This Old Man (10 page)

“He doesn't speak a word of English,” Wing said, smirking. “He's a Chinabug, fresh off the boat. I'll bet he doesn't even read. What will he talk to Old Man about?”

Wing's stop was close, and I wanted to get to the end of this curious conversation. We headed toward the exit. “I guess they'll talk about the old country.”

“Hmph, old country! Chen has lived in Hong Kong most of his life. He's never been to Sunkiang. He's probably a wild street kid, some thief or doper.”

We jumped off the cable car and started up the hill toward the hospital, as naturally as ever, until I stopped suddenly and realized I wasn't supposed to go back to the hospital.

“I thought you'd changed your mind about all that,” Wing said mournfully.

“I'm not going back—just yet. But when the poem's done, I think that will be a sign that it's time for me to go back. I'll take it up to his door myself.”

“What about that man?” Wing asked.

I pretended that there was no threat, that my knees didn't give out each time I thought I saw him on the streets of Chinatown. “Oh, him. Forget him.”

Wing nodded, looking so serious. I drilled little dimples in his cheeks and turned back toward the cable car.

“Tomorrow you meet the Chinabug,” he called out to me, then brightened a bit. “Prepare for doom!”

10

The United States had had a solid week to recover from Second Cousin Chen, and it wasn't nearly enough. He came with a giant chip on his shoulder, just begging to be knocked off. His hair was down to his shoulders, and straight bangs framed his face. He wore jeans so tight that if he had put so much as a toothpick in his pocket, the jeans would have split open in half a dozen spots. I guess he knew that, because he kept the toothpick on his lips a lot of the time, squinching up his face to chew it inside his mouth. His eyes were small and jittery, as though they were accustomed to watching the streets. His hair, his face, his clothes were typical Chinatown, but something in his eyes, in the sneaky way he walked on his toes through the crowded streets, shouted the truth: Chinabug, F.O.B. A regular American Chinese would have nothing to do with a guy Fresh Off the Boat. Even if he came by plane, he was F.O.B.

Chen hung around on the street corners, drifting through the afternoons and nights. The old men of Chinatown drifted also, but they sat on benches in Portsmouth Square and played Chinese chess and threw crumbs to the pigeons. The young men from Hong Kong, like Chen, had higher aspirations. They wanted cars, clothes, women, and money. Chen, we discovered, had no trouble meeting his needs: he was a talented pickpocket.

“What will I do?” Wing wailed to me one day on the cable car. “He'll disgrace my whole family. And if Old Man finds out that his great-grandson from the old country is no better than a street thief, he'll turn his face to the wall in shame and we won't get another word out of him.”

“We'll find him a job,” I said. “After all, I got one. If I could, anyone can.”

We sized up Chinatown from a different point of view: the lean side of the job market. What could an eighteen-year-old, unskilled, unmotivated, uncooperative, unscrupulous kid, fresh off the boat, who barely spoke any English, what could he hope to get in a place where there were already too many people and too few jobs? But I wasn't one to let unemployment statistics stand in my way. We took our time looking in windows: which stores had people waiting in line to pay? which restaurants had full tables, with customers tapping their fingers impatiently? which laundries had bundles tied up and piled to the ceiling, to be taken to the back room for washing?

Chen trotted behind us, as if he owned the street, deliberately bumping people when he slid sideways past them in the crowd. Wing turned back to see what Chen was up to. Chen held up a thick leather wallet and flashed us a crooked-toothed smile. We waited for him in a doorway.

“What did you do that for?” Wing hissed, for my benefit, then repeated it in Chinese.

Chen gave us a defiant smile and said something that Wing translated for me: “Because it's so easy to take a wallet from the White Ghosts.” Of course, he didn't discriminate. He also robbed Chinese men and women and filled a pouch inside his sweat shirt with wallets and coin purses and an occasional gold pen.

Wing told me, in frantic, whispered words, that there had been an ugly argument the night before in his apartment. His mother had kept hushing them, for the neighbors' benefit. Still, his father yelled. Chen should have been over the effects of the long trip, Mr. Kwang argued. But no, he slept most of the day and roamed the streets late into the night.

Wing was silent; he never argued with his father. Nor could he think of anything to say to defend Chen. Chen would have to go to school, Mr. Kwang shouted, but how, with no English? Or else he had to take an English class. Or find a job. Otherwise, when his visa ran out, he'd be sent back to Hong Kong.

