Snakes Can't Run

by Ed Lin

  “What are you going to do there, Winnie?”

  “Well, somebody has to head the family business.”

  I stopped to see Mr. Tin at the Greater China Association’s office, but I was held at the reception desk. He came down instead of letting me up.

  “Mr. Tin, how is Don? The last time I saw him he was in the ambulance—”

  He broke in on me. “You son of a bitch! I trusted you to look after my son and he ends up in the emergency room!”

  “He was examined and released!”

  “I’ve sent Don to live in a good Shanghainese community in London. It was a mistake to ever let him live among the lowly Cantonese!”

  “You’re keeping Don from getting the help that he needs, Mr. Tin.”

  “It’s my business, not yours!”

  “Why did you pay to have those two bodies sent back to China?”

  “It was a decent thing to do, so of course you wouldn’t understand why, Robert! Historically, the final duty of any association to their members was to send bodies back to China for an honorable burial in the family cemetery. I wanted to see those two men treated with respect after what they had to endure here.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Tin.”

  “Stop calling me Tin! My name is T’ien, you peasant! If you ever bother me again, you’re going to end up worse off than a dead dog with three legs!”

  To confirm that I had ruined my reputation in all quarters of Chinatown, I went next to Together Chinese Kinship’s office. Mr. Song jumped out of his chair and charged me, stopping just short of my nose.

  “You son of a bitch!” he yelled. “You got me roped into this snakehead bullshit! All the Chinese newspapers have hanged me along with the Fukienese community on the editorial pages! Even the Communist paper is distancing itself from me!”

  “You didn’t break any laws, Mr. Song. You’re not being charged with any crimes whatsoever.”

  “My reputation was torn apart by being investigated by the INS!”

  “They said they didn’t find anything! You’re clean!”

  “But they were here! Now everybody thinks I’m good at hiding things—and smuggling people!”

  I heard footsteps overhead and glanced up the staircase.

  “Don’t bother looking for Stephanie!” Mr. Song said. “I sent her back to Connecticut already to keep her out of reach from you!”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you looking at her! Like a dog drooling after meat!”

  I met Izzy for a sandwich at Katz’s on Houston Street.

  After I told him about everything, he said, “It’s tough.”

  “Looking back,” I said, “maybe I should have given you a call while this was all going on.”

  “Why?” Izzy was the kind of guy who liked to grunt while eating, and his grunts were louder than his voice.

  “So you could have advised me. I mean, I got a zero on your test, so I obviously need some help.”

  “I would have listened,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Don’t know if I could have helped.”

  “Well, from what I’ve told you, is there anything I could have done better?”

  “Different, sure. But not better.”

  “Things could have been way better! The guy didn’t have to die!”

  “But you’re okay. That’s not bad.”

  “Do you think you guys’ll find the guys who killed Ng?” I was referring to Izzy’s Manhattan South crew.

  “Naw. Nobody talks. No media pressure. Have to nail FALN first, anyway.”

  I squeezed mustard on one side of my plate and thumped out some ketchup on the other side for my fries.

  “Izzy, everybody in Chinatown hates me now.”

  “The leaders hate you. Not the people.” He smiled. “You helped the people and the leaders resent it.”

  “I’ve basically tried to do the right thing, but I’m worried that I might be making everything worse.”

  Izzy shook his head and sipped from his can of black-cherry soda. “You’re young.”

  I took Vandyne to Penn Station to catch a train to Philly.

  “How long are you going to stay out there?” I asked.

  “Few days, I guess. Been a while since I’ve had time for my momma. Rose knows where to reach me, so she can if she wants to.”

  “How’s that going?”

  He threw up his hands. “You tell me. You haven’t talked to Rose, have you, partner?”

  “Naw. Chock full o’Nuts was the last time.”

  “It’s all right if you do.”

  We slapped hands hard and hugged.

  I didn’t get to see Eddie before he went back to San Francisco, but I promised to visit him sometime. He told me on the phone that he had found the guy who knew my dad from the association days. The former association hall was now cut up into a mixed-use building and my father’s old friend sold slippers on the ground floor. Eddie sent my father’s articles by Express Mail. The old man had everything in a locked box, and out of respect Eddie hadn’t gone through the contents.

  The FALN thing was still going on, so I had the squad room to myself when the package came in.

  I took out my keys and cut the packing tape. Eddie had put some San Francisco Chinatown postcards on top. It looked less crowded and spread out than New York. On the back of a picture of Miss Chinatown 1975 he had written MY GIRLFRIEND!

  Under a layer of crumpled newspapers I found the box. It was disappointingly light. A key was taped to the plastic handle.

  I unlocked it and opened the lid. There wasn’t much inside. On top was a copy of an unevenly folded certificate of identity issued to Chinese people from the Department of Labor. The picture attached to it was the same one my mother and I had burned money to. The certificate identified my father by the ridiculous name of Ah Chin Fong. It was his paper name plus a stray character.

