Face

by Aimee Liu

  From the corner of my eye I see two boys with chiseled faces leaning into the Unisex storefront. They leer at me and shove fingers through the spikes of their hair. They spit.

  I turn quickly, raising the Leica, shoot them once, twice, three times dead on, and start running. Keep running. All the way uptown.

  10

  I am watering my mother’s flowers, clipping the dead leaves, wiping soot from the balcony furniture. My brother has left his Mad magazines on the table, and I pick one up, thumb through it without focusing. I can’t see why Henry thinks Alfred E. Neuman is funny. Nothing seems funny to me in this heat. The sky pulses and glows as if the whole world has a fever.

  But as I put the magazine down, the weather changes. A wind comes up, first moaning, then roaring, scalding as the sky. My feet peel upward and I grab a chair, but the wicker is too light. The twisted air pulls me onto the railing, where I perch like a high-wire artist.

  I look down on a street that’s vacant except for Lao Li, running but too far away and fading. Heat shoots from the pavement, pounding upward with the noise of sirens. The city falls back, scorched white, and still the sky keeps pulling, knifing me when I look up. I reach to shield my eyes.

  A cool hand I can only feel, not see, presses back. Quiet.

  Press, release. Press, release. It covers my eyes, strokes my face. Smooth skin scented with pine, meadow grass, and leather.

  “Maibelle. You’ll get heatstroke sleeping out here.”

  He lifts me in his arms and carries me up. Farther, away from the sky.

  The television was on when I woke from this dream. The lights, too, though that was normal. I’d been watching television, fell asleep fully clothed. Normal to leave things burning. But the television is not normal.

  Outside, a siren screams. I count to ten before it passes.

  I was watching The Tonight Show on Channel 4 when I fell asleep. Now it’s after three. Of course, the program would be different. A nature show about children in Tibet. But the thing is, it’s on Channel 7. And the sound is off.

  The listings are right here. Tonight 4, Tibet 7. Not a switch that can happen by itself.

  Another siren breaks the night.

  Marge. This is her kind of show. Something she’d want me to see. Boys no more than four years old in saffron monk’s robes. Himalayan peaks shrouded in clouds.

  It’s for your own good.

  The voice is in my head. I know that, but it doesn’t belong to me. Gravelly, harsh, and loving at the same time. I want to believe it’s her talking to me. That her hand turned the knob. I don’t mind believing in ghosts. Quite the opposite.

  But I don’t believe, not enough to stop the other possibility that crouches in the next room. No creaking floorboards. No muffled breathing. I left the lights on in there, too, and no unfamiliar shadows cross the doorway.

  See for yourself.

  I see them, all right. They followed me home and waited for their chance. Then through the old lady’s yard. Leering. Sneering. Spitting in the garden. And up the fire escape.

  I grab the heavy flashlight I keep beside my bed and slide along the wall. At the threshold I stop and listen to the fading sirens. Four feet away in the shadows they run their thick practiced hands through the spikes of their hair…

  I step around the corner quickly, brandishing my weapon.

  Marge’s children blink back at me. An empty sofa. Equipment and gizmos. Relentless overhead light. The explosion of my own breath exhausts me.

  I touch the locket at my throat and imagine Johnny beside me, taking my hand, walking me forward. I count to twenty while opening the kitchen, the bathroom, the front closet, all empty. Check behind the backdrop paper, through the curtains. I make sure the dead bolt is turned on the door and, securely awake now, turn out the light.

  Only when there is no chance of sleep can I take comfort from the dark.

  I lift the window and straddle the ledge. No one. Marge is silent now, the television only a whisper beyond the wall. I must have changed it myself.

  I just don’t remember.

  The lights of Greenwich Avenue burn through the night, but the street is as empty as in my dream. Not a sound except the renewed eruption of sirens.

  “I’ll do it.”

  The line crackled slightly. “Maibelle?”

  “I can meet you this morning if you want.”

  “I’ll be at the seniors’ center on Bayard Street at ten.”

  “Fine.”

  More static. “This only works if we’re partners, Maibelle.”

