This Is a Bust

by Ed Lin

  —

  Then, suddenly, it was my least favorite day in the world. Chinese New Year and its endless photo ops for me. The actual celebration goes on for two weeks in Chinatown, but on the legitimate first day, they hold the parade with the lion dances. 1976 was the year of the dragon — it was supposed to be a year of tumultuous change.

  The Brow sent us off with his annual remark: “I don’t want to see you put in for holiday differential on this one. This is no American holiday.”

  On the footpost, I walked by a seafood restaurant on Bowery whose big windows were crowded on the bottom with tanks of fish, crabs, prawns, and lobsters. The rest of the window showed off the crowded dining room and the all-you-can-eat buffet that was only open to people who could read the characters in the sign above it.

  I saw a family sitting there, two parents and a daughter and her boyfriend. I knew he was the daughter’s fiancé because she was showing her parents the engagement ring on her finger while he sat back and sipped his water. I didn’t break my stride, and I only saw them all for two seconds, but it brought home how removed I was from regular life in Chinatown. I used to wish that they’d left us in the war longer so that I could have gone on fighting until I was dead.

  Then this thing with Barbara had happened. Maybe there was something out there for me. Not today, though. Barbara was tied up with some relatives for the day, and I had to go see my mother, so we would miss each other today.

  —

  Ten thousand small firecrackers, each representing a year of prosperity, had been strung across Mott Street in front of the Greater China Association’s office. The president of the association and several other community businessmen stood together where the firecrackers dipped at their lowest point. I stood at the edge of the group. Whenever a press photographer wanted to shoot a picture, I was pulled into the frame. A dozen cops circling us kept the crowd at bay.

  Although I had smiled for the pictures, I was irritable. Every time I heard firecrackers go off in the crowd, I looked around for someone to slap.

  “Why so jumpy, Chow?” asked Peepshow, a cop who was off to my left. “You people live and breathe firecrackers, right?”

  How the hell Peepshow had managed to keep his shield through the layoffs was beyond me. He was lazy and incompetent. He had a lower-ass rip in what was apparently his only pair of jeans. That’s how he got his nickname. No one ever told him to get it patched up. His real name was Geller. People forgot his first name.

  I said, “Not only are fireworks illegal, but they’re dangerous.”

  “To hell with that talk,” Peepshow said. “The Chinese have a religious and cultural right to bear them. What would Chinatown be like without firecrackers? We got to keep the visitors entertained.”

  —

  One of the honorees was a guy from the Chinatown American Legion, a decorated World War II vet. His hair was off-white and crisp like his khaki slacks. His shoes were in bad shape. He probably couldn’t see them over his bulging stomach.

  When it was time for more pictures, I got up on the stage next to him and gave a plastic smile.

  “Hey, Chow,” said the vet, “you were in Vietnam, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “How did you lose?”

  I stared at him for a little bit.

  “We were let down,” I said.

  “You guys didn’t have it in you to fight. You were coddled too much when you were kids. Color TV. Rock music. Your generation doesn’t have any real men in it. You guys are a bunch of pussies.”

  “I guess real men plump when you cook ’em,” I said, pointing to his gut.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m an old man now, but I paid my dues. I was in France, Chow. I helped achieve our goals. Goals of the free world. You and your bullshit attitude remind me of the lousy soldiers who lost China.”

  “You think you could have stopped communism in Vietnam?”

  “Hell, yeah. We stopped Hitler, didn’t we?”

  “Weren’t you fighting on the same side as communists against Hitler?”

  “We just had the same enemy back then.”

  “Weren’t you allied with communists, old man?”

  We were both smiling as cameras flashed. We talked out the sides of our mouths.

  “Hey, Chow, you shut your mouth.”

  “Aren’t you a fucking commie, old man?”

  “I’ll tan your goddamn hide for saying that.”

  “I already have a tan. From Nam.”

  When the pictures were over, I glared at him, then stepped away.

