcelain but pocked like lava rock, and her bitterness pervaded every corner of our house.

  And then came another evening and another visitor, a worn-looking, thin stranger whose bony shoulders carried hardness and need, and again, Sucheng and I listened to men's talk. We heard the man speak of a wife who had died and of children who needed care.

  Aferward she whispered in a choked fury of impotence, "I won't go with such a poor person. I'll run away first."

  I knew it for an empty threat, for where could she go? "Perhaps he is better off than he seems," I said.

  With an impatient chop of her hand, she dismissed that. "If he could afford better, he wouldn't want to marry me."

  "I am sorry," I said, for I had no other answer to give.

  ***

  Two nights later, just past moonrise, I watched blood from a scalp wound seep into rocky earth. It came from the stranger's sprawled body, half hidden under Sucheng's small jacket.

  Terrified, she flung incoherent words at me. "I didn't mean ... I didn't recognize him. He attacked ... I only pushed, and he fell. Fai-yi, you have to believe me! You do?"

  "Of course," I answered as I struggled to think clearly.

  "But what if no one else does? What if people say I killed him on purpose so I would not have to go with him?"

  "They will not," I told her, though even to myself I sounded unconvincing. The village might well think Sucheng would murder rather than be hauled off to be field hand, cook, and servant to someone else's children.

  "But if they do, if I'm arrested, I might be killed."

  She huddled close, the way she did when we were little and thunderstorms or Father's anger or a snake in a grain bagfrightened her. "Fai-yi, I don't want to be put to death. Take me away."

  "Where to?" My eyes searched the dark, familiar wooded path as though a branch to a new place might suddenly appear. "There's nowhere that we wouldn't eventually be found."

  Her toe nudged the jacket covering the gaping gash in the man's head. The bloody, pointed rock that he must have fallen on lay nearby. "There's the Gold Mountain."

  I stared at her. "We don't know anything about America, or how to get there."

  "There are those firms that arrange things."

  "For money. We don't have any."

  "He might," she said. Her foot pushed aside the jacket. "He was going to pay for me. Check his pockets."

  When I refused, she checked them herself, and she found a good amount. Not wealth, but far more than I'd have expected, though what did I know of such things?

  "That money is not ours," I protested.

  "He no longer needs it."

  "His family will."

  "And if they don't get this money, will anyone go after them and execute them for a crime they didn't commit?"

  "It's stealing."

  She thrust her face in front of mine, forcing me to see how moonlight caught on welts and cast shadows into the pits of her skin. "And nobody stole from me? What if you'd been the one kept home?"

  I heard the anger behind her fear, and the pain beyond that. I had known my twin's one-time hopes as though they were mine, and our parents had recognised them also. They, too, had known that there might be more possible for Sucheng than for a girl less lovely, and still they had risked her and not me.

  "Sucheng," I said, "they could not know you would get the sickness."

  Abruptly, she reached for the dead man. "Take his legs!" she ordered. "We must move him out of sight."

  Looking back now, I think that is where I went wrong. I should have refused. But her urgency was so great that I obeyed without thinking. Across the body, we kept arguing. We argued about our chances of getting away. About whether Gold Mountain firms really existed. About what was the right thing to do.

  "Right!" Sucheng exploded. "My brother, you owe me this!"

  ***

  Hiding and fearful, we traveled on foot to the city, where we slept as we could and ate sparingly during the time it took us to find one of those firms that arranged passages overseas.

  "You don't just go to America," the firm's agent told us. "Not unless you're someone wanted, like a teacher. However," he went on, "if a person there, a citizen, were willing to claim you as his children..."

  "We don't know anyone," I said.

  The man asked how much money we could spend to find someone.

  Holding back only a little, I showed him. He grumbled that it was hardly enough for his firm's work, for our passage, for some stranger who would certainly not help us for free, but, perhaps...

  And eventually, after many more days of hiding, Sucheng and I were told of Li Dewei of Seattle, in the United States.

  "Your new father.!" the agent said, shoving papers at me. "You can read? You and your sister must learn all this so you will know how he came to have children born in China."

  I taught the story to Sucheng, and on the ship to America we practiced it. We had been warned: "One mistake, say one thing different than what you should say, and you'll be sent back." And so we practiced the story every day, over and over.

  But at night I lay awake thinking about what we had done. Had I been right to give in to Sucheng? Had her need to escape really been as desperate as it seemed that night we fled? Did one deception have to follow another, as they had since that first decision to help her hide the dead man?