  “I don’t expect you to pay me.”

  “Partners means this isn’t just a favor you’re doing me.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Two hours later he was standing on the corner of Bayard and Elizabeth with a blue loose-leaf notebook under one arm and an audio pack slung over the other. How smooth he looked. His skin, his hair, the spotless slope of his white shirt. No wrinkles, no flaws, no tortured curls or stray threads. No spike-haired companions or concealed flashbulbs. His seamlessness at once reassured me and put me on guard.

  I carried two camera bags but he made no attempt to relieve me of these as he touched my arm in greeting.

  “You don’t have to stick with me.”

  I mimicked astonishment. “You’re not letting me loose!”

  He smiled. “Partners.”

  “And cover credit, of course.”

  “Of course.” He offered his hand to shake on the deal. It felt solid, smooth as the rest of him, hairless.

  I scanned for warning signals. Skidding heartbeat, ringing ears, the sweats. Nothing. The sidewalk stayed decisively beneath my feet. The sky burned blue, not white. The weekday morning traffic was light and shopkeepers nodded politely as we passed. I glanced at Tommy as he addressed them by name. Maybe I needed an escort, after all. If it worked, what was wrong with that?

  If it worked, I would owe him dearly.

  The senior citizen center used to be the five-and-ten where I bought my paper dolls. The outside has since been whitewashed and a red and gold sign hangs overhead. A screen painted with the stone mountains of Guilin shields the window, and fluorescent lights stripe the ceiling. As soon as we stepped into the hallway I heard the familiar shuffle of tiles, Chinese voices, hacking coughs of lifetime smokers.

  “They’ll see you as an outsider,” he said. “They might give you white eyes at first.”

  “White eyes?”

  “Turn up the whites to ignore you.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Take it easy. After a while some of them might remember you. The rest will get used to you. I wouldn’t try to photograph them until they do, though. Even the ones who’ve been here for decades, a lot still worry about deportation. They don’t trust cameras.”

  “Or redheads.”

  He cupped his hand over my shoulder and squeezed. “They’re suspicious of what they don’t know. Human nature.”

  “Tai.” The name was beginning to seem natural.

  He took his hand away. “It’s all right.”

  We entered a large open room filled with card tables, soft pop music, and some fifty players intent on the ivory before them. Old palms swam through the tiles, cut circles and swirls. They might have been choreographed.

  A man at the closest table squinted at me. He had a wispy goatee and balloons of skin beneath his eyes. He stared for a second, then waggled his fingers low and wild to get his partners’ attention, jabbed the air in my direction until everybody looked up.

  I nudged Tommy. “White eyes?”

  He leaned over and spoke to the man in Chinese, and a few seconds later the old face fanned wide open. The man grabbed my hand and rubbed it between his shrunken palms.

  “Miss Chung! Miss Chung! You remember me, yes? Grocer Hu?” He thumped his chest. “You go ’way, all grown-up, come back a beautiful lady.”

  The warmth of his grip, his smile, his words worked together. My face went hot and I had to fight a
sudden impulse of tears.

  Tommy folded his arms across his chest. “Told you you’d meet some old friends.”

  I took a deep breath, squeezed Grocer Hu’s hand, and leaned down to meet his mah-jongg partners. Uncle Fah-chi, a rotund figure with thick, distorting glasses and a smile like a sideways question mark, used to manage the Long Ho Restaurant on Mulberry Street, but maybe I never knew him because of his hours, two P.M. to four A.M. most nights. I wouldn’t remember Auntie Mee and Auntie Soong because they had come to Chinatown only in the past ten years. “Not old-timers like you and me!” Hu cried, which set off another gale of Chinese laughter like a mad fluttering of wings.

  “I do believe you’re in love,” Tommy whispered as we moved on.

  “I didn’t think he knew I existed.”

  “Everybody knew about you. You had the best view in Chinatown.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I was smiling. I was an old-timer. The notion was as exhilarating as it was absurd. All over the room heads started to wag, wizened mouths broke into grins, and black eyes snapped with curiosity. Not a single pair of white eyes.

