by Ed Lin
We were at Katz’s on Houston Street, and Vandyne had cole slaw on his face.
“There aren’t any Negroes. Lot of blacks, though,” I said.
“I like that answer. I like that a lot,” said Vandyne.
“How do you feel about being in Chinatown?” I asked, looking at him straight on.
“I feel good about it. I have a lot of respect for the Chinese people and their culture.”
“You good with chopsticks?”
“Pretty good,” he said. I found out soon enough that he’d poke his eyes out if you didn’t watch him closely. “You must be happy to be in Chinatown. You get to be amongst your own kind and do something for the community.”
I dropped my voice. “Honestly, it’s lousy. I mean, I can already see the resentment in the people’s faces, like I’ve been co-opted. I’d rather be in Harlem.”
“You don’t want to be in Harlem,” said Vandyne, looking down as he wiped his hands with a napkin.
A few hours later, we were parked on the corner of Grand and Elizabeth.
“I don’t support Jane Fonda’s message,” said Vandyne. “I support her right to say it, but it was wrong for her to fly in and then fly out. Maybe if she moved to North Vietnam and lived there, then that would have been different.”
“The message that we were killing kids?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Vandyne, I killed a kid in Nam. I mean, one that I’m sure of.”
He was quiet for a little bit.
Then he said, “Oh yeah?”
I started talking.
“We got the orders to go from village to village, interrogate people, burn the hooches down. I mean, I wanted to take the backseat to all that, leave it to the gung-ho guys to do the interrogations. But then as we were going from village to village, I’m feeling all the hatred of the Vietnamese directed at me. They knew I was Chinese — they can tell, man. And they hate the Chinese there.”
“Because the Chinese are the merchant class in Southeast Asia. They control the economy.”
“Not only that. The Chinese have charged full retail for centuries. You have to expect the customers to resent it a little.”
Vandyne shook his head and chuckled.
“So I tried to cover my face up with shades, some mud, but they’d always zero in on me. Old women would throw rocks at me. Little kids would try to kick me. You know they’d never do this to anyone else in a uniform, black or white.”
I waited for Vandyne to nod. Then I gave up and went on.
“This old man came up to me and said in Cantonese, ‘Excuse me, are you Chinese?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I was sort of relieved, because here’s this guy trying to be almost friendly with me. Then he opens up his mouth wide, and he’s got like seven teeth and he says, ‘You fucking Chinks have sucked our blood for too long! Ba tàu! You’re worse than the French and Americans put together! We’re going to kill all the Chinese in Vietnam!’
“I just snapped. I kicked that old man to the ground. I was the quiet guy in the company, and no one else knew what he was saying, but they knew it had to be pretty bad to get me like that.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Hurt him bad. They told me it could have been a good kill. After that, I was one of the lead interrogators in the company. I pushed pregnant women around and twisted their arms behind their backs, just waiting for some excuse to shoot them in the head. Being in Nam made me learn to hate Asians. Seeing another Asian face made me want to reach for my gun. Especially when I heard Vietnamese. It sounds like that mint, ‘Tic Tac.’”
“So how did you kill that kid?”
“We were walking down this road when this kid with a ball comes running over to us. He’s got a rubber ball with him, but it might be filled with explosives. You really don’t know.”
“So you shot him?”
“I shot him in the head and heart.”
“Was it a bomb?”
“It was just a ball. But the worst thing was that I never even told him to stop. He should’ve known not to come running at us, though, right?”
Vandyne was quiet. After a while, he said, “I killed a kid, too.”
“What happened?”
“We were camped out, sitting quiet,” said Vandyne. He was talking slow. I couldn’t look at him. I turned my head and watched steam come out of the gutter and curl into nothingness. “All of a sudden, shots are going out all over the place. We couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Then I saw a little flash coming from this tree, you know, the trunk of the tree itself. I’m thinking, the VCs are training fucking trees to shoot at us? I shot that tree up. Then it didn’t fire no more and blood was coming out of
the holes. I was scared out of my mind when I saw that.
We got shovels and dug up the roots of the tree, and found a tunnel and the body of a little man, still holding his gun. In fact, the gun was bigger than him. He’d dug that tunnel under the tree, then hollowed out the tree from the inside and crawled up in there and fired at us. He’d killed two and wounded five. They told us later it wasn’t a little man—it was a 12-year-old boy.”
I waited for a few minutes. Then I asked, “How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t feel anything about it, man,” Vandyne snapped. “I don’t care if it’s the Easter Bunny. If it’s got a gun pointing at you, you shoot it.”
I wanted to ask him if he ever saw that little boy again, but I decided I not to. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy the first day.
Sometimes I dream about that little boy I killed. He still runs in at me, only I don’t have my gun anymore. If he gets close enough before I wake up, he explodes in my face.
—
My phone rang loudly, foreign and yet familiar. I checked the clock. It was 14 minutes after 1000. That meant it was okay to answer. I even considered opening my other eye.
