Chapter Thirty
Kansas City
Helen
Three days after we met, Philip and I were married.
As a young girl I’d pictured my wedding to be joyously red, and raucous with the laughter of hundreds of relatives.
In reality there was no banquet, only a short ceremony at a courthouse.
We had four guests: Sui Chan, her husband, and two of Philip’s friends whose names I caught and forgot, and I wore my first white dress, which Sui Chan helped me pick out that very morning.
It was long and gauzy, with lacy buttons that itched at the back.
Chinese traditionally wore white for mourning, but Sui Chan teased that the dress looked more like a cloud than a shroud.
That made for my only real smile of the day.
When Philip and I stood for a photograph, I was so nervous that I blinked at the flash, then it was over, the most important moment in my life immortalized in a split second of jittery angst. We said goodbye to our friends then spent the afternoon preparing my paperwork.
Philip had hired a lawyer to help. When he asked for my name, I started, “Ha . . . Ha Yut—” I stopped myself. “Put me down as Helen Yuen.”
“Yuen?” said Philip. “Are you sure?”
“American wives take their husband’s last name.”
I sounded more confident than I felt. As the lawyer recorded my name in neat block letters, I had second thoughts. Once I left Hong Kong, there’d be no one who knew me as Yut Ying. All traces of the girl I once was—would be gone.
“Wait!” I cried. “Helen Ying Yuen. Ying—for shadow.”
Helen Ying Yuen, my papers read. Seeing it, some of the heaviness in my heart lifted. I might have left behind my shadow in Gu Ma’s house, but at least I’d still have the one in my name.
The next morning, Philip and I embarked upon the ship to America.
As I ascended the gangway, I watched the sunlight glimmer over Victoria Harbour.
How magnificent it had seemed, this city of my splintered dreams and bitter love.
Here was the same sun and the same sea, but I was no longer the same girl. I was married now, and I was leaving.
After one last rueful look, I turned my back on the past.
Philip had paid extra for a private cabin, which I appreciated, but it only heightened the stinging reality of what we’d done.
Here we were, two strangers who’d impetuously bound their fortunes together, and this was the beginning of the rest of our lives.
In Hong Kong, we’d had plenty to talk about—planning for the marriage and arrangements for me to come to America.
But alone on the boat, getting to know each other took effort. Luckily, Philip was a patient man.
I told him about the family I’d left behind in Hong Kong, and in turn he told me about his mother, who’d sneaked into America illegally only to be deported after his younger brother was born.
He had followed her back to China as a child, not returning to the States until just before the war.
He’d wanted to fight against the Japanese, but by the time his father permitted him to enlist, the war was nearly over.
The Navy took him in, put him to work in the kitchen under a Frenchman whom Philip still called Simon sifu to this day.
Under “teacher” Simon’s tutelage, Philip spent four months learning to bake bread.
“The first day, every single loaf I baked was hard as concrete,” Philip recalled. “Simon sifu would open the window and chuck the whole thing out to sea. ‘Because of you, the sailors starve to death,’ he said. It was a wasteful lesson, but necessary. I learned quick after that.”
Through the stories we shared, I got to know him. I learned that he was mulishly old-fashioned, that he was impulsive with his money but parsimonious with his words, that he was generous to strangers, and—for better or for worse—he worked very hard.
We arrived in Kansas City on the cusp of spring.
I had pictured fertile hills veined with silver, and gold flecks glistening in the lakes and creeks.
But the city was gray, all the buildings square and flat-roofed except for one tower shaped like a skewered cuttlefish.
The snow came up to my ankles, and my socks became soggy as soon as I got off the bus.
That was when I thought, What have I gotten myself into?
Americans were strange. They ate their vegetables raw, drank their water cold, and showered in the morning instead of the night.
They also wore their shoes in the house, even when the soles were sticky with old bubblegum and dried mud, and kissed their dogs as if they were their own children.
The longer I lived among them, the less I understood them.
Philip’s ancestors had been among the first Chinese to come to the United States. They’d worked on the railroads, hoarding every penny to bring back to China. His great-grandfather had made the journey three times to California; not once had he thought about settling there.
“Why didn’t your ancestors stay in America?” I had asked when Philip told the story.
“Because they couldn’t bring their wives. They had to leave their families behind in China.”
Only after the war did the United States allow Chinese women to enter the country as wives of servicemen. That was how Philip had married his first wife, and now, how I was able to leave Hong Kong.
Lily used to say that Americans were so rich that even their trash bins had gold lettering, their skies were blue like the feathers around a hwamei’s eyes, and fairies winged out of television screens bringing fully cooked meals for the hungry.
I was glad she wasn’t here to see how none of this was true.
My new home was a basement apartment with a corrugated metal door.
An old tornado shelter, Philip suspected, that the landlord decided to rent out.
There was an afterthought of a window, which whistled cold air day and night, and the shower sputtered water the color of rust before turning clear. On the bright side, rent was cheap.
We shared the apartment with my brother-in-law Francis, who took the sofa while Philip and I shared the bed.
Usually I could charm most strangers, but Francis took one glance at my cropped hair and slippery eyes and decided he didn’t approve of me.
It certainly didn’t help that I shut myself in the bathroom whenever he practiced his guitar.
“Helen doesn’t like music,” I overheard Philip explain for me.
“I didn’t take you for a cuckold, dai gor.” Francis sniffed. “A woman like her doesn’t marry a man like you. She’s hiding something.”
It was a moment I appreciated Philip, who stood up for me and said, “Or maybe your twanging gives her a headache.”
