The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  To rule Novokuznetskaya was great glory. It was the city’s rebel heart, the last quarter that clung to its identity, its own fierce soul. All other districts had been rendered interchangeable – mile upon mile of Lego-brick apartments, concrete wastelands. But here you could still tell the houses apart. Lurking among the autoblocks were alleys and courtyards and secret gardens. Street stalls sold kvass, twenty-two kopeks a glass; in the cafeterias you could watch soccer games on TV and get vodka-blind for a ruble. Criminals were admired, warriors idolized.

  This was the turf that the Things and the Numbers disputed, and the Things would kill to prevail. Other gangs stuck to fists and cudgels, brass knuckles. Sasha and the Fruit Eating Bears were quite content to throw snowballs. But the Things had outgrown such stuff. They were ripe for blood, and blood meant knives.

  These were not hard to find. Novokuz was black-market heaven, half the price of Gorky Street, twice the authenticity. At an hour’s notice, you could lay greasy hands on any thing your lust required. So Boris Starkhov, Borka, the Pretty Thing’s leader, picked up a joblot of straight-edge razors, Wilkinson Swords. Then he split the stock in two and dumped the blunter half outside the Hi-Numbers’ clubhouse, a bunker out back of a bakeshop.

  The whole neighborhood awaited the comeuppance. It was the bitterest cold winter, even for Moscow, and everything just stopped. At night, the gangs would shelter in the rancid warmth of the Baikal, eat raw onions, and stare out of the plate-glass windows at the virgin snow, which should have been running with blood. Borka Starkhov and the Things stood stationed at the corner, dressed in matching silver inflatable jackets filled with foam rubber. Some looked like tractor tires, others like human condoms. To stave off the freeze, they sang Here Comes the Night, stamping their imitation Doc Martens to the beat, and their Wilkinson Swords flashed like sharks’ teeth. ‘So what happened?’ I demanded.

  ‘Numbers never came,’ Sasha said.

  ‘Then how did it end?’

  ‘Snow melted.’

  When the last of the soup had been rendered, we went back on the street. Freezing fog wrapped tight around us like a tourniquet, smothered us blood and bone. To the east and west, Chinatown and TriBeCa were still awake, but Broadway was quite deserted, and every hidden doorway seemed to hold a Gum Lan, Born to Kill. So we went walking softly, softly, like two little maids from school.

  A couple of blocks downtown, where we turned left, the buildings shrank, and we skirted Chinatown proper. Between a Lotto vendor’s and a petshop, we ducked into a redstone, began to climb steep stairs in the dark.

  Sam Wing lived at the top.

  The man who came to the door was ageless, a small spry figure in baggy pants and a white waiter’s jacket, an embroidered cap. His cheeks looked swollen, as though he’d recently had mumps, and two of his front teeth were missing. Even so, he exuded jauntiness, a birdlike alacrity.

  The small sign beside his doorbell, printed in both Cantonese and English characters, read ORIENTAL HEALING MASTER: ACUPUNCTURE – SHIATSU – MEDITATION + DISCIPLINES TO TASTE. But his true calling lay in massages.

  He had not been long in the business. When Sasha had first met him, just a few months back, Wing had been a night waiter at the Plum Blossom. In those days, he had sported long moustaches, a lifetime in the growing, and they’d lent him a distinction quite apart from his younger colleagues. He didn’t just fetch and carry, he served food forth, like a bhikku dispensing blessings. ‘I trust you will enjoy,’ he’d say, ‘and benefit.’

  When he did not serve, he slept. Five nights a week, while Sasha drank his duck soup, Wing sat nodding by the door, in a five-barred wooden chair, with a Chinese newspaper spread wide on his lap. According to the other waiters, he was studying the next day’s Runners and Riders. If so, the contemplation seemed to bring him both pleasure and peace. But one night Sasha drove up to find the five-barred chair smashed to kindling, scattered all over the Canal Street sidewalk, and Wing himself in the back alley behind Lafayette, propped up against a dumpster, where two teenage hoods were alternately butting him and kicking him.

  When Sasha ran up, the hoods took off down Lafayette. Wing’s moustache hung in bloodied scraps, one ear was almost severed, and the whole left side of his body pulped. But he wouldn’t let Sasha fetch the law, would neither name nor blame his attackers. ‘It was their right,’ he mumbled through broken teeth. ‘I issue no complaints.’

