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Eating Bitterness to Find Gold

CHINESE NEW YEAR arrives. We follow all the traditions. Old Man Louie gives us money to buy new clothes. I put together an outfit for Joy that will celebrate her Tiger sign: a pair of baby slippers shaped like Tiger cubs and an orange-and-gold baby hat with little ears on top and a tail made from twisted embroidery thread coming out the back. May and I pick out American cotton dresses in floral prints. Then we have our hair washed and styled. At home, we take down the picture of the Kitchen God and burn it in the alley so he’ll travel to the afterworld to report on our activities during the past year. We put away knives and scissors to make sure we won’t cut our good fortune. Yen-yen makes offerings to the Louie ancestors. Her wishes and prayers are simple. “Bring a son to Boy-husband. Make that wife of his pregnant. Give me a grandson.”

In China City, we hang red gauze lanterns and couplets in red and gold paper. We arrange for dancers, singers, and acrobats to entertain children and their parents. We search out special ingredients to make holiday dishes in the café that will be Chinese in feeling but appeal to Occidental palates. We expect big crowds, so Old Man Louie hires extra help for his various enterprises, but he needs even more people to assist with what he anticipates will be the most profitable business on New Year’s Day: the rickshaw rides.

“We have to beat the people in New Chinatown,” he tells Sam on New Year’s Eve. “How can we do that if I have Mexican boys pulling my rickshaws on the most Chinese day of the year? Vern’s not strong enough, but you are.”

“I’ll be too busy in the café,” Sam says.

My father-in-law has asked Sam to pull rickshaws other times, and he always has some excuse not to do it. I can’t say what it will be like on New Year’s, but I know how busy we’ve been on other festival days. We’ve never been so overwhelmed that I haven’t been able to follow my usual routine of working in the café, the flower shop, the curio shop, and the antiques store. I know Sam’s lying, and so does Old Man Louie. Ordinarily my father-in-law’s anger would be great, but this is New Year’s, when no harsh words should be spoken.

On New Year’s morning, we dress in our new clothes, putting Chinese custom above Mrs. Sterling’s rules about wearing costumes to work. These things are factory-made, but it’s wonderful to have something fresh and Western on our skins again. Joy, who’s eleven months old, looks adorable in her Tiger hat and slippers. I’m her mother, so of course I think she’s beautiful. Her face is round like the moon. White as clean as new snow circles the black of her eyes. Her hair is wispy and soft. Her skin is as pale and translucent as rice milk.

I didn’t believe in the Chinese zodiac when Mama talked about it, but the more time that’s passed since her death, the more I understand that the things she said about May and me might have been true. Now when I hear Yen-yen talk about a Tiger’s traits, I see my daughter very clearly. Like a Tiger, Joy can be temperamental and volatile. One minute she’s brimming over with giddiness; the next she can dissolve into tears. A minute later, she might try to climb up her grandfather’s legs, wanting and getting his attention. She may be a worthless girl in his eyes-forever Pan-di, Hope-for-a-Brother-but the Tiger in her has pounced into his heart. Her temper is greater than his. I think he respects that.

I know the exact moment when New Year’s Day starts to turn rotten. While May and I fix each other’s hair in the main room, Yen-yen has Joy on her back on the floor, tickling her stomach, building anticipation by zooming in and out with her fingers and by raising and lowering her voice, only the words that come out of her mouth do not match her happy actions.

“Fu yen or yen fu?” Yen-yen asks, as Joy squeals in expectation. “Would you rather be a wife or a servant? Women everywhere would rather be a servant.”

Joy’s giggles do not have their usual melting effect on her grandfather, who watches sourly from a chair.

“A wife has a mother-in-law,” Yen-yen trills. “A wife has the despair of her children. She must obey her husband even when he is wrong. A wife must work and work but never receive a word of thanks. It’s better to be a servant and the mistress of yourself. Then, if you want, you can jump in the well. If only we had a well…”

Old Man Louie pushes himself away from the table. Wordlessly, he gestures to the door, and we leave the apartment. It’s still early morning, and already ill-omened words have been spoken.

Thousands of people come to China City, and the festivities are great. The firecrackers are loud and plentiful. The dragon and lion dancers wiggle and squirm from shop to shop. Everyone wears such bright colors it’s as if a great rainbow has come to earth. In the afternoon even more people come. Whenever I look out the window, another rickshaw rushes past. By evening, the Mexican pullers look exhausted.

