by Amy Tan
“You did?” He looked wounded.
“Only a little, for a short time—until you got rid of that little tart, the virgin courtesan who tried to give me trouble later. My feelings toward my mother, however, have been more difficult. I’m finally ready to tell her I’m alive.” I did not turn away soon enough to keep him from seeing my tears.
He came to me and put his arms around me. “I will find a way,” he said.
LOYALTY CONTACTED HIS friends who might have known Lu Shing. One of them heard he was in San Francisco and asked a friend there to find him. “All Chinese people in San Francisco know each other,” he told Loyalty. We sent his friend my letter, so that he could pass it along until it reached Lu Shing. Within a month, we had a letter from Lu Shing.
“My Dear Violet,” it began.
I am grateful you have written. I know it was not easy to do so. The addresses for your mother and the Ivory family are on a separate sheet of paper at the back of this letter.
I think of you often. You may find that hard to believe, but it is true. Since I did not receive your reply to my last letter, I honored your request to say nothing to your mother. In any case, I have not seen her since our meeting in Shanghai in 1912. She did not contact me. After numerous efforts to reach her, I finally received a letter from her in 1914. She told me she no longer wanted to see me—nor her son. As I told you in my last letter, she grieves for you constantly. She lives with her mother and father in the house where she grew up. Since she refuses to see me, I cannot tell you more than that.
If I can assist in anything else, please let me know.
As always,
Lu Shing
I had already composed my letter to my mother weeks ago, changing parts of it many times. When I received the address from Lu Shing, I read my letter to her again, and with a pounding heart, I sent it:
Dear Mother,
I know you must be shocked to learn I am alive. Fourteen years have passed and many of them were difficult ones for me. I will not go into the details in this letter. I would not know how to relate all that has happened. Suffice it to say, I am well.
I received a letter from Lu Shing, in which he informed me you had not known that the news of my death was false. He said you had blamed yourself and had never stopped grieving. When he told me that, I was not able to write to you and I made him promise to say nothing. I still had a child’s heart and I refused any explanation as to why you had left Shanghai at all. I believed I would never let go of my hate.
But now I have the heart of a mother. I lost my child when she was three and a half years old. Her father died during the pandemic and his family took her from me by force in 1922.I have grieved for a living daughter for nearly four years. I have had no word about her since and have grown increasingly desperate for her to know I did not let her go willingly. I am haunted that she might believe that I did not love her. I fear she will become like me: a girl who felt betrayed by love, who later refused love, and could not recognize it or trust it. She must know I have loved her continuously since she was born, and more dearly than anyone. She is now seven. I would like your help in finding her. I need to know she is happy.
I once believed with a child’s heart that you left me deliberately. I hated you. I know you were tormented that I might believe that. I feel the same torment, deeply and constantly. While I cannot forgive you completely, I don’t wish for you to be tormented any longer.
Your daughter,
Violet
Mother’s return letter was hastily written and covered with splotches, which I guessed were tears.
My dearest Violet,
I had to reread the first line of your letter a dozen times to make sure it was true. And then I was lifted from the hell of my own heart in knowing you were alive. I sank into another when I realized you believed what I had feared—that I had not loved you enough to save you. There are no excuses for a mother’s failure and I will bear a black mark on my soul forever.
Would it ease your heart even a little to know I nearly went mad on the ship when I suspected what had happened—that I ordered the captain to turn the ship around, that I was sedated so that I would not try to swim back? When I received the letter from the consulate, and then another from Golden Dove, both confirming that you had died, I imagined your last thoughts—that I had not loved you as much as I did a phantom baby. For fourteen years, I woke up every day seeing your frightened face looking at me as I was promising I would not leave without you. I have gone over every false step I took that led to your demise. I have condemned myself for weaknesses. And it all returns to seeing your frightened face looking at me.
I can never earn your forgiveness. But I take it as an enormous kindness that you have written to me. And I am grateful that you have asked me to help you find your daughter and with shared understanding of a mother’s loss of a child. I undertake this mission, not as penance, but with the fullness of love.
I want to say so much to you, my dearest Violet, and yet, I know I should not let my own emotions spill over more than they already have. So I will simply say for now that I hope you’ll one day believe, without doubt, that there has been no one in my heart more precious than you.
Mother
Mother and I began a tentative relationship through an exchange of letters. She understood so well my need to reach Flora—my young and helpless child, who was more gullible, more easily contaminated by the thoughts and feelings of others. And Mother was right to hope I would be comforted to know she had suffered losing me, although her description of my fright and wavering trust brought back my own sharp wounds.
In her next letter, she pulled out the strength of optimism she applied to build Hidden Jade Path. “Nothing is impossible,” she wrote. “We simply have to have persistence and ingenuity. I will deliver her back to you.” I was grateful and more hopeful than ever by her determination. With anyone else, I would have thought that what she said were empty words. I knew that Mother would never give up. She would do what no one would have thought of to do.
