Chapter 6 The Wongs
THE WONGS
Richard didn’t know anything about Robert Moses. Even on his deathbed, Richard would never realize how much he owed to Robert Moses, the extent to which he was, in some way, a child of Robert Moses.
Upon returning, and through a series of appointments that catapulted him to the highest offices in the city’s bureaucracy, Moses became the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful city.
When Richard was a child, Moses buried the ash dumps in Queens with sod and seed to make Flushing Meadows Park.
He paved over Manhattan’s rail tracks so cars could glide along the Hudson.
He ordered two hundred humongous trees from Long Island nurseries, had them trucked to Bryant Park and swung into position overnight.
He stood up to the robber barons of Long Island, running highways through those tycoons’ estates, building Bethpage State Park and Belmont Lake State Park and Heckscher State Park.
He created beaches out of swampy marshland and erected convention centers, performance halls, and science centers.
Then came the commissioner himself, a man like a towering monument, glowing in his white suit, stepping forward as the people chanted “Moses! Moses!” After a few remarks, he handed the shears to Mayor La Guardia.
And then the eruption! Scissors slicing through ribbons, fireworks exploding above the pavilion.
The Thomas Jefferson High School band played “You’re a Grand Old Flag” while Brooklyn College’s swim team dove into the water.
Most of Moses’s opening ceremonies were elaborate, but the ones for the pools especially so.
Moses liked to swim, and he saw himself in the young men who arrived at the ceremony in their suits, eager for the first lap.
Richard had grown up near the bay, but he’d never learned to swim.
At the Betsy Head Park pool, he watched how the other boys kicked their feet, and he imitated them, but he was afraid to let go of the pool’s rim or to leave the shallow end.
Eventually, he fought through his fear and let himself float; he learned to bear the sting in his nose and the chill in his limbs.
By September, he could make it across the sixteen-foot deep end.
From then on, he went to the pool every summer, especially for the free hour at ten o’clock, whether his father needed him at the restaurant or not, so that one day he would become the neighborhood’s fastest swimmer.
He kept to himself, for the older he grew, the more he tired of the way his friends teased him.
Below the water, Richard sometimes saw the ancestors clustered near the drains: toothless A Bak with lumps under her eyelids and frowning Bak Geng, whose long beard hung like a dog tail from his chin.
They urged him to return home and help his father with the mopping.
“You’re not allowed here!” he’d shout at them.
Whenever they made a reach for his legs, he kicked them away.
He was thirteen when a young Jewish lifeguard with a bushel of curly hair squatted at the pool’s edge and offered to time Richard on his watch.
“Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Not bad,” the teenager said when Richard returned, gasping for breath. “You ever play baseball?”
Richard shrugged.
“I’ll teach you. Come find me at Nanny Goat Park tomorrow afternoon. Christopher Avenue.”
The young Jew, Alan Friedman, was the cofounder of a new group called the Brownsville Boys Club, an organization created by and for the boys of the neighborhood, without any adult interference.
Alan and his friends had gathered boys from every warring block and united them with the mission of securing better facilities to play ball.
They’d succeeded in winning meeting space at the Brownsville Children’s Library and even persuaded the board of education to reopen the P.S. 184 gyms.
They needed hardworking players on their baseball and basketball teams.
“Each member pays a penny to be in the club. Don’t matter your religion, don’t matter your nation of origin,” Alan told Richard at Nanny Goat Park.
“We follow a strict code: no stealing, no gang fights, no slurs. Those are the club’s rules that we voted on ourselves—we’re a democracy, we make our own decisions, just like the American forefathers wrote in the Constitution.
A Brownsville democracy. You want to be a member? ”
Richard said he did. From then on, he attended the practices every afternoon. He learned how to hold a bat, how to throw a blackball, and how to dunk on a basketball court. Koon Lai, resigned to his son’s lack of studiousness, felt it was better than him aimlessly roaming the streets.
The Friedmans, Richard learned in time, were respected people in the neighborhood.
Alan’s father owned the butchery near Amboy Street and was known for his eloquent speeches at the Labor Lyceum; Mrs. Friedman volunteered for the Hebrew Ladies Day Nursery.
