An Ocean Apart, a World Away

by Lensey Namioka

  With the pride, however, I felt a keen regret. If I gave up going to medical school, my practice would never go beyond digging out bullets.

  Studying in America, that would also be a great adventure! I thought of my friend, Tao Ailin, and her experiences in the city called San Francisco. Her life sounded hard, but so exciting that I almost writhed with envy as I read her letters.

  Going to America meant giving up Baoshu. I remembered his eyes as he begged me to go with him, and my throat tightened painfully at the thought of never seeing him again.

  Then I remembered something else: the careless way he had talked about Lumei, who had helped him and admired him so much. What if he became tired of me? Would he talk about me in the same careless way?

  I tossed and turned most of the night. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, the sun was already up. I struggled from my bed, and as I blearily looked around for my clothes, I realized that I still hadn’t made up my mind. In the course of this day, I would have to tell Baoshu my decision.

  That morning, it was as if my thinking about Ailin had produced immediate results. As we finished eating and got up from the table, Mother suddenly turned to me. “Oh, I almost forgot. Yesterday a letter arrived for you from your friend, Tao Ailin.”

  She went to a small cupboard, took out the letter, and handed it to me. I tore open the envelope.

  Dear Yanyan,

  You’ve probably heard already from Miss Gilbertson that I’m not returning to China with the Warners. I’ve decided to marry a man called James Chew. He plans to open a restaurant in Chinatown here in San Francisco, and I’m going to help him run it.

  I expect my life to be pretty hard, especially for the next couple of years, but I’m fully prepared for it.

  I don’t see how I can face the sort of life an upper-class Chinese woman would lead. Spending all day playing mahjong and gossiping with friends would drive me crazy.

  In the restaurant I’ll have to wash dishes and chop vegetables, but at least I know that I’ll be playing an essential role in making the restaurant a success. Self-respect is what I value more than anything else.

  Self-respect. That was something I valued too. It was something Father had instilled in me. He was unlike most Chinese fathers in this, since self-respect was not a trait encouraged in girls. Could I maintain it if I became Baoshu’s helper and accomplice? I would not be fighting for a cause I believed in. I would be acting only to please Baoshu.

  At the end of the letter, Ailin said,

  I feel that my father would have approved of what I’m doing, even though washing dishes in a restaurant is not considered a respectable occupation for a young lady in China.

  Please don’t despise me for choosing this path. I hope we can remain friends.

  Ailin

  Ailin’s mention of her father’s approval hit me like a physical blow. One thing I had failed to consider in trying to make up my mind was how my decision would affect Father. He had been so proud of me for wanting to become a doctor. I remembered how much pleasure he had taken in showing me germs with his microscope.

  How would he feel if I gave up my ambition to study medicine? Even worse, I would be joining someone who was plotting to restore the Manchu dynasty and destroy the republic. Father would be hurt beyond measure. It would be like thrusting a knife into his heart.

  I heard Mother’s voice. “What does Ailin’s letter say?”

  “Sh-she said she and her husband are planning to open a restaurant,” I replied. “She will have to work v-very h-hard, she said.”

  Suddenly I realized that tears were streaming down my face. Muffling my sobs with my sleeve, I ran to my room. I flung myself on my bed and cried and cried, until my throat was scraped raw by my harsh sobs.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mother. She stood at the door, her eyes wide with worry. “Is it something in Ailin’s letter? Is she very unhappy?”

  I had forgotten that Mother, too, would be heart-broken if I ran away with Baoshu. I sat up and mopped my eyes. My decision was made.

  “No, Ailin is not unhappy at all,” I told Mother. “In fact, I would like to go to America and see her.”

  After Mother made a few soothing noises and left my room, I took out my pen and a piece of paper. My message to Baoshu was short. It said, “I’m sorry. I cannot go with you.”

  Lumei took my message, and within an hour she returned with Baoshu’s answer. His message was even shorter than mine. “I’m not giving up,” it said.

  “Cornell?” said Father. “I’ve heard of the college, I think. Whatever made you choose that one? It’s in a small town, far away from any big city.”

  I showed him the calling card from the man I had met on the train. “We met this man on the way to Shanghai. He’s a professor at Cornell University, and he seems to be a very nice person. So if I have any problems, I can always go to him for help.”

  Father read the card. “Hmm . . . George Pettigrew, professor of Oriental history.”

  “He also speaks very good Chinese,” I added. I didn’t tell him about the embarrassing circumstances in which I had found out that Professor Pettigrew spoke good Chinese.

  “Very well,” said Father. “Let me make some inquiries about Cornell. The teachers in your school might be able to give us some advice, too.”

  Father liked what he learned about Cornell University. Unlike some of the other famous American universities, it was not connected to any religious organization. What he liked best was that it had been coeducational from its very beginning. It seemed that the founder of the university, Ezra Cornell, believed strongly in a good education for women.

  “Yanyan might get unladylike ideas at such a school,” protested Mother. “Not that she doesn’t have enough of them already! Can’t we send her to a girls’ college? She would get an education suitable for a well-bred young lady.”

