by Henry Chang
Bo Jan was twenty-eight, already considered an old lady, when she’d married a factory worker ten years older than herself. This was during the times of the One Child Policy. Bo had wanted a child, and her husband Kwok grudgingly agreed that a child would be okay if it were a boy. The option of an abortion was already in the back of his mind.
It was a girl.
The marriage quickly became strained. Kwok wanted to give up the baby girl to an orphanage, as many Chinese had done. He hoped they’d have another chance at a coveted boy child.
Bo could not bear the thought.
The orphanages were flooded with baby girls. Americans, who’d declined to adopt black American babies, were flocking to China to adopt yellow babies as fast as they became available. China was selling its unwanted excess population at ten thousand dollars an adoption. This new global baby trade was sanitized, and legal. The Asian women sex-slaves who arrived packed in the holds of cargo ships had no such protection.
Rather than allowing the clan bloodline to end, Kwok abandoned his wife and child before the baby girl was a year old. Bo took her daughter back to her family village near the Pearl River. There, a series of unsuccessful relationships with local village men caused her to lose hope of a future for her in China, where she would be doomed to wind up a spinster, with a mother and a young daughter to care for. She began to hope for a new start in America. After the girl’s third birthday Bo left, alone, smuggled by snakeheads to New York City by way of Canada.
Now, after two years of slaving in Chinatown, she was still struggling to pay off her passage, the specter of prostitution ever present.
At first the snakeheads tried to convince her to become a whore, to work for an escort service, saying it was a much faster way to repay the debt, adding that she was not such a young woman anymore.
She had politely declined their offers and never bowed to their intimidation. Bo explained to these heartless men with no souls that she was a devout Buddhist, and prostitution was a grave sin. The snakeheads ridiculed her, called her crazy, chi seen, but by slogging through a succession of small jobs, she managed to pay her monthly installment to them without fail. She worked in a Chinatown bakery during the day, supplementing her salary with piecework, cheun gee, at home, where she strung beads into necklaces, or assembled gift baskets. The payments to the snakeheads continued, as did the funds she wired to her mother and daughter in Toishan.
After a year, the bakery job became a supermarket cashier post, which became a gift-shop clerkship, the jobs declining in desirability, requiring longer hours for less pay. So, in rapid succession, she snipped threads off piecework in a sweatshop, pushed a steamy dim sum cart in a restaurant, gutted tilapia in a fish market. On Canal Street, she hawked knock-off designer handbags. In between, she washed hair and swept up the shorn locks that piled up beneath the rotating chairs in the barber shops that lined Doyers Street. She taught herself how to cut men’s hair, and learned to include a free ten-minute neck and shoulder massage.
She waited until Sai Go was seated comfortably in the chair before she draped the plastic sheet over him.
He observed his haggard reflection in the mirror, noticed when she glanced at him. She held her small smile.
“I didn’t see you last Saturday, you weren’t here,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Of course not.” He smiled quietly. “How could you see me if I wasn’t here?”
“I thought you found a new cutter,” she teased. “At one of the designer shops, hah?”
Sai Go grinned. She was happy to see this as her comb and electric clipper danced, spraying bits of gray and white hair off his head, small clumps catching on the plastic sheet around him.
“One of those young girls made up like Hong Kong movie stars?” Bo continued, “A siu jeer girl to cut you a new style, hah? Give you a great massage, make you feel like young man again, hah?”
Sai Go chuckled, told her again and again that it was just some family business that had come up. He remembered she had given him the gold-plated Buddhist card, the talisman, many haircuts ago. He’d explained to her then that in his line of work he dealt with good people and bad people alike, explaining why he carried a box cutter in his back pocket.
Bo had detected sadness in him then, and still now, in this older man who she guessed was about twenty-five years her senior. She felt sorry for him, and tried to cheer him up with clever sayings, giving him five extra minutes of shoulder massage. The Buddhist talisman had been one of several that she carried to ward off the sex-slave snakeheads. She’d told him it would protect him in his travels.
