PARTS 2–3
2
When Axiu arrived in San Francisco on the SS Chiyo Maru, she was twenty-one years old, five months pregnant, and without her husband. He had left Canton for America three months before, to be admitted as a paper son to a family in Salinas.
At that time, neither of them had known that she was pregnant. But now that she had finally arrived, she felt like a dust mote dragged by her belly, its sordid swelling. On the ship over, she was beset with fevers, and nausea that left her expelling all her meals. She barely remembered the three weeks at sea, except the rise and fall of her body, its seismic panic—the farther the ship traveled, the less she could recognize herself, her own skin, her own hands. On board she had developed a mysterious rash, and it inched down her arms like little tides.
After they admitted the first-class passengers into San Francisco, Axiu, along with the other passengers, boarded the ferry to Angel Island. When it docked, a long wooden path awaited them, and uniformed immigration officials welcomed them by taking away their luggage. Axiu’s one trousseau was dragged, along with many of the other immigrants’ luggage, into a shed at the end of the wharf. It was the first time Axiu saw the white devils in the flesh: one of them was quite young, perhaps only a few years older than her, in an ill-fitting uniform. Earlier he had climbed on board the ship and checked all their papers. Axiu noticed his light-colored eyebrows, his light-colored eyelashes, which reminded her of corn silk, they were so translucent.
It was this officer who separated the new arrivals: he ushered the women and children to one side, the men to another, and then they walked in these formations to the administration building, which rose like a strange white palace. Axiu was not accustomed to such architecture—to her, it appeared both majestic and austere, with white-painted wooden walls and a colonnaded porch, surrounded by forested hills, facing the sea. Date palms rose from plots of earth, lush with brown-tipped leaves. In their new formations, Axiu began noticing the other women in line: Most of them looked Chinese, but some were from other countries—a Russian mother with child, Sikh wives, and groups of young Japanese women. When they finally entered the main examination room in the administration building, she was further separated into a group of Chinese women. After they were culled according to their identities, each group was led to separate “waiting rooms” inside the building, which were really just isolated spaces cordoned by high steel fences.
The room was already fraught with the nerves of all the new arrivals, but now that they were contained between these fences, the fright was palpable. One woman had her head down, rocking a sleeping child on her lap as if on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and another woman openly wept. Axiu noticed the stark wooden paneling on the walls, the chicken-wire clerestory windows, netting the view of the sea. Not a carving or aesthetically pleasing shape in sight. Even on the walk up to the administration building, the barbed-wire fences had dampened the stunning views of the eucalyptus grove that surrounded them, the palm trees and their low-hanging fronds.
Eventually they were called to meet the inspector in the main room. He was a man in his fifties or sixties, gray-bearded, broad-shouldered. Beside him was an interpreter, a diminutive bespectacled Chinese woman. They did not introduce themselves. Axiu was immediately curious about this interpreter, childlike and moon-faced, who spoke fluent English. What’s more was that Axiu was certain that she’d seen this woman on the ferry, packed along with the rest of them, obscuring her face with a long silk scarf.
“How long have you been pregnant?” the interpreter asked her in somewhat accented Cantonese.
“I do not know. It must be around four or five months.”
“Are you planning to give birth here?”
It seemed like a trick question. “Why, I don’t know….”
“It says here in your file that you are joining your brother, who arrived here in the States a few months earlier. Who is the father of your baby? Where is he?”
She found herself flushing, lightheaded. Her husband had told her to lie and say she was his sister, because wives were not allowed to enter the country, but blood relatives were.
“My husband, sir. He was back in China. He died recently, before I left.” She made the lie up on the spot, and the inspector remained unconvinced.
“How old was he?”
“He was thirty-six. He died in a boat accident.”
“How often were you intimate with your husband before he died?” The woman who was translating now seemed apologetic, as if embarrassed for Axiu. Her eyes strained as they avoided Axiu, who stood horrified at this question, unable to muster something to say. The hard expression of the official, the intensity of his gaze, seemed to cleave into her, and she felt dizzy imagining what he might be imagining at that moment. She wanted to exit, rescind this decision, reject this journey, head home immediately, but it was too late. She was trapped here, trapped in this pregnancy, already a liability in this country.
