by Ed Lin
I crossed my arms. “Who was he before?”
“He was a man who had his dreams of making it in this country. When those dreams fell apart, he tried to make it happen for you.”
“Yes, he was such a nurturing soul,” I said. I remembered one of our last conversations, when he said I should be a garbageman instead of a policeman, which was something that only a “fucking stupid idiot” wanted to be.
“Don’t joke about your father. Sure, it’s easy to laugh at him, the misfortune he had in his life.”
“Mom, don’t you get it? He brought it all upon himself. Wah Kung forced him to move to New York and keep working off his debt and then Dad borrowed even more money from them, right?”
“He only borrowed it to impress me with his new clothes and money. It was a different story in a few months. We had trouble making the debt payments and I was pregnant. As soon as I could, I went to work, too. We didn’t have them all paid off until you were almost in high school.”
“You can blame Pop for all the extra years it took.”
“Well, you were no help, either, Robert! We knew you were running around in that gang and getting into fights!”
I shifted my weight and leaned against the wall. We had never talked about this before and now it was confrontation time—a decade after the fact.
“Mom,” I started, “the gangs back then were a joke compared with now.”
“I saw bloodstains on your clothes when I did the laundry. You think I didn’t know? Your father told me not to bother you about it, because you had your own life to work out and you had your own way of doing it. All men do.”
“Dad sure did have his way.”
She slapped the oven door with her right hand and then leaned toward me, her face looking mean.
“He wasted a lot of money on you, Robert!”
“What are you talking about? He barely even gave me a glance!”
“Your father borrowed even more money to pay for extra photographs of you each year you were in school. He mailed out hundreds of pictures over the years to people he knew in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the rest of the world. He wrote on every single one, ‘This is my son’! It came out to thousands of dollars, Robert, but that’s how proud he was of you, how much he loved you.”
“He never said he was proud.” Or that he loved me.
“You were the only thing he talked about in all his letters. How big, how handsome, and how smart you were. He never talked about his own hard work, the sacrifices and the suffering.”
“Wait a second. How come I never saw any of these photographs he bought over the years?” I asked. I had always thought that my parents were too cheap to buy them.
“He kept only one photograph for each grade in his special box. But he burned them all when you told him!”
“Told him what?”
She burst into tears.
“He had such big dreams for you. He even told me once that he hoped you would rise up in the government and change the immigration laws so nobody would ever have to go through what he had to. Robert, when you said you wanted to become a policeman, it killed him! It really did!”
I had always seen my mother as the foundation of our family of three. My father cried many times, but not my mother. Never. Now I felt terrible seeing this strong woman choking up. I felt guilty as hell, and for the first time in my life I felt like I owed my father something.
“Mom, you knew I was never going to be a lawyer, Senator Chow, or anything like that. You knew I was a crappy student.”
“Don’t you understand, Robert? You were a genius to him! You knew Chinese, but you could speak English just like the people in the TV shows! He thought you could do anything!”
“He thought more of me than I did of myself. Anyway, is it really so bad that I became a cop?”
“He thought it was,” she said, starting to dry her tears. “What was it all for if you weren’t even going to college?”
“A cop is very important, Mom.”
“But how does it honor your father’s spirit? You probably won’t make much more money in your life than he did!”
I bit my cheek from the inside and rubbed my mouth.
“That may be true,” I said, “but here’s something I can do—I can get these snakeheads.”
“What?”
“Snakeheads, Mom. That’s what the smugglers are called now.”
“That’s a good name for them.”
“I can’t go back in time and get the same guys who screwed Dad over, but I can help people stuck in the same situation now.”
“Some things don’t change, I guess. I read in the Chinese newspapers about those two bodies. In your father’s time, if you couldn’t keep up with payments, something could happen to you, too. Back then, when the American cops found a Chinese body, they would dig a ditch and roll it in. They just figured it was a criminal who got what he deserved. Your father knew men who were killed.”
We set all the food on the table surface and lit the incense. A framed picture of my father at a young age leaned against a vase filled with stones.
“How old was Dad in this picture?”
“That’s the picture from his fake passport. He’s only fourteen or fifteen.”
I stared at his young, smiling face. He was ten years younger than I was now. When I was that age, I was swinging a chain in the streets.
He looked innocent and utterly unprepared for his life’s hard work. He couldn’t have known how bad it was going to be. I thought about all the horrible things that were going to happen to that poor little boy in the picture, who looked like a perfect victim.
All that hope brimming in his eyes was mostly dead by the time I was born. I killed what was left.
I looked harder and I saw for the first time that I had his eyes.
Dad, I’m going to get these smugglers, I promised to his picture. Not for the father you were, but for the kid you used to be.
I lit up a hundred-dollar Hell Bank Note and watched it blacken and crumble in a metal bowl.
The veteran precinct detectives were out dealing with the FALN bombing and tried to stay out of the squad room as much as possible because the air conditioner was busted. The precinct detectives holed up in their hiding holes, the main one being Happy’s on Baxter, above Columbus Park, where they hung out with Manhattan South detectives.
