by May-lee Chai
Xiao Yu made it to the end of the courtyard. The sky was lightening. Dawn was coming. Soon the drunk who sat in the gatehouse checking the identification cards of everyone who entered or left the factory compound would wake. Then there’d be problems. But now as Xiao Yu crept to the gatehouse and peered in its window he could see the man slumped over his desk, snoring into the crook of his arm. Xiao Yu slipped past him to the front gate, which was easier to climb over than the stone walls with strands of barbed wire and broken glass embedded in the cement on top. Not that he hadn’t learned to scale those walls, but he preferred not to. Didn’t want to risk a tear in his city jeans, the pair he’d bought with his own money. Now he climbed the metal bars of the front gate and hauled himself to the top where the bars turned to sharp spikes. He balanced on the horizontal metal beam, careful to fit his feet between the spikes. This was the tricky part. If he lost his balance, he’d fall twelve feet to the concrete below. Or worse, if he slipped just a bit, he’d fall upon a spike. But Xiao Yu didn’t slip. He never even worried that he would. It was too exciting to escape the dark, snore-filled, fart-filled, old-man-smell-filled dormitory and roam the city streets and alleys. He was almost fourteen. There was nothing he felt he couldn’t do.
Xiao Yu ran through the streets. There was already traffic. There was always traffic in the city. People working, getting off work, going to work, stumbling from bars, stumbling into bars, lurching about the sidewalks, strolling with friends, running from enemies; sidewalk vendors, small shop owners, big club owners, farmers in tattered clothes selling fruit from baskets, beggars, pickpockets, gamblers, hookers, foreigners, buses, trucks, taxis, cars, bicycles. He met up with his new city friends in the alley behind the department store with the giant billboard of some Korean movie star smiling in front. The boys were already well into their game. A pile of crumpled bills, bartered weapons—knives, cleavers, rusted pointed things—foreign candy, favorite snacks, and a watch lay in the middle of the circle of boys as they tossed their cards down, grabbed up others.
Then the boys compared hands, and after much groaning, one boy swept up the pile into his knapsack.
Another boy began dealing a new round. He flipped the cards expertly. Big Ears’s skill was a thing of beauty. His hands, normally thick and stubby-fingered, dirt under his nails, became as graceful as a wushu artist’s, as fast as Jet Li when he shot the cards through the air.
“Are you in?” one of the boys asked without looking up. He rearranged his cards.
Xiao Yu threw down a few of the bills he was paid by the boss for gutting fish and other animals all night.
“Of course I’m in. Prepare to lose.”
“Ha! You don’t have the money. You’ll fold before we get to the third round.”
They laughed, they swore, they shared some stolen cigarettes and a can of Coca-Cola mixed with a bottle of cheap bai jiu. Xiao Yu was never more aware of how useless his schooling had been, all those years memorizing all those worthless characters, reading those old boring essays, when the real world was out here, on the street, made up of money and fast hands, faster feet. This life was an education. His old life was like a long dream, one only his grandfather still believed in. The dream of school and his father returning from prison and the family together in the village. If Xiao Yu thought of such things at all, it seemed to him his entire family was living in a coma. Only he was awake.
When Xiao Yu returned in the afternoon, after shoplifting with his friends, extorting money from younger kids on their way to and from school, and fighting with rival gangs, he never told his grandfather about his real life, about the real world that Xiao Yu had discovered and now inhabited and intended to learn how to survive in. No, how to thrive in. He was a good student after all. He’d just been studying the wrong material.
When he returned to the dormitory, brazenly walking through the front gate this time, bribing the afternoon gatekeeper with some of his day’s earnings, Xiao Yu told his grandfather that he’d been to school. It was only a half day because he was a migrant in the city, no residence permit, so he had to go to a charity school run by some do-gooders, but at least some schooling was better than none. And his grandfather smiled, the folds around his eyes deepening, the happiness on his face evident. He patted Xiao Yu on the head. “Study hard. Be sure to study hard for your father. He’s worked all these years just for you.” And Xiao Yu nodded and pretended to be both astonished and thrilled by the crumpled ten-yuan note his grandfather slipped into his hand with a wink. “Be sure to buy yourself a snack after school tomorrow. Something the city kids like. You might as well get used to this lifestyle. Learn what it’s like. No point acting like an old man before your time.”
Xiao Yu nodded. “Thank you, Ye-ye,” he said.
“You’re my grandson,” Ye-ye replied. “I want you to have the best. Remember you’re just as good as these spoiled city kids. Better. You know how to work harder.” Then he quoted the proverb about fish and birds: a fish is bound only by the sea, a bird by the sky. It was supposed to mean Xiao Yu could go far in the world if he put his mind to it.
Xiao Yu hung his head, stared at his sneakers, feigning modesty. But truly he thought his grandfather was correct. This was the one point where they indeed saw eye to eye. Xiao Yu knew that he was as good as these city boys, better even, because he saw more clearly than they. They were fish in a bowl; only he had leapt into the sea.
