ARRIVAL
1
From Meiggs’ Wharf, Tye watched the steamship anchor at the docks. It was a monstrous ocean liner, the Chiyo Maru, a behemoth of steel with steam pouring out of its nostrils. Over her line of sight it towered, even as she stood waiting for another, much smaller boat, the ferry The Angel Island, to sidle up next to the ship. Tye checked the clock face on the terminal of the ferry building: 7:27 a.m. It was April 6, 1910, and her heart was pounding. The Angel Island wouldn’t depart for at least another hour, so she had time. She settled on a bench that conveniently afforded her a prime view of the landing. It was crusted with chalk-white gull droppings, so she sat near the edge. She had brought a book with her in case she had to wait, but every time her eyes fell on the text, some sight or noise would distract her. Sailors yelled, seabirds bleated, and the smell of the sea mixed with the stench of human sewage suffused the air. She took out a club sandwich with pickles and ham, but it tasted like cardboard. She let the bread crusts fall on the ground, and the gulls flocked to her, screeching.
Today was the first day of her new job as an interpreter at the newly opened immigration station at Angel Island, and she had come out at the early hour to witness the ship docking and watch the new immigrants debark. She wore a scarf, hat, and sunglasses, partly because of the glare through the fog, and partly because she didn’t want to appear conspicuous. A short Chinese woman under five feet tall, Tye often hated her small stature for making her feel even more exposed. Everywhere she went, strangers always mistook her for a foreign child wandering alone in San Francisco. She couldn’t risk that today. If she bundled herself well enough, she might not get noticed. Her plan that morning was to take the ferry to the island along with the new arrivals. Despite herself, she wanted them to think of her as one of them. She wanted to see this city she’d known for almost twenty-three years now through their clear, unsullied eyes.
The ship’s horn rumbled, and her eardrums emptied. Thick fog spilled from the sky, dissolving into the flare of plumes from all the steamships. She began to make out the newcomers, their seasick expressions, faces nearly all white. The first-class passengers came first, walking down the planks in their shawls and woolen hats, a little hot for that spring day. They poured into the wharf with their luggage, dazed from weeks at sea, sick with relief at dry land. Tonight they would return home to comfortable chambers, to hot meals and hot baths. Then the second-class passengers started pouring in, and this time Tye saw some Asians, straggling and fearful, but mostly composed.
At the base of the plank, a man in a pale green uniform waited. Next to him was an older, taller man in a button-down uniform, a couple of nurses, and a doctor. In the middle of all the incoming foot traffic, the group stood still, though the man in uniform paced back and forth slightly. He must be an immigration official, she thought. In other words, he would soon be her colleague. His pale red hair was neatly tucked into a cap, and the buttons on his uniform were crooked—the jacket fit too snugly on him. He waited until after all the second-class passengers had finished debarking to climb up into the ship along with his party, disappearing into its doors.
It would be a while before that man finished checking the papers of every third-class steerage passenger on the ship. Tye began collecting her things, hoping to make the most of the head start. The Angel Island ferry had already appeared, a paltry craft insinuating itself like a water lily inching noiselessly across the water. Like a mosquito swarm, throngs of people rushed toward the ferry, though it hadn’t anchored yet. By the time she reached the end of the line, the ferry had docked in front of an abandoned building, which Tye recognized immediately as the two-story wooden shed belonging to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the one that used to be the immigration station until just this past month.
At the sight of the haunted place, Tye shuddered. On a couple of occasions, she had been hired to interpret for the immigration officials there, and she knew—witnessed firsthand, in fact—the conditions of this station: how rats would scuttle, covered in seaweed and fish entrails, into the immigrants’ bed quarters, chewing on their belongings. One poor woman had woken up to find her braid had been gnawed off by one of the nasty critters, a bold one hungry for keratin. The whole building was a firetrap, with detainees packed up to five hundred in one room. At night, some of them escaped from the windows, dangling from telegraph lines. When city officials decided to open the new immigration station on Angel Island, it wasn’t due to the many complaints from detainees and their representatives about this shed’s deplorable conditions—rather, the move was because Angel Island was geographically inescapable. If any prisoner made the attempt, they’d have to plunge into freezing-cold Bay water and swim for miles, risking hypothermia and death. Now, through the mist, Tye could just barely make out the lonely shape of the island, flanked by Alcatraz’s cannons and the lips of Tiburon’s shoreline beyond the fog. The new immigration building, too, was a tinderbox waiting to catch fire. She wondered if it would be any more livable than the shed.
