by Aimee Liu
That day was so cold I could see my breath in the arcade’s open doorway. I was trying to decide whether the chicken, too, felt cold when suddenly, without anyone even putting in a quarter, its wings started twitching, the head bobbing and smashing into the glass. Every part of the poor thing’s body seemed to move in a different direction. It looked the way I thought someone would feel whose brain was sliced in half. The crazy moves lasted about a minute, then the bird keeled over. It lay on its side, those white eyes open like tiny silver dollars.
I was still staring at the dead bird when Henry grabbed my elbow, steering me toward home. Mum and Dad were taking us to Little Italy for dinner before the New Year parade, and there was a little skip in Henry’s walk as he pulled me along. My brother loved Chinese New Year.
So did all of Chinatown. For days the merchants had been hanging good-luck red and gold in their doorways, displaying altars with candles and incense, fresh flowers, oranges, and fat, round New Year’s cakes. Women thronged the grocer’s and butcher’s shops. Children compared inventories of firecrackers and imitated the lion dancers they would see that night. Ordinarily I would have been just as excited. But I couldn’t forget those silver eyes, those crazy moves.
“Hey, what’s eating you?” Henry asked.
“The chicken at the arcade. It died. I saw it.”
“Cool.”
“No! It was horrible!”
“C’mon. You know how many birds bite the dust in Chinatown every day. Just look!”
He was pointing at Wah’s Imperial Poultry. That wasn’t the same thing at all.
I kept seeing that dead bird’s eyes all through dinner and was eager to get home, but by the time my parents had finally finished their espressos the Chinatown crowd was backed up all the way to Broome Street. Walking through it was like pushing into earth that got progressively heavier and more dense. I could hear the clamor of gongs, cymbals, and firecrackers, but for most of the way I saw only the backs of wool coats and boots stamping frozen pavement.
Then, as we crossed Canal Street, the crowd pushed back to make room for the dancing dragon. The huge red, green, and gold head bobbed and dove just inches away from me. The great mouth flapped, seemed to gobble the round heads of lettuce being lowered on strings from balconies above. The rest of the body undulated to the beat of the drums that followed, and somehow the dragon and its bearers, whose legs showed underneath, darted fluidly among the hundreds of firecrackers that were thrown skittering and clapping like pyrotechnic mousetraps, directly into its path.
As soon as the dragon passed, the mob closed in again, this time so tightly that I was lifted off my feet. My arms were sealed against my body. I had no idea who belonged to the broad tweed back into which my face was pressed, and except for the dim, sulphury glow of lanterns overhead, all I could see was black. I cried and yelled for my parents, but no one could hear me above the din. I screamed, but others were screaming, too. Finally everything within me shut down, the engine run too hard. I tried to think of the crush as safety, my grave between bodies a place where I could not get hurt.
It seemed as if I’d been suspended like that for hours when a sizzling sound drowned out the surrounding din. Like bacon frying in my ear at top volume, smelling of cannon fodder. I turned my head, caught a glimpse of pink paper—a pack of sugar candies or a party favor? I wriggled my shoulders and flailed against the surrounding backsides. The little tube rolled against my neck. I shrugged but could not get rid of the thing, and although I yelled again even louder, my voice was swallowed by the column of padding around me.
No one paid any attention until the firecracker exploded.
I was aware of the stink of burning hair before I realized it was my own. By then I’d been passed to my father’s arms and the pain was shredding my skull. But the pain didn’t blind me to my father’s face when he realized what had happened. If anything, it magnified his reaction.
His eyebrows lifted. His cheeks twitched. His skin turned a shade as ghastly pale as that dead bird’s eyes. He seemed to be looking straight through me, and as he looked he tightened his grip until I thought he might be trying to squeeze the hurt away, as if it were a bruise.
