Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  She reaches into her pants pocket and brings out a fold of whisper-thin paper. It is beginning to tear at the creases: Your telegram.

  He takes it from her and expects that the words have changed, reconfigured themselves into a call for her to come to America, to risk her life at the hands of a smuggler who packs bodies like cargo for a profit. But the words are the same as the ones he sent across the ocean, though blurred by the oils that creep off fingers. Stay there, wait for me.

  Stay there, wait for me, she says, echoing his thoughts.

  You disobeyed me, he says, because how can she understand what he gave of himself to give to her? She knows only of the seed money—begged and collected from relatives, taken even from the red envelope money they had received at their wedding. If his father had been alive, he could have found a sponsor. Instead he left against the scorn of his brothers and the shame of his mother. Ming Wai has no idea about his life after becoming a paper son. About his transformation from Fong Man Gum to Richard Fong. In his letters home, he alluded to success, and made no mention of his days toiling away on ranches, working his body like he never had before. He wasn’t made for that world—of labor and sun and sweat streaked with soil. The dollar-a-day for split thumbs and itchy pesticide spots on his skin; for the fertilizing, pruning, picking, digging, packing, lifting, and cleaning. All for a suit and some money so he could go with a humble face and broken english to a whiteman and beg for business faith. It will be six more years before he fully owns the gambling hall—even then he can never own the land beneath it.

  I’m your wife. You never should have left me. She has become a woman, Richard realizes by the flash in her voice. When he left, she was only eighteen and answered every question with a timid yes or no.

  I had no choice. He changes tone. I was working for you, to support you.

  The merchants can bring their wives. Li Yin told me. You should have sent for me.

  Richard pours water over tea leaves in two cups. The dark green leaves bloom in the water and heat, unfurl like opening hands. He puts the cup before her. When the law had been enacted four years before, a man had committed suicide in front of the American embassy in Japan in protest. For men like Richard, already in America but ineligible for citizenship, it meant no possibility for the immigration of his wife: condemnation to a return or a double life, a family on two shores, or eternal bachelorhood.

  I don’t own a grocery store, he says. Her hands, which have leaped for the hot cup, withdraw and she looks up, all around, because (Richard knows she’s thinking) she sees that he has failed.

  But, he wonders, what about the icebox, the gas stove, electric lights? Water that comes hot from the faucet?

  I manage a gambling hall. There are very few wives here. It’ll be difficult for you.

  I’m not a child and I’m not a whore. There’s no work for women here?

  You can pack fruit. And there are other things too, I suppose.

  I’m not leaving, she says. She sips at the tea, sucking up the liquid between her teeth loudly. Richard looks again at the telegram. It is translucent with spots of oil. She has carried his words across the ocean with her. It has made two trips—one from him to her; another back to him through her. She has arrived with no luggage, mysteriously, and battered. Shipwrecked, or abandoned at the mouth of the Delta waters, but she carried his letter.

  She flings the cup at the cabinets. Tea splatters across the wood, a broken wave, and the cup shatters like burst gunpowder.

  But it is Richard who begins to cry after the initial startle. She won’t look at him. He leaves his chair and kneels in front of her. He opens his mouth and takes in the air that comes from her. She is his wife and he wants it all—the dirt and the odor and the sounds. Her body offended and stiff. He kisses her knees, where the cloth is waxy from weeks of being unwashed, rolls up the legs of her pants, and takes her right foot into his palm.

  He begins to catch his breath. He wants to vomit; he wants her to stay. He slips off her split shoes, untucks the end of her cotton binding, and begins to unravel. He frees the toes that press into her arch. He releases the scent of sloughed-off skin—flesh wet with rot from its own humidity. He tips his head and concentrates on the task with lost face. He leaves ten feet of soiled cotton binding in a loose pile beside him, then massages Ming Wai’s feet, gently, working blood into her famished limbs. Despite the pain, she is silent.