During dinner, the Golden Dragon is completely full, and perhaps two dozen people stand just inside the door, waiting for a table to become free. Around 7:30, my father-in-law enters and pushes his way through the clustered customers.

“I need Sam,” he says.

I look around and spot Sam setting a table for eight. Old Man Louie follows my glance, strides across the room, and speaks to Sam. I can’t hear what he says, but Sam shakes his head no. Old Man Louie says something else, and Sam shakes his head again. At the third refusal, my father-in-law grabs Sam’s shirt. Sam pushes his hand away. Our customers stare.

The old man raises his voice, spitting the Sze Yup dialect out of his mouth like phlegm. “Don’t disobey me!”

“I told you I won’t do it.”

“Toh gee! Chok gin!”

I’ve been working at Sam’s side for months now, and I know he’s neither lazy nor empty-headed. Old Man Louie yanks his son across the room, bumping past tables and through the crowd by the door. I follow them outside, where my father-in-law shoves Sam to the ground.

“When I tell you to do something, you do it! Our other pullers are tired, and you know how to do this.”

“No.”

“You’re my son and you’ll do as I say,” my father-in-law pleads. His face quavers, and then his moment of weakness hardens. When he next speaks, his voice sounds like grinding rocks. “I’ve promised everything to you.”

This is not one of the pretty dramas with singing and dancing that are happening elsewhere in China City as part of tonight’s festivities. The tourists don’t understand what’s being said. Still, this is a captivating and entertaining spectacle. When my father-in-law begins to kick Sam down the alley, I trail along with the others. Sam doesn’t fight or cry out. He just takes it. What kind of man is he?

When we reach the rickshaw stand in the Court of the Four Seasons, Old Man Louie looks down at Sam and says, “You’re a rickshaw puller and an Ox. That’s why I brought you here. Now do your job!”

Fear and shame wash the color from Sam’s face. Slowly he gets to his feet. He’s taller than his father, and for the first time I see that this is as distressing to the old man as my height was to Baba. Sam takes a step toward his father, looks down at him, and says in a trembling voice, “I won’t pull your rickshaw. Not now. Not ever.”

Then it’s as though both men become aware of the silence around them. My father-in-law brushes at his mandarin robe. Sam’s eyes dart about uncomfortably. When he sees me, his whole body cringes. Then he takes off, sprinting through the gawking tourists and our curious neighbors. I run after him.

I find him in our windowless room in the apartment. His fists are bunched. His face is red with anger and hurt, but his shoulders are back, his posture upright, and his tone defiant.

“For so long I’ve been embarrassed and ashamed before you, but now you know,” he says. “You married a rickshaw puller.”

In my heart I believe him, but my mind thinks otherwise. “But you’re the fourth son-”

“Only a paper son. Always in China people ask, ‘Kuei hsing?’-What’s your name?-but really it means, ‘What is your precious family name?’ Louie is just a chi ming-a paper name. I’m actually a Wong. I was born in Low Tin Village, not far from your home village in the Four Districts. My father was a farmer.”

I sit on the edge of the bed. My mind spins: a rickshaw puller and a paper son. This makes me a paper wife, so we’re both here illegally. I feel sick to my stomach. Still, I recite the facts from the coaching book: “Your father is the old man. You were born in Wah Hong. You came here as a baby-”

Sam shakes his head. “That boy died in China many years ago. I traveled here using his papers.”

I remember Chairman Plumb showing me a picture of a little boy and thinking that it didn’t look all that much like Sam. Why hadn’t I questioned that more? I need to hear the truth. I need it for me, for my sister, and for Joy. And I need him to tell me everything-without having him close up and slump away as he usually does. I use a tactic I learned from my weeks of interrogations at Angel Island.

“Tell me about your village and your real family,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t shake too much from the emotions I feel and believing if he talks about these comfortable things, then maybe he’ll tell me the truth about how he came to be a paper son to the Louies. He doesn’t answer right away. He stares at me in the way he has so many times since the first day we met. Always I’ve seen that look as sympathy for me, but maybe he’s been trying to show compassion for our shared troubles and secrets. Now I try to match his expression. The funny thing is, I mean it.

“We had a pond in front of our house,” he murmurs at last. “Anyone could throw fish in it and raise them. You could dip a crock in the water, pull it out, and there’d be fish in your crock. No one had to pay. When the pond ran dry, you could pick up fish sitting in the mud. Still, no one had to pay. In the field behind our house, we grew vegetables and melons. We raised two pigs a year. We were not rich, but we were not poor either.”

