by Ann Hood
Maisie let out a small yelp.
“Zên me yàng?” someone called to them.
A small, old woman appeared in the doorway. Her face was as wrinkled as a prune, and her hair was so thin that her leathery scalp showed through.
“Zên me yàng?” the woman repeated, and now Maisie saw that she was toothless as well.
Felix pointed to the bugs scurrying around.
The old woman tottered into the room laughing.
Maisie and Felix couldn’t help but stare. Her feet in their faded cloth shoes were smaller than those insects. From beneath thick, white stockings, her three-inch-long feet moved in quick, mincing steps. How could she possibly walk on such tiny feet? They watched as she picked up an old slipper, which seemed to be there just for this purpose, and began smashing the bugs. A sickening crunch echoed every time she got one.
The old woman grinned her toothless grin at Maisie and Felix, threw the slipper down, and teetered out of the room.
“Her feet,” Felix whispered.
But Maisie thrust her chin upward and did not answer.
“Please,” Felix said. “Don’t do this.”
Maisie walked right out of the room without saying a word.
Pearl was in the kitchen with the old woman and a young Chinese girl holding a fat baby. All of them were eating rice from small bowls and laughing as the old woman talked.
When Pearl saw Maisie, she said, “You don’t like our centipedes, I hear.”
“Is that what they are?” Maisie said, grimacing.
“They’re better than the scorpions,” Pearl said.
Maisie swallowed hard. “Scorpions?”
“Mother hates them, too,” Pearl said. “But Wang Amah came to your defense.”
At the sound of her name, the old woman bowed slightly toward Pearl.
“She’s my nurse,” Pearl explained. “I love her mightily. And this is my mèi mei, Precious Cloud.”
When she saw Maisie’s look of confusion she added, “Mèi mei. Little sister.”
Pearl lowered her voice. “Her mother died, so she’s come to live with us.”
“Nice to meet you,” Maisie said to Precious Cloud.
“Oh, she doesn’t speak any English at all,” Pearl said. “That baby she’s holding is my little sister Grace. I think you’ve met all of us now.”
Wang Amah held out a bowl of rice to Maisie. With chopsticks, she added something bright pink, chopped small scallions, and thin slivers of that white, lacy vegetable Maisie had seen in the marketplace.
“What is this?” Maisie asked.
“Pickled vegetables,” Pearl told her. “And lotus root.”
“Lotus Root,” Maisie said to herself. It sounded exotic, and she said again, softly this time, “Lotus root.”
By now Felix had come into the kitchen, too, and Pearl made the introductions all over again.
“Nice to meet you,” Felix said.
Precious Cloud stared at him blankly, but Wang Amah grinned her toothless grin at him and handed him a white porcelain bowl rimmed in red. Felix could smell something vinegary wafting up from it, and his stomach did a small flip. Last night, he had choked down the slimy cabbage. He had to be polite, and he was hungry. All the while, though, he’d thought of the dan dan noodles from Szechuan Gourmet in New York and all the other Chinese food they used to get delivered to Bethune Street. This tasted nothing like that.
Maisie was happily scooping the rice and vegetables in her bowl into her mouth, just like she’d done with that dreadful cabbage last night.
Felix took a deep breath, then picked up the chopsticks in front of him and ate a small bit of rice. Not bad, he decided. He poked around at the vegetables, trying to determine what they were.
“Onion,” Pearl said, pointing one of her own chopsticks at something in his bowl. “String bean. Bok choy. Lotus root.”
He smiled at her gratefully.
As he ate the rice and vegetables, Felix tried not to stare too hard at Precious Cloud. She was beautiful, he thought. And familiar looking as if he’d met her before. He took a longer peek at Precious Cloud and smiled. She looked very much like Lily Goldberg, he realized. For an instant, he remembered Lily standing there in The Treasure Chest. Was she still standing there? He knew that when they time traveled, it was as if no time passed at home. But was it really no time at all? Would they return right where they’d left off to find Lily waiting?
