Chapter Twenty-One
I hid the money under the bottom drawer of my dresser. Altogether, with every coin I’d been able to pinch and stash away from Gu Ma’s clutches, I had nearly two thousand dollars. A small fortune saved up over five long years.
Going back to the mainland was unthinkable, but if Lily and I changed our names and were careful about whom we trusted, this money could be enough to start a new life in Hong Kong.
Over the next month, we set a date and plotted every detail, from the cost of ferry tickets to Kowloon to where I’d buy hats and trousers to disguise us as young men. But the weekend we were to run away, Lily didn’t come home.
“Where’s Lily?” I asked my father.
Downstairs, Sai Ma and Baba were taking congee for breakfast. Their soupspoons tinkled against the porcelain bowls with a cool serenity. Something was wrong.
“Where are your manners, Yut Ying?” Sai Ma said.
“Good morning, Baba. Good morning, Sai Ma.”
“That’s better.” Only Sai Ma would have makeup on at seven in the morning. As she wiped her mouth, her lipstick left a rusty-red smudge on her napkin.
“Where’s Lily?” I repeated.
“Lily won’t be home until the Qingming Festival,” said Baba, folding his newspaper.
“That’s months from now!” I exclaimed. “There’s a break in the school term for Chinese New Year—”
“She’s left school,” Sai Ma interrupted. “She’s gone to live with her future in-laws.”
It was as if a fearsome wind had struck me. “No,” I whispered. “There hasn’t been a party yet. I thought she wasn’t leaving until after—”
“The Tsangs are humble people. They didn’t see the need for a party to announce the engagement, and neither did we.”
Lies, I thought. If what Tommy told me was true, my family was trying to speed up the betrothal before the Tsangs could change their minds.
I simmered in my chair. Tonight, I decided, I’d sneak into Sai Ma’s room and find the Tsangs’ address. I’d rescue Lily.
Sai Ma was chuckling at me. “Oh, Yut Ying. Still such a country girl, wearing your emotions for everyone to see. You’re planning to run away, aren’t you? Well, it’ll be harder without this.”
I heard a flapping of paper, and my stomach lurched with dread. From her handbag, Sai Ma withdrew a thick wad of money. Mine.
“Susu found this under your dresser,” she said, preempting my question. “How good of you to finally pay off the phonograph.”
Something in my mind fractured. I didn’t think through what might happen next and grabbed Sai Ma by the hair.
She screamed as I shook her, ripping out a good fistful of hair before Susu smashed a bowl over my head. As I crumpled to the ground, Baba and the maid wrenched me away down the stairs.
Richard was shrieking in the background, “Killing is bad! Don’t kill Ying Ying Jeh Jeh!”
Susu locked me in the cellar. It was dark and smelled like mold and had a brick-sized window. Cockroaches skittered where the light didn’t touch.
I pounded my fists against the door, screaming until the sound in my throat shriveled up.
In the morning, I became calm. I held my breath, welcoming the sudden cold that prickled my skin.
Easy as that, I dissolved into the air and slipped through the door.
That was as far as I got. No matter how I tried, my shadow wouldn’t follow me out of the cellar.
It was worldly in a way I no longer was, and kept me chained to my prison.
I sank against the wall in defeat, hugging my knees. As the hours whittled away, I thought about how indifferent Lily had sounded about being locked in here, and wondered whether she’d been lying. Whether she’d felt as frightened as I did. As angry.
As helpless.
Inside a fermented sack of rice I found her flashlight and some books she’d hidden.
There were stories about the Monkey King and the legend of Chang’e, and the rest were Western tales about sleeping princesses and poisoned apples and wolves that ate children wandering in the woods.
I found Cinderella, but my light ran out before I reached the end.
On the third day, Gu Ma unlocked the cellar door. Guilt flickered across her face—a telling sign of how little my family thought of me. They hadn’t meant to keep me locked up so long, they’d just forgotten to let me out.
In a matter of days Gu Ma had aged years, white hairs creeping through the dyed blacks, and a web of wrinkles around her eyes. She sat beside me at the table as I ate, replenishing my strength so I could continue hating everyone in this house.
“The wedding won’t be until Lily turns seventeen,” she said, as if that were a consolation. “The Tsangs are good people. They’ll take better care of her than we can.”
How would you know? I wondered. You’ve never even tried.
. . .
There was truth to Gu Ma’s words: Lily was better off away from home. For in the following months, every seam that my family had so pridefully stitched into Hong Kong’s upper society came undone.
It started with little things, like the telephone.
One day, Gu Ma disconnected it and locked it away in a cabinet, then she threw out Baba’s pipe and buried his opium.
Next, she dismissed Susu. She said the maid had been stealing and she’d find a replacement as soon as possible. Lies. The real reason was obvious.
Money was tight. My family had spent a fortune on Lily’s dowry, really a bribe to keep the Tsangs on our side and delay an investigation as long as possible. It was thanks to Gu Ma’s connections that everything didn’t collapse at once.
Even so, our reputation fell swiftly. Invitations ceased, friends made excuses not to visit, and workers at the factory quit, including Sui Chan.
When a handful of military officials came to interrogate the last remaining employees, my aunt ushered me out a back door into her car.
During the ride home, I swore all of her hair turned gray.
Gu Ma wouldn’t admit it, but she was fearful for her life.
People had begun vandalizing the factory and throwing stones at any cars that passed through the gates.
In her paranoia that the house would be searched next, she buried her jewelry in the courtyard and tossed out all the albums by Li Hsiang-lan, a singer I liked.
Li had been branded a traitor herself, sentenced to death by firing squad.
