PARTS 6–8
6
It was common knowledge that no woman should go into the lavatory at night alone. The second-floor lavatory was said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who had failed to answer the questions correctly during her interrogation and killed herself mere hours before her deportation.
In the beginning, several occupants reported hearing a young woman’s voice through the drainage pipes as they washed their hands. A shrill, sad singing—sometimes, if they were brave, they’d press their ears against the cold pipes, so hungry they were for melody. They found the voice and the song to be beautiful, because they were tired of the noises of the sea, of the foghorns, of the English language—they longed for a music familiar from home: the sounds of woodwinds and bowed strings, dizi and pipa and guqin.
Sometimes, as they washed, they would squint and see her form in the water dripping from the black faucet, a wraith struggling to rescue herself from the drain—they could soon make out her wraith eyes, her wraith mouth, the muscles of her shoulders and her arms, always swimming—and they weren’t afraid, because there was something familiar about her movements, how she struggled and struggled against an impossible current, the tangle of all the women’s hair in the drain. Then her voice would hush, a quiet before a squall of wind. She’d start whispering in the water all the wrong answers she relayed to the immigration official, every answer that dragged her down to the depth of where she was. The women would keep listening, because they wanted to know—they wanted to know what she got wrong, why she failed as badly as she did. Yes, my father’s job is with a shipping company. Yes, they sell sails sewn by laborers from the north.
Then quickly the ghost’s whispering would tear open into screaming, as if someone had hacked into the hollow of a tree where all the hornets lived and swarmed. Hearing such a scream, the unfortunate women in the lavatory reported a spitting headache, and the pain of the migraine was beyond anything they could comprehend—listless, they crumpled onto the cold floor, their hands holding their skulls to prevent them from splitting open. In the midst of all this, they would see her—the ghost, fully formed, a young beauty not a day over twenty, peering right at them on the dirty tiles. She reminded them so much of their cousins, sisters, childhood friends, surely this ghost would not want to drag them to the death she chose for herself?
In fact, the young woman who lived this life was unmarried. Her real name she never revealed to anyone, but the name she adopted was Fanglu, the name of the daughter who didn’t exist. The paper daughter. Back when she had just arrived, she understood the stakes of her interrogation. The pale men with hulking shoulders, their glasses fogged with heavy breath. One of them, in particular, had a bald head and his expression chilled her, stupefied her. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by the liver spots on his face—if she failed, there wasn’t a husband who could advocate for her from San Francisco and request to have the decision overturned. The witnesses they brought were strange men she had never met before, and their matter-of-fact, rehearsed explanation of their relationships to her unsettled her rather than comforted her.
Most women who came through the immigration station were married and connected by family, but she was of the small minority who were unattached, therefore she was suspicious to immigration officials and the other detainees alike. Sure enough, the bald man asked the question “Why are you unmarried?” and it disoriented her.
Her answer was simply, “I did not have a chance to.” And then she saw the corners of this interrogation officer’s mouth lift into a horrifying smile. The smile disturbed her more than his usual stern expression—it was as if his facial muscles were deflating, and every dark thought that he had kept to himself he would squeeze out, infecting her.
“Well, if you go home, I’m sure you will find one,” he said.
She knew that was it. Later that evening, she got the results—as expected, she did not pass. She would have to return on the Olympic, setting sail in several days—and she did not know where she could hire a lawyer for her to appeal her case. In the evening, the moon hung heavy, and she saw the outlines of the trees. She went into the lavatory and thought maybe she could crack the window open.
One woman in the barracks, a newcomer, heard the ghost story in the dayroom and laughed. Curiously enough, her name was really close to the name of the ghost—Fenglu—and she was also an unmarried, unattached woman who had sailed from Canton to be a paper daughter of an American-born Chinese. Back in Canton when she acquired the paperwork, she was told that Chinese men could apply for admittance with their credentials as students, merchants, or citizens, but women could only apply through their social ties—as wives of merchants or daughters of citizens. Bristling at this, she still learned the details of her fake life diligently—for months she studied the coaching books before she chucked them overboard when the ship stopped in Yokohama. Back home, she had been a trained actress belonging to a theater troupe that had gone out of business. She had acted in small productions of ancient plays and operas such as The Peony Pavilion and The Palace of Lasting Life. Why should the role of paper daughter be any different from acting these parts?
