This Is a Bust

by Ed Lin

  A Novel by Ed Lin

  Kaya Press

  All thanks to my first reader and universal partner Cindy Cheung. Many

  thanks to my parents, Doris Lin, Daniel Kim, and Melody. Grace Elaine

  Suh’s incredible eye and support were invaluable. So was Sunyoung Lee’s

  chipper way of chipping away at problems. Detective Thomas Ong, NYPD

  (retired); Detective Yu Sing Yee, NYPD (retired); KFL; and GCC all put up with my nagging presence and were overly generous with their time. Corky Lee is the man. Chez Bryan Ong is kid dynamite. Thank you, Julie Koo, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Jessica Hagedorn, Han Ong, Henry S. Tang, Jen Chou, Pritsana Kootint, Rika Koreeda, Terra Chalberg, Tasha Blaine, Jin Auh, and extra special thanks to Anthony Rapp.

  www.edlinforpresident.com

  www.myspace.com/edlinforpresident

  Copyright © 2007 by Ed Lin

  All rights reserved

  07 06 05 04 03 02 01

  Published by Kaya Press, an imprint of Muae Publishing

  New York City

  www.kaya.com

  Book design by spoon+fork.

  All photos by Corky Lee back in the day. Mural by City Arts Workshop.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

  155 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor

  New York, NY 10013

  (800) 338-BOOK www.artbook.com

  This publication is made possible in part by state funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state organization; an award from the National Endowment for the Arts; and the support of Hong Yung and Whakyung Lee, Minya and Yun Oh, Jungmi Son, Gabriela Jauregui, Joseph Goetz, Amelia Wu, Kate Durbin, and others.

  For all the blue guys.

  Chapter 1

  January 20, 1976. The Hong Kong-biased newspaper ran an editorial about how the Chinese who had just come over were lucky to get jobs washing dishes and waiting tables in Chinatown. Their protest was making all Chinese people look bad. If the waiters didn’t like their wages, they should go ask the communists for jobs and see what happens.

  Here in America, democracy was going to turn 200 years old in July. But the Chinese waiters who wanted to organize a union were going directly against the principles of freedom that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln had fought for.

  Those waiters were also disrespecting the previous generations of Chinese who had come over and worked so hard for so little. If it weren’t for our elders, the editorial said, today we would be lumped in with the lazy blacks and Spanish people on welfare.

  I folded the newspaper, sank lower in my chair, and crossed my arms. I banged my heels against the floor.

  “Just a minute, you’re next! Don’t be so impatient!” grunted Law, one of the barbers. A cigarette wiggled in his mouth as he snipped away on a somber-looking Chinese guy’s head. When he had one hand free, he took his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray built into the arm cushion of his customer’s chair.

  He reached into the skyline of bottles against the mirror for some baby powder. Law sprinkled it onto his hand and worked it into the back of the somber guy’s neck while pulling the sheet off from inside his collar. Clumps of black hair scampered to the floor as he shook off the sheet. The customer paid. Law pulled his drawer out as far as it would go and tucked the bills into the back. Then he came over to me.

  Law had been cutting my hair since I was old enough to want it cut. He was in his early 60s and had a head topped with neatly sculpted snow. His face was still soft and supple, but he had a big mole on the lower side of his left cheek.

  You couldn’t help but stare at it when he had his back turned because it stood out in profile, wiggling in sync with his cigarette.

  He looked at the newspaper on my lap.

  “We should give all those pro-union waiters guns and send them to Vietnam!” Law grunted. “They’ll be begging to come back and bus tables.”

  “They wouldn’t be able to take the humidity,” I said.

  “That’s right, they’re not tough like you! You were a brave soldier! OK, come over here. I’m ready for you now,” Law said, wiping off the seat. I saw hair stuck in the foam under the ripped vinyl cover, but I sat down anyway. Hair could only make the seat softer.

  “I don’t mean to bring it up, but you know it’s a real shame what happened. The Americans shouldn’t have bothered to send in soldiers, they should have just dropped the big one on them. You know, the A-bomb.”

