Face

by Aimee Liu

  I opened my fingers and let the stone fall, slowly, luxuriously, through the green water. In an hour’s time the tide would drop, exposing those surfaces to the pounding waves that would gradually dig out new trenches, add to the scars, and reshape the form. Yet if I came back next month, next year, and found this stone, I would still recognize it by its older, deeper markings. I would know it.

  I walked out on a natural jetty of boulders past the point of beach. The water came at the shore in wide smooth bands. A barge, moving as slowly as a minute hand, was the only traffic on the Sound. I was completely alone, but if I squinted deeply into the silvered light, if I faced south and made the effort, I could still see the shadowed spires of Manhattan reaching for the clouds.

  I pulled my father’s Leica from my pocket, focused, and opened the shutter once. Just once.

  I would not be able to live in Chinatown again. I understood that now. But I could not escape it, either. No one in my family could. It didn’t matter how far I ran.

  As I was buying my return ticket a train pulled in on the northbound track. When I looked up and noticed him, Tai had already spotted me through the window. His face seemed to float behind the glass, his dark, angled features and hesitant expression out of place in these New England surroundings. But he stood ready and waiting for the train door to open, as if he had known he would get off at this stop.

  I smiled as he stepped down. “You win.”

  He came empty-handed, dressed in a navy peacoat, jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked good.

  He glanced around. “You described it well.”

  “The real test would have been if you hadn’t seen me.”

  He stuck his hands into his armpits. “I’d have found you.”

  “Buy you coffee,” I said.

  We sat at the back of the café where my father had brought me and Henry. It was busier than I recalled, brighter. Mothers encouraged their children to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and hot dogs. Teenagers held hands. The flecks in the Formica table reminded me of the floor where Tai no longer lived.

  He clasped his mug of coffee as if he was still cold. I took off my coat and the sweater underneath. I should have felt awkward and embarrassed, but I didn’t. I felt as if Tai and I were right on time for a long-standing appointment, as if the past year had never happened and I was responding to his letter for the first time.

  “How’s the book going?”

  “I’ve figured out why you’re leaving,” he said. “Why you run.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He tilted his head until the hair at the back of his neck caught his collar. We were sitting across from each other in a booth surrounded by Muzak, the clink of utensils, and limber suburban drawls. There were lots of blondes in here, several redheads, and a few brunettes. No one else as dark as Tai. No other Oriental eyes.

  “I’ve lived in places like this,” I said. “I never felt I belonged.”

  “I know.” He was pressing so tightly his nails turned white, so tight it didn’t take much imagination to see the cup cracking, scalding coffee streaming down his arms.

  “Go on.”

  “There are always stories in Chinatown, Maibelle. Gang stories. But even when there are witnesses, no one knows how much is true, how much made up to keep the pressure on.”

  His skin would turn pink then red, would burn. He would cry out in pain. “Were there witnessess?”

  “No one knows.”

  “No identifying marks or details.” I pulled my hair back off my shoulders, twisted it into a knot. I could feel beads of perspiration popping across the top of my forehead. Tai’s Adam’s apple made a shadow that slid up and down as he talked.

  “Only that the girl had red hair, was a teenager. Rumor was, she came from outside.”

  I spooned an ice cube into my coffee. It melted surprisingly slowly.

  “Maibelle, after that night you ran from my apartment I had to know what had happened to you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  “So? How’d you find out?”

  “I remembered the look on your face. The same look when you ran from me as you had when you saw Winston Chang.”

  “Who?”

  “Li’s gang’s dai lou.” His right eye flickered. “The man in the cemetery.”

  I placed my hand over the top of my coffee, let the still-hot mist coat my palm and finally turn cold. My heart felt flat and slow and heavy as that barge on the Sound.

  “I started asking the old guys at the seniors’ center about him—” Tai leaned forward, pressing down on his elbows. “Believe me, I didn’t know that day, or I would have warned—”

  “Would you?” I poured cream in my coffee until it was as beige as my mother’s decor. I swallowed some but couldn’t taste. “I saw a picture of him with Li. Back in China.”

