Snakes Can't Run

by Ed Lin

  “Don,” she said, “do you remember getting on the Cyclone with me at Coney Island?”

  “I remember,” he whispered.

  “You had fun that day, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything but nodded his head. After he had finished the last cup of coffee, Don said, “My head is a big radio and I can’t control the dials. It keeps changing channels and the volume goes in and out.”

  “That sounds like schizophrenia,” Barbara said to me. “I thought I had it in college.”

  “How do we take care of this?” I asked.

  “We have to take him to a doctor.”

  “No doctor,” I said. “His old man refuses to let me take him.”

  “Robert, he needs professional help!”

  “Maybe. If I can’t find something else first.”

  “Do you know how sick he is? He could hurt himself! Do you want that? Does his father want that?”

  “Of course not! But how are we going to get him to a doctor without identification?”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t even have a wallet, Barbara!”

  She paused and looked carefully at Don’s face, making sure it was really him.

  “You have to talk to his father,” she concluded.

  “That guy was an asshole to me when I was a kid,” I said. “He likes me only a little bit more now.”

  “Well, he sure wasn’t a fan of me, either,” said Barbara.

  Don got up and said he had to go to the bathroom. We followed him back to his apartment building and then watched him float upstairs like a lost kite.

  7

  FOR A WEEK I TRIED REACHING NG AT EIGHT STARS LION DANCE Group. When I was able to reach Winnie, I think she was getting the idea that I was really calling to talk to her.

  Meanwhile Vandyne shadowed King Lam, but he worried that the guy knew he was being followed. I knew the first rule was to never try hiding from the person you’re shadowing. But Lam knew where the underground passageways were, giving him a major advantage.

  For example, Doyers Street, that little jug handle of a road where I got my hair cut, was originally the private drive of a large farmhouse. While the farmhouse was long gone, the subterranean grain storage areas remained intact, snaking along present-day Doyers Street and exiting on Bowery through the lobby of an office building.

  The tunnels aren’t a secret. In fact, there were even stores down there, little shanty shops selling everything from knockoff calculators and radios to foot massages.

  Thing is, though, if you’re not acclimated to the low light and forks and blind turns, you could easily get lost.

  Vandyne tailed Lam down two flights into the tunnel when he lost Ng’s pal and emerged only after buying a pair of slippers.

  One day Ng suddenly came up to me outside my apartment when I was on the way in.

  “How about we go for a walk, Robert?”

  “Where to, Andy?” He smiled, seeing that he hadn’t thrown me off-balance with the surprise visit.

  “Let’s just have a walk and talk.”

  “Are you going to have me shot, too?”

  “What! Jesus fucking Christ, what’s wrong with you? I just want to talk, brother to brother, you know?”

  “Fine.”

  We walked west toward Chinatown.

  “You don’t have anything on me. You know why?”

  “You’re good at getting other people to do your dirty work.”

  “No. That’s something my father’s good at.”

  I turned to him. He was looking straight ahead.

  “This is not going to be a surprise to you, Robert, but Beautiful Hong Kong isn’t a completely legitimate business.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “But under me, it will be. I’m transitioning the company from a legacy of triad businesses to a socially responsible and modern corporation. I’ve already created a space for our youth. They can learn to be proud of our culture, of who they are. An awful lot of our kids are at risk for delinquency now in Chinatown, but I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know you were born here, Robert. Are you proud to be an American?”

  “Well, pride is a sin, so I’ll just say that I’m very pleased.”

  “But you know what, brother, you’re not really an American. You know what Malcolm X said? ‘Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.’”

  “You’ve read Malcolm X?”

  “Sure, I’ve read a lot! I went to the best prep school in Hong Kong. I went to Cornell University. I have an economics degree. But you know what I learned? What I know?”

  “What?”

  “I know that this country doesn’t respect us, Robert. Western civilization in general despises us, in fact. They hate how inferior our culture is. How Chinese people are backward and worship blasphemous gods.”

  “Not everybody here hates us,” I said. “In fact, you might say that we are our own worst enemies at times.”

  “I was at a wedding when I saw this white cop. I asked him about you and he readily gave me information about you. What if you had been working undercover? He would have given you up like that!” he said, snapping his fingers. “I didn’t even have to come close to threatening him! Do you think he had even a little bit of respect for you?”

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought about Peepshow—it had to be him—squealing in pain as I bent his arm behind his back.

  Ng went on. “You know what a brother would have said? He would have said nothing. You could have cut his hand off and he wouldn’t have even said your name.”

  “And what kind of brother, exactly, would be torturing another brother like that?”

  “I’m just giving you an example. I find torture repugnant, myself, but it happens. It’s the reality.”

  “This is the reality, Ng,” I said, pointing to a group of women walking by who were obviously coming back from a shift at a garment factory. They were carrying more fabric to cut and sew at home because they were paid by the piece.

