PARTS 4–5
4
Rumors flanked the beautiful Daji, who had arrived on Angel Island on the Spirited. Even in the close quarters of the women’s dormitory, she had never been seen without red lips or a natural blush, what one might see painted on the cheeks of a Peking opera singer. Her hair was close-cropped, curled in a modern short wavy style, and she often wore embroidered silk gloves. Daji had a solitaire diamond ring from a previous husband she wore on her pointer finger like a North Star. Envious, the other women loved to mutter all sorts of lies in her wake.
But Daji loved gossip, even and especially when it was about her. The most common rumor was that Daji was a nine-tailed fox spirit who would bring misfortune upon all of them. A hulijing—fox woman, an informal term for loose woman, any loose woman, but in this case it was literal. If she had to be honest with herself, this rumor actually flattered her. Everyone knew that nine-tailed foxes were legendary for their cunning wit and maddening beauty. In some villages in northern China, there were still shrines devoted to these fox demons, and thousands of worshippers. After all, the name itself, Daji, was notorious—according to the famous sixteenth century novel The Investiture of the Gods by Xu Zhonglin, Daji was the name of the man-eating vixen disguised as a concubine who bewitched King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty with her supernatural beauty.
Of course, Daji’s parents would never have thought to give her this name—it was the new name she chose for herself when she was negotiating the terms of her new identity, for which her now-ex-husband paid a price. In her official documentation papers, complete with the U.S. ambassador’s seal, her new name was Daji—it rolled off the tongue harshly. Daji, not the concubine of a king, but the “wife of the wealthy merchant Wing Fu Ong.” Apparently this merchant had quite the reputation in San Francisco as a handsome and formidable patriarch. Daji was sure she would never have to meet him.
Daji neither confirmed nor dispelled the rumors about her, as they entertained her—she loved to play into these women’s projections, sow their fears. At first a few of the women tried to befriend her during breakfast, asking about her life in Shanghai, her husband, her children, but she always replied with a smile. It was a winning smile, half smirk, and it unsettled anyone who tried with her. They always assumed that perhaps she was mute. Their children would wake up in the middle of the night and discover that Daji’s bed was empty, then clumsily walk about looking for her. Daji would be awake in the moonlight, smoking a cigarette one of the smitten cooks had smuggled in for her, staring out the window, and these somnambulating children would appear in front of her, half-dazed, gawking. They were mesmerized by her spectral beauty, but they were also supremely afraid. Late at night, they whispered it to their mothers when they crawled back into the cots, rattling the bunks, tossing other women from sleep.
The one kid at Angel Island who wasn’t afraid of Daji was Yingning, Mrs. Rong’s daughter, who occupied the bunk bed above Daji’s. They began talking after Yingning confessed that she had a superhuman hearing ability—she could overhear almost every private or hushed conversation in that vast, swarming room. Pretty and puerile, Yingning was a young girl, sixteen or seventeen, whose shy smile masked a layer of vindictive glee. She reminded Daji all too well of herself at that age, drunk with hormones and unresolved fantasies. It was Yingning who told Daji all the rumors—some about Daji, but mostly about other women. Together they would share a trove of stories: The woman who tried to jump from the rooftop after her infant son died. The interpreter who was having an illicit affair with an immigration inspector. The granny who was involved in a smuggling ring.
“Did you hear about the pregnant girl from, oh, maybe three months ago?” Yingning asked her one day during recreation time in the sitting room. Just minutes before, Daji had received the news from the Chinese interpreter that she was going to be interrogated the next day. Yingning’s gossip was a welcome distraction.
“Do tell!” Daji said.
“This girl was not much older than me, but came here married and pregnant already, but her husband had arrived months before. Anyway, so she admitted that she didn’t want that baby!”
“What’s wrong with that? I can relate,” said Daji. The day was clear and blue for once, and overhead, gulls flew in swift circles above the eucalyptus trees.
“Well, you know she tried to secure an abortion—she tried to ask the midwife at first, but then the midwife got deported, and…”
“And?”
“So this girl heard that an employee knew where these services could be provided. But then her plan completely backfired, because the employee ended up leaking her planned abortion to, you guessed it, the pregnant girl’s husband!”
“So what happened to her?”
