by Aimee Liu
“But you were friendly with that lady and her mother.”
“Of course. She was one of my best customers. She pawned very precious jewelry, some furniture. Paid big money to get it back.” He rubbed his fingers together and smiled. “Foreigners like to gamble even more than Chinese. You know. Sometimes they gamble at their bridge and pinochle. Mostly they gamble in their stocks. In Shanghai they have big houses, cars, servants, but many times they have no money to buy gas or pay servants. Then they come to me!” He grinned and nodded his head. “The ladies come to me. Foreign men prefer to keep gam bling, hope their luck will change. Until they end up with nothing. Ladies are more practical. You know.”
I considered his inlaid chairs, ornate ginger jars, dragon screens, the cases of pearls and jade and ivory, hanging scrolls, and ceramic Buddhas.
“The foreigners pawned all this stuff?”
“Not all. Some come from Chiang’s officers. They stole it from communist sympathizers, then sold quick. But most from Europeans who are not as rich as they pretend. So they get away from the Japanese.”
“Didn’t you run when war came?”
“Dui. I run. I hate Chiang. I hate Mao. Japanese take everything I own, maybe kill me, too. So right away after they begin fighting for Shanghai delta, I close my shop. I use lot of bribes, lot of guanxi with foreigners and friends of the Generalissimo. You know. I send everything to Hong Kong, then San Francisco.”
“Then New York.”
“After while. Yes, then New York.”
And he had rebuilt his shop in New York. Had embraced his borrowed treasures and gone to great lengths to bring them with him across the ocean, across a foreign continent. Far from rejecting his past life, he had resurrected it here. My father had only pieces of paper, strips of celluloid to carry, but for him even that was too much.
12
Dad returned the toolbox this morning. I was shooting a miniature Christmas tree, the Traveling Tree, as it would be called in the catalog, on a bed of crushed Styrofoam.
He wagged his head back and forth. “Some old battle-ax gave me the third degree downstairs.”
“Harriet. The building manager. What’d she want to know?”
“Who I was. Where I was going.”
“You tell her?”
“Sure.” He handed me the toolbox. “Any reason I shouldn’t have?”
I shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “Did this help?”
“An idea or two.” He watched me adjust a light, try a different filter, lower the tripod. I wondered if he had some suggestions or criticisms, but as usual it was impossible to read his expression. One thing I knew, though, he’d stay longer if I continued working. He’d think his presence made no difference.
“How close are you?”
“I put it aside.”
“Working on something else?”
He sat fingering a matchbook, folded the cover diagonally, then again with attention, as if doing origami. He studied the results for a moment, then slipped it back in his shirt pocket, behind a soft pack of cigarettes. “Bad luck to talk about it.”
I started shooting. “Since when are you superstitious about your work?”
What I saw through the viewfinder was a lone pine in a snowy meadow, no scale. I’d already done one set with the tree’s branches covered with tiny ornaments, but I preferred this cleaner, stripped-down image. Ironically it was the more artificial; the contraption was closer to a Christmas tree than to a real pine. Noble would probably use the decorated version.
“Maibelle,” my father said, “Diana’s upset with you.”
I tightened focus until the needles became blades of cut green plastic. “I’ve been busy.”
“That’s good.”
Dad picked up the National Geographic lying next to him on the couch, open to Marge’s photograph of an Indian boy doing a handstand on the back of a water buffalo.
“She wanted me to say something. I take it you didn’t hit it off with Foucault.”
I lowered the tripod. “It’s not important.”
My father sucked at his dentures. “The man’s a horse’s ass. Whatever she tells you.”
“I know.” I began to shoot. The hidden pictures. Mum and Foucault. The scheme to bring Dad back from the dead and screw him at the same time. The knowledge that I’d so decisively sought now felt like a bomb just waiting for me to trip it.
“That picture in your lap.” I said. “It’s by a woman named Marge Gramercy. She lived here before me.”
