After the war, the United States had governed it as a United Nations trusteeship. In 1986 a Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas was formed. Saipan and Tinian—from where the Bomb was flown to Hiroshima—were parts of this commonwealth. It elected its own governor and legislature, but it was a United States protectorate. That was what gave it the special status that allowed it to produce goods in slave-labor conditions and ship them to the States without restriction.
We were guests for dinner with George Alexander, president of a company called Alexander Products. He was the same man Charlie Han had mentioned in his testimony when he was on trial for labor-law violations. Charlie had testified he didn’t know where Alexander was, and maybe he didn’t. Anyway, we now knew where he was.
George Alexander was a cue-ball bald man and appeared for dinner in a linen blue blazer, white shirt, and rep tie. For him, Saipan was an exile. He lived well there, making big money. It was a haven for George Alexander.
It had been he, that afternoon, who had refused to allow us to see his working people at work. “They’re excitable,” he had said. “A visitor slows them down for an hour.”
We had been sitting in his spartan office. An air conditioner had been laboring in a window, but it was still stifling hot, and we were sweating.
“Are the workshops air-conditioned?” I had asked.
He had smiled broadly. “These are tropical people,” he had said. “Air-conditioning gives them colds, sinusitis, bronchitis, even pneumonia. They refuse to work in air-conditioned rooms. They think there is something unnatural about air-conditioning.”
“Why the barbed wire?” I had asked.
“Predators,” he said. “Our workers are primitive young women, and every pilot or ship crewman can take advantage of them.”
Over dinner he said something a little different. “I wasn’t exactly honest with you when I said you couldn’t see inside our shops. You see … it is hot in the shops. The girls don’t want air-conditioning, but they do what they do on their home islands—which is that they strip down to the minimum. Men fly down here from Tokyo just to see the naked girls working in our shops. Needless to say, I do not put our girls on display. I guess some operators do, but Alexander does not.”
Bullshitting my father was not a good idea. We were in Tokyo only one night before flying on to Hong Kong, but that was long enough for him to wire New York to cancel every contract with Alexander.
On the flight to Hong Kong he talked about Melissa.
“She was just the finest kind of girl you could imagine. I swear to you, as God is my witness, that I never touched her while your mother was alive. That’s a tribute to your mother, not to me. You know by now how things get. I mean, domestic. I should have married her. We loved each other. Why do the women I love die so young?”
He told me a lot more about his days in Paris. He made me understand why Buddy was so good a friend.
“Every man would like to think there’s somebody he could count on if everything went to shit. Buddy and I don’t have much in common, except some life experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything, but I know if the shit hit the fan Buddy would be there for me. And I’d be there for him. It’s been an odd friendship, some ways. Buddy just showed up one day when I was still very young, and he befriended me instantly. I’ve often wondered why. My good luck, as far as I’m concerned.”
We landed at Hong Kong’s adventurous airport, Kai Tak, coming in on an approach so low over the city that, as they used to say, you could look in apartment windows and see what TV shows people were watching. That is an exaggeration. But you could see if they were watching TV or not.
We checked into the plush Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
I wish I could have spent more time in Hong Kong on that visit. I have never seen a more fascinating city. It was at that time still a British colony, but it was emphatically a Chinese city. If we define a building over fifty stories as a high-rise, there were at least two in Hong Kong for every one in Manhattan. The harbor was one of the busiest in the world, crowded with cruise ships, container ships, and tankers, among which the little Star Ferries hurried back and forth between Hong Kong and Kowloon. The streets, subtropical and hot, were jammed with traffic. The population exceeded six million people, the vast, vast majority of them busy, well-dressed Chinese, jostling each other as they hurried purposefully up and down steep and narrow streets and along broad boulevards as well. No one knew really how many people lived there because the so-called I.I.s, illegal immigrants, were an uncountable additional element of the population. One had a sense that anything was for sale there, anything, in a community more cosmopolitan than any other I have ever seen.
But that was the impression of a mere three days in Hong Kong.
My father was not so impressed. “Goddamned anthill,” he grumbled. He did not understand that the city had one of the most active stock exchanges in Asia, some of the biggest banks in the world, and that half the world’s billionaires lived there. He did not understand, either, that Cheeks, though an important customer to a few makers of clothing, was small-time in Hong Kong business terms.
Our contact was Henry Wu, owner of a shop that made some of our most exotic merchandise. Everything from Wu was of meticulously high quality—and cost twice what we had imported from Saipan. We met him for lunch at Luk Yu Tea Shop, a dim sum restaurant. Dim sum were little dumplings filled with all kinds of things: shrimp, vegetables, chicken, fish, and so on. It was a typical Hong Kong lunch.
Though my father and I did not guess it at the time, Wu was honoring us to meet us there. I began to understand it as I observed the businessmen at nearby tables. So far as my father was concerned, we might as well have been eating at McDonald’s. But Luk Yu had stayed open during the Japanese occupation and had been, for seventy years and more, a distinguished Hong Kong restaurant.
“You are anxious to know the conditions in which our goods are made,” Wu said when we—that is, my father and I—were struggling to conquer slippery dim sum with chopsticks. “We will visit some shops tomorrow.”
