Outrun the Moon (2 page)

THE THREE O'CLOCK FUNERAL PEDDLER'S voice pierces the thin windows of our two-room flat. “Joss paper! Red packets! Lucky candy!” In Chinatown, someone is always hawking something.

I thank both the Christian God and my ancestors for the dozenth time today that my family was spared the need for such funeral trinkets.

Tom will keep my misadventure a secret. He always does, like the time I climbed up the flagpole and got stuck, or the time I made him go into the ocean with me and we almost drowned. He might have his opinions, but he's loyal to a fault.

My brother, Jack, breathes noisily beside me as he practices hemming a towel. Despite Ma's protests, Ba said it was time for him to learn the family business, and minor alterations were a part of the laundry trade. Jack ties a knot, then holds up his battlefield of stitches.

“Nice, but you sewed your towel to your pants.”

He slaps his head. “Not again!”

I close the book on my lap—
The Book for Business-Minded Women
—and nudge Jack off the old chest where he is sitting so I can put my book back where all our treasures are held. Last
Christmas, after I lost my job sweeping graves, Mr. Mortimer the mortician gave me the book as a present. I was always borrowing it from the library at Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Jack quiets when I remove another treasure from the chest—our map of San Francisco, the latest 1906 edition. I spread it onto the concrete floor. “We're exploring early this month.”

He digs around in the chest. The tea tin rattles as he pulls out our Indian head penny. Every month, the pirates Mercy the Fearsome and her first mate Black Jack toss the penny onto the map for a new place to explore.

Jack shines the penny on his shirt.

“It's
my
turn to throw,” I tell him, holding out my hand. Normally, I wouldn't insist, but with careful aim, I lob it lightly so it lands on the city's northern edge. “Well, look at that!”

“Wh-wh-what, Mercy?” He stammers when he's excited or nervous.

I point, and Jack leans over. “Looks like we're visiting Chocolatier Du Lac.”

In her
Book for Business-Minded Women
, Mrs. Lowry attributes the success of her cattle ranch—the largest in Texas—not just to hard work but to her education at Radcliffe College. Only one school in this town can give me a similar education, and my way in lies through the chocolate shop.

Jack's eyes grow hungry. Even with my poor French accent, he knows chocolate when he hears it, ever since I bought him a Li'l Betties chocolate drop last month.

“Let's go!” Jack shoots to the door without bothering to fold
the map or snip the towel from his pants. I leave a note for Ma, who's out visiting clients.

Moments later, Jack's dragging me through the narrow alleyways of Chinatown, wanting to go faster than his lungs will let him. We pass under three-cornered yellow flags denoting restaurants and pick our way around the squashed blossoms of a narcissus stand. Sky lanterns sway from building eaves, the same lanterns that inspired Tom's Floating Island.

Though Tom's ba, who I call Ah-Suk for
uncle
, expected him to be an herbalist, Tom has always been fascinated by flying things—moths, paper gliders. It had been his dream to join the Army Balloon Corps, until he learned the Corps disbanded. When the Wright brothers launched a new bird into the sky, Tom wrote to Orville Wright, asking if he needed an apprentice, but Mr. Wright never wrote back.

Jack looks back at me. “
Faai-di!
”
Hurry up!

“English only, Jack.” Today we shall be as American as President Theodore Roosevelt himself. Folks are more apt to do business with people who do not seem foreign. “And I
am
hurrying. It's these boots that are taking their time.”

Perhaps borrowing Ma's too-big boots wasn't my brightest idea, but Mrs. Lowry stresses the importance of looking tall when negotiating. Taller people inspire confidence, and the boots put me in the neighborhood of five foot five. Blisters are already forming on my soles, and I long to hop onto the cable car that clangs past us down the Slot. But trolleys cost a nickel per rider, and I have only one to spare.

“The longer the wait, the sweeter the taste,” I tell Jack.

He knots his mouth into a tight rosebud, and his sticky hand stops yanking so hard. The sight of his bruised knuckles where his first grade teacher tried to hit the stammer out of him squeezes my heart. Jack's lungs and speech development were never the same after the city forcibly inoculated us against the Black Death a few years ago.

It won't always be this way, not if I can help it. One day, we shall have a map of the world and a chest full of pennies to throw at it.

The baker's wife stands in the doorway of her Number Nine Bakery, using a fan to sweep the golden smells into the street. The number nine sounds like the word for
everlasting
in Chinese, and it is hoped that a business with that number will have permanence.

A frown burrows deep into her face as we pass. “Bossy cheeks,” she mutters after me. She has always disapproved of my free-spirited ways, so different than her daughter, Ling-Ling. The girl sits as still as a vase inside the shop, a basket of buns on her lap.

I force myself not to react, herding Jack toward Montgomery Street, the main route through North Beach. Cheeks are a measure of one's authority, and my high cheekbones indicate an assertive, ambitious nature. They were a gift from my mother, and I am proud of them, even though men shy away from women with that attribute.

Is that why Tom has been acting so funny? We'd been as close as two walnut halves growing up, and it only seemed natural that we would end up together. At least to me.

If I were more demure, perhaps Tom would be less ambivalent about our fortuitous match. A respected herbalist needs a proper wife, someone who doesn't parade down uneven streets. Someone who doesn't bribe her way into elite schools.

I nearly collide with a water trough, scaring away thoughts of Tom.

Jack pumps his free arm as if to propel us there faster, risking a rip in the too-tight sleeves of his jacket. The towel flaps against his thigh with every step. I pull him slower again. Ah-Suk tonified Jack's internal energy with his five-flavor tea, but we must avoid overexertion.

“You think they're as good as Li'l Betties?” he asks.

“You can get Li'l Betties on any street corner. These chocolates are special.”

