“So, John, whose funeral are we going to?” I asked, opening a container of dumplings. “Is there sauce with this?”
“Huh? Oh, um, there should be,” said John. “I’m taking you to Benny Yee’s funeral. Well, his visitation.”
“A Chinese funeral?” Max said with concern. “I don’t think we’re properly dressed for that.”
“How should we be dressed?” I asked.
“In white,” said Max. “It’s the color of mourning.”
“I’m not mourning the departed,” I pointed out. “We never even met.” I was wearing dark brown slacks, black boots with low heels, and a nice sweater in forest green, which I thought ought to be acceptable garb for a stranger paying her respects at a visitation on a miserable winter night like this.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Zadok,” said John. “People in Chinatown mostly dress just like you and Miss Diamond would for a funeral. A lot of the old ways don’t survive long in the New World. Or in the twenty-first century.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Max murmured thoughtfully, “I should have realized. The last time I was at a Chinese funeral was in China, and it was a long time ago.”
Knowing Max as I did, I realized that “long time” could easily mean a hundred years or so.
“And, actually, I’m not supposed to take you straight to Benny’s send-off,” said John. “Uncle Lucky wants to see you first. Which means meeting in private. I guess you already know, he can’t be seen in public. And Benny Yee’s wake is pretty public. Lots of people will be paying their respects.”
“I gather Mr. Yee is an influential man?” said Max, clinging to his seat as we skidded a little when turning onto Canal Street.
“Was, you mean,” I said, deciding not to open the sauce I’d found, since the ride wasn’t that smooth. I bit into a juicy dumpling and sighed.
“He was a Chinatown businessman,” said John. “And a pretty prominent member of the Five Brothers tong.”
“Ah-hah!” I said, perceiving the connection with Lucky. “A tong. That’s like the Mafia, right? Only Chinese.”
“Well, not really. I mean, yes, there’s a certain aspect of—”
“Perhaps you should keep both hands on the wheel,” Max said anxiously to John, who had lifted his right hand for a moment to waggle it ambiguously in response to my question.
“We’ll be there soon, Dr. Zadok,” John said soothingly, returning his full attention to the road.
So was John a tong member? Or was he simply, like me and Max, a normal person inadvertently connected to some underworld figures? (Well, “normal” in the sense of not being professional criminals.)
Traffic was heavy here, as it usually was, as well as perilous. On Canal Street, Chinatown’s main east-west artery, a two-way thoroughfare that was crowded with impatient drivers and daredevil cabbies, pedestrians were crossing the street against the lights, wading through moving cars, and stepping off the curb without warning. But despite Max’s obvious anxiety and occasional little gasps of alarm, John was handling this big vehicle well in the tight traffic, and he was alert in his reactions to the human obstacle course. So I thought we had a good chance of reaching our destination without mowing down a reckless pedestrian.
I heard panting in my ear and felt Nelli’s breath on my neck as she peered over my shoulder, from her commodious spot in the back of the hearse, to examine the steamed dumplings. Rather than argue about it, I gave her one, being careful not to let her accidentally take a finger with it.
“But that’s the only one you’re getting,” I said firmly.
As always, Chinatown was an explosion of light, color, bustle, life, and chaos. Even in this rotten weather, outdoor vendors lined Canal Street. The merchants, huddled deep in their coats and hooded parkas, were eagerly waving down pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks, urging them to stop, shop, and buy. We drove slowly past restaurants with duck carcasses hanging in the windows, their crispy skin burnished reddish-bronze by flavorful sauce and slow roasting. Chinese women carrying shopping bags bartered with fish vendors whose fresh-caught wares lay on piles of ice and glistened under the bright electric lights. A profusion of red, yellow, white, and green signs and billboards displayed Chinese calligraphy. The Chinese characters on all the stores and shops were followed, almost as an afterthought, by brief English translations: Happy Family Chinese Bakery; Shanghai Gourmet Restaurant; Glamorous Clothes; Kosher Dim Sum (food being a bond between Chinese and Jews); Herbal Remedies; Tea Imports.
When we stopped at another traffic light, John pointed to a nearby building with golden pagoda-like flourishes around the doorway. “Speaking of tongs, as we were . . . Have a look at the Chinese characters above the window there, Miss Diamond.”
“Call me, Esther.”
“Esther,” he repeated with a nod. “See the third character there? The one that looks sort of like a stick-figure man wearing a big straw hat?”
I peered at it. “Yes.”
“Ah,” said Max with a nod. “The symbol for tong.”
“You read Chinese?” I asked Max, not that surprised. I had heard him speak it once, and I knew he read English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head briskly to disclaim any such accomplishment. “I only know a few dozen common Chinese characters. You’d have to be familiar with several thousand to read the language competently.”
