Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Ah, you sense a good juicy story, don’t you?” Sarah stretched her arms in their long white gloves. Something in the motion reminded Hope of swan’s necks, and for the first time in years she thought of Kathe and Ong. The whole wedding journey, in fact, flooded back over her, but Sarah would not feed her nostalgia. “It is and it isn’t,” she continued. “Donald brought me back nearly two years ago.”

  “You said you’d never come.”

  “I said a lot of things.”

  “The baby?”

  “Oh, that was true enough. He’s a big boy now. Gerald. Poor thing, he’s been through the wringer, but he’s a toughie. Five years going on sixteen, and dark as a Chinaman in spite of my coloring—I suppose I never told you his father was a sailor, a South American with some sort of native blood. Enough to pass around here for Eurasian anyway. Eugene’s decent to the boy.”

  “But Donald …”

  “Well, yes, Donald. He died.”

  “Sarah, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Not in the way you mean. He was a good egg to me and Gerry. That’s what I’m doing here, after all. For everything they say about ’em, Chinese men have done all right by me—better’n any white man I ever crossed paths with. But they’ve more than their share of weaknesses, too, and don’t let ’em tell you they don’t. Funny, remember all that ruckus back in Wyoming about the Chinese wives?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Ong had one, too, you know. It wasn’t only Donald. But such are the tricks fate plays on the foolish. Though another woman in my place might call it luck.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Little I knew, Don wasn’t the marrying kind at all.”

  “He wasn’t…” The band struck up a martial waltz, and a slow spin of dancers took the floor.

  “At first I thought it was because I was preggers. Then because of the birth. Then, when I insisted on nursing Gerry myself, I pretended this, too, put him off. I went nearly two years blaming Chinese superstition before I finally noticed how Don favored certain of his male friends. Can’t begin to tell you how stupid I felt then!”

  A sudden revulsion took hold of Hope as she recalled Donald’s insistence on taking one of the rooms in Evanston for him and Sarah alone, the strangeness of Sarah’s behavior throughout that whole trip. She wasn’t sure she could stand to hear the rest of the story.

  “How did you end up here—and with him?” She pointed across to the banker.

  “Ah, I remember now. Squeamish over the details. I knew that about you the very first day. Remember how you fell to pieces when poor Kathe fell in among those coolies? I warned you then, and I’ll warn you now. You’re going to have to buck up even more if you expect to get by in this country. My business is nothing compared to what you’ll hear—what you’ll see going on before your very eyes in China.”

  “But what is this business?”

  Sarah smiled. “When I confronted Donald about his—ahh—preferences, he was really quite gracious. I’d given him a son, which was all his family cared about. Number One Wife had failed to produce, for obvious reasons, and even a ‘Eurasian’ grandson was better than none at all. Donald offered to keep Gerry, let me go off as a so-called free woman, but I pointed out that—even if I’d consider leaving my boy—being the castoff of a Chinaman was no step up from being an unwed mum. So we came to an understanding. He’d support us, and we’d live together, but separately, you see. Only Donald’s plan to become an American lawyer wasn’t working. Then Standard Oil offered him a position as a clerk here in their Shanghai office. It was one of those arrangements people make to get by.”

  Hope shook her head. “Seems to me, you make more than your share, Sarah.”

  “I won’t disagree with that, but you must admit it keeps life interesting.”

  “Does it?”

  “To shorten a much longer story,” said Sarah, “I would have stayed with Donald and gone on with the pretense of being mother to his child—it wasn’t all bad for Gerald, really. But shortly after we arrived here, Donald got sick. Tuberculosis. And then his family descended, and I couldn’t bear it, Hope, the way they swarmed over us and all but plucked my little boy right out of my hands. I could see what would happen after Donald died. He could, too. Eugene was a friend. I liked him well enough. And he was rich and powerful in that Chinese way that entitles him to collect certain types of women as trophies. I was his first white trophy, you might say.

  “Oh, Sarah!” Hope covered her mouth in disgust.

