Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [57]
She needed to earn some money, for food, and to repay the obliging neighbour who had loaned her the white kimono to impress the American fiancée. Blood and rough medical hands had wrecked the gown.
Giving occasional lessons in Western deportment and vocabulary to a few tea-house girls was never going to be the answer. Cho-Cho considered her options: what talents did she have, what skills, that she could use?
From the window she looked down at the harbour; as always, it was busy with the movement of goods and people. The waterfront surged: passengers laden with tin chests, boxes, baskets, bundles, waited to go aboard a ship, bound for a new world where they would make a new – a better – life.
But there were old people left behind in Nagasaki whose children had already built new lives in America, whose grandchildren were now Americans, and in that fast-moving, faraway world there was little time for letters – some were no longer able to read or write Japanese. If letters could be written in English, how much more strongly they would link the old and new worlds. The people left behind, Cho-Cho mused, would feel less excluded: their bright young American families would be able to get news from home – in English!
She would offer herself as a scribe; a traditional occupation.
Perhaps she might occasionally write letters of her own, to a lost child, her Joy: ‘My Dear Sachio,’ they would begin, but those letters would remain unposted.
Mrs Sinclair at the Methodist mission house was an old friend of Henry Sharpless; she knew the whole story. When Cho-Cho arrived at the mission house and asked to see Mrs Sinclair, she hurried out of her office and impulsively took the girl’s hand in both her own.
‘My dear!’
She looked at the small, pale young woman and wondered what to say next. To enquire after Cho-Cho’s health hardly seemed appropriate. She was saved embarrassment: the visitor, though she spoke in a whisper, took charge with a confidence that surprised the older woman.
‘Mrs Sinc-u-lair, I have for some time studied Engrish. I can read and write, and have some acquaintance of life in the West. Some Nagasaki families have been making use of my letter-writing s-u-kills, but I have time to spare. Perhaps it is possible for me to give lessons to the mission girls?’
She felt it was unnecessary to mention that she had earlier given lessons to enterprising tea-house girls; the vocabulary and tone of those classes would hardly be appropriate for the God-fearing pupils at the mission house. When the tea-house workers picked their way slowly through their lessons, between the building blocks of nouns and verbs and adjectives, something unspoken also emerged: a search for ways to express secret wishes, to be heard, to have a voice.
To Mrs Sinclair she offered a different, tempting bait: she explained that because of Pinkerton she had set herself to learn about Methodism, and the Methodist idea: let your good deeds shine for all the world . . . Would they accept her lessons as a good deed? And, in return, paying her a little to help her stay alive might also perhaps be considered a good deed?
And so the next step forward was taken.
For a while, Cho-Cho’s days were filled with English lessons – basic conversation, reading, writing, geography. She had found a suitably indirect way to insist that Suzuki should leave the silk factory:
‘The machinery has already scarred your hands. I fear the skin will grow so rough that you may damage the fabric when you wash clothes; as a favour to me, Suzuki, please allow your fingers to regain their former smoothness.’
Suzuki knew what she was really saying, and Cho-Cho knew that Suzuki knew. The maid’s hands slowly healed. Meanwhile Cho-Cho’s mission house classes grew increasingly tedious, the girls less keen than the tea-house workers, less eager to improve themselves. She fretted, grew bored.
26
Each day, a cycle rickshaw carried Cho-Cho to the mission house and home at the end of lesson time. One morning, as she stepped into the rickshaw, she