  “Winston was Li’s nephew. A big deal with the KMT in Taiwan. Li brought him over after your dad moved away. Put him in charge of his Boxers.”

  He looked as though he thought this would shock me. I squinted at him, and the subleties of his face blurred into broader, more general planes.

  “He looked like you.”

  He stared into his cup. When he raised his eyes, I realized how deeply my remark had cut him. He didn’t answer.

  “What happened to the rest of them?”

  “No one knows. The tong got them out of town right after. They never came back. Only Winston stayed, but he had a kind of breakdown, wouldn’t have anything to do with the tong. Next thing, he was wandering around Queens like you saw him.” He hesitated, his lips stretching in an apologetic smile. “They say there was a curse on them all.”

  “Right. The White Witch.”

  “That’s what the old-timers say.” He gulped his coffee and grimaced.

  “You believe Li was my grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the way he loved you.” Tai reached but didn’t touch me. “It never would have happened if he were alive, Maibelle… Or if I’d been there.”

  “You’re the one who sits with his back to the wall.”

  “If I could have eyes in the back of my head, I would. Fear gets to be instinctive. You can use it—or let it destroy you.”

  He picked up his napkin, folded it in half, and half again, then laid it flat.

  Two policemen walked in and took seats at the counter. They were big and doughy, red in the cheeks. They settled onto their stools with a jangle of keys and clubs. They didn’t threaten me, but they didn’t make me feel protected. I’d grown up around police, watched them prowling the corners of Chinatown, circling Little Italy, patrolling the street in front of my parents’ building uptown. It was as if they belonged to another species. The uniform. The uniform did that, the special knowledge, the equipment, the borrowed authority. Passengers had watched me with the same removed curiosity when I worked a flight or waited in airports for the motel shuttle. If a plane had gone down, they would look to me to save them, and only I knew how slight was the chance I’d fulfill that expectation. So much had to do with circumstance, so little with equipment or training.

  When I looked back at Tai, his eyes had widened, seemed impossibly round. “I need you to forgive me, Maibelle.”

  “Don’t.” I picked up my spoon. In its curved fun-house surface the room flipped over. My face was distorted and ugly. “What for?”

  “For what I had no part of.”

  We both looked at his hands spread flat on the table. A writer’s hands, now a painter’s hands. More cautious, by necessity slower than a photographer’s hands. With pale square nails and full moons the color of pearls. Beautiful hands.

  I slipped my bitten fingertips beneath his palms. It was the first we had touched. He didn’t move except for his eyes.

  Then he lifted my fingers in his beautiful hands and kissed them softly, gently. Shockingly. A kiss of absolute gravity and release.

  The elevator door slid open to Edith Piaf’s rich a
nd mannish moans. Over the music I could hear my mother in the kitchen exclaiming, pronouncing some critical imperative. Then a lighter, genial woman’s voice. Coralie. Light but firm.

  Business talk. A deal was being struck. Or maybe an outright gift. I heard it in her voice. Coralie was in love with my brother. She was prepared to pay the price of admission.

  The music rose. The ladies concurred. There was no sign of Henry or Anna, and I’d lost all sensation of time.

  When I entered the bedroom, my father was seated by the dimming window, struggling to look and breathe. He smiled when he saw me. His smile had withered to a clench of muscles around his jaw. Each day now took the toll of a year.

  He was holding one of his new boxes, a prototype printed with a colored drawing of mountains and flowers and the name of the candy—Pearls. He worked the lid with his thumbs, popping it open, shut, open, shut, the click of cardboard a steady, soothing percussion.

  “Been gone.” The words made me think of rough water on stone.

  “I needed something downtown. It took longer than I expected.”

  He let the box drop and reached a hand. I pulled up a stool and sat beside him. His skin was cold, full of bones. Like Li’s.