I was sorry Francis didn’t like me, because I came to be fond of him.
He punctuated his questions with a laugh, he folded his own laundry and kept his cupboards neat, and he was an excellent cook.
His ngau lam singlehandedly saved me that winter, warming my bones from the vicious cold.
It was a classic Hong Kong dish—tender disks of daikon radish that the brothers had grown themselves in the yard, an aromatic smattering of herbs, a dash of rice wine, and juicy chunks of beef flank cooked for hours.
I craved it to the point that whenever I woke to the sound of Francis chopping in the kitchen, I prayed he was making ngau lam.
For the life of me, I didn’t understand why we didn’t serve it at Fortune’s Palace.
Our restaurant was a quick four-minute drive away.
Francis was the Chinese cook, while Philip catered to American tastes.
Most of our business came from the workers from a nearby steel parts factory.
In the mornings Philip and I woke at five to prepare brown bag lunches.
We baked fresh bread and assembled chicken, ham, and tuna sandwiches, twenty-five cents each.
We sold two hundred a day, and the profits were good.
Then in the evening, Francis drowned innocent white rice in soy sauce and prepared a buffet of gloopy atrocities that he dared call Chinese American food.
Sweet-and-sour pork was our bestseller. Nuggets of battered pork, fried until they glistened, smothered under a tangy tomato-based sauce—I’d eaten that back in Hong Kong.
Here in America, though, the sauce was far more sweet than sour, brighter than a tangerine, and cooked with canned pineapples.
Canned pineapples! Americans had a sweeter palate, Philip explained.
They actually preferred the syrupy preserved fruit to fresh.
I stayed out of the kitchen. I could cook well, but that was in Gu Ma’s house unhindered by orders and waiting customers.
Here I was too slow to be of much help, and my English wasn’t good enough to take orders.
All the same, Chinese women were rare in those days, young and pretty ones even rarer.
Francis liked keeping me in the front of the house.
“Smile at the customers, give them their menus, and keep their water glasses filled,” he instructed. He looked me up and down. “I’ll have Philip buy you a nicer dress.”
Philip and Francis knew what they were doing, because most nights, we had a line of locals waiting for a table.
Customers enjoyed being waited on by a beautiful woman; only a few minded that my English was poor.
Soon the brothers were talking about opening a second Fortune’s Palace near the new Ford factory. One they could own themselves.
Which was when I learned that they had a third business partner.
Sam Bou held the majority stake in Fortune’s Palace but only showed up once a month to empty money from the till. When I met him, he licked his lips and said, “Ah Philip, heaven smiles on you for securing such a pretty wife. Next time you go to Hong Kong, bring one back for me too, eh?”
He tucked a dollar behind my ear as if I were a streetwalker. A wedding present, he called it. I didn’t like Sam Bou.
Philip’s friends weren’t so bad. Most worked nearby: One owned a laundromat and two worked as busboys in River Market. “Sister Helen” they’d call me.
I piled their bowls with extra noodles and listened to their stories about why they were here. “You were in Guangdong during the war?” they’d say to me. “You know hunger, then. No matter how poor you are in America, at least there’s rice in your bowl. Life will be better here, just be patient.”
Those early weeks, I was na?ve. I thought the hardships his friends were talking about pertained to weather. Before we were married, Philip had warned me about winters in Kansas City. I’d laughed, saying that my ancestors were from the North—I wasn’t afraid of cold.
Big, empty words. In December the whole world turned white, snow stitching together heaven and earth, bleaching away all color and life. I put on every layer of clothing I owned, cursing America with every breath. I hated it here. No place had ever made me so cold, so lonely. So miserable.
I complained to Sui Chan in my letters, but the post between Kansas City and Hong Kong was slow. It took months for a reply.
I won’t lie, there were nights that I stared at the ceiling, wishing I’d stayed in Hong Kong.
Some days I hated Philip, I hated the restaurant, hated this town full of people who didn’t look like me and the scowls I got when people found out I didn’t speak English—and I locked myself in the bathroom.
There I held my breath, welcoming the icy pinpricks that washed over my skin.
It was like drowning. The longer I held my breath, the deeper I sank. The world that I knew washed away, blurring into a dark and empty dream.
Only when a customer knocked, calling, “Hey, are you finished in there?” would I snap back into my body. I’d ignore the lingering sting of cold and smile as if nothing had happened.
One Monday Philip and I came to Fortune’s Palace to find the window broken, our porcelain statue of Guan Yu on the altar smashed, and the cash taken from the till. On the wall was a message in red marker.
“What does it say?”
Philip gave me a tired look. He didn’t talk much, but I’d gotten to know the clockwork of his face. From the way his nostrils twitched, I knew he didn’t want to answer.
“It’s telling us to go home,” he replied at last. “To go back to China.”
He took a broom and swept the altar’s shattered pieces into a dustpan. Before I could see if the Guan Yu statue was salvageable, he poured it into the bin.
“Has this happened before?” I asked.
Philip’s mouth set into a thin grim line. “It’s just a bunch of teenagers. Don’t worry, you’re safe.”
I nodded even though that wasn’t what I’d asked.
There were nights Philip came home dejected, refusing to tell me why.
Now I was beginning to understand, and it softened me toward my husband.
I meant to reach out and say something comforting, but I didn’t know what.
So I took a wet rag and started wiping the wall clean.
The thief’s words didn’t upset me. I wanted to go home. But I didn’t know where home was.
Even after my scrubbing, the red paint left stains on the wall, so we papered the area with extra copies of our menu.
Covering our scars as if they weren’t there.