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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
1909, Seattle. At the World's Fair a half-Chinese boy called Ernest Young is raffled off as a prize. He ends up working in a brothel in Seattle's famed Red Light District and falls in love with Maisie, the daughter of a flamboyant madam, and Fahn, a karayuki-san, a Japanese maid sold into servitude. On the eve of the new World's Fair in 1962, Ernest looks back on the past, the memories he made with his beloved wife while his daughter, a reporter, begins to unravel their tragic past.
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Seitenzahl: 509
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Love and Other Consolation Prizes
A Novel
JAMIE FORD
For Haley, Karissa, Madison, and Kass.
When you graduated I wanted to skip
‘Pomp and Circumstance’ and play ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.
Pleading moments we knew
I will set them apart
Every word, every sign
Will be burned in my heart.
– from ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’,
performed by Édith Piaf
Contents
Overture
(1962)
Ernest Young stood outside the gates on opening day of the new world’s fair, loitering in the shadow of the future. From his lonely vantage point in the VIP parking lot, he could see hundreds of happy people inside, virtually every name in Seattle’s Social Blue Book,wearing their Sunday best on a cool Saturday afternoon. The gaily dressed men and women barely filled half of Memorial Stadium’s raked seating, but they sat together, a waterfall of wool suits and polyester neckties, cut-out dresses and ruffled pillbox hats, cascading down toward a bulwark of patriotic bunting. Ernest saw that the infield had been converted to a speedway for motorboats – an elevated moat, surrounding a dry spot of land where the All-City High School Band had assembled, along with dozens of reporters who milled about smoking cigarettes like lost sailors, marooned on an island of generators and television cameras. As the wind picked up, Ernest could smell gasoline, drying paint, and a hint of sawdust. He could almost hear carpenters tapping finishing nails as the musicians warmed up.
Saying that Ernest wished he could go inside and partake of the celebration was like saying he wished he could dine alone at Canlis restaurant on Valentine’s Day, cross the Atlantic by himself aboard the Queen Mary, or fly first class on an empty Boeing 707. The scenery and the festive occasion were tempting, but the endeavor itself only highlighted the absence of someone with whom to share those moments.
For Ernest, that person was Gracie, his beloved wife of forty-plus years. They’d known each other since childhood, long before they’d bought a house, joined a church, and raised a family. But now their memories had been scattered like bits of broken glass on wet pavement. Reflections of first kisses, anniversaries, the smiles of toddlers, had become images of a Christmas tree left up past Easter, a package of unlit birthday candles, recollections of doctors and cold hospital waiting rooms.
The truth of the matter was that these days Gracie barely remembered him. Her mind had become a one-way mirror. Ernest could see her clearly, but to Gracie he’d been lost behind her troubled, distorted reflection.
Ernest chewed his lip as he leaned against the vacant Cadillac De Ville that he’d spent the better part of the morning polishing. He felt a sigh of vertigo as he stared up at the newly built Space Needle – the showpiece of the Century 21 Expo – the talk of the town, if not the country, and perhaps the entire world. He was supposed to deliver foreign dignitaries to the opening of the Spanish Village Fiesta, but the visitors had been held up – some kind of dispute with the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services. So he came anyway, to try to remember the happier times.
Ernest smiled as he listened to Danny Kaye take the microphone and read a credo of some kind. The Official World’s Fair Band followed the famous actor as they took over the musical duties for the day and began to play a gliding waltz. Ernest counted the time, one-two-three, one-two-three, as he popped his knuckles and massaged the joints where arthritis reminded him of his age – sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-something, no one knew for sure. The birth date listed on his chauffeur’s permit had been made up decades earlier, as had the one on his old license with the Gray Top Taxi company. He’d left China as a boy – during a time of war and famine, not record keeping.
Ernest blinked as the waltz ended and a bank of howitzers blasted a twenty-one-gun salute somewhere beyond the main entrance, startling him from his nostalgic debridement. The thundering cannons signaled that President Kennedy had officially opened the world’s fair with the closing of a telegraph circuit sent all the way from his desk at the White House. Ernest had read that the signal would be bounced off a distant sun, Cassiopeia, ten thousand light years away. He looked up at the blanket of mush that passed for a north-western sky, and made a wish on an unseen star as people cheered and the orchestra began playing the first brassy strains of ‘Bow Down to Washington’ while balloons were released, rising like champagne bubbles. Some of the nearby drivers honked their horns as the Space Needle’s carillon bells began ringing, heralding the space age, a clarion call that was drowned out by the deafening, crackling roar of a squadron of fighter jets that boomed overhead. Ernest felt the vibration in his bones.
When Mayor Clinton and the City Council had broken ground on the fairgrounds three years ago – when a gathering of reporters had watched those men ceremoniously till the nearby soil with gold-plated shovels – that’s also when Gracie began to cry in her sleep. She’d wake and forget where she was. She’d grow fearful and panic.
Dr Luke had told Ernest and their daughters, with tears in his eyes, ‘It’s a rare type of viral meningitis.’ Dr Luke always had a certain sense of decorum, and Ernest knew he was lying for the sake of the girls. Especially since he’d treated Gracie when she was young.
‘These things sometimes stay hidden and then come back, decades later,’ the doctor had said as the two of them stood on Ernest’s front step. ‘It’s uncommon, but it happens. I’ve seen it before in other patients. It’s not contagious now. It’s just—’
‘A ghost of red-light districts past,’ Ernest had interrupted. ‘A ripple from the water trade.’ He shook Dr Luke’s hand and thanked him profusely for the late-night house call and the doctor’s ample discretion regarding Gracie’s past.
