“I’ll still put my earnings in the family pot,” she said matter-of-factly, as if her disobedience and lying would mean nothing to her father. “Now I can give more toward Monroe’s tuition.”
“If you dance here, you will be one notch above a prostitute,” he proclaimed. “Is that how you want people to regard me in Chinatown-as the father of a no-no girl?”
Next to me, a light flipped on in Grace’s eyes as she finally put two and two together.
“I won’t be hurting the family,” Helen insisted calmly. “I’ll be helping more than before. And besides, this isn’t a reflection on you-”
“Don’t be stupid! You have a choice to bring shame or honor on your family. Which is it going to be?”
Helen met her father’s disapproval with surprising stubbornness. “You always say you expect me to maintain the proprieties, recognize right from wrong, and not bring embarrassment on our family.”
“That’s right. Embarrassment!”
“I’m going to make twenty dollars a week,” Helen said.
Her father blinked. “Twenty dollars? A week?”
“Are any of my brothers making that much?” she asked.
He grumbled a bit more-“What will our neighbors say?”-but it was clear Helen had won. I guess the money had convinced him. Still, he’d gone down a lot easier than I expected.
“You can do this on one condition,” he said, acting like he’d once again gained control over his daughter. “I won’t have you walking all over Chinatown… at night… unescorted. Monroe will drop you off and bring you home.”
“Yes, Ba,” she answered, sounding both contrite and disappointed, as though he’d failed a test she’d given him.
“All right,” he said. “I expect you to be home in time for dinner.” As he gathered himself to leave, he ran his eyes over me again. “And, Helen…”
Here it comes, I thought. Now my new friends would know the truth about me. I didn’t have a clue about how they would take it.
“One word of warning. Watch out for this one. She’s a Jap,” he said, nodding in my direction.
Helen acted unimpressed. She gave him a bland look: As if I didn’t know.
Faced again with his daughter’s coolness, he squeezed the newspaper a little more tightly to his ribs and continued down the street. It was a moment of triumph for Helen, utter bewilderment for Grace, and the icing on what had already become a crappy day for me. Grace was the first to speak.
“Why would he say that about Ruby?”
Helen frowned. “You really are a bumpkin,” she said. “Ruby is Japanese. Can’t you tell?” She pointed to the sign above our heads. “It’s the Forbidden City. Like Charlie said, it’s for Chinese. The Japs have invaded China, so no Japs allowed. Naturally, Baba wouldn’t want me to spend time with someone like her.”
My being Japanese wasn’t why I didn’t get hired, but I said nothing to square the error. Grace stared at Helen-shocked, shocked, shocked. “What are you talking about?”
Helen spelled it out again. “Ruby is Japanese.”
Grace looked like someone had bopped her one. “Why would you-he-say that?”
“Because it’s true,” Helen insisted, her tone superior.
“It’s also mean.” Grace turned to me. “You’re Ruby Tom,” she said, positive as could be. “That’s a Chinese name. You’re a real Chinese girl.”
“Ethel Zimmerman changed her name,” I said, “because she thought it wouldn’t look good on a marquee. Now she’s Ethel Merman. My real name is Kimiko Fukutomi. Ruby suits me better, and Fukutomi… well… I shortened it to Tom.”
“That’s a Chinese name, right?” Grace repeated weakly. Then she lightly tapped her head with her fingertips-another light going on. “When you said your family wanted to go home, you meant to Japan.”
I nodded.
“Oh!” The surprised syllable came out like the first time you put a hand down a boy’s pants. “I get it. You’re like a Negro pretending to be white.” She sighed. “Where I grew up… Prejudice, you know-”
“I’ve always been able to pass,” I said, trying to put an end to the commiseration. “I’m good at it. In the Occidental world, no one can tell that I’m different. Even here in Chinatown, most people don’t see me as different.”
“I did,” Helen pointed out. “And my father and brother did too.”
Three people out of this entire enclave? I couldn’t be too worried about that.
“I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt,” Grace said.
I shrugged. “I’m not hurt.”
“We all have secrets,” she went on, still trying to comfort me.
I figured that meant I was supposed to ask about her secret, but I wasn’t fast enough, because she blurted, “I ran away from home. My dad beat me…”
Hardly a big surprise, given the bruises her clothes didn’t quite cover and the cut she tried unsuccessfully to hide under lipstick, but I nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure you did the right thing.”
Neither Helen nor I followed up with additional questions. I can’t speak for Helen, but I didn’t want Grace to lose any more face than she already had, poor thing. Grace and I now turned to Helen.
“Japanese and Chinese have always been against each other. And it’s not just this war,” Helen said, her voice as distant yet impassioned as my mother’s. “Japan is powerful. It can face any country-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I mean, really. Like this was news? “You want to know what my parents taught me? They say all you Chinese think you’re great because your culture is so much older than our culture. You accuse us of stealing your language-”
“You did,” she responded, not wanting to let it go. “Japan has long held a grudge against China. Japan wants to dominate China politically and militarily. It wants to take control of China’s raw materials, food, and labor-”
“I hate all that,” I said, repeating what I told my father when he boasted about Japan’s imperialistic aspirations. “Those things have nothing to do with me.”
“I lived in China, as I’ve already told you,” Helen went on. “When the Jap bombers came, we…” She took a breath and held it. “I mean, Monroe and I were walking on the road. We saw the red sun on the sides of the planes. We heard a warning gong from a nearby village, but what could we do? We saw a pilot in one of the cockpits. He shot at us.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “But those things still have nothing to do with me.”
“Really, Helen, you can’t blame Ruby for events that happened in another country,” Grace threw in, defending me.
“Because it’s not my country,” I added. Again, I’d often said that to my parents, which drove them nearly crazy. “I was born here. I’m an American, just like you and Grace.”
Helen stared in the direction her father had gone.
Grace, still anxious, fumbled for something to say. “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”
Helen gave herself a small shake. Even I-who had known her less than a week-could see that somewhere deep inside a struggle was going on. She shifted her gaze to me, and we locked eyes. Finally, she spoke.
“I will keep your secret.”
Was her change of heart a little too quick? My entire life I’d heard about the centuries-long animosity between Japanese and Chinese, but I knew almost nothing about Chinese girls or how one like Helen might think and act.
“What about your father, Helen?” Grace asked. “You’ll be disobeying him if you see Ruby.”
“How am I disobeying him? He said watch out for her, not don’t ever see her. I went to school with Negroes and Mexicans. He didn’t like that either, but he had to live with it. Besides,” she added, “Ruby won’t be working at the Forbidden City, so it’s not like I’ll be with her every day.”
Grace needed to know one more thing. “Are you really going to give all your money to your father?”