My old home, p.47
My Old Home, page 47
Little Li started tentatively down the white marble aisle toward the bank of organ pipes that rose over one side of the altar. As he sat down in a pew, he tried to imagine his parents walking arm in arm down this aisle, his mother in a white organdy wedding gown and his father in a topcoat just like the couple on the wedding cake at the August Moon Bakery. This vision was interrupted by a creaking sound followed by a curious wheezing, as if a wind had suddenly begun to blow through the church. Then the great organ came to life, filling the cathedral’s vastness with music. It was then that he noticed a flyer slipped into the rack on the back of his pew, announcing a recital featuring the organ works of J. S. Bach scheduled for that evening. Evidently, the organist was here to practice, and his first piece was the chorale prelude “O Man, Bewail Thy Sins So Great” (“O Mensch bewein dein Sünde Groß”). As the prelude’s simple chorale melody sounded, he felt he’d stumbled into a memorial service for his father, and closed his eyes.
When he next opened them, several other worshippers had entered the cathedral, and one of them, a woman seated several rows in front of him, had turned to stare, as if to admonish him for perhaps sleeping in the house of the Lord. But as he watched her, he realized her gaze was actually drawn not by him, but upward, to something else. He turned, too, and saw that the large rose window behind the choir loft at the very back of the cathedral was ablaze with color, as the rising sun was turning the enormous window into a celestial prism. Then, as if on cue, the organ broke forth into the “Little” Fugue in G minor. With its voices entering obediently one after another—the smaller pipes trilling calliope-like, the middle-range pipes like bagpipes, and the enormous bass pipes issuing throaty rumbles—Little Li moved forward to hear better. He seated himself beside one of the pillars that rose up like the trunk of a giant tree from the cathedral floor to support the towering Gothic arches above, as the fugue galvanized toward its epic finale and he thought how much his father would have enjoyed this magisterial recital. As the bass pipes rumbled out the fugal statement one final time, they made the whole cathedral tremble. Then, as quickly as the piece had begun, it ended, leaving only the sound of a distant car horn and the clang of a cable-car bell outside.
Mao Zedong and Johann Sebastian Bach, what a collision of different sensibilities! Mao had been filled with paranoia, infatuated with contradiction, in love with struggle, dedicated to temporal power, and fixated on writing himself across the sweep of history. “A revolution,” he proclaimed, “is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Bach, on the other hand, had been filled with a quest for peace, reverence for God, concern for the spirit, in love with music, and focused on readying the souls of men for eternity. Mao believed the world needed to be remade by outward politics and violent revolution, whereas Bach believed in the curative powers of music to help people accept life’s travails and the inevitability of death. “The aim and final end of music,” he said, “should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”
Whatever preternatural force had brought him here to Nob Hill, Little Li was glad it had. Maybe there was some kind of fate at work after all? How else could one explain that he, like his father, had been mysteriously drawn up to this hilltop, this cathedral, to hear this organ play this music? Tears began splashing down, leaving jagged splotches on the white marble floor. Whether he was weeping because of the music’s beauty, the calamity of his father’s life, his own loneliness, or the tragedy of China, he wasn’t sure. But how had his country, the self-proclaimed socialist savior of mankind, ever ended up inflicting so much suffering and hardship on so many innocent people? Only his father’s favorite writer, Lu Xun, seemed to understand the full depths of China’s self-destructiveness:
Our Chinese civilization, so highly vaunted, is nothing but a feast of human flesh prepared for the rich and powerful. What we call “China” is merely the kitchen where this stew is concocted. Those who praise us are to be excused only in as much as they do not know what they are talking about, like those foreigners whose high positions and pampered lives have rendered them completely blind and obtuse.
In his “Diary of a Madman” Lu Xun had described a fictional society where there was a “murderous gleam” in the eyes of people who’d become so perverted they’d become “eaters of human flesh.” When the story’s hero alone rejects the “etiquette of cannibalism” (吃人的礼教), he is deemed “mad,” causing Lu to cry out in despair: “You must change from the bottom of your hearts! You must know that in the future there will be no place for man-eaters in the world….Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men. Save the children!”
