Chapter 4 The Wongs #3
“If you don’t give me money, then I’m not mopping the floor,” Richard bargained.
Peeved that the floor hadn’t been mopped, his father sent one of the waiters to complete the task, and then he kneeled to be eye level with Richard.
“All those years in China, your belly was full,” he said. “Did you ever think why?”
“I am never allowed to go anywhere!” Richard cried, swiping a pair of forks off the counter. “Bak gui boys go to Coney Island! Why can’t I go to Coney Island?”
“You think you are a bak gui boy?” his father said softly, and then with terrifying, escalating volume:
“Do you have money like a bak gui boy? Can you read like a bak gui boy? Go to Coney Island when you can read like a bak gui boy!”
Richard knocked his head against the wall and groaned.
“Take the garbage to the corner,” Koon Lai ordered, pointing to two black bags in the hall.
Instead, Richard bolted past the bags and down the stairs onto the street. He would get money one way or the other.
All evening at the restaurant, Koon Lai kept glancing at the door, anxious for his son’s return.
In such rapid time, Richard thought like an American—he thought about his own plate.
Koon Lai tried to think of an appropriate punishment.
In China, a misbehaving child would be beaten.
But he was nervous to try; he had never beaten a child before.
He didn’t like leaving when there were so many customers, but at nine o’clock Koon Lai checked the lock on the safe, inspected the supply of sodas in the storage closet, and descended to the street to look for the runaway.
As soon as he reached the sidewalk, Koon Lai heard a loud clatter and shouts from up the block.
About twenty feet away, a crowd had gathered in front of a tenement, the people encircling a broken, upside-down bedroom cabinet.
The cabinet, Koon Lai deduced, had just been shucked from the second-floor window.
There was no sign of Richard, but he recognized the voices of the people in the tenement window: hak gui.
There was a husband, a wife, and four girl children.
He had become aware of them long before.
Sometimes the girls would sit on the fire escape, dangling their feet over the street, braiding each other’s hair.
Once, the father and mother had come to the restaurant for a meal.
His waiter had sought out Koon Lai’s approval, and without hesitation, Koon Lai had nodded his assent.
In any case, he had watched the two hak gui carefully that night, and they had been quiet and tidy.
Now, the four hak gui children came running down the stairs to stand under the tenement window.
Maybe they thought if they stood there, the marshals would not continue to throw furniture out the apartment window for fear of injuring them—but still, a lamp shot out the window and one of the little girls ducked.
The furious crowd, mostly Jewish bak gui, appeared to be on the side of the hak gui girls. One older Jewish woman mounted the front steps of the tenement and turned to face the crowd.
“Comrades!” she bellowed. “Hear what this slum landlord does! He gets a Negro family in there, charges them double the going rent! Just to line his pockets, twice the going rent! The father of the family, Mr. Philips—he’s been waiting years for a WPA job.
And now the landlord wants to throw them to the streets!
We can’t let the Philipses be put on the streets. We must fight!”
The Jewish workers raised their fists, and together, they picked up the cracked cabinet and hauled it back through the tenement door.
But what was the use of that? Koon Lai thought. The marshal would just throw it out the window again.
He felt bad for the hak gui family, but he had enough to worry about.
Koon Lai looked for Richard in the candy store. His son, thankfully, was not there. He hiked up to Pitkin Avenue, but the shoeshine boys had left, the shopkeepers had locked their stores, and only a few knish vendors remained.
Hours went by—Richard stumbling around with his head down, scouring the streets for pennies. At a loss, he sat on the curb and watched the men on the rooftops calling home their pigeons.
And then, in the glow of the streetlamp: a dead body.
Richard made out the leather shoes first, then the crooked legs, the rise of a rump.
The corpse lay in the middle of an alleyway crisscrossed by clothing lines.
He moved toward it, wondering if it could still be alive.
There were dark stains on the back of the jacket and on the concrete, and he thought of the Spring Festival slaughter, ribbons of rooster blood flying across the coop.
Richard prodded the body with his shoe. Nothing happened. He bent beside the corpse, listening. He tapped the body with the tip of his finger. And then he wiggled his whole hand into a jacket pocket and pried out a pack of cigarettes.
In the other pocket, there was fifty cents. He noticed three golden rings on the doughy white fingers and tried to tug them off, but the pinkie was as swollen as a frankfurter, so he took the two other rings and hurried back to the street.
