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“Celebration, my ass. The whole thing is just a gimmick to pay off the Chinese mafia.”

“Yeah?” said Henry. “How?”

She told him those red envelopes people passed to the lion dancers, those heads of lettuce coming down on strings, were all
stuffed with hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth of payoffs to the tongs.

“Darling,” she asked my father, “what did you say it’s called?”

“Lixi.”
Although Dad’s color had returned, this was the first he’d spoken in the hour we’d been at the hospital. “Lucky money.”

“Extortion’s what it is. Every restaurant, every store has to pony up. And they all do, too, good little sheep. So typically
Chinese.”

“If they don’t?” asked Henry.

That stopped Mum momentarily, and she looked to my father for backup.

He took off his glasses and carefully wiped the lenses, then began fiddling with one of the hinges. Back and forth went the
stem as he twisted the tiny screw deeper into the barrel.

“Look what happened to Maibelle!” said my mother at last.

Anna sighed and opened her mouth to ask if we were
ever
going home.

“What’s Maibelle got to do with the tongs?” asked Henry.

Deeper and deeper went the screw in my fathers glasses.

Joe!” barked my mother. “Will you stop that!”

My father looked up, and for just an instant I saw him as a little boy caught in an act of mischief. His face became impassive.
He put his glasses back on and folded his hands in his lap. When at last he spoke, he spoke to me.

“There was a story my amah used to tell at New Year’s when I was about your age.”

We all waited.

“About a man who was caught by spirits. The man had to entertain them, so he danced and sang… juggled balls. Put on costumes
and acted out stories.”

Henry and Anna fidgeted, annoyed by Dad’s lack of timing.

“But he wasn’t clever enough to outsmart the spirits, and when he ran out of ways to amuse them, they got angry. They gave
him an axe and sent him to the moon.”

He stopped to chew on a hangnail and watch a nurse pass by. My mother closed her handbag with a snap.

“The spirits said the man had to cut down the trees. Cinnamon trees, hundreds of them all over the moon. He hacked away. The
sound of his axe cutting into the wood was like gunshot.”

Mum got up and walked to the nurse’s station.

“When the blade hit, sparks flew. But no matter how deep he cut, each time he pulled the axe away, the wood closed right back
up.”

“So what happened to him?” asked Henry.

My father leaned back, thrust his legs out in front of him.

“I used to ask that question. Every New Year, the firecrackers would remind me… You know, she was with us for ten years and
I can’t remember her name. Something Mei-lin, I think.”

“But what about the man in the sfory?”

“Oh, he’s still there. Yueh Lao-yeh. The Old Man in the Moon.”

“Right,” said Anna.

“When Mei-lin told me that, I didn’t believe her, either. I always thought somehow the man would be set free…” Dad looked
up at my mother, returning with the young Chinese doctor who had treated me. “I couldn’t understand that he had been condemned.”

My mother’s eyes widened. Her mouth began to wobble, but before she could speak, the doctor leaned across to inspect the patch
on my ear. He gave me a quick hearing test, checked my balance, told us we could leave. Then, after looking around and establishing
that at least one of us belonged in the neighborhood, he exclaimed,
” Gonghe jacai!”

Happy New Year. Or, literally, Congratulations, Get Rich.

The rest of the years we lived in Chinatown we had to watch the parade from our balcony. Mums orders, though she usually managed
to have something to do uptown on those nights. Henry routinely disobeyed the edict and went out with Tommy Wah. Anna wasn’t
interested to begin with, so New Year came to be an occasion I shared alone with my father.

We would sit, freezing, in the dark and spy through the neighbors’ windows. In each apartment the doors were covered with
scarlet paper for good luck. Visitors tromped in and out with gifts of oranges, tangerines, flowers. And the food! My father
could recite every dish: ants climbing trees, Buddha’s delight, lion’s head, jade beef, drunken chicken, and three treasures.
People dropped morsels in each other’s mouths like birds feeding their young. Then after feasting, their faces turned pink-orange
by the round red paper lanterns strung from their balconies, they’d hurl firecrackers in groups of three to dispel the evil
spirits.

For a long while after my father told me this was the firecrackers’ mission I wondered if that meant I had spirits in me—perhaps
the same spirits that had killed that chicken. But eventually the image of the dead bird faded and I could no longer recall
the stink of burning hair.

Then what I remembered most about the night of the Chinatown chicken
was
the anguish on my father’s face as he clutched me among all those strangers.

L
ocated on Pell Street, around the corner from the pinball arcade, the Ming Yu Tea Parlor was a local landmark well before
I was born. Its interior was a deep sea green, the ceiling painted tin, and the tiny octagonal floor tiles an unnatural but
permanent gray. A New Year’s dragon writhed the length of one wall, glowering at the diners who, one Sunday a month throughout
my early childhood, included my family.

My father used to insist that the Ming Yu served the most authentic dim sum outside of Canton. “See, no tourists,” he would
say, as if this were qualitative proof. “Everybody’s Chinese.” With his hooded eyes and flat black hair he seemed to fit right
in, and if Mum were Chinese, then our family, too, would have validated the Ming Yu’s authenticity. As it was, I often felt
as though we were crashing my father’s party.