But now that she arrived on this island, Fenglu wondered whether all that studying was worth this detention. After only a week of eating the unappetizing food, Fenglu felt her joints grow weak like milk bone. A loner, she couldn’t stand to be in the washroom with so many other women, with their tangled hair and pungent odors, so she often went to the lavatory at night when no one else went. Nothing scared her, and besides, she would welcome the chance to hear a singing ghost. It would remind her of her theater troupe days, which seemed so long gone.
One night, Fenglu forgot to wash her face. She rubbed the corners of her eyes and cheekbones with soap until she found a lather. She rinsed herself off with too-cold water, and when she looked up, she saw a woman standing behind her, staring at her in the mirror. She was around Fenglu’s age, wearing a loose green dress, and, like Fenglu, she wore her hair in a chignon wrapped with ribbons. In the mirror, the woman was breathing heavily, but Fenglu felt no one’s breath behind her—the air was still. This woman was the wraith that everyone was afraid of.
Fenglu did not move. The phantom in the mirror shut her eyes, and began singing in a high, sonorous voice, like a child’s. Her voice was clear like the sound of a brook running through a forest floor. Fenglu had heard this tune somewhere before. It reminded her of music she would hear in her hometown, a folk song, perhaps. Back before joining the theater troupe, when she was working in a silk factory, she would walk home on the main drag of road where on holidays street performers and acrobats would crowd the walk and full-throated girls sang in heavy makeup and headdresses, their songs perfumed with longing. It had been what inspired her to become a performer.
When the song was over, the singer began screaming. There was no whispering, no lull between song and scream—the girl just shrieked and shrieked, her hands clawing into her face. Fenglu, lightheaded, ran her wet hand against the gooseflesh on her forearm.
It occurred to Fenglu that the screaming did not disturb her. In fact, Fenglu felt like it was the sanest thing she’s heard since arriving on this island—the only acceptable response to what was happening. That droves of them had to be subject to such humiliation, have their bodies strip-searched and measured against the edge of metal rulers, confined to these wooden quarters on these metal bunks so narrow that one nightmare could send a woman crashing to the floor. Fenglu didn’t understand why these women projected their fears onto the ghost, as if a female wraith were more terrifying than arriving in this hostile country. The ghost woman’s endless scream felt truly honest, unlike the behavior of most of the other women, who pretended that they were going to emerge from these barracks and barbed-wire fences the same women they were before, that they were going to make it in America and strike it rich like the Gold Mountain wives they’d always dreamed of becoming. Just a few more days of eating shit, and they’ll earn their place in this society!
In the mirror, Fenglu touched the wraith’s face. She had meant it as a gesture of encouragement—maybe even solidarity. As soon as her finger touched the cold surface, the screaming stopped. After a slow moment, the wraith began to smile at her. The cheeks of the girl all crumpled in glee. This was not a face designed for laughter. At first Fenglu felt a thrill, a triumph, that she had calmed the girl down, finally—that she had done what everyone else had failed to do. But the more she looked at the girl, the more she felt a bloodless pounding in her temples—a blister of nerves edging toward her mouth. The girl was not calm. She was not calm at all.
In the morning, the women were bewildered to find Fenglu asleep on the tile of the lavatory. A few of them had screamed, mistaking her for a corpse. This woke her up. Her shoulders and spine throbbed all the way to her tailbone. Fenglu rubbed her eyes, which were wet with tears. Had she cried in her sleep? That was funny—she had decided, as soon as she arrived in this country, that she would never cry, not until all of this was over and she was safe in the comfort of solitude. If she could ever enjoy such a luxury again. The sounds of living women—their gasps, their whispers—filled her with dread. It turned out that Fenglu could only fall asleep soundly to the sound of a ghost woman’s screaming.
7
On weekday mornings, the women gathered in the dayroom to wait for the arrival of the deaconess, who always took the ferry to the immigration station. The Chinese women called her Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. The Italian women called her the Angel of Angel Island. The Russian women called her the Smiling Woman, for she was always smiling. The Japanese women called her A.B.C. Mama, for she taught them English and American manners.
A tall and handsome woman with salty blond hair, Deaconess Katherine Maurer led daily English and Bible lessons in the dayroom. Then, late afternoon, she would move on to the detention center, where the men and older boys were held.