GHOST FESTIVALS
UNCLE LINCOLN CALLED to ask me if I’d heard the news. It was all over the Internet. “The Pope has come out in favor of gay marriage! He said it in a press conference in Rome. It’s amazing, Lu-ying,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see this day.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a hoax. The same as the reports that Pope Francis had said Hell was a literary device. My friends had been “liking” it all day on Facebook, until someone thought to check Snopes. But on the other hand, who knew? Maybe this pope really did think these things and it was only the public airing that was false.
“I thought of your mother today,” Uncle Lincoln said.
“Because of the pope?”
“No, because it’s your parents’ anniversary.”
Oh, shit, I thought. I’d completely forgotten. “Did you call my dad?”
“I left a message. He didn’t answer.”
“He’ll be happy you remembered,” I said. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Still time before it was midnight in New Jersey. I could call right after Lincoln hung up.
“Of course!” he said, his voice offended. “I never forget.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said.
“I always light a candle for your mother on my shrine. I’ve got my own ancestor altar set up, with pictures of Ba and Ma, and of course your mother.”
“Did you put it up for Qing Ming?”
“No, Qing Ming is next month,” Uncle Lincoln explained patiently. “I keep the candle up year round.”
I couldn’t keep track of when Chinese New Year fell, much less the festivals for the dead. It wasn’t just that the lunar calendar threw me, but the fact that Chinese traditionally celebrated the dead more than the living. Birthdays didn’t count, everyone used to add a year on the first day of Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year), but memorial days were essential. There was the forty-ninth day after death when the gates of the underworld opened and the newly departed could finally go to the other side, the official Ghost Day when we were supposed to burn incense money and set out plates of fruit for hungry ghosts wandering in between reincarnations, anniversaries of deaths of grandparents and ancestors I’d never met, Qing Ming for sweeping the tombs (or changing the flowers in front of my paternal grandparents’ mausoleum). When I was younger, I’d never understood why it was important to memorialize death days more than birthdays.
But what really made me marvel was thinking that Uncle Lincoln still carried a candle for my mother. She’d dated him first before she met my father. Not that they’d
ever been serious, but I think she represented something glamorous to Lincoln, some fantasy version of his life, the path not taken, all that. They used to like to dress up and go to parties in Manhattan, Broadway plays, recitals by famous musicians. “I must have known,” Mom would later say of their time together. “He had a roommate and the roommate always acted so jealous whenever I came over, but we never talked about such things in those days.”
I don’t know if he ever knew about her taking part in the letter campaign to get Soap taken off the air because Billy Crystal played a gay man trying to win custody of his child. It was 1977, before Lincoln came out, and the church had condemned the show. My mother, dutiful Catholic, wrote her letters without ever watching an episode. I saw them in the typewriter that summer.
I watched an episode secretly after I eavesdropped on her conversation with Sister Kevin. I checked the TV Guide, planned a distraction with the dogs, and turned to the channel while Mom was busy. All I remember was how boring it was. All these grown-ups talking talking talking.
The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries had started the same year. It was all I could talk about. I collected the cover profiles of Pamela Sue Martin from People and Tiger Beat; I had the lunch box, the t-shirts, the matching notebooks and folders. Mom was worried and had complained to Sister Kevin about me: “I’m afraid Lu-ying loves that TV show more than God.” Sister Kevin, bless her, had reassured Mom that it was just a phase, “Every girl loves Nancy Drew.” I loved Sister then, too.
I REMEMBER that summer well. I was going to start junior high, I was going to turn twelve. My father was busy teaching summer school and worrying about money; my mother was overseeing the construction on our house and worrying about money. There were strange men coming in and out, fixing the carpets, tearing out a wall, adding a shower to the half-bath off the kitchen. Our mother hated our house, our busy street, and was convinced if she could only update the floor plan, we’d be able to sell and move to a better neighborhood, meaning one she preferred, on a quieter street, in another town. I buried myself in my books, dreading the move and the loss of my friends.
One Sunday we took a rare break from the routine of Lewis and me being locked out of the house while our parents cleaned up after the workmen and argued. We were going to Manhattan to have brunch at my grandparents’ favorite Chinese restaurant, Chun Cha Fu on West 69th, to celebrate something. Good news, my grandfather had told my father over the phone. He’d tell us when we got there.
We stopped by Ye-ye and Nai-nai’s apartment on West 71st to pick them up, but my grandfather wasn’t waiting for us on the sidewalk. The commute from our house in New Jersey hadn’t been particularly fast or slow this afternoon. We’d arrived fifty-five minutes after setting out on the Newark-Pompton Turnpike, but Ye-ye wasn’t there.
My father circled round the block once, then twice, and then my mother said out loud what we’d all been thinking, “Hmm, that’s strange. I wonder where your father is.”
Now with the words hanging in the air in the car, my heart beat faster. I peered out the window for clues. But whereas clues always popped up in obvious ways for Nancy Drew, teen detective, they seemed nonexistent for me, Lu-ying Chiu, wannabe teen. Everything looked the same as every other Sunday, except for the Ye-ye-sized hole in the universe.
I had wanted to show him my book, Nancy Drew Number 57: The Triple Hoax. Ye-ye used to give me a dollar for every book I read until Dad made him stop in fourth grade, saying I was too old for that. I didn’t care; I didn’t show Ye-ye my books for the cash. My father didn’t understand me at all.