  —

  At 1300, the president of the association took a red plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, flicked it, and lit the firecrackers. We were quickly enveloped in clouds of sparks, sound, and smoke. Burnt firecracker paper settled dreamlike over the cheering crowd. It was tough to see for a few minutes, and I gagged on the smell of gunpowder.

  I waved my arms around until I saw Peepshow again.

  “Hey, everything’s cool, baby,” he said. “Just relax.” He gestured at the throngs of tourists breathing dim-sum breath.

  I couldn’t take it easy because I knew trouble was going to start once the parade got underway. It was the first one since the death of Chiang Kai Shek, who was the head of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

  The KMT had lost the Chinese civil war to the communists and retreated to Taiwan. But the party still held power in Chinatown. It was no secret that the KMT poured cash into the Greater China Association and paid the salaries of its board. The association was an umbrella group for Chinatown’s many smaller family associations. Most business owners paid lip service to the KMT and bankrolled the parade to show what great communism-fighters they were.

  The parade prominently featured the KMT flag, held in triumph, as if they had won the war. And if you weren’t there on the sidelines cheering and blowing kisses, you might be branded a pinko by the neo-McCarthyites in the community.

  “Kuomintang and the Chinese people for 10,000 years!” screamed a little girl with a megaphone at the front of the parade. Everybody cheered. She stomped on red firecracker paper shreds as she started her march. I shifted my weight and balanced my right hand at my hip.

  A dissident group of merchants who were aligned with the communists had put up posters throughout Chinatown that by dawn had been ripped down by their rivals. A tourist walking by one of these posters wouldn’t notice anything different between it and the numerous other signs offering money-wiring services, get-rich schemes, and apartment listings. But anyone who ate rice and was even semi-literate would see:

  ONE TRUE CHINA FOR THE CHINESE PEOPLE!

  BURY THE CORRUPT CHIANG KAI SHEK!

  BURY THE CORRUPT KMT!

  RAISE OUR VOICES AT THE PARADE!

  COMMITTEE OF UNITED CHINESE

  The committee was mostly made up of mainland Chinese affiliated with old warlords who bore grudges against the KMT and had passed them on to their kids.

  Resentment runs deep in Chinese people. Forgiveness is not a Chinese value. We pray for fortune, luck, a long and happy life, but never for the redemption of our enemies;

  we want them to die a thousand deaths. Chiang Kai Shek killed communists every chance he got, especially unarmed ones. The communists threw KMT soldiers and their families into re-education camps when the war was over. It was stupid to forgive because forgiveness meant you hadn’t learned anything.

  A few years ago, the U.N. had expelled the KMT-ruled Taiwan from its roster of permanent members, a move opposed by the U.S., which still recognized the KMT as the legitimate rulers of China. The U.S. had no diplomatic ties with so-called “Red China.” But Americans didn’t know that the color red has always symbolized China to all Chinese, whether they followed Chiang, or Mao, or

  Dr. Seuss. Even the KMT flag is dominated by a red field. That red could represent all the blood of Chinese killed by other Chinese, whether at the collapse of
every dynasty or in a gambling den.

  When the elementary-school girls were done with their clumsy, mercifully short dance, Boy Scouts came stomping in. Instead of their traditional neckerchiefs, they were wearing the KMT flag. One kid with gold and silver arrow badges running down his chest played a bugle that jiggled a shaggy mane of yellow cords. He did a pretty good version of “Yankee Doodle,” and then he played the KMT anthem. The crowd cheered, and when he was done, he saluted. Tourist cameras went off. The bugle boy led the scouts marching forward to make room for the next performers.

  I saw some commotion in the crowd — eight men with baseball caps pulled low over their faces jumped into the opening behind the scouts. They lined up and unrolled a huge banner as wide as the street that read:

  BURY CHIANG KAI SHEK / BURY CORRUPT KMT!!!

  A small part in English read:

  U.S. RECOGNIZE CHINA

  The immediate crowd reaction was a mass contest to see who could hold their breath the longest. This brash display at a KMT event was shocking to everyone whether you agreed or not.

