by Henry Chang
When he was full he went to the black knapsack and took out one of the disposable InstaFlash cameras. He set the black gourdshaped bottle down on Pa's table, thumbed open the cap and poured a big splash into a beer glass and took a swallow. The maotai was 150-proof rice liquor, more fiery than the Johnny Black he was used to, and left a bitter aftertaste following the scorch down his throat. Damn, he cursed on an incendiary breath, screwing his eyes tight. Moving about the dim apartment, he flashed off the thirty-six shots of the throwaway.
He took another swallow so he could begin to forget the way things looked.
Cans and bottles he placed together, along with dried goods and herbal medicines, in a box for the Old Age Center, to go along with the television, the kitchen appliances.
Pa's old clothes lay neatly stacked on his bed, bound for the Salvation Army instead of the Senior Citizens, since none of the old Chinamen would wear the clothes of the deceased.
The furniture, books, and household artifacts would be split between the Women's Shelter, and the Chinatown History Project.
He poured another splash.
In the last box he placed the things he needed to keep: citizenship papers, a bank account held in trust under his name containing five thousand dollars. A steamship ticket forty years old, Ma's passage to America. A copy of his own birth certificate, St. Vincent's Hospital, 1965.
Behind the dusty kwan kung, God of War figurine, with the urn of burnt-out incense, he found two more photographs, so evenly layered with dust that he knew they hadn't been touched in many years. In one he wore a crewcut and a paratrooper's uniform, no smile on his face. The other was a graduation picture taken at the Police Academy, a blue peaked cap over his eyes.
He stared at the photos, and ran his tongue but could not wet the dryness from his lips.
"Chaai lo ah?Now you're a cop? "Pa had said through teeth clenched in derision. "First it was the army, Bong bing, enlisting. You thought they would accept you? Die for a country that hates you?"
Jack had stood silent, had heard the argument before it reached his ears.
"Chinese don't become policemen. They're worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money. Nei cheega, you're crazy, you have lost your jook-sing-American born-mind. I didn't raise you to be a kai dai-punk idiot so they could use you against your own people."
He became a cop anyway, a ticket out of Chinatown.
And they did use me against my own people, but only against the bad ones, and I never took any money. Words he'd never found the chance to say to Pa.
Jack dropped the photographs into the box, the rice liquor working heavy on his eyelids. He stacked the boxes in the middle of the room, returned to the gourd bottle.
Cops didn't get paid for the blazing shootouts and deathdefying car chases that were commonplace on TV. By and large, the average cop clocked in his years and put in for a pension, never having fired a round, his service piece never clearing its holster.
Cops were paid to sop up images of body bags and toe tags, to record the horrific ugliness of butchered corpses and grisly executions, to clean up the bloody mess daily, like a sponge, so that the suits and the white collars wouldn't have to sully their psyches, or get their fingernails dirty.
Cops had to look for justice in quiet and painstaking investigations after the fact, and more often than not, they carne up empty.
There was a morgue of unsolved cases larger than the public library.
He did four cop years the hard way, plainclothes duty in the South Bronx, then Harlem, East New York, and Sunset Park, before he returned to the Chinatown stationhouse. Now he wasn't sure Detective One was in his future, and making sergeant even less likely. Plus he'd seen enough dead and brutalized bodies to start wondering if being a cop was the right answer. Maybe there were other possibilities in life, short as it is. Or else, he could hang in there and wind up eating the gun. Did he make a difference?The way things happened in Chinatown, he didn't feel like he did. Always a lot of questions that didn't come up with answers.
The mao-tai flamed down his throat.
There were scattered items on the card table Pa used as a desk. A Hong Kong ashtray. There was a small kwan kung statuette next to a framed, faded color photograph of a threesome: Pa and Ma much younger, and he, Jack the baby, in the middle. They were in a park somewhere, wearing summer clothes.
Grandpa had been a laundryman, but he managed to serve in World War II, and was able to bring his China son, Pa, then eleven, to America through the War Brides Act.
Grandma had chosen to return to China.
The rest was foggy.
Two decades later, Ma would be dead, buried in the village of her sisters, in the south of China, where she'd gone to visit but had contracted cholera and died. Pa had been stunned. He took it as a sign, tried to raise the boy himself.
