DEPARTURE
9
On muggy days, the sounds of the fog bells from Point Knox moaned from the distance. Ever since she’d arrived at this post, Tye had marveled at the scrim of fog that covered this island. How different it looked from this vantage point—how the grasses on this island shone yellow like a little church girl’s hair, their spectral stirrings alive against the fog. If she squinted, sometimes she could make out the cannons of Alcatraz against the shapes of distant ships.
It was March 1913. By this time, Tye had worked at Angel Island for almost three years, and so much had changed. The year before, she’d landed on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner for casting a vote at the polling place at Powell and Pacific. California was the sixth state to grant women suffrage, and Tye thought it deliciously ironic that she should be among the first group of women to vote, before white women in other states could. The article described her as a “pretty little Chinese maiden,” and its headline read “Pretty Celestial Maid of 21 Casts Ballot Here; Epoch in the Sex’s Emancipation.” The author did not mention that Tye was employed by the U.S. government, declaring her one vote as the signal to “an epoch in the history of the world’s progress,” “the latest achievement in the great American work of amalgamating and lifting up all the races of the earth.”
Never mind what she actually witnessed day by day: immigrants caged on Angel Island against their will, forced to eat and bathe together in conditions befitting chickens or livestock. Never mind that the Chinese Exclusion Act was still being enforced in full swing and prevented any Chinese immigrants from ever being naturalized. The idea that her lone vote could mean something to all the paper sons and daughters who lived in fear and precarity every day seemed absurd.
Despite Tye’s misgivings about the article, Donaldina Cameron framed it and put it on the wall above the entrance to the missionary home. Tye did not protest.
She had other things to think about. For one, she’d met someone. The man she’d spotted on her first day, the red-haired immigration inspector. She learned his name was Charles Schulze, and he was a Scottish-born immigrant himself. She learned that he was the most desired inspector among the Chinese women, reputed to be the most lenient. Merciful. And, indeed, Tye found him pleasant to work with, unlike some of the other, bullish inspectors who regarded her with unconcealed disdain. He was patient. Never talked down at her. He cracked dumb jokes to make the immigrants feel more at ease, jokes that she translated with care.
One evening last September, she saw him step off the same ferry but from the whites-only deck. She waved at him; he waved back. To her surprise, he lingered until she could get off the ferry. He took her to a discreet watering hole near the pier, a near-empty saloon—they sat in a polished wooden booth facing a huge window that framed a view of the cobalt-blue sea. Above, the seagulls cried, circling the shipyard at dusk.
“Do you ever feel sad when they go?” he asked. “Do you get attached to them?”
“Yes,” she said, sipping the drink he had bought her. Its taste stung her tongue, acrid and salty, like the sea.
“What do you do with that?”
“I don’t do anything. I keep my head down. I wish them well.”
“Do you have any regrets? I mean, with the women there,” he said. At that moment, it felt like he was interrogating her, and it rattled Tye. His voice a slow and husky drawl, the twang of formality he used with the interview subjects. Any series of questions, even innocent ones, triggered a defensive reaction in Tye, and she found herself adopting the same expressions she’d seen her detainees make. His last question most jarred her. Because she would not dare answer honestly.
Yes, she’d made errors of judgment. There was the time Tye caught a woman with a package full of coaching notes and Tye turned her in to her supervisor, a move that eventually caused the woman’s deportation. There was the time Tye broke the news that a beloved older woman was going to be deported, and several detainees spat at her. There was the time Tye hired an envoy surreptitiously so that a recently released young pregnant woman could procure an abortion. The woman never asked her husband for permission to terminate the pregnancy, and then the rumors reached him and he denied their relationship had ever existed. Donaldina admitted the girl into their missionary home, for now that she was freed of her husband she had nowhere else to go. The girl entered into a trance, sick with fevers and fits for several months. In the end, Tye questioned whether it was the right decision, to give her what she had wanted.
Then there was the time another woman vanished right under Tye’s nose. Poof, overnight she was gone, and the other detainees whispered that it was because the missing woman had been a shape-shifter, a fox spirit. A shape-shifter? Tye wanted to laugh. God did not make women “shape-shifters”—if it were true, then no woman would stay a woman, least of all a Chinese woman. Still, nothing else could explain the woman’s disappearance—just as nothing else could explain her reappearance, a year later. Tye had not been prepared for the moment she walked into the newly rebuilt Palace Hotel and recognized that woman, sporting fox fur and the marcelled hairstyle popular at the time, which Tye understood involved a painful hot iron, sitting at the bar on the arm of a man who was clearly not the husband she had claimed in her papers. One of those oil barons with a mansion on Nob Hill? Brazen, thought Tye. Just brazen.
