Water Ghosts Read online

  Water Ghosts

  Shawna Yang Ryan

  First published in 2007 under the title Locke 1928 by El Leon Literary Arts

  This edition in the USA in 2009 by The Penguin Press, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Australia by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited

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  Copyright © Shawna Yang Ryan 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher.

  Designed by Stephanie Huntwork

  Excerpt from The Nobel Acceptance by Toni Morrison, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  Author: Ryan, Shawna Yang, 1976-

  Title: Water ghosts [electronic resource] / Shawna Yang Ryan.

  ISBN: 9781742660806 (ebook : epub)

  Subjects: Chinese—California—Delta Region—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: 813.6

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishment, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For my parents, Mike and Ellen

  Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

  —TONI MORRISON

  Nobel lecture, December 7, 1993

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Richard Fong (aka Fong Man Gum), manager of the Lucky Fortune Gambling Hall

  Ming Wai, Richard’s wife, one of three boat-women

  Poppy See (aka Po Pei), brothel madam, seer

  Chloe Virginia Howell, a prostitute in Madam See’s brothel, Richard Fong’s lover

  Howar Lee, preacher

  Corlissa Lee, wife of preacher Howar Lee

  Sofia Lee, their only daughter, friend of Chloe’s

  So Wai, boat-woman

  Sai Fung, boat-woman

  MINOR CHARACTERS

  Alfred, Chloe’s former lover

  Barrett, Chloe’s former admirer

  Lee Bing, founder of Locke

  Tuffy Leamon, speakeasy owner

  Uncle Happy, farm laborer

  Cholly Wong, ill-fated rescuer of boat-women

  Manny Chow, gambler

  Mrs. Chow, bootlegger, wife of Manny Chow

  Lau Sing Yan, Richard Fong’s childhood friend and rival

  Sarah, Poppy See’s fellow dancer, adulteress

  The butcher, Sarah’s lover, murderer

  Ruby Moore, New York jazz singer

  David Howell, Chloe’s brother

  Jack Yang, restaurant owner

  Lucy Yang, Jack Yang’s wife

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Research

  PROLOGUE

  The Founding (1915)

  HER MIND WAS taken with the thought of pussy willows. She saw them in the market, long cut stems emerging from a bucket of water, ten cents a bunch. each fistful tied with string. Her eyes lingered over them as she stood in line with a can of condensed milk. She weighed the can in her hand as she thought about the willows— which vase she might use, which corner or tabletop they might decorate. She lived in a small apartment—kitchen crowding into dining area crowding into sitting space crowding into a room for a bed. That was all. The way the light fell, through thick glass windows onto tea-colored walls, would turn the brown branches gold.

  She thought of them as she lit the oil stove. The newspaper that covered the wall behind the stove was ready to be replaced. Yellowed already, torn, grease-splattered to a high sheen— it had done its job. Her mind brushed over the task for a moment, then forgot it when she thought of the blooms that could be added to the vase. The motions of lunch making were gone through— measuring, adding, flavoring, stirring— as she lost herself in the idea of color. Lime-colored leaves, petals from heart-red to eggshell-blue. The little wood platform the stove rested on rocked as she moved her chopsticks. The wedge of wood scrap supporting the too-short leg had slipped out again. She leaned to nudge it back into place.

  The sizzle of cooking oil obscured the sound of sparks lifting and catching. She stood up and slid her chopsticks along the thick black pan and the sweep of her hand was met by the sudden sweep of flames up the wall, up the old newspaper. She shrieked and grabbed for a bowl of water. Her frantic turn knocked over the stove. She tossed water on the fire; it sputtered and grew. She tried again and again. The fire spread across the wall, licked at the ceiling.

  IN THE STREET, she huddled close to her neighbors and cried as they watched the fire spread from building to building. Although the river was only a few hundred yards away, the task of bringing water to fire was beaten by the strong north wind. The fireboats struggled. The people relied on yelling— shouting from Japantown into Chinatown for everyone to flee. Both would char and crumple.

  The fire grew so fast that no one except the woman who daydreamed of flowers was sure of its origin. The Chinese would say it began with the Japanese; the Japanese would claim the opposite. And both would live for days with the stench of toppled wood and of the burnt flesh of men too opium-addled to escape.

