Songs of Willow Frost (13 page)

Liu Song shook her head. Her parents had never allowed her to drink alcohol, not a sip or a taste, even before Prohibition. And she certainly wasn’t going to sample some home brew that was probably mashed by hand in someone’s basement. She ignored the offer, pretending she didn’t hear.

As she looked down the avenue for paying customers, she saw a familiar face—her best friend, Mildred Chew, walking with her mother, stepping around puddles.

Liu Song smiled and waved. She had a lot in common with Mildred. They were both American-born, to naturalized parents. They both had to work after school, instead of going to the Chong Wa building to learn city Cantonese. And they both envied the rich kids
who always went after class to Dugdale Field, where they watched the Seattle Indians play doubleheaders, eating popcorn and salted peanuts while the poor kids watched from the cabbage patch up the hill.

Mildred didn’t wave back. And her mother looked unhappy.

When they stopped in front of the store, Liu Song said,
“Neih hou ma?”

Mildred’s mother was shorter than Liu Song by a foot. She looked Liu Song up and down, shaking her head and ignoring her polite greeting.

“I’m sorry, Liu—” Mildred said in English.

Mildred’s mother shushed her, then spoke in Taishanese. “It’s come to my attention that you’re the daughter of that
opera singer
.” She spat the words in her thick dialect, as though the thought of Liu Song’s mother left a bitter taste in her mouth. “Where I come from, the only women who hang around the theater are
courtesans
. And you yourself stand here, shamelessly working the street.”

Liu Song didn’t understand. Most of the locals loved Yuet Kahk. But she remembered her father’s darker stories, about when he was a boy and how Cantonese opera had been banned by the Ch’ing dynasty and performers had been slaughtered. She never asked, but she knew that was why her apprentice parents came to America on tour and never went back. They knew some harsh feelings were slow to change—even after decades, or thousands of miles, even after the Manchus began to allow Peking opera in the north.

Liu Song tried to be polite. She didn’t want to argue. She bowed her head in deference. “I just sell sheet music, by the page …” she said in English, then Chinese.

“You should be home taking care of your family, not out here skulking around like the flower girls over in Paradise Alley.” Mildred’s mother jerked her thumb in the direction of South Washington Street, where Lou Graham’s brothel had operated before she’d
been run out of town. Now girls, some of them Liu Song’s age, doused themselves in perfume and wrapped their bodies in crepe de chine, selling flowers on the corner. But everyone knew that what the girls were really selling was negotiable.

“Dui m’ji,”
Liu Song said. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended …”

“Stay away from my Mildred—
she’s a good girl!
”

Liu Song stood there, speechless. As a car passed, the driver whistled at her.

Mildred’s mother raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, resting a fist on each bony hip. “Mildred doesn’t need friends like you in your … 
flapper dress
.” She swished her hand in the air as though brushing away a bad smell and then turned on her heel and stormed off, cursing in Taishanese as she stepped in a mud puddle.

Mildred slumped her shoulders and mouthed, “I’m so sorry.” Then waved goodbye as she followed her mother.

T
HE RAIN HAD
stopped by the time Liu Song got off work, but the sky was still a perpetual mass of gray. Gaslights on each city block flickered to life, illuminating oily rainbows that swirled down fetid gutters and storm drains clogged with rotting leaves.

The attitude of Mildred’s mother explained a lot. Especially at school, where Liu Song hung out at lunchtime with the other Chinese students, who were kind and polite, but not exactly close. And they rarely asked about her home life or her ailing ah-ma. At first Liu Song thought it was because so many of them had also lost relatives to the Grippe, or in the Great War. But her classmates never dropped by, or talked about visiting. And not once had she been invited to any of their parties or get-togethers.

“They’re jealous of how beautiful and talented you are,” her mother had scribbled in Chinese on a writing slate when Liu Song first entered Franklin High.

Maybe she’s right
, Liu Song had thought. High school was filled
with silly pettiness at times. But when Liu Song sat uninvited to the first tea dance and later the Winter Banquet, she realized that there was something unspoken between her and her peers.

Only Mildred came to visit. Only Mildred had spent time with her these past few years. But Liu Song realized that was probably because Mildred had transferred from the Main Street School Annex in junior high and didn’t know a soul.

As Liu Song walked down Canton Alley to her apartment, she longed to smell her mother’s cooking, to hear her mother’s voice, to feel gentle hands braiding her wet hair once again, to communicate with someone who understood her pain, and her loneliness. Liu Song was so different; from an unorthodox family, she didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, and she longed for approval. She craved validation. Her strength was her voice, but to most in her neighborhood, her gift was a crippling malady—a chronic weakness that made her unsuitable for marriage. And a Chinese woman without a husband was worth nothing.

When Liu Song reached her front step, Uncle Leo was coming out the door. He offered her a large box, overflowing with her mother’s belongings.

“Take this to the garbage,” he said. “Your ah-ma won’t be needing these things anymore. And I can’t sell any of this. Who would buy?”

Liu Song stared at the box in disbelief. She could smell her mother’s lilac perfume on an old scarf. And she felt the finality of Uncle Leo’s callous gesture as she regarded an old brush, filled with her mother’s hair, which in recent days had been falling out in clumps. Liu Song’s fingers trembled as she touched the dress her mother had worn the last time she had been strong enough to leave the house, which seemed like a lifetime ago. Everything here was laden with sentiment but held no monetary value—Leo must have kept those things, or gambled them away.

“But … all of this belongs to my family,” Liu Song said. She
nearly broke down sobbing as she realized she didn’t say,
belonged to my mother
. The tightness in Liu Song’s chest, the lump in her throat, made her feel as though she’d already lost her ah-ma.

