by Charles Yu
(A few months later, Dorothy gets a letter. From her sister Angela. She opens it, curious. Inside is a bill, itemized, for the twelve weeks that Dorothy lived with her sister. Ten cents: bowl of rice. Fifteen cents: long shower surcharge. Twenty cents: laundry. Included in the bill is the price of Dorothy’s bus ticket.)
INT. GREYHOUND BUS—AMERICAN BACKROADS—DAY
Dorothy rides the bus through miles of highways, perhaps nondescript to some, but to her, this is grandeur. The countryside she pictured, in the country she long imagined. The panoramic scenery, the flatness of the landscape, the rivers and lakes, the gray and blue and silver and pink skies.
It’s enough to keep her occupied, to keep her mind off of the looks from fellow passengers, from the men at the truck stops where they take bathroom and meal breaks. Enough to help her ignore the smell on the bus, four days in early summer crammed in with fifty-eight strangers. It’s the smell of people, and she can work with that. She is going north, to Ohio, and she can work with that, too, moving across the map in her head, like in a movie, her vector of travel a dashed line visibly inching across a map of the continent.
To add injury to the insult of having been kicked out by Angela, Dorothy realizes that her sister has kept all but one of her books (no doubt as collateral for the asserted debt). The sole book now in Dorothy’s possession is a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology. A book she has loved since childhood, when she spied the tattered paperback in a bin in her local library, passed over by all the other kids for its ruined state. It says on the back, published in the U.S.A. She has learned to read this foreign language from this book, this book of myths. She loves each of the little chapters, how they are short, and self-contained, but also all fit together in a larger universe of gods and goddesses, spirits, lower and higher, deities of all types and their seconds, their assistants, their rivalries and hierarchies, their relative powers and weaknesses. Their petty squabbles and sordid doings and secret crushes. Every time she opens the book, she hopes to turn to a new page, a new god, a little tiny thing. She likes the minor gods the best, because they are easier to master, to learn everything about. She can search out and soak up all of the other things that other people had written or said about this minor god, and in that way become an authority on such a god. And when she becomes an authority someday, an expert in her own right, she thinks that maybe she might be able to make her own entry in the book. To create a tiny god from scratch. She has not named it yet.
Perhaps the god of bus rides. The god of sponge baths, or maps, or minimum wage. The god of immigrants.
INT. DOROTHY’S FUTURE
Flash-forward. Years later, the book turns up again, in some generational story, of immigrants and assimilation. Dorothy, now Old Asian Woman, will rediscover the book of gods (worn and destroyed by love and overuse, will threaten to fall apart at any moment), will read it to her son in their cramped one-room home. Watch him puzzle over and struggle through each word, his face an oscillating pattern of consternation and joy, the delight from the pronunciation of a word correctly, the pure possibility in his way of reading. The god of first times for everything. The look on his face.
Years after that, Dorothy will get a phone call. Her brother-in-law. Your sister needs help. She will return to Alabama, and find Angela sitting in the dark, in front of a television turned to what appears to be a ten-hour commercial. Angela is wearing a diaper that has not been changed for a day and a half. She has no food in her refrigerator and no way to go purchase any.
Dorothy will clean her sister up, carry her to bed. Make arrangements for her long-term care, Angela’s husband paying for it with their savings. When the money runs out, and her husband proves that he’s not up to the task, Dorothy will end up bringing Angela back home with her. She will wipe and feed her older sister for a year, two days shy of a year, until Angela expires on a cool autumn morning.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT
Ming-Chen Wu sits, listening.
DOROTHY
So that’s how I ended up here.
She realizes Wu is staring at her. Or gazing, more like gazing.
DOROTHY
What about you?
Wu snaps out of it, embarrassed, tries to recover.
MING-CHEN WU
What? Oh, sorry, I just—I like listening to you talk.
Dorothy suppresses a smile.
DOROTHY
What’s your story?
MING-CHEN WU
My story? No, you don’t want to hear it. Do you?
DOROTHY
Yes I do. I really do.
EXT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY
He’s a few years older but his path is starkly different from hers. He was born into Historical Period Piece, the role given to him was Child Victim of Oppression.
BEGIN HISTORICAL NEWSREEL MONTAGE:
NEWS READER (V.O.)
On February 28, 1947, the ruling Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, begins what comes to be known as the 2/28 Incident, a period of violent suppression of antigovernment protests. Over the next several weeks, tens of thousands of Taiwanese civilians are killed. The New York Times reports accounts of:
“indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead. There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped.”
By the evening of March 4, Taiwan has been placed under martial law. An uprising of the people continues for a number of weeks after, with Taiwanese civilians controlling much of the island. Nevertheless, by the end of the month, the governor general of Taiwan, Chen Yi, bolstered by the arrival of troops from the mainland on March 8, has regained control. Chen Yi orders the imprisonment or execution of the leading organizers he could identify. His men execute more than three thousand people.