  Father glanced at me, and there was both pride and a touch of despair in his eyes. “I think making Yanyan into a well-bred young lady is a hopeless cause, anyway. She has stated that she wants to be a doctor, and I hear that Cornell has a good medical program. I’m going to write to the university and see if she can be admitted there. It is already summer, very late in the year to apply for admittance, but exceptions may be made for a special case like hers.”

  During the days that followed, I found it hard to hide my nervousness. My parents thought I was worried about being admitted to Cornell. I didn’t tell them that I had something else on my mind as well.

  Baoshu’s message didn’t say what he was planning to do. It was possible that he was too busy trying to escape from the city to think about me. Or perhaps he had already left Nanjing and was now safe in Manchuria. I watched Lumei anxiously to see if she had another message for me.

  Finally I was driven to ask her if she had heard from Baoshu. “No,” she said curtly. “I would have told you immediately if I had word.”

  Father finally received an answer from the Cornell admissions office. “They said they will let you enroll as a special student for the coming semester,” he told me. “If you do well, you will be admitted as a regular freshman in the spring.”

  In the next few weeks I was swept up in a whirlwind of activity and became almost too busy to fret over Baoshu. Mother hired a seamstress to make Western-style clothes for me. When I was a young child, I was dressed in traditional Chinese clothes for young girls, consisting of trousers and a tunic that buttoned down the side, Manchu-style. Except for differing materials, it was what most women wore. After the revolution, many of the younger women adopted styles that were partly influenced by the West. They wore long skirts, with the Manchu tunic on top. Schoolgirls like me wore shorter skirts that were midcalf in length, with the same sort of tunic.

  But now I was having clothes made that looked like those worn by my American teachers at the MacIntosh School. Instead of tunics, I had blouses that buttoned down the front, with a heavier jacket worn
over the blouse. What I found hardest to get used to was the material of the jackets and skirts, which were mostly made of wool. Woolen clothing was warm, and this was necessary according to Father, because I would be going to a place where the winters were bitterly cold. But I found the wool scratchy, and wondered how my teachers could stand wearing this material day after day. Maybe that was why Miss Scott was always so ill-tempered.

  A big problem was finding someone to accompany me on the long journey. Mother was horrified when she found out that after crossing the Pacific, I still had to travel almost the whole width of America to reach the town where Cornell was situated. “It’s unthinkable for a respectable young girl like Yanyan to travel alone all that distance!” she insisted.

  I suddenly thought of Professor Pettigrew again. He had said that he and his wife would be returning to America. If they hadn’t already left, I could go with them.

  Father thought this was an excellent idea. “I see that you’re really using your head,Yanyan! You must be very eager to go to Cornell.”

  He took me to call on Professor Pettigrew that very afternoon. It turned out that the Pettigrews were good friends of Miss Gilbertson. The Americans in Nanjing formed a small, tight community.

  My cheeks burned slightly to see Mr. Pettigrew again, but he seemed genuinely happy that I had contacted him. And his wife was also warm and welcoming.

  “You’re Sheila, aren’t you?” said Mrs. Pettigrew. “Frances Gilbertson told us about you.”

  Miss Gilbertson had given each student in her class an English name, and mine was Sheila. Ailin’s English name was Eileen, which sounded pretty close. I hated my name of Sheila, but since Americans would have trouble with my Chinese name of Xueyan, I was resigned to using it.

  Mrs. Pettigrew had round, pink cheeks, and when she laughed, which she did often, she showed a mouthful of very big white teeth. I was alarmed when she looked me up and down and exclaimed, “Oh, you little darling! I could just eat you up!”

  What was it about me that made people think of food? I remembered that one of the hoodlums in the Shanghai alley had called me a juicy morsel. It didn’t go with the image of the woman warrior I aspired to be.

  When Father told the Pettigrews that I was planning to attend Cornell, it was Mrs. Pettigrew herself who suggested that I travel on the same boat with them and then take the same train across the United States.

  Even Mother became reassured when she heard about my travel arrangements. One drawback of going with the Pettigrews, however, was that they had booked passage on a boat that would sail to Seattle, a city in the northwest corner of America. From Seattle, they planned to take a train that would go along a northerly route to Ithaca, New York. I had already written to Ailin to tell her I was coming to attend school in America, but now I had to tell her that my boat wouldn’t be landing in San Francisco, and I wouldn’t be able to visit her when I landed. I would have to find another opportunity to see her.

  My last few days in Nanjing were filled with a frenzy of activity. When the day arrived for departure, I was so tired that I hardly felt a thing upon leaving the city that had been my home for the whole of my life.

  At the Shanghai docks, I couldn’t help remembering the day when I had come to see Ailin off. At that time, I had ached with envy because Ailin was embarking on a great adventure, while I had little hope of ever visiting America.

  This time I was embarking for America myself. When Ailin left, I had been the only person to see her off. Today, my parents were on the docks waving good-bye to me. I saw Mother wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. I would be a grown-up young lady by the time she saw me again.

