Paper son, p.2
Paper Son, page 2
“Like your dad. Hi again, Mr. Chin.”
I raised my tea mug. “Hi, Baba.” To Bill, I said, “I mean, I’ve known about paper sons since grade school, but I guess I never really thought about what it must have been like to be one. I didn’t know I had one in the family.”
Though, I thought, considering that one of his progeny had now been arrested for killing another, my great-grandfather’s brother in the other world might be just as happy that he and his own ancestors, stretching back through the mists of time, were seeing all this happen with someone else’s family name attached.
4
I walked across Canal, through the December afternoon. In Tribeca things were quiet, but once I hit Chinatown I had to slip sideways through the bustle of Christmas shopping, Chinese New Year shopping, grocery shopping, and, among the tourists and uptowners, knockoff shopping. Chinatown’s famous for luxury-brand counterfeits, though Chinese people won’t buy them. The real thing means you’ve arrived; a fake, even a good one, is an admission of failure. For tourists, it’s the opposite: a knockoff indistinguishable from the real thing proves you’re a savvy shopper. Among the Chinese merchants, the ability to peddle phony goods without getting pounced on by the law proves you’re a sharp shopkeeper. In this little ecology, everyone wins.
I watched a man fold a grass-leaf spider for a little girl. His table showed his wares: bugs, birds, and animals, made from long sprays of dried grass like the ones he no doubt used to pick by the stream in his home village and now bought wholesale from a grower in New Jersey, to work into marvelous shapes and sell for a dollar on a Chinatown street.
Behind steamy restaurant windows, young men hefted bins of dirty dishes or took cleavers to roast ducks. These men, like the grass-leaf folder, probably spoke neither English nor Cantonese. Unlike the old days of Chinatown, when everyone came from Guangdong, a lot of the new immigrants’ hometowns were in farther-flung provinces: Fujian, Henan, Xinjiang. If they had a common language, it was Mandarin, but some only spoke their home dialect because, as always, the immigrants were the poor, the least educated. Those who, in coming across the ocean and starting over, had nothing to lose.
Climbing the stairs to the apartment I shared with my mother, my thoughts were far away: on leaving home, on starting over. In a way, that was the situation here. My four brothers and I grew up in this apartment. I still lived here, so my mother wouldn’t be alone, and my brothers paid the rent, did the repairs, and covered whatever else my mother needed, until we could persuade her to move in with Ted and his family in Queens. My mother, so far, had ignored all our highly reasonable arguments. She didn’t want to start over, even at her son’s home, and that was that.
I slid off my shoes and walked into the living room, unprepared for my mother’s next move in the Can I Top Myself? game.
“I’ve found the letter,” she called. The air was full of the gingery scent of snow fungus soup. I had to smile; this soup was always her send-off, her way of fortifying a family member before a trip.
“What letter?”
“The letter your father sent me when he went to Mississippi.”
I walked into the kitchen. “Ba went to Mississippi?”
She looked up from stirring the pot. “I just told you that, Ling Wan-ju.” She opened a cabinet and took out a jar of rice. “He rode the Greyhound bus. You were eight years old. His cousin Leland Tam was operating his family’s grocery store.”
“Leland Tam, the man who got killed? Jefferson Tam’s father?”
“Yes. At the time, Leland Tam was a young man, with great responsibilities. Your father thought perhaps we would move to the Delta of Mississippi. He would become partners with Leland Tam in the store.”
“Us? Move to Mississippi?” This was news. I wondered if my brothers had known that was being considered. I certainly hadn’t.
“Ling Wan-ju, do you only talk in questions now?” My mother pursed her lips. “It’s because of your job. Asking questions all day long about things that are not your business.”
“Ma, you’re the one sending me to Mississippi because of my job.”
Her expression made it clear I’d missed something. “This is for family. This is your business.”