  “Maibelle, this is David Ling.”

  I turned and came face-to-face with the ponytailed man I’d last seen barking like a seal. His smile curled into a bemused frown. He knew me but couldn’t place where. I considered not telling him, but the flush of Hu’s recognition still held me in its protective bubble.

  “The bus protest.”

  “Oh, no. You’re the lunatic who ran across six lanes of traffic.”

  “Trying to get away from you and your welcome wagon.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

  “So are you.”

  “Mind filling me in?” asked Tommy.

  “That bus protest last week. We confused her with the tourists—I’m afraid we came on a little too strong.”

  I couldn’t read the dimple that appeared in Tommy’s cheek, but all he said was, “Sounds like an apology is in order. And an introduction. Maibelle was living on Mott Street when you were still protesting diaper changes back in Taiwan.”

  We shook hands cautiously.

  “Please forgive me. Sometimes political activism leads to personal stupidity.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Stupidity is such a relative term; what would he think if I told him mine was caused by probable insanity?

  Instead, I calmly—even sedately—answered, “No face lost.”

  Tommy explained that David was director of the seniors’ center. It seemed that, while he objected to the tourists taking pictures of Chinatown, David fully endorsed Tommy’s project. Now, as he strode across the room waving and patting backs like a politician shilling for votes, he subtly directed me toward the faces that were worth photographing.

  This one, he said, was a card shark in Canton before the war, that one sold tires to the Japanese. This man with the scar across his scalp was shot by the Red Army and left for dead in a ditch. That woman with the glass eye was raped and watched her husband being beheaded by the Japanese in Nanking. Most of the men had spent their American lives working fourteen-hour shifts in laundries or restaurants. Some had been caught and sent back to China three or four times.

  As David talked I had the odd, unsettling feeling that I was looking at surviving shadows of my father’s photographs. These people had lived the scenes he witnessed. Some may have been his actual subjects. He claimed to know no one in Chinatown, certainly had never spoken of this common past. If it weren’t for my college professor—and indirectly for Mum urging me to study photography—I would never have made this connection. Yet it was my father who, by giving me his camera and urging me to use it, had set me up for this moment and the sense of responsibility that swept over me now. A responsibility quite different from the one my mother had been hammering into me for years, this had nothing at all to do with Art, and I was utterly unprepared to fulfill it.

  “These people have been through hell,” said David. “But they feel safe here. This—a game of mah-jongg with friends—is their reward.”

  Across the room, Tommy sat next to a lady wearing a black turtle-neck and glossy black wig. He laid out his tape recorder and notebook.

  “Is it wise to make them relive the past?” I asked David.

  “They don’t forget because they want to, but because they’re afraid to remember. Tai thinks recording their stories can help them get over the fear. Break Chinatown’s code of silence.”

  “You agree?”

  David smiled to a humpbacked man in a plaid beret. “Not sure. But the stories are too important to lose. For all of us.”

  I wandered among the players for nearly an hour before they lost interest in me. More than once I felt my body physically pulling for the exit, but Tommy or David would catch me with an encouraging glance. I finally extracted the Leica from my pocket and began to focus.

  My first subject was the woman with the glass eye. I couldn’t help it. If what David had said was true, she’d survived unspeakable horrors. She could conceivably have been the young wife of that headless body in my father’s photograph. But would I know it to see her now? The glass eye looked at once straight ahead and out to the side—like the moon on a clear night following its watcher without ever moving. Her other eye pounced and darted from players to tiles. Lacquer birds dangled from her ears, red chopsticks pierced the knot of stark white hair at the nape of her neck. Her pink Mets sweatshirt covered her knees.

  She couldn’t have been taller than five feet or weighed more than eighty pounds, and though I didn’t understand a word she said, I could see she ran a wicked game of mah-jongg. She played for over an hour winning virtually every hand until a mountain of chips sealed the space before her, and the others at the table were begging to switch to fan-tan. At which point she gave me exactly what I only that moment realized I’d been waiting for—a grin of exuberant, toothless triumph. Survivor as victor. Then she hoisted herself with a great deal of effort and evident pain onto two bamboo canes. Her winnings tucked inside her sweatshirt, she left her partners to their cards.

