by Carolyn Hart
No one has to say when news is bad. Her plump cheeks sagged and she suddenly looked middle-aged. I knew, from her background, that she wasn’t young. She had, until that telephone call, seemed young.
“She shouldn’t have given up,” Annie said and her voice was almost querulous. “It wasn’t that bad. We would have helped. She shouldn’t have given up.”
“What happened, Annie?” Dan asked gently.
She lifted haunted dark eyes. “I did everything I could.” Her mouth twisted and she turned to me. “You want to know a difference between Chinatown and your Boone County?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Until a few years ago, Chinatown had the highest suicide rate in the whole United States. That’s something, isn’t it? Then Self-Help for the Elderly got started in 1966. We made a difference. Old people knew somebody cared.” She drew a deep breath. “There aren’t as many suicides now, but there are still too many. So many.”
She pulled out the bottom drawer of her desk, lifted out her handbag. “I’ll have to go. There isn’t anyone else.” She closed the drawer with a sharp bang. “She was seventy-three and she had ninety dollars a month to live on. She just made it. You know the way, a cup of weak tea for breakfast, rice for lunch and the Self-Help for the Elderly evening meal for fifty cents at the school on Stockton. Fifty dollars a month for her room, that tiny box of a room at the Green Door Hotel. The big extra expense was her medicine, heart medicine, the little bottle of tablets cost $15. But she was making it.”
Annie pushed back her straight chair, stood. “Last week the notice went up on the bulletin board at the Green Door. Somebody read it to her. The rent was going up five dollars a month. For her it might as well have been five hundred.”
She snatched her raincoat from the wooden tree next to her desk then stopped and looked down at us forlornly. “I don’t know why I’m in such a hurry now. It’s too late now. Isn’t it?”
Neither of us answered.
“If you want to see what it’s like to be old and alone in Chinatown, you can come with me.”
She was angry, too. Upset, angry, wanting to strike out, wanting most of all for someone to share the hurt with her, make it more bearable. And we were there.
I started to shake my head, that old instinctive reaction, wanting to evade the unpleasant, shrinking away from the role of spectator, the horrid image of the morbidly curious.
But Dan’s hand was on my elbow. “All right, Annie. We’ll come. Maybe we can help.”
Help? Or was he remembering that Jimmy Lee had been at the Green Door Hotel yesterday?
It was two blocks to the Green Door Hotel. We walked quickly. I was vividly aware of the street and the people and I noticed now how many of the people we passed were old. The day was growing warmer and the sidewalks were crowded with tourists, office workers out for an early inexpensive lunch, shoppers, a nun with a group of darting eager children and everywhere, walking slowly, stopping to gaze at pressed ducks hanging in market windows and trays of barbecued pork, carefully counting the cost of tangerines in crates along the wall, squinting at fruit and nut cakes in the bakery window, were the elderly, shabbily dressed in grays and blacks, sometimes in pairs, most often alone.
Coming down the street toward us, her faded brown coat a little too big for her, a woven mesh shopping bag clutched tightly in small worn hands, was another old lady. Our eyes met and, for an instant, we stared at one another. Her face was round and softly crumpled and the color of faded parchment. She smiled suddenly, a gentle, trusting, open smile. I smiled in return and then she was past me and I wondered who she was and where she had come from and how her days had led her to Chinatown, to end her days in Chinatown.
We turned the corner, walked a block, turned another corner and Annie stopped at an unmarked door between a grocery and a brown curtained window.
You wouldn’t find the Green Door Hotel unless you knew where it was or looked very hard. A faded sign, green letters edged in peeling gilt, hung crookedly just above the second story. A small grocery was to the right of the door. Dan told me later that the unmarked covered windows to the left masked a garment factory and, once inside, if you paused on the narrow uncarpeted stairs and listened, you would hear the whirr and thump of sewing machines and, softly, like the chirp of spring birds, women’s voices, talking as they worked.
The air in the stairwell was damp and chill and smelled of cooking rice and mildew. Annie led the way, her shoes clicking loudly on the wooden steps. She paused at the top of the staircase.
