Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [221]
“She was clothed like a boy in foreign devil’s clothing and kept locked indoors. Despairing, she climbed from the window and made her escape. Much later, to her surprise, she came across a group of Chinese, working in the fields and she hid behind in the trees, watching them. They were Chinese, but they were also men, and she was afraid. The coolie had told her what a price she would fetch from the men once he got her to the Gold Mountain, and she knew he was right. But her belly was churning with hunger, she was dropping with exhaustion and she knew she could go on no longer. She could find a quiet place in the forest and curl up under a tree and wait for death to take her. But then she would never see her little brother again, and she so longed to see him…. There was only one thing she could do.
“She thought over the idea carefully. She was already wearing boys’ clothes, even though they were foreign devil’s clothing. She was young and still undeveloped enough to pass as a boy. The coolie had shaved her head at the front, and with her long queue she looked just as they did.
“Mayling took a deep breath. She knew that if she were to survive in this world, she must live as a man. She must become Lai Tsin.
“Beloved one, for two years Mayling worked alongside the men from Toishan. Every day was an ordeal because every day she thought she would be discovered. She was young and slender and looked like a boy; she was careful always to keep her body modestly covered, but each month, now that she was a woman, became an ordeal of concealment. The work was brutally hard but she did not complain. She watched the men carefully. She learned to talk like a man, to act like a man, to think like a man. Mayling lived like a man until she no longer remembered what it was to be a young girl, only what it was like to suffer abuse at the hands of men.
“When the work finally came to an end she drifted off with the others, through the many fertile valleys of California to Santa Clara, San Joaquin, Ojai, and Salinas, picking cherries and almonds, lemons, oranges, and lettuces, and when the season finished and winter approached, she went to the big city. She took whatever small jobs came her way, but mostly she paid for her food and shelter from gambling.
“San Francisco was big and frightening, but her heart lifted when she saw Chinatown. The streets had a familiar look and so did the temples with their golden dragons and the smell of incense, the voices, the faces, and the shops with their scrawled slogans wishing prosperity and long life. The smell of spices was familiar, as were the pigtailed children in gay clothing, the fortune-tellers, and the teahouses.
“She stared enviously at the girls, feminine in their cheongsams and padded jackets with flowers in their hair, then looked sadly at her own work-toughened hands, comparing her large feet, heavy boots, and long stride with their tiny delicate ones and their feminine little steps. She listened to the high chatter of their voices and her own rough monosyllabic words copied from the men, and she longed for their dresses and their hair combs, their feminine shoes and chatter. She longed to be a girl again, like them.
“On an impulse, she went into a Chinese store and squandered her precious money on a bright silk smock and trousers, pretending to the shopkeeper she was buying them as a present for her sister. She bought shoes and combs for her hair and took them back to her tiny cockroach-ridden