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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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It is in these thirty seconds that Siu Sang, with all her eighteen years, falls in love.
After all the arrangements have been made, her mother tells her she must not expect anything. When Siu Sang asks what she means, thinking she is, perhaps, talking about money or
servants, her mother replies, “No one treats a daughter-in-law well.”
Siu Sang doesn’t quite understand and does not know what
not well
entails. Will she have to eat the last piece of chicken that no one wants? Will her mother-in-law insist on having her feet washed in scented water? Will someone beat her?
Her mother looks at Siu Sang with narrowed eyes and says, “They will expect things from you, and if you do not deliver, no one will protect you.”
Surrounded by piles of silk and linen, Siu Sang packs for her move to Canada and is having a hard time. In her letters to Yen Mei, she asked what she should prepare herself for. But her questions went unanswered. Instead, Yen Mei wrote on and on about how wonderful her new husband is, how nicely he treats her, how he has promised her a maid by the following year. Soon, Siu Sang stopped reading her letters altogether.
She is sure that her party dresses and thin jackets will be of little use, that there will likely be no servants. This confuses her. After all, she owns nothing else. Her mother has told her that there is no point in buying clothes in Hong Kong when she will not know what she needs until she arrives in Vancouver. She sifts through her slippery silks blankly. She begins to pack randomly; after all, no one can tell her otherwise. She will carry only one trunk with her on the boat; the rest will be shipped ahead and will wait, like ghosts of herself, in Yen Mei’s apartment.
Her younger sister has refused to help with the packing and has instead taken to spending all her time at the library and, as their mother says, “meeting who knows what.” Siu Sang misses her and wishes her dry humour and wicked grins were close by to temper all the seriousness. Her brothers are
little help and only smile at her sheepishly and silently, as if they feel sorry for her but cannot say it.
She pulls her clothes out of her drawers and closet blindly, pushing things into her trunk in clumps. A gecko stares at her from his perch on the wall.
She plucks one novel from her shelf and places it carefully between layers of silk. On the cover is a beautiful young woman sitting at a precise angle that shows off her impressive bustline and tiny waist. She wears a tweed pencil skirt and blouse and looks lovely, but normal. A girl to fall in love with, a girl you wish you were.
Her mother has told her she will have no time for dreaming or reading, but Siu Sang doesn’t quite believe her. Surely washing dishes and serving her mother-in-law medicinal soups won’t take up all her time. She will steal a few moments: before sleep, in the tub, in the morning.
Just one book, only one
. She is sure it will be fine.
The night before she leaves, she lies in her bed and peers out her window. There, in the street, is the scene she knows, has fallen asleep to her whole life. She has always changed it in her dreams, made it pretty. But tonight is her last one here, so she stares at the street as it is, lets its roughness and dirt and movement impress itself on her brain.
It hurts
, she thinks, but she continues, letting the bright hotness and dirt and noise assault her. She watches until dawn and sees the sun rise through a crack in the buildings, turning everything, for a moment, the colour of gold.
She paces in her cabin, her trunk lying open on the floor by her narrow bed. Through a tiny round window she can see the dark water and the faint light reflected on its surface. She hears a low
groaning noise rising from the bowels of the boat, and she feels light-headed.
For the first time, Siu Sang is really alone.
She has spent her whole life surrounded by her family, by her brothers and sisters, servants, the people on the street right outside her home. She shared her bedroom, walked to school with her sisters, went to the café with her friends. On rainy days she sat in her favourite spot by the window and dreamed while her mother hovered and wondered what her daughter could possibly be thinking about.
Here, the window offers nothing except shades of grey and blue, alternating textures of dark and light. She has no telephone, and has spent her first four meals on this boat alone. She thinks she is perhaps not pretty enough for the other young people on board and does not try to approach anyone. The pattern of the tablecloths in the dining room is burned forever on her brain.
She picks up her old novel and begins to read. She knows so much of it by heart that, two hours later, she finds herself looking at the last page and wondering what else she could possibly do. She sighs and stands up to open her cabin door.
She steps out into the hallway and sees another girl popping her head out of the door directly opposite. The girl looks up at Siu Sang and smiles, her grin more like a monkey’s than a person’s. She steps out and offers her hand.
“What’s your name?”
“Leung Siu Sang. And you?”
“My Western name is Susie. My mother said I have to start introducing myself that way so that I’ll be used to it by the time I arrive in Canada. Are you going to be married too?”
“How did you know?”
Susie laughs knowingly. “Oh, so many girls from my class at school were getting ready to go to Canada. There are a lot of boys there, you know, and no women at all, except old ones. But I think it’ll be a great adventure, really exciting. I heard they have eight-foot bears there. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about bears.” Siu Sang is confused.
“Me neither, but that’s the fun part. Do you want to get a soda with me? They have snacks in the dining room between meals.”
They walk together to the dining room, Siu Sang listening while Susie talks. After their snack, Susie wonders if they can trick the other passengers and crew into thinking they are twins. Siu Sang thinks this is impossible and says, “But I am much taller, and our faces are completely different.”
Susie laughs again. “Don’t you see? That’s the challenge. There’s no fun in doing something if it’s too easy.”
Siu Sang doesn’t see.
Together, they walk around the deck, engaging in conversation with as many people as possible. Susie, Siu Sang soon learns, has been taking English lessons in preparation for her marriage and is eager to use it.
“We’re twins, born at the same time. We are going to Canada to marry two brothers. We look alike, yes?” Most people simply nod and agree. Siu Sang stands to the side, chewing on her fingers, hoping that no one will figure out this lie and punish them somehow.
The captain, a British man from Brighton, calls them Sue and Susie. “Like two peas in a pod,” he says. “You can’t even tell them apart.”
