This Old Man Page 14

  The pictures were powder and ash, or half-burnt. On the rest, the images were dissolving and bleeding into a sickening shade of yellow. I ran the bath water over the ruins of my pictures, my memories, my insurance policy.

  When Elizabeth came home, the water was still running. I sat on the bathroom floor, in a cold stream, with the charred towels packed against the doorjamb to keep the water from trickling out onto the hardwood floors of the hall.

  After that, Carmella was sent to Juvenile Detention. Elizabeth wanted her to come back to Anza House as soon as possible, but I kept hoping she’d destroy Juvie and get sent somewhere permanent, like the Rock. It wasn’t that Carmella scared me; she couldn’t hurt me any more than she already had. What scared me was the pure, searing hatred I felt for her.

  20

  The biggest disaster was the loss of my term-paper notes. How many hours had I spent at the library running my finger down the entries on genetic engineering in the Reader’s Guide? All those notes from all those magazines, all those neat three-by-five cards on which I’d carefully printed the author’s name, the name of the article, the magazine, the volume, the date, and the page—all those notes were destroyed.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of reading those same articles again on cloning and test-tube babies and cross-species transplants. For a while I considered going back to the Newsweek articles at the Chinese Hospital, to study liver functioning, but it would be hard to take livers seriously for a minimum of twenty pages and footnotes. I decided Mrs. Wong would like a new, dramatic topic better: Chinese street gangs.

  So, I trudged back to the library, back to the bound magazines that still had my page markers in them, and back to the Hua Ching. On my left was a stack of clean white note cards, and on my right was a growing pile of pencil-smudged notes, as I sank back into the vicious streets Mr. Saxe had warned me about.

  “Yellow Consciousness,” I wrote at the top of one card. It made me think about this big annual deal we have at school called Black Awareness Week. That I could see; I’d just never thought of Chinese people as yellow. But now they were talking about how yellow was beautiful, and yellow was powerful. I read about the opening session of the Free University of Chinatown Kids, Unincorporated, the initials of which I wouldn’t dare put in my paper. In a basement across from Portsmouth Square, Free University met for the purpose of radicalizing American-born Chinese. Kids like Wing.

  As for some of the ones who came over from Hong Kong, they were already way ahead of the American-born. They thought nothing of charging into a Chinese theater with sawed-off shotguns and firing randomly. Or if a restaurant owner wouldn’t pay the gangs for protection, two or three guys would turn the lunch hour into a massacre, with blood and broken glass everywhere.

  Compared to this, Carmella’s flying egg foo yong was strictly Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

  There was a lot written about why kids went into these gangs. Mostly it was because the kids in Chinatown, even nine- and ten-year-olds, were hungry for power and money. They ended up with plenty of both, if they didn’t end up dead.

  I suppose all this reading should have made me more sympathetic toward Chen, but it didn’t. The more notes I took, the more I wanted him sent away, as Carmella had been, before he hurt Wing or Old Man. What if he tore Old Man’s room apart, the way Carmella had mine? What if he pulled those heavy tapestry drapes to the floor, flooding Old Man’s room with unwelcome sunshine; shredded Old Man’s parchment; stripped his ink brushes; shattered his tea set?

  What if Wing and his family were eating in a restaurant on Sacramento Street, and a group of Chen’s hoodlum buddies burst in with meat cleavers and guns?

  I wore down half a dozen pencil points taking notes. The notes practically organized themselves. Elizabeth reluctantly let me stay home from school, and I finished the whole paper in a day. I stayed up all night typing it on Elizabeth’s old clunker.

  Wing read my carbon copy in the lobby of the Chinese Hospital. I watched his dark skin pale, as he read on and on. I couldn’t help thinking of what the immigrants called the “nice-guy” American-born Chinese: Bananas—yellow skin, white inside.

  I wanted Chen out of San Francisco.

  It was Mr. Kwang who finally took action, the kind of action I wished I’d had the courage to take before my pictures had been destroyed. Wing told me the whole story on the steps of Old St. Mary’s.