Ernest remembered how shortly after his wife’s diagnosis her condition had worsened. How she’d pulled out her hair and torn at her clothing. How Gracie had been hospitalized and nearly institutionalized a month later, when she’d lost her wits so completely that Ernest had had to fight the specialists who recommended she be given electroshock therapy, or worse – a medieval frontal-lobe castration at Western State Hospital, the asylum famous for its ‘ice pick’ lobotomies.
Ernest hung on as Dr Luke quietly administered larger doses of penicillin until the madness subsided and Gracie returned to a new version of normal. But the damage had been done. Part of his wife – her memory – was a blackboard that had been scrubbed clean. She still fell asleep while listening to old records by Josephine Baker and Édith Piaf. She still smiled at the sound of rain on the roof, and enjoyed the fragrance of fresh roses from the Cherry Land flower shop. But on most days, Ernest’s presence was like fingernails on that blackboard as Gracie recoiled in fits of either hysteria or anger.
I didn’t know the month of the world’s fair groundbreaking would be our last good month together, Ernest thought as he watched scores of wide-eyed fairgoers – couples, families, busloads of students – pouring through the nearby turnstiles, all smiles and awe, tickets in hand. He heard the stadium crowd cheer as a pyramid of water-skiers whipped around the Aquadrome.
To make matters worse, when Gracie had been in the hospital, agents from the Washington State Highway Department had showed up on Ernest’s doorstep. ‘Hello, Mr Young,’ they’d said. ‘We have some difficult news to share. May we come in?’
The officials were kind and respectful – apologetic even. As they informed him that his three-bedroom craftsman home overlooking Chinatown, along with his garden and a row of freshly trimmed lilacs in full bloom – the only home he’d ever owned and the place where his daughters took their first steps – all of it was in the twenty-mile urban construction zone of the Everett–Seattle–Tacoma Freeway. The new interstate highway was a ligature of concrete designed to bind Washington with Oregon and California. In less than a week, he and his neighbors had been awarded fair-market value for their properties, along with ninety days to move out, and the right-of-way auctions began.
The government had wanted the land, Ernest remembered, and our homes were a nuisance. So he’d moved his ailing wife in with his older daughter, Juju, and watched from the sidewalk as entire city blocks were sold. Homes were scooped off their foundations and strapped to flatbed trucks to be moved or demolished. But not before vandals and thieves stripped out the oak paneling that Ernest had installed years ago, along with the light fixtures, the crystalline doorknobs, and even the old hot-water heater that leaked in wintertime. The only thing left standing was a blur of cherry trees that lined the avenue. Ernest recalled watching as a crew arrived with a fleet of roaring diesel trucks and a steam shovel. Blossoms swirled on the breeze as he’d turned and walked away.
As a young man, Ernest had carved his initials onto one of those trees along with Gracie’s – and those of another girl too. He hadn’t seen her in forever.
As an aerialist rode a motorcycle on a taut cable stretched from the stadium to the Space Needle, Ernest listened to the whooshing and mechanical thrumming of carnival rides. He caught the aroma of freshly spun cotton candy, still warm, and remembered the sticky-sweet magic of candied apples. He felt a pressing wave of déjà vu.
The present is merely the past reassembled, Ernest mused as he pictured the two girls and how he’d once strolled with them, arm in arm, on the finely manicured grounds of Seattle’s first world’s fair, the great Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, back in 1909. When the city first dressed up and turned its best side to the cameras of the world. He remembered a perfect day, when he fell in love with both girls.
But as Ernest walked to the gate and leaned on the cold metal bars, he also smelled smoke. He heard fussy children crying. And his ears were still ringing with the echoes of the celebratory cannons that had scared the birds away.
He drew a deep breath. Memories are narcotic, he thought. Like the array of pill bottles that sit cluttered on my nightstand. Each dose, carefully administered, use as directed. Too much and they become dangerous. Too much and they’ll stop your heart.
Raining Stars
(1902)
Yung Kun-ai watched his little mei mei struggle to breathe. His newborn sister was only two days old – a half-breed like him, without a father. She mostly slept, but when she did wake, she coughed until she cried. Then cried until she was desperately gasping for air. Her raspy wailing made her seem all the more out of place, unwelcome; not unloved, just tragically unfit for this world.
Yung understood that feeling as his sister stirred and keened again, scaring away a pair of ring-necked crows from a barren lychee tree. The birds cawed, circling. Yung’s mother should have been observing her zuoyuezi,the traditional time of rest and recovery after childbirth. Instead, she’d staggered into the village cemetery, dug a hole in the earth with her bare hands, and placed his sister’s naked, trembling body inside. As Yung stood nearby, he imagined that the ground must have been warm, comforting, since it hadn’t rained in months, the clay soil surrounding his unnamed sibling like a blanket. Then he watched his mother pour a bucket of cold ash from the previous night’s fire over his sister’s body and she stopped crying. Through a cloud of black soot he saw tiny legs jerk, fragile arms go still. Yung didn’t look away as his lowly parent smothered his baby sister, or while his mother wearily pushed the dirt back into the hole, burying his mei mei by scoops and handfuls. His mother tenderly patted the soil and replaced the sod before pressing her forehead into the grass and dirt, whispering a prayer, begging forgiveness.
Yung swallowed the lump in his throat and became a statue. At five years old, he could do nothing else. The bastard son of a white missionary and a Chinese girl, he was an outcast in both of their worlds. He and his mother were desperately poor, and a drought had only made their bad situation worse. For months they’d been eating soups made from mossy rocks and scraps of boiled shoe leather his mother had scavenged from the dying. When she turned and saw what Yung had witnessed she didn’t seem shocked, or apologetic. She didn’t bother to wipe away the ashen tears that framed the pockmarked hollows of her cheeks, or the dust and grime that had settled into her scalp where her hair had thinned and fallen out. She merely placed a filigreed hairpin in his hand and folded his tiny fingers around the tarnished copper and jade phoenix that represented the last of their worldly possessions. She knelt and hugged him, squeezed him, ran her dirty fingers through his hair. He felt her bony limbs, the sweet smell of her cool skin as she kissed his face.