  4

  The Sole-Maker’s Son (1908)

  FONG MAN GUM was enthralled with Lau Sing Yan’s tales. Lau Sing Yan had just returned from America—five years abroad. The lot of them gathered at a teahouse to hear his stories. They drank wine and ate and raised their voices to be heard over the din in the place. Now twenty-four and swaggering his adulthood around the younger boys, Lau Sing Yan spat crab shell on the table, and threw emptied clamshells onto the floor by his feet. He finished cup after cup of liquor. Fong Man Gum watched between bites of fish and rice. Lau Sing Yan’s face was clean and rosy and impudent, but his nails were dirty.

  When it’s day here, is it really night there? Siu Baak asked.

  Yes. The world is upside down. If you dig deep enough, you’ll pop your head up in New York. Lau Sing Yan laughed, nibbled on some fish.

  So in America, now it’s night?

  Yes.

  Siu Baak repeated this to Fong Man Gum, though Fong Man Gum had heard every word.

  What’s America like? another boy asked.

  They fear us there, though they’ll work us hard. You’ll meet all kinds of men. The Irish are the worst of all.

  The streets are made of gold? everyone leaned forward for the answer. Fong Man Gum snickered, but leaned forward also.

  Lau Sing Yan laughed. He sucked down two clams before answering with flecks of food on his tongue. No, they’re made of stones, like here. The houses are ugly, but inside is furniture made of silk, beds full of feathers.

  Fong Man Gum watched two men take a table. They rapped on it. A woman came up to serve tea. one of the men lit a cigarette. He held the cigarette with one hand and, with the other, stroked the back of her thigh. She said nothing. Fong Man Gum cringed at her badly bound feet.

  And what about the women? he asked.

  The women are easier. You can even marry a whitewoman in some places.

  But are they beautiful? someone across the table said.

  Not often enough. Spotted skin, big noses. Lau Sing Yan motioned a large nose with his hand.

  Okay for a night, if you keep your eyes closed, right?

  Everyone smiled, and Lau Sing Yan answered, exactly.

  Siu Baak, in his nervous, breathless way, asked, So, when it is winter here, it’s summer there?

  In San Francisco, it is nearly always spring. Lau Sing Yan held out his cup. Siu Baak poured more wine from the clay jug.

  May you dry your cup, Lau Sing Yan toasted. Fong Man Gum gulped down the strong wine. It was dry and hot and bitter. He felt it all the way down. His head went dizzy a moment later. He tipped his face up, stared at the exposed beams, then squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to erase the taste on his tongue.

  The men ate again with a clatter of chopsticks hitting the bowls. Heads tipped in, occasional turns to the side to spit bones and inedible bits on the floor.

  Fong Man Gum worked some phlegm up and hocked it onto the floor.

  Wine too much for you? Lau Sing Yan asked.

  No. You’re not the only one who’s gotten older, Fong Man Gum said. What do you do with your queue?

  Put it up in a hat. It’s a good fashion. Cooler on the neck. More wine?

  Fong Man Gum shook his head. He glanced at the two men, now joking with the woman as she provided a light for their pipes. She smiled, very quickly, then looked serious again. The girl Fong Man Gum was to marry was still eight years old—ten years younger than he was. He’d gotten some fumbling experience from other girls his age, but nothing that would give him the cockiness of Lau Sing Yan.

  Lau Sing Yan held ou
t two strings of cash and called for more wine.

  So you have come back rich, Fong Man Gum said, flicking at the strings so that they swung off Lau Sing Yan’s fingers.

  Richer than you’d ever imagine.

  Richer than my father?

  With the world hot and wavy, such challenges of ego seemed funny to Fong Man Gum. He smiled. He glanced around the table. Most were still eating, chatting to each other, but Siu Baak watched anxiously.

  Lau Sing Yan stiffened. Not yet. But I will be. He turned abruptly, calling out again for more wine.

  Fong Man Gum smirked at the table. His father manufactured rubber soles, sold to America to be made into complete shoes of many styles. He’d built a big house, had a dozen servants. So you can work for the West there or here. either way, you get rich. I’ll certainly drink to that. He tipped his cup for the few drops that rolled down.

