Poppy is still blinded—like the green blindness of coming indoors on a sunny day. She turns toward Chloe’s voice. Leaving?
She hears only Chloe breathe for a few moments, then: Yes, I’m leaving.
That’s fine, Poppy says. Better that you leave now.
Chloe thanks her. I’ll write.
Without touching her, Poppy knows this will not happen.
Chloe sighs. Good-bye. Poppy listens to her walk away. every so often, the world reshapes itself in a startling way. In a matter of days, she has lost Richard and Chloe. One she cared for very much, the other not at all. It was balance, the world trying for some logic in its transformation. The front door opens and shuts. Chloe is gone now. It may be months before Poppy finds her place among the new absences and creates a day that makes sense. In the meantime, she clings to the doorway and waits for her vision to return.
CHLOE KNOWS BETTER than to turn around for a last glance. She knows how the lure of nostalgia can hold one back like sheet-draped sofas and dust-streaked floors. But she hears a voice in the kitchen.
Don’t worry, girl, it’s coming. I see the head.
Madam See had crouched before her, lovely and glamorous despite her bloody hands. Chloe feels all her muscles tighten.
Then Richard’s hand on her back, and it’s been so long since anyone has touched her that she wants to cry. You can squeeze my hand, he says. She takes his hand and leans into him.
He whispers in her ear, You’re doing good. You’re very brave. Very good. Very, very good. Such coaxing, and then such pain as the baby’s head finally comes through. She screams, Pull it out! but she wants to see it so badly—something she has made, the very first thing she has for herself. There is rushing all around her: hot water, a knife, twine, Madam See yelling in Chinese. Chloe looks up at the kitchen window, lances of light dancing on it, blurred figures walking past.
Chloe knows what came next. She opens the door and quickly walks through.
She can’t believe Richard is gone, even though she saw his body in the church, hands pale and limp by his sides. But she doesn’t care, she tells herself. She doesn’t care about dead babies, or dead men, or girls who tease with wine on their breath. She spits on the stoop of Madam See’s.
Under the levee-side porch, tangled up in weeds, is a bicycle she has salvaged from the trash heap behind town. The frame is slightly bent, but it rides okay, and the little bell on the handlebar even dings. She props up the bike and ties her bag on top of the torn basket with twine. She has left some things behind in order to have a bundle small enough to carry this way. The bag is askew, but it holds. She pulls two knots, nudges the bag, then rolls the bike carefully out into the alley.
The deaths have quieted the town. No sounds seep through the closed doors of the Ho Yoi Ling Sing or Lucky Fortune.
Lights burn in seemingly empty rooms. The bats are quiet tonight.
She closes herself to the light on the top floor of the building where Richard’s widow lives, to the blue windows of the church, and to the soughing wind in the crab apple trees in Sofia’s yard. Under Sofia’s window, she gathers a few fallen crab apples. She rolls them in one palm. She tosses one against the window.
The light goes on. Sofia appears in the window, hair tied back for sleep, eyes squinting.
Can you come down? Chloe says.
Sofia nods. Sofia will come down, blanket around her shoulders, and Chloe will lure her to the oak with a bottle of rice wine and smokes. When Sofia says, Show me how the boys kiss, this time Chloe will show her. Her bruises have all faded. Chloe will unbutton her shirt, slide it over each shoulder, and everything will be rewritten.
But the questions scare themselves away from Chloe’s mouth. No Why? or Where? or Will you come with? She knows twice over that leaving is better without good-byes. The crab apples fall from her hand in three tiny thuds.
Chloe pushes the bike back across the lawn, between the houses, under the sycamores on Main Street, on the packed-dirt road with delicate steps over the still-lingering sludge puddles. She struggles up the hill past the mechanic’s, where the oil stains shine like rainbows. On the river road, she steps on the pedal, pushes off, and swings her leg over.
The bike wobbles with its load, then steadies.
. . .
WHEN MING WAI leans toward the mirror, a smear of condensation clings to the glass. She wipes it with her sleeve and tries again. She begins and ends her days in awe of her own breathing.
On the first nights after they pulled Richard’s body from the bottom of the river, she gathered his carefully hung clothes onto the bed and slept in the nest made of them. She breathed him in—her nose pressed to linen and cotton and wool and silk—until he was really gone, interred in the ground, no lingering odor left in the house. She wiped his fingerprints from the silverware and chopsticks and glassware. She sucked the bristles of his toothbrush until all she tasted was baking soda and her own spit. She burned paper money and paper houses and paper cars and paper women so that his afterlife would be too decadent to leave. And, once, she cried.
People come to mourn with her. She has lost two friends and a husband. She is too young, they cry, and she nestles herself easily into the role of virtuous widow. The Lucky Fortune gave her money, the stores provided groceries, and somebody else paid for a coffin.
Now she measures out her days with ritual. When she wakes, she yawns so deeply that there is pain in her lungs. If she is hot beneath the blankets, she opens the window and a breeze makes her cool. She watches her skin go from smooth to goose pimpled. She eats until her belly rounds out. She runs Richard’s old toothbrush over her teeth and her gums and spits blood and foam into the sink. She urinates and shits and wonders at what her body uses and creates. Her hair and nails grow and her wounds scab over.
