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In August, a second fire destroys nearly all of China City. A few buildings survive, but all the Golden enterprises are reduced to charred ruins, except for three rickshaws and May’s costume and extras company. Still, no one has insurance. With China enmeshed in a civil war, Father Louie once again can’t go back to the home country to replenish his stock of antiques. He could try to buy antiques here, but everything is too expensive after the world war and much of the savings he squirreled away in China City is ash anyway.
But even if we had the resources to restock the shops, Christine Sterling has no desire to rebuild China City. Convinced the fire was the result of arson, she decides she no longer wants to re-create her ideas of Oriental romance in Los Angeles. In fact, she no longer wants to associate with Chinese in any way whatsoever and doesn’t want them sullying her Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street. She persuades the city to condemn the block of Chinatown between Los Angeles Street and Alameda to make room for a freeway on-ramp. For now all that will remain of the city’s original Chinatown is the row of buildings between Los Angeles Street and Sanchez Alley, where we live. People fight the overall plan, but no one has much hope. We all know the saying that’s so popular here in America: We don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.
Our home is in jeopardy, but we can’t worry about that yet, not when we have to work together to reopen the family businesses. While some people decide to limp along and stay in what remains of China City, Father Louie opens a new Golden Lantern in New Chinatown, stocking it with the cheapest curios he can buy from local wholesalers, who get their goods from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Joy must now spend more time there, selling what she calls “junk” to tourists who don’t know any better, giving her grandfather a break so he can nap. The new shop doesn’t have much business, but she’s a star watcher. And when no one’s in the shop, which is most of the time, she reads.
Sam and I decide to start our own business with some of our savings. He looks for a new café location and finds one on Ord Street just a half block west of China City, but Uncle Wilburt won’t be coming with us. He decides to take advantage of the lo fans’ increased interest in Chinese food since the war ended by opening his own chop-suey joint in Lakewood. We’re sad to see the last of the uncles leave, even though this means that Sam will be the head cook at last.
We prepare for our Grand Opening, doing renovations, creating menus, and thinking about advertising. The café has a little office behind glass in the back where May will manage her business. She stores the props and costumes in a small warehouse over on Bernard Street, saying that she doesn’t need to sit among those things every day and that getting jobs for herself and for other extras is more profitable than the rental business anyway. She encourages Sam to produce a calendar to promote the café. She asks a local photographer to come and take a picture. Even though the restaurant is named after me, the image shows May and Joy standing at the counter next to the pie spinner: EAT AT PEARL’S COFFEE SHOP: QUALITY CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD.
At the beginning of October 1949, Pearl’s Coffee Shop opens, Mao Tse-tung establishes the People’s Republic of China, and the Bamboo Curtain falls. We don’t know how permeable this curtain will be or what any of it means for our home country, but our opening is successful. The calendar is popular, and so is our menu, which combines American and Chinese-American specialties: roast beef, apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and coffee, or sweet-and-sour pork, almond cookies, and tea. Pearl’s Coffee Shop is clean. The food is fresh and consistent. Day and night a line extends out the door.
FATHER LOUIE CONTINUES sending money to his home village by wiring funds to Hong Kong and then hiring someone to walk the money into the People’s Republic of China and on to Wah Hong Village. Sam warns him against this. “Maybe the Communists will confiscate it. Maybe this will be bad for the family in the village.”
I have different fears. “Maybe the American government will call us Communists. Tha
t’s why most families aren’t sending home remittances anymore.”
And it’s true. Many people in Chinatowns across the country have stopped sending money home because everyone is afraid and perplexed. The letters we receive from China confuse us even further.
“We are happy with the new government,” writes my father-in-law’s cousin twice removed. “Everyone is equal now. The landlord has been made to share his wealth with the people.”
If they’re so happy, we ask ourselves, then why are so many trying to get out? These are men, like Uncle Charley, who went back to China with their savings. Here in America, they’d suffered and been humiliated as low and unworthy of citizenship, but they’d withstood it, believing that great happiness, prosperity, and respect awaited them in the country of their birth, only to discover bitter fates upon their return to China, which treats them as dreaded landlords, capitalists, and running dogs of imperialism. The unlucky ones die in the fields or in the village squares. The fortunate ones escape to Hong Kong, where they die broken and broke. A few lucky ones come home to America. Uncle Charley is one of these.
“Did the Commies take everything from you?” Vern asks from his bed.
“They didn’t have a chance,” Uncle Charley answers, rubbing his swollen eyes and scratching his eczema. “When I got there, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were still in power. They asked everyone to exchange their gold and foreign currency for government certificates. They printed billions of Chinese yuan, but it wasn’t worth anything. A sack of rice, which once cost twelve yuan, soon cost sixty-three million yuan. People took their money in wheelbarrows to go shopping. You wanted to buy a postage stamp? It cost the equivalent of six thousand U.S. dollars.”
