by Gus Lee
Edna still held up the necklace, as if it were a noose. “There are two conditions, young lady. One, you must stay with this woman for two years. After that, I don’t care what you do, so long as you obey the second: never call or write to your father or your brother ever again. There is to be no contact whatsoever, do you understand? Henceforth, you are no longer a member of this family.”
I couldn’t see Janie’s expression, because she was seated too far away from me. But she argued. Then she said, “Father knows. He knows I wouldn’t steal. I’ve been the best girl! I did all the work here! My father will stop you!”
But for months after my sister’s departure, I knew what Janie didn’t know. Our father could not help. He would later say, in a household devoid of daughters, that the American woman knew all the answers and that a Chinese man could not know the rules of this new nation. Yes, it was so sad, so hard. But mai yo ban fa? What can a person do?
I told Uncle Shim that I used to stand on a wooden crate in the bathroom, telling this story of my sister’s banishment, this horror story of wupo, witches, to the mirror. That I told the story to myself and to the spirit of the mirror to keep Janie alive, until Edna caught me and the storytelling had ended and I had to lose my sister again.
I breathed into the phone, my chest banded with weights. My father had not laughed for a decade. He had given up a daughter to the fates, and the laughter god had taken his mirth.
“Ah, ah. This is so strange, Hausheng. I wish we were in Shanghai, swimming in its busy streets in a double-benched pedicab, eating salted fish and arguing about books. We could pretend our families are still strong and united. Your mother still alive, the Little Tail still a tiny girl with a strong musical voice … my wife, waiting for me on the docks of the Whangpu. So, I called to give you news. Instead, you give me news.
“You know, your mother believed in yeh, in Buddhist karma. I do not, at least, very little. We used to argue about this. Do you remember? We used to argue about everything.”
“No,” I said.
“You remember the calligraphy lessons,” he said.
“Vaguely,” I said.
“You of course remember the Sheng yu, the Sacred Edicts of Master K’ung.…”
“I learned them from you, right?”
“Ai-yaa! Of course you learned them from me. Do you think your father taught you the Edicts? How is this possible? You were not in the boh-la, the Run. You did not see war and invasion and revolution. You were not a young witness to death and bombing. Why is your memory as bad as little Janie’s?”
“I don’t know. I actually have a pretty good memory. I don’t think anyone can remember anything before the age of seven, anyway. I mean, maybe the geniuses …”
“See here, this is not true. Everyone remembers those years. Unless they have been in war. Ah!” he exclaimed. “Your mother died. Your memory died with her, as tribute, to honor her life. You and your mother lived in the Chinese language, and now you have lost the language of her memory. It is so clear. Sometimes I think I have the brains of an ox, not thinking at all. I am so sorry. It is time to tell you the tremendous news.”
I had wanted to hear, but was now afraid to listen.
The American jing ji taboos: No talking about the first Mrs. Ting, who had been known to the Chinatown community as Ting taitai, and to my father as Honey, and to me as Mah-mee. No talking about the evil and defiantly double-bad girl who had been my sister. Each of these people had disappeared from my life in the space of a single day, a year apart, without any bidding farewell, any grieving, any rituals of remembrance.
I remembered trying to do this as a child, trying to call up the memory of our family’s females. When I was very young, I could remember my mother and my sister. Later, the little stitchings in the mind that connected me to them broke, and I had trouble recalling their faces, voices, and habits. Because Edna’s voice had been so angry when she attacked the spirits of these two people, I began to develop a throbbing cerebral pain whenever I thought of them on my own. In time, it was as if my fading recollections of the two people who had been closest to my small life were the products of fairy tales and of fable, not of fact; of wishful thinking, and not of life; of pain, and not of love.
“Hausheng, your sister, the Little Tail, Janie Ming-li. I have found her. She has been living in Canada. She is ready to be greeted by you, and to renew your relationship.
“But,” he said slowly, “she is different. She has changed her name. Both names. She is not Janie anymore.” He cleared his throat. “Her new name is Lisa. She also wears the family name Mar, after your mother. She seeks to change her yuing chi, her fortune.
