This is a serialization of short story collection, Staring into the Sun. Start here for more info and the full index.
Previous installment: An Upright Man, Part 3
Oakland, September 1955
There are more photos from that day where the children were happy and relaxed, out of reach of their grandmother. They clustered on the bottom step, seated on a sheet of newspaper to protect their clothes, Donnie a guarded treasure in the middle. Among the few images Henri has of Donnie, there are some earlier ones: the boy was around nine months old, not walking yet. Henri was bent over, holding both of his son’s shoulders from above to help him stay on his feet. Henri looked straight into the lens of the Leica (must have been Mary who took it) and Donnie glanced off to the right, maybe at something happening across the street in the park. In the background were typical Bay Area Victorian houses, with wooden siding and bay windows.
And one from the park itself, one of the last ones, when Donnie was about two and a half. Henri was holding his son and they were both looking at the camera, intense and serious, noble even. Donnie’s right arm was stretched out, adorned by the bracelet from his second birthday. A crisp shadow fell from Henri’s feet, as if the two of them formed the upright spike of a sundial, reaching up toward the star that keeps everyone alive.
Whenever Henri examines that photo, Donnie holds his gaze for as long as he can bear it.
There are two more photos. In one, Donnie was sitting in a small wicker armchair at the bottom of the 8th Street stairs. Wearing a cardigan knitted by Lum Shee, he rested both hands on the arms of the chair, like he was about to spring out of it.
The last picture is Henri’s favorite. Donnie and Corri were sitting on the neighbors’ front steps. The Kows were Chinese; other families on the street were from Japan, Kansas, Massachusetts, Sweden—a typical Oakland mix. Mrs. Kow had given the children something, maybe a lychee, to prise open. The two little ones were fully concentrating on their task. Corri was wearing a white dress she was outgrowing and Donnie had on a striped denim shirt and matching pants, both outfits from the Toggery. The father had caught his children unawares. When they heard the shutter click, Donnie and Corri glanced up at him, then kept doggedly at their assignment. Henri’s shadow was captured in the photo; it caressed Donnie’s feet.
One Monday morning a few weeks after that, Donnie woke with a fever and cried incessantly. Henri reluctantly went to the store, worried. Mary stayed home. There had been illnesses with the girls, but this time with Donnie was different. He wouldn’t eat or drink and his fever climbed higher. He started vomiting, had diarrhea, and his breathing was fast and shallow. Mary sent their eldest child, their eight-year-old daughter, to the store to get Henri. As soon as they returned, Henri sped to the hospital with Mary and Donnie, the boy spent and listless on Mary’s lap.
For a week, they stayed at the hospital by Donnie’s side. His diagnosis was tuberculous meningitis. At 9:20pm on Tuesday, January 14, 1930, Donnie died. They buried him three days later at the San Mateo County Chinese Cemetery.
Lum Shee did not mince her words in blaming Mary for the little boy’s death and likewise, Mary found her mother-in-law to be responsible for the tragedy. The funhouse mirrors of ricocheting accusations only magnified the pain.
The gentle curve of the fishing rod bends into a U, then goes slack, then bends again. Henri snaps back from those ghastly days twenty-five years ago, here into the present. He finds himself in the trawling boat, holding a cigarette, briny Pacific spray in his face, the smell of the ocean filling his nostrils. The fishing line twitches and he flicks away the cigarette so he can fight with the fish. He can sense its power telegraphing through the line, as immediate as holding the fish in his bare hands. His focus is completely on the rod, the line, the fish’s energy, this moment. Donnie is resting again, undisturbed.
Henri reels in a beauty of a salmon to the congratulations of the other fishermen on board. Must be about thirty-five pounds, he thinks, almost a prize winner. He acutely misses Frank’s company. His son-in-law would have shaken his hand and clapped him on the shoulder.
By noon he’s back in the Caddy driving the route in reverse, three salmon in his green metal Coleman ice chest in the trunk. Sausalito, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, Bay Bridge, Oakland. Every two or three years, he trades in his Cadillac for the latest model: it’s the incarnation of his success. It’s progress, forward movement, one mile at a time, one year at a time, one car at a time. Incremental and monumental. Commerce might be slow, but it still excites him—it is him, his validation and his identity.