Sai Go’s haircut hadn’t required much imagination. Years of ministrations by Chin Ho’s barber shop on Doyers Street had shaped his hair into a military-style crewcut, the sides trimmed very tight to the skull, the top about an inch long and angled back. Bo rubbed gel into the top so the sheen would disguise the gray there. He looked younger than a man in his fifties, she thought, although this day he looked tired, a bit distant, his mind drifting elsewhere.
When he looked in the mirror, Sai Go saw a beat-up, baggy-eyed fifty-nine-year-old mask of wrinkles, worry lines etched into his brow. Fifty-nine—the numbers five and nine, in Chinese sounded like not enough. True, he thought, Not enough luck, not enough time . . .”
“It’s the massage,” he heard Bo say, still teasing. “Must be I give a better massage, hah?”
Sai Go smirked, closing his eyes as the roar of the blow-dry gun filled his ears.
Bo released the lever and the chair dropped so that she had a higher angle to work from.
It was the massage, he thought, the only time he’d ever felt tension leaving his body. He liked the way Bo dug her elbows into the tops of his shoulders. He shut his eyes as she pressed down harder into the deep part of the muscle, then dragged her elbows along his shoulder blades. Her fingers worked the joints, pressing nerve points that ran along the spine.
Bo had strong fingers and hands, and knew just how much force Sai Go could tolerate.
“Everything’s stiff,” she said innocently. “Very hard. What have you been doing? See? Miss a week and your back’s all screwed up.”
“You’re right,” he heard himself say. “I’ll try not to miss any more visits.”
She said, “You’re working too hard, that’s what it is. You need to drink hot soup. Wintermelon, foo jook, mushrooms.” She gave him a pat on the back. “It’s the wintertime. You know how to make soup, don’t you?”
She put her thumbs into the depressions at the base of his skull and worked the nerves, then followed with hands, firmly grabbing, kneading the musculature and cords inside the back of his neck.
He took a long and deep breath, held it a moment before releasing it, thinking, He was fifty-nine, and she was thirty-something, yet she was mothering him?
Bo’s pressing and digging, pushing and rubbing, forced his inner energy, his chi, to circulate. He felt his blood moving, the joints of his fingers crackling as he clenched and unclenched his fists underneath the plastic sheet. Finally, she balled her fists and pounded his back. Playing the drum, it was called.
When she was done, he gave her his usual ten-dollar tip, generous but not so overly generous that it suggested anything more than simple appreciation of services received. Knowing her story, Sai Go felt sorry for her, for her predicament, supporting two generations back in China, and having to fend off the snakeheads.
After Sai Go left the New Canton, Bo had begun to sweep up the hair on the floor around her station when she noticed the folded square of paper directly underneath the chair. It was a prescription card with notations she didn’t understand, from the Mon Tang Pharmacy on Mott Street. Folded along with the card was a piece of notepaper from Chinatown Imaging, and a scrap of crinkly cellophane that had the Chinese words Ming Sing, or movie star, scrawled on it.
On the Chinatown Imaging note was the word chemotherapy with appointment dates during previous weeks. They all seemed to be Thursdays. Below the dat
es was a scribble of Chinese words, several of which she understood to mean cancer and radiation.
A freezing wind suddenly swept into the salon, and Bo quickly glanced toward the door, but she knew that Sai Go was long gone. She stepped out into the cold street anyway, looking both ways to make sure he wasn’t still in sight.
Back inside the shop, Bo tucked the papers into her pocket, and reminded herself to return them on his next visit. She realized then why Sai Go had missed his last trim and although she hadn’t noticed any hair loss, he did appear fatigued, quieter than usual. The word radiation lingered in her mind, and she considered whether there was another talisman that could prevent the pain of cancer.