  And how long would it be, I wondered, before I lould return to China?

  Then finally, this morning, we reached land, and through a sleety fog I watched my sister being taken off with the other women.

  The door op
ens again. It is the men returning to question me more, and this time their questions are different. They begin, "It was reported..." and "We've been told you are wanted!"

  They say, "Tellus about the crime."

  My heart beats fast and the room spins. How do they know?

  "We're going to put you on the next ship, in the hold with the rats and foul seepage. That is what we do with criminals. Tell us. How much money did you steal? Show us. Show us."

  In terror, I put on the table all the money that I have left. It is Chinese currency, and the man who translates counts it and then talks to the other.

  Then he says to me, "You are fortunate. We have decided it was someone else who is wanted."

  A mark is made on their paper, like a drawing—"S/N"—and I

  am told, "Enough. You are believed. You may go."

  "Go...?"

  I am not sure what they mean.

  "To the Gold Mountain," I am told, and the two men laugh and laugh. And then I understand that they know nothing at all except their

  I leave without the money I put on the table, but I now have an identification paper that I must keep with me. It says I am Fai-yi Li.

  CHAPTER 4

  I wanted to stay white-hot angry. As long as fury filled the new, empty space at the edges of everywhere, I didn't have to think about the unknown person my father had become.

  And I wanted my mother to feel it with me. She'd been wronged as much as I had. Maybe more. She'd been Dad's wife. He'd lied to her.

  Time after time through the weekend I came so close to telling Mom all I'd learned.

  But always, I stopped myself. Once I told the secret, I wouldn't be able to untell it.

  Besides, hurting her wouldn't make me hurt less. It would only increase the pain already cloaking her like a curtain between us. Maybe knowing would be the final weight that would pull her under and drown her. Then I would have two parents who were all the way lost.

  So I kept my anger in and let it morph into the dull ache I felt when I thought of Dad. An ache that I was mostly able to hide.

  Sunday, though, a small line furrowed Mom's forehead, and she asked if there was something I wanted to talk about.

  I lied. "Not a thing," I said.

  It was early evening, and she was about to leave for dinner.

  "I can stay home with you," she said. "It's just a few of the women faculty getting together. They won't miss me."

  "No. I'm glad you're finally getting out." I gave her a phony grin. "I've got big plans of my own. I'm going to take a long bath, do my nails, talk to Bett and Aimee, and watch TV."

  "You're not still nervous about starting work tomorrow?"

  I lied again. "Nope. Got it under control."

  ***

  I waved from the window as Mom pulled away. I'd been right, not telling her about Dad's deceit. It was best for her and for me, too. Or I was sure it would be, eventually.

  I just wished I could understand.

  I fixed a sandwich and ate it. I picked up the phone and put it back down. I went into the bathroom, filled the tub, and half undressed. And then I put my T-shirt and shorts back on and slipped into sandals.

  "I cannot stay in this house another minute," I told Pepper.

  I felt wired, as though a low dose of adrenaline was circuiting through me. Perhaps it was letdown from working so hard sorting Dad's things and then having the work suddenly done. Mom and I had finished that afternoon.

  Or perhaps, despite what I'd told Mom, it was apprehension over starting at the Herald.

  Or maybe I was restless because the sudden free hours had caught me unawares and allowed feelings that I'd been smothering now to bubble up.

  ***

  With Pepper in the back seat of the used Civic Mom and Dad bought me when we moved to Seattle, I began driving east, not heading anyplace in particular. I wanted the calm of not thinking, and if I couldn't have that, I wanted to put the past from my mind and focus my thoughts on what lay in front of me.

  Soon, though, lights outlining the edge of Lake Washington came into view, and they reminded me of the March evening just a few months earlier when Mom and Dad and I had first explored our new city. "A city defined by water," I remembered Mom murmuring.

  I turned back and started a long, looping tour around Seattle. Now, as then, yellowed squares on the University of Washington campus broke the falling darkness, and the downtown skyline was silhouetted against its own glow.So manypeople, living so many different lives, I thought. Private lives, unless they did something to make them public—ran for office, won a lottery, did something wrong. Which was where reporters came in, and papers and news broadcasts. Where digging for the truth began.

  Dad was the one who'd taught me to always be aware that things might not be as they appear.

  On the far side of the city I turned south and drove along the wharf area, where halogen lamps lighted huge cargo cranes unloading ships.