  While it’s true that one can make a fortune here, your father’s house is a hovel compared to the homes there. This is what I’ll drink to. Lau Sing Yan took the new jug of wine and poured so quickly that it sloshed over the edges. He stood up, held out his cup to Fong Man Gum in a gesture of respect. I drink to Fong Man Gum, who declares that he’ll build streets of gold for America with his own money and his own hands. The whole teahouse laughed and drank. Fong Man Gum rolled his empty cup in his hand. He glared over the table, and at the women at the edges of the room who giggled with hands over their mouths. Whores. And Lau Sing Yan with his silky queue and his well-fed body, stuffed full of American food and washed with American soaps and water—he was just some two-bit laborer posturing as aristocracy, hiding his callused hands with careful gestures.

  Fong Man Gum stood. The teahouse shifted down to murmurs. I appreciate your toast; unfortunately, it’s late. As he walked away, the room burst into noise.

  ON HIS WAY home, Fong Man Gum passed a small pagoda-shaped gambling parlor situated between the facing courtyards of two homes. The parlor called forth its song of glass and ivory and chairs and people day and night. Mostly male voices, but often a woman’s voice rose in flirtation or bawdy laughter above the rest. A woman sitting on the arm of a chair, skirt hitched up her thigh, holding smokes and a drink for her man. She was tough, and she had the scars to prove it. The gnarled ear, where a lover, drunk and angry, slammed a chair against her head, rendering her forever half deaf; the chipped tooth; the callused hands.

  He twisted his hands and paced by.

  He walked into an alley that ran between two stores. Behind the apothecary shop to his right was a dark hut filled with cackling hens. Hot, feathered bodies pressed against the fenced entrance. The smell of shit and feathers and broken eggs gone rancid in the heat arose. He held his breath. He headed away from home as he thought about the prospect of America. It seemed everyone had a cousin who’d gone over to labor. Half had come back. Most men went with no illusions about gold mountains or milk and honey. Hard work was hard work, but over there, your hour, your life, was worth more in paper and coins. Half of what Lau Sing Yan said was a lie—he could sense that. However, all that wealth. More than his father had. This was what intrigued him. But his role was to take over the factory. It was for the younger brother, not the oldest, to set off for the United States.

  He continued on a dirt path that bordered watery fields until he reached an incline littered with a collection of buildings. They huddled, brushing crumbled shoulders. Ruts marked the paths winding among them, some so deep they still held water from the last rain. He passed a pigsty roofed with dark rubber marked with the imprint of soles. Scraps from his father’s factory. The wealth trickled down through the village—discards used as building and farming materials, markers of property division, roofing, pond floaters. everyone was a serf to his father, including himself. Against the side of one home: piles of soles and scraps. Chickens rooted among them. He stamped his feet at them; they clucked and fluttered and settled again. Chickens didn’t clutter the streets of America.

  He wound his way back home. The warmth of a lantern still burned inside some places. His father’s courtyard was large. Small maples grew in the corners. He swung open the door to the cool, european-style home. Two stories, many wide windows. His hand glided up the banister as he headed to his room. All the signs of modernization, but he knew that his father’s tiled atrium, the stereoscope, the telephone, the Bible, were just Western surfaces. He wanted to remake himself all the way to the core.

  5

  OUT OF THE dull, quiet afternoon, a gift. The two women, newly arrived and handed over to a strange whitewoman, give her an even stare. A crowd fans out behind them, a congregation of sweating statues in the post-noon sun. Corlissa feels as she did going from door to door in Chinatown, easing her way in with gifts of food, or even a new icebox, to share the Lord. For the Church, feigning submission, with an undercurrent of authority.

  So can you? Manny asks.

  Howar is not home, but Corlissa has been a preacher’s wife long enough. She puts on her bright middle-class smile. one of the women, her fingernails edged with dirt, pulls at the hem of her salt-stiff shirt. A steadiness radiates from each of them—a conscious not-fixing of the hair, not-rubbing at the cheek in a nervous check for dirt. They smell of pressed earth, flowering fennel rolled between fingertips. Despite the women’s dulled looks, they spark brightness in Corlissa’s bored mind.

  Of course. Come in. Corlissa shuts the door to the wondering crowd.

  . . .

