China Dolls (3 page)

“I’m hoping you can assist me,” I said.

“What’s in it for us?” the oldest boy asked impudently.

“A nickel each, if you help me.” I pulled out my coin purse, picked through it for three nickels, and held them in my palm. “I’m looking for a nightclub—”

“Oh,” he said, his voice rising and falling knowingly. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

I dropped one of the nickels back into the coin purse.

“So you’re familiar with the clubs,” I said. Every boy was curious about the forbidden, and my comment set off all three boys.

“They’re barely better than bars—”

“No one wants them in the neighborhood—”

“My dad says they’re just a rat’s hair above a speakeasy—”

I dropped another nickel into my coin purse.

“You win, lady,” the ringleader conceded. “You want to work in a big-thigh show, that’s your headache.”

“Big-thigh show?”

“Don’t you know anything?” he asked. “You really want to let people see your legs?”

As long as it’s just my legs …

“Please tell me where to go,” I said.

I waited while he exchanged looks with his buddies. All I needed was one name to give me a start.

At last, he said, “Wilbert Wong has the Li Po—a cocktail lounge on the next block. He’s changing it into more of a club. Andy Wong—not related—runs the Chinese Penthouse. It opened last December with all-Chinese entertainment.”

He rattled this off like a town booster. This place was turning out to be a lot more like Plain City than it looked on the surface: a small town, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, especially when it came to the taboo.

“I heard Andy Wong is going to change the name to the Sky Room,” the smallest boy ventured, which earned him an elbow to the ribs.

“There’s Charlie Low’s new club. It’s not even open yet,” the oldest boy continued. “Two years ago, he opened a bar here on Grant Avenue. No Chinese girls or women allowed. What am I saying? No Chinese went, period!”

“How would you know?” I asked, challenging him.

“I
know
,” he responded.

Any boy could spout off about the birds and the bees—and other naughty things—but he often got the details wrong. It would now be up to me to figure out how much of what this little boy said was accurate and how much was gobbledygook picked up from listening to the whispers of older kids.

“Charlie Low’s wife is a singer,” he continued, “and he’s giving her a showplace called the Forbidden City. It’s on Sutter Street—”

“Not even in Chinatown,” the smallest boy interrupted again.

That appealed to me, because Chinatown was too scary for me.

“Can you point the way?” I asked.

“First, you go …”

His voice trailed off, and his eyes widened. The other two boys stared gape-mouthed at something over my shoulder. I turned to see what they were ogling and saw a girl about my age gingerly step off the curb and come toward us. She wore a practical outfit: a gray wool pleated skirt, a long-sleeved black sweater, charcoal-gray wool stockings, and oxfords. She was Chinese, with flawless porcelain skin. She looked
rich
, like out of a movie, except that I’d never seen a Chinese who looked like her in the darkness of the Rialto.

“I know how to get to the Forbidden City,” she said in melodious voice. “I’ll take you.”

Although Joe and the man on Treasure Island had both been perfectly nice to me, I wasn’t accustomed to kindness. Now here was a girl, offering to help, as if magically sent. I glanced down at the boys, trying to get a sense of what I should do.

“She’s Helen Fong,” the ringleader said in awe. “If she wants to help you, let her!”

The other two boys, acting their young ages at last, covered their mouths and giggled. The girl named Helen gave them an unyielding look, and they went quiet but fast.

“Kew, Chuen, Yee, I don’t think your mothers will be too happy to hear you aren’t in school,” she observed coolly. “You’d better hurry along now.”

The boys stood and brushed the sand off themselves. When they held out their palms, I paid them their promised nickels. Once they scampered off, I turned to Helen.

“Where to?”

HELEN

Calling to the Heavens

“This way,” I answered, but what in the world was I thinking—skipping work, walking through Chinatown unescorted, and talking to a total stranger?

My pace was brisk, and I felt the girl wordlessly tagging along behind me as I wove down Grant. She caught up at a red light.

