CHAPTER 1 OVERTURE
That night J came home she had just taught Toni Morrison’s Sula in a summer course “Contemporary Fiction” in a college near Albany, New York. The intense love and bond between the two women, Sula and Nel, growing up girlfriends in the isolated “Bottom” of Medallion, touched her probably more deeply than her students. The students, regardless of their diverse background, took Morrison’s heroine, a black woman growing up in 1920s and 1930s, as though she were their peer. They had no problem understanding Sula, a modern woman, who went to college, wandered all over the white world in Nashville, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Macon, and San Diego. . . a free spirit, only to return home ten years later to break the marriage of her best friend. “And you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone,” Nel said. Sula, the modern woman, has every ready answer: “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” Such good friends, such good friends . . . She was still chewing that question, when the phone rang.
“I am coming to New York.” It was Klever, long distance from Hong Kong. “Best got admitted to a good high school in Boston. She wants to prepare for MIT. I’m bringing her over.” What a joy! Mother’s dream, father’s pride–the top student in a top school, the “Number One” girl! Best was always “Number One” in school, she went to the best private school in Hong Kong, where English was her first language, French by choice her second. Cantonese, the regional dialect she spoke in the streets of Hong Kong, she took as her “native tongue,” while Mandarin, or “the common language” taught in school, that she could “sort of get by.” To Best, Chinese was only the language of her parents. Her mother had prepared her for a Western education, for Europe and America, for the modern world. Klever wasn’t wealthy, but she wanted her daughter to have the best education—something she herself missed when she was her age. . .
Twelve years had gone by, Klever and J had not seen each other, though they kept in touch once or twice a year, now and then a picture, but always a Christmas card. The day Klever left for Hong Kong, Best in her arms, was the day J got her student visa to America. “Come abroad soon,” Klever said. They kissed each other good-bye at the Shanghai Airport. Drawing her even closer, Klever whispered into her ear: “Get the hell out of here.” Yes, J did have the good fortune to get out of China soon after. Following Klever’s departure, J left Shanghai, only drifted farther away.
She came abroad to study Modernism and Modern Literature. Literature wasn’t a hard subject for her. Literary language, bookish English, British English had been her “native tongue.” Growing up in Shanghai, she had been trained by teachers who were educated in Europe, and who wrote English prose in the style of Thomas Hardy. She had read a lot, read together with Klever. It was Klever who first opened her eyes to the Western world, Western literature, and Western style. During those “underground” years when they were out of school, Klever and her friends, some professors’ daughters and college age “big brothers,” had secret access to the books, books stolen from burned public libraries and confiscated from private collections, circulating underground all over Shanghai.
Klever shared with her novels, books of philosophy and poetry. They read Pushkin, Lermontov, Shelley, Tolstoy, Roman Roland, Balzac, Goethe, Dickens, Dreiser, the Brontes, Thackeray, Hardy, Hazlitt, Galsworthy, Maugham, Jack London, and many more. Because the books were in high demand, they often had to finish reading several books in a week. Not infrequently she’d devour a big volume overnight, which meant, she had to pull a light into the closet and sleep there, not to disturb her mother.
Her mother at that time “worked in the fields,” undergoing political persecution, not because of any wrong-doings herself, but because of “ancestral sins.” Her mother, unfortunately, came from a “sinful” family of compradors, bankers and real estate owners–the wealthy class before 1949. The Red Guards had taken away almost everything from their house including her watch, bicycle, jewelry and birthday gifts. So it goes. Books became her jewelry. She read every book she could lay hands on. But she had never read Joyce, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, or James until she came to college in this country.
An expatriate in the modern world, free to enjoy modern freedom, individual liberty, she fell in love with Henry James’ novels. She loved The Ambassadors with its impressionistic landscape on the Parisian lake. San Francisco was Paris to her. She was dazzled by the strange shapes of Modern architecture, the colorful Spanish houses in residential areas, and the picaresque street scenes. Breathing the fresh air from the seaside, near Sea Cliff, for the first time in her life she was free from political movements, free from government control, free from family and parents, free from her “ancestral sins.” Here life is what one can make for oneself. “Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to.”
