Chapter 10 The Wongs #2
Brooklyn’s roads were wide and smooth. On a boulevard with yellowing trees called Eastern Parkway, they passed a white building with many columns that she at first mistook for President Truman’s house.
Throughout the ride, Koon Lai remained quiet, and Foon Wah worried that he was upset.
She’d discovered him to be a small man with a gentle, almost girlish face.
He wore spectacles and walked with a slight limp.
Only a moment after they’d met, Richard had switched to English and berated his father in a tone so harsh that she had to believe Koon Lai had done something awful—or else Richard was crazy.
The issue, she learned eventually, was that Koon Lai lacked the money to rent an apartment for the couple, and for the time being, she would join them and the cooks on cots in the back room of the restaurant. When they reached 78 Livonia, Koon Lai wouldn’t stop apologizing.
“A new wife deserves better,” he said. “This building is getting old. Cracked walls! Aiya, another crack. This mold on the window. An embarrassment!”
“Baba, don’t worry.” She smiled, but he remained so anxious, it was like he’d never met a woman before.
In the weeks that followed, it was always Koon Lai, never her husband, who noticed when her eyes were wet from homesickness.
He liked her tripe soup, praised her and guzzled bowl after bowl of it.
One evening, he took her to the Cantonese theater on East Broadway, where they played the old silent films. It would become their ongoing tradition.
Since she was good with numbers, the men entrusted her with the cash register, and she quickly memorized the phrases she would need to say to the bak gui customers.
Though sometimes the little ones would tug her dress, screech “Ching chong!” in her ear, and skip away, she found that most bak gui were polite to her.
When there were no chores to do, she’d amble up and down Livonia with a dictionary, attempting to read the flyers posted to the pillars of the elevated rail.
“Modern Homes in Long Island,” she tried to pronounce. “There’s No Place like Jersey.”
One afternoon, Richard returned from Pitkin Avenue with a large object and set it down in the corner of the sleeping room.
It looked like a cabinet, but when he opened its doors, she saw it contained a globe of glass, a radio speaker, and six dials of different sizes.
Everyone crowded around in awe—everyone except Koon Lai.
“Turn one of the dials,” Richard encouraged her.
In only a second, a song began to play on the speakers and the globe spluttered into life, showing them the sweet babbling face of a bak gui infant.
Richard slapped his knee and motioned that she should turn another dial.
Immediately, the baby vanished, and they saw a bak gui newsman speaking from behind a table.
Next, a bak gui lady encouraged them to purchase a refrigerator. Then, a ball game.
“Now you can have a movie theater right in our room.”
Foon Wah clapped her hands with delight.
But she stopped clapping when she saw Koon Lai in the corner, polishing his shoes, a disappointed look on his face. At that moment, she turned pink as dragon fruit.
“The television is a wonderful device,” she said aloud. “But a Chinese movie is still best to see in the theater.”
Richard couldn’t stand it—living with his bride, his father, and five other farting Chinese bachelors in a twelve-by-twelve storage room.
Having to wait for a harmonious symphony of snores before she’d permit as much as a hand on her breast. And it wasn’t just lust. He felt uneasy when his wife and father read the Mun Hey Weekly together and he was forced to admit he couldn’t read the headlines.
He and Foon Wah needed their own apartment. No more letting the regular customers doddle after meals, no more paying the dishwasher’s friends to help with side chores. And his father had to stop limping around the dining room—Richard could get the job done twice as fast.
“You should let me run the front,” Richard broached the subject in Toisanese one night after closing. “Your tendonitis has gotten worse. You can rest back there and take care of the accounts.”
“You’re going to run the dining room?”
“Make me a partner. I am your first son.”
Having long waited for Richard to become serious about the business, Koon Lai gave his son the keys to the money box.
They opened earlier in the afternoon, hired another chef, and jammed in additional tables.
Richard had never wanted to work in the restaurant, but so long as he was in charge, he could tolerate it.
Eventually, they’d made enough to rent a third-story walk-up in a tenement on Riverdale Avenue.
When, four months later, Foon Wah reported she was pregnant, he decided they needed a house for their family-to-be.
Following the lead of his friends from the Brownsville Boys Club, Richard looked in Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend.
“Too far from the restaurant,” Koon Lai insisted. “Beach house cost too much.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll get a VA loan.”
“No loan. We pay cash.”
Richard ignored his father, but his luck wouldn’t have it. Realtors would invite him to a house showing, but when he got there, he’d receive an apology—he’d just missed his chance. Or someone’s Aunt Tabatha had decided to move in. Or he must have had the address wrong.
After hearing Richard’s stories during dinner, Koon Lai poured himself a cup of cha.
“No one wants to sell to a Chinese,” he said.
Richard pounded the table so hard the china rattled.
“I’m an American navy vet!”
The others remained silent, chewing their tofu skins.
Another two months passed, and Foon Wah’s belly swelled, but Richard had still not found a proper home.
Spring arrived, and Richard went to Herzl Street to get advice from his old friend, the decorated veteran Alan Friedman.
Rebecca had moved away, but Alan and his wife Eva still lived with Alan’s parents.
“Have you considered Brownsville Houses?”
Alan nodded east, where the New York City Housing Authority was constructing apartments.
“You remember I was helping Milton write those letters to the city? Success. We asked for quality housing, housing affordable for a Brownsville family, and the city is delivering. They’re elevator apartments, Rich.
They’ll have sinks and gas stoves, a bathroom for each family.
Playgrounds, laundromats, programs for the kids—the whole works.
If I didn’t make above the income limit, I’d apply myself. ”
Richard was miffed that Alan would consider him poor enough to live in those public buildings.
Then he thought of Steeplechase—that rascal from the Brownsville Boys Club.
His real name was Jack Schmidt, but he had a grin so wide people called him Steeplechase after that creepy face on the Coney Island billboards.
Jack had followed his uncle into real estate.
“Maybe I’ll ask Jack.”
“I wouldn’t get tangled up with Steeplechase.”
But Richard didn’t see what other option he had. A few days later, he found Jack Schmidt at the handball court. Schmidt made no mention of the NYCHA buildings. Instead, he threw his arm around Richard’s shoulders and led him down Amboy Street.
“I’ve got just the right place for you.”
As a kid, Schmidt had chased the girls up and down Christopher Street, trying to hit their behinds with a table tennis paddle.
More recently, his wife had discovered Schmidt kept a mistress on the side, and she’d run him out of the house with a hot frying pan.
Still, Steeplechase could list every house for sale in the neighborhood with his eyes closed.
“I personally want you to get this steal. Just think, Richie, all this and better is going to be yours.” They mounted the stoop to the porch. Schmidt pointed to the plentiful windows, the wood-paneled floors. “I say you take it now. It’s gonna go quick.”
Richard agreed to the price of the house on the spot. It was only after they’d secured the deed that he found chipped kitchen tiles, a clogged sink, and even urine stains in the living room rug.
But Richard assured himself: he didn’t need a mansion.
All he wanted was what an everyday man was entitled to: something that kept him cool in the summertime and warm in the winter, with a lawn to mow and swings for children to swing on, and separate rooms for each of the activities of the American family.
Others might take that stuff for granted, but he would never. He had climbed his mountain. He’d built his life from scratch. And what makes a man an American more than that?