Page 25 of The Manor of Dreams

She wondered what exactly compelled her toward him. There was something about him that she wanted to be near, to look level. Maybe it was his smile or his confidence, his playfulness, how he seemed at once uncertain and also completely at ease. She watched the clock hit nine and reached for the phone.

The last time Vivian was with a man, he had abandoned her and the life they’d built together.

She didn’t know what to tell Richard Lowell about that, and soshe revealed none of it. They sat a table in the poolside hotel cafe that he’d chosen—it was a well-known place, he said, where famous writers from New York liked to frequent, where studio executives met investors, where business magnates stayed on and off over years. He even discreetly pointed out Diane Keaton across the room.

She wore a simple sleeveless pink dress with a knotted collar. Drinking her white wine, she let her head tip back when she laughed. She wanted him to see her as a young and promising actress; and an attractive one, too. That morning she’d dabbed red on her full lips and lined her eyes, applying just a bit of shimmery powder to her eyelids. It couldn’t hurt for her to shine a little. Vivian wanted another role. And he knew people. He could help her.

“Tell me about how you got to Hollywood,” he said.

She set down her glass delicately and watched the afternoon light cut ribbons on the water’s blue surface. Everything was so full of color. It reminded her of Fujian, except here there was no thick, humid blanket of heat. She didn’t sweat much. “I was performing in some theaters in San Francisco,” she said. “And a casting director was looking for a Chinese actress to put in his movie. So he found me and signed me on.”

“You grew up in San Francisco, then? Or abroad in China?”

Vivian paused. She couldn’t pretend like she grew up in San Francisco. Surely he heard her accent. But how much did she want to reveal? How her family was from Fujian but had moved to Hong Kong right before she was born? How her bà, who was an English teacher, and her ma, who was a store clerk, had called her the songbird of the family and enrolled her at the opera to train as a performer? She’d gone to movie theaters and seen Shaw Brothers productions after her classes with her friends. She dreamed of acting in Xianxia films and palace dramas. Bà took her to Hollywood movies on the weekends, where she had picked up English. Her ma, a proud, exacting woman, told her: “Be glad I gave you my beauty. It’s a gift.” According to her parents, Yin Zi-Lian was destined to be an actress.

And so she was. When she was eighteen she was cast in a film production ofDream of the Red Chamberas Lin Daiyu. She was performing one of her last nights at the opera when the man who would becomeher husband walked in. His hair was cropped short, and he had a quiet, solid presence. He sat at a table and watched her, never taking his eyes off her. Then he would leave. Every time she looked back at him and their eyes met, she felt this pull toward this man who would only look upon her but never speak. After one of her shows, he had finally gone up to the manager and asked for her name, and when she came out of the dressing room after taking off her makeup, he was there waiting for her.

Yin Zi-Lian was twenty and in love. He was a twenty-six-year-old business owner who worked in kitchen supplies. He bought things for her: a dress, jewelry. He was discreet about it. Vivian married him quickly. On their wedding night he brought up the idea of moving to America, to San Francisco, to expand his business. He always had grand dreams, and Vivian was drawn to that. The thought of America thrilled her. Chinese movies were made there too, someone had told her. She had family there. One of Bà’s cousins had settled in California a long time ago.

After Vivian wrapped up filming onDream of the Red Chamber, they flew to San Francisco. Her mother didn’t come to see her off; she didn’t approve of Vivian’s husband and felt like Vivian was abandoning her. Bà sent them off instead, with the gift of a Chinese-English dictionary.

They moved into a small, one-room apartment in Chinatown. The ocean was close enough to walk to. Sometimes Vivian would go to the pier and just look out at the fog and the sea. San Francisco was a marvel, but still she felt untethered. The English she’d picked up from the movies and from her bà was no match for how fast Americans spoke. She stayed in neighborhoods where she would be surrounded with the familiar sounds of Cantonese or the Mandarin that her parents had spoken to her. At night she made dinner for her husband. He talked about his plans with her, his business. They saw movies at the local theater.