I have this rule about answering the phone: Never pick up the phone when it rings on the hour or half hour, because it probably means bad news. Whenever someone has to make a tough phone call, they delay it until the hour or half past, because they’re reluctant and need a deadline. Maybe they turn on the TV and then resolve to make the call when the show is over. That’s what I do.
When there’s something good to say, people can’t wait to call you, so they tend to call at odd times. Six after. Forty-eight after. Fourteen after.
I picked up the phone and waited to hear who it was.
“Officer Chow?” said a thin voice.
“Yip, how are you?” I asked, surprised and suspicious.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No. I’m usually up this early on Saturday.”
“I was calling to see if you wanted to join me for a late breakfast.” A vision of me having a beer before heading downstairs came into my head and then faded.
“Sure, yes. I’ll meet you. I’m allergic to seafood, though.”
I had to tell him that because nearly every dim-sum dish has some shrimp squeezed into it. He gave a heavy sigh. No one has any patience with food allergies. Chinese think it’s all in your head, even when you’re covered in hives, struggling to breathe.
“Okay, no seafood. We’ll go to a cafe,” said Yip.
I met him at a coffee shop that only people who came over before 1943 go to. Those were the people who spoke the Toisan dialect. After 1943, they changed immigration laws, and Chinese who spoke Cantonese started coming in. Toisan and Cantonese are different enough so that the Toisanese stuck together and so did the Cantonese. Native Toisan speakers generally know Cantonese as well, but not the other way around. They didn’t need to talk to each other, anyway. Each group had their own coffee shops to go to.
I stirred some more sugar into my coffee and looked around. An old man at the far end of the counter brushed crumbs off his lap. A lopsided booth held two other old men. And then there was me and Yip, sitting on chairs at a table where an old booth had been ripped out. Hanging on the wall behind the cash registe
r were scratch-and-win New York Lottery tickets for sale. Those probably kept this joint in business.
“He can’t eat shrimp,” Yip said to the waiter, who didn’t have a notepad and lingered only a moment. You didn’t have to order here. Everyone got the regular. Then Yip said to me, “Have you heard any more information?”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t. But you know it’s not something I handle. It belongs to the detective squad.”
“But you’re Chinese. Shouldn’t you be the one in charge
of this?”
“It’s not like that, Yip. I can’t talk about the case. Actually, I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“They don’t give you a high enough position. They keep you at a low-level job because you’re Chinese.”
“I don’t like to think about it that way.”
Yip sighed. “First time I came to this country, I got a job with this contracting company mopping office floors. I was the only Chinese. I was lucky to get such a high-paying job. I was working with Italians, Irish, Spanish, and some blacks. We all worked really hard. Overtime with no overtime pay. Then I voted for having a union. We won, but the bosses closed the cleaning company and started a new one. We all lost our jobs.”
A waiter dropped off two coffees, two plates of steamed rice noodles with ground pork, and two small dishes of pork spare ribs with black-bean sauce.
“So that was when I started with the restaurant in Chinatown. I got paid less, but it was in cash and food was free.” He paused to pick his teeth, then indicated he wanted to be close friends by asking, “Where is your father from?”
“My father’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m still mad at him.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He gambled away a lot of our money. My mother’s the only reason we pulled through.”
“I’m glad your mother was good to you.”
“She was tough.”
“Your parents came from a different time, a different place. But I’m sure they’re proud that you became a policeman.”
“That was when my father stopped talking to me. He wanted me to do something better.”
“When I came here there were no Chinese policemen. The white ones all had bad tempers and hated the people here.” Yip paused to finish his coffee. “I want you to know that I’m so proud to know that a Chinese can be a policeman. I’m so proud to know you,” he said, patting my cuff.
“Thank you.”
“So you married?”
“No.”
“You’re too picky. There are a lot of nice girls.”
“And they all know a policeman doesn’t make much money.”
“Most of the girls don’t think like that.”
“Just the Chinese ones,” I said.
Yip laughed and I bit my lip. What’s so fucking funny, old man, I thought. His mouth opened wider and I saw black splotches on his molars. After he calmed down a bit, he asked, “How old are you and you’re not married?”
“I’m 25.”
“You have to think about your children.”
“I’m not sure I want to have children. I’m not even sure I want to find someone to love to have children with.”
“Someday you will.” I nodded and didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to keep talking along these lines. I became aware of an older Chinese woman standing near our booth. She was clutching a small beaded purse.
I leaned into Yip and said, “I think you got a friend here.”
“She’s Wah’s shift supervisor. She wanted to talk to you.”
“I told you before, it’s not my case. I’m not handling it,” I said. That cued the woman to approach us directly.
“Hello, Yip,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Officer Chow, this is Lily.”
“Hello, Lily,” I said. She took a seat and squeezed Yip over to face me directly.
“I wasn’t just Wah’s supervisor,” she said. “I consider myself a friend of hers. We worked together almost 30 years.” She dropped her voice a few octaves before going on. “I have never talked to the police before about anything. I’ve tried to live my life honestly and never get the police involved. Never wanted any trouble.” She brought her face in close. Lily’s hair was in a tight, smelly perm. She tried to cake makeup into the lines around her face, but she didn’t use enough. A red scarf was draped across her broad shoulders.
