What haven’t disappeared are rats. They’re everywhere. So here’s what I don’t understand: Old Shanghai, my Shanghai, had plenty of sin on the surface but was shored up by the respectability of banking and mercantile wealth underneath. Now I see the so-called respectability of communism on the surface and decay underneath. They can sweep, strip, and cart away all they want, but there’s no changing the fact that my home city is decomposing, rotting away, and turning into a skeleton. Eventually, the only things left will be dust and memories.
As usual, I find bits of May and me on my assigned route. I don’t know if other paper collectors have ignored these advertisements pasted on walls or if they just haven’t gotten to these streets and alleys yet, but it’s strange to peel and scrape away our noses, smiling faces, pretty hairdos, and clothes. I take these pieces—sometimes just an eye or a finger—and slip them into my pocket. One poster I’m able to pull completely from the wall. I roll it up and tuck it inside my jacket. At the end of the day, I’m supposed to turn in everything I’ve collected, but I’ll keep the poster and the other fragments of my sister and me that I have in my pocket to add to what I’ve already hidden at home.
I turn a corner and enter a small lane. Images flash through my mind: paying social calls on New Year’s Day, my mother being helped down from a rickshaw, my father dabbing sweat off his forehead with a linen handkerchief. I know this street. It’s where the Hu family lived. Madame Hu was Mama’s closest friend. Mama and Madame Hu were always plotting how to arrange a marriage for May and Tommy, the Hus’ precious son. Now it’s clear that was never going to happen, but back then I thought Tommy and May made a sweet couple. I remember as well the day bombs dropped on Nanking Road and Tommy died. I can look back and recognize many moments that changed my life. The day Tommy died was one of them. Funny we didn’t recognize it for the bad omen it was, because that night Pockmarked Huang’s Green Gang thugs came to threaten my father.
Why haven’t I thought to come here before now? I have to find out if any of the Hus are still alive. The houses on this lane look very different from others I’ve seen. I’ve grown accustomed to laundry hanging on poles projected from windows, draped across bushes like blankets of dirty snow, or flopped over fences and walls. There are no secrets in the New China. Everyone knows everyone else just by walking past the laundry—how old the people are who live in the house, their sex, if they’re poor or slightly better off. But outside the Hus’ house I see no padded pants, patched jackets, baggy underpants, or the limp socks that would indicate that anyone lives here. There’s no laundry whatsoever. Instead, the rosebushes still have a few blooms and a mulberry tree offers shade.
I stride up the walkway and ring the bell. An elegant woman with bound feet opens the door. I’d know her anywhere. It’s Madame Hu. I’ve heard about the stay-oners—those who had the money and power to leave when they had the chance but didn’t. Madame Hu is one of those. Twenty years have passed, but she recognizes me right away too. Both of us stand there, laughing and crying at the impossibility of it all.
“Come in, come in.” She waves me inside and leads me to the salon. It’s like I’m stepping back in time. The Hu family’s belongings are all still here and beautifully kept. The room is filled with low-slung velvet chairs and couches. The geometric design of the tile floor is clean and polished.
Madame Hu sways to a chair on her bound feet. My breath catches as memories of my mother fill my mind and heart. Madame Hu rings a bell, and a servant appears. “We’ll need tea,” Madame Hu orders. Then she turns to me. “Do you still like chrysanthemum tea, or would you prefer something different?”
Of course, she’d remember that. When May was still a baby, Mama used to bring me here for tea. I’d listen to the two women gossip, and they’d let me have some of their tea sweetened with two spoonfuls of sugar. I felt very grown-up when I was with them.
“I’d love some chrysanthemum tea,” I say.
The servant backs out of the room. For a long moment, Auntie Hu, as May and I called her as a courtesy when we were girls, and I stare at each other. What does she see when she looks at me? Disappointment that I’m dressed in my common worker uniform, or does she see past the clothes to the person I’ve become? When I look at her—and I’ll admit it, I’m staring hard, soaking her in—it’s as though I’m seeing my mother, if she’d lived. Auntie Hu is tiny not from age or hardship but because she and Mama were petite. (How I remember their concern when I kept growing, eventually becoming taller than they were, taller than my father. I remember overhearing fretful conversations about whether I would ever find a husband with my unpleasing and unfeminine height.)
