Chapter 5 Sadie
SADIE
Sadie Chin had a crush on Kendrick Lamar.
Raised on a diet of Billy Joel and the Beatles, then introduced to Coldplay by a college boyfriend, Sadie had never really listened to rap before, but she was starting her journey with good kid, m.A.A.d city.
Soon she could identify the beats she heard from the cars on Eastern Parkway.
It had been more than a month since she’d started at New Gotham, and she liked the feeling that she was becoming more of a Brownsvillian each day.
On the way back home, she would stop on Utica Avenue to buy a Jamaican beef patty or a Guyanese roti or a bottle of peanut punch, usually spoiling her appetite for whatever her father cooked for dinner.
“What’s all this?” he asked one evening when she returned to the brownstone, a plastic takeout bag swinging on her arm.
Jason Chin stood before the stove, stir-frying tempeh in black bean sauce, his shoulder-length hair tied back with a rubber band.
Sadie had seen pictures of his hippie years, when he’d worn it down to his waist, and she knew, too, that he’d once been so gaunt that her grandmother had complained that she hadn’t come to America to have her son looking like a starved peasant.
He had rounded out just a tad since then, as most fifty-five-year-olds were prone to do.
“Goat roti. I don’t need dinner. I texted you.”
“No, I saw,” he said, trying but failing to bite back the smile bubbling on his lips. “I mean you.” He nodded at her attire—she was wearing a crop top and ripped jeans. “Is this your ghetto outfit?”
Sadie nearly choked on the peanut punch.
“What?”
“Your style.” He chuckled, then lowered the flame on the burner. “I think you’re going ghetto.”
She shook her head, dismayed. “A ghetto is an isolated neighborhood where oppressed people live. Nobody ‘goes ghetto.’ ”
Jason, raising one eyebrow, tossed arugula in a bowl for that evening’s salad. He took pride in being a versatile cook, in conscious defiance of the gender norm.
“When I was growing up, if you came from a working-class family and lived in Brownsville, you dressed very, very neatly so no one would look down on you. Black, white, immigrants—all of us. No one dressed like that.”
“If I walk around in a business suit, no one in Brownsville will talk to me.”
“Did you ever find out more about that Chinese guy? The murderer?”
“Nope.”
When she’d asked her father a few weeks earlier if he remembered any other Chinese people in Brownsville, he’d answered in the negative.
He had nothing to tell her about his childhood in the neighborhood except the sidewalk games he’d played with his friend Pete.
Regretting that she hadn’t gotten Mr. William’s number, she’d looked for him and his nurse near the dollar store but hadn’t found them, and no one else she’d met in Brownsville seemed to know about Mr. Wong.
“I should visit Ngen Ngen,” Sadie said. “Maybe she’ll remember the other Chinese families.”
“Can you wait a bit? I still haven’t told her that you’re working in Brownsville.”
“Still?”
“She’s going to be upset.”
“Because she thinks it’s dangerous? Who cares, Dad.”
“She’s going to blame me, Sadie. Me.” His eyes widened. “She’ll say I failed to teach you Toisanese, I feed you leaves, I let you walk around with holes in your jeans like a bak gui, and now Brownsville, of all places!” He poked the air with his spatula for emphasis.
Sadie, dabbing her chin with a napkin, rolled her eyes at her father’s antics. “Do you realize that you are being a bad son by depriving your mother of her lovely granddaughter’s company?”
“Just let me talk to her first about your new job.” He rocked his head from side to side, waved it like a flower in the wind, as he always did when considering one of her points.
“Your ngen ngen will remember more than I do about the neighborhood. But let me figure out how to tell her the news. I’ll go see her Sunday.
After the reading at BookCourt. Are you coming? ”
It seemed to Sadie that her father’s entire world consisted of four places: the kitchen, his poetry study, his favorite black box theater on East Fourth Street, and BookCourt, that indie bookstore in Cobble Hill.
These were his grottoes, and he seemed content cycling between them, never venturing beyond.
“Are you reading that X-rated poem about Mom?”
He blushed.
“No thank you.” She threw her backpack over her shoulder and headed to her room.
As Sadie changed out of her crop top and ripped jeans, however, she fretted that her father might have been right.
But, she told herself, when you went to report in the field, you’re supposed to dress something like the people around you.
Though it was also true that sometimes she went through…
cultural phases. When she’d had a crush on this Indian boy in her class at Stuyvesant, she’d started eating samosas and chana masala and wearing tassel earrings to school.
