Diamond Head (7 page)

1914

G
UANGDONG
, C
HINA

Frank’s resolve to move our family to an island I could barely pronounce came without warning at the end of 1914, and my immediate reaction was panic. He had arrived home from a six-week business trip to the north when he called me into his library. On the map we had received as a wedding gift, a small group of islands was circled. Slowly, Frank traced his finger along the route that we would take across the Pacific Ocean.

I wanted to react. I wanted to tell Frank that leaving China was completely out of the question. But I couldn’t find the strength. Each time I formed a sentence in my mind, readied it on my tongue, a tightness grew in my chest and expanded into my mouth, blocking the words from their exit. Recently, it had been this way. Bohai had just turned five, and it seemed his silence had begun to invade my body as well. I couldn’t change my son—I had tried in every possible way and failed in even more—so perhaps it was not Bohai who needed changing. It was a thought that never left me. Perhaps it was I who was incompetent, a woman incapable of mothering. As days passed and my son remained unchanged, I felt my failure swell and multiply. There was a voice, one I had silenced for many years, that now whispered to me at all times of the day. You are unworthy of this life, it said. It was all a mistake.

We no longer spoke of Bohai, Frank and me. We spoke of very few things. Frank had begun to travel again and was gone most days of the month, far away from the silent house that reeked of our disappointment. When he returned, sometimes I wouldn’t know for two or three days. He would sleep in his library and leave early the next
morning. Sometimes a suitcase on the floor or a teacup in the basin would be the only sign of my husband’s homecoming. Hong would find the suitcase and tuck it into a closet; she would wash the cup in the basin and say nothing. She was the only person in the world who understood the fragility of my mind and the peculiarity of our situation. She knew how easily I could drown in that teacup, how simple it would be to suffocate in that suitcase.

But that night, Frank had woken me. He had taken my hand and I had blushed in the dark of the corridor as he led me to his office, where he told me of Oahu and his plan to move our family there.

“Years ago, I took a shipment there and I always said I would return. There’s an ancient volcano unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, Diamond Head they call it. It’s magnificent. An old home to the Hawaiian gods, and soon it will be our home as well.”

I remember looking at the map and hearing his words, my thoughts still hanging in the dark corridor, when I thought our encounter would be different, when I confused the urgency in his eyes with desire. When Frank spoke the words
move immediately
, I realized what was happening, and the heat coursing through my body became thick and slow. My legs lowered into a chair and the only thought that remained in my defeated mind was how foolish I had turned out to be.

“It wasn’t a simple decision,” Frank said, sitting himself. “But with time, you’ll come to understand why.”

“Can’t I know now?” I asked softly, using my voice for the first time. I felt completely powerless, pathetic. So much of my life hinged on the decisions of this man, and I could barely find the strength to speak, to ask him why.
Virtuous
, I heard my father’s voice in my head, reciting his favorite proverb,
is a woman without knowledge
.

“It’s complicated,” Frank replied, his eyes shifting to the map.

“Okay,” I whispered. “But just tell me,” I said, my words pushing through the narrow passage, unable to stop. “Am I being punished?”

I closed my mouth and immediately regretted my bravery. I
couldn’t look at him. I felt the presence of his body across from mine as I sat in silence and shame, imagining him growing angry at my question, pictured a hand rising above my head, a slap across my face as my father would do to my mother. Moving to Hawaii was not a punishment. A swollen eye and a fractured arm and no doctor in the village was a punishment. A mother who continued to wash dishes and laundry, who served meals while her arm grew swollen and disfigured, was a punishment, but not this.

We sat there, the single candle lighting our stillness, and I waited for my husband to become my father. But he did not.

“Do you remember the year we were married?” he said, his voice gentler than I had expected. It surprised me. I nodded, my body still rigid, but I did not look up.

“That same year,” Frank continued, “just before Shen passed, two German missionaries were killed in the north. In Shandong.” He paused and I watched his right hand reach to his desk, to smooth the corner of his map. “Their deaths, they were violent and the Germans were angry. They demanded that the Chinese government provide them with reparations for their loss.”

I didn’t understand. Why was he telling me this? What did any of it have to do with Hawaii? I remember looking at the map and finding Germany, seeing that it was nowhere near the islands Frank had circled. Be still, I told myself, and listen.

“The reparations came in the form of land,” Frank continued. “Kiochow in Shandong was given to the Germans on a ninety-nine-year lease. And with that land, they built an enormous ship port. The port of Tsingtao.”

Frank paused at this moment, and slowly I raised my eyes from the ground. He was staring at the map, his thick eyebrows pushed together in difficult contemplation.

“Lin,” he said, his shadowed eyes meeting mine, “we are friends of the Germans, and they have been very generous to us. Our business, our money, it comes in and out of three ports.” He raised three
fingers, his knuckles facing me, swollen and worn. “There is the German port at Tsingtao; there is the port here in Guangzhou, and there is one other.” His index finger cast a long shadow across the map, trembling softly in the dim light.

“When the Germans received Tsingtao, the British leased their own port in Shandong—nearby, on the north side of the peninsula. The Germans were building a naval base, gathering manpower, bringing in soldiers from their country, and the British didn’t like this, so they built their own port. For months there has been rumor of war, Lin, of a German invasion, and the British, with their Japanese allies, wanted to make sure they were prepared.”

Frank nodded his head, once, his stare ripping through me.

“Some men, they choose to align themselves with one country; they choose to pick sides. I have never understood alliances. There are too many variables to consider, too many trivial issues. So I choose to make friends with whom I wish. The British and Japanese treated me just as well as the Germans, so why should their distaste for each other mean anything to me? To my business?”