  “Then China would have dropped an A-bomb on the United States,” I said.

  “Just let them! Commie weapons probably don’t even work!” Law shouted into my right ear as he tied a sheet around my neck.

  They work good enough,” I said.

  When Chou En Lai had died two weeks before, the Greater China Association had celebrated with a ton of firecrackers in the street in front of its Mulberry Street offices and handed out candy to the obligatory crowd. The association had also displayed a barrel of fireworks they were going to set off when Mao kicked, which was going to be soon, they promised. Apparently the old boy was senile and bedridden.

  “Short on the sides, short on top,” I said.

  “That’s how you have to have it, right? Short all around, right?” Law asked.

  “That’s the only way it’s ever been cut.”

  If you didn’t tell Law how you wanted your hair, even if you were a regular, he’d give you a Beefsteak Charlie’s haircut, with a part right down the center combed out with a Chinese version of VO5. I was going to see my mother in a few days, and I didn’t want to look that bad.

  “Scissors only, right? You don’t like the electric clipper, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. When I hear buzzing by my ears, I want to swat everything within reach. Law’s old scissors creaked through my hair. Sometimes I had to stick my jaw out and blow clippings out of my eyes.

  The barbershop’s two huge plate glass windows cut into each other at an acute angle in the same shape as the street. Out one window was the sunny half of Doyers Street. The other was in the shade. How many times had I heard that this street was the site of tong battles at the turn of the century? How many times had I heard tour guides say that the barbershop was built on the “Bloody Angle”?

  The barbershop windows were probably the original ones, old enough so they were thicker at the bottom than at the top. They distorted images of people from the outside, shrinking heads and bloating asses. In the winters, steam from the hot shampoo sink covered the top halves of the windows like lacy curtains in an abandoned house.

  In back of me, a bulky overhead hair dryer whined like a dentist’s drill on top of a frowning woman with thick glasses getting a perm.

  The barbers had to shout to hear each other. The news station on the radio was nearly drowned out. The only time you could hear it was when they played the xylophone between segments or made the dripping-sink sounds.

  If you knew how to listen for it, you could sometimes hear the little bell tied to the broken arm of the pneumatic pump on the door. The bell hung from a frayed loop of red plastic tie from a bakery box. When the bell went off, one or two barbers would yell out in recognition of an old head.

  The bell went off, and Law yelled right by my ear.

  “Hey!” he yelled. Two delayed “Hey”s went off to my left and right. The chilly January air swept through the barbershop. A thin man in a worn wool coat heaved the door closed behind him and twisted off his felt hat. His hands were brown, gnarled, and incredibly tiny, like walnut shells. He fingered the brim of his hat and shifted uneasily from foot to foot, but made no motion to take off his coat or drop into one of the four empty folding chairs by the shadow side of Doyers. He swept
his white hair back, revealing a forehead that looked like a mango gone bad.

  “My wife just died,” he said. If his lungs hadn’t been beat up and dusty like old vacuum-cleaner bags, it would have been a shout. “My wife died,” he said again, as if he had to hear it to believe it. The hairdryer shut down.

  “Oh,” said Law. “I’m sorry.” He went on with my hair. No one else said anything. Someone coughed. Law gave a half-grin grimace and kept his head down, the typical stance for a Chinese man stuck in an awkward situation. The radio babbled on.

  The barbers just wanted to cut hair and have some light conversation about old classmates and blackjack. Why come here to announce that your wife had died? The guy might as well have gone to the Off Track Betting joint on Bowery around the corner. No one was giving him any sympathy here.

  Death was bad luck. Talking about death was bad luck. Listening to someone talk about death was bad luck. Who in Chinatown needed more bad luck?

  “What should I do?” the thin man asked. He wasn’t crying, but his legs were shaking. I could see his pant cuffs sweep the laces of his polished wing tips. “What should I do?” he asked again. The xylophone on the radio went off.