“Well, her husband all but disowned her. She had to be rescued and taken in by a missionary home. All that trouble to get to this country, only to be dumped in the end. Sad, isn’t it?”
“But did she get the abortion?”
“That part, I never found out. Great question, though.”
“I feel for her. I’ve been through something similar myself.” Daji put her hand on the railing, and a dragonfly buzzed past them, darting in and out of view.
“Yes, I heard!” exclaimed Yingning.
Daji laughed. “What have you heard, I wonder?”
“Well…” Yingning hesitated for a moment. “According to some women here, your husband was a very successful merchant who met you in a Shanghai tearoom and whisked you away to Canton, where he bought you a three-carat diamond ring and promptly abandoned you for the sea, and then for another woman.”
Daji smoothed her gloves. “Do go on. What else do they say?”
“Well, then they said you went mad, and got possessed by a nine-tailed fox demon. That you were so weak and vulnerable and desperate, you traded your life to be possessed.”
Daji’s expression must have changed abruptly, because Yingning then immediately added, “But who believes that superstitious bullshit? I, for one, do not buy it for a second. Those women are the ones who are pathetic fools!”
But Daji knew there was some veracity to these myths. It was true, for example, that fox spirits possessed women in their weakest moments. That desperate women were indeed easy to exploit, that they willingly gave up their identities, traded them for a chance to transform into something else. What? It didn’t matter. What better way to transform than through a fox spirit—a master shape-shifter, master border-crosser, who moved so easily between worlds?
One thing the rumors got wrong was that her diamond ring was, in fact, five carats, not three—sharp enough to bruise a man’s eye. She could cut the wooden wall with it—and she did. The first poems that Daji composed on the walls at night when the moon was huge and she couldn’t sleep, she carved with a small penknife, and she had refined the edges of the characters with the diamond.
Then one day in the afternoon Daji dozed off as she was memorizing some notes on her bunk bed, and upon waking saw that her ring was missing—someone had taken it right off her finger. She made no assumptions, though everyone thought it was Yingning. At first Daji snooped around, speaking for the first time to the women who had spread all the nasty stories about her. She didn’t want to accuse Yingning directly, for fear, she admitted, of losing her only friend there. Daji wondered if she was actually relieved to rid herself of the ring, or any hope that she would meet her ex-husband again. When she was only a teenager Yingning’s age, full of foolish, lavish hopes, she let him sweep her away with florid tales of Western palaces. The way her ex-husband would regale her with stories of the West—as if Shanghai was not already a microcosm of all that noise, waste, and exhaust. The West was not more enchanting than her home, she knew.
And yet here she was, responding to this call, memorizing the details of this stranger’s life, the merchant Wing Fu Ong—the intimate details: when this stranger slept at night, how this stranger liked his pancakes cooked, how far this stranger’s village was from the sea. This was not freedom, was it? To pose as yet another merchant’s wife? It had been her ex-husband’s parting gift for her: a chance to grow another new life, a ticket across the world—far, far away from him.
The next day, at her interview, Daji wore her best, most respectable outfit: a pale pink silk blouse, a creamy white hat and jacket and skirt, all pure lambswool. She decided to wear her silk gloves, since she was without her ring. The inspector was a broad-headed, flame-haired man in his twenties, who ordered her to the pulpit. Standing next to him was another officer, and beside them was the interpreter and a stenographer. The room itself was sparse, with only one window. Daji was distracted because she recognized the interpreter and the inspector as the very subjects of Yingning’s gossip—the ones who were having an affair. She detected from their gestures that they were actively avoiding each other. She imagined Wing Fu Ong, her “husband,” in that same room, answering all of their questions the day before, and tried to summon her courage.
It didn’t surprise her when the young man asked her if she had been a virtuous woman before and after her marriage to this merchant.
“Would you define what you mean by virtue?” she asked.
“You know what I mean. Any respectable woman would.”
“I just wanted to make sure that our communication is sound.”
The inspector turned to the interpreter with a raised eyebrow, and she gave Daji a withering look. Clearing her throat, she said impatiently, “Have you ever had sexual intercourse before you met your current husband?”
“Yes,” said Daji. “With my first husband.”
“What were the grounds for your divorce?”
“He was always away, didn’t have time to spend with family.”
“Did you have sexual intercourse before you married your first husband?”
