Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Aurora Crane had arrived first. They were her friends, her office mates, and it was their party. Raymond Ding was only a guest of her boss, who was the host of the office party. A visitor from out of town invited at the last minute. A friend of a friend in the city for only three days to do some business. When he arrived at the front door, she knew before he did that they were the only two Asians at a party. With dread she knew her boss would make a special point of introducing him to her and that one by one her friends, the loyal, would betray her and pair her with him. They would probably be introduced several times during the evening. It made sense to them. There was no real covert activity, no setup, no surprise blind date, no surprise dinner companion seated not so coincidentally next to her. She was not at home with mother meeting not so coincidentally her mother’s idea of a “nice Japanese boy.” She had a boyfriend (unfortunately in another city and not Asian and a lover none of the loyal had met and to add to the further misfortune, some knew she had moved away from him to define a future without him making it very complex in her mind, but simple in the minds of the now distrustfully loyal).

  In addition to the publication of his two novels, Homebase and American Knees (which is being adapted into a film), SHAWN WONG has edited or coedited six anthologies, including the landmark Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. He has been a writer and a teacher for over thirty years and has known the editor of this anthology, Jessica Hagedorn, during that same period, which means Wong has shared many of his significant writerly and nonwriterly coming-of-age experiences in her company or under her influence. He was born in Oakland, California, in 1949.

  Prior to the impending introductions, she wondered when they would make eye contact, when he would realize they were the only two Asians at the party. She hoped to God he wasn’t an insecure Asian male who would only talk to her. She hoped to God he wouldn’t see her as every Asian boy’s answer to the perfect woman—half white, half Asian, just enough to bring home to Mother while maintaining the white girl fantasy. This gets somewhat complex, certainly more complex than Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Aurora Crane is Eurasian Jennifer Jones. Is the Asian boy William Holden? He’d like to think so.

  When he eventually gets around to asking, “What are you?” will it be any different than any other obnoxious bore? Or would he simply be overly curious, but too polite to ask? It would be that slow realization creeping over his face, the ponderings and machinations that nestle in the eyes, the slight squint as if squinting can detect racial ancestry and blood lines. He would ask finally when she noticed he was no longer listening to her and merely watching her talk, all the while trying to decipher and calibrate the skin tone, the shape of her eyes, the color of her hair. In the past, the truly devious and ignorant would ask where she was from. A city in California was not the answer. Where are your parents from? Also from California was not the answer. Sometimes she would return the favor and ask where the interrogator’s parents were from because, ha ha, nearly everyone in Washington, D.C., was from somewhere else, a standard cliche. The truly inept (which were sometimes failed devotees of the truly devious and ignorant) would blurt out the question, “What nationality are you?” American and my parents. “What are you, you know, what race?” Was ethnicity so hard a word to use? “Oh, how wonderful to be Japanese and Irish! You’re so pretty.” At which point some D.C. matron and patron of the arts would exclaim to her friend, “Miriam, don’t you think she’s pretty? That skin coloring!” Sometimes they reach out and touch her skin without asking.

  “Don’t you think he’s pretty?” Annie, the betrayer from work, nudged Aurora. She was, of course, referring to the visitor from the Orient. “Maybe he’s a Japanese businessman in town to argue against import duty and the trade deficits, but then he’s kind of tall.”

  Aurora, without looking at him, replied, “His suit is the wrong color. Euro-trash natural shoulders olive brown, not Brooks Brothers American cut charcoal grey. Handpainted tie. West Hollywood is about as far east as this guy goes.”

  Asian people could tell she was part Asian, perhaps not part Japanese, but something. They would know at first eye contact. This eye contact thing between Asian men and Asian women was where the war began.

  This is how it happens.

