Songs of Willow Frost: A Novel

by Jamie Ford

  WHEN THE BED finally stopped shaking, Uncle Leo groaned and stood up, out of breath. He put on his bathrobe and slippers. “Stay in bed. Don’t get up until sunrise.” He patted her arm and touched her hair as if to make sure she was still there in the dark.

  Liu Song closed her eyes and didn’t move or make a sound.

  As she heard the door close behind him, she lay there, paralyzed, her mind telling herself that it didn’t really happen. Her aching body told her otherwise. Finally she pulled the covers up to her face, then smelled Uncle Leo’s odor and tossed the bedding aside. She rolled to her side, clutching her pillow. She curled her trembling body around it.

  She opened her eyes and saw a waning orb through the curtains, reflecting glittering moonlight around her bedroom, her ceiling, dotting the walls. She looked down and saw that the mirror on her nightstand had tipped over and smashed on the wooden floor. Shiny bits of bad luck lay scattered around her bed as though a tiny shooting star had crashed to Earth, shattering upon impact.

  LIU SONG WOKE up startled, terrified. She felt someone kicking her bed, and she opened her tired eyes as someone slapped her face.

  “Wake up,” a woman’s raspy voice said.

  Liu Song looked around the darkened room. A faint glow of sunlight was coming through the drawn curtains. Maybe it was all a dream—a nightmare, she thought.

  “Ah-ma, is that you?” Liu Song whispered.

  The woman stepped back.

  “Ah-ma?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Leo told me how lazy and disobedient you are. No wonder your mother died. She’d still be alive if you’d taken better care of her. Now get up and clean this mess before you make breakfast.”

  Liu Song sat up slowly, aching. Confused by the portly woman standing in front of her. She wore her dark hair up in a tight bun that barely hid streaks of gray, and her excessive makeup failed to conceal her wrinkles, or her moles and acne scars.

  The woman leaned in so close that Liu Song could smell the tobacco on her breath and see the dark stains on her teeth and swollen gums.

  “Clean yourself up,” the woman said. “And wash the blood off your sheets.”

  Liu Song wrapped the covers around her waist. “Who are you?”

  The woman looked down her nose, proudly.

  “I’m Leo’s first wife—from Canton. Your mother was only second wife.”

  Liu Song struggled to comprehend as the woman held out a thick hand that looked like it belonged to a meat cutter, with stubby, dirty fingernails. She proudly showed off the gold and jade wedding band that had once belonged to Liu Song’s parents.

  “From now on, I’m Big Mother. But you may call me Auntie Eng.”

  Plucked

  (1921)

  Uncle Leo sat at the table as though it were any other morning, practicing his English by reading a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He smoked a bent cigarette and coughed. Then he cleared his throat and leaned over to hawk phlegm into the sink as Liu Song tried to wash dishes while she waited for water to boil for congee. Her mother had always made the sticky rice porridge with onions and slices of pickled tofu, but Uncle Leo liked it plain. He couldn’t taste anything but his Chesterfield anyway, Liu Song thought, as she kept quiet, unsure of what to say, suffering in silence, looking over her shoulder for any sign of Auntie Eng.

  Meanwhile Uncle Leo read to himself, out loud, and complained about the newspaper. “William Hearst buys paper, then doubles price,” he grumbled, not wanting to have to go to the Ning Yeung Association, where he could read the news for free.

  As he folded the pages, Liu Song heard a woman in the alley chattering in Cantonese, along with a terrible squawking that ominously fell silent. She heard the creak of the screen door and scrubbed the dishes faster. As her strange new stepmother walked back in, Liu Song noticed that the woman was holding a long carving knife. Her hands and the blade were covered in blood and bits of feathers. Liu Song stepped back as Auntie Eng mumbled and dropped the knife into the dishwater. Then she rinsed her hands before drying them on her baggy pants.

  “When you’re done with breakfast, you need to boil a big pot of water so you can pluck that chicken. Do it outside, and don’t feed any stray dogs.”

  “Chicken?” Liu Song asked.