Of all the women in the administration building, Mrs. Luo was the most devout convert to the faith. The Bible, she felt, was full of the most exciting stories, some that reminded her of the stories she grew up listening to at home. Prophets, kingdoms, plagues, and, of course, palace intrigue. It was a welcome distraction from the reality of where she was. Besides that, she was fascinated by this religion’s obsession with forgiveness. In her Bible studies classes, the deaconess kept emphasizing God’s forgiveness, God’s grace, God’s patience, God’s tolerance. All qualities Mrs. Luo wished her husband had. Every day she asked the deaconess to relay messages to him, check in, make sure he was eating. Mrs. Luo needed the deaconess to assure her that Mr. Luo was learning the same tenets of Christian faith.
Her husband had come with her on the ship, but they had immediately been separated upon landing. He was led to the detention center, while she and their son had stayed in the administration building. They’d been on this island for almost a month now, which was not long, but with the absence of Mr. Luo, their status as a family was slipping away from her. If she had to be honest about it, taking a break from her husband was a welcome respite. They had not been apart for this long in more than twelve years, and she did not miss the sound of his carping. He never missed an opportunity to hound her for the smallest things—his floor not swept, his soup not salted. She did not have to do those things here, and so time passed slowly. She felt like she’d been quarantined for a year, and naturally began to focus her energies onto something else.
Like this new faith, which was so bent on forgiveness. Mrs. Luo was struck by the idea that all of these white Christians spent their whole lives begging for forgiveness even though thousands of years ago someone had died so God would forgive them all. So what happened after they were forgiven? Did they live their lives at peace, free of all guilt or shame or want?
This life appealed greatly to Mrs. Luo. Her son, Lim Kun, was a ruddy-faced little brute who had endured beatings from Mr. Luo since he was only two. As a result, he became quite violent himself. From a young age, he had been bellicose with other kids, pushing and shoving younger boys. At Angel Island, there weren’t many other boys, so he shoved the girls.
“Stop that!” Mrs. Luo would shout, but Lim Kun was at the age—ten—where he carved his whole identity out of rebellion. In response to her recent conversion to Christianity, her son was veering in the opposite direction: more and more, he was privy to superstitions about ghosts, foxes, and demons, which he must have heard from the other children.
One morning she was watching him in the yard, and above him she saw a formation of blackbirds over the concertina wire. Were they crows, blackbirds, or ravens? She couldn’t tell the difference. They made glorious arcs in the sky—if they hovered close or swooped down, she could see their feathers gleaming purple in the sunlight. Some of them had red tufts on their wings.
The deaconess, who happened to be standing next to her, murmured, “A murder of crows.”
Mrs. Luo misunderstood, thinking that the birds were about to be killed, so she scanned the premises for her son. To her horror, she saw Lim Kun in a group of children throwing stones at a row of blackbirds that had been resting on the fence. One of them he struck with such force, the bird flew into the barbed wire and fell onto the ground, alive but bloodied. The children then surrounded the blackbird and piled it with stones, screeching in delight. They repeated this several times with the birds.
Even as the deaconess and Mrs. Luo ran to break up the circle, it was too late to save the grackles. Their feathers jutted out of their flesh, their beaks open. Evidence of carnage was everywhere. Lim Kun, the ringleader, said, “Mother, we want to cook them for dinner. Do you know how to roast it?”
“Roast! Roast! Roast!” The children chanted.
“Why did you do that? What did these birds do to hurt you?” Mrs. Luo asked, swiping the stone from Lim Kun’s dirty hand. At that, he looked at her with all the scorn that a ten-year-old could muster.
“They are demons!” cried Lim Kun. “If we don’t kill these birds, the ghosts and demons will come out of this forest and eat us! We are not protected here!”
“This is nonsense, Lim Kun. If you could only learn Christianity and faith, then maybe…”
“Maybe what? Maybe we’d miraculously be fed something edible? Why should this stupid bird fly past the fences but not me? Not us?” Lim Kun retorted.
At this, Mrs. Luo did not know what to say. But the deaconess firmly put her hand on Lim Kun’s shoulder and said, “That’s enough, young man. That’s enough.”
