"Shanghai Girls" - читать интересную книгу автора (See Lisa)

Isle of the Immortals

MAY ROLLS OVER and buries her face in her pillow to stifle her sobs. I look around, and it seems like the other women are either ignoring us or pretending to ignore us. It’s the Chinese way.

I kick off my shoes and climb up the bunk’s tiers and onto May’s bed.

“I thought you didn’t do the husband-wife thing with Vernon,” I whisper.

“I didn’t,” she manages to get out. “I couldn’t.”

A guard comes in and announces it’s time for dinner, and the women scurry to be first out the door. As bad as the food is, dinner is more important than an argument between two sisters. If any edible pieces exist in tonight’s meal, they want to be first to get them. After a few minutes, we’re alone and no longer have to whisper.

“Was it that boy you met on the ship?” I can’t even remember his name.

“It was before that.”

Before that? We were in the hospital in Hangchow and then the hotel in Hong Kong. I don’t see how anything could have happened during that time, unless it was when I was sick, or earlier, when I was unconscious. Was it one of the doctors who took care of me? Was she raped when we were trying to get to the Grand Canal? I’ve been too ashamed to talk about what happened to me. Has she kept a similar secret all this time? I creep around the topic by asking what seems like a practical question.

“How long has it been?”

She sits up, rubs her eyes with both hands, and then stares at me with sorrow, humiliation, and pleading. She pulls her legs under her so our knees touch, and then she slowly unbuttons the frogs of her peasant jacket and smoothes her hands over her shirt to reveal her belly. She’s pretty far along, which explains why she’s been hiding under baggy clothes almost from the moment we arrived at Angel Island.

“Was it Tommy?” I ask, hoping it was.

Mama always wanted May and Tommy to marry. With Tommy and Mama dead, wouldn’t this be a gift? But when May says, “He was just a friend,” I don’t know what to think. My sister went out with a lot of different young men in Shanghai, especially in those last days, when we were so desperate to forget our circumstances. But I don’t know their names, and I don’t want to interrogate her with questions like “Was it that young man that night at the Venus Club?” or “Was it that American Betsy used to bring around sometimes?” Wouldn’t that approach be as ridiculous and stupid as what I’ve gone through today? But I can’t keep my tongue from flapping.

“Was it that student who came to live in the second-floor pavilion?” I don’t remember much about him other than that he was thin, wore gray and kept to himself. What did he study? I can’t say, but I haven’t forgotten how he hovered over Mama’s chair the day of the bombing. Did he do that because he was in love with May, as so many young men were?

“I was already pregnant then,” May confesses.

A disgusting thought enters my mind. “Tell me it wasn’t Captain Yamasaki.” If May’s going to have a half-Japanese baby, I don’t know what I’ll do.

She shakes her head, and I’m relieved.

“You never met him,” May says in a quavering voice. “I barely met him. It was just a thing I did. I didn’t think this would happen. If I’d had more time, I would have asked an herbalist to give me something to expel the baby. But I didn’t. Oh, Pearl, everything’s my fault.” She grabs my hands and begins to weep again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” I say, trying to sound comforting but knowing it’s an empty promise.

“How could we possibly be all right? Haven’t you thought about what this means?”

To tell the truth, I haven’t. I haven’t had months to think about May’s condition. I’ve had barely two minutes.

“We can’t go to Los Angeles right away.” May pauses and stares at me appraisingly “You understand we have to go there, right?”

“I haven’t seen another way. But even forgetting about this”-I point to her belly-“we don’t know if they’ll want us anymore.”

“Of course they will. They bought us! But there’s the problem of the baby. At first I thought I’d be able to get away with it. I didn’t do the husband-wife thing with Vernon, but he wasn’t going to say anything. Then Old Man Louie went through our sheets-”

“You knew even then?”

“You were there when I threw up in the restaurant. I was so scared. I thought someone would figure it out. I thought you would guess.”

