The Valley of Amazement (79 page)

“I didn’t return home, except twice. The first time was when my grandmother, Mrs. Ivory, died. The lawyers gave the official word that I had just inherited the Ivory family estate. It had passed to me and not to Minerva. But she, as my purported mother, would have the power to determine how to spend that fortune on herself, until I was twenty-five. Practically the first thing she did was marry a man who claimed to own an oil well. If he owned a well, it was a well in someone’s backyard into which he had thrown a bottle of Crisco. The second time I came home was last Christmas, when I knew Minerva was away with her new husband in Florida. I had gone there to remove more of my belongings. I didn’t want any part of myself to remain there. That was when I found Uncle Loyalty’s letter and gift in the mailbox.

“When I learned Minerva wasn’t really my mother, I could feel myself being turned upside down. I felt like all my emotions had been in a saltshaker, tapped out a little at a time. And now everything had poured out all at once. Finally, I understood so many things. Minerva resented me. She hated my face because it was the face of the woman my father loved. She couldn’t love me. I couldn’t love her. There was nothing wrong with me, except that I was someone else’s child. I was elated. I could be me! But then I immediately became scared. I didn’t know who I was. I was like that big empty Santa bag.

“So here I am, the smart-alecky girl who doesn’t really know who she is yet. I’m lost. But I feel better here in China because everything is so different and anybody coming here would be lost. I don’t mean lost on the streets. I mean it’s confusing and jarring and strange and new. The language is different, and you don’t know the rules. And all this confusion here is pushing aside the other confusion I’ve had. I can start over. I can be three and a half again. I can learn a few words: ‘milk,’ ‘spoon,’ ‘baby,’ ‘pick me up.’ And I do remember those words. I feel part of me is in those words and part of me is coming back. A memory of me. A memory of you. I remember saying, ‘I’m scared.’ I don’t remember if it was in Chinese or English. I also remember being a little girl in my mother’s arms, your arms. I know it was you, because when I first got to Shanghai and we were seated in the car, I was looking at your chin. I remembered seeing that same chin when you held me and it was at eye level. I used to poke your chin, and when you smiled, it changed, like a little face. It was different when you were talking or laughing. It was different when you were sad or angry. In the car, I saw your chin was bunched up and I knew you were afraid, because I remembered being in your arms when I was little, bouncing as you ran. I was holding on to your neck. I said, ‘I’m scared.’ You told me in our language, ‘Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid.’ And then I felt someone pulling me away from you. I was reaching for your face and I saw your chin was bunched up hard. You were calling my name and you were afraid. So I was, too.”

F
LORA AND
I took walks in the early morning and we watched everyday life pour out of doorways and onto the widest boulevards and narrowest alleys. She wanted to understand my life in Shanghai and what her father had experienced. What was it like to be Chinese? What was it like for a Westerner? Whose morals were more severe? Who did I think I would have become if my mother had not left?

I used to ask that last question all the time. Who would I have become? If I had lived in San Francisco, would my mind have been different? Would I have had different thoughts? Would I have been happier? “I wanted to live somewhere else,” I told Flora. “But I didn’t want to become anyone different. I wanted to be who I had always been. And I was and still am.”

We went to the house on Bubbling Well Road, where Edward and I had lived. It was now a middle school for the children of foreigners.

“Foreigners,” Flora said. “I’m a foreigner.”

The big tree was still in the courtyard garden. We stood in its shade, as we had just before she was taken away. The stone bench was there, and it bore a plaque with Edward’s name. Beneath were violets. Mother and I had placed the plaque there a week ago and replanted the flowers. She had given the school a nice contribution and also paid for a gardener to tend it.

“Is he really buried here?” Flora asked.

I nodded. I remembered watching the dirt falling on the cabinet that had served as Edward’s coffin. The old sorrow came back: Edward, how could you be leaving me?

Flora brushed her fingers over the violets and closed her eyes. “I want to feel he’s holding me in his arms.”

I pictured Edward rocking Little Flora, looking at her with a wondrous face, soothing her, telling her she was pure and unharmed.

