He turned to the refrigerator and removed the soy sauce and hoisin.
“You’re not going to do anything about it?”
“I mean, you’re the journalist, Sadie.” He was facing the fridge as if looking for another ingredient. “Do you assume everything you hear is true?”
“You have to tell me everything you remember about your dad’s time as a landlord.”
“There’s not much to tell you. It was a money-losing venture for him. So he sold the restaurant building, and that was the end of it.”
She waited for her father to say more, but instead, he turned to the stove and added oil to the wok. He refused to think or speak about his childhood, and now it was standing in the way of understanding what had happened to the people of Brownsville.
“When I see something that troubles me, I look at it,” Sadie snapped. “I’m not like you—I don’t run away.”
Sadie shut her laptop and marched up the stairs. She heard her father calling her name and ignored him. If he was going to be so indifferent, she would figure things out on her own.
With the bedroom door closed, Sadie searched in ACRIS and found 80 Livonia had a very similar deed history to 78 Livonia. Shewould call Ngen Ngen to ask follow-up questions, then go downtown to look at the Fire Records.
Her phone vibrated. Sadie groaned, assuming it was her mother trying to coax her downstairs to talk things over.
But it was Tyrell.
Sadie, whats up?
She answered as quickly as she could.
Nothing really, you?
She found herself hoping for some sort of personal invitation.
U in the Ville?
I can get there if u want me to.
No a lot of shit goes down Halloween.
I wanted to let u know cuz ur not from here.
For ur own safety don’t come to Brownsville tonight.
Got it. Thanks.
He didn’t want her to be there, she thought. He thought she couldn’t handle whatever was “going down.” But he also wanted to protect her. That meant that he cared about her well-being on some level, right?
Sadie wondered if she should tell him anything about her conversation with her father.
Hey Tyrell. What would u guys think about an article on the history of the lot on Livonia? Maybe I can interview Ms. Lina and then write a feature.
Sounds dope.
I’ll ask Ms. Lina when I see her.
THE WONGS
Ng Foon Wah could tell that Chin Dun Ho was not anAmerican war hero, as the elders called him. He did not know anything about war. He was more ignorant than her child-brothers, whose laughter had echoed through the caves during the air raids. Yet she was not stubborn enough to dash her father’s hopes of sending her free into the New World.
Ten years earlier, when the Japanese captured Canton, her father left to work in a weapons factory in Szechuan, and her mother took her and the younger children and fled the villages with hundreds of others. For five days, they trudged through the fields, muscles aching and shoes filling with stones. They passed abandoned villages, where other people’s animals wandered in confusion in the fields. They sailed in boats up the river and caught fish, and then for four days ate nothing but fish, and at night slept aboard, awash in fish blood. Foon Wah learned how anywhere can become a home: a boat, a bean field, a clearing in the woods.
The villagers lived for several months at the generosity of the Gui Lin people, who put them up in their barns and helped them identify the edible mountain fungi. Her mother, a midwife, was always first to rise and feel the cheeks of the sick and the heartbeats of the infants. But then came the typhoon, and with it two weeks ofrain that swamped the barns. Many of the children fell ill, and Foon Wah’s mother tended to all of them, though she had long since run out of medicine. After this, her mother grew very tired and could not stomach the rice Foon Wah cooked. When Foon Wah tried to stay with her, her mother pushed her away, whispering, “Go mind your brothers and sister.”