Friends
At eleven, the Sunset Park waterfront shimmered in the frosty moonlight far below his studio window. Dressed for the chill, Jack was adjusting the holster with the Detective Special on his hip when his cell phone trilled. Seeing Alexandra’s name appear in the little window above the keypad, he was surprised, because the only times she’d ever called before was when he was on the job.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Alex sounded tired.
“No, I was just going to drop by Grampa’s.”
There was a short pause, as if she were sipping a drink or something. “Right. Got a question about a permit for a gun,” she said.
“Shoot.” He felt himself grinning.
“The application process is real complicated, I hear.”
“Wait, who’s this for?”
“Myself.”
“You?”
“Long story.”
“Well,” he checked the Timex on his wrist, “give me the short version.”
“There was a smuggled girl we put up in the shelter. In the last few days, Doris has been getting nasty threatening calls at the reception desk.”
“What kind of threats?”
“‘Stay away from our women.’ ‘Your office may catch fire.’ Crap like that.”
“No shit. In Chinese?”
“Mandarin, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Doris said, with a sort of accent, like Fukienese, maybe. Two nights ago, when we closed, two guys were peering in through the blinds. After that, I felt like someone was following me, like from a distance.”
He pulled his black North Face jacket from the little closet.
“Fukienese?” he asked.
“Chinese, for sure. Last night I thought I saw one of them outside Confucius.”
“Go to the precinct and file a Form Sixty-One report so it’ll be on record. And it could support your pistol application.” He paused, checking for his keys. “You still have that friend in the DA’s office? ”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, you’re a lawyer yourself. That will help. But the DA’s office could call the Licensing Division. Know what I’m saying?”
“Right.”
“After you get the paperwork in, I’ll set you up at a pistol range. Learn how to shoot the right way. I know a guy on the West Side. Nice guy, Chinese, too.”
“Yeah, sure.” He heard her chuckle. “Thanks a lot.” It sounded like she took another sip, before saying, “There’s some other stuff . . .”
He checked his watch again.
“Tell you what,” he said. “ Why don’t you drop by Grampa’s later?”
He thought he heard “You bet” before she hung up.
Golden Star
The Golden Star Bar and Grill on East Broadway was known to the locals as Grampa’s, a revered Chinatown jukebox joint frequented by a Lower East Side clientele of Chinese, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and whites. It was three steps down to a big room with an oval-shaped bar, and even in the dim blue neon light, Jack could make out Billy seated at the end of the long glossy counter. He was watching two Latinas shooting a rack on the pool table in the back.
Jack took a barstool next to him.
“Hey hey,” greeted Billy. “Wassup?”
“You tell me,” answered Jack. “What’s the buzz?”
“Just a coupla the Fuk slop boys talking,” Billy said, signaling the bartender for a beer for Jack. As he waited, Jack remembered Vincent Chin, editor of the Chinese language newspaper, the United National. He had assisted Jack in the past. Jack knew Billy’s words would be neighborhood lowdown, in contrast to Vincent’s professional view.
They tapped beer bottles and Billy swiveled on the barstool, put his back to the two ladies at the pool table and leaned toward Jack. “In the slop room,” he said quietly, “I overheard the Fuk boys talking about the big shootout under the bridge. The crap didn’t start there, and probably won’t be the end of it. A coupla weeks ago, some Fuk Ching gangbangers threw a beat down on a few casino bus drivers who weren’t knuckling under. What happened the other night, the young guns chased a Fuk Chow crew chief down Henry, through the backstreets near the bridge. They shot him as he ran. Six times, both legs and arms.”
“They let him live,” Jack said, knowing now why the shooting never made the blotter as a homicide.
“It was a warning.” Billy continued, “The young Chings felt they were being squeezed out of the tour-bus game, like a new deal was coming down. The older Fuk Chow guys didn’t like the attention the young guns were attracting.”