The next morning he took us in his car for a tour of Hong Kong. They drive on the left there, in the British fashion—which took a little getting used to. We had lunch in a café on the Peak, the highest point on the island. We spent the afternoon visiting three workshops.
Hong Kong sweatshops were nothing like the barbed-wire camps on Saipan. They were certainly not luxurious, and they would not have begun to meet U.S. federal or state standards, but the young women who worked in them were not slaves.
“Any of these girls can quit her job at any time if she doesn’t like it,” said Wu.
“As a practical matter—” I started to say.
“As a practical matter, she has to earn a living, but there are many shops, and she can try others.”
“Looks pretty rough to me,” my father said. We were looking at a room where twenty or so young women worked at sewing machines. The windows were open, and oscillating fans blew air across the workbenches, but the temperature had to be in the high eighties.
“They come here from the Philippines, typically,” said Wu. “A girl works five or six years and then goes home. She may come back after a few months, for another five or six years. Anyway, she talks about the working conditions and the wages in Hong Kong, and her sisters and friends come here looking for this kind of work. So, they must not think it too bad.”
“Don’t they want to get married?” my father asked.
Henry Wu nodded. “They come here at age seventeen, typically, work five or six years, then maybe another five or six years, and go home to marry before they are thirty—holding a dowry a young man has been glad to wait for. They are paid in Hong Kong dollars, one of the world’s most stable currencies, and they deposit their savings in Hong Kong banks.”
“But when they go home—”
“They leave their money here, where the banks can be trusted absolutely.”
“Then how do they get their money
out?”
Wu smiled. “Bank-machine cards. ATM cards. They work the same as they do in the States. Internationally. These are the nineties. We’ve had ATM cards for years.”
My father thought he had been subtle and had not shown his growing impatience with Chinese food and chopsticks. Apparently he had not succeeded in concealing his wish for Western-style food eaten with silverware, since that evening Henry Wu took us to an excellent Austrian restaurant called Mozart Stub’n, all but hidden on an out-of-the-way street in the part of Hong Kong called Mid-Levels. There we dined on asparagus for an opener, followed by green salad, then beef and potatoes with turnips—cooked so you could eat them, as my father put it to me later—followed by a rich chocolate torte and coffee. We drank two bottles of an excellent Austrian red wine, then generous splashes of Courvoisier with our coffee.
“You don’t run things the way they do in Saipan,” my father said to Henry Wu as we contemplated our brandy.
“That’s a very different thing,” said Wu.
“I’ve canceled our contracts with Alexander on Saipan. I’m looking for someone to take them up.”
“I can’t match Saipan prices,” said Wu frankly.
“We can negotiate,” said my father brusquely.
“You don’t want to risk the wretched publicity that’s going to come out of Saipan.”
My father ignored the comment. “I’m going to have to put someone out here for a time to talk about designs and quality, shipments, and so on.”
Henry Wu nodded toward me. My father looked at me quizzically.
“I wish I could,” I said. “But there’s no way.”
44
JERRY
I hired Charlie Han and sent him to Hong Kong. It was a great choice. As a New York Chinatown Chinese, he spoke the Cantonese that was spoken in Hong Kong and southern China, not the Mandarin that was spoken in Beijing. He knew the garment business and did his job well. On the other hand, as I’d had to expect, word came back before long that he was establishing a business of his own. Next the word came that he had married a young Hong Kong Chinese girl and had become a father. Charlie was a professional hustler.
I couldn’t leave him out there on his own, with no supervision, so I leased a furnished apartment in Mid-Levels. We used it as a headquarters. I would go out and live in it for a week. Len would go. After Vicky had her second child—a rambunctious boy they named Jerry—she went out, too. Hong Kong became a sort of second home for us, each visit an adventure.
None of us ever learned a damned word of Chinese. It made Len think of Sue Ellen and remember the struggle she had gone through to learn the language of a quarter of the world’s population. He tried to learn a few words at least, as did Vicky. I never tried.
Something very strange—I got so I could read some of the Chinese characters, even when I could not understand the words. I learned the character for “exit,” for example, and could identify it without looking at the English word below it.
I learned to do something I had done in New York decades ago and had never done in recent years: ride the subway. The Hong Kong underground was so clean and efficient that I chose it often, even over the cheap little taxis whose drivers often refused a tip.
I should not exaggerate my Hong Kong experience. Len came to spend a great deal more time there than I did.
* * *
An odd thing happened. When I returned from Hong Kong, a letter from Lyon was waiting for me. It was from Giselle’s sister, Therèse.
Dear Jerry,
You will my bad English excuse as always. I am think it is bad for us no seeing each other no time. Giselle would have wished. I not see little Len since he was small boy. I no family here no more. Could you come and bring boy? Please? Write to say.
Therèse
I did not write. I put through a telephone call to her.
“Therèse … Len is a married man with two children. Right now he’s in Hong Kong on business. I’d like for you to meet his wife and children. But I don’t see how I can bring them all to France. It has big problems.”
