The Girl with No Face Page 3

  Mr. Pu was one of the few higher-ups in the Xie Liang tong I admired. He was a full generation older than my boss and the rest of his lieutenants, and I did not really understand why the eminent accountant had chosen to become a sworn brother of the upstart, Americanized Xie Liang tong rather than our more traditional competition, the Ansheng. Like most Chinese men, Mr. Pu wore his hair in a queue, his forehead shaved and his long white hair neatly braided down his back. He was clothed in a white mourning robe but he still carried himself with calm assurance. He nodded toward me and remained silent. I started to approach him, but before I had taken three steps, two other men entered, carrying a small plank between them.

  On the plank, a cloth shroud covered a corpse-like shape. Too small to be an adult’s corpse.

  My throat froze. My chest ached. It was a brutal reality that, sometimes, children die. If they came from families that belonged to the Xie Liang tong, their souls were my responsibility.

  The sight of a child’s corpse laid out on a board filled me with sadness and dread, but this child’s soul was my sacred duty.

  I led the bearers to a stone table. “Lay him down here,” I said, “with his feet pointing to the south.”

  Mr. Pu’s voice was quietly tense. “It’s a girl.”

  That surprised me. There were so few females in Chinatown. “Who was she, Mr. Pu?”

  “Her name is Xu Anjing,” he said.

  Anjing. For girls, the name was supposed to bring luck; it meant “be quiet.” Luck did not seem to visit her, but silence had. Any difference in the tone of a vowel could change a word’s meaning; Mr. Pu pronounced her family name, Xu, with the inflection of the word meaning “journey.”

  “How did she die?”

  “She suffocated,” the bookkeeper said.

  “How did that happen?”

  “She was still alive when Dr. Zhou was brought in to examine her, Miss Xian. There were flowers growing out of her mouth and nostrils.”

  “Did he try cutting them off?”

  Mr. Pu nodded, looking queasy. “The cut stems bled. It was her blood.”

  “Is this some form of medical disease, Mr. Pu?”

  “Dr. Zhou never saw it before.”

  “Has Dr. Wei inspected her? He’s more experienced.”

  “Dr. Wei doesn’t work for the Xie Liang tong, Miss Xian. Dr. Zhou is the best we have.”

  I thought for a moment about how it would feel, to suffocate, with flowers growing out of my mouth and nose, stems occluding my throat, my hands scrabbling ineffectively, my lungs dragging for air they could not find. The thought made me shudder.

  It sounded like some kind of a hex. But who would inflict such filthy magic upon a little girl? And why? None of this made sense.

  “Mr. Pu,” I said, “may I inspect these flowers?”

  Within his neatly trimmed white beard, his lips curled wryly. “I thought you might ask that, Miss Xian,” he said, handing me a wax paper envelope.

  I peered inside. A thin, purplish-black stem blossomed in tiny flowers. Their glossy blue petals would have taken my breath away with their beauty, but knowing the plant had killed a girl, I could only perceive it as vicious. Something felt harsh about the plant; though it had no thorns, it felt as if it should be armored with sharp spikes, barbed to penetrate the flesh.

  I sniffed the petals; their scent reminded me first of pine tar, then burnt sugar, and finally of fresh blood.

  Before I could think of anything else to say, another man walked into the deadhouse chamber. I knew him; everyone knew Xu Shengdian, everyone liked him. People called him Du Shen, “Gambling God,” because he’d been blessed with extraordinary luck at the gaming tables. Luck in gambling was said to be a gift from the Ancestors, so losing games of chance meant it was time to be more pious, more filial, while winning was considered a sign of an exemplary person. And no one won more games than Mr. Xu.

  Xu Shengdian wore an American suit, and he wore it well. His clothes were fitted, tailored, and stylish. Mr. Xu was dashing, debonair, suave, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, yet he looked down on no one, and treated everyone like a friend. He spoke Toisanese with an accent like no one else, lilting and aristocratic. When Xu Shengdian would walk down the boardwalks, he’d toss a candy to every passing child and a flower to every passing woman, and all the ladies’ pulses would quicken with a thrill. Even the white women would stop to admire the dapper Chinese man decked out in fashionable finery.