In 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists are finally and decisively driven from the mainland by Mao, Chiang and his loyalists flee to Taiwan, where they impose martial law again. This period begins on May 19, 1949. At the time it is lifted in the summer of 1987, thirty-eight years and fifty-seven days later, it is the longest period of martial law in the world. During this time, known as the “White Terror,” thousands of Taiwanese are beaten, killed, or disappeared by the regime.
At the time of the 2/28 Incident, Young Wu is seven years old. He sees family members shot in front of him. He see his home and his town destroyed, looted, and set on fire. He sees men, and boys, not much older than he is, at first attempting to fight, and then attempting to live. He sees his father running back into his family home, which is on fire. Count to one hundred, his father says. And I’ll be back here, safe and sound.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT
DOROTHY
(interrupting)
Why? Why would he do that?
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY
He waits with his mother and younger siblings, just babies then, for his father to come out. He counts to one hundred. He pauses, unsure if he should keep counting.
When he reaches ninety-nine, he starts to worry. At one hundred twenty-one, he starts to cry. At one hundred eighty-nine, when he is sure his father is dead, his father emerges from the now completely blackened front of their small house, carrying a box.
Young Wu does not know what is in the box, nor does he ask his father. He guesses his mother knows, because she looks at the box, and looks at Young Wu’s father, and shakes her head, as if to say, I can’t believe you did that, but also to say, I understand why you did that.
Later, Wu will learn what was inside the box: a piece of paper. The deed to the family plot of land. This land will be very valuable in the future. His father risked burning to d
eath for his children’s well-being, the chance at a better life.
But Wu doesn’t know this at this moment. What he knows is that the box is valuable, because he just watched his father run into a house on fire for it. Also watching were two Nationalist soldiers, a private and a corporal, who wait until Wu’s father emerges, then calmly shoot him through the back, the bullet exiting from his throat. The box, along with the deed, is casually scooped up by the corporal, and the two walk off, leaving Wu’s family there, without a father, or a house, or a future.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT
Dorothy places a hand on Wu’s shoulder. Lets it rest there.
DOROTHY
You never knew him.
MING-CHEN WU
Not really, no. There are memories, just a couple. Key scenes that replay over and over. I was so young.
(then)
But I was the oldest son. I had to do something.
DOROTHY
You came here.
Wu takes Dorothy’s hand, holds it lightly.
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—JOURNEY TO AMERICA
We see Young Wu, moving, in progress, making his way to the new world. Bright-eyed, full of hope.
As a young student in Central Taiwan, gazing at a map of the world in his classroom.
On the map, it is a jeweled blue, sandwiched between Canada (salmon pink) and Mexico (lime green). Young Wu dreams of the American air. Barbecues, baseball on the radio and in the streets.
In his dreams, he arrives on a bright Monday morning, the ship pulling into the port, friendly strangers waving him and the others onto shore.
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—THE UNITED STATES
In reality, Young Wu arrives in the dead of night. He waits in line to have some papers stamped, and then waits again in an area, sitting with fellow arrivals from seemingly every country on earth. It is cold, and except for the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead, it is quiet. There is no one there to greet him. Once he is done here, he will get on a bus, where he will sit for the next four days, except for twice-daily stops to eat and use the restroom, and at the end of four days, he will arrive in Mississippi, where he will step off of the bus, in the dead of night, into a swarm of mosquitoes.
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—MISSISSIPPI—1965—DAY
He lives in a house with five other graduate students, most of them from other countries. Nakamoto from Japan. Kim and Park from Korea. Singh, a Punjabi Sikh. And one more: Allen Chen, also from Taiwan. Young Wu wonders if he and Allen might be the first two people from Taiwan to ever live in Mississippi.
He will be paid a modest stipend to teach students at a university, and to begin graduate studies, to explore his own field. Young Wu’s share of the rent is fourteen dollars per month. This is Mississippi, in a college town, in the 1960s. His graduate student stipend is one hundred dollars a month. The first time he sees the check, he thinks there has been a mistake. There has not been a mistake. Young Wu, for the first and only time in his life, feels rich.
On top of the hundred dollars per month, he receives a twenty-five-dollar allowance, once per quarter, for housing. One semester, he wins an award for being the best teaching assistant. Half of the class calls him Chinaman, but mostly they mean it affectionately. He is an overwhelming selection for the award. He receives a check for fifty dollars and a certificate. He makes a frame for the certificate, and sends the check home, as he does with almost all of his other checks. In general, he does well enough that he can afford to eat at a restaurant, once a month. He does not like hamburgers at first, but learns to ask for no mayonnaise or ketchup and eats the meat separately from the bun, lettuce, and tomato.
One day he comes home to find his roommate opening a can of cat food. Young Wu hadn’t even known they had a cat in the house. He realizes they don’t have a cat, that his friend, Allen Chen, is going to eat the cat food himself.