“I asked her if she missed you, her syau didi, her baby brother. She said, ‘I have no brother.’ That is the bad news.”
I felt a great pressure behind my eyes. Janie. With surprising clarity I saw her in the old kitchen, pots and pans arrayed on the countertops while she made dinner for Father and me, preparing breakfast, packing lunches. I saw the tip of her tongue, hinting of her effort to run the house. She was putting her hair into a ponytail, proud of her prettiness. She sat on the lawn of Brooks Mortuary while I picked daisies for her. She held my hand so tight as we crossed the street against busy motor traffic, and gave crayons for coloring books about the Lord Jesus. She was on a picnic blanket in Golden Gate Park, apple juice streaming down her face and in her hair, thrown there by Edna for some transgression.
I saw her sitting at the dinner table, holding the envelope with her fate within it. Janie blinked and was looking at our father’s chair, which was empty.
My sister, who had become, after our mother’s death, my mother. Who had been transformed by our new stepmother into a nonperson, relinquished and forgotten, returned to a bland and nameless inventory of Chinese ghosts and abandoned spirits, to whom I could neither pray nor honor, or later, remember. I remembered Pearl’s choice: Chinese daughter or American woman. To honor a Chinese father or to be k’ung ’hsu, abandoned.
Now she had returned, without lun, ties. But she was my sister. When she had been an adolescent, caring for me, standing up for me, she had been pushed out, and I had forgotten her.
“I’m glad that was the bad news,” I said. “I don’t think I could’ve handled it if that was the good part.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are quite American, trying to laugh at the destruction of your family. Please, as a favor to an old man, an old man who is fond of you, do not inflict lightheart-edness on me when we are speaking like honorable men to each other, about our purpose of life. About family.
“It is one thing to endure pain. It is another to laugh at yourself because your head has been chopped off.”
25
JANIE
New South Barracks Sinks, November 10, 1966
“May I speak to Lisa Mar? This is Kai Ting, her brother.”
A short intake of breath, somehow familiar. “Hello,” she said. A precise voice. Neither cheerful nor sad—neutral. Cold, evanescent gray fog in a San Francisco summer morning.
“Janie—is it you?” I asked.
“I don’t use that name,” she said. “My name is Lisa Mar.”
“Can I call you Janie?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Ah-huh,” I said, making the automatic Chinese sound. “Can’t believe I’m talking to you. How are you?”
“Fine,” she said.
“I mean, really, how are you?” I pressed.
“Good.”
“Man, it seems—seems like, like it’s been forever,” I said.
“Eleven years,” she said.
“You’re twenty-seven, right? What do you do for work?”
“I work in a lab. I’m engaged. You’re at West Point?”
“Janie—Lisa—can you visit me at the Academy?”
“I am not related to you.”
“Of course you are. Can you visit me?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s nice to hear your voice. Yo
u must be—very healthy, to be at West Point. Do you still have asthma?”
“No. Well, actually, yes, I just got it again. Not as bad.”
“Is Silly Dilly still alive?” she asked, in a very small voice.
Silence. “Janie. Can you visit me?”
“Did she have a good life?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I have to go,” she said, slowly, mechanically. It seemed her voice, in my ear, was a ghost’s, slipping away from me.
“When’s the best time for me to call you, when you can talk?” I rushed the words, frantic to keep her with me.
“Goodbye,” she said. She hung up.
Quebec City is not only in a different country; it is in a different nation than the one in which it is located. Quebec seemed to be a pinch of France swimming in a hybrid English potpie. The traffic signs said “Arrêt.” I imagined I was in Paris: pretty women, artistic fountains, clustered streets and broad boulevards, warm air, bright lights, and Citroëns. I headed for the student hostel, detouring to check the Citadelle, where Wolfe and Montcalm had fought on the Plains of Abraham. Everyone spoke French. I could not miss my hotel: it was once the Petite Bastille, which was as petite as the Pentagon and as Bastille as San Quentin. It looked like a fort that had been under siege for a century and was ready to capitulate. It overlooked the massively elegant Château Frontenac and the deep blue Fleuve Saint-Laurent.
