Chapter 8 The Wongs
THE WONGS
There was a man in Chinatown with a knack for producing imitation authorization papers and birth certificates.
They had already adapted to a new surname, and now Richard would simply have to adjust to a new birthday.
Not a later birthday—there was no way Koon Lai could hold Richard back a year, as the plan depended completely on his son’s cooperation.
Rather, Koon Lai had been hearing from his friends at the association that when a navy boy returned home, he preened in his silly white hat and blue bow tie, but when an army boy returned, it was usually as the contents of a flag-draped box.
Yet when Richard departed for navy boot camp in Key West, Koon Lai worried incessantly.
Maybe he had sent the boy to his drowning death.
He missed the sound of Richard’s clompy feet pounding up the narrow staircase, and even the mosquitoes that swarmed them when Richard opened a window too wide and stuck out his head to holler at friends.
Koon Lai was so used to his irritation that he’d forgotten how lonely he’d been before his son’s arrival.
One evening about three weeks after his departure, Richard called the kitchen phone.
“Dun Ho,” Koon Lai answered, his heart pounding. “Ni ou nai?”
“Still at the training base,” the boy said in English. “There’s nothing to report.”
“Ni hiak fan miang a?”
“Twenty minutes ago. Potato and meatloaf. In the cafeteria. It was fine.”
It was not the words that comforted Koon Lai, but the tone: Richard was bored. Safe. He had not left the navy base yet but was already coming to his senses. Richard was not a studious child, but at least Koon Lai could prepare him to take over the restaurant one day.
It was true that, down at Key West, the navy was not meeting Richard’s expectations. So it occurred to him that the world tended to overpromise, to keep him ever-hopeful but never fulfilled.
What bothered Richard wasn’t the physical toil, or even the tasteless food in the cafeteria, but the mockery—how certain boys would raise their voices in an abrasive falsetto.
“Me no muscle. Too many push-up. Me don’t like beef.
Me want cat for dinner.” He thought his age-mates had outgrown this nastiness, but it turned out Brownsville was the anomaly.
There were two Puerto Rican recruits who appeared willing to be his friends: one from Harlem, the other from Orchard Street.
They always left room for him at their table in the cafeteria.
But they spoke Spanish when he wasn’t around and sometimes even in his presence, and he didn’t like the feeling that the three of them had been disposed of, ghettoized, at the table closest to the bathroom.
One night in the showers, as he scrubbed hastily beneath the lukewarm water, he heard a cackling in the stall next to him and saw a blond, freckled recruit smirking and shaking his head, his eyes on Richard’s wiener.
“Y’all got itty-bitty ones,” the young man said with a Southern lilt. “Size of my thumb, I swear.”
Richard, naked and dripping wet, lunged at the young man and knocked him to the ground. Next, he punched him in the jaw, busting his lip. Blood dribbled down the boy’s chin like hot sauce. They fought until a junior lieutenant pulled them apart.
“Quit rolling around like faggots!”
The fight earned him some enemies but also some friends, including two Irish guys from the Bronx named Connor and Rory.
He worked hard to keep their favor, which sometimes meant tossing in a few dirty jokes during supper.
“Every time that Spanish guy jerks off, I think a dog got in the room,” he’d whisper to his friends.
Or: “When this Puerto Rican comes back from drill, he smells like a pair of old sneakers!” After about a month at Key West, Connor and Rory included him in their backslapping and shower singing, and on their jaunts to the downtown nightclubs.
Ultimately, they spent five months at sea, engaged mostly in scrubbing the deck.
Then a telegraph reached the ship, declaring the war over.
All the boys celebrated, and each was secretly relieved, for the more stories a young man hears about other boys rendered armless, legless, and blind, the more he dreads returning home mobile as a tree trunk.
Richard ran down the plank onto the docks of Battery Park and discovered a jubilant city—confetti everywhere and cars rolling slowly like parade floats, using their horns to ramp up the revelry.
If he and his mates entered a subway car, the New York rules of silent, stony decorum fell away: little kids scurried up to touch his uniform; suited old men patted him on the back.
At the clubs, bak gui girls flung their arms around his neck and begged him for a dance, and in the window of a Blake Avenue shop, he found his name printed on a sign with all the other vets from Brownsville.
He’d left Brownsville a swimmer, a baseball player, but to his delight, he had returned a man.
