The Valley of Amazement (64 page)

“I cannot marry you and stay in the United States,” he said.

I was angry that this was the first thing he said. I did not expect an expression of joy. But I had hoped for concern. “I will not risk my life with an abortion,” I said. “And if I stay here and have the baby, I won’t be able to keep it. It will be handed over to an orphanage. That’s what happened to Miss Pond, and she’s a Freethinker. She tried to keep her baby and she was shunned. Her work wasn’t accepted. That baby was probably my father’s, and he did nothing for that baby. He let it go to a warehouse. That’s what would happen to our baby, and it would never be adopted because it would be tainted as half-Chinese with your blood. It would languish never feeling loved.”

“The baby would not be accepted in China any more than here,” Lu Shing said.

“Don’t you have any suggestions other than what you cannot do?” I asked. “Am I alone in finding a solution?”

“I don’t know what I could offer that would be acceptable to you. My family will not break the marriage contract, and because you’re a foreigner, they would never permit you into the house, certainly not for the purpose of visiting me. At best, I could see you as my mistress, unacknowledged by my family. And I wouldn’t be able to see you exclusively or live with you. I would be expected to have frequent sex with my wife for the purpose of producing a male heir—actually, as many sons as possible, and, if necessary, with several concubines if my wife proves incapable of having males right away. The expectations are more onerous in China than in America, and there are other complications you cannot begin to comprehend. I know that is not the answer you wanted to hear. I’m sorry.”

He had merely recited the rules of his society. He had not considered breaking them. I defied my parents. Why couldn’t he? He wasn’t willing to consider other possibilities because he was not suffering as I was. He wasn’t desperate to be rid of fear and confusion and wasn’t on the brink of losing his mind. “Why can’t you act on your own? Why can’t you simply leave?”

“I can’t explain the reason, except to say that what I think and do is lodged in my head, heart, character, and spirit. This is not a comparison to your importance to me. But no matter how much I love you, I can’t extract that part of me and change into someone who would betray his family. I can’t expect anyone could understand the enormity of my responsibility unless they were raised in China and in a family like ours.”

“Tell me you don’t love me so I won’t ever hope you might. Tell me you would willingly let my soul curdle and die so you can bed a girl you don’t even know. I will never trust love. I will feel only self-hatred because I let a weakling destroy my heart.”

Finally, I saw anguish on his face. He looked as if he might cry. He embraced me. “I won’t abandon you, Lucia,” he said. “I have never loved anyone more. I simply don’t know yet what we can do.”

His words gave me great courage and expectations, and I inflated them. I took them with me when my family convened in the parlor after I told them I had urgent news. They sat stiffly, wearing expressions of worry. Lu
Shing and I stood, he to the side and behind me.

“I’m pregnant,” I said simply. Before I could say more about my plans, Mother leapt up and shouted at Lu Shing that he had violated “our hospitality, our trust, our honor, and goodwill …” Lu Shing said repeatedly that he was regretful and remorseful, deeply ashamed. Yet he seemed too calm for those feelings to be true.

“What good is your damn Chinese remorse?” Mother said in a sarcastic tone. “It’s not sincere. You’ll board a boat soon and leave this mess behind!”

Both Father and Mother turned on me and hurled words about my defects: that I was “ungrateful,” “stupid,” “prideful,” “promiscuous.” You said you wanted to choose your own interests, hobbies, and passions. So this is what you chose? Passionate sex with a man who is about to abandon you?

I felt the turmoil of a child who was ridiculed for who she was. But my face did not grow splotches of humiliation. I was angry.

“Passion and hobbies with a Chinese man,” my mother said with a sneer. “A Chinese man with a pigtail. People will laugh at us for having taken him in as a guest! What fools we were to be generous.” Those last remarks sent me into uncontrollable rage. She always thought only of herself. What about the harm she had done to me as a child?

I could not keep from crying, and I was angry at the same time that I was showing them the tears of a child.