‘Only two kinds of people in China,’ she said. ‘The too rich and the too poor.’
He’d remembered combing the harvested fields for single grains of rice, gathering enough to make a tiny handful that they would share while the well-fed children flew kites overhead. His empty stomach reminded him of who he was.
‘Stay here and wait for your uncle,’ she said. ‘He’s going to take care of you now. He’s going to take you to America. He’s going to show you a new world. This is my gift to you.’
Yung’s mother addressed him in Cantonese and then in the little bit of English they both understood. She told him he had his father’s eyes. And she spoke about a time when they would be together again. But when she tried to smile her lips trembled.
‘Mm-goi mow hamm,’Yung said as she turned away. ‘Don’t cry, Mama.’
Yung wasn’t sure if the man he was supposed to wait for was truly his uncle, but he doubted it. The best he could hope was that the man might be one of the rich merchants who specialized in the poison trade or the pig trade, because dealing with men who smuggled opium or people would be preferable to members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the Chinese boxers who had been slaughtering missionaries, foreigners, and their offspring. Equally dangerous were the colonial soldiers sent to put down the rebellion. The villagers, including Yung’s father, had been caught in the siege, the melee, and now the maelstrom. That’s when his mother must have known that the end of their world was near – when they saw the starving fishermen hauling in their nets, filled with the bodies of the dead.
As Yung watched his mother disappear, leaving him alone in the cemetery, he wanted to yell, ‘Ah-ma! Don’t leave me!’ He wanted to run to her, to cling to her legs, to cry at her feet, begging. But he resisted, even as he whimpered, yearning. He did what he was told as he ached with sadness and loneliness. He had always obeyed her – trusted her. But it seemed as if she had died months earlier, and all that remained was a ghost, a skeleton – a hopeless broken spirit with no place left to wander and no one to haunt.
What little hope she had, she’d bequeathed to him.
So he waited, grieving, as the sun set upon the place where his mei mei had been interred. He remembered his Chinese grandmother and how she’d once talked about the Lolos, the tribal people of Southern China who believed that there was a star in the sky for every person on Earth. When that person died, their star would fall.
His ears popped and he heard the familiar booming of mortars and the rattle of gunfire. He watched as the horizon lit up with flares and the flash of cannons. Then the sky was dark again and everywhere he looked, it was raining stars.
Unbound
(1902)
The man who was not his uncle came for Yung in the morning. A white merchant with a ruddy beard, he removed his elegant suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal an array of old tattoos. He squeezed Yung’s arm, pulled his hair, looked in his ears. He then smiled and nodded as his translator, a remarkably fat Chinese man, clapped his hands and shouted, ‘Hay sun la!’waking other children – a host of girls and a handful of boys, who had gathered in and around the cemetery during the night. All of them seemed older than Yung, grade school age at least, or well into their teens. Some had rolls of bedding and carried their belongings in bamboo baskets attached to long sticks, topped with netting, while a few of the older girls wore modest, hand-sewn dresses and tied their hair with red strings. But just as many were like him, in rags, barefoot. And all of them stared at Yung when they realized he was a mixed-blood child. He recognized the look, not one of curiosity or contempt, but an expression that said, I may have nothing, I may be homeless and starving, but at least I’m not him.
Yung ignored their attention and tried not to think about his mother as they followed the men away from pillars of black smoke and the sounds of gunfire that were rising in the distance. They walked for hours, Yung taking two steps with his little legs for every one of theirs, as he struggled to keep up. A tributary of sadness flowing into a greater stream of refugees that became a flood of humanity, traveling away from the sound of thunder in a cloudless sky. They boarded a boat, which took them to a city on the Pearl River. When they arrived, in the shadow of a great ship, the salty air made Yung’s mouth water, though the only signs of food were the bones of fish that had been recently caught, cooked, and eaten, on the banks of the murky water.
Yung’s eyes grew wide as he gazed up at the massive freighter, with four masts and an enormous funneled stack. Everyone spoke of the Chang Yi,but he didn’t know if that was the ship’s name, or if they were referring to the man who was not his uncle.
Swirling black smoke from the stack muddied the sky, turning the sun a ruddy orange, and Yung wondered how such a stout ship could move. Then he felt his legs tremble from the vibrations of a great steam engine. His body was haggard, weary and numb from the march, but he was grateful to be upright as he watched a group of Chinese stevedores pulling an oxcart bearing a dozen elegantly dressed girls with bound feet. Yung heard a shrill whistle as they were unloaded, limping, while a white marine officer parted the crowd and began yelling in broken Chinese, ‘Line up and be silent!’
The officer pointed and snapped his fingers as Yung queued up and they were poked and prodded, noses counted.
The officer culled those with rickets or those with stooped backs. That group was herded away from the ship, back toward the heart of the city. Yung watched as the boys and girls obviously stricken with lice and mites were doused in foul-smelling waters, given a change of clothing, and then taken to another vessel.
Yung overheard the sailors chattering back and forth in Chinese, Portuguese, and English, which he understood just enough to gather that they were blackbirders.
His mother had once talked about these men – tailors who sold poor Chinese to plantations in Hawaii, outlaws who smuggled workers into the western world, and brokers who delivered brides to lonely men in the gold mountains of Gum Shan – the rich and mysterious frontiers of North America.
Despite those warnings, Yung’s heart quickened as he began to smell real food – roast chicken, garlic, and other savory spices, emanating from the ship, wafting on the breeze.