He recoiled at the touch—for the first time in years, Lim Kun slipped behind his mother, holding on to her arm. Stunned, Mrs. Luo grabbed her son’s hand and gripped it as if he were slipping away from her already. Turning to the deaconess, she said, “The kids want to cook the birds. They are hungry. They hate the meals they’ve been having here. You can’t blame them.”
The deaconess was uneasy, muttering something about certain birds being inedible, how Mrs. Luo ought to discipline her son, who was spiraling out of control.
It occurred to Mrs. Luo that she could explain the situation in terms of what she learned in Bible studies class. “Please, Deaconess, you have a reputation as the Goddess of Mercy. Would your Christian God forgive these young children for being hungry, and hunting for survival?”
The deaconess sighed and nodded. “I suppose you’re right about that. May God forgive these children.”
Mrs. Luo convinced the deaconess to procure some coal from the kitchen and a shovel from the gardener and bring it back so she and her son could dig a barbecue pit. Later that evening, the children and their mothers gathered around the fire they built. Mrs. Luo, along with the other mothers, defeathered the blackbirds that her son had helped kill. Altogether there were maybe four or five: a murder.
They roasted them in the fire on a spit, and the meat was so tough and stringy that it could not be chewed off the bones. Sliding a wing off the spit, Mrs. Luo glanced up at her son’s bucktoothed smile. Lim Kun licked the crisped skin, the spots burned black. His molars had recently fallen out, the last of his child teeth; she knew for certain that he could not properly chew the meat.
In the firelight, he played with the bones other people left on the ground. “This is so good. So, so good,” he said over and over. But at the end of the night, he was still hungry.
8
There was a story Mindy heard once about a woman living in the walls of the capital. The story was called “The Red Girl,” about a chaste fox woman who befriended an old city guard. The guard was lonely in his tower, and so every night the beautiful fox girl would show up to his post bringing wine and food, and they would feast and drink together until dawn. His other guards wanted in, but they never saw her. Later, the fox girl admitted that when the guard was a young man, he had rescued a black fox, and she owed him this kindness, a karmic debt.
Mindy thought of this story when she first arrived on Angel Island. Disoriented from the twenty days at sea, the smell of pickled onions and cuttlefish, the salt air prying her pores open, Mindy looked to familiar comforts—the books she carried, of which there were too many: a King James Bible in English she acquired from her school in Canton, books of poetry, and two collections of classical tales: Occasional Records of Conversations at Night by He Bang’e, and Ji Yun’s Miscellaneous Records from West of the Locust Tree. In the past decade, whenever she found herself about to have a panic attack, she disappeared into these stories. Even the long passage to America could not get her to part with them. By the time the ship reached Hawai‘i, she had already reread every volume, plus the coaching handbooks for her new life. By the time the ferry docked on Angel Island, she could recite any number of lines by heart.
At the end of the long walkway, Mindy noticed a plaque covered in cattails:
1775–present.
Isla de Los Angeles, Angel Island.
When the Spanish Naval officer
Juan Manuel de Ayala landed here in 1775,
he named it Isla de Los Angeles, after arriving on the Catholic feast day of
Our Lady of the Angels.
Mindy remembered learning about the Catholic feasts from her English missionary teacher back in Canton. It was Mrs. Downey who gave her the name Mindy, which she adopted to replace her Chinese name, and Mrs. Downey who taught her English, enough so that she did not need an interpreter. “Feast days are commemorations of the death of a saint, when people gather and celebrate,” Mrs. Downey had explained. It didn’t seem so different from the Red Girl’s bringing her guard friend a feast to commemorate his heroic act. In the ten years since Mindy left the missionary school, she’d abandoned most of the religious rituals, but not her belief in God. To her, Gold Mountain was a metaphor for feast—the promise of America, the premise of her prayers.
The wooden house in front of Mindy, like the walls of the capital in the Red Girl story—a physical border not made for forever. Yet the fox girl lived and slept in the walls, and Mindy would live and sleep here, too, in this tinderbox palace on the border between the world and this unknown country, this unknown city. Towering against the verdant green hills, the palace rose like spring. All around, yellow wildflowers burnished the grasses like pyrite or gold. Mindy took a breath and ascended the stairs.
Settling in her narrow bunk, Mindy saw a ghost. No, it was someone she recognized from another life. Another girl who attended her missionary school—the radiant Hanna Tsai. Mindy had not seen Hanna in a decade.