“What do you care what happens to me?” I said. “I’ve always been nothing more than a shadow in this house. You never talked to me about what I wanted to do with my life, or what my feelings were. You never noticed when I was sad or happy. Have I ever heard you say that you love me? You made no effort. You simply neglected me. If love were nourishment, I would have been dead long ago. What kind of mother were you? Is it any wonder I went to someone who cared for me. Without love, I would have gone mad. I didn’t want to become like you. But I had to remain here as a child and endure being humiliated for my ideas, ridiculed for having emotions. I was overwrought, you said. You wanted to quash any emotion I had so I would become like you. Loveless, selfish, angry, and alone.”

My mother looked crestfallen, disappointed in me. I wanted her to feel so miserable, she would cry like me. The more I said, the more destructive I wanted to be. I could not stop. I was crazed and grabbed any weapon I could fling.

“What do you know about love?” I said. “You devoted more attention to bugs that have been dead for millions of years than you ever did to me. I was alive. Didn’t you notice? Are you happy with your marriage? All you do is lock yourself in your room and wallow in misery. And when you come out, the greatest emotion you show is anger.”

My voice became more mocking, more wounding: “No wonder everyone said Father was a saint for putting up with you. All your dear friends who you criticized laughed at your science experiments and said they could have saved you the time and told you the answer you sought: The bugs were dead. You were the mad scientist, deluded into thinking you would discover something useful. You wasted your life instead.”

Mr. Minturn was too senile to understand what I was saying. “Why is she angry? Perhaps we should take her on another boat ride to cheer her up.”

Mrs. Minturn gave my mother a superior look. “This is what comes of poor child-rearing practices. You should have locked her in a closet when she misbehaved. You wouldn’t follow my advice. No wonder she has loose morals.”

“Shut up! You’re a stupid wicked woman, an evil presence who poisons this house. All your life, you’ve left rot behind you. Everyone hates you. Couldn’t you feel it? And don’t accuse me of loose morals. You used sleepwalking as your method for seducing Mr. Minturn into marriage. Why don’t you suffer from sleepwalking now?”

“Calm yourself, Lucia,” my father said. “You are saying things you don’t mean and you may regret later. When you’re less excited, we can talk rationally and you’ll see that what you’re saying is not true.”

“You don’t get to preside over this matter like you do at the dinner table with your boring conversations and pompous questions about art. You want me to hide my feelings just like you hide your lovers. Mother, do you know how many women Father has had sex with behind your back?”

He groaned. “No, no … stop.”

“I read the letters from your lovers, praising your instrument of love and your skills, the positions you used, letters of gratitude from women and men alike. Men! Yes, Mother, he has had dalliances with men. Does any of this shock you? He’s been servicing Miss Pond, too. Did you know she came to the house an hour before dinner the other night and asked to see his collection? His collection! Didn’t you see her at the dining table, ogling him with postorgasmic affection? You call me promiscuous for having sex with Lu Shing. You’re my model, Father. Lu Shing is not the first man I’ve had sex with. I’ve had students of yours. I used your books with the disgusting photographs of men and women inserting themselves in different positions. I used Professor Minturn’s lesson book. It’s a wonder I did not also become a sexual deviant like you, collecting nasty objects used for sex and masturbation. Am I wrong to want to keep this baby? Wasn’t it your baby Miss Pond gave birth to? You gave up your own child! Whatever became of that baby? Don’t you care if it’s now languishing in a crib or if he one
day works in a shoelace factory?”

I could not stop, and I did not know why I could not. I took all the secrets a family should keep from each other and made sure I had thoroughly destroyed them. All along I knew I was destroying myself as well.

Mother left, and I believe she may have been crying. Father had said nothing the entire time. But when he looked up, I saw in his eyes grief and terror. It was only then that I realized how cruel I had been. I had damaged the father I had once loved, and had severed him from me, as well as from my mother. I had become a monster.

I could not remain in the house another day. Lu Shing and I would stay in a boardinghouse. When I left the house, no one was downstairs to see me leave.

