She nodded sympathetically, though her knowledge of China’s current situation was minimal. She knew that Japan was constantly threatening invasion, and the Chinese government, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was struggling to fight back. China had always seemed both impossibly distant and uncomfortably near to her, a land of silk-robed emperors in ancient palaces, but also of hardscrabble villages that lived on in her mother’s stories. We didn’t have running water, her mother said when Grace complained about their family store’s leaky plumbing. We slept six to a bed, her mother said when Grace wished for her own bedroom.
“Have you ever wanted to go to China?” Joseph asked.
“Maybe, to visit my mother’s family.” There had been a time when Grace’s mother constantly lamented being separated from her family, but in recent years she had given up the complaints. Grace wondered if she had forgotten them, or if she had resigned herself to a kind of exile.
“When you finish nursing school, your skills will be in high demand in China,” Joseph said. “Many Chinese people need modern medical treatment.”
Grace had never considered this possibility. She had a sudden vision of herself in a modern hospital somewhere in China: bright and clean, with Chinese patients lying serenely in white beds. She was wearing a white nursing cap and rolling a tray of medicines down a pale green hallway.
“Is that what you will do?” she asked. “Go back and treat patients?”
“I hope so. Also I want to use my training from here to train other doctors in China—those who can’t afford to come to America for medical school.”
He sounded so selfless, so upright. She was ashamed of her earlier desire to bring up Shanghai actresses. Their conversation continued in a stilted fashion, moving into and away from China, medicine, and San Francisco, the way so many first conversations went, but neither of them attempted to escape from it. She found him fascinating, and the way he thoughtfully asked about her interest in nursing was flattering. She also liked the little creases around his eyes when he smiled at her. It made her skin tingle; she wanted him to smile at her again.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, when she returned to the nursing students’ dormitory, she remembered the article about the Shanghai actresses.
She went into the living room to see if the Sunday Chronicle was still there. It had been read by now, and the sections were loosely scattered across the console table beside the door, but she found the article quickly. It was the cover story of the Sunday Magazine （“Such a Row in China Over the Two Rival Movie Queens”）， illustrated with photographs of two women gazing seductively at the camera. One of them wore a striped Chinese dress and was seated on a pouf, her legs crossed with one hand draped casually over a knee. The other was smiling at the camera with darkly painted lips and arched brows. Coiling between the two photographs was an illustration of Chinese men fighting, presumably over the actresses; they had slanted eyes and slashes for eyebrows that made them look comically menacing.
The caption beneath the illustrated melee declared: “It all started when Miss Cheng won the crown in a big popularity contest, whereupon the adherents of that radiant siren, Miss Wu, got mad—and the war was on!”
Grace sat down on the sofa to read the rest of the article. The passions stirred by Miss Wu’s singing and dancing were said to have inspired Chinese military officials to ignore their duties and thus allow Manchuria to be invaded by Japan. （That’s ridiculous, Grace thought.） This was followed by a threatening letter written in human blood （How could they have known it was human?） demanding that Miss Wu leave China. But the author of the article was most amazed by the idea that China, perceived as a rural backwater by most of America, had a film industry at all. （Grace rolled her eyes.） And then, in the last column, the article took an unexpected twist.
“You have no doubt heard that heroes and heroines in Chinese pictures do not kiss, as there is no such thing as a kiss in Chinese behavior.” The author explained, rather slyly, that instead of kissing, Chinese women “make love with their hands” by kissing with their fingertips instead of their lips.
Grace flushed. The sensationalism—the tasteless lingering on the alluring qualities of Chinese girls—the bizarre idea that Chinese people don’t kiss! Thank goodness she hadn’t mentioned this story to Joseph Hu. She shuddered with embarrassment and quickly went to bury the Sunday Magazine beneath the other newspapers on the console.