One morning when he was six, his mother woke him with welcome news: they would skip school that day and take a trip to Manhattan. America was so impressed by the obedience of its Chinese residents that it had decided to adopt them.
“Before we hide, use fake name,” his mother explained to him on the 4 train. “But president see Chinese good. We don’t have to hide. We use real name. No more Jason Wong. Now, Jason Chin.”
They hopped off at Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall and entered one of the limestone towers. In a thirteenth-floor office, each of them signed their new names in a government book with a government pen.
Then they went to Chinatown for a feast, and Jason knew he was supposed to feel happy, but mostly he felt confused.
On Christmas, his grandfather fell and broke his leg. Jason watched over Yia Yia as he slept like a baby beneath the blankets on the couch. Yia Yia didn’t like lying down, he told Jason. Yia Yia liked working at the restaurant. Yia Yia said what was the point of life if he couldn’t even move? Sometimes, his grandfather would declare himself healed and try to stand.
“Mommy!” Jason would call into the kitchen, and his mother would rush over.
“Ni het,” she’d insist to Yia Yia. Or, she warned, he might never walk again.
In the many weeks that followed, Yia Yia turned away from food, and in his chest, a shuttering, like maybe he’d accidentally eaten the butterflies Pete had been chasing at Betsy Head Park, and then, Yia Yia’s face against the pillow like he didn’t want anyone to see. But one day, when Baba came into the room, Yia Yia sat up and Jason saw everything: the red eyes, the scrunched cheeks, the runny-nosed knot of hurt.
He realized then that even old men can cry.
Against his grandfather’s wishes, Baba decided to close the restaurant for good. One day, their mother took Jason and his sisters to Canton Kitchen to say goodbye. With all the tables and chairs gone, the dining room looked gigantic. Someone had installed wood planks over the shattered window—the growl of the elevated rail was especially loud on that side. And someone had confiscated the cat food bowl he and Jackie had left on the fire escape, and the gna toi peas they’d been growing in a glass jar on the kitchen windowsill, and the pigeon cage on the roof.
Mourning, Jason sat on the wooden floor, handing his mother and sisters pieces of Scotch tape, which they used to bind the china in Bubble Wrap. He mourned for his grandfather, for the gna toi, the cats, the pigeons. There was nothing he could do to save them all.
“What will you and Baba do for work?” Jennifer asked their mother.
Remembering now that the restaurant had not only fed the neighborhood, but them, too, the rest of the children looked up.
“Fun sin geng dok a,” their mother said, her eyes on the teapot in her hands.
Two days later, Baba pulled up in front of the house in a used truck. He insisted they take a ride, he in the driver’s seat with Julieon his knee, and Jennifer in the passenger seat with Jackie and Jason on hers.
“Son, when you make an investment, you got to think about the market,” he said as they jerked around the block. “Where’s the demand, who’s looking for a bargain. I said to myself: all those Jews, Italians, they’re moving out. People need a moving company.” He took one hand off the wheel to tap his head. “That’s called thinking like a businessman.”
But Jason’s sadness had evolved into nausea, and before they could make it home, he barfed on the dashboard.
“Aiya,” his father groaned. He parked the truck and hurried over to the passenger side to carry Jason to the sidewalk. Baba ordered the sisters to clean up the mess, and gently, he leaned Jason over the street gutter and rubbed his back until the vomiting stopped. Yet if there was any tenderness in the hands that held him, it was drowned in the meanness of the rebuke.
“How come you always get sick in the car? Your sisters don’t get sick!”
Years later, Jason would not remember what had happened to his father’s moving business—he’d think of it as the first of Baba’s many failed ventures.
There was a door-to-door knife sales company. Then a life insurance business. At some point, his father bought the restaurant building and the one next door from their longtime landlord, Mr. Cohen. He got a good deal because no bak gui wanted to buy property in Brownsville anymore.
Baba’s favorite job would be the one waiting tables at the lounge on Wall Street. Big shots dined there, he would tell the kids a thousand times: millionaire stockbrokers, movie stars, politicians. Baba had to dress in a suit and tie, and sometimes, instead of cash tips, the patrons would give his father tickets to a Mets game, or to Loew’s Kings Theatre, or to Jason’s favorite, the Brooklyn Zoo.
But even during the best of times, Jason and his sisters could not risk annoying Baba, for their fates were subject to his moods. If provoked, he could flush those tickets right down the toilet or leave for a Mets game without them. Their mother, especially, would suffer.
After the restaurant closed, she took one of those factory jobs in Chinatown, the kind Baba refused to consider. One school holiday, the sisters decided they would make a surprise visit. Jennifer had already memorized the subway station names and had earned enough pocket money from babysitting the Lebovitz kids to afford the cost of two tokens for Julie and herself. Jackie and Jason remained small enough to duck under the turnstile.
He wanted to see his mother but didn’t like going to Chinatown. This was one thing he shared in common with his father. For Jason, it was a cruel place—all the haggling and shoving and the crabs scraping their pincers against the bins. It upset him when cooks grabbed the fish right from their tanks, the salmon flopping screamlessly all the way back to the kitchen. He too felt like a fish swimming in an overcrowded fish tank as they hopped over gutters clogged with sewage thick as eels and passed bakeries where the locals battled like guppies for flakes.
At last, they arrived at their mother’s sock factory. Trying to spot their mother among the others, Jason and his sisters peered through the narrow window into the basement. It was hard because the window was small and, sitting in rows at their sewing machines in the cramped room, all the women looked the same: shoulders hunched, heads bent, bodies curled inward.
“In the back!” Jennifer exclaimed, and Jason tussled with his sisters for the view. Yet when he picked out his mother, she did not look right. Her mouth was lopsided, like someone had drawn a frown on her face with a crayon.
“Why does Mommy look like that?” Jason whimpered.
“She misses us,” assured Jackie, and the four children hurried inside. As they approached, their mother’s eyes widened. Jason threw his arms around her waist, and Julie presented her with a bag ofdragon eyes from the vendors on Canal Street. But not a moment had passed before their mother urged them all to leave. Her Toisanese spilled out in a panic.
“Aiya! Ho ngai ham a!”
