A Paper Son Read online

  “We can’t go back through Xinhui,” she tells her children, “so we may have to walk a long time tonight, and it will be dark,” she says to them. “I need you both to be strong and brave.”

  Rose takes Henry’s hand and wordlessly they follow her eastward. They leave the glowing lanterns of Jianghai behind and enter unfamiliar fields. A three-quarter moon lights their way from its spot in a clear sky. Li-Yu worries that they will wander off the trail in the darkness of a thick wood, or that the moon will set. But the countryside remains open, with few trees, and after they have walked for half an hour she sees the moon is climbing higher. Their eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. They begin to see details like the heads and ears of rabbits, rising and ducking in the fields

  After an hour the road begins to climb. They walk up and over a ridge. Rose and Henry walk quickly, without complaining, speaking rarely. As they descend into the valley the trees grow thicker, but by now they are accustomed to seeing in the darkness. They slow their pace, and several times one of them stumbles or loses footing, but they press on. They walk along for another half an hour and then the trees above them thin, and the moonlight falls back down around them. They pass over a rise and suddenly the air cools, and then the river is beneath them, black and silent. The road bends and they follow it downriver. If only they could move as easily as the water, and the cool air that rides southward on its back, Li-Yu thinks.

  The glow of lanterns comes from around a bend in front of them, and Li-Yu holds out her hands and slows her children. It would cause too much suspicion for the three of them to walk into a town at this time of night, but she sees nowhere to sleep—a steep hill rises on the other side of the path, and at its base there are only low bushes, barely big enough to hide a cat. And then Li-Yu notices a small pier made of reeds, where a gathering of fishing boats is moored. One of them looks just big enough for the three of them to crawl into and hide.

  She points to the little boat. “In there,” she whispers.

  “We’re sleeping in a boat?” Henry whispers. “Whose is it?”

  She shushes him and guides them onto the dock. There is room only for the children to lie down, so Li-Yu remains sitting. It is better this way, she tells herself. This way she can keep watch. Dawn could be near—she has lost track of time. Henry falls asleep almost immediately. Rose has trouble getting comfortable, but the boat tilts and turns in the gentle current, and the rocking soothes her, and soon she follows her brother into sleep. Crickets chirp on the hillside behind them. An occasional shift in the breeze carries the hint of a human sound or smell up from the village beneath them.

  Li-Yu sits and stares at the flowing water, watching leaves and pieces of branches and tiny bubbles drift downstream, envying their effortless travel. It occurs to her to simply steal the boat and float away, but she thinks of the horsemen, searching the hidden landscape for thieves. So I will purchase it, she decides, and she rips a piece of cloth from the bottom of her skirt, muffling the sound in her hands. She ties several coins into the cloth and then ties the bundled payment to the mooring rope. She carefully loosens the knot and pushes the boat away from the pier. The current cooperates and pulls them quickly into the middle of the river. She keeps herself as low as she can when they pass through the village, and when she is sure they are long past it, she cautiously returns to a sitting position. She smiles over her sleeping children, who, after all these long years, are finally hers again. When she falls asleep, she dreams that she is traveling through the canopy of a leafy forest, passed along gently by the trees’ branches from one to the next.

  THIRTEEN

  “How do you know about guo-yin?” Eva asked the next morning, as soon as I emerged from my room. She was sitting at my desk, reading from my computer screen. “How do you know about rice cultivation, or any of this, for that matter?” She looked relaxed. She wasn’t smiling, but she seemed like she might, somehow.

  “I have a multiple-subject teaching credential,” I said, “which means the state of California has certified me as an expert in multiple subjects.”

  “And which of those subjects covers obscure Chinese rituals, exactly?”

  “I also read a lot,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” she said. “I haven’t seen you read a word the whole time I’ve been here.”

  “Historically, I have been known to read a lot,” I said. “Also, the Internet contains a good deal of information, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Not about guo-yin. I looked.”

