Gift of the Golden Mountain

by Shirley Streshinsky

  "Damn!" Karin exploded. "That bastard Alex!"

  "Maybe," May came back, "but Thea was the one who lied to you."

  Karin ignored the remark to ask, "What did you do?"

  "I didn't want the kid to drive home stoned, so I made him call his father, and the guy was up there in about ten minutes and packed him off. Didn't have much to say, but he did the job—told the kid to get in his car and wait for him, he didn't even have to raise his voice. Then he apologized to me and Thea, though I'm not sure Thea heard, she was so out of it. I brought her here and put her to bed, and she is very contrite. She asked me if I felt I had to tell you, and I said yes. She is probably on pins and needles right now, wondering how you are going to react."

  Karin was holding her head in her hands. "I guess you're right. I do have my work cut out for me."

  "And you're on your own, Philip can't back you up."

  "He never really did," Karin answered. "Did I tell you Dan will be coming through in a couple of weeks? He called on Saturday to say he got his orders. He's being posted to the embassy in Saigon. I thought sure he wouldn't have to go at all, now that the war is over."

  "The war will be over when there aren't any more American military in Vietnam," May said.

  The telephone rang again. "That's Thea," May said, "she can't stand it another minute."

  Karin cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and answered in a voice with a studied distance. "Yes, we were about to come get you . . . yes, she did . . . not so much angry as disappointed, I think, but we'll talk about it later . . . I hope so, but I guess that is something we'll have to work on . . . yes, in about twenty minutes."

  She came back to the living room, smiling wanly. "You were right. She is very contrite, and very worried—and very sincere, I think. But I'm not sure just how smitten she is with this Hollowell kid."

  "You sound so old-fashioned, K."

  Karin started clearing the food cartons from the sink. "Maybe that is my problem," she answered. "My marriage was a mistake, but saying it doesn't exempt me from my responsibility to Philip. He is still my husband, and he is helpless, and while Kit's great passion to help put him back together again is a wonderful help right now, I'm sure her commitment has its limits. I can't allow myself to forget that someday soon I am going to have to go back and take charge—and I should. It's my job. Philip would have done it for me."

  "If you had decided to . . ." May started, then stopped and shook her head. "Forget I said that."

  "Said what?" Karin answered. "If I had divorced Philip before this happened, would I still feel so responsible?"

  "And so guilty?" May added.

  Karin slipped into her sandals and began to gather her things. "I would have done whatever Thea and Dan needed me to do."

  "Isn't that what you are doing?" May asked. "Isn't that what Philip has asked you to do?"

  "Yes, but," Karin said as they climbed into May's car, "the difference is I hadn't made a break before the accident, and now I never can . . . and live with myself. I'm Philip's wife for life, and nothing is going to change that."

  "Nothing sounds pretty hopeless."

  "We make choices, May. I made one and it turned out to be a mistake, but that doesn't mean I can walk away from it."

  "Some people do," May answered. "My mother did."

  "And look at the pain her choice gave you," Karin answered.

  TWENTY-SIX

  APRIL FOOL'S DAY, 1973, May scrawled in the journal, I hope my starting on this date is not prophetic.

  She was in a small stateroom on the river boat Nam Shan, one hour out of Hong Kong on her way to Macao on the China Coast.

  She wrote: "I am keeping this notebook as a record. For Hayes and Kit, in case. And for Faith, for the archive. I do not mean to sound cataclysmic, it's just that I left in something of a hurry and without letting anyone but Karin know—though by now she will have called Hayes and Kit with my messages."

  She nibbled on her pencil, thinking, and then began to write again. "I have real confidence in the Hong Kong people who are helping me. Kit put me on to them a couple of years ago, and they have been working to set this up since the Thailand fiasco. I will not name any names, or give any clues to their identities here, in case."