The letters went back and forth more quickly. I gave her accounts of Flora, and then Edward, information that was factual at first, and eventually included the emotions around the facts. She in turn told me about a memorial she had made in her garden, where violets ran wild. She had already removed the tombstone and put a birdbath in its place. She wrote at length about a man named Danner—not Tanner, as I had mistakenly heard the name when I was a child. He had given me my legitimacy as an American citizen. We were certain the Ivorys knew that my birth certificate existed and had bribed someone to destroy it. Mother said she would secure it for me, if I wished. We reminisced about Golden Dove, both what I believed about her and who my mother revealed her to be—her guide and mentor, who conquered obstacles and stacked them like building blocks. “Without her,” Mother wrote, “I likely would have remained a helpless American girl railing against my stupidity and his spinelessness.”
In those early letters, she was far more forthcoming than I was. Her mother and father were odd, she wrote in one. I did not write back that I now understood where my own mother’s eccentricity had come from. She recalled more about her mother and father with each letter.
I had confused my parents’ oddities as being my enemies, their neglect as lack of love entirely. Neglect is a surreptitious slayer of the heart. It has as its accomplice carelessness. My parents’ oddities faded with age and were replaced with the frailties that await us all. The mother and father I had rebelled against no longer existed. They were new people—gentler and more endearing, flawed and puzzled to be so. They needed me. When they died—my father first, then my mother—I truly mourned them, especially the part of them I had refused as a child to see.
My mother, the one I had grown up with in Shanghai, no longer existed either. She had been replaced with a new person, both a stranger and a familiar. I could start afresh in deciding whether I could trust her. She allowed me to see who she was through what made her vulne
rable to losing her heart, losing her soul, losing her way in the world, and losing me. She was honest, and at times shockingly so, when she gave me confessions no mother and daughter would freely share.
I shudder in remembering the murderous words I flung at my mother and father. I told my mother that everyone talked behind her back and she was cracked for spending years in her room looking at insects that had been dead for millions of years. I told my father I had his lovers’ letters, and I recited the vulgar and laughable nicknames they had given him to describe his sexual prowess. The Vortex of Sex! I think he nearly died of embarrassment. Looking back, I’m aghast that I condemned them so violently to justify my love for a mediocre painter. Happily, my poor taste in art resulted in you. I’m glad you can’t see me blushing as I recall again what I found so compelling about that Chinese painter and why I believed those paintings were stunning masterpieces. My God! I’ll only say this, Violet. You’re lucky you have your father’s looks.
Our letters were frequent, at times almost daily. I shared the moments of my life one at a time. In the beginning, they did not include those days in the courtesan house. They were about the day Flora was born and the day Edward died. I described Perpetual as my last resort for respectability. I admitted that I met Loyalty in the courtesan house, but I did not tell her about his purchase of my defloration. In matters of sex, I remained discreet because those subjects made me acutely aware that she was, after all, my mother. It did not matter that we had been in the same business.
And yet, in many ways, I could speak about my hopes and despairs and moments of happiness far more freely than I could with anyone else. I finally understood them. Often I was not writing to her, but to myself, to my spiritual double, to the lonely child I once was, to the woman who once wished she was someone else. She had said something similar about the act of writing those letters. She likened it to passageways in a house that began at opposite ends, which we entered with trepidation, which became wonderment, when we found ourselves together in a room that had always existed.
In one very important way, she was the same mother I knew in Shanghai, and that was the persistence and resourcefulness she had applied in making Hidden Jade Path a success. She applied the same qualities to finding Flora. When her scheme was in place, she told me what she had done. “I have rented a bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson, a half mile from where Flora lives. The town is lovely and boring enough to provide forced serenity and ample time to go spying.”
She quickly learned where Flora went to school (Chalmer’s School for Girls), which church she attended (Methodist), and where she took her equestrian lessons (Gentry Farm Stables). Mother even attended a school play (Whispering Pines), posing as a talent scout for an anonymous but famous Hollywood movie producer. That fictitious affiliation made her a most welcome guest. “A front-row seat,” she bragged. She revealed to the principal the next day that, unhappy to say, she had not found the child actor the famous director sought—a girl with dark Mediterranean looks and a fiery temper. The principal affirmed that none of their girls qualified in any way. My mother tactfully praised the play and inquired if they would want to use her services as a volunteer in the drama department. “I was an actress,” she said, “mostly silent films, but also a few talkies. You wouldn’t recognize my name. Lucretia Danner. I was never the lead, always the former girlfriend of the leading man, and, more recently, the mother of the misbehaving bride.” She named the films: Hidden Jade Path, The Lady from Shanghai, The Young Barons … The principal claimed to vaguely recognize one of the made-up films. Mother explained to the principal that she and her husband had lived in Manhattan but enjoyed weekends in Croton-on-Hudson. “He adored this town. Having nothing to do is one of life’s greatest luxuries, don’t you agree? Nonetheless, I do believe one can occasionally be useful.” She became a volunteer for two school plays a year. She helped in designing sets, making costumes, and teaching diction suitable for each character, and she bragged that she had excelled in volunteerism. However, there was nothing she could do when the idiotic director assigned Flora a meager role as a scarecrow in one play and the screeching chorus of three milkmaids and their mooing cows in another.