They’ll know, Richard thought. In a panic, he scampered back to the alley, yanked a blanket off a nearby clothing line and draped it across the body, then surrounded the mound with bags of trash.
“You little shegetz!” the dead man snapped, rolling over and throwing off the blanket. His chest was riddled with holes that spouted blood like a fancy fountain. “You think you can take my rings?”
Richard tore down the sidewalk as fast as he could, past the drunks clinging to paper bags, the night-shift workers awaiting the streetcar, stuffing his pockets with the coins and rings and cigarettes as he ran, and the dead man trudged after him, using his fist to plug the holes in his stomach.
Koon Lai saw the little boy racing down Blake Avenue.
“Chin Dun Ho!” he cried, catching him by the arm. Instead of yanking himself free, Richard wrapped his arms around Koon Lai’s waist.
“There’s a ghost! A ghost!”
Koon Lai could nearly have cried with relief.
“There are no ghosts in Brooklyn.” He rubbed Richard’s head. “The bak gui don’t allow ghosts.”
In fact, there had been ghosts in Brooklyn.
When Brooklyn held the maize meadows of the Munsee-speaking.
When whales still swam up the river. Like the Chinese, the Munsee-speakers prepared their dead for the afterlife, offering food and burying them with jewelry, arrowheads, and red-tailed hawk feathers.
And even after the ancestors departed for the spirit world, they would continue to guide the living.
At least those living willing to listen.
But that had been a different Brooklyn—Brooklyn before the Dutch dredged the oysters and slayed the fish; before enslaved Akan people, Senegambians, and Malagasy toiled on the plantations of Kings County.
When the new century dawned, the city-turned-borough grew thick with people.
You had your Irish in Red Hook and your Italians in Bensonhurst and your Scandinavians by Green-Wood Cemetery and your Freedmen in Weeksville.
And then all the way east there was Brownsville, a little Jewish factory town booming up in the middle of nowhere.
Every tribe of Brooklyn had its own leaders, its own tits for tats.
At least that was how things had been until the crash.
Then the assembly lines halted, and the ships in the bay disappeared.
Overnight, Brooklyn was reduced to a scrabbling place, a borough of tin towns and breadlines, of frostbite and men drunk on paint-spiked milk.
Some cried for revolt, raised the red flag with its hammer and sickle.
But all that was past, Mayor La Guardia had promised.
He would pull the city back from the brink, put the fathers back to work, tear down the rotting tenements.
Progress, the American way, would be steely and tangible: highways, airports, tunnels.
Didn’t matter if you were Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish—all would participate in the realization of this vision, and all would prosper.
Coney Island was the epitome of such hope.
It was the everyday man’s playground, where the everyday man could indulge his desires.
If he didn’t like franks, then maybe he went for soft-shell crab.
If he wasn’t a horseback riding, Steeplechase guy, he might be a nut for the Tilt-A-Whirl. A man had to find out for himself.
As soon as his father had left for the Belmont fruit market the next morning, Richard crawled out the window onto the fire escape, skittered down the ladder, ran up the station steps, and ducked under the turnstile. Up on the El platform, the boys were scratching mustaches onto movie posters.
“It’s the Chinaman,” one announced.
“No tickee no shirtee! No tickee no shirtee!” said another, imitating the Chinese man who ran the neighborhood laundry.
“Look.” Richard showed them the rings and cigarettes.
In awe, they reached for his treasures, but he quickly closed his hands and stuffed them back in his pockets. “I sell,” he said. “At Coney Island.”
Now they were full of ideas.
“If that’s real, you’re a millionaire,” one boy remarked.
“That gold’s not real,” said another.
“If it’s brass, you’d still get enough to ride the Ferris wheel.”
“You could get a frank at Nathan’s!”
“You could get a gypsy to tell your fortune.”
“You could see a movie at the Pitkin Loew’s. Hell, you could watch movies all day.”
“Or go to Woolworths and order a hot fudge sundae.”
“A banana split.”
“A root beer float.”
“Damn, I want an egg cream.”
The train arrived and they took it west, then transferred to a line heading south to the beach. The subway car hummed with the chatter of beachgoers, and the boys stole glances at the women, many of whom were already stripped to fitted swimsuits.