Recognizing Mindy, Hanna practically shrieked. A sharp relief, Mindy felt, as the other woman ran up and embraced her. Hanna’s softness a welcome burst of warmth. Mindy had not expected such a welcome. They hadn’t spoken for so long.
“I missed you,” Mindy admitted, and meant it. Hanna had not changed much by way of appearance—same willowy figure, same bangs, same long ropelike braid down her back. Her bones marbled against her skin, delicate and light like her subtle scent of rose hip oil. But something had shifted. There was a glow about Hanna, an easy confidence she must have honed since they’d last seen each other.
Hanna and Mindy attended the missionary school for ten years before the Boxer Rebellion erupted. While Mindy studied diligently and practiced the teachings of God, Hanna skipped classes, ran off with boys on the Pearl River piers. Hanna never learned English well enough to hold a conversation, but she was slippery and mutable in a way that Mindy always envied.
Ten years ago almost to the day, on March 18, 1900, a troop of bandits infiltrated the wrought-iron gates around their school. Young, hungry mercenaries climbed into the school as they shattered windows, targeting anyone who dared cross their path. Mrs. Downey, who suffered a gash across her arm, hurried away with an envoy of American teachers. According to later reports, seven people died that morning: three missionary schoolteachers, four students.
In the confusion, Hanna had dragged Mindy and two other girls outside through a broken window. “I know where we can hide,” Hanna whispered as they climbed through. Following Hanna’s lead, they ran from the schoolhouse, turning through dank alleys for how long? Half an hour? An hour? They ran down Old China Street, then Hog Lane, then crisscrossed toward the piers.
For such a slim girl, Hanna was remarkably athletic—her muscular legs darted across the streets packed with markets, hanging birdcages full of lorikeets, handicrafts and ivory, people and fruit carts, avoiding them all with the spry acrobatics of a ghost, wriggling between narrow spaces—spaces that Mindy missed, hitting her elbow here and there, pains shooting from unknown parts of her body, until finally they found the edge of the Pearl River. Rain began pouring. Whorls of icy water needled their faces. Mindy could never forget the sound of slate-gray river, her heart pounding wildly, her hand suctioning against Hanna’s grip. Open cuts from where she chafed against glass prickled against the pearled moisture, as Hanna pointed toward a hiding place—a row of floating boathouses on the piers. The four girls climbed aboard, hiding in one of the boathouses, covering the ornate carved windows with red cloth. Inside, there was a sitting area.
“They’ll never find us here,” said Hanna. They sat in the boathouse until the evening. Mindy thought it was charming, the ornamental edges of the boat, the vase full of water lilies, the chandelier dangling from the roof. At the time, it never dawned on Mindy what kind of place that boathouse was. All she knew was that she owed Hanna her life.
After the school shut down, Mindy never finished her education. But it didn’t matter—Mindy had learned what she needed to learn. She was fluent in English and Chinese, and moreover she had a God to pray to. Mrs. Downey taught her well. Both the English teacher and Hanna vanished. Mindy still thought of both these women almost every day. A few years ago, Mindy returned to the floating boathouse looking for Hanna. This time, Mindy knew what kind of place it was. A flower boat, where Hanna was the flower, the star. In Hanna’s room, Mindy saw a photo of her, bedecked in Qing silk and hair floating with tortoiseshell and nacre hairpins. The pearl among river stones. Hanna was working, but no one directed Mindy where. In the end, Mindy gave up looking and slipped away.
So perhaps it was God’s will that propelled both Hanna and Mindy to migrate across an ocean at almost the same time, God’s will that they should reunite, this time behind the wooden walls of an immigration station. When Mrs. Downey was not preaching God’s will, she would tell stories of America that always seemed too good to be true. Mindy noticed that though Hanna never paid any attention in class, she perked up whenever Mrs. Downey described the Beautiful Country, just as Mindy herself did. Its trams, cornices, buildings, hills, valleys, cities stacked sculpture-like next to the sea, tall and golden like groves of Osmanthus trees.
Mrs. Downey’s words were enough to convince Mindy to make the crossing. At twenty-four, she secured the papers of an American missionary’s Chinese-born daughter. Such papers these days were rare: most papers for women came in the form of marriages. But Mindy was methodical and prudent—she had to be, to survive. She bought henna dye from the markets and dyed her hair light brown. Her eyes were wide and heavy-lidded, and she put powder on them to accentuate their largeness. With her face, Mindy could easily pass for half-American.