“I have many regrets,” Tye said, finally. Charles asked her if she wanted another drink, though she had not yet finished her first. The night had descended full force, and without the reign of sun and purple oilskin sky, the seabirds hushed. She told him she really had to get going, and he asked if he could see her again. “Of course I’ll see you again,” she said. “Tomorrow, when we work.”
“I meant outside of work. You know. Like, the way we are right now.”
“Maybe. We shall see.” She trotted off, leaving him and her half-finished drink alone with the moon. Then the next day they returned to their post. Avoiding each other at work, and then converging again at their window in the watering hole at dusk. Again, then again, then again.
There was the time Tye interpreted for the interrogation of a twenty-five-year-old woman believed to be a “daughter of joy.” It was a euphemism that Tye learned from Donaldina Cameron when they used to raid brothels together in Chinatown. When Tye was younger, making the rounds with Donaldina energized her. Every time the impressive white woman hacked a window open with her hatchet, Tye felt a rush inside her, a satisfaction. When they broke into buildings, boardinghouses, gambling parlors, general stores, Tye loved the simultaneous feeling of transgression and heroism, though what they were doing was neither. She loved the giddy routine of entrance, rescue, and escape—she loved seeing the expressions of the slave girls transform. Fear to gratitude. Suspicion to joy. That rush, that feeling, Tye realized, would never be replaced, least of all in that Angel Island interrogation room, where instead of broken glass, there was a caged window facing the sea.
Instead of joy, the sullen woman in front of her gave her a look so hateful that Tye felt apologetic. She made sure to choose her words carefully, massaging them a little to sound gentler than the words the inspector used. That was the best she could do. Even though she often merely parroted the words of the inspector, even though she didn’t have a vote on this woman’s fate, Tye felt responsible in a way that the white people in that room probably never did. Once upon a time, Tye had made it her mission to rescue girls like these, but now her job was to send them to the dogs back home. The woman had looked at her with such a specific spite, Tye knew it was reserved only for her. Because betrayal was a worse offense than misunderstanding, even hate.
A couple days after the interrogation, the woman confronted Tye in the dormitory. It was the women’s recreation time, and Tye was smoking a cigarette under the giant sycamore. The woman came up to her, malevolence still in her eyes. “Do you think you’re better than us?” she asked.
“Quite the contrary,” said Tye.
It had been a long day. Tye had just finished interpreting for the other interrogation on this girl’s case. The woman’s “husband” had shown up in a nice suit and cuff links, but Tye had immediately known he was really her pimp. An American-born Chinese, he had a reputation in Chinatown. He had already “fathered” eight children, most of them girls, whose mothers were unknown or still living in China. Tye recognized the man from all her trips with Donaldina Cameron. The inspector asked him a total of 180 questions, and his answers did not align with hers. It was clear the woman had not studied her coaching book.
“I saw your picture in the newspapers. You do think you’re better than us,” she sneered. “You think you’re truly American? With your fancy papers and job and clothes? Let me remind you what you look like—just like the rest of us. You look down on me because you think I’m a whore from China? I guarantee you it only takes one misfortune for you to come crashing down from your pedestal. And we Chinese will never take you back in.”
A few days later, the results were as expected: That woman failed her interrogation, and for the first time in her short time at Angel Island, Tye took pleasure in the news of someone’s deportation. But immediately she caught herself, feeling ashamed. Was it pleasure, or was it relief? Or were they the same? In the span of two years, had Tye already let herself grow vengeful, full of the same rancor that drove that lady’s fuming resentment? Had Tye internalized those accusations?
Despite her misgivings, Tye found it hard not to get attached to the women of Angel Island. They didn’t all treat her that way. The morning that Xiaocui arrived from Toishan, she mistook Tye as a fellow immigrant and offered her a bag of snacks—dried hot bean curd. Tye allowed herself a taste: slick and tantalizing, that hot chili oil an unusual taste, spicier than the dishes she knew in Chinatown restaurants. Afterward, her fingers were sticky, but it was worth it.
Xiaocui was a slender, saucer-eyed young woman around Tye’s age who said she was on her way to join her father and her brother, who started a business south of San Jose growing chrysanthemums. “When they’re in bloom, it’s like nothing you’ve seen before,” said Xiaocui. “I’m sure you’ve seen them before, right? In your hometown in China?”