The officer yelled boarding instructions, and Yung was ushered on board with his tiny knapsack of clothing. He could see another gangplank leading up to the front of the ship, where the man who was not his uncle had donned a coat and top hat and was hosting elegantly dressed men and women, Asian and Anglo, on a forward deck. There were men in military uniforms and a host of Chinese officials. Yung stared, his mouth watering as he watched them eat, and drink wine from long-stemmed glasses. He and the other children and teens were herded below, through narrow hallways, past crew cabins, and beyond rows of bunks crowded with shirtless Chinese sailors who sported brands on their chests and scars on their backs. Yung followed as they were taken down into what felt like the bottom of the ship, to a cargo hold that smelled of coal dust and stale urine. And there was a constant mechanical thrum coming through the walls that he could feel as well as hear.
As his eyes adjusted to the dimly lit space, Yung could see that the cargo hold had been converted into a living quarters, divided into racks of bunks and rows of low-walled pens, with woolen blankets and straw mattresses. He was assigned to a pen with five other boys, who looked at him warily. A group of peasant girls, some with bound feet, perhaps eight or nine years of age, were put in pens directly across from them, while the teenagers in silk cheongsams and lacy European dresses, with high necks and tight collars, were put in a locked wooden paddock toward the rear of the room. The iron bars suggested the place had previously been used for storing precious cargo. Yung watched the sailors regard the comely girls the way his mother and he used to hungrily stare at street vendors cooking fresh siu mei. That’s when Yung realized the well-dressed girls had been locked away for their own protection.
‘You will sleep here, you will live here, and you will spend the entire month at sea belowdecks,’ barked a Caucasian man in a dark blue uniform. He spoke English, which Yung assumed only a handful of children understood. The man removed his cap and rubbed his chin, feeling the blond scruff of a close-cropped beard. He introduced himself as the ship’s chief medical officer. ‘You will stay here, otherwise you risk catching and spreading a coughing disease.’ The doctor pointed to his chest. ‘I will conduct daily health inspections. If one of you gets sick, or is stricken with a rash that bleeds, you will not be allowed to threaten the rest of the passengers – you will be thrown overboard. No exceptions. There is no mercy at sea. Is this understood?’
Yung nodded, wide-eyed as a Chinese crewman translated the doctor’s words. The boys in his pen, the ones who had been lounging on the floor, immediately sat upright. Yung looked around, wondering who might be sick. He didn’t dare sneeze for fear of being dragged back on deck and cast over the side.
There were hushed whispers followed by a nervous pause.
Then a horrible wailing began as the young doctor drew a long, hooked knife from a satchel and went about the room, cutting the soiled cotton bandages that bound the feet of many of the girls, both the rich and the poor. Yung could hear their crying as the girls’ painful feet were touched, moved, the popping of bone and cartilage as they tried to flex and put pressure on their lotus-shaped stumps. For the younger ones he could tell that this was a euphoric feeling of freedom and relief, but for the older girls, their feet long since broken again and again, this brought more pain than comfort.
‘You will feel better in a few weeks,’ the doctor said as he threw the dirty bandages into a wooden bucket. The cotton smelled like blood and herbs and rot.
As girls sobbed, the elegant teens in the paddock sniped at them, ‘Stop mewling. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Show respect.’
Even as a little boy, Yung recognized their Yue dialect and understood they must be merchants’ daughters, of a higher quality than the rest of the children. A few of the poor girls spat back at the teenagers until the sailors began hitting them with rattan sticks.
The older girls looked on, smiling proudly. Better to be a caged peacock, they must have thought, than to live free as a pigeon.
Yung sat down and noticed that the group of peasant girls across from him had kept to themselves. A few of them wiggled their toes for the first time in months and nursed the pale skin on their feet, but none of them cried.
The boys in his pen mocked them and sneered as they shouted, ‘lou geoi,’laughing until a crewman snapped at them.
Yung didn’t know what lou geoi meant, but he knew the words were an insult of some kind. His mother used to fight back tears whenever Chinese men or European sailors whistled and called her that on the rutted streets of their village.
Yung noted how the girls all styled their hair in long braids and they wore dirty clothing made from hemp and ramie. They looked like the lowest of the low – poor girls whose parents had bound their daughters’ feet in an effort to dress them up. Only one of the girls’ hair was unbraided, and she also stood out because of her faded blue robe and wide belt.
Yung was beginning to ache for his mother when sailors brought rags and buckets of fresh water to each pen. He waited until the older boys were done cleaning up and then took his turn. As Yung washed his face and teeth, he gazed into the half-empty bucket of dirty water. His reflection rocked back and forth, swaying as the ship began to move.
He glanced around and noticed that one of the older boys had snatched the bucket from the nearby girls, who had just stared back in contempt. Yung thought about the sister he’d had for a brief moment, and then he carried his bucket to the peasant girls’ side and offered it to them. They all looked at him strangely, suspiciously as he urged one of them to sit at the edge of the mattress. He knelt, placing one, then both of the girl’s feet in the cool water. Yung had once watched his mother treat a cousin this way. He rubbed the arch of her foot; then pushed her toes back, stretching them gently with his small hands. As he washed the girl’s feet with the damp cloth, she winced for a moment, inhaled deeply, then relaxed. He wrung out the towel and handed the cloth to another girl, before returning to his pen. There he found an unoccupied corner of the mattress as the boys looked at him with scorn.
That night, Yung woke as the steam engine rumbled loudly along with his empty stomach. He sat up and realized that the other boys were snoring and that the oldest, a stout bully name Jun, had taken many of the blankets, including Yung’s, for himself. The cargo hold was cold now, and he clutched his knapsack on his small corner of the shared mattress. And as the ship rocked and swayed on the open sea, he realized that with each minute, each hour, he was being carried farther from his village, away from his mother, forever. He wiped his eyes, and in the glow of a single, wall-mounted lamp, Yung could see that some of the girls across from him were awake, staring back. They whispered among themselves and then lifted a corner of the blanket they were sharing.
‘Little brother.’ One of the girls motioned. ‘Come over here.’
