Diamond Head (3 page)

In spite of his lessons and constant nurturing, Maku never quite displayed the qualities of a good Chinese first son. It was a strange situation for my NaiNai and Ye Ye: a young boy encouraged to be arrogant and superior, who had three maids chasing after him at all times, would push in his own chair after dinner, read in his room instead of practicing sports, and daydream throughout his lessons—though he would always apologize afterward. He was a gentler boy than my Ye Ye intended to raise, his definition of masculinity tied to the wildness of his own youth. My Ye Ye would shake his head and mutter that he might as well have had daughters. My NaiNai agreed.
What a strange boy.
It was during this fifth year that my Ye Ye started
going away again, for weeks at a time on business trips to the north, finally leaving behind his first son.

Even in those times, my NaiNai and Ye Ye were considered quite wealthy, having made a good name and a good bit of money in the shipping business. They lived in Guangdong—a large, teeming region in the south of China—in the capital city of Guangzhou, or what my teachers call Canton. Guangzhou holds one of the busiest trading ports in all of China, east-facing and enormous, named the Silk Road on the Sea during the ancient dynasties. I’m told that my Ye Ye is infamous among the men of that harbor, that he set a record for annual cargo that has yet to be broken. It was here, in this port city, that they raised my father until the age of five.

A considerable portion of my NaiNai and Ye Ye’s money was amassed during wartime, sending out fleets of ships to Russia and America filled with what my Ye Ye called toys, but which I imagine were tanks and antiaircraft artillery. It was typical behavior: he could spend the day shipping a hundred thousand tons of lethal machinery to the enemy and be home in time to enjoy dinner with his family. Business for my Ye Ye was about money, not about friends or politics or principles. He had a way of making shady dealings seem legitimate, of downplaying even the most illegal or corrupt of transactions.

I’m told my Ye Ye had many German acquaintances.
Freunde
he called them with his subtle Chinese accent,
friends
. But these were friends that never came to the house, were never called for tea, and were not present at Maku’s one-month celebration. These were business
freunde
, who called late at night asking for my Ye Ye in their heavy, guttural language. My Ye Ye spoke perfect German—perfect French and English, too—which he studied every night in his library. Languages enchanted him. The verbs, the syntax, the colloquialisms, they delighted my Ye Ye like a riddle that he alone could solve, sharing the answer with my NaiNai and Maku every night at the dinner table, insisting that they study linguistics as well. There was nothing
that pleased my Ye Ye more than executing a perfect joke in a foreign language—making a whole table of Europeans laugh with his wit in their mother tongue. He felt powerful in his language, confident in business and socially poised. A cosmopolitan man is what he called himself, his loyalties lying somewhere between China and Spain.

It was Europe he sided with during the Boxer Rebellion, a decade before Maku was born, when his own people were fighting for freedom against Western influence, religion, and the ever expanding opium trade. For many Chinese the Boxers were heroes, but for my Ye Ye they were barbarians, thieves, hooligans. He was never a patriot, always a capitalist, looking into the future and picking the side that favored his enterprise. Even his brother, Shen, four years younger, had been secretly training in Shandong, learning martial arts and practicing calisthenics to prepare for the revolution. Occasionally, Shen would send a message to the house asking my Ye Ye for money, imploring him to support the Chinese effort, telling him that his training made him immune to swords and capable of dodging bullets. My Ye Ye was always courteous, he would always reply to the frantic messages but he would lie to his brother. He would tell him that money was tight, or that it was impossible for it to safely reach Shen without being traced back to my Ye Ye. Afterward, he would complain to my NaiNai.

They’ve brainwashed my brother, filled his head with demons and nonsense.

But my Ye Ye was a rational man. He understood that his cynical patronizing would stop the messages, cutting off his one line to both his younger brother and his source of classified information. So when news came from the north, announcing that the Boxers were moving toward Peking, my Ye Ye already knew. He’d received a message from Shen the day before, telling him of their plan to storm the foreign embassies, sending an aggressive message of Chinese nationalism.

It seems that Shen was a man who suffered from passion. He had passion in excess, always jumping from one cause to the next, never satisfied with his current endeavors. He felt the injustice of the world
so minutely, so intimately, that he couldn’t help himself; he had to do something, no matter how insignificant or futile. And my Ye Ye knew this. He considered Shen’s fixations to be like a disease, chronic and incurable, which is why he still indulged him. He still read every word his brother sent. He still responded, treating Shen as if he were a sick patient, already on his way out. My Ye Ye knew that by the next message, Shen would be on to something new; each cause more precarious than the next, until he eventually met with death. At the very least, my Ye Ye wanted to receive those final words.

