Face

by Aimee Liu

  “What happened, Dad?”

  “That job of yours for the catalog. That’s safe. Honest. There’s nothing wrong with safety.”

  “Nothing a lobotomy wouldn’t cure.”

  I don’t mean to be funny, it just comes out, but a smile begins somewhere in the vicinity of his chin and lifts up and up until his face beams. He throws his head back with a loud guffaw. Chinese laughter, it stops as abruptly as it started, and disintegrates into a retching cough. He catches his breath and frowns. I am crying for no reason.

  “You ask what happened. I stopped caring. Not just about photographs, but what was in front of the camera. I didn’t want to see it anymore. Only push it away.” Dad hands me a handkerchief. “I’m not glad that happened to me, Maibelle. I would hate the same thing to happen to you. Please. Find your own way. Your eyes. Your heart. Let them guide you.”

  “Why? Why did you push it away?”

  He shakes his head and closes his eyes. I think of the images I’ve seen. How many more there must have been, more that he destroyed. All with that same passionate irony?

  “What do you mean, you might as well have pulled the trigger?”

  “I mean what I said.”

  I empty the cold tea from our cups into the ashtray and pour in new. My hand wobbles.

  “Mum thinks we’re the same.”

  “Well, we’re not. We all begin differently. We make different choices, and the only choices that matter are the ones we make alone. You know?”

  He’s made choices alone. To abandon his career. To destroy his work. To vandalize public property for the sake of his private secrets. Not only didn’t he want to see that world anymore, he didn’t want anyone to. Including me.

  I slide the wet handkerchief across the table. A waitress counts our dishes, her bony shoulders carving narrow shelves beneath her nylon blouse. Pockmarks from some ancient sickness are written in her skin. She loses count, starts over. In the old days Dad always complimented the waitress, told how much he enjoyed the food, and she in turn laughed. “Regular customer!” Now, appearances aside, we are both strangers here and this woman seems incapable of laughter.

  When she leaves, my father pulls a black leather pouch from his jacket, places it in front of me. The size of a small Bible, it is covered with years of surface scrapes and discoloration. A metal zipper runs its length.

  Open.

  I am suspicious of his motives, but as I pick up the pouch, feel its compact weight, my arm jerks with the knowledge of its contents.

  “Go on.”

  My mother would have grabbed it by now, ripped open the zipper, and raised the prize with a shout. I am too confused.

  “Did Mum put you up to this?”

  He doesn’t answer, but I can tell from the brightness in his eyes, the stillness of his fingers just inches away, that this is between us.

  I open the pouch slowly, painstakingly, not as a show of gratitude, but because my skin is jumping. The zipper slides back, a mouthful of teeth smiling wider, wider, until I hold in my palm a small, nearly weightless rectangle of aluminum and magnesium, black grain leather surrounding a circle of glass. I balance the machine on my fingertips and imagine, reflected in its lens, the scenes it has witnessed and recorded.

  “Mum said you destroyed all your cameras.”

  Dad pretends not to have noticed the crack in my voice as he carefully chooses his next words. “No one who has ever been a photographer could destroy a Leica.”

  “You kept it a secret all these years.”

  “You could call it that if you want to. Shall we go?”

  “Dad—” I put my hand out.

  “I hope it helps, Maibelle. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

  Outside the restaurant, I kiss my father as fiercely as he hugs me. But he refuses to stay and walk. He wouldn’t mind taking a look around the old neighborhood, my God it’s been years since he was last here, but Mum will be home from the gallery soon and he promised to do some shopping for her. Maybe another day.

  Last chance, I think, as he musses my hair. We could ride together as far as the Village and I’d be back on solid ground.

  He touches the leather pouch in my hand.

  “I loaded it for you.”

  Before I can answer he gives me a light wave and steps into the current of bodies flowing north.

  It’s my own paranoia, I tell myself firmly, as the street starts closing in. The immediate roar of voices in Dad’s wake, the laughter, car horns, the blank heat and squeeze of oncoming bodies—the mortal stares of those hanging ducks in the shop across the street—windows above, with their shades up and down, like blinking lids. These details are lifted from the way it used to be; the fact that it’s the same means nothing. Nightmares may rise to suffocate dreamers, but I’m not dreaming now.

