Chapter 22
CASSIEL
Indigo bomber jacket, hands stuffed in pockets, uneven haircut.
Cassiel was dressed but not ready. He’d been up since six.
The ring his nephew had traded him, that had lived on his finger through almost two years, had not returned and was not going to.
The week he’d lost it, he had gone back to Amoeba and checked every bin in World Music, the floor around the singer-songwriter section, the counter.
Asked a guy at the register if anyone had turned in a ring, a small one, metal or something like it, with five colored beads.
The guy had checked a drawer and said, “Sorry, man.”
He had walked back up the street, eyes scanning the ground as if that would in any world produce what he was looking for, and had predictably come up with nothing. He had gone back to Lauren’s place and searched every room he could have walked through as well as several he knew he hadn’t. Nothing.
Two weeks later, his thumb still went looking for it. The absence had become something he was learning to live with, but the learning process was irritating.
He opened the door.
“Hi,” May said, brightly. “I had a question.”
“It’s seven forty-nine in the morning,” Cassiel told him.
“Okay, so I should have called.” May bounced once on his heels, then slowed.
He was still smiling. “Ben—the grandson. He found a document from an old immigration thing—with her actual Chinese name on it. And it’s Wong for Huang, like mine, not Wong for Wang.
That’s what Ben thought it was too, so we all just assumed.
” He said this quickly, the way he did when he’d had too much instant coffee and clearly hadn’t slept.
“I talked to Auntie at work last night and she knows someone at the Wong association in Oakland. The, uh—family association. She says this lady’s been there since the seventies.
So I thought—Oakland. Chinatown. Huang. It’d be something to chase. ”
Cassiel’s thumb dragged across his bare finger and he had to consider the actual words. This was a real lead, an interesting one. One that would make for what May called ‘good radio,’ and he was clearly excited. And Cassiel wanted to feel something other than tired and unsettled. Not toward May.
A little toward May.
May was looking at his hands. The finger had been bare since the night they’d swapped jackets. May had not asked about it then. He didn’t ask now.
“So you’re going to Oakland,” Cassiel said.
May shifted. “Well, yeah. You don’t have to come, though. I just got excited, I know you’ve got work. I’ll head to the station, we can talk about it tonight or—”
“Stop.” Cassiel knew what this was and hated it more than the idea of a vague daytrip to Oakland. He didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want May to leave.
May looked… something. Taken aback, or apprehensive. Worried.
“—Wait here. I’ll call work. I’m going with you.”
For a few seconds he was sure that May was going to ask something like are you sure? but he didn’t. He just leaned against the corridor wall and said, “Okay.”
Cassiel left the door ajar and turned back into the bedroom as he took out his phone and called Peter. He would make up the hours. This was fine by Peter, who was too lenient by half.
Then he slipped on his jacket, took the notebook from the desk and put it in his bag, then returned to the door. He had agreed to be May’s Watson. This was part of that.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
The yellow line from Embarcadero was half-full. May took the aisle seat, one ankle crossed over his knee, sneaker bouncing. Cassiel sat against the window, arms folded.
He was annoyed. He was aware that he was annoyed, which made him more annoyed. May had given him an out—had physically stepped back, was going to leave for the station—and Cassiel had said stop and come anyway, meaning the annoyance was now his own fault.
May was texting someone. Kevin Chao or his brother or someone Cassiel didn’t know. At this hour, probably the former. The phone was on silent, but Cassiel could still hear the haptics.
His bag was in the space between them. He’d touched it three times since they boarded. He touched it again.
“If you keep fiddling with that someone’s gonna think something’s in there,” May said, looking over and up at him. He was trying to lighten the mood. Cassiel knew this. He didn’t respond. May looked back down at his phone and Cassiel was still annoyed and being an asshole.
After a minute, Cassiel pulled the Midori out from the bag and opened it to the working page. He held it between them without saying anything. May glanced over, shifting slightly closer, looking over what was there.
“Nice,” May said absently, before returning to his phone, and Cassiel had to think about what that was supposed to mean.
