The Madonnas of Echo Park (16 page)

“You love a
chinita
?” she asked. “What, again? They never like you.”

“No, this one's different. She does like me. She doesn't like the fact I'm Mexican.”

“How's that different from the others?”

Juan kept his cool. “Tran has a problem with me because I'm Mexican. Those other girls didn't like me because I was
me
.”

“A Mexican
is
who you are! At least this girl's honest about it.
Ay,
why did I take you to so many Chinese restaurants growing up? That's why you fall in love with Chinese girls. They're all you saw!”

“Mom, don't be silly,” he said. “Manny, can you explain?” he asked me.

“Leave me out of this, boy,” I said from the couch.

“Who's silly?” she asked. “You're the one chasing someone who thinks you aren't good enough the way you are. What's the matter with a beautiful Mexican girl? You can have beautiful Mexican babies.”

“Mom, I'm eighteen.”

“I was eighteen when I had you. What Oriental girl's gonna want a Mexican baby? I've told you over and over, they want
gabachos
. Remember that Vietnamese woman at the hair salon who used to do my hair? Six months here in the country and then,
bam!
, driving a Mercedes and a husband with blond hair. Those
gringos
think those little
chinitas
are
so cute
. You think you're white? Don't you want a real woman instead of a little girl with no tits and no ass? Child molesters like Oriental girls. What about that nice Mexican girl at the bank?”

“The chunky one with the big poodle hair?” Juan asked.

“Don't be rude,” Ofelia said. “She's a beautiful girl. What, are you afraid of tits and ass? You know how many boys lapped at these shores?” she said, cupping her breasts.

“Mom, could you please not fondle yourself in front of me?”

“Ay,
so uptight!” she said. “These were good enough for you when you were a baby! And good enough for your father until he wanted a fresh pair to grow out of the television.”

“Leave me out of this, woman,” I shouted from the couch.

“That girl Duchess has a nice pair,” she continued. “I'll take you both out for lunch so you can get a good look.”

“Mom, I don't like Mexican girls,” Juan sighed. “There's nothing you can do to change that.”

“Her Chino parents will find a way,” Ofelia said. “If her father's wallet goes missing, you'll be the one who took it. If their restaurant burns down, you lit the match. They will find a way to hate you.”

The fighting got so bad I went to Tran's father's restaurant, Saigon Falls, across the street from a derelict gas station and next to Little Joy Jr.'s, a
jota
bar, to talk things over. Ofelia thought I was going down there to “take care” of him, but Tran was a good girl and her being Vietnamese didn't bother me one bit. I think I liked my son sticking it to Ms.
La Raza
by dating an Oriental. When I got there, Tran was packing Chinese food containers into paper and plastic double bags, dabbing her fingertips on lemon halves to keep them moist. Her mother came up behind her and hugged her around the waist, standing on her tiptoes to rest her face in Tran's shoulder-length hair.

“Mom, why are you acting so weird?” Tran said. Her father—
a man named Phoc, who along with the restaurant owned a pallet-making factory in the City of Industry—invited me over to sit at a table he was setting. He sang along with an Oriental song on the stereo while he arranged white plates as thick as windowpanes, fat chipped teacups, and chopsticks sealed in Ziploc pouches.

“You like this song?” he asked, humming a seesaw melody that dangled in midair.

“It's nice,” I said. “Sounds kind of Spanish.”

“I sang this in Hainan, an island off the Chinese coast, growing up. It's about home, never seeing your home again.”

“It doesn't sound sad to me,” I said.

“I changed the melody,” he said. “I can get used to not seeing home because I can have my home here, in America. My friends, my family, my employees, we the same, like in Hainan.”

“You'd never have seen me in Hainan,” I said.

“You right, you right, okay?” Phoc laughed. “But you have your own America, too. Inside, in here, it's Hainan. But out there,
your
home. Those people, Mexicans, like
your
home, Mexico. Right outside the door.”

“My home's up the block on Portia Street,” I said. “I've never been to Mexico.”

