by Aimee E. Liu
CRITICS APPLAUD
CLOUD MOUNTAIN
AND AIMEE E. LIU
“Aimee Liu is a born storyteller.”
—Peter Lefcourt, author of Di and I and The Dreyfus Affair
“The prose has a haunting, lyrical quality and an aura of authenticity.”
—Library Journal
“Impressive … colorful … epic … Liu’s lyrical prose is graceful and evocative.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A heroine whose courage, conviction, and strength will resonate in our hearts and minds long after the last page is read.”
—The Literary Guild®
“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
“What a great storyteller Aimee Liu is! Thank you, Aimee, for a wonderful book … a gripping story of epic proportions.”
—Dr. Amy Ling, director, Asian American Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Poignant… entertaining.”
—Dallas Morning News
“A saga that vividly and poignantly traces the history of a star-crossed couple.”
—Asian Reporter
“A timeless tale of forbidden love—a page-turner that you’ll wish never ended. If you enjoyed The Thorn Birds, you will love CLOUD MOUNTAIN.”
—The Book Report, America On Line
“A telling look … brings to life the streets and intrigues and the brutality of a China struggling to change its future…. The history here is fascinating.”
—Santa Barbara News-Press
“Excellent … very romantic … a wonderful portrayal of the historical turmoil of the period.”
—The Bookseller
“Admirable.…Very few artists have the ability to use intricate historical accounts as well as creative skills to weave a ‘full-proof’ story, as does Liu.”
—Pacific Reader
“A moving story of love surviving cultural differences and the distance of miles and of time.”
—KLIATT
“Determined characters and searing emotion—an epic chronicle of two intertwining souls…. A perfect curl-up wintertime read.”
—AsianFocus (Seattle, WA)
“A true-life based saga of forbidden romance.”
—Buzz Weekly
“Epic … historic … rich … A prize….What a story!”
—Readers Exchange (Studio City, CA)
CLOUD MOUNTAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Aimee E. Liu
Cover image courtesy of Redd Angelo
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Published by Jessfield Press
ISBN: 9781625361370
PROLOGUE
Over the three cliffs of fog
Descends the chill of August.
Animals in the forest cry in alarm.
Yellow leaves are marked by worms.
Autumn surprises this old man,
And crossing the stream becomes arduous.
Winds and clouds are of one kind.
My dreams span the four mountains.
REQUEST
LOS ANGELES
(OCTOBER 1941)
I have a letter from my husband. A small, tailored man wearing a Panama hat brought it to the gate a few minutes ago. He had weak shoulders, this man, a complexion like butterscotch, and he started at the sight of me. My marbled hair and faded blue eyes were not what he was expecting, and then, when I spoke my Chinese name, Liang Hsin-hsin, the tones went flat from lack of practice. He hesitated, clearly torn between duty and doubt, before handing me the envelope. He said he’d received it from his cousin. I did not recognize the cousin’s name any more than I did the young man’s own. I understood this much, however: with the war in China, such human chains are the only sure way to get a message through.
Though I knew it was futile to hope for additional information, I asked my caller to come in, have some tea before starting back down to the city. But he cast a wary eye over the tiered patio and black-bottomed pool, the whitewashed walls and terra-cotta roofs of this sprawling Spanish-style compound where my daughter and her husband have decided I must live with them. I couldn’t blame him. He must have thought he’d stumbled into some gangster’s or movie star’s hideaway. To me, too, this hilltop villa feels as remote as a cloud from the rest of the living world.
As the children were not home to persuade him, I let my visitor go. Still, I waited to open the letter. It’s been years since the last one. To hurry now seemed pointless, and the sun was going down.
From the guest cottage where I am staying I can see a thin band of Pacific Ocean floating above the crisscrossed sprawl of Los Angeles. Throughout the day this band turns from green to blue to silver to gold and then, precipitously, to black. Of course, I know better than most the connection between this shimmering line and the other side of the world, yet I still rely on the sun, after slipping over the edge each evening, to send back its report. When the sky ignites above the dark horizon, I feel reassured that Paul is seeing the opposite glow as dawn.
Now I draw the curtains and inspect the letter. Under the glare of my desk lamp the envelope appears tattered and grimy with the oils of a hundred hands, but the paper inside bears only my husband’s markings. It is addressed from a numbered apartment in Chungking and dated April 2, my birthday six months—no, two years and six months ago. I stare at the number, 1939, with a curious mix of sadness and reproach, as if the long delay en route were somehow our own fault. I know it is only the war and time, geography and history that are to blame, yet my inability to accept these particular opponents was always our deepest problem. Now I don’t know how to proceed. What relevance can words written two and a half years ago have to me today?