  I will myself to breathe, to feel my feet planted flat on the sidewalk, to steady the buildings against that white, hot sky. I plunge my hand into my pocket, but instead of one magical house key that would make everything all right, I come up with the Leica.

  Even if it doesn’t seem like it, everything has changed; whatever happened to cause the instinctual terror I feel toward this place happened—or was imagined—a long time ago. My father was right, I need to do this alone. Give the past a good kick in the pants and prove to myself it’s over. I remove the camera from its case and stuff it back into my pocket as I walk. I wipe the sweat from my eyes. And focus on the changes.

  Modern buildings are fronted in marble now. Restaurant signs are bigger, flashier, everything else more cramped. Merchandise and produce sprawl onto the sidewalks, people throng the streets. Hong Kong music blares from digitized sound systems, and the old dancing chicken arcade is now lit up like a carnival. It roars with video-game punches and strikes. No bird. No cage.

  It’s all different, I tell myself. That souvenir shop sign, “Tourists welcome,” means you now.

  Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. Like a child playing blindman’s buff, I keep hearing my invisible observers calling, “Warmer, warmer. Cooler. Hot!” But unlike the game, I fear that if I reached my goal, stretched out my hands, and touched what ails me, I would be boiled alive.

  I am only warm.

  The bricks of our old building have darkened, the green and red paint on the woodwork cracked. Scarlet cloth covers the window of Dad’s old workshop and an inside wall halves the window of the bedroom I used to share with Anna.

  I step into an empty doorway directly across the street. It must be a typical Chinese home now. Without Mum to draw the dividing line, it must fit right in. A small stone Buddha sits on the ledge of the balcony.

  The only choices that matter, he said, are the ones we make alone. My choice as a child was to live out on that balcony. I could set my watch by the appearance of old bachelor Wen, who spent warm mornings sitting in his undershirt and rolled-up pants on the stoop in front of his building, by the arrival of the two ancient Horn sisters at Mr. Hu’s grocery across the street. The sisters wore dull padded jackets and pants that hung slack in the seat and walked in painful, measured steps on tiny crippled feet. They would buy their vegetables, then come across to Wah’s Imperial Poultry downstairs. I’d listen to the squall of throats being slit, the slapping of Mrs. Wah’s galoshes as the Horns selected their birds. I also kept watch for the babies dressed like pastel flowers, whose mothers took them to the Golden Palace Bakery across the street. They’d come out with their little mouths sunk deep into glistening sesame balls or moon cakes. Except for special banquets, the mothers and children never went into the Hop Li Association five doors down or the Chinese Six Companies on the corner. Those private clubs were reserved for the men whom I watched through the windows of smoke-filled rooms playing games or holding very serious-looking meetings. My father said the family associations were like community centers. My mother called them the Chinese mafia.

  Either way, they’re practically all that remains of my old vista. The bean curd
factory and bakery are gone. Mr. Hu’s grocery is now a seafood restaurant, and the storefront that used to be Imperial Poultry is now subdivided into a sidewalk newsstand, souvenir shop, and back room vegetable vendor. There is no space for bachelors to sit in the sun, the women with bound feet have disappeared, and this passing baby is munching a Hostess Ding-Dong.

  Red lacquer lanterns now hover in the alcoves of my balcony. Mustard chrysanthemums bloom in place of Mum’s Alpine hybrids. Aside from the Buddha, no one looks down on me.

  I join the crowd flowing toward Chatham Square. One more stop and I can leave. I can tell Tommy—what? That I’ll accept his challenge because it no longer poses a threat? Or turn him down for the same reason? I finger the Leica concealed in my pocket. He is not asking me to make salable art or disposable product shots. Not really photojournalism, either, though that’s closer. History. It’s about recording history. Documenting people in their places before they change. Or leave. Or die. He wants me to help him preserve time, make a bridge between past and future. Isn’t that what I want, too?