There was also the daughter, Rebecca, valedictorian of the junior high, and everyone said Alan would become the first Jewish president of the United States.
When the Brownsville Boys Club newspaper came off the press, Richard accompanied Alan through the neighborhood, handing it out in schoolyards and on street corners, and in that way, he gained a new name: not Chinaman, not Chop Suey Kid, but Right-Hand Man to Founding Member of the Brownsville Boys Club. Friend to Alan Friedman.
The club obtained city grants for field trips.
Richard loved every one of those adventures: to the Empire State Building, to the circus, to Fort Tilden, and, of course, to Ebbets Field.
There was always a long line of people, and everyone would wait patiently for hours to cram into that tight cigar box of a stadium, to stare down at the ballfields ringed with ads for Griffin Microsheen and Luckies cigarettes, and then finally, finally to see the muscled, gum-chewing fellows with big white B’s on their blue baseball caps.
In his second year in the Brownsville Boys Club, Richard made it onto the All-Star softball team that competed in citywide competitions.
They rode the IRT dressed in ties and slacks and carried their shorts and sneakers in brown paper bags.
Richard felt himself floating, rising. His mouth hurled new phrases free and fast: “Hold your horses!” and “Break a leg!” He was conquering the English language like he had conquered Coney Island and the pool.
One afternoon, Alan held a conference on “The Negro Question” at the Brownsville Boys Club headquarters.
“Citizens,” Alan said to all the boys gathered in the Stone Avenue library.
They sat on wood chairs, on the floor, and on top of the bookcases.
“If we believe in democracy, if we loathe fascism, if we believe in the American way, where every one of us, of whatever nation, of whatever creed, should have a say in this society, then what would make us stop at color?”
The group clapped and whooped.
Richard was familiar enough with what Alan called “the Negroes.” A few of his junior high school classmates were hak gui, and they seemed normal enough.
At the same time, Richard had learned a thing or two about hak gui from LIFE magazine.
Once, he’d come across a cartoon illustrating the world’s people.
The cartoon showed a mountain, and at its peak, a white man with one foot raised.
Down the mountain, a man with skin yellow as egg yolk toiled on a plateau, and on a lower hill, a nearly naked brown man picked fruit off a tree.
At the very bottom, a hak gui lay flat on her behind, licking the ripened fruit that had fallen to the ground.
There had also been a second yellow man in the cartoon, climbing up the side of the mountain at fantastic speed.
He held an abacus, and his thin nose and spectacled eyes made him resemble a dark-haired version of the white man at the peak.
“Rise of the Japanese Empire,” the caption said, but in Richard’s mind, this superior yellow man was himself.
All that said, when Alan asked the members to take a vote on whether “Negroes” should be recruited into the club, Richard raised his hand along with everyone else.
Over the next few weeks, the officers invited Black boys into the club space.
Richard liked playing paddleball with Freddie Johnson; Freddie put up a strong defense but was always a good sport the times Richard beat him.
Willy Patterson was so good at math he could help the older kids with their homework.
When they went to the Italian and Irish neighborhoods and kicked the butts of the opposing teams, those kids would chase them all the way to the subway station, screaming, “Go home you kikes, chinks, and coons!”
But the Brownsville Boys were faster, and together they’d dive through the closing doors of the IRT and laugh so hard that tears fell.
During those same years, a grave silence fell over Canton Kitchen.
The Japanese military had sunk its teeth into the heart of the motherland, had mashed and devoured Canton City.
The restaurant workers kept a cardboard relief fund box by the cash register and bowed their heads with gratitude whenever a bak gui stuffed a dollar in the slot.
Every Saturday, Koon Lai took a trolley to Chinatown for a “Bowl of Rice” fundraiser, or to donate blood, or to join a parade—a hundred homesick fathers marching the Chinese flag up and down Broadway.
“Dun Ho, your mother walked to Gui Lin. Fourteen days,” Koon Lai would explain at dinner, handing Richard his mother’s letters, though Richard had already forgotten most Chinese characters. “Everyone in the village has fled.”
“Dun Ho, do you know what the Japanese did in Nam Gein? They killed everybody. They did terrible things to the girls.”
“Dun Ho, the gum in your mouth. In China that gum could buy a dinner for a starving family.”