It was no use arguing. Marigold climbed into the back.
Her book was right where she’d left it, except Marigold didn’t feel like reading anymore. She had a real mystery on her hands now. The Case of Helen Yuen’s Vanishment, Nancy would call it.
But unlike Nancy Drew, who was famously only happy when there was trouble, Marigold was the opposite. More than anything, she wished she had never found out her mother’s secret.
Because she had a feeling, sooner or later, it was going to bring big, big trouble.
Kansas City
1952
Chapter Thirty
Helen
Three days after we met, Philip and I were married. As a young girl I’d pictured my wedding to be joyously red, and raucous with the laughter of hundreds of relatives. In reality there was no banquet, only a short ceremony at a courthouse. We had four guests: Sui Chan, her husband, and two of Philip’s friends whose names I caught and forgot, and I wore my first white dress, which Sui Chan helped me pick out that very morning. It was long and gauzy, with lacy buttons that itched at the back. Chinese traditionally wore white for mourning, but Sui Chan teased that the dress looked more like a cloud than a shroud. That made for my only real smile of the day. When Philip and I stood for a photograph, I was so nervous that I blinked at the flash, then it was over, the most important moment in my life immortalized in a split second of jittery angst. We said goodbye to our friends then spent the afternoon preparing my paperwork.
Philip had hired a lawyer to help. When he asked for my name, I started, “Ha... Ha Yut—” I stopped myself. “Put me down as Helen Yuen.”
“Yuen?” said Philip. “Are you sure?”
“American wives take their husband’s last name.”
I sounded more confident than I felt. As the lawyer recorded my name in neat block letters, I had second thoughts. Once I left Hong Kong, there’d be no one who knew me as Yut Ying. All traces of the girl I once was—would be gone.
“Wait!” I cried. “HelenYingYuen. Ying—for shadow.”
Helen Ying Yuen,my papers read. Seeing it, some of the heaviness in my heart lifted. I might have left behind my shadow in Gu Ma’s house, but at least I’d still have the one in my name.
The next morning, Philip and I embarked upon the ship to America. As I ascended the gangway, I watched the sunlight glimmer over Victoria Harbour. How magnificent it had seemed, this city of my splintered dreams and bitter love. Here was the same sun and the same sea, but I was no longer the same girl. I was married now, and I was leaving.
After one last rueful look, I turned my back on the past.
Philip had paid extra for a private cabin, which I appreciated, but it only heightened the stinging reality of what we’d done. Here we were, two strangers who’d impetuously bound their fortunes together, and this was the beginning of the rest of our lives. In Hong Kong, we’d had plenty to talk about—planning for the marriage and arrangements for me to come to America. But alone on the boat, getting to know each other took effort. Luckily, Philip was a patient man.
I told him about the family I’d left behind in Hong Kong, and in turn he told me about his mother, who’d sneaked into America illegally only to be deported after his younger brother was born. He had followed her back to China as a child, not returning to the States until just before the war. He’d wanted to fight against the Japanese, but by the time his father permitted him to enlist, the war was nearly over. The Navy took him in, put him to work in the kitchen under a Frenchman whom Philip stillcalled Simonsifuto this day. Under “teacher” Simon’s tutelage, Philip spent four months learning to bake bread.
“The first day, every single loaf I baked was hard as concrete,” Philip recalled. “Simon sifu would open the window and chuck the whole thing out to sea. ‘Because of you, the sailors starve to death,’ he said. It was a wasteful lesson, but necessary. I learned quick after that.”
Through the stories we shared, I got to know him. I learned that he was mulishly old-fashioned, that he was impulsive with his money but parsimonious with his words, that he was generous to strangers, and—for better or for worse—he worked very hard.
We arrived in Kansas City on the cusp of spring. I had pictured fertile hills veined with silver, and gold flecks glistening in the lakes and creeks. But the city was gray, all the buildings square and flat-roofed except for one tower shaped like a skewered cuttlefish. The snow came up to my ankles, and my socks became soggy as soon as I got off the bus.
That was when I thought,What have I gotten myself into?
Americans were strange. They ate their vegetables raw, drank their water cold, and showered in the morning instead of the night. They also wore their shoes in the house, even when the soles were sticky with old bubblegum and dried mud, and kissed their dogs as if they were their own children. The longer I lived among them, the less I understood them.
Philip’s ancestors had been among the first Chinese to come to the United States. They’d worked on the railroads, hoarding every penny to bring back to China. His great-grandfather had made the journey three times to California; not once had he thought about settling there.
“Why didn’t your ancestors stay in America?” I had asked when Philip told the story.
“Because they couldn’t bring their wives. They had to leave their families behind in China.”
Only after the war did the United States allow Chinese women to enter the country as wives of servicemen. That was how Philip had married his first wife, and now, how I was able to leave Hong Kong.
Lily used to say that Americans were so rich that even their trash bins had gold lettering, their skies were blue like the feathers around a hwamei’s eyes, and fairies winged out of television screens bringing fully cooked meals for the hungry. I was glad she wasn’t here to see how none of this was true.
My new home was a basement apartment with a corrugated metal door. An old tornado shelter, Philip suspected, that the landlord decided to rent out. There was an afterthought of a window, which whistled cold air day and night, and the shower sputtered water the color of rust before turning clear. On the bright side, rent was cheap.
