There was one thing, however, that nearly broke Koon Lai, and this was the American winter: the nights he wore his overcoat and boots to bed, and still could not fall asleep; the constant tension in his shoulders; the numbness in his digits; the difficulty of knowing when the snow on the curb was hard enough to cross and when he might sink into it, soaking his trousers. His fellow workers maintained that bak gui men survived it because they had mothers, sisters, and wives to coddle them, to tend fireplaces and decorate the apartment doors with evergreen. The workers had no women of their own, they liked to gripe, for thirteen thousand kilometers.
Still, Koon Lai’s industriousness made him one of the most prized young men in the community. One day, when he was visiting the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, he was introduced by his paper father to Lee Jung Yu, an older man with a proud strut and a neck layered like a rooster’s. Mr. Lee owned a restaurant in Brooklyn,and in his winter years, he wished to return to China and pass the restaurant to a prospective son-in-law. He invited Koon Lai for cha on Bayard Street, and as they sipped, Mr. Lee boasted about the three kilometers of rice fields he had bought for his village, now tended by laborers from San Wui. After many such cha, during which Koon Lai mostly listened and expressed admiration, Mr. Lee pronounced Koon Lai the perfect match for his daughter in Toisan. As Koon Lai nervously deflected the compliments, Mr. Lee took a red heng bou and stuck it in Koon Lai’s breast pocket: round-trip tickets for the train and ship.
When Koon Lai arrived in Toisan, everyone in the village believed he was a rich man. He had already sent three-fourths of his earnings home, but the villagers goaded him for more. As he forked over the remainder of his earnings, he worried about giving away too much, but his mother said otherwise. He saw her frequently, often as a reflection in the village water well, or by the mountain stream, her white dress bubbling up like foam.
He agreed to marry the girl, who was five years his junior. In truth, he wasn’t pleased that Lee Suet Fong sipped her tea before the elders sipped theirs, and he didn’t love how easily she was distracted by the voices of her age-mates outside the window. But those were superficial things, things she would grow out of, he told himself. And so came the silk sedan carrying the bride, the village feast, the obligatory consummation, and after a few weeks Koon Lai was on his way back to America, to Brooklyn, to a place called Livonia Avenue in the Jewish ghetto of Brownsville.
He arrived on the elevated rail, dressed in a Western suit and a bowler hat; he blended in with the European immigrants, at least from the back. His destination was sandwiched next to the station, upstairs from a hardware store and a tailor’s shop, adjacent to a row of tenements. In those apartments lived the fabric cutters and roofers and toymakers of Brooklyn, many of them from Poland, Russia, and Germany. The stone pillars of the rail advertised all sorts of jobs accessible to the immigrant. With his rudimentary English, Koon Laicould read two of the posters:BE A DOLL—WORK FOR THE DOLL FACTORYandCUT STEAK, PAY GREAT.
In the hardware store, Koon Lai met the landlord, Arnold Cohen, who owned both 78 Livonia and the tenement next door. Mr. Lee had spoken of the Jew’s fatness and of his generosity; the man would gladly accept rent a week late. Mr. Cohen turned over the keys and led Koon Lai upstairs to the restaurant, on the second floor. It consisted of a large front room with ten tables that sat fifty customers, a back room for sleeping—twice as large as the storage closet on Mott Street—a kitchen with an icebox, and two kerosene stoves.
The location, too, was perfect, as the restaurant was easy to spot from the Saratoga station. It helped that Mr. Lee had hung a tin sign out the window—it announced in large red letters,CHOW MEIN HERE!
In the years that followed, Koon Lai poured all his energy into the success of Canton Kitchen. Business was very good at first. Every night, the tables overflowed with cream-and-walnut shrimp, chicken lo mein, chop suey, crunchy egg rolls, and beef and broccoli—all swimming in thick gravy and overdressed in hoisin and soy sauce, just how the Americans liked it. There were the laborers from the Long Island Railroad tracks who swarmed them at lunchtime, devouring multiple rounds of chow fun, and also the girls and boys in courtship, who played footsie under the table. He even had a rabbi who came every Monday at seven o’clock and sat in the window reading a Jewish prayer book while sipping his favorite chicken-chive wonton soup.