“I do not recall, sir.” She flushed. To her horror, the inspector guffawed at her uncertainty and took a note on his pad. Then he ripped off a ticket and began to issue an identification number. Axiu readied herself for the next step, so eager she was to leave this man behind. But in her relief she craned her neck and then the man stopped altogether when he noticed the redness there. The man barked at the interpreter, who then asked Axiu, “What is that rash on your skin?” The woman’s voice, compared to his, was perfectly calm and nonthreatening, and Axiu almost marveled at how mismatched a pair they were, as if the act of translation ended with mere language.
Encouraged by this woman’s steadying demeanor, Axiu tried to shake it off—probably just some insect bites or a burn, she guessed. When the interpreter failed to relay her answer to the inspector, Axiu pleaded: “Tell him it’s not serious. Tell him it’s just a sunburn. It will heal in a day.”
This time, the interpreter gave her a pitiless glance and said, “I can’t tell him that. He has eyes, you know.”
“We’re going to have to send you immediately to the hospital to be treated,” he said. “You’re not to be assigned a dorm in the main building until this has been taken care of.”
At these words, Axiu was, for the first time, legitimately terrified. A guard came and escorted her out by the arm—the way he gripped her with his meaty hands, she felt like a criminal. Axiu felt hot against the stares of everyone in line, whose worry she felt not directed at her but themselves. She shot another glance at the interpreter before exiting. The woman had already moved on to the next detainee, without a glance in her direction.
The guard led her past the administration building, up several sets of wooden staircases to a white building on a wooded bluff. This was the hospital. The door opened to a room full of nervous detainees, and she was sent to the waiting room for Chinese and Japanese women. Finally, when it was their turn, she went into the doctor’s office along with several other women.
A man she assumed was the health inspector told them all to strip down naked. A couple of nurses, one Chinese and one white, flanked him. This time there was no official interpreter, except for the Chinese nurse, who spoke in simple phrases and half gestures. Because Axiu, along with all these women, had been flagged as possible agents, they were to be given a full nude inspection. Axiu felt despair. Never had she undressed fully in front of anyone, even in front of her husband—there was always a bolt of silk, a sleeve, or darkness, something, to hide herself. The nurses took measurements of her body and checked them against her papers. At first they measured her height, but then they also measured her waist, her hips, her belly, her spine. Through all of this, Axiu tried to reassure herself that it was standard protocol.
Then the doctor asked them for a stool sample, and the nurses began issuing shallow wooden pails. A test for hookworm, a common disease that Americans believed immigrants from Asia carried—so every Asian arrival must provide the sample. Each woman was directed toward a cordoned-off section of the room, and asked to do their business there, with everyone still in the room.
Incredulous but lightheaded, Axiu squatted over the pail with her pregnant belly, attempting to control her bowels and failing. The whole time, she grew dizzy trying to hold her breath. The thought of everyone collectively taking a shit made her feel nauseous again, as if she were back on the steamship. When she finally handed the pail to the nurses, they immediately sent it downstairs, to the laboratory, for “testing.”
“Female of the Chinese race. Height, five feet three inches,” the doctor muttered, when she emerged. She did not understand anything he was saying, though she understood he was talking about her. “Five months pregnant. Moon-shaped birthmark on her lower back.”
In his examination, the doctor traced his finger along her rash down to her birthmark. His cold nails against her back, she shivered. She had not been touched in a while, and the strange foreign doctor’s finger probed into her spine. He then administered a white cream onto her rash, kneading into her skin with unnecessary force.
“What’s this medicine?” she asked, but he did not answer. Neither did the Chinese nurse, who fidgeted with her braid.
After another hour in the medical facility, she was finally discharged, but she felt as if all her muscles had been flayed. Her rash was painful: the longer the cream penetrated her skin, the more she felt her skin inflamed. The guard then assigned her to a bunk bed on the second floor of the administration building.
It was a cramped, airless room with wire-netting bunk beds, half of which were covered in drying laundry. The smells burned her nostrils. There must have been about fifty, sixty beds, all stacked together one on top of the other. The women used every last available space to stake their belongings—the chandeliers were draped with wet stockings and blouses, so that even the source of light emitted gloom.