  I tended to distrust men who charmed women, but Mr. Xu’s reputation had no history of sordidness; he gave gifts with no expectations beyond friendship; he was known to rent three prostitutes at a time, give them each some money, and spend a few hours gambling with them, nothing else. All the contract girls daydreamed that Xu Shengdian would someday buy out their contracts and marry them. His winnings from gambling allowed him to lead a playboy’s life, all glamor and extravagance.

  Now, however, though his hair was slicked back with oil, Xu Shengdian’s mouth hung slack. His eyes looked hollow, haunted. I’d never seen him like this. On an ordinary day, his lips would be rolling a peppermint back and forth, the way other men chomp cigars, his usual expression a knowing, flirtatious smirk.

  None of his strut was apparent now. He looked almost like a wandering ghost, unsure of where to go, how to stand, who he was. My eyes traveled to the corpse on the plank. Mr. Xu’s family name was also written with the character meaning a journey; she must have been a relative of his.

  “Xu Shengdian,” I said, “I want you to know that I will make sure your daughter’s soul is conducted well.”

  “My wife,” he said.

  “Your—” I forced myself to stop speaking before I said anything I would regret.

  Mr. Pu saved me the awkwardness, saying, “His paper wife, Miss Xian.”

  I glanced at the accountant. Paper wives, paper husbands, and paper children only existed in writing on official forms. American laws made it difficult for Chinese people to immigrate. To navigate through the bureaucracy, we sometimes created paper families, imaginary relationships. Two men in Chinatown might claim to be brothers, though they shared no parentage. I knew a paper father who was younger than his paper son; the Exclusion Act caused many such relationships to be forged.

  The younger man nodded. “It was not like a marriage between a man and a woman. We only married so she could legally immigrate, and so I could receive good luck.”

  “Luck, Mr. Xu?”

  He responded with a listless look and took a brush and paper to write something. After a few moments scribbling, he held the sheet up for me. “These are her Eight Details, and this was the name she was born with,” he said, indicating a character off to one side. He gestured to a second row of characters. “These are my Eight Details.”

  I examined his writing. At first I didn’t see what he was trying to tell me with this. To fully interpret the Eight Details, I would need to consult the Tong Sheng, a celestial almanac; each of the details would be represented by a string of numerological values, opening up a detailed description of a person’s complex, unique relationships to the energies of the universe. If I had the almanac handy, it would take me about forty minutes to perform a Gua Ming reading and put together a profound set of insights. Yet it was easy enough to make a rudimentary reading. Each of the Eight Details had a value, either Yin or Yang.

  And one after the next, it all fell in place, like the tumblers in a lock: Wherever his details were yang, hers were yin; wherever his were yin, hers were yang. She complimented him, completed him, astrologically, in every way; it was an auspicious pairing, a harbinger of luck.

  “You were a good match, astrologically,” I said. “Yin and yang are only so well aligned in one out of sixty-four pairings.”

  “It went far beyond yin and yang,” he said. “The man who performed the reading also examined our twelve animal signs, our five phases, the hours of our births. . . . He even compared our physiognomy charts. He said this marriage was a unique matc
h, one of a kind in trillions of possible pairings, auspicious beyond anything he’d ever seen.”

  “This man was an expert?” I asked.

  Xu Shengdian’s expression froze. He hemmed, his brow furrowed, and his posture turned awkward. “The . . . reader . . .” he said, choosing his words carefully, “is very highly regarded.”

  I watched his face for a long moment but I could not figure out why he was so flustered. “There are only a few qualified Gua Ming readers in Chinatown,” I said. “This one, you trust him enough to make a life decision based on his judgement?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his glance on me was sharp, “I do.”

  I looked at him a moment longer, trying to work out what he was intending to tell me without saying it. Why would he withhold the reader’s name?

