Chinatown Beat Read online

  Pa wouldn’t hear of it, angry each time Jack brought it up. Where would he get his Chinese vegetables? His Chinese newspapers? Where would he find his cronies to gossip with, to keep track of who died, who lost at the track? All the important things. Didn’t matter, Jack would say. There were three Chinatowns now. Sunset Park. Or Flushing.

  Flushing, too far, would be Pa’s answer. And Brooklyn, too many hak yun—blacks.

  New frontiers were opening up for old-timers stuck too long, for newcomers too long locked out. No longer was the Chinese community defined by a single geographic boundary, but by a single consciousness of race. Not that any of that had mattered to Jack. He knew who he was, but knew he needed another space to live in, to be free from the burden his past here placed on him. But they trapped themselves, the old bachelors, wrapping themselves in their fierce Chineseness, taking pride in their disdain for American ways. Jack’s ways. The man accusing the boy of trying to be white. Father and son were at cross-cultural odds, their lives a clash.

  The keys were old and tarnished, the metal edges worn smooth and rounded from a hundred thousand turns. The lock itself was older than the keys, older than the grime in the hallway.

  Jack twisted the key and heard the bolt open silently, effortlessly. He pushed open the creaking door and stepped inside Pa’s world, his own past.

  Nothing had changed. He wondered why he had ever thought it might have. Under the dim lifeless circle of fluorescent light spreading along the flaking gray ceiling, everything looked the same.

  He stared at the scuffed and dented linoleum floor, produced the slim silver flask he’d prepared for the visit to the cemetery, full of the whiskey with which they’d celebrated life and mourned death. Sanctified liquor. He took a deep swallow, swinging his black knapsack down to the floor.

  There was the tear-off wall calendar from the Hang Seng Bank, bright red with raised gold Chinese characters, trumpeting the Year of the Dog, the thin sheet of white paper printed with the number Four in black, freezing the day Pa died.

  September 4, 1994, gow say gow say, twice a dead dog.

  He crossed the stillness of the room to Pa’s bed, pulled plastic packets of photographs from the bedside table, saw they were thick with dust except for spots where fingerprints had touched down recently, pushing across clear lines in search of memories.

  How soon near the end do we begin to grope for our past?

  When he opened the albums, the fingerprints led him to streaked and faded black-and-white photographs of himself as a child, then pictures of Ma, sometime in the 1940s. Her hair was shiny and combed back, away from eyebrows perfectly curved and sharp as a razor, her mouth slightly opened and dark lips smiling, revealing teeth framed in gold. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, an arranged bride, her almond eyes small lights of hope, resignation.

  And there was the picture of himself with Pa, taken on a visit to the Tofu King almost a decade ago, by the front counter with the bean curd—dao foo—and the flat sheets of white noodles.

  He swallowed quickly, noticed Pa’s gourd-shaped bottle of mao-tai liquor on the floor. The seal had been broken but it felt more than half full. His mind drifted backward.

  Jack was never the good son, but he struggled to maintain the truncated sense of family he had with Pa, who, in the few hours he was home from the laundry or the restaurant, was full of criticism or complaint, the smell of whiskey tinging his words.

  Other times, around holidays, Pa was more melancholy, but managed a smile and brought home sweet cakes and fruit for his son, the jook sing, the American-born, the empty piece of bamboo.

  Jack flipped the cellophane-covered pages, came across old prints of Pa in the laundry, with Grandpa, who had gone back to China, beside him.

  He took another swallow, then sliding his fingers through the dust-covered pages, came to a curled print of himself, in the poolroom, in between Tat Louie and Wing Lee, all mugging for the camera.

  Now, sitting on his father’s crumpled bed, Jack was unable to find the peace of mind he needed. What bothered him wasn’t the neon lights from the Lee Luck restaurant sign whose colors intruded into the darkened room. It wasn’t the clawing sound of rat feet scratching for entry somewhere along the baseboards, near the radiators. And it wasn’t the smells of lop cheung—pork sausage—and hom yee—salted fish—long since leached into the walls, becoming one with the cracked and peeling green paint after thirty years, making time stand still.

