Chapter Six
Hong Kong
Baba wasn’t at the pier.
I shouldn’t have been disappointed, but after three days of traveling elbow to elbow with my brother—first from Tunglam to Guangzhou, where we had a half-hearted reunion with my uncles, all thin and gray like the cigarettes affixed to their mouths; then on to a Hong Kong–bound steamboat so crowded that in spite of the open-air decks I couldn’t even glimpse the sea—I had indulged in fantasies of Baba’s coming to fetch us.
I pictured his arms full of iced gem biscuits, maybe even a soda. I’d never had a soda before.
My stomach growled, and I sorely regretted giving Mama’s last cabbage bun to Yi Gor.
“What do you think she’ll be like?” he asked while we waited at the wharf. The entirety of the boat ride, he’d snubbed me in favor of our fellow passengers. By now everyone had disembarked, leaving behind people such as us—remainders waiting to be picked up.
“What do I think who will be like?” I asked, pretending not to know.
“Our stepmother, stupid. Who else?”
I fidgeted with my bracelet, which I kept under my sleeve to deter pickpockets.
In truth, I’d been thinking of nothing but Sai Ma for days, mostly to avoid brooding over Mama and our last conversation, but it was impossible to disentangle the two.
I prayed that my stepmother would be kind, that Baba hadn’t told her about Mama’s visions, that she wouldn’t treat me like the daughter of her husband’s deranged first wife.
“Baba was never happy with Mama,” I reasoned. “For a new wife, he’d choose someone very different. Someone who didn’t grow up with dirty fingernails.”
In my head, I added, Someone whose nightmares don’t come true.
“He wrote to Ah Ma about her,” Yi Gor divulged. “Ah Ma told me that she’s beautiful but short, and she breathes in perfume and wears silks to sleep. Also”—he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“she has a baby boy on the way.”
At that, I jerked. “She’s pregnant?”
My brother looked smug.
“How do you know it’s a boy?” I asked.
“Women like her get what they want.”
I couldn’t help snorting. “If it’s a boy, you’ll be worth less.”
His face soured. “You’re worth less,” he said tartly. “She has a girl already.”
My heart nearly stopped. “What? We have a sister? How old is she? What’s her name?”
It was malicious, that knowing look Yi Gor gave me.
I stewed, vexed and wondering what else Ah Ma had told him. But soon my thoughts wandered to Sai Ma’s daughter. I had always longed for a sister, someone to be close with the way my brothers had been with each other before the war and before they’d grown up.
She couldn’t be more than seven years old, I thought giddily. I’d give her my doll and I’d win her over. We only shared half our blood, but I promised myself we’d be close.
Finally, a car came for us. The driver wore white gloves and a hat, and I suspected that our family had become quite rich. Yi Gor must have had the same thought. He straightened his spine and raked his fingers through his hair while the driver carried our bags to the car.
As we drove away from the harbor, I wound down the window and folded my arms over the door, reveling in the warm, balmy wind blowing at my face.
“Look, it’s the Star Ferry,” Yi Gor said, pointing excitedly as we whizzed past the famous double-decker boat.
A little distance made Victoria Harbour magnificent. Where the sun touched the water, magic was born. Magic that scintillated like millions of tiny oyster shells or broken mirror shards. Beautiful in a way that I’d never seen and that made me feel better about what was to come.
Outside was a bustling, exuberant new world.
On every corner was a barrage of billboards, surrounded by sun-bleached buildings so tall they cast shadows over the streets.
I leaned my head against the car, feeling it vibrate from the noise—a never-ending symphony of honks and bells.
Rickshaws and bicycles threaded between the jammed cars, and hawkers knocked on car windows shouting “newspapers!” and “cheung fun!” in the middle of traffic.
And the Westerners! I’d seen a few gweilo in Guangzhou, but in Hong Kong they were everywhere.
They all had pasty skin and weathered brows.
Their shirts were white, their leather shoes a burnished brown against the sunlight, and they walked with swagger.
They smiled as though they had nowhere they needed to go.
The driver glanced at us through the rearview mirror. “Your first time here, ah? What village are you from?”
“Not a village—Guangzhou,” my brother promptly lied. He didn’t want to lose face by admitting he was a country bumpkin.
“Is that right? Lots of you coming in. I drove a fellow the other day who’d left, told me Guangzhou’s still a ghost city.
