Sadie sat at her desk before her laptop, her goat roti, and her journal. Opening to August, she reread the notes she’d taken after the encounter with the man in the wheelchair.
A landlord named Mr. Wong
Livonia Avenue
Murderer
More than 30 years ago?
That Saturday, Sadie told her father she had tickets to seeDo the Right Thingat the IFC, and instead she took the train to Chinatown. Ngen Ngen had lived in the Confucius Plaza apartment complex since Grandpa Richard had died. It was less than a mile from Ground Zero, and Sadie could remember her father, in a panic, dialing Ngen Ngen on the morning of 9/11.
“Looks like China,” her grandmother had mused on the phone, watching the towers burn from her twenty-first-floor window, sounding almost wistful. “Everybody go run run run.”
Sadie loved the Confucius Plaza apartment and how completely Chinese it felt: the rice cooker in the kitchen, the bamboo in a porcelain vase by the window, and the landscape paintings within which tiny village men sat fishing below willow trees. The apartment smelled like mothballs, like steamed fish. Having a very Toisanese grandmother was, Sadie thought, something that definitively set her apart from the millennial transplants.
On the way to the apartment, Sadie bought Ngen Ngen a magnificent spread of dim sum—enough pork buns and shrimp dumplings to leave them sleepy and semi-sick for the rest of the day.
“Ngen Ngen, I want to ask you something,” Sadie said after they’deaten. She hit the record button on her Olympus as Ngen Ngen chopsticked another chive siau mai onto Sadie’s plate. “Ngen Ngen, I’m bou le—Ngen Ngen, do you remember living in Brownsville?”
“Brownsville?” Ngen Ngen raised her eyebrows and looked quizzically at Sadie. She seemed to be shrinking a few inches every year, but she still dressed impeccably, in ironed pants and floral shirts with pearl earrings, never to become one of those old Chinese ladies who stayed in pajamas all day—and never, in a million years, to be caught collecting bottles out of people’s trash cans. Ngen Ngen had often reminded Sadie that she was not the daughter of farmers. Rather, her father had been the village high school teacher, and her mother, the village midwife. Sadie had always sensed that her grandmother derived her dignity from the knowledge that she was not the lowest of the low on the world’s totem pole.
“Yeah, Brownsville. What was it like living there?”
“In Brownsville, we run the restaurant. On, on… Livonia Avenue. Very busy.”
“Did you live on Livonia Avenue too? Or somewhere else?”
“Your grandpa… your grandpa buy the house. On a, on a, what street, I forget.” Ngen Ngen scrunched up her face, trying to recall. “Amboy Street.”
Sadie jotted this down.
“Was it very different from living in Chinatown?”
Her grandmother laughed at the silliness of the question. “Very different! No Chinese people. All Jewish people. Then all Black people.”
Ngen Ngen’s accent was like a pizzicato take on a typically bowed melodic line, all the words in the English dictionary plucked out of the five tones of her native tongue—an instrumentation that Sadie, as they went along, couldn’t help but imitate.
“No Chinese people? You don’t remember anyone except for our family?”
“Oh. There is the laundry on Stone Avenue? One, two Chinese? But not so many Chinese.”
“Did you know any of the other Chinese families by name?”
“No time. Just work in the restaurant. Raise the kid. Four kid. Jennifer, Julie, Jackie—then your daddy. Spoiled!” She laughed again.
“Why did Grandpa close the restaurant?”
“The Jewish move away.”
“Why did they move away?”
“No one like the Black people!”
Sadie put down her pen. She’d been hoping for a bit more nuance from her grandmother, but in hindsight, that had been foolish. Ngen Ngen got her takes fromLaw & OrderandBlue Bloods.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Hou ngai ham a! The neighborhood dangerous.”