“Bobby? Bobby?”
He was shuffling down the unlit hall toward us. The stair landing widened out just enough for a tiny reception area to the right. A battered card table and straight-backed chair served as the desk.
He called out to Annie in Chinese and she replied. I looked at Dan but his face was as blank as mine.
“I don’t even speak enough Cantonese to get along,” he said. “And they’re speaking Mandarin.”
I suppose he realized how little I knew about the Chinese language when I didn’t answer.
“Mandarin’s the official language, what most Chinese speak. But almost all American Chinese are from southern China, from only a few villages and districts around Canton, and they speak Cantonese. Annie is from Peking, the north, so she speaks Mandarin as do many of the refugees in the last ten years, especially those who were well-to-do landowners and fled the Communists because their lands were taken over.”
He added a little grimly, “Those aren’t the kind of immigrants you find in Chinatown.”
Annie’s voice rose in a question. Bobby shook his head.
Dan and I waited awkwardly, not belonging, intruders in a stranger’s drama. Seventy-three, Annie had said. I wondered where in China seventy-three years ago a baby had cried. Had that baby girl been nestled in loving arms, wrapped gently in clean cloth, or had she been a burden, an extra mouth, outcast from her beginning? Now that breath was stilled in an alien land in the chill of a lonely room.
The door banged downstairs and heavy footsteps clumped slowly up the wooden steps. Dan and I looked down and a prickle of distress moved down my back.
We moved aside, pressed against the wall, to let them pass, the two young ambulance attendants with the empty stretcher.
We heard them go on up the stairs, Bobby leading the way. And we heard the clump of their returning footsteps, the stretcher not empty now. But, when they passed us, a blanket spread the length of the stretcher, there was scarcely a hump beneath it. She must have been small, so small.
Annie watched until the stretcher was gone from sight, until the door banged in its frame downstairs. She closed her eyes briefly then turned to us. “This way,” she said dully. “Upstairs.”
Ru’lan Wong had lived on the top floor of the Green Door Hotel. If possible, it was even dingier than downstairs, the walls had been painted so long ago they were now just an indeterminate gray-brown. Some squares of the linoleum floor were missing and it gave the hall an odd hop-scotch appearance. It was very quiet. Faintly, I could hear mournful country western guitar. Nothing else.
“It’s almost deserted this time of the morning,” Annie said softly. “Most of them go out, go down to Portsmouth Square. They’ll spend the day there, talking to their friends, sitting on the benches, watching the children, playing checkers and Chinese chess.”
The door to Mrs. Wong’s room was ajar. We stopped at the threshold. Tiny, perhaps nine feet by twelve, it was cluttered but immaculate . . . except for the irregular puddle of blood that spread darkly across the neatly spread newspaper.
Annie stared down at the newspaper and I knew she was seeing a tiny old figure, kneeling, opening a paper, perhaps staring with unseeing eyes at the vertical lines of characters, then, quickly, or was it reluctantly, slowly, drawing the sharp blade across a wrinkled wrist.
I put my hand in Annie’s arm.
“Ru’lan was always so neat, so clean . . .” Abruptly, Annie pulled away and bent to fold over the newsp
apers.
Such a small room. A single bed with a dark iron head-stand, a worn orange afghan spread over the sheets. A small table holding a wind-up alarm clock, a cheap green glass vase with a single carnation, a box of Kleenex. A hotplate balanced on an orange crate in one corner. Bright red cotton trim had been tacked to the edges of three orange crates that sat along one wall. It was her larder, two boxes of Jell-O, a sack of rice, a sack of sugar, tea, three tangerines, salt, cellophane-wrapped dried apricots.
We helped Annie pack away the few dresses, take down the pictures from the walls, a calendar, two snapshots, a pennant from Disneyland.
“Someone will move in by this afternoon. There is always a waiting list.”
I looked at the now bare walls, at the tiny cold cubicle, and wondered how this could be better housing for anyone?
The Green Door Hotel. I shook my head. I did feel sure of one thing now. Wherever Jimmy had found Peking Man, it couldn’t have been here.