Auntie Hu was always fashion and style conscious, again just like Mama, and she’s still beautifully dressed. She wears a dark blue silk tunic closed by intricate frog buttons at her neck, across her breast, and down her side. Her jewelry is exquisite—finely carved jade and gold earrings, a brooch, and a simple necklace. I glance at her feet, and they too are just as I remember them—immaculately cared for and dressed in embroidered silk slippers. The odor that emanates from those two precious appendages—a distinct concoction of rotting flesh, alum, and perfume—is something I haven’t smelled in twenty years. What strikes me most is that Auntie Hu looks young, or at least younger than I might have imagined. Then I realize that, if Mama had lived, she would have only been fifty-seven years old.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Auntie Hu says. “It’s dangerous for you.”
“I had to,” I say, and then I tell her about my daughter and how I’ve returned to Shanghai to find her.
Auntie Hu shakes her head. “So much sadness and heartache, no? And yet we have to go on living.”
“And you, Auntie, why did you stay?”
“This is our home,” she answers. “I was born here. My husband was born here. Our parents and grandparents were born here. And of course, Tommy was born here and is buried here. How could I leave him? How could I leave my husband?”
“How is Uncle Hu?”
She doesn’t answer directly. “When Mao and his cronies took power, they made it their business to take everyone’s property. Not everything was nationalized at once. Instead, they did it by long torture, by taxing people like us out of existence. We had to give up our property piece by piece. Eventually the government took our factory. Uncle was forced to sweep the floors of the factory his own grandfather had built. But those turtle’s egg abortions didn’t know what they were doing. Production dropped. Workers were injured. They asked my husband to resume his former post as director of the factory but with the same pay he received as a sweeper.” She pauses and takes a breath. “He was dead within two years. Now the factory belongs to the government, but I still have my house.”
“I’m sorry, Auntie. I’m sorry about Uncle.”
“Fate can’t be second-guessed, and we’ve all lost people.”
The servant returns and pours the tea. Without asking, Auntie Hu puts two teaspoons of sugar in my cup before handing it to me. I haven’t had sugar in my tea in years. The taste combined with the scent of chrysanthemums and the odor rising from Auntie Hu’s bound feet is vaguely nauseating, yet it transports me to the security, luxury, and coziness of my childhood.
“How are you able to still live like this?” I blurt out, forgetting my manners.
“It’s not so hard to keep the old life,” she admits. “A lot of us do. I have servants, because we were forbidden to let them go after Liberation.” She allows herself a delicate cackle. “Chairman Mao didn’t want us to aggravate the unemployment situation.”
Which may explain Z.G.’s servants, although they would have been little girls eight years ago.
“I still have my dressmaker,” she goes on. “I could take you to her if you’d like. Your mother would want me to do that.” But she’s not answering my question, and she knows it. “I keep my curtains closed, so people won’t know how I live. If you look inside any house on this street, you’ll find housek
eepers, valets, maids, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs. Even in the New Society, we have to keep our homes clean and tidy.”
Auntie Hu’s face wrinkles in wry amusement. “They call it the New Society and the New China, but this is like the olden times my grandmother told me about, when the wealthy kept the exteriors of their compounds gray and simple so that wandering bandits or ill-wishers wouldn’t suspect the privilege hidden behind the walls. Our ancestors may have dressed opulently in embroidered brocades and silks inside their compounds, but they donned simple, unadorned clothes when they went into the streets so they wouldn’t be kidnapped and held for ransom. That’s what we’re doing now! Except”—she gives a devilish snort—“we Shanghainese haven’t lost our hai pah.”
It’s true, the Shanghainese have always had a unique sense of style.
“I still send my maid to buy peonies when they’re in season. I need to put them somewhere. Why can’t I use this vase?” Auntie Hu asks, gesturing to an art deco vase with a naked woman etched into the glass. Her eyes come back to mine. “Where are you staying?”