  “The position comes with a good number of privileges, my dear. Not the least of which was permission for me to keep Gerry. Eugene’s given us our own house in Frenchtown.”

  “I can’t—” Hope stood, suddenly dizzy. The story. Sarah’s cool, disengaged smile. The implied warning underneath it all. “I have to find Paul.”

  Sarah shrugged her freckled shoulders. “You and I, my dear, have the distinction of being the only two Americans married to Chinamen in all the Settlements. I’m not as bad as you think, and you may not be as good as you think after this place is through with you. Don’t be too quick to pass judgment.”

  But Hope was already among the waltzing couples, pushing her way as if through tall grass. Paul emerged at the opposite end of the room.

  “Sarah’s here! Sarah Lim—Chou.” Hope motioned with her eyes to the slim, redheaded figure still standing alone where she had left her.

  He followed her glance. “Yes …” But his voice trailed off. The throb of bodies and music was louder now, and he turned abruptly, leading her through a pair of French doors to an empty balcony above the darkened garden.

  Though the night air was biting and damp, Hope breathed it with relief after the crush of perfumed skin and clothing—Sarah’s hideous tale. She hugged herself. Paul was leaning away, turning his top hat between his hands and looking out into the shadows. From below rose the urgent whispers, in French but unmistakable, of a man and woman plotting an assignation.

  “I must go to Nanking tomorrow,” Paul said, loud enough to disperse the whisperers.

  “Nanking!”

  “With Homer Lea and Dr. Sun. It is decided. Inauguration will take place there next week.”

  “Nanking.” Hope tried to grasp what Paul was telling her, but the geography of China was still as foreign to her as its politics. She had only a vague sense of this inland city as a spot on the map connected to Shanghai by an indeterminate mileage of rail and river. The guidebooks identified Nanking as the capital of the last Han Chinese dynasties and of the Taiping rebels. Paul had told her the provisional parliament had been meeting there, but she had given this little weight, as he’d also told her the site for the Republic’s new capital was undecided. And if he’d settled them in Shanghai, surely he believed the government must seat itself here. Why, this ball was an indication—

  “I will return soon as possible,” he said.

  She removed her wine-damp gloves and stood wringing them for something to do with her hands. When she spoke, her voice was too bright. “Couldn’t we go with you?”

  He turned toward her. “You do not know what you are asking.”

  “But—”

  “There is no foreign concession in Nanking.”

  “That doesn’t matter! We came here to be together.”

  “Hope. There are no Western doctors. No hospital. No cow’s milk. No foreign court of law.” Behind those round glass spectacles, he was again refusing to look at her.

  After a moment he set his hat square on top of his head. “Dr. Sun always speaks of you with much respect. You must greet him. Then we go home.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Hope.” Paul’s voice strained against itself. He removed his glasses and stood briefly staring down at them in his hands, then sought her with his naked eyes. He said gently, “That is all I can say.

  5

  January 8, 1912

  Dear Mary Jane,

  Still no answer from
Dad to my bombshell. The slowness of the mails are a horror to one so far from home, and there’s a part of me that warns, wait and find out how large a wound I have gouged before rubbing salt in it. This is but one reason I am writing you my first report from China instead of directing it to him. Coward that I am.

  There is, predictably, good news and bad. The good is that this is a fascinating place, and Paul has planted us in the lap of luxury. You thought perhaps we would be living in a pagoda a la Chinatown? Or one of Lafcadio Hearns courtyard palaces? Not with Paul in charge. For the next year we will be residing in what must surely be Shanghai’s only pink Italian villa! It belongs to a friend of Paul’s who was smitten by Italy. This young Mr. Huei had an architect make some renderings and bought up half the antiquities in Florence, then came home and built this place as a showcase for his treasures. Like many wealthy Chinese, Mr. Huei’s father had invested in property here in the French Concession because the taxes, while higher than those paid by whites, are stable and low when compared to fees levied by the Manchus outside the Concessions. Also, no matter how much the Chinese rail about “foreign imperialism” and “gunboat diplomacy,” those with large enough purses have invested heavily in the international settlements as a hedge against times of unrest, when the curse of foreign domain, or “extrality” (extraterritoriality), magically transforms into sanctuary.