Now, as I think about it, I realize many people understood what I was too ignorant and blind to see. The old woman whose house we stopped at on our first night out of Shanghai had taken particular care with May. The doctor in Hangchow had been very solicitous, wanting May to sleep. I’m May’s jie jie, and I’ve always thought we are as close as can be, but I’ve been so concerned with my own miseries-losing Z.G., leaving home, being raped, almost dying, getting here-that I haven’t paid attention every time May has thrown up these past weeks and months. I haven’t noticed whether or not the little red sister has visited May. And I can’t even remember the last time I saw her completely undressed. I’ve abandoned my sister when she needed me most.

“I’m so sorry-”

“Pearl! You aren’t paying attention to what I’m saying! How can we go to Los Angeles now? That boy is not the father and Old Man Louie knows it.”

All this is happening too fast, and it’s been a long, hard day. I haven’t eaten since the bowl of jook at breakfast, and I’m not going to get dinner. But I’m not so tired and worn out that I don’t see May has something in mind. After all, she told me she was pregnant only because I’d gotten mad at her because…

“You lied to the board on purpose. You did at the first interview.”

“The baby needs to be born here on Angel Island,” she says.

I’m the smart sister, but my mind races to keep up with her.

“You were already prepared to lie when the ship sailed into San Francisco,” I say finally. “That’s why you didn’t study the coaching book. You didn’t want to answer correctly. You wanted to end up here.”

“That’s not quite right. I hoped Spencer would help me-us. He made promises on the ship. He said he would take care of things so we wouldn’t have to go to Los Angeles. He lied.” She shrugs. “Does it surprise you after Baba? My next option was coming here. Don’t you see? If I have the baby here, they’ll never know it was mine.”

“They?”

“The Louies,” she says impatiently. “You have to take it. I’m giving him to you. You did the husband-wife thing with Sam. The timing is almost right.”

I pull my hands from hers and lean away from her.

“What are you saying?”

“The doctors said you probably can’t have a baby. This could save me and help you.”

But I don’t want a baby-not now, perhaps not ever. I don’t want to be married either-at least not through an arrangement or to pay my father’s debts. There has to be another way.

“If you don’t want it, then give it to the missionaries,” I suggest. “They’ll take him. They’ve got that Chinese Babies Aid society they’re always talking about. They’ll keep it separate from diseased women.”

“Pearl! This is my baby! What other ties do we have to Mama and Baba? We’re daughters-the end of the line. Couldn’t my son be the beginning of a new line here in America?”

Of course we assume the baby is a boy. Like Chinese everywhere, we can’t imagine a child other than a son, who will bring great happiness to his family and guarantee that the ancestors are fed in the afterworld. Nevertheless, May’s plan will never work.

“I’m not pregnant and I can’t have the baby for you,” I say, pointing out the obvious.

Once again, May shows how much she’s been thinking about all this.

“You’ll have to wear the peasant clothes I bought for you. They cover everything. Those country women don’t want anyone to see their bodies-not to attract a man, not to show they’re with child. You didn’t notice how big my stomach had gotten, did you? Later, if you need to, you can put a pillow in your pants. Who’s going to look? Who’s going to care? But we do have to string out our time here.”

“For how long?”

“Another four months or so.”

I don’t know what else to do or say. She’s my sister, my only living relative as far as I know, and I promised Mama I’d take care of her. And like that, I make a decision that will affect the rest of my life… and May’s too.

“All right. I’ll do it.”

I’m so overwhelmed by everything that’s happened today that I don’t have the sense to ask how she’s going to deliver the baby and not have the authorities know about it.

THE HARSH REALITY of what we did by leaving China and coming here hits us hard in the coming weeks. Hopeful-stupid-people call Angel Island the Ellis Island of the West. Those who want to keep the Chinese out of America call it the Guardian of the Western Gate. We Chinese refer to it as the Isle of the Immortals. Time passes so slowly it feels as if we’re in the afterworld, that’s for sure. The days are long and staggered by a routine that is as expected and unremarkable as evacuating our bowels. Everything’s regulated. We have absolutely no choice about when or what we eat, when the lights are turned on or off, when we go to bed or get up. When you’re in prison, you lose all privileges.