“Who needs to, okay? Outside, Mexican on corners, Mexican at bus stop, Mexican at gas station, Mexican everywhere looking for job together. Why together? See, Mexican think of themselves. Too many on one corner means lower price for everyone. Chinese are not that way. They spread out so prices stay high and everyone can profit. We help each other because we want Chinese to succeed. Mexican want himself to succeed only.”

“Phoc,” I said, “my son works, so
he
can succeed. If he succeeds, that's good for him
and
your daughter. If what you say is true, how do you explain him?”

Phoc shook his head, clucking his tongue. “Maybe he Chinese!” He laughed. Behind a bamboo screen, Tran was filling teapots. “Her back's turn, but she strong enough to face her father, tell him how she feel. In here, she respect me. But out there, she can live how she want. She has to live with what people say, not me. Oh-kay?”

“It's their lives,” I said. “Let 'em live them.”

“Oh-kay,” he said. “One day, maybe you go to the real Hainan.
You act too much like Chinese, okay?” He finished setting the tables and walked over to Tran, whispering something in her ear. Then he walked over to his wife and pointed at me. She shook her head as he talked, squealing in protest until he cut the air with his hands, silencing her. I laughed, imagining how much cutting I'd need to do to silence Ofelia. I'd probably need Paul Bunyan's ax.

Tran and Juan dated through college (Ofelia told him to major in Chicano studies; he chose European politics: “What's to study? Either way, the white man wins!”). It was difficult for both of them; the looks and leers they got on the street, in both Echo Park and Chinatown;
cholas
putting gum in Tran's hair in the movie theater; Orientals staring them down when they held hands on the street; Ofelia refusing to invite Tran for Thanksgiving dinner. Phoc invited me and Juan to Saigon Falls as a peace offering during the holidays.

I heard Juan's laughter in the kitchen. I crept there through a dining room decorated with Christmas lights, fish tanks, red Chinese New Year decorations, spiral foil mobiles, and out-of-date calendars with soft-focus photographs of Oriental women staring at koi ponds and flower beds. In between stacks of dented double-burner woks was an oak butcher's block the length of a dining room table. There, Tran had set out a large mixing bowl with a bowling-ball lump of moistened flour, a container with ground up crabmeat, scallions, onions, and paprika, and a small finger bowl of lemon water. Juan was standing next to her, at attention.

Rolling up her long white sleeves, Tran massaged a thin layer of flour onto her arms. The smell from her skin, bath soap and candied perfume, mixed in with the scent of the fresh dough she kneaded in the mixing bowl, overpowering the fatty smell of congealed grease.

“Here, let me show you how to make these,” she was saying to Juan.

She yanked out a taffy-drop hunk of flour and, slapping it on the block, rolled it into a thin tent-flap-shaped pancake. Then came a morsel of crabmeat, followed by an index finger moistened in the
lemon water, kissing the edges of the pancake to create a momentary seal. A quick swoop of her hand, and the pancake was folded over in half. Bunching her fingers together, she kneaded small, ridged impressions onto the dough's edges, plopping fat, raindrop dumplings onto the counter. He mimicked her motions, but his dumplings popped open, their deformed folds and ridges jutting out like baby fingers in clay.

“You're packing them too big!” Tran exclaimed with a laugh. “Give me your hands.”

Her palms guided the backs of his hands across each ingredient, her fingertips dripping lemon water down his arms as their hands wrapped each dumpling together. Her breasts brushed his arm through her blouse, and the plastic buckles of her white bra straps, peeking through the top of her blouse, slid back and forth across her shoulder. The curve of her thighs leaned against the cutting block. Her black eye shadow brought out the delicate whalebone whites of her cheeks. And then, her face crinkled like wrapping paper when she stood on tiptoe to kiss him, with a look of either utter amazement at her recklessness or astonishment at the sincerity of her affection, right before she saw me looking at them and shoved him away.

They made plans to elope, but for a reason that escapes me, the plans fell through and what at the time was seen as a temporary setback became permanent separation, and the life I thought they'd be living now, the life I thought I'd see them have as a grandfather, haunted me—the hundreds of dinners they never cooked together, the photos I'd see from their family vacation trips to faraway places like Disney World or New York City left untaken, the children they never had tugging at my sleeves in a toy store asking me for a Barbie Dream House or a radio-controlled car, and me, hefting them up on my shoulders, planting a kiss on my daughter-in-law's cheek, then waking up from my dream and realizing nobody was there.

