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

Y
oung 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 fortune-teller 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 one-time 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 learnt 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.

‘How you buy flower?’ she’d ask in Chinese.

‘Everythingwasonsaletodayspecialoffer.’ He’d make up some excuse in English, trying to explain it – and the extra change he always seemed to bring home from his errands to the market. Saying it fast, fairly sure she wouldn’t catch on. Her look of confusion would coalesce into satisfied acceptance as she’d nod and put the change in her purse. She understood little English, but Henry could see she appreciated his apparent bargaining skills.

If only his problems at school were solved so easily.

For Henry,
scholarshipping
had very little to do with academics and everything to do with work. Luckily, he learnt to work fast. He had to. Especially on his assignments right before lunch – since he was always dismissed ten minutes early. Just long enough to find his way to the cafeteria, where he’d don a starched white apron that covered his knees and serve lunch to the other kids.

Over the past few months, he’d learnt to shut his mouth and ignore the heckling – especially from bullies like Will Whitworth, Carl Parks, and Chaz Preston.

And Mrs Beatty, the lunch lady, wasn’t much help either. A gassy, hairnet-wearing definition of one of Henry’s favorite American words:
broad
. She cooked by hand, literally, measuring everything in her dirty, wrinkled mitts. Her thick forearms were evidence that she’d never used an electric mixer. But, like a kenneled dog that refuses to do its business in the same place it sleeps, she never ate her own handiwork. Instead, she always brought her lunch. As soon as Henry laced
up his apron, she’d doff her hairnet and vanish with her lunch pail and a pack of Lucky Strikes.

Scholarshipping
in the cafeteria meant Henry never made it out to recess. After the last kid had finished, he’d eat some canned peaches in the storage room, alone, surrounded by towering stockpiles of tomato sauce and fruit cocktail. 

H
enry wasn’t sure which was more frustrating, the nonstop taunting in the school cafeteria or the awkward silence in the little Canton Alley apartment he shared with his parents. Still, when morning came, he tried to make the best of the language barrier at home as he went about his normal routine.

‘
Jou san
.’ His parents greeted him with ‘Good morning’ in Cantonese.

Henry smiled and replied in his best English, ‘I’m going to open an umbrella in my pants.’ His father nodded a stern approval, as if Henry had quoted some profound Western philosophy.
Perfect,
Henry thought, this is what you get when you send your son
scholarshipping
. Stifling a laugh, he ate his breakfast, a small pyramid of sticky rice, flavored with pork, and cloud ear mushrooms. His mother looked on, seemingly knowing what he was up to, even if she didn’t understand the words.

When Henry rounded the block that morning, heading to the main steps of Rainier Elementary, he noticed that two familiar faces from his class had been assigned to flag duty. It was an assignment envied by all the sixth-grade boys, and even a few of the girls, who weren’t allowed, for reasons unknown to Henry.

Before the first bell, the pair of boys would take the flag from its triangle-shaped rack in the office and head to the pole in front of the school. There they’d carefully unfold it, making sure no part of it touched the ground, since a flag desecrated in such a way was immediately burnt. That was the story anyway; neither Henry nor any other kid in recent memory had ever known of such a thing actually occurring. But the threat was legendary. He pictured Vice Principal Silverwood, a blocky, harrumphing old bear of a man, burning the flag in the parking lot while shocked faculty looked on – then sending the bill home with the clumsy boy responsible. His parents surely would be shamed into moving to the suburbs and changing their names so no one would ever find them.

Unfortunately, Chaz Preston and Denny Brown, who were on flag duty, were not likely to move away any time soon, regardless of what they did. Both were from prominent local families. Denny’s father was a lawyer or a judge or something, and Chaz’s family owned several apartment buildings downtown. Denny was no friend of Henry’s, but Chaz was the real menace. Henry always thought Chaz would end up as his family’s bill collector. He liked to lean on people. He was so mean the other bullies feared him.

‘Hey,
Tojo,
you forgot to salute the flag,’ Chaz shouted.

Henry kept walking, heading for the steps, pretending he hadn’t heard. Why his father thought attending this school was such a great idea, Henry would never know. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Chaz tie the flag off and amble toward him. Henry walked faster, heading for the safety of the school, but Chaz cut him off.

‘Oh, that’s right, you Japs don’t salute
American
flags, do you?’

Henry wasn’t sure which was worse, being picked on for being Chinese, or being accused of being a Jap. Though Tojo, the prime minister of Japan, was known as ‘the Razor’ because of his sharp legalistic mind, Henry only wished he were sharp enough to stay home from school when his classmates were giving speeches about the
Yellow Peril.
His teacher, Mrs Walker, who rarely spoke to Henry, didn’t stop the inappropriate and off-color remarks. And she never once called him to the blackboard to figure a math problem, thinking he didn’t understand English – though his improving grades must have clued her in, a little bit at least.

‘He won’t fight you, he’s a yellow coward. Besides, the second bell’s gonna ring any minute.’ Denny sneered at Henry and headed inside.

Chaz didn’t move.

Henry looked up at the bully blocking his way but didn’t say a thing. He’d learnt to keep his mouth shut. Most of his classmates ignored him, but the few who made a point of pushing him around generally got bored when he wouldn’t respond. Then he remembered the button his father had made him wear and pointed it out to Chaz.