  “It’s hanging in the alley,” Auntie Eng said. “Let it bleed out into the bucket, then gut it, boil it, and then pluck, pluck, pluck. Keep the feathers in a bag.”

  Liu Song had never been to China, let alone Taichan or Canton. She’d been up and down the West Coast of the United States, but not across the mountains to Yakima or Ellensburg—similar farm country, where children her age knew how to properly clean and dress a bird.

  “I’ll be late for class …”

  Auntie Eng looked at Leo and cursed in Cantonese.

  “No more school,” he said. “With your ah-ma gone we can finally put an end to that foolishness. School!” Uncle Leo practically snorted. “You’re a girl. The teachers’ time is better spent on boys. I called and told them you’re not coming back. What do you think you’re going to do anyway? Hah?”

  “I didn’t go to school,” Auntie Eng said proudly. “And look at me.”

  Liu Song wasn’t sure if she was expected to answer. She regarded the stern expressions of Uncle Leo and his hardscrabble wife. Then Liu Song stared at the floor.

  “When you’re done with cooking and cleaning the bird,” Uncle Leo continued from behind his paper, “you can go to the music store. I told Butterman—or whatever his name is—that you’d be able to work full-time, for a while at least. Why he was so grateful, I’ll never know. Just don’t be late to help make dinner.”

  Liu Song’s parents both had eight years of formal schooling, followed by long apprenticeships in the theater. They prized education. Not going to school—not graduating—had been unthinkable. Plus Liu Song would miss her friends, even the ones who were closed off to her, and especially poor Mildred. Liu Song would miss the teachers, the library, even the gossipy girls in the lavatory. She wouldn’t even have a chance to clean out her locker. She wouldn’t even be able to say goodbye.

  Saddened, Liu Song took a piece of black ribbon and tied it around her right arm—a sign of mourning, for the loss of her mother, her family, her childhood, her innocence.

  At least I have a job, she thought, a place to go, far, far away from here.

  LIU SONG ACHED as she walked to Butterfield’s in her mother’s old French leather heels. Her insides were sore and her fingers raw from boiling and plucking. She’d barely been able to keep her hands steady enough to apply her makeup. She put on mascara, half-expecting to burst into tears at any moment. She’d been violated by that disgusting, smirking man—robbed of her childhood. Yet all morning she kept wondering what she had done to bring this upon herself. Was she complicit somehow? Did she deserve his attention? She shook her head, struggling to ignore such guilty thoughts. This was his doing. She didn’t ask for this. And she didn’t care how successful he was as a businessman; he wasn’t human in her eyes. There were plenty of yellow cabs in the neighborhood—loose women who flaunted themselves: flappers, floozies, and painted women who would give any man a ride.

  She kept walking, kept grieving. “Who will want me now?” Liu Song asked whatever gods might be listening. All she heard was stray dogs barking in an alley, the brass bells of an electric streetcar, and a man in coveralls who stood on an apple crate shouting about uniting workers, revolution, and Trotskyism. That and the hollow, tinny sound of a piano, coming from a radio display at Grayson’s Appliance.

  As Liu Song walked, her senses were numb. She couldn’t grasp the concept of coming home to the apartment without her ah-ma waiting there. She felt angry, abandoned, but also mournful and longing. Her family had been a whirlwind of chaos, at home, onstage, backstage, in storefronts, for as long as she could remember. Her heart reeled as she imagined her mother, widowed amid the hysteria of the Spanish flu. But that was why her mother ha
d married Uncle Leo, Liu Song reasoned. She must have been desperate and needed someone. He took control of her belongings, her meager savings. And she found a provider—a businessman instead of a showman. But did she know that she was marrying him as second wife? Did it even matter? Some men had spouses back in China whom they didn’t see for decades. They took another wife almost out of necessity. All that was important to them was the provision of a son. But her ah-ma took ill and never produced an heir. And by Auntie Eng’s age it was evident that she was barren.

