Chapter 18
no one had ever asked Bette why she did the things she did, or said the things she said, but if they had, she might have told them that her childhood was entirely out of her control, in the way that only happens to children without parents.
No home felt real, no clothes were ever hers alone, always falling in the shape of another body.
In that vacuum, where she couldn’t find anything that belonged to her alone, she had to be tough.
She had to take control of anything she could, no matter how small, no matter how inconsequential to other people.
You see, Bette wasn’t stupid, though people often mistook her silence for lunacy or mental simplicity.
She knew that many didn’t like her. She could see the way the other students’ eyes narrowed whenever she volunteered to clean the chalkboard erasers or take out the classroom trash, when the teacher smiled at her in that coddling, infantilizing way.
Bette could hear her name, even if it was whispered thirty feet away, and she could hear the insults that went along with it.
Bette the Teacher’s Pet. Bette the Orphan Charity Case.
Bette the Crazy Dummy. Bette the Whore’s Daughter.
It was the low murmur of her life, something that buzzed along every moment she was out in the world, every time she was forced to be with children her own age, or with adults who should have known better.
When she beat the erasers together, she liked how the clouds of chalk dust billowed around her, making her temporarily, gloriously blind to the other little girls standing in groups whispering, whispering, giggling as if their cruel words mattered.
They’re all going to die anyway , she repeated in her head like a mantra, a protection.
They’re all going to die anyway, just like my mother, just like their mothers will.
Everyone will just die. And she felt satisfied, as if she was finally expressing a thought that her tiny inner self could agree with.
But to her schoolmates, she was as silent as she ever was, clapping erasers in a dusty white cocoon of her own making.
The cruel thing about
at home, bette lived with Auntie and Uncle, two people who weren’t actually related to her at all, something they reminded her of every time she did anything that displeased them.
“Why do I put up with this,” Auntie had sighed when Bette spilled the dirty laundry water on the kitchen floor. “You’re not even a blood relation.”
They weren’t cruel. They never beat her or denied her food or made her sleep in a closet.
Sometimes, she even made them laugh, especially when she would sing along to Pat Boone on the radio (her favourite singer, for his calm and gentle demeanour, as if he could rock you to sleep if you were small enough to fit into his arms).
But Auntie and Uncle had three other children—Wen, Mei, and Bo—all younger than Bette, all at different stages of bottles and diapers and walking.
Bette could be ignored, could be asked to do things, could be forgotten when the baby was cutting his first tooth or the toddler fell and opened a gash on her forehead.
In the children’s bedroom, the little ones fell asleep first and Bette was left staring at the ceiling, trying not to make a sound.
“I am so tired,” Auntie said, rubbing her temples with her fingers. “If those babies are up tonight, I don’t know what I’ll do.” She touched Bette’s shoulder. “You’ll help, won’t you?”
So Bette did, silently pulling the covers back over the children when they kicked them off, shutting the window if there was a draft or if the noise from the hawkers’ stalls outside swelled too high.
When Bo whined during a nightmare, Bette crept over to his crib and placed a hand on his belly, rubbing in a counter-clockwise circle.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “Shhh. Sleep now.” And he curled onto his side, his thumb in his mouth, soothed.
Bette sometimes fell asleep on the floor after that, too tired to crawl back to her own bed.
She knew she was already small, and she tried, in all situations, to make herself even smaller by being helpful, by completing the tiny tasks no one wanted and that no one would ever thank her for.
If no one ever noticed her, then no one would ever hurt her.
But there was only so much smallness that was bearable.
As she drifted to sleep, the curve of her back pressing into the hard concrete, she imagined that she was a child worth comforting, too, that her mother was beside her, her soft forearm cushioning Bette’s head, a smooth hand placed delicately over hers, a whisper of touch.
One morning, she awoke slowly, the kind of waking that opens up your consciousness one layer at a time.
It was well before dawn and still dark, and in her half sleep, Bette pulled her mother’s hand tighter around her, bringing her closer so her mother could breathe in the scent of her hair.
