“Okay,” she said, playing along. “One day, I’ll go.”
That autumn, Koon Lai dragged a stool to the middle of his bedroom and looped a belt around his neck.
It was how his father-in-law had taken his life. The Americans shot their brains out and the Japanese sliced open their guts, but notso with the Chinese. They believed in tidy suicides. Hanging was preferable because it did not allow the opportunity to scream for help.
Before ascending the stool, he stripped the bed himself, though his bad leg ached as he bent over to tug the fitted sheet from its corners. Then he packed his clothes into the same maroon suitcase that he’d brought over from Canton in 1923. Perhaps Foon Wah would find somewhere to donate them. He drew up a will that left his remaining savings to Richard and Foon Wah, and he threw his dentures, toothbrush, worn-out slippers, and the wrappers of three dried plums into the waste bin. Only then did he dress himself in his best trousers, painfully ascend, tie himself to the overhead fan, and jump.
Foon Wah discovered him the next morning. She had come upstairs to see why he was late for breakfast, then opened the door and found the light off and the shades still pulled. The room was sparsely furnished with a red rug, a mahogany chest, and an alarm clock with the numbers blinking. Perhaps it was Daylight Savings Day already, and she had forgotten.
In the gloom, she saw the old suitcase, the folded bedsheets. For a moment, she worried he had lost his mind and gone out into the cold morning without telling her. It took her several seconds to realize Koon Lai was there—he was such a small, thin man that, dangling in the middle of the dark room, he looked like nothing more than a shadow of the coat stand.
With a cry, she fell to her knees.
In theSing Tao Daily, they posted an obituary and an invitation to the funeral and told no one outside the immediate family that it had been a suicide. “Heart attack,” they would say if someone asked.
Though he had long stopped taking the train to Chinatown for the association meetings, Koon Lai still had many friends. They hobbled over to the Wah Wing Sang Funeral Home on Mulberry Street, leaning on the arms of their sons, most of them shriveled and hard of hearing, with thinning hair or no hair. They told Richard and Foon Wah that Koon Lai had been the most outstanding man of his generation, that he had helped them secure the loan with which they hadlaunched their business or procured the papers to bring over their wives and children. Richard thanked each one of them in Toisanese with his hands pressed together in the old way.
Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie drove in from the suburbs with their husbands. Jason appeared on foot, about twenty minutes late. They’d had trouble contacting him at first—the phone number he’d provided was no longer in service—but thankfully he’d called from a pay phone the day before the funeral. He arrived wearing a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, and Foon Wah thought he looked more haggard and cadaverous than the man in the coffin. His hair reached his waist, and his legs moved with a tight suaveness that Foon Wah feared meant he’d been with many women. Richard looked their son up and down, scrunching his nose at the skunk smell.
“You’re late,” he said. “Maybe you should have visited when your grandfather was still alive.”
Foon Wah grabbed Jason’s arm before he could walk out.
Some families spent a fortune to send bones to China for burial, but Koon Lai had indicated in his will that this would be unnecessary. He’d already purchased a plot for himself at a cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens. A procession of funeral cars crossed the Manhattan Bridge and took Atlantic Avenue to the city’s eastern end. Then the guests followed the undertaker up a muddy path between two rows of tombstones to the hole in the frosted earth where Koon Lai was to be deposited.
“It’s like a diorama of the city,” Richard grumbled in English—to whom exactly, Foon Wah wasn’t sure. “The Puerto Ricans get the squares down by the street, the bak gui are on the mountain with giant headstones, and the Chinese? The Chinese get the porta potties.” He lined up next to Foon Wah in the first row of mourners at the edge of the burial pit and, shivering, accepted the flowers handed to him by the undertaker’s assistant. “My dad. Still and always a cheapskate.”
“Shut up,” Foon Wah snapped in English.
Richard swallowed. He bent over and peered six feet down at his father’s casket.
They left Koon Lai in the earth and went back to Chinatown to eat, but at the banquet hall, Foon Wah ordered tripe stew, forgetting Koon Lai would not be there to enjoy it. And when they returned home, she withdrew an extra hanger from the closet for Koon Lai’s coat. It took the rest of winter to shed all the other habits, like heating his morning jook and his afternoon cha or looking out the window to assess whether he could take a walk.
She ruminated. Wondered whether she could have prevented it. Believed she could have tried harder. She should have insisted Richard drive his father to the association so he could see how much he was valued there. Or paid for Koon Lai’s ticket back to China. Like his walks, it would have forced him out of his head, into the world, so that he could witness the growth and progress finally happening in his country after so many years of starvation and bloodshed.
She busied herself preparing for the Ting Ming holiday—Cemetery Day, she renamed it for her children, since they had forgotten so much Toisanese over the years. The second weekend of April, she insisted the entire family drive out to Ridgewood to take offerings to Koon Lai and pay their respects. They gathered at the Cypress Hills Cemetery, and Foon Wah laid out bowls of boiled chicken, pork, and sugared gelatin on a blanket in front of the grave. She directed Jason to dig holes for the potted flowers and taught her daughters how to light a fire in the metal bucket for the burning of fake money.
It was windy that morning. They watched the fake money crackling, curling, and withering into black ash. Pieces of gold paper occasionally rose out of the can and fluttered across the cemetery. The wind swept them in Foon Wah’s direction; they kept smacking her midriff. She caught them against her belly and redelivered them to the fire pail.
“He wants to share with you, Ma,” Jennifer said.
Foon Wah nodded, smiling, and her daughters watched as tears minnowed down her cheeks.
SADIE
Milk jugs filled with gasoline.That’s what Mr. William had said. And that’s what the cops had discovered in the rubble at 2100 Marcy Place in the Bronx, according to a news article from 1973.
Sadie had been hunting for a name, a human being. She needed to know who had paid Mr. William to burn the buildings. Yet instead of a name, she was developing an intricate spiderweb of addresses, of which 78 Livonia Avenue was just one node. Her web was a morass of defunct real estate entities, LLCs, false business addresses, and dead people. A man named Ethan Griffiths was listed on a loan taken out by 78 Livonia Avenue LLC, and Griffiths was loosely connected to a number of other men and properties, including several in the Bronx. She had visited the Fire Department Public Records Unit again and discovered that five of the Bronx buildings in her web had perished in fires.
She researched Ethan Griffiths and some of the other names. Hard to figure out who they were, since they’d died years earlier, though quite a few appeared to have worked in real estate. One business address kept repeating: 1058 Avenue Y, in South Brooklyn. She noticed the men did not share an ethnicity—their surnames were Anglo-Saxon, German, Jewish, Italian, Irish. This had not been a mobfamily, and this had not been one borough’s secret—the operation had blanketed New York.
In the archives ofThe Village Voice, she read about arson rings. Landlords would over-insure their properties and throw kickbacks to an insurance adjuster. After a landlord commissioned a “torch” to burn a building, the adjuster would assess the damages in the owner’s favor. Sadie searched for a database with fire insurance application records, but neither the Fire Department nor the Department of Finance had kept one.
There was only one door left: visit the nodes in person.
In May, she took the subway to 1058 Avenue Y in Sheepshead Bay. It was only a few miles from Coney Island, ocean salt on the breeze, and it looked almost suburban, a world apart from Brownsville’s dense NYCHA complexes and the brownstones of Park Slope.
Approaching the address, Sadie found herself standing outside a trim yellow townhouse. According to the silver plaque on the door, 1058 Avenue Y was a children’s dentist office. She frowned. But she had come all this way, and she had to find out what she could.