  As men stopped what they were doing, whipping their heads around to watch her pass, Liu Song looked away, didn’t smile. She shimmied to move her dress lower on her hips. She felt naked. She was nothing but a wanton reflection of her mother in a fun house mirror—her ah-ma’s grace and simple beauty distorted to hideous proportions as she realized that there were plenty of men who wanted her—for a moment, but not for a lifetime.

  At Butterfield’s she stopped and stared sadly at her appearance in the window. Her hairstyle, bangs cut across the front, long tresses hanging loose about her face—it was the style of a virtuous unmarried girl. But what was she now? She was nothing. She belonged to Uncle Leo and Auntie Eng.

  I have to leave, she thought. But where can I go? And who but my stepparents would even care? She was filled with hate, but most of her violent emotions were directed at the lowly person she’d become.

  She allowed a glimmer of hope to shine in the corners of her wasted heart. But she knew it was desperation, nothing more. She thought of the strange, gentle man who’d appeared at her mother’s wake. Colin still favored her parents. He was the only one who could appreciate her many losses.

  “Turn around!” she heard a man’s voice shout.

  Her heart leapt into her throat, but then she saw his reflection in the glass. A megaphone man in an open-top bus was yelling at her.

  “Hey, China-girl, turn around so we can all get a better look!”

  Liu Song slowly turned to face a busload of rubberneckers in tiered seats on their way to King Street for a sightseeing tour. They usually didn’t stop or walk around. The rich white tourists simply cruised through the neighborhood as a guide pointed out the strange, foreign mysteries of Chinatown, the old lottery and gambling houses on Washington Street, import-export stores, curio shops, and the Japanese settlement. Liu Song touched the buttons on her dress; she felt like a caged zoo animal on display.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you don’t see every day,” the tour guide said, “a nifty Chinese girl in a modern dress—isn’t that the kitty’s eyebrows!”

  “She looks like she’s dressed for a petting party,” one man grumped—the way people often did when they presumed Liu Song didn’t understand them.

  She turned to go inside but ran directly into Mr. Butterfield, who was blocking the doorway, smoking a cigarillo, slicking back his thinning hair.

  “Sing something,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Might as well.”

  “Hey, mister,” Liu Song heard a woman on the bus ask, “she speak any English?” It was a question she’d heard often, even though she dressed like an American girl. Her father had heard it too, long after he cut his queue.

  “This could put us on the map—the tour map. Stay here and sing.” Mr. Butterfield took her coat, and went inside and played the prelude to “When I Lost You.”

  As Liu Song closed her eyes and started to sing, the chatter faded away. And when she opened her eyes, she noticed the men with their jaws hanging open, and the women—their wives, their sisters and mothers—suddenly looking terribly uncomfortable, but enthralled nonetheless. The onlookers sat in silence as Liu Song crooned through Irving Berlin’s hit ballad of death and familial loss.

  A newspaperman on the bus stood and held up a flashlamp that ignited as he snapped a quick photo with his Speed Graphic. Liu Song saw colored stars and could smell the smoke and burnt magnesium as he pulled out the film plate and stuffed it into a camera bag before reloading and snapping another.

  Even before she’d finished, Mr. Butterfield left the piano and pushed his way onto the bus, hawking copies of sheet music and passing out cards, boasting about how he’d discovered Liu Song’s talents in Chinatown and how she’d be a star someday.

  Liu Song went inside to collect herself and freshen up as the bus driver ground the gears and revved the engine. As she leaned against the long oaken counter that Mr. Butterfield kept immaculately clean, she realized how safe she felt here, amid the floor-to-ceiling racks overflowing with sheet music and the Craftsman shelving behind the counter with rows and rows of old phonographic cylinders, Pathé disk records, and perforated piano rolls. She looked up at ornately framed portraits of Irving Berlin and Al Jolson, and an old burlesque poster of Marie Lloyd. Mr. Butterfield would tear up whenever he spoke of her. “They tried to deport her for moral turpitude,” he’d once said. “But she kept going, even though her voice got weaker and her shows grew shorter.” Liu Song blinked as the bus driver honked twice and drove off and Mr. Butterfield returned, giddily counting the money he’d made.

