China Dolls

by Lisa See

  “Monroe, I want you to meet my new friends. Grace, Ruby.” I tugged on my brother’s arm. “This is Monroe.”

  I could read the concern on his face as he stared at the two strangers, especially Ruby.

  “Monroe,” I went on in a pleading voice, “can you give me another couple of hours? Grace and Ruby are going to take me shopping.”

  “I’m not sure about this, Helen,” he said.

  “Please?”

  “What’ll I tell our ba?” he asked.

  “Tell him I had to stay late at work—”

  “But you aren’t at work—”

  “Then I’ll take the blame.”

  He glanced warily from Ruby to Grace. He took his responsibility as my older brother very seriously.

  “Please, Monroe, please?” I begged as hard as when I was five and he had a bag of sesame candies I wanted him to share.

  It was his duty to watch out for me, but he loved me too. More important, Grace seemed to have caught his eye, just as I’d hoped. He’d want to impress her with his openness.

  “You promise she’ll be safe?” he asked, his voice demanding truth.

  “Absolutely,” the two girls replied in unison.

  “All right then.” He addressed me directly again. “I’ll cover for you this one time. I’ll see you back here at seven o’clock.” He tucked his hands in his pants pockets and nodded at Grace. “Nice to meet you.” With that, he pulled his shoulders up under his ears and sauntered back the way he’d come.

  We found a telephone booth and looked up the address for a dance shop, then walked several blocks out of Chinatown until we found it. We made it just before closing time, but the clerk volunteered to stay late. Ruby and Grace helped me pick out navy satin shorts and a long-sleeved white blouse to wear for the audition, as well as two pairs of dance shoes—one for regular dancing and the other for tap. Their eyes thinned into slits when I opened my wallet. Cash! I ignored them, saying, “I hope this won’t be a waste of money.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Ruby seemed sure of everything. “We’ve got two full days to teach you the basics.”

  • • •

  I TOOK THEM to a noodle shop on Grant that I promised was one of the best in Chinatown, but Grace looked as jittery as a wet mouse.

  “What should I get?” she asked.

  “Pick your favorite. Remember, I’m buying.”

  Grace blinked. “What I mean is, I don’t know what these things are. I’ve never eaten Chinese food.”

  “Where did you say you’re from?” Ruby pried.

  “I didn’t say, but I’m from Plain City, Ohio,” she answered, guarded.

  “Is it one of those places that’s too small to have a Chinese restaurant?” I inquired.

  “Only about two thousand people live there, so I guess so,” she replied.

  “Cripes!” Ruby exclaimed.

  I shook my head in disbelief. The population of San Francisco’s Chinatown was ten times that, and the larger city surrounded it.

  “I’ve never been to a place where you couldn’t get Chinese food.” After a pause, I asked, “Didn’t your mother make it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s shocking!”

  Grace put her purse on the floor.

  “My mother says you must never do that,” Ruby chastised.

  “Mine too,” I agreed. “Do you want all your money to run out of your purse?”

  Grace blushed and quickly set the purse back on her lap. “We don’t have that custom in Plain City,” she said. After an uncomfortable silence, she added, “You haven’t told us anything about you yet, Helen.”

  “I grew up a block from here,” I answered. “Baba’s in the laundry business—”

  Grace brightened. “My family has a laundry too.”

  “My father doesn’t run a laundry.” That came out haughtier than I intended, and I could see the change in Grace’s expression. I tried again, flecking my voice with jasmine petals. “My baba is a merchant. He sells supplies to laundries: claim tickets, washboards, irons. Things like that. Not just to the mom-and-pops in this city, but to laundries all around the country.”

  The whole time I spoke, I searched Grace’s face. She’d pulled away, but the look in her eyes! Her family’s laundry was probably some little hole in the wall in that dinky town of hers.