When May’s belly gets larger, we move to a pair of adjacent lower bunks so she won’t have to climb so high. Every morning we wake up and dress. The guards escort us to the dining hall-a surprisingly small room given that on some days meals are served to over three hundred people. Like everything else on Angel Island, the dining hall is segregated. The Europeans, Asiatics, and Chinese all have their own cooks, food, and dining times. We have a half hour to eat breakfast and be completely out of the hall before the next group of detainees arrives. We sit at long wooden tables and eat bowls of jook, and then the guards escort us back to our dormitory and lock us in. Some women make tea using hot water from a pot kept atop the radiator. Others munch on food sent by family members in San Francisco: noodles, pickles, and dumplings. Most go back to sleep, waking only when the missionary ladies come to talk to us about their one God and teach us how to sew and knit. One matron feels sorry for me: pregnant and stranded on Angel Island. “Let me send a telegram to your husband,” she offers. “Once he knows you’re here and in the family way, he’ll come and sort out everything for you. You don’t want your baby to be born in this place. You’ll need a proper hospital.”

But I don’t want that kind of help, not yet anyway.

For lunch, we go to the dining hall for cold rice topped by bean sprouts that have been steamed to a soggy mess, jook with slivered pork, or tapioca soup with crackers. Dinner consists of one large dish-dried tofu and pork, potatoes and beef, lima beans and pork knuckles, or dried greens and sand dabs. They sometimes give us course red-grain rice barely fit to eat. Everything looks and tastes like it’s been chewed and swallowed once already. Some women take to putting pieces of meat from their bowls into mine. “For your son,” they say. I then have to find a way to transfer these luxuries to May.

“Why don’t your husbands come to visit?” a woman asks us one night at dinner. Her given name is Dustpan, but she goes by the married name of Lee-shee. She’s been detained even longer than May and I. “They could hire a lawyer for you. They could explain everything to the inspectors. You could leave tomorrow.”

May and I don’t answer that our husbands don’t know we’ve arrived and that they can’t know until the baby’s born, but sometimes I have to admit it would be a comfort to see them-even those nearly total strangers.

“Our husbands are far away,” May explains to Lee-shee and the other pitying women. “It’s very hard for my sister, especially at this time.”

Afternoons pass slowly. While the other women write to their families-people can send and receive as many letters as they want, although they have to pass through a censor’s hands-May and I talk. Or we look out a window-covered in wire mesh to make sure we don’t escape-and dream of our lost home. Or we work on our sewing and knitting, skills our mother never taught us. We sew diapers and little shirts. We try to knit baby sweaters, caps, and booties.

“Your son will be born a Tiger and will be influenced by the Earth element, which is strong this year,” a woman returning from a trip to her home village tells me during her three-day stay on Angel Island. “Your Tiger child will bring happiness and worry at the same time. He’ll be charming and bright, curious and inquisitive, affectionate and athletic. You’ll have plenty of exercise just keeping up with him!”

May usually remains silent during the advice given to us by the women, but this time she can’t help herself. “Will he truly be joyful? Will he have a happy life?”

“Happiness? Here in the Land of the Flowery Flag? I don’t know if happiness is possible in this country, but the Tiger has special attributes that could be helpful to your sister’s son. If he’s disciplined and loved equally, then a Tiger will respond with warmth and understanding. But you can never lie to a Tiger, because he will bound and thrash and do things that are wild and daring.”

“But aren’t those good characteristics?” May asks.

“Your sister is a Dragon. The Dragon and the Tiger will always fight for dominance. She must hope for a son-and what mother doesn’t wish for this thing?-because then their deeper positions will be clear. Every mother must obey her son, even if she is a Dragon. If your sister was a Sheep, I’d be concerned. The Tiger will usually protect its Sheep mother, but they are compatible only during good weather and easy times. Otherwise, the Tiger will leap away from the Sheep or he’ll tear her apart.”

May and I look at each other. We didn’t believe these things when Mama was alive. Why should we start now?

