China Dolls

by Lisa See

  “When you came out, everything ripped down there,” she recalled. “When your dad finally got me back to the mining camp, one of the men stitched me together. I couldn’t walk upright for a month. I felt like my insides were going to fall out. That’s not so different from what many women feel, but I was the only woman in the camp. You have to understand that back then there was—what?—about one Chinese woman for every twenty Chinese men in this country? Most of those women were willow flowers. The miners started to gossip about me. They made guesses about me, and they guessed right. They were our people. Chinese people. Your father was ashamed.”

  “So you ran away and came here—”

  “Where we hoped we’d be safe.”

  “But where we would all be humiliated. Dad had it the worst. He was a laundryman. He was a joke.”

  “Your father suffered great loss of face in this country, where a Chinese man is considered less than a man. And yes, your father was forever a laundryman, doing women’s work.”

  As she spoke, I couldn’t help thinking of Eddie, who’d endured so much disgrace not only for being a dancer who preferred boys but for being a Chinese man, and even Monroe, who’d graduated from Cal but couldn’t find work because he was Chinese. Both of those men—like my father—were enthusiastically American, but what had it gotten them? I could see it and understand it—and I felt terribly sorry for my mother—but even so my parents had systematically betrayed me.

  “Did you and Dad ever tell me anything that was true?”

  “Grace!”

  “Well, did you?”

  “I always told you I loved you—”

  “But he didn’t.” I began to weep.

  “When we saw Aloha, Boys!, your father cried and cried. Everyone in town saw you in it.” For a moment she exuded joy and pride. “That was the longest running movie ever at the Rialto. From the time you were a little girl, you were a star in your dad’s eyes. That movie just proved it to everyone else.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that he beat me.”

  “He was ashamed of me. He was ashamed of himself. Grace, maybe you haven’t yet met a man who’s been shamed, but he’ll do crazy things. Unforgivable things.”

  Like Joe, when he learned about Ruby.

  “Your dad loved you and wanted to keep the truth about me a secret.”

  So which one was it? That he was afraid I’d stumble on Mom’s secret? Or that he’d been humiliated as a man? For every man who hits his wife or his children, there are a hundred excuses. My team didn’t win … You didn’t clean the house … I don’t like this meal … I had a bad day at work … The kids won’t shut up … But what did it matter in the end? My father beat me, and the reasons—however real or misguided—didn’t change that. I loved my mother, but she hadn’t protected me. But by allowing me to leave, it finally dawned on me, she took his full beatings on herself. The realization of that shook me to the core. I could pity my father at some level, but it didn’t alter what had happened in that room over many years. The aches and stiffness in my ribs, fingers, and spine from injuries my father gave me would be in my bones forever. The terror I experienced whenever I felt threatened was deeper still.

  I looked at the scrapbook my father had composed—saw all the obsession and work he’d put into it—and knew I’d never understand him, his life, his choices, his shame. No matter what my mother said, I would always be my father’s measly girl. But I had a choice about what might happen next—hold on to bitterness or try to forge a different kind of relationship with the one blood relative I had left in the world.

  “Tell me about Miss Miller,” I said, and that was that.

  Mom caught me up on my dance teacher, who was still single and still carrying a torch for the manager of the Farmers National Bank, and she still let him walk all over her. All this was news to me!

  “You were a little girl,” my mom said. “What do you expect?”

  I told Mom about life on the road. “I pour my heart out to lonely boys in base towns, mothers missing their sons, lovers who might never be reunited.” I recited something Eddie had once said: “If I feel a song, then the audience does too, because music purges the soul of tragedy. It’s the vehicle by which we can express our deepest human emotions and our spirits.”

  “What highfalutin talk,” Mom said, and we laughed.

  “It’s not always like that,” I admitted. “Sometimes I can command an audience to watch me; other times they ignore me because they’re putting on the dogs for their girlfriends or they’ve had too many drinks. But when I become the Oriental Danseuse and showcase my routine from Aloha, Boys!, I put customers in the movie with me.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m so proud of you.”