“Are you saying bad things about the Generalissimo?” Vern asks nervously. “You better not do that.”
“All I’m saying is that by the time the Communist soldiers came, I had nothing left.”
All those years of labor with the promise of returning to China a Gold Mountain man, and now he’s back where he started—working as a glass washer for the Louie family.
I regain my strength and go to work with Sam, which is wonderful in many ways. I get to see my husband, but I also get to be with May every day until five, when I go home to make dinner and she goes to General Lee’s or Soochow, which have moved to New Chinatown, to meet with casting directors and the like. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’re sisters at all. I cling to memories of our home in Shanghai; May clings to memories of being a beautiful girl. I wear my greasy apron and little paper hat; she wears beautiful dresses made from fabrics the colors of the earth—sienna, amethyst, celadon, and mountain lake blue.
I feel bad about how I look until the day my old friend Betsy—who, now that China’s closed, is on her way east to be with her parents—walks through the door of the coffee shop. We’re the same age, thirty-three, but she looks twenty years older. She’s thin, almost skeletal, and her hair has gone gray. I don’t know if this is from her time spent in the Japanese camp or from the hardships of recent months.
“Our Shanghai is gone,” she says when I take her to May’s office at the back of Pearl’s so the three of us can share a pot of tea. “It will never again be what it was. Shanghai was my home, but I’ll never see it again. None of us will.”
My sister and I exchange glances. We had dark moments when we thought we’d never be able to go home because of the Japanese. After the war ended, we had our hopes revived that one day we might go back for a visit, but this feels different. It feels permanent.
Fear
IT’S ALMOST NOON on the second Saturday in November 1950. I don’t have much time before I need to pick up Joy and her friend Hazel Yee at the new Chinese United Methodist Church, where they attend Chinese-language classes. I rush downstairs, get the mail, and then hurry back up to the apartment. I quickly sort through the bills and pull out two letters. One has a postmark from Washington, D.C. I recognize Betsy’s handwriting on the envelope and tuck it in my pocket. The other letter is addressed to Father Louie, and it’s from China. I leave it and the bills on the table in the main room for him to look at when he gets home tonight. Then I grab my shopping bag and a sweater, go back downstairs, and walk to the church, where I wait outside for Joy and Hazel.
When Joy was little, I wanted her to learn proper written and spoken Chinese. The only place to do it—and you have to admit the missionaries were clever about this—was at one of the missions in Chinatown. It wasn’t enough that we had to pay a dollar a month for Joy’s lessons five and a half days a week or that she had to go to Sunday school, but one of her parents also had to attend Sunday services, which I’ve done regularly for the last seven years. Although many parents grumble about this rule, it seems like a fair exchange to me. And sometimes I rather like listening to the sermons, which remind me of those I heard as a girl in Shanghai.
I open Betsy’s letter. It’s been thirteen months since Mao took power in China and four and a half months since North Korea—with help from China’s People’s Liberation Army—invaded South Korea. Only five years ago China and the United States were allies. Now, seemingly overnight, Communist China has become—after Russia—the second most hated enemy of the United States. These last couple of months, Betsy has written several times to tell me that her loyalty has been questioned because she stayed in China so long and that her father is one of many people at the State Department accused of being a Communist and an old China hand. Back in Shanghai, calling someone an old China hand was a compliment; now, in Washington, it’s like calling someone a baby killer. Betsy writes:
My father’s in real hot water. How can they blame him for things he wrote twenty years ago criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and ’what he was doing to China? They’re calling Dad a Communist sympathizer, and they reproach him for helping to “lose China.” Mom and I are hoping he’ll be able to keep his job. If they end up pushing him out, I hope they let him keep his pension. Luckily, he still has friends at the State Department ‘who know the truth about him.
As I fold the letter and put it back in its envelope, I wonder what I should write back. I don’t think it will help Betsy to say that we’re all frightened.
Joy and Hazel burst out onto the street. They’re twelve years old and have been in sixth grade for all of seven weeks. They think they’re practically grown up, but they’re Chinese girls and still completely undeveloped physically. I follow behind them as they swing down the street, holding hands and whispering conspiratorially on our way to Pearl’s. We make a quick stop at a butcher shop on Broadway to pick up two pounds of fresh char siu, the fragrant barbecued pork that’s the secret ingredient in Sam’s chow mein. The shop is crowded today, and everyone is fearful, as they have been since this new war started. Some people have retreated into silence. Some have sunk into depression. And some, like the butcher, are angry.
“Why don’t they just leave us alone?” he demands in Sze Yup of no one in particular. “You think it’s my fault that Mao wants to spread Communism? That has nothing to do with me!”
No one argues with him. We all feel the same way.