The walk to Richard’s grave is slow on her broken feet and in the heat of an Indian summer. It takes her along the river that now flows smooth and quiet. The turned dirt is still fresh, but small shoots of grass have begun to grow. She thanks him for her tears and saliva and belches. She leaves fruit or meat offerings even though she knows her mouth is better suited for food than his.
She has even started bleeding again. She watches red drops bloom in the toilet water and thinks that maybe someday another life will come out of her own.
Acknowledgments
The citizens of Locke warmly welcomed me to their town in the summer of 2000. For their stories, a special thank-you to Ping Lee and his family, Connie King, everett Leong, Dustin Mar, Lillian Chan, Clarence Chu, and Ronnie. Thank you to John and the Sotos for food, drinks, and conversation. “The King” has kept me connected to the town ever since.
This has been a seven-year journey. My parents, Michael and ellen, and my family (Tina, Annie, and emily) were always supportive. Thanks to Lily Wang, Yosefa Raz, Augustus Rose, Bridget Hoida, and especially Kyhl Lyndgaard and Renee osborne. Spring Warren was an inspiring writing partner. Dan Leroy was my Delta plant resource and guide. Jenny, Jeffrey, and Heather from 626B have been with me since the very beginning. Jia Ching Chen provided love, food, and shelter as I searched for a home for the book.
The U.C. Davis Consortium for Women and Research and the Poon Foundation generously funded the research for this book. Early on, Anne Cheng talked me through the book’s racial/political issues. Clarence Major, Pam Houston, and Wendy Ho provided invaluable intellectual support and feedback. Gary Snyder and the dearly missed Carole Koda kept me well stocked in books on Chinese myths and poetry. My fellow students of the U.C. Davis M.A. class of 2001 helped see me through the original first chapters of the book, and John Lescroart and Lisa Sawyer’s generous endowment of U.C. Davis’s Maurice Prize in fiction came at exactly the right moment for a struggling writer.
Finally, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to the two homes Locke 1928 has had. First, to Thomas Farber, Kit Duane, and Andrea Young at the independent press el Leon Literary Arts, who gave the book its first home in 2007; and then, t
o my agent, Daniel Lazar at Writers House, who believed in and championed the novel, and to Jane Fleming at The Penguin Press, who has given the book a second life. I am forever grateful to you all.
Notes on Research
I would like to credit the following:
The Young Jade story that the boat-women tell to Sofia is a retelling of a version found in The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millennia, translated by Christopher Levenson from Wolfgang Bauer’s and Herbert Franke’s German version of the Chinese (Penguin Books, 1967). The original “Young Jade” is credited to Liu Shih-yin. Other details of Chinese myths were found in Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) by Anne Birrell and Sole Survivor (Design enterprises of San Francisco, 1985) by Ruthanne Lum McCunn. Information on Chinese ideas of death (and connections to sexuality and status) were found in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (University of California Press, 1988), edited by James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski.
Details of life in the Delta were found in Delta Reunion 1999: End of the Century Memory Book, a collection of memories and pictures put together for the 1999 reunion. Carole Koda’s Homegrown (Companion Press, 1996, limited edition) also provided data about growing up in a Valley farming community. Ron and Peggy Miller’s Delta Country (La Siesta Press, 1971) was a source for information about the sloughs and waterways, as well as plant and animal life.
For information about the Chinese in America and the history of exclusion laws, I consulted The Chinese at Home and Abroad. Together with the Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter of that City (A. L. Bancroft, 1885) by Willard B. Farwell; Shirley Fong-Torres’ San Francisco Chinatown: A Walking Tour (China Books and Periodicals, 1991); Pigtails and Gold Dust (Caxton Printers, 1947) by Alexander McLeod; Lotus Among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (University Press of Mississippi, 1982) by Robert Seto Quan with Julian B. Roebuck; and Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era (Temple University Press, 1998) by K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan.
For information on the role of women in the 1920s, I relied on Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (University of California Press, 1999) by Judy Yung; Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls by Ernest A. Bell (various versions by different presses exist; I looked at a 1930 version); Women and the American Experience, Vol. 2, from 1860, 2nd edition ( McGraw-Hill, 1994) by Nancy Woloch; and If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (University of Illinois Press, 1999) by George Anthony Peffer.
For further reading on Locke, see former U.C. Davis professor Peter C. Y. Leung’s One Day, One Dollar: Locke, California and the Chinese Farming Experience in the Sacramento River Delta (The Liberal Arts Press, 1994); the exquisite photo essay by Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow, Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town (Heyday Books, 1987); and fine publications from the Sacramento River
Delta Historical Society: Discovering Walnut Grove and Discovering Locke (1985) by Kathleen Graham and Discover the Dai Loy Gambling Hall Museum (1980) by Jean Harvie.
Finally, with the exception of Lee Bing, George Locke, and Tuffy Leamon, the characters in this book are fictional. Scenes involving historical personages were fictionalized. Any mistakes in creating this milieu are my own.
—S.Y.R.
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