A black-ink cartoon of Henri fishing hangs in his office at home. He’s in a suit and tie, perching on a tiny boat that’s one third his size, and in classic caricature fashion, his head outscales his body. From the bow of the boat rises a fully battened sail like ones found on Chinese junks in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. If the drawing were in color, the sail would be a vibrant red. Near the hook of Henri’s extended line, two fish converse. The smaller one asks, “Shall I try a bite?” and the larger replies, “Don’t you do it! He just wants to show you who’s Wu in Oakland!”
Henri has collected titles, granted by Joe and others. Director of the Chinese Community Center. President of the Oakland Chinese Center Club. Member of the Chinese Committee of the Community Chest. When he can, he chooses fishing over committees, committees over work, work over home—but he does everything. He is a loving father. An upright man.
That evening, Henri puts the thirty-five-pound salmon, now cleaned, in the ice chest. He loads the chest into the car and drives with Mary the fifteen minutes from Merritt Avenue up into Oakland Hills to Country Club Drive, household incomes rising with the elevation.
Corri’s six-thousand-square-foot, five-bedroom, two-level house stretches across its ocean-facing plot above the Claremont Country Club golf course. There’s a pool on the lower level and even an elevator, which often gets stuck.
The house is white: not the white of innocence or surrender but of an untouchable confidence. Permeated by the scent of gardenias, it oozes wealth and glamour like an ermine-clad opera aficionado. Every time Henri sees it, he wonders what became of the factory workers who lost their livelihoods so many years ago. How much of the money here, in the foundations and walls and practically wafting in the air itself, should have been in the workers’ pockets, in their bare apartments? Does Joe’s theft from his workers give the place bad feng shui? Build, build, build, collapse.
“Goong-Goong!” Ten-year-old, gangly Bonnie jumps up into his arms and he nearly falls backwards.
“Hello, sweetie!” Henri dotes on his granddaughter, favoring her over the firstborn, Miltie, who is unfortunately another incarnation of his father Milt. Both Miltons born with a silver spoon in their mouths (Henri thinks in Cantonese, with a million strings of cash around their waist) and always demanding more.
Bonnie grips Henri’s hand and pulls him into the living room. Mary follows. The views across Oakland into the bay always stun him. He squints to see boats passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, right where he was early this morning.
Corri walks in carrying toddler Rosemary—named after her two grandmothers, Rose and Mary—and sings out, “Hi Dad and Mom, any word from Bea?”
As Mary shakes her head, Henri says, “I think you’ll find out before us.” He hugs his daughter, her white cashmere sweater as soft and delicate as a baby rabbit under his hands.
“She must be overdue by now,” Corri says.
Bonnie butts in, “Goong-Goong, look at my drawing!”
Henri turns his attention back to his granddaughter. She brandishes a picture of him fishing and it makes his chest tighten, like she’s holding his heart in her small hand. She’s so creative: always drawing, sewing, playing piano.
Eventually, Viola calls them to the dinner table. Corri’s live-in nanny, cook, and housekeeper has grilled the salmon as steaks, and prepared side dishes of green beans and buttered rice pilaf.
Once they all take their seats, Henri looks around. Tonight, it’s him, Mary, Corri, Miltie, Bonnie, and Rosemary. Milt is away somewhere and Viola doesn’t eat with them. It strikes him how the women in the family—Mary, Corri, even his own mother and sister—are each strong in their own ways. He thinks about the boys and the men, how Donnie was taken at such an early age, and the rot which has set into Milt and Miltie. The source of the blight is money, but somehow it hasn’t affected the girls and women. It’s the men who are the heirs; money is a danger as much as a promise.
He knows that Donnie would have turned out well. He wouldn’t have spoiled him like the Shoongs did Milt and Miltie. Of course, his wealth was nothing compared to the Shoongs’ fortune. But it was enough, and in the end, Henri prefers it that way. He catches Bonnie’s eye across the table and winks.