  So Sasha had brought him home, here to this redstone railroad flat, where he lived in two rooms with his married daughter, Jenny, and her husband, Yung Ng, their daughters Elizabeth and Harriet. Given time, he had healed up nicely, now seemed quite recovered. Still, he did not return to the Plum Blossom. Instead, the ORIENTAL HEALING MASTER sign went up. Wing did not advertise elsewhere, and he never seemed to have any clients. But in this, too, he issued no complaints. ‘It’s better so. More restful,’ he said.

  The first room of his apartment was a cave piled high with gadgetry. Two televisions ran at once, one tuned to an old movie, the other to MTV. There was a VCR, a Toshiba Boombeat cassette player, a Sony CD-video player. There were also Jenny, Elizabeth, Harriet. None of them looked up when we entered.

  Behind a beaded curtain was a small plain cubicle, furnished only with a masseur’s table and a spittoon. While Sasha waited outside on a plastic-covered sofa, watching How to Murder Your Wife with his left eye, Like a Virgin with his right, I stretched out beneath a raffia wall hanging touting JOY, LUCK, LONGEVITY and surrendered myself to a rubdown.

  Wing was not possessed of the magic hand. His touch was leathery and scabbed, his rhythm jagged, and his joints clawed with arthritis. Under his fingers, my flesh was constantly jarred, snagged, twisted, as if caught in a barbed-wire net. ‘Ancient discipline. Lifetime study and mastery,’ said Wing, ripping fiber from sinew like barnacles off a seawall. ‘I myself am in awe.’

  His speech was unaccented, his delivery austere: ‘I am of Toishan,’ he said.

  It was a rural area near Canton. There he had been a schoolteacher, like his father and grandfather, but he had early felt set apart, a stranger. ‘In me was never a shape to fit. Where the sunlight pointed, my shadow would not follow,’ said Wing. ‘Into the unknown only, my footsteps drew me on.’

  After the People’s Revolution, he had fled to Hong Kong. ‘I searched. I quested,’ he said. He swam from the Chinese mainland with his family’s library on his back, wrapped in strips of rubber tire. The books were old, some very rare. They were also very heavy, and Wing almost drowned. As he thrashed in the waters, he saw the figure three, writ in flame against the peak. At this, his strength revived, and he came safely to shore. The books were also saved. So Wing carried them to the nearest antiquarian, sold them off in a job lot. Then he took the money to the racetrack and backed every three horse on the card. They did not win.

  He found refuge in a Buddhist monastery. There he taught Toishan, a classical dialect much prized in Hong Kong, where most novitiates were besmirched by street Cantonese; and he met an elderly Scotsman, name of Samuel Dree. Before converting to Zen, Dree had been educated at Fettes College, had tutored at Loretto. Now, in exchange for a smidgin of Fuchow, a smattering of Mandarin, the dominie drilled Wing in Lowlands Scots.

  Soon Wing was vouchsafed another vision. In a silver ring, he glimpsed a card, the eight of diamonds. Instead of the usual markings, it bore the characters of his own name. So he borrowed from Samuel Dree, went over the wall, and hit the fan-tan parlors. He did not win.

  That was the end of the monastery, the end of Samuel Dree. Other things followed, but he did not speak of these. He was not lucky, that was all. No Triad would take him and protect him. So any man might hunt him and kill him for free. It was very trying. For a moment, Wing almost doubted his fortune. Then he acquired a forged green card. The price was servitude. But it had brought him to America, Gam San – the Mountain of Gold.

  This was in 1952, when Chinatown was still a secret enclave, twisted and teeming as a medieval ghet
to. Its narrow streets had once been battlesites. Tong rivalries, the wars between the Hip Sing and the On Leong, had spawned mass gunfights. But that was a lost age. Tom Lee and Mock Duck, the great warlords, were long since dead, and the tongs defanged. Now Chinatown was ruled by allied guilds, its own style of Tammany Hall. The only war was the struggle for tourist trade.

  Wing worked in a Pell Street laundry for four dollars a week, sixteen hours a day, 364 days a year, with only Chinese New Year’s for vacation. Out of each four dollars, half went in payments against his green card. With interest factored in, and given good health, he would be out of debt in thirty-eight years.

  In Toishan and Hong Kong, his name had been Hui Tang, but here he called himself Sam; it made him feel more at home. He slept in a garbage can, an oversized dumpster out back of the Phoenix Gardens, enwombed in chow mein and discarded porkballs. On payday, he gambled.

  So did everybody else. In Chinatown, the sweatshops and duck-soup kitchens seemed filled with just one story – men who had sold themselves and could not buy themselves back. Their one faint hope was a windfall at fan-tan. So they scraped and starved, they went stampeding to the tables. At the end of the night, of course, they would be penniless again: ‘Still they had play,’ Wing said. ‘It was proof they were living men.’

