The Cooked Seed (36 page)

I did not own a twenty-unit complex! The unit was still vacant! If I had known that Brandi was an expert on “government violation codes,” I would have handled the issue with caution. I would have treated her the same way I would have my former Communist Party boss. I would have stayed on the safe side and would not have responded to her e-mails.

The officer’s name was Sonya. She was in charge of my case representing the Department of Fair Housing. Sonya asked me to pay Brandi $2,000 as “a gesture of agreeing to the conciliation process.” Ms. Sonya did not want to hear my side of the story. “Please send the check to Brandi through my office,” she instructed.

I felt wronged so I didn’t send the check.

I began to receive phone calls from Ms. Sonya. She made me feel as if I was a criminal when she said, “Will you cooperate, Ms. Min?”

I asked Lauryann if she had learned from school anything about the workings of the American government that could guide me. Lauryann did not have an answer.

Ms. Sonya’s repeated phone calls terrified me. “I am asking you to cooperate, Ms. Min. It does not make any difference whether or not you are guilty. I will mark you as refusing to cooperate, Ms. Min. I will move you to a different category, and it will cost you more than two thousand dollars!”

I became nervous every time the phone rang. When I got on the line with Ms. Sonya, the “translator” inside my head would freeze. I told Ms. Sonya that I couldn’t handle the phone conversations. I needed to look up words in my dictionary to make sure that I didn’t say the wrong thing. I requested to communicate through writing.

But Ms. Sonya continued to call. She seemed to enjoy the effect she had on me.

Sonya:
Are you there?

Min:
…

Sonya:
Ms. Min, are you there?

Min:
Yes.

Sonya:
Like I said, it will cost you a lot more if you refuse to cooperate!

Min:
But I didn’t do anything wrong.

Sonya:
Did you write that e-mail?

Min:
Well, my nine-foot vertical blind was not safe for the young child …

Sonya:
Answer my question. Did you write that e-mail?

Min:
I didn’t write to discriminate. The e-mail explains itself …

Sonya:
PLEASE! Would you just answer the question: DID YOU WRITE THAT E-MAIL?

Min:
Yes, I did.

Sonya:
So you discriminated!

Min:
But that’s not true!

Sonya:
Oh, yes, that’s true! I read your e-mail. To me you sounded discriminatory!

Min:
But I … can’t do this over the phone.

Sonya:
Why?

Min:
I am afraid …

Sonya:
What are you afraid of?

Min:
Mis … misunderstanding you. I am sorry. English is not my first language.

Sonya:
Your English sounds fine to me!

Min:
I prefer writing.

Sonya:
What language do you speak?

Min:
Chinese.

Ms. Sonya told me that she could get someone on the phone who could speak Chinese. On second thought, I declined. I sensed that whomever Ms. Sonya sent would be from the same agency and would share the same attitude. I pleaded with Ms. Sonya to put her words in a letter and mail it to me. She agreed, but with a condition.

Sonya:
Once you receive my letter, you will cooperate and pay the two thousand dollars, right?

Min:
I would have to study your letter first.

Sonya:
Well, I need to know when you will get back to me and cooperate.

Min:
May I have ten days?

Sonya:
No.

Min:
A week?

Sonya:
No, I’ll give you two days. I will mail my letter today, which is Monday. You will get it by Wednesday. I’ll expect you to call me to settle on Friday, or I will send you other papers to fill out. You will be in a different category. You
will be responsible for the consequences! Like I said, it’ll cost you A LOT MORE.

I wrote a check for $2,000 to Brandi and sent it to Ms. Sonya. I thought I had swallowed the bullying and had ended the nightmare, but I was wrong. Ms. Sonya decided that I needed more torture.

A few days later, I received another notice from Ms. Sonya. She demanded that I attend a “landlord school.” “You need to learn how to be a proper landlord,” she said. Again, Ms. Sonya threatened to put me in a “different category” if I refused to comply with her order.

For the next week, I rose early and drove two hours to landlord school, located in a different county. It was there that I first learned about “the protected class.” Folks who attended the class were small-time landlords like me. My group was made of a retired garbageman, a former grocery store owner, a handyman, a retired teacher, and a former fireman.

The class reminded me of the “thought-reform sections” that I attended in China during the Cultural Revolution. Our instructor was a middle-aged black woman. She advised us to “cooperate” with the Department of Fair Housing. When I explained my case and asked what I should do, the black woman told me a story. “I want to tell you about a landlord in a similar situation,” she said. “He was concerned for a child’s safety due to his backyard pool. The prospective renter was a single mother with two small children. The landlord refused to rent to the woman because he feared the liability. He was fined two thousand dollars at first for discrimination, but he decided not to cooperate. He kept taking the case to a higher court. Guess what happened in the end? He was fined fifty thousand dollars.”

“Did he pay?” Everybody in the class asked.

“Of course!” The woman smiled. “The tenants had the right to put a lien on the property if the landlord failed to pay.”

“Are you saying that landlords can’t win?”

“Unless you are Donald Trump.” The instructor laughed.

One of the attendees argued that the fifty-thousand-dollar case must be an out-of-the-ordinary incident. “Law is square,” he said. “Justice is blind.”

