by Robert Daley
“You don’t talk Chinese like an American,” conceded Quong grudgingly. He was trying to sound tough, one adult conceding a point to another adult. “You talk like us.”
“I was fifteen when I came to this country,” said Luang. “Same age as you.” The memories were still sharp. Year by year the pain got duller of course, but when remembered it still hurt, the way a broken bone could still hurt long after it had healed. “I was homesick for China every day. Sometimes I walked along the streets crying.”
Luang’s pain must have shown on his face. The child saw it. His eyes went to the floor, and his chin quivered. “Then you know what it’s like.”
“Yeah.” The vivid trauma of being fifteen. It was like remembering a car crash. One could still feel oneself going through the windshield. Fifteen was an age when a boy was more insecure, more vulnerable, and therefore more conservative than he would ever be again. He had discovered the real world, the one outside the home, its cruel rhythms, its harsh tones. Though shocked, he did not desire to change it. He did not know it could be changed. He desired only to adopt protective coloration so as to survive. Only the approval of his peers, it seemed, would save him. He wanted this desperately. He wanted it every day, every hour. He needed it more than food. He could not live without it.
“In classrooms I didn’t understand a word,” said Luang. All this was more than fifteen years ago, but he flinched from it as if from a blow. “School was so incredibly boring.” True, but the least of it. After school was when a boy got his threshold of pain raised. How could you be accepted by your peers when you were Chinese in an American school and did not speak the language? It was impossible, but you hoped for it anyway, day after day.
“You feel so stupid,” confessed Quong. “All the other kids look at you and you know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking you’re stupid.” He was trying to describe emotions that were so intense and immediate as to become for him indescribable. It was like asking a boxer to describe the blow that had stunned him. The boy was only fifteen, and it was like asking him to explain digestion, or sleep. The subject, though entirely normal, was too complex. At thirty-two, thought Luang, the answers would be only slightly easier to come by.
In his chair beside the desk young Quong was leaning forward, almost smiling, almost crying, on the edge of elation as well, thinking he had found a sympathetic listener at last.
I’ve got him, thought Luang, and immediately he became depressed. I don’t care about this kid, he reminded himself. My one and only job here is to nail the undertaker, the Cho Kun. He said: “And a year or so later I got interested in girls. I didn’t go to this school. The school I went to in San Francisco was outside of Chinatown. There were no Chinese girls. The American girls wouldn’t look at me.”
“I’m interested in girls, venerable sir,” said the boy eagerly. Luang noted the ‘venerable sir.’ Surliness was entirely gone. Chinese politeness was back in place. “But most of the Chinese girls around here were born here. They talk English to each other, not Chinese. They only want to make fun of me.”
How like a young girl Quong was, Luang thought, reaching out to his supposed guidance counselor the way a girl reached out to a new boyfriend, timid, tentative - she had been hurt so often in the past. There was no equivalent relationship among males except perhaps for this one, a boy seeking a surrogate father.
Talking his way into the school proved easier for Luang than talking his way out. When he had sent Quong back to class, Mr. Goldfarb invited him into the principal’s office. Goldfarb wanted to chat.
The white-haired educator evidently took him for a scholar, having learned that you could not judge a Chinese by his poverty or his clothes. Most Chinese were poor, and Chinese scholars, though highly honored by other Chinese, were usually among the poorest. Luang’s threadbare business suit was as reassuring to Goldfarb as to most of Chinatown.
Goldfarb had long realized that the Jews and the Chinese held the same values, he said. Same clannishness. Same reverence for learning and the arts, for hard work.
He stroked his white mustache and chuckled. “I understand the Chinese are sometimes called the Jews of the Orient.”
Luang nodded politely.
Goldfarb had tried to stop the gangs from recruiting in his school yard, he said. One day he went out there and confronted Nikki Han - ordered him to leave. When Han refused, the frustrated Goldfarb - to his own amazement - gave the gang leader a vicious kick in the balls. “I didn’t know who he was at the time,” said Goldfarb. “He doubled up on the ground. He puked his guts out.”