I TRY TO be sociable with detainees who speak the Sze Yup dialect, and my vocabulary improves as I remember words from my childhood, but truly, what’s the point in making conversation with these strangers? They never stay long enough for us to become friends, May can’t participate because she doesn’t understand them, and we both think it best if we keep to ourselves. We continue going to the communal toilets and the showers by ourselves, explaining that we don’t want to expose my son to the ghost spirits who linger in those areas. This, of course, doesn’t make sense. I’m not safer from ghosts when I go to the showers or toilet with just my sister instead of the group, but the women let it pass, agreeing I have the typical worries of an expectant mother.

The only changes in pattern come with our twice weekly excursions out of the Administration Building. On Tuesdays, we’re allowed to retrieve things from our bags on the wharf, and even though we never take anything new, it’s a relief to be in the fresh air. On Fridays, the missionary ladies lead us on a walk around the grounds. Angel Island is beautiful in many ways. We see deer and raccoons. We learn the names of the trees: eucalyptus, California live oak, and Torrey pine. We walk past the men’s barracks, which are segregated by race not only in the wings or floors but in the exercise yard as well. And while fences topped with barbed wire surround the entire Immigration Station, keeping it separated from whatever else is on the island, the men’s exercise yard has double fencing to keep them from escaping. But where could they escape to? Angel Island has been designed like Alcatraz, the island we passed on our way here. That too is an escape-proof prison. Those foolish or daring enough to swim for freedom are usually found days later washed up on a shore far from here. The difference between us and the inmates on the neighboring island is that we’ve done nothing wrong. Except that we have in the eyes of the lo fan.

In the Methodist mission school in Shanghai, our teachers talked about the one God and sin, about the virtues of Heaven and the horrors of Hell, but they hadn’t been completely forthright about how their compatriots felt about us. Between the women detainees and the interrogators, we learn that America doesn’t want us. Not only can we not become naturalized citizens but the government passed a law in 1882 barring the immigration of all Chinese, except those in four exempt classes: ministers, diplomats, students, and merchants. Whether a Chinese in these exempt classes or an American citizen of Chinese descent, you need to have a Certificate of Identity to land. This document needs to be carried at all times. Are the Chinese singled out for this special treatment? It wouldn’t surprise me.

“You can’t pretend to be a minister, a diplomat, or a student,” Lee-shee explains, as we eat our first Christmas dinner in the new land. “But it’s not hard to fake being a merchant.”

“That’s right,” agrees Dong-shee, another married woman, who arrived a week after May and me. She’s the one who told us the reason we have brittle wire mesh to sleep on instead of mattresses is that the lo fan don’t think we’ll find beds comfortable. “They don’t want farmers like us. They don’t want coolies or rickshaw pullers or nightsoil collectors either.”

And I think, What country would? Those people are a necessity, but did we even want them in Shanghai? (See how sometimes I still don’t realize my place in world?)

“My husband bought a spot in a store,” Lee-shee boasts. “He paid five hundred dollars to become a partner. He’s not a real partner, and he didn’t pay the money either. Who has money like that? But he promised the owner he’d work until he paid his debt. Now my husband can claim he’s a merchant.”

“And that’s why they question us?” I ask. “They’re looking for fake merchants? It seems like a lot of trouble-”

“What they really want to catch are paper sons.”

Seeing the stupid expression on my face, the two women chuckle. May looks up from her bowl.

“Tell me,” she says. “Do they have a joke?”

I shake my head. May sighs and goes back to poking at the pig’s foot in her bowl. Across the table, the two women exchange knowing looks.

“You two don’t know very much,” Lee-shee observes. “Is that why you and your sister have been here for so long? Didn’t your husbands explain what you needed to do?”

“We were supposed to travel with our husbands and my father-in-law,” I answer truthfully. “We got separated. The monkey people-”

They nod sympathetically.

“You can also enter America if you’re the son or daughter of an American citizen,” Dong-shee goes on. She’s barely touched her food, and the heavily starched sauce congeals in her bowl. “My husband is a paper son. Is your husband one too?”

“Forgive me, but I don’t know what that is.”

“My husband bought the paper to become the son of an American. Now he can bring me in as his paper wife.”

“What do you mean he bought a paper?” I ask.