Yung glanced at his sleeping bunkmates. Then he stepped lightly, nervously, with bare feet on the cool wooden floor. He hesitated, worried that this might be some kind of cruel joke. Then one of the girls reached up, tugged his sleeve, and pulled him beneath the covers. They made room as he nestled among them. He felt cold feet next to his, hands and arms, as they patted his chest and shoulders.
‘It’s okay.’ A girl spoke in a small voice. ‘You’re one of us.’
Yung looked at the girls. ‘What do you mean?’
The girl in the blue robe sat up partway and peeked over at him as if the answer were obvious. She spoke Chinese with a thick accent. ‘Nobody wants us either.’
Yung swallowed the bitter medicine of truth. He nodded, closed his eyes, and felt the tickling of their hair on his cheeks, on his neck, as they all settled in beneath the covers. Despite the sharing of the wash bucket, their clothing smelled old and musty, like his – reeking of weeks of smoke and dust. Yung didn’t mind. Nor did he care what the other boys would think in the morning. He was used to people staring at him on the street – the villagers who’d spat at him or laughed. But for now he felt safely surrounded, comforted, as he drew a deep breath and melted into the girls’ kindness.
The Water Trade
(1902)
If Yung had worried about being harassed by his former bunkmates and Jun in the morning, he had little to fear. Seasickness kept everyone in bed, eyes closed, groaning – everyone but Yung, that is.
The doctor told him his sea legs were a natural advantage of being the littlest, the smallest. Yung nodded and watched as the older boys and the young women turned pale and retched up the broth they’d been given. Vomit now speckled their clothing, their shoes, their shimmering gowns.
Yung busied himself by emptying the reeking pails of night soil, washing dinner tins, and ministering to the girls in his pen, helping them take sips of the ginger tea they’d been given to ease their nausea. His new bunkmates were always grateful, whispering, ‘Thank you, Little Brother,’ which had become his de facto name. They’d introduced themselves one by one as Gwai Ying, Quan Gow Sheung, Wong So, Leung Gin, Fong Muey, Mui-Ji, Hoi, and … something else,but he couldn’t possibly keep track of who was who. They’d explained that the curious girl in the blue robe was Japanese and had been sent to China by her family, sold to an inn where she’d been working as a maid until the owner died and her contract was bought out. The strange girl smiled and spoke Chinese, but when she said her name, Yung couldn’t understand the words. He addressed all of them as Big Sister.
On the fourth day, when most were beginning to recover – to sit up and walk about, to play cards or games with string – they were given solid food – the first real meal Yung had tasted in more than a week. The simple offering of sticky rice balls and dried fish made everyone moan with delight. Yung wanted to savor the salty rice, but like everyone else, he ate furiously, almost violently, chewing, swallowing, and gulping as though the food might be snatched from his hands at any moment.
Yung was licking his fingers after dinner when the doctor appeared with a crewman and made his normal round of inspections. Everyone stood as tall as they could, arms at their sides; no one dared to cough or sniffle or even breathe in a manner that might be confused with illness. They waited as the doctor slowly walked by, leather heels squealing on the floor, nostrils flaring. Occasionally he would stop to look into a mouth, or a shirt would be removed so he could examine the skin on a child’s back.
Yung chewed his lip as the man, whose breath he could smell, stopped in front of him. Then he lit a cigarette and pushed Yung aside as he directed his attention to the girls, especially the one in the blue robe. He ran his fingers along her neck, removed her wooden hairpins, and toyed with the tresses that hung about her shoulders. He shook his head and then turned back to Yung, who stood out among the girls. The doctor patted him on the shoulder and moved on. Yung listened as the doctor chatted amiably with the other boys, telling them to stay out of trouble. He slapped Jun on the cheek and jerked his ear, playful, but hard enough to make his point. Then the doctor stopped at the paddock of older girls.
They all smiled and kowtowed. He snapped his fingers and said, ‘That one.’ He pointed to a girl in a lavender dress as a sailor stepped forward with a key and opened the groaning iron door.
The merchants’ daughters seemed shocked, confused, and then compliant as they stepped away from the tall, slender girl.
‘But … Sir Doctor, I’m not ill – not even seasick anymore,’ the girl in lavender protested, pleading in her native tongue. ‘I feel fine, look at me, my skin is perfect, and my hair is shiny and clean.’ She tilted her chin as she shook her head and her tasseled earrings swayed back and forth. ‘I haven’t coughed once.’
The crewman translated as the doctor dropped his cigarette on the deck and snuffed it out with the tip of his shoe. ‘I know. That’s why you’re coming with us.’ He smiled politely as his words were translated into Cantonese. ‘We will take care of you upstairs. We wouldn’t want you wasting away down here.’
The color drained from the girl’s face. She smoothed out the lace on her dress and nodded, seemingly resigned. Yung heard the doctor ask the girl, as he led her away, if she liked the taste of baiju,rice wine. And then they were gone, leaving nothing but the pregnant silence.
‘They’re not going to throw her overboard, are they?’ Yung asked the girl in the blue robe. She didn’t answer or seem to understand the question. But the boys snickered.
That night, after Yung and the girls finished dinner, they piled onto their mattress and played a whisper game. One would whisper something to the person next to her and then that phrase would be passed down the line and back again. It never came back unchanged, and that was the fun. Yung had seen the game played before in his village, but he’d never been included.
He waited, and the girl next to him finally turned and whispered, ‘I’m a hairy dog that bites,’ in Cantonese. He clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. He collected himself and then passed the message along to the Japanese girl in the blue robe. She looked confused, furrowed her brow, and did her best to whisper something on to the girl next to her.
The messages went back and forth, from ‘My diaper is full’ and ‘Whipped with a cane’ to ‘You’re my pretty servant’ and ‘Jun is your ugly lady-boss’. That one made Yung laugh out loud. When it was Yung’s turn to make up a phrase, he thought of the silliest thing possible. He said to the girl in blue, ‘I’m going to marry you.’