The motion of the boat now seems a part of Siu Sang’s body, the gentle rocking like the pulse of her blood. When she sleeps, she floats through her dreams fluidly, down and then up again, where she wakes, gasping for air.
In between visits with Susie (although they are hardly visits, more like explorations during which Susie inevitably drags her to an obscure corner of the ship, where they are chased out by men who seem not quite angry but not quite happy, either), Siu Sang has had a lot of time to think. This trip is like an extended twilight, the in-between time after leaving and before arriving. An afterlife that isn’t quite death.
Her mother frightened her with cryptic warnings, and her voice never quite leaves Siu Sang’s head. Her mother-in-law, a woman she has never met, never written a letter to, never even seen a photograph of, looms like a giant in her mind. Although her older sister is now married, she has said little about her own mother-in-law, who still lives in a small village in China. Siu Sang will be living with her future husband’s parents and does not have the comfort of distance to help her.
She thinks little of her husband, and when she does, she drifts off, her mind repeating, over and over again, the image of his face in the photos they sent and the nice things he wrote in his letters. “You are very beautiful,” he wrote, “and I miss you before I have even met you.”
When she has been thinking too much (as her mother always told her she did), she tries to tell herself that she is only making herself more frightened than she needs to be. Her husband’s family are only human, after all, and cannot do anything that bad to her. She convinces herself of this for a couple of hours, maybe an entire afternoon, but that creeping, almost-dark feeling always returns, and she is left exactly where she started.
Sometimes, she feels like a pawn. There have always been other people who decided what she should do or where she should go. She thinks she should resent this, but does not. It is easier this way, and less trouble for everyone.
On the second-to-last day of their trip, Susie trims her toenails at the foot of Siu Sang’s bed, cursing as she tries to steady her hands against the sway of the ocean. It’s no use; unlike Siu Sang, she’s a round girl, built solid, with stiff, heavy-footed legs. She is unable to throw her body into the movement of the waves. Susie tosses the clippers aside and picks up a nail file instead.
Siu Sang has the covers pulled up to her small nose, her knees drawn up to her chest underneath. A driving rain has forced most of the passengers to stay in their rooms. The men play cards in the dining room. The women are mostly unseen. Last week, the captain told Susie to watch out for the rain, a sure sign that Vancouver isn’t far away. “I don’t know how the people who live there can survive. They must be a city of water rats,” he said as he strode away on the deck.
Siu Sang turns the idea over in her mind—a city teeming with dripping rats, moving like one furry ocean across sidewalks and concrete, through puddles whose muddy, opaque water splashes up and clings to their fur. She shakes her head and feels the warmth of the blankets around her like the heat of Hong Kong—slightly musty, humid, pervasive.
She hears Susie whisper.
“Susie, did you say something?” Siu Sang sits up and sees Susie hunched over her knees, her head hidden.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be scared. It’s just a little storm. Remember what the captain said? It’ll be over tomorrow.” Siu Sang gingerly pats Susie on the back.
Susie looks up, her eyes painfully dry. “No, I’m scared. About being married. About Canada. About maybe never seeing my parents again.”
Her nostrils flare and she shuts her eyes, rubbing them with her fists. Siu Sang watches her body ready itself for crying—deep breathing, mouth open—but no tears come. She thinks that this dryness, this feeling of wanting to explode but not being able to, must hurt far more than the crying itself.
“I’m scared too, Susie.”
Susie looks at her, the redness in her face turning dark, deep. “Is that it? We’re just two scared girls and there’s nothing else to say? I might never see you again either. Can you say anything about that?”
Siu Sang doesn’t know what Susie wants, doesn’t know how to say everything will be all right; even if she did, she knows and Susie knows that everything might be awful. Those comforting words would mean nothing. And it’s all true: there is nothing they can do if things do not turn out well, if their husbands begin to beat them, if they are deathly allergic to the Canadian air. They will have to stay, no matter what.
She moves over and puts her arm around Susie’s shoulder, changing her breathing pattern to match hers, breath for breath. Siu Sang, without looking out her porthole, knows that the sky and water are dark and that they are hurtling forward through no effort of their own.
Early morning on the boat, and she leans over the rail on deck, wind slicing through the perfectly permed curves and dips of her hair. Her eyes are fixed on the ocean, blue like she’s never seen, somehow glittering hot and impossibly cool at the same time. She closes her eyes and imagines a city perched on the
edge of the ocean, rounded and organic as if it has risen, fully formed, from the blue surrounding it. Sunlight beats down on the seaweed green of buildings and houses. A sea-village, cool and warming at the same time.
She arrives and cannot believe that this (a thousand and one shades of grey, hunched beneath a sky so heavy and dark that the city seems beaten into submission, seagulls its only release) is real.
Cranes move slowly through the skyline, loading and unloading among piles of bright yellow sulphur. Boats, gulls, cars. Each noise is indiscernible from the last—a constant high whine broken only by the sound of the ocean, like glass cracking slowly in the cold.
A lock of hair falls in her face. She presses her right palm against her forehead, her leather trunk between her knees. She looks around the dock and sees Susie stepping into a blue car. Her small eyes scan the dozens of faces for her older sister. The crowd looks back at her coldly, like a monster with hundreds of eyes.
She steps off, and her sister and brother-in-law materialize to pull Siu Sang to a taxi waiting at the foot of Burrard Street. She looks back and sees nothing except a sea of heads and the ocean beyond. She turns to Yen Mei, hoping that her sister will reach out and hold her hand or place an arm around her shoulder, but Yen Mei only looks forward, with her hands in her lap, and lets her husband do all the talking.

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