Songs of Willow Frost

by Jamie Ford

  Liu Song shrugged at the thought. She wasn’t afraid of being alone with her boss, but she dreaded the thought of being alone, without her true family. As she crossed the street she fastened her coat’s collar button. She tied her favorite scarf around her neck and wrinkled her nose because the wool smelled like cherry-vanilla tobacco. She longed for the comforting sound of her mother’s voice. Liu Song knew her mother had once performed onstage but couldn’t recall ever hearing her sing, not even a sad lullaby.

  When Liu Song rounded the corner into Chinatown, she saw her stepfather and two other businessmen smoking and talking in front of the Quong Tuck Company. She recognized him from two blocks away by the expensive Oxford bags he wore. As she crossed the street she thought his stout frame and round belly looked ridiculous in those baggy English trousers, especially next to the businessmen in their three-piece suits.

  “Hello, Uncle Leo,” she said cordially as she passed by.

  Her stepfather didn’t fancy the idea of having a daughter and had insisted on being referred to as uncle. He flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and spat on the sidewalk, then turned his back and continued talking.

  You’re not my uncle, Liu Song thought, or my father. You’re just a laundryman.

  Liu Song’s real father had been a theater director and a Cantonese opera star, but his company in Seattle had foundered when the Spanish flu forced him into temporary retirement. Despite quarantines, he died from the Grippe—the same disease that took her brothers and crippled her mother.

  She wished she could have seen him perform, just once, but girls were not allowed back then—not good girls, anyway. And she loved his stories.

  “One time during the seventh month, when I was just a boy apprentice, our troupe traveled to a remote village and gave a grand performance,” her father had often told her. “But when we woke in the morning, the village had completely vanished—we were standing in an empty meadow. We’d been entertaining ghosts!”

  His story about the ghost village was her favorite, and sometimes when she sang, at home, at school, or in front of Butterfield’s, she imagined his ghost watching, nodding approval or offering instruction.

  As Liu Song wandered down Canton Alley and into her family’s apartment in the East Kong Yick building, she was overwhelmed by the smell of camphor—a reminder that the only real ghost in her life was her bedridden mother. The beautiful woman Liu Song’s father had called My Joyful Goddess had lost her hearing when a fever ruptured her eardrums during the influenza epidemic. She couldn’t sing, could hardly speak, and rarely communicated now. It was a strange miracle that Uncle Leo had even married her, but she still had her looks, and Chinese women were few, so he took them in. Liu Song’s mother had cooked, cleaned, and done everything Uncle Leo expected from an obedient wife, except provide him with a son. As her health failed as well, Uncle Leo administered a variety of treatments, which only brought on a withering storm of seizures. Each time, a part of her mind faded—her memories disappeared. Her mother was a wildflower, transplanted into a bed of sand, losing her natural color and fragrance. Her vitality gone, she seemed to age rapidly, beyond her years.

  “How are you today, Ah-ma?” Liu Song asked as she took off her coat and peeked into the bedroom her mother shared with Uncle Leo. It was a rhetorical question, for comfort—an aspiration of normalcy. Liu Song filled a teakettle and put it on the stove before returning to her mother, who was awake and struggling to sit up in bed. Liu Song watched as her mother looked around as though momentarily bewildered. Then she looked at Liu Song and smiled. She closed her eyes, puckering her lips emphatically.

  Liu Song kissed both her mother’s cheeks, then licked her thumbs and rubbed in the residual lipstick, rouging her mother’s sallow complexion.

  “Did you eat?” Liu Song asked. She motioned as though scooping imaginary rice from an imaginary bowl with a pair of imaginary chopsticks.

  Her mother shook her head slowly, then nodded, wide-eyed.

  Liu Song went to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of cold rice and a spoon. She struggled to smile when her mother’s hands shook violently as she reached for the dish. Despite her relatively young age, and as much as she wanted to try, her ah-ma was well past the point of being able to properly feed herself.

  “I’ll do it, Ah-ma. It’s okay, I’ll do it.”

  As her mother crossed her arms and gripped her nightgown to control her spasms, Liu Song saw red welts and bruising—fresh rope burns. Liu Song lifted the stained sheets at the foot of the bed and saw that her mother’s ankles had been tied as well. And the brass around the bedposts looked polished.

  “Who did this to you?”