  It was the sense of being here, too late, the son, the cop. After the fact.

  Somewhere down the stairs, across the hall, he could hear the vague singsong of Chinese opera, and closer, the rat-a-tat-tat action of Hong Kong videotapes.

  He hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye.

  Decades of Chinese smell and sound hung so thick he could almost touch them, settling upon him a strong feeling of his father’s presence. It wasn’t Jack sitting on the bed after all. It was his sense of his father mixed with the spirit of his own younger self, surrounded by the ghosts of his father’s bachelor apartment.

  Jack felt thirst grabbing in his throat and emptied the flask. Pulling the few much-fingered pictures from the album, he slipped them inside his vest pocket and tossed the rest into the empty Seagram’s carton on the floor.

  * * *

  As he lay down on Pa’s pillow, memories came flooding; then the alcohol reached his brain and rolled him back a decade and four years, into a nightmare.

  The three of them, Tat, Wing, and himself, racing across rooftops, leaping the spaces between buildings. Tat is throwing stones at windows as they run, three teenagers shrieking with juvenile laughter, curses following them from inside the tenement apartments.

  They are clambering down a fire escape, dropping to a courtyard below.

  Wing is shouting, “Race! Last one out sucks lop cheung.”

  They are sprinting through a back alley, jumping cinderblock partitions, dashing for a connecting tunnel. The other end of the tunnel leads out to a side street, and they don’t see the gang of Wah Yings until Wing crashes headlong into the leader.

  He cuffs Wing with a backhand punch, snatches a gold chain from his neck. Wing lunges for the chain and the nasty boys break out their knives. They’re flipping the chain from one to another, taunting Wing. Tat steps sideways, launches a side kick into the leader’s groin, and suddenly everybody’s screaming, cursing.

  The Ying leader swings his switchblade around, and with a short punch blunts Wing’s desperate charge. Wing lurches back, then charges again, his eyes white now.

  There is a crash of black and white across Jack’s forehead, blood from the gash running into his eye, as he watches Wing dropped by a chopping right hand, the color of red wine suddenly spreading across Wing’s white T-shirt. Tat is screaming, and the Yings are beating the shit out of him.

  Then everything is black, filled with the wails of a family overcome with grief. Racks of flowers fail to brighten a room cloaked in the choking odor of incense and death.

  Wing is laid out in the casket and mourners are bowing, bowing, bowing, and burning death money. Tat is speechless and Jack watches him flee the funeral parlor as Wing’s mother explodes with grief.

  The sound of gunfire awoke him, yelling and shooting in the connecting back alley that led out to Mott Street. In the dark of Pa’s apartment he could not tell what time it was, only that it was still black outside. More gunshots and screaming. He groped for his Colt Special, found it, and crept out onto the stairwell landing.

  From the hallway window, he could see shadows and figures darting through the alleyway. He slapped out the hallway bulb with the gun barrel, crouched to observe the action below. But in another instant, it was quiet again. When he climbed down the fire escape into the alleyway, they were all gone, only a few spent shell casings on the ground and the burnt smell of gunpowder in the dark air. No bodies, and too dark to see if there had been bloodshed. He tried to shake the grogginess from his head, his adrenaline rush
subsiding now, leaving a ferric taste in his mouth.

  Back in Pa’s apartment he sat upright on the bed and closed his eyes. Sleep didn’t return and he reached for the flask and tilted it, but it barely wet his lips now. He picked up the gourd, shook it, refilled the flask with mao-tai. Then he found the keys to his Fury and went back out into the deadness of night.

  The City

  The streets were wet, black.

  The midnight-blue Dodge Fury sat on the corner of Mott and Bayard, a police permit on the dash visible through the windshield. No one was on the street when Jack slipped inside, started it up, let it idle while he fired up a cigarette, letting it burn halfway down before he slowly pulled away from the sidewalk, heading toward the East Side.

  He rolled through the extended communities of Fukienese, Malaysians, Chiu Chaos, settlements stretching east to Essex and north to Delancey, into areas longtime Hassidic, Puerto Rican.

