Chapter 15
the war never seemed to end. Instead, the soldiers who came to visit Nam Koo grew older, reappeared with limps and white hair and skin that sagged where muscles used to be.
Gigi didn’t feel sorry for them exactly, but the only way she could even measure the passage of time was with the disintegration of these male bodies, the deterioration that was sometimes slow, sometimes lightning fast. Auntie was determined that all the girls and their bodies would remain the same—pale skin, soft hips, hair that was brushed one hundred times every night.
Each girl had on her vanity a jar of flesh-coloured makeup that felt slippery and gummy at the same time, emollient under her fingers but then cakey on her face, turning blemishes and bruises the colour of skin but the texture of rippled, drying sand.
Gigi sometimes wondered what was the point, when the soldiers barely seemed to care what they looked like anymore.
It was enough that they were pliant and agreeable.
Auntie had unscrewed a third of the light bulbs to save on the unreliable electricity, so no one could see clearly anyway.
The sad, decrepit ghost soldiers wanted joy.
They wanted the girls to laugh, to dance when the music played, to drink the whisky they spilled into their delicate crystal glasses.
Many of the girls did this very well, especially Xuan, who sang old songs in her shaky soprano while holding a single flower she had plucked from the garden.
She always chose songs that told a story, usually of lost love, usually with a heroine lamenting her broken heart and a man who would never return.
Xuan, as she was instructed, held the soldiers in thrall. Gigi, on the other hand, was failing.
When a soldier swung her out onto the ballroom’s parquet floor, she stiffened in his arms, her back rigid against his hand.
When he pinned her against a wall and lifted up her skirts, she slapped him away.
When he tried to enter her from behind, her body lurched forward and he was left, penis out, staring at the vast space between them.
“I am not myself today,” she would say. “The war is getting to all of us.”
That appeased some of the more broken soldiers.
Others grew angry. What they did with their rage was different from man to man.
But the target was always the same: Gigi, and the soft skin that covered her soft body.
When she walked the hallways, when the mysterious women appeared and disappeared, her bruises and sore joints were the only things that still made a kind of sad, tangible sense.
As the war continued, the soldiers stopped asking for Gigi.
She found herself alone, untended by Auntie, forgotten by Xuan.
With no one paying attention, instead of wandering the long halls, she went to the garden, where the trees hid her from the house.
On the north side, she found a stone bench down a narrow path.
A bird bath stood beside it, clematis growing up its base.
There, she watched pigeons and ducks dip their beaks into the water and throw up their heads to spray it upward, before it fell back down again, like rain.
They spread their wings and shook the droplets far and wide.
Gigi felt them on her face. Water blessed by birds , she thought.
She often imagined what her life might be like once the war was over, once she could wander the old streets of Kowloon and order jianbing from a cart, or count the clotheslines that hung from the balconies of the apartment buildings that lined every street.
She could be a model, an actress maybe. After all, she had been playing a role for almost five years now, one she hated, one that was growing more and more tedious every single day.
A barely purple petal from the magnolia fell onto the bench beside her, and she picked it up, felt how soft and fragile it was between her fingers, easy to rip, easy to shred.
Outside in the sunshine and wind, she never saw a ghost of another sad, ruined woman speaking to her from damp shadows.
In the garden, it was a relief to no longer feel as if these women were confusing her with riddles and warnings that she didn’t understand.
It was a relief to no longer wonder if they were wise and generous or wished her harm.
There was nothing for her to occupy her time with, only this crumbling mansion, the soldiers, and the minutes she spent in the garden, hidden from the street by a tall brick wall she could never climb.
It was after one of these afternoons in the garden that Gigi returned to the house and found a package waiting on her dressing table.
There was no name written on the creased brown wrapping paper.
She untied the string, opened the lid of the box.
Inside, her old Noel Coward record. She lifted it out and examined the paper sleeve, her fingers tracing the worn edges of the corner.
