by S. J. Rozan
After all, I reminded us both silently, I was talking to the man who might well be responsible for the bomb that cut the number of what he was seeking from four to three. The man who not long ago was sitting here with Joe Yee.
“I appreciate your delicacy in this matter, Chin Ling Wan-ju,” H. B. Yang replied. “It is a characteristic your father would have taken pride in.”
I get it, I thought. My father, who owes you one. Who is now with his ancestors and thus unable to pay his debt. A debt that therefore belongs to his children, specifically the child sitting in your office right now.
“Nevertheless,” H. B. Yang went on placidly, knowing the unspoken was understood by us both, “I would be extremely interested in knowing what the paths are that you have found, regardless of whether you have explored them yet or not.”
I considered how to answer this. A cup of tea would have helped me think, I reflected grumpily. “I don’t want to raise false hopes in you, Uncle,” I said, “or false angers, either. The methods of my profession often bring me to paths which, in the end, lead nowhere. It is unavoidable, something I have become accustomed to, yet following these incorrect paths can cause someone inexperienced in these matters to take his enemies for friends—or worse, his friends for enemies. I would not have that happen to you.”
H. B. Yang waited a moment before he spoke. “Do you consider, Chin Ling Wan-ju, that I am unable to distinguish my friends from my enemies?”
“Given full information, I have no doubt you can,” I told him. “Given partial facts, even false ones, how can any man?”
This Chinese fencing was driving me crazy, and he didn’t look convinced, but I didn’t see any other way out.
H. B. Yang, however, did.
“So: you will not share with me your progress to this point?”
He was no longer smiling, but his voice was still calm and friendly.
I said, “I don’t want to give you incomplete information. When I have followed these paths to their ends—which I do believe will happen soon, as I said—I will have a full picture. Then I will paint it for you.”
“If you do not follow these paths?”
“Why would I not?”
“Because you no longer work for me.”
I had come up here expecting something like this, but it was still a stunner. I was temporarily wordless, which gave him a chance to go on.
“It saddens me, Chin Ling Wan-ju, to remove you from this project before you have had the opportunity to prove to me you are capable of satisfactorily concluding it. I have no choice, however, if you fail to trust me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t trust you.”
It was, however, what I’d meant. My heart pounded as H. B. Yang’s unsmiling face directed its dark eyes at me. “No. But you will not tell me things I have paid you to learn.”
“It’s not the way of my profession, Uncle.”
“I have paid you,” he repeated.
And that means you own me? “Uncle, I will return your money.”
That was the wrong answer. “Money!” H. B. Yang’s eyes flashed. “American children—hollow bamboo!” He slammed his palms down on the desk. “You think the money is all that matters!”
Hollow bamboo: Chinese on the outside, nothing on the inside. Distractingly, irrelevantly, I was hit by a memory: many years ago, our crowded apartment kitchen. My mother’s elder sister, who came from China already an old woman, shelling peas. Me, a young child, helping, but squirming to get away and join Tim and Andrew at Monopoly, because I knew I could clobber them both. My aunt had also called me “hollow bamboo”; I thought it was a Chinese term of affection. When one of my brothers explained to me its real meaning that day in the kitchen I started to cry, thinking my aunt despised me. Seeing my tears, my father took me on his lap and handed me two of the mud figurines from his collection, small sculptures of a scholar and a fisherman.
“Ling Wan-ju, which of these men is Chinese?” he asked me.
“Both are.” I sniffled, confused, looking up at him.
“How can that be?” he asked. “They are so different. One walks along smiling, with his fishing pole; the other sits in deep contemplation of a delicate scroll. But you say they are the same?”
“Not the same,” I said. “They lead different lives, so they dress differently, they act differently. But aren’t they both Chinese?”
“Chinese people can be different, then, one from another?”
I nodded. He wiped my teary face with his handkerchief.
“And which of these figures is hollow?” my father asked me.
I turned them both over and around, but I knew the answer. “Both are solid clay.”
He pointed to the glass-fronted cabinet that held three dozen similar statues, large and small. “Are any of those figures hollow?”
I shook my head.
“The children of this family are not hollow, either,” he said. He stood me firmly on my feet. “Now, go help your aunt with preparations for dinner. Later, you will teach me this silly game with houses on boardwalks. Your brothers will play on one side. You will play with me on the other. They, I think, will lose.”
I met H. B. Yang’s dark eyes. My aunt had been wrong. H. B. Yang, though he was H. B. Yang, was wrong also.
I spoke to him. “I am very sorry, Uncle, to have been so poor at expressing myself as to give you that impression. The way I feel is quite the opposite. Your money means little to me. Your trust means a great deal. I would regret losing it, but to go against what I believe is right is something I cannot do.”
H. B. Yang regarded me coldly, without moving. Out the window behind him I could see cars and trucks inching through the archway onto the Manhattan Bridge, up over the crest of the roadway, and out of sight.
“You may leave,” H. B. Yang said.