  But he himself was cannier. Even at four dollars, he remained a visionary. Instead of fan-tan, he placed his faith in numbers. And in the seventeenth month, it paid off. In a dream, he saw a jeweled pig with a ring in its nose and, in that ring, was the number 427. He played it the next day. When it didn’t come up, he lost his temper. As far back as he could recall, he had never lost control before, and it shamed him to recall it now. But he had stormed out of the numbers house, a Mott Street souvenir shop, and hurled a brick through its window. Then sanity returned, and Wing started running. A lamppost tripped him up, sent him sprawling in the street. He tried to rise but couldn’t. From a cobalt sky, the plush, fatted moons of a lawman’s buttocks descended on his head. Wing was pinned, paralyzed, to the cobblestones.

  He was, as Samuel Dree would have said, afeared. And with just cause. In short order, he had been frog-marched off to court between two Irish beefheads, and when he could not come up with his fine, he served seven days in the Tombs.

  It was a time of remorse, but also of rethinking, profound contemplation. When Wing was released, he made his way directly back to the numbers house. Humbly, he apologized. More humbly yet, he begged another chance. When the operator, a kindly man, at length acquiesced, Wing played the first three figures of his criminal-record number. They won him five thousand dollars.

  As he talked, he had not ceased to torment my flesh. The fiercer his own deprivations, the more cruelly I was punished. But here the pounding was replaced by a slow, calm stirring, the lapping of cool waters. ‘From this reversal, I learned,’ said Wing. ‘We are surrounded by signs and omens. Ignore them all.’ His breath, a scent like vanilla extract, brushed damply against my ear, curled down the back of my neck. ‘To make dream come true,’ he said, ‘first omit to dream.’

  Henceforth all his bets were scattershots. ‘Do not seek and ye shall find,’ he said. Unlike most Chinese, he did not think of Americans as white devils or black devils. ‘I did not find them smart enough for devils of any stripe,’ he said. Instead of shunning them, shrinking from their touch, it was his pleasure to use them. He haunted their betting parlors, their racetracks. On Suburban Handicap day, he gladly shared their Getaway train to Belmont, and placed himself at the rails. Standing next to him was a pink stranger who smelled of sweetsop and onions. Her name was Edna Rosemary MacCracken.

  ‘A good-sized person,’ she came from County Clare, weighed three hundred pounds. She was a qualified nurse. Loose Lips paid $22.80 in the eighth, and they were married the following day.

  The union was prolific. In twelve years, it produced three children, twenty-eight changes of address, and enough losing tickets to wallpaper the clubhouse at Churchill Downs. On each anniversary of their meeting, they would revisit Belmont, resume their first positions along the rail. ‘Gladsome days, by and large,’ Wing said, slowly stirring.

  In 1966, there was a passing discord. In the fifth, his own selection was Cash’n Carry, while Edna Rosemary espoused Persnickety. An argument ensued. ‘As husband, I was adamant,’ Wing said. But Edna Rosemary, as wife, prevailed. In a rare snit, she whacked down $2, Persnickety, win and show. ‘The horse paid $48.50. The winning margin was five lengths,’ said Wing, and the stirring became a chopping, fitful, out of sync. ‘Woman Edna let out one cry, and she was dust.’

  It may have been a timely demise. They had been living on Canal, right on Chinatown’s borderline. They had been happy there. But for how much longer? The previous year, the Exclusion Act had been repealed. Suddenly hordes of immigrants came swarming, ten thousand new bodies each season. Most of them hailed from Hong Kong, that faithless isle. They brought ugly clothes, ugly dialects, ugly manners. Worse, they brought ugly ambitions. They had no respect for the old order, for permanence and balance. Tradition was not their concern. All they wanted was Gam San, the Mountain of Gold.

  Once again the rhythm changed. Instead of chopping, I felt a series of small sharp jerks, like a suitcase being bumped down a steep flight of stairs. ‘Attend me now. Be guided,’ said Wing. ‘Perceive the picture.’

  For decades, Chinatown had had one supreme leader, Benny Ong, Uncle Seven. It was his genius, above all, that had given the Hip Sing victory over the On Leong. As a foot soldier, back in the thirties, he had fought in the great street wars, done time for a gang murder; as tong president, he had controlled the neighborhood’s great industries – tourism, narcotics, gambling, protection; and now, as an old man, he craved peace. Side by side with opium and chopsticks, he provided free meals for the elderly, day-care centers for the young. The Flying Dragons, Hip Sing’s enforcement arm, gathered rust: ‘They fly away,’ said Uncle Seven.