  “It wasn’t easy for my father, you know. You have to save face here. You have to protect your own family. You stay out of other people’s business.”

  “Well, I don’t!” I protested hotly.

  “No,” he laughed, “that is definitely not your style. But that’s the custom here.”

  Wing always said “here,” as though Chinatown were a separate world from the rest of the state of California, and maybe it was. The voices of the children chanting their Chinese lessons floated back to me from that unseen room upstairs, and the bizarre window displays flashed before my eyes: the pickled ginseng root dangling in a bottle like alien babies; the preserved white fungus looking like lacy bones; the dried mushrooms with huge heads, brown and cracked as turtle backs.

  “There is an old saying—”

  “I’ve noticed that in Chinatown there’s always an old saying. Does Old Man make one up for you every day?”

  “Sometimes,” Wing admitted, “but this one really is old. ‘Sweep the snow in front of your own door, and do not bother the frost on your neighbor’s roof.’”

  “That’s supposed to be very witty, I’m sure, but there’s no snow in Chinatown.”

  “Greta, Greta, you don’t have the Chinese knack for abstraction. No matter how hard you try, you’ll always be white. All it means is that you take care of your own business, that’s all, and no one else’s.”

  “Well, yeah, I knew that.” I felt stupid that he had to explain it to me.

  “This time my father put a ladder to his neighbor’s roof. Last night he took Chen’s bed apart and found a lot of things stuck in the springs. He found wallets and ID cards and jewelry wrapped up in newspaper, a gold cigarette case, and also a semiautomatic rifle and a Smith and Wesson .38 that I guess was a policeman’s once.”

  “Wow! Your father must have had a fit.”

  “He called the police and asked them to give all the wallets and papers back to the people they belonged to.”

  “He turned Chen in?”

  “Chen was picked up on California and Grant about an hour later. My father had to do it, Greta. Chen’s dishonored my father and my grandfather.”

  “And you, too,” I reminded him. “Now what’s going to happen to Second Cousin Chen?”

  “I don’t know. We wait and see,” Wing sighed.

  We didn’t have to wait long. A few of Chen’s “friends” decided to avenge him with swift justice. At the vegetable market on Monday morning, they began smashing tomatoes by bouncing them off the walls of the store. Their switchblades snapped open and sliced through every orange and apple. Customers scattered from the stores on both sides, and Mrs. Kwang crouched in a dark corner until the siege was over.

  Mr. Kwang, though, ran out the back door and phoned the police. By the time their siren came tearing up Washington Street, the three hoods were gone. The whole day’s stock of fresh fruits and vegetables, which Mr. Kwang had brought back from market at 5:00 A.M., was now garbage, fit only for hog troughs.

  Chen was held on $1,000 bail. Despite their loyalty, his buddies did not put up the money. The police gave Chen a choice: he could either wait around in jail for a trial, then face a possible prison sentence for the muggings and burglaries, or he could be immediately deported. He took a week to give his answer, while Wing’s family cleaned up rotten fruit and dared not reopen the store.

  Chen decided to go back to Hong Kong. Mr. Kwang took what little savings the family had and bought Chen a plane ticket.

  “It was a good investment, really,” Wing said.

  “I can’t believe he’s actually going
. All this will be over soon.”

  Wing wasn’t so sure. “Yeah, but what about his friends?”

  “You really think they care about a smalltime punk like Chen? Once he’s gone, they’ll go on to bigger and better things. Trust me, I know about these things. The term paper, remember? They know your family hasn’t got a dime. They can’t get something out of nothing, so they’ll stick to tourists and the Chinese merchants who’ve made it big outside of Chinatown.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Wing said, picking at his thumb. A bead of blood appeared, and he stuck the thumb in his mouth. “Because, if you’re wrong, what are my parents going to do if they can’t keep the store open?”