“No,” said Daji emphatically.
“How many sexual partners have you had?”
“Two.”
“Are you positive?”
“Positive, sir.”
“Do you know the implications in this country, of lying under oath?”
Daji stared into the eyes of the officer. He really did think she was a prostitute. Here this man was, questioning her virtue, when she was certain that he himself was carrying on an illicit affair. It was clear that this man already had a verdict when it came to her. To him, the way she looked proved her moral turpitude, and no amount of speaking under oath would prove her innocence, her worth.
The night after her interrogation, Daji looked out the window from her ledge. She could never sleep at night, especially when the moon was so crisp and visible, a crystal goblet hanging low in the sky, about to pour down its light. Outside the window, she noticed the silhouette of a fox on the dock. A silvery one, walking alone, sharp-eyed and staring right at her. The fox then turned around, revealing a flurry of tails—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—all snow-white and glinting carelessly like knives.
5
Normally, Mrs. Rong had a saffron-flowered complexion, pudgy and sweet. But these days, in the detention center, her blood pressure had taken a toll. When that woman quietly asked her, to her face, if her daughter had taken her ring, Mrs. Rong’s affable demeanor switched to a pink-nosed rage. When she was angry, her face blossomed like a tea rose.
“I’m sorry—I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Never mind, then. I just thought I would ask.” The woman smiled at her with her perfect white teeth. In the crowded barracks, where every normal woman was filthy and stank of sweat and depression, the sight of her perfect white teeth infuriated Mrs. Rong even further, so that even after Daji left it alone, Mrs. Rong seethed for days. The nerve of such an accusation! Yingning had her own trinkets. A gold necklace, passed down to her by Mrs. Rong’s mother. A white jade pendant carved in the shape of a rabbit, which Mrs. Rong gave to Yingning for her twelfth birthday. The girl had no need for someone else’s ring—her whole life, Yingning had wanted for nothing.
Mrs. Rong never thought to ask her daughter if this was true, for Mrs. Rong believed her intuition was unassailable. That is, until her merchant husband blindsided her by deciding to leave for America, opening a fireworks shop in Chicago. This was two years ago, and now he had finally sent for her and their only daughter, Yingning.
Though Daji did not bother her any further after the conversation, Mrs. Rong thought that woman must have run her mouth, because now everyone was wary of Yingning. Locks were fished out of the farthest corners of jewelry boxes and secured quietly, without a word. Of course suspicions would fixate on Mrs. Rong, even though they had no proof, no evidence that Yingning had done anything. These silly women had the nerve to turn on her! The poor girl only tried to befriend what was the obvious pariah of the group, and now she was turned into the pariah, dragging her mother with her.
Only a week ago, Mrs. Rong could gossip with any of the other ladies, but now they actively avoided her. At every meal she sat with Yingning, who stared blankly into her tasteless boiled rice and the fungal-smelling tea as if all the words had been drained out of her.
“You have nothing left to say to your mother?” Mrs. Rong finally said.
Yingning smelled the tea.
“Why do you speak to that vixen and not the other girls and boys?”
Yingning ate one spoonful and finally looked up at her mother. “I’m just not interested. They’re all much younger than me. I’m sixteen, what could I possibly say to a six- or eight-year-old?”
“Little Mu is twelve. That’s close enough to your age.”
“Little Mu eats her own snot, did you know?”
Mrs. Rong noticed her daughter’s oval face, a swollen red dot just under her nose, her eyes all droopy and ironic, her hair loosely swept to the side.
“Yingning, be honest with your mother. Did you take it?”
Yingning said nothing. Irritated, Mrs. Rong continued: “Why on earth would you steal when you have what you have?”
This must have finally hit a nerve, because Yingning snapped, with an expression Mrs. Rong had never seen, “Mother, not everything is about things! All you care about are things, and appearances, and acting proper and holier-than-thou, good god, it’s so transparent. The way you smile at everyone with perfect contempt! You think I don’t notice? You think I’m stupid?”
Yingning dropped her spoon and left her bowl half-eaten, leaving Mrs. Rong speechless. The other women were now staring at her, and she found herself livid again, not at her daughter, but at them. How dare they pry, these low-class women who were suddenly acting so much better than her, with their withering, estranged expressions!
