Chapter 2 The Wongs #2
Still, Koon Lai’s industriousness made him one of the most prized young men in the community.
One day, when he was visiting the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, he was introduced by his paper father to Lee Jung Yu, an older man with a proud strut and a neck layered like a rooster’s.
Mr. Lee owned a restaurant in Brooklyn, and in his winter years, he wished to return to China and pass the restaurant to a prospective son-in-law.
He invited Koon Lai for cha on Bayard Street, and as they sipped, Mr. Lee boasted about the three kilometers of rice fields he had bought for his village, now tended by laborers from San Wui.
After many such cha, during which Koon Lai mostly listened and expressed admiration, Mr. Lee pronounced Koon Lai the perfect match for his daughter in Toisan.
As Koon Lai nervously deflected the compliments, Mr. Lee took a red heng bou and stuck it in Koon Lai’s breast pocket: round-trip tickets for the train and ship.
When Koon Lai arrived in Toisan, everyone in the village believed he was a rich man.
He had already sent three-fourths of his earnings home, but the villagers goaded him for more.
As he forked over the remainder of his earnings, he worried about giving away too much, but his mother said otherwise.
He saw her frequently, often as a reflection in the village water well, or by the mountain stream, her white dress bubbling up like foam.
He agreed to marry the girl, who was five years his junior.
In truth, he wasn’t pleased that Lee Suet Fong sipped her tea before the elders sipped theirs, and he didn’t love how easily she was distracted by the voices of her age-mates outside the window.
But those were superficial things, things she would grow out of, he told himself.
And so came the silk sedan carrying the bride, the village feast, the obligatory consummation, and after a few weeks Koon Lai was on his way back to America, to Brooklyn, to a place called Livonia Avenue in the Jewish ghetto of Brownsville.
He arrived on the elevated rail, dressed in a Western suit and a bowler hat; he blended in with the European immigrants, at least from the back.
His destination was sandwiched next to the station, upstairs from a hardware store and a tailor’s shop, adjacent to a row of tenements.
In those apartments lived the fabric cutters and roofers and toymakers of Brooklyn, many of them from Poland, Russia, and Germany.
The stone pillars of the rail advertised all sorts of jobs accessible to the immigrant.
With his rudimentary English, Koon Lai could read two of the posters: BE A DOLL—WORK FOR THE DOLL FACTORY and CUT STEAK, PAY GREAT.
In the hardware store, Koon Lai met the landlord, Arnold Cohen, who owned both 78 Livonia and the tenement next door.
Mr. Lee had spoken of the Jew’s fatness and of his generosity; the man would gladly accept rent a week late.
Mr. Cohen turned over the keys and led Koon Lai upstairs to the restaurant, on the second floor.
It consisted of a large front room with ten tables that sat fifty customers, a back room for sleeping—twice as large as the storage closet on Mott Street—a kitchen with an icebox, and two kerosene stoves.
The location, too, was perfect, as the restaurant was easy to spot from the Saratoga station. It helped that Mr. Lee had hung a tin sign out the window—it announced in large red letters, CHOW MEIN HERE!
In the years that followed, Koon Lai poured all his energy into the success of Canton Kitchen.
Business was very good at first. Every night, the tables overflowed with cream-and-walnut shrimp, chicken lo mein, chop suey, crunchy egg rolls, and beef and broccoli—all swimming in thick gravy and overdressed in hoisin and soy sauce, just how the Americans liked it.
There were the laborers from the Long Island Railroad tracks who swarmed them at lunchtime, devouring multiple rounds of chow fun, and also the girls and boys in courtship, who played footsie under the table.
He even had a rabbi who came every Monday at seven o’clock and sat in the window reading a Jewish prayer book while sipping his favorite chicken-chive wonton soup.
In addition to the usual specials, Koon Lai offered combos: one vegetable, meat, and rice; or two meats, one vegetable, and rice.
He had already observed that bak gui liked to have their own plates and grew anxious if they had to share.
When the children babbled in fake Chinese, when the young men hollered in jest, “Mr. Wong, you got any dog on the menu?” Koon Lai would grin widely and kid them back in his broken English.
“You like dog? Dog every week?”
The customers never asked if Koon Lai had a wife, a child, or whether his parents were in good health, but he didn’t mind this, for explaining in English would have been difficult. He had a son, too, which was a wonder to him. The child’s name was Dun Ho, and Koon Lai had yet to meet him.
As for Koon Lai’s father, Baba had a bad liver and rotted teeth and talked of nothing but how his friends had cheated him in the mahjong tea parlors. Koon Lai’s mother never visited him in America, as if even ghosts were subject to the exclusion law.
Definitely for the best that no one asked.
It went on like this for a few more years, up until the day of the stock market crash.
Then the textile factory closed, and the workers abandoned the construction sites, leaving cement blocks scattered around like chunks of a bludgeoned monument.
Within a few weeks, half his Brownsville customers disappeared, leaving his meats to sour.
Instead, he found his bak gui standing in the food pantry lines with their bowler hats pulled low over their brows.
Profits dwindled, and downstairs, the hardware store shuttered after thirty years in business.
Koon Lai went to Chinatown and learned that many of his compatriots had declared bankruptcy. Some had not survived their devastation; on Church Avenue, workers had discovered Mr. Fong dangling from the kitchen light fixtures, already two days decayed.
Koon Lai hated to borrow, but he had cut back on both his own expenses and the money he sent to China, and he still was short on rent.