I entered, grimaced with the gouge of two dollars American, and saw I was out of uniform: everyone looked like Jean Valjean on the run, with hair that must have taken years to grow. I was in my Rogers Peet navy Academy blazer and gray trousers, with an Academy tie. “Dig the threads,” came a mutter. I entered the dim prison, caught in a relentless cross fire of hostile stares mitigated by mean-hearted chuckles. Loud rock from competing stations seeped from under closed doors and through walls and floors, filled the spiral staircase, and boomed in latrines that housed people and dorm areas that had been used for waste. The station playing the Rolling Stones was beating the competition.
I smelled Indian incense, exotic oils, old wine, warm beer, stale vomit, a nation of armpits, scented candles, and cigarettes, and something I hadn’t whiffed since early youth: marijuana. Then it hit me. This wasn’t filth; it was the new age—Aquarius.
I found my floor and my bay. A cluster milled about as the Who sang “I hope I die before I get old.…” Eerie shadows from old, forgotten, half-gutted chandeliers and wall sconces played on walls rich with French slogans and black-light posters, creating a fixating effect with a poster depicting forms of intercourse.
A guy looked up and pointed at a bunk. “That’s free. Has crabs or somethin’. Keep your shit off my crib.”
“Right,” I said. The bunk had an active growth: greenish with a tinge of blue, and floating oil bubbles.
“Detroit,” he added.
“New York,” I said.
“You Army?” he asked.
“Got any money, man?” asked another.
“Sleep on yo’ wallet an yo’ shoes,” said Detroit.
“I said, you got any money?”
I turned to the interrogator. “Got any for me?”
The guy cackled. He wore an Army field jacket with a PFC stripe and the unit patch and name tag removed. “Fuck you, asshole,” he said to me. “Don’t give me that DI look.”
I looked at him, and he cursed and bounded up, grabbed a backpack, and sprinted out, his hair flying. Reflexively, I started after him, and stopped as the crowd surrounded me. He was a deserter in Canada. This was his country, not mine.
“Who the hell are you?” asked an Asian guy in my face.
“Kai Ting,” I said.
“Shit,” he said, “look like a narc.”
“He’s a narc?” screamed several guys, some hiding things as others began to move. Two more fled.
“Hey, tune in, dude. You in the Army, right?” asked Detroit.
Another group gathered gear, and a person walked out briskly. Adult musical chairs. Hate beamed at me from cold and angry eyes. I was getting tired of standing out, of being picked on. The group’s malevolence was multiplying.
“Fuck you, you asshole!” shouted a guy displaying a rusted jackknife as if it were a cavalry saber. “What you doin’—screwin’ with us? Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m the baddest sonovabitch you’ll see this year,” I said, “and you got me confused with someone who gives a rat’s ass about anyone. I have no business with you.” I held up the two fingers that used to mean victory. “Peace,” I said. “Or, not. Your choice.”
Janie agreed to meet me at Le Cordon Berthelot on rue de Jardin. It was filled with hip-huggers, beads, headbands, bell-bottom trousers, bright, half-open paisley shirts, and white hats. I ordered an Oly.
“Quoi?” said the bartender.
“Have any Western American beer?” I asked.
He gave me a Schlitz. “This is from Milwaukee,” I said.
“Milwaukee is west, m’sieu,” he said.
Janie and I had lived together and now I couldn’t remember what she looked like. I was nervous, skittish, like the big, simple horses that we rode on the J. P. Morgan ranch on the edge of the Academy.
I thought of Toussaint and Jack, Mike, Arch, Bob Lorbus, and Clint. Cool, confident guys. Hang in. Be calm like Pearl Yee. Lucky to be here on leave. You’re happy to see her. You’re lucky Major Noll and SGM Klazewski gave you emergency leave from the Academy.
