by Henry Chang
The morning light crept in along the edges of the window blinds, and he stepped into his black Versace loafers. He left the gunmetal-gray silk jacket open, loose-fitting cover for a five-ten frame that was twenty pounds overweight. It had gone to flab, new gut hanging where muscle had given way to beer and fatty fast-food dinners. It didn’t matter, he didn’t need to fight anymore. He had face on the streets, and face was everything.
He slipped a box-cutter into his jacket pocket.
The Fukienese, he thought, didn’t care about face, and needed to be taught a lesson. Their Fuk Ching lowboys wanted a gang-bang over East Broadway, they were going to get it. He knew how, but that would come later, after he’d fixed it with Uncle Four, to keep the Black Dragons out of the way.
There was a truce on.
He was lucky. He had outlived those above him who had burned brighter, lived faster, died younger. When the Feds had cleaned out the last of the Ghost Legion’s upper ranks ten years earlier, he’d inherited his position by default. The Legion had to rebuild, and he’d been all they had left.
The door slammed behind him, and he went down, watching the elevator light drop the five levels. The new day was a pale flat wash of morning, broken by clouds, a filtering of sunlight. He turned out to Mott Street and quickened his pace, wanting to get to fay por—fat lady—Fat Lily’s mahjong parlor early, while the girls were still fresh and clean. He didn’t like the idea of walking into sloppy fifths, behind some phlegmy Hakkanese butcher. It didn’t matter how many men the girls had had the night before. Each day was new.
Although the Ghosts operated under the banner of the On Yee, the biggest, wealthiest, and most prestigious Chinatown tong, Lucky realized he had to navigate with great care the treacherous alliances with old-timers like Uncle Four, who controlled the Hip Chings. He knew the Legion had to be wary of new and formidable foes from Mainland China, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan.
He knew that when the politics shifted in Hong Kong’s secret societies, the triads, the shit usually slammed into the fan on Mott Street.
The On Yee was a businessmen’s Benevolent Association, the Number One high roller in America, a coast-to-coast secret society no workingman was able to join. They sneered at the ship-jumpers, the waiters and dishwashers, the laundrymen, who joined the rival Hip Chings. In Chinatown, no business could open without paying deem heunq yau, bribes, to the On Yee membership.
Lucky knew their leadership was younger and more liberal, willing to take chances by working with Italians, and other lo fan. He had seen elder leaders come and go, and less senior members disappear outright. On Yee membership was what he wanted, but only on his terms.
He saw the spiraling barber stripe down the street. He was almost there.
Over the years, he had developed a lumbering gait like a bear, trying to accommodate his bulk, resulting in an awkward strutting bop.
He thought it was like a cool pimp roll, throwing his weight around.
He thought it intimidated his enemies.
The dirty brick building at 94 Elizabeth was a whorehouse disguised as a barbershop at street level, a mahjong club on the second floor, a massage joint on the third.
The barbershop had a backroom behind a red curtain, for that extra trim, or blow job. They played high-stakes mahjong on two, where Fat Lily Wong usually kept watch over the premises. She was the eldest daughter of a Hip Ching officer.
The third floor had a sauna, two sofa beds, a set of massage gurneys on wheels, and four cubicles with covered mattresses. There was a condom machine on the wall.
Lucky went past the spinning candycane barber pole, pressed the bell, waited while Fat Lily checked him out via the surveillance camera. After a moment he was buzzed in.
Normally there were five girls working upstairs, Malaysians and Vietnamese. On Friday nights and weekends they added a crew of Korean girls, so they totaled a dozen in all, upstairs and downstairs. These girls serviced over three hundred men a week.
Lucky liked to rotate girls; sometimes he came here twice a week. He didn’t care about the hundred a bang for the nasty sex, figured it was all part of the same dirty money circling around his life. It was like a perk, he thought, for the tension he had to deal with.
