The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, page 1
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This book is for anyone with a complicated origin story.
I feel you.
“We all have some experience of a feeling, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.”
—CHARLES DICKENS
“As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.”
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
“I saw that.”
—KARMA
Author’s Note
My first concert was Van Halen in 1984 (yes, I’m of a certain vintage). I wedged my scrawny fifteen-year-old self through the tube-topped crowd, all the way to the barricade. Packed in like a sardine, I watched David Lee Roth in leopard-print spandex toss his bleached mane all over the stage of the Seattle Center Coliseum. The evening was hot, sweaty, redolent of weed, and so loud that some days I swear my ears are still ringing from “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love.”
So, imagine my surprise when decades later my twelve-year-old son, Taylor, asked, “Have you ever heard of this band called Van Halen?” I’d never played any classic rock for him (we listened to a lot of Radio Disney in those days) and he somehow bumped into the quartet on YouTube and declared them the best band ever.
At least until he discovered Genesis. Not the chapter in the Old Testament, but the prog-rock group fronted by Peter Gabriel and later Phil Collins. Genesis was another band I was into as a kid and within weeks my son anointed this group the best band ever.
At the time, I thought this was a strange and humorous parent/child coincidence. But years later, while reading about transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, I wondered if something else was going on. Something in the genes—or rather a lot of somethings—creating a genetic proclivity for a certain kind of jam. I mean, he inherited my hairline and my overbite, why not my questionable taste in music?
Epigenetics combined with the philosophical idea of Determinism made me wonder if free will is—if not an illusion—a bit of a mirage. That, in addition to the environment we grow up in, the contour and texture of our lives are shaped—in part—by some form of genetic predetermination.
One way to see this is with identical twins since they have identical genomes. Take the uncanny case of the Jim Twins. In 1940, they were separated at birth and put up for adoption, each finding new homes three weeks later. It would be nearly four decades before the brothers crossed paths and discovered some startling similarities. Both had a dog named Toy, both enjoyed woodworking, both married women named Linda, divorced, and then both married women named Betty. Both had sons, named James Alan and James Allan. Both were plagued with migraines. Both worked in law enforcement. Both vacationed on the same Florida beach. The list goes on…
Granted, not all identical twins have patterns of behavioral similarity, but when they do, it seems preternatural.
You see where I’m going with this?
The idea of epigenetic inheritance has long been embraced in many communities. Native Americans have talked about living with generational trauma for as long as I can remember and a hotly debated study of Holocaust survivors appears to show a higher percentage of PTSDs, depression, and anxiety in their children and grandchildren.
But the most captivating example was a study of laboratory mice that were exposed to a cherry blossom fragrance as the floor of their cage was electrified. (I’m so sorry, mice.) The mice were quickly conditioned to panic whenever they smelled that scent. But generations later, the descendants of those mice would have the same fear reaction to that smell. Even though they had never experienced that pain and discomfort in their own lifetimes.
They had inherited that trauma.
Take a moment and think about your own family, their joys and calamities. Do you see similarities? Do you see patterns of repetition? Rhythms of good and bad decision making? Cycles of struggle and triumph?
For purposes of fiction, I based this novel around an iconic woman who made front-page headlines in nearly every newspaper in the country, only to later disappear. I wanted to give her descendants, and an epigenetic legacy as broad and tragic as her own.
In 1834 that woman set her tiny, bound foot upon the dirty streets of New York City. She was—whether she wanted to be or not—the first Chinese woman to come to America. Identified in the press as Julia Foochee Ching-Chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, and Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, she would eventually go by the name Afong Moy. Though most simply referred to her as The Chinese Lady.
Her early life in China is undocumented, but her middle years are a combination of fame and exploitation. Patrons paid fifty cents each to watch her perform in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, and Boston, and while on tour in Washington, DC, she traveled to the White House at the behest of President Andrew Jackson. Racehorses were named after her. Men wrote poems about her. The public was caught up in speculation about her prospects for marriage.
Her later years, however, involve P. T. Barnum, being discarded in favor of another, younger, Chinese performer, and eventually being relegated to a poorhouse in New Jersey, forever hobbled by her bound feet. In 1850, she vanished from the headlines forever and existed only in rumor: that she was touring Europe, that she finally returned home to China, that she had died on the street, homeless and alone.
When it comes to epigenetics, the transmission of trauma makes headlines because its manifest symptoms are more easily observed and reported. But the hopeless romantic in me couldn’t help but wonder if other things are passed down genetically, like stratums of empathy, levels of limerence, and even the capacity (or incapacity) for love.
The more you think about it, if the genetic circuitry of trauma is intertwined with the genetic circuitry of wellness, together they form an intergenerational feedback loop. Where a parent’s output is used as input for a child’s future behavior. And while there is the latent possibility of cycles repeating themselves, if we understand who and where we came from, genetic destinies can be altered, hopefully for the better.
Or to put it in classic rock terms. If Van Halen’s albums were generations, the first generation’s songs were “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love,” but six or seven generations later it was all “When It’s Love,” “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and “Love Walks In.”
