Her mother sighed. “Don’t think yourself into a state. You know you do it, so don’t look at me like that. It’s really not that important. Be rude to Mrs. Flappert if that is what will make you happy. But realize that someone like her will talk—she likely already has. You may think that the missionary community is spread out over vast distances. You might even imagine her personal thoughts will have no effect. But your good reputation is still at stake. All I want is for you to have a chance at a normal life, Amelia. Is that so much to ask?”
A normal life. A normal life.
“What do you mean by normal?” Amelia finally asked.
“Don’t be obtuse. You should get married and have children.”
“I should have to hear people say for the next sixty years that they didn’t realize they would have to consider my feelings and to swallow how much it hurts? To have my own mother not defend me when someone says my feelings about the rest of my life should be immaterial? Is that what you’re calling a normal life?”
Her mother shut her eyes. “Amelia.”
“Do you mean that I should expect so little because I am a little Chinese girl?”
“I didn’t say that,” her mother snapped. “But we must be honest with ourselves. You are Chinese. It is an obstacle. You will have to settle. I love you for who you are. That’s why I’m telling you this—and I’d appreciate it if you’d give me credit for delivering hard truths honestly.”
That was it. That was the hard truth at the center of Amelia’s life. There was no point holding on to her heart because nobody but herself had ever wanted it. Nobody was coming back for her. The person who loved her most in the world believed her to be an obstacle, and she was probably right.
This was when Amelia should give in. She knew it. Yet some intransigent part of herself held on still. If this hadn’t broken her, nothing would.
“No,” Amelia said. “No.”
“No? No to what?”
“No to all of it.” She was on the verge of tears.
Her mother exhaled. “Amelia, I…”
But she didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t say, Amelia, I’m sorry. She didn’t say I see where you are coming from. She didn’t say anything at all. She just shook her head.
Amelia stalked off, heading up to her chamber. From her small window, she could see hints of the river through shiny green eucalyptus leaves—a hint of blue, that was all, before the landscape rose into hills once more.
Captain Hunter was leaving tomorrow with the tide. If she went with him…
She scarcely knew him. She had just met him.
But her brother had…almost, maybe, in a way…vouched for him. Leland thought he was a man of his word, at least, and Leland didn’t want her to have a normal life where she labored as a maid-of-all-work for no wages. Leland wanted her to be happy. Leland believed it was possible.
When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want.
That aphorism seemed to eat up all the light inside her. Nothing can change, her mother had told her. Nothing can change except you, so change. Change more. Change harder.
Amelia was tired of changing to make other people happy. She was tired of feeling like she was worth so little that she should be grateful a woman wanted to hire her as a scarcely glorified housekeeper to provide her husband with all the comforts of home, sexual intercourse included.
She was vibrating with the need to elude the snare her life had made for her, vibrating so hard she feared she’d run straight into folly. I need more. It thrummed through her system, impossible to ignore. I need more. Something had to change. Something had to.
She wasn’t going to decide; not yet. She had nearly twenty-four hours to think things through. She was going to be rational and come up with a list of rational questions.
But in the meantime…
She could keep her options open. She had started packing last night. Why not continue? She could always unpack on the morrow.
Amelia went to her wardrobe and looked inside. Dear God, what did makers of telegraphic code even wear?
She suspected the answer was trousers since they were likely all men. That seemed rather risqué, even for her current mood. And she didn’t have any trousers.
The green muslin gown—that would be serviceable. It didn’t mean anything that she folded it up and placed it in her trunk; she was just seeing what would fit. The blue organza, in case she was invited somewhere nice. She wasn’t sure how or when that would happen, but it was best to be prepared.
Shanghai, Captain Hunger had said. She would work with him in Shanghai.
Some part of her mind latched on to it, dreaming. Shanghai. Her English mother had found her outside of Shanghai. Her Chinese mother…
Maybe she lived there now. Maybe one day …
For a moment, Amelia sketched a little tableau. She had no idea what Shanghai looked like, but perhaps it would be something like the Chinese part of Fuzhou—houses of gray brick with gentle curving roofs built around courtyards, the smell of savory cooking rising from Chinese-style ranges fueled by coal. Amelia would be a very important telegraph person, doing important telegraph things. One day, Amelia would turn a corner…
She bit her lip imagining that moment. That moment when she would see…
She scarcely knew what face to imagine. Her fragmented memory and the passage of seventeen years had turned everything into murk. When she looked down at the packing she wasn’t doing, she found she’d somehow tangled her corset laces with a pair of stockings into ungodly knots.
“Really, Amelia?”
She shook her head. Enough fantasizing. She should have outgrown it long before now, those moments when she imagined her mother would arrive. If she was going to be a telegraphic code person—whatever that was—she would have to be focused and serious.
Question one: how does one focus when one’s thoughts always go to someone who isn’t around?
A serious telegraphic code operator wouldn’t daydream about a mother who had left her seventeen years before. She would… She would…
For a moment, another dream flashed in front of Amelia’s eyes. She saw herself in a smart outfit at a desk. She imagined a Chinese woman coming up to her in the telegraphic office of her imagination.
“Good day,” the woman would say in Mandarin. “I would like to send a telegram.”
Amelia, the future serious telegraphic code operator, would nod and get out a pen and paper, a thing she would have to do to immediately write down the names before she forgot them. “And who would you like to contact?”
Her mind could have filled in anything in response—anything at all. A man about a piano, for instance.
But instead, the woman in her mind smiled at Amelia and said, “I am trying to find my daughter. Can you help me place an advertisement in a newspaper across the country?”
Amelia shut her eyes.
Chinese telegraphic code. It was one thing for Captain Hunter to offer her money and occupation and an idle chance to exercise her mind. But Amelia had never even told Leland why she wanted a Chinese telegraphic code.
She’d been seventeen and silly when she had the idea. The late Alden Smith had not come on the steamer he’d indicated before, and there had been nothing to do but wait to see if he appeared on another. Her mother had sighed and said how convenient it would be if they could get telegrams in Fuzhou. Mr. Smith might then have sent word.