Chapter 21 The Chins
THE CHINS
One month before he departed, Foon Wah and Koon Lai sat at the kitchen table, eating cornflakes with Del Monte fruit cocktail.
“Look, this group organizes trips to China,” she said, pointing to an ad in the paper. “A four-week trip. Do you want to visit Toisan?” But Koon Lai did not answer, though his eyes wandered toward the ad.
Things had been different in China. In China, the house was always full.
Foon Wah felt she had suffered the loss of her family not once, but twice: coming to America, and now, because her American children had forgotten her.
Her three daughters had married and bought homes outside the city, and her baby boy had abandoned her.
Worst of all, it was the beginning of August, a month devoid of holidays.
Holidays were the exception to her loneliness, for with the approach of holidays, her children began to involuntarily salivate at the thought of turkey stuffed with ham-speckled sticky rice and the memory of warm brown fat gao swelling in the steamers.
Then, her children came like dogs sniffing their way back, stomachs against intellects, and the house was stuffed to its capacity, everyone clustered around the table and saying little to one another except to pass the no mai fan, pass the mo gu gai pein, consumed in the pleasure of eating.
It was during holidays that she concluded that to be Chinese was to be only happy when in the flock.
She tried to sublimate these feelings into the task of caring for Koon Lai—brewing his gen mai cha, making sure he had enough light to read the Sing Tao Daily.
When he went out for his morning walk, she helped him put on his shoes, though he was embarrassed every time, and reminded him to bring his cane.
At least on the days he went out, he could look at the neighbors’ front yards.
The Georges always said good day to him, and Mrs. George had a flourishing garden full of all kinds of vegetables, which reminded Koon Lai of his mother’s garden in Chin village.
On rainy days, however, he barely spoke at all, and Foon Wah became especially attentive, trying to draw him into conversation.
“One thousand dollars is not bad. We can go to Beijing, and then to Canton.”
Even though most of her immediate family had already died, or else had fled to Hong Kong or Australia, she had been wanting to go back.
She wondered what had happened to her best friend Mee Lai, with her thick eyebrows and caustic wit and clumsy hands that could never sew a fine line.
She didn’t know Mee Lai’s address, and they hadn’t spoken in forty years.
Foon Wah would have liked to find her friend, and to bring oranges to the hill in Gui Lin where she had buried her mother.
Koon Lai lifted the soft pink and yellow cubes of the fruit cocktail, without rind or seed or stem, or much by way of flavor to differentiate them.
He thought of his own mother smiling as she fed herself a bowl of jook, and beneath her skirt, those tiny shoes shaped like the triangle cookies in the Jewish bakeries.
Hamantaschen feet. He thought of his wife, with whom he had spent only one night of his life, though their correspondence had lasted fifty years.
Their letters had been polite, but not meaningful, and he had sometimes wondered if she’d met another man—if this was the reason she’d repeatedly turned down his offers to bring her to America.
The truth was, he had not felt strongly one way or the other, and so he had sent her the money she’d asked for, for as long as she’d asked, and when the letters stopped, he’d understood she was in the ground.
It was in the dullness that followed that he realized how much they had always remained strangers to each other.
It seemed to him that someone should have tossed him out long ago, swept him into the yard like a pile of fish bones.
Everything terrified him. Even the sight of an apple struck him with the fear of losing more teeth.
At seventy-eight, Koon Lai tried to remember how old his father and grandfather had been when they’d died.
Had growing old, for them, been so humiliating?
Foon Wah tried to pour the rest of the fruit cocktail in his bowl, but Koon Lai waved her away. “Bou le.”
He watched her, feeling guilty for his distraction.
What had she said? Something about going back to China?
Something about fruit cocktail? “Hou hiak!” he exclaimed, to thank her for the snack, to thank her for everything—he could never repay the debt.
Then he read to her a few items of news from the Sing Tao Daily, the agreeable ones.