But in Shen’s last message, telling my Ye Ye of the Boxer’s plan, there was something very surprising. In the brief telegraph, Shen skipped the usual topics. There was no allusion to government conspiracies, no talk of his supernatural powers, not even a reminder about social responsibility. Perhaps more surprisingly, this was the first time that Shen did not ask for money.

He had just married, he wrote to my Ye Ye. He had met a girl and he was in love.

My Ye Ye placed the paper down. He paused. To be a single man following the precarious path of a revolutionary was one thing. But to involve a woman, a young lady—with that, my Ye Ye took issue.

Don’t worry, brother
, read the final line.
We’ve trained hard and prepared well.

What happened next was exactly as my Ye Ye predicted. The indiscriminate massacre of foreigners, the deaths of hundreds of Chinese Christians, the torching of buildings, the escalation of political tensions—it was all just as he had foreseen, and every morning my Ye Ye skimmed the headlines of the newspaper, skipping the articles, already knowing what they would say. When my NaiNai began to lament the loss of so many Chinese Boxers, my Ye Ye remained stoic, speaking only words of frustration.

The Chinese are too nearsighted. They think of nothing but war and violence, not understanding the good of trade and alliances, of new religion.

For the eight weeks that the Boxers occupied Peking, my NaiNai and Ye Ye awaited a message from Shen. They knew he was within the city, fighting with his quickly falling comrades, his brother in the south the last thing on his mind. Pamphlets and newspapers showed pictures of executed revolutionaries, left bloodied in the middle of the street, dead with a single bullet through the chest.
He can dodge bullets and is immune to swords
, my Ye Ye said, repeating his brother’s words with a quiet laugh as he sipped his morning tea. My NaiNai, who was fond of Shen, flew into a rage.

“This is how you speak of family? This could be your brother!” she exclaimed, throwing the newspaper picture at my Ye Ye. “Does that make you laugh? That your brother may be dead while you chuckle over his words?”

My Ye Ye held his tongue after that, growing more and more silent as the days passed without a word. He read the newspapers now, looking for Shen’s name in the lists of the dead, but he was never there.

My Ye Ye had not seen his brother in a long time. They grew up together along the Yellow River, moving from village to village with their father as he searched for work in the wheat and maize fields. Their father was not a skilled farmer, but more than that, he was not a man who cared to work. Like clockwork, he would meet the overseer of some small settlement and beg for a job, offering his sons as additional labor, making promises of exceptional harvests and new ideas for irrigation and superior crops. Then my Ye Ye’s father would drink and my Ye Ye would work, planting the seeds and collecting the dry corn, hauling water, sorting for quality and checking for diseases and rot. Shen was ten, old enough to work, but he lacked my Ye Ye’s focus, his appetite for something better. Shen held a fierce loyalty to their father, willing to lie to the overseer about his drunken state, his perpetual absence from the fields.

In the fall of 1887, when my Ye Ye was fourteen, they had been living along the river in the north of Shandong for almost six months. The overseer had taken a liking to my Ye Ye and requested
his assistance on a trip to the highlands to find mountain yams. His wife had been complaining of kidney pain and there was word of the nearby growth of a medicinal root. The journey took three days, westward to the holy ridges of Mount Tai, and it was there, high on its crest, that they were told of the flood. The dykes had broken in Henan province to the west and had overwhelmed the banks, spreading violently, swallowing the settlements, leveling the houses, consuming everything in its path; the animals, the people, they were swept away like dust by a broom, razed in a mighty, biblical flash. Very little remained, they said. Everyone was gone.

That day was the first time my Ye Ye thought he had lost his brother. He went nearly a decade thinking this, venerating him at the ghost festivals, burning paper money and trinkets to send him in the afterlife. Until one day, when my Ye Ye still lived in Shandong, Shen appeared at his doorstep: a full-grown man, looking into his brother’s face like looking into a mirror. They embraced in the doorway without a word, and I’m told that was the last time my Ye Ye cried.

