Chapter 12 The Wongs
THE WONGS
On Amboy Street, three little girls played in a yard: Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie Wong, seven and five and two, with matching blue overalls and red sun hats, black hair cropped to their chins.
They and the hak gui were the only ones who ate their bread stuffed with pork.
The only ones who went to school on Rosh Hashanah.
When no one asked to play with the Wong girls, the Wong girls played with one another.
Jennifer acted the part of the mother and decided most of the plot.
When her little sisters acted up, she distributed punishments: stand still for twenty minutes.
No speaking for one hour. Timing them, on her imaginary watch.
Jennifer, charming like her father and industrious like her mother, won penny candy with her smile.
At seven, she could recite her multiplication tables and link together the notes on a keyboard to play “Jingle Bells.” She would go on to be the Wong family’s first college graduate, its first with a desk job, its first to own a house with a trampoline and finished basement.
Julie was the one who loved to write her name with calligraphy pens, who waited all year for the stomp of lions on Mott Street, and who was brave enough to eat pig blood congealed in little pink squares.
She’d become the most traditional of the three, and if anyone wanted to know the correct word in Toisanese for each aunt and uncle, she’d have it memorized.
The Wongs worried about Jackie’s tendency to touch things that weren’t meant to be touched—squirrels, and the hands and faces of beggars who waved at her. She’d be the one to spend every Sunday behind the counter of a Newark soup kitchen, to live a life of service.
On this particular Saturday, Jennifer had decided her daughter Julie deserved a pet, and they were at the shop adopting an over-eager dog named Jackie, who liked to lick Julie’s knees.
Foon Wah watched them from the porch, taking pleasure in the perfection of their matching overalls.
Some of the homeowners hung lights along the porch rails, and others decorated their doorways with stone animals and wind mobiles.
Foon Wah had chopped up the brittle soil and planted violets; her yard now fit in perfectly among the others.
Richard still wanted a boy, but this was not China.
In America, a girl could go to college. Work and support her parents.
She could choose who she wished to marry.
Foon Wah’s girls would study hard every night, attend good universities, and when they arrived in the working world, no one would doubt their worth.
The wife of the neighboring house emerged carrying a heavy cardboard box. She descended the porch steps and added it to the pile of things she had already left on the brick pathway.
“How are you?” Foon Wah ventured.
“Oh, I’m all right. Thank you, dear.”
“You… move?”
“Yes. Yes, thank God, we’re finally out of here.”
“Far away?”
“Oh, just Midwood.”
Something was afoot in Brownsville. The Jews whispered, pointing at the squiggles spray-painted on the synagogue door. Took new routes to avoid the projects. Mothers rummaged through the closets, yanked out suitcases, while fathers stopped in front of Kishke King to jab at the sports section:
“They’re gonna knock down Ebbets Field!”
“They picked a new site yet?”
“Downtown Brooklyn, I heard.”
“The city won’t agree to it. They don’t give a damn about our boys.”
Richard was at the handball court, diving in front of another player, picking it up—a killer.
Knees bent, hands on thighs. Swipe the ball, arm arched backward: a roller.
He won a shutout, and the other players shook their heads.
His pockets bulged with their dollars, evidence to himself that he was one of the best handball players in Brownsville.
Six games in, the eight men removed their leather gloves and passed around a pack of Murads. They breathed in the wet oak leaves, listened to the tinny tune of a passing ice cream truck.
“We made a down payment on that house in Sheepshead Bay.”
“We’re looking in Jersey. Any of you looked over there?”
“With all you guys leaving Brownsville,” said Freddie, “who will we play handball with?”
Freddie: the only Black man in their handball group since Willy had come home in a flag-draped coffin.
“I’ll miss you fellows, but Brownsville isn’t Brownsville anymore.”
Richard wiped the sweat from his face, turned away, tuned them out.
“Alan, where are you looking?”
“Don’t ask Alan. He wants to be the last Indian.”
“Alan, things are changing. Think about your kids.”
Bait and switch, overpromised—that’s what his life was. His first house in Brownsville, and now all his buds were leaving. Richard pointed to the falling sun and urged them back to the game.
“Richie, how come you’re so sure you gonna beat us again?”