If I could have signaled past the screaming inside my head, I would have made him understand he wasn’t helping. But I couldn’t, and we probably would have stood there all night had my mother not snatched me from his arms. The menace in her face made people hustle out of her way, the solid wall parting just in front and reclosing immediately behind us so that I didn’t realize until we’d gone several blocks that the rest of my family was with us. Henry hopped alongside to see if there was a hole in my head. Anna whined for Mum to give her the key so she could just go home. And my father, still looking dazed and disoriented, tried to catch up.
We spent the rest of the evening at Gouverneur Hospital’s emergency room, where I was treated for a ruptured eardrum. After it was established, to Henry’s dismay, that I had not been terminally wounded and would soon recover full hearing in the damaged ear, my mother stopped haranguing the hospital staff and began to curse the associations that organized the parade.
“Celebration, my ass. The whole thing is just a gimmick to pay off the Chinese mafia.”
“Yeah?” said Henry. “How?”
She told him those red envelopes people passed to the lion dancers, those heads of lettuce coming down on strings, were all stuffed with hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth of payoffs to the tongs.
“Darling,” she asked my father, “what did you say it’s called?”
“Lixi.” Although Dad’s color had returned, this was the first he’d spoken in the hour we’d been at the hospital. “Lucky money.”
“Extortion’s what it is. Every restaurant, every store has to pony up. And they all do, too, good little sheep. So typically Chinese.”
“If they don’t?” asked Henry.
That stopped Mum momentarily, and she looked to my father for backup.
He took off his glasses and carefully wiped the lenses, then began fiddling with one of the hinges. Back and forth went the stem as he twisted the tiny screw deeper into the barrel.
“Look what happened to Maibelle!” said my mother at last.
Anna sighed and opened her mouth to ask if we were ever going home.
“What’s Maibelle got to do with the tongs?” asked Henry.
Deeper and deeper went the screw in my fathers glasses.
Joe!” barked my mother. “Will you stop that!”
My father looked up, and for just an instant I saw him as a little boy caught in an act of mischief. His face became impassive. He put his glasses back on and folded his hands in his lap. When at last he spoke, he spoke to me.
“There was a story my amah used to tell at New Year’s when I was about your age.”
We all waited.
“About a man who was caught by spirits. The man had to entertain them, so he danced and sang… juggled balls. Put on costumes and acted out stories.”
Henry and Anna fidgeted, annoyed by Dad’s lack of timing.
“But he wasn’t clever enough to outsmart the spirits, and when he ran out of ways to amuse them, they got angry. They gave him an axe and sent him to the moon.”
He stopped to chew on a hangnail and watch a nurse pass by. My mother closed her handbag with a snap.
“The spirits said the man had to cut down the trees. Cinnamon trees, hundreds of them all over the moon. He hacked away. The sound of his axe cutting into the wood was like gunshot.”
Mum got up and walked to the nurse’s station.
“When the blade hit, sparks flew. But no matter how deep he cut, each time he pulled the axe away, the wood closed right back up.”
“So what happened to him?” asked Henry.
My father leaned back, thrust his legs out in front of him.
“I used to ask that question. Every New Year, the firecrackers would remind me… You know, she was with us for ten years and I can’t remember
her name. Something Mei-lin, I think.”
“But what about the man in the sfory?”
“Oh, he’s still there. Yueh Lao-yeh. The Old Man in the Moon.”
“Right,” said Anna.
“When Mei-lin told me that, I didn’t believe her, either. I always thought somehow the man would be set free…” Dad looked up at my mother, returning with the young Chinese doctor who had treated me. “I couldn’t understand that he had been condemned.”
My mother’s eyes widened. Her mouth began to wobble, but before she could speak, the doctor leaned across to inspect the patch on my ear. He gave me a quick hearing test, checked my balance, told us we could leave. Then, after looking around and establishing that at least one of us belonged in the neighborhood, he exclaimed, ” Gonghe jacai!”
Happy New Year. Or, literally, Congratulations, Get Rich.
The rest of the years we lived in Chinatown we had to watch the parade from our balcony. Mums orders, though she usually managed to have something to do uptown on those nights. Henry routinely disobeyed the edict and went out with Tommy Wah. Anna wasn’t interested to begin with, so New Year came to be an occasion I shared alone with my father.
