Everybody at Hsun’s was very curious as to this new girl of George’s. George himself spoke in terms of 100 per cent endearment and 80 per cent mystery. He himself didn’t know much about her, I think. There was even something funny about her name. She changed it as she liked. When George met her, she was known as May to her friends, but she told George now she would be June.
George described her. He said June had warm eyes.
“What do you mean? warm eyes, George?” asked little Choi.
“Eyes that have got real connection is what I mean!” snapped out George, “Even to toenails and smallest hair. When toes tremble, eyes glow. When fingers vibrate, eyes sparkle. June doesn’t laugh or cry with the face alone. Dance is there as much as in her arms and legs. Not like those girls on Broadway, mechanically moving.”
3
One evening George made Hsun and me go to a Harlem show at midnight, where June was dancing. The audience was quite a mixture, but there were more Negroes than whites, so that whites among the Negroes of all colors, got lost. A good representation from Harlem, and it made a responsive audience. Even the smallest babies were there, hugged to their mothers’ breasts. Poor babies, trying to sleep, while their mothers laughed so vigorously—from the whole being just the way George liked—“with connection.” My! those were good babies. Just a few times they would cry out, then go to sleep again.
The flashing lights though less expensive seemed more colorful than Broadway’s. Nothing was sophisticated, not even those gay cheap bunches of net and tinsel on the tan-skinned dancing girls. Many were beautiful all right, but one tall black one was the star. She looked strong as a man and was mischievous. There was none of the Americans’ idealization of weak and ornamental womanhood about her. She caricatured the sex appeal of this imitation white “review,” made it more rowdy and more interesting, and withal more innocent somehow. She was always getting in the way of the flappery tans, calling attention to herself and them. Yet she was the best dancer of them all. . . . In fact, the jolly rich, highly emotional atmosphere seemed to caricature New York as George, Hsun, and I knew it . . . frank love, loose laughter, lack of discipline . . . vulgarity, good humor . . . sheepishness, plenty of smartness, too, and pavement cunning . . . everywhere a nonchalant grotesqueness (to us at least who remembered the formal traditionalism of Asia) . . . a veritable crazy quilt, and dizzy symphony. But the best part, that mood of freshest genius at the Lafayette, was Negro humor which found some funny side in lack of dignity, in losing face. Nobody, not the white man nor the Oriental, could laugh at himself as the Negro did. Nothing those Negroes found so funny to laugh at themselves as “niggers.” Their best comedians were Negroes painted black. Eyes and lips in this race were exotic anyhow—they looked funny enough in this northern, western stream-lined civilization where the swiftest, sharpest line is the best. But still they had worked hard to make themselves much funnier.
All the actors and actresses were Negroes like the audience, except a few, such as June, acting the Negro part. George punched me when June came in. Hsun punched me, too, for he thought she was brown. She wore some warm brown stain all over the body. That was all in the nude except for a small net on breasts, and a small piece of cloth on the hips. Still she did not look very naked, for the brownness clothed her as she danced. She had the most elastic body I had ever seen . . . just like a rubber band. She had no bones—none, either in hip or leg or back. And she could make herself a perfect round thing by connecting her head with her feet like a rolling serpent . . . the stomach might be on top or at bottom, either way.
We didn’t stay for the end of the show, but left after her act, as George had asked, and he went around to the back stage door. Soon he returned with June, who to our surprise was not black but white, white as chalk. So she must be a white girl unless behind that white mask lived a Negro soul. She still looked to us a strange thing and all the more for her simple dress. Her clothes were sport clothes, her face was bare of make-up, except for the poinsettia lips. As George said, she did move as if she were all alive, almost too much so, and as she walked, some thing behind stuck out and moved like a dancer. I wondered if she put something there on purpose. (But George never noticed this, for he always stood face to face, side by side, or else in front of her, never behind.)
