“Don’t be smart!” And then—wow, this really must be bad, because Ah-Ma actually turned to Ma directly, barking: “Eun-Joo, I need to talk with you. Come with me, please.”
“Oh, Ah-Ma, I don’t think—”
“Right now. Alone.”
Ah-Ma cast a single, significant glance back Jin’s way; Ma sighed and bowed her head. “Yes, all right,” she said. To Jin: “We’ll be back in a minute, ah bee. Don’t touch the Po house, all right? I think it might still be a little tacky.”
The door closed behind them, with a definitive click. But Jin could hear the thrum of their voices anyhow—Ah-Ma’s rising, thinning, dumping tense and conjunctions as annoyance sent her grammar sliding back towards Cantonese. While Ma’s stayed carefully quiet, deferential, respectful—not rising to the bait no matter how vigorously Ah-Ma might fish for a penultimate blow-up, the argument which would finally force Ba to choose sides (badly-selected farang wife vs. good Chinese mother, mother of his melon-faced halfbreed child vs. wife of his own dead, much-beloved father), forever.
And if, maybe, at the beginning, there had been some note other than anger in Ah-Ma’s voice—something like fear, a shadow of genuine dread, at the name of Yau Yan-er—it was forgotten now, like Jin herself, in that endless, pointless hostility, that grudge-match negative feedback loop.
Jin shut her eyes, wishing it all away—them all, even Ba and Ma, in this one painful moment.
And heard Wu Mingshi speak up from behind her at the exact same moment, as though in answer to her pain—his light voice soothing-soft, liquid as a Cantopop ballad, welcome beyond all words—
“Are they both gone, flower?”
Jin’s heart shivered inside her at the mere smell of him, flopping like a fish. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Good. Then it can be just you and I.”
So she turned, and there he was: right there, like always, wrapping her in his arms. Enfolding her completely. Mingshi, with his perfect almond-flesh skin, his liquorice eyes as smoothly shaped as pumpkin-seeds, his whole face symmetrically stunning: shiny, shining, lambent and airbrushed, like any given Disney Studios’ multiracial hunk-of-the-month.
“I die so much when you’re not here with me,” he murmured, with perfect sincerity; “Me too,” she whispered back, thinking: It’s like a soap opera, isn’t it? So corny. So glorious. Oh God, it’s like a dream . . .
Could it really only be two weeks since she’d met him? When he’d told her he lived inside the Po family Hell house, she’d just laughed—until he’d shown her. Taken her. In through the same door she saw her Ma paint on, to a room whose nude grey cardboard walls were hung with bright red marriage-bed silk. And under those billowing curtains, on a genie-in-the-bottle bed made from folded Hell bank-notes and crumpled paper wads of Hell cash, he’d laid her down and climbed on top of her, fitting himself to her like a velvet-lined glove. Gave her her very first kiss, in super-slow step-print stop-motion—and now just looking at him made her delirious, hot-and-cold shaky, like malaria. Like love.
But: How could he possibly fit in there? Let alone make her fit in there?
(Didn’t matter.)
Of course not, no. But . . . how did he even know English? Or was that Cantonese—Mandarin?—they were both speaking?
(Didn’t matter.)
Yes, but how—
Didn’t matter, any of it: It was like Twilight, like Titanic, like High School Musical 1, 2 and 3. He was Edward, she was Bella; she was Claire Danes and he was Leonardo DiCaprio, before he grew that grody beard. It was Romeo + Juliet, but without the dying part. Fate.
Say it Jin-Li Song or Song Jin-Li, the facts stayed the same either way: she was so ugly, so insignificant, belonging nowhere, to no one. But Mingshi, her Hell friend, he chose her—
(This month, you should be careful of what you see . . . and of what you don’t.)
And: “Come with me,” he said, tugging her back towards the house; Jin came, of course. Willingly. Without question. Stammering, as she did—
“I brought you some food, Mingshi—stole it from the corner. Ghost-food . . . my Ah-Ma’d have a cow, if she knew . . . ”
“Oh, I don’t care about that. Kiss me, Jin. I’m cold; just lie with me a bit, will you? Kiss me. Keep me warm.”
Into the Hell house again, wrapped tight in Mingshi’s arms—and vaguely, as if seeping down through slow fathoms, she thought she could hear her Ba calling from outside, her Ma, her Ah-Ma: Jin—where is that girl? Jin? Jin, we have to go . . . just load it up, the Po family won’t wait, the getai for their daughter is tonight . . . she’ll be fine, she has keys . . .
After which came a rocking, a heave and a lifting, a slam followed by rumbling, a pulling away. And throughout it, Mingshi just kept on holding her—close, closer, closest; tighter than she’d ever been held before, by anybody. So tight, she never wanted him to stop.
Yet Jin could still hear Mrs. Yau’s voice as well, buzzing always in one ear, dragonfly-insistent—the voice which never quite dimmed enough to become unintelligible, never quite went away. Mrs. Yau’s susurrant murmur, yin-tinged like every other Mandarin accent, even Mingshi’s own. Saying, over and over:
Remember, what’s hidden, what lies beneath . . . is not for you, little sister. Not for anyone. Unless . . .
***