by Amy Tan
”I know Mr. Bierstadt would appreciate it very much,” Lu Shing said. “But only if you can spare the time.”
“I would enjoy a day of bird-watching as well!” I said.
Mother gave me a skeptical eye. “You suffer from seasickness.”
“I would suffer to see the birds,” I said. “You know I’ve always had an interest in birds.” She gave me another doubtful look.
“There’s time for me to study them ahead of time as well.”
That night, I squirmed in bed, debating whether to sneak up the curling stairs to the turret. Lu Shing was sleeping right above me. I imagined him sprawled on the bed with moonlight washing over his naked body. What excuses could I use to enter the room: a desire to see a ship coming into the Bay, the moon, the stars, a book I had been reading and left behind? And then I remembered that there was, in fact, just such a book. Classical Anatomy of Calisthenics. A thrill ran through me and throbbed in my center. The next day, while Lu Shing was at the Cliff House setting up Mr. Bierstadt’s painting studio, I darted up to the turret to find the pictorial book. I had tucked it under the feather bed. There it was. I pulled it out. I put it in the bookshelf, halfway pulled out. After fifty-two pages, he would be more than happy to welcome me.
The next morning, I greeted Lu Shing in the breakfast room. He was friendly, but he did not give me fond looks or secret smiles, nothing like those Miss Pond gave my father. He must not have seen the calisthenics guide to love.
“I have a collection of favorite books in the turret,” I said. “You’re welcome to read any of them.” I looked for telltale signs that he had already.
“Thank you. For the moment, I am reading as much as I can about the Farallon Islands and Yosemite.”
“I think we have an excellent book on Yosemite. Look through the little bookcase in the loft.”
We went directly from breakfast to Mother’s study. She sat in one corner, scrutinizing her bugs, and we sat kitty-corner from her at a letter-writing table. The large illustrated book of birds lay between us. We dutifully noted coloration, shapes of beaks, wingspan, and tail length—a hundred details that provided opportunity for conversation consisting of: “That tail is longer than this one.”
He turned pages to the right, and I turned pages to the left. I gave him my strongest flirtatious look: a glance over my shoulder with my eyes cast downward before they slowly rose and fixed on him. He returned a simple smile. Twice I made it seem that I had accidentally brushed my arm against his. He pulled away and apologized. When speaking to him about wingspan or migratory paths, I drew close to his face and whispered, purportedly so as not to disturb my mother’s important work. I saw no signs of interest from him and grew more disheartened by the hour.
“Lucia,” my mother called out, “don’t rest your elbows on the pages.”
I quickly leaned back and felt the flush of humiliation rise up my neck.
Lu Shing turned to me and said. “Lucia, Lu Shing. So similar. You Americans call it coincidence. We Chinese call it fate.”
CHAPTER 13
FATA MORGANA
San Francisco
1897
Lucia Minturn
Three days before the scheduled voyage to the Farallon Islands, Mr. Bierstadt sent a hasty note of apology to our house, saying that he had to return to New York because his wife’s illness had worsened.
“Consumption,” Lu Shing said, “that is the rumor and concern.”
My parents made murmurs of sympathy for the master painter. I silently cursed him. There would be no more bird studies, no romantic voyage.
“What are your plans?” Father asked Lu Shing.
“My family has been asking for the past year when I would return, and I can finally give them the answer they’ve longed to hear.”
China. He was going to step back into the fairy-tale book, the covers would close, and that would be the end of the tale between Lucia and Lu Shing. Until now, it had not occurred to me that he would one day make the migratory return. If only he knew what was at stake for me, why I needed to escape to the green valley, wherever and whatever that was. I lived in a madhouse with soulless people. A mother who was in love with the bodies of insects. A grandmother who started the fires of argument. A grandfather who wandered useless with sufficient wealth. A father who disbursed affection into the voracious vulvas of women outside this house. These were the lunatics who sat around the table, airing superiority at dinner, where Father presided like Sophocles chewing a pork chop, directing a debate about the meaningless parsing of art. I had to resist letting them change me, humiliate me, tamp down my emotions.
