This is a serialization of short story collection, Staring into the Sun. Start here for more info and the full index.
Previous installment: The East Wind, Part 1
September 1935
After leaving Lily’s, Rose drives herself to the ferry to cross the bay. Her car has a special license plate starting with an “R,” granted by the governor, which means that if she speeds, state traffic officers will look the other way. Fat lot of good that does me now. A snail would outrun me. She waits for the ferry to dock so she can inch her Ford Model B onto the car deck.
Like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge is in the middle of construction. She can’t wait for it to open, which will probably happen while they’re in China. Once they’re back, the daily trips across will be so much faster.
She doesn’t always take her own car. If she doesn’t mind staying in San Francisco all day, she comes in with Joe. Their driver, Fred, first drops off Joe and then Rose, going in reverse order on the way home. Rose doesn’t know what Fred does during the time in between. She knows that their cook, Lee See, occasionally can’t find certain items in Oakland’s Chinatown, so Fred gets them for him in San Francisco’s better-stocked shops, using the cook’s list written in neat Chinese characters.
Today Rose arrives home well before dinner is ready, so she has some time to herself. The three children are also home, the girls studying Cantonese in quiet voices with their tutor. He comes in for two-hour sessions every weekday afternoon plus Saturday mornings, speaking and teaching them how to write the complex characters.
Somewhere in the house, Milt is shouting and banging on something Rose can’t identify. It sounds like wood, and she prays it’s not the grand piano in the drawing room. She can hear Laura reasoning with him, but can’t make out the words.
Laura has told her more times than she can count, “Mrs. Shoong, boys this age—thirteen,” (she always inserts the current year), “—need to release their energy somehow. Don’t you worry about him. I know how to handle boys.”
Rose appreciates the governess’s steadfastness and trusts her with everything. She even sent the girls on a trip with her to Chicago and New York. She fleetingly wondered what stories people would spin about two Chinese girls traveling across America with a good-looking, fair-skinned, Negro-Indian-Caucasian woman—but at the same time, she didn’t really give a fig what those strangers thought. While Laura and the girls were away, Rose pawned Milt onto Mr. Lee and Fred.
Her daughters are independent creatures—particularly Doris, the middle child. A couple of years ago, when Doris was fourteen, she got her driver’s license early, with Joe reasoning to the state authorities that Fred wasn’t available to take her and her older sister Betty to their high school, Holy Name Central. It was probably the only age exception in the state that involved an unavailable chauffeur rather than something more prosaic, like needing to work on a farm.
For Doris’s driving lessons, Fred took her into San Francisco in the little Ford convertible Joe had given her. Doris reported back that they’d stop halfway up a hill and Fred would say, “Now you take it up. If you learn to drive on a hill, and you can stop, and you can go up, then you will never be afraid of hills.” Rose suspects that Doris will end up being afraid of very little in life.
Six-thirty arrives. At some point, Fred has dropped off Joe and, like Laura, has gone home for the day. Mr. Lee has prepared a mouth-watering dinner: roast squab (a family favorite, typical of the Zhongshan area where he and Joe are both from), sea bass slices, choi sum greens, mixed vegetables with mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and of course, a bowl of rice. The cook calls them to dinner and the family sits down. Mr. Lee lives with them, in the basement, and will eat alone in the kitchen.
Rose raises her eyebrows at her daughters; on cue, they name every dish in Cantonese before the family starts eating.
In English, Milt mocks his sisters, “Chicken, fish, vegetables, vegetables, rice.” The girls and Joe ignore him. Rose flashes him a small smile, wishing he’d be quiet.
Joe clears his throat. He says in Cantonese, “We’re planning a trip to China next year. Girls, you’ll attend Lingnan University while we’re there.”
Doris, hardly missing a beat as the news sinks in, says, “Tell me about Lingnan University, please, Father?”
Joe speaks slowly so his daughters are sure to understand. “Let’s see…it’s well-regarded, and I’m sure you two will find your feet there quickly. I’ve never seen it myself. It’s my first time back since I left when I was just a little older than Betty. You know that’s when I came here to Gum Saan, when I was eighteen.”
Doris and Betty listen closely while their brother stabs his chopsticks into his food.
Doris probes, “Gum Saan, Gold Mountain. Do you mean America, California, or San Francisco?”
“I suppose the West Coast, where people came for the Gold Rush in 1849.” Joe pauses. “Where you’re going in China isn’t too far from your grandmother in Long Tow Wan, so you can see her again. What is it now, five years since she was here?”
“Four,” corrects Rose.
“Okay, four.”
Milt has picked out the word for paternal grandmother and interjects, “Little-Foot Maa-Maa. Her feet are smaller than mine!”
Joe responds in English, “Indeed they are.” Turning back to address Doris and Betty, he continues in Cantonese, “You two are lucky that you were born in America. If your mother had been born in China, her feet would be bound like Maa-Maa’s. You can meet your auntie too. I haven’t seen her for...,” he calculates, “almost forty years.”
Milt butts in, “What are you talking about?”
“Our trip to China. You’ll be with us at the Gloucester Hotel in Hong Kong. It’ll be fun.”
Fun, the same word Rose used with her sisters. So vapid.
“China, wow!” says Milt.
Rose’s face is set in its usual frown of disappointment. She’s dreading all that time with Milt on her own: if only they could take Laura with them. The girls will be fine, away at the university. I’ve picked the short straw. She sighs loudly. Nobody reacts.