It sounds poor to me. His family had lived from dirt to mouth. He seems to sense my understanding as he goes on haltingly.

“When the drought came, my grandfather, father, and I worked hard, trying to make the ground yield to our desires. Mama went to other villages to earn money by helping others plant or harvest rice, but those places also suffered from no rain. She wove cloth and took it to market. She tried to help our family, but it wasn’t enough. You can’t live on air and sunshine. When two of my sisters died, my father, my second brother, and I went to Shanghai. We wanted to earn enough to go back to Low Tin Village and farm again. Mama stayed home with my youngest brother and sister.”

In Shanghai, they found not promise but hardship. They didn’t have connections, so they couldn’t get factory jobs. Sam’s father took work as a rickshaw puller, while Sam, who’d just turned twelve, and his brother, who was two years younger, scavenged for small jobs. Sam sold matches on street corners; his brother ran after coal trucks to pick up pieces that fell from the beds to sell to the poor. They ate watermelon rinds plucked from trash pits in summer and watered down jook in winter.

“My father pulled and pulled,” Sam continues. “At first he drank tea with two lumps of sugar to restore his strength and cool his skin. When money ran low, he could only afford cheap tea made from dust and stems and no sugar. Then, like so many pullers, he began smoking opium. Not real opium! He couldn’t afford that! And not for pleasure either. He needed it for stimulation, to keep pulling in the hottest weather or if there was a typhoon. He bought the dregs left over from the rich and sold by servants. The opium gave my father false vigor, but his strength was eaten and his heart shriveled. Pretty soon he began to cough blood. They say that you never see a rickshaw puller reach age fifty and that most pullers are already past their best days by the time they turn thirty. My father died when he was thirty-five. I wrapped him in a straw mat and put him on the street. Then I took his place, selling my sweat by pulling a rickshaw. I was seventeen and my brother was fifteen.”

As he talks, I think about all the rickshaws I’ve ridden in and how I never really thought about the men who pulled them. I hadn’t considered pullers actual people. They’d seemed barely human. I remember how many of them had not owned shirts or shoes, the way their spines and shoulder blades had protruded from their skin, and the sweat that had oozed from their bodies even in winter.

“I learned all the tricks,” Sam goes on. “I learned I could get an extra tip if I carried a man or woman from my rickshaw to the door during typhoon season so they wouldn’t ruin their shoes. I learned to bow to women and men, invite them to ride in my li-ke-xi, call them Mai-da-mu for Madame or Mai-se-dan for Master. I hid my shame when they laughed at my bad English. I made nine silver dollars a month, but I still couldn’t afford to send money home to my family in Low Tin. I don’t know what happened to them. They’re probably dead. I couldn’t even take care of my brother, who joined other poor children helping to push rickshaws over the arched bridges at Soochow Creek for a few coppers a day. He died of the blood-lung disease the next winter.” He pauses, his mind back in Shanghai. Then he asks, “Did you ever hear the rickshaw pullers’ song?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer but begins to sing:

“To buy rice, his cap is the container.

To buy firewood, his arms are the container.

He lives in a straw hut.

The moon is his only lamplight.”

The melody comes back to me, and my mind is transported to Shanghai ’s streets and rhythms. Sam is talking about his hardship, but I feel loneliness for my home.

“I listened to riders who were Communists,” he continues. “I heard them complain that since ancient times poor men have been urged to find contentment in poverty. That was not my life. That was not why my father and brother died. I wish I could have changed their fates, but once they were gone all I could think about was my own mouth. I thought, if the leaders of the Green Gang got their starts pulling rickshaws, then why couldn’t I? I had no schooling in Low Tin. I was a farmer’s son. But even pullers understood the importance of education, which is why the rickshaw guild sponsored schools in Shanghai. I learned the Wu dialect. I learned more English-not the ABCs but some words.”