Happy’s, which was one of the few big Italian restaurants left south of Canal Street, wasn’t the actual name, but it was easier to say. Everybody knew Happy’s and everybody went there except for Vandyne and me.
Happy himself kept a semicircular booth in the front by the register that no one else was allowed to sit in but squad detectives, who were welcome anytime, even before or after closing. Three or four would come in at a time, wolf down steaks with a few shots of Johnnie Walker Black. If they had smaller appetites, Happy would probably give them the keys to the kitchen, but of course he knew better. A free meal or two per detective per day was enough.
I met Happy about a year ago when I was still on the bottle and stumbling through a footpost. Happy was trying to figure out how to hammer an old sign to the right of his entrance. Happy was doughy, in both shape and color, and about five-nine, 240, with a neutral expression on his face. He got his name because he had the most sarcastic sense of humor in the world. Or maybe he just hated everything, because his comments, which usually contextualized his own death, wouldn’t register more than a flicker on his face.
“Do you like this?” he asked me after taking note of my NYPD uniform. “It’s a family heirloom from Shanghai.”
The sign was a reproduction of an old anti-Chinese cartoon that used to run in newspapers in the old West. A Chinaman with a long queue and ricepicker hat was standing and holding his head back with his mouth wide open. His right hand was holding a rat by the tail and dangling it just above his lips.
“Do you think people around here are gonna understand the parody?” asked Happy. “Or are they gonna wanna
kill me?”
I smiled, but I opened up my right hand and laid it against my revolver. I entertained the thought of pulling the trigger, but the paperwork that would follow was a huge deterrent.
“They’ll really wanna hang me for this one, huh?” asked Happy, his face smooth and frosty as beach glass.
“Let me see that up close,” I said, grabbing the sign. It was light and made out of pine. I laid it down as a ramp from the street to the curb and stomped on it, snapping it in two. I picked up the smaller piece and handed it to Happy. “There you go. Less is more.”
He kind of had it in for me after that. Fuck him. I didn’t need to eat his ratty food. I had all of Chinatown for my ratty food.
Later I had heard that Happy had complained to the Brow about me, which didn’t help my special relationship with my C.O. Well, fuck him, too. He was the one who was keeping me walking a beat and blocking my advancement to investigative assignments. The whole time I had blamed English Sanchez for not throwing me a bone.
I had unfairly hated English for a while and sometimes I felt bad about it. Lonnie told me that the Bible said that just thinking of sinning was the same as actually sinning, so thinking of killing someone was the same as doing the deed itself. Now I knew why so many cops had Blessed Virgin Mary cards shoved into the inside of their hats. Nobody had more murderous thoughts than an NYPD cop.
I came into the squad room and found that the heat and humidity were already comfortably settled in, shoes off and everything. I saw English and pointed at the dusty, dented air-conditioning unit perched above a blackened window.
“That thing ever going to get fixed?” I asked.
“Yeah, right after you finish that Apex Tech class,” he said, never looking away from the newspaper on his desk. “They let you keep your tools when you graduate, you know.”
We were alone in the room.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry I blamed you for not giving me investigative assignments.”
“Forget it.”
“I thought you had something personal against me.”
“Never did.”
“I thought you were a racist.”
“I sort of am.”
I chuckled a little. “Anyway,” I said. “I’m not making a lot of headway on the two bodies.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Because you don’t think I’m up for it?” I growled. “You wanted to see me fall on my face?”
“That’s not it.” English flipped the newspaper closed and put his hands behind his head. “It’s just that something like this gets forgotten. This FALN thing is going to get solved. People will go to jail for this one because white people were killed. Important ones. Two illegal Chinese guys dead? I don’t need to tell you this: No one cares outside of Chinatown. Even inside Chinatown, most people probably feel like they got what they deserved.”
“What about the smuggling, the illegal human trafficking?”
“It’s all on the rise, but let the INS worry about that.”
“So you gave me this assignment fully expecting me to not come up with anything.”
“Yeah, I did.” Now he was looking right at me. “But I was hoping you could surprise me. Pleasantly.”
“This is a personal thing for me, you know?”
“That’s not going to help you. Don’t take the job to heart. It’s not worth it. You don’t need emotional scars when you retire.”
“I already got ’em.”
We each found other things to occupy ourselves with.
After a while, I asked English, “Do we know for sure that illegal immigration is up in Chinatown?”
“We see all the signs: There’s a lot more trash, the streets are more crowded, and money-transfer businesses are booming. The illegals here, they always try to send as much money as possible back home.”
“I can see all that. We should get the Immigration and Naturalization Service in on this and round up the illegals. It would be a humanitarian mission, stop the exploitation.”
English sighed and shook his head.
“We tried that before. The Greater China Association threatened to file a racial discrimination lawsuit if we start raiding restaurants with the INS.”
“We need the association’s approval before we do anything?”