Foon Wah heard a melody on a nearby street and smiled. She’d learned what this sound meant: that soon, children would come barreling out from the doors, running and stuffing their heels into sneakers, arms flailing, quarters in their fists, hollering.
Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie had heard it, too, and turned to her expectantly, their tongues waggling in their heads.
Foon Wah fetched her pocket money from the kitchen, returned to the yard, and gathered their hands.
Together, they skipped down the street to the ice cream truck and joined the long line of children.
Foon Wah listened carefully to how the bak gui children ordered—“Firecracker”—“Vanilla with sprinkles”—“Chocolate in a cup, please”—until she knew what her desires were, and how to satisfy them.
“Strawberry in the cup, please.”
They returned to their stoop, squatting on the steps to eat their dripping delights.
While the girls finished quickly and returned to play, Foon Wah tried to make hers last as long as possible, though the strawberry ice cream turned into a cold soup.
It was just like when the pudding boy came to On Fun with his wagon.
All the children would grin at the sight of the pudding boy’s long neck and sleepy eye and silly toothless smile, and follow his cart through the dust as he sang the pudding song:
Ji ma wu!
Lek eu sa!
Liang fun yit won
Mou gong ga!
But as she whispered the words of that song to herself, she found herself spinning, slanted, into another place, without melodies or ice cream.
Suddenly, the pudding boy was shoveling mud in a rice field, and the children lining up for watery bowls of jook.
She saw the oyster-slurping men wailing as they knelt on a road of broken glass, and then her uncle, standing on a platform with his eyes downcast. Her people came to her—bruised, hungry, clawing, their swollen tongues asking why she alone was so deserving.
Why she alone should be so healthy, so fat.
In America, lampposts flickered on, and the street smelled not like dewy rice paddies, but like gasoline and beef brisket. Urban smog and buttered corn. She saw Koon Lai trudging home from the bus stop, bearing bags of bittermelon and bok choy from Mott Street.
Foon Wah stood.
“Geu biau cheng liang,” she said, gathering the girls.
On Saturdays, the family ate in the living room, clustered around the black-and-white Philco TV set. They ate meatloaf and potatoes; Foon Wah had learned it pleased her husband to eat American food on some nights and Chinese food on others, or a mix of the two.
“Chinese refugees are flooding Hong Kong, stretching resources to the limit,” said the newsman on the Philco. “The Soviets are testing a nuclear bomb… The U.S. is on track to launch its first satellite.”
“One day we’ll have guys walking on the moon,” said Richard, his English garbled by mashed potato. “You kids will spend your vacations on the moon.”
“In China, there is no TV,” said Foon Wah in Toisanese. “In China, the Communists make people line up, and they give everybody one rice bowl.”
“Long time ago, your great-grandfather start restaurant. Work hard,” said Koon Lai in English, patting the pocket of his jacket where he carried the letters from their country.
“Then he go back, but Communist beat him, take land, take house. He tie rope to ceiling…” He trailed off then, for he saw Foon Wah’s eyes pleading that he say no more.
Koon Lai, however, could not turn away from the truth. After all his work to build a business in Brooklyn, his proud, octogenarian father-in-law, Lee Jung Yu, had strung himself from his barn rafters in Toisan.
Koon Lai reached into his sweater pocket and reexamined the letter from his brother.
In truth, Koon Lai was relieved—that his wife and their big house in Chin village had been left alone.
His cousins had taken the land and the livestock, just enough to please the revolutionaries, but they had spared the house, for they remembered the many holidays they’d eaten eggs from his barn, the tractor he’d bought for the village’s use, and the new school he’d financed.
Distracted by the opening of The Ed Sullivan Show, Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie paid no attention to this talk. They watched as a man danced with his bangs drooped over his eyes, then thumped his pelvis in a manner that was oddly exciting.
Koon Lai thought about how wrong it was to watch such nonsense on television when your brother is eating in the dark.
“This bak gui is crazy,” Richard laughed, and for once, his father nodded in agreement.
Foon Wah removed her curlers, twisted the switch on the lamp, and pulled the blanket around her shoulders, ready to settle into sleep.
In the dark, she reviewed the memory of turning off the stove, then decided which mooncakes she would purchase in Chinatown.
She felt shame at the luxury of such thoughts, and this shame, taut as a fishing line, threatened to drag up that barely submerged ache, to send it bobbing to the surface like a dead fish.