With this interactive death chart, you plug in your race, gender, and age, then it displays a chart of how and when you’re most likely to die, based on CDC data. I plug in my stats: Asian, female, twenty-five. The chart whirls out its prediction. Most likely I will die of cancer or a circulatory disease. I plug in J’s stats: white, male, twenty-six. Most likely he will die of cancer or a circulatory disease.
“Are you feeling lucky?” my dad asks.
The question is a trick, or an entrance to a vast, complicated maze I have no choice but to enter. The first days of bonding and reunion have given way to the old paths, the ingrained behaviors, the past pains and irritations. I am exhausted and snap at him.
“Not really. Why?”
“You better start feeling lucky, then. And watch your tone.”
We walk farther, until he stops and says, “Here we go.”
It is a small booth, the lower section a glass case full of various colored paper items decorated with Chinese faces and characters. The man inside sits on a plastic crate, a cat on his lap, listening to some sort of talk radio.
My dad says something in Cantonese, “Hello” or maybe “How’s it going?” or quite possibly “Hey, old man, it’s me.” The man stands up; the cat scampers up and out of the booth, down the street. I watch it go.
“This is my buddy, the lotto man,” my dad says. His buddy, the lotto man, nods carelessly in my direction. The man has yellow fingertips, which are now wrapped around a dark bottle with a gold cap.
“You see,” my dad says. “Just like I told you. Every time I come here he makes me drink wine with him. These are my bars in Zhuhai.” He sweeps his arm, which spans the entire booth. The lotto man pours amber liquid into three small cups, then gestures for me to pick one up. I do. He says something to my dad and laughs.
“What’s he saying?”
“He says you don’t look very happy. So drink!”
We clink our cups. Gom bui! The men pour their drinks down their throats, shot-style. I sniff at the stuff and take a sip. It is bitter and strong and I wince. It is definitely not wine as I understand wine, but my dad has called it wine. Another trick.
“It’s liquor,” I say.
“This is Chinese medicinal wine, that’s the name,” he says. “You don’t have to finish.” So I do, and I feel the heat rise inside me.
The lotto man’s mouth moves. I watch his body closely, desperate to glean meaning out of where his toes point, how far he leans forward, the placement of his arms, the twitch of his eyebrow. After a few minutes, I’m certain he’s tired of my dad’s constant talking. I forgot, or did not remember fully, how much he truly talks. I don’t think five minutes of silence have passed without him telling another story from his past, complaining about something or another, going over the mundane details of this or that. He’s always talking, to anybody and everybody, even if they don’t want to hear it.
“Let’s go,” I say. “I’m hungry.”
I pull at my dad’s elbow, but the two men exchange a few more words, the lotto man laughs and slaps my dad on the shoulder—so maybe I’m wrong, maybe he wants to keep chatting, maybe he likes my dad, maybe they really are buddies.
“The lotto man says it’s too bad you can’t understand or speak. But it’s okay. You can pick it up in a couple weeks. You’ll remember. Chinese is inside you.”
“That’s what people keep saying, but where exactly is it?”
Before he can answer, another man walks up with a small toddler. This new man lifts the boy onto a chair in front of the lotto booth. The boy stares at me with the sullen expression of a tired child I understand well. My dad reaches for the boy’s face and pats his cheek several times while saying something in a stern voice. The boy’s eyes widen and he half opens his mouth, showing his tiny white teeth and pink tongue. He glances toward his own father, for reassurance or for guidance or to tattle, but his father is not paying attention. I pull my dad away from the booth, away from the poor boy.
“Why did you do that?” I ask, when we are far away enough not to be heard, though I’m not sure why I worry. It’s so unlikely here that anyone will understand our exchange.
“Hey, stop pulling me. Watch it, young lady,” he says. “It’s fine to pat a child’s cheek. It’s the head you can’t pat, like a dog. That’s bad luck. The cheek is okay. It’s good. He understands. Kids, everywhere I go, they stare at me. So I tell them, I told this one. I told him to behave. Be a good boy. If he’s a good boy, he’ll have good fortune and success. He knows now. He’s lucky. Think about that. Get it?”
The last time we spent this much time together was when I was thirteen and he took me to Europe. On what money, I’m not sure. During the trip, we were always interacting with strangers, late into the nights. He never had a hard time finding locals who would take us around. He was glamorous and in control, while I often felt awkward and ugly. And the whole trip, he was giving me lessons and testing me, as though each challenge would make me stronger. Go buy the train tickets, ask that woman for a restaurant recommendation, play checkers with this man at the park, pick a hotel and book the room.
Once, at a bar in Barcelona, after I returned from the bathroom, he and our guides of the night were gone. I walked around the place in search of him, panicking. I went outside, but he wasn’t there. “What will you do if you find yourself alone?” I could hear him saying. “How will you handle the situation?” I went around the crowded block a few times; concerned people spoke to me in Spanish, but I shook my head and kept walking. It occurred to me that he may have truly abandoned or forgotten me. Or that something terrible had happened to him. Or that I’d entered an alternate reality. But when I returned to the bar, there he was outside, calm and casual, chatting with the strangers. He waved me over.