“No? Sorree, Jerree. I had hope…”
“I’ve got a better idea. Let me fly you here, Therèse. Trip to the States, first class, at my expense. I’d like to see you again. Len would like to. Plan on staying a month at least. I’m alone, too. You can live in my apartment with me.”
“You would do this for me?”
I arranged for her a first-class ticket to Kennedy. When I finally recognized her coming out, I was amazed. Some Frenchwomen age badly, growing fat and mustachioed. Giselle, of course, had never done that. Well … neither had her sister.
Therèse had lines on her face, especially around her eyes, and the flesh under her chin was loose. She was sixty-five years old that year, two years younger than I was. But she was slender and walked with a spring in her step; and, wearing a rose print silk minidress, she had a figure many women would have died for. She was blond—not naturally so, I knew—and had had her hair styled quite short. She had a flair for makeup, knowing what was enough and what was not quite enough. Coming toward me, carrying a small, simple case and letting a porter push a cart with the rest of her luggage, Therèse was a vision of a self-confident, mature woman.
We kissed as we met there in the airport. I supposed some of the kids who saw us smiled, even laughed at us old people, but that kid rekindled a passion I had felt for Thèrese long ago. We had spent an erotic night together, years before I married Giselle.
“Zheree…” she whispered.
“Therèse. It is so very good to see you!”
The second night in my apartment we slept together. We had wonderful sex together. Therèse had a flair for it. I was ready to think it was a Frenchwoman’s special flair, but I don’t think so anymore; I think she shared with Giselle simply a healthy woman’s flair. Maybe being French subdued some inhibitions.
My wife’s sister. I don’t think Giselle would have objected. To the contrary. She had set me up to spend a night with her kid sister, who had all but fucked me out of my mind—back in France, in the old days.
Therèse had not been entirely straightforward with me. I needed only a few days to figure out that she did not intend to return to France, unless she had to. She had brought with her everything she very much cared about.
One night in the bedroom she opened an old, cracked leather photo album and showed me some faded, browning photographs.
“You know about zis thing,” she said. The pictures were of a brick-paved street in an apparently middle-class neighborhood. A boulangerie and a boucherie were visible; also, in one picture, the doorway of a church where two priests stood laughing. I had walked on such French streets a thousand times. But in these pictures a heckling mob herded five crying, cringing, stark naked girls, heads shaved, down the middle of the street. “Iss me,” she said, laying her finger on one image. “I am ninezeen year old. Zey take sousands of picture.”
If ever a girl looked utterly miserable, in whatever circumstance, Therèse looked agonized in those pictures. I could not understand why she had preserved them all these years.
“You have heard of zis thing, no? You know what I have done and what they have done to me?”
I took her hands in mine. “I have heard of it, Therèse. The war. Many of us did odd things. A lot of time has passed. I did things I’m not proud of. We all do.”
“You heard,” she murmured. “For all zese years I have live where everybody knows about zis.”
“And nearly everybody has forgiven,” I suggested.
“Uhh … zey say. I not know.”
We talked a lot and reached a decision that she would stay in New York. Not only that. When Len came home from Hong Kong, we confronted him with our decision that we would marry.
I was going to marry his mother’s sister. I didn’t ask Len if he liked it. I suspected he did not. I liked it, and Therèse liked it, and that was all that counted.
Therèse and I left on a wedding trip.
We flew Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, settled into my apartment there, and made Hong Kong our base for visits to Bangkok, Singapore, and Beijing.
I did not turn our wedding trip into a business trip. Except in Hong Kong, where we lived in our apartment, we stayed in the best hotels. I had a sense that this might be my last great romantic fling, and Therèse had the same sense for herself. We wanted to savor and cherish every moment.
We did not carry cameras. Our eyes were our cameras, our memories our film.
Therèse was the only woman I ever knew who had utterly no interest in Cheeks merchandise. She was a direct, earthy Frenchwoman, and when the time came to be intimate she simply stripped and that was that. The time to be intimate might begin at six and go on till midnight, and she might be naked all that time; but naked was the way to think about love, work up to love, and make love—not wearing some odd, impractical garment.
I could not complain, even if the erotica she scorned were my business and my living.
“Ah, Zherree, you want I should wear zees, I wear zees, but ees more beauty zan zee skeen?”
She called my cock “beauty.” “He is very beauty. He look good, feel good, taste good.”
She told me about the German lieutenant who got her in trouble. “He want marry me,” she said. “He say he send for me as soon as war is over. We live in Germany, he say. On day when I was shamed I didn’t know he already dead. Shot by Resistance sniper in streets of Paris. Zis I learn only in 1946. His family invite me to come, live with them. I could not.”
She knew more about me than I had imagined. Giselle had told her. “She lucky girl,” Therèse said of Giselle. “She dance tout nu, but she no fuck with Boches, not never. Never enough hungry. Fortune always smile on Giselle.”
We stayed in the Far East for a month, then went home to find that my son had created a problem.
* * *
By now our gross sales, stores and catalogs, exceeded five billion dollars a year. Something like 60 percent of our merchandise was imported, a little of it from France, still, but most of it from Asia, chiefly Hong Kong.
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