“Do you see him often, Chen Lao-li?”
“More often now, since we moved here. He comes for holidays and the kids’ birthdays, things like that. I grew up in California, so when I was little I didn’t see him much. I wasn’t born yet when they came here, he and his cousin, but my big brother used to tease Zayde about how excited he’d been when he got the letter that they were coming. He flew to New York three days early, so if he got delayed he’d still be there to meet them.”
“I wonder why they didn’t ask him to sponsor them?” Bill said. “Instead of C. D. Zhang, whom one of them didn’t know and the other didn’t like.”
“They did, and he tried. But he wasn’t a close enough relative for the INS. So Zayde tracked down C. D. Zhang. I have the feeling they might not have contacted him at all if they didn’t have to.”
I asked, “When did Dr. Gilder come to this country?”
“In 1949. He was one of the last refugees to leave. Very few stayed, but Zayde had been planning to. My father used to say we all could have been Chinese.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Stay on? Well, I suppose he had less reason to, after Rosalie died.”
18
I stood in Anita’s living room stunned, as though I’d gotten a phone call full of bad news. Not my Rosalie! Oh, Lydia, get a grip! I demanded. You already knew she was gone.
Yes, but not so young! I found myself negotiating. Not so soon! Couldn’t she have had a life of happiness with Kai-rong first, and died a contented old lady?
“Are you all right?” Anita eyed me with concern.
“Yes, I’m sorry.” I drew a breath. “It’s just, I’ve been reading Rosalie’s letters at the Jewish Museum and I got very fond of her. I didn’t know she died so young.”
“I read the letters, too. Zayde donated them around the time Lao-li and Li came to this country. I think I would have liked her.”
“Do you-can you tell me what happened?”
“How she died? I just know it was near the end of the civil war. Those last days are something Zayde absolutely never talked about. Do you think it’s important?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe not to the case, I was thinking. But to me. It is to me.
For a moment, we were all silent. I looked at the book Paul Gilder had handed me. “Do you know what this is?”
“He’s never mentioned it. I didn’t even know the box existed while I was growing up. My father brought it with Zayde’s things when Zayde came to live here, but all he knew was it had papers in it.”
“May I look at this?”
Anita nodded. Carefully, I opened the cover. Flakes of leather drifted off the spine. On thick paper flowed column after column of beautiful calligraphy. The first characters on the first page, twice the size of the others, read, “Kairong is back!”
Back, I thought. From England? Just off the Conte Biancamano?
“Can you read that? What is it?” Anita asked.
“I think it’s a diary. The pages are dated. This first one’s May eighth, 1938. That’s the day their ship docked in Shanghai-Rosalie, Paul, and Chen Kai-rong. Anita, what are the letters in the box?”
“I don’t know. I could try to take a look, but not right now, I don’t think.” Paul, with the box on his lap, was running his hand through a set of bamboo chimes. When he stopped, Lily pointed; when he clattered them again, she laughed.
“If you could, it might help. Anything from that time. And I’d like to try to translate this.”
“I don’t know… What if he asks for it? Now that he’s been reminded.”
“We’ll Xerox it,” Bill suggested. “Then you can put it back. It won’t take long.”
“Well.” Anita smiled. “All right. After all, that he gave to you.”
“Can you really read that?” Bill asked as I got back into the car. We’d spent twenty minutes at the Kinko’s in the mall, and then I’d returned the book to Anita, thanking her profusely and trying not to look like I was running out the door.
“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.
“Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it’s probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, though Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese.”
I stared at him. “What are you, Wikipedia?”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind. How do you know all that, what you just said?”
“Anybody trying to impress his Chinese associate into thinking he wasn’t a total loser would have gone out of his way to know that. So can you read it?”
“Anyone trying to impress her lo faan associate into thinking she was a genius wouldn’t admit it if she couldn’t.”
“I already know you’re a genius.”
“Oh. Okay, then, I can read it, but I have to guess at some words. But there’s no question it’s Mei-lin’s diary. Listen how it starts: ‘Kai-rong is back!!!’ That’s written extra big, with emphasis. Then it goes, ‘What-’ uproar, I think that’s the word. ‘The houseboys airing his rooms, Cook racing to market, the kitchen maids peeling and chopping. I wanted to go meet his ship but of course Father and Amah said no.’ Doesn’t that sound like family?”
“Not my family, but I see what you mean.”
I scanned the page. Modern Chinese is written in simplified characters, but at the Mott Street Chinese school my brothers and I had (with varying degress of grumpiness) gone to Saturday mornings, the teachers had been educated before Mao’s reforms. They’d proudly taught us the old ways. And these strokes-made with a pen, I thought, not a brush-were particularly crisp. “Okay,” I said, “now listen.”
“You’re about to show off?”
“I am. Any objection?”
“None.”
So as we drove toward and over the gleaming Hudson, I read the entry out loud. I stumbled occasionally, but generally, I think I did my Chinese teachers proud.
“ ‘Father sent bodyguards, so I’d have been perfectly safe, but it’s not the danger, I know it’s not! The docks are like every place I want to go: A decent young lady can’t be seen there. SO old-fashioned!!! A decent young lady can’t go anywhere except the homes of other decent young ladies. Even then her amah goes with her! A decent young lady is the same as a prisoner!
“ ‘So I’m sitting, waiting. Sitting, waiting!! Amah sent me to work on my embroidery-an ancient, useless art! Though I am rather good at it. But I stuck myself twice when I thought I heard the car. So I threw that aside to start this book.
“ ‘I haven’t put a stroke in it since Kai-rong sent it from Italy. Father wanted me to fill it with calligraphy-another useless art I’m good at! Copies of famous poems. Amah thought that was a lovely idea. I didn’t! I know why Kai-rong sent it: So I could keep a journal the way European women do. Until now it’s been empty, because what could I write about? Whatever happens behind these walls? But now that Kai-rong’s back, things will change! Father and Amah listen to him. He’ll tell them I’m grown up! He’ll make them let me go out! I’ll finally, finally, finally get out from behind these walls! Kai-rong’s come back to rescue me!!!’ ”
That was the first entry. I took a breath.
“Boy,” said Bill.
“No kidding.”
“Girls just wanna have fun, huh?”
“Hey, give her a break! In the old days women could spend their whole lives locked up in the house. And Shanghai was a dangerous place. You’re the one who’s reading a book about it.”
“Doesn’t say much about girls locked behind walls.”