  I moved on to two deaf couples who managed to simultaneously play, chain-smoke, and talk with their hands. My shot came when one of the husbands told a joke that annoyed his wife. I caught him weeping with laughter, hands shaping a swan, while she furiously sliced the air, her manicured fingers joined into a sword.

  The more subjects I found, the more seemed to appear and the less I consciously thought about what I was doing. A man in a brown felt coat at least thirty years out of style hummed along with the golden canary he kept in a cage on the floor. His friend with a crewcut and skin like a walnut shell, one jet-black eye and one amber—the same colors as his teeth—broke spontaneously into a Hank Williams tune. Behind him and completely oblivious to his beat, a man and a woman in matching baby-blue sweat suits slowly, hypnotically, practiced t’ai chi. The Leica caught them all.

  Finally I returned to the first table to take Lao Hu’s portrait. The two aunties had joined a crew of ladies fixing tea in the kitchen, but Hu and Fah-chi were only too happy to pose for me. They each gripped the edge of the table and sat up straight, stared at the camera, and stretched their lips back until their gums showed. With that landscape screen directly behind them, their identical white shirts and pens in their pockets, with Fah-chi goggled-eyed through those Coke-bottle glasses, they looked like perfect caricatures of old Chinese power brokers. I lowered the camera, wanting a more accurate way to frame them.

  Fah-chi leaned forward and stared at me so hard his eyebrows touched together. I smiled back and shot. Shot again as the old man bored through the lens. A steady hand, my father said. That’s all it took. But my hand, inevitably, was shaking.

  Whatever he was looking at or for, I told myself, I mustn’t take it as an affront. The day had been a success. I’d passed inspection. I’d kept my head, even enjoyed myself. No villains. No demons. Now Tommy, who had spent the past half hour interviewing the Hank Williams fan, was stridin
g across the room. In a minute or two we’d be gone.

  “I know!” The tiles leapt as Fah-chi’s hand slammed the table. “You are Li’s girl! Mei-bi Chung, yes? His little Jade Maiden.”

  I glanced at Tommy, who stood just outside our circle. He folded his arms.

  “You were friends?” I asked Fah-chi cautiously.

  “Same fong. Same barber. I hear a lot about you for some time. I hear he taught you to write Chinese.”

  “No.” I waved my hand to force down the blush I again felt stinging my cheeks. “No. He tried but I wasn’t a very good student.”

  “You are like a daughter to him.”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t a very good daughter, either.”

  “Ah, you show Chinese humility. Li would be proud of you.”

  But I wasn’t being humble at all. I was simply telling the truth.

  A few minutes later I left Tommy on the corner of Canal Street with an honest hug. The morning had been a success, after all. The whole way home I couldn’t stop thinking about Lao Li.

  I’d ignored my father’s prohibition, of course. Lao Li’s tacit offer of stories and friendship had the power of a spell. In no time I was visiting once or twice a week.

  Always he greeted me with a cup of tea and a cookie from the pink box under his desk. He asked after my family’s health, then had me select an object in his shop. Every one of Li’s artifacts, it seemed, had a mystical tale to go with it. The falling-apart rickshaw, for example, had belonged to a leper who was transformed into a monkey after helping the Emperor Yung Yen’s third son escape from an evil warlord. When I asked if the leper really preferred to be a monkey, Mr. Li answered, “Monkeys very powerful. They keep away evil spirits.” As if the leper could not have asked for a better fate.

  A set of porcelain wine cups prompted a story of scholar-poets gathered by a country stream to drink themselves into a state of grace and compose by the light of the moon. From the ornamental dragons on an opium pipe came a tale of men enslaved by demons. And when Li took me into the river gorges of a landscape scroll, I heard the dying sighs of coolies, the cries of drowning men. The China Lao Li taught me to fear and love was a world where magic and real life mingled without warning.