To her relief, Axiu was assigned to one of the lower bunk beds. By then it was dinner hour and the women had already shuffled off to the dining hall, but Axiu had no appetite. Exhausted, she curled into a sleeping position and cherished this rare moment of peace. The blanket she was given felt coarse, like fox hide, tangled with the smells of other women’s bodies.
3
Opposite Axiu’s bunk was Mrs. Yee. Back in China, Mrs. Yee had a different name, Mother Bai. Mother Bai was primarily a midwife, and she was known to deliver the babies of almost every family in her southern village, but she wore many hats: in addition to her “official” job as a midwife, she was also a healer, a diviner, and a fox spirit medium.
Mother Bai came from a family from Shandong so poor that they ate bark off of trees and boiled grass for suppers. In the north, it was common practice to worship fox spirits. When a local woman was rumored to have been possessed by a fox, the Bai family, along with all the other poor villagers, thronged to her home to ask questions and seek cures. The possessed woman, she was told, became a medium in front of all their eyes. She jerked in all directions, she muttered, she spewed noises in a language no one could decipher, she approximated the sounds of an animal in heat—and finally, after what seemed like hours, she fell on the ground in a trance, and woke up a medium. The medium told the Bai family that in order for their son to revive, they needed to marry their daughter off to a man from the south.
And so off she went, the teenage bride-to-be, in a caravan of sorts, journeying the long, craggy miles from Shandong to the village in the Pearl River Delta to wed her husband, who was twenty years her senior. She could not remember much of him; only that he was quiet, studious, provided her with a modest shelter. Three years after their daughter was born, he died. She was twenty-two and already widowed, living in their empty house with just her toddler. Soon there was an infestation of foxes: she found her clothes torn and eaten, her menstrual rags stolen, her stores of food raided and spilled. Chicken bones and tufts of fox hair and fur appeared in her husband’s former study.
One night, the fox spirit finally visited her and told her that it could bring her financial independence for the near future, if only she surrendered the area of the study to them as well as surrendered her daughter to be wed into the fox family. Mrs. Bai considered her options: She could agree to the fox taking residence, but she refused to give up her daughter like her own mother had forsaken her. She didn’t want to hire an exorcist to eradicate the foxes, either, for she knew it would result in karmic consequences. So she decided to offer herself as an imperfect substitute for her daughter; in exchange for peace, she would serve as a medium for the foxes and worship them for the rest of her days.
Many fox mediums were forged this way: through a mutual arrangement with a fox, which bestowed the medium with favors and supernatural gifts. She developed a loyal customer base as midwife, healer, fox medium, and shaman. People came to her with just about any affliction—physical, emotional, or spiritual. She administered medicine for the ill, divinations for the wayward, exorcisms for the bewitched, and rituals to commune with the spirit realm for those beset with grief. She was respected well enough that many families sent her gifts during the Spring Festival, affectionately calling her Mother Bai. She raised her daughter as a single woman, and this was unheard-of in a village like that. This went on for about thirty years.
And then just like that, it all disappeared. One day, a Taoist priest visited the village and requested her services. After asking her a series of difficult questions she easily evaded, he frowned and began chanting a hateful sutra to exorcise the fox, who had begun flailing inside her body until she vomited a poisonous red sap. The fox, wet and squirming, slid out into the puddle and the priest wrung its neck with a string of mala beads.
Then he professed to the village that she was a fraudulent fox medium, and thrust the fox’s emptied husk of a body forward as proof: Go on, he said, ask her anything. And so in the span of one miserable season, business dried up, famine struck her village, floods drowned the crops, bandits moved in to wreak havoc and loot the homes of her neighbors. Still, the bandits skipped her home: true medium or not, bandits remained afraid of her.
Her only daughter, Anqing, weak from starvation, died giving birth. Her daughter’s husband, Ho Mock, grief-stricken, took the baby and moved to Canton, abandoning his life in the village. Eventually Mrs. Bai heard that he sold his house for a meager sum and bought the papers of an American-born Chinese on credit, making the crossing to California.
