“You know…” Amelia looked over at Auntie Zhu. “Even after our wire goes into service, I don’t think Diyu will have a telegraphic station.”
“But you explained it to me,” Auntie Zhu said. “Isn’t the telegraph like little bursts of fire going down a wire?”
“Eh…” Now was not the time to explain electrical current. “Figuratively. Yes. In a manner of speaking.”
“Well then.” Auntie Zhu made a little gesture with one arm. “It sounds like the message already goes to Diyu. I think Mr. Zhu is probably already in Hell. This way, I can talk to him.” She turned and gave Amelia a smile. “You should try it.”
“But who would I talk to?” Amelia asked.
Auntie Zhu just looked at her. And Amelia knew.
Long after the test had been completed, after Amelia had collected data on the length of time it took to encode the message and send it, after she’d looked at the decoding on the opposite end and identified that it had operated as expected, after everyone had left the office…
Long after the sun had gone down, she stayed, sitting at her desk.
What she was about to do felt wrong. When she was younger, when they’d passed shrines or temples and Amelia had wanted to go in and explore, her mother had jerked her along.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” her mother had reminded her. So Amelia had done her best to apply her curiosity to the Bible, where she was told it belonged.
Ever since coming to Shanghai, she’d been failing at multiple commandments. Keeping the Sabbath day holy was one of the most prominent ones. She’d been working most Sundays, a thing that became easier to do after she attended her first Anglican service and was asked by no fewer than six separate people whether she had intended to go to the missionary classes instead. No, really. Perhaps that was where she belonged.
Her curiosity about those temples, her questions about the incense she’d seen, all had been wrong. She was now going to do something that felt wrong, too. It also felt necessary.
She had imagined how she might meet her Chinese mother for years. That feeling had intensified since coming to Shanghai. She would walk down a street and find herself temporarily alone, the crowds dissipated, and the space would feel oddly disorienting. Or she’d make her way home at night and catch sight of a woman at the other end of the street, face obscured in darkness. Her heart would jump. Someone would come into Auntie Zhu’s shop and speak in Shanghainese. After the first few months speaking with Auntie Zhu and the other customers, Amelia had found herself gradually understanding what they said.
She’d been born near Shanghai, hadn’t she? Probably? If she were truly from here, shouldn’t her understanding of the dialect have come more quickly?
In those moments, she felt on the edge of some unseen boundary. She would turn and stare, her heart beating wildly, thinking finally and she’s here. Shanghai felt like a transitional space, one that stood between the child she had been and the woman she could become.
A makeshift telegraph line had been constructed inside the office for the test. One end was situated upstairs in her office, the other downstairs in the room off the entry. All Amelia had to do to make it work was to attach the battery they used to power it. She sat in front of the apparatus and collected her thoughts.
How should Amelia address her telegram? Should she be formal, speaking to a woman she couldn’t remember? Should she call her “Chinese mother,” as Amelia did in her head?
What came to mind was this: Ah Ma. It was what she’d heard young children calling their mothers on the streets. It was a word with weight to it, a word imbued with affection and the certainty of an answer. She wasn’t sure she had any right to use it.
Still, her fingers flew on the encoding. Ah Ma. EQEICZ EBTWI. I have waited to know you my entire life. That want rose up in her now, the bitter wrapping around the empty. She tapped again, letting all those feelings—the anger, the sadness, the hollowness, the wrongness—be converted into disruptions in the flow of electric current, sent out into nothingness.
You said you were going to come back. Why didn’t you? Why wasn’t I enough to come back to?
Her fingers fell from the transmitter and she waited in silence. Footsteps crunched outside the office. She heard the dim murmur of voices in passing. It was closing in on October, and the crickets, an ever-present chorus through the spring and early autumn, had fallen to one solemn voice in the evening. The eaves of the office building creaked around her. Merry stirred where she lay, then stood, stretching, walking to Amelia, claws clicking on the floor.
Nothing more. Just those mundane noises.
Maybe Amelia’s Ah Ma was in Diyu waiting for Amelia, who would never make it to the Chinese afterlife. Maybe she was separated from this world by a dielectric gap so small that this interrupted current could leap over it. Maybe it was so large that Amelia would never pass over.
It was there, sitting in her office, that Amelia finally accepted the inevitable.
She was never going to see her Chinese mother again. There would never be a time when she rounded a corner in Shanghai and saw a woman from her past. Her only connection with where she came from was the code she’d made.
She was eternally going to stand with one foot in the British rules she’d been raised in the other in the Chinese community she didn’t quite belong to. She had to accept that this was the case. She had to make it work, or she was going to be miserable her entire life.
She shut her eyes. Maybe this blow, soft as it was, urging her to make her peace with herself, was as close to communication as Ah Ma could manage from Diyu. Apparently, she was going to straddle two communities for the remainder of her life.
There was nothing to do about it but learn balance.
Amelia exhaled. “Come, Merry,” she finally said, standing. “Let us go.”
Chapter Nineteen
The journey down to San Francisco aboard the Victory, and the subsequent train voyage across the American continent, was longer and more grueling than Grayson had expected. He missed Christmas at home through no fault of his own this time, sending an apologetic telegram out of Omaha two days before he arrived home. He managed to make up a day by wheedling and bribery, and that was how he arrived at his parents’ home on a quiet afternoon when nobody was expecting to see him.
Their home was on the edge of town, which was a relief. If he’d had to go through the village where assorted cousins and workers and longtime family friends lived, he would have gathered a clamoring entourage. He didn’t think he could handle that.
He opened the door, silently letting himself in, swapping his snow-crusted boots for a pair of slippers waiting nearby. Then he padded into the kitchen where he could hear voices.
They didn’t see him as he stood in the doorway. His youngest brother, Adrian, was present alongside his wife. It had been years since he’d last seen Adrian.
Adrian had always been something of a homebody, particularly in contrast to Grayson. More like their father, less like their uncles.
Now Adrian was here, holding his first child in his arms, shushing her and bouncing her on his hip while his mother looked on, cooing from one side, and his father sat at the other, making exaggerated faces.