How often she wished she could have shared those books with Klever! When her parents were going through a divorce, she asked Klever, how a child might live without the hell of parents. Klever’s parents left her for Hong Kong when she’s only five. “Don’t you worry,” Klever assured her, “they’ll give you enough pocket money, and you’ll be free without them.” When she was ten, and Klever twelve, Klever took her to movies, all foreign movies, Richard III, The Idiot, The Wanderer. . . Klever could repeat the stories, and memorize all the names of the characters, actors and actresses, foreign names, which she couldn’t. When J was thirteen and Klever fifteen, they both got “wheels”—bicycles, a luxury for girls of their age. They used to ride into the countryside just by themselves to explore “Nature.”
After all, they were city girls. They knew every fancy store in town. They would spend their afternoons loitering through every busy street of Shanghai, window shopping, or exploring good restaurants. Like most Shanghai girls, they liked pretty dresses. Unlike many Shanghai women, they never went after fashion. Fashion came after them. Klever used to wear whatever her parents sent from Hong Kong, and J had to use some of her mother’s clothes made before 1966 that her mother couldn’t wear to work anymore, anything that looked fancy would be criticized as “bourgeois.” So together they looked “modern,” or “Western,” in the fashionable streets of Shanghai. Sometimes they went to visit friends, playing cards, not Mahjong. Mahjong was old fashioned. Bridge was in vogue then. Sometimes they went to movie or theater for drama, not opera. Opera, too, was old fashioned. J used to go to opera with her father, all kinds of opera— Shaoxing Opera, Suzhou Pintan (Ballad), Peking Opera, where she learned the best of classical Chinese. Klever never liked opera, she couldn’t stand the high pitch of regional dialects.
Often the two girls would come home late, around midnight. No one in the house ever bothered. Grandmas, uncles, nannies trusted that they were good girls. The Chinese believed that “those who read books know manners.” The books educated the two girls and taught them how to behave themselves. They were “by nature” good, not in a vulgar sense of being “well- bred from respectable family,” but in a blessed way, they never lacked self-discipline and self- esteem. Manners they seemed to be born with; lies they had never known any. They were polite to the elders and modest before poor neighbors. Grace and courtesy were part of their sweet nature. Happily they were above girlish virtues that others had to be taught by parents.
They were not “ladies,” but tomboys. Both excellent athletes, they played basketball for their respective schools they attended. Sometimes they met in a District championship, she always admired Klever. She admired Klever’s graceful jump and beautiful touch. In school, they weren’t really hardworking, but they never failed to maintain decent records. J was the so called “Number One” girl, way ahead of three hundreds of her peers. Klever was also a top student. Even the teachers let them go by themselves, respecting their intelligence as well as their independence.
Then came the long nightmare when the schools were shut down. “Well, to hell with it,” Klever said, “we’ll educate ourselves. Great people educate themselves.” So they continued their own education at home. Klever played violin; J practised calligraphy. Klever took interest in photography; J studied economics and world history. English was their common subject, they took lessons from private tutors, those “returned students” from England and Germany. Though they chose different masters, they helped each other to learn, never competed, one was never jealous of the other’s accomplishments. Klever had a knack of learning foreign languages, she could spell every word precisely once she saw it. Amazing memory.
No wonder she could pick up Japanese quickly when she first arrived in Hong Kong and had to work for a Japanese company. Within a few years she had learned enough from the Japanese to start her own business. Now she was fluent in French, trading with some French and Italian companies. She knew that life in Hong Kong wasn’t easy for Klever. But as though watching Klever playing basketball from a distance, she never doubted for a moment that others might fail, Klever would make it.
“How are you doing in Hong Kong?” She asked Klever.
“Oh, busy busy. I have my own business, sell custom jewelry, you know.”