Then, at Yale, she’d donned a kimono robe patterned with lily pads and worn black eyeliner to accentuate the Asian almondness diffused by her mother’s Jewish blood.
Given her racial ambiguity, she really could belong to any community. Any except the Black community.
Sadie sat at her desk before her laptop, her goat roti, and her journal. Opening to August, she reread the notes she’d taken after the encounter with the man in the wheelchair.
A landlord named Mr. Wong
Livonia Avenue
Murderer
More than 30 years ago?
That Saturday, Sadie told her father she had tickets to see Do the Right Thing at the IFC, and instead she took the train to Chinatown.
Ngen Ngen had lived in the Confucius Plaza apartment complex since Grandpa Richard had died.
It was less than a mile from Ground Zero, and Sadie could remember her father, in a panic, dialing Ngen Ngen on the morning of 9/11.
“Looks like China,” her grandmother had mused on the phone, watching the towers burn from her twenty-first-floor window, sounding almost wistful. “Everybody go run run run.”
Sadie loved the Confucius Plaza apartment and how completely Chinese it felt: the rice cooker in the kitchen, the bamboo in a porcelain vase by the window, and the landscape paintings within which tiny village men sat fishing below willow trees.
The apartment smelled like mothballs, like steamed fish.
Having a very Toisanese grandmother was, Sadie thought, something that definitively set her apart from the millennial transplants.
On the way to the apartment, Sadie bought Ngen Ngen a magnificent spread of dim sum—enough pork buns and shrimp dumplings to leave them sleepy and semi-sick for the rest of the day.
“Ngen Ngen, I want to ask you something,” Sadie said after they’d eaten. She hit the record button on her Olympus as Ngen Ngen chopsticked another chive siau mai onto Sadie’s plate. “Ngen Ngen, I’m bou le—Ngen Ngen, do you remember living in Brownsville?”
“Brownsville?” Ngen Ngen raised her eyebrows and looked quizzically at Sadie.
She seemed to be shrinking a few inches every year, but she still dressed impeccably, in ironed pants and floral shirts with pearl earrings, never to become one of those old Chinese ladies who stayed in pajamas all day—and never, in a million years, to be caught collecting bottles out of people’s trash cans.
Ngen Ngen had often reminded Sadie that she was not the daughter of farmers.
Rather, her father had been the village high school teacher, and her mother, the village midwife.
Sadie had always sensed that her grandmother derived her dignity from the knowledge that she was not the lowest of the low on the world’s totem pole.
“Yeah, Brownsville. What was it like living there?”
“In Brownsville, we run the restaurant. On, on… Livonia Avenue. Very busy.”
“Did you live on Livonia Avenue too? Or somewhere else?”
“Your grandpa… your grandpa buy the house. On a, on a, what street, I forget.” Ngen Ngen scrunched up her face, trying to recall. “Amboy Street.”
Sadie jotted this down.
“Was it very different from living in Chinatown?”
Her grandmother laughed at the silliness of the question. “Very different! No Chinese people. All Jewish people. Then all Black people.”
Ngen Ngen’s accent was like a pizzicato take on a typically bowed melodic line, all the words in the English dictionary plucked out of the five tones of her native tongue—an instrumentation that Sadie, as they went along, couldn’t help but imitate.
“No Chinese people? You don’t remember anyone except for our family?”
“Oh. There is the laundry on Stone Avenue? One, two Chinese? But not so many Chinese.”
“Did you know any of the other Chinese families by name?”
“No time. Just work in the restaurant. Raise the kid. Four kid. Jennifer, Julie, Jackie—then your daddy. Spoiled!” She laughed again.
“Why did Grandpa close the restaurant?”
“The Jewish move away.”
“Why did they move away?”
“No one like the Black people!”
Sadie put down her pen. She’d been hoping for a bit more nuance from her grandmother, but in hindsight, that had been foolish. Ngen Ngen got her takes from Law & Order and Blue Bloods.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Hou ngai ham a! The neighborhood dangerous.”
“Just because there are Black people doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.”
“Rob you, follow you on street all the time. Your great-grandpa, he come home from the restaurant, then the Black man chase him, make him fall on the step.”
“Was Great-Grandpa, like… hurt?”
“Very hurt! Don’t walk like before. That’s the Black people. Always try to rob the Chinese people.”
Sadie put her face in her hands and suppressed a moan.
She wondered what she could say to challenge Ngen Ngen’s convictions.
In college, she had learned truths—and each was as beautiful and untouchable as an artifact behind glass in a museum.
She didn’t know how to communicate her newfound consciousness in terms her grandmother would appreciate.