Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Well, except for last summer when His Highness and the Pretender scored a great victory. Granted I did help their cause by throwing up and then passing out before I could reach the stairway to my room. Their noses must have been offended by the strong smell of alcohol that my vomit released into the room. I can imagine that their barking then reached a particularly persuasive pitch. Pépé does have a tendency to emit a eunuch-worthy howl when he is in pain or when there have been too many days of rain. I remember groping for the stairs one moment, and then the next I am being doused with water for the second time that night or, maybe, it was already morning. I looked over at the pool of vomit on the floor and nearby pair of sandals standing slightly apart. “Bin, you will take the train tomorrow. GertrudeStein and I will take the vegetables with us in the automobile,” said a voice that, I am afraid, like the sandals, belonged to Miss Toklas. The sandals then padded away, gently slapping the tile floors of the dark house.

  The next day, I walked around the house, somber and silent, closing the shutters and putting cloth over the furniture. The last of the summer vegetables caught a ride back to Paris with my Mesdames. Basket’s ears were flapping. Pépé’s were twitching. The usual traveling circus took off in puffs of dust as GertrudeStein waved, “Good-bye, Thin Thin Bin.” Miss Toklas was in no mood for pleasantries and kept her hands on her lap.

  Good-bye, GertrudeStein.

  Really, Madame, what was I supposed to do in Bilignin? It was never part of our original bargain. I spend my months there and never, never see a face that looks like mine, except for the one that grows gaunt in the mirror. In Paris, GertrudeStein, the constant traffic of people at least includes my fellow asiatiques. And while we may never nod at one another, tip our hats in polite fashion, or even exchange empathy in quick glances, we breathe a little easier with each face that we see. It is the recognition that in the darkest streets of the city there is another body like mine, and that it means me no harm. If we do not acknowledge each other, it is not out of a lack of kindness. The opposite, GertrudeStein. To walk by without blinking an eye is to say to each other that we are human, whole, a man or a woman like any other, two lungfuls of air, a heart pumping blood, a stomach hungry for home-cooked food, a body in the constant search for the warmth of the sun.

  GertrudeStein, in Bilignin you and Miss Toklas are the only circus act in town. And me, I am the asiatique, the sideshow freak. The farmers there are childlike in their fascination and in their unadorned cruelty. Because of your short-cropped hair and your, well, masculine demeanor, they call you “Caesar.” Miss Toklas, they dub “Cleopatra” in an ironic tribute to her looks and her companionship role in your life. As for your guests who motor into Bilignin all summer long, they are an added attraction. Last summer, the farmers especially enjoyed the painter who hiked through their fields with clumps of blue paint stuck in his uncombed hair. There was also a bit of commotion over the young writer who wore a pair of lederhosen to walk Basket up and down the one street of that village. As for me, the farmers there are used to me by now. Only when they are very drunk do they forget themselves. At the grape gathering this year, one of them asked, “Did you know how to use a fork and a knife before coming to France?” That was followed by “Will you marry three or four asiatique wives?” Then a usually quiet farmer, a widower who lives alone with his dog, which he claims is more sweet-tempered than his now departed wife, asked, “Are you circumcised?” I looked around at my hosts and then up at the harvest moon. Why do they always ask this question? I wondered. I could only assume that their curiosity about my male member is a by-product of their close association with animal husbandry. Castrating too many sheep could make a man clinical and somewhat abrupt about such things, I thought. The morning after, they never recall asking me this question. In a matter of a few short hours, everyone in that village loses their memory. Everyone except me. Believe me, I have tried. But no matter how much I drink, I am still left with their voices, thick with alcohol, and their faces burnt raw by the sun.

  MS. PAC-MAN RUINED MY GANG LIFE

  Ka Vang

  Mandy stole my boyfriend, Tiny. The RCB, or the Red Cambodian Bloods, called him Tiny because he stood at six feet with iron arms. He was big for a Khmer. Everyone respected him because of his size, except me. I didn’t like Tiny because, well, he was tiny, about the length of a fortune cookie and as thick as a Bic pen.