Belonging, Part 1
Oakland, February 22, 1953
Stuck in the mass of people, among strangers in her own city, Mary is trying to hear the dedication speeches. She’s clutching the inauguration program and her purse in one hand and her granddaughter’s soft little hand in the other when she feels the booklet tugged from her fingers. She looks down and finds Bonnie holding it, smiling mischievously. The greatest transgression this innocent being can imagine.
“Poa-Poa, will you read it to me?” Bonnie asks.
Mary squints down at the English words written in brush stroke and reads out, “Chinese Community Center. Dedication Edition Program, February 22, 1953.”
“What about this?” The girl points to the Chinese characters.
“Says the same thing.” Mary plants her feet as the crowd presses in on them. They should be at the front, with her husband and the rest of her family. And their friends—the other store owners, the dentist, the lawyer, and their wives, the people she and Henri meet for dinners in Oakland’s Chinatown. Her second family, who share the fish that Henri catches and brings in for the Silver Dragon’s chef to clean and steam with garlic, ginger, and soy sauce.
“Read it, Poa-Poa,” Bonnie insists.
Mary thinks twice about demanding a “please” since she wants to get back to the speeches. She hurriedly says, “Opening ceremony of the Oakland Chinese Cultural Institute.”
“So it’s not the same!”
“You’re right. It’s different,” Mary concedes. She rises to five-foot-nothing on her tiptoes to see the second floor of the new building at Ninth and Harrison. The windows—freshly cleaned of masking tape and workmen’s dust—are designed to impress, extending the height of both tall stories and topped with a terracotta tiled pagoda roof. Henri was worried about the timing of the construction, though Mary kept telling him that it wasn’t his problem, he wasn’t formally involved. “You want to be on every single committee,” she teased him.
Someone jostles Bonnie and the cream-colored booklet flutters to the asphalt. Before either of them can rescue it, a man steps back and his well-polished black leather shoe comes down on it. Unaware, he shifts his weight, grinding the program into the pavement. Bonnie cries out as if the paper is her own skin being mangled.
“It’s okay, we find another one,” Mary reassures her. She’s glad to have a distraction from her unease at being separated from her family.
The ground begins to rumble and Mary freezes.
April 18, 1906
When Mary was four, the world crumbled. Then it caught on fire.
Later, her parents said that the signs were there: 1906 was the year of the Fire Horse, already fiery with the eruption of Vesuvius in Italy.
It’s her only memory before Oakland. All ten of them were sleeping in one dark room. Baby brother’s wail cut through the warm stuffiness. The high pitch of his terror yanked Mary from slumber into hyper-awareness from one second to the next. She had never heard him cry like that before. Then the other noises began.
Her older sisters and brothers screamed out for their mother.
Monstrous rumbles bellowed up from the angry Earth.
Her parents shouted for them, calling out all their names.
Outside, bricks and stone thundered to the ground, wood creaked and splintered, glass shattered. Things meant to stay together were breaking apart.
Their apartment’s floor tilted like the deck of a boat crashing off the top of a wave. Mary had popped up to all fours on the mattress. She tumbled into Second Older Brother and they both slammed into a table. A wall sheared open, sucking out warm darkness and blowing in cold air and dawn light.
The noise deafened Mary. Streets and buildings groaned, speaking primal words of destruction. Cries and screaming in all voices, of all ages, in English and Cantonese.
Then the Earth herself fell still while San Francisco broke into pieces. Dust and smoke filled the air.
Mary doesn’t remember the fires caused first by ruptured gas mains, then catastrophically worsened by dynamite intended to make fire breaks. She doesn’t remember her family grabbing a few belongings and running four miles away from the worst of the chaos, to Golden Gate Park for shelter.
She only remembers their new home in Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay, with neighbors who spoke strange languages.
To be continued on 20 September 2025.
Wow, lots to think about and imagine with this installment. I loved the salmon fishing and meeting little Bonnie.