by Nghi Vo
I ended up looping around behind the restaurant to find a solid steel door, which was more familiar. I rapped briskly on the steel, and when the peephole slid open, I gave them my best grin.
“Hello, I got a card from—”
To my surprise, the door swung open, revealing a squarish Chinese woman in slacks and a long maroon tunic. I blinked at her in surprise, and she nodded impatiently for me to come in.
Oh, it’s because I’m …
The thought was a foreign one, and bemused, I walked up the half-flight of steps to the restaurant level.
I suppose I was expecting something grand, with great gold idols and opium beds scattered throughout. I certainly didn’t expect a restaurant ringed with red vinyl booths, and a dozen people sitting around a table picking at plates of demolished leftovers. They were my age and maybe a little older, the women in slacks just as the men were, and they passed a bottle from hand to hand, pouring each other shots in small teacups before passing it on.
One girl in a man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up noticed me first, and she elbowed the boy next to her, who was still wearing ferocious patrician eyebrows and a goaty beard over his undershirt and braces. Soon enough, they were all looking at me with various degrees of curiosity and hostility. I gave them back look for look, unsmiling, and I held up the card.
“Khai gave this to me,” I said. “He said I should come.”
I waited for whatever ax was going to fall onto my head, but then it was as if the table gave a collective shrug and people were squeaking their seats aside so I could drag over a chair from another table. I stared in fascination at the picked-over food in front of me, startlingly white buns, piles of stringy meat, and barely cooked vegetables gleaming with grease, thin white things that made me think of the tendons on the back of Aunt Justine’s hand. I averted my gaze quickly, but the girl sitting next to me caught me staring.
“You want me to put a plate together for you?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said stiffly, but she was already moving, taking a plate and piling it up with something I couldn’t even identify. Now everyone was watching me as she handed me a pair of chopsticks to eat with. I took them, and then glanced at the bottle.
“I wouldn’t mind some of that,” I said hopefully, and there was a quick glance that went around the table before the girl took the bottle decisively and poured me a slug into a teacup.
I was smart enough to know that they didn’t think I was, and this was a game played all over the world. It was also a game I had played before, and I was willing to bet that I had done it with better alcohol than they ever had.
The liquid in my surprisingly dainty teacup had a yellowish tone and a slightly sluggish movement, almost syrupy. I had seen some of them sipping at their cups and others tossing it back as I came in. I can already tell that I’m not going to like this, I thought even as I lifted the cup to my lips and swallowed the contents.
The liquor hit the back of my tongue, burned its way down my throat, and scorched my chest before settling uneasily in my belly. I opened my mouth, dragonish, to suck back a mouthful of air to calm the fiery sting. I had had worse, but not often, and not recently. I shook my head hard, and the table burst into laughter, and in the case of one boy, applause.
“Here, here, have another,” the girl said, and I was smart enough to get the bottle away from her even if my grasp felt a little shaky.
“No, darling, no, I saw you, let me…”
I fumbled for her cup, slopping more in than out. She lifted it to me in an ironic salute before taking a ladylike sip and pulling it away from her lips.
“Oh, is that the way I’m meant to do it?” I asked, mock-aghast. “I just don’t know anything…”
It started what sounded like a familiar fight at the table, conducted half in English and half in something else, fast and fervent and intense. The girl next to me took another sip, giving me a smile that was entirely in her eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was friendly or not.
“So Khai invited a girl who doesn’t know anything.”
“Well, I know that I don’t know anything,” I said, leaning in. “Maybe you could teach me…”
She narrowed her eyes at that, leaning back away from me in a way that made me sit up straighter. Of course this wasn’t the Cendrillon, and it wasn’t Peggy’s either, the tiny little place under the Porter Bowling Alley which was mostly for girls and only served up pickled hard-boiled eggs from enormous jars of brine for refreshments. I had forgotten, so I lifted my chin and pretended I hadn’t forgotten anything.
“What’s someone like you come here to learn?” she asked.
“How about your name for a start?”
She hesitated as if even that was asking for the moon, and then she shrugged.
“Bai. What’s yours?”
“Jordan Baker,” I responded, and she gave me a confused look.
“No, your right name,” she said, and I scooted back a little farther.
“It is my right name,” I said coolly. “You can use it or you can pick out something better to call me.”
She frowned as if trying to decide if she wanted to name me, and then the steel door burst open and a whole new group of people came in, led by Khai. They were half-in, half-out of what I now knew to be costumes for their act, and they were trailing bits of paper behind them, slivers of turquoise that slithered through the air like snakes, shreds of pink that blew into cherry blossoms as I looked, scraps of crimson that landed on one girl’s long sleeve to smolder there before a helpful boy beat it to steam with the flat of his hand.
More importantly, they had two more bottles of alcohol, and despite how little I liked the stuff, I felt a jolt of relief.
The night got fuzzy after that. Bai insisted on filling my glass again, and so I filled hers in vengeance, and I know that someone laughed at us and someone else was trying to explain the history of the liquor to me, though I listened as well as I ever did, which was to say, not at all. I remembered throwing my arm around Bai’s shoulder and having her shove me off quickly, and then I went and leaned against Khai, who liked it a little better though not as much as I wanted him to.