When Tye told her that she was not native to China, that as a matter of fact she was an interpreter for Angel Island and she had personally never been to China, Xiaocui didn’t even bat an eyelash. This information usually caused the Chinese women to keep their distance, or to adopt an overly formal tone, but not Xiaocui. Xiaocui wanted to know everything. What was it like growing up in San Francisco? What were Tye’s impressions of China? Did Tye feel like a foreigner, though technically she was a native? Did Tye ever want to go to China? What groups of women on Angel Island most interested her? Did she love or hate her job?
Such questions usually caused Tye to shut down. But in this case, perhaps because Xiaocui seemed so curious and guileless, they didn’t bother her. Tye didn’t have a straight answer for some of them. She didn’t know if she loved or hated her job. Some days it felt like a real honor: to work for the government, to have the kind of respectable job post that her parents never imagined or envisioned for her. Tye had surpassed the expectations of almost everyone in her life.
“Why aren’t you prouder of your work?” Xiaocui asked her, and Tye wondered. Why wasn’t she? If she were a schoolteacher, or a deaconess, would she be prouder? If she ran a newspaper, or a brothel, would she be prouder?
Most days, Angel Island was hard to bear. The poems on the bathroom walls, words crawling over stalls in every imaginable form—carved with a knife or written in ink, flowery or plaintive, calligraphy or scrawl. All the women’s grief spilling from walls, threatening to flood. Even when the maintenance staff came over to cover the writing with putty and then paint, sometimes Tye could still hear the poems. Disembodied, floating in smoke or vents, a poem could surface at any time, its syllables shimmering, pain, pain, pain.
Were they true? Were they false? Sometimes a presence clawed inside the lavatory pipes. She’d heard rumors of ghosts, or fox spirits haunting the empty rooms, the broom closets that doubled sometimes as solitary confinement spaces for children who misbehaved. According to the matron, most of the women never went to the lavatory alone—they needed to go as a unit so they would not be outnumbered by ghosts. The haunted lavatories, the frightened women, the rumored fox spirits, all sealed in that building and unable to escape. How some women waited for over a year for their appeals to process, slipping slowly into hysteria. A few even died by suicide. These were the things she didn’t have the heart to tell Xiaocui about. The girl would have to find out on her own.
On top of all this, Tye knew that if she continued to see Charles, soon it may not be a secret anymore, and both of their livelihoods would be on the line. Tye had to make a decision—and fast. She turned to face Xiaocui. The ferry had anchored—they’d arrived at last. Xiaocui grabbed Tye by both her shoulders and shook them in excitement. “Wow, Tye—look!” Tye whipped her head around but saw nothing of note.
“I thought I just saw a fox!” said Xiaocui. “It was so beautiful!” That wonder on her face, that excitement, Tye wanted to remember. Because it would not last.
On the rooftop recreation area of the administrative building, the two of them watched the merchant junks crossing the San Francisco Bay. Every day, dozens of these ships passed Angel Island. Today was the women’s weekly walk around the premises of Angel Island with the Deaconess Katherine Maurer, and the sky was a rare clear blue. Xiaocui, instead of congregating with the others, spent most of her free time with Tye. From where they stood, they had a view of the long wooden walkway, where a group of five Japanese men were waiting, clutching their hats to their heads. Their gestures were so anxious, Tye could practically smell the sweat on their necks and foreheads. They were there to meet their brides for the first time.
The deaconess ushered a group of Japanese women downstairs, and slowly, the women walked to their counterparts. The women were wearing beautiful kimonos in spring colors, their hair in the updos of married women.
“Picture brides,” said Tye. “They cross an entire ocean to marry men they’d never met before. These men chose their brides based on a photograph, and the brides also only knew their husbands through the photo they were sent.”
“You know, that all sounds really awkward.”
“Oh, I’ve seen it many times. In fact, the matron tells me that many of the brides can barely contain their disappointment. Their new husbands don’t look anything like their photos.”
Xiaocui chuckled. “If it were me, I’d slap them! Oh god! The deception. Imagine crossing a whole ocean for a husband, and then…”
Tye went on, “It’s such a shame. I’ve seen some photos, too. The photographs show these handsome young men, groomed at these photo studios, professional makeup and haircuts, and you know how photographers can touch up the final product. So guess what? Some of the women don’t even recognize their husbands when they meet.”
