Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2 page)

The more Henry thought about the shabby old knickknacks, the forgotten treasures, the more he wondered if his own broken heart might be found in there, hidden among the unclaimed possessions of another time. Boarded up in the basement of a condemned hotel. Lost, but never forgotten.

Marty Lee

(1986)

Henry left the crowd at the Panama Hotel behind and walked to his home up on Beacon Hill. It was not so far back as to have a scenic overlook of Rainier Avenue, but in the more sensible neighborhoods just up the street from Chinatown. A modest three-bedroom home with a basement--still unfinished after all these years. He'd meant to finish it when his son, Marty, went away to college, but Ethel's condition had worsened and what money they'd saved for a rainy day was spent in a downpour of medical bills, a torrent that lasted nearly a decade. Medicaid kicked in near the end, just in time, and would even have covered a nursing home, but Henry stuck to his vow: to care for his wife in sickness and in health. Besides, who'd want to spend their last days in some state-owned facility that looked like a prison where everyone lived on death row?

Before Henry could answer his own question, Marty knocked twice on the front door and walked right in, greeting him with a casual "How you doing, Pops," and immediately headed for the kitchen. "I'll be right out, don't get up, I just gotta get a drink-

-I hoofed it all the way from Capitol Hill--exercise you know, you should think about a little workout yourself, I think you've put on some weight since Mom died."

Henry looked at his waistline and mashed the mute button on the TV He'd been watching the news for word on today's discovery at the Panama Hotel, but heard nothing.

Must have been a busy news day. In his lap was a stack of old photo albums and a few school annuals, stained and mildew-smelling from the damp Seattle air that cooled the concrete slab of Henry's perpetually unfinished basement.

He and Marty hadn't talked much since the funeral. Marty stayed busy as a chemistry major at Seattle University, which was good, it seemed to keep him out of trouble. But college also seemed to keep him out of Henry's life, which had been acceptable while Ethel was alive, but now it made the hole in Henry's life that much larger--like standing on one side of a canyon, yelling, and always waiting for the echo that never came. When Marty did come by, it seemed like the visits were only to do his laundry, wax his car, or hit his father up for money--which Henry always gave, without ever showing annoyance.

Helping Marty pay for college had been a second battlefront for Henry, if caring for Ethel had been the first. Despite a small grant, Marty still needed student loans to pay for his education, but Henry had opted for an early retirement package from his job at Boeing so he could care for Ethel full-time--on paper, he had a lot of money to his name.

He looked downright
affluent.
To the lenders, Marty was from a family with a decent bank account, but the lenders weren't paying the medical bills. By the time his mother passed, there had been just enough to cover a decent burial, an expense Marty felt was unnecessary.

Henry also didn't bother to tell Marty about the second mortgage-- the one he'd taken out to get him through college when the student loans ran dry. Why make him worry? Why put that pressure on him? School is hard enough as is. Like any good father, he wanted the best for his son, even if they didn't talk all that much.

Henry kept staring at the photo albums, faded reminders of his own school days, looking for someone he'd never find. I try not to live in the past, he thought, but who knows, sometimes the past lives in me. He took his eyes off the photos to watch Marty amble in with a tall glass of iced green tea. He sat on the couch for a moment, then moved to his mother's cracked faux-leather recliner directly across from Henry, who felt better seeing someone ... anyone, in Ethel's space.

"Is that the
last
of the iced tea?" Henry asked.

"Yup" was Marty's reply, "and I saved the last glass for you, Pops." He set it on a jade coaster next to Henry. It dawned on Henry how old and cynical he'd allowed himself to become in the months since the funeral. It wasn't Marty. It was him--he needed to get out more. Today had been a good start.

Even so, a mumbled "Thank you" was all Henry could muster.

"Sorry I haven't come by lately--finals were killing me, plus I didn't want to waste all that hard-earned money you and Ma paid to put my butt in college in the first place."

Now Henry felt his face flush with guilt as the noisy old furnace shut off, letting the house cool.

"In fact, I brought you a little token of my appreciation." Marty handed him a small
lai see
envelope, bright red, with shiny gold foil embossed on the front.

Henry took the gift with both hands. "A lucky-money envelope--you paying me back?"

His son smiled and raised his eyebrows. "In a way."

It didn't matter what it was. Henry had been humbled by his son's thoughtfulness.

He touched the gold seal. On it was the Cantonese character for prosperity. Inside was a folded slip of paper, Marty's report card. He'd earned a perfect 4.0.

"I'm graduating summa cum laude, that means with highest honor."

There was silence, nothing but the electric hum of the muted television.

"You all right, Pops?"

Henry wiped at the corner of his eye with the back of his callused hand. "Maybe

next time, I borrow money from
you
, " he replied.

"If you ever want to finish college, I'll be happy to front you the cash, Pops--I'll put you on scholarship."

Scholarship.
The word had a special meaning for Henry, not just because he never finished college--though that might have been part of it. In 1949 he'd dropped out of the University of Washington to become an apprentice draftsman. The program offered through Boeing was a great opportunity, but deep down, Henry knew the real reason he dropped out--the painful reason. He had a hard time fitting in. A sense of isolation left over from all those years. Not quite peer pressure. More like peer rejection.

