A Paper Son (27 page)

They spend the morning wandering through the little fishing village, looking into shops, pausing to watch a weaver mending baskets and a man making fishing poles out of a pile of cut bamboo. At noon the ferry collects them and the next morning they are in Canton.

They disembark with the rest of the passengers and step down onto the piers. Li-Yu remembers well the smell of soot and garbage and fish and the sprawling chaos of travelers streaming across the creaking wooden planks, laden with shoulder bags and suitcases. Teams of workers haul steamer trunks or drag overloaded wooden carts, whose bamboo racks threaten to break and spill their contents. Uniformed officials keep watchful eyes on the mass. Two men block Li-Yu's path momentarily; between them they carry a long pole from which several squawking chickens dangle, each in its own flimsy wooden cage. Rose and Henry stay so close to their mother that Li-Yu can barely take a step without treading on one of them. Finally she puts Henry's hand in one of Rose's hands, takes her by the other hand, and pulls them through the crowd.

The edge of the city near the piers is as she remembers it: a labyrinth of dark tortured alleys, all of them crowded. She finds an inn and steps inside to inquire about rates, but the clerk tells her it's not a place for children. She argues, so he smiles and quotes her a rate high enough for ten rooms for a month. Li-Yu turns and drags her children back into the alley. The next two inns are full, and in the one after that a pair of rats are fighting over a scrap of food on the floor just in front of the counter. After a half-hour of searching she finds a place that seems safe and clean enough for the children. It is more expensive than she had hoped, but she can't keep dragging them through this chaos. Perhaps she will find something else the next day. The clerk is tall, almost emaciated, and he has short gray hairs that cover his Adam's apple, but he smiles a lot and he shows them a room up three flights of stairs. It will be quieter, he explains, and better for the children to be away from the street. They leave their things and venture back into the alleyways to find food. There are hundreds of vendors selling food from storefronts, from carts, from stacks of tin buckets hanging from poles that seem impossible to carry through the crowds. She and the children gorge themselves on glass noodles and bean curd, fried pork with hot chilies, and
gai lan
. Even though Rose and Henry are full she buys each of them a custard pastry for dessert. They return to their room, sated and tired. Rose curls up on one of the beds and falls asleep instantly. Li-Yu imagines her daughter is dreaming of San Francisco. Henry stands near the window, staring down into the teeming alleyway.

“Do you remember being here?” Li-Yu asks him softly.

He nods.

“You do? It was many years ago, and you were only three.”

“I was four,” he says. “I remember.”

“Do you remember America?”

He nods. “I remember Dad. I remember our house. Are we going to live there again?”

“We're going to have a new house,” Li-Yu says. “Do you remember your aunts? Do you remember your
po
and
gung
?”

He nods again.

“We're going to go see them first,” Li-Yu says. “They are very, very excited to see you and Rosie.”

“And then?”

“And then we'll find a home of our own.”

Henry is quiet. Together they watch the traffic streaming through the half-lit alleyway below. Li-Yu waits for his next questions to form.

“Is it better in California?” he asks.

“It's our home,” she says.

“What was the house in Xinhui?” Henry asks. “Not a real home?”

“Someone else's home,” Li-Yu says. “Mae's. Not ours.”

“Are we ever going to go back there?” Henry asks. “Are we ever going to see Mae again?”

“I'm not,” Li-Yu says. “You could, though. Maybe when you're all grown up, you might come back.”

“She might be dead by then,” he says.

“Are you going to miss her?” Li-Yu asks.

She wants him to shake his head, to say no, that all he wants is to go back to California, and reclaim the life she'd set about making for him all those years before. But his life has already been far different than hers, and this is a different journey for him. How much did he know? Did he know that he was the center of all these movements? That he had been the reason for their trip to China in the first place, and the reason they couldn't leave? That for years she and Rose had been little more than forgotten satellites, quiet in their hidden orbits as they circled him? Did he know that the love he'd felt in that house had been exclusively his? Rose had told him as much, there on the pathway outside the meeting hall, as the hoofbeats of the spirit horses thundered around them, and he hadn't seemed surprised. He'd plunged into the night alongside her.

