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I’m Joy’s mother and I see her with mother eyes. Her long black hair holds the blue of distant mountains. Her eyes are the deep black of a lake in autumn. She didn’t have enough to eat in the womb, and she’s smaller than I am, smaller than May. This gives her the appearance of a maiden from ancient times—lithe like willow branches swayed by the breeze, as delicate as the flight of swallows—but inside she’s still a Tiger. I can try to tame her, but my daughter can’t escape her essential nature, just as I can’t escape mine. Since graduation, she’s complained about the clothes I make for her. “They’re so embarrassing,” she says. I made them out of love. I made them because there wasn’t a place in Los Angeles like Madame Garnet’s in Shanghai for me to take her to have dresses molded to her exact shape. What upsets Joy most of all is her perceived lack of freedom, but I know the kinds of things May and I—especially May, really only May—did when we were young.
A lot of this wouldn’t happen if Father Louie were still alive. He’s been gone four years now. Sam, Joy, and I could have used Father’s death as our chance to move out on our own, but we didn’t. Sam had made a promise when Father took him as more than just a paper son. I may not believe in ancestors anymore, but Sam lights incense for the old man and make
s offerings of food and paper clothes to him during New Year’s and other festivities. But beyond that, how could we leave Vern, who’s lived longer than anyone expected? Who will explain to him that his parents are gone when he asks for them, as he does every day? How could we leave May to care for her husband, run the Golden Prop and Extras Company and the curio shop, and manage the house? But it goes even past loyalty to the family and promises made. We continue to be deeply afraid.
Every day the news from the government is bad. The U.S. consul in Hong Kong has accused the Chinese community of being inclined to fraud and perjury, since we “lack the equivalent of the Western concept of an oath.” He says that everyone who comes through his office looking to go to the United States is using fake papers. Angel Island has long been closed, but he’s devised new procedures requiring the answering of hundreds of questions, the filling out of dozens of forms, and the procurement of affidavits, blood tests, X-rays, and fingerprints, all in an effort to keep Chinese from coming to America. He says that almost every Chinese already in America—going all the way back to those who panned for gold more than a hundred years ago and helped build the transcontinental railroad eighty-some years ago—entered illegally and is not to be trusted. He says that we’re responsible for trafficking in drugs, using fraudulent passports and other papers, counterfeiting American dollars, and illegally collecting Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Worse, he claims that for decades the Communists have sent paper sons—like Sam, Wilburt, Fred, and so many others—to America as spies. Every single Chinese living in America must be investigated, he insists.
For years, Joy has come home from school with stories about her duck-and-cover drills. Now it’s as though we want to live each day in that coiled position—cocooned in our houses with our families, hoping the windows, walls, and doors won’t be shattered, immolated, and turned to bitter ashes. For all these reasons—love for one another, fear for one another—we’ve stayed together, and we’ve struggled to find balance and order, but with Father Louie gone, we’re all slightly adrift, especially my daughter.
“You don’t have to wash clothes for lo fan, make their meals, clean their houses, or answer their doors,” I say. “You don’t have to be an office girl or a clerk in a store either. When your baba and I first came here, all we could ever hope for was to have our own café and maybe one day live in a house.”
“You and Dad got that—”
“Yes, but you can have and do so much more. Back when your aunt and I first arrived, only a handful of people could go into a profession. I can count them on one hand.” And I do. “Y. C. Hong, the first Chinese-American lawyer in California; Eugene Choy the first Chinese-American architect in Los Angeles; Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American doctor in the country—”
“You’ve told me this a million times—”
“All I’m saying is you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or an accountant. You can do anything.”
“Even climb a telephone pole?” she asks tartly.
“We just want you to get to the top of the heap,” I reply calmly.
“That’s why I’m going to college. I never want to work in the café or the shop.”
I don’t want her to either, which is exactly what I’ve been saying. Still, there’s a part of me that hates that our family businesses—the very things that have kept Joy fed, clothed, and housed—are so embarrassing to her. I try—not for the first time—to make her understand.