As he looked down at his sixth-grade yearbook, he remembered everything he had hated and loved about school. Strange faces played in his thoughts, over and over, like an old newsreel. The unkind glances of school-yard enemies, a harsh contrast to the smiling innocence of their yearbook pictures. In the column next to the giant class photo was a list of names--those "not pictured." Henry found his name on the list; he was indeed absent from the rows and rows of smiling children. But he'd been there that day. All day.

I Am Chinese

(1942)

Young Henry Lee stopped talking to his parents when he was twelve years old. Not because of some silly childhood tantrum, but because they asked him to.

That was how it felt anyway. They asked--no, told--him to stop speaking their native Chinese. It was 1942, and they were desperate for him to learn English. Which only made Henry more confused when his father pinned a button to his school shirt that read, "I am Chinese." The contrast seemed absurd. This makes no sense, he thought. My father's pride has finally got the better of him.

"M-ming bak?"
Henry asked in perfect Cantonese. "I don't understand."

His father slapped his face. More of a light tap really, just something to get his attention. "No more. Only speak you American." The words came out in
Chinglish.

"I don't understand," Henry said in English.

"Hah?" his father asked.

"If I'm not supposed to speak Chinese, why do I need to wear this button?"

"Hah, you say?" His father turned to his mother, who was peeking out from the kitchen. She gave a look of confusion and simply shrugged, going back to her cooking, sweet water chestnut cake from the smell of it. His father turned to Henry again, giving him a backhanded wave, shooing him off to school.

Since Henry couldn't ask in Cantonese and his parents barely understood English, he dropped the matter, grabbed his lunch and book bag, and headed down the stairs and out into the salty, fishy air of Seattle's Chinatown.

The entire city came alive in the morning. Men in fish-stained T-shirts hauled crates of rock cod, and buckets of geoduck clams, half-buried in ice. Henry walked by, listening to the men bark at each other in a Chinese dialect even
he
didn't understand.

He continued west on Jackson Street, past a flower cart and a fortuneteller selling lucky lottery numbers, instead of going east in the direction of the Chinese school, which was only three blocks from the second-floor apartment he shared with his parents. His morning routine, walking upstream, brought him headlong into dozens of other kids his age, all of them going the opposite way.

"Baak gwai! Baak gwai!"
they shouted. Though some just pointed and laughed. It meant "white devil"--a term usually reserved for Caucasians, and then only if they really deserved the verbal abuse. A few kids took pity on him, though, those being his former classmates and onetime friends. Kids he'd known since first grade, like Francis Lung and Harold Chew. They just called him Casper, after the Friendly Ghost. At least it wasn't Herman and Katnip.

Maybe that's what this is for, Henry thought, looking at the ridiculous button that read "I am Chinese." Thanks, Dad, why not just put a sign on my back that says "Kick me" while you're at it?

Henry walked faster, finally rounding the corner and heading north. At the halfway point of his walk to school, he always stopped at the arched iron gateway at South King Street, where he gave his lunch to Sheldon, a sax player twice Henry's age who worked the street corner, playing for the tourists' pleasure and pocket change.

Despite the booming activity at Boeing Field, prosperity didn't seem to reach locals like Sheldon. He was a polished jazz player, whose poverty had less to do with his musical ability and more to do with his color. Henry had liked him immediately. Not because they both were outcasts, although if he really thought about it, that might have had a ring of truth to it--no, he liked him because of his music. Henry didn't know what jazz was, he knew only that it was something his parents didn't listen to, and that made him like it even more.

"Nice button, young man," said Sheldon, as he was setting out his case for his morning performances. "That's a darn good idea, what with Pearl Harbor and all."

Henry looked down at the button on his shirt; he had already forgotten it. "My father's idea," he mumbled. His father hated the Japanese. Not because they sank the USS

Arizona
--he hated them because they'd been bombing Chongqing, nonstop, for the last four years. Henry's father had never even been there, but he knew that the provisional capital of Chiang Kai-shek had already become the most-bombed city in history.

Sheldon nodded approvingly and tapped the metal tin hanging from Henry's book bag. "What's for lunch today?"

Henry handed over his lunch box. "Same as always." An egg-olive sandwich, carrot straws, and an apple pear. At least his mother was kind enough to pack him an American lunch.

Sheldon smiled, showing a large gold-capped tooth. "Thank you, sir, you have a fine day now."

Ever since Henry's second day at Rainier Elementary, he'd been giving his lunch to Sheldon. It was safer that way. Henry's father had been visibly excited when his son was accepted at the all-white school at the far end of Yesler Way. It was a proud moment for Henry's parents. They wouldn't stop talking about it to friends on the street, in the market, and at the Bing Kung Benevolent Association, where they went to play bingo and mah-jongg on Saturdays. "They take him
scholarshipping,"
was all he ever heard his parents say in English.

But what Henry felt was far from pride. His emotions had gone sprinting past fear to that point of simply struggling for survival. Which was why, after getting beat up by Chaz Preston for his lunch on the first day of school, he'd learned to give it to Sheldon.

Plus, he made a tidy profit on the transaction, fishing a nickel from the bottom of Sheldon's case on the way home each day. Henry bought his mother a starfire lily, her favorite flower, once a week with his newfound lunch money-- feeling a little guilty for not eating what she lovingly prepared, but always making up for it with the flower.