The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, page 10
Lai King held her breath in anticipation, leaning forward as British sailors wrenched open the doors of the main cargo hold. She felt a cool breeze coming from the vessel and pinched her nose when she smelled white vapor, pumped into the air by the new reefer ship. The aroma of drying seaweed gave way to something pungent, like the sharp smell of salts the local pharmacist once used to try to revive her elderly neighbor who had hit her head and fallen into a stupor.
“The belly of the ship is cold like winter.”
Lai King jumped when she heard her father. She turned and found him standing behind her, watching the ship. He put a hand on her shoulder. “See, everything stays nice and cool, even when the sun is shining.”
“I’m sorry, Ah-ba,” Lai King apologized in plain English. “I know I’m supposed to be in school. I just wanted to come and see the ship. I promise I’ll go tomorrow.”
For a moment, Lai King thought she might be in trouble again. Her father’s voice had startled her in the same way the iron bell at the Chinese school could snap her out of a wistful daydream. She heard the ship’s horn again, reminding her of the many times she’d been late for class. Or absent altogether, like today, when she left her books and slate behind to see if the ship really was delivering a cargo of winter.
Her father hugged her tight. Then he took her hand. “That’s okay, little one, I was curious too at your age. Let’s watch this winter ship, but don’t tell your mother.”
Lai King thought her father was teasing when he’d said the ship was delivering a cargo of wintertime. That he was spinning a folk tale, like how a wicked old man died on the first day of December and that’s why they ate red rice in winter, to scare away the man’s spirit. Or the tale of Captain Stormalong, whose ship was so tall the masts had to be hinged to avoid catching the moon. That story seemed as unbelievable as when he once told her that a stranger found him as a baby, in some dirty alley, in a city far away. That his ah-ma was the most famous Chinese woman in America and when she died in childbirth, her spirit flew like a grasshopper sparrow, carrying him over the mountains to California, where he was raised by a mission home.
Lai King smiled and looked back at the ship, hoping to get a better view as seamen barked orders to the boss stevedore and his foremen. She watched the Chinese men climb the treadwheel, which hoisted a cargo net into the air laden with crates of bananas and pineapple. She’d secretly hoped that the wooden boxes might be covered in snow. But they looked as boring as the rice cake her mother had given her to eat for lunch. She unwrapped it and took a bite. She tasted rosewater, wishing the chewy rice had been flavored with brown sugar and fried in egg the way her father made it whenever he cooked. She offered him a bite, but her father smiled and shook his head.
Disappointed in both the ship and her lunch, she glumly watched a flock of herring gulls as she ate. The noisy seabirds were circling, swooping, darting, as they battled a fat crow intent on stealing a few of the cockles and clams that the gulls had scavenged and dropped from the sky, cracking them open on the seawall.
Then the birds scattered as the ship’s horn blared.
She put her fingertips into her ears as the horn kept bellowing, sending gusts of steam skyward. She watched as the stevedores who had been unloading the ship, porting heavy burlap bags of coffee, halted their labors. Then she heard a sailor on the forecastle yelling, cursing. One of the Chinese foremen shouted, “Aai yah!” He implored whatever deity he worshipped as he took the red scarf from around his neck and retied it, covering his nose and mouth. He called out to the men who had stopped unloading the cargo, many of whom were backing away.
“I don’t like this,” her father said.
Lai King imagined that perhaps winter really was about to emerge from the belly of the ship, that the men were bundling up in preparation for a swirling blizzard, or would soon be dashing home to get heavy wool coats, mittens, and hats. She smiled eagerly as she pictured a frozen cargo net, dripping with icicles, lifting a snowy, cloud-covered mountain peak above the bulkheads. She’d been taught that white bears lived on top of the world. She pictured one of those great creatures climbing out of the hold with a salmon in its mouth, dropping the fish to announce his presence with a frightening roar.
But as the ship sounded its horn again and again, a few of the dockworkers pointed up to where a thin veil of black smoke floated out of one of the freighter’s giant, funneled stacks. Lai King cocked her head as she watched two British sailors hastily lower the ship’s ensign, the red duster of Great Britain. Then the men on the docks stepped back even farther as a broad sheet of yellow fabric was hoisted to the top of the foremast. The makeshift flag was plain, boring, unremarkable, yet as men on nearby piers saw it waving in the wind they too began shouting, pointing, panic in their voices.
“What does a yellow flag mean?” she asked.
A man aboard the ship, bald and round in the middle and wearing a leather apron, stepped out of a metal door with something dark on the end of a long pole. She squinted as she tried to see. The men on deck stepped back as the lump on the end began moving, writhing. The man shook the end of the pole over the edge of the ship, banging it until the lump fell. The dark shape wasn’t one thing, it was three—enormous rats, hissing, their tails whipping wildly as they tumbled to the water below. Lai King gasped as the bodies of two men, loosely wrapped in sheets, were dragged topside.
She heard the word stowaways as she stared at their limp corpses.
“It means we need to go,” her father snapped. “Right now.”