“Did you have a nice walk?” he asked.
“Where were you? Why’d you leave me alone?”
“I didn’t leave you alone. I knew where you were the whole time. I was watching you.”
“No, you weren’t. I didn’t see you.”
The group of them laughed. “Oh yes, we followed you as you marched around the streets,” one stranger said, doing a drunken impression of my stride. “Your papa is a funny man.”
I felt idiotic and crazed, but held back my tears.
“My daughter is very mature and independent, though, isn’t she?” he said to the strangers and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.
Yes, they all said. She handled herself very well, like an adult.
We finally get into a big argument. It begins with my telling him about a friend of mine he knows whose boyfriend cheated on her. He says to tell her these wise words from an old-timer: She should date more mature men, older men, even somebody closer to his age. What? I ask. That’s gross. What’s gross about it? he asks. And then we go at it, standing in his living room, an hour-long, weaving debate that goes from the virtues and deficiencies of women versus men, to generational differences, to the absurd and nonsensical.
“You think you know more than me? I’ve been around much longer than you,” he says. “Let’s see if you can make it as far as I have.”
“Maybe I won’t! Maybe I’ll die in early age, and you’ll get to live to be right!”
“I would never hope for that,” he says. “That’s a very unintelligent thing to say.”
I fall to the couch and stare at the blank TV. He walks off to the kitchen. I can hear him cleaning and tidying.
After we’ve cooled, I say, “I don’t like us to have conflict.”
He comes back into the living room. “This isn’t conflict,” he says. “Don’t use that word between us. What that was, that wasn’t conflict. That was just a speck of dust or pollen, it floats above our heads, it’s there, then it’s gone. You can’t even see it anymore. You and me, there’s never conflict. Listen to me and listen carefully. There are two words that describe what we have and they are, one: trust. Do you know what the other is?”
“. . . Love?�
�
“No, love is too basic. Love is tossed around for all sorts of people. It’s meaningless.”
“Not for me.”
“Okay, but it’s not love. There’s trust, and?”
“And?”
“Counting.”
“Counting?”
“Trust and counting.”
“What does ‘counting’ mean?”
“It means we can always count on each other. You can count on me and vice versa.”
“Oh, like, dependability.”
“Right. Trust and dependability, or counting, whichever one you want to use. Okay, Jing Jing?”
“Mmm, okay.”
“Come, let’s get going. I forgive you. You forgive me, too. Okay, give me a hug. All good now. Lots more to show you in Hong Kong.”
What feels the worst is when a white person speaks Mandarin. Like the businessman in line in front of me at the ferry building Starbucks. The barista asks the white man in English what he’d like and he responds in unhalting, very good Mandarin, that much I can tell—that his accent is well practiced. The barista doesn’t pause or look impressed; she must encounter people like this all the time, catching the ferry to and from Hong Kong. She replies to the man in Mandarin, takes his money, and puts in his order. Next, the barista asks me, in Mandarin, what I’d like. I wish briefly to be another person, either one who can speak or one expected not to speak. Then I respond in English that I want a soy green tea latte. And there it is, that small glance, the minor grimace, the disconnect. The barista nods and replies in English to tell me how much the drink costs, though I can see the amount on the display, I am not that unintelligent and inept, however inadequate I am in this moment. And yet, while I wait, why do I try to make eye contact with the white man, as though to signal something to him? I stop. I stare down at my shoes instead.
On the ferry, my father falls asleep. I pull out my computer.
Hippolytus’s story continued to unfold in grand dramatics, as documented by the Call. He, too, was becoming a local sensation. The Secret Service found a love letter in his possession, addressed to Agnita Burbank, a stenographer at the Chinese Bureau office, his former place of employment. The woman with whom he fell in love, which, as the newspapers claimed, caused him to lose his job (“neglected and failed his duties”). In Agnita’s possession, the authorities found more letters from Hippolytus (addressed to “My Dearest Ami” and “My Onliest Pretzel). The letters promised marriage and a life together; they expressed his plans for the Chinese women he brought over to St. Louis; they lamented the case against him. Agnita Burbank therefore became an important witness, somebody with information that, if shared, could be used against Hippolytus.
Meanwhile, reporters found a second lover, seventeen-year-old Carmen Averreto, to whom Hippolytus had also promised marriage. Carmen, after reading about Agnita in the papers, said, “Now that he has another girl, I want him no more. . . . He was nice to me and gave me this piano and this ring. It was pretty. It had five stones, but they have all fallen out but one, just as his love for me has fallen away. I will care for him no longer. But I thought I loved—he played music, he sang and he talked, oh, so fine.” Days later, to further clarify how far she’d moved on: “Life is too short to bother much over men anyway. I’m all for myself when it comes to love matches, Da Silva is out of my life and I am not worrying.” Another mystery: a photo of an unidentified woman in his possession. “He has his local sweethearts guessing how many young women have fallen victim to his blandishments,” states the Call.