“A little,” he says. “She was nice to me.”

“You used to be scared of her,” Li-Yu says. “Do you remember?”

“That's when I was little.”

Li-Yu nods. Henry lies down on the other bed and stares up at the ceiling, his fingers laced behind his head, his feet crossed. His socks look clean and new, even after two days of traveling. Mae must have gotten them for him in one of her recent expeditions to the market.

“I'll be back in just a little bit,” Li-Yu says. “I have to send a telegraph. You two stay right here.”

Henry glances over at his big sister, whose light, airy snores are floating around the room. “Okay,” he says. “What's a telegraph?”

“I'll tell you when I get back,” she says. Li-Yu locks the door behind her and climbs once more down to the street. The clerk gives her directions and just a few minutes later, in the next alley over, she finds herself in a small dingy shop, dictating a message. The clerk is a small bent man who hunches over a desk, writing down her words. “We're going back to California,” Li-Yu tells him, smiling. The man grunts. He reads the message back to Li-Yu, and then taps it out on the machine. He hands Li-Yu a receipt, and a few minutes later she is back in her room, thinking about the electrical impulses flying toward her sisters. Henry has fallen asleep. She sets the receipt on a table, curls up next to him, and sinks into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The response comes back just three days later, sliding beneath the door, carried up, presumably, by the tall graying clerk. Li-Yu pounces on it and rips the envelope open. Taped to a thin sheet of paper is the short message: “3 tickets booked.” There is a date, a week from then, and a time, and the name of the ship: the
Crystal Gypsy
. There is the name of another inn, elsewhere on the waterfront, where she and the children are to check in two days before their departure. Li-Yu reads the words a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth. She stares at them until she can close her eyes and see each curve and angle of every letter. Warmth fills her; it radiates from her skin and fills the room.

Li-Yu floats through the next few days. She and her children explore the piers, watching the huge steamships and freighters sailing up and down the Pearl River. Canton feels like a vacation now. They eat well. She buys them things they don't need. On the appointed day they carry their things to the next inn and find themselves in a crowded lobby. Several times she picks the
Gypsy
's name out of the noisy, exuberant conversations. She hears San Francisco mentioned again and again, as though the city's name is a great new secret sweeping through the room. Rose and Henry smile and watch and listen.

On the following morning a team of doctors work their way through the crowded inn, examining each traveler and stamping their tickets. And then, in the middle of that afternoon, the
Crystal Gypsy
steams into the port. Li-Yu and her children watch it from a bench along the waterfront. She has been braiding Rose's hair, and Henry has been reading a book he brought in his pack, but now they stop and watch. As it plies up the wide Pearl River, plumes of black smoke billow from its smokestacks, merge with one another, and trail out behind it.

“That's ours,” Li-Yu tells her children. They watch it dock, silently assessing its massive size, its unimaginable capabilities. Li-Yu barely sleeps that night, and the next morning they pack their things early and check out of the inn. They buy as much food as they can carry and arrive at the appointed pier well before they are scheduled to board. They watch the first-class passengers climb aboard, and then the second-class passengers, and after that, they are the first up the gangway. There is an American waiting for them at the top. He addresses them in a barely-recognizable attempt at Cantonese. Li-Yu smiles. “We're American,” she says. “We're going home.”

“You and me both,” the man says, with a grateful smile. He checks their name against a list and directs them to a doorway. Through the door is a stairway that takes them below deck and aft to their bunkroom in the steerage quarters. The room is as large as a barn, and crowded with beds made of stretched canvas stacked in sets of three. Li-Yu selects a spot in the corner and takes the bottom bed. Rose chooses the middle, leaving Henry the top. Li-Yu settles back into her bed and watches as the room continues to fill. Above her she can hear Rose talking to Henry about California. She listens to descriptions of their old house, of the school Rose had attended and the shop Bing had owned, and the weekly radio programs they had once listened to. Li-Yu forgets the clamor around her as she listens to Rose's descriptions. Everything is there—the contents of their refrigerator, the smell of the car, their wooden toys and books, the other homes and trees and fences on the quiet block where the house stood that had once been theirs. She had driven so much of it from their conversations, from their lore and remembrances—and from her own mind—in an attempt to create a future in China for her children. But the past had been there all along, vivid and rich, thriving in her daughter's memory. It should not have been a surprise that Rose had known exactly what to do when the time had come.

