Cloud Hill, where they buried the dead, was the highest and most beautiful point in the valley. Life in Chin village carried on beneath it, consisting of forty clay huts clustered together like flies on a succulent leg of turkey, surrounded by rice paddies and sugar fields and a new canal, one irrigated at Richard’s father’s expense.
Everyone in Chin village and even the dead believed that Koon Lai was now wealthy. Richard imagined he would live in a house the size of four or five hovels combined, and every night would be like the Spring Festival, abounding with sesame pudding and flower jelly.
On the final day, neighbors peeked into their hut to watch their preparations. Richard was used to them. His family always had the most food in the village, and for as long as he could remember, the aunties had availed themselves of the surplus. “How do you need all these chickens, and with just one son?” they’d say, patting Richard’s cheeks a bit too hard, holding out their cloth sacks so his mother could fill them with extra eggs. She usually obliged them. “He left me a bride and never came back.”
Now that Richard was departing, the aunties were frantic with envy. When the wagon arrived, they and their children followed Richard, his mother, and his grandfather to the gate, whispering as they shuffled forward.
“All our children should be on that wagon,” one auntie said.
“When the Japanese come, what will we do?”
Richard, not understanding their words, turned his head to gloat at their uneasy faces. Then he looked at the wagon bound for Hong Kong, and on it, he saw a boy his own age, from another village, slumped in the back with tears striping his red cheeks. Richard, who until then had felt only excitement, saw the boy’s tears and froze.
Why was the boy crying?
“Go on, go on,” his mother whispered, offering her palm so he could step onto the wagon. She smiled, her eyes like water buckets balanced carefully on the bridge of her nose.
For the first time, Richard realized he was leaving his mother.
He boarded the wagon, sitting as far as he could from the other boy. When he would visit the village twelve years later, the aunties would tease him for having neglected to cry or cling to his mother’s neck. In truth, he longed to embrace her, to ask when she would join them in the New World, but he knew that if he did such things, he would not last the journey. He’d learned this from her. The way she took her outrage, tossed it in the well, shoved it in a pigpen. Smiled.
As the wagon moved down the road, he pretended he was already on board a giant ship and that the hill on the other side of the rice paddy was America, land of beef chunks and golden roads. The otherboy would not stop whimpering. Richard ignored his snotty face. At all costs, Richard knew, he had to preserve his immunity. Locking out the sound of sniffling, the image of laden eyes—his mother’s and the boy’s—he pressed his thumbs and forefingers into the shape of a gun and pointed at the fields like a soldier aiming for the enemy. At the sound of the rattling wagon wheels, the half-submerged water buffalo raised their heads.
“Pew! Pew!” he cried, shooting at them.
That was how Richard Chin left for America: excited to meet his father, denying the loss of his mother, wrapped in a fantasy.
In Hong Kong, a friend of his father’s awaited him. Mr. Lao reminded Richard of Uncle Gee: his teeth were yellow and mealy like corn. Mr. Lao led them on board the ship, then dragged Richard down to the bottom floors where the Chinese people slept.
“Sit,” said Mr. Lao when they’d reached two empty bunk beds in the crowded cabin. He removed a little book from his pocket and handed it to Richard. “You must study the customs questions so you can prove you are your father’s son.”
Richard sat down on the lower mattress and flipped through the book. Squinting, he made out the name “Wong,” and the characters for “Canton” and “restaurant.” Again, he looked at Mr. Lao, at his dirty fingernails, crunchy teeth, and frantic eyes, and found the man uninspiring. Unable to sit still, Richard sprang to his feet.
“There were bak gui up there!”
The uncle yanked him down and handed him a metal cup. Richard drank the liquid, which was brown and bitter like throw-up.
“I want to go out!” He sprang up again.
“Aiya, your mother spoiled you! You trouble the bak gui, who’s going to pay?”
Richard sat back down, disappointed. For many months, he had been waiting for the moment when he could see his country in its entirety, to grasp it in one glance like a Kuomintang pilot.
Days passed in the bottom of the ship—Richard lost track of howmany. It was impossible for him to escape; Mr. Lao never slept for more than a few minutes at a time, or so it seemed to Richard. The man was often seasick and spent hours with his head bent over a bucket.
“Study your answers to the customs questions,” Mr. Lao told him repeatedly. “If you don’t know your answers, the bak gui will send you back. Or they can keep you in the detention on Angel Island. One woman went crazy in there. She shaved a chopstick until it was sharp like a knife and stuck it in her ear.”
Richard was horrified—and intrigued. Scrunched up in a corner of the top bunk, with his shirt over his nose to mask the smell of the poop hole, Richard thought about knife-chopsticks and people trapped in dungeons. But it was never dark and never light and he couldn’t sleep because he wanted to jump or break or kick something, and finally, while the other passengers slumbered, he punched a hole in the cabin wall. Water flooded the cabin, and the whole ship sank to the bottom of the ocean.
On the seabed, he met the ancestors. They were sitting on rocks in a half-circle, and they were frowning and stern, the men brushing their queues, the women nursing their tiny feet. When they recognized Richard, they scolded him, but their words dissolved in puffs of bubbles. Then he saw that beyond them, an American car floated in the ocean. It was white and gleaming, with massive wheels and headlights that illuminated the gloom. He rushed toward it, but the ancestors rose in unison and crowded around him, bubbles surging from their mouths to block his way.
Richard tore through the bubbles and dove toward the vehicle, swatting away the ancestors’ gossamer forms. He pulled back the door of the car and climbed inside, gasping and victorious, and then his eyes opened to the ceiling of the ship cabin.
His encounter on the ocean floor emboldened him. The next evening, when he and Mr. Lao were eating tofu jook in the Chinese dining hall, Richard crawled under the table, combed through thediners’ legs, popped out at the end, and dashed for the door. He ascended the steps all the way to the ship deck.
In the sun, he found the bak gui congregated in small groups: towering men in blazing white jackets and wide-brimmed hats, and women, almost as tall as the men, wearing dresses that flared like flowers. Richard turned around and caught a whiff of something heavenly; they were eating legs of chicken, cutting and stabbing moist chicken flesh with silver utensils. He could not remember the last time he had eaten chicken. Half-consciously, he took two steps in their direction, emerging from behind a pole, and stood exposed, the sea winds flapping in his hair.
One by one they stared, pointed, whispered. The chicken-eating women paused, and it was the older one with the giant feather in her sun hat whose eyes softened. She began to hold the fork at just the slightest angle toward him, until the younger woman snapped at her and, with a stern glance at Richard, patted down the older one’s fork-holding hand.