  As I approach the bottom of Mott Street, the crowds let up. Beyond the immediate squeeze of buildings Chatham Square opens like a vast arena, filled above with light and space, below with the thunder of buses and cars dodging potholes. On the other side of the square, streets point like spokes of a wheel to a patchwork of tall modern buildings and disintegrating tenements. It isn’t likely that my destination remains or, if it does, is recognizable, but I have to look to see. Then I’ll decide what to tell Tommy.

  A slick air-conditioned tour bus with “National Adventures” emblazoned on its side pulls up to the curb, blocking my way. Though the windows are tinted, I know before the first of the passengers step down exactly what they will look like. Big people with puffy middles and, in spite of the air-conditioning, moist reddish faces. They’ll wear travel-ready polyester and carry Instamatics, take turns snapping pictures of each other in front of the pagoda phone booth, then mosey up Mott Street in search of fortune cookies and chop suey. When they fail to find either, they’ll settle for a cheongsam for the little woman to squeeze into at the next BOE costume party. I know these people from my childhood when the buses came like clockwork every Saturday and Sunday. I know them from working the cross-country flights that bring them from their homes in the West and Midwest to the buses that drive them to Chinatown. But I also know them from Wisconsin, where they seemed neither silly nor predatory but kind and honest and good-humored. They could be Johnny Madison’s family. What he, in spite of himself, might have grown up to become.

  Henry used to say our grandparents, too, would have seemed ridiculous if they’d ever come to Chinatown. That almost makes me glad they never did. As a child I instinctively disliked these invaders and cast myself above them. My first allegiance was to my home. If I didn’t exactly belong, I thought, at least I was no outsider.

  Today’s passengers duck their heads as they get off the bus. The women point, wave to each other, talk nonstop. They pour onto the sidewalk and turn in circles oohing and aahing at the Chinese signs, the ornate rooflines, and of course, the phone booth. They whip off their lens caps and begin pointing, arranging wives and buddies, husbands and sisters. Eighty people, maybe more, press into the corner where I was foolish enough to get trapped.

  “Helen! Yoo-hoo. Look here now, Harold.”

  These people are unschooled in crowd behavior. Never been on a rush-hour subway or stood in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Or been caught in a mob in Chinatown. When I push, they close in tighter. When I catch their attention, they grin. When I speak up, they say, “Howdy,” and wonder how they failed to notice me in the group before.

  Slowly, and with the greatest effort, I inch between their soft, damp arms and backs, have almost reached the bus when I hear chanting from beyond the phone booth. The words aren’t clear at first, but they have the rhythm of protest. Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum. Dum-ta, dum-ta, dum-ta, Da.

  I ease along the side of the bus and step around the back fender. I am standing in the street, but the traffic has stopped to watch the commotion.

  “Chinese people are humans too! Chinatown is not a zoo!”

  Some ten men and women dressed in T-shirts and jeans bear placards with slogans such as “Tourism Promotes Racism” and “Invest in the Future, Not Fortune Cookies.” About half the size of the tourists, both in height and in weight, they make up for any lack of scale by the noise they are making.

  “You hate us in your neighborhoods! We hate you in ours! Tourists go home! Tourists go home!”

  Their black hair gleams in the sun. Their mouths open and close over even white teeth as they string their chants on a continuous loop. Shoulder-to-shoulder they press the astonished tourists back toward the bus as car horns blare around us.

  “Arnold, can’t you do something?” shouts one of the passengers to her husband.

  Do something. I feel as if I’ve forgotten a critical detail, a burner I’ve left on in my apartment, something I’m supposed to be doing. As if any second they’ll all look my way and I’ll realize I am naked. I can’t move.

  The tourists are clambering back into the bus when a woman steps from the center of the advancing column and screams, “You come gawk at us!”

  She has thick bangs that stop just short of charcoal eyes. Her hair, coiled on top of her head, is held with an elaborate lacquered comb. She is as beautiful as I remember the Butterflies.