George had not exaggerated their intimacy, for now we watched them talking lip to lip, and cheek to cheek, smiling and kidding, and June didn’t care who might be there to see. She impressed Hsun and me as having been a dancing-girl from the cradle up, and she seemed the most unconventional woman, the kind George had always been waiting for. June never blushed nor was shy, which to George made a comfortable atmosphere, not like that about Oriental women. We went to a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, not far from the Lafayette. I saw Hsun was somewhat perplexed and puzzled by this June. Anyway by appearance, he seemed to be uncomfortable, for he kept tightening his necktie and pressing back his hair, which of course was flying.
June went into the washroom and there was a moment of relief and a breathing space for Hsun.
“Is she not beautiful?” George murmured happily.
“All women are beautiful if they are nicely dressed and young,” Hsun said. “What do you mean by beautiful? What’s that?”
“What it is,” mused George raptly, “well, that is hard to say. The critic is in the same case. He can tell you what poetry is not, but he can’t tell you what poetry is. The lover can tell you what love is not, but never what love is. What his girl is, man cannot know. Of course, the beauty is inside and springs from some inner covered-up place in the girl—but shining out eternally. It must be so, or there is no difference between a piece of painting and a girl. I am free to admit, you can never divorce the conception of beauty from the spiritual sight. What the Christian Bible says ‘pleasant to the eye’ is just a superficial conception . . . that only refers to visual pleasure or delight. What the truly beautiful girl gives is melody to the whole man. She brings about inner harmonization, so that the whole man dances. Sometimes this harmonization is so powerful that the man becomes re-created. That is to be in love.” George considered a moment, then slapped his knee. “That is it! A beautiful girl is one that can stir man’s blood and make man live and make man re-created . . . without which life becomes an empty shell or rather a mechanical machine. . . . A beautiful girl is the best Western civilization has to give for this revivification.”
“Your talk of a beautiful girl is too deep for me,” said Hsun. I was much interested in their conversation.
“Let me describe one to you in the language of the Western poets,” I said, and quoted Swinburne whom I had been reading that afternoon while working for Hsun.
A lady clothed like summer, with sweet hours,
Whose beauty, fervent as a fiery moon
Made my blood burn and swoon
Like a flame rained upon. . . .
Hsun laughed and laughed at this. But George exclaimed, “That’s good. Write that down for me, Chungpa. Hurry before June comes back.”
I set to work and George continued:
“Of course Hsun here would never understand it. You are too Oriental, Hsun. Western love is undiscovered country to you still. Ah, you don’t know what it is to be sucked in by warm eyes, to be caressed by thrilling feminine tones that have no shyness, to be all melted away in Mamma tones . . . this is the thing you have to learn . . . this is the greatest discovery of the West . . . soul-absorbation.”
I wrote George the Swinburnian passage, as nearly as I could remember it; he tucked it into his vest pocket, just as June came dancing back—for her feet were quick to move in dance even when not dancing. Like a feather for lightness she seemed, and made you feel that if you touched her skin it might make a blue bruise mark, or she might jump or squeeze up. She didn’t pay attention to me and Hsun, only to George. And to George—my!
She moved her chair up close to his, sque
ezed his arm lightly, and said in a low private voice, “Hello, da-a-arling!”
From then on both ignored Hsun and me.
“How’s the headache?” And June stroked her long white boneless hand over George’s forehead. (We hadn’t known any thing about a headache.) “Think you can eat a little now?” she asked as the food came. “Darling.”
George snatched a kiss from June, and said he felt better. He and I ate a lot. Hsun was still too uncomfortable to eat much. And June appeared to touch only a few grains of rice. She was lefthanded, and held George’s unoccupied hand all during the meal. George had ordered a number of dishes and naturally a good deal of food was left. George looked at that and said to June, significantly: “When in love hard, you can’t eat much. . . .”
June laughed heartily. She had a lazy, magnetic laugh, and appeared to be delighted and amused by all George said.
“June is beside me . . . in me . . . around me . . . everywhere . . . thoughts are in dream,” murmured George, drowning, it seemed, in the new sensations of soul-absorbation. “Summer nights sometimes calm nerves down, but not this one. . . . June excites too much the inner man. . . .” Out came the slip of paper which I had written for George. He read it feelingly.