Han’s followers had helped him out of the school yard, while Goldfarb rushed inside to phone the precinct. A Detective Kelly had come around, had provided Han’s identity, had described his reputation for violence. This had terrified Goldfarb, who feared reprisals. But there had been none.
“No,” said Luang. “For the most part Chinese gangsters won’t touch non-Chinese. They know you people will testify against them, whereas their own people are usually too frightened, and won’t. That’s why Chinatown crime is as successful as it is - and why it is expanding so fast.”
“If I see Han or any of the others out there in my school yard,” said Goldfarb, “I still will go out there and throw them out.” But he sounded surprised by his own conduct, like a man who learns that he has committed an act of insane courage while drunk.
When the school bell rang that afternoon, Luang was waiting outside the fence in his car. He could hear the bell, then the drum roll of feet on the staircases. In a moment, he saw Quong, carrying a book bag, wearing now his Chinese cap, come running across the school yard and through the gate. The car door was yanked open and the boy, grinning with pleasure, jumped in beside him.
“Is this your car, venerable sir?” He looked around the car in wonder as if at the inside of a palace.
“This is my car.”
“You’re pretty rich.”
The car was a Volkswagen Beetle, not new. It was older than Luang’s suit. Certainly no American kid would have been impressed by it. But in Chinatown very few people owned cars at all.
“I went to school,” said Luang. “I learned to speak English. I got a job, and I bought myself a car. You can do the same. Your first problem is to learn to speak English. I can help you there. I know a place that’s run by the city for Chinese kids.” Luang had spent the last several hours researching this. “I can get you in there. But only if that’s what you want.”
“Hey, I’d like that.”
Luang, driving, thought he had never seen a happier-looking boy, and for a moment he felt less guilty.
“Well, what would you like to see? Would you like to see Central Park, the Bronx Zoo?”
Later in the afternoon they drove down Fifth Avenue. The office buildings were just letting out. Traffic thickened. Two-toned blue buses that plowed straight on. Yellow cabs that darted toward individuals who stepped out from between parked cars, hands waving frantically.
“You’ve been running with some bad kids,” said Luang.
The boy had been gawking at the crowds, at the tall buildings. Immediately his defenses sprang up. Drawbridge raised, barbed wire out front. “They’re my friends.” He was as hostile as Luang had yet seen him. But it did not last. He turned pleading eyes on Luang. “They understand me.”
“What makes you think they’re your friends?”
Quong said nothing.
“They’ll get you in trouble.” His glance flicked sideways at Quong, who looked suddenly miserable. “Maybe they already got you in trouble.”
“I don’t know,” the boy mumbled, his voice so low the Chinese police officer could barely hear him.
“This is Fifth Avenue here,” said Luang cheerfully. “I guess you’ve never seen Fifth Avenue before.” He was changing the somber mood, the mood of siege. He was pulling his troops back out of sight. He could not afford to alarm the boy too much.
“It’s more crowded than China.” There was
gratitude in Quong’s voice, relief. Detecting it, Luang was satisfied. Whatever the boy was afraid of, ashamed of, whatever he was hiding, it would come out. It was inevitable. He was like the Chinese maiden awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom she had never seen before. The only question was, how soon?
“Say, how about taking me home to meet your parents,” said Luang. He would keep the pressure on. “I’d like to meet them very much.”
This meeting proved not easy to set up. Both parents worked more than twelve hours a day, and were rarely off work at the same time. And so about a week passed.
The Quongs lived on the fifth floor of a tenement on Elizabeth Street, about one block north of the station house. Luang had to climb five flights of stairs. By the time he knocked on the apartment’s front door he was breathing hard.
