by Aimee E. Liu
They kept on in a stricken, fearful silence, but after the hunters they encountered only a white-haired sojourner crouched by the river with his basket of washing. The Bear River led them to a stream that branched left, then they struck off through a meadow solid with yellow mustard plants and brilliant blue lupine. The meadow was triangular in shape, an arrow dipping down to a shaded pond where a family of elk had stopped for a drink. Following Joe Gon’s instructions, they continued along the stream, entering a high, narrow canyon. It was hushed here, the race of water fusing with the rustle of wings and paws in the undergrowth. Live oak and sycamore and enormous lodgepole pines grew sideways in the canyon walls. There was no trail or other evidence of humans, which was reassuring but also inconvenient, as it meant they had to cut their own path. Paul suggested stopping at several points, but Hope insisted if they kept going, the canyon would eventually widen out.
“We need a flat area to pitch the tent,” she explained, and when he asked how she knew such things, she told him of the trips she used to make with her father, childhood summers and holidays when he was a traveling naturopath. She told about their red and gold wagon, with DOC MIRACLE’S CURES emblazoned on the sides, how proud she was to ride beside her father, how he called her his “assistant,” even though she was just five years old. She was never as happy in Fort Dodge with the Waylands as she was out traveling, and their adventures only got more rugged when Doc took up ranching. They’d pitched tents during lightning storms and on Indian ruins. One night they’d been awakened by a herd of stampeding longhorns. And there was the time they’d fed two strangers supper only to learn in town the next morning that their guests had robbed a bank just three days earlier.
“You are afraid?” asked Paul, extending a hand to help her over a wide, knuckled root.
“Were,” she corrected. “I had no reason to be. The bandits did me no harm. In fact, they told me stories. Jack and the Beanstalk, Robin Hood, of course. But most important was my father’s reaction. He laughed. Nothing scares Dad.”
“He teach you to be brave,” said Paul.
“Look!” Hope clapped her hands. “Isn’t it perfect!”
Ahead, in a clearing lined with berry thickets, blooming apple and massive old oak trees, stood an abandoned miner’s hut. The structure had long ago lost its roof, but the fieldstone walls stood firm. Mourning doves had nested atop one corner, and a family of chipmunks used another as a storage den. Fallen leaves and pine needles padded the dirt floor, and sky was visible through the stovepipe still in position above the fireplace, though no fire had been built here in decades. The only other sign of human occupancy was a tin washtub overturned by the stove, now home to an active universe of spiders.
“You see!” Hope hung their hats on a rusty nail beside the door. “It’s sanctuary!”
Paul smiled, indulgent as a father, and wondered if they could eat the raspberries just coming ripe outside the hut. After a lunch of this fruit, some crackers and sausage from their provisions, and stream water, which Paul insisted on boiling into tea, they set to work. He constructed a broom from birch-wood branches and swept the floor, scrubbed the hut for cobwebs, scoured out the tub, and hung an oilcloth roof across one corner in case of rain. Hope washed their utensils in the creek, unpacked the rest of their provisions, and ordered a kitchen from a ledge beside the fireplace, then explored around the house until she located a ring of spruce trees that would serve as screen for a privy. Using a large flat rock, she dug a pit in soft dirt as her father had taught her, and spread a carpet of clean pine needles around what Dad had always dubbed “the wilderness throne.”
When she returned, Paul stood barefoot to meet her. He took her hand and drew her to the mattress he had fashioned by spreading their bedrolls over a cushion of lavender and sweet grass and feathery sage. “I wish look at you,” he said simply.
Afterward, she wondered how she could have failed to see, when his clothes fell away, when her hands ran, trembling, down his back. Was it her own innate desire to avoid his suffering, or had he orchestrated his body, even in the throes of passion, to shield her? Whatever the reason, it was only after they had lain together, after the tenderest murmurs of inquiry and exploration had subsided, after Paul stepped across to the brimming tub that her eyes discovered what her hands had missed: a net of white-blue and purple wheals that stretched from the small of his back all the way to the crease of his buttocks.
