Chapter 12 The Wongs #2
With the American meatloaf heavy in her stomach, sleep finally clouded over guilt.
Yet as she was drifting, she felt, sliding across the darkness, a hand.
Inside the shoreline of her pajamas, along her waist, and then her stomach, snaking itself up to her breasts, cupping the left one, scooping it like a ball of ice cream.
She hummed softly. Then another hand, tugging at the bottom of her pajamas, the hem of which dragged stubbornly against the bedsheets.
She did not lift herself to help. She felt that cactus-shaped bulge against her backside.
It humped its way toward an entry point, and at that point she swatted his hands away, twisted her body out of reach.
“I’m sleeping,” she whispered.
“What about my son?”
She glanced over at him.
“Three is enough.”
“I want a son.”
“This isn’t China.”
“First son of first son of first son of first son.” He chuckled as he repeated his father’s trope.
“Aiya.” She turned away. “Crazy. This neighborhood is not safe anymore. Look around. Everywhere, the hak gui!”
He sighed. He did not dispute it.
“And how come you know it’s going to be a boy?” she continued. “Maybe it’s another girl.”
He reached for her hips, suffered a jab of her elbow.
Yet a few weeks later, he complained of her failure to fulfill his needs. He would wake her up in the middle of the night with his prowling hands, until she felt she had no choice but to roll over and insist that as a condition to her cooperation, he must not release himself inside.
“Take it out! Take it out!” she would cry when he reached the cliff edge of his pleasure.
For many months, he complied, wiping himself with the tissue that she handed across the bed.
Then a year passed where he rarely had the urge, and she thought with hope that maybe, at thirty, they’d both grown too old.
One night, he spent himself inside her. He apologized in Toisanese, laughing, and she didn’t know if he’d carelessly forgotten, or if he had decided to obtain his desired son through trickery.
She ran to the bathroom and squatted above the toilet seat, praying that the quiet drop she heard in the toilet bowl was all of him.
Though she went to Chinatown to see a medicine woman, though she dutifully drank the bitter tea every day for two weeks, her blood didn’t come.
He had gotten what he wanted.
She was so angry she could barely speak to him, which was strange to her because she had never before shirked away from her duties. Foon Wah told herself she was being selfish and lazy. All Chinese men want a son.
One night in her second month, she dreamed of the child growing in her womb, the baby her husband continued to insist was a boy, as if he could will his wish into reality.
But while the baby had a boy’s name, they wore a pinafore dress and hair in two even pigtails.
Foon Wah sat in the dust nearby, counting her red eggs, knowing an odd number meant girl and an even number meant boy, but she was never able to finish counting because the child would throw itself upon her lap or weave its hands around her neck.
She took the child’s hand and walked with it all the way to the Toisan River, where the two of them poked gingerly at the water with the tips of their toes.
They climbed the path up the mountain, picking dandelion stems, blowing the feathery seeds. Then the child stood to pee.
On waking, Foon Wah knew that whether girl or boy, this child was hers, not Richard’s. It had even taken her home.
In the spring of 1960, Jason was born—a wailing, whining, jaundiced banana thing with a massive tuft of black hair.
When the waiters served the pig head at the one-month banquet, he stared into its hollowed sockets and screeched in terror, provoking laughter from all the guests.
He was a bad sleeper, a bad eater, and as happy in a tub of bathwater as a stray cat.
Richard resolved to harden the boy the way the Depression and the war had hardened him. After his first birthday, Richard took Jason to the pool. With an early start, his son would grow lungs the size of boxing gloves and master a butterfly stroke that would break all Brownsville Boys Club records.
But Jason only grew more petulant and attached to his mother.
Richard thought Jason would take better to the beach, so one summer the whole family piled into the Chevy Impala, Richard and Koon Lai in the front seats, and Foon Wah and two of the young restaurant cooks in the back, each with a child or two on their knees.
In Richard’s opinion, Coney Island had gone to the dogs—Luna destroyed by fire, NYCHA housing crammed all up and down the avenues—but at least the beach was still the beach, and Nathan’s was still Nathan’s.