“They can make things easy or hard. Besides, let’s say we raided a restaurant that was owned by a member of Greater China and found no illegals, which is a feasible outcome. Then what? Not only would the association come down on us, but also the ACLU, not to mention the fucking Manhattan D.A.!
“Anyway, Chow, the fact is that the Chinatown businesses benefit from the smuggling of aliens. They pay ’em less, work ’em longer, and if they treat ’em like shit, who the hell can they complain to? They sure as hell aren’t going to try to organize a union or go on a hunger strike.”
“I have reason to believe that these associations have a hand in the smuggling so that they get cheap labor for their restaurants and sweatshops.”
“Is this from family experience?” English asked.
“Actually, from a certain family that’s a friend of the family.”
“I see,” English said evenly, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples.
“You all right?” I asked.
“You know how much shit I’m getting over this FALN bombing?”
“What do you mean?”
“The new FALN spokesman has the same name as me! Manhattan District South guys kid around with me, but it ain’t all kidding!”
“You’re not Puerto Rican—you’re American!”
“But my parents are from there! They’ve also got idiot friends who are pro–Puerto Rican independence who are not unsympathetic with the FALN!”
“If they live in New York City, they should have no say whatsoever over the fate of Puerto Rico.”
“You tell them that. They’re more loyal to Puerto Rico than anyone else.”
“It must be an immigrant way of thinking. You feel loyal to the place that was so crappy you had to leave.”
“I think they’re nostalgic for the crap,” said English.
“If this country keeps losing jobs, they won’t have to be nostalgic.”
8
I TOOK A SLOW WALK TO THE TOY STORE.
I could feel my father around me, which was a little strange because the old man and I hadn’t been close in years. When he came home, tired and cranky, I used to wonder where the other guy went. The guy who used to bring me candy, dried mango, or squid jerky. The guy who discovered that I was allergic to seafood because of how violently ill I became after eating squid jerky.
When he died, I couldn’t feel anything for him. It was after I was back from Nam, so that wasn’t surprising. He had given me shit about going to the police academy, so I just sort of regarded him as an annoying papa-san.
The mind is a funny thing. After I got on the wagon and fell in love with a girl, I started seeing my father out in the streets. I didn’t literally see his ghost walking around, but I’d see his nose in profile on another guy’s face. Sometimes I’d be walking behind someone who had his slouchy shuffle, his spotted ears, or the back of the head that looked like an elderly porcupine with spikes gone soft and white.
One time a hand reached out to my shoulder and touched me exactly where he used to touch me from his chair after dinner to ask me to get him a beer from the fridge.
Of course it wasn’t my father. It was an older guy who wanted to know if I was the guy whose picture used to be in all the Chinese newspapers. The man was almost completely bald and had two light brown spots on the top right of his head that looked like an imprint from a woman’s high-heeled shoe.
He called me the Sheriff of Chinatown. I tried to get away from him as soon as possible, but he was one of those people who liked to say good-bye and then ask another question just when you’re about to part. The guy ended up grabbing both of my hands twice before I was able to make the corner and get away. I c
hecked that my wallet was still in my pocket, though, just in case he had been working me with a partner. I guess he was genuinely glad to meet me.
I get recognized less now.
My father died before he ever saw my face in the papers. I wonder if he would have been proud of me. Maybe he could have come to see that I made the right choice in becoming a cop. Then we could have been buddies. We could have gone to the father-son bowling tournament and chucked gutterballs.
I knew, though, that that never could have happened. The few years that my father was kind to me used up the last bits of humanity he had left. Dad couldn’t even be nice to Mom by that point.
That smiling, hopeful teenager in the photo was long forgotten. Dad’s spirit looking to pocket paper money and eat a meal during the Ghost Festival might not have recognized his picture. I can only hope his spirit was less bitter than the man. Working long hours at menial jobs to pay off his smuggling debt must have been like trying to save up for a new house with a paper route.
What it all came down to was that the smugglers made money from cheap labor to work in restaurants and factories owned by associations—maybe more money than they got from the people they brought over. The laborers made up a reliable workforce even after their debt was paid off and until the day they couldn’t work anymore.
My dad was dead long before he fell off the roof. I really don’t think he was holding out hope for me to make all his sacrifices worth it, like my mother said. If he was, then that was as foolish as taking that first step on the gangplank back in China to come here.
When I was drinking I used to be mad at everything that didn’t come in a can or a bottle. I was focused now.
Stop the snakeheads.
Maybe, only now, years after my dad had passed, I was ready to do something for him and find some sort of resolution between us. Maybe my father’s spirit had entered me and we were going to stop the snakeheads together.
Maybe I was just losing it.
Soon I was in front of the toy store. I went in and carefully scrutinized the two paintings behind the counter and felt my jaw tighten up.
The Guan Gong portrait was typically terrifying, with his bloodred complexion, war paint, and Green Dragon crescent moon blade weapon. His two-foot-long beard flowed into a point in his left hand. Guan was a real general during the Three Kingdoms period and is deified as a symbol of loyalty and righteousness throughout the Chinese community.