“The sons in the Fong family have become doctors and lawyers, but they still help out at Fong’s Buffet,” I point out. “That one boy goes to trial in the courthouse during the day. At night the judges go to the restaurant to eat. They say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ And what about that Wong boy? He went to USC, but he’s not too proud to help his father at the filling station on weekends.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me about Henry Fong. Usually you complain he’s become ‘too continental,’ because he married that girl whose family came from Scotland. And Gary Wong is only trying to make up for the fact that he broke his family’s heart by marrying a lo fan and moving to Long Beach so he can live a Eurasian life. I’m glad you’ve become so open-minded.”
This is how Joy’s last summer at home unfolds—with one petty argument after another. At one of our church meetings, Violet tells me she’s experiencing the same things with Leon, who’ll be going to Yale in the fall. “Sometimes he’s as unpleasant as a fish left behind the couch for too many days. Here they talk about the bird leaving the nest. Leon wants to fly away all right. He’s my son and my heart’s blood, but he doesn’t understand that a part of me wants to see him leave too. Go! Go! Take your stinkiness with you!”
“It’s our own fault,” I tell Violet on the phone another night when she calls in tears after her son complained that her accent means she will be forever labeled a foreigner and that if anyone asks where she’s from she should answer Taipei in Taiwan and not Peking in the People’s Republic of China, otherwise J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI agents might accuse her of being an undercover agent on an intelligence mission. “We raised our children to be Americans, but what we wanted were proper Chinese sons and daughters.”
May, aware of the discord in the household, offers Joy work as an extra. Joy flutters with excitement. “Mom! Please! Auntie May says if I go to work with her, then I’ll have my own money for books, food, and warm clothes.”
“We already saved enough for that.” This isn’t quite true. The extra money would be welcome, but having Joy go off with May is the last thing I want.
“You never let me have any fun,” my daughter complains.
I notice that May isn’t saying a word, just watching us, knowing that the impish Tiger will have its way in the end. So my daughter goes off with her aunt for several weeks. Every night when she comes home she treats her father and uncle with stories of her adventures on the set, but she still finds ways to criticize me. May tells me I should ignore Joy’s rebelliousness, that it’s just part of the culture these days, and that she’s only trying to fit in with American kids her age. May doesn’t understand how confused I feel. Every day I have an inner battle: I want my daughter to be patriotic and have all the opportunities that being an American will give her. At the same time, I worry that I’ve failed to teach Joy to be filial, polite, and Chinese.
Two weeks before Joy leaves for the University of Chicago, I go out to the screened porch to say good night. May’s in her bed at one end of the porch, flipping through a magazine. Joy sits on top of the covers of her bed, brushing her hair and listening to that awful Elvis Presley on her record player. The wall above her bed is covered with pictures she’s cut from magazines of Elvis and James Dean, who died last year.
“Mom,” Joy says, after I kiss her, “I’ve been thinking.”
I know by now to beware this opening.
“You always said that Auntie May was the most beautiful of the beautiful girls in Shanghai.”
“Yes,” I say, glancing at my sister, who looks up from her magazine. “All the artists loved her.”
“Well, if that’s so, why is your face always the main focus on those magazines Dad buys, you know, the ones that come from China?”
“Oh, that’s not true,” I say, but I know it is. In the four years since Father Louie bought that issue of China Reconstructs, Z.G. has designed another six covers in which May’s and my faces are absolutely recognizable. In the old days, artists like Z.G. used beautiful girls to advertise the luxurious life. Now artists use posters, calendars, and advertisements to communicate the Communist Party’s vision to the illiterate masses, as well as to the outside world. Scenes in boudoirs, salons, and baths have been replaced by patriotic themes: May and me with our arms outstretched as though reaching for the bright future, the two of us with kerchiefs in our hair, pushing wheelbarrows filled with rocks to help build a dam, or standing in a shallow paddy, tending rice shoots. On every cover, my face, with its rosy cheeks, and my body, with its long lines, is the central figure, while my sister takes the secondary position behind me, holding a basket into which I put vegetables, steadying my bicycle, or bending her head from the burden she carries while I gaze skyward. Always there’s some hint of Shanghai in the painting: the roll of the Whangpoo outside a factory window, the Yu Yuan Garden in the Old Chinese City for uniformed soldiers to practice their rifle drills, the glorious Bund made drab and utilitarian for marching workers. The subtle hues, romantic poses, and soft edges that Z.G. once loved have been replaced by everything outlined in black and filled with flat color—especially red, red, red.
Joy hops up and walks the length of the porch. She examines the magazine covers that May has on the wall next to her bed.
