“I brought a car,” said the stranger, much to my relief.
“Will our dog fit?” I asked him.
“Sure. That’s why I brought it. Um, our mutual friend suggested it. He said Dr. Zadok would be bringing a big dog.”
“Actually, ‘dog’ is not quite accurate,” Max explained, still trying to coax Nelli out the door. “She is a mystical familiar who has chosen to manifest in canine form.”
“A very large canine form,” our companion noted.
“Nelli, come on,” I said firmly, taking her leash from Max and giving it a sharp tug. She skittered toward me and tried to seek shelter under the hem of my coat (not a very practical strategy) while Max closed the shop door. I asked the well-dressed stranger, “Where’s your car?”
“Right over here. I got lucky with parking,” he said, leading the way. A few seconds later, he stopped at a big black hearse and opened the tailgate so Nelli could climb into the back.
“A hearse?” I blurted, clutching my warm bag of food.
“I thought it would be too conspicuous, but our mutual friend insisted I bring it. Now I know why,” he added with a grin as he closed the door on Nelli, who was settling herself comfortably. “Anyhow, being inconspicuous was the idea with the carry-out. I was trying to seem like I had an ordinary reason for entering the shop to find Dr. Zadok.”
“Delivering food in a hearse?”
“Not my smoothest plan ever,” he admitted with another smile. “Here, you don’t have to keep holding the bag.”
“Yes, I do.” I took a step back when he reached out to take it from me.
As Max helped me into the back seat of the hearse, he said to our escort, “May I ask were we are going?”
“To a funeral,” was the reply.
“Of course,” I said as I dug into my bag of food.
5
White
The color of death and mourning, ancestral spirits and ghosts.
As we turned south on 7th Avenue, I extracted a container of egg rolls from the bag. “Does anyone else want something to eat?”
Nelli whined a little, and although I didn’t want to encourage bad habits, I tossed an egg roll into the back for her, rather than feel her mournful brown gaze bore into me while I ate. Our escort was busy dealing with bad driving conditions and heavy traffic, and Max was too nervous to eat. (Not because we were on our way to confront Evil, but because cars terrify him. Born in the seventeenth century, he’s still having a little trouble adjusting to motorized transportation.) So I ate alone, munching on the remaining egg roll with relish as I investigated the other contents of the bag.
After we crossed Houston and continued going south, Max unclenched his tense jaw enough to ask, “Where exactly is this funeral we’re attending?”
“Chinatown,” said our driver.
When traffic became so thick that the hearse came to a standstill, I asked, “Who are you, by the way? Or can’t you tell us?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I should have introduced myself,” said the stranger, turning to look at us both. “I’m John Chen. How do you do?”
We exchanged greetings.
Then John said with a self-deprecating smile, “Uncle Lucky got me so focused on secrecy, in case your shop is bugged by the cops—”
“Uncle?” I said in surprise.
“Bugged?” Max blurted.
“—that I forgot to say something after we were outside.”
“Bugged,” I repeated to Max with a nod. As soon as I had realized the message was from Lucky, I’d understood why we were supposed to be silent. “I really doubt it, Max, since it’s not as if you’re a ‘known associate,’ and OCCB’s resources probably aren’t so endless they can spy on everyone who knows Lucky. But I guess that being so cautious is one of the reasons he’s never gone to prison.” Then I asked our chauffeur, “Is Lucky really your uncle?”
John returned his attention to traffic as things started moving again. “No, we just call him that. My brother and I. I’ve known Lucky all my life. His uncle—a real one—and my grandfather were business partners, and ever since they died, the business has belonged to Lucky and my dad. But he’ll explain all that to you.”
I wondered what sort of business we were talking about. Underworld stuff? I didn’t think Lucky would get me and Max mixed up in Gambello business. Not in the current circumstances. And John seemed like a respectable guy, not a third-generation hoodlum. Then again, what did I know about Chinese criminals? I’d seen gangbangers stalking the streets of Chinatown occasionally, when I was there shopping and eating (prices are good in Chinatown, so I go there often), and they looked just like thugs of any other ethnicity. But for all I knew, maybe Chinatown associates at Lucky’s level of business all came across like John—who gave the impression of being a courteous, well-spoken professional with nice manners. One who slowed down when the traffic light changed from green to yellow, I noted, rather than speeding through it.
“So, John, whose funeral are we going to?” I asked, opening a container of dumplings. “Is there sauce with this?”
“Huh? Oh, um, there should be,” said John. “I’m taking you to Benny Yee’s funeral. Well, his visitation.”
“A Chinese funeral?” Max said with concern. “I don’t think we’re properly dressed for that.”
“How should we be dressed?” I asked.
“In white,” said Max. “It’s the color of mourning.”
“I’m not mourning the departed,” I pointed out. “We never even met.” I was wearing dark brown slacks, black boots with low heels, and a nice sweater in forest green, which I thought ought to be acceptable garb for a stranger paying her respects at a visitation on a miserable winter night like this.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Zadok,” said John. “People in Chinatown mostly dress just like you and Miss Diamond would for a funeral. A lot of the old ways don’t survive long in the New World. Or in the twenty-first century.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Max murmured thoughtfully, “I should have realized. The last time I was at a Chinese funeral was in China, and it was a long time ago.”