  I stood up and swept the clippings out of my hair. The bangs were longer on one side of my head. I slipped the sheet off from around my neck and coiled it onto the warmth of the now-vacant seat. Law opened a drawer, dropped in his scissors, and shut it with his knee. He leaned against his desk and fumbled for a cigarette in his shirt pocket.

  I blew off the hair from my shield and brushed my legs off.

  I pushed my hat onto my head.

  “Let’s go,” I told the thin man.

  —

  He led me through a garbage-strewn alley to a rear-tenement building. It was built in the middle of a block and enclosed on all four sides by other buildings. It was dark back there, and the thin man pointed out where I should watch my step and where I should watch my head. God would have had to hold a magnifying glass under the sun to get any light into that building.

  The smell was terrible. No tourist could take it. Imagine phlegm hacked out onto crumbly grout between bricks and damp, moldy hanging laundry that took days to dry out. It didn’t bother me at all. I’ve eaten worse.

  The thin man said his name was Yip. He and his wife Wah had been married for more than 50 years, 20 before they came over. They had never changed apartments.

  Bald spots were worn into the carpet on the stairs. By the time we hit the sixth floor, hair clippings were slipping down my neck on trickles of sweat. I felt pangs for a drink.

  Yip’s apartment was at the far end from the common bathroom. The doors in the hallway looked as fragile as balanced playing cards.

  Wah’s body was lying in the sheets of a foldout bed. Her thin hair looked like fungus on a dead tree. She was even skinnier than Yip. You could fold the bed back up into a sofa and you wouldn’t even feel a bump when you sat down.

  I looked around the one-room apartment. A small stand on the sewing machine held a curly black wig that was going bald. Gaunt jackets slumped on the coat rack. Three pairs

  of shoes and two pairs of slippers lined up by the door. Three bumpy lemons huddled in the soap dish of the sink. The windowsill was crowded with empty halves of Tiger Balm tins.

  Wah’s color wasn’t good, but I knelt down and checked her vitals anyway. Yip stood by the door and stared at her. I got on the radio to tell them to send the paramedics who would officially declare her dead. Then we needed the medical examiner to make sure there hadn’t been any funny business. You can never be sure. I looked around for more details for my report. There wasn’t much more to see.

  In a few days, her body would be in the back of a hearse running through the tight and narrow streets of Chinatown. The traditional last ride around the neighborhood. The hearse’s horn would blow and startled tourists would focus their cameras on the face of the woman in the picture tied to the front fender.

  Honk! Honk! Honk!

  Another chunk of money that had been saved to someday move out of Chinatown would go to the Five Fortunes Funeral Home. As much as Chinese loved to bargain, no one would dare to cheap out on the burial of a loved one.

  It would be bad luck.

  Honk! Honk! Honk!

  And then Yip would pick his way back through the alley to his apartment. He’d keep sleeping on his side of the foldout bed. His clothes would become tattered and rip at the seams. He’d stumble over steps because he didn’t have a hand to hold on to.

  I knew because I know lonely Chinese men. That’s why I didn’t bother to talk to Yip.

  He took a seat at the small dining table and put his hands down flat in front of him.

  I hooked my thumbs into my pockets. It could take a while before the ambulance showed up. I had never realized how much of a cop’s job was wasting time until I was in uniform.

  I went over to the sink and stared at the just unfurled 1976 calendar from the Mei Wah Restaurant.

  In the previous year, the city had fired the 5,000 cops with the least seniority, not because of performance issues, but because of fiscal mismanagement. That was one sixth of the force. Morale had already been lousy, what with Frank Serpico’s book and movie smearing shit on our badges in the public’s eye. Maybe Serpico had seen himself as a muckraker, but how many muckrakers make millions from a book and movie and move to Europe?

  Bruce Lee was dead.

  Vietnam was going to be completely communist. It was just a matter of signing the papers. That situation didn’t go over well with the NYPD, either. Apart from having to deal with war protests, a lot of cops and their brothers, fathers, and cousins were walking around carrying gook shrapnel, if they were still walking.