  I didn’t tell her about being blackballed or that I had no jobs lined up after Atlanta. Mom and Dad had run away from her past. I was running from lies that had been told about me, but would she believe me? So I asked about kids from school. Mom told me that Freddie Thompson, who’d teased me when I wore one of his old shirts, had died in the war. Henry, who now worked for my mother, had gone against his family and married Ilsa—“even though she was Finnish”—when he was drafted.

  “But that girl never was any good,” Mom said. “As soon as she heard Henry lost his arm, she hightailed it out of town.”

  Frankly, plenty of girls “abandoned ship” when they heard their husbands or boyfriends were maimed, blinded, or badly burned in the war. I’d also heard of servicemen who refused to answer letters or allow hospital visits from their girls. No man wants a woman to see him as anything less than strong and able.

  “And you, honey?” Mom asked. “Is there someone special in your life?”

  I told her everything about Joe, ending with “I haven’t heard from him in a month.”

  “He’s in a war, Grace. He faces death every day. That will change a man.”

  “I don’t want him to change.”

  “Maybe he understands that about you,” she reasoned. “Maybe he realizes he won’t be the same in your eyes when he comes back.”

  My mom was giving me advice on my broken heart. Incredible. No matter what had happened in the past, she was my mother.

  “I love him,” I confessed.

  “Then fight for him. Don’t run away. Stand your ground and fight.”

  “How can I do that, if he won’t answer my letters?”

  “Keep writing,” she counseled. “Stake your claim. That’s what your father and I did. We were both flawed, but we found this place, and we built a life for ourselves and for you. Maybe in this one way you can learn from us. Fight for him, Grace. Fight for him because you love him.”

  THE NEXT SATURDAY, the theater was filled with familiar faces: Miss Miller, Doc Haverford, my mom’s friends from church, a couple of my teachers, and Mr. Tubbs, who’d pulled my father off me that last night. There are many ways you can measure success, but none is more meaningful than having folks who’ve known you forever see your rise in the world. They “knew you when.” They celebrate what you’ve accomplished. And yes, there are some—like Maude and Velma, the remaining evil triplets—for whom your success is a knife in the gut, making it a triumph all the way.

  As a girl, I’d believed my family and I would be outsiders forever. We’d washed people’s dirty laundry. We looked different, but my family had struggled just like all the other families did in Plain City. At the Forbidden City, total strangers asked if they could touch me, because they’d never touched an Oriental before. In Plain City, everyone had known me, and they hadn’t wanted to touch me. In Chinatown, I’d learned from Helen the importance of family over the interests of the individual. In my hometown, maybe the individual took precedence. Maybe that was what had allowed me to run away in the first place. When I took my bows and saw those faces in the audience, my heart brimmed with pride. But I also remembered what my mother used to say to me: When fortune comes, do not enjoy all of it; when advantage comes, do not take all of it.

  RUBY />
  Dying Ashes Will Burn Again

  The taxi went in fits and starts down Atlanta’s Peachtree Boulevard. The next few hours were going to be momentous for me, and I was having a difficult time lining up my feelings. I wasn’t at all sure how I’d react when I saw Grace. Last night, Helen had told me a lot of strange things about her. Interesting, chilling things, really, about how she’d turned me in, stolen my part, wheedled her way into Joe’s heart, and then been dumped by him. It was hard for me to believe she could have done all that but, as Helen said, everyone couldn’t be wrong. Two and two always add up to four, but my mind reeled away from the possibility that any of it could be true, even though I knew that at least some of it must be.

  My taxi dropped me off in front of the theater, where a man on a ladder was placing letters on the marquee. Top billing: GRACE LEE, THE ORIENTAL DANSEUSE, STAR OF STAGE AND SCREEN. Below that: MING AND LING—TWO HILLBILLIES FROM THE BURMA ROAD. And at the bottom of the bill: PRINCESS TAI, FRESH FROM HER APPEARANCE IN HAVANA. (Ha!) My agent made it sound like I was lucky to hook up with these performers. I hadn’t heard of Ming and Ling, but as far as I was concerned, Grace wouldn’t be the headliner for long. I had to become better and bigger than she was. I had to get my career and life back. Like I said, momentous.