When the ferry began admitting passengers, the line moved relatively fast, even with passengers carrying heavy leather suitcases and lugging steamer trunks. Tye climbed on board with her ticket and found a seat in the main cabin. The upper deck of the Angel Island ferry was reserved for Westerners, and the non-white people—mostly Asians—had to shuffle into this level. Tye, of course, was not exempt from these rules. From her seat, she was relieved she had a clear view of the ocean. The water was a cold grayish green, with phantom jellyfish moving just under its surface. The ferry rocked gently, and Tye felt a stab of familiar anxiety: the last time she took such a vessel had been in the aftermath of the earthquake, when she had crossed San Francisco Bay to temporarily shelter in the East Bay.
It had only been four years since that day in 1906. Tye remembered it as a tremor, a fissure, a fire—though it was really in the ocean where the fault first ruptured. From the throat of the Pacific, a seismic movement ripped through California as far south as the Central Valley and as far north as the Oregon wilderness. The San Andreas Fault tore the skin of San Francisco open and expunged its simmering insides for the world to see. At the time, Tye was nineteen years old, staying on a bunk bed at the Occidental Mission Home for Girls, where she worked as a translator with Donaldina Cameron, the superintendent. Donaldina was more than a boss—she was a mother figure to Tye and all the other girls. A tall and hulking Scottish woman with a formidable voice, she was no ordinary missionary hostess—this woman had made it her life’s work to “rescue” enslaved Chinese girls sold into prostitution. As a teenager, Tye had accompanied her on these trips, easily slipping into the role of interpreter for the dazed Chinese girls who emerged from the basements on Jackson Street operated by the local tongs. Tye had seen the wretched pits from which these girls had escaped: she felt Donaldina’s cause was noble, if a bit proselytizing. At first Tye wasn’t sure if Donaldina was forging this identity as savior out of pity or contempt for the Chinese girls, but soon she decided the ends justified the means. It was Donaldina who recommended her for this new job.
The rattling had come in the early hours of April 18, when Tye was still sleeping in her bunk. She remembered waking up to chunks of plaster and white paint from the ceiling dropping onto her face, her arms covered in fine dust. The creaky bunk had quavered along with her tongue against her teeth, and the contents of her stomach sloshed along with cups and urns, which toppled like dominoes. The younger girl on the bed below had whimpered with fear and panic, and Tye had wasted no time climbing down and consoling her. Gathering and rocking the girl’s skinny limbs in her arms, Tye had explained in Chinese that this event had a name—not the apocalypse, but an earthquake. Within minutes, Donaldina had appeared in the doorway, dressed in plain black pajamas, and had calmly instructed Tye and all the girls to shuffle out of the house. Outside, it seemed that the world around 920 Sacramento Street had transformed—a sunlit crumble of buildings, rubble falling off eaves like cake crumbs.
The missionary home had survived the earthquake itself, but in its aftermath fires had raged across the whole city. City officials, in a desperate bid to fight the fire with fire, decided to release dynamite into the streets, believing it was the last resort they needed—to destroy parts of the city in order to save the rest. But ultimately they’d bungled their efforts. The dynamite destroyed the Occidental Mission Home, and Tye, along with fifty other girls, had been forced to take shelter in a house belonging to Donaldina’s relatives in San Rafael, in Marin County across the water. On the ferry that took them there, Tye saw Angel Island up close for the first time.
In the weeks afterward, Tye had obsessively read about the earthquake in the newspapers. The tremor had sputtered fire up Van Ness, swallowing up rich white estates and the St. Ignatius Church. Market Street leveled, the clocks of the sea-facing buildings cracked and frozen in dawn. The Palace Hotel on the corner of New Montgomery and Market burning in lacquer and gilt, a bitumen mess, the staircases collapsed like broken piano keys—the grandest hotel in the American West, its glass ceiling shattered, Doric pillars crumbling into the marble floors of smoking rooms like a worthy ruin. South of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Cliff House on Point Lobos had slid into the sea.
But what really disturbed Tye was that her beloved Chinatown had been all but decimated. The paper had mentioned this only in passing, but she could imagine it—the thousands of already-impoverished Chinese residents crouched together in wreckage. Shabby buildings collapsed with entire family lines inside. Pomelos thumping and rolling onto the ground, crushed lanterns, scattered rinds and seeds. She imagined her family amid the rubble, and for a moment she’d felt a pang of guilt for running away from them. They had attempted to marry her off to an older man who lived in a faraway town called Butte, Montana. At twelve, she had been determined to defy these orders.
Tye was the youngest in her family. For the first half of her childhood, she received special attention from her father, which her sisters did not enjoy. He sent her to the Presbyterian mission school when her other siblings went to work in the small family business. He reserved the best cuts of roast pork at the end of the day just for her. Every now and then he took her to the beach near Lurline Pier to walk along the shore and dig for clams. At first she believed this extra attention was evidence that her father loved her the most. But then she turned nine, and he sent her to become a servant in another family’s house. A few years later, when he mentioned the proposal from the unknown suitor, the adolescent Tye jumped to the bitter conclusion that her entire upbringing had all been a cruel bid to sell her off. She ran away and took shelter in Donaldina Cameron’s Occidental Mission Home for Girls, because she had learned from school that that was where Chinese girls with no homes went.