“Hey Richie,” one boy said, holding open a paper bag. “You want some polly seeds?”
“You ever tried halva before?”
“Hey Richie,” said another, pointing to a vacated seat. “Take the window!”
Squeezed next to a bak gui man, Richard looked out the window.
He could see Brooklyn stretching far and wide, the sky almost as vast and blue as the sky of the village.
Below, the thousands of houses and cars looked like a classroom model constructed from papier-maché and toothpicks.
It was a world that belonged not to the Jew or the Anglo, the Italian or the Pol, but to any deserving American man.
Thirty minutes later, the train reached Stillwell Avenue, pulling up near the minarets and pinwheels of Luna Park.
The boys squirmed through the crowded station and onto the street, determined to grab good seats at Seven Wonders of the World Freak Show so they could judge with their own eyes whether they were really seeing bona fide monsters.
The theater smelled of sweat and child puke, its seats spattered with sand and popcorn.
One by one, the world’s strangest mutations emerged from behind the curtain—first, a young girl with pigtails.
She wore a long, heavy skirt and looked like an ordinary child until she lifted it.
This exposed four legs—two thin ones that didn’t fully reach the floor, and two thick limbs, each clothed in pink pantyhose.
Richard and the boys sat on the edge of their chairs.
It seemed those extra legs were really hers, and she, an actual freak.
The entire crowd went wild, throwing popcorn, and Richard and the boys shouted and rocked in their squeaky seats.
Next came the Fire-Eating Man. Then the Snake Lady.
Then a hak gui with elastic skin. Richard was so happy, he could have torn up all the auditorium seats with his bare hands.
He could have jumped out of the El and landed on his feet—at least until the second-to-last act, when the host announced the arrival of Wee Head Wong.
It was obvious that he was Chinese, because of his tadpole eyes and black hair, only Richard had never seen anyone in China whose head was that small—so small that a teacup could’ve fit on his forehead like a top hat.
Wee Head Wong bumbled around the stage, and then he stopped and stared at Richard.
Richard twisted around, wanting to believe this, too, was an illusion.
But the worst was true: Wee Head Wong had found him, and was smiling, pointing, and wagging his head like an idiot, so that the entire audience followed his finger to Richard’s seat.
“Wee Head Wong! Is that your grandpa?” The boys laughed, patting Richard’s head. He batted away their hands, wishing Wee Head Wong would leave the stage.
After the show, the boys descended to the streets and headed down Surf Avenue, laughing and hooting as they walked, past candy stores—ALL GOOD POPS BUY LOLLIPOPS!
—cosmetic stores—WHAT MAKES AN AMERICAN MAN?
HE WEARS AMERICAN SPICE!—and an accordionist with a lizard sprawled on his neck.
They skipped toward the beach, sniffing up the boardwalk treats they couldn’t afford to eat.
HOT SAUSAGE WITH EVERYTHING! BUTTER-brUSHED CORN! COTTON CANDY!
“Wee Head Wong, here’s your sun hat,” said one boy, slapping a lost baby bonnet on Richard’s head.
“Look, Wee Head Wong! It’s hot DOG, your favorite!”
Richard spotted a bearded bak gui with a vest full of American flags and ray guns. He showed the peddler his rings and cigarettes, and after a painstaking appraisal, the peddler offered him two dollars.
Richard agreed, then bought a frankfurter for every boy in his group.
Thanks to his generosity, they feasted on wieners that had been sitting for hours in an unrefrigerated bin on Mermaid Avenue, in buns that had been molding for months on dank shelves in Red Hook warehouses, dressed in sauerkraut bubbling with Brighton Beach bacteria.
According to the Brooklyn Times Union, they were among several dozen Brooklynites poisoned by a sweaty, gloveless vendor on the boardwalk that day.
For Richard, it was worth it. Worth it because the boys never blamed him, and included him in their moans and groans, their vomiting out the subway windows, their storytelling for weeks after.
Worth it because that frank tied his fate to all the other food-poisoned Coney Island–goers of Brooklyn, who happened to represent thirteen religious persuasions and fifteen nationalities and forty-seven occupations—everyone equalized in an identical rotation between toilet, bench, and garbage pail.
Worth it because each of the dozen times Richard puked in the restaurant bathroom that night, he knew Coney Island belonged to him, as much as anyone.