“Excuse me,” she said to no one in particular, and headed to the lavatory. Mrs. Rong thought back to their respective interrogations, which occurred the week before, on Wednesday and Thursday. It was two arduous days of questions, and when Mrs. Rong asked Yingning what questions they asked her, the girl had given her another blank look. And then she worried: What if her daughter failed, and she passed? Then what—would they be separated? She had been confident in her answers—but many of them seemed too difficult for a teenager like Yingning. Like the address of the hospital in their village. Or what crops were harvested and imported to the merchants late spring the year before they emigrated. Or what cardinal direction the kitchen door faced.
In the middle of her interrogation, Mrs. Rong had stumbled on that question. The official stared at her, studying her silence, and her neck stiffened under his scrutiny. She remembered the kitchen door, its red paint chipping—how one afternoon she let the chickens she bought from the market wander around outside that door before eventually killing them for a feast. And she had fixated on that feast—if only that had been the interrogation question! What did you feed your neighbors on the Mid-Autumn Festival? If they had asked that question instead of the kitchen door question, then she would have answered, proudly: three chickens, a pot of rabbit stew with fresh green onions, a mountain of steamed jasmine rice. They had a good life. If only her husband didn’t decide to go here, this hostile shore. Daydreaming, Mrs. Rong had almost missed her chance to answer.
In the lavatory stall, Mrs. Rong came across the half-carved poem on the wall. It must have been Daji’s poem, the one Yingning mentioned once:
If I was truly a fox-woman,
then I could shape-shift back into an animal
and leap out of this human cage!
The barbed-wire fences would not prick,
for my luxurious fur would be too thick.
Then she noticed underneath the stanza there was another stanza, scratched lightly in a different handwriting. She recognized it as her daughter’s:
Yet, if I really could leap past this fence,
I don’t know where I would go.
Do I stay here in this land that despises me
or go back to a home I do not truly know?
The line cleaved into her unexpectedly. It occurred to her that up until now she had no idea what her daughter was capable of, whether it was stealing or writing poetry. This filled her with inexplicable sadness.
The morning after, Mrs. Rong woke up to a disturbance. Mrs. Burke, the matron, had entered the sleeping quarters at about six-fifteen, her eyes grim and lined with russet. Tye Leung, her interpreter, was standing by her side with a pad of notes, her face similarly stricken.
A woman had gone missing, they announced. Anyone with information as to her whereabouts had to notify the matron or any of the officers immediately. If any detainee harbored a secret or withheld information, that was a chargeable offense, subject to immediate deportation.
Mrs. Rong already knew who it was without asking. The matron said that the woman had been last seen late in the night, already outside the premises of the building. There was only one eyewitness, a child who saw her through a window. No one knew how she had escaped, but she was wearing a white gown with long sleeves.
The little boy then identified himself—he had to be no older than eight or nine. A crowd of women, now risen from their bunks, surrounded him. He said her sleeves “floated in the night,” flying like what he imagined in the martial arts illustrations in his storybooks. According to him, she glowed like a goddess, she rose up in the air, and the sea and the moonlight seemed to move along with her. She had been leaping and leaping into the sky, and he saw her transform, upon landing, into her true form: a white fox, with multiple tails. And that was where the matron drew the line. “Enough,” she said. “We need a more reliable witness. This child was clearly dreaming.”
Mrs. Rong glanced quickly at her daughter, who was slumped and leaning against Daji’s empty metal bunk, expressionless. It seemed that Daji had left most of her fancy possessions there, and Yingning was already rifling through the woman’s leather satchel amid the ruckus.
This time, Mrs. Rong smiled. In the end, her daughter couldn’t hide everything from her. Perhaps Yingning agreed with her after all, that this vain woman needed to be taken down a few notches. That she deserved it.
“It’s true!” the boy cried in protest. “I swear I saw it with my own eyes!”
“You need rest,” said Tye, in Chinese, stroking his head, but he pushed her away, crying. Soon his weeping turned into screaming wails, and his mother, apologetic, bowed in front of the matron and then wrapped the boy in her arms, in an attempt to both comfort and quiet him. But the boy was inconsolable, and the worst part, Mrs. Rong thought, was the truth she couldn’t tell him—that actually she believed him. They all did.