  “So maybe I read about it,” I said. “Or maybe I saw a show about it once. Why does it matter?”

  Now she did smile. “Just try to remember. Did you read it or was it a show?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I just had a feeling you wouldn’t remember,” she said, her smile growing. “That’s all.”

  “Well, you were right,” I said, shrugging off her questions and trying to think ahead to my teaching day.

  “I can see that,” she said. “Have a great day at school.”

  Lucy had asked if she could come back to my class with me, but a schedule shift meant that my kids would be occupied that Friday morning by a visit to the science lab, so I told her to stop in around lunchtime and I headed up the hill alone. In my mailbox I found a reminder, printed on bright yellow paper, that report cards would be due on Tuesday. In my empty classroom I booted up my laptop. There was a quick thought or two I had to get down about Li-Yu and her kids, and then I’d get to work on the reports.

  There is a little bump and Li-Yu awakens to find the boat resting against a bank of dirt and rocks and grasses. Her children stir, but remain asleep. She turns to look behind her but instead of the opposite bank she finds herself staring back upstream, up a river that grew to ten times its previous width as she and the children slept. The riverbanks, she now sees, are no longer parallel, but run away from one another, and she whirls back around to the realization that they have come to rest against an island. She rouses her children. They collect their things and carefully climb out of the boat, stretching their arms and legs, working the stiffness out of their necks. At the top of the bank they discover a pathway that leads up the back of a treeless hill, and when they arrive at the summit they find the rest of a crescent-shaped island curling away from them, back toward the northern shore. There is a single village on the island, a few minutes’ walk before them. Beyond it, there is only open ocean. Li-Yu turns to look at the little boat, parked on shore, and at the river’s mouth behind it. How easy it would have been—how far more likely it would have been—for the current to have carried them past the island and out to sea. She offers a silent thank you, to the island and the current, to the boat and the river and to the nameless fisherman who unknowingly sold her this charmed vessel, and then she leads her children into the village. They arrive at a small stand along the pathway where a woman is at work, stirring a steaming pot of jook and frying dough. The woman makes no effort to hide her incredulity at their approach.

  “Good morning,” Li-Yu calls. “What is this place?”

  The woman does not answer right away, but looks behind them, up the pathway, as if into their pasts. She looks back at Li-Yu and the children, squints, shakes her head, squints again.

  “This is Jiaobei Island,” she says, when she finally accepts they are real. “How did you get here?”

  “Our boat brought us,” Li-Yu says. “That jook smells delicious.”

  She buys three large bowls of the rice porridge, three boiled salted duck eggs, and a plateful of fried yau ja gwai. The woman lets them eat in peace, though Li-Yu can see the questions in her head. By the time their bellies are full, the sun is warm on their faces and the food is heating them from within.

  “We are trying to reach Canton,” Li-Yu says.

  “The ferry comes once a week, at noon,” the woman says. She smiles, and again looks back up the pathway. “I don’t know your story, but your trave
ls are blessed. Today is the day.”

  “Thank you,” Li-Yu says. “Our little boat is resting on the bank on the other side of the hill. I would like you to have it.”

  The woman’s eyes ignite. She reaches into her apron and returns the money Li-Yu had paid her for their breakfast. “You have made my son the happiest boy on the island,” she says, and she pokes apart her cooking fire and then turns and runs into town, leaving Li-Yu alone with her children.

  They spend the morning wandering through the little fishing village, looking into shops, pausing to watch a weaver mending baskets and a man making fishing poles out of a pile of cut bamboo. At noon the ferry collects them and the next morning they are in Canton.

  They disembark with the rest of the passengers and step down onto the piers. Li-Yu remembers well the smell of soot and garbage and fish and the sprawling chaos of travelers streaming across the creaking wooden planks, laden with shoulder bags and suitcases. Teams of workers haul steamer trunks or drag overloaded wooden carts, whose bamboo racks threaten to break and spill their contents. Uniformed officials keep watchful eyes on the mass. Two men block Li-Yu’s path momentarily; between them they carry a long pole from which several squawking chickens dangle, each in its own flimsy wooden cage. Rose and Henry stay so close to their mother that Li-Yu can barely take a step without treading on one of them. Finally she puts Henry’s hand in one of Rose’s hands, takes her by the other hand, and pulls them through the crowd.