  Whenever he cruised the neighborhoods, he thought of the boyhood Tat and Wing and he had shared. They were working-class Chinatown boys, but they were also Manhattan boys, who stayed mostly in the borough and came of age trolling through the various ethnic neighborhoods: Little Italy, the Village, Soho, Tribeca, Chelsea. When they ventured into Brooklyn or Queens, it was usually on the snake that roared through the subway tunnel, always a dusty noisy death march to get anywhere.

  He used to like cruising the old places, remembering the year Tat got a used Volkswagen and they bombed around town, wolfing at girls.

  Manhattan was twenty-two square miles and if he took his time, he’d cover it in two hours. He needed the air, needed to clear the alcohol from his head. The perspective from the driver’s seat was a bittersweet pleasure to him.

  He continued east.

  The Greater Chinatown Dream, the Nationalists had called it: an all-yellow district in lower Manhattan running from the Battery to Fourteenth street, river to river, east to west, by the year 2000.

  Then he turned the car north and made all the green lights through loisaida, the Lower East Side, past the Welfare Projects— the Wagner, Rutgers, Baruch, Gouverneur—federally subsidized highrises, which ran along the East River, blocs of buildings that stood out like racial fortresses. Blacks in the Smith Houses, Latinos in the Towers.

  That’s how the Lower East Side really was, not a melting pot but a patchwork quilt of different communities of people coexisting, sometimes with great difficulty.

  Manhattan was symbolic of the rest of Gotham, the Big City, where the best walked the streets alongside the worst.

  When the red light caught him, he was already past Alphabet City, in that part of the East Village where the druggie nation came to score: smoke, crack, rocks, pharmaceuticals, and a brand of Mott Street H tagged China Cat, so potent and poisonous it had sent twelve of the hardcore straight to junkie heaven in August, keeping the Ninth Precinct narcs tossing.

  He powered down the window, kept the car headed north through Gramercy Park and Murray Hill, the wind buffeting his face, past the lights and shops of Midtown, the neighborhoods tonier now. He imagined the air was cleaner. Sutton Place. Beek-man Place. The arriviste strongholds of the Upper East Side.

  He drove through El Barrio, Spanish Harlem, the decay suddenly evident here, and crossed over above the Park at 110th, going west toward Morningside Heights and the enclave of Dominicans, a drug-dealing hub that connected New York, Connecticut, New Jersey. He paused on the Heights, long enough for another smoke, viewing the city spread out below him. The city was dying. One murder every three hours. One rape every hour and a half. One robbery every four minutes. An aggravated assault every six minutes. A motor-vehicle theft every three minutes.

  There was a new governor and the death penalty was coming home.

  The city was dying. He saw it every time he drove through the old neighborhoods. Saw it in the blacked-out windows of abandoned graffitied tenements, in sinking potholed streets and garbage-strewn parks. He felt it every time he heard the sirens of the patrols, the ambulances, the fire trucks, day and night, relentless. He heard it in the voices of the homeless, crying, begging, threatening. Death. It touched him every time he smelled the sewage on the waterfront, the choking urine stench of the subways. Old neighborhoods that had survived the World Wars and Depression years but could not survive crack and heroin.

  Dope, he figured. Dope and despair feeding the death of the darkening city.

  Farther south he slashed across the blackness of Harlem, the Thirtieth Precinct sitting in the valley where the island went flat, rose, and fell again, until he came to the highway.

  It was only then, cruising back down along the Harlem River Drive, that the feeling caught up to him. He didn’t know if what he felt was guilt, filling his soul with sadness, breaking through the hardness in his heart, the price of growing up an only child and without a mother’s love. Perhaps, he thought, it was the finality of being alone, absolutely, without family now, after only a week, the Yu bloodline trapped, ending, with him. Perhaps, with Pa’s passing, he was feeling his own mortality.

  The lights across the river danced as he came south down the undulating highway, became misty as the tears flooded up behind his eyes. He blinked and the tears ran down the hotness of his cheeks, his breathing suddenly quick and heavy, a shuddering inside him.

  He wiped a sleeve across his face, caught his breath as he turned on the dashboard radio, coming to the cutoff at Canal Street, the lights of Chinatown winking in the distance.