Jack remembered grammar school. They had Parent-Teacher Days but Pa always worked, never attended. The other kids called Jack gzuoo yee, orphan.
Jack capped the gourd, went over to the bed. Granpa went home to 1 oishan. Pa got the Laundry. Ma died.
And like most of his Chinamen brethren, Pa never believed in life insurance. "Dai ga lai see," he'd say. "Don't ask for bad luck." He'd had no Social Security, no nest egg. Money never figured in the sum of his life.
Yu gor, brother Yu, the laundrymen had called Pa; he had the biggest heart, big with the giving of his all. Until the giving ran out, when it stopped beating one sudden dark morning, and the old sojourner's wandering was abruptly canceled, betrayed by the heart he'd given of so generously. Not to burden his son, he'd left six thousand in cash; a grimy stack of hundred-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box at the Bank of China. It paid for the prearranged funeral expenses, allowed him to depart with face and leave no shame for his son.
For that son, there was a hundred-dollar savings bond, and a note on folded white paper which contained his final message. When Jack had Pa's note translated, it read: I have seen that long shadow behind me, that shadow of our many ancestors. You, my son, are part of that unseen shadow that precedes me, the shadow of my descendants. There is no grandchild, no great-grandchild that I can see. That shadow ends with you. Yet you have the responsibility to make that shadow as long as the one behind me, though I may not live to see it. Remember where you came from. Know who you are. Know where you are going.
This, thoughtJack, from a man who believed only in the struggle of the laundrymen, who fought for his kindred brothers, workingmen all, slaves to the eight-pound steam iron.
The tragedy of the laundrymen, recalled Jack. Could they have known where they were going? Hemmed in by racism? Made unnecessary by the age of machines? He had played his fingers over the crispness of the savings bond, speechless in the silence of the private room in the basement of the bank where he'd opened his father's safety deposit box, the silence of things left unfinished, feelings left unspoken. Now it was too late. The bad feelings between father and son were left unresolved. Pa, dying alone. At the end, had there been forgiveness or recrimination?
Jack would never know, but justwanted to say once what in life he'd been too angry and stubborn to admit. I did love you, Father, after all.
The memories ached inside him, undiminished by alcohol. He checked his watch against the darkness outside Pa's window, and remembered Billy, and the midnight meet at Grandpa's.
Struggle
The Golden Star Bar and Grill, known locally as Grandpa's, was a wide basement window three steps down from the street with a video game by the front and a pool table in the back. The bar was a long wraparound oval under shadowy blue light, which ran along the perimeter of the ceiling, obscuring a mixed-bag clientele colored more Lower Eastside than Chinatown. A few Chinese. White. Puerto Rican. Black.
Jack set up a nine-ball rack snugly and tossed the wooden triangle under the pool table. It was eleven p.m., Wilson Pickett doing "Midnight Hour" on the jukebox. Jack hit on a beer, then stroked the stick back and out in a fluid, piston motion
, until it felt right, then slammed the tip high on the cue ball, blasting it toward the triangle-shaped cluster of nine balls.
The cluster broke with a sharp crack, scattering the balls, the white cue ball following hard through them. Jack studied the layout of balls. Billy had said midnight so there was time to chase a couple of racks around the green-felt table.
He knew he wasn't good enough to run nine balls unless the rack opened up exactly the right way, keeping the shots simple for him. Rarely happened. Divide and conquer, he was thinking, Sun Tsu. Split the rack. Try hard to run four or five balls, then repeat, a second run of four or five.
Nothing had gone down, the colored balls settling across the middle of the table. The one, two, three, he could make those. The four and five split out toward the end pockets, he'd have to work for those. He scraped the blue chalk cube across the tip of his stick and sighted the two, then drew back on the one, watched it drop as the white ball rolled behind the two. Straight shot, side pocket, followed by the three. He hit the beer, chalked again, scanned the place for Billy. Left-side English on the three spun the cue ball off the side rail toward the far end. Four ball, five, at the end of the table. He drew low and hard. The four went down with a plop, the cue ball skidding toward the other end, positioning off to the right. A cut shot, tight and thin.
He missed the five, took a long swallow of beer. Didn't see Billy. He followed through the rest of the rack until the nine ball dropped, and Billy walked into the bar.