But the immediacy of the brush-worked letters overwhelms the numbers at the top of the page. Paul’s hand is so evident in these jerking strokes, I can just see him leaning over his table, eyes pinched with effort behind their round glasses, a ruff of gray hair skimming the tops of his ears, the wide sleeves of his scholar’s gown fanning down from his shoulders. He writes English like the stranger he has become, awkward with his calligraphy brush, using as his tablet not the elegant rice paper he once demanded but crude sheets torn from government issue pads. Before I read the first word, I feel all that he has spared me by sending me away. By allowing me to leave. After nearly a decade apart I still don’t know which is the truer version.
He writes that we have lost everything we built together. Everything he owned. He has escaped the bombings and firestorms and fled across China with nothing but one bag of summer clothing and the Shetland blanket I gave him our first Christmas in Shanghai. He has survived the Japanese and the Communists and Chiang’s scorched earth policy just as he survived the blacklists and firing squads that regularly took aim at him during our years together. I was the one who could not survive.
But now his brushstroke wavers. He writes in the language of mourning.
Dearest Hope, here all is gone for me, everything change. I do not know how to do in future. I think, if I come to you, now will be better. Only so much time passed. Do you keep place for me in your heart, your home? I cannot be certain unless you answer.
I await your answer,
Your husband, Paul
The light flickers. Two and a half years. I stare at the letter, dry-eyed, no longer reading. Laughter at the gate signals the children’s return. I don�
�t know if or when or what I will tell them. Even if I should tell them. So I turn out the lamp. Let them believe I’m sleeping, Mama needs her rest. My daughter is parading these days as a “Eurasian” starlet and her doleful young husband supports us all off his father’s investments in the railroads. They think I’m old at sixty. That my hardest choices are over. They don’t know me any better than I know the man who wrote this letter.
Yet Paul knows what my answer must be. He remembers when our story began … and so do I.
BOOK ONE
Three hundred white strands are suspended.
Together they fall like the roots of clouds,
Splitting the cliff and leaping from the sky,
Hanging streams among the rocks.
Yin and Yang form twin towers,
Mist and fog mysterious gates.
The drunken sky weaves its summer brocade.
Mountain spirits dare not touch it.
I
MEETING
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
(1906)
1
I remember that the young woman I was then had no intention of celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday. Hope Newfield preferred to keep her age to herself, and the day, in any case, was too warm for festivities. Unreasonably warm, she thought. Berkeley in April should be either crisp and breezy or drenched in mist. Instead, from the verandah of the house where she boarded, Hope could see particles of dust shimmering like fool’s gold. The lawn had a withered look, and all the moisture it seemed to beg for was pouring down the crease between Hope’s imprisoned breasts, pasting that old whalebone corset to her back, and steaming her feet in their proper but insufferable laced black boots.
“Many younger girls,” said Eleanor Layton, peering over Hope’s shoulder at the letter in her lap, “would give their souls to marry Professor Chesterton.”
While waiting for her next student, Hope had been reading her father’s birthday apologies, a confession that the Oregon gold mine he’d bought in ‘04 probably had been seeded. My girl, I promise, I’ll have a little something to send your way by Christmas. Hard times, hut thanks to your Professor Chesterton, least you’re safe and sound…
Eleanor stepped back waving her garden shears. “Delay much longer, you’ll be worse off ’n me, Hope. Maybe my dear husband’s gone, but I do have my memories.”
And a reliable income and property, thought Hope, and, through that, the conviction that all of Berkeley society embraces you. Eleanor was an officious, middle-aged widow, hardly taller than Hope but several times as wide, who favored crinoline bows, velvetta hats, and was perpetually struggling to reduce. Hope worked hard to view her with sympathy or humor—her five-dollar rent was a bargain she could ill afford to jeopardize—but the landlady’s busybody ways did get tiresome.
Eleanor picked the yellow leaves off her potted gardenia. “You know,” she said, as if the thought had just occurred to her, “you’ll never do better.”
Hope rolled her eyes. “Whether I will or will not do better is irrelevant.”
“Ah, irrelevant is it!” Eleanor cried. “Well, if it’s love you’re after, you’d best hurry. Love’s a game for the young and lovely, and the mirror, my dear, never lies.” She snapped her clippers for emphasis and let the screen door slam as she went inside.
“Happy birthday to you, too,” Hope said under her breath, turning defiantly to her reflection in the parlor window.
In any ordinary looking glass, the bright blue of Hope’s eyes and the paleness of her skin left no doubt as to her “loveliness.” Unfortunately, the play of light in this dark glass stripped away her color while highlighting the ambiguities of her face. But, she reassured herself, her aquiline nose could as well be the legacy of English or Roman forebears as her one Seneca grandmother—who had died long before Hope was born. And her hair, though dark, was fine and wavy as no Indian’s she’d ever seen. If Hope’s bloodline had not been public knowledge among the boys in Fort Dodge they surely would never have guessed it. And here in California, not even Eleanor Layton suspected she was part native. No, the mirror never lies, Hope thought. She had nothing to worry about.
“Hulloo-oo!”
She looked up. Shading her eyes she saw it was not the new student, but Collis Chesterton swinging around the weeping willow at the foot of the yard. In spite of the heat, he wore his signature tweeds and bowler, and moved with lumbering precision. His recent trip to Los Angeles, Hope saw, had poached his nose and forehead.
