Chapter 12 The Wongs #3
“We’ve been working for years to get that vocational facility here at Betsy Head Park,” Alan continued, pacing on the concrete.
“And what does the Parks Department tell us?
They take over the Brownsville Boys Club, fire Levine and Adelman, steal our building, and call it the Brownsville Recreation Center.
Between you and me, it went down like this because of those bigots on the BBC board.
“And the schools!” Alan went on. “I don’t know how my sister makes it through the day teaching at that junior high school! J.H.S. 271? There’s a whole line of classrooms they can’t even use because the ceiling caved in.”
Letting his friend rave, Richard remained silent.
A clever man could sometimes win an argument by letting the other talk himself into contradictions.
And Richard felt he deserved to win, as a consolation prize.
His friend was finally leaving him, and his kids’ school was filled with hoodlums and falling ceilings.
Richard and Foon Wah laid off most of the restaurant staff and worked harder.
Foon Wah stir-fried, Richard hosted, and Koon Lai washed dishes until his fingers turned to raisins.
Yet with fewer hands, they were increasingly exhausted.
A strand of hair appeared in someone’s wonton soup.
A mouse nested in the cupboard. The appliances malfunctioned; to get the burners to light, Richard had to hit the stove with a baseball bat.
The new restaurant clientele were hak gui.
They came with their dates or for a family meal after church.
Richard would lean against the back wall of the dining room and watch them.
One night, a party of four arrived and pointed to the center table, where the Schulmans had once sat.
While most hak gui guests requested just a couple of dishes, this group ordered a whole banquet, and Richard doubted their ability to pay.
Then they talked and laughed joyously and sang “Happy Birthday,” and when one of the women reached across the table to playfully pat the birthday boy’s cheek, she accidentally knocked the teapot off the table.
It hit the floor and shattered, jasmine tea spilling across the wood. The girls yelped and the men laughed, throwing their napkins on the floor to soak up the spill.
“Waiter? I’m so sorry,” the woman cried.
Koon Lai didn’t want a scene; he sent a waiter to fetch a broom. But Richard couldn’t tolerate it.
“Get out!” he demanded, standing above the table. “We can’t serve you anymore.”
“Oh, come on,” one of the hak gui men said. “We’ll pay for the teapot. Add it to the bill.”
“I said you’re out. You guys are loud, you break the china. No one can enjoy their meal!”
“No disrespect, sir, but there are no other customers here but us.”
“I said get out!” Richard pounded his fist on the table. “Get out of my restaurant!”
The birthday boy gave Richard a cold stare, and the group left in silence with their food half-finished.
Christmas, 1966: Koon Lai found a letter in the restaurant mailbox.
He usually waited to read them at home, but it was six o’clock and there had been no customers. That, perhaps, was the most eerie change—Christmas had always been their busiest day.
He had already sent Richard and Foon Wah home, and alone, he walked slowly from one side of the dining room to the other, checking for trash and straightening tablecloths, his left knee throbbing with each step.
The doctor on Baxter Street had prescribed snake oil, and for four months, Koon Lai had massaged it into his knee at bedtime. There’d been little improvement.
Koon Lai flicked off the lights and sat down behind the cash register to examine the envelope. It was addressed from Hong Kong, but he recognized his wife’s handwriting. He broke open the seal. Water had penetrated the envelope, rendering a column of characters illegible.
I have taken my mother to Hong but your third brother did not make
It wasn’t hunger in the end, it was the youth Your wealth in America is no more than a
They saw the height of the house they saw the perfume you sent from New York, the ivory
They called us landlords rich peasants
They took stones and smashed the windows, stole the furniture smashed the made me walk on the glass
Your third brother they tied to a tree and whipped until he
We buried him in the
The house is destroyed.
Blood drained from the hand that held the letter. A humming in his chest, erupting on his lips as a moan.
His brother.
We buried him in the…
His young nieces.
The house is destroyed…
His wife, in exile.
Your wealth in America is no more than a…
And then a thought, unbearable, rose to the fore and overpowered him.
He should have insisted that they come to New York. He should have fought for the refugee visas.
Koon Lai crumpled onto the floor, panting, clutching the leg of a chair like it might anchor him. He had thought his family was safe, that they had escaped the revolutionaries’ vengeance.
But children can be as cruel as a foreign army.
The lamppost outside the window illuminated the dark of the restaurant so that the tables glowed like snow-covered cars.
Suddenly he was on his feet, pacing in the dining room.
He had spent decades feeding bak gui, learning their tastes, smiling and laughing when they made silly sounds in imitation of his language, and all the while, he’d longed for home.
And his reward? An image flashed across his eyes: his brother roped to a tree trunk.
Again, Koon Lai collapsed to the floor and curled up like a child, his forehead against his knees.
A sharp silver noise shattered Koon Lai’s nightmare. An explosion, he thought: an attack. He peered through the dark and saw the left window had splintered into an intricate web, glass shards falling like loose teeth.
In terror, Koon Lai thought of the masses rising in unison against him, rattling the walls and smashing the windows.
They had tracked him down across the world—and if someone must be punished, didn’t he deserve it far more?
Far more than his brother and wife—and he saw the youth flatten him against a table in the dining room, rip off his collared shirt, and empty bottles of soy sauce on his naked back.
Si Yiu Gai! Soy Sauce Chicken! they ordered, laughing, stuffing his face in a plate of cream shrimp, the curds dribbling down his tie.
Chunks of glass glimmered on the dining room floor. He heard a scramble of feet on the street below, then nothing.
He was afraid, but he wanted to know. Slowly, he crept toward the window, glass fragments snapping beneath his shoes.
He looked out, but there was no one below.
There, on the sidewalk: a rock the size of a melon.
He returned to the cash register, grabbed the letter and his coat, and made for the front door.
He could not recall a time when the street had been so poorly lit.
Once, the neon signage of the barbershop and the cigar store had brightened the block at night.
Now both were boarded up. And it had never been so silent, the only sound the tap of his shoes against the pavement.
He could hear as well as see his breath, reaching out before him like a ghostly hand.
The street smelled of garbage and burning wood, and his thoughts ran like water out of a drainpipe: The hak gui do not know how to work. And those of us who work, they tie to a tree and whip to death.
He heard something like a step, or like Styrofoam sliding against concrete, and glanced behind him.
No one. He turned the corner onto Amboy and heard it again.
Stopping to look, he glimpsed what appeared to be a person, only it was thin as a stick and folded in upon itself, a body half-there, half-ghost.
Holding his breath, his eyes on the Christmas lights twinkling in their house window at the end of the block, Koon Lai walked faster. As the figure gathered speed on the outside edge of the cars, he could almost hear the tapping of shoes.
Koon Lai began to run, trying to lean on his good leg, but even so, the bad knee throbbed. He hurried onward, ignoring the searing pain, and screamed for his son at the top of his lungs. “Dun Ho!” he yelped. “Dun Ho!”
He threw open the gate of the house, but tripped on the stoop’s first step. His hand still grasped the letter as he tumbled down; his elbows and knees clattered on the stone, another shattering. Koon Lai’s sixty-two-year-old throat opened into a child’s cry.