They took a booth in the back and ordered a round of boilermakers, huddled together in cigarette smoke.
"The boys in the shop," Billy said, "think the rapist comes from outside of Chinatown, outside the city, on his day off. Works in a restaurant or factory, upstate maybe, where there's no Chinese around. Takes the bus down to the city."
They gulped liquor and Jack listened.
"The guy probably has a rent-a-bed in the area."
"Fukienese?"
"Probably, but don't get me wrong. Most of them are hardworking people, like slaves. Until they pay back their passage, they have to live under the gun, know what I'm saying?" He ordered more shots.
"Farrakhan," he grimaced, "comes on the TV and calls them bloodsuckers. Colin Ferguson gets on the Long Island Railroad and blows away two Asian women and the Nation of Islam praises him."
The shots came and they touched glasses like it was a declaration of war.
"Black gangbangers loot and burn the Koreans out of L.A. and the cops, man, they cut and run. No one cares."
Jack shrugged. "It's different now. You get killed for looking at someone the wrong way. For stepping on someone's shoe. Dissing, they call it. The rapper's rap it and the movies blow it up bigger than life."
Billy tapped the rim of the beer glass.
"It's open season on Chinamen."
Jack watched him drain it, his eyes telling the truth. Chinesepeo- ple never enslaved Black people, never robbed or lynched them. The Black Rage angle had nothing to do with the Chinese, who suffered under the same weight of discrimination as the Blacks did. The Black-on-Yellow crime wave was blind racist hate, straight up and simple.
"You know how it works, Jack. White cop shoots a black kid, the niggers riot, loot the Asian merchants." He signaled for another shot.
"Ease up," Jack said. "We got time yet."
There was a sigh, a disdainful shake of the head from Billy before he spoke again.
"Yeah. The other thing you asked about. The muscle behind the snakehead human traffickers? Yo, the Fuk Ching are the young guns down East Broadway, but the Fuk Chow have a lot of older guys, in their thirties and forties. Most of them are exPeople's Army. They got military training. Thems the ones you've got to look out for. The young Chings got Tech-nines and Magnums, but the old grunts got Chinese Makarovs and AK 47s. Explosives, too, know what I'm saying? What happened in Fort Lee was strictly hothead stuff. Revenge. You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till they really set up their numbers."
Jack shook his head, crushed his cigarette.
"A lotta shit," Billy said. "And you're eyebrow deep, pal. The badge that heavy on you?"
"I'm in a different position now, Billy."
"That badge don't make you any less a Chinaman, Jacky. Do what you got to do, but remember, you still just like me, like the rest of us. You don't have to go too far in NYC before someone reminds you who you are. We be Chinamen, Jack. You can't be happy till you accept what you are."
"I don't like boxing myself in like that."
"You kidding, right? You're a homeboy cop working Chinatown. You don't think you're boxed in?"
"I asked for the transfer back, Billy. The old man got sick. It was a hardship thing." Jack finished the beer. Billy shook his head.
"You know Chinatown well as me. Not for nothing, but you think the merchants are gonna stop giving it up because you came on the scene?"
"The merchants think it's easier to pay them off," Jack said.
"Nah, that's not it. They pay off because they know the cops can't protect them. Homeboy, you think you make a difference here?"
Jack didn't answer, but the waitress brought another round and when they toasted, Billy sprinkled whiskey onto the wooden floor.
"Your father was a standup guy, Jack. All the old-timers used to say so. He stood up for the laundrymen against the big laundromats. He challenged the City's labor taxes."
"That was a long time ago," Jack said, "and I wasn't around."
"They tried to make him out a commie, a troublemaker. But he had support in the community."
Jack remembered vague fragments as Billy went on.
"All that anti-American stuff he spoke, you never did believe it, did you?"
Jack finished his JB, shook his head slowly from side to side.
"I knew," Billy said. "You were proud to be American. That's why you joined the army. Not to get away from him, and Chinatown. Not because you hated what your father struggled for."
"Struggle," Jack agreed, "is a good word for it. There was a lotta years of that. Pa didn't understand. He thought I was nuts, or suicidal, or maybe I wanted to spite him by jumping out of airplanes."
"What happened with that?"
"I broke my ankle two weeks into Airborne out of Fort Ben- ning. I went into Computer-Tech after that, but a year later they decided Computers was overloaded and I volunteered out. Two years, I did."
