“It’s easy! It’s a ‘cat’!” he’d call to his father, and run into the kitchen to point it out, but his father would insist he write the word. And writing the word in English should have been as easy as sayingit aloud, he thought—just as it should have been easy for a boy of his age to write in Chinese—but he could only stare up at the A-B-C strip that his father had pasted to the wall of the back room, his eyes whirling until he was nauseous.
Over the course of the year, attending school with the other children of Brownsville, Richard metamorphosed rapidly. As his spoken English progressed, he made friends, all of them the children of the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Richard and these boys spent their time hurling rocks from the railroad quarry at each other’s noses. Or they played two-hand touch with a folded newspaper, or snuck into the Pitkin Loew’s for the seven o’clock Western. Sometimes, they stood barefoot outside the turnstile of the Saratoga station, a few faking as beggars while another dipped his fingers into the pocket of a Crombie overcoat. Most frequently, the boys fought one another on the street corners, piling body on body into a thick, soft mass of prepubescence: punching, jabbing, writhing, like maggots under the sun.
The boys—many fatherless, their daddies stolen by the early years of the Depression—wanted to be mobsters like the guys who haunted the back of the candy store. Murder, Inc., wore the best clothes in Brownsville, owned the fanciest cars, and sported the finest girlfriends, and the boys aspired to be just like them. They wanted girls before they knew why, money, and big houses.
Richard learned to share their ambitions. He too yearned to be the Gary Cooper or Buck Jones of Brooklyn. But then there was his father, who began showing up outside P.S. 175 to march him straight back to Canton Kitchen so he wouldn’t play with those boys, and who on weekends would drag him through the streets of Chinatown to the Chin Association, where in smoky rooms, uncles in business suits pinched his cheeks into wontons.
One summer day, a year after his arrival, Richard’s irritation reached its breaking point. In the afternoon, he slipped out when his father wasn’t looking and caught up with the bak gui boys. For the next couple of hours, he joined in their activities: hauling egg cratesfor the dairyman, teasing the Humpty Dumpty Pickle Twins, and watching the slaughterhouse workers wield their knives on a new truckload of sheep. Then the boys noticed a fresh sign.
CONEY ISLAND’S SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD THEATRICALS!
10¢ A TICKET: EVERY DAY NINE TO NINE ON THE HOUR!
The boys hatched a plan: hide the challah, tell the babushka there was no more bread, make her hand over a dime for the bakery, then ride out to Coney Island to see the show. Soon they all wanted to go, and they agreed to meet at the Rockaway Avenue station the next morning.
Five, six, seven, eight of them would go, would the Chinaman?
Richard understood Coney Island was the best place on earth. He did not have a babushka, but he nodded anyway.
After the boys dispersed for supper, Richard’s indignation swelled, and he felt the urge to throw something. Kicking the crumpled newspapers and soda bottles that had gathered at the curb, filled with loathing for the scrawny man who had indentured him, he sloshed globs of spit in his mouth, fomenting three English words—hurled them, loud and outraged, across the street:
“I WILL GO!”
When he reached the restaurant dining room, it was so hot, he instinctually reached to pull his shirt over his head. On days like this in the village, the children would spend all day splashing in the river. They would not be locked up behind layers and layers of brick, a human-size furnace.
Richard stomped past the mop bucket toward the kitchen. It was crowded with cooks in dove-white tunics chopping ginger and shaving carrots, the air steamy and scallion-sweet, and he found his father bent over the metal safe, accounting for expenses in a notebook.
“I need a coin to go to Coney Island tomorrow.”
Closing the safe and removing his glasses, Koon Lai looked down at his son, his lips pressed tight.
“If you don’t give me money, then I’m not mopping the floor,” Richard bargained.
Peeved that the floor hadn’t been mopped, his father sent one of the waiters to complete the task, and then he kneeled to be eye level with Richard.
“All those years in China, your belly was full,” he said. “Did you ever think why?”
“I am never allowed to go anywhere!” Richard cried, swiping a pair of forks off the counter. “Bak gui boys go to Coney Island! Why can’t I go to Coney Island?”
“You think you are a bak gui boy?” his father said softly, and then with terrifying, escalating volume:
“Do you have money like a bak gui boy? Can you read like a bak gui boy? Go to Coney Island when you can read like a bak gui boy!”
Richard knocked his head against the wall and groaned.
“Take the garbage to the corner,” Koon Lai ordered, pointing to two black bags in the hall.
Instead, Richard bolted past the bags and down the stairs onto the street. He would get money one way or the other.
All evening at the restaurant, Koon Lai kept glancing at the door, anxious for his son’s return. In such rapid time, Richard thought like an American—he thought about his own plate. Koon Lai tried to think of an appropriate punishment. In China, a misbehaving child would be beaten. But he was nervous to try; he had never beaten a child before.
He didn’t like leaving when there were so many customers, but at nine o’clock Koon Lai checked the lock on the safe, inspected the supply of sodas in the storage closet, and descended to the street to look for the runaway.
As soon as he reached the sidewalk, Koon Lai heard a loud clatter and shouts from up the block. About twenty feet away, a crowd had gathered in front of a tenement, the people encircling a broken, upside-down bedroom cabinet. The cabinet, Koon Lai deduced, hadjust been shucked from the second-floor window. There was no sign of Richard, but he recognized the voices of the people in the tenement window: hak gui.
There was a husband, a wife, and four girl children.
He had become aware of them long before. Sometimes the girls would sit on the fire escape, dangling their feet over the street, braiding each other’s hair. Once, the father and mother had come to the restaurant for a meal. His waiter had sought out Koon Lai’s approval, and without hesitation, Koon Lai had nodded his assent. In any case, he had watched the two hak gui carefully that night, and they had been quiet and tidy.
