Sadie handed over one of the hair ties on her wrist. Her mom, who taught fiction at The New School, had never been interested in material things. She was more like a flower shedding petals, maturing naturally and without a care.
At that moment, another wave of children arrived, but this time most of them lacked costumes, though a few wore cheap plastic masks. Sadie helped her mother hand out the candy, and she knew a younger version of herself would have looked at these kids with disdain:How can you go trick-or-treating without a costume?
Yet it was the adult version of Sadie, the reporter, who saw them now, who discerned they were not from Park Slope.
At last, she spotted her father among the trick-or-treaters. A lump of fish swung in the bag on his arm.
“Dad!” she called as soon as he was in earshot. “Who is Dun Ho Wong?”
“Your grandfather.”
“What?” Sadie jumped up from the stoop.
“My father,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“But I thought his name was Richard Chin!”
“He was born a Chin. Then in the States we had the fake name Wong, so his legal name here was Dun Ho Wong. He went by Richard Wong for decades.” He ascended the stoop. “I told you that Wong was our fake name, right?”
“Ourfakename?” Sadie hugged her laptop. “What do you mean, fake name?”
“Come.” He opened the front door and motioned her through it.
Leaving the fish on the counter, her father crossed to a bookshelf in the living room and selected a green folder.
The papers were yellow and brittle with age.
“Your name is JasonWong?”
“Under the Chinese Exclusion Acts, they only let a Chinese person over if their father was here. My grandfather pretended to be someone else’s son—to be a Wong. So, my dad became a Wong, and I was born a Wong, and then when I was a kid, we went to a government office and changed it back to Chin.”
“Did you also know we were landlords?”
Rocking his head from side to side, he moved toward the kitchen and selected a cutting board. “Landlords? I guess you could say that.”
“You guess?”
The smell of the salmon sickened her.
“So my parents owned a house on Amboy Street. The restaurant was on Livonia and there was a landlord we called Mr. Cohen. And then after we closed the restaurant and moved to East Flatbush, my father bought the restaurant building and rented it to tenants for a few years. So, I guess you could say he was a landlord.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before? When I told you about that man who said there was a murderer named Mr. Wong in Brownsville?”
“But you didn’t give me the name of the murderer. You just said he was Chinese.”
“He was talking about your dad!”
Her father’s brow furrowed. He rinsed his hands in the sink, dried them, then leaned his back against the counter.
“You’re saying this man thought my dad was a murderer?”
“Yes!”
“Well, we know that isn’t true.”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“My dad was screwed up in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t a murderer.”