“Pearl,” Maisie was saying, “why do you wear your hair up in your hat like that? We thought you were a boy!”
Pearl laughed. “I never thought about that,” she said. “Blond hair is considered worse than an animal’s hair here. So Wang Amah always makes me hide it when I go out. You should, too, Maisie.”
Maisie loved the idea. It felt mysterious and special to take her long hair and tuck it inside a cap like Pearl’s, like a disguise.
“Okay,” Maisie agreed. “I will.”
Pearl stood. “Let’s go sit on the veranda,” she said. “We can see the river from there, and it’s lovely to watch the boats in the morning.”
“Like at home,” Felix said. “In Newport where we live, I like to go to the wharf and look at all the sailboats.”
“I like to imagine I can escape on one of them,” Maisie said.
“Escape?” Pearl repeated.
“I don’t like Newport. Not one bit.”
Pearl nodded sympathetically. “My mother doesn’t like China very much,” she said. “But honestly, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Wang Amah followed them out to the porch. Maisie saw that it wasn’t a front porch as it had seemed last night, but instead wrapped around the little house. From it, they could indeed see the Yangtze River with its junks and sampans moving along it. A fine mist hung over the river and the hills. Everyone settled into rattan chairs that faced the river.
“What are those sticks coming out of the river?” Felix asked.
“That’s bamboo,” Pearl said.
On a hill in the distance they could just make out the outline of a slender building with a gently sloping, pointed roof.
“What’s that building?” Maisie said, pointing to it.
“That’s a pagoda,” Pearl said.
Maisie nodded happily. A pagoda. She’d heard the word before, of course. But now here she was, sitting in China and looking at a real one on a hill above the Yangtze River. A shiver of excitement ran through her.
Wang Amah began to speak in Chinese.
“She says that there’s a dragon in that pagoda,” Pearl translated. “He’s kept underneath it. If he gets free, he’ll flood the river and drown us all.”
“A dragon?” Felix said.
“There aren’t any dragons,” Maisie said dismissively.
“Wang Amah believes these stories,” Pearl said.
With her long, blond hair and bright-blue eyes, Maisie would have thought Pearl seemed out of place here. Yet she was obviously so connected to China and her home that Pearl Sydenstricker seemed as Chinese as Wang Amah and Precious Cloud did.
“According to Chinese beliefs,” Pearl explained, “there are storm dragons and sea dragons and all kinds of demons and spirits. They live all around us. In the clouds and the trees. Even in the rocks.”
“That’s—” Maisie began.
“Romantic,” Felix interrupted. He loved stories of all kinds. And he didn’t want his sister to be rude.
Wang Amah began to talk again, Pearl nodding as she listened.
“She’s telling us about daggers that are magical,” Pearl said when the old woman had finished. “A man can make them very small and hide them in his ear or in the corner of his eye. But if a demon attacks him, he can take the dagger out, and it will grow large and fast and sharp enough to slay it.”
Pearl sighed contentedly. Obviously she loved the myths that Wang Amah told her.
“I don’t care for fairy tales,” Maisie said.
“I like them,” Felix said. He looked ou
t at the mist. It was easy to imagine dragons and spirits out there among the bamboo and green hills.
Pearl leaned toward Maisie. “Wang Amah’s real life is even more exciting than her fairy tales.”
She spoke in rapid Chinese to Wang Amah, who smiled her toothless smile and began once again to talk. This time Pearl didn’t wait for her to finish the whole story. Instead, she translated as the old woman spoke, their two voices creating a harmony of words.
“I was once very beautiful. My skin was not always brown and wrinkled like it is now. Rather, it was as white as the clouds. And my hair was as black as the night. I wore it in one long, thick braid that fell down my back to my knees. This was in Yangzhou, far from here. My father was prosperous, and he married me off when I was very young to protect me from the soldiers who preyed on young women.”
Wang Amah sighed. “That is how lovely I was.”
She paused as if remembering, and then began again.
