He glanced up: bak gui faces all around, scrutinizing him, arms crossed. Yet there was one man in a bamboo-colored uniform who whistled to catch Richard’s attention. The man made a funny, clucking sound in his throat, then gestured with his hand, as if calling over a puppy.
Grinning, the young man tugged Richard onto the seat beside him and showed Richard some photographs.
“Girl,” said the man, pointing at the pictures, his lips spread to show his white, healthy teeth. He guffawed, slapped his knee, took a swig from a bottle at his side. Poking at Richard’s chest, he laughed again. “Boy.”
Girl, boy—Richard recognized those English words. He’d learned them in the village primary school.
And then he realized.
As he ogled the photographs, the bamboo man laughed, showing him others. Soft white cakes topped with hard brown walnuts.Blond and red-haired women, naked or in lacy undergarments. Prior to that day, Richard had never thought about what lay beneath the clothes of his cousins in the village.
Just then, Mr. Lao reached the deck, and before Richard could run, his chaperone grabbed him and yanked him down the stairs.
The loss of dinner and breakfast, the spanking, the slap to his ear—these were no real deterrents. Whenever Mr. Lao snatched him with those dirty fingernails, Richard’s hatred swelled, and he swore that once they docked in America, he’d run away.
The day they arrived in the harbor of San Francisco, however, the ship crew allowed only the bak gui passengers to descend to the pier, and they transferred the Chinese to a ferry. “Angel Island,” Mr. Lao muttered as they shuffled on board, his fingers pressed hard into Richard’s shoulder blades.
They stood on the deck of the ferry with a hundred other Cantonese as the boat bobbed forward. Richard watched the island rise before them like the hump of a beached shark, its banks flanked with long white penitentiaries. He realized then that he hadn’t studied his book. In panic, he turned to Mr. Lao. “I can’t read these characters.”
Mr. Lao grabbed the book from his hands and began to drill him.
What was his father’s name?
Chin Koon Lai?
No. He must sayWongKoon Lai!
How many brothers did he have?
No brothers.
No, he must say three!
Richard wanted to cry, because even when he knew the correct answer, the book required that he memorize a falsehood.
How many cooking knives did his family own?
He had no idea.
Mr. Lao told him to say the number four.
They were herded into a facility teeming with families from several ships. There were not enough benches, so people squatted onthe floor, wetting their clothes in the dirty puddles under the windows, suffocating in the smell of unwashed bodies. There was rising chatter, and then the guards demanded silence. But how long were they going to keep him there? Richard watched a guard seize a woman with red pocks and drag her down the hall. Her children clawed and screamed. They were going to lock her up in the dungeon, Richard thought, and he wanted to scream, too, as if she were his own mother. Richard was still watching when someone handed him a bowl of watery oats, but when he lifted the spoon to his mouth, it tasted like something sucked up from the puddles on the floor. Mr. Lao reprimanded him—“Your father doesn’t want you to cry”—“You must study”—“Eat your dinner”—now trying to stuff a spoon in Richard’s mouth—“How many knives in the kitchen?”—“They’ll send you back if you cry”—“How many chairs in the bedroom?”—but instead of answering, Richard howled, “Mama, Mama, Mama!” for hours, until he exhausted himself and fell asleep on Mr. Lao’s shoes.
They spent two weeks in the barracks, with its four rows of three-tiered bunk beds. One morning, the guards separated him from Mr. Lao and led him to the interrogation cell. Richard faced a desk with two bak gui and a translator. Despite his terror, something coalesced within him, some strength left waiting in reserve, and he remembered his name was now Wong. He remembered that he lived in Wong village, that he had three brothers, and that their family owned four knives. He remembered their home contained three beds and four chairs, and that his father had bought his mother an ivory elephant as a wedding gift.
Lie by lie, he won their approval; by the end, he was an American.
When Richard arrived in Brooklyn, he was taken not to a sprawling house with servants, but to a tall, narrow building crisscrossed by iron ladders, its three floors crammed with people. His father’s restaurant was on the second floor, and they slept with their workersin the back. Across the street was a twenty-four-hour candy store called Midnight Rose. Richard learned to say “Double Bubble” and “Abba-Zabba.”
But the novelty of 78 Livonia Avenue wore off quickly. It was hard to sleep with the trains crossing outside the window, and his father was quieter, thinner, and more fastidious than the men in Chin village; he never took a nap and sometimes did not stop for lunch at all. Seeing all this, Richard reached a new conclusion. His father hadn’t brought Richard overseas to fatten him. He’d brought him overseas to fatten the envelope they sent back to the village.
“We are not like the others. We have a special title,” his father’s speeches always began. “You are the first son—the only son. But just as I was the first son, eldest of six. And my father was also the first son, eldest of four, and his father was the first son, and his father. Which means, we inherit this family.
“You must work hard and study hard. In school you can learn English, and then one day, you can have a good, American job. You’ll wear a suit and tie and go to Manhattan.”
But Richard did not want to wait for Manhattan. From the restaurant window at the corner of Livonia and Saratoga, he looked down and saw bak gui boys wrestling in the gutter, bak gui grandmothers knitting on stoops, bak gui girls grouped around the iceman with his glass bottles of colored syrup, and toothless bak gui men with sardine cans, competing for the affection of the block’s stray cat. He saw the dead quiet of Saturdays followed by the evening’s eager rush to Pitkin Avenue, the stuffing of faces with pastrami sandwiches, the seagulls flying low for scraps.
His father confined him to the restaurant. Each weekend, Richard was forced in front of yet another Burt & Benjamin’s Beginner’s English Print Book, with page after page of dull gray cats, dogs, and houses, each with a wide line underneath.