  “My parents are very traditional,” I continued. “Filial piety begins with serving your parents, which leads to serving the emperor (in our case, the president), which ends in establishing your character.” Apparently, Grace wasn’t familiar with that aphorism either. “I wasn’t allowed to take dance classes, as you know. My brothers and I could speak only Chinese at home. I wasn’t permitted to play on the street or in the park. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never even had a girl from school come to my house.”

  “I’m practically in the same boat friend-wise,” Grace admitted.

  We glanced at Ruby. She lifted a shoulder. Agreement?

  “I have seven brothers, and my dad wished for an eighth son,” I told them. “He hoped to get the sound ba—for eight, which sounds the same as good luck. He wanted to walk through Chinatown and have everyone recognize him for his successful business and his eight sons. Instead, I came along and ruined everything.”

  The waiter set down three bowls of steaming soup noodles. Ruby and I picked up our chopsticks and used them to bring the long noodles to our lips.

  “Mama had eight children in ten years,” I picked up after the waiter left. “She kept trying for an eighth son, but after me she only had miscarriages and stillborns. It’s hard for girls like us. Boys can go to college, but Baba says, ‘A woman without education is better than a woman with education.’ ” Neither of them seemed to recognize the Confucian saying. “We also aren’t allowed to drive. We shouldn’t show our arms. We can’t show our legs. We’re supposed to learn to cook, clean, sew, embroider—”

  “Then how can you dance now?” Grace asked, fingering her chopsticks. “Didn’t you say you can’t do anything in Chinatown without people finding out about it?”

  “And what about your brother?” Ruby chimed in. “Won’t he tell?”

  I had to think about how to answer them. Today was my first foray into the world of lying. Tell the truth, but not too much of it.

  “If Baba finds out, I’ll be in real hot water,” I answered at last. “But Monroe won’t tell on me, because he wants to change his life too. He’s studying to be an engineer, but he’s worried he’s going to end up working as a janitor or a houseboy. Something like that happened to another of my older brothers. Jackson was the first in our family to go to college. He graduated two years ago—one of twenty-eight American-born Chinese to graduate from Cal that year—as a dentist. Now the only job he can get is as a chauffeur for a woman who lives in Pacific Heights.”

  A look passed between Ruby and Grace. College? An engineer? A dentist? I bet the chauffeur part sounded pretty good to them too, but I didn’t see it that way.

  “Baba makes plenty of sweat money in this country, but he says this isn’t our real home and that we shouldn’t live where we aren’t welcome. If one of my brothers gets upset because someone on the street taunted him, calling ‘chink, chink, chink,’ then Baba says, ‘See? I told you so. Go look in the mirror. Your eyes automatically tell you this is not your home.’ ”

  Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but I rolled right over her. “Baba complains that my brothers are too Americanized. He says, ‘You might be Americanized, but you’ll never be accepted as Americans, even though you were born here.’ After that, he criticizes them for not being Chinese enough, because they were born here. We all were.”

  Look who was cheung hay now!

  “But you can’t argue with my baba,” I continued, unable to stop myself. “It wouldn’t be right. He said he wanted my brothers and me to learn proper Chinese for when we went back to China for good. For months, he went around to the laundries that he supplies. He asked for
their old rags, clothes that hadn’t been collected, worn-out shoes, hardware, and junk—”

  “I had to wear unclaimed laundry too,” Grace cut in. “In elementary school, the girls taunted me when they recognized their castoffs. Once the kids caught me wearing Freddie Thompson’s old shirt under my jumper—”

  “I bet they made fun of you then,” Ruby said.

  “I’ll say. I went in the girls’ room, took off the shirt, and tried to give it back to Freddie, but he tossed it in the dirt, saying he didn’t want to touch anything that had been on a girl.”

  “That’s what he said. He probably didn’t want to touch anything worn by an Oriental,” Ruby assessed shrewdly.

  Grace nodded. “The boys spent the rest of recess throwing the shirt back and forth, teasing me, but teasing Freddie even worse. Freddie was a tough customer even when he was eight. He fought back.”

