“More like a toy, isn’t it? Tell you what, the country folks eat hot peppers every day and wouldn’t give a shit about something like that.”
I chuckled. Actually, my question about pepper spray wasn’t frivolous — I wanted to see how sophisticated the Chinese police had become in crowd control. The government was unlikely to send out the standing army to quell uprisings again, having learned from the fiasco of Tiananmen Square. That was why in recent years they’d been building a huge police force (2.5 million in total) and spent more on “internal security” than on the military. I often wonder, without that astronomical budget, how much China could do for its people, for the children in the countryside who are underfed and deprived of decent schooling.
We stopped at a two-story inn called Home for Everyone. I handed the cabbie a fifty-yuan bill for a thirty-five-yuan ride and let him keep the change. A fortyish woman at the check-in counter gave me a multibed room, just for myself, as it was a slow time of year. I went upstairs, unpacked, took a quick shower, and lay down on a bed that smelled of tobacco. Though exhausted, I was in a good frame of mind because the woman downstairs hadn’t asked for my ID and I might be able to stay here peacefully. I had not expected the trip to go so smoothly.
In the evening I went out for dinner at a nearby eatery, a cubbyhole that had only three tiny tables below a cyst of a low-watt bulb, but it offered spicy noodles and succulent steamed buns stuffed with pork and cabbage. I wished I could eat noodles like a full-blooded Chinese, heartily slurping the broth and sucking in the wheat ribbons noisily and then, halfway through, holding the big blue-rimmed bowl to my sweaty face to bolt down the remainder. But whenever I ate noodles, people could tell I was a foreigner who used chopsticks clumsily and was afraid of lifting the bowl to my mouth. So I bought two small buns and a bowl of soup instead. The old man at the counter pointed his stubby red finger at me and said good-naturedly, “Just two buns? You eat like a kitten.” Behind him a stack of huge bamboo steamers was swathed in a cloud of vapor. He must have taken me for a Chinese woman fastidious about food, so I said, “Thanks,” then carried my purchase to a table and sat down to eat.
In China I liked being viewed as Chinese, though in the States I always insist I am American. For me, similarity is essential — I want to be treated equally. In elementary school I had once come to blows with a girl who called me “mongrel” instead of “bitch.” I looked up the word in a dictionary to see if it was related to “Mongol.” It wasn’t. I also examined a photo of my family and could see that I had my father’s nose and mouth, but I had white skin. Strangers tended to regard me as a brunette. Clearly it was my last name that singled me out. Yet intuitively I had always known I was different. Later my father would urge me to date only Chinese boys, saying they were more reliable than white or black boys. That sounded anachronistic to me. I was so annoyed by his harping that once I retorted, “Why don’t you find me a suitable Chinese boy? I don’t want a nerd, though.” I said that thinking of Francie Wong, the only Chinese boy in my prep school. After my father died, I often wondered what he would have thought of my first husband, who was Hispanic. Carlos was quite nerdy, even bespectacled, but he had his charm and, as an insurance broker, maintained a large clientele.
Back at the inn, I ran into its owner, a roly-poly man with a doughy face and a thatch of bushy hair, and I asked him how to get to Gutai Village, where Yufeng was supposed to live. He said it was far away, more than ten miles, and I should take the bus. But I wanted to go alone in a car so I could have a flexible schedule the following day. The man helped me book a taxi, for which I put down a one-hundred-yuan deposit.
I ARRIVED IN GUTAI around midmorning the next day. The trip was easy but turned out to be futile. The village chief told me that Yufeng had died a few years ago, and that the rest of her family was living in the county seat, running a seamstress shop. Her body had been cremated and the ashes were in her daughter Manrong’s charge, so Yufeng had left nothing in the village. “Damn,” I said to myself. “I hope this won’t be a wild-goose chase.” Without further delay I headed back to Fushan Town.
