One night, she didn’t come home. Lina called Nellie’s cousin, the salon, some friends, but no one had seen her. She searched Nellie’s favorite spots, asked the neighbors, the dealers.
And then she had no choice but to dial the police.
Lina would tell many people in the years that followed that the ones we love and lose survive in us and become a part of us, and that when we, too, are gone, they persist even still—because we, too, will live through those who love us and outlive us. Back in the day, there was a Jewish tailor on Sutter Avenue with Russian nesting dolls on the windowsill, she’d say. Those pretty wood dolls fit one inside the other, baby inside mami, mami inside abuela, abuela inside bisabuela. Love makes a nesting doll out of all of us.
She’d say this without telling them that as you grow older and older, with all those many dolls crammed inside you, it becomes difficult to breathe.
Eventually, the NYPD found Nellie in her car under a highway in Long Island, her forehead on the wheel, a vacuum cleaner pipe hooked from the exhaust through a crack in the rear window.
THE CHINS
One month before he departed, Foon Wah and Koon Lai sat at the kitchen table, eating cornflakes with Del Monte fruit cocktail.
“Look, this group organizes trips to China,” she said, pointing to an ad in the paper. “A four-week trip. Do you want to visit Toisan?” But Koon Lai did not answer, though his eyes wandered toward the ad.
Things had been different in China. In China, the house was always full. Foon Wah felt she had suffered the loss of her family not once, but twice: coming to America, and now, because her American children had forgotten her. Her three daughters had married and bought homes outside the city, and her baby boy had abandoned her.
Worst of all, it was the beginning of August, a month devoid of holidays. Holidays were the exception to her loneliness, for with the approach of holidays, her children began to involuntarily salivate at the thought of turkey stuffed with ham-speckled sticky rice and the memory of warm brown fat gao swelling in the steamers. Then, her children came like dogs sniffing their way back, stomachs against intellects, and the house was stuffed to its capacity, everyone clustered around the table and saying little to one another except to pass the no mai fan, pass the mo gu gai pein, consumed in the pleasure of eating. It was during holidays that she concluded that to be Chinese was to be only happy when in the flock.
She tried to sublimate these feelings into the task of caring for Koon Lai—brewing his gen mai cha, making sure he had enough light to read theSing Tao Daily. When he went out for his morning walk, she helped him put on his shoes, though he was embarrassed every time, and reminded him to bring his cane. At least on the days he went out, he could look at the neighbors’ front yards. The Georges always said good day to him, and Mrs. George had a flourishing garden full of all kinds of vegetables, which reminded Koon Lai of his mother’s garden in Chin village.
On rainy days, however, he barely spoke at all, and Foon Wah became especially attentive, trying to draw him into conversation.
“One thousand dollars is not bad. We can go to Beijing, and then to Canton.”
Even though most of her immediate family had already died, or else had fled to Hong Kong or Australia, she had been wanting to go back. She wondered what had happened to her best friend Mee Lai, with her thick eyebrows and caustic wit and clumsy hands that could never sew a fine line. She didn’t know Mee Lai’s address, and they hadn’t spoken in forty years. Foon Wah would have liked to find her friend, and to bring oranges to the hill in Gui Lin where she had buried her mother.
Koon Lai lifted the soft pink and yellow cubes of the fruit cocktail, without rind or seed or stem, or much by way of flavor to differentiate them. He thought of his own mother smiling as she fed herself a bowl of jook, and beneath her skirt, those tiny shoes shaped like the triangle cookies in the Jewish bakeries. Hamantaschen feet. He thought of his wife, with whom he had spent only one night of his life, though their correspondence had lasted fifty years. Their letters had been polite, but not meaningful, and he had sometimes wondered if she’d met another man—if this was the reason she’d repeatedly turned down his offers to bring her to America.
The truth was, he had not felt strongly one way or the other, and so he had sent her the money she’d asked for, for as long as she’d asked, and when the letters stopped, he’d understood she was inthe ground. It was in the dullness that followed that he realized how much they had always remained strangers to each other.
It seemed to him that someone should have tossed him out long ago, swept him into the yard like a pile of fish bones. Everything terrified him. Even the sight of an apple struck him with the fear of losing more teeth. At seventy-eight, Koon Lai tried to remember how old his father and grandfather had been when they’d died. Had growing old, for them, been so humiliating?
Foon Wah tried to pour the rest of the fruit cocktail in his bowl, but Koon Lai waved her away. “Bou le.”
He watched her, feeling guilty for his distraction. What had she said? Something about going back to China? Something about fruit cocktail? “Hou hiak!” he exclaimed, to thank her for the snack, to thank her for everything—he could never repay the debt. Then he read to her a few items of news from theSing Tao Daily, the agreeable ones.
1981????
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August 1, 1981: tax cuts in the U.S., police to fight drug sales, increased trade between China and America—yes, things were improving now that the red emperor was dead. Koon Lai had heard there’d been a public shaming of the Red Guard members who’d killed his brother. And yet, it hardly seemed like enough. The Communists now claimed the late Mao had been “70 percent right” and “30 percent wrong,” but they continued to exalt his name.
Sometimes in his bitterness, he didn’t feel like reading the newspaper, he didn’t feel like doing anything, and yet nevertheless he went on sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping out of nothing but fear.
According to the New York section of theSing Tao Daily, a government official named Robert Moses had just died at the age ofninety-two. The newspaper said he’d been in decline for a much longer period—had suffered from deafness for years but refused to use a hearing aid, in complete denial about his deterioration. That man Moses was just like the red emperor, Koon Lai thought. Hiding his many ailments, Mao had ruled far longer than he was fit. And so had his son Richard, it occurred to Koon Lai, when he had long ago lost his authority to command. Dun Ho refused to hear the doctors who said he was too old to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and eat bacon for breakfast and duck blood for lunch. And the fifty-four-year-old looked bad for his age: semi-bald with side hair, hands dry and splotchy, belly overhanging his pants. He still yelled at Foon Wah, but needed her help clipping his toenails. At least he had accepted the job at Wo Hop.
To make up for his own uselessness and his son’s foolishness, Koon Lai did what he could to lighten Foon Wah’s burden. He ate less, reused the same glassware, washed his underwear by hand. Yet with neither his ancestors nor his descendants in reach, he had no purpose. It might have been different if they had kept the restaurant open. Or earlier: if he had beaten the restlessness out of his son. Sometimes, Koon Lai felt himself to blame for the stillness in their house. Rendered immobile by regret, he would sit on the couch for hours, unable to lift a limb.
Foon Wah finished her cereal, then drank the remaining Lactaid milk. She pulled a section of theSing Tao Dailytoward herself.
“The Chinese Citizens Association is arranging a trip to China,” she said again, in case Koon Lai hadn’t heard. “One thousand dollars.”
“You go,” he said, holding the paper over his face so that she wouldn’t see his expression. “I am too old. You go, Foon Wah.”