“Here?” He gave the place another look around, then studied the picture. His thumb rubbed the margin of the page. He took his time. “I knew her.”
Naturally I thought he was joking. But the way his thumb just kept working that paper, and he wouldn’t look up, and then I began to think and it made perfect sense. She was older, but not by much. They covered some of the same territory. During some of the same years.
“She was a doctor, you know.”
I pretended to take a meter reading.
“Her parents were missionaries in Singapore. They sent her back to the States to medical school. She was supposed to do God’s work, but it got away from her.”
He put the picture down and shook out a Kent, lit it with a steady hand. I gave him his plate, which he balanced on his knee, and pulled the curtains back just enough to open the window. A cool breeze, jagged with city sounds, blew through.
“How did you know her?”
“Burma. Rangoon during the war. There was one hotel where all the journalists stayed. She wore a Yankees cap. Backwards before her time.” He smiled.
“Did you love her?”
He let out a little grunt to inform me in no uncertain terms that I was off track. “Everybody did. But I hardly knew her. Never saw her again after that.”
“I feel as if I know her. From her pictures. And living here.”
His eyes toured the walls, the fireplace, windows, the abbreviated kitchen. “I saw in the paper she died last winter.” He closed the magazine. “You have more of these?”
I pointed to the bottom orange crate where most of the National Geographies were stacked.
“She never worked for Life, then?”
I thought I saw his head twitch, but all he said was “No.” He made no move to look at the magazines or the tearsheets on the mantelpiece. I pushed the collapsible tree aside, swept the fake snow into a shoe box. I pretended Marge was guiding my hand.
“I didn’t know you got Mum her job with Foucault.”
The red and white checks of his shirt marched up the rise of his belly as he smoked. No answer.
“I always thought it was like her and him against you.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know.”
He ground his cigarette into the plate. “Neither do I.”
“But you could have stopped her. You hated the gallery. Art. When you came back from China—”
“When I came back from China, I was bloody grateful she had a paying job. She seemed to like it. That’s all that mattered.”
“And later?”
“Later the gallery was her career.”
“But she still wants her superstar.” I nearly said “back.” Wants him back. I nearly told him about Mum’s plan.
Not yet.
I glanced down at the old lady in the garden with her bird. It wasn’t her high wheedling voice, though, or the bird’s rasp.
“How are you getting along with the Leica?”
So, while arranging snowman and Santa Claus soap dispensers for the next shot, I told him about my work in Chinatown, about Tommy’s book. I thanked him with the news that I’d put his gift to use. And not for art. I was looking and seeing.
Seeing shiny round men with plastic pumps growing out of their skulls.
“I could show you,” I said.
“No.”
The swiftness of his reply, and the decisiveness, made my hand jerk, wasting a shot. Could he see through my bluff? I had nothing dev
eloped. You can’t rush free work, I’d warned Tommy. Had he called my father to complain, to urge him to push me forward? The thought was ludicrous, a diversion. That’s not what Dad meant at all, and I knew it. No meant no. He wouldn’t look. He didn’t want to see. He wouldn’t mention this to Mum, either.
“Bad luck.” I straddled the stool on the edge of the set, not quite facing him.
“What?”
“You said it’s bad luck to talk about your work. Is that why you hold back so much?”
“Do I?”
“When I was little, I thought you were a spy.”
“I wasn’t.”
Two horizontal lines cut across my father’s forehead. He was picking at his fingernails, his shoulders tipped forward, elbows pulled in as if he were hiding something in the center of his body. He did not straighten up.
“Did something happen to us, Dad? Something bad? When I was very little, maybe, or later. That I could have forgotten?”
“Why? Why do you ask?”
“I have nightmares.”
“Oh.” He patted his breast pocket, but the cigarette pack was empty. “Well. So do we all.”
“Okay, then. What are yours about?”
“Awwk! Bye. Bye. Blackbird!” The parrot’s song leapt over the outside sounds. It seemed to land in the center of the room and stopped as unexpectedly as it had arrived.