She knew nothing about custom jewelry, didn’t know what to say. So she changed the topic: “Why do you want to send Best to attend high school here? And why Boston?”
“Well, most of her classmates applied to the three best known high schools on the East coast, two in Boston and one in New Jersey.”
J got the picture of the type of prep schools that Klever was talking about. It happened that she had taught freshman writing at Cambridge the year before. She had some idea of the kind of education in Boston prep schools. There were rich boys and girls from India, Taiwan, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, boarding in those expansive prep schools. There the English classes were still teaching Milton and Hawthorne, and the students were still writing essays to prove that “Man’s sin was caused by the sin of Woman.” They came here to receive an “American education,” yet they only learned how to put up with the punishment by the puritans and share the guilt of white “ancestral sins.” She doubted those were the “best” schools by her own standard.
“How much will you have to pay, Klever?” “Around twenty-thousand a year.”
“Twenty-thousand! That’s a lot. I paid nine thousand a year for my Master’s in 1984. I paid with the money I had made from waiting tables, you know, in Auntie Cecilia’s restaurant.”
“Yes, I know, I know it was hard for you those years when you first came abroad, wasn’t it? I couldn’t imagine that your mom and dad thinking of you waiting tables.”
“Well, it wasn’t too bad. I had a good time there. Auntie Cecilia was fond of me, although she thought it’s silly of me to want a Ph.D. She was a writer in Hong Kong herself, you know.”
“I don’t know any writers in Hong Kong, J. Anyhow, we are the unfortunate ones, you and I, we had to make it for ourselves. Best is fortunate just as now I have been doing well for the last two years. Otherwise I couldn’t afford it.”
She couldn’t understand why Klever would want to spend her hard-earned money this way.
She thought she might want to warn K for what she was getting into.
“Are you sure the high school education is better here than that in Hong Kong? It might be better for Best to finish her high school in Hong Kong, then come here for college later.”
“I wish she could have waited. The kids in her school are all from rich rich family, and most of them go to America, Canada, or England for high school. So she wanted to go, too. I couldn’t deny Best the kind of opportunity the other kids have. What they have I have always managed to let Best have it too.”
“Did we have what the other kids had, Klever? Mom and Daddy? Aren’t we good enough for what we are today?”
“Yes, we are good enough because we knew who we were when we grew up. But who are we now, J? We are nobody here in Hong Kong.”
“I see. I know Hong Kong is a pretty exclusive and snobbish society, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes. We are outsiders here. Aliens from the mainland. We don’t have family names, social connections, school ties, friends we grew up with, as others do, so we have to do the best for our children. Well, I let Best talk to you.”
“Hi, Best.”
“Hi, Auntie J.”
“I am glad you got admitted to a good school in Boston. You must be very intelligent, like your mother. I hope you’ll like America, like your school.”
“I am admitted to all the three schools I applied. But Mom and Dad want me to go to that girl’s school, which is not the best of the three.”
“Do you like that school well enough yourself ?”
“I don’t know. I must say that school is lucky to have me.”
The girl’s immodesty did not surprise her at all. She was rather pleased with Best’s confidence and honesty. Like mother, like daughter, she thought.
“What do you want to study in America?” She was on the point of saying to Best: “You could study Literature and read all the books you don’t have in Hong Kong once you come here. Your Mom and I loved Literature so much when we were your age, and you can make your mom’s dream come true.” But what she heard from Best was:
“Chemistry.”
“Chemistry?! Why not Literature?”
“No way.” Best’s voice sounded just like an American teenager. “I hate English.”
Klever’s daughter would hate English! And growing up in British Hong Kong! She couldn’t believe her ears. It was a shock more than a surprise. The picture she had envisioned of the mother in her daughter shattered instantly. She wished she could ask her: “Then why do you want to study in America where everything is taught in English?” She expected K’s daughter must have a ready answer to such a question. She wanted to know. So she proceeded to get a picture of her knowledge of English.
