Then, sudden quiet.
Then, the hum of a zipper.
Then, a stream of hot piss dribbling into Koon Lai’s hair.
Down his neck. Under his shirt.
Koon Lai didn’t make a sound. He remained as still as the Guardian Kwan. Eventually the aggressor left him alone, as if he had concluded Koon Lai was an unfeeling object.
Koon Lai lay in half-conscious misery for hours until he woke to another putrid wetness—his own. Sitting up, he found the bak gui men asleep on the floor and on the benches, and his mind turned toward the money. He didn’t know how he would repay the debt to the association or keep the restaurant afloat.
Another thought came, with the swiftness of a cook’s cleaver.I’ve been proud, he brooded. He had been feeling superior to the gamblers at the association, to his father, to the bak gui—but in truth, he was just as careless.
With this self-flagellation, Koon Lai tortured himself for hours—and yet, when he looked around at the cell with all its sleeping bak gui prisoners, something kept lifting in his breast, a butterfly-fluttering of hope. He had failed, but he would do better when he got out, if he had the chance. He would be cautious with every penny. He begged the ancestors for mercy.
Still, it was terrible not knowing how long he would be kept there or what his family would do without his earnings. He regretted that he had not brought a photograph of Suet Fong to America. He wondered if she missed him or if she, too, was forgetting what there was to miss.
In a letter, Suet Fong had written that the baby at his first grab party had reached for everything in sight: the medicine balls, the abacus, the stamps, the oranges—one after the other, he scooped themup, stuffing what he could in his mouth. Chin village now joked that the baby was destined to be a businessman of international fame, or maybe the world’s greatest inventor.
But he was no baby now. Koon Lai had memorized the birth date; Dun Ho was two years and eleven months old. He prayed that he might survive to hold the child on his lap.
Koon Lai was released to the streets just a few hours later. Returning to Brownsville, he begged Mr. Cohen for extra days to pay the rent. He had never availed himself of Mr. Cohen’s leniency in the past, and the landlord rewarded him by granting an additional month. With double resolve, Koon Lai promised himself that he would never drink diu, gamble, or buy a woman’s touch. He would keep his earnings under lock and key and slash the prices until the neighborhood returned.
During the years that followed, the textile factory reopened, and the men returned to the construction sites. Mr. Cohen filled the vacancy downstairs, and business at Canton Kitchen improved. In time, Koon Lai was able to pay his debt to the association and resume remittances to Toisan.
Yet, although he should have been satisfied by this—although he resumed his title as village hero and recovered the respect of the association—something was not well with him. He would have described it as a dry ache in his back, a weight under the ribs, a blueness in his peripheral vision. He felt it most during the Chinese New Year, or when a big family came to his restaurant, jiggling babies on their knees.
He complained to no one, confided in no one. But it was as his mother had always used to say:
Gu sin jiak yein.
A body with only a shadow for company.
It was his friends at the association who reminded him about “the seed,” as they liked to call it. The seed he had planted in Chinathe night of his wedding, the most powerful seed in the darkest, most ripe soil. This seed had grown rapidly into a fruitful plant, they pointed out, and now that plant could be seized by the roots.
Koon Lai came to agree. In the spring of 1935, the year of the pig, he paid for the boat ticket to bring his eight-year-old son to America.
LINA
Peering from her window at the courtyard below, watching the pigeons fine-dine on oxtail bones, Lina Rodriguez Armstrong knew what day it was. She knew by the quantity of glittery, windblown trash on the sidewalk, by the reshuffle of the parallel-parked cars, and by the appearance of the social worker with the Beyoncé waves who came weekly to see Debra on floor five.
It was the day after the West Indian Labor Day parade, a Tuesday—and this particular Tuesday, her last chance.
She lived in Brownsville Houses, but she’d grown up in Van Dyke Houses, the NYCHA complex across Mother Gaston Boulevard. Van Dyke was taller, and her family had lived up on the twelfth floor—they could see all the way to Jersey, and on July 4, she and her siblings would rock-paper-scissors for the best spot to watch the fireworks. As an adult, she’d lived on the second floor of the 78 Livonia Avenue tenement. She and Nellie could eavesdrop on the neighbors, on the repairman calling Mr. Wong, learn tidbits that might help with the struggle.
Yet what she had now at Brownsville Houses—the sixth floor—was her favorite. Not a city view or a street view: it was a community view. Every day she lingered by the window to see who was coming in and out, who was chasing after the ice cream truck, and who’d forgotten to pick up after their dog for the twentieth time.
Grandma, the kids called her now, like they’d once called the lady on Livonia.
Tita.
The meeting wasn’t until noon, but Lina had woken with the garbage truckers at four a.m. so she’d have time to prepare. The pain was worst in the morning, and she had a regimen: ice pack to her knees for thirty minutes, a warm shower, then gentle stretches with one hand on the dresser. She’d invited the bureaucrats from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to meet in her apartment, but they’d insisted on the Stone Avenue library. Maybe they thought if they came up to the apartment, she’d rant about repair problems that were not in their jurisdiction, that were NYCHA’s responsibility—like she wasn’t well familiar with the way city agencies split themselves and pointed fingers. She’d invited the HPD officials into her home because she wanted them to see the mural in her living room, to meet eyes with the heroines on her walls. She’d wanted them to look out the window the wayshelooked out the window. Maybe they’d stop gaping at Brownsville like missionaries come to save heathens.
Not to mention the arthritis. Now that she was seventy years old, walking anywhere took Lina twice as long as it once had.
Lina opened the fridge—once a teacher, never skip breakfast. She would have liked a blueberry muffin or a strawberry Danish, but she was not a niña delgada like she’d once been. Sit too much and those muffins start growing on your hips. She slurped down a bowl of Quaker Oats at the kitchen table, pulled out the leak bucket under the kitchen sink and dumped the water in the toilet, then lowered herself into her favorite chair, her mother’s crocheted blanket over her shoulders.
She looked over the proposal one more time.