It was all Bette had ever wanted. But this morning, she felt the embrace give way.
When she opened her eyes, she was holding a blue-tinged arm, severed at the shoulder, ragged flesh like teeth.
She turned to look over her shoulder: her mother’s eyes were open and bulging out of their sockets, tongue swollen and protruding from her mouth.
Bette covered her own mouth with her hands, pressing down so that she wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t wake the children or Auntie and Uncle in the next room.
A small voice inside her head let out a giggle, and Bette swore she heard it say, She’s still dead, you dummy .
She squeezed her eyes shut again and kept them closed, even as she felt the morning light travelling across her face.
It was a dream, of course, because when Bo woke up and began to push at Bette, forcing her to open her eyes, there was no trace of her mother at all, but for the memory in Bette’s hands.
bette wasn’t a servant , not quite anyway.
She had been left with this family by Auntie’s father, an old man who, as Auntie told it, showed up at their apartment in Yau Ma Tei with her in his arms, wrapped in layers of blankets and two bags stuffed to the brim.
Auntie hadn’t seen her father in years, not since before the war, and she didn’t know what to say when he handed her this baby and said simply, “She needs you.” He stayed for lunch—tomato and beef on rice, sliced papaya, a smoky tea—and then left.
He never said if he would come back and he never did, so at least he had never been a liar.
It was a way of being honourable, Bette supposed.
The two bags were full of things to sell, or things Bette might need, and fine but worn clothes that Auntie would never wear herself and that were, over the years, used as rags or dumped in the Catholic church’s donation box.
At the bottom of one bag, there was a diary Bette’s mother had written that Auntie let her keep in the one drawer that was hers alone.
It was swollen with water damage, some pages now yellow, with paper lice crawling from the spine to the edges.
Ever since she could read, Bette read it once a year, on the anniversary of the day she had come to live in this third-floor apartment, a box in a bigger concrete box that was strewn with laundry lines tied to the sagging balconies and tangled electrical wires strung up with J-hooks.
For many years, she didn’t understand what she was reading and spent most of her time staring at the photograph of Gigi that was tucked within the pages. It was impossible that Bette—whom no one ever noticed—should have had a mother that beautiful, with skin that smooth and flawless.
When she turned ten, she began to read more closely and better understood the life that Gigi had led.
Bette realized she was half Japanese in a place where such a thing was loathed at worst and ignored at best, a product of war and violence, and the taunts she heard at school finally made sense.
Half breed , whore baby , Jap trash , the other children sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted.
One afternoon at school, Bette found a skilfully drawn cartoon of a Japanese soldier—eyes like slits, hair fearsomely slicked and black—having sex with a woman from behind, a woman with huge breasts spilling out of her half-torn dress, her mouth open to suggest pleasure or maybe pain, Bette couldn’t tell.
Your beautiful mother was scrawled across the bottom of the page.
Well , Bette thought, as she ripped the sketch into tiny pieces that she stuffed into her pocket, my mother was truly beautiful, not that any of them would care .
What she repeated to herself from Gigi’s diary, like a bedtime story her mother might have told and retold:
I told a story tonight that scared all the girls. If only they knew what I see in the long dark hallways.
I do not know whom I am writing to, or if I am writing for myself. One day my baby might read this in order to know me better. If so, she will be a diligent, good daughter, just as I wished.
I kept the ring of keys to Nam Koo and I don’t know why. I hate them.
The ghosts wait for me. They know I am coming before I even know where I am going.
I hope everyone loves my little Bette. She can be better than these circumstances.
She will be more fortunate than me.
And Bette would pull the keys from the back of the drawer and test their weight in her hands.
They should be heavier , she always thought, as if the memory of all the girls kept there had heft and density, as if this old set of keys could hold their stories like genies in bottles, like captive spirits.
The ones her mother saw, the ones she described as lurid , helpless , resentful , scared .