Young Wu takes the can from Allen, asks him not to do this ever again. Allen points to a whole bag of cat food he has just bought from the market in town. Young Wu says they will find a cat to give it to. He takes Allen to a diner and buys him a hamburger that night, and from then on leaves a couple of dollars on Allen’s desk, or in his graduate department mail slot, every week. They look for a cat, together. Allen eventually finds one, and feeds the cat well, for a while.
When the food runs out, the cat keeps coming around, so they feed it leftovers.
All five of Young Wu’s housemates are called names. They compare names. Chink, of course, and also slope, jap, nip, gook. Towelhead. Some names are specific, others are quite universal in their function and application. But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.
But mostly the roommates are grad students, and men, and they do what male grad students do. They sit at the table, and smoke cigarettes, pooling money to buy packs.
Young Wu will occasionally take a drag off of Allen. They smoke, and drink watered-down beer or cheap whiskey one of them has swiped from a faculty reception. They laugh and play cards and compare names they have been called, mostly by the undergraduates. The faculty are generally respectful, although for the most part unmistakably distant. Some are even reasonably warm. A few. The people in town are the most varied. Many are polite, if silent. Most are wary, with an edge of slightly menacing disdain.
One day, Young Wu comes home in an unusually good mood. Actually humming as he walks into the house. The day is perfect, jewel blue. Birds sing along. Young Wu sings himself into the kitchen, where all of his housemates were sitting at the table. He stops singing when he sees the looks on their faces.
It’s Allen.
What?
He’s in the hospital. Someone beat him unconscious. Called him a jap.
According to a witness, as the first man hit Allen in the temple, knocking him to the ground, they said, “This is for Pearl Harbor.”
Young Wu thinks: it could have been him. Nakamoto says: it should have been him.
All of the housemates realize: it was them. All of them. That was the point. They are all the same. All the same to the people who struck Allen in the head until his eyes swelled shut. All the same as they filled a large sack with batteries and stones, and hit Allen in the stomach with it until blood came up from his throat. Allen was Wu and Park and Kim and Nakamoto, and they were all Allen. Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever. Anywhere over there. Slope. Jap. Nip. Chink. Towelhead. Whatever. All of them in the house, after that, they should become closer. But they don’t. They don’t sit around the table anymore, comparing names. Because now they know what they are. Will always be.
Asian Man.
More and more, they spend time in their rooms studying, or pretending to study. Lying in bed, looking at the ceiling. Singh leaves at the end of the year, transfers to Oregon State. Park and Kim move out, share an apartment on the other side of campus. Young Wu loses track of the others quickly. Eventually, as people do, they all lose track of each other. Except for Allen.
He keeps in touch with Wu, writing letters, which Wu returns, guiltily and belatedly, about one for every three received.
Coming to enjoy, over the years, hearing of Allen’s exploits, as he climbs the ladder of academia, then industry, as he turns out to be the best and brightest of them all.
They never catch the three men who beat Allen ninety-five percent of the way to dead. Not that they need to be caught. Everyone knows who did it. Allen goes on to star in American Dream—Immigrant Success Story, that rare variation, the mythical promised land,
someone leaving Chinatown for the suburbs. Living among the mainstream, which everyone knows means whites.
He goes on to get his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He gets married, and has two children, a son and a daughter. He suffers headaches for the rest of his life, from the concussion he received in the beating. When he is fifty-one, he is granted a patent, which turns out to have a wide range of industrial applications, opening up whole new possibilities in several fields. The patent is acquired by General Electric for almost three million dollars. It’s the first of several dozen patents Allen will go on to file.
Allen, newly rich, with a devoted wife and well-loved and loving children, decides to move out of his house for a while. He thinks about going back to Taiwan, but he had lost his immigration privileges and is afraid he will not be allowed back in if he leaves.
He does not feel at ease in the United States. Taiwan is not home anymore. Increasingly, he finds himself drifting back to Chinatown, where he’s treated as a local celebrity. One of us, done good. Made it big. When Allen is fifty-eight years old, he takes half a bottle of sleeping pills and never wakes up. Two years later, Allen’s daughter, Christine Chen, graduates from Stanford. Her mother and brother are at the graduation as Christine accepts the departmental citation in physics. She gives a short speech, in which she thanks her mother and her father. Her mother cries, and her brother claps. They all go out to dinner afterward. Two weeks after graduation, Christine is filling her car with gas at a rest stop off of the I-5. Someone yells out the window of a car moving at close to forty miles per hour that she should go back to where she came from, and throws a half-full beer bottle at her head. She is taken to the emergency room, where her scalp is sewn up with eleven stitches. She goes on to be a lead researcher at CERN, but like her father, suffers headaches for the rest of her life. She never visits Chinatown anymore.