Our names, Lucia, Lu Shing. He said it was fate. But I was mistaken. He did not mean we would cling together from those words forward. Fate blew us together, two grains in a cloud of pollen, and then it blew us apart. I had counted on too much because of my peaks of emotion. I was the fool, now overwrought.
I heard Lu Shing speaking about his disappointment in not being able to study with Mr. Bierstadt. He mentioned a mundane matter—settling the hotel bill and removing Mr. Bierstadt’s belongings, booking passage on a boat to Shanghai, preferably via a fast route. He believed there was one leaving in a week. Mother asked if I was ill. I nodded, grateful for the excuse to leave before my face turned blotchy with shame. I went quickly to my room and sat at my desk to write down quickly what I was already losing.
The whole of me was contained in that painting. I cannot adequately explain it in words, except that knowledge of my Self-Being is already slipping away from view, and soon all that will remain are these words. I had felt my soul and now it is barely remembered—all of me at once that was truth, purity, strength, what was unchangeable and original, no matter how much was quashed and ridiculed by others. I wanted its creator, the mirage maker. I wanted him to show me his doubts, so I could show him mine, and together we could find the real valley and not just the one in the painting, but a real valley between two mountains, away from the mad world.
I know now it was not an ecstatic vision. There is no valley, no vale. What I felt was not even my soul. I saw a painting and I wanted to see and feel more than anyone else in the room. I wanted the novelty of a Chinese man and to fool myself into thinking he possessed Oriental Wisdom and could whisk me away from unhappiness. He was from the fairy tale in my childhood, someone would save me and love me. I became infatuated with the painter, who could paint a place for me to live. The feeling of all that has nearly disappeared, leaving me, like life through the vale of death. Yet why do I still want the painter? If he were here before me now, I would let myself be deluded, fly off with infatuation to wherever lust would take me.
The maid knocked on the door and startled me out of my reverie. She set down a tonic by my bedside. A few minutes later, Mother entered my room—a surprise—she rarely visited me here. She asked if I had caught an illness. Did I have a stomachache? Were there chills and fever? How strange that she took an interest in my symptoms. I think I have a fever, yes. She was concerned, she said, that I not pass my illness onto Lu Shing. Last year, quarantine had been placed on all Asiatics coming into San Francisco due to an epidemic in Shanghai of bubonic plague.
“If Lu Shing becomes ill, that might lead to the wrong conclusion, and our house and we in it would be quarantined.”
What a wonderful prospect. All of us remanded to this house, Lu Shing and I imprisoned together, he right above my bed. My fever was growing.
My mother went on. “Lu Shing would likely be sent back to China and quarantined in the bowels of the boat. It would be an uncomfortable journey home.”
My fever was abating. “I don’t think I am contagious. It was the turnips,” I said.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “I hope it will improve in time so you can come on our trip to the Farallon Islands on Thursday. Your grandfather said there was no sense in our wasting the opportunity. He said he’ll pay for everything, including a picnic of roast beef, just as he did twenty years ago …”<
br />
I made a miraculous recovery, thanks to this tonic of good news, which worked with such lightning speed I was able to join everyone for dinner and discuss further plans for the voyage. I caught Lu Shing looking at me with a smile, which I interpreted as meaningful—but not yet clear. I simply knew that between us lay fate and it had turned the boat around.
THE ECSTATIC MOMENTS would no longer be mine if I did not make haste. Sex would not bring us together in spirit, I now knew. Our union would be a carnal one, but more promising than what I had experienced with my other young men. I did not need excuses of ships with tall masts or the rise of the moon over an island. I put aside my fears of humiliation. I would lay myself before him and ask him to enjoy me. I had the confidence of a whore, knowing I would succeed in this one task.
At ten o’clock, I heard his footsteps and the creak of the ladder. I left my bed in my nightgown and I climbed the curling staircase and made two raps on the door. He called out, “Yes?” And I accepted this answer to enter the room. He was up in the loft, and the outline of his body was visible by the light of the oil lamp. But I could not see the expression on his face. I said nothing, and he did not ask why I had come. I went to the ladder and ascended. He wore no clothes above his waist and the rest of him was concealed by the sheet. He moved back to allow me room to slide in. I lay on my back and turned my head toward the bookshelf. I was not yet ready to see his expression, what he thought of my coming to him so boldly and unasked.
