Shanghai Girls

While Edfred is at boot camp, Father Louie and I go through the store to check each item, removing stickers that say MADE IN JAPAN and replacing them with new stickers that read 100% CHINESE PRODUCT. He starts to buy curios made in Mexico, which puts us in direct competition with the merchants on Olvera Street. Oddly, our customers don’t seem to notice the difference between something made in China, Japan, or Mexico. It’s foreign, simple as that.

We too are forever foreign, which makes us suspect. The family associations in Chinatown print up signs that read CHINA: YOUR ALLY for us to hang in the windows of our businesses, homes, and automobiles to a

But when Edfred comes to Los Angeles to visit after his military training, people salute him on the street. “When I wear my uniform, I know I’m not going to be kicked around. It tells folks I have as much right to be here as anyone else,” he explains. “Now I have number three reason: in the Army I’m getting a fair chance-one that’s based not on my being Chinese but on my being a man in uniform fighting for the United States.”

That day I buy a camera and take my first photograph. I still keep my photographs of Mama and Baba hidden for when the immigration inspectors make their periodic checks, but seeing Uncle Edfred go to war is different. He’ll be fighting for America… and for China. The next time the inspectors come, I’ll proudly show my snapshot of Uncle Edfred, forever China-ski

What the photo doesn’t show is my father-in-law, standing a few feet away, looking devastated and scared. My feelings about him have changed the past few years. He has almost nothing here in Los Angeles: he’s a third-class citizen, he faces the same discrimination we all do, and he will never break out of Chinatown. Now his adopted country, America, is also fighting Japan. Since the commercial shipping cha

“THOSE WHO CAN’T fight need to produce,” Uncle Charley tells us one day. “You know the Lee boys? They’ve gone over to Lockheed to build airplanes. They say there’s a place for me, and it’s not making chop suey They say every blow I strike in building planes is a blow of freedom for the land of our fathers and for the land of our new home.”

“But your English-”

“No one cares about my English as long as I work hard,” he says. “You know, Pearl, you could get a job over there too. The Lee boys took their sisters to work with them. Now Esther and Bernice are driving rivets in bomber doors. You want to know how much money they’re making? Sixty cents an hour during the day and sixty-five cents an hour for the night shift. You want to know what I’m going to make?” He rubs his eyes, which look particularly painful and swollen from his allergies.

“Eighty-five cents an hour. That’s thirty-four dollars a week. I tell you, Pearl-ah, those are good wages.”

My photograph shows Uncle Charley sitting at the counter, his sleeves rolled up, a piece of pie in front of him, his apron and paper hat discarded on a vacant stool.

“WHAT CAN MY boy do for the war?” my father-in-law asks when Vern, who graduated the previous June from high school, where they didn’t want him and didn’t bother to educate him, receives his draft notice. “He’s better off at home. Sam, go with him and make sure they understand.”

“I’ll take him,” Sam says, “but I’m going to enlist. I want to become a real citizen too.”

Father Louie doesn’t try to change Sam’s mind. Citizenship is one thing and the risks of being questioned can affect many people, but we all know what this war is about. I’m proud of Sam, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried. When Sam and Vern return to the apartment, I know things didn’t go well. Vern was turned down for obvious reasons, but, surprisingly, Sam was classified 4-F.

“Flat feet, and yet I pulled a rickshaw through the streets and alleyways of Shanghai,” he complains to me when we’re alone in our room. Once again, he’s been belittled and dismissed as a man. In so many ways, he continues to eat bitterness.

Not long after this, May picks up the camera and takes a photograph. In it, you can see how much the apartment has changed since May, Joy, and I first arrived. Bamboo shades are rolled above the windows, but we can let them down for privacy. On the wall above the couch hang four calendars depicting the four seasons that we received over four years from Wong On Lung Market. Old Man Louie sits on a straight-backed chair, looking cocooned and solemn. Sam gazes out the window. His posture is erect and held up by his iron fan, but his face looks as though he’s been punched. Vern-content in the womb of his family-sprawls on the couch, holding a model airplane. I sit on the floor, painting a ba

To me, this photograph shows how we sacrifice in big and small ways. We can finally afford to buy a washing machine, but we don’t because metal is so scarce. We promote the boycott of Japanese silk stockings and wear cotton stockings instead, using the motto “Be in style, wear lisle,” and, sure enough, women all over the city join the Non-Silk Movement. Everyone suffers from shortages of coffee, beef, sugar, flour, and milk, but in the café and in Chinese restaurants all over the city, we suffer even more because ingredients like rice, ginger, tree-ear mushrooms, and soy sauce no longer cross the Pacific. We learn to substitute sliced apple for water chestnuts. We buy rice grown in Texas instead of fragrant jasmine rice from China. We use oleo, squirt yellow food coloring in it, knead it, and press it into bar-shaped molds so it will look like butter when we cut it into pats for the café. Sam gets eggs on the black market, paying five dollars for a case. We save our bacon grease in a coffee can under the sink to take to the collection center, where we’re told it will be used in the production of armaments. I stop feeling resentful that I have to spend so much time stringing peas and peeling garlic in the restaurant, because now we’re serving our boys in uniform and we need to do everything we can for them. And at home we begin to eat American dishes-pork and beans, grilled Spam sandwiches with cheese and sliced onion, creamed tuna, and casseroles made with Bisquick-that will spread our ingredients the furthest.

SNAP: THE CHINESE New Year Fund-raiser. Snap: Double-ten Fundraiser. Snap: China Night, with your favorite movie stars. Snap: the Rice Bowl Parade, where the women of Chinatown carry a gigantic Chinese flag by its edges and ask bystanders to throw coins onto the flag. Snap: the Moon Festival, where A