  The only sounds came from the tourists and the cops, who had no idea what was going on.

  “They didn’t put a lot of thought into that banner, eh?” asked Peepshow, throwing an elbow into me.

  Suddenly six men with their heads tied in red handkerchiefs charged out onto the street. Each held a deceptively thin bamboo pole that was strong enough to smash cinder blocks. The pole-bearers advanced on the men holding the banner. The Chinese people in the crowd took two steps back behind the tourists.

  “Hey, it’s a kung-fu exhibition!” said Peepshow, crossing his arms. I grabbed his right elbow and yanked him forward with me.

  “Listen, yo-yo! This fight is for real!” I yelled at him.

  I don’t know who hit first. The guys with the bamboo poles were awkward, and their weapons were soon grabbed away. Baseball caps and handkerchiefs were yanked off. Pretty soon, you couldn’t tell who was from which side, and bamboo poles were spanking anyone within reach.

  None of us were ready for a riot, least of all the merchants who had opened special sidewalk displays for the parade.

  “Grab anyone with a pole!” I yelled at Peepshow. I wrestled down a man who must have been twice as old as me and yanked the pole out of his hands. I was reaching back for my handcuffs when I saw a periscope rise out of the chaos and zero in on my face.

  “It’s a Chinese cop!” said the periscope. A hand reached out from the crowd and grabbed the bamboo pole on the ground that I had just taken away.

  I twisted around and stepped on the hand. The man under me squirmed.

  “Ouch!” said a female voice, and a woman tourist rolled forward onto the ground next to me. The periscope swung away, revealing a male tourist with a TV camera.

  “What the hell are you doing!” the man tourist demanded to know.

  “Don’t touch that pole!” I yelled at the woman tourist.

  “I just wanted to see what it was made of,” she moaned.

  “I’m going to report you!” threatened the man tourist. He swung his camera lens back at me. “I got your badge number and everything.”

  “Keep that shit out of my face!” I yelled at him. I heaved against the camera and felt him fall back. The man under me managed to scoot out and slipped into a sea of legs somewhere to the south. “Motherfucker!” I yelled to God.

  “I can’t believe you talk like that!” yelled the tourist woman. She was cradling her hand like it was a sick hamster.

  “Go fuck yourself!” I told her.

  —

  We managed to get six men into custody with no reports of serious injuries in the crowd. We weren’t sure who we had, and even though a few thousand Chinese had seen what had happened, no eyewitnesses would come into the house.

  We gave the men warnings for disturbing the peace. They all seemed to know English.

  “Can you believe it, those guys pushing for Red China?” asked Peepshow. He’d managed to get a bruise on his jaw. “Right when the Viet Cong are running all over. Those Red China protesters are right down there with Jane Fonda. They keep up at it, people will think they’re gooks.”

  “People already think they’re gooks,” I said.

  —

  I went home, took a shower with a bar of sandalwood soap, and cut myself shaving. In the mirror, I saw that I had bruises in the shape of fingers around my neck. I didn’t remember getting them, and they didn’t hurt, so I ignored them. I got into plain clothes and went back out. The streets were flooded with tourists going in and out of the restaurants and shops. I headed for Columbus Park.

  The rundown park was jammed with groups of Chinese people talking loudly while eating rice cakes, leading

  some to choke on too-big bites. Grandmothers spitting into their hands and wiping children’s faces. Old men standing together, each adding another sentence to an imagined story about this guy they all used to know. Teenaged boys and girls slapping handballs around on the courts. Someone had a soccer ball, but with no field or goalposts in the park, the kids took turns trying to bounce it on their knees. Everyone was dressed in red or wearing something red.

  A little boy sucking on a dry plum stared at me and I buttoned the second button to my red flannel shirt. When he spat the seed out, it would slip into the cracks in the asphalt, where there were hundreds of other seeds that had been spat out by his father and uncles.