My heart beat in my throat every time I received a letter postmarked from Croton-on-Hudson. Mother had promised me she would not hold back in her reports. If Flora was happy, she would tell me. If she was not, she would tell me that as well.
Flora has the same independence of mind you showed at her age, but she also doesn’t seem to care for anyone in particular. As you may recall, in the school play, Flora had a very small role as one of three scarecrows in a field invaded by birds. After the play was over, the odious family—Minerva, Mrs. Lamp, and Mrs. Ivory—descended like vultures on Flora. I have seen no sign or heard mention of Mr. Ivory. He is either an invalid or dead. The three women lavished praise on Flora’s performance, and Flora showed no happiness or shared pride. Her apathy concerned me. But later I remembered that when you were a child, you went through periods when you pretended you cared for no one. Furthermore, it was a dreadful play, and it’s ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus’s dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.
I must say, however, I have never observed Flora showing any affection for Minerva. She never seeks her out. That was unlike you. You were a skirt puller for attention, at that same age.
I was glad at first to hear Flora was not close to Minerva. But later I worried. If Flora felt no happiness or pride, this would be terrible. If she did not feel love for anyone, this would be tragic. I hoped her lack of feeling had more to do with the loathsome people she lived with. A few days later, another letter came from Mother:
She is cordial with her teachers and cooperative with the other students, but none are special to her. She does not seek them out. They do not seek her out. She prefers her solitude on the school grounds. She has a favorite tree and a squirrel that eats from her hand. From that spot, she observes the others. She appears to be quite fond of her tan-colored horse at the stables where she takes her riding lessons. And her favorite companion is a little perky-eared dog, the color of a dirty mop. I learned this after I accidentally tore out a small hole in an ivy hedge that surrounds the Ivory family’s estate. The dog runs around her in circles, does tricks, and barks in a piercing shrill voice. I went to the library, and after a search in the encyclopedia with all things that start with the letter C and D, I determined the dog is a cairn terrier, whose talents are limited to digging and stealing food. I will obtain one soon.
“Uncle Loyalty” received a well-written letter of thanks from Flora for her father’s cuff links. “She has very good handwriting for a seven-year-old child!” he exclaimed. He slowly read aloud the English words: “Dear Mr. Fang … Mr. Fang? Why not Uncle Loyalty?” He looked puzzled, as if his own child had disavowed him. He had developed avuncular feelings toward Flora simply by helping me scheme how to reach her. I told him this should not discourage him from sending another gift next year from Uncle Loyalty.
MY VALUE TO Loyalty’s business grew. He had me attend meetings with his foreign-trade customers. I was his so-called secretary who took notes of what was said. As his translator did his usual work, I took on the role of being momo. With his English-speaking customers, I transformed myself into the secretary who spoke only Chinese. With the Chinese ones, I became the foreigner. By plan, Loyalty and his translator were called away at least twice during those meetings, which gave his customers a chance to speak confidentially among themselves, assuming I understood nothing. If they glanced toward me, I gave them a friendly smile. Later, I would give Loyalty my report, the customer concerns about quality, or speed of manufacturing, or cheaper competitors, or honesty.
I gave him yet another observation. Many of his new customers talked about going to the latest nightclubs. They discussed ways to get out of going to the party Loyalty wanted to host at a courtesan house. I told Loyalty tha
t courtesan houses were less in fashion and some were known for fleecing customers. For a while, Loyalty resisted my suggestion that he set up an account at one of the more popular clubs. He had once been looked upon as the epitome of a successful and sophisticated businessman, but he had not changed with the times. He wore the same fashions, which I said suggested he was not that successful anymore. Eventually he let go of his stubbornness and bought new suits, which he wore to the Blue Moon Club, where, with my help, he became a member and, soon, a favorite customer who was always seated at his preferred table.
“Violet, you are always surprisingly clever,” he said one day after I suggested he give his American customers souvenirs of Shanghai.
Since our early days together in the courtesan house, he had often said I was “surprisingly” this and “surprisingly” that. I should have seen it as a compliment, but, given our history, I felt he was implying that he had expected little of me. I used to worry that one day he would cease to say he was surprised, and I would feel I had met only his low expectations. I finally told him that the word annoyed me.
“Why is it bad that I say this? My other translators do nothing surprising. You will always be surprising to me, because you are better than most, and that is true not just in your work, but also in who you are to me. This is your nature, which I appreciate and is the reason I’ve always loved you.”
“You haven’t always loved me.”
“Of course I have. Even when you married—both times—I kept my loving feelings. All these years, I have never loved anyone more than I have you.”
“You mean not anyone else besides your wife.”
”Why do you persist with that? You know that was a marriage in name only. We’re divorced now. We stayed together only for our son. Why don’t you believe me? Shall I have you talk to her on the phone? Let me call her right now.”