NINE
It isn’t how long you know someone but the quality of the time you share. I had never, until this morning, seen Annie Jiu. I had never, until last night, seen Dan Lee. But, the three of us, after the Green Door, could never be strangers again. Dan and I helped Annie distribute the little pile of worldly goods to Ru’lan Wong’s friends. The hotplate to Max Chang. His had burned out last week. The groceries to Ed Wu on the second floor. The snapshots to Miss Mary Huang.
It didn’t take long.
Outside again, on the sidewalk, we all stood quietly for a moment, blinking in the bright sharp sunlight. San Francisco wore her siren suit this morning, the sky sharply blue, the sea-fresh air deceptively warm from the February sun. The hills rose behind us and fell away in front toward the Embarcadero.
Annie reached out, touched Dan’s hand, then mine. “Thank you for coming with me. Thank you so much.” She turned quickly away then and we watched her sturdy figure down the hill.
Dan’s arm came around my shoulders and he gave me a brief hard squeeze, then his arm dropped away. “You’re all right, Ellen.”
I looked up at him and for that instant we saw into each other’s eyes without pretense or defense. I smiled a little. “You’re all right, too.”
He shrugged that away. But I knew now that Jimmy wasn’t the only Lee with a kind heart.
We walked back to Grant, turned north. I hurried to keep up with Dan’s long strides but, once again, I was looking at the people we passed, seeing more than camera-laden tourists. Mid-morning on a Friday and I was struck with how few families we passed. A few, of course. And some teenagers, laughing, jostling each other on the narrow sidewalk, cheerful, out, I realized suddenly, for a morning visit to Chinatown. Chinese, yes, but American Chinese, their patter the national language of youth with only that particular rising inflection at the end, that telltale ‘Don’t you think, huh?’ to mark them as Californians. They would be as comfortable as sightseers in New Orleans or Philadelphia. They weren’t Chinatown. No, Chinatown was the occasional prosperous businessman, the more harried less affluent small shopkeeper, the workers, office, store and manual, and, everywhere, walking slowly, bent and spare, the elderly.
This end of Grant, the north end, caters to Chinese shoppers, small groceries, laundries, sandwich shops, and, on the corner ahead, the Ping Yuen Bakery, named after the public housing units on Pacific.
At Pacific, as we waited for the light to change, Dan pointed ahead, “There’s Ping Yuen. Jimmy’s second stop on Wednesday.”
It was public housing with a difference, lime green walls, bright red pillars and Chinese characters inscribed on the balconies.
“It looks nice.”
“It’s a damn sight better than the Green Door and other tenement hotels. Only one drawback.”
“What?”
“It houses about 400 families but there are always about 2,000 on the waiting list. It takes about four years to get in.”
“Is this the only public housing in Chinatown?”
“Yeah. For now. Construction’s supposed to start pretty soon on some new. There’ll be room for about 220 families and thousands have already signed up.”
Ping Yuen had something else the Green Door lacked. Four little girls, their black hair neat and pretty in pigtails, played hopscotch, and their high happy voices followed us down the sidewalk.
As we pushed through the main doors, Dan looked back at the little girls. “It’s an okay place for kids. Ping Yuen is the only public housing in the United States where more than ninety per cent of the kids who grow up in it go on to college.”
Only in Chinatown, I thought.
We found the Chan apartment on the second floor toward the back. Dan had scarcely knocked when the door opened and a little boy about three poked a curious face around the edge, looked at us solemnly, then drew back his head before we could say anything.
We could hear the soft murmur of a radio, a girl laughing, the lilting sound of Cantonese, a rush of water.
Then the door swung wide. A plump sweet-faced woman looked at us shyly.
“Mrs. Chan?” Dan asked.
She nodded.
“Is your husband home?”
She looked from Dan to me and back again and her dark eyes were uncertain.
“Could we talk to you for a moment?” Dan asked. “I’m Dan Lee, Jimmy Lee’s brother, and . . .”
She held up her hands. “Ngaw mm wuey gong ying mum,” and turned away from the door. She called out to someone.
“She said she didn’t speak English,” Dan explained. “I know enough Cantonese for that.”
