suspicious. After that I was afraid to call, but I couldn’t bear not to. If someone else answered, I hung up. Then one day Mohit called me from a public phone. He told me to get out of Calcutta as soon as possible. He had heard that the Chinese were being sent to internment camps. Then he said that he couldn’t phone or see me again. Already he had received threats because people knew about me. He was afraid his family would be targeted as sympathizers. The worry was making his mother sicker.
“I felt like my world had ended. I couldn’t believe Mohit could let me down like this. I couldn’t even tell my family (who had their own problems) how much it hurt.”
Mohit’s sources had been accurate. Within a couple of days, Jiang’s family was notified that they must leave the country or relocate to an internment camp in Rajasthan, all the way across India. Those who did not obey would be forcibly deported to China. Jiang’s father knew that going back to China under the yoke of Mao’s Communist regime was out of the question. From refugees in the 1950s, he had heard stories of the labor camps rife with starvation and disease, the massacre of those labeled traitors to the Party. And he no longer trusted the government of India, this country that he had mistakenly loved as his own. He tried desperately to get his children out of the country- Vancouver or Brazil, San Francisco or Sydney or Fiji -it did not matter where. (Paperless as he and his mother were, he knew they had no hope.) But the Chinese exodus was at its peak. There were no airplane tickets, no ocean berths. Mr. Feng was willing to pay a hefty bribe, but he discovered that others had already paid equally hefty bribes.
Two days before the family was to board the train that would transport them to the hot, dry quarry town of Deoli, Vincent managed to locate a friend-an acquaintance, really-whom he had met a couple of times at the Chinese Dentists Club. Curtis Chan was the lucky possessor of a berth on a ship that was to leave for America in the morning-and he was a bachelor. That evening, unknown to Jiang, her father and brother bribed the guard posted outside their house and went to Curtis Chan’s home. They took with them Jiang’s photograph, a stack of dollars that Mr. Feng had managed to procure by calling in favors, several of his rare calligraphy scrolls, and all her mother’s jewelry.
Curtis Chan was a practical man. He had been approached by two families with unmarried daughters earlier that day, and at the very moment the Fengs rang his doorbell, he had been getting ready to phone one of them. But perhaps he had a romantic streak in him, too, or a love of art. Otherwise why would he, after examining Jiang’s photograph and one of the scrolls, agree to Mr. Feng’s proposition, even though one of the other families had offered him as many dollars, more valuable jewelry, and, additionally, a bag of gold Krugerrands? Vincent was dispatched home to fetch his sister. Mr. Feng and Mr. Chan-it is appropriate that we should address him in this manner, because as Jiang was about to discover, he was decidedly older than her brother and going bald, besides-hurried to the Buddhist temple in Tangra.
“And, just like that,” Jiang said, “I was married.”
Under normal circumstances, Jiang would have balked at the summary manner in which her father had decided her fate, yoking her to this middle-aged, stocky stranger, without even asking her opinion. But since Mohit’s phone call, she had been walking around in a numb haze that gave way periodically to fits of furious tears. One moment she wanted a bomb to obliterate all of Calcutta, or at least the Das household. The next moment she wanted time to rewind itself to that day at Feng’s so that she could leave the shop before Mohit arrived, and thus avoid the entire heartache of loving him. At other times she longed for Mohit to break down the door of the Feng mansion and carry her away to a place where her Chineseness would not matter. Buffeted by contradictions, she stood in the Buddhist temple, under the ominous shadows thrown by a single, shaky candle (Calcutta was under blackout orders), and did as the priest instructed, her motions jerky as a puppet’s. It was only the next morning, as she was about to board the
None of the things he promised came to pass. Within a year, he died of a heart attack at the camp, his devastated mother following him soon after. As for Vincent, he did get on a ship, but one bound for Australia, and it was years before he and his sister found each other.
“That was the last time anyone would see me cry,” Jiang said.
The monthlong voyage seemed endless, with the Chans cooped up in a minuscule cabin with another newly married couple. (Upon boarding they had discovered that the captain, taking advantage of the helplessness of his customers, had double-sold tickets.) Mr. Chan and Mr. Lu, understanding that they had no recourse, made the best of it. They divided the little space they had with a blanket that served as a curtain, made up a bed on the floor where each couple slept on alternate nights, and created a strict timetable for the use of the cabin so that they would each get some privacy with their wives. This had a twofold result. Mr. Chan and Mr. Lu formed a lifelong friendship, and by the end of the voyage, Jiang was pregnant.
How did she feel about this last development? Did joy course through her as the baby grew? Or did she feel sick with worry at the prospect of having a child in a place where she knew no one who could support her through childbirth and into motherhood? Did she feel fondness for the child’s father-or perhaps even the beginnings of love? Did she resent him for imprisoning her in a bloated body that would no longer fit into the pretty clothes she brought from Calcutta? Did she compare him with someone else who had kissed her more tenderly? Or did she tolerate him with resignation, because what choice did she have?
In America, they moved from city to city until Mr. Chan was forced to accept the fact that his dentist’s degree was worthless here. Finally, they sold Jiang’s jewelry and bought a small grocery in a Chinatown. Jiang helped in the store, dividing her attention between the customers and the babies-one, then two, in the playpen in the tiny back room. She was so good at managing the business that by the time the babies grew into children, the store had expanded into a supermarket and the Chans lived in a comfortable apartment above it. The family bought another supermarket and then a third; the children were sent to private schools; they moved to a large and lavish apartment in a gated building.
Everything Jiang required for daily life lay within the boundaries of Chinatown -markets, movie theaters, the houses of friends, the children’s schools. Was there another need? If so, she buried that hankering deep within herself. In this new, compacted existence, there was no necessity for her to speak English, so she let it go. And, along with the language she had once prided herself on speaking so well, she let go of that portion of her past where English had played an important part. By the time her grandchildren were born, she communicated only in Mandarin.
Sometimes in the evenings Mr. Lu, now a widower, visited Mr. Chan. Jiang served them tea and dim sum but never joined in their wistful reminiscences. Her brother, Vincent, having finally managed to locate her, paid them a visit from Australia, where after decades of hard work he had risen to be the manager of-ah, ironic world!-a shoe factory. She was happy to see him, if in a bemused kind of way. (This stooped, tobacco-chewing man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair did not seem to her to be connected in any way to the young man she had left behind on the docks of Calcutta, dressed in a crisp white button-down shirt.) When he brought up their childhood, waxing poetic about the hidden mansion in which they were raised, she refused to indulge in nostalgia with him. Only fools chewed the cud of the past.
But something was dislodged inside her as she listened to her husband and her brother conversing. After Vincent left, she found herself sitting by her bedroom window, staring out. Instead of the busy streets of Chinatown she saw an enclosed courtyard, roses spilling over a stone bench, children running around a fountain, screaming with laughter. The moon rose, shaking her heart with its beauty. Her father recited poetry, and she mouthed the words along with him. Each day she could smell the mango trees more distinctly. Inside her, emptiness grew until she felt like a hollowed-out bamboo. So when Mr. Chan passed away and Vincent wrote that he was planning a trip to Calcutta to decide whether he wanted to retire there, she wrote back impulsively- surprising herself, because she had thought herself long done with impulsiveness-that she would meet him in the city of her youth.
“Why am I going?” Jiang said. She shrugged and spread her hands. “Not sure. End of story.”
