At that moment, Mrs. Friedman hurried outside to embrace Richard and invite him in for egg salad. Richard declined. “I got business at the navy office,” he lied. “Got to get there before closing.”
He took off down the block, wondering where he could go. A young man in Brownsville had no privacy, a young Chinese man even less, and there was no room to be weak, not even for a moment, no nook in which he could hide from the eyes of his neighbors.
He caught a train to Times Square and wandered the streets still dirty with trampled streamers, and to whoever would buy him a drink, he mumbled complaints about his father. That was how he passed the several weeks that followed, drunk on whiskey and roaming, or with the girls in the swing clubs. These were bak gui girls who ordered men like drinks, and he was on the menu.
One night, when he stumbled off the IRT in Brownsville and trudged to the second floor, his father was awake, waiting for him at a table in the dark dining room.
“Ni so ga!”
“It’s you who’s crazy, Ba.” Richard staggered through the room until they were chest to chest. “It’s you who’s crazy. What do we got? Nothing. No record player. We live with our workers. You don’t got even a second shirt. We’re worse off than the peasants in Toisan. And all for what? So you can give all your money to the association and look like a big man.”
“And what you do since come home?” Koon Lai stammered in English. “You go bar. You go dance. You do nothing.”
“I can’t dothis, Ba.”
“Do what?”
“Waste my life serving pork chops.”
“How you live?”
“Fuck this, Ba.”
“You can’t get the job. You don’t study.”
“I’ll get a job.”
“How?”
Richard didn’t answer, instead forcing the little man out of hisway so he could make it to the sink in time to vomit. He awoke the next morning on the kitchen floor with flakes of saltines on his lips and his hair baked in Hamm’s beer.
And that’s when, in the desperation of his shame, he had an idea.
“Baba, I’ll fix cars. I’ll have a shop of my own.”
“Where you fix car? No place to fix car.”
But Richard applied, and the Veterans’ Commission gave him a scholarship to attend an auto-mechanic school in nearby Canarsie. He rode the trolley down Rockaway to newly subdivided streets where there’d been farms only ten years earlier. Now bungalows had sprung up on all the roads, and the air was thick with sawdust and paint.
He found he liked working under the hoods and reassembling engines; he’d always been skilled with his hands. Yet the instructor, Vito Conti, rubbed him the wrong way. He played favorites with the students, and Richard was no favorite.So fuck Conti, Richard told himself. He showed up late one week, then skipped class altogether.
When he received Rebecca’s wedding invitation, he buried it on the shelf with his father’s old notebooks and tried to forget the date. It was his father’s habit to hide bits of money throughout the back room, and between the notebooks, Richard discovered an unmarked heng bou with four hundred dollars.
He was nineteen, with nothing to his name.
The money was apparently to help with the funeral of a cousin, but Richard had spent it before he found this out—and there was never a better moment to own a car. Everywhere, the rails and cables of trolley lines had been scraped away to make room for the automobile.
Richard bought a map of the city’s new highways and tackled them one by one. He drove himself to games at Yankee Stadium and to the beaches on the Long Island Sound. He glided from tip to tip of Manhattan, weaving his way ahead of the cabs. The only place he wouldn’t go was Chinatown. His father’s friends would urge him to become a bookkeeper at the Chin Association, or manager of this or that restaurant.
Like bees attracted to the bright yellow of his car, the bak gui girls appeared in droves. He’d beckon a girl into the passenger seat, then whisk her off onto the highways. If it was rush hour, the cars would be jammed nose to nose, but at the right time of day, he could take those chicks fast as a horse on the plain or a plane on the runway, conquering wide immensities.
More than anything he loved taking them to Coney Island—to the Cyclone. His date would cling to his arm, begging for mercy, and he’d laugh and tease, “Baby, why’re you closing your eyes? This is the best part!” How powerful he felt, how hard he laughed when they reached the top and began to tip forward, his girl screaming for her life. Then he’d hustle through the crowd at Nathan’s to order a feast of crab cakes, franks, oysters, and elephant ears, eating most of it himself since the girl feared looking pudgy.
Rumors spread back to Chinatown. A member of the Chin Association had spotted him and a blond licking ice cream and kicking heels at the South Street Seaport pier. A second cousin had seen him parked at Grand Army Plaza, tangled with a redhead. At the association meetings, they urged Koon Lai: fly the boy home.
Koon Lai sent Suet Fong a letter with detailed instructions, then bought his son the boat tickets.
“I have something for you,” he said to Richard one night in the back room, and, just as Mr. Lee had done for him, he tucked a heng bou envelope into Richard’s breast pocket.