Frank held my gaze. His eyes were exhausted, delicate red webs extending from his pupils to the outer edges, but they were determined. He wanted me to understand. He wanted me to know that Oahu was not a punishment. Without a single blink, he continued, and I felt a surge of the old confidence I once shared with my husband.

“Last week, something happened. There was a surprise attack. The Japanese and British invaded the German port and they seized Tsingtao. I had no idea. I was already at sea and the news couldn’t reach me.” He was gathering intensity, his voice growing more powerful, rawer with each word. He paused now, allowing himself to breathe.

“I took my shipment as I normally would, north first to Tsingtao, then to Weihaiwei—to the British—but when I got to Tsingtao the British were there. The Japanese were there. And when they saw me, when they saw my ships, they were angry, Lin. They made threats. To me, to our family.”

I was clutching the hem of my nightshirt, my fingers cold and rigid, pearls of sweat gathering along the back of my neck. I never knew what my husband did, exactly. I knew there were ships involved, dozens of them, and he would transport things from country to country. But my understanding of money, of business, was shallow at best. At my parents’ restaurant, where I worked as a girl, the exchange was simple. A plate of food for a yuan. A pat of rice, a piece of fish—I understood this to be business. What my husband did, how he traveled and bartered and came home exhausted, all remained a mystery. There was no cooking, no creating, no producing of goods to be sold. Instead, Frank had a briefcase. He had paperwork. A few times, early in our marriage, I thought about asking, but how would I phrase it? How would I ask without revealing my position, that I hadn’t the slightest notion of how these collections of paper made him rich? And then, when I lost my babies, my girls, I stopped thinking of it entirely. Who was I to be asking of money when I could not produce the single thing we lacked?

“Lin,” Frank said. “I fear we are entering a war. I fear for our safety and I know that if we wait much longer to make our move, we will run out of options.”

I looked at my husband and, for the first time in our marriage, I saw a nervousness that made me uneasy. Suddenly, I understood that this had nothing to do with me or Bohai or a marriage that could not produce sons. This was a force greater than my daily anxieties. And as my husband took my hand in his, blew out the candle, and led me back to our bedroom, I knew that I would follow him to that group of islands, to his ancient volcano, secure in the secret we now shared, the information he had entrusted in me. That night, I believed that the red string was guiding our fate.

The next morning, I went immediately to see Hong. Slowly, I led her into the idea, showing her the photographs of Oahu that Frank had left for me.

“I won’t go without you,” I insisted as she studied the photographs, her flat lips shut in careful thought. “Do you see the water? So clean you can see to the bottom! Imagine a life there—so close to the ocean.”

“It’s a photograph,” she said finally, handing it back to me. “It’s a beautiful photograph.”

I couldn’t believe that was all she said. Since the rebellion, Hong no longer believed in China. She spoke poorly of our country, calling it a leech that preyed on its children, a nation of slaves. To my surprise, she showed an interest in English, the Western tongue she once considered evil. She attended lessons with me and my tutor, learning the language with a vengeful determination. She never said it, but I knew she saw English as the link between Shen’s life and his death. Had one of them spoken English, just enough to yell through those branches, enough to slow the soldier’s gun, Shen might still be alive.

So with a gentle approach, I expected she would be willing to leave; I thought she might even be pleased. What I did not consider, however, was Shen. China was where Shen’s body lay. To leave China meant abandoning the spirit of those who had passed, and as much as Hong felt China had wronged her, she would not agree to that. She would not leave her homeland for a house near the ocean. She would not trade her loyalty to Shen for a row of pretty sugarcane.

A life without Hong was a half-life. I’d imagined it on many occasions, and each time a bitter taste filled my mouth. Since the day Hong arrived at my husband’s door, I felt that she had been sent to me, and I to her, to ease each other’s journey into the unknown. When I lost my daughters, Hong was there, quieting my madness, assuring me that fate had intervened, that it had nothing to do with my own deficiency. She would not allow me to use the word
barren
, would not let me neglect my appearance, reminding me that without desire, without intimacy, there was no possibility of sons. While I poured my soul into Bohai, Hong ran my household with a deft hand,
and when Hailee died, it was Hong’s composure that allowed me rest. She was more of a mother than I was able to be, loving Bohai easily, without the constant need for validation, without the complications that plagued my mothering, that colored everything just a little black.

I needed her; we all did. In my mind, there was no possibility of leaving Hong behind. So I forced her hand. I told her the one thing that frightened her more than anything else in the world. War was coming, I said. I told her war was coming and we were all in danger.

“Is this true?” Hong asked, her square face revealing only a portion of what I knew she felt.

“Frank says it is.” It wasn’t a lie, I told myself.

“I need time,” Hong said, her thoughts far away. “And I’m late for the vegetables.”

Hong walked away from me and continued her usual routine, shopping for the evening’s meal, stripping the linens, watering the houseplants. But that afternoon, without a word, she closed herself into the prayer room at the end of the hall. From the corridor, I could smell her lighting incense and burning long, thin joss sticks for her loved ones. For Shen, for her mother. Through the door I could hear her praying, repeating words of sorrow and forgiveness. Hong remained there through the evening, cutting paper into houses and clothing and jewelry, bringing a match to the figures and sending them to the afterlife. After dinner, I knocked on the door and joined her. I kneeled with her in the sandalwood smoke and held her hand. I brought her a roast duck and a pyramid of sweet cakes to lay on the altar. At midnight, I left her alone to pray and I knew that she had made peace with her family. I knew that Hong had decided to come with us.