One of the working girls on the stoops—my parents called them “professionals,” which confused me—perked up upon seeing our large, boat-like Buick Electra creep down the block yet again. She was thin and dressed casually in a yellow tube top and cut-offs, it still being afternoon and not the usual working hours, but she approached the curb cautiously. Then she saw my brother and me, faces anxiously peering out the back window, looking for Ye-ye, and she waved a hand dismissively and turned back to her stoop.
We sailed round the block, up West End Avenue, past the Jewish temple and senior center, then down Broadway—my father slowed so we could see if Ye-ye and Nai-nai were out walking—then he turned at the tiny corner McDonald’s, inching back up to my grandparents’ apartment building. My father set the blinkers, double-parking.
“Oh, George, don’t stop here. There are some real pros by the steps.” Mom pointed with a long finger.
My brother and I craned our necks to see but it was the same woman in the yellow top and her friend hanging out the window from our last trip around the block.
Dad didn’t answer. He was scowling. He unlocked the doors with a click, then jumped out. “Move the car if you see any police,” he told my mother, then he bounded over to the callbox.
Mom locked the doors again.
I watched from the backseat. I could hear the dial tone. It rang and rang. I couldn’t remember a time when the loud BUZZ hadn’t sounded the moment Dad touched the box. My brother was playing with his toy soldiers, making shooting sounds, “pshoo, pshoo,” and wounded sounds, “aargh! aaaw!”
“Quiet, Lewis,” I said. “I’m trying to hear. Roll down your window.”
“Don’t roll down the windows,” Mom said from the front seat.
“Maaaaaa, I’m trying to hear.”
My mother rolled down the window on her side a tiny bit.
The pros and pimps were calling to each other, there was a ringing sound, traffic, pigeons cooing.
After what seemed like forever, Dad came running out of the building, red-faced, sweating. He threw open the car door; Mom barely had time to scoot over again. “Ye-ye’s been hospitalized. His heart.”
“Oh, George.” My mother’s face grew pale.
My father pulled out without looking, nearly hitting a yellow cab, which honked. The cabbie shouted out his window, “Asshole! You asshole! Whadyathink—” My father honked back, pounding the horn, over and over and over again, until the cabbie drove off.
“George! George!” Uncle Lincoln appeared on the sidewalk, shouting, his face as red as my father’s.
My father turned and the two of them started shouting at each other in Chinese, then Uncle Lincoln jumped in the backseat, pushing Lewis into me. “Sorry, kids. Hey, kids, how you doing? George, George, look out. I haven’t heard from Harry.” Then they started shouting to each other in Chinese again. All I could recognize were their Chinese names: Hao-bo, Hao-hsin, Hao-hsueh. Only in English did their names really stand apart. Lewis and I were named after Uncle Lincoln, in fact. The L at any rate. Because he and Dad were always the closest despite their difference in age and because Dad helped Uncle Lincoln choose his American name. I got the Chinese name because I was eldest, the first of the family to be born in America, and clearly the experiment, while Lewis just got the L.
Lewis whispered in my ear, his breath hot and wet against my neck. “Uncle Lincoln has a perm.”
“Sssh! I’m trying to listen,” I said.
I peered around my brother. Uncle Lincoln’s normally black, straight hair was now bent in stiff, orangeish curls like a wire sculpture of crispy noodles set atop his head.
Lewis pursed his lips together tightly, holding his tongue.
Uncle Lincoln leaned forward, holding onto the back of Dad’s seat, and shouted things I couldn’t make out. He wasn’t using simple words I understood, like the names of our family members, the dishes we liked to eat, how to say “thank you” and “you’re welcome” and “shut up, Stupid Egg!” Dad was facing forward, but he wasn’t really looking at the street or at the honking cars, he was staring into something unseeable and nodding.
I recognized the word for “Father” and “kitchen” and then Uncle Lincoln shouted in English, “Operator! It’s an emergency! Send an ambulance!” He held an invisible phone to his ear, pantomiming. “Quick! Quick! My father’s lying on the kitchen floor.”
“George, look at the road!
” Mom said.
In the confusion it was as though the streets were an Escher print, with moving pieces that coalesced, turning into something unexpected. A delivery truck, double parked; two cop cars, lights flashing; an elderly Jewish couple, jaywalking.
Dad turned back to the street and we lurched around the corner, then onto Broadway, cars honking as we merged. Dad had a grim, determined look on his face that meant he was going to ignore them, and our large Buick Electra eased into the lane.
Finally, we pulled up to the white loading zone in front of Chun Cha Fu. My father barely waited for us to get out of the car, before pulling off with Uncle Lincoln, who was still shouting from the backseat, repeating everything he’d seen, the shock of it, over and over.
I followed my mother into the restaurant, a sick hollow feeling in my stomach. Everything seemed strange. A waiter rushed up to us with three menus, the English kind. If Ye-ye were there, they would never have given us those.
Mom insisted the waiter take us to a side room, with the large round table for families, as if everyone would be coming together as usual.