The rice made a crisp slide into the electric cooker. My mother turned the dial with a firmness that dared it to come out any way but perfect and walked back to the living room. On the side table was an envelope bearing my father’s unkempt handwriting and a thirty-two-cent stamp. She picked it up and held it out to me. “Here.”
“It’s okay if I read this?”
She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. All right, in view of the fact that she had put it in my hand, it was a dumb question.
I sat and took two sheets of yellowing, character-covered paper from the precisely sliced envelope. That would be like my mother, to open a letter from my father with delicate care. And like my father, to write rather than call. Partly to save money; but also, I could picture him at the end of the day, at a table in his cousin’s house. He’d be smiling to himself as he thought of my mother, choosing his words with care, because they were for her.
My father’s handwriting in Chinese was more under control than in English, but it took me a moment to get used to reading the vertical columns. Chinese today is written horizontally, left to right, but my father learned it top to bottom, and he never made the switch. Surrounded by the aroma of my mother’s soup and the staccato chopping of vegetables, I began to read.
My dear wife,
I hope you are well. Before I left I made it clear to the children that they are not to misbehave while I’m gone. I trust that command has tempered their natural exuberance so that you don’t find them too much of a handful.
I smiled. The most naturally exuberant member of our family had been my father, an energetic, generous man, full of jokes and ideas. In truth, my brothers and I were always more likely to misbehave if he was around. Alone with our mother, we were pretty sure we’d never get away with anything.
I arrived here safely after a tiring but not unpleasant journey. It happens that another Chinese was on the bus, returning home to Greenville (a town larger than Clarksdale, south of here), where his family also has a grocery. I shared with him your char siu. Also your ho fun. As usual, after filling me full of snow fungus soup, you sent me away with more food than I could eat in a week! He was grateful, proclaiming you a most excellent cook. His own wife was born in Greenville as he was. Therefore, he says, although she’s Chinese, she’s more partial to deep fry than stir-fry.
“Ma,” I said, “Ba met another Chinese man on the bus. Another grocer. From Mississippi.”
“I’ve read the letter.”
Practically read the ink off it, I’d bet. “Okay. I was just surprised.”
She didn’t answer, so I went back to reading.
Our conversation gave me much to think about, preparing me for my visit here. My new friend, Ro Tung, whose slow, strange English is still better than his odd-sounding Chinese (I suppose that must be the Mississippi accent I’m hearing), is planning on closing his family’s grocery in the coming year. The neighborhood, he tells me, has become dangerous. Also, profits have gone down as stores such as Walmart have opened outside the city. He thinks the situation in Clarksdale might be different, as there were fewer Chinese groceries to begin with, in a smaller, more self-contained town. However, he warned me that all over the Delta, the Chinese stores are closing.
I put the letter down. “Ma, I don’t get it. Ba’s talking like Chinese grocery stores in the Mississippi Delta are a . . . a thing.” I had trouble saying what I meant in Chinese, but my mother’s face as she peered around the kitchen doorway made it clear she wasn’t having any trouble understanding me, just trouble understanding why I was having trouble.
“Each store is a thing,” she said. “Of course it is. If it weren’t a thing, it wouldn’t be a store, only the idea of a store.” She spoke as though that were a clarifying comment.
“That’s not what I mean. There are lot of Chinese grocery stores in the Delta? How many?”
“I haven’t been to Mississippi to count them, Ling Wan-ju.”
“Are they like a chain?” I persisted. “Some Chinese family went to Mississippi and started a chain of stores? Ba’s cousins?”
“I don’t believe that’s what happened, but really, Ling Wan-ju, these questions won’t help you solve your case. I gave you that letter to read because I hoped you would learn things from it. Instead of constantly questioning me.” She pulled her head back into the kitchen like an annoyed turtle.
