This Is a Bust (12 page)

“A lot.”

“Yes, a lot. Think of all the regional beliefs and traditions
that each of those countries had, even before the Mongols and the Manchus colonized us. Everyone who's Chinese is really many different ancestries, with the blood of a hundred different nations that are now gone.”

To the little boy in the suit, he said, “Take that piece back.
That's a bad move. Very bad move.” The boy sadly dragged his cannon back and bit his lip.

The midget went on. “All the Chinese people feel this
internal struggle. That's why Chinese leaders are so terrible.”

“Both
the KMT and the communists are lousy,” I said. “But
you know, if Sun Yat Sen hadn't died suddenly, China would be farther along than Japan is now.”

The midget blinked. “Sun, he would have ruined China if he
had lived.”

I was shocked that the midget dismissed Sun so easily. Both
the KMT and the communists looked up to Sun. He was the one who'd kicked out the colonizing Manchus in 1911. Tragically, he had died before seeing his reforms put into practice. If you ate with chopsticks, you loved the man.

“You can't say that about Sun,” I said. “He was the one who
got China back on its feet.”

“He was so vague about everything,” said the midget. “No
wonder both the KMT and the communists love him so much. If he had lived and headed the country, he would have been expected to be as ruthless as the old emperors, like Mao and Chiang are now — otherwise people wouldn't admire him. Sun loved Chinese people so much, he couldn't stand the thought of mistreating anyone. That's what killed him.”

Life under the Manchus had been hard on China. The
men had to wear their hair in queues to show loyalty to the Manchus and pay taxes to a Manchu emperor. Chinese weren't allowed to rise up to the highest military or government ranks, which were held by Manchus or Europeans. It had been almost 300 years of institutionalized discrimination against the Chinese. I wondered if the Manchus had allowed the Chinese cops to get investigative assignments.

“Okay,” I told the midget. “You think Chinese people make
lousy leaders and we all hate each other, then how come we all live together in Chinatown? Why do you come to Chinatown?”

The midget shrugged.

“I'm only in it for the soy milk,” he said.

I shook my head and checked my watch.

“I gotta go see my mother,” I said.

“Have fun in Brooklyn,” the midget said with a wry smile.

“Happy New Year!”

“Whoopee.”

—

Down the street, I bought a fresh green bamboo twig from
a sidewalk salesman. It was cultivated in a nursery where it had been slowly twisted over a few months so it would grow into the shape of an undone wire coat hanger. More twists made it more lucky.

I stopped at Martha's Bakery. Lonnie and Dori both looked
frazzled. To save time, boxes had already been packed with rice cakes and stacked up. I picked one up and threw my money at Dori.

“Happy New Year!” I told her. She glared at me, but held her
tongue. It was bad luck to say anything mean-spirited on New Year's, since that day would set the tone for the rest of the year. In Dori's case, I couldn't see how it mattered. She was going to have a lousy year whether she talked badly about me or not. Still, we all followed traditions we didn't believe in. Like being a diligent son.

Lonnie gave me a searching look.

“Happy New Year, Lonnie!”

“You, too, officer!” she said, already looking away.

The Brooklyn-bound platform of the N train was packed
with tourists heading for home. There were some Chinese, but almost none of them would be riding out as far as me to just past Bay Ridge.

I got on the train and
leaned against the doors when they closed. I thought about how my mother wanted nothing to do with Chinatown anymore and lived in a neighborhood where she was the only one who knew how to fiddle around with a wok. When I got out of the train, I walked down to her block, which looked like a suburban Little Italy. I was sure I was carrying the only rice cake for miles.

“Stupid, low-class Chinese culture,” she said. I had just
seated myself down on her couch, which was swathed in a multi-colored crochet cover with three God's eyes. Seeing me always reminded her of how she came to this country and ended up living and working with people she considered beneath her social status back in China. Understandably, she was always in a bad mood at first.

“I saw the little girls parading on television today. They use
such cheap material, and they didn't dance in time with the drum. Then they had that fight. So disrespectful. Made me lose face,” she said, swiping her cheek with a finger.

She leaned forward into me. “Hey Robert, what's this?” she
asked, tapping at the nick in my chin. I was glad my shirt was covering up the bruises from this afternoon.

“Oh that? That's from a bullet, Mom.”

“Shut up! It's from shaving!”

“If you know it's from shaving, then why did you ask me?”

“I just want to talk to you. You don't want your mother to
talk to you? Maybe I need to get a ticket from you to say that you write to me.” A whistle went off in the kitchen and she left to get the tea.

She owned this apartment, a one bedroom in an old
brownstone on the ground floor. My mother did really well.
A lot of women of her generation had to work as seamstresses. But my mother's family had been one of the richer ones, and she already spoke enough English when she came over. She managed to get a job working for Americans in midtown, sorting and punching 80-column cards for the computers. Now she supervised the department.

The women who worked in the sweatshops weren't so
lucky. When they got older, they slipped up more and got canned from the garment factory. They found themselves making dumplings for a penny each. Or giving foot massages on the sidewalk. Or worse.

“This tea comes from the middle of China.
Not the cheap
Hong Kong garbage,” said my mother. She walked back into the living room with a lacquer tray. The teapot and two cups had a crack glaze finish that looked like lizard skin. A raised seal stuck out on each of the three pieces, the character for longevity, which looks like an old man bent over with cane. She also brought out a rice cake sliced into eighths on a small dish.