F
LORA AND MY
mother stayed for a month. A few days before they would leave, I felt she was again being pulled from me.

“You should come to visit us in San Francisco,” Mother said. “You have a birth certificate under the name of Danner that says you’re an American citizen. I can help you get it. Although maybe you’d be too wary to let me try that again.”

“We wouldn’t be able to get a visa for Loyalty. Thousands of Chinese citizens want to leave, and the consulate knows they wouldn’t return. I can’t leave Loyalty by himself,” I said. “He wouldn’t know how to take care of
himself.” I did not tell her that Loyalty had already made me promise that I would not leave without him. He was afraid I would be pulled to America, now that I had found both my mother and my daughter. When people go to America, he had said, they don’t come back for a long time. “After the war, Loyalty and I will both come,” I told Mother. “Or you come back here and bring Flora. We can go to the mountain that Edward and I climbed, or to Hong Kong and Canton, places I’ve never been. We can see them together.”

Mother gave me a sympathetic look. She knew I wanted to see Flora again. “I’ll see what I can do.” She squeezed my hand.

Three days later, Loyalty, Magic Gourd, and I stood on the dock with Flora and Mother. How long would it be before we could see each other again? How long would the war last? What other terrible things could happen between now and when I would next see them? What if I did not see Flora again for ten or fifteen years? What if Mother died in the middle of writing a letter to me? They were leaving me again. It was too soon.

Magic Gourd shoved a large sack of candied walnuts into Flora’s arms. She had been cooking them for the past two days. “She looks like you when you were that age,” Magic Gourd said. She had said that nearly every day since Flora arrived. “I used to wonder what would happen if someone saved you and you left and I was all alone. I wanted you to be saved, but then …” She put her fist against her mouth to keep from crying. “Watching her leave is like watching you go.” Flora embraced her and thanked her in Chinese for her good care when she was little.

“She has a good heart,” Loyalty said to me in Chinese. “She got that from you. Three and a half years was enough time to give that to her. She’s the daughter we might have had. I’ll miss our daughter.” He made Flora promise to send a cable as soon as she arrived so that we would know she was safe.

And then it was time. Flora came to me and said in an oddly stiff voice, “I know we’ll see each other soon. And we’ll write often.”

I thought she had warmed to me and was stricken to realize it wasn’t true. She couldn’t leave now. I needed more time with her. I was panicking, shaking.

She took my hands. “It’s not as hard this time, is it? I’m leaving, but I’ll be back.” She threw her arms around my neck, hugged me close, and whispered, “What did I call you when I was little and they were taking me away? Was it Mama? It was, wasn’t it? I found you, Mama. I’ll never lose you again. My mama came back from a memory, and Little Flora came back, too.”

I whispered back that I loved her. And then that was all I could say.

“No more heartbreak,” she said. She kissed my cheek and pulled away. “There’s that face on your chin.” She poked my chin and rubbed it until I laughed. “We don’t need to be scared anymore,” she said. She kissed my cheek again. “I love you, Mama.”

She and Mother walked toward the gangplank. She turned back three times to wave, and we waved as well. I watched them ascend, and at the top of the gangplank, she and Mother waved again. We waved furiously until Flora put her arm down. She stood still and looked at me. And then she and Mother went inside and were gone.

I remembered the day when I was supposed to leave Shanghai for San Francisco. My mother should have waited for me. She did not. She should have returned. She did not. The American life that should have been mine sailed away without me, and that day I no longer knew who I was.

On sleepless nights, when I could not bear my life, I thought of that ship and imagined I was aboard. I had been saved! I was its only passenger, standing at the back of the ship, watching Shanghai recede—an American girl in my sailor dress, a virgin courtesan in a high-necked silk jacket, an American widow with streaming tears, a Chinese wife with a black eye. A hundred of me over the years were crowded on the deck, looking back at Shanghai. But the ship never left, and I would have to disembark, and begin my life again each morning.