The more Sam talks, the more my heart opens to him. When I first met him in the Yu Yuan Garden, I hadn’t thought he was so bad. Now I see just how hard he’s tried to change his life and how little I’ve understood. He speaks Sze Yup fluently and the Wu dialect of the streets, while his English is practically nonexistent. He’s always looked uncomfortable in his clothes. I remember the day we met noticing his shoes and suit were new. They must have been the first he owned. I remember the red tinge to his hair and mistakenly believing it had something to do with the fact that he was from America and not recognizing it as the well-known sign of malnutrition. And then there is his manner. He’s always been deferential to me, treating me not as a fu yen but as a customer who must be pleased. He’s always bowed down to Old Man Louie and Yen-yen-not because they’re his parents but because he’s like a servant to them.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” my husband says. “My father would have died anyway. Farming is not a good life when you have to carry a two-hundred-fifty-jin load on a bamboo pole balanced on your shoulders or you have to stoop in the rice fields all day. The only riches I’ve earned have come from working with my hands and feet. I started out as so many rickshaw pullers, not knowing what to do, my bare feet slapping the road like a pair of palm fronds. I learned to hold my stomach in, expand my chest wide, raise my knees high, and stretch my head and neck forward. As a rickshaw puller, I earned an iron fan.”

I’d heard my father use the term about his best pullers. It suggested a hard, straight back and a chest as wide, spread open, and strong as a fan made from iron. I also remember what Mama said about being born in the Year of the Ox: that the Ox is capable of great sacrifices for his family’s welfare, that he’ll pull his own load and more, and that-while he may be as plain and serviceable as the beast of burden he emulates-he is forever worth his weight in gold.

“If I could make forty-five coppers from a fare, I was happy,” Sam goes on. “I would exchange those coppers for fifteen cents. I would keep turning my coppers into silver coins, and my silver coins into silver dollars. If I could pocket an extra tip, I was happier still. I thought, if I could save ten cents a day, I would have one hundred dollars in a thousand days. I was willing to eat bitterness to find gold.”

“Did you work for my father?”

“At least I didn’t have that humiliation.” He touches my jade bracelet. When I don’t flinch, he loops a forefinger through the bracelet, his flesh barely grazing mine.

“Then how did you find the old man? And why did you have to marry me?”

“The Green Gang owned the largest of the rickshaw businesses,” he answers. “I worked for it. The gang often served as matchmaker between those who wanted to become paper sons and those seeking to sell paper-son slots. In our case, they acted as a traditional matchmaker too. I wanted to change my fate. Old Man Louie had a paper-son slot to sell-”

“And he needed rickshaws and brides,” I finish for him, shaking my head at the memories all this brings back. “My father owed the Green Gang money. All he had left to sell were his rickshaws and his daughters. May and I are here. My father’s rickshaws are here, but that still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”

“For me, the price to buy the paper was one hundred dollars for each year of my life. I was twenty-four, so the cost was twenty-four hundred dollars for boat passage, plus room and board once I got to Los Angeles. I would never be able to earn that amount at nine dollars a month. Today I work to pay off the old man-not only for myself but for you and Joy too.”

“Is this why we’re never paid?”

He nods. “He’s keeping our money until my debt is paid. This is why the uncles aren’t paid either. They’re paper sons too. Only Vern is a blood son.”

“But you’re different from the other uncles-”

“That’s right. The Louies want me as a true replacement for the son who died. This is why we live with them and why I’m the manager of the café, even though I know less than nothing about food or business. If the immigration people ever discover I’m not who I say I am, they could put me in jail and deport me. But I might have a way to stay, because the old man made me a paper partner too.”

“But I still don’t understand why you needed to marry me. What does he want from us?”

“Only one thing: a grandson. That’s why he bought you and your sister. He wants a grandson one way or another.”

My chest tightens. The doctor in Hangchow said I’d probably never be able to have children, but to say that to Sam would mean I’d have to tell him why. Instead I ask, “If he wants you as his true son, then why do you have to pay him back?”

When he takes my hands, I don’t pull away, even though I’m terrified I’m about to be caught.

“Zhen Long,” he intones earnestly. Even my parents rarely called me by my Chinese name-Pearl Dragon. Now I hear it as an endearment. “A son must pay his debts, for himself and his wife and child. Back in Shanghai, when I was considering this whole arrangement, I thought, When the old man dies I will become a Gold Mountain man with many businesses. Then I came here. There were days in the beginning when I just wanted to go home. Passage only costs a hundred and thirty dollars in steerage. I thought I could make that by hiding my tips, but then you and Joy came. What kind of a husband would I be if I left you here? What kind of a father would I be?”

From the moment May and I arrived in Los Angeles, we’ve been thinking of ways to escape. If only we-I-had known Sam felt the same way.