“Let him go back to China,” Wing had said quietly. He thought of the wallets Chen hid under Old Man's thin mattress, the fine leather lady's handbag that happened to have a small pouch of jewelry in it. What had Chen done to get it away from the woman? Wing's parents were staring at him, his mother's eyes darting from his to his father. They were ignoring his English, so in their language he said: “Let them send him back.”

“Don't say that again,” his father said, and he reached out and slapped Wing for the first time in at least three years. His mother's eyes quickly jumped to her sewing; she dared not look at Wing. When he told me about this, I could see the shame still stinging his face: to be slapped at his age, in front of his mother, and with his brothers and sisters watching from the hall. How humiliating.

So he knew that it was clearly to be a battle between him and his father over Chen. Maybe his father was sorry then, for he tried to soften Wing's shame by saying, “It is Old Man's dying wish to have his first great-grandson here. We must respect his wishes.”

Wing said to me, “If Old Man knew what Chen was really like, it would kill him. If he could see the pleasure Chen gets out of stealing, how he smiles when he tells me that he's smarter than these white devils. No offense, Greta.”

I smiled and patted Wing on the back to show I wasn't offended.

“What will I do?” he asked.

“I told you. We'll find him a job.”

“No one will hire him. And I'd be embarrassed to go begging with him for a job. I won't do it.”

Somehow it became my responsibility, since I was so experienced now at getting jobs. I began forming a plan in my mind. “Okay, don't say anything, let me do the talking.” We stopped walking suddenly, and Chen collided with us.

“Hi, Chen!” I thought I'd start out cheerfully. Chen crossed his arms over his 49'ers T-shirt and stared at me with amusement. “We are going to be friends,” I said, enunciating each word carefully.

“Oh, brother,” I heard Wing mutter under his breath.

“
Friends
.” I patted him on the back, but his back didn't yield to the touch the way Wing's had. I smiled as warmly as I could, considering the fact that I couldn't stand the guy. “I will help you find a job.”

“Job?” Chen repeated.

“Work.” I darted around the busy street, in a pantomime of industry—tidying up, organizing, sweeping, dusting. “I am working. This is a job. You get money for a job.”

“Keep talking. He understands money,” Wing said.

“Money,” I repeated, brushing my thumb across my open fingers. I hoped the gesture for money was the same in Hong Kong. There was no sign of understanding.

“Just take one of his hot wallets. He'll understand that.”

I found a couple of coins in my overalls pocket. “Money,” I said, “money for job.”

“Ah,” he nodded.

“Come.” I led Chen into the first prosperous-looking restaurant I found. Wing waited outside, cupping his eyes against the window glare. Full of optimism, I approached a sour-looking waitress who had spilled soy sauce down the front of her uniform. “This is a friend of mine, Kwang Chen, and he wants to work. Do you have a job for him?”

The waitress looked him over coolly. “No, no job,” she said, dismissing us with a wave.

On the corner was a busy store with modern freezer display cases in the window. All sorts of Chinese packaged foods were stocked there to tempt passersby. Three people worked behind the busy counter. One, who appeared to be the manager, wore a French chef's hat, but spoke Chinese.

“Do you have a job for my friend here?” I asked.

“Chinabug? No job.”

Chen made an obscene gesture toward the chef's hat. I figured that at least
some
gestures were universal.

In the next restaurant the cook sat at a front table in the sun, reading a Chinese newspaper.

“Do you need a dishwasher?” I sweetly asked. “Chen is strong and quick. Look—” I pulled Chen's arm up to display firm biceps. “He's very strong, he can carry heavy pans of dishes, and you wouldn't have to pay him too much.”

“I don't need no dishwasher,” the cook said decisively.

There was a fish market next door. A small brown man, perhaps Filipino and not Chinese, shifted ice shavings in a chipped pan and flicked spots of blood off the ice. They landed on his bloody apron. He reminded me of a heavy operating scene on
M
*
A
*
S
*
H
, except that his whole shop smelled like fish, not flesh. Most of the fish had heads on them still, and I figured that if this man hired Chen, I'd make an offer to buy all the dissectible fish eyes from him for Biology.

“Yes, I could use a man two hours in the aftanoon,” the fish man said. “Two dollah a hour.”