My father grinned, exposing large square yellowed teeth, one gold. He strode to the window, poked his head out to see the bird and its mistress. He stayed there long enough to ignore my question, but when he pulled back he gave himself a shake and said, “I don’t remember my dreams. Never have. Doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”
“Maybe if you remembered them, you might change them. For the better.”
“I don’t think so.”
I lifted the plastic tree and folded its branches. Fully collapsed, it was the size and shape of a calligraphy brush.
“Li used to say it was important to remember, to pass those memories on. He said if we didn’t, only ghosts would know the truth.”
I thought that would get a rise, because of the way he used to talk about Li, because I wasn’t sure if he ever knew how much time I’d spent with the old man. But Dad placed one hand on top of my head as if blessing me. Then he hitched up his pants and moved to the door. It hardly made a sound behind him.
When Li described his flight from China, he said he’d lived for a while in San Francisco before traveling to New York. Later, when I asked what he’d done there, he fluttered his hand in front of his face and closed his eyes briefly, handed me a bowl of tea.
“I wait for someone. She never did come.”
“She” who gave him the pearl-sewn union suit, I thought. So it wasn’t just the war. My old friend’s one true love let him down, left him to live out the rest of his days as a lonely curio dealer. The admission aroused my sympathy, and then something else.
I set my bowl down with a splash. “What do you care if I have a boyfriend—if I ever get married?”
Li stared at me as if I were half-witted. “If you marry Chinese boy,” he said slowly, “you have almost Chinese children.”
“My children,” I repeated. “If I marry a Chinese boy.”
I suspect all young girls daydream about their future families, and I was no exception. I was going to have two boys and two girls, all about two years apart. But in spite of the glaring example of my own American grandmother and her Chinese husband, not to mention my American mother and her half-Chinese husband, in spite—or perhaps because—of living in Chinatown, I automatically assumed that white girls do not wed Chinese men.
“What about the White Witch?” I said, reaching for an argument that would not insult him. “Wasn’t the moral of that story, it’s bad for Chinese men to have anything to do with white ladies?”
“Aha! You think about stories I tell to you. Good. But Mei-bi, you are not white witch. You are child of witch. If you marry Chinese man, you have almost Chinese babies. If your babies grow up and marry Chinese, spell of white witch is broken. That is moral of story for you.”
He pulled from his desk a softbound book with a cover that showed, in vivid pinks, blues, and golds, a beaming Chinese family. He’d begun this reading primer with me earlier that week.
“You’re crazy, Lao Li.”
“Some say so. But is very disrespectful for you to say to me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t actually mean it.”
“Apology accepted.” He opened the book and pointed. “This character mean ‘person.’ Ren. Like somebody walking. You know. One leg, two legs. Very simple.”
But it wasn’t at all simple. I didn’t want to become part of Old Li’s fairy package. It wasn’t my fault my grandmother had married a Chinese man, so why should I have to undo the results?
“Why didn’t you pick my brother or sister? They’re older. They could fix the spell a lot sooner than I can.”
“Not Chinese enough.”
“As Chinese as I am.”
“Same parents, but they are not Chinese like you.”
I scowled at him and flipped my red hair. “I wish.”
“Chinese spirit is strong in you. I can never mind your red hair. You hear my stories. You pay attention. You work hard. You know.”
“How do you know I’ll even have children? How do you know they’ll be good Chinese? I know lots of ABC full-bloods whose parents say they’re bad Chinese.”
Lao Li nodded. “I know. Terrible. But not your children.” He jabbed the page. “If you cross walking man, give him arms, and stretch them wide, he become ‘big’: da.”
I was staring at this character when Tommy Wah walked in.
He and Li greeted each other and talked for several minutes in a dialect I didn’t recognize. When I asked about it, Tommy said, “Fuzhou dialect. He makes sure I don’t forget. I see he’s got you doing your lessons, too.”