  "In case," she repeated out loud. It was possible that something could happen. But they had all been so careful, so much attention had been paid to detail. She scribbled, "If all goes according to plan, I should go into China through Macao's Barrier Gate on April 6 and be back out again on Friday, the 13th. I am operating on the theory that the days between April Fool's and Friday the 13th will be lucky."

  She closed the journal and made her way to the deck, to breathe in the Orient. There was, she thought, nothing in the world quite like it, the sweet smoky smell and steam rising.

  A heavy mist hung over the shores as the Nam Shan, flying the British flag, approached that point where the brown silt from the Pearl Estuary meets the waters of the South China Sea. The line of demarcation was almost pencil sharp, the water was so still. From the upper deck she could make out, even in the mist, the hills of Macao. Beyond them lay China.

  An Englishman, reporting to his wife from behind the pages of the South China Morning Post, read, "The last American troops left Vietnam yesterday. Today, all remaining American prisoners of war will be released in Hanoi." Then he offered, "The Yanks finally decided to cut and run—serves them right, arrogant bastards."

  When his wife attempted to shush him, he came out from behind the paper long enough to scan the deck and announce, "No Yanks here, why are you making all those dreadful squawking noises?"

  May felt an urge to correct him, but she held herself back. It was just as well, she thought. It showed she was passing already, if only in the mind of a smug, middle-aged British couple. She thought instead of the report from Vietnam. Hayes would be even more worried now about Andy's child and his mother, and she wasn't making matters any easier for him by choosing this time to smuggle herself into China. Karin's mind would be on Vietnam, too. Dan Ward would soon be on his way to Saigon to serve as a marine guard. It is all so strange, she thought, how so many threads of their lives seem to be coming together here, in Asia.

  As the docks at Macao hove into sight, the boat took a long, slow dip and May's stomach rose and fell with it. Her heart began to race. She held hard to the railing and faced into the stiff, hot breeze to try to catch her breath. She did not recognize her own anxiety, did not realize her body was reacting to the fear that had been buried in her for most of her life.

  She was to make her way to the old Bella Vista hotel, register as Kwan Da-yong, and wait to be contacted. The mist that was turning into a light rain seemed to be conspiring to set the stage.

  She tried to imagine how it would be, meeting the woman who had deserted her, the mother who had lived for so long inside of her. She tried to set the scene, predict the dialogue. "I'm the daughter you left behind," she would say, "I'm the one you walked away from, and never bothered to look back." And her mother would say . . . She could never get that far, never imagine even how she would look or what the sound of her voice would be. She could only see herself standing there, in the middle of an empty room—it was always empty—saying, "I am the daughter you left behind . . ."

  The Bella Vista, a rambling old colonial hotel set into the hills high above the Praia Grande Bay, had been in a state of decline for several decades. From the end of the Second World War until 1950 it had served as a NAAFI for British soldiers. It was all pillared splendor and faded grandeur from another century, now quite shabby except for the wonderful views from the balconies. Aside from two meals on the verandah, where a warm breeze was blowing, May stayed in her room, waiting.

  In a drawer she found a faded booklet that detailed the history of the hotel. It included a poem called "Macao" written by a young English cadet named Jollye, who had stopped at the hotel for a time, the booklet reported, before being posted to Malaya where he was killed in a jun
gle ambush in the 1950s. She scanned the poem:

  An alien city rimmed by shallow seas

  And purple islands, at the world extreme. . .

  At the world extreme. She sat propped against the iron headboard of the bed and a cramp in her neck caused her to shift. At the world extreme. She looked out over the calm sea, watched as a junk made its way slowly across her field of vision. When she could no longer see it, she turned back to the poem.

  The yellow hour of twilight that recedes . . .

  The slow sad songs girls sing. . .

  She stood, stretched, squinted into the light. Once more she glanced down at the poem and caught a closing phrase:

  ". . . a woman I loved too much . . ."

  A woman loved too much. She wondered if it was an Asian woman he had loved too much, or one he had left behind in Britain.