The paper goes on to speculate:
What Burbank knows will be of value to the secret service men. If she can be induced to believe that all has not been exactly fair in Da Silva’s professed love for her, she may tell everything. . . .
Upon a woman’s whims and caprices rest important developments in the case. The query is, will she remain true to the man who once said he worshipped her, or will she say “Revenge is sweet,” and tell all she knows when called upon to testify?
And what was Yamei thinking of all this? Was she thinking of him at all? Did she ever wonder if her leaving him had anything to do with his downward spiral, a once-promising musician and linguist turned human trafficker and playboy? Had she so successfully distanced herself from him that the news meant nothing to her at all? Did she ever think back on their shared memories, wonder where they had gone astray? Or had he exhibited these disturbing qualities early on? Had she known something like this was coming? Why, then, had she married him? And what was their breaking point? The moment that made her decide to shake him?
My dad experiences hiraeth in Hong Kong when he returns after this ten-year absence. He points out places where his family lived and died. There’s the pier where he first docked by ferry from Macau. This was after the two-night train journey from Shanghai to Guangzhou, the boat from Guangzhou to Macau, then the three-month wait in Macau. He was sixteen. He learned to take cold showers—not showers really, more like splashing cold water from the faucet onto his body—since the room where he and his brother stayed didn’t have hot water. But it was worth it. The communists couldn’t reach you in Hong Kong—that sixty or so kilometers of sea, and the British, acted as a protective barrier. There’s the hotel where an uncle and his lover killed themselves together, because she already had a husband and this was the ’50s, when there was so much shame. I believe it was a room on the fourth floor, which would be appropriate, he says. In Mandarin, “four” and “death” are just an inflection away from one another. The mint-green exterior peels with age, but once it was one of the best, most expensive hotels in the city. There are many suicides in this family, did you know? Another uncle killed himself in Shanghai around the same time, but at home, not in a hotel, and the reason was less apparent. He was just an emotional man. In Hong Kong my dad bought an American car, a Mustang. He worked in a camera shop and lived in a three-story apartment in Kowloon. Down the street was a great dim sum spot, and around the block, a noodle shop where an old man hand-pulled the noodles to perfection. Everything is different now. Gone are the dim sum spot and the noodle shop. In their place is the expensive pet district where tiny purebred puppies sit in window displays, pressing their small bodies and noses against the glass. I take a hundred photos of the puppies, and two of my dad on a street corner where he used to live, the little apartment building long ago demolished and replaced with a gigantic pink tower more than ten times the height. In the photos, he stands there beneath the street sign, pointing up at the words that signify he is where he once was. This is the same place, although nothing looks the same, except maybe those thick, tall trees in the background.
Here, we are constantly getting lost. He asks shopkeepers for directions. We walk up and down blocks, and end up farther away, with no sense of return, and then somehow, are back where we started, without having reached our intended destination. He asks again for directions. In one of his backpack bottle pockets is a tall can of German beer. In the other, a small glass bottle of medicinal Chinese liquor. He walks with another can in his hand, drinking along the way, and only when he runs out do we stop walking, so that he can go to the nearest market to buy more.
“Can you drink less, please?”
“Nobody minds if you drink in public,” he says. “It’s all the same here. Inside, outside.”
“Well, can we stop somewhere with Wi-Fi so I can figure out how to go wherever we’re trying to go?”
“What would you do if you didn’t have that little gizmo, that little gadget? In the old days we just walked around and asked for directions and stumbled upon things. You think I was born yesterday? You’re tired? I’m almost seventy years old and can walk all day, and you’re tired? This is your first time here and I’m showing you around.”
My feet are sore. The pain pulses up toward my head. I suppress it.
“My parents were never married. They just had the three of us, my brothers and me. My father’s family didn’t like my mother. She was a
ballroom dancer and my father’s family was bourgeoisie. They always looked down on us, so when we went to Hong Kong, I had to prove myself, and I surprised them all by surpassing my cousins in business. Did I tell you my grandfather died before my middle brother and I got to Hong Kong? He died in the casino after losing all of his money. He brought everything he had to the casino in Macau, the Grand Lisboa. I’ll take you there later. He thought he could make a lot in time for our arrival, so he could provide for us when we arrived from Shanghai. But he lost it all. He was friendly with everyone at the casino, he knew the manager, so they let him borrow money to keep playing. He kept borrowing and losing, borrowing and losing, until the manager decided to finally cut him off. My grandfather didn’t want to leave, he was headstrong, so when security tried to escort him out, he yelled at them. Then they got into a little fight, they started shoving and pushing him out. He was a pretty old man by then. It was 1965, he was born in 1897, so he was . . . sixty-eight. Around the same age as me now. He started to cough up blood and he fell over and died right there on the casino floor. The manager felt so bad about it, he wiped the entire debt and bought the most expensive casket he could find in Macau to send my grandfather back to Hong Kong. My brother and I got to Hong Kong soon after, and my grandmother spent years blaming the death of her husband on us, the outcast grandsons.”
Days of Distraction Page 25
