Chinatown Beat

by Henry Chang

  “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 Benning. 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.

  Jack Yu, 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 gwailo, 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 lo fan—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 lo 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.

  In that equation, he’d known that women had all the power. Asian women could sell out, cop to the plea, give up the struggle, because they were desired. Asian men had to live with their struggles for acceptance. In his mind it sounded bitter. It felt the same.

  He ordered another round and they watched Grandpa’s fill up with radio car drivers and their raucous passengers of the night. Pretty ladies and gangsters. Gato Barbieri wailed out of the jukebox and when they finished their drinks, Jack left Billy at the bar, each of them feeling sadder and more alone.

  Karaoke

  The Sing Along Song Club was a walk-up assembly-hall space in the White Tiger Crane Kung Fu Academy. The school was operated by the Hip Chings on weekdays only. The hall was recast as the Sing Along from nine at night until three a.m. every night of the week.

  Young men from the Association came each night and rolled out the tables, laid on the tablecloths and topped them with candles. Liquor was inside locked wall cabinets that folded out into a display shelf behind a long, low wooden bar, with red-topped barstools that the students sat on during Kung Fu practice. The other long wall was lined with mirrors.

  It was a turnkey disco-ball operation. Hit a switch, dim the lights. The huge flat-screen projection TV lit up the back wall. Pin spots of light spun off the mirrored ball. The Samsung CD-O
K laser karaoke machine kicked in. Pick up a microphone and follow the bouncing ball.

  Every half hour, smoke rolled in from the Fogmaker 200, and they punched up the audio. The girls in black mini-dresses came out with trays of Remy XO cognac and served them at the covered tables.

  Dragons were posted near the doors, and they screened for weapons.

  The place usually opened with Hong Kong college students and got cooking after midnight when the hardcore older crowd came in from the gambling joints, the tracks, the late action at OTB. The siu jeer, young lady hostesses, arrived at twelve-thirty and picked off the single men.

  The CD-OK machine had a capacity of fifteen thousand songs and videos in a single compact disk, and featured auto-mike mixing and echo for giving the singer a pro sound even after a fifth of XO.

  The cognac had been stolen from Chin Wah Distributors, twelve bottles a case, twenty-five cases in all. A twenty-five-thousand dollar score by the Dragons, more when the girls served it out at a hundred-fifty each fifth. Counting the five-dollar cover, they cleared a thousand a night, easy. Not counting the fifty-dollar bags of Jamaican, the hundred-dollar glassines of Chinese Number Three, balown sooga.

  The Sing Along had contest nights during which the collegiate Hong Kong wannabees partied hearty. Toward the Double Ten parties, celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China on October tenth, more people crushed in from out of town, hungry for the action, and the Association gladly fed the volatile mix.

  It was past midnight.

  Johnny watched Mona follow Uncle Four up the flight of stairs into the Sing Along. He had been told to return in an hour, and was considering what to do with the hundred dollars he had left after his losing streak at Yonkers.

  He decided he was hungry and went for a quick siew yeh at the Harmonious Garden. The chef boiled him up some noodles and chopped in pieces of soy-sauce chicken and roast pork. There was a Hong Kong Star magazine for him to read and after that there wasn’t enough time to go to Fat Lily’s so he went back to the Sing Along and waited.

  The karaoke game wasn’t for old men. They sat around smoking cigars and drinking cognac, watching thirty-year-old ladies chirp wistfully about better times and romances lost and found.

  It was only the second visit for Mona, the Sing Along not being one of her favorite places. Too many gang kids and hom sup, horny, Chinatown men. Still, she sat in her place beside Uncle Four, who had met up with Golo Chuk, the three of them at a table beside the mirrored wall. She glanced at her reflection in the candlelight and noticed the group of men at the next table, smiling, making eyes at her. She flashed her eyes, then ignored them. The club was crowded and the hostesses were working the room, but there weren’t enough of them to go around.

  The men were Taiwanese, Mona judged by their accents, banker types, from their suits and ties. They were working on their second fifth of XO and smoking up a storm cloud.

  Golo picked up on them, figured them as bok los, northern Chinese, slumming for southern Cantonese snatch.

  “Shau mei,” one of the bankers said across the tables. “Don’t you remember me?”

  Uncle Four and Mona exchanged looks, hers saying, He’s mistaken, I don’t know them.

  Golo thought, How dare they insult us in our own place!

  “Ta ma da,” he said in his best cutting Mandarin. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  That started it.

  Two of the suits closest to Golo stood up as he pushed back from the table. In a single motion, Golo kicked out one man’s kneecap, and driving his hung kuen, red-style fist, full force, split open the other man’s face. Glass tumblers flew across and crashed into the mirrored wall, shattering onto Uncle Four and Mona.

  Suddenly, the Sing Along was in pandemonium, emptying out as the Black Dragons beat the hell out of the Taiwanese, trying to cool out Golo Chuk.

  The pin spots of light kept whirling and the song machine kept wailing even as the Dragons dragged the bloody men across the empty hall.

  Fear

  Johnny flung down the racing form as people dashed out of the Sing Along. He jumped out of the car just in time to hold the door for Mona and Uncle Four.