‘“I am Chinese,”’ Chaz read out loud. ‘It don’t make no difference to me, shrimp, you still don’t celebrate Christmas, do you?’

The second bell rang.

‘Ho, ho, ho,’ Henry replied. So much for keeping my mouth shut, he thought. We
do
celebrate Christmas, along with Cheun Jit, the lunar new year. But no, Pearl Harbor Day is not a festive occasion.

‘Lucky for you I can’t be late or I’ll lose flag duty,’ Chaz said before he faked a lunge at Henry, who didn’t flinch. Then Henry watched the bully back up and head into the building. He exhaled, finally, and found his way down the empty hallway to Mrs Walker’s classroom, where she reprimanded him for being tardy – and gave him an hour of detention. Henry accepted his punishment without a word. Not even a look. 

W
hen Henry arrived in the school kitchen that afternoon, there was a new face, though because it was turned toward a stack of beet-stained serving trays, he couldn’t see much of it. But it was clearly a girl, probably in his grade, about his height; she was hidden behind long bangs and the black strands of hair that framed her face. She sprayed the trays with hot, steaming water and put them in the dish rack, one by one. As she slowly turned toward Henry, he noticed her slender cheekbones, her perfect skin, smooth and lacking in the freckles that mottled the faces of the other girls at the school. But most of all, he noticed her soft chestnut-brown eyes. For a brief moment Henry swore he smelt something, like jasmine, sweet and mysterious, lost in the greasy odors of the kitchen.

‘Henry, this is Keiko – she just transferred to Rainier, but she’s from
your
part of town.’ Mrs Beatty, the lunch lady,
seemed to regard this new girl as another piece of kitchen machinery, tossing her an apron, shoving her next to Henry behind the serving counter. ‘Heck, I bet you two are related, aren’t you?’ How many times had he heard that one?

Mrs Beatty wasted no time and fished out a Zippo lighter, lit a cigarette one-handed, and wandered off with her lunch. ‘Call me when you’re all done,’ she said.

Like most boys his age, Henry liked girls a lot more than he could bring himself to admit – or actually show to anyone, especially around other boys, who all tried to act cool, as if girls were some strange new species. So, while he did what came naturally, trying his best to show indifference, he was secretly elated to have a friendly face in the kitchen. ‘I’m Henry Lee. From South King Street.’

The peculiar girl whispered, ‘I’m Keiko.’

Henry wondered why he hadn’t seen her around the neighborhood before; maybe her family had just come over. ‘What kind of name is Kay-Ko?’

There was a pause. Then the lunch bell rang. Doors were slamming down the hall.

She took her long black hair in equal handfuls and tied it with a ribbon. ‘Keiko
Okabe
,’ she said, tying on her apron and waiting for a reaction.

Henry was dumbfounded. She was
Japanese
. With her hair pulled back, he could see it clearly. And she looked embarrassed. What was she doing
here
?

The sum total of Henry’s Japanese friends happened to be a number that rhymed with
hero
. His father wouldn’t allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day, according to Henry’s mother. In his early teens,
his father had played host to the famed revolutionary Dr Sun Yat-sen when he visited Seattle to raise money to help the fledgling Kuomintang army fight the Manchus. First through war bonds, then he’d helped them open up an actual office. Imagine that, an
office
for the Chinese army, right down the street. It was there that Henry’s father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home.
His
home, not mine, Henry thought. The attack on Pearl Harbor had been terrible and unexpected, sure, but it paled when compared with the bombings of Shanghai or the sacking of Nanjing – according to his father anyway. Henry, on the other hand, couldn’t even find Nanjing on a map.

But he still didn’t have a single Japanese friend, even though there were twice as many Japanese as Chinese kids his age, and they lived just a few streets over. Henry caught himself staring at Keiko, whose nervous eyes seemed to recognize his reaction.

‘I’m American,’ she offered in defense.

He didn’t know what to say, so he focused on the hordes of hungry kids who were coming. ‘We’d better get busy.’

They took the lids off their steamer trays, recoiling at the smell, looking at each other in disgust. Inside was a brown, spaghetti-like mess. Keiko looked like she wanted to throw up. Henry, who was used to the putrid stench, didn’t even flinch. He simply showed her how to dish it up with an old
ice-cream
scoop as freckled boys in crew cuts, even the younger ones, said, ‘Look, the Chink brought his girlfriend’ and ‘More chop suey, please!’

At the most they taunted, at the least they sneered and glared suspiciously. Henry kept silent, angry and embarrassed
as always, but pretending he didn’t understand. A lie he wished he believed – if only in self-defense. Keiko followed suit. For thirty minutes they stood side by side, occasionally looking at each other, smirking as they served up extra-large helpings of Mrs Beatty’s rat-scrabble slop to the boys who teased them the most, or the red-haired girl who pulled at the corners of her eyes and made a hideous bucktoothed face.

‘Look, they don’t even speak English!’ she squealed.

He and Keiko smiled at each other until the last child was served and all the trays and pans were washed and put away. Then they ate their lunch, together, splitting a can of pears in the storage room.

Henry thought the pears tasted especially good that day.