But the next morning, after a celebratory meal of jiaozi dumplings and long beans and endless pours of rice wine, Shen was gone. He slipped out of the house in the early hours, while the others slept, leaving a note on his blanket, still warm from his resting body.
See you next time
, it said, the fat strokes of his characters like a small child’s. My Ye Ye was devastated, quietly and profoundly heartsick for weeks, quiet at dinner, distracted at work, until Shen returned and my Ye Ye realized that this was how their relationship would be. Like their father, Shen was a nomad: appearing and disappearing, never staying longer than a few days, off to chase the revolutionary dream, to rid China of the evils of Westernization, to overthrow the Qing, to practice martial arts, to learn to eat fire, to destroy Christianity, to join the next group of men with a dozen swords and a righteous cause. My Ye Ye had little choice in the matter; he simply had to keep his door open, his life moving.

Once a year, every year, my Ye Ye asked Shen to come live with
him and his family. My Ye Ye knew a change of environment would do wonders for his brother—that a warm bed and regular meals might keep him safe forever. My Ye Ye, however, refused to force Shen into change; he knew that under duress, Shen had a tendency to rebel, like a child, against all things good and conventional. But this last message had been different. My Ye Ye couldn’t kick the feeling that something had shifted, that his brother had changed. Shen wrote that he’d like his wife to meet his family—that after the occupation of Peking was over, he would finally make the journey south with his new bride.

November 1964

H
ONOLULU
, H
AWAII

Hong stands in the entrance of the great house, her square frame lit from behind, her hands clasped before her as she watches the women approach.

“Looks healthy,” she says, smiling, gesturing at Theresa’s stomach. “I think a boy.”

“She still won’t tell me,” Amy replies, embracing Hong at the top of the stairs. “Can you believe that? She still won’t tell her own mother.”

“It’s a surprise,” Theresa says, the words automatic now. She repeats what she has told her mother, nearly every day since that morning in September when she went to see Dr. Ho, the Chinese birth chart specialist. Theresa had asked her mother to leave and Amy had waited outside, pacing the empty parking lot as Dr. Ho made his calculations, as he found her lunar age and matched it to the time of conception, sliding his prediction across the wooden table.

“I want it to be a surprise,” Theresa says again as she leans in to touch her cheek to Hong’s.

“Let her have her little secret,” Hong replies, winking at Theresa. “Soon enough, we will all know.”

The old woman takes Amy’s hand and turns it over, opening her palm and placing a piece of candy in the center. She gives a second piece to Theresa. Hong wraps her own hand around Theresa’s, letting the heat from their palms fuse, softening the thin sugar shell between them.

“Eat,” Hong tells them. “Life is a dream walking. Death is a going home. Let it be sweet.”

Hong unwraps a piece for herself and together, the women place the candy on their tongues, letting the honey flavor melt and chase away the bitterness that came before it. The taste comforts Amy; it soothes her in a way she had not expected.

“I can’t tell you how indebted I am to you,” Amy tells Hong, biting into the center of her candy, cracking it open so that its strength can fuse to the bottom of her teeth. “I don’t know what would have happened if you weren’t here. It would have been a nightmare. It would have been impossible.”

Hong shakes her head dismissively, swatting at Amy’s words with her hand.

“These things I do are for the family but I do it also for myself. It’s not easy to accept but death is a gift. Bohai was too young. Yes, he was too young, but we are lucky,” Hong says, her voice dipping on the last word, a low rasp exiting through her flat, thin lips. “How lucky it is that we can say goodbye, don’t you think? It does not always happen like this. We are not always so fortunate, not always able.”

Hong pauses and Theresa can hear the candy in her mouth, making a hollow sound as it clicks against her teeth. Her hair is entirely white now, but on Hong, these bright wisps of colorless hair look less like a sign of age and more like a reaction to something inside of her—something entirely good and pure—as if her body is unable to produce a silver or a grey. The skin on her face is padded with a fleshiness that leaves most women her age. The only indication of Hong’s fragility is in the lids of her eyes, which slope downward toward the outer edges, dragging on her face when she frowns. Theresa notices this now, as Hong considers her words.

“He would have liked to be here today,” Hong says, looking past their faces, above the garden, beyond the iron gate. “He would have wanted to do the rites.” She speaks with a measured regularity, her words slowed by both caution and intention. “He came to me last
night, you know? In my sleep. He comes every night since Bohai passed, and he tells me that today he cannot be here, but he is waiting.” She pauses. “He is waiting to greet Bohai when he arrives.”

Hong smiles and the heavy slope of her eyelids disappears.

Theresa stands between Hong and her mother, her ears lit, her mind suddenly ignited. She isn’t sure; she’s racking her memory, not yet entirely positive, but Theresa thinks—for the first time in the entirety of her life, in all the years she has stood between these women, their conversation like layers of impenetrable, maddening encryption—that maybe, just maybe, she understands what they are saying.