  I remembered the two of them facing each other the day after Johnny died. The way the air between them seemed to tremble. The silence as thick and hard as glass, holding them at once together and apart with me in the middle.

  I waited for my father to regain his breathing, then handed him the bag I’d brought. He took out the photographs one by one. Cold currents of air eddied around the bottom of my stool, made me pull my knees to my chest. I could see by his face, he’d known I had them and probably thought I had them all along.

  “It’s your mother, isn’t it? Alyssa. Li called her Eliza.”

  He took a corner of the blanket and wiped the glass above her face. Sad eyes, frozen. Trapped. In the photograph his mother was a young woman, hardly older than me.

  “That letter you wrote me about your father.”

  “Yes.” His voice surprised me with its strength. He stared at the pictures. An infant. A toddler holding his amah’s hand. A boy with two sisters.

  I thought back to the photograph in that old basement box. Chung Wu-tsai was thick, with a head like an egg, already balding in his youth, and flat-faced below slitlike eyes. He looked nothing like my father. Lao Li at least had moonpuffs, and now in my father’s ravaged face I could see other similarities peering through, like the ghost of someone within. The same shadows dug into my father’s cheeks, the same distant glimmer in his eyes. Dad’s hair was thinning and whitening, not receding like Wu-tsai’s.

  “Your mother loved Li.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “And the man you call your father lied, deceived you all. Why do you—why tell us you were Wu-tsai’s son?”

  His lids flew open.

  I pointed to the baby picture. “I know your mother had a son by Li.”

  He gave me back the stack of frames and reached to the floor beside him. For a second I thought he’d collapsed, but he came back up slowly, lifting something in his arms.

  “Let me help you.”

  He waved impatiently. He had Coralie’s portfolio, unzipped as if he’d been going through it. It fell open in his lap and he threaded through the familiar pictures until he came to the one of Halliday and Li and Winston Chang.

  I heard my own voice from a distance. “Li’s nephew.”

  And my father’s too close. “Li’s nephew—” He jabbed the young man’s face with his finger. “Li’s son!”

  “Li’s nephew,” I repeated quietly, carefully. “Li’s son. Which is it?”

  My father watched the picture as if it were about to spring to life. Or as if it had never stopped. “Son.”

  The music died at the far end of the apartment, but the photograph was full of its own noise. The heavy wooden scrape of chairs, dishes clinking, music and voices. The smell of salted meats, men’s perfume, expensive wine and wartime. Li’s and my grandmother’s bastard son.

  The game of blindman’s buff was over, and I was cold. Stone cold.

  “Li’s sister—” My father started wheezing and reached for his inhaler. “Married name Chang—they took him—raised him.”

  “Winston Chang.” I proceeded slowly. “I met him once. After we moved out of Chinatown. After Li died.”

  My father’s body quieted. He didn’t ask for clarification. He didn’t demand the truth. He stared through the window at the blackened sky as if looking for something far, far away. I lifted the photograph out of his lap.

  He was in the same room, smelled the food and perfume, was distracted by the same noise. He was there, behind the lens. There with his half brother. And, in effect, his stepfather. And his childhood classmate. But there is no recognition in these faces. They talk and smile, exchange pleasantries and secrets as if they don’t know there’s a witness. Meanwhile the photographer hides behind his camera, as anonymous in his line of duty as if he’d pulled out of his physical body, become invisible and untouchable. As if he were a ghost. But Dad wasn’t that. Not then.

  Anna had it right when she said our father was a spy. That was his true nature, anyway, and it must have run in the family. Now when I looked at the young man’s face I no longer saw Tai. He was no more like Tai than my father was like Li. The resemblance was between the two brothers, as it had been all along. My father’s younger brother. My uncle. He had known where we lived. He hadn’t lied. He had threatened me with the truth. And saved my life.

  “You knew Winston was here, didn’t you?”

  Dad grabbed the edge of the blanket and pulled it higher. I laid a sweater over his shoulders. He turned aside to cough, and his face blanched with the effort.