It didn’t matter at the end of the day. At the last minute, the inspector decided to shuttle her off to Angel Island, too, along with the rest of the people in the second-class cabins and steerage—including Chinese men and boys, families from Mexico and Guatemala. No one talked on the ferry over. It was as if everyone was holding their breath, their anxieties spilling quietly overboard, unsaid. Mindy closed her eyes. She had assumed she could skip going to Angel Island altogether, because of her sterling papers and her ability to pass as American. Mindy had not been careful enough; she had messed up, being so overconfident. The papers were suspicious. She should have studied harder, been more vigilant in case she had to endure interrogations. But too late now.
Within the first week, Hanna read all of Mindy’s books. Mindy was pleased to discover that Hanna had changed somewhat in the past decade: Hanna once hated school, but now she was well versed in Chinese literature. In her seven years working at the flower boats, Hanna had discovered an affinity for quoting poems to her guests, and then eventually she began writing the poems herself. After she got married three years ago, Hanna quit the flower boats to move in with her in-laws, but she continued to write poetry. At Angel Island, Hanna received constant deliveries of delicacies from her husband, who was a merchant living in San Francisco—dehydrated blood oranges, smoked meats, peanuts, and melons, some of which contained hidden coaching notes. The notes arrived carefully folded into cuts of meat, or stuffed inside a melon pit, smeared with honeydew seeds. Sometimes when they could find a moment, Mindy and Hanna studied the notes together.
The scheduled dates of their interrogations were days apart. Mindy’s interrogations were a two-day-long process, and in total she was asked about two hundred questions. What shocked her was how easily she breezed through the questions, as if her fake life had already been implanted into her, replacing her old one.
“Where did you learn to speak English so well?” the inspector had asked.
“I’ve been speaking it all my life,” Mindy replied. “Believe it or not, I am the daughter of an American.”
Hanna did not fare as well.
“I think I messed up,” she said. It was the afternoon after their interrogations, and Hanna was sharing her persimmons with Mindy in the bathroom. The two of them often wrote poems together, copying the style of Du Fu and Li Bai, recording them in little notebooks that Mindy procured from the deaconess. At every chance, they transcribed their poems onto the bathroom walls with a fountain pen that Hanna collected, another gift from the deaconess.
“I’m pretty sure I did, too,” said Mindy, though it was a lie.
“I heard that if you write a poem here, the walls will listen. The walls deliver a message to the fox spirits,” Hanna said. “They’ve made haunts, dens, and the women here have been communicating with them. The ones who write poems are liberated soon afterwards.”
Mindy peered at Hanna’s efforts. The lines holding her ideographs were crooked, clunky, but her individual strokes were elegant. “If that were true, then no one would be doing anything else in this house. Everyone would be scrambling to these walls to write. And besides, when did you become so superstitious? I can’t subscribe to beliefs like that. I believe in God.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me you still believe in their God,” said Hanna, laughing. The laugh, while harmless, cut into Mindy. There was so much about Hanna that remained remote to her, no matter how close they became again.
“I do. Why not? Besides, aren’t the kindest people always the women of faith? Like Miss Maurer, or Tye Leung.”
“I hate that woman, Tye,” said Hanna. Hanna complained that during her interrogation, Tye had made some offhanded comment about Hanna’s profession that she would not repeat. It derailed Hanna for the rest of the interview.
“Mmmm. Yeah, I mean sometimes I find her to be disingenuous when she tells us she’s here to help and that this all is good for us,” said Mindy, although it wasn’t really true. She actually liked Tye.
“She—they—think I’m a whore,” said Hanna. “Seems like my husband has a reputation in Chinatown. But why punish me for it? They actually think I came all the way across the sea to be his whore. Why go through the trouble when there’s a demand for that at home? I should know that more than anything.”
“To be fair, they think every woman is a whore,” said Mindy. “What they don’t know is that whores can also be great poets.”
Hanna smiled, and Mindy blushed. “So you don’t judge me?”
“Never.” Mindy examined the freshly painted wall facing the sinks. Whenever the matron ordered a repaint, within a few days new poems replaced the old. If Mindy ran her hand against the paint, she could feel the faint grooves that the putty filled, where knives cut wound-like words into the wood. There, she began her own poem.