  “The fortuneteller,” Mr. Xu said, his accented Toisanese insistent, “said a marriage with this girl would fill my life with blessings, and he urged me to wed her.”

  “Where was this reading performed?”

  The awkwardness of his face and body seemed to dissipate; it was the question he’d needed me to ask. “At a temple on Dupont.”

  “Dupont?” I said, and then it came to me in a flash of insight. I knew exactly why Mr. Xu had lost his composure. Yes, the man who interpreted their fortunes was indeed an expert; this man was well-known, respected, and eminent, a masterful reader of destinies, and he no longer considered me his daughter.

  My father’s reading could be trusted implicitly. If Father had told Mr. Xu to marry this girl for luck, he would have needed to be an idiot to refuse. But here, now, in the deadhouse, if Xu Shengdian mentioned my father by name, he would humiliate me. The reason Mr. Xu was tongue-tied was that he was struggling to protect me from embarrassment.

  Not a lot of people would go out of their way to spare me from humiliation. I really liked Xu Shengdian.

  I met his eyes with a glance that said, I know what you did, and why, and I appreciate it.

  In our communities, small considerations like this and their repayments sometimes blossomed into networks of trust, a system of social bonding called guanxi. To outsiders it often seemed invisible; but when someone deliberately took a step to help you preserve face, it was meaningful. If you repaid them in kind, then you began to see each other as allies, friends, and family. Mianzi or lian—face—was intricately, inextricably intertwined with these nuanced social interconnections. Xu Shengdian had worked to spare me from being shamed, when few people would have cared enough to make that effort, and I found myself feeling warmth and gratitude to the man.

  “Anjing was going to be put up for auction,” Mr. Xu said. “The fortune-teller showed me her charts, saying she would bring me exceptional good luck. I bought her, and I took care of her. I gave her food and clothing, and I sent her to school. We played music and went for rides together. I gave her a stuffed rabbit that she carried everywhere. She was my wife in name alone; in reality she was my lucky charm, and I raised her as if she were my own daughter.”

  “That’s how he won so much of the Xie Liang tong’s money at the gaming table,” Mr. Pu grumbled.

  Mr. Xu seemed to come suddenly awake. “Li-lin, will Anjing’s spirit be safe?” he asked me urgently. “Will she be happy?”

  I met the widower’s eyes, and considered his questions. The hun, or higher soul, had three portions, which travel in three directions after death. One soul portion would go with Xu Anjing’s name, one would stay with her corpse, and the third, most conscious portion would travel to the afterlife. All three portions of her higher soul were my responsibility. It was my duty to commemorate her name, locate an ideal site for her corpse to be buried, and deliver her safely to the care of the Niutou and the Mamian, implacable soldiers with the heads of oxen or the faces of horses, who guard the gates to the next world.

  Facing Xu Shengdian, I said, “I will hang a placard with your wife’s name in a place of honor in my Hall of Ancestors. I will find the gravesite in the cemetery with the finest feng shui. I will perform a thorough funeral, with musicians and wailing women, and I will lead a procession across a wooden bridge, thirteen times, to guide your wife safely deep into the afterlife.”

  “What will I do?” he said.

  “You can participate in her funeral,” I said.

  “That isn’t what I mean, Miss Xian,” he said. “What will I do without her?”

  I stood for a long moment, bewildered. “You said she was only a paper wife?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but she lives in my home. Lived. It will be so quiet, without her there to play music.”

  “She played an instrument?”

  “No,” he said.

  The reply puzzled me. I would have asked him to explain, but his eyes looked tearful; he breathed heavily, a throaty sigh, at the edge of weeping. A long moment went by, and I could not find words to console the bereft man. One would think, having lost so much, I would have learned something of value I could say to others in their times of grief; but loss never conveyed clear lessons or easy answers. Sometimes life seemed like a series of catastrophes, which we were always helpless to avert. Terrible things would happen, and we continued to exist, continued to go on living, breathing, waking up, seeing the world. I had always felt somehow tainted by the blood of my mother, of my husband, as if their deaths stained me, and nothing could ever wash that blood away.