“Haven’t you heard of paper sons and paper-son slots?” When I shake my head, Dong-shee puts her elbows on the table and leans forward. “Suppose a Chinese man born in America travels to China to get married. When he comes back to America, he tells the authorities that his wife had a baby.”

I’m listening carefully for the loopholes, and I think I’ve found one. “Did she actually have the baby?”

“No. He only tells them that, and the officials at the embassy in China or here on Angel Island aren’t going to go to some village to check if he’s telling the truth. So this man, who is a citizen of the United States, is given a paper saying that he has a new son, who is also a citizen because of his father. But remember, this son was never born. He only exists on paper. So now the man has a paper-son slot to sell. The man waits ten years, twenty years. He then sells the paper-the slot-to a young man in China, who adopts his new family name and comes to America. He’s not a real son. He’s only a paper son. The immigration officials here on Angel Island will try to trick him into admitting the truth. If he’s caught, he’ll be sent back to China.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then he’ll go to his new home and live as a paper son with false citizenship, a false name, and a false family history. These lies will stay with him for as long as he remains here.”

“Who would want to do that?” I ask, skeptical because we come from a country where family names are hugely important and can sometimes be traced back twelve or more generations. The idea that a man would willingly change his family name to come here just doesn’t seem plausible.

“Plenty of young men in China would love to buy that paper and pretend to be the son of someone else if it meant they could come to America-the Gold Mountain, the Land of the Flowery Flag,” Dong-shee answers. “Believe me, he will suffer many indignities and work hard, but he’ll make money, save it, and return home rich one day.”

“It sounds easy-”

“Look around! It’s not that easy!” Lee-shee interrupts. “The interrogations are bad enough, and the lo fan are always changing the rules.”

“What about a paper daughter?” I ask. “Do women come here that way too?”

“What family would waste an opportunity so precious on a daughter? We’re lucky we can take advantage of our husbands’ fake status to come here as paper wives.”

The two women laugh until tears gather in the corners of their eyes. How is it that these illiterate peasants know more about these things and are clearer about what has to be done to get into this country than we are? Because they’re the targeted class, while May and I shouldn’t be here. I sigh. Sometimes I wish we could just be sent back, but how can we go back? China is lost to the Japanese, May’s pregnant, and we have no money and no family.

Then, as usual, the talk turns to the foods we miss: roast duck, fresh fruit, and black bean sauce-anything other than the overcooked garbage they feed us.

AS MAY PLANNED, I wear the loose clothes I’d worn to escape from China. Most women aren’t here long enough to notice that both May and I seem to be growing plumper by the day. Or maybe they do but are as reticent as our own mother would have been about something so private.

My sister and I grew up in a cosmopolitan city. We acted like we knew a lot, but we were ignorant in many ways. Mama-typical for those days-had been unforthcoming about anything that had to do with our bodies. She never even warned us about the visit from the little red sister, and when it first came I was terrified, thinking I was bleeding to death. Even then Mama didn’t explain what was happening. She sent me to the servants’ quarters to have Pansy and the others teach me what to do to take care of myself and how a woman could get pregnant. Later, when the little red sister visited May, I told her what I’d learned, but we still didn’t know much about pregnancy or the process of giving birth. Fortunately, we’re now housed with women who know all about it and have all kinds of hints for me, but I grow to count on Lee-shee’s advice.

“If your nipples are small like the seeds of a lotus,” she counsels, “then your son will rise in society. If your nipples are the size of dates, then your son will sink into poverty.”

She tells me to strengthen my yin by eating pears cooked in syrup, but we don’t have any of those in the dining hall. When May starts having pains in her abdomen, I tell Lee-shee that I am having these pains, and she explains that this is a common ailment for women whose chi is stagnating around the womb.

“The best cure is to eat five slices of daikon radish sprinkled with a little sugar three times a day,” she recommends. But I have no way to get fresh daikon, and May continues to suffer. This prompts me to sell the last piece of jewelry from Mama’s dowry bag to a woman from a village near Canton. From now on, whenever May needs something, I’ll be able to buy it outright at the concession stand or pay a bribe to one of the guards or cooks to get it for me. So, when May develops indigestion, I complain accordingly. The women in our dormitory argue over the best remedy for me, suggesting that I suck on whole cloves. These I procure easily, but Lee-shee isn’t satisfied.