She followed her father, scrambling down the stack of old crates, trying not to get slivers as the ship’s horn sounded. When she looked back, more British sailors and Chinese workers emerged from belowdecks, this time amid smoke, followed by a mischief of rats that scurried in every direction. Men were hastily climbing the masts and rigging, or running for the gangway. Others threw themselves over the wooden taffrail and began furiously climbing down the cargo nets to escape.
“The yellow flag means something bad.” Her father spoke in Cantonese as he took her hand. As a translator for the Kong Chow Association, he’d always encouraged Lai King to practice her English. But she also knew that whenever he was upset, he would revert to his mother tongue. “Jau gam faai, dak gam faai! Let’s go. Let’s go.”
They ran through the pandemonium, his hand clasped over hers. She could barely keep up. As workers and sailors swarmed in all directions, she tripped over a loose board on the pier and fell, skinning her knees and tearing the hem of her dress.
She sniffled as a tear ran down her face. “What’s going on?” She winced as she brushed bits of dirt and gravel from a bloody knee.
“We’ll talk when we get home,” her father said, picking her up.
Lai King had seen him this upset, talking this frantically, only once before, when he ran out into the darkness late one night and helped the other men in Chinatown put out a fire. He came home exhausted, blackened with soot, coughing but smiling, because the fire had claimed only one home and not the entire neighborhood.
As her father carried her down a darkened side street, the cobblestones seemed to light up as though the sun were coming out of hiding. Lai King looked skyward and saw that the long clotheslines that hung between the buildings, from the second, third, and fourth floors—fifty, sixty, maybe one hundred lines in all—were quickly being reeled back in by the residents on either side. Thousands of garments parted the sky like clouds of white cotton, dappled with pink, red, and yellow. Most of the laundry was dry and merely blew in the wind, while the rest dripped upon them like falling rain.
To Lai King it looked as though Chinatown was closing down early. Flower carts were being covered. Merchants hurried to bring all their barrels of fruits and vegetables inside. Windows were shuttered. She looked over her father’s shoulder and watched officers from the Chinese Six Companies, in traditional riding jackets, directing people to their homes. Even the beggars had migrated elsewhere. Lai King saw a plump rat with a long pink tail scurry beneath the boardwalk. She shuddered and hugged her father’s neck as she looked away.
At their tenement, he carried her up the stairs and into their one-room apartment.
“Zum mo liu?” Lai King’s mother asked as she turned from their open window. “Is it another fire? Have the Knights of Labor come back?”
Lai King’s father set her down. He stretched his back for a moment, catching his breath, then closed the window and drew the curtain.
“They found two stowaways. Both dead,” her father whispered. “Syu jik.”
Her mother paused for a moment as the news sank in. Then she knelt down and rolled up Lai King’s sleeves, her pant legs, appraising her skin, her scraped knee. She touched the sides of Lai King’s neck. She touched her own.
Lai King felt scared, sensing fear and worry in her parents, but she didn’t understand. She didn’t know what the black death was. She imagined a dark cloud covering all of Chinatown, bolts of lighting, striking down men, women, children in the street. She imagined the fallen people, lying in the gutters. Then she swallowed and recalled the words of Li Qingzhao. In school, Lai King had been taught that in times of trouble one should become a ghost hero, as the poetess implored.
While her parents began to argue, Lai King sat at a small table and played with a bouquet of forget-me-nots that she’d picked the day before. She’d been told that the small, ocean-blue flowers smelled better in the evening, though she wasn’t sure if that was true or another one of her father’s stories.
“We can stay inside, keep the door locked,” her mother pleaded. “We have enough food for a week—three if we skip meals. Besides, where would we go?”
Lai King’s father peeked out the window. “The Chinese mission on Battery Street. They’ll take us in. Long enough to kill all the rats and clean the ship.”
Lai King pictured a horde of rats pouring down the gangway, flooding the streets, climbing up drainpipes, and infesting their home.
“Pack your things,” her father said. “We’re leaving.”
* * *
Lai King heard bells ringing as she held her mother’s hand and they ran from the heart of Chinatown, up the steep hill to the south. In Lai King’s other hand, she carried the small bundle of flowers. As they fled it appeared that everyone who was Chinese had already retreated to their homes, their workingman’s hotels, their alley apartments where families lived. The only people on the street were British sailors, longshoremen, and Western merchants with negroes readying their horses or loading wagons so they could leave with their wares. Lai King and her parents, suitcases in hand, followed a stream of people leaving Chinatown. Some of them cursed Lai King and her family, yelling and calling them names, but she’d been born two years before the Chinese Exclusion Act and had grown up learning to ignore certain words.
When they neared the boundary of Chinatown, they stepped out of the street and up onto the boardwalk as an open carriage rolled past in the opposite direction, pulled by a single bay horse. The sign on the carriage said Bureau of Health. Two men in white gowns rode inside, their heads covered in white hoods. Only their faces peeked through, forehead to chin. “Gwai,” Lai King whispered in awe. To her they looked like ghosts.
“We’ll be safe at the mission,” her father said to himself as much as to anyone else. “They won’t let anything bad happen to us. Then when this is all over, I can go back to work. Lai King can go back to school. It’s going to be okay.”