  Grace was trying hard to fit in to the conversation—and Ruby was doing a good job making her feel comfortable—but I had to set them both straight. “I told you, we don’t have a laundry. I’ve never worn people’s leftovers, or anyone’s hand-me-downs for that matter. My baba packed all that trash in trunks, and we took it to China to give to our relatives.”

  “Why would you do that?” Grace asked, sounding as unpolished as a servant—one brought in from the rice paddies to work in the landowner’s house: dumb, without an ounce of knowledge of how real people lived. But she’d been so nice to me and so open that I liked her despite her country innocence.

  “The more trunks we had, the richer we looked,” I explained. “The more we gave away, the more important my father appeared. But fortune like that can be won and lost very quickly.” I turned and spoke directly to Ruby. “We were only there a year and a half before the Japanese invaded. Baba said it was better for us to come back here and be poor than stay there and be dead. President Roosevelt says times are getting better, but they still aren’t that good around here.”

  “Not where I’m from either,” Grace said.

  “Or me either,” Ruby allowed, the corner of her lip twitching. “That’s one of the reasons my parents wanted to move to Hawaii. They could live cheaply, and they’d be closer to getting home—”

  “Baba wants all of us to work,” I interrupted, and Ruby went back to her noodles. “My other brothers and I are all supposed to chip in for Monroe’s tuition, but there aren’t a lot of jobs for girls like me. Baba says that no matter how bad off we are, he’ll never let me work in a garment factory. Being a maid or working as an elevator operator in one of the department stores on Union Square doesn’t appeal to him either.”

  “But you have a good job already,” Grace blurted.

  I sighed. “The manager at the Chinese Telephone Exchange is indebted to my father. I’ve been working there for six months. I hate it, and I’m only making five dollars a week. If I get the job at the Forbidden City, I’ll make twenty dollars a week.”

  Grace croaked, “That much?”

  The sum must have seemed fantastical to her. Ruby ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth. Twenty dollars must have sounded like a fortune to her too.

  “Didn’t either of you ask what the pay was going to be?” When they shook their heads, I said, “But that’s the most important piece of information.”

  Ruby ignored the criticism. “What happens when your father finds out you’re dancing?”

  I jutted my chin. “Fathers like to give orders and tell you what to do. The next minute? Who are you? Get out of my way! Having a worthless daughter isn’t just something Chinese say. It’s been in our culture for—”

  Grace cleared her throat. “My father said I could have anything and do anything I want in America. That’s why he forced me to take dance and singing lessons with the other girls in town. He made me do everything they did.”

  I wanted to ask, If he’s so great, then what are you doing here? But I didn’t, because her talent and her pluck couldn’t hide the fact that offstage she seemed barely above a frightened street urchin. But then Ruby saw only her own light and heard her own music, and I was happy to be anywhere but in the compound. Yet as dissimilar as we were, it was as clear to me as chrysanthemum jelly that all three of us were alone in the world—each in our own ways. I saw, felt, an invisible string of connection tying us together.

  Since the conversation seemed to have reached its end, Grace went back to fingering her chopsticks. Finally, she asked, “Could one of you gals teach me how to use these?”

  “You don’t use chopsticks?” The idea was astounding.

  “I’ve never seen them before, so how could I know how to use them? Plain City …” Grace hunched her shoulders, humbled, embarrassed. “How do you eat soup with sticks?”

  “Cripes!” Ruby exclaimed again.

  We showed Grace how to pick up the noodles with the chopsticks and dangle them over her porcelain soupspoon before lifting them to her mouth. She was beyond hopeless, but she ate like she hadn’t had a meal in a year.

  “You’ll get better,” I promised. “If you can teach me how to tap, then I can certainly teach you how to eat like a proper Chinese.”

  After dinner, we walked back to the telephone exchange, where we spotted Monroe waiting for us. “If you were going to have noodles here in Chinatown, you should have told me,” he said, proving what I’d said about Chinatown’s gossip mill to be true. “Next time, we’ll all meet there. Okay?”

