With these memories, he felt a deep satisfaction, and he popped another grape into his mouth, slouching with his belly turned up like the Laughing Buddha. He was not Richard anymore; he was a bronze statue in an ancestral temple. He stared in front of him, thoughtless as if outside time, like he was floating beyond his porch and beyond Mrs. George’s garden and down the street, maybe all the way down Kings Highway to Ocean Parkway, to Coney Island, into the Atlantic. His arms and legs felt weightless, like he was sinking in water. But he wasn’t afraid. Not even as he felt himself fall onto the porch floor and then below it and then beyond it.
Mrs. George made a sound like a bird’s high-pitched tweet. He heard the cat-meow of the rusty iron gate, and then Mrs. George was upon him, smelling like the grass on her hands and apron, lifting him up from the armpits. He could feel her fingers in what had become the malleable putty of his flesh. Foon Wah was also on the porch, and the two old women were trying to put him back in the chair. He knew it was an impossible task because he was already on his way somewhere else.
And then he was unconscious, and this was surprising and a bit terrifying, how quickly that thing called consciousness slipped away, like he had accidentally dropped it onto the subway tracks. His wife was still there, and his daughter Jennifer, sitting across from him in a very cold hospital room, Jennifer insisting that Foon Wah borrow her sweater. Then Julie and Jackie arrived, which meant this was serious. He probably looked as awful as he felt, like he was splitting into strands of kelp, loose skin flapping around the bones, tubes pokingfrom the paper nightgown. Three Jamaican nurses fussed with him, whispering about a stroke and oxygen deficiency. At some point his wife nodded off in the chair. Her head hung heavily on her neck like that of a hanged man’s, like his father strung up on the ceiling light. And suddenly he was afraid, because his father stood up and began chastising him, like Richard was a boy who, thinking himself invincible, had jumped off the jungle gym only to fall and break a bone—his father scolding: You see what happens when you eat too much duck blood?
At last, Jason appeared. Yes, that was the final portent: his son, here to show Richard to the door. Jason was standing right at the side of the bed, the bed that was more like an operating table, like the one on which Foon Wah had given birth to his four children, only now Richard was moving in the opposite direction. Back into the dark. His son waited, looking a little impatient, and Richard wished he could be a bit less obvious about it.
In truth, he was glad for his son. His son was alive and happy and a father now. He even had a bak gui wife.
In the coffin, dusted in talcum powder, Richard looked like a bak gui—finally white, as if with death ascending.
His children stayed for a week to arrange the details: Jennifer chose the casket, Julie reserved the banquet hall, Jackie phoned the relatives, and Jason delivered Richard’s best suit and tie to the funeral home. Foon Wah busied herself with the obituary, printing, in elegant calligraphy, their Chinese names in order of gender and age. His funeral on Mulberry Street was well attended. People still remembered his importance in the family tree: first son of first son of first son of first son of first son, he never remembered how many times. There were some old Jewish friends from the Brownsville Boys Club, various Chinese relatives, and random Chinese hangers-on—he didn’t recognize a lot of them. Maybe they just went through the funeral part to get drunk at the banquet. There was his daughter-in-law,Rachel, peeking at him and then at the lump of hair cocooned in her arms, perhaps comparing his face to her daughter’s. There were the older grandkids, hungrily eyeing the boiled chicken on the sacrificial altar, and so many wall bouquets his daughters had to rent an extra limo just to transport the flowers to the cemetery.
Jennifer had selected one of the priciest: Green-Wood Cemetery, where Richard used to take them for picnics. But it all went by too quickly: they dumped him in the ground, bowed and threw flowers on his casket, then got back in the car and drove away. He thought they should have been grateful that he’d had the generosity to die in June, not in the middle of the freezing winter like his father. And because it was spring, his decomposed flesh would fertilize the soil.
For a whole year, Richard waited anxiously for Cemetery Day. At last they returned, and they bore gifts: money for the underworld’s vending machines and a feast of sesame gelatin, boiled chicken, and pork chops. Then they left again, taking the food with them. But how could food be an offering to him if the living were also going to eat it? Unless food has a spirit that had already made it up—or down—to him? And during all those years he’d visited his father’s grave, had he been eating food with the spirit sucked out of it?
“When you come next April, make sure you bring a beer!” he hollered, but no one paid attention.
Thanks to Jennifer’s generosity, he now reclined with the Anglos of yore, with the Ebbets of Ebbets Field, the Chadwicks of Chadwick Avenue. So maybe the bak gui had not moved away from Brooklyn after all: they’d reestablished themselves here, conquering the hill with elaborate sarcophagi and swelling obelisks.
