Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  “What I dream,” said Pearl deliberately, “is that Papa will come get us and never go away again.”

  Hope inhaled sharply. “Yes,” she whispered as Pearl’s large eyes continued to watch her. “I dream that, too.”

  The next morning Mann brought the following cable:

  Relieved you and babies safe stop thanks to doctor stop letter to follow stop Paul stop

  3

  Canton

  6 April, 1916

  My dearest Hope,

  I receive a cable from Dr. Mann telling me only that you have diphtheria but will be well in few weeks. This makes me wild with worry, you know. He does not say if our babies are ill or well. I do not know if your recovery continues. Please write to me as soon as you are able, set my heart at ease.

  I worry all the time, but must believe you will return to me. I have arranged passage for you with China Line steamship, all paid, tickets cut when you are well to make this journey. Our new home is ready at 50 Range Road in American Settlement. This house has very much space. Tell Pearl that she will have her own room and Joy is eager to see how big she has grown. Ah-nie has returned to Shanghai with all house goods from Peking, and our former servants wish return my employ also. Other ways, all is ready for you return.

  Of the rest, I dare not write. William and I have made a safe journey, but I fear for the unity of our hard-fought Republic. And so I fear for us all.

  You must know my thoughts are with you morning and night. I remember that you are my true wife. I remember all that you once told me about your early years without your own mama, and your fear that this same fate awaits our own children. So when I receive Dr. Mann’s cable I went to the Buddhist temple in Nantao and made many prayers before the Goddess Kuan Yin. I know you do not believe in such things, but the temple was a place of comfort for me in my boyhood, and I find it still has that effect during times of greatest hardship and pain.

  I long to hear in your own words that you are well and ready to return my side.

  I am your Paul

  Tientsin

  April 15, 1916

  Dearest Paul,

  I have your letter in my hands and in my heart. I am indeed your true wife, Paul, and you cannot imagine how your assurances have healed me. You are right that the specter of death loomed very large before me that first awful night. You are also right that Yen takes better care of us than we deserve. Were it not for his fortitude and the miracle that he was from Tientsin and so knew of Dr. Mann’s clinic, I assure you I would be in no condition to answer you today. But the good doctor has done everything but turn himself out of his own home to make us all comfortable, and we owe him as well as Yen a great deal. We have stayed these weeks in his own very pleasant compound, and he has a fine library, so I have regained my strength with the help of Hardy and Dickens.

  Dr. Mann also has a puppy, to whom the children have become very attached. I’m afraid they will not leave here without, at the very least, a promise of a dog of their own upon our return to Shanghai.

  The doctor says I will be well enough to travel by the end of this week, and I’ve already sent Yen to arrange for a berth on the SS Yantai, so we shall be chugging into Whangpoo harbor Monday afternoon. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but illness has a similar effect, and the combination of the two have made me miss you more than I ever thought possible. I will ask this. Just this. Please be standing on the wharf to meet us. Please be there.

  With all our love,

  Your true wife,

  Hope

  The day before the family was to sail, Mann hired a motorcar to take them on a farewell excursion. It had running boards and chrome headlights and a spacious tonneau and, within minutes of its arrival, was surrounded by admiring neighbors.

  “It’s extravagant, Stephen!” Hope protested. “You’ve already done too much.”

  “Quite the opposite, I’d say.” He swung the picnic basket into the trunk, tipped his cap to the children already in the car and mugging through the rear windshield. “Anyway, you’re overruled.”

  It was a jaunty cap, Hope noted, charcoal tweed to match his suit, and he had slipped a sprig of peach blossom into his lapel. He looked as though he had been planning this outing for weeks. She smiled. “It’s doctor’s orders, then.”

  “As you wish.” He twirled his hand in the air and bowed, then opened the car door with a flourish. She climbed in, and, tooting the horn to disperse their onlookers, they were off.

  It was a warm day. The sky was stippled with filmy clouds and the air blew soft through the open windows. They sat facing each other, Mann next to Pearl and Morris beside Hope, Yen and the liveried driver up front. Everyone exclaimed at the smooth, purring motion and the speed, in spite of the uneven roads.