The Japanese girl crinkled her nose, then her eyes grew wide and she laughed.
But the phrase was taken more seriously as the words moved further down the line. The girls murmured it solemnly, sighed wearily, shook their heads, and eventually returned the message as though relaying a bit of bad news. To Yung it felt as though all the joy, all the laughter, had been snuffed out like a candle.
Yung didn’t understand the sadness he had caused, even as the Japanese girl turned back and relayed the message that had only slightly changed. She looked embarrassed as she confessed, ‘I am sorry. No one will ever marry us.’
Juju Reporting
(1962)
Ernest touched the tarnished band of gold on his ring finger and felt the groove worn into his skin from years of wearing it. He pondered the seaborne episode of his childhood, sipping a cup of oolong tea that had grown cold.
Ernest sighed as he gazed out the third-floor window of his tiny one-room apartment at the Publix Hotel. One aspect of Gracie’s dementia was that she didn’t tolerate men very well – she had even punched a male orderly at the hospital. Even Ernest was not exempt. As a result, Ernest and Gracie had lived apart for almost three years now. Not the retirement he’d imagined. He visited as often as possible on sunny days – that’s what Juju called Gracie’s happier, lucid moments – and he wrote to her on cloudy days, when she didn’t feel like company. He missed her terribly, even when he was by her side – he ached for who she used to be. He longed for who he used to be as well.
Ernest finished his tea. He could hear passenger trains coming and going, as well as the wind through cracks in the panes of glass that had been covered with masking tape to hold the pieces together and ward off the chill. King Street Station was one block away, and he imagined nattily dressed people streaming from the velvet-curtained Pullman cars, to be embraced by loved ones – the warmth, the smell of familiar cologne or perfume, the rush and excitement that came with a long-awaited reunion. But he also recalled the haunting emptiness of waving goodbye. The sunrise colored by thick, ashy smoke from torched fields and burning buildings. And the depth of sadness plumbed by the remembrance of falling asleep among dozens of seasick children in the belly of a ship that smelled like fear and despair.
Ernest could almost feel the rain and the mist in the evening sky, as much as the melancholy. He stretched his back as he noticed an illuminated spire in the distance that could only be the top of the Space Needle.
He thought about his long-lost mother as he regarded the hairpin she’d given him so many decades before. That tarnished bit of copper – the jade phoenix he now knew as Fenghuang – made him feel guilty for not missing her more, as though sixty years later he had somehow failed her as a son. At least he’d survived. And the sad truth was, he just couldn’t remember what she looked like. He didn’t possess a single photograph. He could always remember how she smelled, though – sweet, like fresh watermelon, mangoes, and bayberries. While reading a science book years later, he learned that’s what a body smells like when it’s starving.
Over the years Ernest had always thought more about the many girls on that ship and what might have happened to them – especially whenever he saw an elderly woman in a market in Chinatown, the story of her life written in the lines on her face.
He imagined that if they’d been fortunate, the ones who could walk probably ended up as servants in fancy, ivy-covered manors in Broadmoor or Laurelhurst. Or perhaps they’d found work in a laundry or a sewing factory. The choice few might have been able to earn or marry their way out of their contracts, to eventually have a home on Beacon Hill, and children who would have attended school at Franklin or Garfield High. They would have enjoyed all the trappings of a relatively normal life.
The merchants’ daughters, in all likelihood, had ended up as picture brides, married to strangers they’d never seen except in black-and-white photographs.
Unlike the least fortunate of all – the sorrowful girls who had been so kind to him. Like him, they’d been sold by their parents because their families couldn’t feed them or didn’t want them, or they were mere runaways tricked into thinking they’d get rich in America by working as maids. Many of those girls who came to Seattle ended up at the Aloha, the Tokyo, or the Diamond House, or perhaps the old Eastern Hotel – low-rent brothels. The girls were indentured servants with unfair contracts, who might run away to the police only to be returned, like stray animals, to their owners.
All of these women, Ernest thought – the poor, the merchants’ daughters, and the handful of working girls who survived – they’d all be grandmothers by now. With secrets kept, stories hidden, and respectful children who would never dare to ask about their youth.
Ernest’s reverie was interrupted by footsteps in the hallway.
He listened as the radiator pinged and hot-water pipes rattled within the walls. As he waited, he drew a deep breath, and then relaxed when he heard the tromping of work boots in the groaning, creaking mahogany stairwell of the old Chinatown hotel.
Perhaps it was his old friend, Pascual Santos, a longtime resident of the Publix who’d helped Ernest move in when he lost his home.
Maybe he’s hoping I’ll join him for a night out on the town, Ernest thought. He knew he should answer the door, but he didn’t feel much like socializing.
In fact, he’d considered moving someplace nicer, but whenever he was woken by chatter in the hallway – greetings in Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog, some polite, some stern, a few happy, rambling voices that slurred from too much drugstore screw-top wine – Ernest realized that he felt strangely comfortable here. At this pay-by-the-week purgatory, the rooms were tiny, the floors were warped, the bathrooms shared, and the old floral wallpaper was perpetually peeling, but the bar for achievement was remarkably nonexistent, and he was fine with that. Because the Publix was an old workingmen’s home, a tobacco-stained hideaway where lost individuals found solace. Where the elderly tended to their gardens on the roof, and the children of the few families who lived here played basketball in the basement. And for Ernest the hotel was also mere miles from all the people he’d grown up with and cared about.
Ernest was about to make a fresh pot of tea when he heard footsteps again, this time the unmistakable rap-tap of a woman’s heels on the wooden floor outside his door, and a knock.