The two women laughed. In one pairing, a Japanese man in Western clothes, distinguished-looking, was talking to a woman in an elaborate lace dress. She was wearing her hair in a short wavy style covered by a velvet hat that looked luxuriously expensive. Based on his gesticulations, Tye could tell he had big plans for them.
“That woman’s name is Kiyoko,” said Tye. “The story is, her husband was recently divorced, and a year is required after an interlocutory divorce, where he cannot get remarried. She might have to be sent home.”
The bride’s expression remained blank, mostly silent, and she didn’t even raise her eyes to look at him. At times she smiled at something he said, but her eyes remained on her own shoes, or their long shadows stretching out toward the sea.
Xiaocui asked suddenly, “Did you ever want to get married?”
Tye paused. “As a matter of fact, I do. Someday.”
“I can’t imagine that being easy in America,” Xiaocui said. “What kind of potential husbands are there here?”
Tye took out a cigarette, lighting it with a match. “Chinese women are rare in this country. You won’t have any trouble finding someone.”
“Please,” Xiaocui scoffed. “I come from a line of women who made vows they’d never marry. I want to be a comb sister, like my four aunts. They all work at a silk factory in Shunde.”
Tye chuckled. Comb sisters were women who swore allegiance to their independence and remained single and celibate all their lives. She’d heard of women like that from the other detainees, their daily gossip about their villages back home. In fact, Tye had even privately considered herself a comb sister, before she started meeting with Charles.
Xiaocui continued, “What about you? Do you have someone you like?”
“That,” said Tye, “is something I can’t tell you. You and me, I think we have very different conceptions of love.”
“I don’t mean to offend you, I just want to know about your life, that’s all.”
“We’re forgetting who we are to each other.” Halfway through the cigarette, Tye extinguished it, stepping on it with her cloth shoe. This time, Xiaocui had asked her the wrong question.
“Don’t tell anyone I smoked here. This whole island is a fire hazard.”
After six months of meeting after work at the pier, Charles didn’t want to keep their relationship a secret anymore.
“But…this can’t work,” said Tye. “The law prohibits it.”
They were speaking in whispers, even in the near-empty saloon. He suggested that they travel across state borders, to Washington, where miscegenation was legal.
“But if we married there, and came back here where a marriage like ours is outlawed, then wouldn’t we be illegitimate?” Tye asked. “And besides…” She trailed off. “I don’t know if I’m ready.” She did not know what a marriage between them could even look like. She’d never seen something like that before. There was no coaching book for this sort of thing.
“What would you rather do?” asked Charles.
“I have to consult a few people first,” said Tye. “What’s the rush?” She wondered what Donaldina would think. When she first applied for this job, she thought she would never marry. That the job would be the reason she would never need to.
“The rush is, I’m going mad,” said Charles. “Pretending I don’t know you. Pretending.”
“Pretending doesn’t bother me,” said Tye. She was well versed.
So deep were they in their conversation that they didn’t notice they were being watched. A cough, a smirk, an approach. The man, a burly stranger, his reek finding them before he could make their acquaintance.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before, boy?” the man asked Charles, raising a stein of beer at him.
“I don’t think so, sir,” Charles said.
“Oh yes I have! Charlie, that your name? I knew your father.” The stranger then fixed his eyes on Tye. She knew exactly the kind of gaze it was—she didn’t have to even look at him. “Didn’t know you had a taste for Chinks.”
A pause. A break in the spell, a rip in their arrangement. Tye’s neck and face burned from her whiskey. She could never hold liquor, not then, not now—why was she pretending? For him?
Finally, Charles said, “It’s none of your business.” His voice low and steady, calm like a lake, something broiling just beneath. “You have me mistaken for someone else. Now, if you would leave me alone, I’d appreciate that very much. I don’t want any trouble.”
Tye stared down at her hands, which bloomed red, little poppy fields, not daring to look at Charles. One moment he was intent on marrying her, the next he could not defend her from a word that at one point she had thought had lost its sting. But there it was, the spittle of ch, the curl and fling of tongue, the tail of ink, the hateful k sound, contorting itself just like a scorpion’s tail. Once, Tye saw a scorpion in the wild in Chinatown, before she left her parents. She mistook it for a spider, but then realized what it was: brown like a blister, bent toward death. Must have escaped from one of the markets. So transfixed was she that she didn’t notice the white girl, the tourist, staring at her from a parked wagon. Then she heard: “Chink! Chinky! Chinky! So many Chinks!” Tye could not locate where the voice was coming from, only a pair of dangling white legs. From that day on, she associated the word with a scorpion, as if it were that creature that had poisoned her with its stinger. Now the word filled the room, buried her view of the sea, of Charles, and she could no longer be there. The man had backed off after Charles’s choice words, but Tye no longer felt safe. She had to get out. Despite his protests, she walked out of the saloon, its dim lighting disappearing behind her. She made a careful curve around the bend, took the shortcut back toward Sacramento Street. Back toward her mission home.
