“It’s over,” Yi Gor whispered. “They lost.”
I couldn’t cheer or weep with relief as others were doing. Instead of joy, I felt numb. The war had devoured my childhood, and my memories of life before were faint, almost as distant as my memories of living with my father. Now, it was over. Things would go back to the way they were. But what did that even mean?
The change happened quickly. A few weeks later, the Japanese left China. They were like locusts, here one day then gone the next. The mess they left would take years to clean up.
At eleven, I was a slip of a girl, teetering on the precipice of womanhood. I wore a white undershirt to hide the two soft mounds forming below my collarbones, and with my nails Iplucked at the tiny hairs sprouting under my armpits. As a child, my voice had been high and sweet, delicate like the popular singers I heard on the radio. Now it was lower, deeper. I sounded like a stranger in my own head and I hated it.
Nonetheless, I didn’t stop singing. I needed music. I loved it the way Ah Ma loved the house. Music restored my faith that there was still wonder in this world, still beauty. Every chance I got I listened to the radio. I memorized every song on air and sang them constantly, so immersed in my daydreams of becoming a famous singer that I forgot to pay mind to my chores.
“Ying!” Mama would whack my arm with the rice paddle. “The cabbage is burning! What’s the matter with you?”
She’d seen how when I went outside, the boys who used to come by to see Yi Gor now dallied to flirt with me. Mama blamed my negligence on such attentions. She thought I was in love.
I’d get another whack, then she’d go on and on about the foolishness of young romance. The lectures went in one ear and out the other. Pretending to listen was better than telling her about my dream of becoming a famous singer. I knew what Mama would say: that singers were scarcely better than prostitutes. She was teaching me to become a wife and mother.
I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t want her life. I didn’t want to marry a man I’d never met and end up caged in a house of strangers.
Then came the letter from Baba.
I was in the kitchen frying rice when Mama appeared at the door. Never one to ease into a difficult conversation, she said, “Your father has invited you and Yi Gor to Hong Kong.”
Startled, I dropped my paddle into the wok. “What?”
“Ah Ma wrote to your father as soon as Hong Kong was liberated,” said Mama, taking my place at the charcoal stove. “She asked him to take you in.”
At this point, my father was more a list of memories than a person, tucked into a drawer far in the back of my mind. I recalled that his hair smelled like shoe polish, and he kept a comb in his back pocket to tame every strand that dared fall out of place. His face was a clock with too many hands: thick eyebrows pointing at two and ten, the ends of his mustache at four and eight. He always had a pipe in his mouth or a cigarette between his fingers, and his cheeks turned red when he drank too much wine. He liked to eat salted fish.
I had missed him at first, but that longing had long since curdled into resentment. He had written us only one letter, simply to say that he’d arrived in Hong Kong. Mama had tucked it away in a biscuit tin that stored her needles and buttons and never mentioned it again.
“Will Dai Gor come too?” I asked.
“No,” Mama replied. “He will work for eldest uncle in Guangzhou come the spring.”
“When will we leave?”
She turned to the rice, stirring it vigorously. “I won’t be going.”
“What?” It was as though I’d been struck. “But—”
“Your father remarried,” she interrupted without looking at me. “He took another wife before the war, and she lives with him in your aunt’s house.”
“Baba remarried,” I repeated stupidly.
“You’ll call her Sai Ma, understand?”
Little mother. Or, second mother.
Mama’s words were stilted, the cadence all wrong. That was when I realized she’d known about Baba’s other wife for years. I suddenly felt sick. “Aren’t you angry?”
“It is common to take more than one wife,” Mama said. She made a well in the center of the rice and cracked two eggs inside. “We’ve arranged for a boat to take you and your brother fromthe port. Pack what you need. This will be a good opportunity for you.”
Steam blurred my vision. “What about you?”
“I’ll stay with Ah Ma. Now that the war is over, your father’s begun sending money again. You needn’t worry about us.”
“But—”
“Mind the heat,” she interrupted. “Always stir in the same direction.” She handed the paddle back to me, closing the matter. She knew me, and she was succinct. “No more questions.”