Years at the mission house left her homesick—even though her family was still close by, she couldn’t bear to visit her mother, her father, her seven brothers and sisters, whose faces were beginning to slide away, because she knew they were disappointed in her. She comforted herself by becoming a vigilant helper for Miss Cameron, whose efforts toward rescuing Chinese girls from trafficking always seemed to fulfill an essential purpose. For years Tye was translator to Miss Cameron, and older sister and protector to the girls. Donaldina had in effect replaced both her parents, and the other girls in the boardinghouse her siblings. In one day, the earthquake had obliterated their whole operation.
The one silver lining in the aftermath of the earthquake was the fire down by Larkin and McAllister, the one that had burst through the Municipal Building, the Hall of Records: records of births, deaths, citizenship status, and marriages all went up in flames. In the end, calamity decided that from there on out, it didn’t matter whose names were on the papers, who was legitimately born in the United States. For the first time in Tye’s life, it didn’t matter who was native, who was an outsider. Enterprising as they were, the San Francisco Chinese began to file reports that they had more children than they actually did. One Chinatown man claimed he had three children back in Canton, some of them grown. He fabricated the names, births, dates of these children, inventing their lives, and sold these slots for a price.
Soon enough, the floodgates for paper slots opened up—for a bit of money, people in China could shed the life they’d always known and become a fictional invention. A hard life in Canton could surely be abandoned, the way one abandons a dirty shirt with too many holes. A new identity as a paper son or daughter was as good as the promise of gold that had brought Tye’s father to the new world. In the ruins of San Francisco, anyone could pretend that they belonged.
Learning about the Municipal Building fire and the response among the Chinese, Tye had felt roused, even inspired, by these amazing new deceptions in her community—she saw them as heroic subversive actions against the oppressive Chinese Exclusion Act. What would the old Tye have said to this new Tye on the ferry, now that she had secured a job with the very people trying to enforce this act? The guilt she felt was not dissimilar to her feelings about the family she abandoned.
During her interview, the man who hired her, the commissioner of immigration, a pale mustached man named Hart Hyatt North, had not minced his words: “You’d keep a close eye on those Chinese women for us. Stay on the alert for the…lewd ones. Keep a log of which ones are respectable, which ones are not.” And when she nodded, she felt disgusted with herself, as if she were betraying her own.
The fog, she noticed, was beginning to lift. Sunlight began to warm her face, and she saw them—the immigrants. The arrivals started climbing on board, and Tye lost track of her thoughts in their din. Something lifted in her heart—it was like seeing another country for the first time, even though they were the ones experiencing it, not her. Occasionally she found herself homesick for China, a country she’d never been to. Perhaps this job would bring her even closer to it, she reasoned. Her camouflage had seemed to work—no one noticed her or questioned her belonging there. On the ferry, they sat next to her. They mistook her for one of their own.
The women began whispering.
Did you hear? The night after her interrogation, a woman had taken a pair of metal chopsticks and inserted one through each ear until she bled to death.
Did you hear? A girl was possessed by an errant ghost on the Nanking, which sailed from Canton, and she flung herself over the railing. She had lost her papers, including the coaching book on her paper identity—the answers on the square footage of a grandfather’s villa, how many steps led up to the bedroom, whether the windows faced east or west, where the well was in relation to their street. It was rumored that this girl’s “best friend,” also from her village, had stolen her papers. This girl naturally assumed the paper identity upon landing.
Did you hear? One wrong answer, and they’d send you back to Canton, and then what? You could fall into the hands of slave traders. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor. A reject from the Beautiful Country half a world away was bound to fetch a bargain.
As they neared Angel Island, Tye saw something that made her breath catch. It was an exquisite fox, sitting on the deck, luxuriating in the sun. It was licking its own fluffed-out tail and its eyes squinted at the newcomers, as if in a gesture of welcome.
Did you know? Like in those Pu Songling stories, you become either a ghost or a fox. If you were turned away on Angel Island and cast back home, you became a ghost: no life to assume, no life to return to. Everyone you had ever loved had already assumed you’d made the passage to your new life.
So the myth went, according to one old lady—a self-proclaimed spirit medium: If you become the paper daughter, you will shed your old self like a lobster molting its exoskeleton. And in the remains of your past self, you will find a fox just like that creature on the deck. A fox survives your last known life. Did you know? They are the only other mammal besides humans that can live on every continent—the population has already spread to this island, an earth of foxes, a pestilence. Entering this country is a small death—sisters, be forewarned, you will grow into a kind of monster.