“I began to think you, Joy, and I could go home together, but how could I allow our baby to travel in steerage? She could die down there.” He squeezes my hands in his. He stares directly into my eyes, and I don’t look away. “I’m not like the others. I don’t want to go back to China anymore. Here, I suffer every day, but it’s a good place for Joy.”

“But China ’s our home. The Japanese will tire eventually-”

“But what is there for Joy in China? What is there for any of us? In Shanghai, I was a rickshaw puller. You were a beautiful girl.”

I hadn’t realized he’d known this about May and me. The way he says it strips me of the pride I’ve always felt for what we’d done.

“I don’t care to hate anyone, but I can hate my fate-and yours too,” he says. “We can’t change the people we are or what’s happened to us, but shouldn’t we try to change our daughter’s fate? What road awaits her in China? Here, I can pay back the old man and eventually earn our freedom. Then we will give Joy a proper life-a life of opportunities that you and I will never have. Maybe she could even go to college one day.”

He speaks to my mother’s heart, but the practical part of me that survived my father losing everything and my body being torn apart by monkey people doesn’t see how his dreams can become real.

“We’ll never be able to break away from this place and these people,” I say. “Look around. Uncle Wilburt has worked for the old man for twenty years and he still hasn’t paid his debt.”

“Maybe he’s paid his debt and is saving his treasure to return home a wealthy man. Or maybe he’s happy where he is. He has a job, a place to live, a family to have dinner with on Sunday nights. You don’t know what it’s like to live in a village with no electricity or running water. Maybe you have one room for the whole family, maybe two. You eat only rice and vegetables, unless there’s a festival or a celebration, but even that takes great sacrifice.”

“All I’m saying is that one man by himself is barely able to support himself. How are you going to help the four of us?”

“Four? You mean May.”

“She’s my sister, and I promised my mother I’d take care of her.”

He considers that for a moment. Then he says, “I’m patient. I can wait and I can work hard.” He smiles shyly and then says, “In the morning when you go to the Golden Lantern to help Yen-yen and see Joy, I work at the Temple of Kwan Yin, where I have an extra job selling incense to the lo fan to stick in the big bronze burners. I’m supposed to say, Your dreams will come true, for the blessings of this graceful deity are limitless,’ but my mouth can’t form those words in English. Still, the people seem to take pity on me and buy my incense.”

He gets up and walks to the dresser. He’s such a sadly thin man, but I don’t know how I didn’t recognize his iron fan before this. He rummages through the top drawer and then returns to the bed with a sock that bulges at the toe. He turns the sock upside down, and nickels, dimes, quarters, and a few dollar bills spill on the mattress.

“This is what I’ve saved for Joy,” he explains.

I run my hands over the money. “You are a good man,” I say, but it’s hard to imagine this pittance changing Joy’s life.

“I know it isn’t much,” he admits, “but it’s more than I made as a rickshaw puller, and it will add up. And maybe, in another year or so, I can become a second cook. If I learn to be a first cook, I might make as much as twenty dollars a week. Once we can afford to go out on our own, I will become a fish peddler or maybe a gardener. If I’m a fish peddler, then we can always eat fish. If I’m a gardener, then we can always eat vegetables.”

“My English is good,” I offer tentatively. “Maybe I could look for a job outside Chinatown.”

But honestly, what makes either of us think Old Man Louie will ever release us? And even if he does, don’t I have to tell Sam the truth too? Not the part about Joy not being his! That secret belongs to May and me, and I’ll never reveal it, but I have to tell him what the monkey people did to me and how they killed Mama.

“I’ve been smeared with mud that I’ll never be able to wipe clean,” I tentatively begin, hoping that what Mama said about the Ox is true: that he won’t abandon you in times of trouble, that he’ll stick by you faithfully, and that he is charitable and good. Don’t I have to believe her now? Still, the emotions that play across his face-anger, disgust, and pity-don’t make it easy for me as I tell my story.

When I’m done, he says, “You went through all that and still Joy came out perfectly. She must have a precious future.” He puts a finger to my lips to keep me from saying anything more. “I would rather be married to broken jade than flawless clay. And my father used to say that anyone can add an extra flower to brocade, but how many women will fetch the coal in winter? He was talking about my mother, who was a good and loyal woman, just as you are.”

We hear the others enter the apartment, but neither of us moves. Sam leans close and whispers in my ear. “On the bench in Yu Yuan Garden, I said I liked you and I asked if you liked me. You only nodded. In an arranged marriage this is more than we can hope for. I never expected happiness, but shouldn’t we try to look for it?”

