China Dolls (41 page)

The news left me confused. Dad was the biological vessel who helped put my soul into this body, but he’d hurt me so many times.

Mom’s hand covered mine. “The doctor said I should be grateful he didn’t suffer.”

I pondered that, then I said, “I’m sorry, Mom, but I can’t forgive him.”

She withdrew her hand, sliding her fingers back across the surface
of the table and spidering them into her lap. “You never understood your father. You never knew how much he loved you or how proud he was of you.”

“How can you say that? You were
here
.” I gestured around the room. Memories of being bashed into furniture and walls battered my mind. It still deeply hurt that my mother couldn’t or wouldn’t defend me.

“I want to show you something,” Mom said. She went to a cabinet, pulled out an album, and brought it back to the table. “It’s a scrapbook. Your father put it together after you left.”

I opened the cover. On the first page was a photograph of the ponies at the Forbidden City on opening night. I quickly flipped through the book. Somehow my father had found almost every review and notice that had been printed about me.

“How?” I asked.

“We saw you in the newsreel,” Mom answered. “Your dad made sure everyone in town knew that you’d gotten out of here and that your dreams had come true.”

I cast my mind back to that day on the beach when the other ponies and I had danced in the sand, and tried to imagine my father seeing it in the darkness of the Rialto.

“No.” I shook my head, refusing to accept what she was telling me. “You’re wrong. Dad couldn’t have been proud of me. I became exactly what he hated.”

“Do you remember the night you left?”

“I’ll never forget it. He called me a whore … ‘just like your mother.’ ”

Mom’s gaze was steady and her eyes clear. “He told you the truth. A long time ago, I was a willow flower—a prostitute. Once those words came out of his mouth, I realized he couldn’t keep them buried any longer. We never wanted you to learn about all that and, of course, he worried that somehow you would follow my path.”

Nothing she could have said would have stunned me more.

“There’s no point in keeping the secret any longer,” Mom continued matter-of-factly. “I was born in China, like I always told you. My parents sold me when I was five. Maybe younger, maybe a little older.”

“Did you come through Angel Island?” That was my first question? I blame it on shock.

“I came before Angel Island opened.” Her eyes darted to the ceiling as if the past were projected there. “Back then, no one paid much attention to who was coming in, but I have a vague memory of some kind of interview. Then I was sent to Idaho, where I worked for a shopkeeper and his wife. They were Americans, which is why I speak the way I do. Like you, I didn’t see another Chinese until I was older. The Johnsons were like parents to me, but they died of typhus when I was twelve. The townsfolk sent me to San Francisco, because no one wanted a Chinese orphan.”

“I was scared when I went to San Francisco,” I said, still trying to absorb what she was telling me. “And I was a lot older. Where did you go? The YWCA?”

“They didn’t have that then. This was just one year after the earthquake and fire. A gang swept me up. I was put in a crib on Bartlett Alley.”

“Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

“It was a hard life.” She angled her head and smiled wanly.

“How did you escape?”

“The man in charge of the brothel said I could buy my freedom for five thousand dollars, or he could sell me to a tong gunman or professional gambler. But I knew I’d be dead from a willow-flower disease long before either of those things happened.” She saw the look of horror on my face. “It could have been worse. I could have been working in that life since I was five. I met other girls, little girls, who had that fate.” She paused and took a breath. “I was rescued by Donaldina Cameron.”

Donaldina Cameron? Incredible. I knew from Helen that she worked out of the building right around the corner from the YWCA. She’d rescued hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese slave girls and
prostitutes. My mother had been through hell and yet she’d suggested I go to the very city where she’d suffered.

“How could you encourage me to try San Francisco after everything you’d been through?” I asked.

“I couldn’t see him hurt you again. Letting you leave was the only way I had to save you … I paged through your magazines. I saw Treasure Island, and I saw the city. San Francisco—the
world
—had to be different.”

I reflected on all the stage-door Johnnies I’d met over the years; the ponies who’d gotten in trouble after nights of goodbyes to servicemen only to be labeled Victory Girls; Helen, who was left high and dry by Tommy’s father; the way Joe dumped Ruby when he found out her background, and now had dropped me. Men weren’t perfect and what they did to us could be thoughtless and cruel, but none of that compared to what my mother had experienced. I ached for her.

