“Maybe you blocked it out. He would be screaming it in and out of the doors. My parents and I could hear from the porch. He was older by then. Maybe you’d already left.”
When he went to Chinatown that Saturday to take his mother to the doctor, he had a secret mission. On arriving, he found her ready to go, wearing a purple peacoat and jade earrings. As always, she was a stickler for presentation. Pressing down the Velcro of her Mary Janes, he guided her into the wheelchair. The sun was out, and on Mott Street, he pushed her slowly so she could take in the sights.
Chinatown had changed. There were more white people on the street than Chinese, it seemed to him. A Japanese creperie shop and a Taiwanese ice cream parlor had replaced the old Toisanese pottery and dried fungi stores. A few homeless Chinese men sat on flattened cardboard outside a shuttered dim sum restaurant.
“Hon Ngin Gai change a lot,” Jason leaned down and said into her ear.
“All the new immigrants are from Fujian Province,” his mother replied in Toisanese. “The Fujianese are poor!”
“No, I mean this.” He pointed at the creperie. “All these fancy shops.”
His mother shrugged in the wheelchair. “Hon Ngin Gai hou gi,” she said back.
Jason frowned. Even his own mother—with all her prejudices, her Republican leanings, her habit of projecting the wordFujianeselike it was a cuss—was concerned about rising rents.
They reached the medical offices and took the elevator to the third floor. Jason sat beside his mother as a nurse recorded her vitals. Dr. Zhen, the young heart specialist, spoke Mandarin but no Cantonese, and they all agreed it was best if they just communicated in English. Dr. Zhen said she wanted to up the dose on the A-fib medication, and that his mother ought to come for another appointment in a month. From all this it seemed to Jason, though Dr. Zhen didn’t say so directly, that his mother was declining.
When he thought of her dying, he felt wrapped in a silence that was deeper than the quiet he’d grown used to in the brownstone. Perhaps he should have been overcome with guilt, that long neglected but innate sense of filial piety finally welling up in him, so that at last, for her sake, he’d leave his life as a writer and become a lawyer, and renounce salads, and visit his sisters more often. But the feeling wasn’t guilt.
What he was experiencing was something more like the anticipation of displacement, for even though he was so safe, so secure, in the brownstone that he owned with Rachel’s parents’ money, his mother’s death would be yet another disappearance, the hardest of all. With her, it felt as if the world from which he came—a world of homegrown bean sprouts and rooftop pigeon cages, of hawthorn candy and Hostess fruit pies, of backyard barbecues and blackouts—would vanish entirely.
When they returned to her apartment, he helped her move to the couch, where she promptly fell asleep. Jason lifted his mother’s feet so she could lie back properly, then repositioned her head.
“Oh, I go to sleep?” she said, laughing at herself.
“Don’t worry—take a nap. I’ll wash the dishes,” he said, covering her with a blanket.
Within a few minutes, his mother’s mouth was hanging open, and she was snoring at regular intervals.
This was just as he had hoped.
He crept to the cupboard by the window. It was an old wood cabinet with clunky shelves and no sliders. With a little tug to the left and a little to the right, he wiggled the bottom drawer until he’d opened it just wide enough to peek at its contents.
He withdrew a folder. Riffling through the papers, he found a yellowing rectangle from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Name: Dun Ho Wong Occupation: Student Age: Eight Years
Origin: Canton, China Destination: New York City, New York
Physical marks and peculiarities: Mole outer corner right eyebrow
Next, he discovered his father’s discharge papers from the U.S. Navy, the regal script rendered so heavily that it was now no more than a smear of black ink. And he noticed his grandpa’s death certificate:1903. Retired. Restaurant Owner. Suicide.
He reached the change-of-name form next.
At a special term, part two, of the Civil Court of the City of New York, at the Court House thereof, 111 Centre Street, Borough of Manhattan, on Seventeenth of June, in the Year Nineteen Sixty-Six,
In the Matter of Application of DUN HO WONG and FOON WAH WONG on behalf of themselves and their children for leave to change their names to RICHARD DUN HO CHIN, FOON WAH CHIN, JENNIFER CHIN, JULIE CHIN, JACKIE CHIN, JASON CHIN…
For years, it seemed, his family had wrapped and unwrapped itself in disguise. Why, for instance, had his father bought the house on Livonia using the name Richard Wong—at least according to that deed Sadie had obtained—when one year prior, he’d changed his name to Chin? Had he forgotten his new name? Was he trying to hide himself still?
Jason continued to search. He found a bankruptcy filing, a utility bill, a mortgage note. He opened boxes, poured out folders, and closed the window so the drilling outside wouldn’t disturb his mother’s sleep. Then he noticed a folder marked “78 Livonia”—within it, a flaking piece of paper.
THIS INDENTURE, made the ninth day of August, nineteen hundred and seventy-eight
BETWEEN
WONG DUN HO, also known as RICHARD WONG, residing at 5534 East 52th Street, Brooklyn, New York