‘Dad, it’s me. Open up.’ The voice in the hallway belonged to his daughter Juju. Ernest had been so busy driving people to and from the fair that he’d ignored the small stack of pink While You Were Out messages that had piled up in his mailbox downstairs, courtesy of the hotel’s front desk manager. Now he guessed they were from her.
Juju switched to an innocent singsong. ‘Da-aaaad, I know you’re in there.’
His daughters always worried about him, especially in the years since Gracie had fallen ill. Even Hanny, who lived in Las Vegas, which seemed like a world away, called at least once a week, long-distance charges and all. Ernest rubbed his eyes as he looked in the chipped mirror on the wall. He finger-combed his thinning, salt-and-pepper hair and straightened his well-worn sweater, which had only one button left.
He cleared his throat and donned a smile as he opened the door. ‘Juju!’ he said, wide-eyed. ‘Come in and get warm. I’m so sorry I haven’t returned your calls. I’ve been so busy these days – running people around town. Your mom okay? Have you eaten?’ As he gave her a hug and she kissed his cheek, he realized that he hadn’t shaved.
His daughter loosened her raincoat and stepped inside, groaning as she looked around. She pointed to a patch of old paint blistering on the ceiling and a leaky pipe that dripped into a mop bucket on the floor. ‘Dad, if they’re not going to fix this place up you should at least let me do it for you. Seriously, how can you live like this? Oh, and I’m pushing forty, so feel free to call me Judy anytime.’
‘Hanny doesn’t seem to mind—’
Juju interrupted. ‘Hannah also wears a three-foot headpiece with ostrich plumes that glitter, and struts around in a sequined G-string for money. Her name doesn’t go on a byline like mine does.’
Ernest smiled and tried not to roll his eyes. He couldn’t help but be proud of his daughter, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She’d started off at the Northwest Times,then landed a job at the big daily, covering the Ladies Garden Club and meetings of the Women’s Auxiliary of the King County Library. But somehow Juju (Ernest couldn’t bring himself to call her Judy) had fought her way up to a regular beat covering Chinatown, the Central District, and Rainier Beach. Sure, she’d probably landed the assignment because she was ambiguously Asian – and more to the point, because no one else wanted to cover the colored neighborhoods. But her region was also riddled with racial tension, and dubious development deals on every corner and vacant lot – fertile journalistic soil for someone with a sharp, eager plow, and a shoulder for hard work.
Ernest was proud of Hanny too, but it would be an understatement to say that her vocation as a Stardust showgirl (and occasional magician’s assistant) had always struck too close to home. He didn’t care for her profession the way Howard Hughes didn’t care for reporters, or the way Elvis didn’t care for the army. Ernest told himself that he was happy that Hanny was happy. And honestly, he was impressed that his younger daughter had gotten the job given that she was half-Chinese and didn’t look like Jayne Mansfield or the cookie-cutter showgirls he’d seen on postcards. But Hanny was extraordinarily tall (she called it poised) and royally confident (she called it refined) and he guessed that had carried the day.
Occasionally, Ernest worried about her working at places like the Sands, which had made Nat King Cole eat alone in his suite rather than be seen downstairs in the restaurant. But the times were slowly changing. And Hanny seemed immune to controversy. She was Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,practically gushing, ‘Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there in Las Vegas! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people as Frank Sinatra in’t!’
Ernest was less impressed, though he had to admit that he loved to hear about Hanny’s run-ins with Billy Daniels and Peter Lawford, even if he had to turn a deaf ear to stories about the drunken marriage proposals she seemed to receive on a nightly basis.
Ernest offered Juju an orange Nesbitt’s soda and sat down in his favorite reading chair. He watched as she drank half the bottle in one long swig. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took a seat on his lumpy vinyl chesterfield.
‘So what brings you here?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ said Juju, ‘I think I found a way to finally get my byline on the front page of the paper. It has to do with you and Mom – but mainly you—’
‘Is she okay?’ Ernest asked. ‘Has she had a relapse? Let me get my shoes on—’
‘No, Dad – she’s fine. She’s, you know, pretty much how she is. She still thinks I’m her nurse half the time, a maid the other half. She’s happy, pleasant, in and out of her own world, no nightmares lately,’ Juju said with a resigned shrug. ‘Better than ever.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’ Ernest asked as he sat back in his chair.
Juju looked at him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Oh, it’s not a problem. It’s just that I convinced my editor to let me write a then-and-now piece about the grand opening of the new world’s fair, seen through the eyes of some old-timers who happened to attend the original Alaska–Pacific–Yukon Expo, fifty-something years ago. Granted, that story angle isn’t particularly unique, but along the way I dug up some details that could make my story stand out above the rest. And since I’m on deadline, I was thinking that I’d fact-check with you about some of the details. Because I remember you talking about how you went to that first expo as a little kid.’
Ernest nodded politely. ‘Oh, I don’t remember all that much, really.’
‘Well, do you remember anything like this, by chance?’ Juju reached into her handbag and retrieved a small stack of newspaper clippings. She handed one to her father, who donned a set of reading glasses.
The article was from The Kennewick Courier circa 1909 and read:
Seattle – A boy, the charge of the Washington Children’s Home Society, was one of the prizes offered at the exposition. His name is Ernest and maybe he will have a surname if the winner, holding the proper ticket, comes to claim him.
Ernest opened his mouth to speak. Closed it. And then opened it again. ‘That’s interesting … I mean … they gave away a lot of peculiar things at the fair …’
‘Dad.’ Juju pointed to the name in the article. ‘It says Ernest. Was this you? I mean – you once told me how you ended up at the Washington Children’s Home after you came here from China. And you said you were given a job as a houseboy after the world’s fair. You told me that’s where you met Mom.’
Ernest tried to laugh. ‘Why would you think that? Ernest is a pretty common name – Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Shackleton, Ernest Borgnine, Ernest—’
‘Oh my God, it is you.’