At the association, he found several ruined business owners smoking cigars, drinking diu, and scrambling mahjong tiles.
They tried to convince him to join their game, but he stood at the edge of the four-player tables with his arms crossed, lying that he had no luck, that he would surely lose.
At last, the association president smiled and handed Koon Lai a heng bou containing a whole one hundred American dollars.
Bowing with gratitude, Koon Lai took his leave and headed toward the City Hall subway station.
When he made it to Foley Square, he found a crowd of bak gui swarming the roads and sidewalks.
They lifted cardboard signs into the air and chanted a rhyme he could not understand.
These were the kind of men who had lost everything—their jobs, their houses—the kind who were gathering in the parks.
Unshaved, in tattered coats and stained trousers, their bodies gave off a rancid odor.
Koon Lai had seen some of the makeshift dwellings built with orange crates on Houston Street, and he had read in the Mun Hey Weekly that these men lit fires in trash cans and cooked pigeons in clay pots, just like in China.
These are bak gui, Koon Lai thought, rushing past them. And even they think yelling makes food appear.
Then there was a skirmish, and before he knew what was happening, Koon Lai was thrown to the ground.
Pain shot through his elbows and knees, and as he cried out, he felt someone cuff his wrists.
He was tugged to his feet by a police officer, rounded up with a slew of the bak gui, and slammed into a windowless truck.
Winded, shocked dumb, trembling, divorced from his arms, Koon Lai let out a garbled cry, grabbing at the few English words that came to him.
“I don’t have the problem!”
Someone, everyone, began laughing.
“Seems to me like you have a problem.”
A smack of spit on his neck.
He was quiet after that. They drove past the government buildings, the breadlines, the Houston encampments, the shivering prostitutes. Then they crossed a bridge to a large fort where each man was forced to empty his pockets.
He held the heng bou to his breast.
“This a gift. A gift from friend.”
The police officers tore it from him, guffawed when they saw the amount, one of them pocketing it. They handled him more aggressively, calling him a thief, throwing him into one of the cages with ten other men.
Koon Lai, terrified, tucked himself in a corner and tried to make himself small. Yet there was one bak gui prisoner, the angriest and loudest of the bunch, who wouldn’t leave him alone. This bak gui stood over him, gesticulating.
Then, sudden quiet.
Then, the hum of a zipper.
Then, a stream of hot piss dribbling into Koon Lai’s hair.
Down his neck. Under his shirt.
Koon Lai didn’t make a sound. He remained as still as the Guardian Kwan. Eventually the aggressor left him alone, as if he had concluded Koon Lai was an unfeeling object.
Koon Lai lay in half-conscious misery for hours until he woke to another putrid wetness—his own.
Sitting up, he found the bak gui men asleep on the floor and on the benches, and his mind turned toward the money.
He didn’t know how he would repay the debt to the association or keep the restaurant afloat.
Another thought came, with the swiftness of a cook’s cleaver. I’ve been proud, he brooded. He had been feeling superior to the gamblers at the association, to his father, to the bak gui—but in truth, he was just as careless.
With this self-flagellation, Koon Lai tortured himself for hours—and yet, when he looked around at the cell with all its sleeping bak gui prisoners, something kept lifting in his breast, a butterfly-fluttering of hope.
He had failed, but he would do better when he got out, if he had the chance.
He would be cautious with every penny. He begged the ancestors for mercy.
Still, it was terrible not knowing how long he would be kept there or what his family would do without his earnings. He regretted that he had not brought a photograph of Suet Fong to America. He wondered if she missed him or if she, too, was forgetting what there was to miss.
In a letter, Suet Fong had written that the baby at his first grab party had reached for everything in sight: the medicine balls, the abacus, the stamps, the oranges—one after the other, he scooped them up, stuffing what he could in his mouth.
Chin village now joked that the baby was destined to be a businessman of international fame, or maybe the world’s greatest inventor.
But he was no baby now. Koon Lai had memorized the birth date; Dun Ho was two years and eleven months old. He prayed that he might survive to hold the child on his lap.
Koon Lai was released to the streets just a few hours later.
Returning to Brownsville, he begged Mr. Cohen for extra days to pay the rent.
He had never availed himself of Mr. Cohen’s leniency in the past, and the landlord rewarded him by granting an additional month.
With double resolve, Koon Lai promised himself that he would never drink diu, gamble, or buy a woman’s touch.
He would keep his earnings under lock and key and slash the prices until the neighborhood returned.
During the years that followed, the textile factory reopened, and the men returned to the construction sites. Mr. Cohen filled the vacancy downstairs, and business at Canton Kitchen improved. In time, Koon Lai was able to pay his debt to the association and resume remittances to Toisan.
Yet, although he should have been satisfied by this—although he resumed his title as village hero and recovered the respect of the association—something was not well with him.
He would have described it as a dry ache in his back, a weight under the ribs, a blueness in his peripheral vision.
He felt it most during the Chinese New Year, or when a big family came to his restaurant, jiggling babies on their knees.
He complained to no one, confided in no one. But it was as his mother had always used to say:
Gu sin jiak yein.
A body with only a shadow for company.
It was his friends at the association who reminded him about “the seed,” as they liked to call it.
The seed he had planted in China the night of his wedding, the most powerful seed in the darkest, most ripe soil.
This seed had grown rapidly into a fruitful plant, they pointed out, and now that plant could be seized by the roots.
Koon Lai came to agree. In the spring of 1935, the year of the pig, he paid for the boat ticket to bring his eight-year-old son to America.