“Well, too late now.” Jack smirked. “The shit’s hit the fan. Whatever the shady bus deal was, there’s a spotlight on it now, and they can’t be happy about that.”
“That’s a bet,” said Billy. “And about Jeff’s office getting robbed out there? The slop boyz claim that the Ching crews ain’t into burglaries. They don’t want stuff they gotta resell. They only want cash money, gold and silver. Easy money, jacking home invasions, kidnap, strong-arm. They threaten the victims to keep them quiet. The victims don’t really want to pull in the cops, get deported. It’s a win-win deal for the bad boyz.”
Jack remembered Ah Por’s bad, monkey vision, and kept silent. He knew that a third of cases went unresolved, and if Jeff’s family members were really robbing him, would he want it made public? To bring the family shame?
Cold Case came to his mind.
“Guess it’s just another mystery,” Billy said, turning his attention back to the Latinas, one of whom sank the eight ball, and was squealing gleefully, her breasts jiggling.
“Rack,” she said to the other woman.
“Rack is right,” agreed Billy, admiring her cleavage, and earning a smile from her.
Jack saw Alexandra come through the front door and slide into one of the booths. He patted Billy on his shoulder. “Catch you later,” Jack said, gliding off the barstool. He left Billy at the bar watching the Dominican ladies work a new rack, two beers still on ice. For him, the night was still young and full of possibilities.
He slipped into the booth next to Alex, ordering another beer as the waitress brought her a cloudy martini. Alex torched up a cigarette, took a French diva’s drag.
“Go for broke?” Jack teased. “Every man for himself?”
“Sure, no prisoners tonight.” She grinned.
“When did you start drinking those?” Jack asked. He remembered the morning she’d been escorted into the Fifth Precinct by one of the female uniforms, holding back on a D&D only because Alexandra had dropped his name. The drunk and disorderly had turned out more disorderly than drunk, with Alex still fuming after she’d tossed her cheating ex-husband’s Italian suits out of their eighteenth-floor condo at Confucius Towers.
The husband was angry, but not about to press charges.
Jack had gotten it straight with the woman cop, thanked her for backing off the D&D, for giving him face, cop to cop. He’d given Alex a stern talking to about the evils of alcohol, before releasing her.
Alex blew out a stream of smoke through the O of her lips, smiling. “You think work’s driving me to drink?”
“I think it’s driving you nuts.” He smiled, reluctant to judge her when his own fist was wrapped around a d
rink.
“How’s the little girl?” Jack asked, strangely feeling a sense of duty.
“Chloe’s with her father this weekend,” she said with a frown. They were quiet a moment, looking to lose the subject. They clinked glasses.
Alex sipped, watching Jack draw back a big gulp.
“After you left the other day,” she said, “a girl came in. She was about nineteen. The snakeheads brought her over and she was paying off the passage. The owner of her sweatshop absconded with the money, the place closed, and she was out of work. Couldn’t make the payments.” Alex worked the martini down. “They tried to make a whore out of her,” she said quietly. “She refused and got a beating. Now we have her in our women’s shelter. She’s afraid they’ll find her, and she’s desperate for a job.”
Jack put a gentle hand on Alex’s shoulder. “You can’t save everyone, Alex.”
“ For the ones that fall in my lap, I know I can make a difference.”
“And I know you will.” They touched glasses again.
“To the struggle,” she said, irony in her voice. She sounded bitter, and after a slow, lingering sip, she said, “So here’s my question. What can be done, in terms of law enforcement, to stop these snakeheads?”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “Hasn’t she gone to the precinct?”
“She’s too afraid.”
“Get an Order of Protection.”
“That’s a joke.” She exhaled a menthol puff sideways.
“Set up a sting? Agree to pay up and catch them when they show up to collect.”
“Come on, Jack. She’s even more afraid of that.”
“Then get her to relocate. Start over somewhere else, preferably far away. You can’t always deal with the snakeheads using courts and cops.”
“How then?”