I’m no linguist, but I knew that in contrast to the phonetic way that Western writing had developed over the millennia, with each alphabetical symbol representing a sound, Chinese writing had arisen from ideograms and pictographs. I nodded in response to what Max had said, adding, “Because every word in the language has its own unique symbol, right?” I’d learned my ABCs when I was a small child, which is where literacy starts in our language. Kids in China don’t have it nearly so easy. If you memorized twenty-six symbols in Chinese, you’d only know twenty-six words, rather than knowing all the symbols used to write your whole language.
“And a lot of the characters are easy to confuse with each other, too.” John added ruefully, “I’m a good student, but my father finally gave up hoping I’d ever learn to read Chinese.”
“But you can read that symbol?” I asked. “The character for tong?”
“Well, there are a hundred or so symbols that are so common—especially in daily life in Chinatown—that most people around here know them,” John replied. “Even people like me who were hopeless at our Chinese lessons. Or immigrants from the bottom rungs of society who never really learned to read and write.”
“That’s why I recognize it,” said Max. “I know even fewer characters than our able young escort, but tong is a common one. And easy to remember.”
I found Chinese writing beautiful and exotic, but it all just looked like abstract art to me, without identifiable patterns, so I had never noticed this symbol—or any other—in particular, though I came often to this part of town.
“A stick-figure man with a straw hat,” I said to John with a smile. “I’ll remember that.”
“It’s one that you’ll see all over Chinatown,” he said.
“That seems very bold,” I commented. “Sort of an in-your-face challenge to law enforcement, isn’t it?”
I really couldn’t picture the Gambellos—or the other Mafia families with whom they competed—writing La Cosa Nostra on their buildings.
As traffic started moving again, John said, “No, not at all. The literal meaning of tong is ‘gathering place’ or ‘meeting hall.’ It applies to any space in which people congregate, for whatever reason.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, understanding now. “It’s similar to the way ‘family’ is a common word with a harmless meaning—unless we’re specifically talking about something like the Gambello family.” In which case, family meant a criminal organization, most of whose members weren’t actually related to each other.
“Um . . . yeah,” said John, keeping his eyes on the road.
I w
ondered if it had been tactless of me to bring that up, given that Lucky was evidently relying on the Chen family while he was hiding from the cops. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. I was curious and a little puzzled now, so I asked more questions as we proceeded through the center of Chinatown, passing Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth. Fortunately, John didn’t seem to mind answering.
“But I’m sure ‘tong’ has some kind of criminal connotation,” I said. “I sometimes read in the news about tong leaders being investigated or arrested for running extortion, prostitution, and gambling rackets. And whenever there’s a sweep of street gangs in Chinatown, the media usually describe the gangs as the enforcers for the tong bosses.”
“Yes, that’s certainly an aspect of Chinatown’s tongs,” said John as the hearse approached the Bowery. “A well-known one. They’re secret societies, in a sense, like Uncle Lucky’s work family—which my brother and I were never allowed to ask him about. Being kids we asked anyhow, of course, but my parents chewed us out if they found out about it, and Lucky mostly just told us not to ask.”
Ah. So apparently the Chens had not raised John and his brother to go into a similar line of work. Which would explain why he came across as respectable—he evidently was.
John continued, “But the tongs are also fraternal organizations. Community benevolent associations, you might say. There’s criminal activity—really bad stuff, in fact. But the tongs are also involved in helping immigrants, assisting families, supporting community activities and local businesses, and working on civic problems. It’s all based on the way Chinatown evolved, separate from the rest of the city. Self-contained and self-reliant. A lot of those old ways and established customs have far-reaching effects. Especially in a community where there are always a lot of new immigrants who don’t really speak English, don’t trust government authorities, and aren’t always here legally.”
When we slowed down for the traffic light at the Bowery, the windy north-south boulevard that bisects Chinatown, I wondered how far east we were going. Historically, Chinatown was a very small, densely packed neighborhood. Still densely packed today, it had expanded geographically in recent decades to take over much of Little Italy, which is north of Canal, and most of the Lower East Side, which was historically a Jewish neighborhood—way back when the Diamonds came to America from Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.
“Tongs are complicated,” John concluded as he turned south on the Bowery. “Well, most things in Chinatown are complicated.”
That much I had always gathered. In keeping with the long tradition of New York City as a gateway to America, there’s a constant churn of population in Chinatown, with new immigrants (legal and illegal) arriving here and working hard to scrape out a fresh start in a new land, and previous arrivals moving on after a few years—or after a generation—as they seek to turn their initial foothold in the New World into middle class prosperity. Much the way that my own forebears came to these shores more than a century ago, survived in overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side, and labored long hours for low wages as garment workers, before ultimately saving enough money to move on to better jobs and decent apartments elsewhere. Their children, in turn, grew up as Americans, started successful businesses, and owned suburban houses. It’s the perpetual cycle of realizing the American dream, generation after generation.
The Chinese got a late start on this path, despite migrating to America as early as the mid-nineteenth century to build the railroads that eventually crossed the continent. The racist Chinese Exclusion Act severely limited Chinese immigration to the US for some sixty years, including decades during which there were no immigration quotas or restrictions for other nationalities. The act prevented Chinese men from becoming US citizens, and prevented their wives and families from joining them here.