  A scrap of paper recorded everything he had eaten in a particular week. Pork in shrimp sauce, preserved bean curd, and pickles figured in many entries. This was probably why he hated pork in shrimp sauce, preserved bean curd, and pickles by the time I was around.

  Under that was some sheet music that featured pictures of Al Jolson on the covers. I wasn’t aware that he had performed outside of blackface.

  At the bottom was what I thought was a diary. As I flipped through the pages, it became apparent that the book was a ledger.

  I turned it sideways to read the columns. It was undoubtedly my father’s handwriting, and while it was mostly numbers, small notations left no doubt as to what the book recorded.

  “Paper identity $2,000, boat travel $200,” was the column head for most of the entries. The names of the people were written in code—“long fingers,” “old duck,” “Mr. Brown”—and apparently they paid weekly increments of five to ten dollars.

  Most had a black line drawn through with my father’s seal stamped at the ends of the entries, running pages and years down the line. Several accounts were ominously cut short.

  I shut the book and pushed it into my bottom drawer and kicked it shut. I braced myself on my desktop with slippery, sweaty hands. My father had been a precursor to snakeheads like Ng. He must have made huge amounts of money, but I was at a loss to explain why my family, when I grew up, was barely scraping by.

  My phone rang. Lonnie told me the Presswire interview went great and that she thought she had the job. I don’t remember what I said.

  27

  September 9, 1976

  IT WAS LONNIE’S LAST DAY AT THE BAKERY AND A TON OF PEOPLE had turned out to see her off. She struggled to hand me a box of moon cakes to bring to my mother’s house for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It was so crowded I could feel other people’s heartbeats.

  “Robert, it’s crazy!” she shouted.

  “You’re going to miss this!” I yelled back.

  “Yes, but I’m ready for a change!”

  The cash register was invisible under taped red envelopes that were stuf
fed with five- or ten-dollar bills. Most of the envelopes had scribbled notes on them reading: “Good luck, Lonnie!”

  The bakery was getting a little too pushy and we only managed to touch fingertips before I had to go.

  I stopped by the toy store, but it was also packed. The door wouldn’t even shut.

  I banged on the glass and waved to Paul and the midget. Paul gave me the thumbs-up. The midget nodded at me.

  My mother greeted me at the door in a Hawaiian blouse.

  “Where did you get that from, Mom?” I asked as I stepped in.

  “I went to Hawaii a few months ago. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I don’t remember you saying. I would have remembered. Did you go by yourself?”

  “I went with a friend from work.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Robert, what are you thinking? Of course a woman! Just a girls’ trip!”

  I brought the moon cakes to the kitchen and undid the red plastic tie.

  “Mom, do you think of your husband often?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “He was a real swell guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Don’t slander your father on a holiday . . . or any other day!”

  “I didn’t tell you, Mom, but I got ahold of some of Dad’s old stuff from San Francisco.”

  She smiled as wide as she could, but there was fear in her eyes.

  “That’s wonderful!” she said. “How did you manage to find it?”

  “I have a friend who works in the police department out there.”

  She swallowed. “What sort of things did you find?”

  “I found some sheet music and a funny little book in there.”

  “Was it Al Jolson’s music?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. He had always wanted to learn how to play Jolson’s songs. He liked that it was happy music. Never got around to it. Never got the piano, either.”

  “You know what was in that book, Mom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was a record of people making payments to the association. People who were illegally brought in.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have the book in my desk down in the squad room at the police station!”

  “Burn it!” she yelled. “He should have destroyed it years ago. But he needed it in case future disputes came up. He was always scared the authorities would find it. He just never imagined that it would be his own son.”

  “Dad was sneaking people into the country and exploiting them, wasn’t he?”

  “It was a complicated situation, Robert. People in the association had a number of paper slots to bring in fake sons from China. The association helped to broker between buyers and sellers. Your father made sure that once the paper son was through payments were kept up.”

  “What happened if they didn’t have the money?”

  “Then your father would let them pay late or they would provide goods in place of that.”

  “What happened if they couldn’t do that?”

  “Sometimes your father would even make the payment for them.”

  “What about after that?”

  “I don’t know! A lot of things could have happened!”

  “Did he have people killed, Mom?”

  “He made sure that everybody paid off their debts!”

  “But some people couldn’t pull it off, right?”

  “Almost everybody did!”

  “That’s still not everybody! You told me that a dead Chinese body would just get rolled into a ditch and buried, no questions asked!”

  “Robert!”

  “Did he shoot people, stab them, or strangle them?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this!”

  “How many people did Dad turn into ghosts?”

  “Your! Father! Did! The! Best! He! Could!” she yelled, her face as red as a lit paper lantern.

  We were both furious and ready to bite each other’s heads off. I pointed at the box of moon cakes.

  “Mom,” I said as calmly as I could muster. “That box of cakes was a present from Lonnie and it’s not going to waste. Now put some tea on and we’re going to sit down and eat them all and have a happy Mid-Autumn Festival!”

  “All right, Robert.”