I saw the calisthenics book, just as I had left it, untouched. I did not reach for it. I did not want those muscled men and cheerful women in bed with us. I heard the foghorn followed by the barks of sea lions, their futile mating calls. If only he would simply begin and do what the other young men did, fastening their mouth on some part of my body.
“I’m not a virgin,” I announced, “and my parents do not care what I do. I mention these things, if those are concerns.” I turned my head and looked at him. His face was calm, or perhaps sympathetic or amused. I undid the top button of my nightgown to make my mission clear. But then he placed his hand firmly over mine to stop me. I had not counted on this. I felt the warm creep of blotches over my chest and neck.
“Let me,” I then heard him say, and he slid his finger down the placket of the nightgown, and all the buttons popped out of their holes. He bent down close to my face, and I was taken aback by how Chinese he looked. I could finally touch him without the questions that lay between distances of what might happen or be allowed. I ran my hands over the smooth slopes of his cheeks, his forehead, the top of his head, his jaw to his chin. I looked into his dark eyes. “I leave in a week,” he said. I denied it but nodded, and with that, I felt my gown slip off. The windows were open, the air was cool, and I was shivering. One warm hand glided along my body in a leisurely way, rounding over my shoulders, slipping along my side, his eyes following with the same calmness, and yet also curiosity, as if he were studying how I had been sculpted, how this curve had been made, how the length of my arm had been decided, how the curve of my ear had been shaped. I closed my eyes. His hand moved in light circles, slowly, more firmly, pressing along my inner thighs. I opened my eyes, and again I was surprised to see his Chinese face, and infatuation slowed my thoughts and blurred the light around him, so that all I could see in the clearest of newfound sight were all the details of his face. I closed my eyes and felt him move my hips into a new place. I opened my eyes, and his wonderful strangeness returned, yet now I knew him as I did in the valley of the painting, knowledge without words, and the joy of familiarity. He drew his queue down my belly—the forbidden sight, touch, feel of a Chinese man slipping his queue down and up my cleft, then slipping into me in a forbidden rhythm, watching his unfamiliar face, my mind floating into brief thoughts of the difference of our races and the indecency of joining the two, and then my mind falling back into the pleasure of violating taboo. I closed my eyes and asked him to speak to me, and he softly recited in his British speech.
“Good little boat,
good little boat,
neither mast, nor an oar,
in waves you float.
You paddle toward shore.”
I opened my eyes and saw a pained expression of pleasure on his Chinese face and I realized that to him I was also taboo, a wild white girl, exciting because I was forbidden and unfamiliar to him, different, rare, and unusual. I sighed, fulfilled in that valley where I was My Self. We stared at each other as he uttered the words that carried us along.
“Trust me, trust me,
I’ll take you to dock.
Go aboard, go aft
Ride, ride on my cock.”
My Chinese emperor closed his eyes and now he spoke his Chinese words, not a nursery rhythm but harsh sounds as he flayed against me, until our bodies were slapping, and he took me into the typhoon and geologic disaster.
I awoke when he lit the lamp.
“The sun will be up in an hour,” he said simply.
Life outside of this room would soon return. “Let me lie awhile longer,” I said, and hummed, settling against his body. “I’ve loved to read here since I was a little girl,” I said drowsily, happily. “I was glad for solitude, although sometimes I was lonely. The room comforted me. Perhaps it had to do with its round walls. There were no sharp corners. The room was the same in any direction. Did you think about the roundness of this room?”
“I had disturbing thoughts—the impossibility of hanging a painting on round walls. I don’t have the Oriental mysticism at my fingertips you might think I have. I am a very practical man.”
“What were you saying in Chinese when we were having sex?”
He laughed softly. “The obscene words a man uses in the peak of excitement. Chuh nee bee.”