Even Jews were treated better than that. Not a thing one often has a chance to say about my people, historically speaking.
During the decades that the Exclusion Act was in effect, the Chinese in America became a small, isolated bachelor society, largely self-governing and separate from the general population. Hence the establishment of historic Chinatowns in various major cities, which are still destinations for new Chinese immigrants every year.
The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until World War Two, and the motivation for eliminating it was political, not moral. In the Pacific war against the Japanese, the US became allied with China. This made the typical American characterization of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril a tad inconvenient for the US government, which finally lifted the virtual ban on Chinese immigration that had been in effect since the Victorian era.
But, you know—world at war, tens of millions perishing, the Japanese occupation of China . . . There wasn’t exactly a huge rush to get in the door the moment the Exclusion Act was abolished. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Chinese population in the States really started booming. So the Chinese have made major inroads in American society in a relatively short time. And in the process, much of lower Manhattan has now turned into Chinatown.
Hey, you learn a lot about a people when you spend your whole life eating their food twice a week and every Christmas. Especially if your father is a history professor.
Still making cautiously slow progress, the hearse turned once more, cruising down to the south side of Chinatown’s historic area and doubling back toward Mulberry and Mott, where they each came to a dead end in this tangle of old streets. I realized that the claustrophobic one-way traffic system of this neighborhood had forced John to bypass our destination and circle back around to it. He pulled into a parking garage and swiped a plastic key card through a machine at the entrance. A moment later, we were granted access to the garage, and John parked the hearse in a large ground floor space that was, I noticed, reserved for Chen’s Funeral Home.
The penny dropped, as Ronnie Romano might say.
“So this family business that Lucky is in with your father . . . It’s a funeral home?” As we all got out of the vehicle, I realized with consternation that John’s mode of transport had been a pretty big clue.
“Yes.” He went around to the back of the hearse so he could let Nelli out. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t make that clear.”
“No need to apologize,” said Max. “The hearse was self-explanatory.”
Indeed.
It was starting to dawn on me how Lucky, while hiding from the cops, had uncovered disturbing information about the recent death of a Chinatown businessman. John’s family was obviously handling the funeral, in the business which they co-owned with their Uncle Lucky.
“Okay, I think I’m caught up now,” I muttered.
Having consumed most of the carry-out appetizers, I was still hugging the bag in my arms. I hoped we were headed some place comfortable enough for me to sit down and finish my dinner.
Nelli leaped out of the hearse in a burst of energy and then gave herself a bracing little shake. She wagged her tail gaily as Max took her leash from John and we all headed toward the exit.
“Are you a mortician?” I asked John curiously. I didn’t think I’d ever met one socially before.
“No. I mean, I help out, of course. It’s the family business, after all. But I’m in grad school. Biochemistry. My older brother is the mortician. He’ll take over running the funeral home, when the time comes.”
“In that case, your father must be pleased with both his sons.” One would be a scientist and the other would follow in the father’s footsteps. My own parents, who must often wonder if I was a changeling left for them by fairies with a malicious sense of humor, would be hard-pressed to hide their envy of the elder Mr. Chen.
John grinned as he shook his head. “Chinese parents are never pleased with their kids, Esther.”
“Well, then, that’s another bond between Jews and Chinese,” I replied, and he laughed.
“Or if they’re pleased,” he added, “they don’t show it. That would never do, you know.”
The sleet was turning to snow as we left the garage, so I pulled my hood over my head. As the wind whipped down the street, blowing damp flakes into my face, Max paused to settle his fur cap more firmly on his head. Nelli huddled close to him, clearly skeptical about the wisdom of venturing forth on foot in this weather.
Following John’s lead, we started walking in the direction of Mulberry Street. I estimated that our destination, which must be close now, was roughly halfway between the Fifth Precinct house, which was the Chinatown police station, and One Police Plaza, which was just a few blocks from where we’d left the hearse. So Lucky must really trust the Chens. There were a lot of cops nearby, if the family happened to decide they didn’t really want a Gambello hitter hiding out here. Or if any of the Chens happened to be a little too loud or indiscreet, unable to resist gossiping about the notorious mobster hiding out with them.
Thanks to my recent memories of being arrested and incarcerated, I also wasn’t thrilled to see how close we were to the immense, ugly façade of Manhattan Central Booking, where a lot of people were probably having a grim night. I always thought that building’s architect must have been a huge fan of Stalin and Mao; the place had that sort of look. Feeling a little spooked as I glimpsed that stark edifice looming ominously over Columbus Park by night, I reminded myself that I was a free woman—and would remain so, thanks to Lopez making a mess of the procedure after arresting me.
Thinking of him made me start wondering where he was now, and whether he . . .
No, stop there. Stop right there.
“We’re almost there,” said John, startling me.
“Huh?”
“It’s just ahead.” He was squinting against the snowflakes flying into his eyes. They clumped on his dark lashes.
The Misfortune Cookie ed-6 Page 9