As the oldest of my siblings, Sinmay was the patriarch of the family. If he grew angry at me for hiring Ernest, he might find it a good excuse to drive me out of this house. He’d been looking for an opportunity to kick me out since our inheritance fight. Our clash had started when Mother wrote me into her will, entitling me to a share of the family’s fortune equal to my brothers’。 Sinmay argued that since women traditionally were not eligible to receive an inheritance, he, the firstborn son, had the right to execute the will his way. I sued him by the law under the new Republic of China, an unthinkable step for many people who regarded lawsuits as scandalous. But I won, and the money was returned to me, and Sinmay never forgave me for shaming him publicly.
Neither of us could have foreseen that we would lose all our inheritance to the ruthless Japanese.
I had thought to move out and live in an apartment, but I simply couldn’t do it. It would be a declaration to sever my relationship with my family. Besides, only divorced women, widows, and prostitutes lived away from their families. And now the war had emboldened rogues and gangsters who made a living kidnapping and robbing women like me. I must be accompanied by my chauffeur, who was also my bodyguard, to and from my club. I couldn’t go shopping alone or go to the Sincere, my favorite department store. Radio was a memory because it was banned by the Japanese, playing music on a gramophone was a dream because it was restricted by Sinmay, and parties and festivals were forgotten fancies because of food shortages.
The truth was I wouldn’t dare to live alone. I was raised to value my family, and family was in my blood. So million-dollar-business owner that I was, I still lived in fear of my older brother, who, at his whim, might make me homeless. This, of course, would never have happened had Mother been alive.
I missed her. Life was not the same without her. Each day I got out of bed, thinking of this hard truth: a family without a mother was like a pearl necklace without a string.
I ducked out of my car, my high heels hitting the ground overlaid with stones in shapes of diamonds and circles. I could hear the clashing of mah-jongg tiles coming from the reception room near the fountain. My siblings, Cheng, and my sister-in-law all held the fervent belief that passing the days by playing the game of mah-jongg would kill the indignity of occupation and possibly heal all wounds of pain.
“Aiyi? Is that you? Come here.” The voice of Peiyu, my sister-in-law, came from the reception room.
I had no choice but to turn around and thread down a pebble path, passing the osmanthus evergreen bushes and yellow dahlias that bloomed each spring. On a bench near the gardenia garden, my nephews and nieces were playing under the watch of Peiyu’s nanny; behind them, my family cook fetched a live carp from a wooden basin, smacked its head, and began to scale it.
“Who won?” I asked in Shanghai dialect, crossing the high threshold of the reception room.
At a round table, Sinmay was sitting at the east; Peiyu the west; my youngest brother, Ying, the south; and Cheng, the north. No electricity again, so the curtains were rolled up to let the natural light in. Around them, two house servants, all we had left of the twenty we used to have, walked around with small clay jars of stewed chicken bits, milky porridge cooked with red dates and ginseng, bite-sized thousand-layer cakes, and sugar-coated rice crackers. A shabby party before the war, but a decent one in these days.
“We don’t know yet. Aiyi, look. Cheng’s mother and I finally found an auspicious date for your wedding. It’ll be spring next year, a good time. We’ve started planning. We’ll hire a traditional band, put a deposit on a restaurant, and send out invitations,” Peiyu said.
She was the matriarch of the family, replacing Mother, now in charge of my wedding. She wore a purple tunic with golden braided frogs. Her stomach was protruding, pregnant with a sixth child, due any day. Peiyu had bound feet and rarely left the compound, but she was a capable woman, negotiating the ever-changing land tax with the rogues working for the Japanese, running the household, and gathering gossip from relatives.
“The traditional band playing souna? It’s so old-fashioned. I prefer a jazz band, sister-in-law.” Planning my wedding was not my favorite topic; it was Peiyu’s.
“No jazz band, little sister. Cheng’s mother wants a traditional band. What took you so long to get home? Was there another shooting on the street?”
This was all I could do about my own wedding. Tell them my preference, then be overridden by the wishes of Cheng’s mother or Peiyu. “Two. It’s good you stay at home.”