My cousin Leland Tam (he doesn’t use his Chinese name, Lo-Liang, at all) is a respectful but harried man who’s taken on a good deal of responsibility. His father, Jonas, who also prefers his American name (I can see you frowning, Yong-Yun, but our children do the same), no longer involves himself in the store’s daily operations, as Leland told us in his letter. This isn’t because he’s elderly or infirm. I’m sorry to tell you the reason: Jonas gambles. Not in the way of so many people, like his own younger brother Pete, enjoying pai gow or mah-jongg (or following the horse races with excited friends at the OTB—come, you’re frowning again!), but in the consuming fashion with which we are unfortunately familiar. Jonas spends days on end at the casinos while Leland works. Your opinions on gambling differ from mine, Yong-Yun, but when it becomes a devouring disease, we agree.
Tomorrow I’ll take Jonas aside to demand that he look around: at his wife, his son, his daughters, his business. I’ll insist he acknowledge where his responsibilities lie. I’ll do this because it’s my duty, but Leland is sure my words will have no effect. His own have not, nor have Pete’s, nor those of Jonas and Pete’s eldest brother, Paul, who has left Clarksdale for Jackson but continues to admonish Jonas for his irresponsibility. I’m afraid, though I’ve known Jonas for only a day, that I agree.
As to our coming here to become partners with Leland, I’ll need more time to explore the situation. We’ll speak about it when I return.
Tell the children I’m watching them!
Your loving husband.
Dinner prep complete, my mother came into the living room and sat on the sofa, picking up her sewing again. She almost never just relaxes. “He who waits for a roast duck to fly into his mouth must wait a very long time,” is her response when someone suggests chilling out.
I put the letter down. “Ba said to say he was watching us.”
“He always wanted me to tell you that, when he was away.”
“Is that why you still said it, even . . . years later?”
“It was what he wanted me to tell you.”
I stood. “Do you want some tea, Ma?”
In the kitchen, I plugged in the kettle. Fifteen years is a long time, and I’d gotten used to my father being gone. But every now and then, something reminded me how much I missed him.
I made jasmine tea and brought a mug to my mother. I sat back down on the sofa with my own tea and asked, “Did you want to go?”
“To Mississippi? If that had been your father’s decision, we would have gone, of course.”
“That’s not what I asked. I know you would have. You’d have made a big success of it, too. But did you want to?”
She looked at me for a long moment, then went back to her sewing. “These questions will not help you investigate this case, Ling Wan-ju.”
“We didn’t go,” I said. “So Ba must have decided not to. It won’t be like you’re disagreeing with him”—a cardinal sin, policed by my mother, though Ba had enjoyed argument and debate—“if you tell me you didn’t want to go.”
She sighed. “No, Ling Wan-ju, I did not want to go. Leaving China to start a new life in Hong Kong, leaving Hong Kong to start another new life in New York, that was enough. Your father had worked hard to make a good life for our family here.”
I thought about the long days my mother had spent in Old Lun’s sewing factory all through my childhood, doing the hand finishing. After my father’s death, she also brought piecework home in the evenings and sewed while she watched, eagle-eyed, to make sure my brothers and I did our homework. My father and you made a good life for us, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. My mother’s not a particularly humble person, the notable and enormous exception being when it comes to my father.
“In Mississippi,” she went on, “we would have had a house with a yard. A garden to grow our vegetables. You children could have played in the grass, fished in the river, instead of riding the subway to classes at the YMCA. It was a pretty picture. But there are not many Chinese people in Mississippi. Who would I exchange recipes with? Who there plays mah-jongg?”
I wondered if I were the first person she’d told this to. Had my father known how she felt, before he decided?
Glancing down at the letter, I said, “There seem to be a lot of Chinese grocers.”
I’d been joking, but she answered me seriously. “The Delta of Mississippi is not like Chinatown,” she said. “Even if there were other families, they would be far away, like your brother in Queens. They have no subways there to take you places.”
My mother grew up in a small Guangdong village, spent years in Hong Kong, and then came to Chinatown, which she rarely leaves except to go visit one of my brothers. She’s never not been surrounded by Chinese people.
“So you told Ba you didn’t want to go?”