The girl who came to the door smiled at us in a friendly way. “Hi. Can I help you? I’m Mary Chan.” Sleek dark hair framed a lovely heart-shaped face. She wore pale pink slacks and a white-and-pink patterned blouse.
Dan introduced us, then tried to explain why we had come. A new story this time.
“Ellen is new at Trouble, Inc., and she’s following up on Jimmy’s recent cases.”
Mary nodded politely, but didn’t say anything.
Dan paused, tried again.
“Jimmy came here Wednesday . . .”
She nodded, smiled again. “That is my father’s day off so we asked Jimmy to eat with us.”
Her mother stood close, looking at her, then at us. She asked Mary something in Cantonese and the girl replied then turned back to us.
“Please come in. We wish to welcome Jimmy’s brother and fellow worker.”
The living room was simply furnished, one sofa, two easy chairs, a straight chair. Dan and I sat on the sofa, Mrs. Chan on a chair beside us and Mary in the straight chair.
I heard a soft giggle and looked down the narrow hall and saw the little boy who had come to the door and two girls about seven and eight. Mrs. Chan saw me looking at them and called out and slowly, shyly, they came into the living room and crossed to their mother.
“My brother, Allen, and my sisters, Ruth and Lisa,” Mary said.
There was an awkward silence.
Dan cleared his throat. “Actually, we’re backtracking . . .” At Mary’s quick frown, he rephrased it, “. . . introducing Ellen to the people Jimmy’s helped. She’s going to work with him. Now, if you could explain to us why Jimmy came to see you . . .”
Mary still looked puzzled.
“I mean, what is your difficulty? What help do you need?”
Mary spoke to her mother and Mrs. Chan began to shake her head and words tumbled out. Mary nodded then laughed and looked at me. “It is all confusion, yes? We need nothing now. Jimmy, he has already helped us. It was to celebrate that we asked him to come on Wednesday.”
When we sorted it all out, it was happiness that brought Jimmy to Ping Yuen. Not all of Chinatown was desperate or ill or old. Sometimes, yes, things went right and I was glad that good things were happening to the Chans, Mary told us, interrupted by short translations to her mother and rapid streams of Cantonese from Mrs. Chan.
It was in October that her father had lost his
job. He had been a dishwasher, earning $390 a month, working ten hours a day, six days a week. They had been living then in two un-heated rooms in a tenement on Stockton, her parents, Mary, the three younger children. There was one toilet on each floor, a kitchen serving two floors. People ate in shifts, bathed and washed in shifts.
Mary’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “It was bad, you know. I was frightened because . . . my father, one night he cried. There was no work, no job, no chance. He said . . .” she hesitated, then blurted out, “. . . he said America was a lie, a trap. There was no chance for him, nothing. And you see he had brought us, had come because he believed life would be better for us, that we would have a better chance, be able to go to school and that it didn’t matter how bad it might be for him and my mother, it would be better for us.” She took a deep breath. “But it wouldn’t be better if we could not even eat. You see, in Hong Kong, he had a better job, he was foreman in a toy factory, but here, we came five years ago, he could not speak English and the only jobs he could get were in Chinatown—dishwasher, janitor, waiter. It was hard to find any job and none of them paid enough but you could not complain because there were twenty people for every job and a man was lucky to get any work, no matter how little it paid. But then, you see, one night he was very tired and the water was too hot and his right hand was scalded, so he couldn’t work, you see. So he was fired.”
I interrupted sharply, “But that’s outrageous! An employer owes a duty to his workers if there’s an injury . . .” My words trailed away. Mary and Dan both shook their heads.
“No minimum wage. No unions. Not in Chinatown.” Dan’s voice wasn’t angry or especially vehement or even bitter. It was resigned. “It’s all hidden, of course. Jimmied time cards, no claims made.”
“But, I don’t understand how that can happen.”
“Too many people, too few jobs. Thousands of new immigrants come every year and most of them are broke and, pretty soon, desperate for work. They can’t speak English so they have to find a job in Chinatown. Every job, no matter how little it pays, has a line waiting for it.”