Page 49 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
You mulled that over. “I guess that’s true.”
“The dead return when they have something to say, daughter, and we listen to them until they have said it. We help them even if we are not responsible for the crimes committed against them. Do you understand?”
“I think so, Mami.”
But secretly, you wondered if that was how she saw you: a bad-luck girl, a ghost haunting her life, whom she nonetheless felt a duty toward. Whom she dared not ask to leave.
“Good.” She straightened up. “We should go home. It is late.”
And you followed.
When I think of your mother in the years to come, I prefer to remember her in those moments: standing by the harbor’s edge in the failing light wearing her plain green qipao, eating cheap street food and rattling off stories in that flat, matter-of-fact way. Her calloused hands smelled of hospital soap, and sometimes she would even smile.
Occasionally, I look back and wonder how your lives might have unfolded, if given enough time and peace. Whether you and Mami might have built something stronger, if brutal war and long toil had ever eased their grip.
I still wonder that now.
16BLOODY SATURDAY
Fifty-two years ago…
Mami was not your only parent, of course. The yang to her yin was Ho Tung, your Baba. He is a big part of the reason why you went to the island, why you stayed so long, and so his story here matters, too.
In many ways, Baba had always been a silent fixture in your life. He often came home late and tired, having talked all day as a translator—mostly arguing over import paperwork—and seemed to retreat into himself. He drank tea, smoked cigarettes, ate his meals, did the accounts, and cleaned the stove all in stoic quietude, while you bounced around the kitchen or nattered to the neighbors through the door gate. Meanwhile, Mami hung the laundry, swept the floor, and put away dishes.
What Baba lacked in words, he made up for in action. He often brought treats and small toys, purchased on his journey home, proffering them with embarrassed gentleness. Once, he brought you back a tiger charm bracelet, a nod to the year of your birth; you never took it off, treasured it always.
And when Mami scolded too hard or hit too often, he could sometimes quietly defuse her—a gifted cigarette, a manufactured errand, occasionally a kiss.
It goes without saying that you loved him.
You knew your father, and yet also didn’t. You knew what kind of cigarettes he bought (American, to impress the traders), his favorite dish (mutton stewed in a fragrant broth), and the exact order in which he read a newspaper (headlines, obituaries, finance). But those things were not the man himself, just affectations he had collected.
There were a few things of importance that you learned about him, from listening to snippets of conversations across the years and nosing through his old belongings. Baba was from a small village just outside Shanghai. He left it to serve in the First World War, as a young volunteer. China sent no soldiers to that conflict, but he did work in a munitions factory, producing bullets.
Even that relatively safe exposure was enough to quell his curiosity. After the conflict ended, he became determined, from then on, to lead a peaceful life. He returned to Shanghai and met your mother, who was living with northern relatives after the destruction of her home island. They married soon after.
Together, Baba and Mami settled in Hong Kong, where the money was better and life was a little easier. Her Mandarin had never been good, and she missed the climate; Baba was drawn by the good job opportunities, and liked Southern Chinese food. Here in this city, they hoped that wealth and modernity and the heavy hand of British colonialism would protect them from strife, from war and typhoons and uncertainty.
It did not.
War came to your lives, unwanted yet predictable, like the cycle of yearly storms, like the crash of a rising tide, and drowned everything in its path.
You were fifteen years old when incendiary bombs began to fall on Beijing in the sun-soaked months of July 1937, adding man-made fire to the sun’s crushing heat. People talked about nothing else at home, at school, at work.
Yet Japan was so small, China so vast—surely, despite everything that had happened to the country in the past, they would weather this, too.
“It is not so simple,” Baba said, when you asked him about it over dinner. “China has been struggling for a long time, little bird.”
He still called you“little bird,”because of the meaning of your name. Even though you were old enough to be leaving school soon, and were already looking for work.
“Struggling with what, Baba? Do you mean the Opium War? I thought that was finished.”
Even the smallest child knew about the Opium War, and how badly Britain had devastated China. At least there was a certain honesty about armed conflict, bloody though it was. But a conflict waged through drugs and extortion was just a dirty, miserable mess.
“War does notfinish,” he said, heavily. “It is not a game that stops when enough players quit. It is a wound, sinking into flesh, leaving scars and rot that cause pain for a long time.”
Then he sighed, forced a smile, and told you to come sit next to him. “Look, I have a new book of poems today,” he said, as he so often did; Baba was forever buying little books of this and that, bringing them home to show you. “We will forget about the news for a while. Come read with me, Siu Yin.”