  I found the midget sipping sweetened soy milk from a plastic bottle. He nodded and said, “Officer Chow,” without taking the straw out of his mouth. He was wearing a red cardigan over a t-shirt that had turned pink from being washed with the sweater. He was idly playing a game of Chinese chess against a little boy dressed in a suit with a red tie.

  “I didn’t see you at the parade,” I told him.

  “I don’t have to go to the parade,” said the midget.

  “Aren’t you proud of your culture?”

  The midget took the straw out of his mouth.

  “I’m very proud of the Chinese people,” he said. “We invented soy milk, right? What a wonderful drink. Anyway, if you’re talking about things like the lion dance, I don’t support that. You know where that originated from?”

  “There’s that old fable about that guy who wanted to show how brave he was by playing ball with the lions.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. But the whole ritual of dressing up dancers as lions and going around to businesses to collect red envelopes was just a big bribery scheme cooked up by government officials in ancient times. You give enough money to the lion, you buy some ‘good luck.’ Sound familiar?”

  “That was a long time ago. It’s not like that now.”

  “Well, they use more than lions now.”

  “If it were a crime, we’d have detectives on the case.”

  “I heard about the dustup at the parade today,” said the midget. His soy milk bottomed out and he tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder into a trash can. “Fighting amongst ourselves is in our culture. Think about China’s history. How many little countries were defeated and consolidated and broken up again over how many thousands of years?”

  “A lot.”

  “Yes, a lot. Think of all the regional beliefs and traditions that each of those countries had, even before the Mongols and the Manchus colonized us. Everyone who’s Chinese is really many different ancestries, with the blood of a hundred different nations that are now gone.”

  To the little boy in the suit, he said, “Take that piece back. That’s a bad move. Very bad move.” The boy sadly dragged his cannon back and bit his lip.

  The midget went on. “All the Chinese people feel this internal struggle. That’s why Chinese leaders are so terrible.”

  “Both the KMT and the communists are lousy,” I said. “But you know, if Sun Yat Sen hadn’t died suddenly, China would be farther along than Japan is now.”

  The midget blinked. “Sun, he would have ruined China if he had lived.”

  I wa
s shocked that the midget dismissed Sun so easily. Both the KMT and the communists looked up to Sun. He was the one who’d kicked out the colonizing Manchus in 1911. Tragically, he had died before seeing his reforms put into practice. If you ate with chopsticks, you loved the man.

  “You can’t say that about Sun,” I said. “He was the one who got China back on its feet.”

  “He was so vague about everything,” said the midget. “No wonder both the KMT and the communists love him so much. If he had lived and headed the country, he would have been expected to be as ruthless as the old emperors, like Mao and Chiang are now — otherwise people wouldn’t admire him. Sun loved Chinese people so much, he couldn’t stand the thought of mistreating anyone. That’s what killed him.”

  Life under the Manchus had been hard on China. The men had to wear their hair in queues to show loyalty to the Manchus and pay taxes to a Manchu emperor. Chinese weren’t allowed to rise up to the highest military or government ranks, which were held by Manchus or Europeans. It had been almost 300 years of institutionalized discrimination against the Chinese. I wondered if the Manchus had allowed the Chinese cops to get investigative assignments.

  “Okay,” I told the midget. “You think Chinese people make lousy leaders and we all hate each other, then how come we all live together in Chinatown? Why do you come to Chinatown?”

  The midget shrugged.

  “I’m only in it for the soy milk,” he said.

  I shook my head and checked my watch.

  “I gotta go see my mother,” I said.

  “Have fun in Brooklyn,” the midget said with a wry smile.

  “Happy New Year!”

  “Whoopee.”

  —

  Down the street, I bought a fresh green bamboo twig from a sidewalk salesman. It was cultivated in a nursery where it had been slowly twisted over a few months so it would grow into the shape of an undone wire coat hanger. More twists made it more lucky.

  I stopped at Martha’s Bakery. Lonnie and Dori both looked frazzled. To save time, boxes had already been packed with rice cakes and stacked up. I picked one up and threw my money at Dori.