Uncle Leo dropped the box onto the pavement. He pulled up his suspenders and flared his nostrils. “Fine,” he barked. “Choose one thing to keep. But the rest …” He waved his hand dismissively. “All bad luck.”

Liu Song picked up the box and slowly walked down the alley as she heard Uncle Leo slam the door. She saw a pile of her mother’s possessions, the remnants of her family, good and bad memories, strewn among yesterday’s refuse.

Your superstitions haunt the both of us, Uncle
, Liu Song thought.

She set the box down next to the rest of her mother’s belongings and knelt on the wet, mossy pavement, amid orange peels, fish bones, and tattered cigarette butts. She reverently touched her mother’s old possessions as if they were alive—her blouses, her hats, shoes, slips, books, trinkets and curios from the theater.

Choose one thing
.

Liu Song nodded when she found her mother’s vaudeville case—a cracked valise filled with stage makeup, headpieces, satin footwear, and assorted costume jewelry. The leather was spattered with used coffee grounds. She wiped it clean with her bare hands.

The case had been an engagement present from her father and was stamped with ports of entry—Seattle, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, mementos of a time when her parents were barely out of their teens. They’d traveled from city to city with a troupe of 130 other performers—catering to audiences of migrant workers and high-minded Caucasian socialites who wanted to indulge in something exotic. Liu Song dug through a box and found her mother’s final costume, the elegant gown with long tassels, shimmering sequins, and silver beads. She carefully folded the embroidered silk and tucked it into the suitcase, along with a small photo album, old letters—as much as would fit. She knelt on the
case to close it. Then buckled it shut. She thought about taking more things, but Uncle Leo would probably just burn them if he found them. In his mind it was bad fortune to keep anything so personal, because after death they might draw the spirit back.

Inside, the apartment smelled like pungent dried herbs, old incense, and the ever-present camphor oil. Her mother hadn’t moved at all from when Liu Song left that morning. She adjusted the blankets and pillows to prevent bedsores, talking to her mother as if she could hear—as if there was a chance that she would come back to the world of the living. She noticed round mirrors on the window-sill, on the dresser, on the nightstand—mirrors her parents had used to symbolize a perfect marriage were now being used to ward off unwanted spirits. Uncle Leo was preparing for the worst. Whatever was happening to her mother, good or bad, would be reflected, magnified.

Liu Song pressed her face to her mother’s cheek. She felt heat from a rising fever and a wisp of her ah-ma’s breath on her ear. Liu Song closed her eyes wearily as she avoided looking into the mirrors.

Glory of Mourning

(1921)

Liu Song didn’t weep when Uncle Leo woke her up a week later and told her, “Your mother is in Heaven.” She didn’t whimper as she sat at the table and watched the undertaker bring in a pine casket while her breakfast grew cold. She didn’t even shed a tear as she dressed her mother’s frail body in an old gown she’d saved for this sad occasion, an elegant slip of ivory that now seemed three sizes too big. She did everything a dutiful, obedient, loving daughter was expected to do—without fuss or complaint. She brushed her mother’s remaining hair and carefully applied her makeup. She wore black for the wake and hung a dark wreath on the door. She burned incense and joss paper all day, sending riches to her mother in the afterlife. And she broke her mother’s favorite comb, placing half in the casket and keeping half for herself. She left the crying to the wailers. Uncle Leo had hired a trio of old women with missing teeth who were famous for their ability to sob for hours at a time, at great volume, shedding real tears.

As she sat in their living room and tried to block out the baleful noise, Liu Song wished her father and brothers had been given such a wake, but they weren’t even given proper funerals. They’d been laid to rest without caskets, since there were none to be found in the city. Instead, a truck had taken their bodies from a temporary morgue at the old city hall and delivered them to a potter’s field
somewhere south of town, just past the county line. They were buried along with others who had died from influenza, without ceremony, in a massive unmarked grave.

Liu Song remembered that her father had been a pragmatic man. He always made sure he and his family wore their gauze masks. But he’d been stricken with fever and began coughing up blood two days after the Armistice celebration, when thousands of drunken revelers had taken to the streets without protection. Her brothers had died two weeks later, prompting her uncles and aunties to sell their belongings and flee with her cousins to Reno, Nevada, and Butte, Montana. Some even went back to China, leaving her alone with her widowed mother, grieving in a city overflowing with bodies, infected with mourning, prone to fevers of panic and despair.

Now she was even more alone, as Uncle Leo’s relatives, associates, and business partners came and paid their respects. To Liu Song they were a parade of strangers, who didn’t shy away from commenting in her presence.

“She didn’t even give him a son,” one woman complained bitterly.

“How terrible it must be,” another woman said, “to inherit a daughter who doesn’t carry your own blood, from a shameful mother with such bad luck! Who would want to marry Leo now—with her family’s ghosts around?”

“Maybe he’ll send the daughter away—marry her off quickly,” a man replied. “She’s too tall—her eyes too big, but there are so few girls, he’d get a nice dowry.”

Liu Song thought about her mother’s final words and her final warning as she weighed which might be worse: being stuck here, alone with Uncle Leo, or being betrothed to some unknown man, haphazardly chosen by her stepfather. She stared at the framed portrait of her mother and found no answers and little comfort.

“Ah, look at her.” A woman pointed at Liu Song. “She’s so
skinny. She must be a terrible cook. No one will want her, and Leo will probably starve—that poor man.”

That poor man
, Liu Song thought.

She heard laughing and cursing, and looked out the front window, watching as Uncle Leo and a group of men in shirttails and suspenders tossed dice in the alley. Her uncle had a fat pile of silver dollars and a wad of folding money in front of him as he knelt on one knee, chewing a cigar. He rolled again, smiling as the other men groaned and shook their heads, reaching into their billfolds for more cash.