“What do you read in English?” “Shakespeare and Bronte.” “Which Bronte?”
“Jane Eyre.”
“Why do you hate English?” “’cause. . . ’cause it’s boring.”
Before J could discuss this with her further, Klever at the other end took over the phone and explained protectively: “Her English is all right. She’s got all straight As in English. If you want to know, she is more like you than like me. She likes books. But I don’t want her to become a bookworm like you, in the end cannot make good money and cannot get a good job. She will get a degree first, and then a well-paid job in business or industry. That’s what we have in mind.”
“Sure she’ll get a degree, sure she’ll get a well-paid job, here in America. That’s not hard, for a girl as talented as your daughter, Klever. For most Chinese in America, it’s probably the easiest thing to do here. But are you sure if that’s the best for her, that will make her happy, and make you happy, and ultimately happy? Do you hear what I say? You’d better come here and live here and see for yourself before you send a teenage girl all by herself to grow up in this country.”
“I cannot stay in the States for long. I have to come back. Can’t get away from business.” She could sense that Klever was disappointed with her and a bit unhappy. But it was Klever who asked: “Are you happy with what you are doing there?”
For a moment she failed to answer Klever’s question, though she trusted that Klever meant well. Then she decided to give it a try:
“Well, I suppose I am happy with the books, some of the books we read together, do you remember that book Gone With the Wind? ‘Tomorrow is another day’?”
This time Klever failed to reply directly. “Well, well, that’s a long time ago. ‘Gone with the Wind,’ indeed. I don’t have the time to read those books now. The happiest moment in my life now, J, is at night when I look out of my window, I can see across the water, across the bay, ‘Up the Sea.’ I’ll see you in New York.”
“Up the Sea” in Chinese stands for “Shanghai,” their hometown, their birthplace. She closed her eyes in a vain effort to recapitulate the pictures of that city. From Lake Erie she couldn’t see “Up the Sea,” as Klever still could, across the Pearl River. Migrating from the West coast to the East coast, she has drifted even further away from the Pacific, the water that flew from East to West, and the air that blew her over. She had come to see the Atlantic, thought that she might go to Europe someday. But now she feared to cross the ocean once more. Distance did make difference; it weighed. Every step one took determined one’s destiny.
Even though the rains and storms during the ten years of Cultural Revolution had diminished and disappeared at the back of her mind, she knew if she looked back, she wouldn’t see what she wished to see–her grandmas, her uncles, her old nannies, her playmates, and her playgrounds. Klever was not there anymore. “What one loses one loses.” What one gained, the opportunity of coming abroad, for instance, one gained by a loss that one even didn’t know it was a loss, and even years later, still couldn’t recognize.
It took fifteen years of life experience abroad to understand the double irony of James’ art. She thought of that James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady. What she didn’t understand as an undergraduate she began to understand now, she could understand what her professors didn’t, or couldn’t, explain satisfactorily–the ending of that novel, the question why Isabella Archer, an immigrant woman, chose not to come home to Albany, New York, but “took her wandering feet” back to Rome. Home is where one makes for oneself.
Between Rome and Shanghai, New York was only a middle ground, Whitman’s “Passage to India,” if only one would look the other way around. She opened her eyes, and she could see now the rising skyscrapers, neon lights, highways, and new bridges, there “Up the Sea.” She could imagine its thrill, its excitement, its prosperity. But for her it was the thrill of love and death in “The Jolly Corner.” Was Shanghai to become another New York? Or another Hong Kong? Then the coming of Best and Best’s generation might bring home closer. A home that was not home any more.
She thought of Sula, who came from a place called “the Bottom,” quite a different world, a different culture, as one could imagine, from that in Shanghai, “Up the Sea.” But tonight after Klever’s phone call from Hong Kong, she was lost in her thoughts wondering what it was that made her feel ever so close to Sula, this modern woman who died on the National Suicide Day. She smiled a bitter smile, putting down a quiz question for her students to answer: “Why does Morrison believe: ‘The heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see’?”