The instructor gave him a you-haven’t-heard-anything-yet expression. “Here, please help pass out this material. I want everyone to read it carefully. It’s a cover story published in the
Apartment Owners Association News
under the headline ‘Landlord Paid Over $1 Million in Discriminatory Complaint.’ ”

She went on to explain, “It was the largest settlement ever obtained by the Justice Department in an individual housing-discrimination case. The tenant requested a wheelchair elevator installed inside his unit after he was injured in an auto accident. The landlord refused. When the tenant protested, the landlord told him to move. The one-million-dollar fine on the landlord showed that our law
is
square and our justice
is
blind.”

The city inspector came five times within a year. Each time, I had to pay the city $150 for the inspection fee. Each time, the inspector gave me a new violation list. There were thirty-nine items to be corrected. The inspector took her job seriously. Nothing escaped her trained eye. If the wall paint was chipped or was less than spotlessly clean, she would mark it as a violation. She ordered me to spend over $1,000 to repaint the entire unit. She looked for mold in the bathroom. If she saw a dark spot, she would mark that as another violation. It was no use for me to explain that the mold smell was due to poor ventilation—the tenants were too lazy to open the windows after showering. I was fined for “lack of proper lighting” for Ruth’s stage-set-like dark bedroom, with its layers of canvas curtains pinned with giant fake spiders and sprayed with thick paint in the image of a monstrous web.

I obeyed the orders and lost every dollar I earned from the rentals. In time, the inspector grew sympathetic to me. It was after she repeatedly witnessed how the fire extinguishers and smoke detectors she ordered me to replace were stolen the next day. She had a record of the new stove hood I had replaced that was destroyed a few days later. Although she praised me as a “model landlord” and wished that she could be more helpful, she issued me a fine for mattresses the tenants threw out on the street. She also ordered me to repave the driveway and reroof the carport.

I hired a licensed contractor. After taking my deposit, the contractor
stopped showing up. When I canceled the contract, he put a lien on my property accusing me of breach of contract. He demanded $150,000 to remove the lien.

My mother was gravely ill in China, but I had to postpone my visit in order to deal with this issue. My doctor said that I was “one step away from stomach cancer.” As if she had matured overnight, Lauryann came to my rescue. She could no longer stand the way I was being bullied. She had witnessed my sleepless nights, my tears, and my need for her. She realized that she could protect me as I had once protected my mother in China. Lauryann helped me write a letter to the Fair Housing Department, the City Inspection Department, and the Department of California License Board. I was in tears as I watched Lauryann edit my letters.

A Chinese saying goes, “The flowers that you spent all of your time trying to grow failed to blossom, while the willow you had no intention to cultivate provides you with shade.”

I never expected that my books would take off to become international bestsellers. As a result, my publisher offered me a generous two-book contract.

The money brought freedom. I hired a real estate property management company to take care of my apartment troubles. This relief improved my health. I cannot say that the experience with my rentals did not shake my faith in people. I lost my innocence, and I did not like the transformation. I didn’t enjoy learning how to profile prospective tenants without getting caught.

With Lauryann’s help, I challenged the lien. I contacted the State License Board. At first, I didn’t have much faith in the investigator because of my previous experience with Sonya. I went along with the investigation. It surprised me that after a year, a conclusion was reached by the State License Board. The contractor was ordered to remove his lien. I won the case but did not recover most of the money I had already paid the contractor. This experience restored my faith in America’s justice system. I was grateful to the California State License Board.

Lauryann didn’t come out of the experience as bitter as I did. I had
so feared that she would lose her generosity and trust in people. I didn’t know why she wasn’t more affected. Nothing helped speed up a child’s maturity more than witnessing her mother’s failures and struggles in crisis. Lauryann was forced to live my reality. I hadn’t meant to involve her—a young girl at her tender age—though in my heart I had no regrets. I felt that it was the best thing that could have happened to her. She learned to respect reality. American children are the best-cared-for children in the world. Most of them are sheltered from everything bad and cruel. The future to most of them was rose colored. I told Lauryann that I didn’t want her to grow up a houseplant. I would rather have the shit hit her fan now, so that she would have the time to develop coping skills.

I felt a great sense of achievement when I heard her say, “Mom, there will always be bad apples. You just have to recognize them.”

Lauryann didn’t really get to choose her foreign language at school. She was offered a choice between French, Japanese, and Spanish. I made her pick Spanish because I wanted her to help me communicate with the tenants. I wanted her to be prepared to serve the majority of the immigrant population in the future. This was part of a larger conversation. I told her that I had nothing against pleasure seeking as long as pleasure seeking was not the goal of her life. Spanish would be useful.

“Qigu and I have agreed to disagree on this point,” I said. I felt a bit guilty imposing, but I had always been straightforward about my values and opinions. Lauryann had been mine to not only love and cherish, but also to influence and mold. To the Chinese, “It is the carving that turns a piece of raw wood into fine art.”

Lauryann was no longer a houseplant. In the years to come, life would turn her into a storm petrel, the tube-nosed seabird that enjoys taking flight, soaring into the sky, and diving into the wildest ocean waves. I felt blessed to witness my daughter growing into a confident young woman, fully in possession of her mind and body and unafraid of what lay before her.