1981八月一號
政府批准美國史上最大的減稅計劃
警察將打擊毒品銷售
美國和中國加強貿易關係
August 1, 1981: tax cuts in the U.S., police to fight drug sales, increased trade between China and America—yes, things were improving now that the red emperor was dead.
Koon Lai had heard there’d been a public shaming of the Red Guard members who’d killed his brother.
And yet, it hardly seemed like enough. The Communists now claimed the late Mao had been “70 percent right” and “30 percent wrong,” but they continued to exalt his name.
Sometimes in his bitterness, he didn’t feel like reading the newspaper, he didn’t feel like doing anything, and yet nevertheless he went on sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping out of nothing but fear.
According to the New York section of the Sing Tao Daily, a government official named Robert Moses had just died at the age of ninety-two.
The newspaper said he’d been in decline for a much longer period—had suffered from deafness for years but refused to use a hearing aid, in complete denial about his deterioration.
That man Moses was just like the red emperor, Koon Lai thought.
Hiding his many ailments, Mao had ruled far longer than he was fit.
And so had his son Richard, it occurred to Koon Lai, when he had long ago lost his authority to command.
Dun Ho refused to hear the doctors who said he was too old to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and eat bacon for breakfast and duck blood for lunch.
And the fifty-four-year-old looked bad for his age: semi-bald with side hair, hands dry and splotchy, belly overhanging his pants.
He still yelled at Foon Wah, but needed her help clipping his toenails.
At least he had accepted the job at Wo Hop.
To make up for his own uselessness and his son’s foolishness, Koon Lai did what he could to lighten Foon Wah’s burden.
He ate less, reused the same glassware, washed his underwear by hand.
Yet with neither his ancestors nor his descendants in reach, he had no purpose.
It might have been different if they had kept the restaurant open.
Or earlier: if he had beaten the restlessness out of his son.
Sometimes, Koon Lai felt himself to blame for the stillness in their house.
Rendered immobile by regret, he would sit on the couch for hours, unable to lift a limb.
Foon Wah finished her cereal, then drank the remaining Lactaid milk. She pulled a section of the Sing Tao Daily toward herself.
“The Chinese Citizens Association is arranging a trip to China,” she said again, in case Koon Lai hadn’t heard. “One thousand dollars.”
“You go,” he said, holding the paper over his face so that she wouldn’t see his expression. “I am too old. You go, Foon Wah.”
“Okay,” she said, playing along. “One day, I’ll go.”
That autumn, Koon Lai dragged a stool to the middle of his bedroom and looped a belt around his neck.
It was how his father-in-law had taken his life. The Americans shot their brains out and the Japanese sliced open their guts, but not so with the Chinese. They believed in tidy suicides. Hanging was preferable because it did not allow the opportunity to scream for help.
Before ascending the stool, he stripped the bed himself, though his bad leg ached as he bent over to tug the fitted sheet from its corners.
Then he packed his clothes into the same maroon suitcase that he’d brought over from Canton in 1923.
Perhaps Foon Wah would find somewhere to donate them.
He drew up a will that left his remaining savings to Richard and Foon Wah, and he threw his dentures, toothbrush, worn-out slippers, and the wrappers of three dried plums into the waste bin.
Only then did he dress himself in his best trousers, painfully ascend, tie himself to the overhead fan, and jump.
Foon Wah discovered him the next morning.
She had come upstairs to see why he was late for breakfast, then opened the door and found the light off and the shades still pulled.
The room was sparsely furnished with a red rug, a mahogany chest, and an alarm clock with the numbers blinking.
Perhaps it was Daylight Savings Day already, and she had forgotten.
In the gloom, she saw the old suitcase, the folded bedsheets.
For a moment, she worried he had lost his mind and gone out into the cold morning without telling her.
It took her several seconds to realize Koon Lai was there—he was such a small, thin man that, dangling in the middle of the dark room, he looked like nothing more than a shadow of the coat stand.
With a cry, she fell to her knees.
In the Sing Tao Daily, they posted an obituary and an invitation to the funeral and told no one outside the immediate family that it had been a suicide. “Heart attack,” they would say if someone asked.
