The Paper Daughters of Chinatown - Heather B. Moore Page 0,86

way out of her grief except following Yuen Qui into the afterlife.”

Frances’s brows lifted, but she understood Dolly’s meaning. “I’ll speak to the others,” Frances said. “We’ll all rally around her.”

It was all they could do, and Dolly knew it. But that didn’t make this any easier. Yuen Qui had received a death sentence, and Dolly hoped it wouldn’t be the same for Tien.

Over the next three weeks, Dolly spent every spare moment by Yuen Qui’s bedside. Despite the doctor’s prediction of two weeks, she hung on for another week, painfully hovering between life and death as the symptoms of tuberculosis wracked her increasingly thinning and frail body.

Dolly and Frances took turns treating her fevers, night sweats, chest pain, and coughing. Each morning, Dolly would find Tien curled up on Yuen Qui’s floor, asleep.

When Dolly tried to speak to Tien, the girl would turn away or leave the room.

One morning at the end of the third week, Dolly once again arrived at Yuen Qui’s bedroom. Frances had been on duty to check in on her throughout the night. But when Dolly opened the door, she found only Tien inside, standing next to the bed, gazing down upon her friend.

Something was different about the room. The atmosphere was too quiet, too still. Dolly approached the bed and saw what she dreaded most.

The lovely Yuen Qui had died.

Despite having known for weeks that this day, this moment, would come, Dolly felt like the world had been stripped of color. Yuen Qui’s face was beautiful, ethereal, yet so very pale and still. Absent were her light and smile. And in their place, emptiness.

Dolly’s heart felt like a vase that had shattered on a tiled floor, the broken shards too numerous to count. Her knees gave way, and she sank onto the bed beside her beloved interpreter. She had no control over the sobs that wracked her body and the pain that lanced hot through her limbs.

Yuen Qui was too young to suffer as she had. She should have lived a good number of years more. She was desperately needed by the mission home, by the girls, by Tien. By Dolly.

She and Yuen Qui had traveled the bowels of the underworld of San Francisco together, leading girls from the darkness into the light. And now . . . she was gone.

“No, no, no,” Dolly repeated over and over. Her prayers had been in vain. Yuen Qui’s sacrifices had brought her only grief. How could a woman so good, so full of purpose, and with so much more to give, be taken from the earth?

Someone patted Dolly’s shoulder, but she had no strength to rise.

“Lo Mo,” Tien said.

When Dolly didn’t, couldn’t, respond, Tien spoke again. “Lo Mo, I will help you. Don’t cry.”

It was the first time Tien had called Dolly Lo Mo. In this torturous moment of dear Yuen Qui’s departing, she had left behind a miracle after all.

“I will help you with the rescues, Lo Mo,” Tien said. “I won’t be afraid, and I will work harder than anyone.” The girl sniffled, and Dolly brushed at the tears on her own cheeks and turned to Tien.

The young teenager fell into Dolly’s embrace and wrapped her sturdy arms about Dolly’s neck.

Dolly squeezed her eyes shut as she held Tien. The Chinese girl trembled as if she stood barefoot in a winter storm. The two clung to each other in their shared grief and sorrow, while something that neither of them could define sprouted. A seed that had a future of its own. The light of Yuen Qui lived on.

“A picture of their early homes may shock your sensibilities, yet I want you to realize the life from which our innocents come. Ah Yoke’s home in Chinatown was a house of vice on Spofford Alley. Her mistress, Foon Ying, one of the cruelest, most depraved women of the underworld, vented her anger on this helpless child every time her evil nature asserted itself.”

—Donaldina Cameron, plea to the board to start

a home for the younger girls

1904

One night, Huan Sun had told her. But a full month had passed now, and Mei Lien had yet to go outside. Someone could be waiting; someone could be watching. The fear of the ever-present unknown had carved a hollow into her stomach. This morning, the shop had yet to open. The rain outside made it seem earlier in the morning than it actually was. And Mei Lien felt every bit of the gloomy mist as if it had seeped inside