China Dolls (19 page)

“Why would one man dance with two girls?” the Vendome’s manager asked after we performed. “What does it mean? Do Chinese girls do
that
?”

Max got us a few other bookings at second-rate joints, but splitting $17.50 a week between three people was no way to earn a living. The Chinese cooks in the club kitchens so pitied us that they gave us leftover ice cream and stale rolls. We’d take home our handouts, steam the rolls, and then dip them in the melted ice cream. I could have written home and asked for money, but I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction. Besides, to me, this was all still a big and fun adventure.

Then our luck took a turn for the worse. We were rejected again and again, with one kick in the pants after another. In October, Max finally managed to book a gig for us to do programmers—putting on our act before shows at the Orpheum movie palace, right across the street from where Ruby had told us she lived with her parents when she was a girl. This was the last gasp of vaudeville, and our trio was slotted between a jumping dog act and an old woman who
should have abandoned burlesque a long time ago. We tried to be better than the other performers, but the audience just wanted the movie to start.

One night, after two weeks of shows, Eddie fell into a dark mood. We were backstage, the film was playing, and it reflected on us in reverse. Eddie sat on a wooden crate, put his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor.

“I’ve been working as an entertainer for a long time, and I’m right back where I started,” he said, his voice dry and black. “My father was a doctor, and he expected me to become one too. When I was in my first year at Yale medical school, I’d go to the local speakeasy, where they held dance contests as part of their cover. The first prize was fifteen bucks. What I’d do for that now.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s go home.”

When he shrugged me off, Grace and I grabbed a couple of stools and pulled them next to him. We gathered our skirts and draped them over our knees to keep them from slipping onto the filthy floor.

“I used to go down to New York on weekends to see Fred and Adele Astaire on Broadway. I’d watch the show three times in a single weekend. I’d practice what I’d seen on the sidewalk. Then I’d go up to Harlem and watch Bill Robinson, Peg Leg Bates, the Nicholas Brothers—”

“I saw Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in
The Little Colonel
at the Rialto,” Grace interrupted. “I didn’t much care for Shirley Temple, but I loved Bill Robinson—”

“I’d go in the alley behind the Cotton Club between shows,” Eddie continued, “where the guys would be smoking, drinking, showing off to each other. It’s 1925, and you just can’t believe who’s dancing there—”

Nineteen twenty-five?
I was only seven years old then. If he was in medical school in 1925, he would have been somewhere around twenty-two years old. That meant he had to be about thirty-seven now. I glanced at Grace. She blinked back at me:
Holy smokes!

Eddie ran a hand through his hair. “My dad has family connections
in New York Chinatown, and he sets me up for a job in a clinic over winter break, because he wants me to get experience. Instead, I visit my buddies over at the Cotton Club. ‘You gotta help me, man,’ I tell them. They send me to a speak down on Fifth. When I walk in there, the headman looks at me like I’ve got a screw loose, but they’ve got a good band and I start dancing on the floor—alone, among all the couples. Pretty soon they’re backing away, giving me plenty of space. They dig it! They start throwing money at me. It’s raining coins and bills. I make picking up the money and putting it in my pockets part of the act. I make more dough in those five minutes than I would have made in five days working for my dad’s friend. The music ends, and I’m still picking up money. The headman comes over and says, ‘You dance like that five times a night and you got a job.’ ” Eddie lifted his chin. “Do either of you have a drink on you?”

Of course not.

“But it’s a speak,” he went on, “so we’re raided a lot. I’m dancing in my tails, while everyone else is running for the back door. Then it was time to go back to Yale.”

Eddie lifted his head. He seemed tormented by memories. “My dad wants me to shadow him as he takes care of his patients. He was one of the first Chinese to attend medical school in America. I’m proud of him, but I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want to deliver babies or lance boils. One night I ask my mom to come to my room. I open my box with all the money I made in the speak. She asks, ‘Who did you rob?’ Not long after that I leave for Hollywood. My first job you wouldn’t believe. I’m dancing at the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and then before every movie showing. It seems like a big accomplishment, but it’s actually not my big break. I get a solo in a movie. I leap off a piano and land in a split. Everyone tells me that will become my signature move. I thought I had it made.”

“That is your signature move,” I said, “and you do have it made. You’re just going through a rough patch—”

“I understand, Eddie,” Grace interrupted. “With every good opportunity that comes along, I get the sense I’ll only go so far. Even if I
do get a part in a movie, it will be as a maid or dragon lady. And even if I succeed, I’ll always be compared to—”

“I don’t want to be a copy of someone else,” Eddie grumbled. “I don’t want to be the Chinese Fred Astaire. There are enough imitators already. I mean, how many Chinese Fred Astaires can there be? I don’t want to be the Chinese Bill Robinson either.”

Grace sympathized. “Who hasn’t heard of the Betty Grable Legs of Chinatown, the Chinese Sophie Tucker, the Chinese Houdini, or the Chinese Bing Crosby?”

“Isn’t that just shorthand?” I asked, trying to be business-practical. “Isn’t it a way for customers and casting directors to put people like us into a recognizable box—”

“Like if you can’t afford Errol Flynn, you put a man in tights, give him a bow and arrow, and throw a felt hat with a feather in it on top of his head, and people will make the connection?” Eddie asked bitterly.

So I’d insulted him.

“I want to be recognized for who
I
am and for what
I
do.” He sighed. “I was hired to play a Hawaiian, an Indian, and a Japanese. They never wanted me to play a Chinese, because they said I didn’t look Chinese enough. I didn’t look right to play a waiter, houseboy, or hatchet man. I can’t win,” he said, anger surfacing. “Even Charlie Chan’s Number One Son never gets the girl. So here I am, flanked by two babes. But that brings the other stereotype—that Chinese men are oversexed, and we’re going to rape white women and pollute the race. If that weren’t enough, we’ll never make what other entertainers make. Hell, we’ll never make what Negro entertainers make. Back at the Cotton Club, Ethel Waters and the Nicholas Brothers earned about a thousand bucks a week. Bill Robinson made thirty-seven hundred big ones. Charlie and the other club owners will never pay us anything close to that. Never!”