Once again, I imagined myself as that girl in the sailor dress. I was on the ship, standing at the back of the boat. I was going to America, where I would be raised by a mother who took me to San Francisco. I would grow up in a beautiful house and sleep in a bedroom with sunny yellow walls and a window next to an oak tree, and another that looked out upon the sea. From that window, I would be able to see all the way across to a city at the end of the sea, to a dock by the Huangpu River, where I was standing with Magic Gourd, Edward, Loyalty, Mother, and Little Flora, waving to the girl in the sailor dress as the ship receded, waving until it disappeared.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many friends and family who sustained me during the eight years it took to write this book. I will try to repay all of you with sustenance in kind over the years.

For help in keeping this story and me alive: My husband, Lou DeMattei, was so supportive of my need for solitary confinement that he brought breakfast, lunch, and dinner to my desk, where I was shackled to a deadline. My agent Sandy Dijkstra saved me yet again from my own blunders and worries, and thus enabled me to write with peace of mind. Molly Giles, always my first reader, saw the false starts and patiently pushed me forward with astute advice. If only I had followed all of it from the beginning.

For background on courtesan culture and photography in Shanghai, I am deeply grateful to three people for freely sharing through our countless e-mails their research of courtesan culture and photography in Shanghai during the turn of the century: Gail Hershatter
(The Gender of Memory),
Catherine Yeh
(Shanghai Love),
and Joan Judge
(The Precious Raft of History).
I offer apologies for any distortion of their work through my imagination.

For research for the various settings of the story, I thank Nancy Berliner, then-curator of Chinese art at the
Peabody Essex Museum, who arranged for Lou and me to stay in a four-hundred-year-old mansion in the village of Huangcun. My sister Jindo (Tina Eng) got us to the village by navigating the best route via trains and cars from Shanghai. Because I had to speak only Chinese to her for four days, my language skills improved enormously, to the point where I could understand much of the family gossip necessary for any story. Fellow traveler Lisa See braved the cold, despite predictions of balmy weather, and she reveled with me over the historic details and unfolding human dramas. She also generously insisted that I use the name of the village pond in my book, even though Moon Pond would have been a perfect name for a village in her novel. Cecilia Ding, with the Yin Yu Tang Service Project, provided extensive knowledge of the history of Huang Cun, the old house, the streets of Old Tunxi in Huang-shan, and Yellow Mountain.

Museums have always been important in my writing for both inspiration and research. The Shanghai Exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco opened my eyes to the role of courtesans in introducing Western culture to Shanghai. Maxwell Hearn, curator of the Asian department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, provided information on the aesthetic and romantic mind of the scholar as well as on the green-eyed poet who wrote about ghosts that he purportedly saw. Tony Bannon, then-director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, opened up the archives of photographs of women in China at the turn of the century, and he also showed a rare and restored film of a city girl forced into prostitution. Dodge Thompson, chief of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gave me a special tour of paintings by Hudson River School artists, including those by Albert Bierstadt. Inspiration for the painting
The Valley of Amazement
came from a hurried visit to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, after which I recalled a haunting painting with that title, whose artist, alas, I failed to note, but who was likely Carl Blechen, a painter of fantastical landscapes, whose work is prominently displayed in the Alte Nationalgalerie. If anyone finds the painting, please let me know. I suffer from a sense of failure in not having rediscovered it yet.

For Shanghai research: Steven Roulac introduced me to his mother, Elizabeth, who recounted her days in Shanghai in the 1930s as a foreigner in the International District. Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, gave me insights on several historic periods in China, including the rise of the new Republic and the antiforeigner movement. The late Bill Wu introduced me to the aesthetic world of the scholar—the accoutrements, house, garden, and wall plaques of poetry, all found in his scholar house outside of Suzhou. Duncan Clark found street maps of old Shanghai, enabling us to pinpoint the modern-day location of the old courtesan district. Shelley Lim spent countless hours taking me around Shanghai to old family homes, haunted houses, and the places that provided the best foot massages at midnight. Producer Monica Lam, videographer David Peterson, and my sister Jindo helped me make my first visit to the family mansion on Qongming Island, where my mother grew up and where my grandmother killed herself. Joan Chen laughingly gave me Shanghainese translations for funny expressions, often of the lewd variety, for which she in turn had to ask her friends for assistance.