It startles her at first. She thinks again; she reconsiders. It’s become almost second nature to Theresa, to be excluded from the conversation, for the subject matter to be decades old, for those around her to allude to people without names, to events without dates or context or clarity. Theresa is used to it; the padded dialogue that reminds her of her absence, of her separation from a lifetime already lived is like white noise, so impossible to grasp that she’s almost stopped trying. But today Theresa thinks she hears it differently. Since her father passed, since the stories began, she’s made a point of listening.

Her eyes move to Hong’s wrist, to the white bandage wrapped around its soft circumference. She knows what’s below it. She remembers Hong in her parents’ living room, almost six months ago, extending her hand, showing Theresa the stained cloth that has lived on her body since she was seventeen years old.
I was younger than you
, Hong had told her.
Can you believe that?

Her parents had been gone that afternoon, off brokering her future in Kaimuki. That’s what she’d told them when they had left, glaring, glowering as they got into their car and drove away. Theresa was miserable, two months pregnant and still in her pajamas at noon when there was a knock at the front door.

“What are you doing here?” Theresa had said.

“I took the bus” was Hong’s response. She looked so strange in
their doorway; away from the house on Diamond Head, she appeared to be from a different era. With her short white hair, her high cossack collar, she looked like a figurine of an elderly Chinese woman.

“Sorry.” Theresa paused. “Do you want to come in?”

“Yes.” Hong nodded. “Yes, I do.”

Hong walked through the front door, down the hall and toward the living room. Theresa had wondered if she should change out of her pajamas. She had wondered if her parents knew that Hong was there, but she hadn’t asked, because something told her that they did not.

On the coffee table, Theresa collected her cereal bowl from earlier that morning and moved it to the sink. She ran the faucet as Hong sat on the couch.

“Can I get you something?” Theresa asked when she returned. “Water? Are you thirsty?”

“No, it’s okay,” Hong said, patting the bag beside her. “I have my own.”

“Okay.” Theresa sat on the couch across from the old woman and began thinking of a way to ask her again what she was doing there, how she had managed to show up half an hour after her parents had driven away for the entire afternoon. But Hong spoke first.

“I have come to tell you a story,” she said, straight-faced, entirely serious.

“A story.”

“Yes. It’s a very old story. Maybe older than me.” Hong smiled, pointing to her face, holding her finger to her cheek. “Laugh,” she encouraged Theresa. “It’s a joke.”

Theresa had laughed, unexpectedly, for the first time in many days. It was a strange laugh, prompted yet sincere. She had always enjoyed Hong’s company, what little time they’d shared, just once a year when the Leongs gathered to celebrate the Chinese New Year. It was tradition for Theresa to help Hong in the kitchen, preparing and arranging the sweetmeats in their elaborate porcelain boxes as the adults
gathered in the great room. She could recite the seven sweets in her sleep, had memorized their symbolism and given a presentation in the sixth grade: lotus root for friendship, squash for a long line of descendants, carrots for wealth and prosperity, coconut for a strong relationship between father and son, ginger for continuous good health, melon seeds for fertility, and lotus seeds for the protection of sons. It was with Hong that Theresa felt her heritage most strongly—a connection to a country she had never seen, to a language she didn’t speak.

Amy stayed out of the kitchen, greeting Hong when they entered the house and immediately retreating into the company of her mother-in-law. But as soon as they left the Leongs’ party, on their way home to sleep before the next day’s celebration in Kaneohe, Amy would always question her daughter. Had Hong said anything about her? Did she seem healthy? Did she seem herself?

“Now,” Hong said to Theresa, nodding on the word. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Theresa said, wishing they were in the kitchen, that she had something in her hands to busy herself.

Hong cleared her throat and leaned forward, so far that her chest reached nearly to her knees. She folded her hands in front of her, stretching them outward, and then she straightened, vertically, releasing the air in her lungs. Finally, Hong settled back into her spot on the couch and gently, methodically, she began her story:

One evening, in a street lit by moonlight, a young boy meets an old man. This man is Yue Xia Lao. He is the old lunar god of matchmakers and marriages. Lao explains to the boy that every man is attached to his future wife. He says that every man is connected to his destined match by an invisible red string, tied around both their ankles. This string, he says, connects destined lovers, despite time or place or circumstance. It can stretch and tangle, but never can it break.

