“I am your mother.”
Amelia ignored that. “And you say it’s for my own good. Until I left here, I felt like nobody would ever love me unless I got everything right. That a year of employment would spoil me like a fruit. How was that for my own good?”
“Amelia, you must understand. I know how the world operates. It wasn’t I who believed it. I know it must sting for you to contemplate it as well. But I did it all for your own good.”
“No.” Amelia finally realized through her confusion what she was feeling. Her heart was breaking open like an ocean wave against the immovable black rock of her certainty.
Her mother opened her mouth again, and a torrent of words poured forth. Amelia could not concentrate on them. She could scarcely hold the seams of her own emotions together, let alone listen to what someone else had to say. Not when that person (your mother, her mind whispered, and not your mother, another part whispered back) had lied to her throughout her entire life, had been offered the chance to tell the truth and had lied brazenly again.
She would have accepted an apology. An explanation. She had hoped for one.
“I cannot believe you are accusing me like this,” her mother was saying through tears. “Have you no gratitude? Do you not realize that, in actuality, it is you who—”
Amelia held up a hand. She did not think she could stand to be told she was apparently at fault for removing herself from her Chinese mother, for not knowing her Ah Ma had come for her, and for being upset the knowledge had been concealed from her.
“You taught me to question myself when I wanted something too much,” she said. “You taught me to be careful about my own desires. But you never questioned yourself the way you questioned me. When the devil came courting you, he told you that you could take a child. Why did you never ask yourself if that was right?”
Her mother sniffled, then wiped at her eyes. “Why are you doing this? Can’t you see how you’re upsetting me?”
A part of Amelia still wanted to step forward. To apologize as she was expected to do. Making someone else cry… It had to be her who was wrong. And yet were her own tears of lesser value?
It was, maybe, the first time in Amelia’s life that she saw clearly. Those tears were a weapon. They openly proclaimed her mother’s hurt, demanded attention to heal that harm, and in so doing, declared the harm that she had done to Amelia unimportant. In fact, Amelia was rude and invasive for mentioning it.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Amelia said. “Why did you think you could take me?”
Their eyes met. Her mother shook her head.
“What does the mission in Shanghai know?” Amelia asked.
“Nothing.” Her mother muttered sullenly.
“Not her name? Not her direction? Nothing? If I went to them and asked, what would they say?”
Her mother looked up, a hint of fear in her eyes.
“Did they write to you?” Amelia asked. “Did they tell you she was still coming to inquire? Did they give her your direction?”
Her mother’s eyes widened, and a memory caught at Amelia’s mind.
“Is that why you wanted me married off so quickly? Has she come here as well?”
Her mother just stared at her, unblinking, and Amelia wanted to cry all over again. But her well of tears felt dry and empty.
Finally, “Yes,” her mother whispered.
Yes. She hadn’t just come one year. She’d come more than once looking for Amelia. Often enough that her mother feared its recurrence.
Amelia shut her eyes. “Is that why you thought I should marry at seventeen?” To get her out of the way?
“I have always wanted what was best for you,” her mother replied in quavering tones.
Amelia stood. “I think I’ve heard enough.”
Her mother also stood. “Where are you going? What are you going to do? You can’t just leave me like this!”
For a moment, Amelia thought her mother might physically bar her way.
Amelia’s heart was bruised, and that made her feel a little wild. She’d had enough of being handed around like a dog that nobody really wanted. She stared back into her mother’s eyes.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “But before I do, you’re going to tell me every last scrap you’ve heard about my Chinese mother. You’re going to do it because if you don’t, I will never talk to you again. I want letters. I want names. Places. Everything you’ve heard from the mission. Everything you remember. You’re going to tell me all of it.”
“And if I do? What then?”
Amelia hadn’t the capacity to make threats. She wasn’t even sure what threats to make. For all her anger and her confusion, this woman had raised her and she still couldn’t bring herself to examine what that meant.
Amelia shook her head. “If you do, you’ll get to believe that maybe one day, if you figure out how to apologize for this, I might forgive you.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Amelia felt odd when she returned to Grayson’s ship.
Odd did not quite cover the way she felt. A freezing numbness had set in, and her veins felt full of creeping crystals of ice. She made her way to the cabin that had been assigned to her and sat.
She now had letters in her possession. Plural. She spread these out in front of her and started reading from the beginning.
None of these letters were from her Ah Ma.
Instead, the letters had been sent by the mission in Shanghai where Mrs. Acheson had once volunteered. The first letter, from a Mrs. Wilson, said That Woman (that was how she was referred to) had come again. They had promised her that they would pass on the information she provided. Further letters came at irregular intervals—sometimes once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes more.
They always said some variant of the same thing.
We have promised That Woman that we would pass on this information, and we are doing so now.
“That woman” had a name. Eventually, a Mr. Tallent used it. He called her “Long” in one letter, and “Liung” in the next. Mrs. Wilson named her as “Ling.”
Amelia strained her memory, trying to hear the echo of that family name in her mind. Surely her own name would have to feel familiar.
But her memory for names didn’t improve no matter how much she wanted it to do so. She could remember nothing but silence.
No personal name was ever given in those letters. The writers reported dutifully that she lived up the Yangtze River from Shanghai. Four days, one said, although no mode of transportation was given to qualify what that meant.
One letter finally provided more. Lee Yong City, that letter said. Near Chang Chow. That was how those words were written: Chang Chow. Lee Yong. The transliteration was no doubt a mess. But it was something to go on.
Amelia’s Ah Ma had been making the voyage from the place four days up the river down to Shanghai at least once a year for the past seventeen years to ask where her daughter was. When that hadn’t turned up anything, she’d apparently made her way to Fuzhou a handful of times.
The letters from the mission in Shanghai concluded in much the same way: apologies for the annoyance, promises not to give the woman any information, best wishes for Mrs. Acheson’s health.