Finally the idling engines roar, shaking the walls and the beds. The three of them rush outside to a small deck and find places along the crowded railing. From the deck above them, which is reserved for the higher-class passengers, a white handkerchief falls. Li-Yu watches it as it drifts, turning in the wind, and then it disappears into the darkness between the ship and the pier. The deck lurches and there are renewed shouts and great bursts of smoke, and then the pier begins to drift away. The ship performs a slow pirouette and rumbles down the wide river. Buildings line the banks for miles. Rose and Henry point to things they spot on the riverfront streets: a pair of stray dogs, a man carrying a giant basket, an occasional automobile. The river widens and then its banks turn away, running in either direction, away from the ship, and the ocean takes them in. Li-Yu stays at the railing until China slips completely beneath a liquid horizon, finally relinquishing its hold on her family.

When Lucy arrived later that day my students were delighted to see her, so I wrote a recommendation extolling her natural abilities and her extensive experience with kids, and the next morning we climbed into my car and headed north to her interview. A newscast came over the radio: Sometime the previous night there had been a mudslide at the south end of China Beach and two of the backyards of the homes along Sea Cliff had collapsed onto the sand below. The reporter described the scene—a mass of grass and mud and smashed gazebo pieces atop the storm-littered beach. There were other items amid the wreckage—an oak wine barrel, several shoes, the door of a car—but it was unclear whether they were part of the mudslide or if the sea had contributed them.

We drove up and over the crest of Russian Hill and dropped down toward Lombard Street, which we found to be full of cars, their progress hampered by rain and red lights, and by the big green-and-white Golden Gate Transit buses that doddered along, swerving in and out of the right lane. We made it through the long series of stoplights and the road swung to the right and climbed and narrowed, its lanes merging and merging again as they approached the bridge's narrow toll plaza. Drivers competed with one another for spaces that were too small for their cars; sprays of water pounced on our windshield again and again. I took it slow and held my ground and it was mostly manageable until a bus moving a bit too slowly tried to muscle into a small space just in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, expecting to hydroplane into the back of it, but my tires held. To reinforce its vehicular superiority the bus assaulted us with a steady spray from its tires, which continued until I'd dropped well behind it.

“Asshole,” Lucy said. “You'd think people would have figured out how to drive in the rain by now.” The final words of her sentence sounded strangled though, and she reached out and clutched at my sleeve. Her face was white; her eyes were wide and still, her mouth agape. She looked the same way she'd looked when she collapsed in the hallway by the side of the pool.

“What?” I said. “Lucy, what?”

“That's him,” she said.

“Who?”

She let go of me and pointed through the windshield. Through the bus's rear window we could see the back of a man's head and shoulders. He was sitting by himself, wearing a dark coat and a dark cap. “How can you tell?” I said. “That could be anybody.”

“It's him,” she said. “We have to follow him.”

“But how do you know?” I said. “What about your interview?”

And then he slowly and deliberately turned, looked right at us, and smiled. Lucy leaned forward and stared up at him, her forehead inches from the windshield. The muscles of her jaw stood out through the drawn skin of her cheeks. Her eyes were narrow and her brow thick with furrows. The windshield wipers pushed patches of shadow back and forth across her face. She stared at him like that all the way across the bridge and up through the tunnel, as though everything we were searching for might be revealed in a single small gesture of his. Traffic was moving more easily here, and we stayed on the bus's tail, just beyond the spray of its tires, as it lumbered back down the hill. We arrived at an exit in Sausalito and the bus slowed and, without signaling, pulled into a freeway-side bus stop. A pair of signs, one on each side of the road, told us not to enter. Buses only, they said. Lucy lifted a hand as if she was about to yank on the steering wheel.