Face
Authors: Aimee Liu,Daniel McNeill
FACE
“Authentic in every detail, this novel
should attract not only readers with Asian interests,
but
everyone concerned
with the changing qualities of American life today.”
—John Espey, author of
Minor Heresies, Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood
“A journey through family
toward
self, exquisitely layered
through
the lens of memory. An
absorbing read.”
—Paul Mantee, author of
Bruno of Hollywood
“Impressive…
Liu’s lyrical prose is
graceful and evocative.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Structured
like
a mystery, around secrets and unanswered
questions.… Liu raises
compelling questions about identity,
the
power of memory, and
the cost of
forgetting”
—
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Reads like a kind of visual poetry…. Whether Aimee Liu turns to the tumult of Chinatown, the
bloody chaos of Chiang’s mainland China or
the pain of her
central character’s own past, we travel
there, too, in a book well worth the price of the ticket.”
—Linda Phillips Ashour, author of
Speaking in Tongues
and
joy Baby
“With clarity
and
insight, Aimee Liu has given us a glimpse into a world in which the secrets people keep are as potent as the stories they
tell.”
—Christina Baker Kline, author of
Sweet Water
“A powerful examination of the Asian-American
experience”
—
Transpacific
“A searing story about the pain of being
different and about the
inescapable, often destructive hold of the past…. The novel creates a haunting
atmosphere?
—
New York Times Book Review
“Arresting and
well-plotted…. Liu’s
characters are
deftly delineated, and at times the
descriptive
lines are so beautifully written that they have the delicacy and quality of that other Oriental art form, haiku.”
“—
Rocky Mountain News
“FACE exquisitely
depicts
Maibelle’s slow
coming to terms with
the forces that made her, in a story that is part psychological
drama,
part rite of passage, part literary exploration of being racially divided, and part mystery.”
—
Milwaukee Journal
Solitaire
P
UBLISHER’S
N
OTE
: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Aimée E. Liu
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: October 2009
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
ISBN: 978-0-446-56557-8
Contents
PRAISE FOR AIMEE E. LIU’S DEBUT NOVEL
Part1: The Emperor State Building
For Margaret Blackstone
This novel has acquired many godparents during its long journey from impulse to publication. The first, of course, is Martin
Fink, whose humor, love, and understanding sustained the author through many stretches when it seemed the story was a goner.
Cai Emmons, Arnold Margolin, Hugh Gross, and Eric Edson, too, offered invaluable criticism and encouragement from early on.
Willyne Bower, Nancy Fawcett, and especially Susan Bartholomew and Sarah Piel gave the finished manuscript its first of many
vital blessings. Lori Andiman and Artie Pine were on hand, as always, with energetic support, while my agent, Richard Pine,
provided the honest friendship, faith, and professional excellence that gave his blessing the weight of gold. Finally, Jamie
Raab bestowed on this project the enthusiasm, wisdom, and generosity that are the marks of a truly gifted editor—and a true
gift to this new novelist. Thank you, one and all.
I would also like to extend a special note of gratitude to my distant teachers, Joanne Hoppe, Jesse Sommer, and particularly
Chic Reich, for urging me to write long before I realized I had anything to say.
Should the misted clouds survive,
They will drift to the void and let free the moon.
L
IU
Y
Ü
-
SHENG
I
was a child in Chinatown.
My earliest memories are filled with strangled ducks and ginseng root, parades of round, worried faces, and babies in pastel
colors. Rich light slants between squeezed buildings, and winter shadows soak the streets tugging warmth from fingers and
toes. I hear wailing, chattering, a multitude of tones. A language I can’t understand. And the smells—I know them as well
as my name—the unearthly blend of fishmongers’ trash, orange peel, garlic, and sandalwood. Joss sticks lit for the dead.
I see myself in these memories as a tall, pale, redheaded girl reflected in a storefront window. A narrow face with a broad
off-center nose. Too-wide eyes the color of jade and only a vague Oriental cast. Against the rest of the Mott Street crowd
I stand out like a vivid flaw in a bolt of jet-black silk.
But the girls I admired most in the world—the Yellow Butterflies—stood out, too. Just one grade ahead of me and worlds apart,
they had the flawless appearance of porcelain dolls. Pale skin. Flying cheekbones. Diminutive noses. Waist-length hair that
hung straight, gleaming like
dark cellophane, and those classic almond eyes with their smoothed-down lids, as if carved in a single stroke.
I studied the Butterflies’ movements, their fashions, their games. True to their name, they dressed in yellow, light and bright,
with shoes of silver or gold and hair ornaments shaped like blossoms. Their voices, alternating between Cantonese and English,
made me think of the sparrows that nested in my Wisconsin grandfather’s barn. Grampa said if I got too close, the sparrows
would peck my eyes out, but as long as I kept my distance I could play in the barn and they’d let me be. I thought the same
rule should apply to the Butterflies.
One day I followed them out of the schoolyard and heard them tittering about my height, my green
eyes.
They said my hair was like cock feathers. They turned and called to me in Chinese, broke into giggles when I stopped and
pretended to read a nearby wall poster.
Still, I imagined them waving me forward, taking my hand. We’d stop to buy plum candies, walk to one of their homes to play.
Their mothers would have a mah-jongg game going and the gentle
swish-click
of the tiles would sound in the background as I tried on the Butterflies’ colors…
I fastened my eyes to that poster. A Ringling Brothers clown leered back. The Butterflies yelled in English.
“Who’s your grandpa? Jolly Green Giant?”
“Who does your hair? Chicken Little?”
I bolted across the street, house key clenched in my fist. If I just held onto that key, the Butterflies would stay where
they were, laughing and linking arms. They would leave me alone. But if I let go, they would come pull my hair out strand
by strand, they would suck the color from my eyes. They would beat me with their wings until I melted into the pavement.
The key gave me safe passage.
From my father’s window I watched grocer Hu scold the Butterflies over a box of lychees they had upset in the chase. They
scrambled on their knees to retrieve them, and then Old Hu softened and gave each of them a nut to crack and nibble at as
they moved on. I imagined the
cool pink flesh between their teeth, the juice like sweet perfume. I could almost feel the brittle shell breaking and, inside,
the hard, smooth pit, dark as the finest rosewood.
Much later, between years of college, I ran into one of the Yellow Butterflies selling panty hose at Bloomingdale’s. She’d
had her eyes done. Had the lids lifted, folded, and cut until the almond shape was gone and with it her exotic, imperious
beauty. Now she looked innocent. Cute. She could pass for American.
“Donna and Bidi had their eyes done, too,” she told me, “and Lily had her nose built up. None of us live in Chinatown anymore.”
I didn’t remember this woman’s name, much less those of the other Butterflies, but I felt as though I’d come face-to-face
with myself turned inside out.
Secretly, she was saying, the Butterflies used to envy me because I was real American. “If you’d stayed around, we might have
been friends.”
I mouthed the conventional wisdom, said those differences never should have mattered.
“No,” she agreed, “but if they didn’t, there would be no Chinatown.”