The Quongs had the rear third of what had been a living room. Their “home” was sectioned off by a curtain that ran along a wire. It was the preferred space in the room because it had the window, and was not a passageway - there was no foot traffic going through. For these reasons they were quite proud of it. On the other hand, one had to walk through the other two sections to get in or out, to use the kitchen or bathroom. Both other sections were full, Luang had noted, arriving. He had smiled and bowed to about fifteen persons on the way through. He was neither surprised nor shocked that such accommodations existed in New York. As a child in Hong Kong, and in China before that, he and his parents had lived just this way themselves.
The Quongs had a narrow single bed, which he supposed the parents shared, and a pallet on the floor for the boy. There were two straight chairs. A square of plywood lay on top of the bed - this served as a table. There was also a hot plate and a teapot, the tea already steeping.
“Tea, Mr. Luang?” said the mother. She was surely twenty years younger than the father, but she looked worked out to Luang, all the moisture squeezed out of her flesh long ago.
He was offered one of the chairs. Mr. Quong, lord of his own home, took the other, and his wife stood. She had her arm around her son, and was beaming.
Luang sipped his tea out of a porcelain bowl that seemed brand-new to him, and expensive as well, and he surmised that the Quongs had bought it just that day, believing their everyday cups unworthy of tonight’s honored guest, the false guidance counselor, himself.
“He’s a good boy,” Mrs. Quong said, giving her son a squeeze. She grinned with pride - pride in her boy, pride that tonight she was entertaining such an exalted personage as Luang.
“Next year, he’ll be speaking English,” said the father. It was hard for Luang to concentrate because of the buzz of family conversations behind the curtain.
“More tea, Mr. Luang? Oh, I’m so relieved to think you’re taking an interest in my boy. He’s a good boy, but America is strange to him. I’ve been afraid he might get into trouble.”
“That can’t happen now,” said Mr. Quong. “He’s lucky and we’re lucky. I used to be a schoolteacher myself, did you know that?”
“I think I will have some more tea,” said Luang glumly. “It certainly is delicious tea. How do you make tea that good, anyway?”
By the time he went down into the street again it was nearly midnight, and he was so upset that he phoned Captain Powers at home, possibly waking him up - he didn’t care. Powers told him to come right over, and gave directions. And so he drove through the night to Powers’ house in a part of the city he had never entered before. It was at the opposite end of Manhattan island from Chinatown and to Luang, once he had seen it, it could have been the opposite end of the world. Powers’ house seemed to him huge, solid, gracious, incredibly luxurious - a brick mansion to Luang, to any Chinese - and when he had parked out front he sat some minutes in his car merely contemplating it.
Powers, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, half-glasses perched on top of his hair, let him in.
“Do you want a beer? Something to eat? You want a cup of tea? What’s the trouble?”
“I’ll never make it as a cop, Captain.”
Powers gave him a smile. “Of course you will. What’s bothering you?”
So Luang spoke of lies and deceit - of deceiving the Quong family, of betraying their trust. “Mr. Quong wanted to tell me all about being a schoolteacher in China. He wanted to know all about my job as schoolteacher in New York.”
Powers frowned. He had encountered Luang’s reaction before - it had been his own reaction too, as a young cop. “Don’t get soft on me, Luang.”
“These people are so poor, Captain, and so hopeful. And the kid seems a decent kid. They are all depending on me, and it makes me feel like a snake.”
“You’re not a snake. You’re a cop. You’re doing your job.”
As a young man - as a far younger man than Luang - Powers had confronted these same moral questions himself. He had concluded that there were just no answers. One had best not even look for them because the risk was too great. One risked becoming unable to function as a cop at all.
“The kid’s got a gun in the waistband of his pants,” muttered Luang glumly. “I could have arrested him for carrying. I didn’t. I think he wants me to know he’s got it. I think he wants me to ask him about it.”
Powers said, “What are you waiting for? Ask him.”
LATE THE next afternoon the school yard was crowded. There were skaters, Frisbee players. There were games going at both ends of the basketball court. Wooden bleachers rose up at one side of the court, between the court and the fence, and on the top row sat Luang with Quong.