Vivian asked around to see if she could meet any producers. She had just started auditioning when she felt sick one morning and realized she was pregnant. She stopped auditioning. By the following spring of 1973, a year and a half after she had arrived in this country, she had given birth to twin girls.

Acting slipped from her mind as she took care of her daughters. Lucille, whom she named after Lucille Ball, whose show Vivian’s neighbor always played, and Ada, a name that sounded beautiful to her. Seasons passed. Her husband worked, often taking trips to and from Hong Kong. Vivian stayed behind with the children. She’d reconnected with Bà’s cousin, her aunt, and her aunt’s husband, her uncle. They’d immigrated into the country five years before. Now they lived just blocks away and came over to help with the twins.

She loved her daughters and adored being a mother, but she could not face herself in the mirror. She could no longer squeeze herself into her old clothes. Her breasts swelled and her nipples cracked and bled. She wanted desperately to get back into acting, but how? Her life was now consumed with the care of not one, but two infants. And her husband had become absent and irritable. When he was home, he talked about moving them back to Hong Kong. Vivian was lost. It was hard enough to come here; how could they move their young children across the ocean? He said his business was going through hard times. In June 1973 he went on a trip to Hong Kong. He was due to return in two weeks. He never came home.

First, Vivian was angry. Then she grew anxious. She wrote letter after letter. She placed frantic international calls that cost a fortune. She begged her parents to ask around, but no one had seen him or heard from him. And then someone wrote back and said that they’d seen her husband. He’d been gambling. She waited for him for weeks. One month stretched into two. Alone, in a foreign country, with two babies. She thought about going back to Hong Kong. But what was there for her? She would be returning a single mother, with a missing husband. The landlord put up an eviction notice. She was running out of time.

And then her uncle offered to house them.

With rent taken care of, she was ready to build herself anew. She moved into her uncle’s apartment by the end of summer. They all lived in the apartment, above an apothecary where she got a temporary job. The twins cried and fussed. Ada didn’t sleep well. Lucille wailed during the day, loud, piercing shrieks that seemed to flatten every thought.

Vivian changed diapers. She changed her children’s English andChinese surnames to hers. Lucille was Yin Chen, named for a silver dawn. Ada was Yin Xue-Hua, named for snow and flowers. If her husband wasn’t going to be around in their lives, then her daughters would inherit her own family name. Yin Zi-Lian became Vivian Yin. And all that time she kept watching movies, Chinese ones down the street and American ones in Nob Hill. She pitched down her tone and taught herself to form the words slowly in her mouth, flattening them so she sounded like an American. She auditioned to perform at the opera place down the block and got a small role. She could still sing. She could perform. And it was at the opera house where an American director first saw her. Don Corcoran was directing a noir film set in Chinatown:Song of Lovers, a feature film about a lovesick opera singer in Chinatown whose affair ended in tragedy. He wanted to cast her as the supporting character.

Hollywood was where the money was. But as she got more and more into acting, each following role that she fought for, each part that barely had any lines, came with a sour feeling: they had her play a spy, a prostitute, a crime lord’s daughter. They had her amplify and distort her Chinese accent instead of trying to speak English like an American. Directors told her how to sound. It didn’t feel right. But most of her sets were around San Francisco, which allowed her to be near her family. And she was making enough of a living to help pay for her part of the rent. So she swallowed the bitterness and kept going. One role gradually led to another.Song of Loversreleased, to praise on her role. Suddenly her name appeared in reviews in newspapers. The film led her to the awards show where she met Richard, and then to this very cafe at the hotel where he was staying.

Now she set down her wineglass and looked directly at him. She would tell him none of this. The sunlight glittered off the swimming pool. “I have family in San Francisco,” she said with practiced ease. “What about you? Where are you from?”

ten

APRIL 1975

VIVIANand Richard were having dinner later that spring in a red booth at a dimly lit restaurant. She had come to that dinner with a speech prepared. She wore a plain suede jacket over her jeans. She was going to order the cheapest entrée on the menu and offer to split the bill. She was going to walk away. This would be the end.