  Liu Song had offered to—no, she’d insisted she would—quit school and stay home to be her ah-ma’s full-time caregiver, but Uncle Leo had said no. He said he would take care of her, as he always had, with a strange brew of herbal remedies, which failed. When Dr. Luke was finally called, he diagnosed Liu Song’s mother with Saint Vitus’ dance—a rare affliction for a woman her age. But her peculiar convulsions, her jerking and twitching, never went away—her health grew worse until there was little anyone could do. A nurse who used to come by to check on her condition had eventually stopped coming.

  “Did Uncle Leo do this?”

  Liu Song gently touched her mother’s wrists as she jerked them away.

  “Did he do this to you?” she pleaded, her words falling on scared, deaf ears as she found a jar of Pond’s cold cream and gently rubbed the salve, which smelled of witch hazel, onto her mother’s bruises. Liu Song asked again, pointing to a framed photo of her stepfather that hung on the wall. Years ago her real father’s portrait had occupied that space. Her mother stared blankly at the photo, and then looked toward the door, blinking, and she smiled with trembling, cracked lips. She made a sound that was lost somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

  “Get out,” Uncle Leo said, as he appeared in the doorway, holding a bottle of camphor oil. “I need to give your mother her medicine.”

  “She hasn’t eaten,” Liu Song said, pointing to her mother’s body, which must have weighed less than ninety pounds. “Can’t you see she’s starving?”

  “Leave the food. I’ll take care of it.”

  Liu Song stared at Uncle Leo. This was the same man who had helped sponsor the local Go-Hing festival—a carnival to raise money for famine relief in China.

  “Make me some tea.” He glared back, unblinking, as the kettle whistled in the kitchen. “Do as I say, Liu Song Eng.” He emphasized his last name, which she was now burdened with, like an animal branded for life.

  Liu Song turned to her mother, who was nodding slowly as she reached up and wrapped her bruised, trembling arms around her, pulling her close, whispering in her ear.

  “I’m s-s-s-so … sorry,” her mother said.

  The teakettle blared.

  Liu Song felt her ah-ma release her and exhale slowly, raggedly. She watched as her mother sank into her pillow and closed her eyelids tightly, as though shutting out the world. When Liu Song stood to leave, her stepfather was still staring at her body, appraising her appearance in her mother’s chevron tabard dress. He grunted and then stepped aside, closing the bedroom door behind her.

  Flower Girls

  (1921)

  After school, Liu Song rode the streetcar from Franklin High over to Butterfield’s, where she stood beneath a leaking umbrella and tried to sing, “Blue days, all of them gone …”

  She forgot the rest of the lyrics when she caught her reflection in the rain-streaked storefront window. She looked so much like her mother, especially in the dress. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had worn it. All she could think of now was her wisp of a parent, tied to her bed, mute, delirious, and slowly starving.

  Mr. Butterfield continued playing the chorus to “Blue Skies,” then the bridge, then back to the chorus as Liu Song struggled to sing, “Never saw the sun shining so bright …” She lowered the umbrella and felt the ra
in on her face.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Butterfield.”

  The old man stood up from his piano just inside the front of the store, tucked away behind the red-velvet curtains of the window displays, which Liu Song had helped arrange—Leedy drums, polished brass instruments, and a life-size statue of Nipper, the Victor Talking Machine Company’s canine mascot. The ceramic dog stared with his head tilted, one ear perpetually cocked, toward a new Victrola in an expensive Chippendale cabinet. Mr. Butterfield cracked his knuckles, then patted his pocket, looking for his three-finger cigar case. “Take a break, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s a slow afternoon anyway.”

  Liu Song stood in the doorway, where the air was fresh, watching flivvers and Model Ts roll by. She counted scores of cars. Their noisy, clattering engines and blaring horns scared a team of horses pulling an old carriage in need of fresh paint. The coachman steered to the side of the street to let them pass.

  Liu Song felt a dizzying wave of melancholy because her father had once owned a tree-green landaulet—an old model, with gas-powered headlights. Liu Song remembered going for bumpy, wild rides on Sunday afternoons to Green Lake and Ballard, sitting on the fender and eating ice-cream floats. Now Uncle Leo owned her father’s motorcar. He rarely drove it and, when he did, he never put the rear top down, not even on sunny afternoons when the weather was perfect. As Liu Song lingered in the past, she felt as though her memories were quicksand and she was sinking deeper and deeper.

  “There’s fresh coffee,” Mr. Butterfield interrupted, yelling from the back room. “And a flask of cognac, if you need something a bit warmer.”

  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.

  THE 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 b
ox 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.