She told Lucky her name was Leena. She was a dusty-colored Malay girl with large brown nipples that cried out to be sucked. Lucky ran his tongue over the areolas in a circular motion, making tiny bites on the nipples as he went, sucking, bringing her body jerking up off the bed, her hands holding his head to her breasts, moaning now. Her body quivered on the cool sheets, her arms pulling him down into her, clutching at his lower back, floating over his buttocks, all the while moaning as he thrust in and out of her hot wetness.
He raised her legs into the air, held them by the ankles, spread them open into a V and rode his hardness into her, the wet slap of his groin against her bottom bringing sharp, loud groans, then pleading whispers.
When it got hotter, he turned her over, entered her from above. She wailed as Lucky pounded against her buttocks, begging now. He loved loving her. He slipped his member out, brushed its slick hard head around her velvet lips, slipped it back inside. She gasped and he thrust hard and long, then softly, gently. He put his tongue inside her, licked around her hard little button, plunged himself back in. She just kept coming, convulsive spasms fighting for breath, coming even as he exploded, then shivering soft whispers, pleading, full of want and fulfillment.
Later he cradled her like a baby, nibbled on her ear. She turned over and took his spent member in her hand, caressing it, nestling her head into his throat, licking it.
They were two players, playing each other.
“I love you,” he whispered, checking his Rolex.
“Sure,” she agreed, “sure you do,” giving him face.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered, his tongue in her ear.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ll be waiting.”
His hands went over her breast one last time.
She flicked up a cigarette and watched him making ready to go. When he finished dressing, he placed the crisp Ben Franklin on the bed next to her, kissed her on the head, and left the musty cool of the little room.
Sanctuary
Confucius Towers was a forty-five-story crescent-shaped brick complex.
Uncle Four took the express elevator to apartment H, twenty stories above the heart of Chinatown. He heard the clatter of ivory tiles as he approached his door. No surprise there.
His wife, Tam tai, former Taiwanese starlet now longtime mahjong wife was holding court at the squared wong fa lee antique table, surrounded by a much younger gaggle of siew lai lai, ladies of leisure, chatting her up over cocktails and seafood—siew ma— dumplings that were displayed on matching pearl-studded mahogany folding trays.
The wispy romance of Hong Kong pop music floated off a compact disk and spread throughout the spacious living room, around the carved Ming armoire, past the set of zitan-wood Imperial chairs, a ballad just loud enough so they never heard Uncle Four enter, closing the door with a pickpocket’s touch. He stood behind the lacquered rosewood and inlaid-jade screen that set off the foyer and pictured them.
Wife, almost fifty, her hair dyed blacker than fot choy, moss threads, and teased perfect above curved eyebrows redrawn daily. Pancake on the crow’s feet at the corners of eyes blinking out from heavy shadow and liner, leaving the red gash of her mouth at a restless angle. She wore gold on one wrist, jade on the other; an aging actress in her sunset performance on the Chinatown stage.
Too much perfume, he could smell it from the door, streaming from the four women at the table. They were talking at each other in choppy, patterned phrases.
Loo je, sister Loo, was married to the treasurer of the Hip Ching, giving her the unofficial rank of daai ga je, elder sister, in their entourage. She wore clothes from The Limited, and spoke in a mannish style.
“Business has been good,” she said. “Should be bigger bonuses this year.”
/> Mak mui, her cousin, who was engaged to a senior Black Dragon, cooed, “Wonderful, another gold bracelet for me.”
Shirley, which they pronounced, surly, was the oldest. “Sisters,” she said, “life is good. Jade and diamonds for everyone. A toast!”
The women clinked glasses and drank, settled back into their game, slapping the mahjong tiles back and forth across the table.
Silly women, thought Uncle Four behind the screen. When he married the second time, it had appeared to be a fortunate match. Using Tam tai’s connections in the Taiwanese film industry, he’d established a chain of Chinese videotape rental outlets that stretched from the Chinatowns in San Francisco to New York, from Toronto to Florida.
They had no children.