“In my old house, but it doesn’t look like this.”
“Oh, I know.” She shakes her head sympathetically. “After the bombing in 1937—such a long time ago now—we went to your home when I didn’t hear from your mother. We found boarders. Squatters more like it. They told us about the Green Gang. Uncle thought all four of you were dead, but I knew your mother. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to you two girls.”
“I don’t know what became of Baba, but Mama, May, and I left Shanghai together.” I reach up under my sleeve and pull my mother’s bracelet down to my wrist. Auntie Hu’s eyes flash in recognition. I don’t have to tell her the terrible details. I keep it simple. “She didn’t make it to Hong Kong.”
Auntie Hu nods somberly but offers no condolences. As she said earlier, we’ve all lost people.
“Anyway,” she picks up, “I’ve gone to your house every few years. I’ve seen how those boarders have treated it. But it could be worse. Your house was divided before Liberation. No new people were assigned to live there. Just don’t expect those nails ever to leave.”
“Nails?”
“The people who live in your house. Once they’re in, you can never pull them out. But it doesn’t have to look the way it does,” she scolds in a motherly tone. “Visit the pawnshops. I bet you could find and buy back some of your family’s belongings.”
“I doubt they’d still be there after all this time.”
“You’d be surprised. Who was going to buy anything during the war with the Japanese or later during the civil war? All those workers you see on the street? How would they know what to buy, even if they had money? They aren’t real Shanghainese. They don’t have hai pah. You shouldn’t be afraid of living as you once lived.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then where are the nightclubs? Where’s the music? Where’s the dancing?”
“Dancing in a club all night is completely different from having things. Besides, some people—very high up people—play Western instruments, dance to Western music … The Communists say they’re pure and for the masses, but you go high enough and they’re very corrupt. But none of that matters.” She leans forward and taps my knee. “You need to fix your house, even with those nails there.”
“How can I? Won’t I be reported?”
“I haven’t been reported.”
“You live alone.”
She winces, and I immediately regret my remark. But she’s a woman of old traditions. She chooses to ignore my rudeness, as though I’m merely an uneducated child.
“Never forget this is Shanghai. Never forget you are Shanghainese. Never forget your hai pah. You carry that inside you no matter what new campaign that fat chairman launches.”
Later, she walks me to the door. She takes my hand and stares at my mother’s bracelet. “Your mama always loved you best.” Then she wraps her fingers around the bracelet and slides it up under the sleeve of my jacket. “Please come back and see me.”
I spend another hour picking up paper before returning to the office to deliver most of what I’ve collected. It’s dark now, and I have a few last things to do before I go home. First, I survey the ships and security along the Bund. Chairman Mao does not command a great navy: laundry hangs on lines, hats and clothes drape on guns, sailors sit on decks eating bowls of noodles. The soup must be strong and tasty, because the scent of ginger, scallions, and fresh coriander wafts through the air to me. One thing is sure: the sailors aren’t paying much attention to anything beyond what they’re eating.
I nod to myself, and then, as I do every evening, I go to Z.G.’s house. A week ago, the servants finally became so irritated by my nightly ringing of the doorbell that I don’t bother with that anymore. Instead, I linger behind a shrub on the other side of the walk street and wait to see what lights come on in the house. One of these times I’m going to see my daughter but not tonight.
Then it’s on to the Methodist mission I attended as a girl. I come here every day. I, like many others, am afraid to enter. I sit on the curb across the street. I’m not alone for long. A few other women approach, and it’s as if they are dragging great shadows of memories behind them. They sit on the curb next to me.
Chairman Mao is against all religions, whether Chinese or Western, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. One-Goders like me have been told to “walk the road of socialism,” “expose rightist elements hiding behind the veil of Christianity,” and “resolutely struggle against anti-Communist, anti-socialist activities conducted by reactionaries, vagabonds, and wicked elements using the fronts of church or free preaching.” They can tell me what to do, but they can’t keep me from praying.