A few years after her son-in-law vanished, a group of angry townsfolk rapped at her door, accusing her of defrauding them. Many were irate former customers—they had consulted her, and she predicted good fortune; what they faced instead was disease and devastation. They emptied her cupboards of rations, they spilled her rice. They sacked her medicine drawers, her herbs and roots and flowers, the ones she’d spent her whole life collecting—the ginseng reserves, the dried Osmanthus flowers, the teas. They plundered her makeshift altar to fox spirits and to Mother Taishan, the goddess she consulted in her divination practice, the one she summoned to communicate with fox spirits. They smashed the goddess’s statue against her altar, and at her feet landed the broken head, which she snatched up and ran away with as they set her house on fire.
Some of the people who had done this, she had delivered from their mother’s womb. She had cradled them when their faces were still wrapped in a film of caul, cut their umbilical cords, ran their first baths under clear springwater steeped in herbs. She had been the first one to welcome them to their lives, but of course none of them remembered. All they saw then was a pathetic old woman who had no relation to them—the lowest of the low—a widow, a fraud, and a crone.
“Repent, old witch! Repent for your lies!” they cried as flames tore the roof of her house, the smoke incinerating all other senses.
A sympathetic neighbor let her hide in her house for a few months. In the first week, Mrs. Bai could not eat or sleep—she did not even dare to dream. Instead, she ruminated. So she sold lies—so what? She was not special: judging by her customers, everyone was always lying to each other all the time. Husbands lied to wives, wives to husbands, to children, to in-laws—if anyone asked her, lies were the standard procedure of belonging to a family. In fact, in many cases, lies were actually the glue that held families together. It wasn’t that Mrs. Bai was lying to her clientele, it was her clientele who lied to each other and themselves. In most of her cases, the lies had already been circulating long before it occurred to anyone to consult her. They only sought her out not because they were clueless, but because they wanted confirmation for their suspicions. And she was paid handsomely for substantiating the lies they told—most of the lies, in fact, were not hers. For example, when one woman made an appointment with her to ask if her husband had gone and impregnated a village girl, the husband came to her first before his wife’s appointment, slipping her a bag of coins to have her tell his wife he hadn’t. And then they lived happily ever after. Until now.
At first it felt like America was finally her way out, to another start. When her son-in-law requested her to take care of his son while he worked long hours at the mining camps, she was grateful. She hadn’t seen the man in years—since he left with the child, he never bothered to even write. Then on a Saturday, his brother, Kee Mock, showed up at her neighbor’s inquiring about her. It was her first visitor in over a month. Kee Mock informed Mrs. Bai that he was also making the journey as a paper son. He asked her to come with him as his “mother,” that his brother in America had requested this. It turned out their real father had died and left his sons a sum of money. The papers were bought, the tickets procured—Kee Mock had gone to see a hawker for Gold Mountain and secured everything they needed to make the trip. He even gave her a coaching handbook, full of questions to study and memorize about this invented life: the life of one Mrs. Tet Sam Yee.
Before she died, Anqing had been eager to become a “Gold Mountain wife,” having seen the finely dressed women at the ports, their arms heavy with gifts and luggage. And now, in her daughter’s place, Mrs. Bai felt it was her duty to go.
Upon her arrival at Angel Island, the newly minted Mrs. Yee right away sensed the presence of fox spirits. The old impulse she’d long suppressed revived itself overnight. Pungent fox scent dampened all her clothes, and whiskers chafed her neck at odd hours, especially at dusk. Mrs. Yee had not felt this since she was twenty-two, at her fox medium initiation ceremony. That ritual possession took place over the course of one evening, in which she experienced every sensory extreme: cold as if she had sprouted a glacier inside her lungs, heat as if molten rock had replaced her innards. She screamed and danced and ran around the neighborhood naked, setting off a ruckus in town. Outside her residence, she planted a fox shrine in the mossy peat. She slept outside the first few nights, the rain casting a glow. She gave it offerings: tofu skins, radishes, the rest of her rice. She had never felt more alive.
She didn’t dare repeat that behavior here, in the presence of so many other women. The first night, she felt a sensation like wind slashing everyone’s turbulent sleep, though all the windows were closed. Beset by the ghostly motions, Mrs. Yee could not sleep. Perhaps she’d grown so used to the vertiginous rocking of the ship that she could no longer find rest without the whole world moving beneath her. The walls seemed to breathe on their own.
