Distracted by the opening ofThe Ed Sullivan Show, Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie paid no attention to this talk. They watched as a man danced with his bangs drooped over his eyes, then thumped his pelvis in a manner that was oddly exciting.
Koon Lai thought about how wrong it was to watch such nonsense on television when your brother is eating in the dark.
“This bak gui is crazy,” Richard laughed, and for once, his father nodded in agreement.
Foon Wah removed her curlers, twisted the switch on the lamp, and pulled the blanket around her shoulders, ready to settle into sleep. In the dark, she reviewed the memory of turning off the stove, then decided which mooncakes she would purchase in Chinatown. She felt shame at the luxury of such thoughts, and this shame, taut as a fishing line, threatened to drag up that barely submerged ache, to send it bobbing to the surface like a dead fish.
With the American meatloaf heavy in her stomach, sleep finally clouded over guilt.
Yet as she was drifting, she felt, sliding across the darkness, a hand. Inside the shoreline of her pajamas, along her waist, and then her stomach, snaking itself up to her breasts, cupping the left one, scooping it like a ball of ice cream. She hummed softly. Then another hand, tugging at the bottom of her pajamas, the hem of which dragged stubbornly against the bedsheets. She did not lift herself to help. She felt that cactus-shaped bulge against her backside. It humped its way toward an entry point, and at that point she swatted his hands away, twisted her body out of reach.
“I’m sleeping,” she whispered.
“What about my son?”
She glanced over at him.
“Three is enough.”
“I want a son.”
“This isn’t China.”
“First son of first son of first son of first son.” He chuckled as he repeated his father’s trope.
“Aiya.” She turned away. “Crazy. This neighborhood is not safe anymore. Look around. Everywhere, the hak gui!”
He sighed. He did not dispute it.
“And how come you know it’s going to be a boy?” she continued. “Maybe it’s another girl.”
He reached for her hips, suffered a jab of her elbow.
Yet a few weeks later, he complained of her failure to fulfill his needs. He would wake her up in the middle of the night with his prowling hands, until she felt she had no choice but to roll over and insist that as a condition to her cooperation, he must not release himself inside.
“Take it out! Take it out!” she would cry when he reached the cliff edge of his pleasure. For many months, he complied, wiping himself with the tissue that she handed across the bed. Then a year passed where he rarely had the urge, and she thought with hope that maybe, at thirty, they’d both grown too old.
One night, he spent himself inside her. He apologized in Toisanese, laughing, and she didn’t know if he’d carelessly forgotten, or if he had decided to obtain his desired son through trickery. She ran to the bathroom and squatted above the toilet seat, praying that the quiet drop she heard in the toilet bowl was all of him.
Though she went to Chinatown to see a medicine woman, though she dutifully drank the bitter tea every day for two weeks, her blood didn’t come.
He had gotten what he wanted.
She was so angry she could barely speak to him, which was strange to her because she had never before shirked away from her duties. Foon Wah told herself she was being selfish and lazy. All Chinese men want a son.
One night in her second month, she dreamed of the child growing in her womb, the baby her husband continued to insist was aboy, as if he could will his wish into reality. But while the baby had a boy’s name, they wore a pinafore dress and hair in two even pigtails. Foon Wah sat in the dust nearby, counting her red eggs, knowing an odd number meant girl and an even number meant boy, but she was never able to finish counting because the child would throw itself upon her lap or weave its hands around her neck. She took the child’s hand and walked with it all the way to the Toisan River, where the two of them poked gingerly at the water with the tips of their toes. They climbed the path up the mountain, picking dandelion stems, blowing the feathery seeds. Then the child stood to pee.
On waking, Foon Wah knew that whether girl or boy, this child was hers, not Richard’s. It had even taken her home.
In the spring of 1960, Jason was born—a wailing, whining, jaundiced banana thing with a massive tuft of black hair. When the waiters served the pig head at the one-month banquet, he stared into its hollowed sockets and screeched in terror, provoking laughter from all the guests. He was a bad sleeper, a bad eater, and as happy in a tub of bathwater as a stray cat.
Richard resolved to harden the boy the way the Depression and the war had hardened him. After his first birthday, Richard took Jason to the pool. With an early start, his son would grow lungs the size of boxing gloves and master a butterfly stroke that would break all Brownsville Boys Club records.
But Jason only grew more petulant and attached to his mother. Richard thought Jason would take better to the beach, so one summer the whole family piled into the Chevy Impala, Richard and Koon Lai in the front seats, and Foon Wah and two of the young restaurant cooks in the back, each with a child or two on their knees. In Richard’s opinion, Coney Island had gone to the dogs—Luna destroyed by fire, NYCHA housing crammed all up and down the avenues—but at least the beach was still the beach, and Nathan’s was still Nathan’s.
But Jason was a child who cried when his elbow grazed the hot metal handle of the Chevy, and again when forced to part with hismother at the door to the men’s bathroom. Down on the sand, he whined at the grittiness of sand in his teeth.
“Jay Jay, be a big boy now”—“Jay Jay, I’ll hold your hand”—“Jay Jay, look, a seagull!” his sisters cooed, to no avail.