She stood as he reached the top of the steps. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
He took her hand and gave it a kiss more mustache than mouth. “I hurried back.”
She reclaimed her hand. “… how was your interview?”
“Superlative!” He grinned. “G. R. Granville—that Pasadena construction tycoon I told you about—he’s put up five thousand dollars for a department he’s calling—” he cleared his throat “—Modern Austro-Germanic Studies. Granville’s decided Austria is the cradle of twentieth-century civilization.”
“And your role … ?”
“What would you say to department chair?”
“I guess I’d say congratulations.”
“Thank you, my dear.” A courtly bow.
“I’d ask you in, Collis, but I’m expecting that new student. Mr. Liang?”
“Yes.” He drew a yellow handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose. “That’s one of the reasons I came, to warn you. I’m told he’s something of a troublemaker.”
As faculty advisor and Hope’s referral to the Asian students she tutored in English, Collis had a credible interest in such matters, but his timing today made her suspicious. “In what way?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing serious. Celestials and their mystical cults and intrigues. But best be on your guard. You know.”
Hope knew little of the kind. Of her ten Chinese and Japanese students, not one had ever directly met her eyes or shaken her hand, and questions regarding their personal lives or beliefs were invariably answered in monosyllables.
“Mr. Liang is a mystic then?”
“Hardly! One of the moderns, calls himself a republican. Wants to overthrow the imperials back home. Other fellows call him a traitor.”
“I see.” Hope had read in Harper’s about these revolutionists, their campaign under Dr. Sun Yat-sen to bring democracy to China. She thought Mr. Liang sounded interesting.
Collis took a step toward her. “It’s been three weeks, Hope.”
At that, a floorboard creaked inside, and Eleanor’s shadow drew away from the screen. Hope took her suitor’s elbow and steered him back down the steps.
“I have been considering,” she said.
“Well, I should hope so!”
And she did like the way he towered over her. He was fair, strong, accomplished, respected. It should be a simple matter to say yes. But at close range, Collis Chesterton smelled of breakfast meat, and he was just so positive about everything … especially his future with her.
“I’m sorry, Collis,” she said. “But he really will be here any minute.”
He tugged on his ear, eyes on the scrubby grass, then snapped his fingers. “I left out the best! Granville wants me to make a study expedition to Europe this summer, and when I mentioned our plans, he suggested you come along as my—well, researcher. Cagey old bastard, said to consider it his wedding present.”
“Collis—”
“No, now not a word. I’ll call in a few days.”
As he leaned forward and planted a kiss on her cheek, Hope reached—fought—for some shred of sensation she could associate with passion. All she felt were his whiskers.
When he had gone, she returned to the verandah and flipped through the new Leslie’s Weekly, but as often happened after Collis’s visits, her thoughts were back with Frank Pearson.
Hope would have said yes to Frank without question—and she knew it the first moment she saw him, four years ago now, helping a little boy fallen from a wag
on down on Adeline Street. Frank was brawny and warm, a compassionate physician with a voracious appetite for books and exploration. Together they rode up into the Oakland hills and walked the shoreline all the way to Albany. One day they borrowed a boat and sailed around the point to Cliff House and on, clear down the peninsula, so far they had to return after dark, navigating by moonlight. But all the time they were together, Hope never felt the slightest twinge of anxiety or fear. Frank’s protection was like a glove that held her close, kept her warm and dry, yet left her free to move. He thought women should have the Vote. He considered education a lifelong pursuit. He believed the world was waiting to be seen and there was nothing so suffocating as the smug complacency of American high society. This comment prompted Hope to put their relationship to the ultimate test. After swearing Frank to secrecy, she revealed that her mother’s mother was Indian. Frank responded by sweeping her into his arms and, laughing, said he knew there was something wonderful about her. The son of a Baltimore steel baron, Frank Pearson offered Hope the tantalizing prospect of snubbing the same elements of society that scorned her while, at the same time, marrying among them.
The next evening Frank was summoned to the Barbary Coast to patch up some casualties of a dockside brawl. A stevedore found him the following morning with a harpoon through his throat.
Hope’s first public appearance after Frank died was a suffrage rally, and though everyone was cheering and stomping, the crowd’s exuberance reduced her to tears. She plowed blindly into Collis Chesterton, and he insisted she make it up to him by letting him buy her a cup of coffee. When he learned she’d just graduated from Mills College and was supporting herself by tutoring spoiled rich children by day and immigrants by night, he presumed her distress was financial. He explained that, as de facto advisor to the university’s Asian students (he taught European, not Asian, history and was filling in only because no one else would volunteer), he was always looking for able English tutors. Though Hope spoke not a word of Chinese or Japanese, Collis assured her that such knowledge would only lead to her coddling the boys. He also promised a reliable income of ten dollars or more per week—nearly double what she had been earning.