‘Look …’
‘Dad, I’m an investigative reporter. This is what I do for a living. I can see the truth written on your face. I can tell just by the tone of your voice.’
Ernest furrowed his brow and drew a deep breath, exhaling slowly. It was one thing to lose himself in memories, but the last thing he wanted to do was share the whole sordid story with his daughter. Let alone one hundred thousand readers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He coughed and tried changing the subject.
‘Has your mother’s memory improved anymore these days?’
‘I guess, because she’s the one who told me.’
Ernest blinked. ‘Told you what?’
‘Dad, she’s the one who told me that a boy had been raffled off as a prize at the AYP – she said you were that boy.’ Juju stared back. ‘She was listening to the radio and heard a commercial for the new world’s fair. Then she started talking to herself. I thought she was spouting nonsense until I looked it up.’
Ernest felt the warmth in his chest grow cold. ‘What … are you talking about?’
‘Mom,’ Juju said as she put a hand on his arm. ‘She’s begun saying things. Most of the time she still doesn’t make a lot of sense, but every once in a while – I think she’s starting to remember.’
After his daughter left, Ernest turned on the small Philco swivel-screen he’d gotten on clearance from Hikida Furniture and Appliance, because of a broken dial. It worked fine, though he had to change the channel with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He tried to relax, listening to the hum of the television as the color picture tube warmed up and the distorted image on-screen slowly came into focus.
As far as Juju’s questions, Ernest had stalled. He’d bought a little time by saying he was tired and promising to come over tomorrow afternoon to talk. He’d wanted to drop everything and see Gracie tonight, but he knew she’d be going to bed soon and that evenings were when she was most fragile.
Let her rest.
Ernest thought about the people he knew – the ones he’d grown up with as well as his neighbors here at the Publix. He suspected that everyone his age, of his vintage, had a backstory, a secret that they’d never shared. For one it might be a forsaken husband back in Japan. For another it could be a son or daughter from a previous marriage in China. For others perhaps the secret shame was a father they didn’t talk to anymore, or a baby they’d given to a neighbor, never to be seen again. Or perhaps a vocational secret – backroom gambling, bringing rum down from Canada during Prohibition, or the personal, private horrors that lay hidden behind the bars, ribbons, and medals of a military record.
We all have things we don’t talk about, Ernest thought. Even though, more often than not, those are the things that make us who we are.
Ernest remembered the AYP and wondered how much he could share without giving up Gracie’s part of the story. Moreover, he worried about how long it would be before Gracie inadvertently gave herself up. What would Hanny and Juju think if they learned that their mother was once someone else – something else? To him, Gracie would always be more than a survivor of circumstance. She was a person of strength, a woman of fierce independence. But if her past ever got out, her gossipy friends at church, their old neighbors – no one would look at her the same.
Ernest rubbed his temples and watched Ed Sullivan as the show broadcast live from the refurbished Seattle Opera House, which sat adjacent to the new expo’s pillarless Coliseum. He offered a warbling introduction to Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, who danced and sang ‘Love Tastes Like Strawberries’. That performance was followed by the Amazing Unus, a local equilibrist who could balance anything on one finger – an umbrella, a sword, a padded barstool, even a six-foot scale model of the Space Needle.
Ernest glanced at the clock on the wall, next to a calendar from the Tsue Chong Noodle Company featuring a beautiful Chinese girl in a traditional dress, but with heavy make-up and ruby lips. The calendar was three years old.
He whispered, ‘Gracie, where did the time go?’
The Floating World
(1902)
Yung wished that someone had a pocket watch or at least a bundle of timekeeping incense, the kind the Buddhist monks in his village had used to mark the hours of the sun. Instead, the best anyone could muster was a piece of chalk that was used to keep track of the days, according to meals and their regular bedtime. Yung watched as one of the girls made another hash mark and quietly counted to nineteen.
As the ship rocked and the time passed, Yung had mourned his mother terribly – her memory waxing and waning like a ghostly echo. But he’d also been reasonably well fed for the first time in his life, surrounded by big sisters who laughed and smiled. And on his better days, he’d had his impressionable young heart realigned, set on foreign promises: the Hawaiian Islands, tropical sunshine, an endless horizon of warm water, and a beggars’ feast of sugarcane. They’d been told that there would be fat stalks everywhere they looked, just waiting to be sliced and peeled and chewed, nectar waiting to be savored. Yung clung to that hope, and the illusion that his mother would survive and that someday he’d grow up and make enough money to send for her. But even his tender imagination suspected that was folly.
And sadly, so were the islands, when a constellation of sores had burst on the chest, arms, and legs of one of the other boys. Because of that illness, the ship was unable to make port in Honolulu. The boy, delirious with fever, had been taken to an isolation room and later his body was buried at sea, as the ship continued to the Northwest.
After that sad event, a rainbow appeared in the form of an oil-stained canvas curtain, which was hung from a rope that kept the nearby boys, Jun included, sequestered from the rest of the children in the steerage hold. The boys had been officially quarantined and were now fed from a separate serving kettle. The doctor paid special attention to them, often checking two or three times each day, though they were as healthy as ever. Or at least as loud as ever – they heckled the girls through the curtain. Especially Jun, who found perpetual amusement in singing vulgar songs, much to the disgust of everyone but the passing sailors. He also teased the girls behind the bars, loudly speculating about which one of them would be taken next. The girls shouted back with cutting words – the kinds of insults that could be hurled only from the safety of their cage.
Yung and the peasant girls stayed out of the fray, giggling until Jun focused his rage in their direction. He ranted until one of the passing sailors shouted in English and everyone laughed and giggled a bit more as they settled down for the night, feeling safe, knowing that despite his bark, Jun’s bite was trapped behind the curtain.
Yung fell asleep feeling sorry for the rest of the boys in quarantine.