Knowing Max as I did, I realized that “long time” could easily mean a hundred years or so.
“And, actually, I’m not supposed to take you straight to Benny’s send-off,” said John. “Uncle Lucky wants to see you first. Which means meeting in private. I guess you already know, he can’t be seen in public. And Benny Yee’s wake is pretty public. Lots of people will be paying their respects.”
“I gather Mr. Yee is an influential man?” said Max, clinging to his seat as we skidded a little when turning onto Canal Street.
“Was, you mean,” I said, deciding not to open the sauce I’d found, since the ride wasn’t that smooth. I bit into a juicy dumpling and sighed.
“He was a Chinatown businessman,” said John. “And a pretty prominent member of the Five Brothers tong.”
“Ah-hah!” I said, perceiving the connection with Lucky. “A tong. That’s like the Mafia, right? Only Chinese.”
“Well, not really. I mean, yes, there’s a certain aspect of—”
“Perhaps you should keep both hands on the wheel,” Max said anxiously to John, who had lifted his right hand for a moment to waggle it ambiguously in response to my question.
“We’ll be there soon, Dr. Zadok,” John said soothingly, returning his full attention to the road.
So was John a tong member? Or was he simply, like me and Max, a normal person inadvertently connected to some underworld figures? (Well, “normal” in the sense of not being professional criminals.)
Traffic was heavy here, as it usually was, as well as perilous. On Canal Street, Chinatown’s main east-west artery, a two-way thoroughfare that was crowded with impatient drivers and daredevil cabbies, pedestrians were crossing the street against the lights, wading through moving car
s, and stepping off the curb without warning. But despite Max’s obvious anxiety and occasional little gasps of alarm, John was handling this big vehicle well in the tight traffic, and he was alert in his reactions to the human obstacle course. So I thought we had a good chance of reaching our destination without mowing down a reckless pedestrian.
I heard panting in my ear and felt Nelli’s breath on my neck as she peered over my shoulder, from her commodious spot in the back of the hearse, to examine the steamed dumplings. Rather than argue about it, I gave her one, being careful not to let her accidentally take a finger with it.
“But that’s the only one you’re getting,” I said firmly.
As always, Chinatown was an explosion of light, color, bustle, life, and chaos. Even in this rotten weather, outdoor vendors lined Canal Street. The merchants, huddled deep in their coats and hooded parkas, were eagerly waving down pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks, urging them to stop, shop, and buy. We drove slowly past restaurants with duck carcasses hanging in the windows, their crispy skin burnished reddish-bronze by flavorful sauce and slow roasting. Chinese women carrying shopping bags bartered with fish vendors whose fresh-caught wares lay on piles of ice and glistened under the bright electric lights. A profusion of red, yellow, white, and green signs and billboards displayed Chinese calligraphy. The Chinese characters on all the stores and shops were followed, almost as an afterthought, by brief English translations: Happy Family Chinese Bakery; Shanghai Gourmet Restaurant; Glamorous Clothes; Kosher Dim Sum (food being a bond between Chinese and Jews); Herbal Remedies; Tea Imports.
When we stopped at another traffic light, John pointed to a nearby building with golden pagoda-like flourishes around the doorway. “Speaking of tongs, as we were . . . Have a look at the Chinese characters above the window there, Miss Diamond.”
“Call me, Esther.”
“Esther,” he repeated with a nod. “See the third character there? The one that looks sort of like a stick-figure man wearing a big straw hat?”
I peered at it. “Yes.”
“Ah,” said Max with a nod. “The symbol for tong.”
“You read Chinese?” I asked Max, not that surprised. I had heard him speak it once, and I knew he read English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head briskly to disclaim any such accomplishment. “I only know a few dozen common Chinese characters. You’d have to be familiar with several thousand to read the language competently.”
I’m no linguist, but I knew that in contrast to the phonetic way that Western writing had developed over the millennia, with each alphabetical symbol representing a sound, Chinese writing had arisen from ideograms and pictographs. I nodded in response to what Max had said, adding, “Because every word in the language has its own unique symbol, right?” I’d learned my ABCs when I was a small child, which is where literacy starts in our language. Kids in China don’t have it nearly so easy. If you memorized twenty-six symbols in Chinese, you’d only know twenty-six words, rather than knowing all the symbols used to write your whole language.
“And a lot of the characters are easy to confuse with each other, too.” John added ruefully, “I’m a good student, but my father finally gave up hoping I’d ever learn to read Chinese.”
“But you can read that symbol?” I asked. “The character for tong?”
“Well, there are a hundred or so symbols that are so common—especially in daily life in Chinatown—that most people around here know them,” John replied. “Even people like me who were hopeless at our Chinese lessons. Or immigrants from the bottom rungs of society who never really learned to read and write.”
“That’s why I recognize it,” said Max. “I know even fewer characters than our able young escort, but tong is a common one. And easy to remember.”