  You can imagine what they thought about me. They didn’t know that I had fought on their side.

  My name is Robert Chow. I had grown up in Chinatown before it became my beat. And it was the last place in the goddamned world I wanted to be.

  Chapter 2

  I headed over to the Five Precinct on Elizabeth for the 0800 to 1600 shift. It was a cold January morning, but I was sweating. Something didn’t feel right. I chomped down on a Tic Tac and toyed with my right collar.

  The street was filled with high-school kids heading to the subway. After school was over, they’d head off to college-prep classes and/or piano lessons. Saturdays were for Chinese school and Sundays were for Chinese church. Chinese kids learned how to cram, or they learned how easily their skin bruised.

  The kids stared at me as I walked by. I could see they were worried that if they didn’t get into a good college, they’d end up with a dumb, low-paying job like mine. That was the Chinese attitude about it. I smiled and said, “Good morning,” to the kids closest to me as I went up the steps.

  “Good morning,” the kids said to their socks.

  The Five Precinct is an old brick building in the middle of the block, on the west side of Elizabeth Street between Canal and Bayard. The Five was built in 1881, and being in there is like taking a trip back to those days. There’s no elevator and no modern heating. Someone was always on duty to shovel coal into the furnace in the basement. The giant iron hook on a chain at street level hauled out bins of coal ashes, but all the parents told their kids the hook was for hanging criminals.

  When you first come in the door, the C.O.’s office is to the immediate left. There were only two reasons you’d be called in there: if you were in trouble, or if you were in big trouble.

  The commanding officer was a small, thin Irishman named Sean Ahern. He had short reddish-brown hair, without a spot of gray although he was well into his 50s. His clear blue eyes twinkled when he looked directly at you, which was deceptive, because he was never nice to anyone, and the last thing you’d ever want to do was block his view of his closed office door.

  The C.O. favored heavy-soled shoes that he liked to stomp, even when he was sitting. In his chair, he liked to hunker down, pound his fist on the table, and look up at you
, as if you were some bully out of his childhood that he never got to settle the score with.

  His right eyebrow was missing hair about the width of a pinkie right in the middle. When he raised his voice, his eyebrow went up and you could see the muscle in that hairless part flex. That was why we called him the Brow.

  The Brow kept a woodcut print framed on the wall above his head. A British soldier in a Revolutionary War uniform stood with one foot raised on a step and one hand brandishing a sword over his head. In front of him was a defiant teenager in rags holding up a dirty elbow to block the soldier’s blow.

  I’ll never forget my first day at the Five and my first meeting with the Brow. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten assigned to Chinatown. It was the last precinct I’d wanted, and everyone else from my class had been assigned elsewhere. Funnily enough, everyone else wasn’t Chinese.

  By the time I walked into the Brow’s office for the first time, I was already having second thoughts about what I was doing there. The reek of gun oil filled my nose and mouth while resentment throbbed in my heart. In the Five precinct I’d be dealing with people who knew me and my parents. People who would ask about the war, my father, and other stupid questions. I’d even considered putting my badge on the table and saying, “That’s all, folks!”

  Instead, I stared at the British soldier woodcut. There wasn’t much else to look at apart from the Brow’s face.

  He followed my stare to the woodcut and spoke.

  “That dirty little boy is Andrew Jackson, the first Irish President of the United States,” he said. “That’s him being slashed for refusing to shine that bloody English officer’s shoes. Carried that scar on his arm to the grave. Now let me make something clear to you, mister. I don’t shine anyone’s shoes, either!”

  He looked at me expectantly.

  “Yes, sir.” Apart from being a sign of respect, it gave me something to say.

  Then he exhaled slowly and stretched his arms a little.

  “I understand, Mr. Chow, that you’re one of our boys from Vietnam. A good soldier follows his conscience. A good policeman, too. I’ll bet you’re wondering why you’re here and how we selected you for our rather exclusive house.” The Five had a rep for being one of the safest precincts in the city, with great cheap food. It was a nice place to work 20 years and then retire at half pay.