Don’t get me started on “Jamie’s Cryin’.”
Act I
1 Faye
(1942)
Faye Moy signed a contract stating that she would never marry. That’s what the American Volunteer Group had required of all female recruits. Though as she sat in the bar of the Kunming Tennis Club, Faye thought that perhaps there should have been an exception made for older nurses. Not that she had any immediate prospects among the thirty young officers who made up the Flying Tigers. It was just that a notarized statement of marital exclusion seemed to hammer home the fact that she’d never been in love. She’d come close once, back in her village near Canton, amid the wilted lilies of her youth. Since then she’d felt many things for many people, but always more yearning than devotion, more appreciation than passion. There had even been an awkwardly arranged marriage proposal a lifetime ago, at the Tou Tou Koi restaurant, where a dashing young man got down on one knee, with a ring, and too much pomade in his hair.
Wasted. That’s what her father said when she turned him down. “Fei-jin? Why do you have to be this way? No one likes a stubborn girl.”
She’d tried not to roll her eyes. “Why can’t you call me Faye like everyone else?”
“Because I’m not everyone else. Look at you. You’re not getting any younger. You should be happy someone still wants you at your age.”
She’d been twenty-seven.
But as much as Faye had wanted to share her life with someone, to watch a sunset in the arms of somebody who wouldn’t leave before sunrise, even then she knew that want was not the same as need. She’d refused to settle for convenience, or to abet her aching loneliness. She went to Lingnan University instead. She told herself that if she stopped looking, eventually the right person would come along.
That was decades ago.
Now she felt like the jigsaw puzzle of her life had long been completed, the picture looked whole, but there was one piece missing.
That’s my heart, Faye thought, something extra, unnecessary.
Now well into her fifties, Faye still couldn’t forget how in nursing school, Chinese mothers used to point at her as she walked down the street in the evening. They’d turn to their daughters and say, “Don’t be disobedient or you’ll end up like her,” or “That’s what happens when you’re too proud—too foolish. No one wants you.” Faye would pretend she didn’t hear. Then she’d run home and curl up in bed, crying herself to sleep. In the morning, she’d light a Chesterfield and stare at the tobacco-stained ceiling, aching inside, as tendrils of smoke drifted upward like unanswered prayers.
To her parents and those mother
“You want another?” Faye shook her glass tumbler.
Lois, the latest nursing recruit, a comely blonde from Topeka, looked back, bleary eyed. “Am I supposed to say yes? What is this, some kind of initiation?”
Faye noticed that Lois was slurring her words, so she peered over the recruit’s shoulder and made eye contact with the bartender. Faye shook her head, almost imperceptibly so Lois wouldn’t catch on, then nodded as the barkeep put his bottle away.
“I don’t know why everyone around here drinks so much,” Lois said, waving broadly at everyone in the club. “And why do they have to play such sad music?”
Faye listened to the jukebox as Frank Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again.” She thought about the flashes of light on the horizon each night, the peals of thunder. Followed by the rumble of pony carts on cobbled streets in the morning and the wailing of widows as refugees flooded through the city’s arched gates.
“It comes with the territory,” Faye said as she worried about her parents, whom she hadn’t heard from in two years.
She finished her drink, leaving only a mint leaf.
The mountains will protect us, Faye had been told when she first arrived, even after Shanghai, Nanking, and Hankow fell. Then word spread that the defenses around Chunking had collapsed and the wind began carrying the malodorous smell she’d learned to recognize as the fetor of burning bodies. Japanese bombers killed thousands of civilians in last week’s raids, along with six American pilots. President Roosevelt, who had sent planes and men, publicly denied US involvement in the war between China and Japan. But after Pearl Harbor there was no need for the pretense, and now everyone in Kunming knew who the Americans were.
“I can’t believe they made all the nurses swear we’d never marry,” Lois said as an aviator walked by with eyes like Gary Cooper and a smile like Jin Yan.
Faye shook her head, grumbling, “They should have made the men swear an oath as well.” Faye felt invisible compared to Lois, who was so young and fetching and her periwinkle blouse so tight its buttons seemed ready to burst.
“Why would you want that? It would lessen our chances,” Lois said. “But I guess at your age you could probably care less that the AVG is run like a seventh-grade church dance—after all, you must be close to retirement.”
Faye cringed inside. She wished she’d cut Lois off two drinks ago.
“But for the rest of us girls, we’re still in the game,” Lois yammered. “You’re so lucky. I always wondered what it would be like to live alone. To be able to choose how to spend my evenings and my days.”
“I thought you had a boyfriend back home in… Kansas?” Faye asked.
Lois shrugged. “What if I do?”
Faye tilted her head and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, please, don’t Mother Hen me,” Lois laughed. “We could all die over here at any moment. From bombs or malaria or sheer boredom.”
Faye understood that all too well. Orders arrived like the tropical rains along the Burma Road—all at once, or not at all. When the downpour of wounded came, the nurses gave up wearing white shoes because they were standing in so much blood. Those long days were followed by an idle stew of melancholy, lassitude, and homesickness.