“Of course I didn’t. It was your father’s decision to make.”
I sipped my tea. “What does Ba mean about the kind of gambling you’re ‘unfortunately familiar’ with?” I made air quotes around “unfortunately familiar” before it occurred to me my mother probably didn’t know what air quotes were.
“Really, Ling Wan-ju—”
“Really, Ma, you gave me the letter to read.”
My mother took a long pause. From the way she didn’t look at me I knew she had something to say.
“I came from a poor village in China,” she said. “Your father, from a poorer one. To have a good future for our family we decided to come to America.” More silence. “In my poor village, my family was the poorest. This was because my father, your grandfather, could not stay out of the pai gow parlors. My mother raised geese, my brothers worked from the time they were small. Myself, my sister, also. None of us finished school. Because Ba bet on pai gow, on mah-jongg, on whether the brown duck would swim under the bridge before the white duck did. He had a sickness.” She stopped, lifting her mug. I waited without speaking until she was ready to continue.
“After our marriage, we put off leaving China for two years,” she finally said. “American visas were expensive. We wanted to have the price of them with us when we went to Hong Kong. Finally, we had saved enough. As poor as they were, our families gave us a farewell banquet. With all our possessions in two suitcases, we got on the train for the border. The ride was long, dusty, bumpy, but we were going to America. I was pregnant with your brother.” Hot red spots glowed on her cheeks. Not being particularly modest, my mother has no false modesty, either, so I wasn’t sure why mentioning her pregnancy embarrassed her. But as it turned out, that wasn’t it. She went on to say, “It was only at the border that we discovered my father had taken our money.”
“Oh, Ma,” I breathed.
“We talked about going back. But we already had visas to Hong Kong, which had taken some time to get. We decided to remain there. My cousin, who was our sponsor, had offered us a place to stay while we waited for our American visas. We went to her apartment. Instead of leaving for America we found jobs, then a tiny apartment of our own. I cleaned rooms in a hotel. After your brother was born, I left him with my cousin on her days off. She left her two children with me on mine. When your second brother was born, the same.” Surprising me, my mother smiled. “It was a hard life, but not an entirely terrible thing. Your father got a job washing dishes in a restaurant. He was hardworking, dependable. Always cheerful. Soon he was promoted to vegetable chopper, then to under-chef. In Hong Kong, your father learned to cook.”
My father had been a chef in great demand in Chinatown, restaurants always trying to poach him from each other, until finally he opened a place of his own.
“Also,” my mother said more slowly, “in Hong Kong, we learned to live in a city. In a tiny room in a tower, without grass, or rivers. We cooked in the hallway, with five other families. At first, I hated it. Then I became used to it. By the time we came to New York—to an apartment with its own kitchen, a great luxury at the time in Hong Kong—I was at peace with cities.”
“Ma,” I said. “About your father. I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t. Why would I tell my children such a shameful thing?”
“Did he ever say anything? About the money?”
“He said he’d taken it to double it for us, to give to us as a surprise. But things had not happened as he had hoped. The money was gone. He said—” She looked through her pale tea at the flowers painted on the inside of the cup. “He said that he was sorry.”
5
Bill at the wheel, our rented Chevy Malibu rolled down the highway between dry yellow hills. Skeleton trees waved tangles of branches against charcoal clouds skidding across the sky. I gazed out the windows at the bleak midmorning. I’d stuffed my Uniqlo parka into my carry-on before the flight but now that we were here, I found I still needed a sweater over my shirt.
“Where’s the magnolia? The, what’s that stuff at the Botanical Gardens that smells so good? Bougainvillea—where’s the bougainvillea? And the cotton, for Pete’s sake, aren’t we way down south in the land of cotton?”
Bill glanced over at me. “It’s December.”
“They have winter here?”
“They do.”
“And strip malls. They have strip malls.”
We were heading down Highway 61, like in the Bob Dylan song, from the Memphis airport to Clarksdale, Mississippi.