“My name’s Grace,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks so much for helping me,” she went on, trying to appear composed, I thought, but actually sounding as scared as a fawn panting in fear at the sight of the moon.

“It’s nothing,” I responded, but it was
everything
. This morning, my brother Monroe had walked me to the door of the Chinese Telephone Exchange, where I worked. After he left me, I’d simply stood there, unable to bring myself to enter the building. I couldn’t face another day of listening to the other women talk between calls about what they were going to make for dinner that night for their husbands, how clever their children were, or how hard it was to make ends meet. Those women just weren’t pleasant to me. I understood, I suppose. I earned the same five dollars a week they earned and gave every dime to my father for my “upkeep,” but everyone knew my family was one of the best and most important in Chinatown.

So there I’d been, outside the telephone exchange, daydreaming about how the thousands of women—wives and concubines—in China’s
imperial court had once spent their entire lives hidden inside the walls of the palace with no family or friends to love them. To amuse themselves, the women used to catch crickets and keep them in cages near their pillows. The crickets’ songs—haunting, calling to the heavens of their loneliness—told not only of their own lives but also of the women who were cared for, but equally helpless, in the cage of the palace. I lived in a traditional Chinese compound right in the heart of Chinatown, with twenty-nine of my closest relatives. A sense of futility had nearly overwhelmed me as I realized my life wasn’t all that different from those of the crickets who belonged to the women, who, in turn, belonged to the emperor. Right then, I’d noticed the girl in the street, talking to those silly boys. She looked as lost and lonely as I felt. She wasn’t fresh off the boat from China, but she was new to town, of that I was certain—a country bumpkin in her tatty store-bought dress. I’d edged to the intersection. As I’d listened to her conversation with the boys … I don’t know … I felt
compelled
to help her.

Once Grace and I were clearly out of Chinatown, my spirits lifted. No one from the neighborhood was watching me, hoping to curry favor with my father by reporting on my actions. We crossed the street, turned right on Sutter, and continued until we reached a sign that read
FORBIDDEN CITY AUDITIONS. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED
. Music wafted down the stairs, enveloping us right on the street.

“Here it is,” I said.

“Come with me. Try out with me.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve never had a dance lesson.”

“It says no experience needed. We’ll stick together. I promise.”

Before I could protest further, Grace took my hand. I never would have expected that from a Chinese girl. I shivered. Didn’t she know it was rude to touch like that? I guess not, because she gave me an encouraging smile and pulled me up the stairs. I had leapt so far out of my cage—out of
myself
—that I followed Grace like I was the one who was lost and she was now leading the way. Or maybe she was desperate and afraid to go in alone.

In the entry hall, workers—dressed in baggy pants, sleeveless undershirts, and painters’ caps—carried lumber and other construction materials. A Chinese woman, sitting at a table made from two-by-fours and a sheet of plywood, handed us forms with spaces for our names, heights, weights, and ages. I wrote down the address of my family’s compound. I glanced over Grace’s shoulder as she scribbled the name of a hotel in a seedy part of town.

The woman, who I was sure recognized me, took Grace’s form and scanned it. “You’re seventeen?” she asked, not bothering to look up.

“Is that all right?”

“We’ve got younger inside. We just don’t want you to be
too
young.” She pointed down the hall. “You can change in that room on the right. After that, sit with the other girls trying out today. They’ll call you when they’re ready.” She didn’t specify who “they” were.

I lingered by the table when Grace walked down the hall.

“If I get the job, how much will you pay?” I inquired.

“Twenty a week,” the receptionist answered. I could almost hear additional words pouring out of her mouth.
As though you need it
. Then she bent back to her paperwork.

I could have walked out right then, but I was intrigued. Maybe I could do this. I traced the path Grace had taken and entered the half-finished ladies’ room. She had changed into a soft pink one-piece playsuit with short puffed sleeves and little shorts.

“I made this,” she boasted, “after I saw Eleanor Powell wear something like it in
Born to Dance
. I couldn’t tell the color of the playsuit in the film, but I thought this fabric would look pretty against my skin.”

