“We’re looking in Jersey. Any of you looked over there?”
“With all you guys leaving Brownsville,” said Freddie, “who will we play handball with?”
Freddie: the only Black man in their handball group since Willy had come home in a flag-draped coffin.
“I’ll miss you fellows, but Brownsville isn’t Brownsville anymore.”
Richard wiped the sweat from his face, turned away, tuned them out.
“Alan, where are you looking?”
“Don’t ask Alan. He wants to be the last Indian.”
“Alan, things are changing. Think about your kids.”
Bait and switch, overpromised—that’s what his life was. His first house in Brownsville, and now all his buds were leaving. Richard pointed to the falling sun and urged them back to the game.
“Richie, how come you’re so sure you gonna beat us again?”
Foon Wah heard a melody on a nearby street and smiled. She’d learned what this sound meant: that soon, children would come barreling out from the doors, running and stuffing their heels into sneakers, arms flailing, quarters in their fists, hollering.
Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie had heard it, too, and turned to her expectantly, their tongues waggling in their heads.
Foon Wah fetched her pocket money from the kitchen, returned to the yard, and gathered their hands. Together, they skipped down the street to the ice cream truck and joined the long line of children. Foon Wah listened carefully to how the bak gui children ordered—“Firecracker”—“Vanilla with sprinkles”—“Chocolate in a cup, please”—until she knew what her desires were, and how to satisfy them.
“Strawberry in the cup, please.”
They returned to their stoop, squatting on the steps to eat their dripping delights. While the girls finished quickly and returned to play, Foon Wah tried to make hers last as long as possible, though the strawberry ice cream turned into a cold soup. It was just like when the pudding boy came to On Fun with his wagon. All the children would grin at the sight of the pudding boy’s long neck and sleepy eye and silly toothless smile, and follow his cart through the dust as he sang the pudding song:
Ji ma wu!
Lek eu sa!
Liang fun yit won
Mou gong ga!
But as she whispered the words of that song to herself, she found herself spinning, slanted, into another place, without melodies or ice cream. Suddenly, the pudding boy was shoveling mud in a rice field, and the children lining up for watery bowls of jook. She saw the oyster-slurping men wailing as they knelt on a road of broken glass, and then her uncle, standing on a platform with his eyes downcast. Her people came to her—bruised, hungry, clawing, their swollen tongues asking why she alone was so deserving. Why she alone should be so healthy, so fat.
In America, lampposts flickered on, and the street smelled notlike dewy rice paddies, but like gasoline and beef brisket. Urban smog and buttered corn. She saw Koon Lai trudging home from the bus stop, bearing bags of bittermelon and bok choy from Mott Street.
Foon Wah stood.
“Geu biau cheng liang,” she said, gathering the girls.
On Saturdays, the family ate in the living room, clustered around the black-and-white Philco TV set. They ate meatloaf and potatoes; Foon Wah had learned it pleased her husband to eat American food on some nights and Chinese food on others, or a mix of the two.
“Chinese refugees are flooding Hong Kong, stretching resources to the limit,” said the newsman on the Philco. “The Soviets are testing a nuclear bomb… The U.S. is on track to launch its first satellite.”
“One day we’ll have guys walking on the moon,” said Richard, his English garbled by mashed potato. “You kids will spend your vacations on the moon.”
“In China, there is no TV,” said Foon Wah in Toisanese. “In China, the Communists make people line up, and they give everybody one rice bowl.”
“Long time ago, your great-grandfather start restaurant. Work hard,” said Koon Lai in English, patting the pocket of his jacket where he carried the letters from their country. “Then he go back, but Communist beat him, take land, take house. He tie rope to ceiling…” He trailed off then, for he saw Foon Wah’s eyes pleading that he say no more.
Koon Lai, however, could not turn away from the truth. After all his work to build a business in Brooklyn, his proud, octogenarian father-in-law, Lee Jung Yu, had strung himself from his barn rafters in Toisan.
Koon Lai reached into his sweater pocket and reexamined the letter from his brother. In truth, Koon Lai was relieved—that his wife and their big house in Chin village had been left alone. His cousins had taken the land and the livestock, just enough to please therevolutionaries, but they had spared the house, for they remembered the many holidays they’d eaten eggs from his barn, the tractor he’d bought for the village’s use, and the new school he’d financed.