Donaldina was on a trip to visit her relatives in Santa Rosa. The only person Tye found who could listen to her was Axiu, the mad girl she brought home from Angel Island. Still woozy from drinking, Tye told her what had transpired, except for the incident with the stranger.
“I sense something fortuitous about this potential arrangement,” Axiu said to Tye.
Axiu kept a cracked head of the goddess Taishan, an idol that Donaldina only tolerated because the girl denied ever worshipping the broken goddess, claiming it was a sentimental gift from her mother back in Canton. But Tye knew that Axiu had been making divinations behind the missionary woman’s back, lighting incense and reading the smoke. After arriving at the missionary home, Axiu had spent two months sick and feverish in bed. According to Axiu, after her baby was ripped from her body, something else had replaced it. A gift. The illness gave her the powers of divination—and she could communicate with spirits and see the future.
Who was Tye not to believe her? Although she was a Christian, there were times Tye wondered whether God was testing the strength of her belief. The first days she visited Angel Island, Tye felt the presence of fox spirits everywhere: in the hallways, in the closets, in the spaces behind walls, in the poems and bathroom stalls. Did this contradict her belief in God? Tye never brought it up to Donaldina: she didn’t feel the need to. Some experiences were beyond attempts at explanation.
“There are many ghosts here in this house,” Axiu had said, when she first arrived at the missionary home. “But don’t worry. They’re not malignant.”
At times, against her faith, Tye found herself wanting to consult Axiu for direction in her own life. Would it betray her God if Tye asked Axiu to divine her future? After all, many of her predictions did come true. That evening, she decided she would. She procured a match and a joss stick, and a fistful of plump, half-peeled longans from the markets, and Axiu set them on a plate in front of Mother Taishan’s head. She then pressed her hands together, touching her face with ink.
Read the flame, then the smoke. Axiu began writing—beautiful calligraphy, Tye noted. The ideographs soaked in ink and smoke. Then Tye saw her: a girl with blunt-cut bangs, in the smoke. She was wearing a robe embroidered with an old-time brocade, and she was frowning. She looked so familiar. Who was she? Tye looked over at Axiu. “Do you see that?” she asked softly.
“See what?”
“That girl.”
“All I see is your future. Perhaps she’s your daughter?” said Axiu.
“She can’t be. She’s dressed in old clothes.”
“Well, I see a big family. Prosperity. A real home. Progeny who will be grateful to you for all of your days. Marriage will not curse you.” Axiu laughed. “Wow, I’m beginning to envy you. It’s rare to see such a bright future, but the man who asked you might be sincere.”
“What about the…differences between me and him?” Tye asked.
“An impediment, but just an impediment,” said Axiu, a smile blooming on her face. The girl in the smoke laughed once and was gone.
The next Monday, Tye arrived on the island and didn’t see Charles. His absence distracted her all morning. In the afternoon, Tye and Charles were scheduled to interview Xiaocui and her father, the chrysanthemum grower. Tye had pulled what strings she could, between Charles and her supervisor, to get Xiaocui assigned to his Board of Special Inquiry.
Taking Charles’s place was Inspector Johnson, a ruddy-faced man with a bad leg and a mean streak. The women gave him a nickname: Rat-Smeller. The man had the pink skin of a hairless rat and prided himself on smelling vermin—his goal in each and every interview was to trip up and intimidate the detainees so that they were denied admission. Johnson specifically loved to flog and humiliate the women he interrogated, reserving the most invasive questions for the younger women. Tye had always tried to avoid being assigned to him, because she knew his habits didn’t end at just the detainees. This didn’t bode well for Xiaocui.
The interrogation lasted all afternoon. In the hot seat, Xiaocui looked visibly more meek than her usual bubbly self. Her shoulders were hunched over, she stumbled over her answers. Her normally clear singsong voice flattened. She was soft and meek, somnolent prey.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“The file says you’re seventeen.”
“It was in error. My age I count in the lunar calendar.”
“What was the name of your village doctor?”
“I don’t remember.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Last year, February.”
“Are you pure?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I mean by pure?”
“I think so.”
“What bedding was used in your bedroom in Toishan?”