  Ailin had scanned the crowd for the sight of a friendly face. I scanned the crowd too, for another face. Suddenly I thought I saw Baoshu. But it turned out to be someone else. He had sent no word at all. A sudden wave of anguish passed over me, for I didn’t expect to see him again.

  CHAPTER 6

  At the MacIntosh School I had studied the geography of America, but I was still unprepared for the real thing. Our ship docked at Seattle, where we were to spend the night before getting on the train that would take us across the continent to New York State.

  The waterfront, instead of teeming with people as in Shanghai, looked almost deserted by comparison. What really startled me was the sight of some people in the streets who had brownish faces and straight black hair.

  “Were those people Chinese?” I whispered to Mr. Pettigrew as we went into our hotel.

  “They’re Indians,” said Mr. Pettigrew. “Some of them leave their reservations and come into the city to look for work.”

  “I thought Indians wore feathered headdresses, lived in tents, and rode horses!” I said, shocked and disappointed. These Indians wore the same sort of cotton shirts and pants as the white men around them.

  Mr. Pettigrew grinned. “You also thought Indians had red skin, remember?”

  I nodded, embarrassed. It seemed that my ideas about America, obtained mostly from hearsay, were turning out to be inaccurate. At the hotel that night, I wrote home to tell my parents that I had arrived safely in America. I also wrote to Ailin.

  Dear Ailin,

  By now you will have received my letter saying that I was coming to America. Our ship docked in Seattle, which is in the northwest corner of the country. It’s a beautiful city, surrounded by distant mountains covered with snow, even at the end of summer. I saw some real Indians! Only they didn’t look the way I expected. In fact, a lot of things aren’t turning out the way I expected.

  Tomorrow morning we start our train trip across America. I don’t expect our train to be attacked by Indians riding on horseback.

  It’s too bad that I won’t see you before I go to the East Coast. I hope we can arrange to meet later.

  Yanyan

  Our train traveled across the northern part of America, and I followed our progress on a map I had with me. We started by going through the states of Washington and Idaho, which were mountainous and heavily forested at first. I had never seen so many trees before in my life! No wonder most of the houses we saw were built of wood instead of brick or mud. Not that we saw many houses. I was amazed at how empty the country was. We would go for hours and hours and not see a single town!

  The land became flatter, and when we reached the state of Montana, we saw some people on horseback. “They’re cowboys,” Mr. Pettigrew told me. “Out here in the West they still have ranches and cowboys, although the numbers are dwindling every year.”

  I had read about cowboys, and they seemed like very romantic figures. For an instant I felt a pang as I remembered how Baoshu loved to ride horses. I resolutely turned my thoughts away from Baoshu. “If there are cowboys around here, shouldn’t there be Indians, too? Indians on horseback with feathered headdresses?”

  Mr. Pettigrew laughed. “You don’t give up, do you? Actually, you may be right in that the Indians around here are the horse-riding type. The ones we saw in Seattle are very different. In that part of the country, the Indians mostly live by hunting, fishing, and gathering.” His face grew somber. “At least they used to.”

  “So there are many different kinds of Indians, then?” I asked.

  “My dear, there are as many different kinds of Indians as there are different kinds of Chinese,” said Mr. Pettigrew. “The Seattle Indians are as different from New York State Indians as you are from a Mongolian.”

  I was reminded again that America was a vast country. We left the mountainous states of the West and passed through almost endless stretches of desertlike land before we reached the greener states of the Midwest, Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was strange to see so many acres of lush farmland with so few people living on them.

  We changed trains in Chicago, the biggest city I had seen so far. From there on, we began to see more people. After so many miles of emptiness, I felt warmed by the sight of the crowds. In fact, there was comparatively little emptiness from that point on. As we proceeded farther east, we seldom
lost sight of some little town or city. There would be no more cowboys or Indians on horses. Cornell was situated in Ithaca, New York. Did that mean we would be close to the biggest city in America?

  To my surprise, we changed trains at a medium-sized city and took a smaller train that went south. “Ithaca is in the central part of New York State, quite some distance from New York City,” Mrs. Pettigrew told me, answering my question.

  On a late summer afternoon, after a journey lasting nearly a month, I finally arrived in the town that would be my home for the next four years.

  The first thing to do was find a place where I could rent a room. I couldn’t live with the Pettigrews since their two teenaged sons would be coming home at the end of summer and their house had barely enough room for their own family.

  The rooming house that the Pettigrews found for me was on a steep street not far from the campus of Cornell University. It was run by a widow, Mrs. Harte. It amazed me that in America a woman could own property, such as this huge three-story house with six bedrooms. Mrs. Harte had begun taking in boarders after her husband’s death six years ago. I learned that boarders meant people who rented a room from her and also ate their meals with her.

  When I said good-bye to the Pettigrews at the front door of Mrs. Harte’s house, it was a bit like waving farewell to my parents all over again. Mrs. Pettigrew gave me a hug that squeezed all the air out of me. “We want you to visit us often, do you hear?”

  “If you have any problem whatsoever, come straight to us,” Mr. Pettigrew said. “You can also see me at my office at the university.”

  “And remember, Sheila, you’re expected for dinner this Sunday,” said Mrs. Pettigrew as they left.