“Sometimes the police have to get involved,” I said. “We don’t like it any more than you do. But we’ve got good men on the case already.”
“You’re the only one I can trust,” she said. “I start trying to speak English and the stupid white cops roll their eyes at me.”
“If you have something to report about Wah, we can get you an interpreter at the precinct. This is not my case. Someone else is handling it. Did Yip tell you to come here and meet me?” I looked at Yip, but he had his head down and his hands around his tea cup.
“I told Yip I had to meet that Chinese policeman and talk to him,” Lily said.
“What do you want to tell me?”
“I know who killed Wah.”
“Look, if you know something, you have to go down to the precinct or at least call it in.”
“I don’t want to! I have to tell you! No one else understands!” It was no use talking to her. I felt waylaid by the old woman. I resented Yip for making me come out. I glared at him, but Yip didn’t make a sound.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you know?” She smiled.
“Wah was one of the best workers at Jade Palace. She could always convince people to get two or three extra dishes. She knew all the customers by name and what they liked. There are two groups of waiters and waitresses at Jade Palace — the young and careless, and the old and bitter. She had the energy of the young people and the old people’s connection with regular customers. But Wah was being paid the same as everyone else.”
“And she expected to get paid more.”
“It’s even worse than that. The younger people were geting angry that the management was taking part of their tips. They started holding meetings to see if they should start a union. The old people already knew that this was the established practice and accepted it, but Wah went to some meetings. They told her she should be paid at least 20% more, based on her seniority. Then when the younger workers decided to go on strike, Wah went to the upper management. You know, I’m just a low-level manager. I’m only one step above the workers. I told her not to, that they would laugh in her face.”
“And she didn’t get her raise.”
“She got the raise!” Suddenly Lily dropped her voice. “And a month later, she was. . .” Lily pursed her lips and flipped her hands to show her palms. “It must have been a jealous co-worker, one of the younger people.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said you knew who killed Wah!”
“No! I didn’t say that!”
“You said you thought you knew who killed Wah.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Yes, you. . .oh, never mind. I think it’s time for me to leave.” I was getting too bogged down with useless information. Some dry Japanese beer would help clear the chalkboard.
“What are you going to do now?” Lily asked.
“I have go match up some stray socks. I’m sorry I can’t
help you.”
“But Wah is dead!”
“If you think one of her co-workers killed her. . .”
“I never said that!”
I lazily scratched at my face and turned to Yip. “What do you know about this?”
“She told me about the raise, but I didn’t know anything
about the meetings. We never talked very much about work. We only wanted to talk about the good things in life.”
“Lily, you’re going to have to go to the precinct and make
a statement.”
“No, I can’t! I d
on’t want any trouble!”
I stood up and dropped a few bills on the table.
“Officer Chow! You cannot pay! I invited you out today!”
Yip exclaimed.
“Yip, I can’t allow you to pay for me. Nice meeting you, Lily.”
“Nice meeting you, officer.”
The dim-sum crowds on the sidewalks were getting louder, but no tourists came into this cafe. I walked to the door and hit the street. I thought about a little coffee shop that had catered to people who came over in the 1920s. They spoke a dry, sharp Shanghainese you almost never hear in Chinatown anymore. That cafe’s a pharmacy now.
I got off the sidewalk and onto the street, hugging the parked cars. It was the easiest way to get through Chinatown, since the sidewalks were crammed with tourists and vendors. I put my hands in my pockets and thought about people who were dead, places that were gone, things that had changed.
—
I was born into a batch of kids that Chinatown just loved. Because of the War Bride Act, Chinese women of a child-bearing age had finally been allowed to come over in significant numbers. Before then, a lot of Chinatown consisted of groups of old men getting older. And these old men would stand on a corner all day just to get a look at a Chinese woman, maybe glance at her legs, too. This guy I called “uncle” whom I wasn’t related to at all told me the best place was Mott and Bayard because there were markets nearby, and you’d see the women doing some shopping.
When the Chinese women started coming over in numbers, it prettied up the scenery. It also increased the sound volume — newly born Chinese kids wailed from their makeshift cribs all night every night. For the first time ever, you could smell diapers in the streets.
Nobody complained, because us kids were miracles. The Chinese community wasn’t going to die out. Nearly every merchant had loose candies to hand out to us.
I was born in 1950, the year after my mother came over and married my father in a deal that his boss helped fix.
I still don’t know exactly what happened. He was a 40-year-old waiter and she was 20. She was expecting the Wizard of Oz, but she got the scarecrow, my dad. They named me after Robert Mitchum, this American B-movie chump my mother liked.
I had a great time as a kid. Everybody older was “uncle” or “aunt.” Nobody ever hit us. There were no grandmothers or grandfathers to guilt us into doing anything. No older brothers to slap us around or older sisters to snitch on us. Birthday parties every day. The only thing we were forced to do was say, “Thank you,” when we got little candies. Everybody knew Cantonese, but we spoke English to leave out our parents.