“Hello and peekaboo,” he joked. “So, here’s where all you bak gui went! Bak gui—it means ‘white ghost’! You get it?”
He laughed, but the earth hushed him. Lonely, he found himself yearning for his fellow gravemates’ attention. He hoped that the bak gui of yore would initiate him into their underground club with its thick and pungent lounges, its rotten, acrid delicacies.
“I’m sorry for the noise, gentlemen!” he joked. “These Chinamen don’t know the difference between a restaurant and a graveyard!”
He waited for their welcome, ready to withstand the hazing.
The day of the funeral could have been her wedding day, the murmuring crowd escorting her from Ng to Chin village. The bride is only important because the crowd makes her so, conferring an honor on her temporary homelessness. Not since those nuptials had she felt so rootless. Walking forward on the arm of first son of first son of first son of first son of first son of first son, her steps as careful as they’d been on her wedding day, she almost forgot that Mulberry Street was the street of death.
In the months that followed, Foon Wah, now sixty-three, sold the East Flatbush house. Its value had appreciated, and she was able to buy a co-op apartment in Chinatown and use the remainder to purchase a four-week travel package. Nowadays, a person could take a Chinese airline all the way from New York to Beijing. The attendants would not be bak gui ladies, but bilingual Chinese girls in bright lipstick and trim red-and-white uniforms, and instead of uncooked leaves soaked in oil and vinegar, the plane would serve dumplings and beef chiang fun.
During the eighteen-hour flight, her bottom grew sore, her knees ached, and her little bladder forced her to the washroom a dozen times. When she finally looked out the window and made out the contours of her homeland, she was moved to tears.
It was her homeland, and yet much of it was new to her. She’d never been to Beijing. The city’s subways were much cleaner than New York’s, its highways wide and faultless. She and the other expatriates on the trip stayed in a fancy hotel with bidets and faucets that turned on with a wave of the hand. Residents still hung their laundry on the balconies, but she could see through the windows that many households now owned color TVs.
The travel package came with a tour of the China World Shopping Arcade, a day of sailing on the translucent lake at the SummerPalace, and a bus trip to the Great Wall. Foon Wah finally saw with her own eyes all the gilded, pretty objects that she had once read about as a schoolgirl. She especially liked the old hutong villages with their stone houses and cobbled roofs, where the people still traveled by rickshaw and where old ladies shucked corn in the doorways of their homes.
She was perplexed by the tour guide, a young man who spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese fluently, and who had been born to a Cantonese mother but had grown up in Beijing. Each day, he extolled the many great things that the Communist Party had done. The Communists had built factories, roads, bridges, and dams. They had practically eliminated illiteracy, had vastly reduced poverty, had doubled life expectancy. She wondered if all this was true, and how much of the progress had taken place before trade resumed with America.
Their next stop was Canton City. Skyscrapers had replaced the old bricks, there was electricity and running water, and her people dressed like Westerners, in pants and T-shirts. They took a bus to Gui Lin, to the mountains where she’d hid with her siblings from the bombs. The government had designated the caves a national jewel, and signs along the paths reminded tourists not to spit or throw their trash in the lake. The village where they’d taken refuge and where her mother had died was no longer there; the Party had razed the homes, and in its place, there was a travel resort, offering tourists access to hot springs and massage. She could not find the graveyard with her mother’s tombstone, but she hadn’t really expected to.
From the window of her taxi to Toisan, she beheld the peasant huts, the vegetable patches, the rice fields, and the children running in the dirt. Yet still, something was different: the people looked better fed and their skin clearer. She learned from the taxi driver that, along with a new and bigger school, the government had built a hospital with thirty cots. As they passed it, she marveled at its three stories, and at the mini ambulances lined up outside.
When they reached her father’s village, two women dashed out to the gate to receive her. They so much resembled Foon Wah’s cousinsDi Di and Moi Moi that it was only when they called out, “Gu Po!” that she realized they were Di Di’s and Moi Moi’s children.
In the hovel, her cousins greeted her in the doorway. They had transformed into toothless old ladies with white hair. Were it not for her hair dye, wrinkle cream, and regular dentist appointments, Foon Wah would have looked much the same. They took Foon Wah’s arms while their daughters pushed sandals onto her feet and a cup of dandelion tea into her palms. There was another woman there, struggling to break through the crowd of cousins, and with one glance at the bushy-browed face, Foon Wah knew who it was.
“Aiya—Mee Lai?”
She and Mee Lai grabbed each other like they would otherwise fall down, then held each other at arm’s length, both trembling, gasping, exclaiming with glee.
“You came all the way from Lew village?”
“Lew village? Ay, no! I was only there two years!”
“He died?”