Lai King wondered how her classmates were doing, her friends and playmates. She imagined them locked inside their homes. She wished she were back in her apartment. She’d visited the mission home once and it felt like school.
“Maybe the outbreak is not so bad,” her mother said as she looked over her shoulder. “The illness. Maybe it’s just a few sick people, nothing more.”
They rounded a corner and five police officers in dark uniforms blew their whistles, sharp and piercing. The men waved their truncheons as they ordered Lai King and her parents to turn back. Lai King thought the men looked regal in their custodial helmets, their gold buttons polished to a marvelous shine. But they all had white kerchiefs tied around their noses and mouths. Other men stretched ropes across the street, blocking all passage. A large wooden sign dangled from the top rope, rocking in the wind. Painted in red lettering was a word she didn’t know: QUARANTINE.
Lai King watched, confused. She didn’t understand, because dozens of English sailors were allowed to leave. As well as the white merchants and dockworkers, who slipped beneath the ropes, smiling and sighing with relief. That’s when she realized that all the Chinese and Black people were forced to stay. As her mother began to cry, Lai King watched small petals drop from the forget-me-nots, drifting to the filthy pavement like sing can. Stardust, trampled underfoot.
10 Dorothy
(2045)
The first thing Dorothy noticed about Epigenesis was that it didn’t smell like a typical doctor’s clinic. Instead of something cold and antiseptic, there was a hint of warmth, a fragrance, like scented candles, or the dusky notion of dried flowers.
The second thing was that there was no one else in the tiny waiting room, which was fine with her. She’d had her fill of awkward moments sitting in therapist’s offices filled with old magazines and new faces. Everyone avoiding eye contact. Dorothy found that such close proximity to silent strangers always left her feeling naked and vulnerable, as though everyone were thinking, I may have problems, I may need help, but at least I’m not her. Meanwhile a bossa nova version of “Stairway to Heaven” would play on an office sound system, music so awkward, so sublime, she wondered if there wasn’t a dedicated satellite radio channel called Therapy Nation.
The third thing she noticed was a Native woman who opened the glass panel of a reception desk. She smiled and asked Dorothy to sign in on a tablet and take a seat.
When she sat down, Dorothy thought about what her therapist had said when she’d recommended her for treatment. “I think you’re a perfect candidate. Go with an open mind. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. This methodology will open it for you.”
Dorothy wasn’t fond of riddles, so she’d Googled the place, but all she learned was that their process was based on experimental methods used to help restore the failing memories of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In tests at the University of Washington, Alzheimer’s patients undergoing epigenetic treatment occasionally reported having memories they couldn’t account for—artifacts, contrivances—recollections that weren’t there before. Those seemingly random thoughts were dismissed as synaptic misfires. But over a ten-month period, researchers noticed that those extra memories were never in the present, nor abstract in the future, like lucid dreaming. They were always in the past and always before the lifetime of the individual patient.
Dorothy felt goose bumps on her arms, a tingling in her spine as she recalled reading that article and how they used the term: anamnesis. She hadn’t thought about the concept of inherent knowledge since her college philosophy days. Then she chewed her lip as she remembered trying to explain Plato’s theory of memory to Louis. That, combined with the speculative nature of the Alzheimer’s report, only made her sound a bit unhinged, like a zealous convert. He regarded her as though she’d fallen in with the last holdout Scientologists in town, or was about to run away to some new minimalist ashram tucked into one of Seattle’s tony bedroom communities, bent on giving up their worldly belongings for the prospect of enlightenment.
“There’s a reason why this place is in some tiny office in Ballard,” Louis argued. “And that reason is: they’re charlatans. I hate to be the one to tell you, but if they’re really, seriously what they claim to be, why aren’t they in some biotech center with hundreds of scientists and billion-dollar budgets?”
Dorothy had no answer, just scars on her arms and a lifetime of suicidal ideation.
At first, Dorothy thought that perhaps the humble nature of the facility was designed to hide it from prying eyes, or to afford local celebrities and businesspeople a measure of discretion. There were no press releases and no online presence. The business model of Epigenesis appeared to be exclusively based on word of mouth. Those facts, mixed together and seasoned with Louis’s doubts, created a recipe for suspicion. She only hoped that the secretive nature of this place was because of its treatment methods and not a way to fly below the radar of litigious clients who’d been cured of their bank accounts.
Another Native woman in a lab coat opened the door into the lobby and said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Shedhorn. You must be Dorothy Moy. The lab sent over a report on your blood work, and everything looks great. Come on back.” Dorothy looked around, realizing there was another explanation. The doctor was indigenous and had the benefit of transitory sovereignty. Many tribes had given up their reservations in return for the right to claim any building or compound that they owned as an extension of their nation. This building was like a Native embassy. Unencumbered by the regulations of the mainstream medical community, Epigenesis was free to offer radical medical procedures.
“Welcome to my humble treatment center,” Dr. Shedhorn said. “I’m not sure how much your therapist told you about what I do here, but my success rate is fairly robust. Eighty-two percent of my patients have been relieved of their depression, anxiety, debilitating phobias, even PTSDs—within six months. I’ve been over your files and your medical history, and I think I can help you a great deal.”