She sniffed. It did not smell of her mother.
In the box, a folded piece of paper.
Dear Gigi ,
If you’re reading this, then I have died. I won’t be able to come for you. I’m sorry. Take care, Little Sister. I love you, as Mama did.
Big Brother
She hid the record between her mattress and the bed frame. She did not know who would ever see it and care, but she did. She cared very much.
by the time the war ended and the soldiers stopped coming, Gigi was spending most of each day in the garden on the stone bench.
The gardener had long since left, and the trees had grown heavy over top.
Gigi pulled the clematis out of the basin so the birds could still drink and bathe.
It wasn’t long before Auntie left, disappearing one night.
When the girls checked her room the next day, she had taken almost nothing, only her jewel box and whatever she had been wearing.
Her ring of keys hung from the post at the foot of the bed.
Gigi took them. Easier to pretend she was fearless with them in her pocket, heavy and loud, a metal jumble of protection.
Eventually, it was only Xuan, Gigi, and Old Yan left.
By the time Gigi realized that she was pregnant again, she figured that she was at least six months along.
The soldiers had been gone for weeks and weeks, and she’d had no reason to check her cycles or the growth of her body.
She did not tell anyone. Instead, she weeded the kitchen garden every morning and brought Old Yan what she could—mustard greens, potatoes, apples from the grove.
Old Yan began taking things from the rooms—small mirrors, cutlery, linen—and selling them.
Where he went and whom he saw, Gigi didn’t know.
On the morning Xuan left, she walked into Gigi’s room wearing her straw hat and her favourite dress.
“I met an American man who says he will take me in his car as far as Fuzhou. From there, I will find a way to get to Shanghai.” She paused for a moment and adjusted her hat. “Maybe I can be a new person there.”
Gigi held her gloved hand and squeezed. “I hope you get everything you want.”
“What will you do? You can’t stay here.”
“I will leave soon. And then I’ll become rich and famous somehow. You know, with all the accomplishments we’ve perfected here.”
Xuan laughed but Gigi didn’t laugh with her, and her trills died in the air.
They walked down the stairs together, Xuan’s right hand on her suitcase, her left in Gigi’s grasp.
Outside in the circular driveway, Xuan’s American boyfriend leaned against a rusted car, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was tall, and his fair hair fell in a wave over one eye.
He nodded at the girls and hoisted Xuan’s suitcase into the trunk.
Gigi held on to Xuan’s body, so narrow under her dress and coat.
She whispered, “You will be happy and glamorous in Shanghai, my sister. I won’t forget you.”
Xuan kissed her cheek and got into the car.
As Gigi turned to walk to the house, she heard Xuan call her name.
When she looked back, her friend was standing in the middle of the driveway, dress shining green in the soft light, holding her hat at her side.
She did not wave, only gazed evenly at Gigi and also past her, at Nam Koo.
Gigi blinked. Before her, instead of Xuan, was the faceless girl, the one she had seen just before she was brought to this place and then again when she was pregnant that first time.
Now, the girl was wearing the dress she had stolen from Gigi’s closet, the full-skirted green taffeta, and she stood precisely, ankles together, exactly how Gigi had been taught to stand by the nuns at her old school.
Her posture did not waver. The girl was not looking at anything other than Nam Koo, at the mansion that she had loved and died in, the mansion she continued to be tethered to in her afterlife.
It occurred to Gigi that maybe the girl was planning an escape from this place, that her spot in the driveway meant she might someday try to leave.
Or maybe she had been trying to leave this whole time.
When Gigi blinked again, Xuan and her American boyfriend were gone, as if they had never been there at all.
Had she mistaken Xuan for this ghost all along?
Had her grip on reality loosened so much that her eyes had mistaken Xuan for a silk merchant’s dead daughter?
It would be understandable, wouldn’t it, after all these years, all the scars on her body, the things the soldiers had done to her?
Wasn’t madness the reasonable conclusion?