  “Mr. Pu, Mr. Xu,” I said, sweeping them both in one glance, “it will not be safe for you to spend time here until I have a chance to treat her. I promise I will treat her well. But until I seal the lower souls within her corpse, the two of you could be contaminated by illness or misfortune.”

  Xu Shengdian still stood as if in a trance. Mr. Pu placed a hand on the widower’s back and guided him out of the room. The two pallbearers followed, leaving me alone with the corpse.

  A moment later Mr. Pu stepped halfway back through the door, one hand stroking his white beard. “Miss Xian,” he said. “You do not consider yourself a part of the Xie Liang tong, is that correct?”

  “I am not a member of the tong, Mr. Pu.”

  “I am not speaking of formalities, Miss Xian. You do not think of yourself as part of this community; you are merely fulfilling the terms of a contract, and when your three years are done, you will have no ties to us. True?”

  I did not feel compelled to admit it. “Why are you asking, Mr. Pu?”

  “Because of her,” he said, gesturing to the corpse. “Through her husband, Xu Anjing was under the tong’s protection. If you were one of us, you might feel a connection to the dead girl, as if she were a cousin of yours. But since you are not a member of the community, but merely an employee. . . .”

  “Mr. Pu,” I said, “you think that I would not care for this girl because I’m not a member of her group?”

  “I said no such thing, Miss Xian,” he said, a sudden steel in his voice. “I would offer some words of counsel to an employee of the Xie Liang tong, if she intends to look into the manner of this girl’s death.”

  I looked at him, and did not need to nod or speak.

  “Tread carefully, Miss Xian,” he said. “The boss has not encouraged you to explore, so any course of action you pursue will come without the backing of the Xie Liang tong. I myself could not condone any actions you take . . . no matter how much I might admire them.”

  “Is that all, Mr. Pu?”

  “One more thing, Miss Xian. Whatever you do next, I would appreciate it if you survived. Consider it a personal favor.” And with that, he left.

  Alone with the silence and the candles and the dead girl, I stood breathing in the emptiness. Mrs. Xu’s face was still concealed. I rolled back the shroud and saw, for the first time, the girl’s face.

  What could be said about a corpse? I had never seen Mrs. Xu while she was alive. Had she been pretty? Had she laughed and smiled? Did she love spicy noodles? None of this was apparent as I looked at the blank dead face and inanimate body on the table.

  I tri
ed to get a sense of who she had been. Such a brief life, and then she was gone. Maybe her parents died, maybe they sold her, or maybe she’d been abducted; then somehow she’d crossed the Pacific and been put up for auction. A decent man bought her and sent her to school. Then, when Xu Anjing was nine years old, somehow, flowers grew from her mouth and nose, killing her.

  My own life followed a similar path and yet a different one. I also lost my mother and my home; I also was brought across the sea. Yet I lived past my ninth year, and in my tenth, I met the boy who became my husband.

  Life was easy for exactly no one. Each of us had a face, a fate, words and hands to try to craft for ourselves a better life. But a girl’s words had less sway, since girls were so often hushed to silence, and a girl’s hands rarely could steer her own destiny.

  This girl’s life may have been decent, or it might not have been. The decision hadn’t been hers. She was a small paper ship lost at sea, a paper wife, passing from one man’s hands to another’s. My father and Xu Shengdian had decided the course of her life. And now she was dead. Nine years young, and dead.

  Something about the corpse sent a slither of revulsion through my skin. Over the months I had worked in this deadhouse, and in the years I spent shadowing my father’s similar work, there had been other dead children. But this cadaver was different, in some way, from the others. Something about this corpse, a sense of hollowness, gave me a uncomfortable feeling.

  I forced myself to place a finger on the dead girl’s forehead. Nothing.

  I touched the corpse’s throat. There was nothing.

  I pushed back her shirt and pressed my palm against the cold skin below her navel, feeling for her Lower Dantien, where the human body generates its qi energies. Nothing.

  I removed her shoes and examined the points on her soles known as the Bubbling Springs. Again, there was nothing.