Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

  Even on the worst days, he never completely forgot you for more than a minute or two—somehow in his paranoia you sensed he always knew that you were someone to him. You suspect that only made him more afraid of you, your presence a vague familiarity triggering in some deep part of his memory an inchoate, low-level anxiety, the son returning home, the lost son come to assert his right to challenge the father.

  In the months since, he eventually settled into a new, diminished equilibrium, even began to work again, as Old Asian Cook or Old Asian Guy Smoking, which was rough, was a hard thing to see for anyone who’d known him back when. Known what he’d been capable of. A new role, a new phase of life, it could be a way of starting fresh, the slate wiped clean.

  But the old parts are always underneath. Layers upon layers, accumulating. Which was the problem. No one in Chinatown able to separate the past from the present, always seeing in him (and in each other, in yourselves), all of his former incarnations, the characters he’d played in your minds long after the parts had ended.

  In that way, Sifu had gotten this old without anyone noticing. Including your mother—deemed to have aged out of Asian Seductress, no longer Girl with the Almond Eyes, now Old Asian Woman—living down the hall, their marriage having entered its own dusky phase, bound for eternity but separate in life. The rationale being that she needed to continue to work in order to be able to support him and for that she needed a minimum amount of rest and peace of mind, all true, and that they were better apart than together, also true. The reality being that they’d lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by. And it was just that: getting by. Barely, and no more. Because they’d also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing.

  Poor is relative, of course. None of you were rich or had any dreams of being rich or even knew anyone rich. But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident. Bad day at work and/or kid has a fever and/or miss the bus and consequently ten minutes late to the audition which equals you don’t get to play the part of Background Oriental with Downtrodden Face. Which equals, stretch the dollar that week, boil chicken bones twice for a watery soup, make the bottom of the bag of rice last another dinner or three.

  Cross that gap and everything changes. Being on this side of it means that time becomes your enemy. You don’t grind the day—the day grinds you. With the passing of every month your embarrassment compounds, accumulates with the inevitability of a simple arithmetic truth. X is less than Y, and there’s nothing to be done about that. The daily mail bringing with it fresh dread or relief, but if the latter, only the most temporary kind, restarting the clock on the countdown to the next bill or past-due notice or collection agency call.

  Sifu, like many others INT. CHINATOWN SRO, had without warning or complaint slid just under the line so quietly it was easy to minimize how painful it must have been. The pain of having once been young, with muscles, still able to work. To have lived an entire life of productivity, of self-sufficiency, having been a net giver, never a taker, never relying on others. To call oneself master, to hold oneself out as a source of expertise, to have had the courage and ability and discipline that added up to a meaningful, perhaps even noteworthy life, built over decades from nothing, and then at some point in that serious life, finding oneself searching for calories. Knowing what time of day the restaurant tosses its leftover steamed pork buns. Not in a position to turn down any food, however obtained, eyeing the markdown bins in the ninety-nine-cent store, full of dense, sugary bricks and slabs and disk-sized cookies, not food really, really only meant for children, something to fill the belly of a person who once took himself seriously. Buying this food without hesitation, necessity overcoming any shame in simply eating it, and not just eating it, swallowing it down more quickly than intended, a young man’s dignity replaced by a newly acquired clumsiness, the hands and mouth and belly knowing what the heart and head had not yet come to terms with: hunger. Nothing like an empty stomach to remind you what you are.

  To be fair, it wasn’t as if anyone in Chinatown was in a great monetary position to be helping Sifu. Old Asian Woman did what she could, but as work slowed down, had enough of a challenge trying to take care of herself. And you just starting out, contributing what you could manage, a bag of food or medicine, once in a while a piece of fish or meat. That’s what you tell yourself anyway. The truth being that if each of you had done a little, together it might have been enough.

  OLDER BROTHER

  Some say that the person who should have helped the most, was in a position to help the most, having been Sifu’s number-one-most-naturally-gifted-kung-fu-superstar-in-training-pupil all those years and thus having reaped the greatest benefit from Sifu’s teachings, was Older Brother.

  Not your actual older brother. Better. Everyone’s Older Brother. The prodigy. The homecoming king. Unofficial mayor of the neighborhood. Guardian of Chinatown.

  Once the heir apparent to Sifu, the two of them even starring together in a brief but notable project about father-and-son martial arts experts (Logline: When political considerations make conventional military tactics impossible, the government calls on a highly secretive elite special ops force—a father-son duo among the best hand-to-hand fighters in the world—in order to get the job done, Codename: TWIN DRAGONS).