The mingled scent of garlic and ocean brine signals that North Beach lies ahead. Ba says when he was a kid, he could hawk coffin nails—what he called cigarettes—to twenty different people in the Latin Quarter and not hear the same language twice. Now the Russkies and Paddies have left for sunny Potrero Hill, the Germans have moved to Noe Valley, and
les Froggies
went wherever they pleased. Today, the area's mostly Italian, with pockets of Mexicans and South Americans sewn in, each conveniently provided with their own Catholic church, just like the Chinese.

The avenue grows dense with Italians hurrying in and out of shops. Some avert their gaze as we pass, while others make no effort to conceal their distaste for our being there.

Jack squeezes my hand. “The paving stones are newer here. Maybe they're afraid we'll track dirt through, and that's why they're
ngok
.” He uses the Chinese word for “hot-tempered.”

“We have the same dirt under our shoes as they do.” We pass through this neighborhood every once in a while to fly kites on the shoreline, and the inhabitants are never happy to see us.

“Are we mad when they use our streets?” he asks.

“Sometimes.” He pans his thin face at me, waiting for an explanation. But how do I explain that to white ghosts, we are animals, which is why they've caged us in twelve rickety blocks. We are something to be ogled, lower even than black ghosts. I once read in a brochure that whites could purchase a “heathen experience” in our “labyrinthine passages,” including a trip to an idol-filled joss house, a peek into a real opium den (including a suck on a savage's pipe for the more adventurous), and a nibble on pig's feet (as if we ate those every day).

I sigh. “We're more mad that
they're
mad when we use their streets.”

People openly stare at us, even in our western clothes. Ba says that since we were born in Oakland, we are American, and he doesn't want Jack to wear the queue in his hair since it is unpatriotic. Whites consider the tradition barbaric, but I don't see how it's any worse than stuffing horsehair pads into one's hair to achieve the Edwardian poof.

I realize I'm now pulling Jack and force myself to slow our pace again.

Ahead, a woman with an enormous hat attends to her produce stand. Checking for traffic, I guide Jack across the street
to avoid any accusation of stealing. We reach the other side, where a trio of Italian men hunch on crates beneath the red awning of Luciana's, the swankiest restaurant on this street. A young man with teeth like yellow corn flicks the ash off his cigarette and leers.

I consider crossing back to the opposite side—Mercy the Fearsome is not stupid—but if I let the Italian cow me, I show him and anyone watching that we can be pushed around like the dogs they think us to be.

I attempt to sail by like I have not a care in the world.

But as we pass, the man unfolds himself and peanut shells waterfall off his dungarees. He towers over me by a head. “Pigtail Alley's that way.” He stabs a tobacco-stained finger toward Chinatown.

“Excuse us. You're blocking the footpath,” I say evenly.

With a laugh that smells like wine, he glances at the two other men peeling carrots behind him. “Whadyaknow, she speaks English.”

Wouldn't I like to show
him
how much English I speak.

Jack tugs at my hand, and I squeeze his palm reassuringly. When life puts a stone in your path, it is best to walk around it.

I pull Jack into the street. We pass the hooligan, but as we regain the curb, I feel my straw bonnet being lifted off my head. The man places it on his greasy locks, presses his hands together, and bows. “No walkee on street without paying ching-chong toll.”

My cheeks flame, and I can feel the button about to pop off my collar. I attempt to snatch back my hat, but he holds it out
of reach. “Pay the toll—a dollar for you and the bambino—and maybe I'll give you your hat back.”

“I will not, even if I did have a dirty dollar to throw at swine like you.”

“Oh ho, she's got some pepper in her sauce, eh,
cugino
?” He glances again at his friends, who are now grinning. Through the window, a young woman with mahogany curls moves about the restaurant placing snowball-shaped votives onto the tables.

“G-g-give,” says Jack. His fists clench, and his chest begins to move as quick as a bird's. “G-g-give it—”

“It's okay, Jack,” I tell him in Cantonese.

The man laughs. “Whatsa matter? Your mouth don't work, bambino? Or maybe he's some kind of
idiota
.” He taps his head.

It is all I can do to keep from clouting him in the mouth. His gaze washes over my figure like dirty bathwater, coming to rest on the pocket where I have the
chuen pooi
bulb stashed in a handkerchief. A corner of the white fabric peeks out in stark contrast to the black of my funeral dress.

I jerk away, but he snatches the bundle from my pocket. “I found my toll.” The man discards my hat onto a newspaper full of carrot peelings. Jack fetches it, his face pale.

The man unties the handkerchief, but doesn't find the coins he's looking for. He holds the shriveled bulb to his nose, then quickly pulls it away.
Chuen pooi
smells like ripe feet. “
Che cavolo!
What is it?”

One of his friends peers at the herb, then shrugs. “Looks like
cogliones
.”

The first man snorts loudly, but then his derision gives way to uncertainty.
Aha.

“It is the energy pouch of a farmer who tried to pass off a guinea hen as a chicken.” The words are out of my mouth before I know what I'm saying. “Chinese people have many ways to make those who cross us pay.” I draw myself up as tall as I can and summon my haughtiest demeanor. “Lucky for him, he'd already had five sons and didn't need it anymore.”

The man blanches from under a grove of black whiskers. At that moment, the mahogany-haired waitress pokes her head out the door. She glares at the men through her almond “dragon” eyes, a shape that indicates determination. “How long does a smoke take?”

I seize the moment and pluck my belongings from his grasp. Clamping my hat back onto my head, I sweep Jack away, hoping they don't follow.

By the time we arrive at Chocolatier Du Lac, I've developed a crick in my neck from looking backward and am ready to throw my boots into the nearest trash receptacle. But to give up now would be a waste of several good blisters, so I resolve to ignore the pain a little while longer.