I hadn’t been to many movies, so I didn’t know what to say.

She glanced in the mirror, squished her curls a couple of times to perk them up, and covered a cut with lipstick. I’d never be so rude as to ask her what had happened, but then she turned in my direction, frowned, and asked me a totally inappropriate question.

“You don’t know how to doll up, do you?” she said with a laugh.
She poked around in her bag and fished out a slippery thin pink hair ribbon, which she tucked between her lips. She turned me toward the mirror, ran her fingers through my hair, and then whisked the ribbon from her lips, passed it behind my neck, and pulled the satin strips to the top of my head, where she tied a bow. “That’s better!” And it was, because the pink lifted my cheeks’ natural color.

We exited the restroom and followed the sound of music and rhythmic tapping. At the end of the hallway, I saw construction framing—for what looked like a bar to the left and a large central room. The stage looked done, though. The place was still a skeleton, but as my mind put flesh on it I began to see a nightclub like the one in Shanghai where I’d once danced the fox-trot …

Onstage, as if testing it for the first time, a Chinese man, twenty-six or twenty-seven, or maybe older, wearing cream-colored pants and a blue button-down linen shirt, slid across the floor, spun, and then resumed tapping. His arms appeared simultaneously loose and taut. The slap of his shoes as they hit the parquet—
tat-a-tat—
reverberated through the floorboards and shivered up my spine. His hair was slicked back with pomade, but his athletic steps—rattling now foot over foot across the front of the stage—caused strands to break loose and flop across his forehead. This, in turn, made him flip his head back after every dance phrase to clear his vision. And he was tall—almost six feet—which was extraordinary for a Chinese. He had no musical accompaniment, but his feet tapped out a rhythm that continued to build.
Rah-cha, rah-cha, tat, tat, tat
. Spin. Slide. Now his arms and legs flew—like a windmill. A group of forty or so girls, who sat cross-legged on the floor before the stage, clapped and cheered. Next to me, Grace radiated delight. I couldn’t help feeling the same way, because this was a lot better than the Chinese Telephone Exchange.

When the performance ended, the dancer picked up a towel and wiped the sweat from his face. He loped down the stairs, dropped onto a folding chair next to a woman and two men, all of whom had their backs to us. I focused on the girls by the stage. A couple of them
were attired in playsuits like Grace, but the rest wore street clothes. I didn’t recognize a single girl. Not one of them was from Chinatown. The air I sucked in felt clean and free.

That’s when I saw her, one particular girl, who had a spot to herself. Suddenly I wanted out of there, but Grace gripped my hand tightly and pulled me across the floor toward the creature, who was strikingly different from all the rest. Light seemed to glow out of her skin. Her black hair was highlighted by a pair of shockingly white gardenias pinned just above her left ear. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips formed a perfect bow. She wore tap pants and a pale pink blouse with puffed sleeves not all that different from Grace’s, only hers had embroidery on the collar and cuffs. Her bare legs ended in ankle socks with delicate lace ruffles and basic black shoes with two-inch heels.

“Sit with me,” she trilled when we reached her. “I don’t know anyone either. I’m Ruby Tom.”

“Helen.” Grace pointed to me before putting her hand on her chest. “Grace.”

Ruby, excited, continued, “Can you believe Eddie Wu?”

“Eddie Wu?” Grace echoed even as the three of us scrutinized each other to see where we fit in. Ruby and Grace looked poor in their homemade outfits; I was better-dressed than anyone in the room. Ruby’s features were willow-delicate, Grace had perfect cheekbones, while my face was a little rounder and softer. Ruby sparkled; Grace could be summed up in four words—skinny legs, big bosom. Otherwise, we looked quite similar: petite, slim, with black curls falling over our shoulders, except that Ruby wore those gardenias in her hair, which made her look like a glamorous crane amidst a flock of chickens. We shifted slightly. We’d finished with our evaluations.
No wind; no waves
.