He closed the notebook.
* * *
They walked for seven minutes down Webster Street from the station.
Civic buildings and parking structures, laundromats, and then they took a left on 8th and everything compacted further.
Oakland’s Chinatown was smaller than SF Chinatown by a factor of four.
All the signage was bilingual but the English was an afterthought.
It was half past nine on a Tuesday now. They passed two older women in sun visors walking across the painted crosswalk, chattering at a speed Cassiel couldn’t have followed even if he’d spoken Cantonese.
On past a bakery, a karaoke place, a restaurant with a blue door.
Cassiel stared at the back of May’s head.
May navigated without consulting his phone. He looked at everything, every so often swiveling his head to peer into the window of a shop or glance up at a sign, but he didn’t dally and he didn’t ask Cassiel. He knew where he was going.
Half a step ahead now, one earbud in, two fingers pinching the cord at the microphone.
The audio quality would have been better without the earbuds, which were cheap and on the verge of breaking.
May might as well have just spoken directly into the phone, but Cassiel was not in the mood to say it and May was not in the mood to hear it.
“—we’re in Oakland Chinatown, on our way to the Wong Family Association now.
We just passed this herb shop on the corner and it smells like…
did you ever crawl inside your ah-ma’s cabinet looking for Hua Lu Shui?
The crosswalks are painted, they’ve got these beautiful Qing Dynasty designs in red and gold—”
This was not May’s voice as Cassiel knew it. The pitch was lower, his cadence intentionally slowed. This was some version of May. Smoothed out, talking to an imaginary audience while Cassiel walked behind him, hand clutching the strap of his messenger bag.
As they reached the end of the next block, May pocketed the phone and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun.
The buildings here were two and three stories, narrower than the commercial stretch, with tiled entryways and security gates, the association names in gold characters on plaques that had oxidized to brown. Cassiel read the ones he could parse.
According to Google, the Wong Family Association was on a second floor above a shuttered restaurant, up a staircase that smelled of incense.
They climbed this quietly. At the top, an open door led them into a narrow room, maybe twelve by thirty feet.
Hardwood floors, folding tables with metal chairs.
The lighting was fluorescent, so the less said about it, the better.
Cassiel looked inside to the far wall, where framed photographs ran in a row from black and white to faded color.
A small woman in her sixties or seventies was reading a Chinese newspaper with a magnifying glass at a folding table, a red thermos beside her. Her silver hair was cropped close and she was tapping her feet rhythmically though there was no music or radio playing.
May came over and introduced himself, gesturing at Cassiel, who stood behind him.
He bowed what felt like the polite amount as May explained their purpose and asked, in English, if she minded being recorded.
She waved a hand—go ahead—and May set his phone on the table between them as he pulled up a folding chair.
Cassiel didn’t feel like sitting, so he stood there.
They spoke in Mandarin. The first thing May said made the old woman laugh and he grinned, which was the first time Cassiel had seen him smile since the morning.
A few stray English words came out when the Mandarin failed—vinyl, record, association.
May showed her Ben Shum’s photo on his phone, the image of Wong Suet Ying in 1972 with her hair pinned up, face turned slightly left of the lens.
The woman, whose surname was Au Yeung, moved her magnifying glass over the phone screen and looked, then after three seconds, shook her head.
Cassiel watched. He couldn’t really see the expression on May’s face from his angle.
May tried again. Cassiel didn’t need to understand the language to know what was being explained.
He’d heard the same version in English. It was the history of Wong Suet Ying as May knew it.
The record, then the marriage to a man named Shum, followed by the move from Hong Kong to the States, to Oakland.
Mrs. Au Yeung listened, sucking her teeth.
She said something which May half-turned to translate for Cassiel’s sake, having finally remembered he was there: “She says a lot of people came over from Hong Kong back then.”
That was nothing.
A delivery truck reversed below the window, the beep at two-second intervals. Cassiel murmured an “Excuse me,” and moved toward the wall with the photographs, finding the pictures dated in the 80s.