Sadie Chin had a crush on Kendrick Lamar. Raised on a diet of Billy Joel and the Beatles, then introduced to Coldplay by a college boyfriend, Sadie had never really listened to rap before, but she was starting her journey withgood kid, m.A.A.d city. Soon she could identify the beats she heard from the cars on Eastern Parkway.
It had been more than a month since she’d started atNew Gotham, and she liked the feeling that she was becoming more of a Brownsvillian each day. On the way back home, she would stop on Utica Avenue to buy a Jamaican beef patty or a Guyanese roti or a bottle of peanut punch, usually spoiling her appetite for whatever her father cooked for dinner.
“What’s all this?” he asked one evening when she returned to the brownstone, a plastic takeout bag swinging on her arm.
Jason Chin stood before the stove, stir-frying tempeh in black bean sauce, his shoulder-length hair tied back with a rubber band. Sadie had seen pictures of his hippie years, when he’d worn it down to his waist, and she knew, too, that he’d once been so gaunt that her grandmother had complained that she hadn’t come to America to have her son looking like a starved peasant. He had rounded out just a tad since then, as most fifty-five-year-olds were prone to do.
“Goat roti. I don’t need dinner. I texted you.”
“No, I saw,” he said, trying but failing to bite back the smile bubbling on his lips. “I mean you.” He nodded at her attire—she was wearing a crop top and ripped jeans. “Is this your ghetto outfit?”
Sadie nearly choked on the peanut punch.
“What?”
“Your style.” He chuckled, then lowered the flame on the burner. “I think you’re going ghetto.”
She shook her head, dismayed. “A ghetto is an isolated neighborhood where oppressed people live. Nobody ‘goes ghetto.’?”
Jason, raising one eyebrow, tossed arugula in a bowl for that evening’s salad. He took pride in being a versatile cook, in conscious defiance of the gender norm.
“When I was growing up, if you came from a working-class family and lived in Brownsville, you dressed very, very neatly so no one would look down on you. Black, white, immigrants—all of us. No one dressed like that.”
“If I walk around in a business suit, no one in Brownsville will talk to me.”
“Did you ever find out more about that Chinese guy? The murderer?”
“Nope.”
When she’d asked her father a few weeks earlier if he remembered any other Chinese people in Brownsville, he’d answered in the negative. He had nothing to tell her about his childhood in the neighborhood except the sidewalk games he’d played with his friend Pete. Regretting that she hadn’t gotten Mr. William’s number, she’d looked for him and his nurse near the dollar store but hadn’t found them, and no one else she’d met in Brownsville seemed to know about Mr. Wong.
“I should visit Ngen Ngen,” Sadie said. “Maybe she’ll remember the other Chinese families.”
“Can you wait a bit? I still haven’t told her that you’re working in Brownsville.”
“Still?”
“She’s going to be upset.”
“Because she thinks it’s dangerous? Who cares, Dad.”
“She’s going to blameme, Sadie. Me.” His eyes widened. “She’ll say I failed to teach you Toisanese, I feed you leaves, I let you walk around with holes in your jeans like a bak gui, and nowBrownsville, of all places!” He poked the air with his spatula for emphasis.
Sadie, dabbing her chin with a napkin, rolled her eyes at her father’s antics. “Do you realize that you are being a bad son by depriving your mother of her lovely granddaughter’s company?”
“Just let me talk to her first about your new job.” He rocked his head from side to side, waved it like a flower in the wind, as he always did when considering one of her points. “Your ngen ngen will remember more than I do about the neighborhood. But let me figure out how to tell her the news. I’ll go see her Sunday. After the reading at BookCourt. Are you coming?”
It seemed to Sadie that her father’s entire world consisted of four places: the kitchen, his poetry study, his favorite black box theater on East Fourth Street, and BookCourt, that indie bookstore in Cobble Hill. These were his grottoes, and he seemed content cycling between them, never venturing beyond.
“Are you reading that X-rated poem about Mom?”
He blushed.
“No thank you.” She threw her backpack over her shoulder and headed to her room.
As Sadie changed out of her crop top and ripped jeans, however, she fretted that her father might have been right.
But, she told herself, when you went to report in the field, you’re supposed to dress something like the people around you. Though it was also true that sometimes she went through… cultural phases. When she’d had a crush on this Indian boy in her class at Stuyvesant, she’d started eating samosas and chana masala and wearing tassel earrings to school. Then, at Yale, she’d donned a kimono robepatterned with lily pads and worn black eyeliner to accentuate the Asian almondness diffused by her mother’s Jewish blood. Given her racial ambiguity, she really could belong to any community. Any except the Black community.