  “This is what I’m trying to get you to see, Robert! Look at what America has reduced our people to! If they cared about Chinatown, we wouldn’t be living in squalor, crammed into rooms, six people sharing a plastic basin to take a shower in, shitting in a toilet that doesn’t have water! Our elderly should be taken care of and our young people should have more to do than just loiter in the street and shoot each other.”

  “I think you should be a social worker.”

  “I am a social worker! I’m fighting for change in Chinatown! Change that the Greater China Association doesn’t want to see. Change we need! They only want to enforce the status quo and keep everything safe for the tourists.”

  “Are you a communist?”

  He blinked.

  “I am not a communist! Just because I want to improve our people’s welfare doesn’t mean I’m a communist! You ever meet a pinko with an economics degree?”

  “Ng, while you were up at Cornell pushing your lunch tray through the fucking cafeteria, I was in the jungle fighting for my life. You’re a rich mob boy with working-class fantasies of upsetting the order that your old man is a part of!”

  “But we have so much more in common than not. We’re the same age, mid-twenties! Two strong young brothers of the Chinese diaspora! If I had a man like you working with me, there would be no stopping us.”

  “What do you think of illegal immigrants?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about it,” said Ng.

  “But you’re not against it.”

  “I’m not. They want to come, let ’em come. Your old man snuck over, didn’t he?”

  “He became a naturalized citizen years before I was born!”

  “Oh, yes, the Magnuson Act in 1943. Did you know that that was the first time the U.S. allowed any Asians to become naturalized citizens?”


  “That was thirty-three years ago. That’s old news in my book.”

  “Old news is history and if you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re going.” He broke off from me, but before he walked away he turned and said, “By the way, you can keep trying to keep tabs on me, but you’re not going to find anything else. Why don’t you keep an eye on your old pal at the Greater China Association? Check how clean he is!”

  “He’s a leader in the community! Okay, I’ll grant you that he’s not the nicest man in the world, but he is respected by many.”

  “In the courts and temples, maybe, but not in the rivers and the lakes.”

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

  He smiled. “See, we do have much in common!”

  I walked into my barbershop in the elbow of Doyers Street. Since I was nearly there, I figured I would get my hair taken care of ahead of the holiday.

  I walked in and the bell that was tied to the door let out a dull clang.

  “Hey!” yelled Law, the barber who has been cutting my hair for as long as I wanted it cut.

  The other barbers yelled “Hey!” at me and waved.

  “You sit down!” Law said. “I’ll be done with this guy soon. He doesn’t have that much to work with.” The seated customer looked up and wrinkled his nose at Law, who had no reaction.

  While waiting in a chair I caught up on some of the papers’ latest ruminations on the murders.

  The Communist-biased paper had an editorial about how Chinatown residents needed to join together and demand improved social services and better policing.

  The KMT-biased paper chastised those who had come over illegally instead of through proper channels. Rules must be respected and good Chinese people were always respectful.

  The Hong Kong–biased newspaper asked readers to buy more goods from Hong Kong. It would create more jobs in Hong Kong and people wouldn’t have to go to the United States to find opportunity.

  “Robert, put down those stupid papers,” said Law. “Come over here and sit down. It’s your turn.”

  He shook off a sheet, and although it still had some hair stuck to it and reeked of aftershave, he tied it around my neck. There was a cold and wet spot right under my chin. Why did I keep coming here?

  “Law, what do you think about these illegal immigrants?” I asked. The shop used to have a radio, but it went bust. Nobody had had the heart to throw it out after all the years of service it gave, though. It stayed on the shelf, getting dustier.

  “Listen,” he said in a soft whisper that I’d never heard come out of him before. “It’s okay to try to sneak in, all right? Many people have done it. But you know, if you’re going to make the trip worth your while, you’d better be skilled in one of the three knives.”

  “Are you talking about kung fu?”

  “No!” said Law. “I’m talking about cutting hair, cooking, or tailoring! Those are the three knives! If you’re skilled in one of them, you can go anywhere in the world and make a decent living. If you don’t have those skills, then you have to work shitty jobs for shitty pay for the rest of your miserable life. I have a feeling that the illegals don’t have the skills.”

  “My dad didn’t.”

  “No. He didn’t.”

  Law didn’t have to say it, but I knew he was thinking: That’s why your dad had such a miserable life. Before he killed himself.

  “Law, cut it short. I’m going to see my mom for the holiday. Make me look respectful.”

  Lonnie and I had been together a few months, but we agreed it was still too early for us to go to each other’s parents’ for holidays. You bring someone home to meet Chinese parents they’ll pull crib parts out of the closet and set it up in the living room.

  My mother had met Lonnie very briefly at an awards dinner a few months ago, but it was way too soon for me to meet Lonnie’s stepmom and dad. I haven’t yet figured out how I could shake the guy’s hand instead of breaking his jaw for beating Paul regularly.

  Lonnie’s family didn’t celebrate the Ghost Festival. As Christians, they shunned the holiday as a form of ancestor worship.