At some point, after everyone was red-faced and staggering a little, people started pulling out the most delicate scissors I had ever seen, spindly as storks with long narrow blades and deadly sharp tips.
“Here! Look, look,” Khai said in a voice I remembered as being loud and brassy and far away. “I’ll show you.”
As I watched, sitting on the ground with my head tilted against the seat of an empty chair, he pulled out a sheet of green-blue paper, shimmering like mermaid’s scales. As he cut, the paper opened up in his hands like a flower or a song, and from the heart of it roared a dragon, filigreed so that you could see the dim lamplight straight through, so that I could see Khai through the sinuous curves of its body.
He let it go, and it flew around the room, wide crocodile mouth opened in a roar.
“Can’t let the king go alone,” said another boy whose name I didn’t catch, and he pulled out a sheet of sunny yellow paper, cutting quickly and producing a shadow puppet of a beautiful lady, though with only a cursory band across her breasts for modesty, I had no idea how much of a lady she could be. She was perfectly flat, and as we watched, clapping and stamping our feet, she pranced along the wall, her head always facing left or right and the angular movements of her arms and legs as much a joy as the dragon’s curves had been.
With a gesture, Khai brought his dragon around to circle the female figure. The dragon’s body waved like a banner, and after a few arching, slithering circles, it came down to wrap around the woman.
“They’re fighting!” I said, and Bai, who was sitting on the ground next to me, her legs stretched out in front of her, made a scornful noise.
“That’s the mountain goddess and the sea king,” she slurred. “And if you think they’re fighting…”
I blushed at her words, fortunate that
it could be passed off to the ridiculous alcohol we were somehow still drinking. Now that I was looking for it, no, they were not fighting at all.
“They’re the mother and father of Vietnam,” Bai was saying. “Tonkin. Ha, Vietnam. It can still be Vietnam here. But the dragon and the goddess. Our mother and father.”
Mine too? The voice came from somewhere inside me, and I firmly locked that voice back in the box.
“Why is the father of Vietnam a … a lizard?”
She reached out to backhand my upper arm too hard. I yelped and would have hit her back, but she was talking again.
“A dragon, a dragon, ghost girl,” Bai said. “He was a dragon, and he fell in love with the mountain goddess. They had a hundred strong sons…”
“Sounds painful,” I said, trying to sound flippant, but she gave me a look with eyes as dark as mine, and I had no experience reading them at all. I could have looked at her all night in a kind of narcissistic fascination, taking in how similar she was to me, where she differed. How I would look like her if I didn’t get the faint hairs on my face carefully plucked every week. How much she would look like me if she dusted her eyelids with sparkling green powder.
“It was. She gave birth to them, and then … and then she didn’t want to be married anymore. When she was in the sea with her husband, she missed her mountains, and when he was in the mountains with her, he missed the sea.”
“Did they fight?”
“Of course not. They loved each other. They split up the family instead, half the sons going north into the highlands and half going to meet the sea. That’s why Viet people are the best fishermen in the world and the best mountain climbers too.”
I know that I made some kind of polite noise, and everything broke into fragments after that. Khai and another boy stripped to the waist to prove who was the better fighter when the answer was clearly neither of them. Another boy whose name I didn’t catch accordion-folded a long strip of paper, made a few cuts, and then there were a half-dozen tiny elephants following each other around, fixed together long nose to whippy tails. Bai tried to tell me the story of the two elephant-riding sisters who took on all of China in Vietnam’s pre-history, but I wasn’t able to focus on her for more than a few minutes before my brain wandered away in desperation. I was not good at history, and it felt like everyone in the room was trying to give me some, whether it sat well on me or not.
I drank some more of that fiery liquor, and then I drank as a chaser a glass of plum wine, which was not nearly as sweet as I was hoping for. I thought I would be sick for a bit, and that was hilarious, so I stayed on the floor, laughing helplessly as Bai tried to put me in a chair.
At some point much later on that evening, she put a pair of scissors in my hand, and then a little while after that, I had a memory of her slapping me so hard that I landed on my rear on the floor. I had to think about whether I wanted to see a doctor or not. At the very least, a doctor would have given me a few doses of something pleasantly fizzy to get me through the night.
There were hands hauling me to my feet and a babble of voices raised in a clamor. Someone was saying that they had to talk to me. Someone, Bai most likely, wanted me gone. Someone else commented acidly on what kind of danger I posed to them, how it was something like me that was to blame for all the recent trouble.
“Oh I really am just a danger to myself instead of the individuals of my community,” I sang out. “Before I can answer your question, though, you must tell me what I’m posing for. I won’t do it for just anyone, you know. It has to be someone who can capture something new about me, something that no one here would have eyes to judge me for.”
“Goddammit, Khai,” someone else said, and I heard him sigh somewhere close to me.
“It’s fine, it’s fine, ah? I’ll take care of it.”
Then I was being lifted up with Khai’s shoulder under my arm.
“I’m going to take you home now,” he said patiently. “Tell me where you live.”
“Oh, I’ll just come home with you,” I said, momentarily forgetting myself. I thought home was on 41 Willow Street, and I certainly didn’t want to go there anymore. Too many dead people.