  A Puerto Rican mama, Mandy had yellow fever. Every three months, an Asian brother passed her to another like a coat that had been worn, but lost its appeal. She met up with Tiny at a party that I didn’t attend because I was working. Within minutes, Mandy was wrapped around Tiny tighter than a bun around a hot dog.

  Being dumped didn’t bother me at all. Well, maybe just a bit. But Tiny was no trophy to be fought over. He didn’t care that his father was killed in a Khmer Rouge labor camp because he wore glasses, or that his mother was raped by boys his age when Pol Pot’s people came to his village. The killing fields were the streets of south Minneapolis for him. Tiny was only interested in getting high and getting laid, and it didn’t have to be in that order.

  KA VANG is an award-winning Hmong writer born in 1975 on a CIA military base in Laos just days before the country fell to Communism. She came with her family to the United States in 1980, and was formerly the first Hmong reporter for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and the Chicago Tribune. She studied political science at the University of Minnesota, as well as literature and theater at the Imperial College in London, England, and African American history at Xavier University in New Orleans. Her writing addresses many aspects of historical and contemporary life in the Hmong community, drawing upon both traditional folklore and modern imagery to create a vivid record of her people’s experiences.

  But, when you live the life of a gangsta girl, a woman stealing your man, particularly if she was from a rival gang, was a major sign of DISRESPECT, and therefore a serious justification for war.

  “What about your rep?” my home girls implored, trying to convince me to jump Mandy. “Gurl, if I waz you, I’d cap her ass.”

  “It ain’t like that,” I replied, pushing down a hand made up into a sign of a gun.

  It had been a while since our last gang fight and now my girls were itching to do damage. Mandy suddenly emerged as a convenient target. Last night, we jumped two black bitches for cutting us off on University Avenue. Like a scene out of a bad seventies car flick, we chased them down, trying to run them off the road until they pulled over somewhere between Snelling and Vandalia. Getting out of their beat-up Oldsmobile, they look like typical ghetto holes with cheap gold shimmering on their ears, fingers and necks. The first girl reminded me of Lil’ Kim, short and flamboyant and the second, well, she was just plain ugly. But there were five of us and only two of them.

  Nikki, my best friend, did a pretend karate kick she saw in a movie just to scare them as we approached cursing and threatening. She loved to perpetuate the myth that all Asians knew kung fu. We jumped on them with our brass knuckles and razor blades, and left them bleeding by the side of the road.

  “I don’t want to throw down, at least not for him,” I told Nikki as we sat on my bedroom floor. “His father was killed by Pol Pot’s regime and he thinks that stands for a specialized Khmer joint!”

  “Cindy, you are the only one who cares about this shit,” said Nikki, twisting her head in a circle. “Besides, you’re Hmong, not Khmer, so why the fuck do you care? This is Saint Paul, not Southeast Asia. Think about the now, the hea! You can’t let any ol’ hole steal your MAN!”

  Her fingers were in my face, accusing me of not protecting my property, our property. She made it clear that we would go to war. In a way, being in a gang is a lot like being in a democracy, the majority is right even when it becomes tyrannical.

  “All right! Tonight at Louis’s Billiard, her ass is grass!” I screamed, surprised by the hardness in my voice. Already my heart was hardening and my emotions evaporating so I could bring myself to hurt someone
, even take a life.

  We called our homeboys and told them we needed backup. About five of us gathered at my house in the late afternoon, and started to plan our war strategy. We brought every scissors, hammer, screwdriver, nail and tool we found in our fathers’ toolboxes and wrapped them in duct tape so our fingerprints wouldn’t be on the weapons if the cops ever got a hold of them.

  Next we put tape on the gun. The one gun we all shared, which I was still holding from the last time we shot a Laotian girl for looking at Nikki the wrong way.