But be warned, Lao tells the boy, not all will find their destined match. Stay on the righteous path, do good deeds, and only then can you be united with your true and perfect companion.

Then Lao points to a young girl on the street. He tells the boy that this girl is his true love and destined wife. The boy, he is too young to be interested in a wife, so he takes up a rock and throws it at the girl. It strikes her in the face. The girl cries and runs off. She clutches her eye; she turns into the alley and disappears. Yue Xia Lao shakes his head and scolds the boy. You have unsettled the forces of fate, Lao tells him. You will see that these misdeeds change not only you and your future, but also the generations that follow.

Years later, when the young boy becomes a man, prosperous and respected, his parents arrange for him a marriage. The night of the wedding, his bride waits for him. Her face is hidden beneath the wedding veil. The man lifts the veil and finds that his wife is a great beauty of his village. Her face is perfect. She has even, milky skin, a soft mouth, eyes that echo a hundred shades of blue. She is flawless, except for an adornment that she wears on her eyebrow. The man asks his wife why she wears the adornment and she replies that when she was young, a boy threw a rock at her. It struck her face and left a scar. She wears the decoration to conceal her embarrassment.

His bride is the same girl shown to him by Yue Xia Lao, fifteen years before. She is connected to him by a red string and fated to be his destined match.

Hong had yet to blink. She held Theresa’s gaze throughout the entirety of her telling, as if reading the words in the whites of her eyes. And Theresa hadn’t looked away. The rhythm in Hong’s voice kept pace like ocean tides, crashing steadily to its natural pulse. Theresa couldn’t find a place between Hong’s words to interject or look away, not even once, not even for a moment.

“A red string can never break,” Hong continued. “A whole life, it can pass, while you are married to the wrong person, living with a knot.”

Theresa’s blood slowed. Could she know? She panicked. How could she already know?

“A knot?” she asked as the blood rushed to her face, sweeping through her veins, unbalancing her. “What do you mean?”

“A knot,” Hong replied, dipping her head. “An affair. A forced marriage. A concubine. A prostitute. These things, they are knots in
a red string. They are punishments for mistakes. You see, a red string with no knots, it moves like Chinese silk. It slips through mountains, weaves through cars and trees and railroad tracks. It can swim across an ocean and cross three countries to reach its destined match. But a knotted string, it is very different.”

Theresa swallowed. The saliva caught at the bottom of her throat. She forced it down with a gulp of dry, swollen air.

“With time, with neglect,” Hong continued, “a knotted string becomes stiff. It becomes like sandpaper and then like wood, stubborn and rigid. And as the knots collect, the chance that you will find your match becomes so small, because who can cross three countries with lengths of wood tied to their ankle? Who can swim for miles with such a burden? Do you understand what I am saying?”

Theresa drew in her lips and slowly, inhaled through her nose, trying to spread oxygen throughout her body. She hoped it would stop her from crying, from giving away her predicament entirely. She understood exactly what Hong was saying; she nodded her head.

“Good,” Hong said gently. “There is just one more part.” Her voice continued like this, softly, as if compensating for the words that she would say next.

“See, these knots, they do not depart when you do. This is where the most confusion lies. These knots are passed, from mother to daughter, from a father to his son. So that the more you lose your way—as the knots gather, as they sprout, the harder you make it for your children to find love, and for theirs after them.”

Hong paused and her eyes were entirely clear, like two snow globes whose particles had settled to the bottom.

“You hate me,” Theresa said, lifting her eyes from Hong’s crystal stare. “You hate me, too. I get it. I do.”

“It is the opposite!” Hong replied, straightening. “Last night I dreamed of fish. I saw your child, I saw your face. You’re frightened, Theresa, I know you are but I have come to tell you that you still have a chance. You have one knot, just one instance of weakness, your
red string is still strong. You have so much, Theresa, if only you do not lose it. You must not tie yourself to him, you must see what lies beyond.”

“But the wedding—”

“Wedding?
” Hong repeated, her mouth suspended around the word.

“You didn’t know?”

Hong’s face slackened. She hadn’t known.

“Listen,” Theresa began. “I appreciate you coming down here to talk. It means a lot to me, it really does, just to know you care. But a fairy tale isn’t going to save me from this. I wish it could but it can’t. And I don’t mean to offend you, but do you think
an invisible red string
can save me from this amount of fuckup? I’m sorry.” Theresa shook her head and raised an apologetic hand. “I’m sorry, I just feel like it’s a nice story and I’m glad to have heard it but really, has a red string ever done something real for anyone?”