But Jason was a child who cried when his elbow grazed the hot metal handle of the Chevy, and again when forced to part with his mother at the door to the men’s bathroom. Down on the sand, he whined at the grittiness of sand in his teeth.
“Jay Jay, be a big boy now”—“Jay Jay, I’ll hold your hand”—“Jay Jay, look, a seagull!” his sisters cooed, to no avail.
Richard tried to teach Jason to play baseball.
To Richard, there was nothing better than a game of baseball at Prospect Park—a place where every twenty feet there’d be a different tribe of people, eating their traditional foods, dancing to their traditional songs, and everyone throwing down their various utensils to get on base.
Yet when stationed at home plate, his son did nothing but brush mosquitoes off his arms.
“Man up!” Richard bellowed from across the field.
Foon Wah begged Richard to go easy on their son. It seemed to Richard that between her, his father, and his three daughters, Jason would be pampered into softness. A soft boy wouldn’t survive in a world like this one.
One day, Richard came home from the restaurant and found Jason standing on the front porch, dressed up by his sisters in a purple lace dress and Julie’s clip-on earrings.
“Ni so ga?!” Richard cried, yanking the earrings off Jason’s lobes.
Koon Lai looked amused. “He’ll be less trouble than you.”
Richard could never get what he wanted without losing something else. He’d had a son, but the Dodgers had quit New York, Ebbets Field smashed to smithereens.
And though he couldn’t always explain what, something was happening in Brownsville.
Like those mornings when he looked out the bedroom window and saw a car pull up to the curb and a bak gui driver push a hak gui onto the sidewalk, the way you’d fling an overgrown goldfish into the Prospect Park Lake. Usually a nice car.
“We’ll pick you up at the next corner,” the bak gui driver would yell from the front seat.
It was always the same routine. The hak gui wore a soiled suit and clutched a bottle of liquor. He would stumble up the block, mumbling to himself, and throw the bottle in someone’s yard, the glass shattering against the stoop. Richard saw the same thing so many times, he had a bad case of déjà vu.
Always, the expensive car depositing the soiled hak gui. Always, a few hours after, a real estate agent proceeding door to door, warning those who remained: sell now, before it’s too late.
By Jason’s fourth birthday, there were hardly any bak gui left on the block. Hak gui children raced up and down the street on wooden scooters. It was the same, Richard heard, in the government projects. No more “fifty percent Negro, fifty percent European,” as Alan had once told him.
At first, the Jews came back on Saturdays for synagogue and stopped for Chinese food after.
Then the police killed a Black boy in Harlem, and sirens blared for six nights straight.
By the time it was all over, hak gui had emptied out the cigar store down the block, smashed the windows of the bicycle shop, and burglarized Mathenial Hats.
Richard installed gates downstairs and a double lock on the door to the restaurant, but the Jews did not come back.
Richard checked out homes in Marine Park but could not afford them. He looked at a home in Bay Ridge, but it sold during the fifteen-minute drive to see it.
One evening after closing, Richard went to the handball court at Betsy Head Park and, finding no one there, threw the ball against the wall by himself.
Half an hour later, he noticed Alan walking down Livonia in his Esquire suit.
When he reached the court, Alan unrolled the newspaper beneath his elbow and handed it to Richard.
“Robert Moses.” Alan shook his head with disgust. “He’s the one siting a million housing projects all in Brownsville.
A good idea gone bad. We said we needed better housing for struggling families.
We didn’t say every single poor New Yorker should live in one square mile.
Can you believe it, Richard? They’re planning to build another fifteen hundred government poor houses right here! ”
Richard shrugged and walked off, bounced the ball against the wall.
Alan sighed, loosened his tie, and cleared his throat.
“It’s good we ran into each other. I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
Richard hit the ball.
“We got a house. A house out in Riverhead, Long Island. A nice three-bedroom with a big yard. And an office space in the town—I’ll be opening up my own practice out there.”
Richard served the ball against the wall.
“Rich, you’re not gonna miss me?”
Richard grinned. Laughed. Kept his eyes on the ball. “So much for loving the coloreds.”
“It’s not a color problem. The city doesn’t give a damn!”
Richard caught the ball, took a seat on the bench, lit a cigarette.