  “What happened?” he asked once they were inside the car.

  “A fight,” huffed Uncle Four. “Faan ukkei, get home.”

  Johnny wasn’t sure which home Uncle Four meant but started the car. He looked in the rearview and saw fear in Mona’s eyes.

  “Henry gaai,” she said coolly, and he turned the car toward the Henry Street condo. It was a short drive, and he could feel the heat of Uncle Four’s anger curling the short hairs on the back of his neck.

  Quickly enough he was there, watching as Uncle Four marched Mona into the China Plaza, her heels clicking along the stone lobby floor, clutching the little purse to her bosom.

  When they were out of sight, he doused the headlights and killed the engine. He felt helpless, and stayed in the car until the lights on her balcony came on. When the light went instantly to black, he fired up the car, and thought about Fat Lily’s.

  But his pockets were empty, and he wheeled the limo around, looking toward his home.

  It was bad enough when Uncle Four drank too much cognac, but now he was in a simmering rage.

  He grabbed Mona, then shoved, tearing the silk of her blouse, ripping it off along with the black lacy bra. He slapped her across the face, which he never did, not wanting the bruises to show, but this time leaving a dull pink palm print, and sprinkling bloody spittle from her mouth. Shoving her onto the bed, he grabbed her by the hair, slapped at the back of her head.

  She knew not to resist, or be defiant. It would only enrage him further. Play along, suffer it. He’d be more forgiving in a day or two, and then it’d be flowers and champagne.

  He unbuckled his belt and slipped it off the loops, whipped her with it across the buttocks.

  “I cannot face you,” Mona sobbed. “I won’t dare next time. Please forgive me,” she whimpered, choking on her words.

  At this, he tossed the belt aside, stripped her skirt and panties off and turned her over. He dropped his trousers and forced her legs apart.

  She cried out and he shoved her face into the pillows, plowing into her. Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, she was thinking, have mercy on me, as Uncle Four vented his hatred hard inside her.

  Cop

  Daylight came again, made stark those things that had blended in with night and artificial light. The alarm on Jack’s watch jingled. He barely noticed it and took five minutes to roll off Pa’s bed of clothes. He went to the green-streaked sink to splash water on his face. It was too late for breakfast and too early for roll call at the 0-Five. But he’d had enough of the dead air and the dark night. From the knapsack he extracted the cellular phone, the pager, another disposable InstaFlash. He opened all the windows before he left the apartment, the cool morning breeze at his back as his feet pounded the stairs until he stepped onto Mott Street and into the roar of the morning.

  The tension was building. He could feel it pulling, grabbing inside his shoulders.

  When he entered the stationhouse he passed an old Chinese woman seated at one of the benches, bleeding from the mouth, her eyes glazing over from the shock, a broken half circle of jade bracelet in her hand.

  P.O. Jamal Josephs, a.k.a. Jay Jay, brushed past Jack with a wet paper towel and gave it brusquely to the old woman. Turning, he threw a pissed-off look in Jack’s direction.

  Jamal was a leading member of the Ebony Guards, a black fraternal police organization that had success nullifying sergeants’ examinations based on charges of discrimination and cheating. Recently, thirteen thousand cops had been tested and five hundred made sergeant. The Guards alleged widespread cheating among white cops and filed suit against the City for allowing the exam to be compromised. The Department of Investigation was figuring out how many, if any, of the five hundred had prior access to the exams.

  When Jay Jay came back he leaned into Jack
, jerking his two fingers back at the old woman, saying, “She keeps flashing me the peace sign, Yu. ‘Hock-kwee, hock-kwee,’ she keeps saying, and I know what it means, Jack. I know what it means and I don’t need it, okay?”

  Jack said, “What does it mean, Josephs?” He walked over to the old woman without waiting for Jay Jay’s answer, sat down opposite her and spoke quietly in Toishanese, watching the look on her face go from surprise back to fear, to resignation, telling her story.

  When she finished, Jack came back from the bench. Jay Jay, waiting with crossed arms, said with a challenge, “Hock-kwee means black devil. It means nigger, right?” Jack was silent looking from Josephs back to the old woman.

  Jay Jay said, “See, Jack, I know what it means and don’t need it, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Jack leaned in closer, said into Josephs’ eyes, “That’s right, Josephs, you don’t like it but there it is. It wasn’t the peace sign, man, it was two, like in two black African-American soul brothers from the Smith Houses mugging a seventy-year-old Chinese grandmother, busting out her dentures, but all you can hear is nigger, right?”

  “Fuck that racist shit,” Jay Jay said in a low growl.

  “Yeah, fuck it,” Jack answered, “’cause half the fuckin crime in the Projects is committed against Asians by blacks, and what’s racist about it is that you can’t face up to it, how badly you’re fucking up as a people.”

  Sergeant Paddy Staten-Island-Irish Murphy got his considerable girth between them.

  “Be nice, boys,” he huffed. “Don’t want to spoil the captain’s morning, do we?”

  “Fuck you, Jack,” Jay Jay, a.k.a. P.O. Josephs said, backing away.

  “Likewise, brother.” Jack watched Josephs storm off, knew that was the way it was in this precinct, this city, this country.