Shanghai Girl (5 page)

The name hits me. As far as I'm concerned, DellaFave is pro-business. One would say he's my kind of candidate, the kind of guy I should rub shoulders with. Over the years I've proven a lot with the money I made. But it is certainly not with early retirement in mind that I’m selling the company. I want to dabble in politics for a change. I want to show these big-nosed Americans that a Chinese man's power is beyond the physical labor of building their railroads.

It’s eerie that somebody else has figured out my next move. I’ve underestimated these downtown Chinese bumpkins. I open the envelope and find an invite to a $1,000 per plate dinner at the Waldorf on January 14th, 1985, the very night before I leave for China. Dong Kee fans out ten $100 bills - crispy as if fresh out of a Chinese laundry - and explains, "The thousand dollars is for the dinner. The Chairman thinks it's imprudent to reveal that we're behind this. We want you to go as an independent supporter who happens to be Chinese. You see, as a Chinatown civic leader, Chairman Siew has always openly endorsed Democratic candidates. We think it's now important to be on good terms with both parties so that the Association can truly help our community in the long run. Times have changed. It never hurts to have our man in Albany at all times."

Invitation still in hand, I ask, "But why me? I'm not even a Siew. With all due respect to Mr. Siew, I've never met him."

"That's precisely the point. Nobody would dream about the friendship between the Chairman and Boss Lou," Dong Kee says, squinting like a fox. "The Chairman thinks you have the makings to be the first Chinese-American Republican.”

“That’s still a rare breed in this town, you know,” I say. "Tell Mr. Siew I'm flattered to be in his good graces, but I've already made plans to go abroad."

Heavy Set suddenly walks toward my desk and stands between the armchairs. I notice that his left hand pinkie is missing the last joint, a sign of being an avowed gangster. I am reminded of the reports I occasionally read about on mysterious deaths in and around Chinatown involving meat cleavers and other handy weapons. I wipe my forehead with a handkerchief.

Dong Kee props the red package against my pen set and says, "Chairman Siew knows Boss Lou is a wise man that understands what's best for himself and his business. Besides, we know you won't be traveling until the fifteenth."

My office turns deadly silent. I can hear the Omega on my wrist go "DellaFave; Siew. DellaFave; Siew." I'm between a rock and a hard place. I've been made an offer I can't turn down.

"What does Mr. Siew want me to do at the dinner?"

"Nothing, absolutely nothing, Boss Lou. Just go, shake hands, and have a good time. That's all."

"And then?"

Dong Kee smiles now. "There won’t be a ‘then’. You continue to build your prosperous business and we wish our friendship will last as long as your good fortune."

Siew's strategy reminds me of an old Chinese saying: "To angle for a big fish one needs to use a long line."

"Oh, there's a little something for you. The flight to China is long and we want you to be comfortable. Here's an upgrade from Business to First Class on JAL. Please, Boss Lou, no insult intended. Just a small gesture." He hands me the boarding pass folder and sticks out his right hand. "Thank you very, very much, Boss Lou. I'm greatly honored. Sorry we didn't have a chance to make an appointment."

“My regards to Mr. Siew,” I reply, rising to shake his hand, a hand, I’m afraid, would lose a finger or two it failed to shake mine on this occasion.

“Your command obeyed,” he says, bowing slightly.

"Lotus, see the gentlemen out," I summon on the speakerphone.

Loosening my tie, I pull at the top button of my Brooks Brothers' shirt, the first thing Lotus always does.

It dawns on me that Lotus is a Siew.

It was a few years ago that I was last at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. It was supposed to be my surprise for Marlene’s fiftieth birthday, but Irene had called her from school. "You won't be going out of town. A garment bag and a duffel will do." Marlene agonized over which Manhattan establishment I would take her to. The Plaza? The Ritz? The Pierre? We owned, and I still do, an unobtrusive three-story townhouse in Gramercy Park. If we were to stay overnight in town, she would expect it to be at a worthwhile place, at least in name. A lady like her would not live for half a century just to check into a Holiday Inn off some exit on the Major Deegan. I can still remember how my late father-in-law staged his Fiftieth Grand Longevity Celebration at the Excelsior overlooking Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, most of all, its squealing scene.