He had a teenaged daughter from his first marriage and had wanted nothing more to do with children after that. This had suited Tam tai fine. At the time they married she was already in her late-thirties, and he knew, secretly, that she was barren. He gave her a share of the video business and the skim money from the Ting Lee Beauty Salon, in which he was also a partner. She made the collections personally, every week on Monday.
Now, a decade after exchanging vows and toasts, they lived separate lives in the same apartment. Separate bedrooms, separate schedules, and separate vices. The only values left to share were money and jewelry, and never enough of either.
Pung! Mak mui shouted, grabbing the discarded tile. She splayed out her row of thin blocks and grinned.
“Mun wu,” she laughed. A full house.
The others groaned and collapsed their hands, then threw dollar bills at her.
The little ivory blocks were crashed and shoved together into a large pile.
Uncle Four stepped out from behind the screen amid the racket and entered the living room. There was a short silence as the surprised women turned their eyes to him. His wife raised her chin, smiled, said nothing.
He murmured lo por, wife, at her and nodded at the others, turned and headed for his bedroom at the far end. Lo por drained her vodka tonic as he passed, the others watching him. When he turned to close the door, their attention shifted quickly back to the table, his wife already stacking the tiles, quietly forming a wall.
She glanced at the closing door and listened for the click of the lock that closed off the world of her estranged lo gung.
Bill yTofu
The sky had drifted back to a leaden gray when Jack rolled onto Mott, parking the Dodge Fury up the street from On Yee headquarters, around the block from the stationhouse. He saw the busloads of weekend tourists deboarding into the streets, mixing with locals waking to morning errands, and the taking of tea, yum cha.
The tourists moved along in a huddling line, bought T-shirts and fake Chanel scarves, and were herded along the three blocks back to their buses idling at the edge of Chatham Square.
Jack sat in the car. His visit to Pa’s apartment, the photographs, all had him thinking of those three rudderless years of his life in the Tofu King. And of Billy Bow.
Billy was the last friend Jack still had in Chinatown from the old crowd. Everyone else had married, moved to the suburbs, came to town only on special occasions to visit their parents, grandparents, whoever was abandoned in Chinatown.
Billy was still there, and whenever Jack was in the neighborhood, he went by the Tofu King for a fresh dao jeong, soy bean milk, and to shoot the breeze with him.
They’d become fast friends in those years together in the back of the shop, cooking, slopping beans. The shop was smaller then, and it wasn’t until Billy’s grandfather renovated the upstairs and expanded into the backyard that it became the Tofu King. That was ten years ago, when Jack left. Billy was still there, thirteen years a captive in his father’s business.
And since then Billy’d become hard and cynical. He was divorced, paying child support, and when he was two boilermakers deep, he’d call himself “a deadbeat Chinaman with two princess daughters and a dead-end job.”
He’d wanted to be a writer, an actor, something creative, but nothing went his way. He tried college but couldn’t keep up. He took the tests for civil service but they weren’t hiring Chinamen with nothing on their resume except ten years in a bean-curd shop.
So there he was, drowning in bean milk, and no way out.
This time, Jack had called Billy to confirm permission to post composite sketches from the SCU, which had arrived together with a note that said the girl’s pregnancy test had come back negative. He’d need to post one sketch inside and one outside of the Tofu King. Some stores considered it bad luck to bring a sign of such an event, an evil presence, into their places of business.
Billy was okay with it.
Outside the Tofu King, a man wearing a white apron sold fried Chinese turnip cakes, attracting a crowd beneath the white plastic fluorescent sign that said tofu, puto. Wholesale and Retail. Business was brisk. Inside the shop the walls were white tile all the way around. The near wall opened to a window on the street where they sold cold bean milk and hot tofu custard to passersby. Four fifty-gallon barrels of soft tofu lined the left wall, four more barrels of hard tofu on the right. Foo jook, bean curd strips, took shape in the large water tank in back, past the refrigerated counter with the bok tong go, sweet rice cakes, and the gee cheung fun, noodles.