I looked to see if he was making fun. He grinned and shrugged, noncommittal.
Lao Li placed a wad of money in an envelope, wrapped it in red paper, and tied it with a gold string. “Take this to On Liang Association,” he said to Tommy. “Tell Lao On Chou my heart on fire. I cannot come to his birthday celebration, but I wish him many years prosperity, plenty grandchildren. Make it flowery, you know.”
“I’ll take it if you really want me to,” said Tommy. “But On Ling told me the tong hired a group of singsong girls for the party.”
“No! Singsong girls in Chinatown, New York City? No good singsong girls in America.”
“Maybe not good.” Tommy grinned. “But you take what you can get.”
“You do not want take that gift to On Chou.” Li grabbed back the packet. “I will take myself!”
“What happened to the fire in your heart?” Tommy wagged his finger at the old man.
“You never mind my fire. You mind your own fire.” Lao Li rolled his eyes in my direction.
Mortified by the sudden swerve of focus, I grasped for some witty, sophisticated barb, something my mother or Anna might say. When nothing came, I pretended to be engrossed in my lesson. But I’d slid too far over on my stool and now, when I leaned forward, the thing flipped right out from under me. I grabbed for a handhold and Li’s tea went flying all over the desk, the primer, my shirt—
“Nice going,” said Tommy. “Is that grass style or running style?”
He shouldn’t have said that. Not while a full bowl of tea still remained. Because next thing I knew and faster than I could stop it, that bowl was flying after the first one, but higher, wider, and harder. It splashed directly in Tommy’s face.
The bowl landed on his toe and made him jump.
“No!” Lao Li roared, and grabbed my arm. “That your future husband!”
If Tommy had been surprised by my impromptu attack, he was positively astounded by the news that we were engaged. “Future husband! Old man, you have finally gone around the bend.”
“Around bend?” Lao Li re
leased me and handed Tommy a towel.
“Too far. Wacko.” Tommy skewered me with a look. “You knew about this.”
I grabbed the towel from him. “Sure didn’t know he had you in mind.”
“Oh, but you were ready for him to marry you off to anybody else, huh? The ten-year-old concubine!”
“No!”
“The ten-year-old orange-haired concubine!” Tommy forced a laugh. “You know what ‘orange’ means in China? It means lots of fun, lots of babies. You get my drift?”
And suddenly I felt the sting of oncoming tears. Not daring to look or answer him, I began to mop up the desk.
“Uncle Li,” said Tommy. “Let’s leave each other’s fire alone. Dui?”
“Huh!” said Li.
“Dui?” Tommy insisted.
“Dui”
But, “He will change,” Li said as soon as Tommy had gone.
“No, he won’t,” I replied. “I don’t want him to.”
The Tommy Wah of my childhood could stroke a bird with his left hand while slitting its throat with his right.
Tommy has changed. His work shows it. And his insistence on businesslike partnership. I believe he’s changed and he seems intent on proving it, but the embarrassment of Li’s matchmaking increasingly stands between us as the Great Unmentionable, the wall we pretend isn’t there. I have not returned to his apartment and he hasn’t invited me to. Nor have we met outside of working hours. Nothing that might be construed as a date. Nothing after dark.
Nothing until he called this afternoon and suggested I get some pictures of a play being staged in Columbus Park. David and some of his activist friends have a public theater company. Fairy tales for the people. Tommy would meet me there.
* * *
Columbus Park is neither large nor welcoming. It has no play equipment, little grass, and because it’s shadowed by the Criminal Courts Building to the west, it gets dark early. But people come, as they did when I was small. They talk, waiting for something to happen. Old men hunch over stone chess tables. Children play pavement games. Toddlers suck on long candy stems and clutch at their mothers’ sleeves. Older kids taunt each other, shoot and lunge with twig weapons. As the shadows lengthen, parents pull their folding chairs beneath strings of paper lanterns.