  Sam, our backer who had a beef with Tiny’s gang, picked us up at seven and took us to a gas station where we changed ten dollars into quarters and divided them among the five of us. The change came in handy if the cops came and we had to flee the scene on foot. That way, we could call home base, Sam’s celli, from a gas station to be picked up. We had partners to run with just in case someone was shot or needed help. It wasn’t the invasion of Normandy, but it was a scheme that worked. My only concern was that Louis’s was located on a hill and it was January in Minnesota. The snow and ice were the unseen enemy.

  We got to Louis’s before Mandy and Tiny. I didn’t see fear in my girls, and they didn’t see fear in me. But my right toe covered beneath the thick sock twitched from anxiety at the thought of breaking open a head like a coconut with my bare hands. Only one part, an unseen part, feared. My mouth was foul and my soul had enough hate to turn a man into stone like Medusa, but this was reality and not a myth.

  I played my favorite old-school video game, Ms. Pac-Man, to shake off any doubts. I pretended the ghosts were Mandy and Tiny, and I was chomping them up to be stronger. Chomping away, first the cherries, strawberry, and then the banana, which meant I reached the highest level of the game.

  “Damn!”

  “Whussup, second thoughts?”

  “No. This is my highest score and I’m dead. Hey, can you spare me a quarter?”

  “But the quarters are for—”

  “Now, three-two-one! Nikki, please! I need that quarter. I’ve got to beat this game.”

  She hesitantly handed me a quarter. Thirty seconds later she handed me another quarter, and another.

  “That’s enuff, gurl! You should be keeping an eye on the door unless you want Mandy to come up in hea and blow your brains into the machine. Your back is towards the door!”

  “Thought you got my back?”

  The clicking sounds of billiard balls hitting each other and rolling to the pockets faded into the darkness when Mandy and Tiny arrived with some of Tiny’s gang members.

  He took one look at me and motioned his crew to exit. They were gone and there would be no fight. I turned back to the machine, back to defeating Ms. Pac-Man, a truly worthy opponent.

  But it wasn’t over for my friends. They crowded around me with their smeared lipstick mouths yapping and gawking at me to pursue Mandy and Tiny. Like a mindless zombie, I headed towards the door. My hands slipped into my jean pocket for the scissors. Walking into the cold Saint Paul night from the musky billiard hall, my excited breath formed a line of smoke from my mouth to the dry sky. Mandy and Tiny were about to get into their car when I screamed their names.

  “Come over here!”

  Tiny walked towards me like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. Mandy followed closely behind.

  “Is Mandy your new girl?”

  “Yeah,” he said in his typical slow drawl.

  “Why’d you dump me?”

  “’Cos.”

  “’Cause what?”

  “’Cos you’re a crazy hole. Woman, I don’t want no girl who’s gonna be in my face, riding my ass about getting a job, fighting for my rights as a color man. I just don’t care ’cos I just wanna have fun. And lately, you haven’t been fun. You changed . . .”

  It was about the sex. For men, it’s about the G-thang. I knew I should have placed more of a priority on that, but I really didn’t care for it.

  My home girls urged me in Hmong to hit Mandy and they would follow. One of Tiny’s hangers-on, Joe, got all tough and stepped up.

  “Why yo bitches in my boy’s face?”

  “This is between the girls,” said Sam, who cocked the gun in his pocket loudly.

  “Yo, like you said, um, it’s between the girls,” replied a frightened Joe.

  Nikki got tired of the rhetoric and took out a screwdriver from her pocket. She stabbed Mandy in the chest with it. Mandy let out a howl as Nikki drilled it into her coat and deeper. The next moments happened so fast that it is hard to explain all the details. I followed Nikki’s lead and thrust the scissor into Mandy’s stomach. The other girls hammered Mandy with their fists and weapons. But she was tough. Her hard fist slammed into my face and back. We were like bees attacking her and she was swatting us off.

  I stopped and saw Tiny’s worried face. He was too selfish to truly care for Mandy, but he didn’t like an unfair fight. Tiny couldn’t lift a finger to help Mandy for fear of Sam shooting him and his homies. But I still don’t think he would have interfered even if he had a gun. He couldn’t risk going to war with Sam, at least, not over a woman.