  “I found out,” he said in a toneless voice. “Too late.” He pointed to one of his bedside pouches.

  Inside I found a folder labeled “Winston.” All it contained was a one-paragraph newspaper clipping. “Man Drowns Self in Queens.” A blue-ink star drew my attention to Winston’s name.

  The body of an Amerasian male washed ashore in Flushing Bay, October 28. Investigators identified the victim as Winston Chang, 59, a homeless vagrant. He drowned in an apparent suicide. Chang left no survivors.

  I had seen him in the cemetery in Queens just three weeks earlier. He’d recognized me, and the White Witch had cast her curse.

  “He was crazy,” I told us both. But even as the breath left my mouth I could feel water closing over my head. Winston Chang. The name inflated, buoyed up to the surface, dragging me with it. My lungs burned. Tai and the old-timers all believed Winston was Li’s nephew.

  “Did he know, Dad? Did Winston even know he was Li’s son?”

  He started to shrug, then shook his head no.

  “But why would Li never tell him?”

  “Face,” said my father in one gnawing breath. “Too much lost face.”

  I wiped his forehead gently, carefully, as he pulled a very different picture from the portfolio still in his lap. A young boy stood in the midst of a bustling Chinese market with his head tipped back, eyes half closed, as if he expected the sky to reach down and kiss him.

  Dad gazed at the photograph. “I remember.”

  He strained for each new breath, each word. “Clouds in the river— Heat— Smells. The light.”

  “China.”

  He moved and grimaced with the pain shooting deep inside his body. I reached for his medicine, but he shook his head.

  “Just to know— It was no dream.”

  I took in the boy, his waiting upturned face. My father’s memory. “Like looking at a photograph.”

  “Yes.” My father turned to the window and, beyond, the blinking light of a night plane flying west. “Like that.”

  Early in the morning, I raise my lens and click off half a roll. An overnight freeze has left the shop windows and awnings glazed, released geysers of steam from manhole covers. Fire escapes shine silver and
old brick walls gold. A merchant pushes back an iron gate while stray cats dart among the shadows and breakfast noises spank the airspace overhead.

  Tai stamps his feet against the cold. I photograph him, tall and uncertain, against the storefront that was Imperial Poultry. Chrysanthemums still dot the guardrail of the balcony overhead, but their frozen heads droop brown and the surrounding windows recede, faceless and dark.

  Farther down Mott Street, doors are opening. Inside fingers arrange baked goods in the windows of basement coffee shops. Women in thick coats and scarves bustle past us. We move on.

  “You’re nervous. Give me your hand,” he says.

  We have no more than a block to go. He touches my hair and kisses my forehead. His lips are warm and gentle.

  “We don’t have to do this now—or ever.”

  I stretch as tall as my height permits. “If I’m not scared, it won’t mean anything. If I don’t do it now, I’m afraid I’ll be scared forever.”

  We walk on, more slowly, blowing steam from our nostrils like dragons.

  Doyers is an easy street to miss, a blind horseshoe hardly wider than an alley and just one block long with a half dozen shops. It should be odd that Tai and I have missed this center-of-Chinatown passage on our wanderings, but we’ve had no reason to come here. There are no sweatshops, no day-care or senior citizen centers.

  I am trying to remember the way it was. White tiles and cracking red paint. Dirt-streaked glass. Fish eyes staring, glassy as marbles. But the fish store is gone, the tiles cracked and grimy. The paint has aged to brown. Now stacks of hand-embroidered polyester clothing lie where once I passed eels and squid. Around the open doorway fibrous dust catches the early sun, the smell of brine long since absorbed by boxes of shiny cheongsams and jackets and synthetic shoes “Made in China.”

  I let go of Tai and reach for my throat, the small golden heart that hangs there. It was Tai’s idea. “Bring something that will remind you, you don’t have to stay or be afraid. You’re safe, you know? And you can escape any time you need to.”