  An Asian woman and an Asian man are the only two people on opposite sides of an intersection waiting to cross the street. First there’s usually one momentary point of eye contact to register race. He looks to see if he knows you or your relatives. If he doesn’t, the competition begins. The men always weaken first. They look at the traffic, check the lights, check the wristwatch, then walk, never making eye contact again. At the critical point when eye contact should occur between the only two people on the street caught between the boundaries of a crosswalk, the men chicken out and check the time again or run as if they were late. Just once she’d like to shock one of these boys and say, “Hey, home. What it is?” Whenever she was with her black friend Steve Dupree on the street and heard him say that to another black man, she would ask if he knew that man. The fact that he never did made her wonder why it wasn’t ever possible between two Asians. Was it distrust and suspicion? Was it historical animosity? Was it because Japan invaded China and Korea? Mao versus Chiang Kai-shek? Chinatown versus Japantown? Fourth generation Chinese American versus fresh off the boat?

  Since the “mysterious and exotic visitor from the east” didn’t have any Polo trademarks on his clothes, Aurora ruled out Korean and decided he was Chinese. She set out to find the most typically Chinese feature about him, but couldn’t find the usual landmarks: cheap haircut with greasy bangs falling down across the eyebrows, squarish gold rimmed glasses askew because there’s no bridge to hold them up, polyester balls on his pants with a baggy butt, a shirt tucked in way too tight, and perhaps a slab of jade on a thick 24 kt gold chain around his neck. He had none of the above except for a gift for the host and hostess in a plastic shopping bag. Please, please, Aurora thought, let it be oranges! Oh, it would be so Chinese to bring oranges. And, of course, the plastic shopping bag—Chinese Samsonite. He was made.

  She knew she was being cruel. She had to be cruel in order to steel herself for the impending introductions. Why she needed to be cruel, she wasn’t sure, but she found herself now looking for and analyzing the most un-Asian features about him. Okay, the clothes were certainly Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, all natural fiber, beautiful colors. No man dressed like that in D.C., which was a lawyer’s dark grey or navy blue and red tie town. No exceptions. Maybe on Saturdays they would walk on the wild side and wear a yellow tie. She doubted if Asian American men in West Hollywood dressed like him. That gave Aurora a clue. Okay, he was tall, nearly six feet, which gave Asian men that attitude that they’re tall enough to qualify to flirt with white women eye to eye and not have to resort to either dominance or the cleverness of their shorter counterparts with the Napoleon complex.

  “Isn’t he pretty, Ro?” Annie repeated.

  “He’s obviously got some Wonder Bread squeeze at home who dresses him.”

  “Well there’s one you don’t have to make over,” Annie said. “We deserve once in a while to find one that’s already been made over with the cute clothes, contact lenses, cute haircut, nice shoes by some other woman. Jeez, the work we put into some of these guys, then they leave us because they’re so presentable and de-polyesterized.”

  Aurora was reloading another salvo about a Chinaman shopping on Melrose Avenue in a four wheel drive Jeep Cherokee with a golden retriever, when Annie said what she always said about Aurora’s analysis of men, “Yeah, yeah, I know, we weren’t born cynical.”

  Aurora looked away when she saw her boss leading the Chinaman by the arm to the front room where she was sitting. Instead of the impending introduction she feared, she heard her boss announce, “Everybody, this is Raymond Ding from San Francisco. This is everybody.” Turning to Ding, her boss continued, “I’ll let everybody introduce themselves, and the food’s coming soon.” Th
at was it.

  When Ding surveyed the room and nodded hello, he didn’t do a double-take on Aurora, instead said hello to the group, nodded his head. Those of the loyal closest to him began a discussion of San Francisco out of which Aurora heard snatches of conversation about fog and Italian food. Maybe he thought he was too good for her.

  Aurora didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed. She was willing to give him a chance. Later, through some miscalculation on both their parts they had ended up at the food table together, each entering the dining room from different doors. She handed him a plate by the buffet. They spoke briefly about the food and exited the same separate doors. Upon re-entering the living room again by separate entrances they noticed that their seats had been taken by others. A piano bench large enough for two remained. From across the room, he made eye contact, didn’t look away, and motioned for her to share the chair.

  Brave Chinese boy, she thought.