  Not for long. By the late seventies, his lifetime’s work lay in ruins. Not only were the On Leong resurrected, and the Tung On and the Fu Ching, but the Hong Kong Triads had moved in. Their warriors had names like Tiger Boy Wang, Alligator Chan, and, most feared of all, John Eng – Onion Head, Machinegun Johnny. Their battlefield was China White, pure heroin from the Golden Triangle, and their Godfather Eddie Chan, the Sixth Dragon.

  ‘War, I know and esteem,’ Uncle Seven had said, a genial old gent. ‘Anarchy, I think, is not good business policy.’ But he was not granted the choice. In 1976, he was sentenced to eight years for bribery and retired to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he grew squash and winter cabbage on the prison farm. The Hip Sing foundered; Eddie Chan took over. In no time flat, he’d annexed the On Leong. Fast Eddie, the cops called him then. He wore hand-tailored silk suits, rode in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, took lunch with Mayor Koch. Borne up on clouds of China White, he owned his own bank. Down in the streets, meanwhile, his Ghost Shadows were shooting everything that moved. Their motto was We Die Harder.

  Wing was outraged. Walking peacefully about his business, he found himself jostled, abused. Skinny kids with rickets and their teeth still in braces waved knives in his eyes. ‘This was not good,’ he said. A twist, a slight slap. ‘This was bad,’ he said.

  Since Edna Rosemary’s passing, he had lived cast out. Because he’d mixed his blood with the white devils, his fellow Chinese did not trust him. Even his children, whose birth had been his life’s great joy, had come to doubt him. Pressured and mocked at school, they had forgotten their English, reverted to Hong Kong type. His first son had gone to work for Eddie Chan’s United Orient Bank; his daughter had married a green-card immigrant. As for his younger son, Robert, he’d joined the Ghost Shadows.

  Robert was then seventeen. Two weeks before his next birthday, he’d helped ambush a Flying Dragon clubhouse in Queens and been shot dead by one of his own comrades. ‘They took the body back to Pell Street and buried him the same night,’ Wing said. ‘His father was not informed
but found out on the fourth day, through street talk, a washwoman’s idle gossip. On application, a request for the dead boy’s clothes and personal possessions was not honored. Instead, three thousand dollars cash was delivered in a wooden box, as payment for his lost life.’

  Wing’s hands lay still on my kidneys. His fingers flexed but did not strike. Then they went away altogether. ‘All finish,’ Wing said. ‘The end.’

  When I’d put my clothes back on, he led me back through the curtain, out into the room full of electronics. Elizabeth and Harriet lay asleep on a corner pallet, but Jenny was still ironing their schoolclothes. Raidas, a Hong Kong disco group, blared from a cassette. The time was 2:45.

  Underneath a wall hanging selling GOOD LIFE, BIG FORTUNE was a small inlaid cabinet, all crimson dragons and gilded scrollwork.

  Wing squatted. His swollen cheeks, purple and green, were mottled like spoiled luncheon meat, and his white waiter’s jacket was sweat-stained under the arms: ‘I have picture,’ he said. ‘Why won’t you see?’

  From inside the cabinet he drew a school yearbook, Seward Park High School. Robert’s mugshot, surrounded by beaming white devils, showed a rabbit-faced youth with an outsize Adam’s apple and a pompadour, a stare of frozen defiance. Only the fatness of the eyes suggested Edna Rosemary. ‘His name was Robert Eamonn,’ said Wing. ‘He called himself Bobby 2 Bad.’

  Across the room, his daughter Jenny went rigid, squawked like an outraged nightbird. Her brother’s life and death were family business, she hissed, not fit to be exhumed before white-devil strangers. In protest, she switched up both TVs full-blast. John Wayne and Aretha Franklin merged with Raidas in a death chorus of stuck pigs, and we slunk back behind the beaded curtain, into a twilit haze of embrocation and staled sweat.

  ‘My daughter has bad stomach,’ said Wing. She worked six days a week, seven in the morning till seven at night, hemming in a Bayard Street sweatshop, and she brought home $140. ‘Not enough for rent and children’s food. Not enough even for horses.’ As for Yung Ng, her husband, he was a waiter on Mulbridge Street. While his green-card debt was unpaid, every cent he earned was pledged. So tonight would find him in some basement, at prayer and fan-tan: ‘In the world, all things change. Chinatown is not the world,’ Wing said.