“I believe cotton.”
“Where were the light fixtures?”
“I don’t recall.”
“What color were the tiles in the kitchen?”
“I don’t recall.”
The stenographer typed furiously as Xiaocui grew more and more crestfallen. Xiaocui’s lips began quivering, and Tye whispered to her softly, It’s okay. Try to be composed. You’ll be okay.
By the end of the interrogation, the sun was setting and the ferry to San Francisco was filling with just-released detainees. Row by row, the newly admitted immigrants ascended the gangplanks. It was still February, and the San Francisco night brought a dank chill that made Tye shiver, even indoors. Everyone was bundled in thick coats, their breath warming the air. Xiaocui stared at them from the window as she gathered her things.
The next day, Xiaocui sought Tye out in the breezeway where they watched the other women play ball.
“You promised. You promised to help me,” she said.
“I tried. It was settled. But yesterday, I had no control.”
“When I walked into that room, I didn’t expect to see the face of that Rat-Smeller instead of Schulze!”
“That was the plan! But he didn’t show up to work yesterday, and…I had no choice but to let them assign you another inspector.”
“And now my fate is sealed.” Xiaocui sighed. “I’m sorry for acting like this, it’s just I never expected to fail. To crash so hard—I got my own age wrong!”
“I really did try,” said Tye. “I really am sorry.”
“Well, if you’re truly sorry, then can you please at least do this one thing? Can you relay this message to my brother? He lives in San Francisco, I think: 853 Post Street. Three years ago, that’s the last time I heard from him. If I could get this to him, he could find me a lawyer—and…and I would find out if he was really out here.”
Tye paused, straining. “I’ve already risked my job once for you,” she said. “Now you want me to do it again? I cannot serve as an illegal intermediary. You do realize that I’m employed by this immigration station, don’t you? That it’s my job to keep women, including you, in line?”
“It might be your job,” said Xiaocui. “But…don’t you think that all of the Chinese here who pass through this place…don’t you think our lives mean something? Don’t you feel any type of loyalty towards us?”
Tye took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Of course, of course I do. But…”
“But what? You told me before that you were born here, that you don’t even know China. That just tells me that your allegiance will never be with the people from my country.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then you must see that I’m not asking for much! I’m only asking to know whether my brother is alive or dead, you think that’s a lot? You think that risks your job?”
“If I allow it this one time, what will be next? You want me to cheat for you? You want me to get you out of here?”
“You told me yourself, the Canadian and Russian women live in better conditions here than all the Chinese! I just want to feel like a human again!”
“Then you might be disappointed, on the mainland, if those are your expectations.”
At this point, Xiaocui’s eyes were wet. “You don’t know the hell we’re in, do you, even though you see it clear in front of your face? That’s the only way I can explain why you do this. I thought I was your friend, but there are fences and rules and boundaries here everywhere. I should have understood what that meant.”
Xiaocui began moving away, walking back toward the building. Tye tried to pursue her.
“Xiaocui, please! You’re…” Tye reached out and grabbed her arm, but Xiaocui pushed her back with such force that Tye fell over backward, losing her balance and tumbling onto the ground. Dirt under her fingernails, dirt on her clothes. Cattails scratching her face, and ahead, that long, familiar pier. She whipped her head about. No one saw them, to her relief. For a moment, Tye sank into the grass. She rolled herself into a ball, a small one, so small no one would detect her. Coyote brush, cool earth, the scents of wild animals stalking the island.
Xiaocui and the other girls were right. What was Tye doing there? Perhaps her job—which she wanted to think of as a helpful one—only further alienated her from the celestial place she would never know, a kingdom and a people and a history whose specter followed her very existence, from the seat where she took a photo for the newspaper, to the saloon where that white man’s poisonous word bent her spine into the shape of the shame he wanted, the shame he saw in her. And Charles: Why did he want to marry her? So he could be an exception? Was it to allay his own feelings of guilt, an inspector who judged and determined the fates of desperate strangers every day of his life, whose only crime he, too, committed: to be born in a different country?
And yet, Tye did not think there was anywhere else for her to go. She had Donaldina, she had Axiu and the other girls at the house. She had her siblings, whom she sometimes saw at the markets, the parlors, the fruit stores. She thought of Charles. How his absence reverberated that day like the fog bell, how consequences had so immediately arisen. How so many futures lay at his feet. Xiaocui’s fate sealed because he didn’t show up to work. It would be extraordinarily selfish, for the two of them to marry. It would cause an unknown amount of pain, if they resigned from their jobs just to love each other in the open. A cataclysm, and then a rift. There was no other woman who could interpret in Cantonese between the matron and the hundred or so Chinese women detained, no other intermediary, no other advocate, no other resort. And yet, Tye didn’t know how much longer she would last there on the island.