Milt seems like a baby compared to Doris, though there are only three years between them. The girls are like the roses in their back yard, perfectly trained onto the trellises, blooming.
Rose and Joe never explicitly agreed to spoil Milt—their free-for-all indulgence just happened. For Rose, the reasoning is that he’s their only boy, he’s the youngest, and he’ll need to take over the business one day, so he might as well have some freedom before that.
The girls, on the other hand, will marry into their futures; they need to be good catches beyond their wealth. Thus the discipline, the tutoring, the piano lessons. For Joe, Chinese language and culture means everything. He always drones on about how he promised himself that, if he achieved his ambition—a definite yes, Rose thinks—he would vitalize education—whatever that means—to bring up more talent in China.
Joe has moved on to a pop quiz on Confucian principles. “What are the Five Relationships?”
Doris recites, “Also known as the Five Bonds. Ruler to Subject, Father to Son, Husband to Wife, Elder Sibling to Younger Sibling, Friend to Friend.”
And Chinese history. “Who was the first king of China?”
Betty pipes up, “Wong Ti.”
Milt is staging a sword fight between his two chopsticks, complete with sound effects and narration: “Generalissimo Milton William Shoong is the victor!”
He’s a bit of an experiment, Rose realizes. Like the East Wind winning or losing double…it’ll be like that with him.
After dinner, Rose and Joe retire to their bedroom. Joe shrugs off his jacket and takes off his tie.
The ticker tape runs constantly, like a typewriter key being hit over and over. It sits on a rosewood table and spits out paper in long ribbons into a basket below. Damned thing.
Joe lifts the protective glass dome and opens a metal door on the machine to reveal a cylindrical felt pad. He carefully brushes ink onto the felt, closes the door, and puts the dome back in its place. Twice a week, every time this little ritual happens, Rose rolls her eyes.
He threads the paper ribbon between his fingers and scrutinizes the cryptic numbers and letters.
Rose’s head is throbbing and she yearns to be back in Lily’s parlor with her sisters. She tries to picture the trip to the foreign country that she has always been told is her motherland. Her breathing becomes shallow as the pressure in her builds.
She prods, “So, how are the opium markets doing?”
“You’re the daughter of the Queen of the Opium Ring, remember.”
“And you got caught up with it too—you’re not as high and mighty as you think.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Joe bats back, emotionless, still fixated on the ticker tape and scribbling notes with his fountain pen in a small, leather-bound notebook.
“I’ll do whatever I want.”
“I’ll say.”
“Fuck you!” Shrill, she tries it on for size.
“How dare you?” he says evenly.
Entirely unsatisfying. She changes tack. “At least I finished high school.”
“Apples and oranges. I would have been happy for you to go to college, too.”
“But I was knocked up with your children.”
“Our children.”
“Your children.” That doesn’t even make sense. She exhales heavily. This is going nowhere. She should be the happiest of the sisters. She’s the one with the richest and most handsome husband. But instead, she’s the most miserable. Her daughters are distant and cold to her—and, annoyingly, loving toward their father. She adores Milt, but he’s a holy terror.
Rose gives up, lava still flowing through her veins. She can’t recall her parents fighting, ever.
Rose’s father, Fong Soo Hoo, was known among Americans as “Big Jim” due to his personality rather than his stature. His wife, Sing-fah, was his opposite, a shy woman who had grown up cloistered away from public view in her family’s apartment in Chinatown. “Being shut away was the norm for Chinese girls then,” she told Rose.
Fong brought out a lightness in Sing-fah which was manifested with occasional tinkling laughter reserved just for him. Rose’s parents didn’t easily get their feathers ruffled. She viewed their bond as some kind of conspiracy, linked to their history with opium.
Fong was a merchant—humble, run-of-the-mill, not a millionaire like Joe—starting with a cigar store in Napa, where the Soo Hoos lived before moving south to San Francisco. In Chinatown, he opened a dry goods store with waxing and waning income. It was during an interim stint as a steamship agent when he and a friend were tempted into opium distribution by a group of customs guards.
When Rose was in her early twenties, her father, his friend, and the ten guard-smugglers were “caught in a net” (as the Arizona Republic put it) and indicted by a federal grand jury. After two years going through the legal system, six men were ordered to serve six-month prison sentences, while Fong and one of the guards got a year.
Rose and Joe planned their wedding for June 1916, two months after Fong finished serving his time at the Alameda County Jail.
Before Fong had spent time at the jail, Sing-fah had already had a short stay there. During the waiting period between Fong’s indictment and the judgment, Rose’s parents couldn’t keep their hands off opium. Sing-fah, under surveillance, was caught with a five-tael tin of opium hidden in her blouse. The Tonopah Daily Bonanza dubbed Sing-fah “Queen of Opium Ring,” reporting that “immense quantities of opium were passing through her fingers.” Rose’s mother was detained in jail, pled guilty, and ended up with a $250 fine—more than six times the tin’s market value.
And Joe? The lucrative opium trade drew him in too. Rose kept her nose out of his business, as she did with her parents’ activities. Before Fong went to jail, Joe was detained for smuggling opium from Mexico, paying $5,000 bail to be set free. Nothing stuck except for Joe’s propensity to goad Rose about her parents.
To be continued on 11 October 2025.
Wow, lots of intrigue!!!