“I don’t know about no Mr. Wong the murderer,” said Pierre Henry. “But, Mr. William, the girl already told you! She not related to that man. Her name is Chin.”
Mr. William glared at the shopkeeper. “You West Indians weren’t around then.”
Quickly, Sadie rummaged in her purse for her press pass, and she handed it to Mr. William, hoping this proof would settle the matter.
The man took the press pass and held it an inch from his face. “Chin,” he mumbled, and embarrassment quivered across his cheeks. Sadie stifled a sigh of relief.
Suddenly, Mr. William was swaying on his feet, and both Sadie and the nurse launched forward to steady him. He held Sadie’s shoulder—his hand heavy, his eyes averted. Then he sat back down in the wheelchair, his pupils fixed bitterly on the floor.
“Okay, we’re done,” the nurse laughed. “We going home now. Time to go home and stop saying crazy things to people.” She rolled her eyes and pushed Mr. William out of the store.
Sadie turned to Pierre Henry with her mouth open.
“What exactly just happened?”
Pierre Henry smiled and shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and he spun his index finger around his ear. “Something wrong with him.”
“But was there actually a murderer named Mr. Wong?”
“Who can say? I’ve been here a long time. But he’s been here longer.”
Sadie unlocked her bike from the parking sign and pedaled homeward. Soon she was back on Eastern Parkway, that major boulevard connecting the east and west sides of Brooklyn, linking Brownsville to the Park Slope brownstones, her bike whizzing in the opposite direction of the cabs on their way to the airport. She passed the crowd of Hasidic Jews gathered outside the world headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch, people with whom she may have shared a distant ancestor. Yet she didn’t really see any of them as, over and over, she relived the interaction at the 99 Cents store.
She was shaken, but there was no reason to be upset, she told herself. The man had probably survived a stroke. Especially in a neighborhood like Brownsville where there’d never been many Chinese people, it was natural that he’d mix her up with someone else.
When Sadie reached Park Slope, it seemed more pretentious than ever: the boutique clothing shops, the brownstones with their nineteenth-century post lights, the curated sidewalk gardens adorned with signs instructing dog owners not to let their pups pee. Add to that the obliviousness of the yuppies as they skirted around the same man on Carroll Street who’d been sitting on a stool andjingling quarters in a coffee cup for two decades. Again, she wished she wasn’t from Park Slope.
Sadie strung her bike to her parents’ gate and unlocked the door of the brownstone.
“Dad!” she yelled into the hallway. “Have you heard of some landlord in Brownsville named Mr. Wong?”
Then she remembered: her parents had gone to the Village to see Chekhov’sThe Seagull. She had the house to herself.
Sadie ascended the creaky stairs to the second floor. Everywhere there were shelves of books: Henry James, Tu Fu, the Brontës, Amy Tan, Hawthorne, Ginsberg—these were her parents’ bibles. Yellowing pages and crumbling plaster was the smell of home. At least, she consoled herself, her parents were not like other Park Slopers. They didn’t have a second home upstate, didn’t use professional cleaning services. They threw Billy Joel on the stereo and danced around with feather dusters. This modesty had to count for something. Plus, the fact that she still lived in a Park Slope brownstone instead of a tenement in Bushwick like others from Yale—well, that was because she was trying to save money, to pay back her student loans.
Sadie reached her bedroom. She ran her fingers over the Lord Shiva sculpture that she’d bought at a Tibetan store, then held a staring contest with a beaded Nigerian mask from a street fair. Sadie remembered the time Aaliyah, a friend at Yale, had remarked that white people should stop buying African masks—that this wascultural appropriation.Sadie had nodded without telling Aaliyah that she had one at home.
In some ways, her whole life was a series of out-of-context cultural objects. Growing up, she’d eaten Ngen Ngen’s fish cakes and Grandma’s latkes, indulged in red heng bou envelopes and Hanukkah gelt, burned incense sticks and eight candles, bowed at the cemeteries and recited Baruch Atah Adonai. But not to any extreme: no weekend Hebrew school, no Chinese language class. The best of both worlds without the strings: two rounds of gifts in winter, two cultural New Years, everything duplicated like a Happy Meal when they’veaccidentally thrown two toys on your tray. Her parents had always said she was incredibly lucky to inherit two cultures.
Yet sitting at her desk, she couldn’t get Mr. William’s words out of her head. She searched for “Brownsville” and “Wong” inThe New York TimesTime Machine archive.
There are no results matching your search.
She thought back to the Decolonizing History course she’d taken at Yale, where she’d studied the concept of the “model minority.” Perhaps this Wong dude had gotten away with murder because the police chose to believe him. Maybe it was her purpose to reveal the truth. She would find Chinese people who would talk to her because she was half Chinese. It was the story that would enlist all her identities, her talents—and in the process, she’d learn something about her own family’s life in the neighborhood.
Sadie took out her journal and jotted down some notes to save for later.
THE WONGS
On the corner of Saratoga and Livonia, under the elevated rail in Brownsville, Brooklyn, there was once a Chinese sit-down restaurant called Canton Kitchen. Beef chow mein sold for seventy-five cents, sweet-and-sour shrimp for fifty cents, chicken egg soup for four dimes. Customers patted their mouths with baby-soft yellow napkins and sometimes gazed at the altar with that little red-faced, bearded warrior statue clutching a golden staff. On most nights, the room brimmed with sound—a chop suey of clinking teacups, Yiddish, and screeches from the El.
The restaurant’s owner was a man named Chin Koon Lai.
Koon Lai was born in Toisan, a rural county of Canton Province, in 1903, the year of the rabbit, and even before the rabbit returned, the village knew he was the perfect candidate for America.
He learned the meaning of diligence young. So young that at the time, he needed help reaching the hen eggs at the top of the coop. That was when his mother was still alive, hobbling across the thatch house on her bound feet that looked and smelled like shriveled apples. He ate with her and the babies in the kitchen while the grown men ate in the front room. At all times, they kept wine in the glass for the statue of the warrior Kwan, and if someone fell sick, they’dbelieve the person possessed, and they would circle the bed, chanting and begging the demon to leave.