There was a silence that brought the jukebox music back between them, until Billy rapped his knuckles against the wooden bar, and spoke like he was seeing a warm summer memory.
"Whatever happened to that foxy Chinese babe you used to hang with? The one used to live on Mulberry, with the crazy mother?"
It was just Billy's way of changing the conversation, Jack knew, but the question made bittersweet the grief he was already feeling, and though he didn't have a choice, feeling sad or mad, he decided he didn't want either, settling for more whiskey and oblivion instead. Zero feeling, he knew, was better than bad feeling, better than searching for answers that never came.
Still, the question caught him off guard. He remained silent, his eyes searching the dim blue-lit room for an answer to something he'd allowed himself to forget, something he'd felt long ago, when women seemed more important, and love was full of possibilities.
Maylee. At eighteen, his Chinatown beauty queen.
He hadn't thought of her in the eight years since college, before he'd dropped out, before the Tofu King, before the army, and the NYPD.
Maylee. His first love, and first heartbreak. It taught him to dull his expectations, to be cautious with the giving of his heart.
The memory was a rush. Three tenements apart, they'd made love every day that long summer after high school, before college, except for the days she cramped, and then he'd pamper her, head to foot. Their love ended when the fall semester began, bringing college boys with BMWs cruising the campuses like matriculated hustlers.
Maylee noticed. She'd long wanted out of the dilapidated
tenement, away from summer streets that stank raw with spoiled seafood, rotten fruit, restaurant garbage, overrun by rats and vermin. She was ashamed of how they lived, embarrassed by poverty and the narrow-mindedness of her culture.
JackYu, the boy next door, was sweet, but he wasn't the way out.
Her mother wasn't crazy; just afraid. Afraid her daughter would join the street gangs. Afraid she'd drop out of school, take up with a gwuailo, a blue-eyed white devil. Afraid she'd get pregnant. Afraid she'd lose her Chineseness, forget her name, where she came from.
Afraid, afraid, afraid.
Afraid of all the things lofan-foreigner-white, and American that her daughter desired to be, until finally that mother's fear drove the daughter away, but not until she had broken Jack's heart and made him want to leave also.
Maylee enrolled at Barnard. Jack squeezed into City College. Their classrooms just a mile of city streets apart, but their worlds already tumbling in opposite directions: she, edging her way uptown; he, falling back into Chinatown. It was Maylee who made him wary, but it was Wing's murder that made him hard-hearted, that erected the great wall around his emotions that protected him, isolated him.
"She cut loose, Billy. Got sick of Chinatown, married a to fan white boy, moved to Connecticut. Became a lawyer, or doctor," Jack heard his whiskey voice answering, ice cubes clinking the glass in his hand.
"Haven't seen her in years," he said carelessly, drinking away the contradictions in his private life, gaining short bursts of clarity in the alcoholic reaching for oblivion. Halfway gone, only then was he able to make some sense of it all.
After Maylee, there came a series of unrewarding, unsatisfying affairs, with Asian girls he'd figured he had something in common with, affairs ultimately overshadowed by the differences in their cultural attitudes. The Japanese considered themselves superior to the Chinese. The Chinese never forgot the Japanese atrocities in World War Two. Koreans were clannish, rude, spiteful in the face of Eastern history, their occupation by the Japs. Vietnamese and Cambodians never got over China's part in their wars of liberation. Indians, Filipinos, Thais, their skin was too dark. Poverty and colonialism settled their place in the Asian pecking order. Later generations paying for the crimes and weaknesses of their ancestors. Attitudes steeped in centuries of struggle, prejudice and pride, too strong for Jack's brief Americanization to overcome. He knew who he was, but refused to let history trap him the way it did Pa. In New York, in the last decade of the twentieth century, love had become too complex, sex too risky, intimacy too great a compromise. Jack let it go, found his own center, decided to let love flow to him, instead of him chasing after it. Patience, Pa would have said, was a virtue. The right one would come along. Later, there were Puerto Rican women, and artistic women of color from the Village, but never white women, to whom he was invisible, the Chinaman no man. Sure, he thought, had he been wealthy, or possessed a fancy car back then, it might have made a difference. Money transcended color. Class transcended race.