“You won’t like that,” he said, tilting his head away when I tried to press my face into his neck. “I’m sharing with Charlie and Wang. Tell me where you live.”
This time I remembered I lived on Park Avenue, and out on the street, where I was able to take my breath and hail a cab, I took several gulps of fresh air, feeling a little better.
“I can get home on my own,” I said, and he laughed a little at that.
“Doubt it.”
I pouted, but I wasn’t fond of late night city cabs without company, so I let him come with me all the way back to Park Avenue. On the ride home, I slumped against the window, letting the lights chase each other over my face.
“So who are you?” he asked finally.
“Jordan Baker,” I snapped. “I told Bai that already.”
“And you’re Vietnamese, right?”
“I’m from Louisville,” I sniffed. “But … yes. Before that, from Tonkin. I came back with a missionary, Eliza Baker.”
“She stole you?”
“She rescued me. From the village where she was missioning. The Chinese were right across the river, so she took me and ran all the way to where the carriage was waiting. She used an orange crate as my cradle on the ship back to New York.”
It was family legend, trotted out every Christmas while I lived in Louisville. I had grown quite immune to it with the judge and Mrs. Baker because the story was really about Eliza rather than about me, but when I told it to Khai, it stuck a little. It felt a little strange, a little bit shameful, though that could have been the bad alcohol.
“Were your parents dead?”
“They must have been. Otherwise why would she have taken me?”
The answer came back in Eliza’s sweet voice, worn thin and a little ragged from age in my mind.
You were my very favorite. Just the very best baby. I could not leave you, I could not bear it.
“She couldn’t bear leaving me,” I told Khai, deliberately ignoring the conclusions that we were both reaching.
I stared out the window.
“Was she good to you?” he asked, his voice determinedly neutral.
“She died when I was a little thing,” I said absently. “She was frail, prone to illnesses of all sorts, you know. Her parents raised me.”
They had, where I hadn’t raised myself. I could feel that that wasn’t enough for Khai, so I groped around for something else in the dim toy box that held my earliest memories.
“She … she said I was born in the pig year.”
“You told Bai you were twenty-one.”
“Yes?”
“I’m the year of the pig, and I’m twenty-three.”
My head spun. I remembered Eliza doing a silly little song for me, her hands on her head to mimic a pig’s ears. I could remember her telling me I was born in the year of the pig, which was part of the Tonkinese religion, like the golden statues they worshiped and the food they set out for their ancestors. If she was telling me the truth and Khai was, I was two years older than I thought I was, the same age as Daisy.
“Oh God,” I said with a wet little giggle, “I’ve gotten so old.”
Khai was silent as if he didn’t know what to make of that.
“We’re going to be in town for another month,” he said finally. “If you want to try that again—”
“Not really, no.”
“—I’m staying at St. Curtis Hostel. Maybe if we kept the alcohol out of it.”
“No,” I said again, more strongly this time. “That was the only thing that made it bearable.”
“You almost made a person out of trash,” he said. “Baijiu wasn’t going to make that bearable.”
We had gotten back to Park Avenue. Khai’s eyes widened as he handed me out of the car.
“I live here with my aunt,”
I said, before he could say something about me being one of Mrs. Chau’s girls again. They had been all over the papers lately because of the one they had caught with that married judge. She’d turned up dead with vines growing out of her mouth and the rest went into hiding.
“Right,” he said, as if he doubted me, and I stood up straight.
“Thank you for seeing me home,” I said. “Paul won’t want to see you through the doors.”
“Paul…”
“The doorman.”
I reached in my purse and pulled out three crisp dollar bills, folding his hand over them neatly.
“There you go. That’ll get you back to Chinatown, and pay for the alcohol I’ve drunk so very much of.”
He glared at me.
“You know that’s too much.”
“You mustn’t give it back, I’ll be ever so—”
“What are you? Of course I’m not going to give it back.”
He pocketed it, shaking his head.
“I’m here for another month,” he repeated. “If you want to come, then come.”
“You’re so welcoming,” I said stonily.
He let me get the last word, which was good because I was likely going to fight for it. He gave me another dark look and got into the cab, the front seat this time. I turned before I could see him drive off and went home.
That night, I dreamed about sitting on a sticky tile floor, laughing crazily as I gathered up menus and receipts, cutting them, crushing them in my hands as I shaped the pieces into a soldier’s form, a gun in his hand and death in his eyes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Then everything sort of stopped.
It was sticky, sickly August, the worst time to be trying to do anything. Aunt Justine had me throw all the windows of our apartment open, no matter what her nurse said, and I swung my bare legs out onto the ledge, leaning over my thighs to look down at the street below.
Nick had made himself scarce again, and I wondered a little at that. The party at Gatsby’s had lurched to a stop, or so said Margaret Dancy, who had gone over there with the Wellhurst crowd. They found the gate chained and the windows dark, and no matter how they shook the iron bars, it would not open for them. Just as they had left, Margaret said, a tall man in a sharp black suit had driven up. They’d watched as he stood at the gate for several long minutes, and then, without any expression, got back in his car and drove away again.