But Lu Xun was wrong. In Mao’s revolution, there had been plenty of room for cannibalism and myriad other cruelties.
“Excuse me, but can you recommend a less expensive place to stay?” he asked Lim Poon back at the Hotel Sam Wong.
“You like cheapo hotel renting by month, you betta off try Hotel Asterix in Tenderloin District. Okay?”
“Indian guy,” said Lim, scrawling a name on a piece of paper and shoving it under the bars of his cage.
“Is it far?”
“Maybe far. You take numba-thirty bus. You betta off at Sam Wong,” he chided. “But alla same for me.” He held up an admonitory hand. “Tenderloin cheaper, but lotta bad guys and too many porno.”
“Well, thanks.” Little Li nodded fatalistically.
“No sweat!” said Lim, smiling perfunctorily.
Before going upstairs to gather his things, he bought two postcards showing the Golden Gate Bridge from the rack next to Lim’s cage. He addressed the first to Little Wang and the second to Little Hong, whom he missed with piercing poignancy.
Dear Hui:
This is an amazing place! I am sure you’d enjoy it!
I do hope you’re well.
Wende
On Little Wang’s card he wrote:
Hey buddy:
Greetings from the land of American imperialism!
I don’t know how this whole adventure will work out, but each time I think of you, I hope your path isn’t as uncertain as mine.
Long live the Two Virtuous Ones!
By the time he reached a mailbox, he was so disgusted with the disingenuousness of what he’d written to Little Hong, he threw the card into a curbside trash can.
When he stepped off the bus at Golden Gate Street, he found himself in the middle of an encampment of homeless people that reeked of urine. Two blocks later, where the Hotel Asterix should have been, he found only an aging building identified on a side brick wall as the Hotel Colon. The Tenderloin certainly was down-and-out, but that it might have a hotel named after the lower intestine seemed really peculiar. He paused in front of a bar called Club 2:00 AM from which a zephyr of sour, smoky, beery air wafted out onto the sidewalk as a jukebox pounded.
“The name’s Wooster. Are you lookin’ for somethin’?” a scruffy man loitering outside asked with boozy good cheer.
“Can you tell me where the Hotel Asterix is?”
“Well, it so happens you’ve arrived at the right place,” replied Wooster grandiloquently. “They change its name so often, only us natives can keep track of it.”
“Is that the Asterix?” Little Li asked, pointing at the Hotel Colon.
“You got it! Talk about piss-in-the-sink hotels!” Wooster accidentally inhaled some port while swigging from a bottle in a brown bag and went into a fit of coughing. Then, swaying so close to Little Li that he could smell the stale sweetness on his breath, Wooster added, “That joint’s run by Indians, an’ I don’t mean guys with tomahawks and tom-toms.”
“Thank you for the warning,” said Little Li, unable to resist smiling. Wooster may not have been San Francisco’s finest, but he’d extended the most effusive expression of hospitality Little Li had yet been afforded in America.
34
THE NEW WORLD
LITTLE LI was so dispirited that, without even looking at the room, he forked over three hundred dollars to Patel, the turbaned clerk at the Hotel Asterix’s front desk, for a month’s rent. Room 24 was furnished with a dinette table whose wobbly metal legs were plated with flaking chrome, and whose plastic top was scarred with rings from so many hot pans that it looked like a parody of the Olympic Games logo. Other furnishings included a folding metal chair with bent legs, and a mattress on the floor hemorrhaging stuffing and covered by a faded floral-pattern quilt. In the coating of dust covering the bedside table someone had written “Fuck you, Rhonda!” The room’s single grimy window propped up with an empty Diet Coke can looked out over a dumpster to the Club 2:00 AM. Hoping to make this forlorn space his own, Little Li took his father’s scroll out of his satchel and hung it above the mattress.