  “Not a bad alternative to the Peking cart,” Mann said with a grin.

  “Do you think Papa could buy us a motorcar?” asked Pearl.

  “Yay,” said Morris. “I want a big black motorcar just like this one!”

  Hope rolled her eyes at Mann. “Now see what you’ve started?”

  But he looked back at her without a hint of regret, and said nothing. She faltered, finally answering the children, “It’s because we don’t have an automobile that today is so special. Mustn’t ruin what you do have by wishing for what you haven’t.”

  “Words to live by.” Mann lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a Kansas pioneer slogan, or something you picked up here?”

  She felt herself redden. “Don’t mock me,” she warned, turning away. But he had made his point.

  They turned the corner past his clinic. The gates were open, and Hope could see through to a courtyard filled with white-tunicked attendants and patients resting under shade trees. The scene was peaceful, almost bucolic, in stark contrast to the antiseptic atmosphere of most Western hospitals. She thought of her first encounter with Dr. Stephen Mann at Ste. Marie’s, his recommendation of the Native Hospital, her automatic assumptions about his character. And her hostility.

  He was now pointing out the sights to Pearl and Morris—the distant boats in the harbor, the old Tientsin drum tower poking up above the city wall, the usual fantastic assortment of roadside vendors and entertainers—but every now and then his eyes would wander back toward Hope. They would stop and rest until she noticed, and only then slip back toward the window. Over the past month, through breakfasts and dinners and evenings with the children and daily walks (her “physical therapy”) around Mann’s courtyard, this had become an all too familiar pattern. Though Hope tried to deflect his gaze with laughter or shrugs or blithe conversation—or references to her husband—such efforts had proven as futile as they were halfhearted.

  “Look, Mama. It’s Ch’ing Ming.” Pearl pointed to a series of low hills on which families dressed in springtime colors were picnicking among burial mounds. Ch’ing Ming, or Clear Bright, festival was the annual celebration of the dead.

  “Actually,” said Mann, with a glance toward the front seat, “I have an ulterior motive for this expedition. With your approval, of course, Hope. I thought we might thank Yen for his good services by paying our respects to his ancestors.”

  “What a wonderful idea! How could I not approve?” In fact, she had expected to be toured through Tientsin’s drab Legation Quarter, which she had already glimpsed from the train, and the prospect of seeing Yen’s home village seemed much more appealing. It was just the sort of thing Stephen would think of.

  Once again, she felt his eyes on her. She smiled and shook her head.

  Yen made the mandatory protest, but when Hope and the children insisted, he assumed the role of navigator with such energy and accuracy that it was only minutes before they turned off the main road and down a dirt lane bordered by lush fields of kaoliang. They raised a storm of dust, and Hope was beginning to wonder if their fancy coupe would survive this route when Yen pointed to a cluster of broken walls. This was where he was born, he said calmly. He grew up here. Then, during the 1900 uprising,
some of the farmers were accused of befriending the foreigners, so the Boxer rebels attacked the whole village. He shrugged. “Mei fatse”

  Yen had the driver stop at the base of a neglected slope strewn with toppled grave stele. He sprang from the car clutching his hat to his head, and motioned for the children to follow him. They did so eagerly, gathering fallen branches for brooms, and sweeping the ancestral ground as they had seen Chinese children do.

  “It should have been my idea,” Hope said to Mann as they waited for the driver to open the trunk. “You shame me.”

  His voice darkened, even as his smile held steady. “I would never shame you, Hope.”

  She looked away to Yen’s ambling form, now halfway up the hillside. “He rarely mentions his family.”

  Mann took the picnic basket from the driver, then they left him with the car and began walking slowly after the others. “Yen and I had quite a lot of time to chat before you came out of your fever. He told me his people were killed by the Boxers. Everyone in the village who survived fled. That’s how he came to be in Shanghai—where, I gather, he met your husband.”

  Hope smoothed her perspiring palms on her skirt, conscious of the quickened breeze against her clothing and her shortness of breath at the steep incline. She was still weak. “Yen’s devoted to Paul,” she said abruptly.