It looked as though an etcher’s burin had dug across Paul’s flesh, and again, and again, and again. Some of the gouges ran straight, some quavered. Reading the scars Hope could see that the lacerations had cut to bone. How many years earlier she could not tell, but no mere accident could have produced such trauma.
She was paralyzed by two competing impulses: to caress the damaged flesh in a futile, womanish attempt to comfort, and to withdraw in revulsion.
As he turned, bringing the tub closer, she held her breath and clutched her arms across her breasts. He said nothing, but reached his fingertips into the water, ran them across her cheeks. He unfolded her arms and touched the hollow at the base of her throat, and the cold forced her to breathe, though what came forth was something between a gasp and a cry. He wet her lips then to silence her, kissed her firmly and bade her stand in the tub. He bathed each breast. He gently unfolded the place where he had entered her, washing away his own seed and sweat.
“No!” She grabbed his wrist, afraid suddenly to lose his scent from her skin, as if the man would go with it.
He stopped and lifted her like a child out of the tub, stepped in himself. “Now you,” he said, as much with his eyes as his voice. And he turned, that she might begin by cleansing his scars.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Long story,” he warned.
She stroked the marbled flesh. “When did it happen?”
“Western calendar, nineteen hundred. First, you need know about one man Chang Chih-tung. Chang is my teacher many years in Hupei. He is very powerful, viceroy of Hupei and Hunan Province both. Chang start Two Lakes Academy. I am student in first class. Chang change whole education system, stop classical examinations, open to modern learning. He do many good things, also can be evil. Very interesting, but—”
Paul knit his fingers together to illustrate the word.
“Complex?”
“Complex, yes. Chang admire Jesus, Socrates, so he follow their example. Some time every day he bring his students and followers around him this kind discussion. This way he hear many ideas. He take many ideas, decide which followers he can trust.”
“And you were one of those he could trust?”
He took her hand and led her back to the bed, where they lay facing each other. “Chang enjoy me. I study him. I memorialize him. I teach him about foreigners and the West. He will use this. He say Japan is good place for Chinese to study—modern country, very good military training, but still Asia, so better than West. Many Chinese now think this, but Chang was first.”
“It was Chang, then, who sent you to study in Japan?”
“At first. Yes. I attend Seijo Gakko military academy.”
“You trained to be a soldier!” Hope was stunned. In spite of Paul’s revolutionary fervor, there was nothing remotely militaristic about his attitude or bearing.
“I learn military arts. Troop movement. Strategy.” Paul smiled. “Chess.”
“What about weapons?”
He shrugged, wrapped her damp hair like a bandage around his hand. “I learn artillery, ballistics, ammunition. Price of these things.”
“You learned to organize a revolution.”
“In Japan I meet Dr. Sun, who teach me revolution is only way China can be free of Manchus and foreigners.”
“But all of this is before you got up at that New Year’s party and called for the Manchus’ overthrow.”
“That is 1903, yes, this only 1900. Through Dr. Sun I join plot to take Hankow. I arrange funds, make connection with Chinatown donors in Honolulu, Singapore.
I return to Hupei to plan with revolutionary leaders. But there is fire in Honolulu, and the money is slow. We must postpone. Other donors pull back. Some men turn, confess to Chang Chih-tung in trade for their lives. So arrests begin. It is not like Japan or Shanghai, where police are cautious with Chinese prisoners. In Hupei, questioning is never words alone. Chang takes heads of ten my friends, some same students he sent with me to study in Japan.”
“And he had you marked for life.”
“Chang does not know how to do with me. My father has been viceroy of Canton, you know. My mother is sending gifts every day, pleading for my life. One day she comes in person, offering Chang statue of goddess Kuanyin, Goddess of Mercy, apple jade more than five hundred years old. Base of this statue is hollow. Inside, three gold bars. Next morning, door to my prison cell is open, no guards. I escape. You see, this Chinese justice.”
Hope shivered. “Your mother saved you.”