  How can you love a woman you have never known, she wondered. The thought stopped her. Is that what she expected? For her mother to love her? Did she think it was an automatic response, motherly love? That once you had it, it never went away? Was she going to China to meet her mother and collect what was coming to her—all that stored-up love? No! Absolutely not. If that was what she was expecting, she should turn right around and go home and hug Kit and crawl into bed with Hayes and make her own babies, and hold them tight and love them hard and never let them doubt, not for a minute. You can't store up love, you have to use it.

  So what did she expect? she asked herself. Why was she going to find her mother? She knew why. To shed some light on the dark place that had existed within her for so long, simply to see the woman and understand that she was just that—a woman, a human being, no goddess with superhuman qualities. Not the golden creature who still appeared in her dreams, beckoning her to come with her.

  She had always believed that when the dreams stopped, she would be free of her mother. But they had not stopped.

  She wanted Hayes to be with her, she wanted him so much it was all she could do to keep herself from going down to the lobby and putting in a call to tell him where she was. That was the hardest part, cutting herself off from Hayes for even a few days. The letter she mailed that morning would reach him when she was already inside. There was no turning back . . . she had come this far, everything was in place, she could not waver.

  The waiter brought her a note with the bottled water she had ordered. She was to go to Luis ca Moes Square at four that afternoon and walk through the old Protestant cemetery.

  She couldn't fathom why they would choose to meet in a cemetery. Maybe in a ghoulish way they wanted her to feel at home. It was Western inside the walled garden—old and beautiful, spacious and ornate with the heavily carved old stones and frangipani bushes spilling flowers over the green, grassy graves. She was standing before the stone of Fidella Bridges, beloved daughter of James B. and Sarah A. Endicott, who was born in Macao on August 21, 1853, and died on September 15, 1859. She was thinking sweet little Fidella, poor James and poor Sarah. Sacred to the Memory of. The man—Chinese, short, wearing black trousers and a gray short-sleeved shirt—came walking rather blithely down the stairs that led into the cemetery and headed straight for her. There was nothing secretive about the meeting. He smiled broadly and said she should call him "Joe" and that everything was set, that tomorrow she would meet her Chinese "family." He told her the family numbers seven or eight—depending on who works on any given day—and comes through the Barrier Gate every morning at seven to work in the fields around Macao. They go back through before eight at night, when the gate closes. She was to join the family in the fields tomorrow and work with them for three days so she could study their gestures, their dialect, and learn how a peasant girl should act. If she was a good student, she would be allowed to go into China with them on the evening of day four.

  Every joint in her body ached, she felt as if her back was permanently deformed and she knew she had no vocation for hard physical labor. Coming back to her room at the finish of the third day in the fields, she attempted to write in her journal. "The family," she began, "has taken me under its wing. I have learned the proper way to spread night soil, the proper way to pull weeds, the proper way to tie my apron, the proper way to hold my chopsticks. Proper for a young peasant woman from Wanchi. I work without a hat to get as dark as possible, and without gloves to toughen my hands. I also know how to answer if I am asked to produce my identification certificate from the Revolutionary Committee for my county. It is a pretty good forgery. I suppose some of Dad's old nemeses would say that makes me a cardcarrying commie. We go in after work tomorrow. Tonight I must sew my stash of gold and Silver coins, and some pieces of jade, into the gray pajamas I will be wearing. There is also a money belt, in which I have gold taels. To pay and to bribe, if it becomes necessary. I will be able to carry only a small knapsack to hold some clean rags. I am expecting my period. Tampax is not allowed. Welcome to the dark ages. I am too tired to write any more."

  At seven on the evening before she was to go in, Joe took her to the temple of Yuan Yin to pray for a safe journey. She found herself looking into the goddess's smooth face and whispering, "Please bring me home safely to those I love." Joe gave a few last-minute admonishments and made her go over the route and all the landmarks he had insisted she memorize before he returned her to the family. Before he left, he smiled and said, "Until we meet again," in the peculiar brand of English he spoke.