  “Do you play?” he asked pointing with his dinner plate to the piano. He wished those weren’t his first words to her. Prop dependent, boring, and unoriginal introductory comment. Raymond suddenly felt like an interloper who sidles up to an attractive woman at a piano bar only to realize the vacant seat beside her belongs to her boyfriend only temporarily absent. Of course, he’d never do that anyway, unless the woman spoke to him first.

  Her answer was a simple truth, “No.” The intonation in her “no” closed doors, broke hearts, melted romantic inscriptions on sterling silver keepsake lockets with acid.

  He said, “Food looks good.” Prop dependent, boring, unoriginal again. Should he say something funny now like, “My how your eyes slant in this rich light. Hey, it’s tough to get that yin/yang thing just right. How about that war bride thing?”

  Aurora snaps a carrot stick in her mouth. Perhaps, Aurora thought, she should speak a little to the “Oriental” at hand just in case people were watching. “Was it Ray or Raymond?”

  “Either way is fine, but go easy on the Ding jokes.”

  “Aurora Crane.”

  Raymond smiled. He was being witty and clever in his mind. He knew without asking that her parents had named her Aurora because of the aurora borealis, a child of many colors. Perhaps her girlhood friends teased her and called her “AB” for short. She was looking away from him after her introduction as if she were bracing herself for questions about her name, but Raymond posed the questions only in his mind and smiled to himself at the answers.

  Back to back they entered conversations on opposing sides of the room. At first they spoke at the same time, each conversation drowning out the conversations on the opposite side of the room. The piano bench had a sensory induced demilitarized zone in which all touch and invasion should be avoided. But each time she laughed she leaned back touching, no, grazing him slightly. Each time after the first touch, the feeling lingered as if they were holding a flower petal between them without bruising it, or a potato chip, depending on how sentimental the touch. The touching worked its way into their conversations as each one of them paused in their own talk to eavesdrop on the other while feigning to pay attention to their own. Their touching became a way of flirting with each other. A simple touch from one would cause the other to stop their conversation, stutter over a word, be distracted. They would need this information later in order to gauge and measure the ground on which they would talk when the time came.

  The Chinese “six breaths of nature” moved between them: wind, rain, darkness, light, yin, and yang. The perfect blend of each breath of nature settles the heart, mind, and body. Indeed, if something were to begin between Raymond and Aurora, neither one of them paid much attention to the fact that it had been raining for days, it was dark, a bright piano lamp was glaring in their eyes as they spoke and each of them now were situated antagonistically back to back rather than allowing the complementary yin which is dark and feminine and the yang which is light and masculine to find a sense of place between them. But then, that was just so much Orientalism under the rug.

  He wanted to begin again. He prepared for a new beginning knowing that the conversation would eventually turn and it would include the two of them together. The piano bench’s north and south would be joined together. The longer the delay, the later the party went, the more impossible to get over this Asian thing between them. Solve the dilemma, get the facts about each other’s preference for lovers not of their own race. Nothing personal, you know. It’s an individual thing, that love thing. We can get on with it, maybe even be friends, double date to prove how comfortable we are with voicing our racial preference to each other honestly and forthrightly. How adult of us; how politically correct.

  Was she part Korean or Japanese? he wondered. Or maybe he was altogether wrong and she was native Alaskan or Indian or Latino? What a relief that would be.

  He tells her in his mind, with his back turned to her, “Let’s say we’ve just arrived here in America from a foreign country; you from Korea, Ceylon, or Mongolia, me from the Forbidden City. I say to you at the supermarket checkout line where we meet, ‘Hi, how are you?’ in broken English. You, having just learned about standing in the express lines, look down and say, in Korean, ‘You have two too many items.’ I give you my salami and oatmeal cookies because you only have four items. You buy them and leave.

  “The next time I see you, you’re taking English and Pre-Nursing classes at Seattle Central Community College. In the school cafeteria, I say, ‘Hey, how are you? What’s your major?’ You buy green Jell-O and leave.