In time, the neighborhood changed, like Ofelia said it would. Phoc sold his restaurant to a gay white man named Brad, who turned
it into Membo's Coffee Shop. I asked Brad if he had any way to reach Tran. He thought he remembered her visiting the restaurant once with her Chinese husband and newborn baby. He couldn't be sure, though; it may have been Tran's sister.

That's where I was, at Membo's, when the hospital called on the cell phone Ofelia gave me “for emergencies” and told me Ofelia had collapsed in a flower store picking up a bouquet of yellow roses for a baby shower. She'd had a stroke and was dead before I reached the hospital.

Each of us believes, when we are young, we know a way to cheat death. Then as we age, we tilt toward the end on a seesaw that never teeters back up. When that end arrives, we are surprised, gasping with shock, at last knowing the unknowable but not knowing how to tell anyone we know it.

Membo's became a new routine of sorts, to get me out of the house. One time, I held the front door of the coffee shop open for a two-year-old girl on unsteady legs, tethered to her parents, a mixed black and Oriental couple, part of the new wave of residents around here. A pair of elderly Oriental women in line with their daughters pushed the mother and father aside and cooed over the child, speaking to her in a mix of broken English and Chinese.

The girl, her skin a blend of her parents' but also a shade entirely her own, saw me and covered her smile with her hands. She could have been my grandchild, I thought, loved by those who didn't know how to love those who made her.

Juan finished his espresso. “I need to give you something,” he said. In his back pants pocket was a thick, folded white sheet of butcher paper. A caricature of a beautiful woman in an elegant red dress was on one side. On its back was writing, in the form of a letter, and a signature.

“This is my ‘last letter,'” Juan said. “This way I don't have to write each letter like it's my last.”

“What's this it's written on?” I asked.

“This was that drawing I told you about. The one that . . . from that girl at the bank, Duchess, the one I dated for a while.”

“Yeah, I remember her. Why are you giving this to me now?”

“I'm going to be with Angie at her place before I go. I didn't want her to see me give it to you. It's for her.”

I unfolded the paper. “It's a drawing Duchess did of Angie,” he said. “She gave it to me when I started dating Angie. I don't think Angie's ever seen it. Duchess said she'd want it.” I tried to flip it over without Juan seeing me do it but I was never much of a confidence man and he caught me.

“You can read the letter if you want,” Juan added.

“Hands aren't as quick as they used to be. You don't want someone else to hold on to this for you?”

“Who else could I ask?”

“I don't know,” I said, unsure how to say I was petrified of fucking up this one simple task by losing the letter, ripping it up in anger, or worse, getting drunk enough one night and sending it to Angie in a fit of rage. That was a real possibility.

“It's for your woman,” I said. “Someone else should hold on to it.”

“You'll do fine,” Juan said.

“I don't have a safe place to keep this in,” I said.

“Since when were you the kind of guy who has ‘safe places'?” Juan teased.

I wanted to say something more here, a promise that I would be faithful in honoring what could be my son's last request. Ofelia would have told me to go further. Say something to make him stay, she'd've said. Enough brown brothers have died for this country.
Por la raza, todo,
she'd've said. The best I'd done up to this point was concoct a series of plans and schemes to keep my son from leaving—a
fake heart attack, threats of physical violence, and an appraisal of how much my house was worth, with a document giving three-fourths of the money to him and Angie as a no-strings-attached gift for their wedding. Yet each day when he came home from another round of preparations before basic training, I sat glued to my couch, watching a muted television and sharing wordless TV tray dinners before Juan sprinted out to Angie's.

This was a moment I might not have again with my son. It was a moment that required fearlessness, courage, the kind my father said he brought to take down those 18th Street punks. Why aren't you more like your old man, they'd say, even if he was a faggot who died of AIDS. He wasn't a
jota
(so he said), but they didn't know he was a baby killer. My old man told me tons of stories, but only one rang true. It came out one night while we were playing bones. I was on a hot streak and gloating.