“But then came the rebellion that swept China. They say millions were killed. Maybe as many as ten or twenty million. This I don’t know for certain. But I do know that everyone I loved died then. Mother. Father. Husband. I only survived because I hid in a well. When I emerged, our pagoda was on fire with all the monks trapped inside.”
“You mean they all burned to death?” Felix said in horror.
Pearl sighed. “Wang Amah’s life could be a novel, don’t you think?”
Glancing at the old woman’s feet, Maisie whispered, “What happened to her feet?” She imagined the soldiers slicing them with bayonets or Wang Amah running into that burning pagoda to save the monks.
“They’re bound, of course,” Pearl said, surprised.
“Like, tied up?” Felix asked. Even though he didn’t like to look at those tiny feet inside the small, cloth shoes, he peeked at them.
“No, no,” Pearl said, shaking her head. “The Chinese bind their daughters’ feet when they’re very young. Wang Amah was only three when her parents did hers.”
“But why did they do that?” Maisie asked. Unlike Felix, she couldn’t stop looking at those tiny feet.
“The goal is to stop the feet from growing,” Pearl explained. “At first, they break the four small toes and force them under the sole. That’s to make them narrow and shorter. Then they wrap them in bandages really, really tightly, and every day they tighten them even more. The whole thing takes about two years.”
Felix looked at Wang Amah’s kind, old face and thought about all she had endured.
“But why do they do it?” Maisie asked again.
“I’ve heard several stories,” Pearl said. “But I like the one that says it began so that women could walk like Princess Yao Niang. It’s said that she walked so gracefully it was as if she skimmed over the top of golden lilies. Every woman in China wanted to be a lily-footed woman.”
“I think it’s barbaric!” Felix blurted.
But Pearl just shrugged. “It’s the custom here. My friends’ mothers do it to them.”
“It sounds terrible,” Maisie said. “Painful.”
“Amah says that her parents made her sleep alone in the outhouse so they wouldn’t have to hear her cries of pain all night.”
Pearl brightened. “Do you want to see them?”
“No!” Felix said, just as Maisie said, “Yes!”
Amah and Pearl spoke in Chinese for several minutes. Then the old woman bent and removed her small shoes and white stockings.
As she began to unwrap the bandages, Felix got up, panicked. “I don’t want to see deformed feet,” he said.
“In China,” Pearl said gently, putting a hand on his arm, “they are considered beautiful. And Amah’s, at only three inches long, are the ideal golden lilies.”
“There are so many bandages,” Maisie said, watching Amah unroll them.
“She has to wear them all the time, even when she sleeps,” Pearl explained.
Finally, the last of the bandages came off, and Wang Amah lifted her tiny foot for them to see.
Felix pretended to look, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of the deformed lump, he averted his gaze. Maisie, however, gawked. The skin was black and purple, and the foot itself had been reduced to just the big toe. But on closer inspection, she saw that the other four toes were indeed fused below the arch.
“Xie xie.” Pearl softly thanked Amah.
The old woman slowly began the process of putting the bandages back on. As she did, she said something to Pearl.
“Amah says every pair of small feet costs a bath of tears,” Pearl translated.
Wang Amah spoke again to Pearl.
“She wants to take us to Horse Street,” Pearl told Maisie and Felix. “Where I met you yesterday,” she added.
“Is it okay with your mother?” Felix asked.
“Sure. She needs to stay here and take care of Grace,” Pearl said. “Do you want to go to Horse Street then?”
“All right,” Maisie said eagerly.
With each passing hour, Maisie became more and more enchanted by China, with its bamboo rising from the river in the mist, the storybook pagoda, and green rice paddies. She loved the smells in the air, the gardenias and roses mixing with spices from the kitchen. She even loved Wang Amah’s stories, with their soldiers and burning monks and foot bindings.
Felix recognized the look that had spread over his sister’s face. Once again, she would want to stay in the past instead of going home to Newport and their mother. This happened every time. The simple life on Clara Barton’s farm and the return with Alexander Hamilton to New York—even the New York of the eighteenth century—appealed to her much more than their own new life. Certain that they would give the jade box to Pearl and the time would come for them to leave, he could already foresee the arguments they would have when Maisie refused to try to get back. Felix sighed.