  “You think Chinese are freaks?” She leaps forward and jabs her finger at a man with a Marine cut and red and orange Hawaiian shirt beside whom she does, in fact, look like a dwarf. “Well, how do you feel now!”

  Arms rise. Metal glints in their hands. I feel the pavement slide beneath me as the tourists shriek.

  “They’ve got guns!”

  The throb of the bus’s engine rises like the beating of a whale’s heart, and I instinctively lean into it, warm air drawing me down and back against the wall of steel. I trip. My hands grab, close, find a dark space low to the ground. I crouch with my head pulled in, seeing nothing.

  The moments stretch, immeasurable, thick with the silence of the engine’s din. My eyes open. The asphalt glistens with summer heat. The tread in the bus tires travels in waves. Slowly, slowly, I remember what I’m supposed to be doing.

  My fingers locate their target and begin the long return journey back through what seems a black, heavy ocean.

  I am supposed to see.

  But when I finally lift my eyes, I am blinded by scalding white light. Around me, the tourists not yet back on the bus tip sideways. Moans erupt. Hands fly to faces. I watch red and blue and yellow, a screen of sizzling dots.

  “Again!” the beautiful woman cries, and again the world turns white.

  I sense rather than see the last of the tourists escape into the bus, just as I sense the concealed faces watching from overhead windows and the deadly blur of traffic inches from my toes. I hold my circle of glass to my face as if it could protect me and dash across the path of light, directly in front of the beautiful woman, into the shade of the phone booth.

  “Stop!”

  A cluster of elderly merchants trotting down Mott Street waves past me. They all yell at once.

  “Pay no attention! You come see. Okay tourist. Good deals for you.”

  The crackle of flashbulbs eases. The chant shifts.

  “Uncle Tom! Uncle Tom!”

  The merchants run between the protesters and the bus, laughing too loudly and hopping like wind-up toys. The doors of the bus have been pulled closed, turning the passengers to ghosts behind their protective glass.

  I realize I’ve stopped breathing as a two-hundred-pound linebacker in a driver’s cap comes around the front of the bus with a carton of take-out food in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.

  “You kids want the cops, you got ’em.”

  The protesters hesitate, exchanging glances, then resume their chant.

  “Marge, you there?” the driver
shouts into his mouthpiece. “I got a problem down here in Chinatown.”

  They grudgingly form a gantlet through which the tourists may pass. The driver signs off but the merchants keep shouting, wheedling, assuring the passengers of bargains they cannot refuse, and in a few minutes the Middle Americans are back on schedule, only mildly disturbed and maybe now amused by the cluster of Chinese-American Yippies who trail them with occasional flash shots to remind them why they are here.

  I follow stupidly, using only my eyes, as the parade moves back up Mott Street.

  Suddenly one of the protesters, a man with a ponytail, spins around barking like a seal. The roundness of his face, like a plate, registers. I release the shutter.

  “Hah! This one’s got some nerve! Think we’re putting on a good show, huh? Come to the Chinatown zoo, lady?” He leaps toward me.

  I freeze. My hands tighten around my father’s Leica, but that’s the cause, not the way out this time.

  The long-haired man dances close, peering at me through hands shaped like binoculars. The others form a tight circle around us, raise their cameras, taunt and jeer. The flash thunders, splinters into a thousand shards of light.

  I charge my assailants, push through and run without looking across six lanes of wailing traffic. Three blocks, four. I begin to slow down. They’re not coming.

  At the far end of Catherine Street I finally reach the ruins of my safe haven.

  The windows of Lao Li’s old store have been painted blind white, their frames splintered and chipped. From the upper floors come the drone of heavy machinery, a competing hum of women’s voices. The noodle shop next door is now a “Unisex Hairstylist” with a magazine stand out front. But the worst is the pillar—someone has taken a hatchet, decapitated the birds, slashed the serpentine forms, and literally gouged out the figures’ faces, then smeared what was left with red, blue, and white graffiti.

  As I lay my hands on the butchered forms, my fingertips turn to ice.

  “Lou jan”

  A grunt, forced laughter. It means barbarian.