On the way home, Eddie stopped at a liquor store and bought a quart of gin. When we got back to the apartment building, he didn’t invite us to share it with him.

HELEN

A Tide of Emotions

By Thanksgiving, we were “on the beach”—no work, no bookings in sight. Our dinner that night: ten cents’ worth of buns picked up in Chinatown. Grace and I needed jobs, but getting employment anywhere—as Americans who looked Chinese—felt as futile as plowing the sand and sowing the waves. That said, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Grace and I lucked (ha!) into positions making hot fudge sundaes at C. C. Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard, a block from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and practically across the street from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The job allowed us to eat a little, and sometimes people left us nickel tips under their saucers. The manager, Tim McNulty, was nice. He was tall, soft-spoken, and kept his hair neatly trimmed. I’d never worked in a restaurant before, but Tim was patient and easygoing, teasing me about the deliberate way I sprinkled the slivered almonds and set the cherry just so. And really, making and serving hot fudge sundaes to people hungry for a mouth-happy experience wasn’t all that bad.

When Tim asked me out just four days into the job, I surprised myself by accepting. I was lonely, and I’d been lonely for a very long time. I liked having a man take my hand when I got out of the car, hold my elbow when we walked on the street, put an arm around my shoulder when we sat in the movie theater. Hours later, Tim kissed me on the front porch of the boardinghouse. It wasn’t like Eddie’s performance
kisses. I’d never kissed a
lo fan
before, and it made me wonder if everything would be different with him. The next day, when I went to work, he was attentive without being overbearing. A sensation of light burning the edges of my loneliness allowed me to say yes to a second date a couple of days later. We didn’t do anything fancy—no big night on the town—because he didn’t have much money either. He was just a sweet man, who invited me back to his apartment after dinner. His room was clean and orderly. The way he made love to me … His skin was so white against mine, and for a few minutes I forgot everything as a familiar warmth started to overwhelm me, washing me to the precipice … Then, from deep inside me, I felt darkness well up and brutally grasp my heart. Inwardly I pulled back, but I had nowhere to escape. I didn’t try to get Tim to stop. I forced my body to go numb and waited for the final spasms of pleasure to shudder through him. And then, and then …

I began to cry. How could I have let Tim touch me at all? I knew that making love could be good and comforting for wives and mothers, but this was a terrible mistake for me. I’d been trying to quench my thirst by looking at plums, console myself with what could be, but now I felt wretched.

“It’s all right,” Tim comforted, but he couldn’t possibly understand my feelings. I sat up, making sure the sheet kept me decent, and began pulling on my clothes. The whole time, he kept talking. “Don’t go. Don’t leave like this.”

When I put on my shoes and stood, he slipped out of the bed too. Naked. I covered my eyes.

“I’m not this person,” I said. “I don’t do this.”

Tim got dressed and drove me back to my apartment, even though I said it was unnecessary. He offered to come up and sit with me until I felt better. I said no. He asked if he could bring me anything. I said no to that too.

I told Grace what I’d done, and she was about as shocked as a country-bumpkin virgin could be.

“At least he’s nice,” she said, acting like she knew all about it. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? You do it with someone nice? Are you going to see him again?”

“We both have work tomorrow, so I guess so.”

But it was hard making hot fudge sundaes with Tim coming up to me and whispering, “Are we square? I’m so sorry you’re taking it this way. Can we go out later and talk about it? Oh, Helen, I thought you enjoyed it.”

I wanted to stick it out, but I quit at the end of my shift. I had lasted as a sundae-maker exactly one week and a day.

“Okay,” Grace said, “we’ll find other jobs.”

“You don’t have to leave—”

“Of course I do! We’re sticking together!”

We went to Sam Yuen in Chinatown that night. When the owner made his customary offer of employment, Grace and I accepted. If my father saw me, he would have died from shame.

A
COUPLE OF
days later, Eddie banged on Grace’s and my door. When I let him in, he threw the new issue of
Life
magazine on the coffee table. The cover showed a pair of long legs that went up, up, up until they reached a giant bubble that covered … well, what it covered was left to the imagination. The woman’s face was obscured—turned alluringly away from the camera lens—but the headline billed her as
PRINCESS TAI
—
STAR OF SAN FRANCISCO
’
S HOT SPOT
—
THE FORBIDDEN CITY
. The three of us squeezed together on the love seat and pored over the pages, looking first at the photographs.

“Hey! Irene and Jack!” Eddie’s breath told me he’d been drinking. “I bet she’s learned all his tricks by now.”

“Seems like Ida’s put on a few pounds,” I observed.

“Charlie and Bob Hope?” Grace exclaimed.

The writer labeled Princess Tai the world’s only Chinese bubble dancer. “She’s straight from China,” Eddie read, his words slurring. “When she moves that pale orb just so, visitors imagine they can see all the way to China. They don’t, but the looking sure is fun.”

“Everyone reads
Life
,” Grace said, “which means everyone is going to see this, which means everyone is going to visit the Forbidden City, which means Charlie’s troubles are over—”

“Do you think we could go back?” I asked, hopeful.

But Eddie was like a frog at the bottom of a well, limited in his perspective and seeing only what he wanted to see. “Max is working on things,” he said. “He’ll get us something.”

But even with all the holiday shows, Max couldn’t get us a single booking. No one wanted Chinese faces ruining their holiday tableaux.