As he tried to fall asleep that first night, his room came alive with a procession of intrusive noises: the repeated clump-clump of footsteps, then the slamming of a door, the clicking of a latch, and the clap of a toilet seat slamming down as another “guest” entered the adjacent lavatory. Then, after a brief silence, came a fusillade of bassoonlike crepitations, an obbligato of tinkling piss, and a rush of water, a soundscape that truly bespoke the name Hotel Colon.
From across the street came another nonstop cacophony of clinking glasses, drunken voices, and the percussive thumping of a jukebox. Each time a customer came or left and the door opened, the volume swelled as if a radio had suddenly been turned up. And even with the ripped window shade down, the Club 2:00 AM’s neon sign—a bright-blue smiling olive impaled on a green toothpick that danced in a pink martini glass—filled Room 24 with oscillating pulses of gaudy color. But the most provocative audio drama to contend with was a moaning sound that turned out to be the sounds of a woman in ecstasy in the room next door, that only served as a painful reminder of how alone Little Li was. The only competitor with this quadraphonic racket was the small, reedy voice of his cricket.
For the next few weeks, Little Li did little but sleep, eat one budget meal a day at the Duc Pho restaurant, a Vietnamese dive down the street, and stroll the derelict neighborhood, past the other “residential” hotels, strip clubs, bars, cheap Asian diners, adult bookshops, and porno shops. Besides Wooster, who stood like a carnival barker in front of Club 2:00 AM, hailing passersby with drunken good cheer, he spoke to no one. He considered returning to his aunt’s, but felt so humiliated by his initial reception that he rejected the idea. He had, in effect, disappeared. Even to think of the word “home” (家) made him feel dejected, because he was no longer sure he still had one. From the Hotel Asterix, his escape from China seemed like a cruel joke, one he’d played on himself. What upset him most about his attacks of nostalgia was the recognition that, even though he’d finally arrived in the promised land of California, he was still not free of China’s sway. Instead of being able to savor his getaway, he was pining for Willow Courtyard, his father, and especially Little Hong. It all made him wonder if the party was not, in fact, correct in scorning those Chinese who naïvely fantasized that the moon is rounder in America than in China.
It was not long before he began welcoming the noises bombarding his room. They were, at least, reminders that there was a living world outside, even if he hadn’t figured out how to join it. When the Club 2:00 AM closed on Sundays, far from granting Little Li surcease, the silence only made him more eager to be intruded on by his neighbor’s moaning. Like a theatergoer expectantly awaiting for the curtain to go up on a performance, he lay awake, hoping not to be cheated of this bit of real-life drama that allowed his troubled mind to sink into waking reveries of American girls shamelessly satisfying themselves. He may have managed to enter geographic America, but no passport could assure him entrance into the universe of American hedonism.
One night, while out walking aimlessly, he spotted an aurora borealis of light bleeding up into the foggy San Francisco sky. As he drew closer, he saw it came from floodlights illuminating the exterior of an all-night Cala Foods supermarket. The minute he stepped through the store’s automatic doors, he experienced a mood change so profound, it felt almost chemically induced. Everything about the supermarket—its hangarlike vastness, brightly lit interior, soft music, drifts of perfectly complexioned vegetables and fruits, shelves of gleaming products, and aisles of refrigerated cases—justified its name. So entranced was he by this all-night American emporium that, after picking up the few things he could afford, he lingered for the simple pleasure of being surrounded by such abundance. Roaming the aisles, he tarried over each section as if the bins, shelves, and cases were exhibits in a great museum. The supermarket was, indeed, a far cry from the state-run stores he was used to back home, where surly disinterested clerks watched as truckloads of cabbage, turnips, or squash were dumped unceremoniously on dusty sidewalks like loads of gravel. Here an attentive Japanese American manager presided over the produce section like an emergency-room nurse, carefully stacking his apples, pears, and oranges in neat pyramids and spritzing his lettuces and legumes with invigorating mists of water. And whereas Chinese butcher shops often looked like execution grounds, here the meat-and-seafood section was as spotless as a hospital examination room, and the smocks worn by the butchers were as white as the gowns of medical orderlies. And he loved the forceful product brand names: Miracle Whip, Challenge Milk, Comet Cleanser, Cheerios, and Wonder Bread. But what most entranced him was a life-sized cardboard cutout of a shapely young blonde in a scarlet bikini who stood watch over the detergents in Aisle 4. Sporting a tricornered hat and a snare drum hanging around her neck, she held a plastic container of aquamarine-tinted Minuteman Toilet Bowl Magic in one of her delicate hands. Little Li tried to imagine the effect of such an ad in the Wangfujing Department Store, but he knew it would assuredly be removed as a form of “spiritual pollution” (精神污染). Such come-ons might be base, but they were, at least, a demonstration that even companies here in America were obliged to court “the people” in a form of commercial crypto-democracy.