  1

  STRANGE HAPPENINGS, CHLOE knows, can take place in a town built on tragedy. After the Chinatown fire in Walnut Grove, the Chung Shan Chinese moved over to the Locke family property to start over. The first building had been a store. A boardinghouse and gambling hall followed until a community had arisen and clustered around the three buildings. The town was called Lockeport, then, eventually, as tongue
s grew lazy and letters were lost: Locke.

  Thirteen years after the original fire, Chloe feels made and unmade by the air in the two-road town. She has been turned into something new from sleeping alongside the other girls in the attic of Madam See’s brothel to the sound of bats fluttering in the eaves-spaces. She is of an untouchable caste, even as she lies now in the red room with Richard Fong’s head resting on her chest. Tule fog presses against the windows and obscures the faint dawn light. It is summer, but the room is cold and gray, the lamp wick extinguished for hours already. The dark borders of the room, lingering like shadow people, push in around the bed. In the dimness, Chloe sees only Richard, jawbone and lips to make you cry and eyes dark as Valentino’s; the mellowed pink tint of the sheets; and the cold hurricane lamp on the nightstand. Richard asks her to say his name.

  She responds, Richard.

  No. Fong Man Gum.

  Chloe’s voice flattens out the curves, Fong Man Gum.

  Once more.

  Fong Man Gum.

  He grows hard inside her.

  Fong Man Gum.

  He breathes in her ear; his breath staggers and falters.

  Fong Man Gum.

  His sighs collapse in jags into the curve of her neck.

  Chloe lifts her hands and drags her fingers through his hair, pulls lightly; she wants him to hush, even as she utters his name a final time.

  Fong Man Gum.

  IT IS JUNE 22, 1928, and the morning of the Dragon Boat Festival. Back pressed to the wall, Poppy See can feel the vibrations of Richard’s footsteps move down the hall. She smokes as she listens. She would like to sleep, but a premonition has awoken her: bodies with seaweed-strewn faces under water, glistening and pale, with bloated fingers and Delta crawdads scuttling though the water-heavy locks of their hair. She hoped it had been a dream, or even a memory— in her youth, shamed women had been pulled from the river with some regularity— but when she rose and turned on the light, she discovered that the bowl of dry rice at her small altar had been disturbed and the incense sticks lay broken.

  Flooded with light, the room looked otherwise normal, but she couldn’t stop the bird in her chest, so she went to the wall to wait for him. For four years she had opened her eyes to Richard’s face and had inhaled his rank night breath in order to know that the horrors of sleep could dissipate with him sleeping beside her. Before she heard his footsteps, she heard the groan and ease of springs as he left Chloe’s bed.

  Through her thin nightdress and the ridges of the wall, she feels his feet crack past her room. Fingers smash cigarette into gold dish. She leaps to open the door. His figure— jacket uncreased and tight across his back, the drape of his pants over the curve of his heel— retreats down the hall. Disappointment draws her heart into a beating-wing frenzy, but the next sight stills her. Behind Richard follows a woman in an old-style dress— snapped-closed collar, sleeves falling wide like bells, and, beneath the embroidered hem of her dress, tiny bound feet. Against the harsh outlines of Richard’s suit, the woman is so delicate she follows like an echo to a sound. Richard descends the stairs, but the woman pauses and turns to look at Poppy. Poppy freezes. Hand to the doorknob, legs in indecision as she weighs this against her visions. Through the woman’s soft girlish face, Poppy continues to watch Richard’s fleeing figure.

  THE CHILDREN WILL collect at the southern end of Main Street, near the slough and railroad tracks. The domestic quiet of Second Street slinks into the chaos of Main. Under the sycamores and willows, cars line the one-lane road. The stores will have lifted their blinds and opened their doors to the raised wooden sidewalks that fall in and out of light beneath the balconies.

  It is nine and the fog is gone. Corlissa climbs the stairs to rouse her daughter Sofia for the parade. She knocks on the door. When there is no response, she hesitates to enter. She feels the headiness that often had come to her when she looked down from the window of their apartment in the city. The spin when each stone of the alley looked impossibly close, then dizzily far. All the dares that arise in a playing mind: to leap in front of a streetcar, to walk into the ocean with a pocket full of stones, to step out the window— initially came to her when she held her baby daughter. After Sofia learned to walk, the thoughts came on their own, and Corlissa learned to hold her breath when crossing the street, to count out the seconds until the cars passed.