  Older Brother who never had to work his way up the ladder, never had to be Generic Asian Man. Older Brother who was born, bred, and trained to be, and eventually did become, Kung Fu Guy, which meant, of course, making Kung Fu Guy money, which is good for your kind but still basically falls under the general category of secondary roles.

  Older Brother.

  Like Bruce Lee, but also completely different.

  Lee being legendary, not mythical. Too real, too specific to be a myth, the particulars of his genius known and part of his ever-accumulating personal lore. Electromuscular stimulation. Ingesting huge quantities of royal jelly. And with his development of his own discipline, Jeet Kune Do, the creation of an entirely new fighting system and philosophical worldview. Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest.

  But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.

  Older Brother was the inverse.

  Not a legend but a myth.

  Or a whole bunch of myths, overlapping, redundant, contradictory. A mosaic of ideas, a thousand and one puzzle pieces that teased you, let you see the edges of something, clusters here and there, just enough to keep hope alive that the next piece would be the one, the answer snapping into place, showing how it all fit together.

  Bruce Lee was the guy you worshipped. Older Brother was the guy you dreamt of growing up to be.

  BEGIN OLDER BROTHER AWESOMENESS MONTAGE:

  —Older Brother always has the good hair, not the kind that goes straight up and then out at weird angles and with stupid cowlicks in the back and on the side and wherever else. Not the kind that makes you think of math club and pocket protectors. Older Brother was blessed, among other things, with the rare phenotype, the kind of Asian dude hair with a slight wave to it (but always in a tight fade), thick and black but with brown or even red highlights.

  —Older Brother’s kung fu is A-plus-plus, obviously, but he isn’t l
imited to just kung fu. He can also mess around with Muay Thai, is proficient in a couple forms of judo, and is definitely down with Taekwondo (and its many strip mall variations). His Brazilian grappling is legit if you care to go to ground with him, but you shouldn’t because in about eight seconds you’ll be tapping the mat, asking him through tears of excruciating pain to please stop bending your arm that way.

  —If you get Older Brother drunk enough (not that he ever really gets drunk, just sort of slightly faded, Older Brother’s legendary tolerance for alcohol having been proven time and again in countless drinking games and late-night wagers, some fun, some not so fun) he will show you knife tricks that will leave you laughing and scared shitless at the same time and he will do it effortlessly, knife in one hand, beer in the other, his long hair looking cool.

  —It’s not clear if he can dunk (no one’s ever seen him try) but he can definitely grab the rim and that alone is pretty impressive given that he’s five eleven and three-quarters.

  —Which, for the record, is the perfect height for an Asian dude. Tall enough for women to notice (even in heels! even White women!), tall enough to not get ignored by the bartender, but not so tall to get called Yao Ming and considered some kind of Mongolian freak.

  —And if you get any ideas that you could take him in a bar fight or on the basketball court or anywhere else, you’ll quickly find out the hard way what a bad idea that is. Guys don’t want to fight him anyway—they call him Bruce (“Yo, yo, I’ve seen Fists of Fury like a hundred times”), or Jackie or Jet Li, and he’s cool with it all, whatever the vibe, wherever it’s coming from. Everyone admired his level of comfort, moving in and out of language and subculture, from backroom poker game to dudes on the corner looking for trouble to the octogenarians playing Go or mahjong at the Benevolent Family Association. Older Brother’s reach and influence was not limited to the Middle Kingdom and its ethnic diaspora, but extended into other neighboring domains: he could sing karaoke with the Japanese salarymen, could polish off two plates of ddukbokki slathered in a tangy, blood-red gochujang, wash it down with a bottle of milky soju, all while beating the pants off the K-town regulars at their own drinking games, dropping some of his passable Korean (mostly curse words) in the process.

  —Older Brother was never in a gang, not even close, makes a point of not even being loosely affiliated with a triad or Wah Ching, yet somehow manages it so that those scary dudes are still cool with him. He gives them their distance and they do the same with him, a form of silent respect.

  —On top of all this, Older Brother was a National Merit Scholar. 1570 on the SAT.

  —Everyone has their own story about Older Brother.

  “Man you don’t even know. Last week I saw him at Jackson and Eleventh.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Chin-ups on the cross bar of the traffic signal.”

  “I saw him, too.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I did. He was doing them one-handed.”

  “No shit one-handed. OB doesn’t mess around with regular chin-ups. Not like your weak sauce.”

  “You’re weak sauce.”

  “Say that again. To my face.”

  “You’re weak sauce.”