  The man climbed down the ladder, paid my driver, and offered me his arm. “Your trunk has already been delivered, and your dresser is arranging things. Right this way, Princess.”

  Princess. It gave me chills to be called by my title again. I followed the man through the theater until we reached a door with a big gold star and PRINCESS TAI written in red glitter. I entered, and there were Helen and Tommy.

  “Your bubble is polished.” As Helen spoke, I noticed that she’d put two framed photos on my makeup table: one of Eddie doing the flying splits, the other of Helen and Lai Kai in China. “I’ve fluffed the fans, in case you chose to use them tonight. I’m ready to do your makeup.”

  Aah—the cold of the foundation followed by the pouf, pouf, pouf of the powder against my naked skin ignited physical pleasure in my body. I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked pretty damn good, considering. Just as Helen kneeled before me to glue on my patch, someone knocked at the door.

  “Answer it, sweetie, just like I taught you,” Helen told Tommy.

  He went to the door, opened it a crack, and delivered a well-rehearsed statement in a tiny yet clearly bossy voice. “No visitors allowed.”

  The door swung open anyway. Grace whisked into the room, wearing a gorgeous fur coat, hat, and gloves, and acting like a big star. It was hard to believe she’d once been such a hick.

  “Ruby! Gosh, am I glad to see you! Helen! Tommy! This is a surprise! What are you doing here?”

  It had been a little more than a year and a half since I’d heard Grace’s voice, and I can’t say it gave me a big thrill.

  “I wondered how long it would take the weasel to say ‘Happy New Year’ to the chickens,” Helen mumbled. “This is like opening the door and saying hello to the bandit.”

  Helen and her sayings! Gotta love her!

  “I hardly know where to start,” Grace babbled on. Was she really that oblivious to the ice in the room? “Ruby, you have to tell me everything. Tommy! You’ve grown so much! How old are you now? Three? Oh, Helen, I can’t believe you’re here! How’s Eddie?”

  “He’s fighting in France,” Helen said.

  “And Monroe?”

  “Still hanging on.”

  “Fifteen minutes, people,” someone called. “Fifteen minutes.”

  Grace did an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “All right, then. Hey, why don’t the three of you come to my suite after the show?”

  Her suite?

  After Grace left, Helen finished my makeup. We didn’t talk about the Oriental Danseuse. I was tense. I wanted to be better than perfect. I walked alone to the curtain, because Helen’s only request had been that Tommy not see me perform, which didn’t make a lot of sense when he’d just watched her powder me, but what the hell. I’d promised that we’d be together when I got out of the camp, and I’d come through on that promise. Good thing too. That boy of hers … The way he looked she needed to get away from her family.

  My music started. I placed my bubble just so and glided into the blue light. My skin prickled to have all the men’s eyes on me. For a few moments, the room turned raw and hot. It gave me confidence that I would get back to my full form a lot sooner than Lee and Sam imagined. When I came offstage, the Chinese hillbillies whirled past me. Ming and Ling, who were actually a half-Filipino and half-Irish father-and-son team, wowed the audience with their “Yangtze Yodel.” Those ding-dong daddies had the audience rolling in the aisles. Helen—with Tommy—joined me by the curtain, relieved me of my bubble, and handed me a robe. The hillbillies came offstage—higher than kites from the adrenaline that comes when you go over big. Coming toward us was a jingling, jangling creature in a goofy getup with gilt and bangles and I don’t know what else. It was Grace. Everyone moved aside for her, like she was the Queen of Sheba. She nodded at us. Thank you, peasants, for your adoration. Cripes!