“My mother gives to me two times life. This is true.”
“Then I owe her my thanks also.” But the words stuck in Hope’s throat. Paul noticed.
“My mother have one child, Hope, and he is son. This center everything in China.”
“In your China, or in hers?”
“Hope.” He shook his head.
“I can’t help it, I’m afraid of her, Paul. Of the power she wields over you. Everything you tell me about her seems to add to that power, and yet I can’t picture her. I have nothing to compare her to except the queens of fairy tales. In fairy tales, the queen can become invisible, can turn lovers against each other without their even knowing she’s there.”
“You worry too much.”
She placed her hand over the tracery of his lower back. “Do I?”
“I should not told these stories. I think you can understand, I want you know me, care for me. You ask questions, I give answer. But you listen to words you hear, not words I speak.”
“Have told,” corrected Hope, retiring to the shelter of literacy in order, they both recognized, to sidestep the words he had spoken. “I should not have told you these stories. I want you to know me. But, Paul?” She pushed herself up onto her elbow so she was looking down at him. “I’m glad you did, and I don’t want you to stop. Some things are so different—I can’t help but feel threatened. Yet if you don’t teach me where you come from, what forces made you the way you are, then I’ll never truly know you. And when the world starts to close against us, as we both know it will, we won’t have a chance of surviving—together or apart.”
“And you?” answered Paul. “You wish to know me, but you say little about yourself.”
A sudden movement caught her eye and she looked up to see a squirrel spread flat as a kite sailing between the branches above them. “My stories are not as interesting as yours.”
“I like these about your father. Camping with bandits.”
She shook her head, still facing upward. “That world is behind me. Yours is ahead.” And then, unexpectedly, “Did you understand your first wife so well?”
“Hsin-hsin.” He started to reach for her, then pulled back. “I know more about my wife maybe I can ever know you. I can name her parents, cousins, ancestors, village, birth sign, history of her clan. I learn these things like lesson to pass examination. That examination is marriage. But I never understand her. I do not try. This way is easy to leave her.”
He held his hand to her breast, not quite touching but close enough that she felt her skin lifting toward him.
“Help me to understand you, Hope.”
The next morning, they ventured deeper into the canyon. The air was hot and dry, and mosquitoes nipped at their throats. Hope rejected her boots, rolled up her pant cuffs, and walked in the stream, stepping stone to stone. Paul kept to the bank, hands clasped behind his back, head tilted upward, silent. He might be composing a poem, Hope thought. Or pondering the mysteries of the universe. If there was a difference. “Look.” He pointed.
Ahead on their right, up from the stream bank, rose a massive tree whose upper half looked as if it had once been split by lightning. Paul pushed up his glasses. “They are like us.”
“They?” Hope splashed closer.
“It is two trees. Look, two colors.”
Though identical in size and planted so closely that their seeds could have grown from the same pod, one of the trees had the deep gray bark and clustered leaves of a live oak while the other had the pale skin and larger fisted leaves of a sycamore. They were clearly two different species, yet they had literally grown into and around each other, the two skins pressed so tightly that the transition from one to the next was perfectly seamless and they appeared to share the same trunk. In fact, it defied belief that they had not managed to organically enter each other’s systems.
Hope and Paul clasped hands as they circled this strange botanic monument. Every detail suggested the intensity of embrace, from the interweaving of limbs and leaves, to the roots, which held stones and moss and petrified nuts in their combined grasp. Unlike the trunks, the roots grew equally dark in color, so it was impossible to tell which belonged to which parent. One span of roots laced together into a bench that stretched out over the water. “A love seat,” Hope pronounced, pulling Paul down.
He, too, removed his boots now, let the icy water pummel his feet. “I think these lovers forced to part in past life. Now for eternity, they will be together.”
“Eternity.” Hope leaned back and stared up through the fretwork of leaves. “My father used to tell stories like that. About lovers. He said they came from old Indian tales.”
Paul thought for a minute, then asked, “Will I meet your father?”