  “Yes.” He waved to the little band above them, now plucking buttercups to lay on the graves. “He’s devoted to you, too, Hope. And the children.”

  “Maybe I should have married Yen!” She meant this as a light remark, to defuse the tension gathering in her chest, but it drew a quizzical look from Mann. Rather than risk further discussion, she pushed ahead to catch up with the others.

  As they moved from one weathered stele to the next, Yen recited his relatives’ names. These spun past Hope without her being able to tell the men from the women or how they connected to Yen—except for his mother and father, who had died when he was little older than Pearl. Before their graves, Hope pressed her hands together and bowed three times, thanking them aloud, on behalf of herself and her baby and Morris and Pearl, for giving life to Yen, who in turn had saved their lives. Stephen Mann followed her example, adding that Yen had “given me great happiness by bringing the Leon family to my home.”

  To the children’s delight, Mann had brought along a brilliant, multipaneled kite shaped like a whiskered dragon. It required both his and Yen’s efforts to get skyborne, but when this was accomplished, he handed Pearl the spool of kite string and assigned Morris the task of weatherman. The boy’s disappointment at being denied the controls was overwhelmed by his delight at the trick Mann taught him of licking his finger and testing which way the wind was blowing. Yen, meanwhile, schooled Pearl in the intricate maneuvers that would make the kite soar and dance.

  Stephen rejoined Hope on the picnic blanket, where she was assembling their provisions—sliced sausage and ham and cucumber sandwiches, paotzu in a little hatted wicker basket, sweet rice wrapped in lotus leaves, almond cookies, and a thermos of green tea. He lay on his side watching her hands.

  She pointed to the children. “You don’t make it easy to leave, you know.”

  “That’s the idea.” He had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves before helping Yen with the kite. Suddenly his forearm, with its golden hairs and freckles and long, slender bones, stretched toward her like a lure.

  The cup shook as she filled it with tea, set it down on the blanket between them. “They’re going to miss you terribly.”

  “Are they?” He lifted up on his elbow. “And what about you, Hope?”

  She circled her thumb on the thermos’s smooth surface. She watched him reach for his cup. Instead, his hand veered, closing over her own.

  “Please, don’t,” she whispered.

  “Are you sure?”

  She shook her head. “Yen,” she said. “And the children. They’ll see

  For four weeks they had lived together. This was the first they had touched since Paul’s cable arrived. She wrenched her arm away.

  For a long time neither of them spoke or looked at the other. Mann lay back twisting a stalk of grass between his fingers. Hope watched the paper dragon climb and dive, fighting the wind above them. The wind would claim that kite, she thought, were it not for the children tugging its string.

  He sat up. “Hope, I know what you’re thinking, but I can’t let you go without, at least—”

  She glanced at him with a longing so pure it felt like hatred, then turned quickly back to the sky. Beyond the whipping figure of the kite, the clouds had stiffened. Their brilliance made her eyes water.

  He continued very slowly, “I would give you a different life.”

  But Morris had tired of the kite and was running toward them with his small zigzag steps. Just before he reached them, she turned, her voice breaking. “Write to me, Stephen?”

  For the merest fraction of a second they looked at each other without evasion. She recorded the colors of his eyes. The square line of his jaw. His straight, full lips and backswept hair and his scent of brilliantine and pipe smoke. The low, rumbly voice that had stroked itself so stealthily into her consciousness that she only now realized it was part of her.

  IX

  SEPARATION

  SHANGHAI

  (1916–1919)

  1

  They entered Whangpoo harbor on a clear, treacherously calm afternoon four days later. As Hope waited at the rail, the children chased each other around her skirts, and three Persian businessmen, the only other passengers, huddled at a polite distance. Apart from the junks and cargo vessels by the godown wharfs, theirs was the lone boat coming into dock, and she could see the pier from the middle of the river. It was empty but for the stevedores and two figures at the bottom of the gangway. One was William Tan. The other was Paul.