“Great! He'll take the job,” I cried. “Chen, you have a job for money.”

“No job,” Chen said flatly. A long string of Chinese words followed, and the fish man laughed robustly.

“He say it smell too bad in here.” He sniffed the air and shrugged his shoulders. It probably smelled normal to him.

I thanked the man, inspecting the fish eyes on the way out. They were too small for dissecting, anyway. Chen, of course, was already outside, reporting my debacle to Wing. When I got out on the street, he said in much better English than I would have given him credit for, “You girlfriend have job for money!” He turned and ran up the street, glanced around once to laugh at us, and continued on his way to the park, where he'd probably be terrorizing the chess players in a few minutes.

“I'm going home to get Old Man's dinner. You want to come to the hospital with me?”

I hesitated. I did want to go, just to frost Mr. Saxe, but I couldn't do it yet. Maybe if I stayed away a few more days, Hackey would give up and start looking for me somewhere else. Besides, the poem wasn't done. The time wasn't right to go back to Chinese Hospital. “I've got to get home. I think it's my turn to make the salad and set the table tonight. It's a big occasion. Sylvia's Chest Man is coming for dinner. We're having skinned chicken and dry baked potatoes and lettuce-and-tomato salad with lemon juice squeezed on top. Melon balls for dessert. Doesn't it sound wonderful?” I realized Wing wasn't paying any attention, so I tried even harder. “The Chest Man has lost seven pounds already and can almost buckle his belt now. Sylvia's asked her mother to cut down on the weekly care packages. Last Saturday's only had three bags of Hershey's Kisses, a box of Fiddle Faddle, and a two-pound Genoa salami. It was the first time I could lift the box with one hand.”

“What am I going to do about Chen?” Wing said, for about the twentieth time.

“He ought to live in a house like mine. We're all misfits there.”

Wing snapped out of the doldrums. He wrinkled up his forehead and glared at me. “Greta Janssen, you are not a misfit.”

“I'm not? Maybe you don't know enough about me yet.” There were so many things about me he didn't know. They were things I wasn't very proud of. My mother's profession headed the list. Hackey's plans for me came next. My own grim thoughts about Hackey—maybe they should be at the top of the list.

“You are not a misfit, and I won't let you go around telling people you are. That's that. You want to talk misfits? Second Cousin Chen, he's a misfit.”

11

“I've been concerned about you this week,” Mr. Saxe said. “Have you worked through your hostility yet?”

Oh, yes, days ago. Kwang Chen was great for using up hostility. But I wasn't about to let Mr. Saxe off the hook that easily. “You have a mole on your neck, you know.” His hand flew up to cover it. “Have you worked through your self-consciousness about that mole yet?”

He was not amused. He assumed a more casual pose, but kept his index finger just over that brown bump on his neck. “You've been to the hospital, I suppose?”

“I haven't. But it isn't because you told me not to go.”

“Of course not.” He smiled, finally.

“The time just hasn't been right yet. Tomorrow or Thursday everything should come together.” I thought he'd ask what, or why. But no. I wished he were more predictable, like he'd been in February, when we first started out together.

“Perhaps you should tell me about Chen.”

I was stunned. I couldn't remember ever mentioning Chen. “How do you know about him?”

“It's my business to know.”

“You got spies on the streets?”

“And other sources. What's the story on this young man?”

“Well, let's see. He's Wing's second cousin, fresh off the boat from Hong Kong.”

“I smell trouble.”

“You've got a one-track nose.”

“Do you spend a lot of time with him?” By now he'd forgotten about the mole, but I couldn't take my eyes off it.

“Oh, my, yes, scads of time. We meet for lunch at the Blue Fox at least four or five times a week.” The Blue Fox was only the most expensive, the most exclusive restaurant in town, but somebody stupidly put it right across the street from the city morgue. You'd think that would kill a patron's appetite. Not Sylvia's. She had gone there with her parents once and told us that each table got two waiters, a busboy, a wine captain, the maitre d', and, on request, a visit from the high muck-a-muck chef himself. She told me she had ordered hearts of palm salad with her
medaillons de boeuf
. I couldn't imagine eating the inside of a palm tree for free, much less for $28.95. I asked Mr. Saxe, “Have you ever been to the Blue Fox?”