“Very pretty,” commented June, smiling.
“You may have it,” said George. “That poet must have known somebody just like June.”
“I’m part-Chinese, you know,” and she looked George in the eye without a flicker of the eyelash. She fed him some last tidbits of mushrooms and chicken, with chopsticks which her left hand handled very gracefully.
“See how I use chopsticks?”
Hsun and I thought she was just kidding. But George would be convinced by anything just now. Then she told us George was a very good dancer and she was taking him that night to a place where they could do some exhibition dancing.
“When I go with George, they take us for Chinese. It’s more exotic.”
After that she and George took a taxi and drove around Harlem some more, perhaps because they could not get drinks in that Chinese restaurant and June said she must have a drink.
Hsun remained sceptical all the way home.
“That girl June is just playing with Jum.”
“Both seemed to be having a good time,” I suggested.
“I can tell a butterfly girl,” insisted Hsun. “George is not such a butterfly man as he acts. Good stuff in George.”
“Well, it seems that George wants self-exhibition and duet dancing in the American way. With thoughts and feelings like his well-pressed dress . . . quite up-to-date and well-Americanized . . . why should George be ashamed of showing up? His only care is to dress up in the right way according to the part he plays. . . . Thus he gets his degree in the new soul-absorbation.” I explained George to the Oriental Hsun.
4
About this time Hsun grew too poor to keep me. In fact, he had grown steadily poorer since employing me. He had made too good use of my services and the Korean directory, helping poor fellows out who sold no tea.
Hsun knew a man who knew a man named Sung. Sung, an Oriental importer, was in need of a boy to help him in his store. It was near 23rd Street in the Chelsea section. For Sung’s store was too good for Chinatown. Sung, too, was unlike most Chinese merchants, who are generally easygoing and fat. He was tall, spare, and nattily dressed, with very light-colored eyes and hair smoothly combed back to leave a bald arch over both temples. Sung had a shrewd gnawing look. Altogether he impressed you that he got around fast and would be a man hard to satisfy.
But he said he would try me for a month and pay me twelve dollars for that with lunch at a Chinese-American restaurant in which he owned part share. I started in to work for Sung. I got back my old room in Chinatown, and lived very economically. One good meal a day was enough for me. I soon found I couldn’t get that at Sung’s restaurant—but if I wandered through the streets of Chinatown about nine o’clock at night—the dinner hour for Chinese waiters and restaurant men—some waiter was almost sure to see me and call out, “Come on—come on. Dinner time!” Always they cooked enough to be elastic either way—five more or five less made no difference—and if I joined them, they just brought out another bowl and chopsticks. Such was the Chinese custom. They had a psychology which would seem strange to American businessmen. A spiritual treat for a material, a material for a spiritual—they saw no difference. I was recognized as a scholar who knew the classical writing, old style. Sometimes I would take them as a present a bottle of the kind of Chinese wine George drank—they all knew George. But mostly I recited poetry or produced samples of calligraphy, or wrote English letters for them, as I did once for Pak.
Neither did Sung and I get on. It was just as Mr. Wang said. For twelve dollars a month I was supposed to be working for Sung all the time. Soon Sung complained that I was taking too long for my lunch, that I was coming too late in the morning, more especially, that I was not using enough imagination in naming the price to a customer. He said, “In charging, use your own judgment. The ticket is merely to go by. Study psychology. If they are willing to pay, charge high. If not, sell some way.”
This was the reason he never marked the right price in English, although it was a store only for Americans and no Oriental customers ever came there. He always used Chinese scripts scribbled on the bottom of the goods, to indicate their approximate value.
The big quarrel began when he saw me selling a shawl to a lady who had a limousine with a chauffeur. This shawl had been displayed in the window for a long time. The lady had noticed it, and having made up her mind, came in to buy it at once. She did not even ask the price until I was tying it up.