The buildings of this detention center were new, but the wooden walls were ripe for hauntings. Mrs. Yee saw poetry on the walls, carved with penknives or forged in ink. Some of the poems, she suspected, were written not by women, but by fox spirits. How else to explain the tattoo-like quality of the ink on the wall, the sharpness and depth of the strokes? Surely the poems were not carved using regular knives—the penmanship of the calligraphy seemed near-perfect, almost supernatural. Foxes were attracted to liminal residences, lodging houses, and this detention center was a veritable playground.
Every day, the breakfast bell rang, and the guards showed up to escort her and the other women to the dining hall, where they all ate together in collective disgust and dolor. To Mrs. Yee, this routine eventually became a rare source of comfort, even though the meals were so bad: stewed vegetables that melted into mush, rice gruel that reminded her of pig feed, all the different iterations of bone and cartilage without a trace of salt.
Eventually the women all came to adore her, since she gave them advice and herbs, sometimes a divination, and occasionally an ointment for sores or aches or homesickness. She even had a cure for hookworm, which was desperately in demand. They sought her out for tips on backaches from too much time spent on the bad mattresses. Several women discovered her reputation as a fox medium and begged her to light an altar for their journeys, to pray to the fox spirits that they’d be protected and eventually landed. And so she did: she fashioned a small makeshift one, very simple, but it would have to do. The head of Mother Taishan, set sideways, her broken neck carefully hidden with a piece of cloth. A few stray incense sticks stacked atop a small porcelain ewer from home, the matches procured from the Chinese cooks. After years of not practicing, Mrs. Yee found herself hypnotized once more by the burning. Against the charred joss sticks, the faces of the women flushed with the distinct beauty of hopeless hope. They offered both her and the fox spirits fresh persimmons and pomelos, all sent from their families in San Francisco’s Chinatown. One woman even offered a whole roast duck, dehydrated and brined, wrapped in red wax paper.
To read a flame, to read the color and shapes of ashes—to enter the state of trance—Mrs. Yee had to motion to welcome the fox spirits. Her hand like an eagle, swinging over the smoke to capture its tendrils. This was her at her most vulnerable, her arms open, ready to receive. Then when the spirit slid into the flame, she could hear herself assuming its rasp, the small throb in her throat like a drum, answering the women’s prayers.
On her tenth day on Angel Island, Mrs. Yee was summoned for interrogation. In the interrogation room, light poured from the barred windows. There was a chair for her to sit in, and she faced the immigration official—a frowning man with a blond beard. An interpreter sat to his right, and a stenographer, whose hands rapped against a typewriter with metallic clangs, distracting her from listening to the questions. There were about two hundred questions in all. How many stairs led to the temple in the village? What was the distance between her house and the dry goods store? Who was her son’s teacher? Was there a red bridal chair for the bride at her son’s wedding? What were the birth dates of her grandchildren, and where were they born, at what address? What was her son’s American address? What dialects did her merchant husband speak? In what year did he open his business?
She regretted not studying the coaching book more closely. What arrogance, to assume her own clairvoyance would be an asset! In that room, in the face of the officials and their dubious gazes, her extra senses abandoned her. She’d been stripped of her power, her authority. The humiliation of drawing a blank on these questions she should have known was something she foolishly did not anticipate. Many of the questions she answered truthfully, so therefore they were incorrect. Her village was next to a river, yes, but not the village of her paper husband’s. She said there was a palanquin at her son’s wedding banquet, but did not remember the date, the number of guests, or the dishes served. “I don’t know” was the most legitimate answer she could muster.
The interpreter spoke swiftly, barely looking at her through his spectacles, wearing his Western clothing. All were strangers, all were men, and Mrs. Yee understood that other than the Chinese interpreter, all had a say in her fate. Later that afternoon they would go into the city to interrogate her paper “husband,” and she knew that if enough answers did not match, they would reject her and put her on a ship back to Canton. She hoped that they would chalk up her errors to her seniority rather than her identity.
“Forgive me,” she said to the interpreter as kindly as she could. “Have pity on an old woman, why don’t you? My memory has never been sharp, but especially not now.” He peered at her in pity but did not relay her message to the official.