  “The next time I see you, you’re getting an MBA degree from Kansas and dating a Jayhawk, 6910” power forward, full scholarship. He’s no walk-on. You’re his tutor. I see you in the library. I ask, ‘Would you like to read my Wall Street Journal?’ You put down your copy of Die Zeit and glare at me. I say, ‘I’m majoring in social work.’

  “The next time I see you, you’re at a dude ranch in Arizona wearing cowboy boots with your jade. I resist calling you ‘slim.’

  “The next time I see you, you’re buying leopard print black tights at Bloomingdale’s. You’re wearing a black suede dress with fringe. You’ve changed your name from something with too many syllables to Connie. ‘How about some espresso, Connie?’ I ask. You look down at the women’s socks in my hands and I explain, ‘I buy women’s socks because I have small feet.’

  “The next time I see you, you’re trading in your Toyota and buying a Ford Bronco 4WD equipped with monster mudder tires and a chrome brush guard. Safest car in America. You’ll never get in it with that skirt, I think. ‘What’s she got under the hood?’ I ask. You peel out in reverse.

  “The next time I see you, you’re anchoring the news on television. ‘How’s the weather and what’s the score?’ I ask.”

  He feels Aurora rise from the piano bench, glances up at her as she gathers some empty plates to take to the kitchen. When she returns someone else has taken her place on the piano bench. Raymond and Aurora’s eyes meet. He wants her to come and sit on his lap, sit on the floor beside him with the arm casually draped across his leg, share a glass of wine. Eye contact, then it’s gone.

  He rises from the bench because there isn’t a place for her to sit, makes the same motion he made when they first shared the bench. She shakes her head and points at him, then at the kitchen. Follow me.

  In the kitchen they talk for nearly an hour. No one interrupts them because they’re the only two Asians at the party. Private and natural. There’s an occasional “oh, I’m glad you two have met.” Guarding against any further cleverness, he withholds anymore prop dependent glib comments and she finds out he’s actually a little shy. He doesn’t squint to determine her ethnicity. She doesn’t leave him guessing. Their conversation is complementary. She offers information and he fills in the blanks without asking embarrassing questions. “I’d like to study Japanese at a language school in Kyoto,” she tells him. He responds by asking if her mother is Issei or Nisei. She says she’s Nisei and that her Irish American father me
t her while buying strawberries from the family farm.

  She finds herself not needing to explain herself or her identity. Twice she reaches out and pulls him toward her to keep him from backing into someone carrying a tray of food. When the danger passes each time, he retreats a step. Perhaps he should have read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

  In just this hour of talk, Raymond sees that Aurora is not the kind of woman who places stuffed animals in her car or would wear a dress with a zipper from the neckline to the hemline. She doesn’t buy Tup perware.

  Two days later, this is how she made him kiss her. He was leaning against a column at the top of the stairs on the portico of the Lincoln Memorial. She walked toward him saying something he couldn’t hear and leaned next to him, covering his arm with her back. She nestled. He put his arm around her waist. She denies this to this day claiming her eyesight isn’t that good and she simply misjudged how close she was to him, yet at the time she didn’t move away. They kissed at the top of the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, at lunch time, in full view of school children on a field trip from North Carolina. He suddenly felt too conspicuously Chinese. She held him close and he kissed her on her neck just under her left ear which was exactly the right thing to do. She didn’t breathe until she whispered in his ear, “Public and demonstrative Asian love. A rare sight.”

  One of the little southern white children asked their teacher, “Are they making a movie?”

  Three years later, in San Francisco, they were packing their separate things and parting.

  Raymond watches Aurora walk across the room and sit on the floor in front of the dresser. She pulls open a drawer and begins to sort through it, placing her things in a box. Raymond remembers their first kiss at the Lincoln Memorial was followed by several weeks of absence as Raymond returned to San Francisco. In the space between them they flirted, she scolded, he reminisced about their delicate kiss, she changed the subject, he probed politely the boundaries of their intimate talk, and she questioned his motives. With each answer, Raymond discovered the power of his voice in her ear. And with each answer he moved the boundaries closer to her heart.