Lois kept talking. “If I’d wanted to settle down I wouldn’t have traveled halfway around the world to take this job. It’s not paradise, but it’s more exciting than watching the tumbleweed races back home. Besides, you only get one life, you know?”
Faye remembered feeling just as eager, years ago. Restless and weary of her parents’ disappointment, she left her hospital job and sailed from Canton to Rangoon aboard the Jagersfontein, an ocean liner with a swimming pool and an orchestra. That’s where she met and was hired by Dr. Gentry, a US army flight surgeon who was traveling with a group of pilots and aircraft mechanics. All of them with fake IDs in case they were stopped by the Japanese. Faye had been excited, but also nervous to join the Americans, especially when she heard the Japanese had issued an order to kill all Chinese doctors and nurses caught fleeing the occupied cities. Once she stepped off the ship, however, she felt at ease, as though the broken compass of her heart was now working. She traveled with Dr. Gentry’s team on the Burma Road over the Himalayas to Yunnan Province. There her magnetic north led her on muddy roads, past water buffalo and roadside statues of the Buddha, toward something unknown, but oddly hopeful. Here in Kunming she almost felt complete, even as the world around her was on fire, falling to pieces.
“I thought you were gonna buy me another drink?” Lois said.
Faye cocked her head, eyes toward the ceiling.
“Fine,” Lois said. “I’ll go get one myself. Or maybe one of these handsome young fellas will come to my rescue…”
“Wait.” Faye grabbed Lois’s arm. “Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear a thing.”
Faye watched as the bartender quickly unplugged the jukebox, which elicited a round of groans and complaints from drunken patrons. Their protests diminished, however, as one by one they heard the sound of a distant air raid siren.
“Oh God, not again.” Lois knelt down, nearly tipping the table over in the process.
As pilots and crewmen began running for the door, Faye listened for the sound of explosions. Or the heavy thud of passive bombs filled with yellow wax and maggots designed to spread cholera. Instead, she heard the wail change into a long blaring tone.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Faye urged Lois, pulling her up and toward the exit. “That’s the all clear. It means we’re safe, but a plane is inbound.”
Outside the club and into the street, villagers and merchants, beggars and monks all searched the late afternoon sky. Faye looked as well, hearing the all-too-familiar roar and sputter of a damaged P-40 engine—one of theirs. Then a shark-nosed fighter-plane sailed overhead, leaving a contrail of black oil smoke in its wake. The underbelly was painted sky blue with white stars, the colors of Nationalist China, but Faye knew the man trying to land the burning plane would be an American.
She sprinted in the direction of the new airstrip, a large clearing of land that used to be a sugarcane field, which sat beneath a slope of rolling hills covered in acacia trees. Lois stumbled behind, pausing and muttering as she removed her high heels.
As Faye ran she didn’t feel her age or the alcohol, she felt needed.
When she arrived at the edge of the airstrip, out of breath, the smoking plane had swung around, dropped its landing gear, and was rapidly descending on an open runway.
Lois caught up and swayed next to her as a crowd of mechanics and pilots gathered, some praying, some cursing. Faye had seen this before, damaged planes making emergency landings anywhere they could, clipping treetops or crashing into nearby hangars. The last airman to attempt an emergency landing at Kunming died for his efforts, his body burned beyond recognition.
Faye took Lois’s hand as the pilot shut off the engine on descent.
“It’s going to be okay,” Faye told Lois. Her words felt like a wish as the nose of the aircraft pitched upward to slow its silent approach. She watched the smoking plane glide above the ground for a breathless moment before its landing gear kissed the surface of the runway. The men around her erupted into cheers.
The plane was still smoking and the front of the fuselage was black with soot, the cockpit a web of broken glass. There were so many bullet holes, Faye wondered how the pilot had managed to survive, let alone land. When he threw back the canopy she saw his face, covered in blood. The young pilot climbed out, his flight suit slick with oil, and his wet boots squished on the runway as he limped toward them. Faye felt the crowd surge forward. She became a rock in a stream of people flowing past her, everyone laughing, cheering, until the cockpit burst into flames. The plane exploded, sending a billowing cloud of debris into the air that made a tinkling sound as hot metal rained down around them. The wounded pilot looked at her, dazed, as .30- and .50-caliber rounds from the plane’s mounted guns began cooking off in the flames, shooting in all directions. The crowd dispersed in a frenzy, shouting, ducking, running. Faye heard the chirping sound of bullets piercing the air. She froze as the young man waved at her amid the mayhem, staggering in her direction. Faye could see his bloody, oil-soaked flight suit, the flammable grime that blackened his hands. She could smell the petroleum as he approached and could feel the heat of the burning wreckage. She watched in horror as the pilot tucked a crumpled cigarette into the corner of his mouth and fished out a Zippo lighter. Faye dashed toward the wounded stranger as Lois called her name, as men screamed, “Get down!”