“Oh, I hope so!” She looked at him sharply. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s waiting for us when we return to Berkeley.”
Paul unhooked his glasses, folded them, then waved them at the tree. “I think these lovers part because bride father disapprove.”
“You needn’t worry about Dad. I told you, he’s a romantic.”
He glanced at her. “You do not speak of your mother.”
“I don’t know much about her. Only …” She chewed her lower lip. “These stories of Dad’s. He was talking about himself and my mother. I could feel it in his voice.”
“Why Indian stories?”
She leaned forward and dipped her hand, felt the current push against her. You wish to know me, but you say little about yourself.
She came back up and forced herself to look at his face. His coloring. The arching cheekbones and flat sweep of his lids above those dark eyes. “My mother,” she answered slowly, “was half Indian. Her mother was from the Seneca tribe, but she died in childbirth. My grandfather was post commander at Fort Dodge. He was from England. My father was always respectful, said my mother’s Indian blood made her very beautiful and headstrong, but I was raised by a white family in a white town. My father was from Boston, and if I had any living Indian relatives, we never knew them. Do you understand?”
Paul lifted her chin with his fingertips. She felt him reconsider the shape of her nose and eyes, the tint and texture of her hair, and there was an irritating eagerness in his gaze, like that of a scientist examining a rare specimen, but that same gaze was so utterly devoid of prejudice that she found it impossible to begrudge him his curiosity.
“When I study history,” he said, “I think Europeans do to native people in America same way foreigners and Manchus do to Chinese. It is good you tell about your mother. And father. Yes.” He nodded slowly. “Yes, Hsin-hsin. I understand.”
He smiled, first at Hope, then up at the intertwining branches above them. “This tree is our children’s history,” he said. “We must remember this place, always.”
IV
HOME
BERKELEY
(1906–1911)
1
BERKELEY DAILY GAZETTE, June 21, 1906
OBJECTS TO THE CHINESE
CITIZEN FEARS THE ORIENTALS MAY SECURE VALUABLE HOME PROPERTY IN HEA
RT OF TOWN
When the frightful calamity to San Francisco brought thousands of homeless ones to this side of the bay a few buccaneering individuals have not only been guilty of renting a home on Grant Street to a half dozen or more Chinamen but have also a scheme to sell the adjoining property to another batch of Orientals. These houses are located in the heart of town, within two blocks of the high school and a region where many comfortable and tasty homes have been erected. Now these are threatened by an influx from Chinatown and a certain deterioration of the value of property.
If this horde of yellow Chinese, with all the filth and disease there [sic] presence means, are to remain within the town limits let it be in some locality apart from decent residences where they can herd together under proper surveillance….
“Baboon!” Mary Jane hoisted the paper like an enemy flag. “What’s the Chinese word for abominations like this man?”
Paul peered at her over his glasses. He and Hope had debated whether to show the article to Mary Jane, but Hope had insisted—to prove to him that her friend would stand by them. “Sha jiba,” he answered.
“I hope that’s worse than what I said.”
“I do not speak its meaning in company of ladies,” he answered with a gallant nod.
“Unfortunately, there are plenty of others exactly like him,” said Hope. “And far too few of these ‘buccaneering individuals’ for us to find a home. What are we going to do?”
“Just stay put,” said Mary Jane, returning Paul’s nod. “Since the Three Musketeers decamped, I’m crawling with room, and your company has spoiled me for solitude.”
It was when Mary Jane started calling Dorothea, Anne, and Antonia the Three Musketeers that the trio decided they’d overstayed their welcome and found an apartment together in Albany. Hope and Paul would have heeded the cue as well, if they’d had a choice, but while housing for Chinese was limited—and disputed—housing for Chinese who had taken white wives seemed to be nonexistent. Kathe and Ben Joe had given up the hunt and moved to a Chinese community near Fresno, and Sarah and Donald had stolen away even before Hope and Paul returned from Wyoming, supposedly following an offer of employment in Maine. Mary Jane was the only friend Hope had who could, and would, take them in. But they had been here nearly a month.
