by Aimee Liu
He wouldn’t say if he was thinking of something in particular, but I knew what he meant.
Tai stands waiting to one side of the door I’ve refused to notice until now. Two steps up, one forward, and we’ll be inside. The green-painted wood and frosted glass will close off the street. The stairs will stretch straight up, light or dark at the top. And I’ll be back.
The door opens with a kick. Tai’s been here before, knows some of the tenants. Families live here now, he said. He knew it would be unlocked.
“You okay?”
I grip my father’s Leica with both hands. “I’ll go first.”
The stairwell reminds me of drawings I’ve seen of near-death experiences. A flare of light, blinding as a star at the end of a long, black, upcast tunnel. A sense of being lifted, drawn weightless toward the light. Sounds filter through the walls, but distant and blurred. The motion of water through pipes. A laugh track. A murmur of indistinguishable voices. The cold, dank smell of damp plaster and rotting wood, reminiscent of the old basement, fills the hallway, and the first step groans.
“The bogeyman on Mott Street,” I say.
Tai holds the door open behind me.
“That was Li, wasn’t it? One last story come to life.”
The door eases shut.
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
I take a deep breath. A story come to life. If only my assailants had been playacting.
It was quiet that night, and dark, the stink of fish overpowering everything else. That boy Mike. He stood blocking me, pushing me forward. Now Tai leaves a space between us. A way out.
His footsteps echo with the hollow planking of the stairs. I can hear the thick, measured cadence of his breathing, and the light makes me squint to look forward, but I don’t turn my head. I keep climbing, let the light surround me. It’s warm in the sunny enclosure at the top before I step into the wind.
The door has been pulled from its hinges, and the rooftop is crisscrossed with laundry lines. Patches of yellow, pink, green, and white whip back and forth, some brush the tarred surface of the roof. The sky has brightened to a crisp, robin’s-egg blue with skeins of cloud like an old man’s beard over flat-topped buildings that stretch for miles, each weighted down by a short, squat water tower wearing a conical hat. It’s too far to see the river, but I can smell it over the fumes of traffic. I can feel the snap of water and wind, the salted ocean it brings to the city. It all seems so much bigger than the cramped, collapsing night that slits my memories.
I stand rooted by the unhinged door. A low wall surrounds the roof with asphalt rolling up its side, darker because of the sun. Bright light makes shadows deeper, colors tougher, contrasts more intense. As a photographer I know this as well as I know that the space behind me is shrinking.
I make the necessary adjustments and begin to shoot the place where I was raped.
The camera offers a removed chamber where I can rest and wait for the glare to subside. The frame controls what I see, lens and shutter give me something to do with my hands.
The wind pushes my hair in front of the lens. I step closer to the wall and begin to see their faces through the flying strands. Rooster hair, they called it. One had a sliver of a mustache and a scar that cut his left eyebrow in half. Another had a mole between his eyes with a whisker that grew from its center. A third twitched and had a voice like a hiccup. They’d brought me up here and stood in a circle around me staring and pointing and yanking my curls. They’d struck matches to prove the green of my eyes. The one with the mustache lunged, pulled my head back, and shoved up my shirt to show the others my breasts. Mike held the knife. Mike, the one I trusted. He came forward with that blade, made me gasp. I fell backward and the fat one caught me, turned me around, threw me forward…
I whirl and catch Tai in my frame.
“They’re not dead. There are others.”
He doesn’t move. “There will always be others, but the ones who hurt you are gone.”
“They’re here.” I train my lens on him like the crosshairs of a gun.
“I’m here, Maibelle. I love you. You’re safe now.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling. But I know you have the power to make them go away.”
A motion to the right, and he’s gone. Into black. The camera allows no peripheral vision. In or out. Like magic.
I step closer to the edge, and the wall rises, higher than it seemed, or than I remember. Waist-high. Above it, the other side of the street pulls closer. Five stories to the ground. A window shade snaps up. A child leans her head against the glass, blows a cloud of mist and draws a line through it.
No peripheral vision. It pulls me over and down, lifts the pavement to meet me. I no longer feel my feet.
“I’m going to keep you from falling,” Tai warns. His hands press, strong and quiet on my shoulders. To my left, not ten feet away, is a fire escape. Like a stile, it crosses over the wall, zigzags down, down to safety. It is scaled with rust the color of dried blood and mounds of white bird droppings.
“How long do you think that’s been there, Tai?”
“As long as this building’s been here.”
“Fourteen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“But it was here.”
“I wouldn’t have had the courage to use it.”
“You might if you’d seen it.”
He lifts his hands from my shoulders, and my feet connect with the rough, black surface of the roof. The street drops into place. I keep my finger on the shutter and follow the slow, cautious progress of a car that has entered the alley at Division Street, creeps forward, lost, rounds the corner, and disappears into Chatham Square.
When I turn around, Tai is smiling. I lower the camera, let the sky widen behind him. A candy wrapper, green and gold with scarlet characters, dances for a moment at his feet as if led by an invisible partner, then rises on the wind and sails toward the river.
“It’s cold. I’m ready to go downstairs.”