  “They’ll be all right, you’ll see.” I pulled a Band-Aid out of my purse and wrapped it around Wing’s thumb, tossing the wrapper to the wind. I wished I believed my brave encouragement. “Does Old Man know Chen’s leaving?”

  “Not yet. I have the privilege of telling him tonight.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “Not quite everything,” Wing replied. “Only that First Great-grandson is returning to his home in Hong Kong. I think Old Man won’t miss him much.”

  On Thursday we stopped by the vegetable market to pick up Old Man’s dinner. The walls were stained with fruit pulp, though Mrs. Kwang had scrubbed them until her hands were raw. The broken windows were boarded up, but there was a fresh supply of beautiful vegetables once again.

  Mr. Kwang was on his way to the airport with Chen and his police escort, and Mrs. Kwang seemed radiant, but cautious. She threw her arms around Wing’s neck, then backed off, blushing. “Tell Old Man there are moon cakes in his dinner,” she said. “Lun Wah from the market gave them to me today, especially for him.”

  Moon cakes, I found out after trying to eat one of the nasty round lumps, are small cakes filled with lotus seeds and chestnut paste. I doubted that Old Man would like them, but on second thought, they could provide an evening’s entertainment for him. It would take him until bedtime to finish swallowing one. For pure stick-io-it-iveness, the moon cake was Chinatown’s answer to peanut butter.

  Old Man fell. Though Wing tried his best to support him in their walk around the room, Old Man’s legs buckled, and one of the dry-twig bones snapped.

  I heard the agonizing cry of pain and the thud of his body as it hit the floor. I knew he was dead. I dashed to the nurses’ station. “Quick! Mr. Kwang!” The nurse was there in a shot. The door slid shut behind her, and I was left alone, shivering in the hall.

  Once inside, she must have called for help, because an orderly and two other nurses came immediately. There was no equipment brought in on carts, no defibrillator or respirator, not any of the things I’d seen on Quincy. Then I was sure he was dead, like Hackey’s mother, crumpled in a shameful heap on the floor.

  The nurses’ voices were low and commanding. “Support his head,” one said. “Keep his legs as flat as you can.” They were laying his body to rest. I heard nothing from Wing and pictured him flattened against the wall, or seated in a corner with his head buried.

  There was a thin mournful sound, like the lowing of distant cattle. It must have been Wing. If I heard it again, I would not be able to stop myself, I would have to be in there with him. Suddenly the door burst open. Old Man’s bed was bumped against the door, the wall, as the orderly wheeled him out to the hall beside me.

  There he lay, just as I’d seen him a thousand times, and not at all like that. His body was the size of a child’s, wrapped tight in the hospital white like Pammy’s baby in the nursery. His arms were folded across his chest, one hand wrapped around the other wrist. That was the way I had always imagined him to sleep, never on his stomach or curled like a cat on his side. So full of dignity and self-restraint he was, even in death.

  Wing followed alongside the bed, clutching Old Man’s starched white napkin as though it were a widow’s handkerchief. I touched Wing’s shoulder as a question. He glanced at me briefly and back to Old Man: no answer.

  When Hackey’s mother died, I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, because I’d known her alive, the way she was supposed to look. I’d never known Old Man alive, so I forced myself to memorize his face now.

  It was small, reminding me of a squirrel, and very wrinkled and rutted. It was calm, befitting his dignified posture. He wore no skullcap or queue. There were only thin dark strands of hair that fanned out on his pillow. I wanted to tuck the hair in under his head. I would remind Wing to do that later. That mournful lowing came again. I tore my eyes away from Old Man to Wing, to see if he would be all right.

  All this—the first glimpse of Old Man’s small body and wizened face and disheveled hair—happened in a flash. And yet it seemed that these seconds stood perfectly still. Now the frozen scene was plunged into a steaming frenzy. The bed raced down the hall, a nurse went ahead to press for the elevator. Someone ran beside the bed taking Old Man’s pulse; there was a blood-pressure cuff on his arm. A nurse dabbed at his forehead with a damp cloth. These were all signs of life. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? Old Man was alive! The lowing I’d heard came from deep within him.