By the time Axiu arrived, Mrs. Yee had already been in the detention camp for a month awaiting the results of her interrogation. When she woke up next to a girl who was the spitting image of her daughter, Anqing, Mrs. Yee saw it as a portent, a lucky sign. Even though Anqing had already been dead for five years, it was a bitter loss that Mrs. Yee had never stopped mourning. The fox spirits must have sent her, this pregnant girl, whose gait, profile, and widow’s peak were so familiar it was enough to confuse Mrs. Yee from time to time, make her question where she was. Axiu even had the same mole underneath her right eye as Anqing. At times Mrs. Yee wondered if the month she had spent aboard that terrible ship actually pulled her back in time, to the past where her daughter was still alive.
One evening, Mrs. Yee surveyed Axiu’s belongings, starting with the tiny jars of medicine and herbs she carried in her satchel. A few of the ingredients alarmed Mrs. Yee.
“Who prescribed you these?” she asked Axiu. “You should never eat wild ginseng while pregnant!”
“It’s okay. I had no appetite on board, and still don’t. I’m starting to wonder when I’ll ever want to eat again.”
“You must eat!” Mrs. Yee offered Axiu a pinch of herbs and dried fruits from her own paltry reserve, the ones she recommended specifically for pregnant women. Angelica root, dehydrated loquats, sweet hawthorn.
But Axiu refused, saying, “I don’t want these. I really have no appetite, Mrs. Yee.”
Exasperated, Mrs. Yee said, “This isn’t about you, Axiu. It’s about the baby, who might be hungry.”
“I don’t want that.”
Mrs. Yee asked Axiu what she meant.
“I never decided to get pregnant.”
“What woman decides to get pregnant?” Mrs. Yee exclaimed, incredulous.
“What if my daughter turns out to be a miserable person, and blames me for bringing her into this life?”
“How do you know you will give birth to a daughter?”
“I have this strong feeling she is. Why else would I have so many dreams about having a daughter? And daughters, you just know the kind of life a daughter is going to have. It’s no life at all!”
“You’ve suffered no losses, girl. You have never lost a child.” Mrs. Yee found herself rubbing her eyes, thinking of the evening her daughter went into labor. It was true that she had tried, tried to deliver the baby safely, but it was also true that she was partial to her daughter, not the baby, when the eleventh hour arrived and it came down to the agonizing decision of who to save, and that perhaps heaven had wanted to punish her, because even when she made her choice, fortune was reversed and her daughter was not spared in the end.
Axiu was quiet, waiting for Mrs. Yee to continue.
“You know. You’re right,” said Mrs. Yee finally. “You’re right about daughters. It isn’t a life at all.”
They sat there, staring at each other from across their bunks, Axiu plaiting her long hair. Mrs. Yee did not remind her of her mother, who was always too vain to care about what was in her mind. To be chided, then reassured, by Mrs. Yee—Axiu was oddly stirred.
“Do you have any daughters?” Axiu asked suddenly.
“I did. One,” Mrs. Yee said. “I wish I could have done more for her.”
“Why?”
“She died young. She was only a few years older than you.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She died giving birth. My grandson is alive here in America, but…” She trailed off.
“But you would trade him for your daughter to come back?” Axiu asked.
“Nonsense. What has happened has happened.” Mrs. Yee sighed. She suddenly felt very tired. “You know, I can’t help you myself if you want to…do that, but I do know a way,” she said to Axiu slowly.
“How?” Axiu grabbed Mrs. Yee’s hand then, genuine gratitude in her eyes.
“It’s that interpreter, Tye. You might have recognized her as the only Chinese woman who’s working here. She can help you get one, but you have to pass the test to get out of here first. And you have to pay her. It’s long, it’s bitter, but it’s possible.”
“But I barely have any money.”
“There’s always a way. I’ve talked to Tye before, she seems to trust me because I’m just some old lady. You know, she may seem callous, but she’s not a bad woman. She has networks, connections. She will help you get rid of your problem.”
Later that day, Mrs. Yee wondered if it was really the right thing to do, tell that girl where to get the procedure done. At dinner, she saw Axiu talking to Tye, whose eyes then flashed right to her. Then Tye began walking in her direction.