As he masticated a wad of gum in his cheek, his navy cap tilted on his brow, Richard felt he was approaching Gary Cooper– or Humphrey Bogart–level suaveness, though of course, there was that one difference.
He hadn’t written Rebecca letters from Key West, hadn’t the nerve to try forming a sentence that would compare with one of Alan’s, and hoped she wouldn’t think he’d forgotten her. On his second day back, he strode up to the Friedman house in his cap and uniform.
“Miss Friedman!” he called when he spotted her on the porch swing. Then he realized someone was sitting beside her. Another soldier.
“Richard! Thank God you’re home! Alan said you were back!” Leaping up from the hammock, she hurried to the fence, embraced him tightly, and kissed him on the cheek. A six-foot-tall GI, hands in his pockets, followed her down the steps. “Joe, this is Richard Wong, have you met Richard?”
“Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Joe Salzman,” said the GI.
Richard contorted his lips into a smile and shook Joe’s hand.
“Richard, look.” Rebecca extended her left hand. She pursed her lips, waiting for his response. “I’m going to be Rebecca Salzman.”
Richard said nothing for a noticeable stretch of time.
“Well,” he finally stuttered, his eyes on the pearl. “Look at that.”
“The wedding is next month.”
“We’ll send an invitation. All her friends are invited.”
“And we made a down payment today on a house in Marine Park.”
The wind scraped through fallen leaves and tussled with the American flag on the porch of the next-door row house. Richard fixed his gaze there.
“Congratulations,” he muttered. “I guess I should be going.”
“Don’t worry, boychik.” She pinched his shoulder. “I’ll still be around. When I finish my degree, I plan to teach in Brownsville!”
At that moment, Mrs. Friedman hurried outside to embrace Richard and invite him in for egg salad. Richard declined. “I got business at the navy office,” he lied. “Got to get there before closing.”
He took off down the block, wondering where he could go. A young man in Brownsville had no privacy, a young Chinese man even less, and there was no room to be weak, not even for a moment, no nook in which he could hide from the eyes of his neighbors.
He caught a train to Times Square and wandered the streets still dirty with trampled streamers, and to whoever would buy him a drink, he mumbled complaints about his father.
That was how he passed the several weeks that followed, drunk on whiskey and roaming, or with the girls in the swing clubs.
These were bak gui girls who ordered men like drinks, and he was on the menu.
One night, when he stumbled off the IRT in Brownsville and trudged to the second floor, his father was awake, waiting for him at a table in the dark dining room.
“Ni so ga!”
“It’s you who’s crazy, Ba.” Richard staggered through the room until they were chest to chest. “It’s you who’s crazy.
What do we got? Nothing. No record player.
We live with our workers. You don’t got even a second shirt.
We’re worse off than the peasants in Toisan.
And all for what? So you can give all your money to the association and look like a big man. ”
“And what you do since come home?” Koon Lai stammered in English. “You go bar. You go dance. You do nothing.”
“I can’t do this, Ba.”
“Do what?”
“Waste my life serving pork chops.”
“How you live?”
“Fuck this, Ba.”
“You can’t get the job. You don’t study.”
“I’ll get a job.”
“How?”
Richard didn’t answer, instead forcing the little man out of his way so he could make it to the sink in time to vomit. He awoke the next morning on the kitchen floor with flakes of saltines on his lips and his hair baked in Hamm’s beer.
And that’s when, in the desperation of his shame, he had an idea.
“Baba, I’ll fix cars. I’ll have a shop of my own.”
“Where you fix car? No place to fix car.”
But Richard applied, and the Veterans’ Commission gave him a scholarship to attend an auto-mechanic school in nearby Canarsie.
He rode the trolley down Rockaway to newly subdivided streets where there’d been farms only ten years earlier.
Now bungalows had sprung up on all the roads, and the air was thick with sawdust and paint.
He found he liked working under the hoods and reassembling engines; he’d always been skilled with his hands.
Yet the instructor, Vito Conti, rubbed him the wrong way.
He played favorites with the students, and Richard was no favorite.
So fuck Conti, Richard told himself. He showed up late one week, then skipped class altogether.
When he received Rebecca’s wedding invitation, he buried it on the shelf with his father’s old notebooks and tried to forget the date.
It was his father’s habit to hide bits of money throughout the back room, and between the notebooks, Richard discovered an unmarked heng bou with four hundred dollars.
He was nineteen, with nothing to his name.