  Both Chinese Buddhists and Taoists claimed to have originated the Ghost Festival, but my mother said it came from folk religions from before China was even united. Before getting on the subway, I stopped at the Golden Door market on Canal Street and loaded up on jars and cans of food. In the housewares aisle, away from the food for the living, I picked up Hell Bank Notes and incense.

  One burns Hell Bank Notes to give loved ones money in the afterlife. Everyone goes to “hell” when they die, but if you have living relatives diligent enough to burn Hell Bank Notes on a regular basis, your account at the local Hell Bank branch should be nice and fat. Then you can buy your way out of the most excruciating torments of the afterlife and, if you have enough, buy mansions and hire servants.

  Burning Hell Bank Notes was such an ancient religious practice that over the centuries it came to be seen as secular and as culturally Chinese as stir-frying. Some Chinese Christians and Buddhists objected to the practice, the latter because it was offensive to offer the dead material goods that had brought them suffering their entire lives.

  Another thing that some Buddhists frowned upon was garlic, because it excited the senses. Eating it apparently could lead to a Buddhist monk or nun abandoning his or her celibacy vows.

  I made sure to get a plastic take-out pack of water spinach sautéed with garlic, the old man’s favorite. If my mom and I weren’t reason enough for him to materialize, then the food might do it.

  My mother lived in a brownstone past Bay Ridge in Brooklyn in a suburban Little Italy. Because she had learned English so well, she had gotten a job, years ago, sorting eighty-column cards in Midtown. It paid well and it was over the table. Now she was some sort of supervisor in the department—the only woman, she was proud to say.

  “Robert! I was trying to call you!” she yelled out even before I had gotten inside. “I was going to ask you to bring some bitter melon!”

  “Dad hated bitter melon,” I said.

  “It wasn’t for him. It was for me! I was going to cook later this week. Guess I’ll have to make do without.”

  She was trying to lay a guilt trip on me about the bitter melon and it put me in somewhat of a bad mood. I looked down at the bag I was carrying and felt the spinach sloshing around in the garlic sauce. I thought about the old woman who had cut in front of me at the take-out counter and yet gone on to complain how long the line was. I felt my grip tighten.

  Then I took a deep breath. I didn’t want this to be yet another night at my mother’s that ended with me vowing inside never to come back. I looked up at my mother and smiled.

  I had her strong nose bridge and expressive eyebrows, which she raised at me as she asked questions that she already knew the answer to. She was in her late forties and tried to come off as an Asian Jackie O. I’ll admit—it was close.

  My mother had already set up the dining room table for two people and three ghosts.

  “Why three ghosts?” I asked her.

  “I’ve been thinking that we should pay our respects to your father’s parents. We haven’t before and that’s been my mistake.”

  “Aren’t his parents still alive, Mom?”

  “I mean your father’s real parents in Toisan. They were the ones your father had been sending money to. They died during the Cultural Revolution.”

  “Yes, them. I know, I know. The parents in Hong Kong were the paper parents.” Funny how the pretend grandparents were the only ones I’d ever met.

  “Exactly, Robert. The ones on his fake documents. I talked to his biological parents only once on the phone before I left for here. We didn’t want to jeopardize your father’s position.”

  “As an illegal immigrant, you mean.”

  “Originally, yes, but by the time I came over, he was already a naturalized American citizen. He worked on a navy ship, so after the War Brides Act was passed he was ab
le to bring me over.”

  I’d heard it all before, every year at this ceremony. Next would be the bit about how he had had to pay fifteen hundred dollars for the falsified documentation.

  “Mom, I brought the spinach.”

  My mother took the bag and opened up the container.

  “He came in under the family name ‘Chin,’” she started. “He changed it back to ‘Chow’ for our marriage certificate. He had to pay two thousand dollars in 1928 for the fake paper. He was only fourteen years old.”

  “Wow, it’s two thousand this year? Talk about inflation!”

  “What are you talking about, Robert?”

  “Last year you said it was fifteen hundred.”

  “With all the interest he ended up paying, it was probably more than two thousand.”

  I could already see the amount ballooning to twenty-five hundred bucks next year.

  “An association in Hong Kong paid for it,” my mother went on. “When he made it to San Francisco he was forced to join Wah Kung, a tong affiliated with the association, and he had to wash dishes in a tong-owned restaurant.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” I muttered.

  Everybody knows about the tongs, associations formed by people who had the same family name, came from the same town, or had the same trade. They were founded to unite lonely Chinese men who had a common heritage and interests. But once some of these associations reached a critical mass, they went into organized crime, which was an inevitable step when like-minded people got together.

  “It was a really big risk he took, Robert,” said my mother. “You don’t know how hard it was.”

  Impatiently I blurted out, “It was hard because he made so many mistakes in his life, Mom!”

  “Don’t you make mistakes, too? His only problem was that he was too trustworthy.”

  She went to the pantry to pull out her nicest large plate.

  “Mom, his problem was that he never thought about us. If he had, he wouldn’t have wasted all that money gambling and whoring.”

  My mother quietly put her head down and scooped the spinach onto the nice plate.

  “That’s not who your father was,” she said. “He was a different man before.”