  “Shut up, idiots. Did one of you really see Older Brother?”

  “Yeah. Like I said. Chin-ups. Did like fifty of them.”

  “More like seventy.”

  “With his left hand.”

  “He’s left-handed, dumbass.”

  “Older Brother is left-handed? Come on. You’re the dumbass, dumbass.”

  “He’s ambidextrous. You’re both dumbasses.”

  —That’s pretty much how it goes with Older Brother stories piled on more stories, conflicting, combining, canceling each other out. In the end, you’re not sure how much of it’s real and how much is local lore, exploits that over the years have expanded, but in any case it doesn’t matter. Even if Older Brother were not actually a real person, he would still be the most important character in some yet-to-be-conceived-story of Chinatown. Would still be real in everyone’s minds and hearts, the mythical Asian American man, the ideal mix of assimilated and authentic. Plus, the bonus: a viable romantic lead. Older Brother is the guy who makes every kid in Chinatown want to be better, taller, stronger, faster, more mainstream and somehow less at the same time. Makes every one of you want to be cooler than you’re supposed to be, than you’re allowed to be. Gives you permission to try.

  —For a brief period during Older Brother’s ascendancy, all felt right. What was happening was what was meant to happen. The chosen one, the best and brightest and most conventionally-handsome-by-Western-standards, he had worked his way up in the system, had reached his designated station of maximal achievement. All other Asian Men stood in his shadow, feeling anything was possible or, if not anything then at least something. Something was possible. You put your heads on pillows at night and went to sleep dreaming of what it would look like, to be part of the show, lie awake wondering how much higher Older Brother might rise within Black and White. What that would mean for the rest of you.

  —And then you woke up one morning and it was over. The dream had ended. Older Brother was no longer Kung Fu Guy. The details secret, the official story that it just didn’t work out. The upshot for all of you was: no more Kung Fu Guy. Somehow, the golden era of Older Brother was over, without warning or fanfare or any kind of reason, really. Or at least, no official reason. Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.

  It was probably for the best. For him, personally anyway. Older Brother, despite all of his success, never seemed entirely comfortable with his preordained place in the hierarchy, was never totally down with the whole career track. Didn’t see himself as a Kung Fu Guy. And he wasn’t wrong. His kung fu was too pure, too special to be used the way that everyone knew it would be: flashy, stupid shit, the same moves everyone had seen a million times and yet still wanted him to trot out for every wedding and lunar new year celebration. Better that fame had never happened on him, to preserve his claim for posterity. Better to be a legend than a star.

  END OLDER BROTHER AWESOMENESS MONTAGE

  A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be the performer and observer of the same show.

  Erving Goffman

  ACT II

  INT. GOLDEN PALACE

  SHE’S

  the most accomplished young detective

  in the history of the department.

  HE’S

  a third-generation cop who left Wall Street

  to honor his father’s legacy.

  TOGETHER

  they head the Impossible Crimes Unit, tasked with cracking the most unsolvable cases.

  When all others have failed, the ICU

  is the last hope for justice.

  When all others have failed, you call:

  BLACK AND WHITE

  This is their story.

  INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT—NIGHT

  Dead Asian Guy is dead.

  WHITE LADY COP

  He’s dead.

  BLACK DUDE COP

  Looks that way.

  Our heroes regard the prone Asian male body, partially covered with a sheet.

  BLACK DUDE COP

  Next of kin?

  WHITE LADY COP

  Checking.

  A crime scene investigator swabs something. Another measures the radius and dispersal
pattern of a pool of drying blood. A female officer in uniform (BLACK, 20s, ATTRACTIVE) approaches White Lady Cop and Black Dude Cop.

  BLACK DUDE COP

  Whaddya got?

  ATTRACTIVE OFFICER

  Restaurant worker says the parents live nearby. We’re hunting down an address.

  WHITE LADY COP

  Good. We’ll pay a visit. Might have some questions for them.

  (then)

  Anyone else?

  ATTRACTIVE OFFICER

  A brother.

  Seems to have gone missing.

  Black and White exchange a look.

  BLACK DUDE COP

  This might be a case of—

  WHITE LADY COP

  The Wong guy.

  White: deadpan. Black tries hard but like always, he breaks first, flashing his trademark smile. White holds steady a beat longer but then she breaks, too. It’s their show and they have the comfort of knowing it can’t go on without them.

  “Sorry sorry. I’m so sorry,” White says, trying to keep it together. “Can we do that again?” They’ve managed to stop laughing when Black’s nose makes a snort and sends them back into another round of giggles.