  The men were so deep in conversation that the steamer was docking before they noticed it. At Pearl’s shout, Paul looked up. William pointed. Paul waved. The children jumped and yelled. As the gangplank was moved into place, Yen began gathering up their baggage. Hope took a deep breath and moved forward.

  Paul scooped Morris into one arm, placed his free hand on Pearl’s upturned head. His hair was uncombed, and his glasses rode low on his nose. Behind them, his eyes seemed dark and small and studious. Hope could feel his caution as he searched for indications of her health and mood. Like a divining rod, her hand dropped to her swollen belly.

  Pearl squealed. William had conjured a coin from behind her ear, now produced another from under her collar.

  “You are well, Hsin-hsin.” Paul smiled.

  “And you’re alive.”

  He put Morris down and straightened the boy’s cap. Both children were transfixed by the magic.

  Paul turned back to Hope. “I am standing on the wharf to meet you,” he said. “As you wish.”

  As you wish. Hope felt something thin and tender falter inside her chest. Stephen Mann had kissed her goodbye on the wharf in Tientsin. He had held her publicly, brutally. He had kissed her full on the mouth.

  “It’s been a long trip,” she said. “Do you think we could go home now, Paul?”

  April 27, 1916

  I feel like a pillow that’s been shaken out, all my stuffing flung to the sky, floated to parts unknown and forsaken, then recovered and stitched back into the original casing, placed on the same old bed, with the same man cupping his face against me. I tell myself that I’m really here, yet it is inconceivable that I could be.

  Last night, our first in this new house, this new stage (as I feel it to be) in our married life, Paul was so gentle toward me. He worried about my illness, about the baby. I don’t believe that our separation entered into his consideration. But another factor, which I dare not even put into words, drove me in a way I could hardly have expected. I pulled him to me, all but ripped off his clothes in my hurry. I felt as if I had been starved for months—it was that visceral a hunger, with nothing spiritual about it. I devour
ed him, exhausted him, sated him, and when he lay dazed and adoring by my side, I turned away.

  I fear for this child inside me. All the deceit and bitterness pulsing through me is being fed directly to this growing soul, and there is nothing in me now to nourish the sweetness, the light, the innocent trust a baby—every baby—deserves. Always before, my pregnancies graced me with the illusion of maturity and courage, that my days of chaos were over and I could be entrusted to hold and protect. This time the illusions have all come crashing, and I feel I am twelve again. Lost. Powerless. And hopelessly unreliable.

  As the steamer turned into the delta coming back, we passed a British gunboat and I remembered that strange mirage I suffered the day Pearl and I first arrived from America. Frank Pearson’s ghost. Then I remembered that in Tientsin Stephen Mann said he, too, arrived in China just after the revolution. He spent his first months working as an assistant medic on a navy vessel. Yesterday I understood that it was not Frank’s ghost calling me home, but Stephen.

  50 Range Rd.

  May 5, 1916

  Dearest Dad,

  I imagine by now you have received the letters I wrote back in March. I hope that the sharpest pains of your grief have faded and you can think of Mary Jane with as much love and sweetness as sorrow. I’ve found some comfort in the knowledge that this point does eventually come—like a light that beckons, however dimly. Too often I’ve had to rely on it. But surely you know this. You’ve more experience than I, and you’ve always bounced back.

  I am sure I’ve missed Mary Jane almost as much as you these past weeks, missed her wisdom and humor and relentless honesty, but life here has allowed me little peace to mourn her as she deserves. As you can see from the address, we are back in Shanghai. The new house Paul’s found for us is large and solid and comfortable. A glassed-in verandah runs the length of the garden side, so I can write there while watching the children play. There is room in the yard for badminton and croquet, in which Morris’s enthusiasm more than makes up for his lack of skill or size. Pearl excels in her role of athletic coach, and they are both ecstatic to be reunited with their old amah Joy (I should say former rather than old, as she’s barely twenty), who views sports as a prime example of Western inanity. Like all those born of the peasant class, Joy and our other amah Ah-nie equate leisure with rest and cannot imagine why anyone—even children—should choose to run and jump like wild animals.