Chapter 1 Sadie #2
Her third week on the beat, however, her Chinese heritage became strangely relevant.
It was a hot day in late August, and she was interviewing store owners about the difficulties faced by small businesses.
For her last interview, she entered a 99 Cents store on Rockaway Avenue that lacked air-conditioning but smelled of clean plastic.
Its shelves brimmed with every possible plastic import that a household could require: shower caps and pillboxes and toilet scrubbers.
The owner agreed to answer her interview questions:
“How long have you been running this store?”
“What should the new mayor do to help businesses in Brownsville?”
“What are the pros and cons of running a business near the elevated rail?”
His name was Pierre Henry, and he’d emigrated from St. Lucia thirty years prior.
He sat calmly behind the cash register curling ribbons with the edge of some scissors as they discussed the commercial vacancies on the block and the shooting down the street the week before.
Just as they were finishing their conversation, a woman in scrubs entered the store and pushed a middle-aged man in a wheelchair up to the cash register.
“Mr. William,” saluted Pierre Henry, leaning over the counter to greet the man. The caretaker disappeared into the toiletries aisle. “Summer long enough for you?”
“Summer,” the customer repeated, his voice like a stuttering motor. His eyes narrowed on Sadie.
Pierre Henry nodded toward her. “She’s a reporter. She’s asking me some questions about the challenges of business in Brownsville.”
“Good afternoon,” Sadie said, extending her hand, but Mr. William didn’t reach for hers.
The man was thick-bodied, with salt-and-pepper hair, and he wore a faded Earth, Wind & Fire T-shirt. His face lagged on one side and his fingers curled in his lap. As Sadie studied him, he studied her—his eyes sternly fixed on her.
“What… paper?” Mr. William asked.
“New Gotham. It’s a newish paper. .”
“You… Where are you from?”
Sadie hugged her notebook to her chest.
“Brooklyn!” she answered, sidestepping what she knew he was really asking.
“Where are your people from?”
“I’m mixed.”
“What’s the mix?”
He would wrench out the whiteness, broadcast this news to the people of Brownsville.
“So my mom, she’s, like, Jewish American. And my dad is Chinese American.”
“Chinese,” he said, nodding, as if he had discovered the key to her.
Relieved he hadn’t latched on to the Jewish part, she smiled. Perhaps he had only wanted to know what type of POC she was. In fact, maybe he’d appreciate her family’s personal connection to Brownsville.
“My grandparents used to run a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue. Many decades ago.”
The man gripped the handles of his wheelchair. “Wong. Your grandfather was Mr. Wong?”
“Richard Chin. Our last name is Chin. I’m Sadie Chin.
” She reached out her hand again, but the man only continued to glower.
At this point, the nurse returned with a roll of paper towels and a box of Efferdent Denture Cleanser.
She handed a twenty to Pierre Henry, who had been listening to the exchange with amusement.
When the nurse took hold of the wheelchair handles, Mr. William twisted around and hollered.
“Wait!”
Painfully, he strained against the weight of his bones and, hands on the arms of the wheelchair, raised himself to his feet. Sadie caught a whiff of the man on her breath: the smell of Tic Tacs and old newspapers.
“What’s wrong, Mr. William? Let me help you!” said the nurse, touching his arm. “What do you want?”
He swatted her away.
Extending his left arm, he jutted a trembling hand in Sadie’s direction and began to unclench his fingers.
“Liar!” he cried, pointing at her. “Mr. Wong! Ask your grandfather about the people he killed!”
“Wait, what?”
“Mr. Wong. The landlord. It was him!”
“What nonsense you telling that girl?” the nurse cried.
“Wait, but…” Sadie stuttered. “I’m not related to anyone named Wong.”
“Mr. Wong is a murderer!”
“I don’t know about no Mr. Wong the murderer,” said Pierre Henry. “But, Mr. William, the girl already told you! She not related to that man. Her name is Chin.”
Mr. William glared at the shopkeeper. “You West Indians weren’t around then.”
Quickly, Sadie rummaged in her purse for her press pass, and she handed it to Mr. William, hoping this proof would settle the matter.
The man took the press pass and held it an inch from his face. “Chin,” he mumbled, and embarrassment quivered across his cheeks. Sadie stifled a sigh of relief.