In the afternoon I went out in search of my half sister. The village chief had told me, “Just ask about Seamstress Shang, everybody knows where her shop is.” I was glad she and I still shared the same family name. My mother used to tease me, not without malice, saying, “You’re probably the last Shang on earth.” True, even in China, Shang, meaning “esteem,” is an uncommon name, but in a nation of 1.3 billion people, there must be many thousands of Shangs. The seamstress shop was easy to find indeed. It was on a cobbled street in the commercial section downtown, the part closed to automobiles. After passing the few vendors selling produce and poultry along the sidewalk, I entered the shop.
“Can I help you?” a resonant voice asked from a corner. Following it emerged a sixtyish woman in a green turtleneck sweater.
At the sight of her I felt my heart lurching. She was the spitting image of my father, although a female version and four or five inches shorter, with the same elongated eyes, wide nose, full forehead, and roundish cheekbones. She was a bit plump but glowing with health.
“Are you Manrong Shang?” I asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“Your father’s name is Weimin Shang.”
“Who are you?” She stared at me in amazement.
“I’m Lilian Shang, his daughter too. Can we speak inside?”
She called over a younger woman, obviously her daughter, and told her to mind the front counter. Then Manrong led me into the back room. After we sat down at a table strewn with scraps of cloth, stubs of French chalk, and a measuring tape, she kept looking at me as if she hadn’t yet recovered from the astonishment. I took a small album out of my purse and handed it to her, saying, “Here are some photos of our father.”
“I never met him,” she said. “All I know about him is that he gathered lots of important intelligence for our country but couldn’t come back to join us. He died in the line of duty. That’s what the Internet says.” She couldn’t access uncensored Google or she’d have known that our father’s life had ended wretchedly. As she was thumbing through the album, her eyebrows now joined and now fluttered. Then her thick lips stirred, a smile emerging on her face. She said, “This is him. We have a photo of him as a young man.”
Holding down the turmoil inside me, I tried to explain calmly, “Our father died thirty years ago. He had never forgotten your mother. He loved her but couldn’t come back, so he married my mother, a white American woman, and they had me. I’m their only child.”
Manrong broke into tears, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. I began crying too, my fingers gripping her forearm. “I’m so happy to find you at last, Sister.”
She wiped her face with a hand towel, got up, and went to the front room. She called out, “Juya, come and meet your aunt!”
1955
In February 1955, a month before Gary’s thirty-first birthday, he was notified of the agency’s imminent departure for the States. Thomas asked him to move with them, and Gary agreed, saying he was a refugee anyway and had better hold on to his current job. Now, most of his personal belongings had to go. He sold his noisy jeep for two hundred dollars to a local businessman, a Taiwanese merchant of wine and liquor. He gave away his tatami mat, his two chairs and sideboard, his kerosene stove and utensils, but he was possessive of his books, which, for as long as possible, he wouldn’t let go. He even kept those he had read and marked up.
In early March they boarded a large rust-colored ship. A month later they reached San Francisco, then took the train across the American continent. Gary had read quite a bit about the States but was still awed by the immense land, which looked sparsely populated in many places despite the abundant water supply and the farmable soil. No wonder the Chinese called this country the Beautiful Land. The sky looked higher and deeper blue, a match for the boundless landscape. He was struck by the sight of forests, mountains, deserts, lakes, meadows, vast crop fields, and farms. On every farmstead stood a house, a barn, a silo, sometimes a windmill; viewed from the distance, they brought to mind a set of toys. There were also a lot of cattle and horses that looked content, lazing around without a harness on them. The animals seemed to have a lot of leisure. The fields were flat, and some stretched beyond the horizon. What’s that for? Gary thought about a tall gleaming structure that slid by, but he couldn’t figure it out. Probably it was a water tower or some sort of refinery. Passing a prairie in Nebraska, he saw a herd of bison and wondered if they were domesticated. He had read somewhere that bison had been wiped out by the European settlers by the end of the nineteenth century, but George Thomas assured him that those were wild.