At first Mrs. Yee thought she would be reprimanded for giving Axiu that advice. But then she recognized: Ah. It was just the news that she hadn’t passed her interrogation. Mrs. Yee knew this because Tye was giving her permission to speak to visitors. Mrs. Yee was finally going to see her son-in-law—maybe even her grandson—and that only meant that she was going to be deported. Only those who did not pass their interrogations could speak to their family members while on the island, because those who passed were landed in San Francisco, and could speak to their loved ones whenever they wanted. When Mrs. Yee heard Tye announce it, she felt lightheaded—it was as if the news wasn’t real, as long as it was told in near-unintelligible syllables.
The next day, a Saturday, she met with her son-in-law. The visitation room was very small, and mostly consisted of weeping women talking to their lawyers or their relatives. Mrs. Yee waited for around ten minutes and then a tall, lanky man in a bowler hat and a threadbare shirt entered the room. He had aged remarkably since she last saw him. New hollows had sprouted under his eyes, and the man barely spoke. He had brought with him his son, who was around five years old, his hair shaved and his eyes black and beady, suspicious. At the sight of the child, Mrs. Yee choked back sobs.
“I can file an appeal on yours and Kee Mock’s behalf,” said her son-in-law. “We’ll hire a lawyer, and he will send the appeal directly to Washington, D.C. We just have to wait a few more weeks.”
“Some of the women have been waiting for a year for this appeal.”
“We don’t have much of a choice at this point. Would you rather go home?”
“I’m an old woman, I will not last here for much longer.”
The next Monday, when Tye delivered the news to Mrs. Yee, a noticeable hush fell across the mess hall. In the end, her intuition had been correct. She, along with two other women, were to be sent out on a boat to The Mongolia in Meiggs’ Wharf, sailing back to China in the next week.
Mrs. Yee struggled to finish her bowl. The bench under her, the long table set with that day’s meal—cloudy, mushy pork with chives—all fell into a void. All around her, the other women began to react. It was these other women who wailed and wept for her—she could not muster a reaction herself. And then she noticed Axiu, who had managed to push past those other women to kneel in front of Tye, her head lowered with her arms outstretched.
“Please,” Axiu beseeched. “Spare Mrs. Yee, at least. She’s sixty-four. She never broke any laws; she has never done wrong. Isn’t there anything you can do to help?”
“There’s nothing,” said Tye quietly. “I know you’re new around here, but I’m just an interpreter, I have no vote on what the outcomes are.”
“But you’re close with the immigration officer—I’ve seen you!” Axiu cried. “Surely you can talk some sense into him?”
Mrs. Yee lifted Axiu to her feet, whispering to her, “That stance won’t be good for the baby. The baby doesn’t want to feel her mother begging.”
“I don’t want you to go.” Axiu clutched on to her.
“Nothing will happen to you,” said Mrs. Yee. “I know this. I consulted the fox spirits last night, and they ensured me that you and your baby will be safe.”
“But what about you?”
Mrs. Yee led Axiu back to her bunk, where she was prepared to pack everything. Mrs. Yee unwrapped the head of Mother Taishan and handed it to Axiu. “You know, I sensed something about you. You should communicate with the spirits now. I’m too old to keep practicing.”
Her hands ceased shaking as they let go of the goddess. As much as the news devastated her, Mrs. Yee felt release. The shock of her discovery had long worn off—that her dreams, which had led her here, were wild projections. Now that she had tasted the Beautiful Country’s beauty, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stay. She thought of her lost daughter, the burned house, the village. She thought of the faces of the ones who burned down her house and felt, to her astonishment, a warmth bordering on gratitude. She preferred that to the lachrymose strangers who projected their own anxieties onto her, a woman they barely knew.
Once again it was she who remained the most composed at the news. Once again it was she who took the responsibility of comforting everyone else. The pregnant girl in her arms was now inconsolable, weeping and shuddering, clasping the head of Mother Taishan like it was a flotation device and they were all wreckage floating on a sea. It reminded her of nights like this with her feverish and pregnant Anqing, whispering into her hair: It’s okay. It will be fine. I’m home now. You won’t be alone in this world. Soon, you won’t be alone.