“You’ve got a gun,” said Luang. “I’m not blind, you know. Who gave it to you, your new friends? Did they make you use it yet? Did you shoot anybody yet?”
Tears popped into the eyes of the boy. It was instantaneous. Luang was astonished. Absolutely instantaneous. One second the boy was dry-eyed, and the next second his eyeballs overflowed with tears. A moment after that he was sobbing. Turning toward Luang, he threw himself into his supposed guidance counselor’s arms. He wept copiously, wetly, the way a child weeps, and Luang embraced him, patting his head, murmuring: “There, there. It can’t be that bad.”
“It is, it is,” sobbed Quong, and Luang suspected that indeed it was.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” said Police Officer Luang.
It happened that Nikki Han and Go Low had entered the school yard through the Hester Street gate about five minutes before. It was getting on toward dusk, the bleachers were on the Baxter Street side, and the school yard was teeming with kids. It was possible that the two Flying Dragons would not have noticed Quong and Luang at all, had not their attention been caught by the boy’s racking sobs.
The noise of a child crying does not disturb other children. Children are people who have not learned to recognize most warning signals. They can sleep through alarm clocks. A police siren suggests excitement, not distress. Tears represent barked shins, not a cry for help. To them crying is as normal as pain, as normal as water - the one produces the other, though in minimal amounts only, like drops wrung out of a towel. There is no danger - no one is going to drown from it. In the case of Quong, a few kids threw glances toward the bleachers. But the glances glanced off.
But adults, having lived longer with fear, react instantly to any warning signal at all. Each one is a circuit-breaker. The mechanism will not function until the break is found and the gap bridged.
Nikki Han was twenty-five years old - old enough. Quong’s sobs barely carried across the school yard, but they triggered every bell in Han’s head.
Who was that kid and why was he crying?
“Look,” said Han sharply. “That’s the guy we followed.”
“He’s with Quong,” said Go Low. “What do you suppose it means? Do you think it means anything?” They were both American-born, and they spoke English to each other.
“That guy’s a cop,” said Han. “He’s gotta be.”
They backed out of the school yard, backed away while watching the bleachers carefully, m
aking certain that their departure went as unnoticed as their arrival.
They were successful. Across the school yard Luang and Quong had their hands full with each other, for the boy’s dreadful revelations had begun to pour forth. And so neither looked up.
A hundred yards down the street from the school yard, Han and Low began to run.
MIDNIGHT. Again Luang stood on Powers’ doorstep. “Come in, Luang. What is it?”
Again Powers wore the homeliest of man’s uniforms, pajamas and bathrobe. Again his glasses sat on his hair. Different uniform from the one he wears in the daytime, thought Luang. Different man inside it too, probably. Powers’ bathrobe had become something he would recognize anywhere. He could identify it in court. It was as though he lived in this house, and Powers was his father - the notion was bizarre, but understandable: normally if you saw a man in his night clothes he was probably your father - someone you trusted totally, anyway.
“I just left the boy, Captain. I’ve been with him since three o’clock this afternoon. I just took him home. I couldn’t leave him till now.”
In Luang’s voice was a note of quiet desperation. Powers detected it. He led the way into the living room. “Sit down. Can I offer you anything?”
Luang was wearing his gray suit, but had left his suit coat in the car. His tie was undone and his collar open. He took a small revolver out of his pants pocket, and handed it over.
Powers hefted it, studied it. Guns to Powers were not question marks, but statements. They were like presidents, they spoke with the power of their office. One had best pay attention.
“He gave it to me, Captain. He wanted to get rid of it. He’s fifteen years old and absolutely horrified by what he’s done.” Luang looked and sounded drained. “He thinks I’m his guidance counselor. I’m supposed to tell him what to do next.”
“Thirty-two caliber. One of those executions-”
“Take it to ballistics, Captain. The bullet will match. He shot one of the Hsu brothers. Nikki Han made him do it. Han shot the other. Koy ordered it. In any case, Koy was there a few minutes before the executions took place.”