  She smacked a fake smile on her face, raised her hands up to her head and her fingers into rigid sticks, and then shuffled onstage on bare feet. I stayed by the curtain to watch. What a cockamamie routine! Her style had evolved from her performance in Aloha, Boys! The dance now had every stereotype in the book, but the audience ate it up. And those long nails? Kooky. I may have liked to float above and removed from the earth, but I lived in my body. That’s why I could dance naked! Grace may have been technically better, but my dancing was filled with passion. All right, I’ll call it what it was. Sex! No wonder Helen didn’t want Tommy to watch me.

  “I guess it’s going to be like old times,” Helen muttered, and I could hear the jealousy in her voice.

  “Not at all.” I squeezed her arm. “It’s you and me against that out there.”

  “Dying ashes will burn again,” Helen recited.

  Another saying! And it was perfect for us.

  “Jeez, Helen, it’s good to have you here.” My grin cut all the way across my face.

  HELEN DIDN’T WANT to visit Grace in her suite after the show.

  “Why should we go groveling?” she groused. “Let her come to us.”

  “No, we’re going to accept her invitation. I want to hear what she has to say.”

  “Fine,” Helen said, but she didn’t sound fine. “That’s just fine.”

  Five minutes later, we were standing at Grace’s door. She was as beautiful as ever, even with her hair in curlers under a scarf. She wanted us to sit on her bed, propped against the pillows with me in the middle, like we were still best friends. Ugh, but we did it. Tommy tried to stay awake, but he fell asleep stretched across our laps.

  “We have so much to catch up on, but first tell me how you got on the Chop-Suey Circuit,” Grace said. She may have presented herself as more sophisticated than when we first met, but she was no less stupid if she thought we could pick up where we’d left off.

  “I wrote to all my friends,” I answered, trying to stay bland, “hoping someone would help me.”

  A shiver ran through Grace.

  I went on. “I wrote to people we’d worked with, gossip columnists like Ed Sullivan—”

  “The skunk who ratted out Dorothy Toy?” Grace sneered.

  “Can you believe we lived in the same building with her and didn’t know she was a Jap?” I asked.

  Grace winced. It killed me to use that word, but I wanted to see her reaction.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “most people wrote back to say they couldn’t help me. Some didn’t bother to reply. Helen’s the only one of our old gang who wrote to me when I was in Topaz.”

  “We’ve been writing to each other all along,” said Helen. “We’re very close friends.”

  Grace leaned across me and tapped Helen on the arm. “You told me not to write to Ruby. You said we could get in trouble for wri
ting to her—a Jap, as you put it. Especially me, since I’d lived with her.”

  “If you say so,” Helen said, pulling away from Grace’s touch.

  “I say so!”

  “A story about a tiger can only be accepted as truth when told by three people,” Helen retorted.

  Grace pushed herself off the mattress. Tommy’s slippers fell with two soft thuds. She planted herself at the foot of the bed. “You’re saying it’s my word against yours?”

  Helen looked away. Grace’s face sagged. What a good actress.

  “I can’t believe this. What did I ever do to you?” she asked.

  Helen set her jaw. “You hurt our friend—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Keep singing that song, Grace,” Helen said. “It seems to be working well for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think you know.”

  “Are you talking about the rumors?” Grace asked Helen, disappointment dripping from her voice. “Is that why you never wrote to me?”

  “I wrote you a letter,” Helen replied. “That’s more than you wrote to Ruby.”

  “You told me not to write to her!” Grace repeated, practically shouting. She pressed her lips together and tried to compose herself. “And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m as much a victim in all this as Ruby. Do you have any comprehension of what I’ve lost? Our friends stopped speaking to me. I was blackballed—”

  Helen cut her off. “Victim?” She spat out the word indignantly. “You promised you’d stay with me, but you deserted me—”

  “What did you want me to do? Sit in my apartment until I went broke?”

  “You were protecting your own skin—”

  “As usual,” Grace finished for her bitterly. “Jesus, you’re worse than George Louie.”

  “Let’s not fight,” I said. So all of a sudden I’m the peacemaker, when I was the one who was chiseled out of Hollywood, lost Joe, and was sent to a camp. Maybe they thought they knew everything about me, but there was one thing they hadn’t counted on … I was down but not out.