We would sit, freezing, in the dark and spy through the neighbors’ windows. In each apartment the doors were covered with scarlet paper for good luck. Visitors tromped in and out with gifts of oranges, tangerines, flowers. And the food! My father could recite every dish: ants climbing trees, Buddha’s delight, lion’s head, jade beef, drunken chicken, and three treasures. People dropped morsels in each other’s mouths like birds feeding their young. Then after feasting, their faces turned pink-orange by the round red paper lanterns strung from their balconies, they’d hurl firecrackers in groups of three to dispel the evil spirits.
For a long while after my father told me this was the firecrackers’ mission I wondered if that meant I had spirits in me—perhaps the same spirits that had killed that chicken. But eventually the image of the dead bird faded and I could no longer recall the stink of burning hair.
Then what I remembered most about the night of the Chinatown chicken was the anguish on my father’s face as he clutched me among all those strangers.
9
Located on Pell Street, around the corner from the pinball arcade, the Ming Yu Tea Parlor was a local landmark well before I was born. Its interior was a deep sea green, the ceiling painted tin, and the tiny octagonal floor tiles an unnatural but permanent gray. A New Year’s dragon writhed the length of one wall, glowering at the diners who, one Sunday a month throughout my early childhood, included my family.
My father used to insist that the Ming Yu served the most authentic dim sum outside of Canton. “See, no tourists,” he would say, as if this were qualitative proof. “Everybody’s Chinese.” With his hooded eyes and flat black hair he seemed to fit right in, and if Mum were Chinese, then our family, too, would have validated the Ming Yu’s authenticity. As it was, I often felt as though we were crashing my father’s party.
The only time Dad ever spoke Chinese was at the Ming Yu. “Ni hao ma!” he would greet the waitresses who circulated trays of dumplings around the room, and soon the table would be filled with plates of fragile shrimp balls, fried tofu, hacked duck, and meaty potstickers. Dad’s grinning enthusiasm made my mother roll her eyes. “Joe, for God’s sake, it’s only food!” But for my father it seemed to be more. He devoured as aggressively as he ordered the dishes, and his entreaties to us to “Eat, eat!” were calls for loyalty that my mother and Anna stubbornly resisted. Henry and I tried to pick up the slack, but still, when at last we could hold no more, Dad’s brow would tighten. He’d shake his head as if he’d been betrayed. Then he would forge on alone and polish every plate.
We stopped having dim sum when we moved uptown—when we went into exile, as Henry put it at the time—but when I checked the phone book this morning, I discovered the Ming Yu is still there.
This intelligence goaded me. I have to go back to Chinatown; I’ve known this (whether or not I’d admit it to myself) ever since Tommy’s letter. There are answers there, if I can face them. If I can get past the nightmare’s silken web, plant my feet on the pavement, and prove to myself that I will not fall or spin or crash. That no one will care if I come or go.
The terror in a nightmare is that it never ends. If I can bring it to a close through real life, I should be able to subvert my terror. Then I might stop focusing on what’s holding me back and finally see what I’m aiming for.
The Ming Yu is a safe point of entry. And my father is free for lunch.
The first thing I notice as we enter is the wall behind the cash register, covered with paper certificates. I know what they mean. They are visible proof of the Ming Yu’s many years of generous contributions to the CCBA, An Leung Association, and other tongs, fongs, and fraternities. The restaurant has paid its lucky money and thus is well protected. Nothing bad can happen here.
I can and should relax, I tell myself. My father is with me. I am wide-awake. We will sit and eat and talk as if we are anywhere. Anywhere but Chinatown.
A waitress shows us to a table. My heart gradually stops racing. I wipe my palms on my pant legs and make myself look around.
It’s hardly changed. The floor and walls are still dingy, the dragon more tarnished than ever. Smells of garlic and peanut oil seem to coat every surface. The clientele remains Chinese and my father still fits in, though I am struck—and finally brought to attention—by the contrast between his presence today and my memory of him in this place.