  He twisted up the volume.

  The rap anthem crashed out of the radio, violent and angry, and he mashed the pedal to the metal, the Fury screeching up Canal the same way he was beginning to feel.

  Freedom

  The China Plaza was a modern elevator building, fifteen stories of beige and gray brick with lanai balconies, shoehorned in between turn-of-the-century Chinatown tenements and the foot of the Manhattan Bridge.

  Apartment H was the only red door on the eighth floor, all the others painted a deep brown that suited the tan carpet and dark Taiwanese marble lining the corridor. Red was the color of luck, but behind the door the possessions of the old man were spread out to create the image of a private bordello.

  The condo unit had a small living room with a closet bedroom stuck to it and a kitchenette squeezed into the corner. Positioned on the glass end tables and étagère shelves of the living room were assorted mini-pagodas, orange trees, dragon figurines and octagonal bot kwa, I Ching charms to fend off malevolent spirits and the breath of ill fortune. A small bowl of goldfish on a stand faced northeast, a red futon couch stood beneath the picture window, a double-happiness printed loveseat filled the remaining corner.

  There was a smiling Buddha Kitchen God above the refrigerator, a lucky calendar behind the front door.

  From the bedroom came the cadenced voice of Chinatown radio, the Wah Kue station reporting weather, time, news. A queen-sized bed filled the bedroom, covered with rose-colored sheets, the faint scent of Chanel on the pillows. Japanese Vogue, Rendezvous, Hong Kong movie star magazines had fallen from the edge of the bed to the floor. A statuette of Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, stood on the windowsill, just above the mirrored dresser covered with jewel-box chinoiserie. Draped on top of a leather ottoman was an Hermès scarf, vividly printed with Buddhist pilgrims, prayer wheels, a stupa, the heavenly Elements of the Universe. Prayers floating in the wind.

  Mona, in silky yellow lingerie, stirred beneath the sheets, awoke, roused herself from the bed, moved like a cat across the bedroom, past the kitchenette, then parted the sliding red curtains at the balcony which looked out over Henry Street, eight flights above the noise of bridge trucks and the Kwik-Park garage below. She poured a rice bowl of water into the small pots of jade and evergreen plants that faced to the northwest: good fung seui, harmony with Nature. She had hoped that the various talismans, and her prayers to the Goddess of Mercy, could change her fate.

  But her worst demon entered anyway. Uncle Four had the key, owned the a
partment, came through the front door.

  When she looked out on the street, she could see ghetto detritus on the blackened rooftops below, discarded mattresses and dismembered plastic dolls, tattered laundry drying across telephone wires. In the alleyways lay the carcasses of gutted refrigerators, air conditioners.

  Once she saw a black man on top of a woman, doggy style.

  The billboard above the China Plaza read:

  LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS

  VIEW OF RIVER, AND CHINATOWN.

  It was early morning, a dead gray light. She brewed up a cup of Ti-Kuan Yin, Iron Goddess, spilled some ginseng into it, went over and sat in the red futon by the window. She closed her robe and stared ahead into the far distance, beyond the rooftops and the bridges, into the smog-colored sky.

  Her fingers moved back and forth over a small jade charm clutched within her closed right hand, working it like a rosary. She contemplated freedom and death and the tao, the way of her life.

  Jade Tao De Ching

  The white jade octagon, a bot kwa, an I Ching talisman, was the size of a fat nickel. It nestled neatly in the soft of her palm, dangling from the flat gold Chanel bracelet on her wrist. She caressed it with the tip of her ring finger.

  The jade was a translucent mutton-bone white, with a cool vitreous luster that in hard sunlight revealed tiny veins and serpentine, twisting fibers of a smoky-yellow hue. Not Shan, nor Chou, nor Ming dynasty. Quality jade, but not rare. Worthless compared to some of the pieces of jade Uncle Four had given her. But it had come from her mother, her only memento, and had touched three generations of the women of her family. It was her mother’s soul.

  On its flat sides, in bas-relief, were symbols of the Eight Tri-grams. Yin and Yang together representing the Eight Elements of the Universe: Heaven, Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, Thunder, Mountain, Lake.