D
URING THE LAST
two weeks before we left for China, Lu Shing never questioned what I had said to my family. I told him that I had greatly exaggerated my experiences with other young men. I also admitted that I had lost control of my mind, and that while these were my feelings, and that everything I had said was true, I knew I had said too much. I wondered if I had scared him by showing him this turbulent side of my personality. I may have jarred him into thinking I would expect more than what he could give me. That was what I feared—that I would want more because my needs were bottomless.

Doubt crept in. I had made him feel contrite and forced him to say he loved me. He said he was thoughtless, that he did not deserve me and would never abandon me. A man being tortured would say anything. I did not remember how I had led him to say those words, but I knew he had not said them spontaneously or in a single confession of love. Yet I hoped that his piecemeal declarations were whole and strong.

At the last minute, I sent a note to Miss Huffard, the opera singer. She had passions, and only she would understand. I told her where I was going and that Lu Shing and I would marry once we overcame a few problems that could be expected between the races. I said I would write from Shanghai and asked her to wish me luck. I dropped my letter at the post office, and when they took it away, I felt that had been the final declaration that I was leaving my life behind and starting afresh. It gave me a boost of confidence.

When we reached the boat, I kissed him on the cheek. I did not care who saw. We were leaving each other for the next month. Lu Shing took one gangplank, and I another. His would lead him to a deck for Orientals. Mine would deliever to the decks reserved for whites. Earlier, when I had realized we would be separated by race, I had dismissed the rules as ridiculous. We could sneak into each other’s room, just as we had in the house.

“If I’m caught in your cabin, or you in mine,” Lu Shing said, “I would wind up in the jail at the bottom of this ship. They’ll drop you off in Honolulu before you ever reach China.”

He assured me he had a comfortable berth in a private cabin, and on a deck with other well-to-do Chinese. We would reunite when we disembarked. His family knew I was coming. He had written—at my insistence. He did not know what their reaction would be, but they sent a cable that they would be waiting.

On the second day out at sea, I unpacked the rest of my bags. At the bottom of one were two things I had not placed there. One was a red velvet bag. Inside was my father’s spyglass. When I was a little girl, we used to look through the spyglass from the turret and watch the boats come in. I remember him naming the countries where the boats hailed from.

I then found a bag of purple chamois. It contained three pieces of amber with wasps. I wept all night, because I did not understand what the objects meant. I guessed that my father was rebuking me for spying on him. Maybe my mother was asserting that she did indeed love those insects more. I allowed a small chance that they were small tokens of love, which they must have shown me at one time. Otherwise how could I feel so palpably, so painfully that it might be love?

On top of the nausea from pregnancy, I was seasick the first three days. I used seasickness as my excuse for the sudden rise of a greenish complexion when I was with my dinner mates. I had been seated with five women traveling alone. The wives of diplomats and businessmen, they were rejoining their husbands in Shanghai. When they asked why I was going to China, I gave them the lie I had told the clerk at the passport office: I had an uncle who ran a school, and I would be a teacher of English.

“A school to teach the Chinese?” the eldest woman asked.

I nodded. “It is for the sons of diplomats.” Lu Shing had been tutored among children of that standing.

“Then I know your uncle quite well!” she said. “Dr. Thomas Wolcott. We should arrange for all of us to have tea when you’re settled.”

I mumbled that it must be a different school, because my uncle was someone else, Dr. Claude Maubert. No one had heard of him. “It’s a new school,” I said. “He may not be taking students yet. My uncle has been in Shanghai for a short amount of time …”

“Here I thought I knew everyone,” the woman said. “It’s a very small circle of us foreigners in Shanghai. But everyone says that Shanghai is growing faster by the day.” They encouraged me to join the societies there, a church, a ladies’ circle to help orphans, another to rescue slave girls.

After we had been on board a week, I ventured to tell them an interesting tale I had heard.

“My uncle said he met a couple in Shanghai, an American woman and a Chinese man. They were married and living with his family. They even had a child. I thought that was a very modern arrangement.”

The diplomat’s wife scowled. “That cannot be true. There is no legal marriage between a Chinese man and an American woman.”

I tried to hide my alarm. “Is that a Chinese law or an American one?” I asked. “I’m sure my uncle said they were married.”