  My mother told me most of my dad’s story in a detached, matter-of-fact sort of way as we ate slices of moon cakes. I was sure she was still leaving stuff out.

  Nobody eats moon cakes because they taste good. In fact, I couldn’t tell the difference among the date, red-bean, and lotus-seed fillings. It was all dense and impossible to chew and swallow without some hot tea to help it down.

  Some of the cakes have a hard-boiled egg yolk in the center that represents the moon. Why you’d want to eat the moon, I don’t know. I could have asked my mother, but I wasn’t going to interrupt her for that.

  My father’s pathetic little tale would have made a great holiday wire-service story for Lonnie. Yet I didn’t quite know how to tell her—or anybody else—about all this.

  He had made his association rich out west by exploiting the illegals. The elders were so impressed they sent him off to New York with a chunk of money and a deed to their San Francisco building to secure a loan for a building on Mott Street. It was going to be the association’s East Coast headquarters.

  The New York associations had gotten wind that a potential competitor was planning on setting up shop in town, but instead of simply shooting my father, they killed him with flattery.

  “A big shot from California!” they called him. “A king from the West!”

  They brought him out to eat and set him up with tabs at the bars. He also had generous accounts in the gambling dens and beds at the brothels.

  My father’s sweet ride in New York didn’t last long. Soon he had lost everything in the gambling dens—even the deed to the San Francisco association’s office. Somebody flew out there and took it over, establishing a West Coast office for one of the New York associations.

  On top of that, my father had worked himself heavily into debt. Someone took pity on him and got him two jobs washing dishes and waiting tables to work off the debt. He was still in debt fifteen years later when World War II rolled around. He enlisted in the segregated navy and served food and coffee on an aircraft carrier for two years.

  After his discharge, he flew to Hong Kong and got my mother under the War Brides Act.

  When they got to New York, they found that his debt had continued to accrue interest while he had been away. He was almost back to where he had started.

  My mother did all she could to prop him up. Working for Americans. Cooking and cleaning. Giving him a son. The debts were eventually paid off, but the sour man who was left was beyond redemption. He was already pickled by the poisonous choices he’d made in life.

  My father was a snakehead who couldn’t handle his own bite.

  On the subway ride back to Chinatown I looked around at the twisting lines of the spray-painted ceilings, walls, and seats. I had the whole car to myself, which wasn’t really a luxury. The subway car jerked around and sometimes the lights went out. I felt like a lone crayon bouncing around inside a marked-up box.

  Getting out of the Canal Street station, I heard a raucous celebration up on the surface world complete with screaming, fireworks, and loud drumming. Mid-Autumn Festival was usually fairly restrained, with people choking down moon cakes with their unfortunate friends and family.

  I came up the stairs and found the streets so crowded that all I could see at first was black hair and raised hands.

  “Mao’s dead! Mao’s dead!” the crowd yelled.

  The Greater China Association was shooting off alternating rounds of fireworks and firecrackers. I struggled to walk down Mott Street.

  Above me people were leaning out of windows, shaking KMT flags like they had bugs on them.

  “You see that?” an old man said to the grandson on his shoulders. “That’s the real flag of China! It’s g
oing to be flying in Beijing before I die! The Communists are finished!”

  I brushed off burned scraps of firecracker paper from my head and shoulders.

  I made my way through crowded pro-KMT Chinatown and through the empty blocks of lit windows in pro-Communist Chinatown to get to the place that I call home.

  Acknowledgments

  FIRST OF ALL, I WISH TORRENTIAL RAINS OF LOVE UPON MY UNIVERSAL partner and first reader, Cindy Cheung.

  Sunyoung Lee, you are wonderful in every way.

  My agent Kirby Kim, you’re the man!

  My editor Diana Szu, you’re the woman!

  All respect to clans and extensions of Kaya, Cheng, Cheung, Kim, Lin, and Liu.

  Detective Yu Sing Yee, NYPD (retired), and Detective Thomas Ong, NYPD (retired), thank you for letting me bust in on you again.

  The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University granted me access to their archives. You are awesome and beautiful people: Jack Tchen, Laura Chen-Schultz, Alexandra Chang, and I-Ting Emily Chu.

  Heavy bows and respectable gifts to Wanda Cheung, Chez Ong, Corky Lee, Molly Cain, Mayumi Takada, Neela Banerjee, Chris Bowe, Harvey Dong, Karen Maeda Allman, Sarah Onufer, and Eugene Shih.

  Epigraph from Xunzi: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson.

  About the Author

  ED LIN, a native New Yorker of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards and is an all-around standup kinda guy. His books include Waylaid and This Is a Bust, both published by Kaya Press in 2002 and 2007, respectively. Snakes Can’t Run and One Red Bastard, which both continue the story of Robert Chow set in This Is a Bust, were published by Minotaur Books. His latest book, Ghost Month, a Taipei-based mystery, was published by Soho Crime in July 2014. Lin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and son.

  www.edlinforpresident.com

  www.facebook.com/edlinforpresident

  www.twitter.com/robertchow

  www.myspace.com/edlinforpresident

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