The truth was, sometimes when she walked into the dining hall with the detainees, she would experience, momentarily, something like the opposite of déjà vu. Jamais vu, they called it: a peculiar disorientation—though she had been in that room every weekday for the past three years, she felt as if she were seeing it for the first time. White-hot fright sharpened her spine as she stood in a roomful of women who looked like her, with whom she had nothing else in common. It was the loneliest feeling, that alienation and bewilderment, as if she were the only one alive on that island, that the room was full of sad, vengeful ghosts ready to bite into her. At their sorrow and anguish she retained a kind of disgust. How embarrassing, all their gaping wounds carved onto the wooden walls, the bathroom stalls, for all to see. At such times, in the throes of jamais vu, Tye would have to catch herself and breathe—so she would get away from all those women, those embarrassing misfits, those pathetic vandals, and down the hall she would walk, her nails scratching each and every poem on the walls—down the hall, jade paint peeling, into the bathroom, where there was one cracked mirror, its edges all covered in poems, endless poems.
When she looked into the glass and saw a pretty stranger, there was the bliss, or comfort, of non-recognition. How marvelous: this pretty celestial maiden, her vulpine features, her long hair pulled tightly into a low chignon, how meaningless and constricting this hairstyle, this uniform. She let the pleasure wash over her. She unraveled the hair and it tumbled down the shoulders, then she unbuttoned the vest until her creamy satin blouse spilled out. When she removed the blouse, she shivered a little. In the reflection, the pale arms, the ribs, were stippled in gooseflesh. Then the face materialized in the mirror, the one with the blunt-cut bangs, smiling against the desperate poems of women long departed—the same girl she had seen in Axiu’s smoke.
Perhaps this familiar stranger was a past life coming back to stay, perhaps she was the fox spirit. Perhaps she was the provenance of all the heartbroken poems. Perhaps she was her mother’s mother, the princess of prospectors, arriving in San Francisco on a ship made of wood and sails, not iron and steam—who, in the dead space of that ship, in the steerage, drank bilge water believing it was fragrant cassia tea. The girl was only fifteen, her thick hair gathered up in a knot, secured with a sash. Only fifteen and she believed in the phantasms of other worlds. Alone in the dank, dismal steerage, she counted promises. Promise: a new life in Gold Mountain. Promise: a husband, a family, a job. Promise: comfort. Promise: perhaps even gold, a nugget or two, her entire worth fitting in the palm of her hand.
But when she arrived, there was no Gold Mountain: instead, as soon as she walked off the gangplank she was carted off in a horse-drawn wagon to a secret barracoon with a hundred other girls like her. Instead, the slave traders stripped her naked so she could be inspected and prodded by bidders for the price she could fetch on the auction block, which was called the Queen’s Room—such a pleasant name, indeed very civilized, not a room but an outdoor paddock built to temporarily hold the unbought slave girls. Instead, men in strange Western suits put their fingers in her mouth, squeezed the flesh under her breasts, checked her “hymen” to determine her value. Instead, she was sold on the auction block of the Queen’s Room for the price of two hundred silver dollars, signing with her one stained thumbprint a contract she could not read. Instead, she was then transported to a subterranean boardinghouse on Pacific Street, into a crawl space with no light, no sun, and her days and nights then blurred into waste, the Gold Mountain in her mind spinning its thread, tangling in her hair, her breath. Gold Mountain, the Queen’s Room, the Palace of Degradation.
It was night she dreaded. Night meant the arrival of men. Their tongues like tongs stabbing her, hot with greed and stench. The girls around her, painted red and brittle like dolls. One girl prayed to the fox spirits to die, and she died. One girl ran down the slopes of Jackson Street to the wharf, where she flung herself into the freezing San Francisco Bay. One girl transformed into a fox, slipping away in the cover of crepuscule. This girl wanted to leave, too. Welts appeared, abscesses, too, up and down her body. Unknown, terrifying ailments. A nightly searing pain, as she deranged herself with dreams.