  The edge of the city near the piers is as she remembers it: a labyrinth of dark tortured alleys, all of them crowded. She finds an inn and steps inside to inquire about rates, but the clerk tells her it’s not a place for children. She argues, so he smiles and quotes her a rate high enough for ten rooms for a month. Li-Yu turns and drags her children back into the alley. The next two inns are full, and in the one after that a pair of rats are fighting over a scrap of food on the floor just in front of the counter. After a half-hour of searching she finds a place that seems safe and clean enough for the children. It is more expensive than she had hoped, but she can’t keep dragging them through this chaos. Perhaps she will find something else the next day. The clerk is tall, almost emaciated, and he has short gray hairs that cover his Adam’s apple, but he smiles a lot and he shows them a room up three flights of stairs. It will be quieter, he explains, and better for the children to be away from the street. They leave their things and venture back into the alleyways to find food. There are hundreds of vendors selling food from storefronts, from carts, from stacks of tin buckets hanging from poles that seem impossible to carry through the crowds. She and the children gorge themselves on glass noodles and bean curd, fried pork with hot chilies, and gai lan. Even though Rose and Henry are full she buys each of them a custard pastry for dessert. They return to their room, sated and tired. Rose curls up on one of the beds and falls asleep instantly. Li-Yu imagines her daughter is dreaming of San Francisco. Henry stands near the window, staring down into the teeming alleyway.

  “Do you remember being here?” Li-Yu asks him softly.

  He nods.

  “You do? It was many years ago, and you were only three.”

  “I was four,” he says. “I remember.”

  “Do you remember America?”

  He nods. “I remember Dad. I remember our house. Are we going to live there again?”

  “We’re going to have a new house,” Li-Yu says. “Do you remember your aunts? Do you remember your po and gung?”

  He nods again.

  “We’re going to go see them first,” Li-Yu says. “They are very, very excited to see you and Rosie.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll find a home of our own.”

  Henry is quiet. Together they watch the traffic streaming through the half-lit alleyway below. Li-Yu waits for his next questions to form.

  “Is it better in California?” he asks.

  “It’s our home,” she says.

  “What was the house in Xinhui?” Henry asks. “Not a real home?”

  “Someone else’s home,” Li-Yu says. “Mae’s. Not ours.”

  “Are we ever going to go back there?” Henry asks. “Are we ever going to see Mae again?”

  “I’m not,” Li-Yu says. “You could, though. Maybe when you’re all grown up, you might come back.”

  “She might be dead by then,” he says.

  “Are you going to miss her?” Li-Yu asks.

  She wants him to shake his head, to say no, that all he wants is to go back to California, and reclaim the life she’d set about making for him all those years before. But his life has already been far different than hers, and this is a different journey for him. How much did he know? Did he know that he was the center of all these movements? That he had been the reason for their trip to China in the first place, and the reason they couldn’t leave? That for years she and Rose had been little more than forgotten satellites, quiet in their hidden orbits as they circled him? Did he know that the love he’d felt in that house had been exclusively his? Rose had told him as much, there on the pathway outside the meeting hall, as the hoofbeats of the spirit horses thundered around them, and he hadn’t seemed surprised. He’d plunged into the night alongside her.

  “A little,” he says. “She was nice to me.”

  “You used to be scared of her,” Li-Yu says. “Do you remember?”

  “That’s when I was little.”

  Li-Yu nods. Henry lies down on the other bed and stares up at the ceiling, his fingers laced behind his head, his feet crossed. His socks look clean and new, even after two days of traveling. Mae must have gotten them for him in one of her recent expeditions to the market.