  This is what I mean about good and bad! Everything is all mixed up here, more than ever in the States. Servants are another example. Yes, we have five full time, plus a second amah, no doubt, when the baby arrives and a rickshaw puller and mafoo—carriage driver—whom we share with the neighbors. They all speak colonial pidgin, a jumble of British and Portuguese that is even more offensive to the ear than the talkee-talkee hurled at Chinese journeymen back home. They call me Missy and Paul Master, and promise to do everything “chop chop.” Paul says pidgin is the worst sort of compromise between the races—the result when neither side is willing to do the work to really understand the other. What he means, of course, is that the foreigners have not made the effort to learn Chinese. Since most servants are illiterate in their own language, pidgin represents a heroic effort on their part. No, Paul’s absolutely right, and I’ve made it my first order of business to get at least a functional handle on Shanghainese (a totally different lingo from Mandarin!) so we can avoid this charade.

  Pearl, meanwhile, is in hog heaven. So happy here that I think she must possess some core biological component that responds to this continent as her proper home. I have taken her out for an excursion every day since we arrived, and while I am at times overcome by the sense of confluence that pervades this city, she is enthralled by it.

  You want particulars, I know. It’s so overwhelming though, Mary Jane. Perhaps best to describe as if I were a camera some of what we saw on our outing yesterday. In the same frame, I was looking out from our carriage and saw an emaciated man, muscles standing out from his bare neck and chest and legs in cords as he dragged a towering load of scavenged paper by means of a cloth strap around his forehead and another man dressed in blue silk brocade with a coral-buttoned scholar’s cap and a gold cigarette holder casually dangling from his lips as he rode piggy-backed on the shoulders of a young, perspiring serving girl. There is the Bund, the riverfront avenue with its facades of imposing European colonnades and parades of carriages and lorries and couples dressed in fine English tweeds, while there in the lower right-hand corner of the frame—can you picture?—squats a young mother in rags clutching the body of her limp boy-child, a baby daughter lying silent as a stone beside her, and the woman rocks, howling like an animal, and not a single head on the promenade turns in her direction.

  Pearl says, “Why’s that lady crying, Mama?” When I tell my daughter that the lady and her children are very poor and sick (I do not tell her that I suspect the boy is already dead), she says, “We can bring them to our house.” And I am confronted by the fact that I host the same monster within myself that grins with evil pleasure from the fronts of these British banks and mercantile houses, that glints in the corners of all those blue and green eyes so carefully turned away from the doomed woman and her children. That monster is content to wait and watch, to taste the pleasures of this exotic realm, to convert the foreign into the familiar, to tame that which is primitive or rude, but it will send up shields, post guards at the gates if China’s deeper terrors veer too close.

  “Because we’re not doctors,” I said to my daughter, “and because what they have may be catching.”

  “But what will happen to them?” she insisted.

  “Someone will come,” I told her. “Someone will help.”

  “Like Miss Cameron back home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Cameron will know.” She nodded with certainty, then, “Look!” And she was up out of her seat pointing at a street juggler twirling five plates on the tips of chopsticks while hopping on six-foot stilts—the woman with the dying child no more than a lingering question.

  I am not proud of my reply to Pearl’s question, but I find this place forces all notions of self-protection to a new level. You see, we are alone, Pearl and I with our houseful of servants. This is the rest of the bad news.

  Paul’s government is to be seated in Nanking, former capital of the Ming Dynasty (the last rulers who were not “barbarian invaders”). And because Nanking is one of the few major cities that has no international concession, Paul feels it would be unsafe for us to move there with him. He has promised to return whenever he has a break in his duties. It is just a day’s journey. But it is not what I had expected, and I am so hopelessly unprepared for all of this, Mary Jane!

  Please do not say I told you so. The fact is, I do not want to return, and I would not have chosen differently. Seeing Paul for a few days a month is better than not knowing if we would ever meet again. And once I recover the liberty of my own body, my outlook surely will change. But my confinement looms like a door that is about to spring shut… How I miss you!