  They approached the Barrier Gate a few minutes before eight, just at closing so the guards would be thinking about their dinners and not pay so much attention to the last-minute rush of workers returning to China. Because of her height, she rode in the cart. She lifted her eyes as they approached the old archway that marked the border. Across the top was enscribed: A Patria Honrai Que A Patria Vos Contempla. As the cart rolled toward the Chinese border officials, her heart was pounding so hard she was certain it could be heard above all the chatter and noise the family was making.

  A large, conical hat shielded her face and her eyes were trained on her lap. She had her hands in the folds of her apron so the blisters could not be seen. In a moment it would be her turn. She began to breathe through her mouth; she was sure every move she made could be heard. The silence was broken by the wild flapping of a red-brown chicken that had got loose, setting off a cacophony of voices, calling and screeching. In the periphery of her vision she could see feathers flying, and behind them the drab green uniform of the officials, and a high-pitched voice filled with authority, shouting. As the feathers floated lazily to earth and the noise calmed, the guards waved the family through. In the confusion, they had not asked questions. Her teeth were clenched so tightly that her jaws ached. She gave herself up to the lurching of the wagon, allowed the crunching noise of the wheels to enter her bones. Her ears rang with the aftermath of fear.

  China was dark, quiet, vast. After less than an hour the lurching cart stopped at the dirt road where she was to leave the family. They had been paid by Joe. When she offered more, the father refused, smiling but determined. The girl who had braided her hair giggled and pressed her hand in goodbye, and she had an awful urge to shout, "Don't go." She did not. The first rule Joe laid down was "Follow the plan and do exactly as you are told." And then he had said, gently, "If you do not, you could hurt all of us who want to help you."

  It was dark now, but the moon was full and so bright she could easily follow the road. She walked some distance—a kilometer, Joe had said—until she came to a small harbor with several dozen sampans, just where he had said they would be. It took three tries before she found one that would be heading upriver in the morning, and would take her on. A large old woman with short, bowed legs said, "Climb aboard, climb aboard" almost before she could finish telling her where she wanted to go. Soon she discovered why. The woman lived on the boat with a son who looked to be about fifty and was mute, whether by choice or not May could not say. He simply did not talk, and the poor old soul was starved for company.

  That night the cicadas'
song echoed over the water, loud and shrill and throbbing. May had been given a pallet in the corner of the boat under the roof, and a pot of very hot green tea. From this perch she could smell the mud, smell the night. Brown and green and gray, the colors of China. She was not afraid.

  Almost at first light, as the son poled the boat from the nest of sampans, the old woman started talking. She talked compulsively as she made their morning gruel. She could not stop: stories of her girlhood, of her father and her mother, stories from another time. It was why she took her on, May realized. She was a fresh ear to hear all the old stories. It was why, she supposed, the son had so thoroughly tuned out. The woman gave May some nets to mend, but when she saw the blisters on her hands she took the nets away and brought out some White Flower Medicated Oil and rubbed it into her palms, murmuring, "so young, so young." It was the only glimmer of interest the old woman showed in May. Not once did she ask her any questions.

  May left the sampan at midday and walked for perhaps an hour along an empty country road. She wished she could have brought a watch; it was terrible, not knowing the time. The only people she saw close-up were two men sitting on their haunches near a flame tree. The colors struck her as outrageous—the orange-red of the tree against a field of brown and green, the tight brown muscles of the men's bare legs, sculpted by years in the fields. She could not let her eyes wander, so intent was she on spotting the hut that would be standing alone in the middle of a field of Chinese cabbage. When finally it appeared, she felt relieved enough to lift her eyes and look out over the green fields which merged in the distance with low hills. Dust and manure and the smell of green things growing filled her nose and mouth and eyes. A water buffalo moved slowly across a field, straining at its harness. She could feel slow beads of sweat slipping between her breasts, the prickly dampness of the money belt around her waist. She sat on a stump and fished two gold coins out of a pant cuff. That is what Joe had said it would cost.