Suddenly, Mr. William was swaying on his feet, and both Sadie and the nurse launched forward to steady him. He held Sadie’s shoulder—his hand heavy, his eyes averted. Then he sat back down in the wheelchair, his pupils fixed bitterly on the floor.
“Okay, we’re done,” the nurse laughed. “We going home now. Time to go home and stop saying crazy things to people.” She rolled her eyes and pushed Mr. William out of the store.
Sadie turned to Pierre Henry with her mouth open.
“What exactly just happened?”
Pierre Henry smiled and shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and he spun his index finger around his ear. “Something wrong with him.”
“But was there actually a murderer named Mr. Wong?”
“Who can say? I’ve been here a long time. But he’s been here longer.”
Sadie unlocked her bike from the parking sign and pedaled homeward.
Soon she was back on Eastern Parkway, that major boulevard connecting the east and west sides of Brooklyn, linking Brownsville to the Park Slope brownstones, her bike whizzing in the opposite direction of the cabs on their way to the airport.
She passed the crowd of Hasidic Jews gathered outside the world headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch, people with whom she may have shared a distant ancestor.
Yet she didn’t really see any of them as, over and over, she relived the interaction at the 99 Cents store.
She was shaken, but there was no reason to be upset, she told herself. The man had probably survived a stroke. Especially in a neighborhood like Brownsville where there’d never been many Chinese people, it was natural that he’d mix her up with someone else.
When Sadie reached Park Slope, it seemed more pretentious than ever: the boutique clothing shops, the brownstones with their nineteenth-century post lights, the curated sidewalk gardens adorned with signs instructing dog owners not to let their pups pee.
Add to that the obliviousness of the yuppies as they skirted around the same man on Carroll Street who’d been sitting on a stool and jingling quarters in a coffee cup for two decades.
Again, she wished she wasn’t from Park Slope.
Sadie strung her bike to her parents’ gate and unlocked the door of the brownstone.
“Dad!” she yelled into the hallway. “Have you heard of some landlord in Brownsville named Mr. Wong?”
Then she remembered: her parents had gone to the Village to see Chekhov’s The Seagull. She had the house to herself.
Sadie ascended the creaky stairs to the second floor.
Everywhere there were shelves of books: Henry James, Tu Fu, the Brontes, Amy Tan, Hawthorne, Ginsberg—these were her parents’ bibles.
Yellowing pages and crumbling plaster was the smell of home.
At least, she consoled herself, her parents were not like other Park Slopers.
They didn’t have a second home upstate, didn’t use professional cleaning services.
They threw Billy Joel on the stereo and danced around with feather dusters.
This modesty had to count for something.
Plus, the fact that she still lived in a Park Slope brownstone instead of a tenement in Bushwick like others from Yale—well, that was because she was trying to save money, to pay back her student loans.
Sadie reached her bedroom. She ran her fingers over the Lord Shiva sculpture that she’d bought at a Tibetan store, then held a staring contest with a beaded Nigerian mask from a street fair.
Sadie remembered the time Aaliyah, a friend at Yale, had remarked that white people should stop buying African masks—that this was cultural appropriation.
Sadie had nodded without telling Aaliyah that she had one at home.
In some ways, her whole life was a series of out-of-context cultural objects.
Growing up, she’d eaten Ngen Ngen’s fish cakes and Grandma’s latkes, indulged in red heng bou envelopes and Hanukkah gelt, burned incense sticks and eight candles, bowed at the cemeteries and recited Baruch Atah Adonai.
But not to any extreme: no weekend Hebrew school, no Chinese language class.
The best of both worlds without the strings: two rounds of gifts in winter, two cultural New Years, everything duplicated like a Happy Meal when they’ve accidentally thrown two toys on your tray.
Her parents had always said she was incredibly lucky to inherit two cultures.
Yet sitting at her desk, she couldn’t get Mr. William’s words out of her head. She searched for “Brownsville” and “Wong” in The New York Times Time Machine archive.
There are no results matching your search.
She thought back to the Decolonizing History course she’d taken at Yale, where she’d studied the concept of the “model minority.” Perhaps this Wong dude had gotten away with murder because the police chose to believe him.
Maybe it was her purpose to reveal the truth.
She would find Chinese people who would talk to her because she was half Chinese.
It was the story that would enlist all her identities, her talents—and in the process, she’d learn something about her own family’s life in the neighborhood.
Sadie took out her journal and jotted down some notes to save for later.