  Please write to us, dear heart.

  The letter she had been dreading arrived in the following week’s mail.

  Dr. Herbert Newfield

  Naturopathic Physician, Nervous and Chronic Diseases

  Vibration, Electricity, and Herbs, Mineral Baths

  1311 South Hill Street

  Los Angeles, Cal.

  Broadway 3777; Home 24053 December 16, 1911

  Dear Dolly,

  I received your letter this morning and I think a spanking would do you good. Last I heard you were sick in bed in Frisco and I wrote there and received no reply. I did not know whether you were dead or what—you can write fast enough when you want assistance but not otherwise. I hightailed it up, found your house empty, Thomas and Li-li off who-knew-where, was about to get on to the police and likely would have lit out after you myself if I’d known what you were up to. Might even now if Mary Jane hadn’t got her thumbs into me. That woman could make a lion purr if she had a mind to. You’ve still got the goddamnedest way of saying goodbye I ever did hear of, though, daughter.

  Mary Jane said you were ashamed, and I won’t deny there’s reason, making a decision like this without a word to those who love you. But to cross the Pacific Ocean not even bothering to tell me! You’re right, girl, you’re on a great adventure, bigger’n any of mine, but you’re my only child, and you might have given me something as Pearl’s granddad. I don’t blame Paul. I don’t even blame you for the going… Well, you’re gone now, nothing for it. Just see you keep yourself and that family of yours safe and come back to us someday soon—sooner if Paul’s grand plans don’t come together for the good. Anyhow, you can use this fiver on a late Christmas present for Pearl.

  You know you have my love if not my endorsement of your tactics. Better write and tell me how it is.

  Always,

  your Dad

  How it is. Hope dragged the coarse white stationery across the back of her hand. How it is to come halfway around the world to be
with a husband who is not here. How it is to live in someone else’s home which, at that, belongs on yet another continent. How it is to live with servants and a bodyguard who look at you like some strange Arctic specimen, who never ever meet your eyes, who steal your daughter’s heart and talk about you behind your back but in a language and at such speed that you cannot guess whether they speak with malice or mere ridicule.

  How it is to be summoned to tea, as she and Pearl were last week, by the only “society” for which they might conceivably qualify. Renata Hwang, wife of an immensely wealthy Chinese usurer, had spied Hope with Sarah at the Republican ball and had desired to satisfy her curiosity about this new arrival. Hope believed that, since Renata, too, had a Chinese husband, they would find much in common, so she anticipated the visit with some excitement. As it turned out, Renata was a young, radiantly lovely, and thoroughly spoiled Parisienne whose daughter, only a month or two older than Pearl, appeared in a swirl of pink organdy. Pearl was dazzled and unaware of the comparative plainness of her own smocked pinafore. The two girls played in the Hwang nursery while Renata, who did virtually all the talking, informed Hope about the social hierarchies that dominated Shanghai society—the ladies clubs and Cercle Sportif, the racecourse, symphony, and rituals of tea at the Cathay and dancing at the Palace. “If you have enough richesse,” she said, “perhaps you may be admitted. And if you have some courage ici,” she tapped the emerald brooch fixed to her bosom, “then you may enjoy. But for all that, you and I, cherie, we shall never be accepted.”

  There was one British wife, she said, flicking her thin white hands like handkerchiefs, who was so tormented within the International Settlement for having “married Chinese” that she left her husband and two children, taking nothing, and went in secret to the British consulate where she begged the ambassador for repatriation. Which he granted without argument. Found a home-bound English couple to escort her and booked passage within a week. Renata concluded this story by kissing the large diamond on her left hand with a reverence that both appalled and unnerved the silent Hope. The visit was abruptly terminated when Pearl came running into the room in tears because Renata’s daughter had told her she looked like a Chapei half-breed. Pearl didn’t fully understand what that meant, but Hope did. Chapei was the neighborhood for poor and working-class whites—mostly Portuguese or Russians—who married Chinese.