It wasn’t permission so much as an order, and I got up to obey; but it was permission, too, of a kind. I wasn’t sure H. B. Yang had the power, and I knew he didn’t have the right, to keep me here if he’d wanted to, but it was clear that he fully thought he had both. I didn’t argue. Turning from this quiet room with the streams of traffic moving in never-repeated but organized patterns outside and the intricate assembly line of waiters and diners below, I just left.
Nineteen
God, Lydia, I thought as I stood on the Bowery in the gleaming afternoon sun. You just told H. B. Yang, one of the most powerful men in Chinatown and the bogeyman of your childhood, to go jump in the lake. Boy, that’s terrific; and what’s your next trick?
The traffic straining at the crosswalk for the light to change offered no advice. Not content to spew impatient fumes, as red flashed to green and the car at the head of the line didn’t move fast enough everyone started to honk, everyone annoyed at everyone else for being here, in this place, at this time. The sound was loud, messy, and uncontrollable. I just stood planted where I was, until I was hit by the not totally unpleasant realization that I was hearing something no one—not H. B. Yang, not Duke Lo, not the State Department, or even the NYPD—could do anything about.
I checked my beeper, silenced during my ejection from H. B. Yang’s retinue, to see if Bill had called, but he still hadn’t. I looked around me at Chinatown both wearily and warily, and headed for home.
I had a few ideas for how to spend the evening, but I wanted to give Bill more time to turn up first. I also wanted to take a quick shower and get out of these sesame-oil-and-sweat-scented duds into something that reminded me more of me.
The problem with that plan was my mother.
My mother had been difficult to head off last night, late as it was when I got home. I’d told her I was tired; I’d told her I didn’t think Joe Yee and I really had that much in common, a concept she scorned as overrated: “If you have less in common, you will always be able to surprise each other.” I’d told her I wasn’t sure if he’d call me again: “But you also have his number?” she’d asked, looking ready to box my ears—something she’d never done
when we were children—if I’d failed to think of that. Another assault when I got home today was unavoidable, though I’d told her I was going to be working during the day and therefore not likely to experience much action in my personal life. That had carried about as much weight with her as I’d expected.
Heading up the stairs to our apartment, I found myself dreading both my mother’s driving enthusiasm at the thought of Joe Yee and her tight-lipped disappointment when I told her H. B. Yang no longer thought quite so much of me as he’d seemed to when we met. I’d never actually told her that he’d hired me, but the fact that he’d fired me was likely enough to get back to her one way or another that I had no option but to give her a sanitized version of events myself first.
I unlocked our multilocked door, pulled on my slippers in the tiny vestibule, and found my mother sitting peacefully on the couch in the living room, her embroidery needle flashing in and out of the blouse she’d been working on the night before last, the one for Elliot’s daughter. The diffuse light of a spring afternoon fell softly on the glass-fronted cabinet where my father’s mud figurines sat. From the living room I could hear, faintly, as I’d heard it all my life, traffic funneling itself over the Manhattan Bridge, the same cars and trucks you could see so clearly through the window in H. B. Yang’s office.
My mother looked up briefly from her work, then returned to it with a frown of concentration. “Ling Wan-ju,” she said. “How was your day?” Finishing the difficult stitch at the center of a plum blossom, she tied off a knot and looked up again, smiling this time. “Did you see anyone interesting?”
We both knew who that meant.
Looking for a way to deflect that conversation, I was suddenly struck with inspiration. I realized I might, after all, have something to offer her.
“Not today, Ma,” I said from the kitchen, pulling a bottle of seltzer from the fridge. “But guess who I ran into yesterday? Tan Wei-Lian,”—Warren Tan—“remember him? From Clinton Street.”
There you go, Ma, I thought as I carried my seltzer with lime slices into the living room, a good-looking single Chinese male for us to discuss.
But as usual, my mother threw me a curve.
“Tan Wei-Lian,” she said. “Pah. With that family there is always trouble.”
“The Tans?” Surprised, I perched on the arm of the overstuffed chair. “I thought they were nice people.”
“The parents, yes, of course. Very hardworking, very diligent. But without any luck in their children.”
“Both sons went to college,” I protested. “Jian-Min”—Jeremy—“even went to graduate school. They’re both handsome, smart,” I had to swallow some seltzer to stop myself from adding, single, “both attentive to their parents. You don’t like them?”
“College.” My mother snorted. “Some people learn nothing from education. Wei-Lian thinks and plans for that union. You think I don’t know this, Ling Wan-ju, but I do. He is a troublemaker. Like Jian-Min, his brother, making that stinking mess in your classroom, you had to clean it up.”
“Chem lab,” I said. “I had to clean it up with him because I helped him make it.”
“He should have known better. He is older than you.”
“By three weeks, Ma.”
“Three weeks, three years, what’s the difference? He is older, he was responsible.”
“That was more than ten years ago. Anyway, we’re not talking about Jian-Min.”
“At least Jian-Min has a respectable position now. Not like Wei-Lian, sitting in a basement finding ways to get other people into trouble. Worrying his parents, also, not taking care of his heart.”
How did this conversation get away from me like this, I wondered, finishing my seltzer. My mother went on, delivering her final dismissive remark: “Besides, Ling Wan-ju, he is much too young for you.”