“Are you all right?” Pearl asked him.
“He’s fine,” Maisie said knowingly.
Pearl threw her arm around Felix’s shoulder. “Just wait,” she said. “Amah always buys the candy Mother forbids me from having. You’ll love it.”
Once again, Felix tried to meet Maisie’s eyes. And once again, Maisie ignored him completely.
Telling stories marked the days with Pearl. Wang Amah, Mrs. Sydenstricker, and even Pearl herself were all masterful storytellers. Maisie and Felix loved to sit out on the veranda in the morning and hear their stories about life in China and Chinese legends and myths. At night, Felix wrote down the stories he’d heard to take back to Lily Goldberg, who so desperately longed for information about her culture.
They spent a lot of time in the kitchen, too, where Chushi, the cook, fed them salted fish, pickled vegetables, tofu, and—to Felix’s surprise, his favorite—the crunchy rice from the bottom of the pan. Never before had he liked anything crunchy, but this rice changed his mind about crunchy food. Chushi told them stories, too. He loved to read, and every day he would act out parts he’d read the night before from Chinese novels. Tall, with a thin, long face and graceful hands, he imitated birds flying and oceans rolling.
Pearl translated, and Maisie and Felix sat, transfixed, eating and listening.
The story Pearl asked Chushi to tell again and again was “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” a kind of Chinese Romeo and Juliet story about star-crossed lovers from warring tribes.
“Ah,” Chushi always said, shaking his head, “you are a romantic, Zhenzhu.”
In the afternoon, the children often went to Horse Street. Wang Amah gave Maisie a hat like Pearl’s and tucked her mop of hair beneath it, muttering in Chinese as she did.
“Don’t eat that candy,” Pearl’s mother always ordered as they left the house.
Mrs. Sydenstricker seemed to have an unusually strong obsession with germs. Every day she washed the walls and floors of the house with a strong-smelling chemical. She fretted over Pearl and baby Grace, feeling their foreheads for fevers, listening to their chests, and watching them closely as if they might disapp
ear.
One day as they ate the forbidden candy from its paper cones, Maisie asked Pearl why her mother didn’t want her to eat it. The candy was just crystallized sugar, like the rock candy Maisie and Felix liked to get at the little candy store in Cape May when their family went on vacation.
“She thinks it’s dirty,” Pearl said with a shrug.
Felix forced himself to swallow what was already in his mouth.
“Dirty?” he asked.
“She thinks everything in China is dirty,” Pearl said sadly. “My father doesn’t. If he were home more, I wouldn’t have to sneak like this.”
So far, Felix and Maisie hadn’t even met Pearl’s father. He was too busy trying to convert people up north to bother coming home for a visit.
“She worries about you a lot,” Felix said.
Pearl hesitated before she answered. “My father says we’ve had a cup full of sorrow. My sisters Maude and Edith and my brother Arthur, all of them older than me, went away too soon.”
When she saw the puzzled looks on Maisie’s and Felix’s faces, she added, “They died.”
“Died!” Maisie said, shocked.
“As did my brother Clyde,” Pearl said sadly.
“But how?” Maisie managed to ask.
“Mother blames China. The summer heat, the lack of hospitals.”
Felix blinked back tears. Four children? All dead? No wonder Pearl’s mother was such a worrier. For the first time since they’d arrived in China last week, when Felix looked at Maisie, she returned his glance.
“You can’t die from the heat, though, can you?” Felix said. As a worrier himself, and a bit of a hypochondriac, the idea that heat could actually kill you started a panic in his chest.
“Well,” Pearl said. “They died from diseases.”
Felix swallowed hard. The taste of the candy had turned sour in his mouth.
“Diphtheria, cholera, malaria…”
To Maisie, these sounded like diseases from novels, terrible but unreal.
Felix wondered if his vaccinations would hold up here. Every year when their mother took them to the pediatrician, there always seemed to be another booster shot waiting. Were any of them for cholera?