“Squealing” because it was the predominant sensation that has stayed with me. Fifty jeering, grimacing, bouncing mountain monkeys were brought in to the 50-table banquet, single file, like star performers in a circus. They had been smuggled in fresh from Yunnan Province. Those wild breasts were believed to sometimes possess higher intelligence than their human captors. Their gray matter mattered. Their brains were known to be highly nutritious.

It was 1958 and the Koos were among the handful of prominent Shanghainese families who had fled the Communists and settled down in Hong Kong to renewed wealth and fame. The fifty monkeys, unlike the scores of people who daily couldn’t make it trying to swim ashore to Hong Kong from the Mainland, had set foot on the British Crown Colony, where my in-law, the Fiftieth-Birthday Longevity Star, was a man of influence. He was the garment industry
tai-pan.
Marlene’s grandfather, comprador galore to the English-owned Shanghai General Textile Mill, had later set up his own factories. To me, Marlene was the ultimate embodiment of grace and beauty that an Oriental lady could achieve in the Western world: petite, tasteful, classic. And then, of course, 1958 was only the second year of our marriage, and we flew from New York for the Koo grand occasion.

All fifty tabletops were shaped like toilet seats with ultra-wide rims. One by one, the monkeys, heads sheared monk-style, were led to the tables and locked into the donut holes. They sized up their seated audience with tiny bone china bowls in front of them.

The skilled master started at the head table. “We wish you, the Longevity Star, a ten-thousand-year life! A ten-thousand year-life without boundaries!” the table chanted. My father-in-law was all smiles. “Thank you, thank you,” he acknowledged with clasped hands. Pointing at a monkey with ivory chopsticks, he ordered, “Let us all begin, please! --
qing, qing!
”

The head craftsman stepped in. Pointed, sanitized chisel in one hand, hammer in another. One. Two. Three. The monkey squealed, squealed, and squealed!

Seeing what was coming, the other monkeys began to squeal, squeal, squeal. The circus masters shrieked to keep order.

Within a minute, a monkey’s crown was down on the table like a lid. The craftsman headed for the next table. White-gloved servers filled our bowls with polished silver ladles. The gray matter from was warm -- priceless. My father in-law believed that it promoted longevity.

As the crown-less dying monkeys were being removed, another round of “A thousand-year-life without boundaries!” filled the air.

I had no way of knowing whether that oozy, mucous drink has enhanced my intelligence. What I did know was that it would be impossible for me to outdo that party when it came to celebrating Marlene’s own big five. Still, as the only Koo daughter of her generation, she deserved something special.

I picked the Waldorf because no two rooms there were the same. I had wanted to reserve a suite at the Waldorf Towers. The Towers' separate entrance and staff would give her an enhanced sense of uniqueness. So I called. After hearing my name, and my accent, I suppose, the clerk promised me the best suite "with an Oriental motif." It so happened that the suite’s decor was imitation Qing Dynasty. Chinese vases and rice paper lampshades abounded. Worse, a giant pair of scrolls of Emperor and Empress Kang Xi stared down at us in the sitting room, bringing back my boyhood terror upon seeing my great-grandfather and his third concubine before the family altar. I wondered if the clerk felt that anyone sounding Chinese would not have had enough good taste for the American Waldorf.

Marlene promptly pronounced the suite tacky. For birthday wish, she had this to say: “I wish I were back in Shanghai, if only for a day.”

I remember staring at her and forcing myself not to bring up the name Hong Tao. Three decades ago, Hong Tao was my pal at Columbia and Marlene was his girlfriend. Their disagreement over the future of China led Tao to return to Shanghai. It took me years to win Marlene over, but I am afraid I never completely won her heart. With all her family either in Hong Kong or in the States, her mentioning of Shanghai on a night like this could only bring me to one conclusion.

Her beauty, it turned out, was as transient as my pride of having made a pile in America as an immigrant. Before we attempted sex that night, I buffed my slippers on the “WT” monogrammed bedside towel and made a silent wish of my own: power to go along with my money.

Nothing came of the sex. It seemed to me that all her height had gone to her width. Seeing her lying there like a sacrificial lamb was instantly off-putting. I gave up, bid her good night, and sank into my half of the king bed. My more immediate wish was that we were back home, in our own separate beds.