“What's wrong with Hong Kong, Mom?”

“Nothing wrong with Hong Kong! Did I say something's
wrong with Hong Kong?”

“You called it ‘garbage.' This isn't the way to start the new
year, talking badly about Chinese people.”

“When are you going to learn?” asked my mother, taking
sips of her tea. She slipped a piece of rice cake into her mouth.
“Don'
t worry about ‘Chinese people.' Just worry about yourself. You think people in Chinatown care about you? They all just want to make enough money to get out
of there.”

“How did you learn to hate Chinese people so much?”

“You
think I hate Chinese people? Chinese people hate me!
You know how they treated me! After your father died, everybody turned their backs on me. I'm buying groceries in the street, the store owners don't even look at me until I give them money.”

“But you still have Chinese friends. What about Auntie Two
Big Girls and Auntie One Girl and Boy? You hate them?” I never knew the names of my mother's friends; as I was growing up, and even today, we just referred to them by their children.

“They are my friends. I know them. But most Chinese
people are simple and unsophisticated.”

“Now you're being racist against yourself, Mom.”

“Robert, don't you hate working in Chinatown? Chinese
people don't love you and you don't love them right back.”

“You know, you sound like Dad going
off on the communists.
How can you hate people who look like you?” I bit off a rubbery chunk of rice cake and it instantly glued my mouth shut. I took a sip of tea to help break it up.

“Don't talk about the communists,” she said, running out of
steam. “You've never been to China, how can you talk about the communists?”

“I read the newspaper, I know about the political situation.
The communists defeated the KMT so easily, they obviously had the support of the Chinese people.”

My mother sighed and sipped more tea.

“The Americans are celebrating the 200th birthday of their
country this year.”

“It's our country, too. We're American citizens, Mom.”

“You're American. I'
m only American on paper. You know
my English isn't that good. Anyway, China's history is more than 20 times longer than 200 years. You have no idea how old our history is. You think the communists are going to last? Even if the KMT had won, they wouldn't be doing better. Nothing lasts. Worry about yourself. That's history's lesson.”

I thought about the reports coming out of some parts of
China. The Cultural Revolution had destroyed the country in ways the Japanese could only have wished to do. Employees had killed their bosses, students had beaten their teachers, and cats had chased dogs up trees. The movement now seemed to be losing steam, according to reports in the Hong Kong and Taiwan papers, but you never knew for sure.

“What do you think happened to all the money that Dad
sent back to China?” I asked. “It wasn't too much but we really could have used that money a few years ago.”

“All of it was confiscated by the communists,” sighed my
mother. “Along with your dad's brother. The entire family was labeled ‘class enemies' because of all the money your father had been sending them. But that's not the worst part.”

“What could be worse than losing your money?”

“Well,” said my mother, leaning back and speaking
very slowly. “I never told you this before. Because your father was sending money back to China, he was under investigation for being a communist.”

“Who was investigating him?”

“The FBI, but really, the old guard Chinatown organizations,
the ones who loved the KMT. They were compiling information on everyone who was sending money back to China. They wanted to get them all deported. They didn't want anyone sending money to the communists.”

I was stunned by this revelation.

“He
hated the communists! How could he be accused of
being a communist?”

“When your father fell off the roof, some people said that it
wasn't an accident,” said my mother. Her voice had all the emotions squeezed out of it. “They said that it was a guilty man committing suicide.”

“Motherfuckers,” I said. “Who were they?”

“I don't know.”

“What were their names?”

“Nobody k
nows. They only sent us anonymous notes in 
the
mail.”

“You never told the police?”

“What am I going to tell them? Huh? If I came into the
police station, they would tell me to do their laundry.

I didn't dare go there. Huh!”

“They wouldn't do that!”

“Tell me they wouldn't!”

I put my hands on my knees.

“We should really talk about good things, Mom.”

She nodded.

“How is your job going?” I asked.

“Can't complain.”

After a minute or two, we had the TV on.

—

I called up Barbara not too long after I got home. It was a few minutes after 0100. I didn't know if she'd be there.

“Yeah?”

“You answer the phone like a guy, Barbara.”

“I can do everything a guy can do. Even more.”

“Yeah, I know, I remember. Hey, what are you doing now?”

“Recove
ring from the worst Chinese New Year ever at 
my
aunt's.”

“I gotta bottle of Seagram's. Wanna help me read the label
upside-down?”

“You have to come over here. My bra's already off.”

Somebody shook me and I opened my eyes.

Barbara had her coat on and was sitting on the side of the
fold-out bed.

“Time is it?” I asked, turning on my side.

“Around 5.”

“You going into work now? Today's my day off. I was thinking we could have some drinks and go back to bed.”

“No can do. I have to finish some reading before a meeting
today.”

“When are you gonna get out tonight?”

“I'm not sure.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Robert.” Her voice came out in a way that made me cross
my legs and my arms. “Our time together has been really great. We really had a lot to get out of our systems. But I'm not ready to be in a thing now.”

She'd obviously put a lot of thought into this. Her
presentation was pretty good.

“The good times never last, do they?” I said. I could feel my
center of gravity shifting from my chest to the bottom of my stomach.

“We can still get together once in a while.”

“Once a week? Once a month?”

“Let's not put restrictions on it, Robert.”

I leaned back on one elbow.

“I see how it stands,” I said.