Not Hong Kong. Look outside, traffic’s bad every day, but after four years under those Japanese devils and having nowhere to go except to wait in line for your ration of rice, no one minds.
You made a good choice coming here. Everyone on your boat was escaping the mainland, weren’t they? ”
Yi Gor agreed, while I frowned. “Escaping what? The war is over.”
The driver laughed. “The war in China isn’t over, little girl, it’s just begun.”
“You are Chinese,” I blurted. “Why do you talk like you’re something else?”
“Our Chinese and your Chinese are different,” he replied. He uttered something in English and, seeing that I didn’t understand, laughed again. He switched back to Cantonese. “You’ll see.”
I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. Some things weren’t so different from Guangzhou, I noticed.
The scorched walls and chipped lion statues, the streams of debris and haphazard pits in the ground, the endless walls of barbed wire.
Volunteer soldiers filed down every street, their shoulders straight and proud. There was not a Japanese flag in sight.
We ascended into the hills, past an oblong field that I’d later learn was a racecourse.
Gu Ma had a house in Happy Valley. Despite its propitious-sounding name, the neighborhood overlooked an expansive cemetery, and I pictured the fit Ah Ma would throw if she knew her only daughter lived in such an ill-fated place, right next to the dead.
Then again, who knew when I’d ever see my grandmother again?
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if the answer was never.
Twelve Harbourage Road was a white house with terra-cotta roof tiles.
Compared to our mansion in Tunglam, it was plain, with no vermillion doors with brass knockers or winged roofs where the roosters could perch and crow.
Still I admired the simple look of it. Its straight walls were long like a comb, its teeth the arched black windows and matching box planters outside, brimming with spades of purple myrtle.
The gate had pineapple finials, which I thought was a nice touch.
The driver whistled at the sight. “Some people did well during the war.”
He escorted us to the gate, carrying my bag and Yi Gor’s suitcase. A maid waited up at the door.
Yi Gor ventured ahead without me. My foot had fallen asleep during the ride, rendering me slow to climb the steep and winding brick stairs leading to the house.
When at last I reached the top, my entire leg was aching.
My chest ached too, though I couldn’t tell whether that pain was from the climb or from something else entirely.
“Welcome home,” said the driver, grinning. I didn’t smile back. This wasn’t home, far from it.
I took my bag from him and followed Yi Gor through the door.
Baba summoned my brother first.
The maid showed me to a dimly lit room where I was to wait. The parlor, she called it. Its door had a bronze feather-shaped lock on the outside, and it made a click when she left me.
Inside was a rosewood settee with two matching armchairs and lace curtains over the windows.
Gilt-bronze mirrors and long scroll paintings of the four seasons adorned the walls, and on each wooden coffer was a selection of magazines, along with a cloisonne bottle—not for perfume, I later learned, but snuff.
As the minutes ticked by, I grew restless.
I explored, flipping through the magazines and pinching the oranges that were laid out in a porcelain bowl.
In the corner farthest from the windows stood a rattan table with some sort of wooden contraption resting on it.
Its base was a mahogany box, and the rest was covered by a velvet cloth.
At first I thought it might be a birdcage until I spied a black crank on one side.
My heart skipped, and I darted a glance at the door. No one was coming. It couldn’t hurt to take a closer look.
I inched toward the box, vibrating with excitement as I swept away the velvet.
A record player!
I’d never seen one before. It was beautiful, its brass horn fashioned like a jasmine flower. A pile of records sat nearby, and I picked one up, cautiously pulling the shiny black disc out of its sleeve. I wished I could read the label and know what song this precious record played.
“The song’s called ‘Dreaming by the Winter Blossoms,’ ” spoke a voice from behind.
My heels popped into a little jump.
A slender young woman stood at the door, two maids close behind her.
She looked like she’d stepped out of the record I was holding.
With her finely plucked eyebrows, dew-painted lips, and birdlike bones, her very presence was glamorous.
Her belly was swollen, but you wouldn’t notice it unless you saw her from the side.
A lace shawl was draped over her torso, secured by a moon-white pearl brooch, and her black silk cheongsam hung loosely, heeled slippers peeking out from under the hem.
“You must be Yut Ying,” she said. “My new daughter.”
My jaw fell at the sight of her. This was Baba’s new wife?
Caught off guard, I bowed and stuttered a greeting.