  IN THE ICEBOX there is a fish, a bowl of peas covered with a dishcloth, carrots with dirt-flecked leaves, half a roast caked in cooled grease. Tomatoes in a basket, and pears too. There should be food before bathing, but embarrassment spreads from Corlissa to Manny to the women and soon everyone shifts in response to the odor of humanity so blatantly displayed.

  Corlissa shoots small smiles to the women as she and Manny discuss the living arrangement. There must be an end to the shifting, the thin smiles and exchanged glances of introduction. She tells him that they can sleep in the church. It’s warm enough this time of year, comfortable with a few blankets laid out. Manny clears his throat. Corlissa rises from under the unspoken that causes tears of embarrassment in the women’s eyes.

  Perhaps the last thing they want to do is sit in water, she says, but I can ready a hot bath and get them dresses. Manny nods and translates and Corlissa leads the group down a short hall to the bathroom. Manny looks at the ground, shrugs his shoulder against his cheek, and says, I should be going now. Nothing to say between the three women, they watch him go, then Corlissa turns to the bath.

  When her hand touches the faucet—hot hand to cold metal—she is sharply aware of the wealth implied in the gesture. Water pours forth like jewels. She wants to explain that the enameled, claw-foot tub with brass fixtures is the result of a wedding night promise made sixteen years before. That she had once lived in a two-room apartment in Chinatown with a shared hall bath and that for the first three years, only cold water came from the tap, and the bathwater had to be shared. Instead, she reaches into the stream and tests the temperature.

  Awkward silence as they wait for the tub to fill. She has never seen skin so pale. They are so pale, they seem to vibrate blue, as if the cold of the sea hasn’t left them yet. except for their hands, burnt and chapped. How did they protect their faces? she wonders. Their cheeks are free of any flush at all, sun- or heart-induced. They are not yet ready to smile either. They watch her movements carefully—the stretch of her hand to the faucet, how she wipes her fingertips on her dress. one is still a teenager, nineteen or so, face built so that a smile might transform it from cradle-fresh to fat-cheeked jolly. She clings to the older one, who is bony and tall.

  Manny had said the younger is named Sai Fung and the older So Wai. So Wai, Manny solemnly reported, is looking for her husband, employed somewhere in the Delta. Sai Fung seems to have drifted in on the same intention as many others, propelled by rumor and ignorance and will. etiquette keeps Corlissa from asking all these things
: their names, ages, reasons. Instead, excusing herself in her stilted Chinese, she goes to get some towels. The walls are damp to the touch. The women are so weary they don’t blink an eye at the familiar language coming from the strange mouth.

  SHE TAKES TOWELS from the hall closet, then rummages, with the familiar rattle of mothballs, through her bureau for old dresses. The clothes let up the smell of closed boxes breathing heat and crumpled tissue paper.

  She wants to give them old dresses, but not so old that the women feel they are not worthy of something better. She pulls free a dress with a collar made of lace that has stretched. And here is the one with the buttons that droop down the bodice on thread anchors. The worn cloth and faded print remind her of a day at the beach when Sofia was ten. The day of the fire in the east Bay, when curls of burnt wallpaper floated across the bay and landed on the wet sand, the day Sofia nearly drowned, knocked off a rock by a wave. Sai Fung and So Wai won’t think of the ocean, or the play of fire versus water, but of their first day in Locke.

  Back down the hall. She pushes open the door, excuses herself, and sets the clothes and towels on the lid of the toilet. Their quiet talking stops, but it is the conversation, not the silence, that excludes her. The intimacy of the breaks, the simultaneous intuition toward silence. Sai Fung sits on the side of the tub and smiles.

  I’ll be in the kitchen. If you need me, Corlissa says.

  When she leaves again, she expects the rustle of voices to begin anew, but hears splashing instead.

  AS CORLISSA FOLDS a crust over a vegetable and meat pie, Sofia bursts into the kitchen.

  Who are they? said breathlessly, a braid coming unraveled. She carries a river stink into the room.

  Corlissa wipes her hands and turns toward her daughter. She laces a mass of Sofia’s unkempt reddish brown hair between her fingers and sniffs. You stink, she declares. They’re in the bath, but maybe you should follow them. Where have you been?