  Overall, Seattle was a pretty hard place to get lost in: just a narrow strip with Lake Washington on the east and Puget Sound on the west. It was navigating the every-which-way, older streets that could get confusing.

  The way they must have for Dad, that day when he was on his way home from the airport. The accident had happened near the International District. Police figured that Dad must have tried to avoid a traffic jam by exiting I-5 early and then gotten lost after leaving the area that used to be known as Chinatown. They guessed he'd parked in front of the convenience store because he intended to ask for directions.

  For Dad, I thought, who was such a traveler, to get lost so close to home...

  Stopped at a traffic light, I looked across the water to the far-off distance where the Olympic Mountains pierced a dimly luminous charcoal sky. I could imagine the Pacific Ocean beyond them.

  Mom and Dad had taken me to the ocean more than once over the years, to keep up a tradition of birthday celebrations that had begun when I was five and my favorite picture book was Harry by the Sea. We were living in Nevada then, but we'd driven all the way to the California coast just so I could put my feet into a real sea that went so far it was hard to imagine its end.

  My dad had made sure I understood that there was an end to the Pacific, though, where it merged into new oceans and crashed onto the shores of different lands. In fact, he'd said, if we got into a boat and sailed sure and straight, we'd wind up in China, where I'd look so much like everyone else that I'd blend right into the woodwork.

  "Why would I want to do that?" I'd asked, making him and Mom laugh.

  He'd answered, "Blending in can be handy. And as for sailing beyond what you can see? Beyond is where you find the best surprises. Beyond into the unknown."

  Now I wondered if perhaps Dad's unknown family might be over there, in China. But then I remembered the notebook entry about how his search might end right here in Seattle.

  We'd driven home from that first ocean trip the same night so that Dad could catch a plane the next morning. Even by then he was more than a local reporter. And along the way, as we crossed a silver-tipped desert, he'd taught me a rhyme to remember when I missed him. "I see the moon and the moon sees me. The moon sees someone I want to see."

  A horn sounded behind me, and I realized the light had turned. I started forward, waving an apology.

  "The moon sees someone I want to see." I whispered the words, letting myself miss Dad for the first time since I learned of his deceit. And for the first time, too, I felt a little sorry for him. It must have been hard not knowing where he came from. Wondering if he had, somewhere, a whole family he didn't know.

  He'd have felt a void. I knew because I felt it in me. The part of me that had been the story family Dad made up was gone, and I had nothing—nobody and no real story—to replace it.

  Perhaps I'd been too hasty, destroying his notebook. Maybe further on, after the notes I'd read, there were other notes that would have pointed me to whoever my unknown blood relatives might be. Not that I'd necessarily want
to meet them. But if I just knew who they were...

  But I had destroyed it, and anyway, to the best of my memory, the remaining pages had been blank.

  I drove the rest of the way home, considering whether I should pick up the search where Dad left off. Could I? I wouldn't have to make a big deal of it, just maybe gather a little information. I certainly wouldn't tell my mother what I was doing. And I'd keep my focus on the important thing in front of me—my internship.

  But there was Mr. Ames. Working together, he and Dad must have talked. Maybe one day soon I'd give him another call.

  CHAPTER 5

  I really should have figured out my clothes before going to bed on Sunday night, but I didn't, so I began Monday morning pulling things from my closet. Most of my wardrobe consisted of jeans and T-shirts. One long dress, worn to the spring prom with a senior I didn't particularly want to see again. Some shorts, two skirts, and one pair of natural linen pants that I hated because of the way they wrinkled.

  In other words, I didn't own anything fit for going to work.

  I borrowed a cream-colored shirt from Mom, put it on with the linen pants, and then, studying myself in the mirror, debated whether I should go with jeans and a pullover instead. I didn't want to look like a kid playing dress-up. But I didn't want to look like just a kid, either.

  ***

  Half an hour later, wearing Mom's top and the good pants, I stood in the Herald's lobby waiting for the receptionist to complete a phone call. Beyond her desk, the cavernous newsroom stretched out, electronic air humming and fluorescent lights buzzing.

  Screen savers floated across computer screens on unoccupied desks, and the people who were there visited quietly or leaned back in their chairs reading newspapers. A silent television tuned to CNN went unwatched.

  My insides fluttered with nervous excitement. I'd imagined myself in a place like this even before I could picture it. All the way back in preschool, when other kids played fireman and store, I'd handed out scribbled pages that I said was my newspaper. And now, now this was a real newsroom, and I belonged in it. Or I had a chance to belong, anyway.If I can just, please, get off to a good start.