Well, I thought, so much for my attempt, not even to beat my mother at her own game, but just to try to play it.
“Now,” she said, with a small smile of satisfaction, “Yee Ji-You, that nice man you saw last night. Well-spoken, a man with a future, I think. Have you heard from him today, or were you too busy at your business?”
My business. Probably it was something about the light, or how tired I was, but my mother, smiling up from the couch, suddenly looked old to me. Old, and smaller than the last time I’d seen her, before H. B. Yang had told me he didn’t like my way of doing business.
“No, I haven’t heard from him,” I said, moving around to sit on the couch beside her. “But I ran into a little problem today.”
“Ah?” She threaded blue silk through the needle where red had been before.
“I had another talk with Yang Hao-Bing.”
My mother raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“The truth is, Ma, when I talked to him on Friday he asked me to do a … small job for him. Today, he decided that had been … unnecessary.”
Three stitches; then, “You have been fired?”
I sighed and flopped back on the cushions. So much for spin doctoring. “Yes.”
Three more stitches. “Why?”
“Why? Because we don’t do things the same way.”
“Yang Hao-Bing did not like your way?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“What is your way, Ling Wan-ju?”
That was, I guessed, a fair question. “He asked me to tell him things it would have been … unprofessional … for me to tell him.” As well as possibly dangerous for any number of people, but I didn’t see a reason to go quite that far with my mother.
“Unprofessional?”
“Not the way things are done in my profession, Ma. We have certain standards. Rules. It wouldn’t have been right.”
“So you decided what was right, rather than doing what Yang Hao-Bing asked you to do?”
“Yes.” I turned my head to look at her; she kept her needle moving through the embroidery frame, above, below, above, below.
“Could you have done this thing another way, Ling Wan-ju?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Ma. I’m sure there were all sorts of ways that someone smarter than I am could have thought of. Or someone more experienced, maybe. But it was only me. No was the only answer I thought wouldn’t be wrong, the only answer I could find to give him. Politely,” I added hurriedly. “I was very polite.”
My mother stitched some more. The wing of a swallow began to appear on the cloth. “Then,” she said, “what you have done is right.”
My eyes widened. I sat upright and turned to face her. “It is?”
Now she looked at me, stilling her hands, one above her fabric, one below. “If agreeing to Yang Hao-Bing’s request would have forced you to act in a way your profession considers wrong, you have done well to refuse.”
Her hands began to move again, and she focused her attention back on her needle.
“You hate my profession, Ma,” I said.
She nodded. “I consider it unsuitable for you. It brings you into the company of people no mother could approve of her daughter knowing. It puts you in danger. Men who might otherwise become attracted to you dislike the way you dress, the way you walk, the way you talk, which are required by your profession.”
That was going a little far, I thought, but it was hardly the point. “But you think what I did was right?”
“If you insist on engaging in this profession, Ling Wan-ju, I would expect you to behave in a professional manner, with proper conduct, just as I expect your brothers to do in their professions.”
Oh, I thought. Oh. Oh, my.
“You’re not mad?” I said. “Yang Hao-Bing?”
She looked sharply at me. “A public disagreement with Yang Hao-Bing is not something to be proud of.” Turning back to her work, she said, “However, there are many people in Chinatown who over the years have found it unavoidable.”
“Even after what this family owes him?”
“Except for the respect due a man of his age, with his accomplishments, what
does this family owe him?”
I stared at her in astonishment. “He brought Ba over here,” I said. “While you waited with my brothers”—Ted and Elliot, the oldest of the four—“in Hong Kong. You always told us that.”
“Brought him over, yes. But what of it? Your father paid Yang Hao-Bing for his passage, many years ago.”
“Well, he worked it off, sure, but—”
“No, Ling Wan-ju, what are you talking about? Your father worked very hard for a long time, sometimes two jobs at once in Hong Kong, to earn the money for his passage to America.” She started the long stitches of the swallow’s wing.
“But then, what does it mean, Yang Hao-Bing brought him over?”
My mother looked at me as if I were seriously missing a piece. “On his ship,” she said. “Yang Hao-Bing sold your father passage on his ship, the ship that brought him here.”
She waited another moment, watching to make sure that that registered. Then, apparently satisfied that my lights, however dim, were on, she went back to her needle and thread.
I sat motionless, watching her hands move over the cotton fabric of Elliot’s daughter’s blouse. The ship. H. B. Yang owned the ship my father came here on. H. B. Yang, octopusarmed entrepreneur. Why should he not be in shipping? And how dumb was I?
As if I were not the only one who wanted the answer to that question, the phone in my room that rings through from my office started to shrill. I jumped up to answer it.
“Hi,” Bill said in my ear. “It’s me.”
“The damn ship!” I shouted. “H. B. Yang owns the damn ship!”
He paused. “What damn ship?”
My words tumbled out, tripping over one another. “When my father came here, legitimate passenger ships. Now, I’ll bet anything, immigrant-smugglers. The ship the courier came on!”
Bill was briefly silent. “The one who stole the dope?”
“From Duke Lo. Who ships his dope via H. B. Yang!”