Perhaps she did leave. Perhaps the fox came to her one night in the shape of a man. Perhaps it had a pearl in its mouth and gave it to her as an offering. Perhaps she had seen this creature once as a child, far away, the memory now buried—she might have rescued it from a pack of hunters or jackals back in her home by the river, across the world. The fox’s pearl, its grit and granule against her teeth—the taste of sea, the taste of wild blood. Its spiritual essence. Without it, the fox would die. This will heal you, it said. Call it a karmic debt.
Are you sure? she might ask, uncertain her life was worth more than the one of the ancient creature in front of her. She swallowed the pearl and it cast an oily ray inside her, leaking into all corners of her body until all the welts sealed up, all the parts of herself she had lost to the passage. And then the strength materialized, which gave her the will to defy her captors, escape her cage, and flee to the hills, to Gold Mountain. The frontier, its violent excess: Roaring rivers, endless sunlight, the thaw of spring. Poppies and primrose everywhere. The wildflowers winking at her: Congratulations, you’ve made it!
But it was not Gold Mountain in front of her. It was another mountain she’d forgotten altogether: the mountain in the storybooks from her childhood, Mount K’unlun, where the Palace of the Immortals, marbled and blood-red like a lantern, rose from the edges of the rivers, thundering beyond this verdant valley. She had finally abandoned the sublunar realm of humans. She was finally free.
Before there was a Tye or a Donaldina Cameron, there was this girl, this slave girl, who had no name, no language, no life worth a damn, who learned early on what this world was, how ugly, how bleak—a life reduced to bodily functions, the oil in her lamp, the mat she curled on, where she dreamt of hogs and hounds and knives. How she was to be abandoned, no relatives to take care of her burial, no one in this country, no one.
Tye wept. Who was she? The girl shuddered, her bangs singed at the ends. Better leave, the girl said. In the future, this place will burn down in a fire. All the poems eaten in flames, no traces left.
It was time to say goodbye. The girl gave way to another face, and at first Tye could not recognize herself. The wire-rimmed glasses, the pink-rimmed eyes, the bangs cut asymmetrically against her temples, the gaunt collarbones. She didn’t want to see herself. She did not like the woman in front of her. Dread overtook her as she tried to wipe herself away. Splashing water and lye on her tweed sleeve, she rubbed the mirror to clean it of its image.
And when that image vanished, it gave way to the image of Daji in a wedding gown—all lace, all fox-white crinoline. In verdure, somewhere in the Salinas Valley, Daji kneels next to a cold, shuddering creek, splashing water on her perfect face, licking pollen from her hands. No groom in sight except for herons and ospreys.
Axiu, perhaps a future Axiu, free of the Presbyterian mission home, holds a baby of her own, its face all purpled, all alive.
Mrs. Yee, silver-haired, lights incense for a fox shrine, with a stone Mother Taishan, intact, in an unknown village. She has set up a new shamanic practice and apothecary under her new name. Shorn of her old identity, she has gained a new following.
Fenglu wears a Beijing opera mask, the kind that distorts the wearer’s face into its most exuberant, opulent expressions. She has landed the part of Consort Yu in Farewell My Concubine. Black streaks of glittering paint spill from her eyes as she contorts her arms into arcs onstage, brandishing a prop sword in front of an audience of hundreds. On Marchessault Street, in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, at the Chinese Opera House, Fenglu has finally found a new face.
Mrs. Rong and Yingning, reunited with Mr. Rong, move into a small house on a cliff near the cannery where he labors. Every night, they hear the sounds of waves and shuck mussels. Yingning sells the jewelry she stole to a local pawnshop.
Mindy becomes a translator herself in San Francisco, working for a small printing press. Years later, Hanna surprises Mindy with a letter notifying her of a return. Hanna and Mindy move up the Oregon coast, crossing ghost town after ghost town until they reach the Puget Sound.
Xiaocui reunites with her brother and father south of San Jose, and every day she runs through fields of chrysanthemums.
The women who pass through here go elsewhere. This includes Tye. In the mirror, her face returns without fanfare. The foxes are mewling outside. They are in a hurry. They surround the whole immigration station. They swarm Angel Island. There are hundreds, of all ages and classifications: seductive vixens, the kind that transform into wanton women; nine-tailed foxes, the ones fabled to have achieved divinity; wise old foxes, generous with their wisdom; ordinary field foxes, who yowl at the moon for food; man-eating fox demons, who rip out hearts and tongues and livers. There are hulijing, there are kitsune, there are gumiho. Now it’s an island of lustrous fur and marvelous women. They’re singing, they’re dancing, they’re reciting poems. They signal Tye to collect what little is left of her belongings and go. It is dawn now, a gateway to morning. It is finally time.