“What do the words mean exactly?”
“They’re quite vulgar. How can I say this? … It has the meaning of pleasure as we connect, male to female.”
“Those aren’t the words. Pleasure as we connect! Male to female! That’s not what you were groaning about.”
He laughed. “All right. But don’t take it as an insult. The words mean ‘fuck your cunt.’ Quite vulgar, as I said, but it indicates my passion is so great I’ve lost my mind and a more eloquent vocabulary.”
“I like that you are uncontrollably vulgar,” I said. I secretly thought about my young men. Most simply grunted, one was silent except for his panting. One called to God.
“Have you said those uncontrollable words to many women?” I stared at him directly so that he would think I asked only out of curiosity and not with a knife already pointed at my heart.
“I’ve never counted. It’s customary to visit courtesan houses starting at the age of fifteen. But I didn’t go often, not as much as I wanted. A man has to court them, give them gifts, woo in competition with other men and suffer heartbreak. I didn’t have the money. My father wasn’t indulgent.”
He did not ask me about the young men I had been with. I was relieved, yet I wished he felt the need to ask, as I did to torment myself, wanting to believe there were no others, or at least none who had won him.
The next night, I again went to the turret, and this time we fell more easily into the spell of intimacy. As we kissed I closed my eyes to imagine him as the emperor. But I pictured only him, the face beside mine. I did not feel surprised when I opened my eyes. I was overwhelmed with joy to see him. The excitement of taboo remained, a Chinese man having sex with an American girl. He whispered the vulgar words as he entered me, and repeated them with each stroke. In the mindlessness of swimming in each other’s body, we were intimates. He lifted my hips and my head soared and I lost all my senses except for the one that bound us and could not be pulled apart. But then we did pull apart and we lay on our sides facing each other, growing quiet and with the distance of race spreading larger.
Despite my promise that I would not expect more than these few days of pleasure, I could not avoid the creeping fear that I would soon lose him. Had he thoug
ht of that inevitability as he caressed my body? “Will you miss me?” I wanted to ask. On the third night, before our trip to the Farallon Islands, I could not keep back the question. I asked him in the dark when he could not see my face. I held my breath, and when he said, “I shall miss you a great deal,” tears fell and I kissed him. And when I touched his face, I felt the dampness of his own tears on his face. At least, I thought they were his, and not the wetness from mine. Doubt was removed when he drew my hips toward him, pulled my leg over his back, and plunged into me with even greater need than before.
At that moment, I decided to go to China and knew instantly this had been the answer all along to my spiritual malaise and loveless life. I was buoyed on crests of emotion, more exhilarated than I thought possible. Bravery surged and conquered all fears. I could at last feel deeply and unrestrained. How could I lock my soul away by returning to the life I had before him? I knew it was mad and reckless to go to China, but this was the time to take risks and face danger rather than retreat into the living death of safety and stagnation. How could I stop myself? Our bodies were moving together, rowing to China, drawing nearer to the Valley of Amazement, where our emotions were free and we could wander together with our souls.
MY MOTHER SENT carriages around to bring the passengers to the dock. The opera singer, her lover, Mr. Maubert and his sister, Miss Pond, my father, my mother, Lu Shing, and I. We boarded with bundles of coats and baskets of food, sketchbooks, soft pencils, paints, and a guidebook to the islands.
During our sail to the islands, my mother gave lectures on the sea creatures we glimpsed from the boat. “Whales are not fish, but thinking mammals like us,” she shouted into the brisk wind, making it either impossible or unpleasant to listen. The coats we brought were more fashionable than useful, all but Miss Huffard, who wore a thick fur coat, which, given her size, made her quite bearlike. The boat cut into the wind and the wind cut through my skin to the marrow of my bones. Mr. Maubert, his sister, and Mr. Hatchett wore greenish faces and periodically rushed to the railing. I was miraculously spared from seasickness, owing, no doubt, to the headiness of love. My mother went belowdecks and emerged with thick blankets, and we all stood about like Indians smoking peace pipes as we puffed clouds of breath into the cold air.