  “I’ll be back in just a little bit,” Li-Yu says. “I have to send a telegraph. You two stay right here.”

  Henry glances over at his big sister, whose light, airy snores are floating around the room. “Okay,” he says. “What’s a telegraph?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back,” she says. Li-Yu locks the door behind her and climbs once more down to the street. The clerk gives her directions and just a few minutes later, in the next alley over, she finds herself in a small dingy shop, dictating a message. The clerk is a small bent man who hunches over a desk, writing down her words. “We’re going back to California,” Li-Yu tells him, smiling. The man grunts. He reads the message back to Li-Yu, and then taps it out on the machine. He hands Li-Yu a receipt, and a few minutes later she is back in her room, thinking about the electrical impulses flying toward her sisters. Henry has fallen asleep. She sets the receipt on a table, curls up next to him, and sinks into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  The response comes back just three days later, sliding beneath the door, carried up, presumably, by the tall graying clerk. Li-Yu pounces on it and rips the envelope open. Taped to a thin sheet of paper is the short message: “3 tickets booked.” There is a date, a week from then, and a time, and the name of the ship: the Crystal Gypsy. There is the name of another inn, elsewhere on the waterfront, where she and the children are to check in two days before their departure. Li-Yu reads the words a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth. She stares at them until she can close her eyes and see each curve and angle of every letter. Warmth fills her; it radiates from her skin and fills the room.

  Li-Yu floats through the next few days. She and her children explore the piers, watching the huge steamships and freighters sailing up and down the Pearl River. Canton feels like a vacation now. They eat well. She buys them things they don’t need. On the appointed day they carry their things to the next inn and find themselves in a crowded lobby. Several times she picks the Gypsy’s name out of the noisy, exuberant conversations. She hears San Francisco mentioned again and again, as though the city’s name is a great new secret sweeping through the room. Rose and Henry smile and watch and listen.

  On the following morning a team of doctors work their way through the crowded inn, examining each traveler and stamping their tickets. And then, in th
e middle of that afternoon, the Crystal Gypsy steams into the port. Li-Yu and her children watch it from a bench along the waterfront. She has been braiding Rose’s hair, and Henry has been reading a book he brought in his pack, but now they stop and watch. As it plies up the wide Pearl River, plumes of black smoke billow from its smokestacks, merge with one another, and trail out behind it.

  “That’s ours,” Li-Yu tells her children. They watch it dock, silently assessing its massive size, its unimaginable capabilities. Li-Yu barely sleeps that night, and the next morning they pack their things early and check out of the inn. They buy as much food as they can carry and arrive at the appointed pier well before they are scheduled to board. They watch the first-class passengers climb aboard, and then the second-class passengers, and after that, they are the first up the gangway. There is an American waiting for them at the top. He addresses them in a barely-recognizable attempt at Cantonese. Li-Yu smiles. “We’re American,” she says. “We’re going home.”

  “You and me both,” the man says, with a grateful smile. He checks their name against a list and directs them to a doorway. Through the door is a stairway that takes them below deck and aft to their bunkroom in the steerage quarters. The room is as large as a barn, and crowded with beds made of stretched canvas stacked in sets of three. Li-Yu selects a spot in the corner and takes the bottom bed. Rose chooses the middle, leaving Henry the top. Li-Yu settles back into her bed and watches as the room continues to fill. Above her she can hear Rose talking to Henry about California. She listens to descriptions of their old house, of the school Rose had attended and the shop Bing had owned, and the weekly radio programs they had once listened to. Li-Yu forgets the clamor around her as she listens to Rose’s descriptions. Everything is there—the contents of their refrigerator, the smell of the car, their wooden toys and books, the other homes and trees and fences on the quiet block where the house stood that had once been theirs. She had driven so much of it from their conversations, from their lore and remembrances—and from her own mind—in an attempt to create a future in China for her children. But the past had been there all along, vivid and rich, thriving in her daughter’s memory. It should not have been a surprise that Rose had known exactly what to do when the time had come.