Six workers were on the floor, three of them plastic-wrapping the white bricks of tofu for local groceries. For the restaurants, the workers packed the ivory bricks in water, fitting them snugly into ten-gallon tin cans.
It all started with the beans.
They arrived once a month, sixteen tons of soybeans via Jacky Chew, the trucker. The beans came out of Indiana in tractor-trailer loads, in hundred-pound sacks, twenty-thousand beans each sack. They soaked the beans upstairs, then they were ground down and cooked, mixed, and at different levels in the process became firm tofu, silken tofu, tofu sticks, tofu skins, and soy bean milk drink. The smell was thick upstairs, hanging in the hot air, suffocating. This went on twenty-four hours a day.
Jack looked down the street and saw the line of empty carts moving into the Tofu King. He took a roll of composite sketches of the rapist from the glove compartment and checked his watch. It was ten-thirty.
The sky darkened and a few Ghosts appeared on the street. Jack watched them, four youths with streaked hair and leather jackets, as they took up positions on the corner. Behind them, farther down the street, Jack saw a soft doughy-faced Lucky, his onetime friend Tat Louie, behind sunglasses, chatting easily with Uncle Four, making accommodating gestures with his hands. Jack narrowed his eyes at them, the Pell Street big shot, Ghost Legion gang leader. An arrogant power meeting on the streets they ruled.
A few more Ghosts came onto the street, took up space on the opposite corner. They observed all that passed, signaling to one another across the street with cat whistles, woofing at pretty girls, flexing the tattoos on their skinny arms.
The two leaders shook hands, and then the Big Uncle ambled down Bayard Street.
Jack watched the Ghosts strut off, keeping his eyes on Lucky, who turned and stared through his black glasses momentarily at the Fury. Lucky raised his middle finger and waved it loosely, sneered, then crossed the street and disappeared around the corner.
A tinge of sadness colored Jack’s vision, but he pushed away the feeling it brought. Tat Louie was a stranger now, deep on the other side of the law.
Jack grabbed the roll of composite sketches and slid out of the car.
Inside the Tofu King, he saw Billy stamping about, waving a yellow paper in his hand, cursing, “niggers with badges, them moth-erfuckers.” He slammed the paper down on the counter, turned, and saw Jack. He shook his head and frowned, the corners of his mouth turning down.
Jack stood ready to listen, his face sympathetic, nodding.
“The Department of Health, Wealth, I should say, came yesterday,” Billy hissed. “Then this motherfucker gives me a ticket ’cause there’s some papers in the street. Told ’im it wasn’t my
shit, must’ve blown down from the corner, from a car or something, you know? The kid swept this morning already. What the fuck you want me to do? Put him out there all day with a broom in his hand? Motherfucker says ‘Eighteen inches from the curb, bro. You got garbage, you got a violation.’ Just like that, the motherfucker. I called him a spear-chucking, watermelon-eating black cocksucker. He laughs and walks away. Shit. Gonna cost me seventy-five. That’s a lotta dao jeung. Damn it, City Hall makes a killing off of Chinamen. Chinatown is a goddamn gold mine to them. The traffic pricks cut tickets by intimidation. They know most Chinese don’t speak enough English to argue. Health and Sanitation target the restaurants. Department of Buildings, Fire Code inspectors, they go after the construction crews. Plainclothes issues summonses to sidewalk peddlers, grocers, the gift shops. Everyone down here’s paying some fine, payoffs not included. It’s bullshit. No other minority group in the city pays off like the Chinese do. How come we don’t have no NAACP?”
Billy paused to catch his breath. “Man, the city’s got more nig-gers on the payroll than Welfare, and they all drop down here like the black plague, getting paid, busting on the yellow man.”
Jack shook his head, then Billy grinned. “I’m telling you, Jack, I gotta get out of this business.” He tossed Jack a bean milk.
“Write it off, Billy,” Jack said. “It comes with the turf.” He gave Billy a few of the composite sketches. “I need you to post these. Show ’em to your workers. See if they hear anything.”