Free Diamond Head by Cecily Wong Page B

favorite proverb, is a woman without knowledge .
    “It’s complicated,” Frank replied, his eyes shifting to the map.
    “Okay,” I whispered. “But just tell me,” I said, my words pushing through the narrow passage, unable to stop. “Am I being punished?”
    I closed my mouth and immediately regretted my bravery. Icouldn’t look at him. I felt the presence of his body across from mine as I sat in silence and shame, imagining him growing angry at my question, pictured a hand rising above my head, a slap across my face as my father would do to my mother. Moving to Hawaii was not a punishment. A swollen eye and a fractured arm and no doctor in the village was a punishment. A mother who continued to wash dishes and laundry, who served meals while her arm grew swollen and disfigured, was a punishment, but not this.
    We sat there, the single candle lighting our stillness, and I waited for my husband to become my father. But he did not.
    “Do you remember the year we were married?” he said, his voice gentler than I had expected. It surprised me. I nodded, my body still rigid, but I did not look up.
    “That same year,” Frank continued, “just before Shen passed, two German missionaries were killed in the north. In Shandong.” He paused and I watched his right hand reach to his desk, to smooth the corner of his map. “Their deaths, they were violent and the Germans were angry. They demanded that the Chinese government provide them with reparations for their loss.”
    I didn’t understand. Why was he telling me this? What did any of it have to do with Hawaii? I remember looking at the map and finding Germany, seeing that it was nowhere near the islands Frank had circled. Be still, I told myself, and listen.
    “The reparations came in the form of land,” Frank continued. “Kiochow in Shandong was given to the Germans on a ninety-nine-year lease. And with that land, they built an enormous ship port. The port of Tsingtao.”
    Frank paused at this moment, and slowly I raised my eyes from the ground. He was staring at the map, his thick eyebrows pushed together in difficult contemplation.
    “Lin,” he said, his shadowed eyes meeting mine, “we are friends of the Germans, and they have been very generous to us. Our business, our money, it comes in and out of three ports.” He raised threefingers, his knuckles facing me, swollen and worn. “There is the German port at Tsingtao; there is the port here in Guangzhou, and there is one other.” His index finger cast a long shadow across the map, trembling softly in the dim light.
    “When the Germans received Tsingtao, the British leased their own port in Shandong—nearby, on the north side of the peninsula. The Germans were building a naval base, gathering manpower, bringing in soldiers from their country, and the British didn’t like this, so they built their own port. For months there has been rumor of war, Lin, of a German invasion, and the British, with their Japanese allies, wanted to make sure they were prepared.”
    Frank nodded his head, once, his stare ripping through me.
    “Some men, they choose to align themselves with one country; they choose to pick sides. I have never understood alliances. There are too many variables to consider, too many trivial issues. So I choose to make friends with whom I wish. The British and Japanese treated me just as well as the Germans, so why should their distaste for each other mean anything to me? To my business?”
    Frank held my gaze. His eyes were exhausted, delicate red webs extending from his pupils to the outer edges, but they were determined. He wanted me to understand. He wanted me to know that Oahu was not a punishment. Without a single blink, he continued, and I felt a surge of the old confidence I once shared with my husband.
    “Last week, something happened. There was a surprise attack. The Japanese and British invaded the German port and they seized Tsingtao. I had no idea. I was already at sea and the news