I tell Him about the loneliness I feel for places and people that are lost to me. I ask about Joy. Does she miss Chinatown as I missed Shanghai as a young woman in a new country? Does she miss her grandparents, her aunt and uncle, her mother and father as I’ve missed my parents, my sister, and Sam? I let the grief I feel for Sam well up inside me. My head hangs low, my shoulders sink, and my back weakens.
Maybe it’s better to be in Shanghai. At home, everything would have been a reminder of him: his recliner, his favorite bowl, his clothes, which still hang in the closet where he committed suicide. If I left my house in Chinatown, I’d see the places we went together, the café where we worked, the beach where we picnicked. I wouldn’t want to turn on the television either, because I wouldn’t want to see any of the shows we watched together. And what if I heard one of our favorite songs on the radio? Any one of these things would have been devastating. But I’m in Shanghai now. I can’t turn back the clock, change the present, or influence the future.
I end with a special plea for God to watch over my daughter and Z.G. I haven’t once forgotten that his servants said he was in trouble, so wherever they are, I hope he’s protecting her. I recite the Lord’s Prayer and then I get up. A knife grinder rolls his cart down an alley to my right, shaking metal rattles and calling, “Sharpen your scissors to snip away bad fortune. Make your cleavers sharp enough to cut through all disasters.”
The bus is crowded, as usual. I get off at my stop and then hurry to our neighborhood’s political meeting. I’ve been told I’ve done a good job “participating actively” in what I can only call brainwashing. I listen to the lessons, recite slogans in a loud voice, and join others in criticizing a neighbor for his bourgeois behavior and someone else for her right-leaning tendencies. I keep my actual thoughts to myself. In my own neighborhood, I can’t masquerade as an illiterate paper collector. My neighbors know about my decadent past and my long sojourn in the West. I’m considered a person with “a historical problem.” I could be attacked at any moment, but, as Dun has advised me, the more I go along with everything that’s drilled into me, the better off I’ll be. The more I confess—and how easy it is, really—the more I’m trusted.
The streets are mostly empty as I start home. If I had to
give a single example that shows how much Shanghai has changed, it’s that the city is asleep by nine in the evening. Even cars are not allowed on the streets after nine unless they have a special permit. As soon as I get home, I check the table by the front door to see if I’ve received any mail. I’ve been waiting such a long time to hear from May that I’ve nearly given up hope, but tonight there’s a package with handwriting I don’t recognize. The postmark shows that it’s come from Wah Hong Village. The box has been opened and carelessly resealed. I grab it, run upstairs to my room, and lock the door.
I rip off the paper. The box contains some clothes and other items. An envelope with May’s handwriting sits on top. I open the letter and read just the first line—“Good news! A letter has come from Joy”—before quickly searching through the box for another envelope with my daughter’s handwriting. I find some sweaters, a packet of sanitary supplies, and the hat with feathers I wore out of China many years ago. I’ll be grateful for the sweaters this winter, if I’m still here. The pads are a true blessing compared with what I’ve found at the local dry-goods store. But I don’t find Joy’s letter. I pick up the hat. I hid our coaching papers in its lining when we arrived at Angel Island, and later I hid money there. It took me a minute, but only I would understand the significance of this particular hat. I carefully peel back the lining and pull out a twenty-dollar bill and two more envelopes, neither with writing on them.
I open one of the envelopes, and there’s my daughter’s precise handwriting. The letter begins, “Dear Pearl and May,” as though we’re friends and not her mother and aunt. Her formality is like a knife in my heart.
I’m writing this on the boat to Shanghai and am giving it to the captain to mail when he returns to Hong Kong. You must be worried about me. Or maybe you’re mad at me. Either way, I want you to know I’m fine. I really am. I never felt at home in Chinatown. I’m going to my proper home now. I know you doubt me, and I can practically hear Uncle Vern saying bad things about communism. Please trust that I know what I’m doing. I appreciate what you did for me, but from now on Chairman Mao will be my mother and my father. If I’m wrong in my thinking—but I’m not—I’ll live with the consequences. You both taught me how to do that … live with the consequences. I was a consequence. I know that now.