Days before her execution, it was discovered that she was actually a Japanese spy, and she was released to Japan.
My aunt, unfortunately, had nowhere she could go.
Police drove by the house every day. We were being watched.
On her thirtieth birthday, Sai Ma couldn’t stand it anymore. None of her girlfriends would come visit the house—not even the kindly Mrs. Wong—and her own parents made excuses, citing too much traffic on the roads.
“You’ve ruined us,” she cried, turning on Gu Ma. “It’s my birthday, and we can’t even leave the house for a nice dinner!”
Gu Ma calmly picked up a slice of fish and set it on Sai Ma’s plate. “Sit down, Seet Ling. Your food is getting cold.”
“I will not sit down—”
“I seem to recall that during the occupation you said the Japanese were going to win the war, and we needed to be on their side before everyone else. Or have you forgotten?”
I chewed on my noodles, glad that I had taken the time to make them extra crispy. No one else was eating, so I served myself seconds.
Gu Ma slammed down her chopsticks. “If not for the sacrifices I made, do you think a woman like you would be sitting here now in your pearls and fur? Oh no, I forgot, you have a daughter you would’ve sold off.”
“It’s because I sold Lily off that the British aren’t knocking at our door right this instant—to arrest you!”
“Enough!” Baba snapped. “You two, quiet down.”
“You tell your wife to shut her mouth,” Gu Ma hissed. “We didn’t hurt anyone, we didn’t kill anyone.” She grimaced, and I knew she was thinking about Zhou Hin Kong, that technically it was Yi Gor who killed him. “So long as we keep our mouths shut, nothing will happen. They won’t find anything.”
The rest of dinner, my family ate in spiteful silence.
Afterward, while I cleaned the dishes, my stepmother retreated to the parlor.
Lately she’d taken to heavy drink, and every few nights I’d jolt in my bed when I felt the vibrations of her drunkenly shattering a glass or hurling her records to the floor.
Tonight she sat in her pearls and heels listening to old Cantonese operas as she drank herself into oblivion.
This was what I’d wanted: Sai Ma’s defeat. Too bad I couldn’t muster a single laugh.
I wished I could say I tried to see Lily at the Tsangs’. Every day I meant to, but something in me was broken.
All I could fixate on was how my aunt was guilty. It had been bad enough to suspect she’d collaborated with the enemy, and worse to hear the confession from her own lips—from my entire family’s lips.
No matter who you were in society—a tycoon, a bottle cleaner on the street, a schoolteacher, or a gangster, everyone agreed that traitors deserved to rot in the lowest of hells. My aunt had earned her place in this rung among the devils. And for what?
Money.
The days melted one into another, marked by the dust gathering on my white windowsill.
Gu Ma could be found at her desk poring over her ledgers, crumpling the pages to be burned.
Sai Ma sat in front of the parlor mirror brushing her hair for hours while listening to the same song.
Baba I avoided. His moods were worse than Sai Ma’s, and since quitting the pipe, his skin was a calamity of boils, chills, and sweats.
He was often in the toilet with a stomachache.
With Susu gone, I was responsible for all the chores. I cooked and did the laundry; I washed the stone path in front of the house and looked out for the police. And I prayed.
Sometimes when I lay in bed, on the verge of sleep, I heard gunshots thundering in my left ear, as if I’d pressed my cheek to dynamite. They left me shaking each time. Phantom sounds, I would learn. They were gone as soon as I startled awake.
“Little devil,” Zhou Hin Kong had said, “does anyone else know what you can do?”
I didn’t believe in ghosts like Gu Ma did, but I did believe in curses, and I didn’t want mine to hurt Lily. I was starting to believe I was bad luck. The farther Lily was from me, the better.
So the days passed, the weeks burning into months.
One morning, Baba had another stomachache and Sai Ma wasn’t available to nurse him as usual.
I brought his po chai yuen on a tray, the tiny red pills rattling as I padded to his den.
By now I’d given up yearning for his attention.
When I entered, he held up the newspaper, pointing at the front page.
“What is this?” he asked. His hands trembled, a sign that he hadn’t smoked. Money had to be scarce if he wasn’t puffing a cigarette at this time of day.
My heart jumped when I saw what he was pointing at.
“It’s a girl selling soymilk,” I responded.
“Don’t lie,” he growled. “This is your face. What is your face doing in an advertisement?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I used to fret that Sai Ma or my aunt might notice me on the billboards beaming down on Queen’s Road, but I was like Cinderella hiding in plain sight.
I should have known Baba would be the one to find out. We had the same moon-wide eyes, the same bowed lips and dimples in our cheeks. He recognized me because he saw himself in the picture.
“Tommy Yeung asked me,” I finally replied. “His grandfather owns—”
“Peaksoy.” Baba’s eyebrow arched. “You know his family?”
“They came to Richard’s full moon party.”
“So they did,” said Baba, drumming his fingers. “His mother’s family has done well. Even though the war’s over, people are still afraid. They’re nostalgic for simpler times, simpler pleasures. The Fungs have been shrewd to capitalize on this. Are you friends with Tommy?”
Was I? It’d been months since I last saw him. He knew my family was in trouble, yet not once had he stopped by to say hello like he promised he would. Not once had he written.
With a pang, I replied, “No. We’re not.”
“That’s too bad.” Baba folded the newspaper. “Don’t tell your mother about this.”
It took me a moment to realize he meant Sai Ma, not my real mother.
“I won’t.”
As I left the den, Baba threw the newspaper into the bin. That night when I emptied the waste, my picture stared back at me, my smile torn in half.