The last two months had been an enchanting fever dream. What started out as a mid-afternoon wine at the Beverly Hills Hotel lasted into the cool twilight hours, which Vivian finally ended by saying that she had to get home to prepare for an audition the next day, coincidentally for one of his friends. Richard told her that he would like to see her again. She went to the audition and got the part. Only later would she wonder if Richard had spoken to the director, or if she got the role herself. Either way, she didn’t question it.

She went back to Los Angeles a week later for table reads, leaving the twins in the care of her aunt and uncle. Vivian both adored and feared the city. She felt so small in the face of the billboards, the wide swaths of highway, the landscape itself. Daisy generously offered to let her stay at her place on the corner of Fountain and Sunset, a little one-bedroom apartment up three flights of stairs that teemed with color inside, full of mismatched furniture that had either sentimental value or was pulled off the street. Daisy had painted the walls herself and splotches of lilac and deep-blue paint spilled from one corner to another, but it was all charming to Vivian. And it was very characteristic of her friend, who dressed in sequins and bright geometric prints andbig earrings and uneven sleeves, who tried to pull her out to dance at night.

The one time Vivian relented, they went out to West Hollywood. Daisy kept pointing out famous musicians and actors who drifted down the street, talking about the parties in their homes that she’d gone to. How as a teenager, she’d snuck into one of their mansions in Beverly Hills and spent the night wandering around on magic mushrooms and getting lost in all the mirrors. Vivian kept her head clear and refused every pill that was offered to her. But still, even standing in the line outside a bar in a loose chiffon collared blouse, wide-leg jeans, and heels, with her blown-out hair fanning around her, with billboards and posters that dripped down from over two stories, she felt an electric, youthful rush. It was like she was being reinvented out here, born anew into this cosmic current of excitement and chatter, music and chaos, where she was only herself, untethered to anyone. At the end of the night, though, with her eyes aching and the music pounding in her head and her heels rubbed raw, she was pulled back into her old life, her real life. She missed her daughters. The next morning, when she looked through Daisy’s bare fridge and found nothing but bits of food in take-out boxes and bread rolls, she yearned for braised pork in a thick congee.

During free days when filming, Richard drove her in his convertible over canyons and hills, to Malibu, to the ocean. He told her about how he’d worked with Roger Corman–like directors who would steal onto film sets without permits and let anyone take a shot at cutting and editing. He’d gone everywhere: charmed shipping magnates and princes on a boat in southern Italy, accidentally entered a rodeo and broken up a gunfight in Wyoming. He’d booked one of the top managers in the industry by walking into his office and telling the secretary that he had a meeting scheduled, didn’t she remember his call? He told Vivian all of this with a sheepish dip of his head, as if even he couldn’t quite believe his own nerve, but Vivian could; who wouldn’t be charmed by that easy, hopeful smile? But for every story he told, he asked her even more questions, about her childhood, her hometown, her parents. She found herself telling him everything, down to what she would do after school and the fruits she’d eat on the way home. Everythingexcepthermarriage and children. She often looked into his eyes and was so enthralled by his sincerity, his abundant and unending curiosity, that she found herself launching into one story, one detail after another.

She told him she wanted to drive someday. He promised to teach her. He’d drop her off afterward at Daisy’s place, and on the way up the stairs to Daisy’s apartment, clutching her friend’s spare key, she’d still be laughing. She and Daisy would perch on Daisy’s little balcony, smoking cigarettes, while Vivian recounted Richard’s stories secondhand, although never with his charm. She’d catch her grin in the reflection of the window and be entranced by her own joy. Daisy teased her, saying that she was in deep, that soon enough she would be moving down here, that she couldn’t wait to meet Vivian’s daughters.

Could Vivian see a future here? How could she raise her daughters here and chase her wild dream at the same time? That would be impossible to do by herself, and she couldn’t afford a nanny. Would she leave them in San Francisco, then? With her aunt?

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