“She was my first love,” he told me. I could sympathize with that. “Did she love me as much as I loved her?”
“Of course she did,” I answered steadfastly.
“Our relationship never would have lasted anyway,” he admitted one night as the busboys cleared the last of the tables in the club. “We don’t have miscegenation laws in Illinois, but marriage to Ruby would have been impossible. There’s prejudice, and then there’s prejudice. A bubble dancer is”-he struggled to find the right words before settling on-“a different kettle of fish.”
“But you always knew she performed bare,” I pointed out.
“No one in Winnetka would have known about that,” he responded. “But the cover of Life changed everything. I mean, look at her. If you had a brother and he brought her home, what would your parents say?”
I didn’t have a brother, but if I returned home and my father knew what I was doing, he would have beaten me to death. Pure and simple.
“What about someone like me?” I asked. “I’m a dancer. I’ve had my photo in lots of Sunday supplements thanks to the Associated Press story. I was in that newsreel. What if you brought home someone like me?”
“You don’t dance buck naked,” he said. Just then Ruby approached our table. Joe patted my hand. “Don’t worry, hon. One of these days there’ll be someone like me waiting for you.”
He didn’t love me like I loved him, but I preferred to be his friend rather than not have him in my life.
HELEN NEVER GOT very big. She was Chinese, she performed every day, and she was one of those blasted gals who’s blessed with not looking all that pregnant. Still, in May, six months into her pregnancy, her stomach popped out. After that, Helen stayed home, and I took her place. The customers loved Eddie and me. We may have looked great, but his melancholy had deepened since our return to San Francisco, and he ironed it out with drink. Helen had never complained about it, but I did. If he had a martini between the first and second shows, I pestered him. If he bought a round for everyone in the bar between the second and third shows, I hounded him something fierce, because he’d been boozing too.
“I don’t want your breath in my face.” I seethed indignantly when we performed. “You reek of liquor down to your shoes.”
“Am I making any mistakes?” he asked as he tipped me back for the dip over his thigh. And of course he didn’t, because he was a flawless entertainer.
On September 8, 1941, Helen got want she wanted: a son, born in the early evening when the rest of us were at the club. The baby was full term, although he arrived just seven months after Helen and Eddie’s wedding. The Fongs went ahead and threw a huge one-month banquet for their new grandchild at Shanghai Low. (Anything to save face.) Helen’s father even invited Ruby. As a leader in Chinatown and a member of the Chinese Six Companies, he was showing how important he was to have the “Chinese princess” featured on the cover of Life attend his party. Ruby, wearing a day dress in emerald shantung with navy trim and a matching hat with a net veil coming down over her eyes, handled it all like a star-shaking hands, posing for photographs, and smiling, smiling, smiling.
Bowls of dyed red eggs symbolized happiness and the renewal of life. Ginger added a touch of yang-heat-to the nutritional needs of the new mother, who was tired and weak after giving birth. The infant didn’t yet look like much of anything one way or the other, which was a good thing. Mr. Fong announced his newest grandchild’s name publicly for the first time-Thomas Bo Yu Wu. The baby’s milk name, Bo Yu, meant firstborn fish. Helen said she’d call him Tommy, which wasn’t all that far off from Tim for those of us in the know. The banquet? The very best, with bird’s nest soup and every delicacy imaginable.
After the party, Helen invited Ruby and me back to the Fong family compound. When I told Helen she handled Tommy like a pro, she laughed lightly. “Have you seen how many little nieces and nephews I have?” I stared down into his face, searching his unformed features, touching the tiny wisps of fuzz-not brown, not black-on top of his head. He seemed like every other baby to me, but Helen was besotted, adoring him with eyes of love. “One joy shatters a hundred griefs,” she recited, and I nodded like I understood what she was talking about.
Ruby tired of the baby-staring party first. “I thought you and Eddie wanted to get your own place.”
“It’s better to be in the compound,” Helen responded. “We’ll be safer here.”
“Safer?”
“The four walls. The family. The…” Helen gestured around her at the implied wealth.
“What about Eddie?”
Helen looked startled by the question, and she adjusted the baby in her arms. “What about him? He’s never around.”
Ruby tilted her head, considering. “He leaves right after the last show-”
“And he doesn’t come home,” Helen finished, but she didn’t seem perturbed. “He stays out all night. He won’t tell me where he goes or what he does.”
“You need to come back to the club,” Ruby suggested. “Keep an eye on him.”
“I know, and I’ll do it,” Helen said.
She tightened her arms around the baby, and he greedily took her breast. She appeared content. At peace, in a strange way. But when I looked ahead at Tommy’s future, I couldn’t imagine how he, as a half-and-half child, would be treated in Chinatown, outside Chinatown, or any place he went. It would have to be far worse than what I’d experienced in Plain City. I saw that each of us, and now Tommy too, was cursed-not in the Chinese manner of bad fate or inauspicious destiny, but in the very Western way of being weighed down by the blood that ran in our veins, the secrets we kept and the lies we told, and the things that we, with our American know-how, had the greatest capacity to deny to ourselves and others. But at this moment, as Helen stared into her baby’s face, she glowed-blissful, a heavenly mother.
WHEN TOMMY WAS three months old, Helen reluctantly returned to the club to be part of a new holiday show. It had a novelty number for the chorus girls in which we carried kittens in net muffs. (Those little fluff balls would pop their heads out of the muffs and the entire audience would ooh and aah.) Naturally, Helen brought the baby with her. She was crazy about the kid and couldn’t go anywhere without him. She hated to be parted from Tommy for more than the few minutes it took the Chinese Dancing Sweethearts to do their routine. And, from the moment of her return, she bickered with Eddie nonstop. They danced beautifully, though, and I was colossally jealous. Helen was in the spotlight again. Her breasts were large and creamy with milk, which made her more luscious than ever, while I was, once again, a pony.
RUBY: The Jimjams
Grace and I could sleep through just about anything, but not the neighbor’s brats running up and down the hall, banging on everyone’s doors, and shouting, “Turn on the radio! Turn on the radio!” I rolled over and squinted at the clock. It wasn’t even noon yet, and a Sunday to boot. I’d give those kids what for later. I closed my eyes, letting darkness suck me back into slumber. The sound of someone thudding across the room upstairs jolted me awake again. Through the walls, I heard panicked voices. I forced myself out of bed-only five hours’ sleep-and shuffled out to the living room, where I found Grace, tousled and groggy, leaning against her doorjamb.