The next day, news arrived: Mindy had passed her interrogation and would land that Friday. Hanna, however, had failed hers.
Across the dormitory, a distraught woman rushed toward Mindy. “But you are the only one of us who can stand up to them for us,” she said. “Your English is good, and your Chinese is even better than Tye’s!”
“Mindy is leaving,” said Hanna firmly. “What are you suggesting there, lady? Why would she want to stay in this hell?”
“I would trade places with you,” said Mindy, gripping Hanna’s hand. “I want to trade places with you. Once I land, I will find a lawyer who will appeal your case. Please don’t worry, you know that most appeals get approved.”
“Congratulations, you’re getting what you’ve always dreamt of,” said Hanna, ignoring Mindy’s proposal. “Don’t think I didn’t notice, when we were young. You always lit up whenever Mrs. Downey talked about America.”
“I won’t rest until you are out there with me,” said Mindy. “And besides. I only lit up because you lit up.”
Hanna was right: This was what Mindy wanted—to land in America, the Beautiful Country. It was true it was her dream, but this dream only began because she saw Hanna’s face. At fourteen years old, the only hope Mindy ever wanted in on was Hanna’s. The only hope that could convince Mindy. Hanna would shine in a city like that. Hanna would not just survive—she’d live. The grand hotels, the opera houses, the parks, the gardens, the trams, the churches, the lanterns of Chinatown—all of that beyond the foggy gray bay. The feasts. The angels. The sibilant names of the streets. The strangers. Hanna could remain on Angel Island indefinitely, or head back on a ship to Canton. Where would she go? Would she return to the flower boats? Would she be welcomed back?
“I want you to have this,” Hanna said as she was helping Mindy pack. “It’s protective. It will keep you safe out there.” It was a ring, a pearl in its center, surrounded by tiny stones. A freshwater baroque pearl from Canton.
“I’m the one who owes you a debt,” Mindy said, but she gripped it tight. It was too much, the beauty. The pearl gleamed like it was supernatural. “I should be the one giving you the gifts.” She gave her books of poetry to Hanna: the Du Fu, the Li Bai, all her most cherished tomes. “Someday, you will write your own.”
“That’s a pretty thought,” Hanna said, smiling.
There was no telling what awaited Mindy. She understood that the border, the walls of the capital, was all she knew of this city. To travel to the center now, suddenly she was afraid of what she’d find there, how her illusions would leave her, just like she was leaving Hanna. What good was freedom, if freedom meant she would go back to being alone?
But the day that her departure was supposed to take place, the fog hung over San Francisco so thick that everything it touched became invisible. It was the kind of fog that a person could vanish into and never come back. Judging from the quiet solicitude of the detainees at Angel Island, it seemed like many were thinking about doing just that. A group of picture brides were standing at the dock, waiting for their husbands to arrive in the fog. There was no hope they’d come, but the women still waited.
Mindy decided to walk outside for a better view, but when she walked out onto the long wooden pathway, her own hands vanished in front of her. Beyond her hands, she suddenly began to make out the shape of a woman at the very end. It was Hanna, standing on the wharf looking at the sea, her lovelorn face in profile behind the fog. She looked so peaceful she could have been a ghost.
No! Mindy wanted to scream, but then the fog bell began to ring.
That day, no one was allowed to leave the island. The deaconess never arrived on the ferry. The ships that were supposed to dock never made it. Rumor had it the fog had interfered with the clockwork in the lighthouse at Point Knox, and the ships already out at sea were out of luck. The lighthouse keeper was a woman, and for twenty hours she struck the bronze fog bell. Against the sound of surf and wind, it rang all day into the night, a peal that felt as heavy as a heartbeat. It sounded forlorn, like the bells they struck to mourn the martyrs and revolutionaries back home. In other moments, it sounded hopeful—a carillon from a faraway country that had nothing to do with her.
As Mindy turned around to return to the administration building, she began to notice the presence of foxes. One by one, they appeared in the fog, yowling and moaning in unison with the bell. From the verdant green hills, they walked toward her. Must have been hundreds of them, immigrant foxes, their tails curled over their bodies—some had one tail, some had seven, some had four. In the human-made thunder of the bells, Mindy waited for hers to arrive.