She was in a yellow suit and matching yellow headband. I jumped up. “Hi,” I said. Impulsively, I kissed her on the cheek. I realized that this was the first time I had ever kissed one of my sisters.
She leaned away from me stiffly. “Oh,” she said.
“You look really good. Beautiful.” I beamed at her. “It’s great, just great, to see you.”
Her mouth was open. Then she smiled for an instant, dimples deepening. I remembered them. We studied each other, searching for clues of the children we had been, the siblings we had lost. She didn’t look the least bit like me: a small, delicate nose, common to the three sisters; high, pronounced cheekbones; large eyes; dark, elegant eyebrows; thick, dark black hair, more than halfway down her back. She was about five feet tall.
She patted me on my arm—the old signal to move on. (“Kwala, kwala. Time to go. Put down the toy—come, come.” Pat, pat.)
“I picked this place,” I said, “for the moo shu pork.” I grinned; she smiled wanly as we sat. We ordered. With flair, I ordered a French rosé. “Goes with anything,” I bragged.
“You’re just huge,” she said, studying me.
“I’m a lot bigger than when you last saw me.”
“No, really. You’re huge. How did you get so big? Do you take vitamins, or are you on a special diet? You’re built like the black men in our old neighborhood in San Francisco.”
“I eat anything that isn’t alive. A girl I know calls me the adorable glutton. One out of two’s not bad.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“ ‘Adorable’ and ‘glutton.’ I like the ‘adorable’ part.”
“You’re trying to be funny,” she said.
I showed my teeth.
“So Edna let you stay at the YMCA and lift weights.”
“You know, when I was little, I wanted to be with her and she had nothing to do with me. When I became a teenager and wanted freedom, she nailed my foot to the floor.”
“She did?” she asked in horror.
“Figuratively,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
“Janie. Where have you been? Where’d she send you?”
“Edmonton, Alberta. A Christian foster home. I was the oldest of seven, a mother again to smaller kids. Two of us were Chinese, one was Filipino, one was English, one was black, and two were Canadian Indian. It was the Stonehocker family.”
“Were they good to you?” I asked.
“They were very nice.” She looked around the dining room. “Actually,” she said, “
they were wonderful.” She sighed. “Two years later, Jennifer found me, and I joined her in Minneapolis.”
“That’s super! Jennifer! I would’ve loved that.”
“But I didn’t have Dad,” she said. “Or you. None of my friends. It wasn’t easy for Jennifer to raise me. No money.”
“Yeah, but getting away from Edna …”
“I didn’t want to get away from Edna. I wanted to get her out of our home, away from Daddy—from K.F. And you. Kai, we could do that now. You’re big enough to do it.”
I shook my head. “Bad idea. Why do you call him K.F.?”
“It’s his name. He’s not my father.”
“Whatever happened, he’s still our father,” I said.
“I am not his daughter. He’s not my father. He gave me up. He’s your father.”
Silence. “How long were you with Jennifer?” I asked.
“Until 1957,” she said. “You don’t know any of this?”
I shook my head.
“I went to Cal. I called Dad. He and Edna visited me for tea, at International House. They said you were fine. I wanted to see you. Megan said they didn’t even let you visit her, but she saw you when she visited. She said that you didn’t talk too much.”
I looked at her: so grown, adult, and remote. She was a stranger. My sisters, strangers—as I was to them.
“We’re not much of a family, are we?” I said.
She laughed bitterly. “You just figured that out?” It was our father’s laugh, the sound of joy offered to the gods of woe, a laugh without a smile—the laugh of Chinese tragedy.
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s because you followed Edna’s orders.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“You’re twenty years old and just realized ‘we’re not much of a family’? Wake up. You’re thinking like her now.”
“DON’T COMPARE ME TO HER!” I cried, blinking with the volume of my voice. This wasn’t shouting commands; I was yelling. “Sorry,” I said, breathing fast. Everyone was staring and someone was wiping up a spilled drink.
I asked about her fiancé.