  Later I found out that he had only broken his hip. The nurses were rushing him to the operating room for x-rays and to have his hip set.

  The part that stuck with me through that long night as I tried to fall asleep was the image of Old Man lying peacefully still on that bed. He wasn’t writhing or squirming. He didn’t even move a muscle. His small, ordinary, old-man face said nothing of the pain he felt in his body. He had won still another round with the foreign doctors.

  Then I understood what Wing meant about saving face.

  21

  There was no ceremony or induction. I simply became Old Man’s guest each afternoon. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his toes. They stuck out of the end of his cast, because they were too tender to be touched, even by a thin sheet. I’d never noticed until then that feet don’t age like the rest of the body. They could have been the toes of a young cowboy, flexing and glad to be free of the boot.

  Old Man never asked what I was doing there. I was simply introduced as the Girl of the Lu Yun Poem. He never spoke to me directly. Still, I felt he was very aware of my presence. Wing said Old Man remembered my being in the hall the day he broke his hip.

  After a week or so I was sure he was playing with me, in the manner of a man who remembered himself to be roguish and dashing. He smiled much more than I thought he would, and pointed to this and that of me, and said things to Wing that I didn’t understand, but that seemed happy and playful.

  Wing taught me a few things to say—hello, have you eaten today, thank you—and Old Man would snicker when I said them awkwardly. He’d command me to say them again and again. Other times there wasn’t a thing we could say to please him, and we would just wait quietly for the storm in his heart to pass.

  The broken hip seemed to have done wonders for his health. The foreign doctor said that if all went well, Old Man would be home in two weeks.

  Mrs. Kwang began preparing the apartment for his homecoming. She stripped his bed and beat his mattress and rearranged the furniture in the boys’ room so that Old Man’s corner would be closest to the bathroom in the hall.

  I worried about who would take care of him at home.

  “I will, of course. A visiting nurse will come from Chinese Social Services to give him a bath and shave him every day or two, and take his blood pressure or whatever they do, but I’ll do the rest,” Wing said proudly.

  “I know, I know, the first born of the first born, et cetera.” Poor Wing. He’d be tied down all summer with that gnome of a tyrant, who’d be yelling at him one minute and cooing to him the next. Each day he’d demand more and more of Wing’s attention and energy. What a way to spend your sixteenth summer.

  “I’m surprised you asked, Greta. Who else would do it?”

  Who else? I would have done it. I would have given up Quinn’s job at Candlestick Park and stayed with Old Ma
n in the daytime. I would have learned to say more words, and to understand even more, so he could tell me what he needed, and I could take care of everything.

  I was disgusted with myself for feeling so jealous of Wing. It wasn’t as though he were getting a fantastic trip to Honolulu, or a new TransAm. What he was getting was a sentence to three months in a musty, crowded, third-floor apartment, with a man who muttered tight, ancient poems and clapped his hands to bring Wing to him, as he’d done seventy years before to his household of humble servants. Who could be jealous of such a thing? I must have been crazy.

  The next Tuesday Mr. Saxe and I had it all out.

  “What does Old Man represent to you?” he asked pointedly.

  There was a lot to do in forty-five minutes. “Could we maybe skip the question game and get right to it? What does Old Man represent?”

  Mr. Saxe must have sensed my impatience that day, because he gave me one of his rare straight answers. “Old Man is—oh, the family continuity you’ve never had, the ethnic background you miss as a Wasp? Try that on.”

  “What’s a Wasp?”

  “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In other words, you don’t have roots in a specific ethnic or minority group.”

  “You mean, Old Man’s interesting and different, and I’m ordinary?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. You’re an extraordinary girl.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think you’ve hit it yet. Try something else.”

  “All right, how about this? Old Man appeals to you because you’d like something or someone to take care of.”