  “Well done, sweetheart—you blew ’em away,” he said as he hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. “We must have made thirty whole dollars, and that was just from one song! Imagine if they stop here every day. You’re gonna make your uncle awfully proud. Rich too.” He stood at the nearest piano and played the first few bars of a victory march as she stepped away.

  “My uncle?”

  “Leo.”

  “I know who he is.” Liu Song glanced outside, then back at Mr. Butterfield.

  She watched as her employer counted out her portion, then tucked the money in a zippered bag that he kept beneath the counter.

  “Now that you’re working full-time, he wanted me to pay him directly. He said he was saving it for you—that he’d take care of you later.”

  Liu Song pictured herself in bed, tied down, with ropes around her wrists and ankles, like her mother, her poor, dear ah-ma. Liu Song wondered for the first time if Uncle Leo might have poisoned her ah-ma with the camphor oil. She knew he was prone to home remedies. Did it help, or merely hasten the inevitable?

  Mr. Butterfield slammed the cash register shut, snapped his suspenders, and relit his smoke. Then his smile faded. “You know—I heard the bad news.” He pointed at the ribbon she wore. “I’m very sorry about your mom, that’s such a tragedy. I’m sure she was a lovely woman—she had to be, to have had a daughter such as you. If there’s anything I can do, if you need time off, you just let me know.”

  Liu Song thanked him.

  “At least you have your uncle. Sounds like he has big plans for you, chickadee.”

  LIU SONG DREADED going home. She skipped the trolley and slowly walked down Second Avenue like a prisoner heading to the gallows. She shuffled past old nickelodeons that were going out of business and dozens of new movie theaters—the Bijou, the Odeon, the Dream. One marquee that caught her eye showcased The Red Lantern, a curious story about the Boxer Rebellion. Liu Song stopped and stared in awe at the poster of a slender woman in an elaborate, flowing gown and Peking-style headdress. Ah-ma, she thought, touching the cold glass, inhaling the damp Seattle air. But under close examination it became obvious that the star was a white actress—some Russian named Alla Nazimova. In fact, all of the actors had Western names.

  When she was little, Liu Song had dreamed of the stage. Theater was everything she knew. Performing was all her father talked about. Now the stage was changing. It was moving, coming to life in storefront theaters. Even local vaudeville houses like the Alhambra had been converted to showcase moving pictures, which were cheaper. That’s where she and Mildred went to watch The Hazards of Helen and eat toasted watermelon seeds. Each week the adventurous Helen was nearly burned at the stake, fed to the lions, crushed beneath iron spikes, or cut in half with a buzz saw, yet by some miracle she always got away unscathed.

  Liu Song wished she could be that fortunate.

  Black and
White

  (1921)

  “You’re late.”

  “We had a very busy day at the music store,” Liu Song said. She stopped short of an apology as she watched Uncle Leo hang a red scroll outside their front door. The Chinese characters, painted in gold, were a traditional greeting, inviting the ghost of her mother—welcoming her back before she embarked on her spirit’s journey. And on the lintel above the door he’d hung a bundle of dried mugwort and a peeled onion to ward off any wayward demons.

  Liu Song knew that Uncle Leo didn’t really care about her mother. But he was a slave to appearances and tradition. He was a man who strictly believed his fortunes were wedded to his superstitions, so why take chances? He went through the rituals of mourning even as his first wife had moved in with them. But he was still no family man. He was a businessman—a laundryman, whose hands were always filthy.

  “Last night was a good night. Maybe tonight I’ll be lucky again.” He hiked up his pants, jingling the pockets, which were laden with coins, and wandered off for an evening of drinking and gambling at the Wah Mee Club.

  Inside, Auntie Eng was already serving dinner. The chicken Liu Song had plucked had been roasted and chopped. The savory aroma made Liu Song’s mouth water, but her appetite waned when she saw the group of curious strangers who sat around the table eating noisily, chewing, smacking, and picking the meat with their fingers, licking them clean. Liu Song watched as they ate from her parents’ celadon double happiness bowls, greedily shoveling rice into their mouths with her mother’s favorite chopsticks.