“I lived with a lot of shame,” Mom admitted. “Miss Cameron took care of me for many years. I changed back to the girl I had once been. She promised to help me get a husband, but nothing could erase the black mark against me. No good man would take me.”

“Is that why Dad married you? Because he was a bad man? And he saw you as a bad girl?” I didn’t mean to sound unkind, but I needed to know.

Mom sighed. “You still don’t understand.”

“Is his story different too?” I asked. “Was he actually born here?”

“Yes. I’m sure of it. He lived with his father in a mining camp—”

“Why did he always say it was a lumber camp?”

Mom shrugged. “What does it matter now? He did laundry and cooked for miners. He was on his way to China to find a wife when Miss Cameron introduced us. She sold him on the idea that I was reformed and a good Christian woman. He convinced her that he could make an honest and righteous life for me. Miss Cameron consented to his proposal. Your father and I were married. He took me back to the mining camp—”

“But the two of you lived in San Francisco—”

Irritation flitted across Mom’s face. “Will you listen? We were in the mining camp. I got pregnant. We had a car. We drove to Sebastopol to pick apples …”

I recognized this part. Mom went into labor, was turned away from the hospital, and I was born by the side of the road.

“When you came out, everything ripped down there,” she recalled. “When your dad finally got me back to the mining camp, one of the men stitched me together. I couldn’t walk upright for a month. I felt like my insides were going to fall out. That’s not so different from what many women feel, but I was the only woman in the camp. You have to understand that back then there was—what?—about one Chinese woman for every twenty Chinese men in this country? Most of those women were willow flowers. The miners started to gossip about me. They made guesses about me, and they guessed right. They were our people.
Chinese
people. Your father was ashamed.”

“So you ran away and came here—”

“Where we hoped we’d be safe.”

“But where we would
all
be humiliated. Dad had it the worst. He was a laundryman. He was a joke.”

“Your father suffered great loss of face in this country, where a Chinese man is considered less than a man. And yes, your father was forever a laundryman, doing women’s work.”

As she spoke, I couldn’t help thinking of Eddie, who’d endured so much disgrace not only for being a dancer who preferred boys but for being a
Chinese
man, and even Monroe, who’d graduated from Cal but couldn’t find work because he was Chinese. Both of those men—like my father—were
enthusiastically
American, but what had it gotten them? I could see it and understand it—and I felt terribly sorry for my mother—but even so my parents had systematically betrayed me.

“Did you and Dad ever tell me anything that was true?”

“Grace!”

“Well, did you?”

“I always told you I loved you—”

“But he didn’t.” I began to weep.

“When we saw
Aloha, Boys!
, your father cried and cried. Everyone in town saw you in it.” For a moment she exuded joy and pride. “That was the longest running movie ever at the Rialto. From the time you were a little girl, you were a star in your dad’s eyes. That movie just proved it to everyone else.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that he beat me.”

“He was ashamed of me. He was ashamed of himself. Grace, maybe you haven’t yet met a man who’s been shamed, but he’ll do crazy things. Unforgivable things.”

Like Joe, when he learned about Ruby.

“Your dad loved you and wanted to keep the truth about me a secret.”

So which one was it? That he was afraid I’d stumble on Mom’s secret? Or that he’d been humiliated as a man? For every man who hits his wife or his children, there are a hundred excuses. My team didn’t win … You didn’t clean the house … I don’t like this meal … I had a bad day at work … The kids won’t shut up … But what did it matter in the end? My father beat me, and the reasons—however real or misguided—didn’t change that. I loved my mother, but she hadn’t protected me. But by allowing me to leave, it finally dawned on me, she took his full beatings on herself. The realization of that shook me to the core. I could pity my father at some level, but it didn’t alter what had happened in that room over many years. The aches and stiffness in my ribs, fingers, and spine from injuries my father gave me would be in my bones forever. The terror I experienced whenever I felt threatened was deeper still.