“ Pearl either has a weak stomach or a weak spleen-both signs of deficiencies in her Earth functions,” Lee-shee tells the other women. “Does anyone here have any tangerines or fresh ginger we could use to make a tea for her?”

These items are bought without difficulty and bring May relief, which makes me happy, which in turn pleases the other detainees for being able to help a pregnant woman.

MORE TIME GROWS between our interrogations. This is common practice for those whose hearings have problems. The inspectors think that long hours spent in the dormitory will weaken us, intimidate us into forgetting our memorized stories, and trick us into making mistakes. After all, if you’re interrogated only once a month for eight hours straight, how can you remember exactly what you said one, two, six, or eighteen months ago, how that conforms to the coaching book that you destroyed, or what your relatives and acquaintances, who aren’t on the island, said about you in their hearings?

Husbands and wives remain separated throughout their stays. In this way, they aren’t allowed to comfort each other or, more important, share information about their interrogations and the questions asked. On their wedding day, did the sedan chair stop at the front gate or the front door? Was it overcast or drizzling when they buried their third daughter? Who can remember these things when the questions and their answers can be interpreted in different ways? After all, in a village of two hundred people, aren’t a front gate and a front door one and the same? Can it matter how damp the weather was when they put that worthless daughter in the ground? Apparently it does to the interrogators, and a family whose answers to these questions don’t agree might be detained for days, weeks, and sometimes months.

But May and I are sisters and can compare stories before our hearings. The questions asked of us became increasingly difficult as the files for Sam, Vernon, their brothers, Old Man Louie, and his wife, business associates, and people in the neighborhood-other merchants, the policeman on the beat, and the man who makes deliveries for our father-in-law-are brought in. How many chickens and ducks does my husband’s family keep in their home village? Where is the rice bin kept in our home in Los Angeles and in the Louie family home in Wah Hong Village?

If we dawdle with our answers, the inspectors get impatient and shout, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” This tactic works well for other detainees, scaring them into making crucial errors, but we use it to appear as though we’re confused and stupid. Chairman Plumb grows increasingly annoyed with me, staring silently at me sometimes for a full hour in an effort to intimidate me into coming up with a new answer, but I’m stalling for a reason, and his attempts to bully and threaten me just make me calmer and more focused.

May and I use the complexity, simplicity, or idiocy of these questions to prolong our stays. To the question “Did you have a dog in China?” May answers yes and I answer no. At our hearings two weeks later, the inspectors for each of our interrogations confront us with this discrepancy. May sticks with our story that we owned a dog, while I explain that we once had a dog but our father killed it so we could eat it for our last meal in China. In the next hearing, the inspectors announce that we’re both right: the Chin family owned a dog but it was eaten before our departure. The truth is we never had a dog and Cook never served dog-ours or anyone else’s-in our home. May and I laugh for hours about our tiny triumph.

“Where did you keep the kerosene lamp in your home?” Chairman Plumb asks one day. We had electricity in Shanghai, but I tell him that we kept the kerosene lamp on the left side of the table, while May says that it was kept on the right.

Let’s just say these are not the brightest men. In our Chinese jackets, they don’t notice the baby growing inside May or the pillow and bunched up clothes I shove into my pants. After Chinese New Year, I begin to waddle in and out of the interrogation room and exaggerate my efforts at sitting and rising. Naturally, this brings a new round of questions. Am I sure I got pregnant on the one night I spent with my husband? Am I positive of the date? Mightn’t there have been someone else? Was I a prostitute in my home country? Is my baby’s father who I say he is?

Chairman Plumb opens Sam’s file and shows me a photograph of a boy of seven. “Is this your husband?”

I study the photograph. It’s a little boy. It could be Sam when he went back to China with his parents in 1920; it could be someone else. “Yes, that’s my husband.”

The recorder keeps typing, our files keep expanding, and along the way I learn quite a bit about my father-in-law, Sam, Vernon, and the Louie family’s businesses.