I found Chinese writing beautiful and exotic, but it all just looked like abstract art to me, without identifiable patterns, so I had never noticed this symbol—or any other—in particular, though I came often to this part of town.
“A stick-figure man with a straw hat,” I said to John with a smile. “I’ll remember that.”
“It’s one that you’ll see all over Chinatown,” he said.
“That seems very bold,” I commented. “Sort of an in-your-face challenge to law enforcement, isn’t it?”
I really couldn’t picture the Gambellos—or the other Mafia families with whom they competed—writing La Cosa Nostra on their buildings.
As traffic started moving again, John said, “No, not at all. The literal meaning of tong is ‘gathering place’ or ‘meeting hall.’ It applies to any space in which people congregate, for whatever reason.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, understanding now. “It’s similar to the way ‘family’ is a common word with a harmless meaning—unless we’re specifically talking about something like the Gambello family.” In which case, family meant a criminal organization, most of whose members weren’t actually related to each other.
“Um . . . yeah,” said John, keeping his eyes on the road.
I wondered if it had been tactless of me to bring that up, given that Lucky was evidently relying on the Chen family while he was hiding from the cops. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. I was curious and a little puzzled now, so I asked more questions as we proceeded through the center of Chinatown, passing Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth. Fortunately, John didn’t seem to mind answering.
“But I’m sure ‘tong’ has some kind of criminal connotation,” I said. “I sometimes read in the news about tong leaders being investigated or arrested for running extortion, prostitution, and gambling rackets. And whenever there’s a sweep of street gangs in Chinatown, the media usually describe the gangs as the enforcers for the tong bosses.”
“Yes, that’s certainly an aspect of Chinatown’s tongs,” said John as the hearse approached the Bowery. “A well-known one. They’re secret societies, in a sense, like Uncle Lucky’s work family—which my brother and I were never allowed to ask him about. Being kids we asked anyhow, of course, but my parents chewed us out if they found out about it, and Lucky mostly just told us not to ask.”
Ah. So apparently the Chens had not raised John and his brother to go into a similar line of work. Which would explain why he came across as respectable—he evidently was.
John continued, “But the tongs are also fraternal organizations. Community benevolent associations, you might say. There’s criminal activity—really bad stuff, in fact. But the tongs are also involved in helping immigrants, assisting families, supporting community activities and local businesses, and working on civic problems. It’s all based on the way Chinatown evolved, separate from the rest of the city. Self-contained and self-reliant. A lot of those old ways and established customs have far-reaching effects. Especially in a community where there are always a lot of new immigrants who don’t really speak English, don’t trust government authorities, and aren’t always here legally.”
When we slowed down for the traffic light at the Bowery, the windy north-south boulevard that bisects Chinatown, I wondered how far east we were going. Historically, Chinatown was a very small, densely packed neighborhood. Still densely packed today, it had expanded geographically in recent decades to take over much of Little Italy, which is north of Canal, and most of the Lower East Side, which was historically a Jewish neighborhood—way back when the Diamonds came to America from Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.
“Tongs are complicated,” John concluded as he turned south on the Bowery. “Well, most things in Chinatown are complicated.”
That much I had always gathered. In keeping with the long tradition of New York City as a gateway to America, there’s a constant churn of population in Chinatown, with new immigrants (legal and illegal) arriving here and working hard to scrape out a fresh start in a new land, and previous arrivals moving on after a few years
—or after a generation—as they seek to turn their initial foothold in the New World into middle class prosperity. Much the way that my own forebears came to these shores more than a century ago, survived in overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side, and labored long hours for low wages as garment workers, before ultimately saving enough money to move on to better jobs and decent apartments elsewhere. Their children, in turn, grew up as Americans, started successful businesses, and owned suburban houses. It’s the perpetual cycle of realizing the American dream, generation after generation.
The Chinese got a late start on this path, despite migrating to America as early as the mid-nineteenth century to build the railroads that eventually crossed the continent. The racist Chinese Exclusion Act severely limited Chinese immigration to the US for some sixty years, including decades during which there were no immigration quotas or restrictions for other nationalities. The act prevented Chinese men from becoming US citizens, and prevented their wives and families from joining them here.
Even Jews were treated better than that. Not a thing one often has a chance to say about my people, historically speaking.
During the decades that the Exclusion Act was in effect, the Chinese in America became a small, isolated bachelor society, largely self-governing and separate from the general population. Hence the establishment of historic Chinatowns in various major cities, which are still destinations for new Chinese immigrants every year.
The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until World War Two, and the motivation for eliminating it was political, not moral. In the Pacific war against the Japanese, the US became allied with China. This made the typical American characterization of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril a tad inconvenient for the US government, which finally lifted the virtual ban on Chinese immigration that had been in effect since the Victorian era.
But, you know—world at war, tens of millions perishing, the Japanese occupation of China . . . There wasn’t exactly a huge rush to get in the door the moment the Exclusion Act was abolished. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Chinese population in the States really started booming. So the Chinese have made major inroads in American society in a relatively short time. And in the process, much of lower Manhattan has now turned into Chinatown.
The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel Page 9
