Once I was alone, my fidgety desire to run was even stronger. It was all I could do not to sneak out of Helen’s room and the compound by myself. I closed my eyes and saw Ruby and Joe naked. His thing. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Across the room on a little table was a framed photograph, fruit on a blue cloisonné dish, and a couple of candles. Grateful for a momentary distraction, I went to get a better look at the photo. It was Helen and a Chinese man, probably one of her brothers with the presidential names-Washington, Jefferson, or…
Helen returned with Monroe. He didn’t show surprise that I was there, and he didn’t ask any questions. In his mind, I’d probably come to the end I deserved, what with my lo fan thinking. It took only a few minutes to drive to the bus station, where Helen revved up her campaign again: “There will be consequences if you run away.”
I held her hand in mine. “Thank you, Helen, for helping me… again. You’ve been a good friend, but I’ve made my decision.”
“And your decision does not include me.”
I boarded the first bus heading south. I had lived the last sixteen months with joy in my heart, but now my mind ran from the memory of seeing Joe and Ruby in bed together. I’d lived as though I would never cry again, but now I couldn’t stop crying. I hoped to find refuge in sleep, but I was unable to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. All those times I thought Ruby had been out with boys from the Gayway, she’d been with Joe. And she hadn’t bothered to tell me because she’d decided I’d “get over him” on my own? The bus driver stopped for gas, and I went to the restroom. I stared at myself in the mirror and saw a pale ghost. My red lacquered nails seemed morbidly alive against my dead skin.
I DON’T KNOW what I expected. Movie stars greeting me on the sidewalk when I got off the bus in downtown Los Angeles? Chauffeur-driven Packards and Auburns tooling along palm-lined boulevards? Mansions with sprawling lawns? Diamonds in the pavement? Glamour everywhere? What I saw as I took a local bus west along Sunset Boulevard looked drab-little bungalows with peeling paint, geraniums wilting in the sun, and regular working stiffs plodding along the sidewalks. After moving into a furnished room on Ivar in Hollywood, I taped my envelope with my mom’s fifty dollars under a drawer, with a promise to myself not to spend my money frivolously as I had in San Francisco. I was nineteen years old now and determined to make myself into a star: reward for my heartbreak.
I went to Paramount Studios first. The gate looked just like it did in the movies.
“I’d like to go to your casting department, please,” I told the guard.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Then I’m sorry, miss. I can’t let you in.”
I went to other studios-Warner Bros., RKO Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, and more-but I couldn’t get past those guard gates either.
I needed a new strategy. With the listings of theatrical agents torn out of the yellow pages in hand, I started with the As and went to the office of a man named Abel Aaron.
“Aaron isn’t my real last name,” the balding man said as he waved me into his private office. “But it guarantees that young aspirants like you will visit me first. Now, please, sit on the couch.”
I wasn’t that dumb, but as I worked my way down the list-visiting the Bronstein Agency, Carrell Talent, and Discover New Faces-I heard that request more times than I could count. My response was always the same-“No, thank you”-so of course I didn’t get representation. My refusal to have sex wasn’t the only reason I didn’t make progress. I looked up casting calls in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, but the white girl always got the job. I went to Chinatown, but it didn’t have a single nightclub. My sorrow deepened. I was on my own now without a soul to help me. I had to toughen up-grow up, as Ruby had put it. I slept in very little clothing, trying to discipline myself to take whatever cold might come my way. I walked miles to save the nickel bus fare. And if Ruby or Joe entered my thoughts, I’d distract myself by stretching or doing a barre routine by holding the back of my chair in my room. I gave myself pep talks. I’d bounced back from adversity before. I’d do it again. But life isn’t that simple or easy.
The worse things got, the more I thought about my mom and dad, and why I could never give up and return to them in Plain City. My waking hours in Los Angeles started and ended the same way: with good and bad memories of them. I’d often asked my mom how and why we’d ended up in Plain City. Her story was always the same, and it had to do with my birth. Mom and Dad had been living in San Francisco. They’d been doing pretty well, well enough to own one of the first closed Model Ts-used, of course. One weekend they drove north to Sebastopol to pick apples. “I went into labor,” Mom liked to recount. “The contractions were far apart so I wasn’t frightened. We started driving back to San Francisco. By the time we reached San Rafael, I had to get to a hospital. We went, but they turned us away. They said they didn’t service Chinese.”
What kinds of people would turn away a woman in labor? The kinds of people I now met every day in Los Angeles.
“You were born by the side of the road,” she’d go on. “That’s why your feet move all the time. We looked at you, our precious little girl, and your father said, ‘Why would she walk when she can dance across the room?’ He saw your special talent. He decided we should go where people weren’t used to hating Chinese.”
So we’d piled in the car and headed east. The car broke down in Plain City. Dad dropped it at the Ford dealership on Main Street and went looking for a hotel, but there wasn’t one. (Because Plain City was just a place to pass through.) Reverend Reynolds at the Methodist church took us in. Dad eventually rented a two-story building on Chillicothe-the only other major thoroughfare in town. We lived upstairs; Dad opened the laundry downstairs. He was a dreamer, so he sunk a ton of money into a neon sign that blazed MR. LEE’S LAUNDRY gaudy and bright into my room all night. Dreamers are born to be disappointed. My dad was, certainly, and in this single regard I now understood him in a way I never had before.
My parents cut themselves off from their culture and replaced it with the reddest, whitest, and bluest. Some of my earliest memories were of playing with Velma, going to church on Sundays, and dancing at Miss Miller’s dance studio. My life changed when I started school. It didn’t happen all at once. It takes training to learn how to be a bigot. Velma dropped me and adopted Ilsa and Maude as her friends. Slowly I began to understand why they hung out together and why they always picked on me. The evil triplets were beyond beautiful with their blond hair and perfect skin, but they were just as much outsiders as I was even though they looked like they belonged. But how could they belong with their strange holidays-Pikkujoulu and Laskiaistiistai-and their stranger foods-Janssonin kiusaus and kylmäsavu stettu lohi? That Ilsa, for example, assumed she was going to marry Henry Billups. Didn’t she understand that the minute a young man dated someone like her, his parents would become agitated?
Sometimes when I was waiting to go in for an audition, I’d run through the events of one day in particular. In seventh grade-a normal day, I’d thought at the time-I went to school and discovered Velma at the entrance, saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “Grace Lee thinks she’s gonna be a movie star.” Word circulated fast, and soon every kid who thought he or she was better than me, which is to say every kid from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade, found the idea hilarious. Henry Billups pantomimed a buck-toothed, cross-eyed Chinese laundryman he’d seen in a movie… or maybe he was just making fun of my dad. Harold Jones followed me around for days, chanting, “Take a look in the mirror, take a look in the mirror, take a look in the mirror,” and laughing cruelly. After a while, the craze faded and my classmates fell back on the tried and true: “Chinky, chinky China. Chinky, chinky China.”