“How much?” she said then.
“$5.50,” I said, which was marked on the tag in Chinese for me to tell by.
She paid that amount and went out.
Sung all the while was watching from the back of the store. He came up and his hair, so smooth usually, bristled like an angry cat’s, while the little veins on his bald temples twitched.
“That is not the way to do business,” he said quietly, but with glinting eyes.
He was quiet for several minutes afterwards, walking around the shop, touching this and that, though all was neat. He came back to me.
“If you don’t learn American business methods, you will never do here.”
“What did I do wrong?” I said.
Then he told me I should have charged that rich lady much more for her shawl. I argued back. We had a fight. I left. I had been there three weeks, and for that received five dollars. I insisted that he owed me four dollars more. This he never paid, although like Wang, I, too, came back again and again, trying to collect. Sung argued that I must have taken some money from the store, or at least, he had lost four dollars on the shawl because I was not a good salesman.
I think I would make a good politician: I was not so soft spoken as Wang. Finally Sung made me a compromise because I kept coming and arguing with Sung when customers were around. He said he would send me to another big restaurant in which he was only slightly interested. I could earn six dollars a week with meals as a waiter there if I would agree to say nothing more about the four dollars he owed me.
There were nine waiters. Among these were three Ph.D.’s from Columbia, and two more to be next June; a B.A. and B.S. and one M.A. The ninth never went to college. The non-collegiate fellow happened to be the most interesting one. He was a painter in the Chinese style from Shanghai. He could not speak English well, and was a newcomer, but had a shy, ready smile. He was not liked much by the boys there, maybe because he had a strikingly distinguished look which didn’t go with waiting, and was superior to the rest in many respects; but especially was Mr. Chu despised because he set no value on college degrees, and had only contempt for wages, tips, and the restaurant business in America. But Chu and I became friends. One afternoon we talked on Chinese literatu
re and became so absorbed that we did not know when the dinner hour came, and we should have been waiting on tables.
One of the waiters, a recent Ph.D., was a real M.D. as well. He studied medicine in Peking, and had come over to take Public Health at Johns Hopkins. He had finished his work, and now preferred waiting on tables to going back to Peking. Nobody liked Chong either—but for a different reason—because he was too noisy and conceited. When he told some of the guests that he had two doctors’ degrees, the others felt ashamed of him. They said that these people came to eat and to be waited on, they were not interested in how many degrees their waiters had. The headwaiter often talked of firing him, but he did his work all right in spite of his talking. That is why I saw him there still working when I was leaving the place.
At the cash register was a big fat Chinese, American-born, who had the biggest, fattest share in the restaurant’s stock. Unlike the Greeks and Italians, who often suspect their partners, the Chinese never fight; I have seen Italian restaurants divide and become two, purposely occupying the same street and even both keeping the same name, which causes much confusion and soon ruins both. Chinese partners stick together. If you suspect your partner, you get it back some other way. But the richest always holds the cashbox.
Fairly good American meals were served as well as chop suey and chow mein; and since I did not like chow mein, I always took the American ones, with the addition of rice instead of bread and potatoes. The first day I worked hard to familiarize myself with the menu and all the different dishes the cook made. There seemed a lot of nuts—almond nuts, walnuts, leechee nuts, peanuts; a lot of sauce—Chinese sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, applesauce; a lot of creams—soup-cream, chicken-cream, vegetable-cream, ice-cream . . . so it impressed me strongly as a nut, sauce and cream restaurant. Not much else. But as a Chinese restaurant, it was thoroughly popularized. No electric sign for an eating-place was more brilliant than the varicolored lights outside, encircling this upstairs chop-suey place. There was a space for dancing in the middle of the floor, smooth and waxed. Once while running in to the kitchen, one of the waiters fell down with dishes and oil sauce on the floor, and even before he could wipe it up, one of the dancers fell down too, a fat man with a featherweight of a girl on top. This was in tune with the general confusion of the rush hour.
East Goes West Page 12