Since Cala Foods was always open, whenever Little Li was lonely or unable to sleep, he headed over, grabbed a shopping cart, and trolled its aisles. Late at night, when customers were few, he sometimes played a version of his old boyhood game of shutting his eyes and trying to navigate his way by touch, sound, and smell. It took him no time to map the supermarket’s interlocking fields of fragrances, sounds, and temperatures. There was the sweet, cinnamon aroma of the baked goods in Aisle 1; the pungent fragrance of roasted beans around the coffee section at the end of Aisle 2; the pleasing smell of roast chicken and barbecued ribs near the deli department; the low-tide smell around the seafood cases; and the raw, almost sexual odor of cut meats that lingered around the butcher counter. Then there was a damp feeling in the lettuce section and a miniature weather system of frigid arctic air around the frozen-food cases. But ruling over all these separate sensory domains was the overpowering chemical pungency emanating from Aisle 4 next to the Minuteman Toilet Bowl Magic girl, where the air fresheners, detergents, household pesticides, and toilet-bowl cleaners were shelved. This aisle’s nostril-tingling chemical signature had such authority that whenever Little Li lost his way he knew he could always reorient himself simply by homing in on it, like the North Star.
He was, of course, aware that drunkenly pushing a shopping cart around with his eyes shut made him look quite daft. But because there was no chance he’d run into anyone he knew, he didn’t care. What’s more, there were so many other deviants in the store late at night, he was hardly out of place. In fact, as he shuffled along with his nose held high like a hunting dog on point, he sometimes half wished he were blind. At least then he’d have a proper excuse for being so inept and insoluble in this impregnable land.
One night as he arrived at Cala Foods, he heard the sound of a violin. Next to the main door, beside the ice-vending machine, stood a young man with a beard and a top hat playing a Mozart sonata. A hand-lettered sign around his neck announced: Penurious music student: Help me get through the San Francisco Conservatory!
Little Li stopped to listen to this talented busker.
“Hey, man! Where ya from?” the violinist asked when he came to the end of the movement.
“China,” replied Little Li.
“Far out! Do you like music?”
“I do.”
“You play?”
“Yes, the flute,” he answered, but immediately felt regretful, because, having come all this way to the United States to study music, he’d not yet made any progress in that direction.
“You should come out to the Conservatory some time,” the violinist said. “We’ve got a lot of foreign students.” Then he tucked his fiddle back under his chin and sawed out the next movement.
The words “San Francisco Conservatory” jolted Little Li. After all, this was where his parents had both studied and met. He dropped a dollar into the violinist’s open instrument case, and as he walked back to the Asterix, he resolved that as soon as he made some money, he’d investigate music school.
That night, he put his hulu under his quilt, hoping his cricket would sing. But when, after a while, there was still no sound, he turned on the light and twisted off the carved top. His cricket was lying on its back, its paper-clip legs sticking up in the air and both its antennae were broken.
When Grace Cathedral’s bells tolled at 6:00 a.m., Little Li was already in Huntington Park. As dawn broke, he dug a hole in a bed of primroses, shook his dead cricket out onto the palm of his hand, laid its weightless body in the miniature grave, and gently pushed the earth back in around its body. It was only an insect, but it had been alive, traveled with him all the way from China, and was the last living tie to his homeland. Its death left him feeling even more friendless and lost.