I turn to him. Our lips nearly touch as I whisper, “What about more children?” As close as I feel to him now, I find it hard to tell him the whole truth. “After Joy came out, the doctors at Angel Island told me I’d never be able to have another baby.”

“As boys, we are told that if we don’t have a son by age thirty, we are unlucky. The worst insult you can yell on the street is ‘May you die son-less!’ We are told that if we don’t have a son, we should adopt one to carry on the family name and care for us when we become ancestors. But if you have a son who is… who has… who can’t…” He struggles, as May and I often have, to put a name to Vernon ’s problem.

“You buy a son, as Old Man Louie bought you,” I finish for him, “so that you can care for him and Yen-yen when they become ancestors.”

“And if not me, then the son we might give them one day. A grandson would ensure them a happy existence here and in the afterworld.”

“But I can’t give them that.”

“They don’t have to know, and I don’t care. And who knows? Maybe Vern will give your sister a son, and all debts and obligations will be paid.”

“But, Sam, I can’t give you a son.”

“People say a family is incomplete without a son, but I am happy with Joy. She is my heart’s blood. Every time she smiles at me, grasps my finger, or stares at me with her black eyes, I know I’m lucky.” As he speaks, I bring his hand to my cheek, and then I kiss his fingertips. “ Pearl, you and I may have been given bad fates, but she is our future. With just one child, we can give her everything. She can have the education I didn’t have. Maybe she will be a doctor or… These things don’t matter so much, because she will always be our consolation and our joy.”

When he kisses me, I kiss him back. We’re sitting on the edge of the bed, so all I have to do is put my arms around him and bring him with me as I lie down. Even though people are in the apartment and even though they hear every squeak of the bed and stifled moan, Sam and I do the husband-wife thing. It isn’t easy for me. I keep my eyes squeezed shut and terror clenches my heart. I try to concentrate on the muscles that labored in the fields, pulled rickshaws through my home city, and so recently cradled our Joy. For me, the husband-wife thing will never bring great feelings of enjoyment, the release of clouds and rain, the taste of ecstasy of a hundred years, or any of the things the poets write about. For me, it’s about being close to Sam, the loneliness we feel for our home country, the way we miss our parents, and the hardship of our daily lives here in America, where we are wang k’uo nu-lost-country slaves, forever living under foreign rule.

After he finishes and a proper amount of time has passed, I get up and go into the main room to get Joy. Vern and May have already gone to their room, but knowing glances pass between Old Man Louie and Yen-yen.

“You bring me a grandson now?” Yen-yen asks as she hands me Joy. “You’re a good daughter-in-law.”

“You’d be a better daughter-in-law if you told your sister to do her job,” the old man adds.

I don’t respond. I just take Joy back to our room and lay her in her drawer in the bottom of the dresser. Then I reach around my neck and take off the pouch Mama gave me. I open the top drawer and tuck the pouch together with the one that May gave Joy. I don’t need it anymore. I close the drawer and turn back to Sam. I take off my clothes and slip naked back into the bed. As his hand runs up my side, I find the courage to ask one more question.

“Sometimes you disappear in the afternoons too,” I say. “Where do you go?”

His hand stops on my hip. “Pearl.” My name comes out long and soft. “I didn’t go to those places in Shanghai, and I’ll never go to them here.”

“Then where-”

“I go back to the temple, but this time it’s to make offerings to my family, to your family, and even to the Louie ancestors-”

“To my family?”

“You just told me how your mother died, but I knew she had to be gone, and your father too. You wouldn’t have come here to us if they’d still been living.”

He’s smart. He knows me well and he understands me.

“I also made offerings to our ancestors after we were married,” he adds.

I nod to myself. He’d answered the Angel Island interrogators honestly about that.

“I don’t believe in these things,” I confess.

“Maybe you should. We’ve done them for five thousand years.”

As we do the husband-wife thing again, sirens sound in the distance. In the morning we wake to learn that a fire has swept through China City. Some people say it was an accident that flared in the smoldering firecracker remains behind George Wong’s fish market, while others insist it was arson set by people in New Chinatown who don’t like Christine Sterling’s idea of a “native Chinese village” or by people in Olvera Street who don’t like the competition. The gossips will go on and on, but no matter who started the fire, a good part of China City has been destroyed or damaged.