“It says here that your father-in-law was born in San Francisco in 1871,” Chairman Plumb says as he leafs through Old Man Louie’s file. “That would make him sixty-seven years old. His father was a merchant. Are these facts correct?”

From the coaching book, I’d learned everything but the year of Old Man Louie’s birth. I take a chance and answer “Yes.”

“It says here he married a natural-footed woman in San Francisco in 1904.”

“I haven’t met her yet, but I’ve heard she has natural feet.”

“In 1907 they went to China, where their first son was born. They left him in the home village for eleven years before bringing him here.”

At this, Mr. White leans over and whispers in his superior’s ear. They both shuffle through the files. Mr. White then points to something on one of the pages. Chairman Plumb nods and says, “Your alleged mother-in-law has five sons. Why did she have only sons? Why were they all born in China? Doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?”

“Actually, the youngest son was born in Los Angeles,” I offer helpfully.

Chairman Plumb gives me a look. “Why would your in-laws leave four sons in China before bringing them here?”

I’ve wondered the same thing, but I recite what I memorized: “My husband’s brothers grew up in Wah Hong Village because it was cheaper than Los Angeles. My husband was sent back to China to meet his grandparents, learn the home language and traditions, and make offerings to the Louie family ancestors on his father’s behalf.”

“Have you met the brothers?”

“Only the one named Vernon. The rest not.”

Chairman Plumb asks, “If your in-laws were together in Los Angeles, why did they wait eleven more years to have a last child?”

I don’t know the answer to this, but I pat my stomach and say, “Some women don’t take the proper herbs, eat the proper foods, or follow the proper rules for their chi to accept sons from their husbands.”

My backward-village answer satisfies my questioners for the day, but a week later their thoughts turn to my father-in-law’s occupation, trying to make sure he isn’t in the prohibited class of laborer. During the past twenty years, Old Man Louie opened several businesses in Los Angeles. Currently, he has just one store.

“What’s the name of the shop and what does he sell?” Chairman Plumb asks.

I dutifully recite my answer. “It’s called the Golden Lantern. He sells Chinese and Japanese goods, including furniture, silks, rugs, slippers, and porcelains, with a value of fifty thousand dollars.” Just having that number in my mouth is like sucking on sugarcane.

“Fifty thousand dollars?” Chairman Plumb marvels, equally impressed. “That’s a lot of money.”

Again, he and Mr. White put their heads together, this time to talk about the severity of their country’s depression. I pretend not to listen. They check Old Man Louie’s file, and I hear them say that, later this year, he plans to move his original store and open an additional two shops, a ride for tourists, and a restaurant. I rub my fake belly and feign disinterest when Mr. White explains the Louie family’s situation.

“Our colleagues in Los Angeles visit the Louies every six months,” he says. “They’ve never seen a connection between your father-in-law and a laundry, lottery, lodging house, barbershop, pool or gambling hall, or anything else objectionable. Nor has anyone ever reported seeing him do manual labor. In other words, he appears to be a merchant of good standing in the community.”

What I learn in my next interrogation, as Mr. White reads aloud in English portions of Sam’s and his father’s transcripts, which are translated into Sze Yup by yet another interpreter who’s been sent to cover the hearing, absolutely stuns me. Old Man Louie reported to inspectors that his business lost two thousand dollars a year from 1930 through 1933. That was a huge amount of money in Shanghai. Just one year’s worth of that money would have saved my family: my father’s business, the house, and May’s and my savings. Yet Old Man Louie still managed to come to China to buy wives for his sons.

“The family has to be rich with hidden wealth,” May says that night.

Still, it all seems muddled and deliberately confused and confusing. Is Old Man Louie, whose file is only slightly larger than mine after having passed through this station numerous times, as much of a liar as May and I are?

One day Chairman Plumb finally loses his patience, slams his fist on the table, and demands, “How is it that you’re claiming to be the wife of a legally domiciled merchant and the wife of an American citizen? These are two different things, and only one is needed.”

I’ve asked myself the same question many times these past months, and I still don’t know the answer.