  I tried yanking the scissor out of Mandy, but it was caught in something, maybe her coat, or skin? After three or four tries, I managed to pull it out and slashed her across the face.

  Mandy laid in the ground moaning in agony. A circle of blood formed on the snow underneath her. We took turns kicking Mandy until we heard police sirens in the distance.

  “Let’s go!” Nikki said.

  We dropped our weapons and scattered. Nikki and I, who were partners, started running down the hill into an unlit alley along University Avenue. I slipped and rolled, and twisted my ankle. Pain shot through my leg as I tried to stand up. Limping down through the alley, I couldn’t keep up with Nikki.

  “Whassup with your foot?”

  “Sprained ankle,” I huffed.

  The sirens got closer. The Five-O must have seen us run into the alley.

  “Into the garbage bin before it’s too late,” she said.

  Nikki, who was more athletic, pushed me into a Dumpster behind a Vietnamese restaurant on University Avenue. My face landed on a pile of old pho noodles. It took me three years to eat noodles again. The Dumpster reeked with the rudest, most obnoxious odor, which penetrated my clothes, hair and skin. Nikki jumped in and crawled to the other side.

  The siren came closer, but as the squad car approached it was turned off. We heard the wheels of the car on the snow. Silently and slowly it stalked us. I expected the lips of the bin to open and blinding lights from a flashlight to shine on my face. My parents would be disappointed with me again when they came to pick me up from juvenile hall. My mother would cry and my father would threaten to kill me. Then it dawned on me that I had just turned eighteen, so I wouldn’t get off as easy. I had forgotten about my birthday, which raised the stakes.

  We waited in the bin for hours, not saying a word. Not even when I felt a million small and slimy creatures crawling up my arms. After a while I could make out Nikki’s large watery eyes in the dark. Then I saw her doing the same thing I was, slowly picking off the maggots from her body. My right ankle throbbed with pain, but I couldn’t move to rub it, worried that I would give away our hiding place.

  Were the police waiting for us to emerge like filthy pigs from the pen? Maybe they wanted to play a joke on us and the entire gang strike force was waiting for us to appear.

  But there were no lights, no handcuffs, and no police dogs, only our shadows as we climbed out of the garbage bin.

  I vomited all the way to the nearest gas station. We found a pay phone, but it was broken, so we walked to another station about a half a mile away. Afraid that the cops were still looking for us, we hid in doorways as cars drove by. The ice and cold made it difficult for the both of us to move faster.

  “I think gangs have it easier in Cali,” I said trying to make light of our situation. Nikki was not amused. I wondered if Mandy was dead. Would Tiny still find her pretty wit
h that scar I made on her left cheek?

  Nikki was becoming increasingly frustrated and took out a pack of smokes. I knew she thought I had let my home girls down by my unwillingness to jump Mandy. I had become useless.

  She took out a cig and placed it in her mouth without lighting it up. She was trying to quit.

  When we got to the second pay phone, we realized we were out of quarters.

  “Where are they?” she screamed.

  “In the Ms. Pac-Man game.”

  “Cindy? Why did you do that? How will we reach Sam now!”

  “I forgot. I had a good game,” I said defensively. “Look, I never told you to give me all of your quarters!”

  Reeking like a bad Vietnamese restaurant with my ankle sprained, I knew it was the last gang fight for me. I had turned eighteen, and would no longer get a slap on the hand if I were caught. Tiny was right, my interests changed. But more importantly, I had changed. The role of being a gangsta girl was becoming too narrow for all that I wanted to do with my life. Even if Tiny didn’t care about his future, I did about mine.

  “I think this is it for me,” I turned to Nikki and said.

  Somehow she wasn’t surprised.

  “It’s about time. I always knew you didn’t have it in you. I wondered how long you’d last. I’ve got a bad habit that I am also trying to quit so I understand, but the others won’t.”

  “I can take care of myself.”