Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [22]
Just before dawn, I get up, take a shower, and get dressed. I look in the mirror. I’m forty-one, and, even after everything I’ve been through, I don’t have a single gray hair. I’ve never been like my sister, whose face is her fortune. Nevertheless, despite the trials of these past weeks, my cheeks are still pink. Only in my eyes do I see the depth of my struggling heart, a maelstrom of sadness and loss.
I go downstairs and order a bowl of rice porridge and a pot of jasmine tea. The meal is as plain as I can make it. I’m a widow, who’s lost everything. How could I ever eat a Hong Kong English breakfast of eggs, bacon, stewed tomatoes, and toast?
After breakfast, I stop at the front desk to ask directions to the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association, hoping to get advice about going into China and also how to deal with mail to and from my sister once I get there. The association was founded to help people of the Louie, Fong, and Kwong families. My father-in-law used its services for years. Father Louie remained connected to his home village of Wah Hong after nearly a lifetime spent in America. He sent tea money to his relatives, even if it meant we had to sacrifice. When China closed, he had to use the association to get money across the border to his family. After Father Louie died, Sam kept sending money to Wah Hong, which the FBI and INS agents considered one of his biggest crimes. I can almost hear Sam say to them, “We do what we can for our relatives who are trapped in a bad place.” That didn’t matter to the agents, obviously. So I know that, if May sends letters and money straight to me in Red China, she’ll be attacked for being a Communist sympathizer by the FBI, just as Sam was. At the same time, what waits for me on the other side of the border is a mystery. We’ve heard mail is often opened, read, and censored, or tossed in the dustbin. I know as well that people in China who dare to send letters abroad or receive them—no matter how innocent the content—can also be accused of being secret capitalists or spies.
So, out into the streets. Hong Kong bustles with life: flower and bird sellers, street markets, British businessmen in three-piece suits, beautifully dressed women holding umbrellas to shield them from the sun. I could say that Hong Kong is just a bigger, gaudier, richer, more cosmopolitan version of Chinatown, but then I’d have to admit that it isn’t like my adopted home much at all, except for the food, the streams of white tourists, and the Chinese faces. I could say Hong Kong is closer to how I remember Shanghai, with its lively waterfront, the sex and sin for sale, and the smells of perfume, coal, and delectable treats being cooked right on the street, except that it isn’t nearly as grand or wealthy as the city of my girlhood.
An hour later, I reach the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association’s office and approach a thin man of about fifty years, wearing a cheap suit, standing behind a counter, drinking tea. I extend my hand. “I’m Pearl Louie and I’m from Los Angeles,” I blurt. “My daughter was born in America. She looks Chinese on the outside, but she’s an American. My daughter …” Tears well in my eyes, and I manage to hold them back. “She’s only nineteen and she’s run away to China—Shanghai, I’m pretty sure—to find her father. She thinks she’s smart and she has a lot of enthusiasm for what’s happening there, but she doesn’t know anything about it.”
How can I say these things to a total stranger? Because I can’t expect this man to help me, if I’m not honest with him.
“Are you planning on going to the People’s Republic of China?” he asks, unimpressed.
“You say that like it’s nothing, but China is a Communist country. It’s closed.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says in a bored tone. “The Bamboo Curtain and all that.”
I can’t believe his attitude. I just poured out my sorrows and worries and he acts like neither thing is important.
I rap my knuckles on the counter to get his attention. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Look, lady, it’s a bamboo curtain, not an iron curtain. People