Though he had long stopped taking the train to Chinatown for the association meetings, Koon Lai still had many friends.
They hobbled over to the Wah Wing Sang Funeral Home on Mulberry Street, leaning on the arms of their sons, most of them shriveled and hard of hearing, with thinning hair or no hair.
They told Richard and Foon Wah that Koon Lai had been the most outstanding man of his generation, that he had helped them secure the loan with which they had launched their business or procured the papers to bring over their wives and children.
Richard thanked each one of them in Toisanese with his hands pressed together in the old way.
Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie drove in from the suburbs with their husbands.
Jason appeared on foot, about twenty minutes late.
They’d had trouble contacting him at first—the phone number he’d provided was no longer in service—but thankfully he’d called from a pay phone the day before the funeral.
He arrived wearing a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, and Foon Wah thought he looked more haggard and cadaverous than the man in the coffin.
His hair reached his waist, and his legs moved with a tight suaveness that Foon Wah feared meant he’d been with many women.
Richard looked their son up and down, scrunching his nose at the skunk smell.
“You’re late,” he said. “Maybe you should have visited when your grandfather was still alive.”
Foon Wah grabbed Jason’s arm before he could walk out.
Some families spent a fortune to send bones to China for burial, but Koon Lai had indicated in his will that this would be unnecessary.
He’d already purchased a plot for himself at a cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens.
A procession of funeral cars crossed the Manhattan Bridge and took Atlantic Avenue to the city’s eastern end.
Then the guests followed the undertaker up a muddy path between two rows of tombstones to the hole in the frosted earth where Koon Lai was to be deposited.
“It’s like a diorama of the city,” Richard grumbled in English—to whom exactly, Foon Wah wasn’t sure.
“The Puerto Ricans get the squares down by the street, the bak gui are on the mountain with giant headstones, and the Chinese? The Chinese get the porta potties.” He lined up next to Foon Wah in the first row of mourners at the edge of the burial pit and, shivering, accepted the flowers handed to him by the undertaker’s assistant.
“My dad. Still and always a cheapskate.”
“Shut up,” Foon Wah snapped in English.
Richard swallowed. He bent over and peered six feet down at his father’s casket.
They left Koon Lai in the earth and went back to Chinatown to eat, but at the banquet hall, Foon Wah ordered tripe stew, forgetting Koon Lai would not be there to enjoy it.
And when they returned home, she withdrew an extra hanger from the closet for Koon Lai’s coat.
It took the rest of winter to shed all the other habits, like heating his morning jook and his afternoon cha or looking out the window to assess whether he could take a walk.
She ruminated. Wondered whether she could have prevented it.
Believed she could have tried harder. She should have insisted Richard drive his father to the association so he could see how much he was valued there.
Or paid for Koon Lai’s ticket back to China.
Like his walks, it would have forced him out of his head, into the world, so that he could witness the growth and progress finally happening in his country after so many years of starvation and bloodshed.
She busied herself preparing for the Ting Ming holiday—Cemetery Day, she renamed it for her children, since they had forgotten so much Toisanese over the years.
The second weekend of April, she insisted the entire family drive out to Ridgewood to take offerings to Koon Lai and pay their respects.
They gathered at the Cypress Hills Cemetery, and Foon Wah laid out bowls of boiled chicken, pork, and sugared gelatin on a blanket in front of the grave.
She directed Jason to dig holes for the potted flowers and taught her daughters how to light a fire in the metal bucket for the burning of fake money.
It was windy that morning. They watched the fake money crackling, curling, and withering into black ash.
Pieces of gold paper occasionally rose out of the can and fluttered across the cemetery.
The wind swept them in Foon Wah’s direction; they kept smacking her midriff.
She caught them against her belly and redelivered them to the fire pail.
“He wants to share with you, Ma,” Jennifer said.
Foon Wah nodded, smiling, and her daughters watched as tears minnowed down her cheeks.