A child’s voice answers my knock, and the girl opens to Tai’s greeting. She is about five, with curly black hair and skin the color of cocoa dusted with fine, darker freckles. Her grandmother, a small, tightly shrunken old woman with gray hair knotted close to her scalp, sits in a folding metal chair by the empty fireplace. They both talk to Tai in Chinese while I study the small, well-lit room for traces of the gang den it used to be.
It’s as much smaller than my memory as the rooftop was large. A dilapidated vinyl couch and card table fill it. As decoration, New Year’s calendars and the labels from food packages paper the walls with red, and gold. Pipes and antique sprinklers crisscross the punched tin ceiling. The couch is thick with moth-eaten blankets and a cheap stuffed dog like the ones you win at carnival games.
There are voices in the other room. Men talking hushed and inces, santly, as if they have something to hide. Tai doesn’t seem to notice.
The light that fills the apartment is diffuse and absorbent. Unlike the stark sunshine upstairs, it illuminates even the darkened spaces, leaves no impression of shadow. I lift the camera to my eye and move , forward, stepping as quietly as if I were stalking a bird, and swing around the door frame to a space the size of a closet. Hardly big enough for the twin bed inside. The window opens on an air shaft. A worn gray blanket is pulled neatly to the pillow. Two pairs of black tie shoes sit below the bed. But there are no men.
The voices come from a plastic transistor radio that lies facedown at the foot of the blanket. I reach to switch it off. The room fills with the sound of Tai’s voice and the child’s. She is challenging him. He speaks louder, angry.
I look back into the other room and see his arm rise high, his palm spread. She is turned toward him, hands wide to push him away. He starts to pull down, hard and fast.
“No!”
I let the camera fall and rush forward, grab his wrist and push it a
way.
“Maibelle, it’s a game.”
Two of his fingers are spread in the peace sign. He brings them together, widens them back to a V V for victory. I clutch his wrist and struggle to think.
The child wraps one fist in her other palm.
“Paper,’ She gives me a gap-toothed smile. I let Tai go.
“Paper, scissors, rock,”, he says cautiously. “You know that game?
I retrieve my camera. “I know it.”
But as I straighten up, the child is at my throat. Her grandmother barks at her in a dialect I’ve never heard before, starts to rise. “It’s all right.”
The little girl’s fingers feel like the wings of a hummingbird. She lifts without pulling, entranced by the shine and reflection. She’s a strange child, elfin and dark.
“Where’s she from, Tai?”
“Vietnam. Chinese on her mother’s side. Father’s gone. He was American. They’re here to look for him.”
“Where’s her mother?”
“With her aunt, out trying to find work. They just arrived a couple weeks ago.”
The child’s eyes are elongated, beautifully carved with the same perfectly smooth, flat lids that I used to admire in the Yellow Butterflies. But that’s where the resemblance ends. As I lean close I see, this child’s eyes are not black or even dark brown. They are flecked with color radiating like a wheel—slivers of gray, amber, green—but deep in the center, as unearthly and hypnotic as a summer pool, they are pure blue.
I reach behind my neck. The grandmother waves her arms to protest, and the child flashes astonishment, joy, and dismay in such quick succession that I hardly have time to insist.
“I want to take her picture. Tell them, Tai.”
“You’re sure about this?”
The little girl circles her fingertip over the smooth surface. I remember the way Johnny rubbed and rubbed, until life returned where none had seemed possible. Like a phoenix, he said.
I find Tai’s eyes and rest in their darkness. “I’m sure.”
I move back to get her whole upper body with the Chip ’n Dale T-shirt, her bright pink hair ribbons, the red plastic jewels in her tiny ears. She waits for me to adjust the Leica’s settings, then sits up straight, looks me sharp in the lens, and smiles shyly, happily. Around her throat hangs a golden heart.
I wait until my tears are flowing, and begin to record what I see.
“AIMEE LIU IS A BORN STORYTELLER.”
—Peter Lefcourt, author of Di and I and The Dreyfus Affajr
In her piercing and poignant fictional debut, Aimee Liu crosses continents and generations, from New York’s Chinatown to pre-war Shanghai, to tell a tale of a young woman trapped between two worlds…
FACE
Part Chinese, part American, with red hair and only a vague oriental cast to her green eyes, Maibelle Chung grew up on Mott Street as an outsider. She has been away for years when an irresistible offer to capture Chinatown’s “hidden face” lures the young photographer back. What she exposes is a world of human longing, forbidden love, and betrayal with ties extending all the way back to Imperial China. But as her photographs shed light on Chinatown’s dark truths, her own shadowed memories begin to emerge—memories she has spent a lifetime trying to forget….
“DELICATE. LYRICAL. MYSTERIOUS… THE POWER OF THIS ENCHANTING DEBUT LIES IN THE EVANESCENCE OF REALITY AND THE STEALTH OF TRUTH.” —Kirkus Reviews
“WE ARE SO MUCH A PART OF MAIBELLE’S INNER LIFE, SO INTIMATE WITH HER…. AIMEE LIU’S FIRST NOVEL EXQUISITELY DEPICTS MAIBELLE’S SLOW COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FORCES THAT MADE HER.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