I see him with a kind of double vision. His hair, once black, now milky gray. The sedate moonpuffs beneath his eyes, turned as full as stones. The thick black-rimmed reading glasses, on a stay-put strap of his own invention, were never there before. And the fingers, while still perpetually fiddling, knitting, picking at each other, have thickened at the joints. The same flat wedding band he’s always worn has become coarse with scratches.
The most telling change today, though, is the absence of any predatory glint as he surveys the first tray of dim sum. “I can’t eat so much anymore.” To the waitress: “Guo-tie, bao-zi, shao-mai. Gou. Xte xie”
But the next waitress hasn’t heard that this small order is enough. She stops to display her tray and, for old times’ sake, I point to a plate of shrimp balls and another of potstickers.
My father ruefully watches the center of the table fill with dishes. “I hope you’re hungry.”
“It’s not a crime to leave food, Dad. Especially when it’s this cheap.”
He smiles. That cheers us both. He helps himself to a steamed bao. I wonder if he shares my disorientation at being back here, just the two of us, if he has any notion why I asked him. He closes his eyes and gobbles the bun, smacking his lips at the sweet pork filling.
I pick up my chopsticks and roll them between my fingers. All those dim sum lunches and I’ve never learned the proper way to use these things. My father tried to teach us when we were young, but only Henry got the knack. The rest of us learned to make do by balancing and skewering, but that’s like hunt-and-peck versus touch typing. One more symptom that set us apart.
My father’s fingers, though blunted from years of nail biting, become long and graceful, quick as talons as he swoops in on a fragile rice dumpling.
“Dad?”
“Mm?”
“Remember the night the firecracker landed on my shoulder?”
He studies the array of choices before him.
“You remember the story you told at the emergency room? About the man who chopped trees on the moon?”
“I don’t remember any stories. That was an awful night.”
“You talked about being condemned. What did you mean?”
“Probably having trouble with a new idea.” He turns his head, does something with his mouth. A clicking noise. I realize he’s adjusting his dentures. I didn’t know he had dentures, and it gives me a mild shock, on top of the other changes.
But when
he looks back, his eyes are piercing. “You still want to know about China?”
“I—” The dumpling at the end of my sticks falls back into its plate, splashing oil across the tablecloth. “Sure, I guess so.”
He speaks as if we’re arguing. “The war was a helluva mess, I tell you.”
And with that he takes charge, his volume climbing, talking at me, around me. “I wanted to go back, you know, when the Japanese invaded. So I persuaded a history professor of mine at Columbia to lend me his Rollei, teach me to use it. He introduced me to a guy at the U.S. Information Agency who thought it could be useful to have someone with a foot on both sides. They didn’t want to own me, so I went out freelance at first. Life and the news services. You know all that.”
I feel as if he’s pushed into high gear and my mind refuses to shift along. “I know about Life’.’
“There was a ready market, Maibelle. I needed the money. The work got me back to China, and I had a steady hand. You have a steady hand in a battle zone, you make good pictures. It takes nerve and ignorance, not talent.”
Something in his delivery makes that last statement feel like a spanking. This is not what I bargained for.
“Shouldn’t you be having this out with Mum?”
He blinks. His face softens. “Just listen. In ’48 when USIA finally gave me a full position, I lived in a basement in Peiping. Rats the size of—” He scans the restaurant and points to the dragon’s tongue, a foot-long expanse of scarlet satin. “They had me in the bloody KMT command center. I spent half my time taking family portraits at fifteen-course banquets and goddamn lawn parties. Other half shooting beggars and opium addicts they claimed were communist agitators.”
“Is that why you quit?”
He lights a cigarette, takes a couple of deep drags, and speaks more quietly but no less intensely. “Photographs are like mirrors. They can always be manipulated and distorted, no two people use them the same way. In the end, I might as well have been pulling the trigger.”
He stares at me, waiting as if he’s asked a question. He still hasn’t answered mine.