Within twenty months of my last attempt to romance her, she died of a rare form of cancer. I paraded her through the array of treatments: chemotherapy, herbal potions, yoga, and uptown shrinks. Lotus even offered her own mother to help take care of my dying wife for a handsome sum, which I accepted, only to be fired by Marlene within a week. “She is a butcher’s wife from Chinatown, not a servant. Nobody knows how to be a proper servant any more, not in New York, anyway. What is this world coming to?”

In the end, nothing worked for Marlene. All the modern miracles stopped short of saving the "shining pearl on the palm" of a Hong Kong tycoon, the wife of a New York Seventh Avenue big shot in the making. She died unsung, un-mourned, unmentioned in
The Gotham Tribune
obituary page.

I had wanted to draft something for Lotus to type up and send over to the paper. But when she said, "Are you sure you want to publicize this, Boss?" I changed my mind. I knew well that my success was partially attributable to my in-law's influence, at least during my pioneering days. I hated being reminded of that. Now that both the old man and my fair lady were gone, I had never felt freer. The watchful, disapproving patriarchal eyes from Hong Kong had finally closed.

That sense of independence has continued since, until I accepted the Siew invitation to come here tonight. But I know I'm paying my dues for a different type of autonomy.

The dinner is on the second floor in the grand ballroom. Surprised that I'm ushered to the center table, I look around to search for other Chinese faces planted by the Siew clan. There are pretty women and cheerful men everywhere. But no other Chinese.

Like a beam from a searchlight, Leonardo DellaFave’s shining crown is the first thing I see. In a flashback, it reminds me those of the monkeys’. Short, stout, and lively, DellaFave is a political Danny DeVito. Gigi DellaFave, in two-inch heels and a black see-through gown, appears twice his height and half his age. The tabloids have hinted that this second wife was once a call girl.

The pair sits down at our table and begins to exchange pleasantries. "New York's back to the Republicans where it belongs," someone says. "Y-y-es," others echo. I stand up, conscious of my boarding school reach across the lazy Susan. "My name is Gordon Lou. I'm a Chinese-American businessman here in the city and a supporter of yours. I'm honored to meet you, Senator DellaFave."

"Oh, the pleasure is mine, Mr. Bow. Welcome to the party, ha-ha. We need more supporters like yourself."

I try to correct him on my name inconspicuously. "It's Lou, which means 'buildings'. My ancestors must have dealt in real estate near the Great Wall."

"Oh, pardon me, Mr. Low. I like your sense of humor, a rare quality in the Orientals I've come into contact with," says the Governor aspirant. "My own ancestors owned a bakery. But now I’m all set to take over the State House’s kitchen cabinet."

"And I’m here to cheer you on, Senator.”

“Much appreciated.”

A blond, tanned man sitting next to me holds out his hand. "Ted Cook," he declares, leaving no doubt what trade his ancestors engaged in. "Great suit you have on," he says. "You have to introduce me to your tailor someday."

"Thank you. All my clothes are made in Hong Kong.”

Ted smiles broadly and says, “Ah, they are quite a steal, I understand. My son traveled there and came back with half a dozen custom-made, hand-sewn suits with his initials stitched inside the lining – all for about a hundred bucks each. I wish I had this kind of a deal with my tailor.”

The mention of the word “tailor” turns into a painful dagger in my underbelly. In a way, I had left China for the U.S. to flee an incident associated with the death of our family tailor. My father was the head of The House of Lou, a Colonial-style house in Shanghai’s International Settlement. In addition to the year-round staff of a servant, a maid, a cook, and a chauffeur, the house retained a seasonal, tubercular tailor. He would come from the countryside in late autumn each year and work until the Lunar New Year, when all three generations of Lou’s would don silk, cottonwood-wadded outfits hand-sewn by him. Little Jade, my father’s concubine then twenty years old, had recommended the tailor, who was from her village in Jiangsu. Known to us as Old Tailor, he wore a long strand of goatee, was hunchbacked, bamboo thin, and coughed all day. The small eyes on his dark and wrinkled face were forever squinting, possibly a condition caused by his line of work.