The only time Dad ever spoke Chinese was at the Ming Yu.
“Ni hao ma!”
he would greet the waitresses who circulated trays of dumplings around the room, and soon the table would be filled with
plates of fragile shrimp balls, fried tofu, hacked duck, and meaty potstickers. Dad’s grinning enthusiasm made my mother roll
her eyes. “Joe, for God’s sake, it’s only food!” But for my father it seemed to be more. He
devoured as aggressively as he ordered the dishes, and his entreaties to us to “Eat, eat!” were calls for loyalty that my
mother and Anna stubbornly resisted. Henry and I tried to pick up the slack, but still, when at last we could hold no more,
Dad’s brow would tighten. He’d shake his head as if he’d been betrayed. Then he would forge on alone and polish every plate.

We stopped having dim sum when we moved uptown—when we went into exile, as Henry put it at the time—but when I checked the
phone book this morning, I discovered the Ming Yu is still there.

This intelligence goaded me. I have to go back to Chinatown; I’ve known this (whether or not I’d admit it to myself) ever
since Tommy’s letter. There are answers there, if I can face them. If I can get past the nightmare’s silken web, plant my
feet on the pavement, and prove to myself that I will not fall or spin or crash. That no one will care if I come or go.

The terror in a nightmare is that it never ends. If I can bring it to a close through real life, I should be able to subvert
my terror. Then I might stop focusing on what’s holding me back and finally see what I’m aiming for.

The Ming Yu is a safe point of entry. And my father is free for lunch.

The first thing I notice as we enter is the wall behind the cash register, covered with paper certificates. I know what they
mean. They are visible proof of the Ming Yu’s many years of generous contributions to the CCBA, An Leung Association, and
other tongs, fongs, and fraternities. The restaurant has paid its lucky money and thus is well protected. Nothing bad can
happen here.

I can and should relax, I tell myself. My father is with me. I am wide-awake. We will sit and eat and talk as if we are anywhere.
Anywhere but Chinatown.

A waitress shows us to a table. My heart gradually stops racing. I wipe my palms on my pant legs and make myself look around.

It’s hardly changed. The floor and walls are still dingy, the dragon more tarnished than ever. Smells of garlic and peanut
oil seem to coat every surface. The clientele remains Chinese and my father still fits in, though I am struck—and finally
brought to attention—by the contrast between his presence today and my memory of him in this place.

I see him with a kind of double vision. His hair, once black, now milky gray. The sedate moonpuffs beneath his eyes, turned
as full as stones. The thick black-rimmed reading glasses, on a stay-put strap of his own invention, were never there before.
And the fingers, while still perpetually fiddling, knitting, picking at each other, have thickened at the joints. The same
flat wedding band he’s always worn has become coarse with scratches.

The most telling change today, though, is the absence of any predatory glint as he surveys the first tray of dim sum. “I can’t
eat so much anymore.” To the waitress:
“Guo-tie, bao-zi, shao-mai. Gou. Xte xie”

But the next waitress hasn’t heard that this small order is enough. She stops to display her tray and, for old times’ sake,
I point to a plate of shrimp balls and another of potstickers.

My father ruefully watches the center of the table fill with dishes. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“It’s not a crime to leave food, Dad. Especially when it’s this cheap.”

He smiles. That cheers us both. He helps himself to a steamed bao. I wonder if he shares my disorientation at being back here,
just the two of us, if he has any notion why I asked him. He closes his eyes and gobbles the bun, smacking his lips at the
sweet pork filling.

I pick up my chopsticks and roll them between my fingers. All those dim sum lunches and I’ve never learned the proper way
to use these things. My father tried to teach us when we were young, but only Henry got the knack. The rest of us learned
to make do by balancing and skewering, but that’s like hunt-and-peck versus touch typing. One more symptom that set us apart.

My father’s fingers, though blunted from years of nail biting, become long and graceful, quick as talons as he swoops in on
a fragile rice dumpling.

“Dad?”

“Mm?”

“Remember the night the firecracker landed on my shoulder?”

He studies the array of choices before him.

“You remember the story you told at the emergency room? About the man who chopped trees on the moon?”

“I don’t remember any stories. That was an awful night.”

“You talked about being condemned. What did you mean?”

“Probably having trouble with a new idea.” He turns his head, does something with his mouth. A clicking noise. I realize he’s
adjusting his dentures. I didn’t know he had dentures, and it gives me a mild shock, on top of the other changes.

But when he looks back, his eyes are piercing. “You still want to know about China?”

“I—” The dumpling at the end of my sticks falls back into its plate, splashing oil across the tablecloth. “Sure, I guess so.”

He speaks as if we’re arguing. “The war was a helluva mess, I tell you.”

And with that he takes charge, his volume climbing, talking at me, around me. “I wanted to go back, you know, when the Japanese
invaded. So I persuaded a history professor of mine at Columbia to lend me his Rollei, teach me to use it. He introduced me
to a guy at the U.S. Information Agency who thought it could be useful to have someone with a foot on both sides. They didn’t
want to own me, so I went out freelance at first.
Life
and the news services. You know all that.”

I feel as if he’s pushed into high gear and my mind refuses to shift along. “I know about
Life’.’

“There was a ready market, Maibelle. I needed the money. The work got me back to China, and I had a steady hand. You have
a steady hand in a battle zone, you make good pictures. It takes nerve and ignorance, not talent.”