  She glances down the hall toward her own bedroom door, ajar, room empty. Perhaps if Sofia had been a son the thoughts wouldn’t have come. Fifteen years later, they arrive even more often, now that Sofia’s body presses against her clothes and threatens to burst out with hips and breasts and blood and milk. The lack of traffic and tall buildings in Locke doesn’t stop Corlissa’s urges, and the confusion that swirls around her— the only whitewoman in town not a prostitute— brings the flush of danger rising higher. Red-haired and freckled, she feels conspicuous, like a rag doll left in the street. each corner she turns in her seven-months-new town offers another solution. She’s found an oak tree with branches that will hold a body; the gas released from an unlit oven is intoxicating; and, of course, the river is only a few hundred feet away.

  She knocks again. No answer from Sofia’s room. She nudges the door open.

  Sofia disappears for hours each day and gives vague replies when asked where she’s been. Summer allows for roaming, but the waves descend on Corlissa when Sofia comes home, noncommittal in her answers, and smelling odd-musky. Corlissa has not made enough friends in town for it to be whispered to her what her daughter is up to. She is unsettled enough to feel chilled at night when she thinks of this creature, her daughter, from her own body, who sleeps down the hall, in the dark mystery of her room.

  Behind Sofia’s door, discarded socks lie on the floor, a magazine splays under the bed, and fragrance lingers in the air amid the haze of morning light that washes the room. The cover is pulled over the bed, but still rumpled. The blue and green flowers printed across it wink like flirting eyes. A basket of gimcrackery sits on the nightstand— metal snappers, ceramic sheep, a high-bouncing ball. Sofia is still such a girl. All the trimmings of girlhood mark the room, but there is no girl here.

  EVEN WITHOUT ATTENDING, Chloe knows how the festivities will go: the children will carry banners and flags and dragon puppets made of felt and paper stuck together with paste. The painted ten-year-old girls in majorette costumes— cheeks rosy, lips red, faces powdered— will lead off with high kicks and twirls and faces upturned toward thrown batons. And the older boys in dragon masks will line the route, baring white paper teeth.

  The merchants will stand in the doorways of their businesses, pulled by the merrymaking, but still reluctant to count out the till and close the shop. People from Walnut Grove, Courtland, Ryde, Isleton, will arrive in straw boater hats, vests, picnic-day dresses, to see the exotic spectacle played out in their own homeland.

  Cable-armed farm laborers culled in from the fields and orchards, fingers crooked from pruning shears and wrists aching from asparagus pulling, will bring up the rear, carrying boats. They will march toward the water by following the flash of little girls’ ankle socks glimpsed from under the shadow-hollow of the upside-down boat held above their heads.

  Then the plash of wood hitting water. The thunder of heels hitting wood. The ung! of men rowing wood oars through water to a steady drumbeat.

  A RATTLE OF pebbles across the window startles Chloe. Sofia waits below, dressed like a sailor girl. She glances over a shoulder draped in a big blue collar, then beckons Chloe down.

  Downstairs, Chloe eases past Madam See’s closed office door and onto the stoop.

  Let’s go, Sofia says. I can’t stand those kids. Her little freckled nose edges up into a snarl. She has told Chloe about the girls, so friendly to each other, who shift at her approach, reconfiguring themselves until Sofia sees only touching shoulders and the napes of smooth necks. Not even a look. Months ago, Sofia said, she’d thought it was San Francisco all over again, where she was dragged from whit
e school to white school until she found herself at school in Chinatown, among children who thought half white was a half too much. But in Locke, there was no taunting. It all happened in whispers and, then, in silence.

  I’m not supposed to be gone, Chloe says.

  C’mon, Chloe, the whole town is closing down. Let’s go to the river.

  Chloe sighs, What about the parade?

  I don’t care. Mama isn’t going anyhow.

  They peer around the corner at the growing crowd, then run along the railroad tracks to the slough that curves behind the town. They skid-skad their heels down the bank, through soft mud and strands of creeping wild rye. Chloe and Sofia climb onto a low branch that overhangs the dirt and water. Two girls, one blond and one brown-haired, perch on a branch with legs dangling.

  You got smokes? Sofia asks.

  Chloe loosens a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco and rolling papers from her garter and hands them to Sofia.

  I’ve been thinking about what your mother said last week. Sofia licks the paper flap and picks a fleck of tobacco off her tongue. Matches?

  Chloe takes matches from her left garter.

  Sofia says, I don’t know how you stand being so far away from things. I’m out of my mind here.

  I thought you didn’t like the city.

  Sometimes I do.

  What’s it like being saved? Chloe asks.