In addition to the usual specials, Koon Lai offered combos: one vegetable, meat, and rice; or two meats, one vegetable, and rice. He had already observed that bak gui liked to have their own plates and grew anxious if they had to share. When the children babbled in fake Chinese, when the young men hollered in jest, “Mr. Wong, you got any dog on the menu?” Koon Lai would grin widely and kid them back in his broken English.
“You like dog? Dog every week?”
The customers never asked if Koon Lai had a wife, a child, or whether his parents were in good health, but he didn’t mind this, for explaining in English would have been difficult. He had a son, too, which was a wonder to him. The child’s name was Dun Ho, and Koon Lai had yet to meet him.
As for Koon Lai’s father, Baba had a bad liver and rotted teeth and talked of nothing but how his friends had cheated him in the mahjong tea parlors. Koon Lai’s mother never visited him in America, as if even ghosts were subject to the exclusion law.
Definitely for the best that no one asked.
It went on like this for a few more years, up until the day of the stock market crash. Then the textile factory closed, and the workers abandoned the construction sites, leaving cement blocks scattered around like chunks of a bludgeoned monument. Within a few weeks, half his Brownsville customers disappeared, leaving his meats to sour. Instead, he found his bak gui standing in the food pantry lines with their bowler hats pulled low over their brows. Profits dwindled, and downstairs, the hardware store shuttered after thirty years in business.
Koon Lai went to Chinatown and learned that many of his compatriots had declared bankruptcy. Some had not survived their devastation; on Church Avenue, workers had discovered Mr. Fong dangling from the kitchen light fixtures, already two days decayed.
Koon Lai hated to borrow, but he had cut back on both his own expenses and the money he sent to China, and he still was short on rent. At the association, he found several ruined business owners smoking cigars, drinking diu, and scrambling mahjong tiles. They tried to convince him to join their game, but he stood at the edge of the four-player tables with his arms crossed, lying that he had no luck, that he would surely lose.
At last, the association president smiled and handed Koon Lai a heng bou containing a whole one hundred American dollars. Bowing with gratitude, Koon Lai took his leave and headed toward the City Hall subway station. When he made it to Foley Square, hefound a crowd of bak gui swarming the roads and sidewalks. They lifted cardboard signs into the air and chanted a rhyme he could not understand.
These were the kind of men who had lost everything—their jobs, their houses—the kind who were gathering in the parks. Unshaved, in tattered coats and stained trousers, their bodies gave off a rancid odor. Koon Lai had seen some of the makeshift dwellings built with orange crates on Houston Street, and he had read in theMun Hey Weeklythat these men lit fires in trash cans and cooked pigeons in clay pots, just like in China.
These are bak gui, Koon Lai thought, rushing past them. And even they think yelling makes food appear.
Then there was a skirmish, and before he knew what was happening, Koon Lai was thrown to the ground. Pain shot through his elbows and knees, and as he cried out, he felt someone cuff his wrists. He was tugged to his feet by a police officer, rounded up with a slew of the bak gui, and slammed into a windowless truck.
Winded, shocked dumb, trembling, divorced from his arms, Koon Lai let out a garbled cry, grabbing at the few English words that came to him.
“I don’t have the problem!”
Someone, everyone, began laughing.
“Seems to me like you have a problem.”
A smack of spit on his neck.
He was quiet after that. They drove past the government buildings, the breadlines, the Houston encampments, the shivering prostitutes. Then they crossed a bridge to a large fort where each man was forced to empty his pockets.
He held the heng bou to his breast.
“This a gift. A gift from friend.”
The police officers tore it from him, guffawed when they saw the amount, one of them pocketing it. They handled him more aggressively, calling him a thief, throwing him into one of the cages with ten other men.
Koon Lai, terrified, tucked himself in a corner and tried to make himself small. Yet there was one bak gui prisoner, the angriest and loudest of the bunch, who wouldn’t leave him alone. This bak gui stood over him, gesticulating.