I looked at the scrapbook my father had composed—saw all the obsession and work he’d put into it—and knew I’d never understand him, his life, his choices, his shame. No matter what my mother said, I would always be my father’s measly girl. But I had a choice about what might happen next—hold on to bitterness or try to forge a different kind of relationship with the one blood relative I had left in the world.

“Tell me about Miss Miller,” I said, and that was that.

Mom caught me up on my dance teacher, who was still single and still carrying a torch for the manager of the Farmers National Bank, and she still let him walk all over her. All this was news to me!

“You were a little girl,” my mom said. “What do you expect?”

I told Mom about life on the road. “I pour my heart out to lonely boys in base towns, mothers missing their sons, lovers who might never be reunited.” I recited something Eddie had once said: “If I
feel
a song, then the audience does too, because music purges the soul of tragedy. It’s the vehicle by which we can express our deepest human emotions and our spirits.”

“What highfalutin talk,” Mom said, and we laughed.

“It’s not always like that,” I admitted. “Sometimes I can command an audience to watch me; other times they ignore me because they’re putting on the dogs for their girlfriends or they’ve had too many drinks. But when I become the Oriental Danseuse and showcase my routine from
Aloha, Boys!
, I put customers in the movie with me.”

“Oh, honey. I’m so proud of you.”

I didn’t tell her about being blackballed or that I had no jobs lined up after Atlanta. Mom and Dad had run away from her past. I was running from lies that had been told about me, but would she believe me? So I asked about kids from school. Mom told me that Freddie Thompson, who’d teased me when I wore one of his old shirts, had died in the war. Henry, who now worked for my mother, had gone against his family and married Ilsa—“even though she was Finnish”—when he was drafted.

“But that girl never was any good,” Mom said. “As soon as she heard Henry lost his arm, she hightailed it out of town.”

Frankly, plenty of girls “abandoned ship” when they heard their husbands or boyfriends were maimed, blinded, or badly burned in the war. I’d also heard of servicemen who refused to answer letters or allow hospital visits from their girls. No man wants a woman to see him as anything less than strong and able.

“And you, honey?” Mom asked. “Is there someone special in your life?”

I told her everything about Joe, ending with “I haven’t heard from him in a month.”

“He’s in a war, Grace. He faces death every day. That will change a man.”

“I don’t want him to change.”

“Maybe he understands that about you,” she reasoned. “Maybe he realizes he won’t be the same in your eyes when he comes back.”

My mom was giving me advice on my broken heart. Incredible. No matter what had happened in the past, she was my mother.

“I love him,” I confessed.

“Then fight for him. Don’t run away. Stand your ground and fight.”

“How can I do that, if he won’t answer my letters?”

“Keep writing,” she counseled. “Stake your claim. That’s what your father and I did. We were both flawed, but we found this place, and we built a life for ourselves and for you. Maybe in this one way you can learn from us. Fight for him, Grace. Fight for him because you love him.”

T
HE NEXT
S
ATURDAY
, the theater was filled with familiar faces: Miss Miller, Doc Haverford, my mom’s friends from church, a couple of my teachers, and Mr. Tubbs, who’d pulled my father off me that last night. There are many ways you can measure success, but none is more meaningful than having folks who’ve known you forever see your rise in the world. They “knew you when.” They celebrate what you’ve accomplished. And yes, there are some—like Maude and Velma, the remaining evil triplets—for whom your success is a knife in the gut, making it a triumph all the way.

As a girl, I’d believed my family and I would be outsiders forever. We’d washed people’s dirty laundry. We looked different, but my family had struggled just like all the other families did in Plain City. At the
Forbidden City, total strangers asked if they could touch me, because they’d never touched an Oriental before. In Plain City, everyone had known me, and they hadn’t wanted to touch me. In Chinatown, I’d learned from Helen the importance of family over the interests of the individual. In my hometown, maybe the individual took precedence. Maybe that was what had allowed me to run away in the first place. When I took my bows and saw those faces in the audience, my heart brimmed with pride. But I also remembered what my mother used to say to me:
When fortune comes, do not enjoy all of it; when advantage comes, do not take all of it
.