  Grace, excited, grabbed Ruby’s and my hands. What was it about these girls and all their touching? Didn’t they have any manners?

  “Thank you,” Grace said to Monroe, whose cheeks went crimson. “Thank you so much for letting us see each other again.”

  I waved goodbye to my new friends and let Monroe escort me home. Most people rented apartments, but not my family. Our home took up nearly a whole block. We occupied an American version of a Chinese compound, with four sides, each with two stories, surrounding an interior courtyard. My six oldest brothers, already married with wives and children, inhabited the side wings. Monroe and I lived with our parents in the back of the compound, where we also had the public rooms. The laundry-supply business faced the street.

  Monroe opened the gate, and we walked across the inner courtyard, which was littered with tricycles, balls, and other toys. Suddenly, he stopped and turned to me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked gently.

  “I’m trying to start my life again—”

  “After everything our family has been through, especially you … I’m worried you’re going to get hurt.”

  A lot of responses ran through my head, but I wisely didn’t speak them.

  “You’re only just beginning to recover,” he went on. “You have a good job. I come and get you every day. Let things return to normal—”

  “Nothing will ever be normal again.”

  “Helen—”

  “Don’t worry about me. This gets me out of the compound. That’s what you all want, isn’t it?”

  Monroe stared hard at me. I loved him best of all my brothers, but his concern wouldn’t help me or change my fate. He sighed. Then he continued to the back of the courtyard and entered a door that led to the dining room. Everyone would just be gathering for dinner, but I didn’t want to see all those babies and small children. I also wanted to avoid the kitchen, where my sisters-in-law would ignore me and my mother would struggle for something to say as though anything she could utter could possibly change my status in the household or the world. How could I live in a compound with three generations of my relatives—all so alive with all their breathing, eating, and siring—and still be so lonely?

  I ducked through a side entrance, went upstairs, threaded my way along the deserted hallway to my room, and shut the door behind me, but I could still hear the bustle and noise of the family. On a small table next to the window was a plate of oranges—neatly stacked—unlit candles set in pewter dishes, an incense burner, and a photograph. I began to weep.

  RUBY />
  A Real Chinese Girl

  On Saturday morning, I left my aunt and uncle’s house, took a ferry from Alameda to San Francisco, and walked to the Chinatown playground. Grace and Helen were already there. Sitting on a bench. Talking. Time for work! Grace and I taught Helen steps with one sound—the ball tap, heel tap, brush, and scuff. Every so often, mothers entered the park with their strollers, whispered when they saw us, and then rolled right back out.

  “What are they saying?” Grace asked.

  “They’re calling us no-no girls,” Helen answered.

  No kidding. But Grace didn’t get it. She was a great dancer, better than me by far, which was downright irksome, but she truly acted like she’d just fallen off the turnip truck. I liked her even so. I saw in her what she probably saw in me—that we’d been hit by hard times, that we’d put cardboard in our shoes when the soles had worn out, and that we were on the thin side from too many dinners of watery soup.

  On Sunday, same travel time to get to the Chinatown playground. I arrived first. Then Grace. We got to watch Monroe drop off his sister.

  “This is the busiest day of the week in Chinatown,” he yakked, kicking and complaining, “and you’re in the playground!” He gestured to the apartment buildings that surrounded the park. “Lots of eyes up there … and everywhere. Ba’s going to find out.”

  He was right, but either Helen wasn’t able to think of a better place to go or she was choosing to be deliberately defiant. I couldn’t get a read on her. Monroe beat it to the library, reminding Helen with a call over his shoulder that he’d “fetch” her at Fong Fong Chinese Tea Pavilion at five. Then Grace and I spent the morning showing Helen taps with two sounds—the shuffle, scuffle, slap, and flap. She was pretty, which was hard for me to admit, but, man, she was a real cement mixer. By noon, it was clear she simply wasn’t catching on.