One day in his eighth year, a few weeks after the Spring Festival, Koon Lai heard a roar of voices from the Chin village gate. He slipped from the hut to join the crowd of men: they had gathered to greet a wagon of soldiers who brought news from the capital. Koon Lai noticed a bottle of bak diu being passed hand to hand. He watched the smaller children scurrying forward to touch the wagon. Then the village men brought their house chairs to the outdoors, and with laughter, they took turns slicing off each other’s mandated braids. The Manchus were gone: no more “Lose your hair, lose your head!”
“China is free!” the villagers cried.
“China for the people!”
He was too young to understand the meaning ofdemocracy, and perhaps no one did. For, as he would think years later, how could a people who had known only emperors for five thousand years grasp the concept of “republic”?
Yet everyone believed a miracle had occurred. Though their bellies still ached from the New Year’s feast, the villagers threw a second celebration. They looked out at the miles of rice, sorghum, and pumpkin fields and imagined future years of bounty, and so they roasted a pig and a chicken from each household.
Decades later, the smell of squashed ginkgo nuts on the sidewalks of Brooklyn would remind Koon Lai of this misjudgment, and of the many bad harvests in the years that followed. Then, there was no meat, and the peasants ate nothing but ginkgo jook. Just like always, typhoons ripped through the paddies, landlords seized the grain, and functionaries leeched the remainder. In the year of the ox, his mother died of fever, and his father and uncles took what little they had to the teahouse in Toisan City and lost it all playing mahjong.
Koon Lai decided then that his family’s survival had nothing to do with dynasties or democracies; it depended solely on the sensibilities of its able men. When he was fourteen, he hopped on a rickshaw bound for Canton City, where he peddled oysters for an oldfisherman, sleeping in a rain-soaked shack along the Pearl River. In this way, Koon Lai fed his siblings and his drunk gambler of a father.
After many seasons in Canton listening to the wash of the river, watching it flow out to the Hai Pein Yiang—the Big Even Sea—his mother came to speak with him. By then, eight years had passed since the morning he had folded five hundred sheets of joss paper into golden houses and burned them for her, sending her shelter for heaven. Eight years since his father, awash in diu, had dug her hole on the muddy hill, then poured the rest of his liquor on the soil of the grave.
She arrived in the shack at dawn, dripping wet and covered in barnacles. Her white gown, the one in which they’d dressed her for the funeral rites, left a glistening stripe on the wood floor. She sat on the edge of Koon Lai’s cot while he, lying prone, stared up at her, and then she leaned over and stroked his hair. She smelled of salt, her eyes gleamed like oyster pearls, and she still wore that tiny pair of lotus shoes, small enough to fit in his palm.
First son, she said, though her lips remained closed.You must go.
Go where?
But he knew, as soon as she left, that he needed to cross the Hai Pein Yiang.
Venture to the New World. Make money. Send it home.
The next day, he asked the fishermen how to do it. The Americans had written laws to prevent Chinese people from entering their country. To be admitted, they explained, you had to be the son or grandson of an existing resident—or at least bear papers saying you were. For a hefty sum, you could buy false papers, become someone’s “paper son.” And so, Koon Lai spent the next year saving up to buy himself a fake father, a fake family. In America, Chin Koon Lai would be Wong Koon Lai, the paper son of a New York merchant named Wong Man Chan.
Koon Lai left his homeland in 1922, after his nineteenth birthday. He carried little with him: a single maroon suitcase containing one change of clothes, a notebook with the correct answers to thequestions at customs, a picture of his mother, and a bag of dried sour plums. “Mama, bou wu ngoi,” he whispered to the photograph each night on the ship.
During the four-week boat ride to Vancouver, Koon Lai sketched in the notebook a plan for his success:
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He would keep only a fourth of his earnings for daily expenses, and the other three-fourths would go to Toisan: one-fourth to feed his family, another fourth to commission the construction of a new house, and the last to repair the village irrigation system. No longer would his people be poor tenants on the land. He would buy the land. They would live in grand houses, and their children would be fat.
At night in the ship hold, he dreamed of his little brothers and sisters lined up hand to shoulder, playing Catch the Dragon’s Tail. When he awoke, it pained him to realize all his people were far away. He was alone, adrift in a vast, blue sameness that was deeper and quieter than grief. Then, as the New World approached, he began to doubt his ability to survive. He spoke only a few words of English. He knew nothing about America’s customs. Again and again, he reminded himself there would be other Toisanese men in America to welcome and guide him.
From Vancouver, he took a train east, then rode a horse-drawn wagon over the border. For four years he worked at a restaurant on Mott Street in New York City’s Chinatown, bunking with six other Toisanese workers in a storage closet at the back of the restaurant. They shared a toilet with the customers.
It was not the America that Koon Lai had imagined. Still, he learned to ignore the water bugs that crawled on his sheets at night, to hold his breath while crossing the gutters stuffed with chickenfeathers, and eventually, to sleep through the police raids at the gambling den and the gunshots between battling tongs.
During smoking breaks, Koon Lai and the workers stood outside the restaurant and took in the obscenities of Mott Street. Sometimes, their countrymen would stage fights in the middle of the road, smearing pig blood on their chests and pretending to be wounded with the hope of squeezing a few extra bucks from the American onlookers. Koon Lai and his fellow workers watched the bak gui watching. Bak gui,white ghost, was what they called the white people.
Other times, they would talk about Sun Yat-sen’s efforts to unify the motherland.
“Soon the whole country is Kuomintang. The warlords can get lost,” a coworker would say.
“Canton was the anus. Now Canton is the heart!”
“Get me an account in his Central Bank!”
Koon Lai said nothing, but he wondered if he had been too quick to dismiss the importance of politics. Sun Yat-sen would change the country. He would take China, a nation brittle as a shrimp chip, and build it into one as strong, unified, and proud as the United States.
