The Fortunes (25 page)

They worked their whole lives in laundries and restaurants. “For what?” Vincent asked me savagely during his father's final illness. “They never had any fun.” We were outside in his drive, smoking, Mrs. Chin framed in the kitchen window washing rice as if panning for gold. I knew what it was to lose a parent; I'd come to pay my respects. I didn't know his father well—what I remember most is his sure-handed ability to pluck out a fish's eyeball with his chopsticks, a deftness that impressed me as a child almost as much as his relish in eating it appalled me—but I knew the answer to Vincent's question. For what?
For you!
It was the same for all of us kids. The debt he could never redeem, no matter how late he sat up rubbing the old man's swollen knuckles when he couldn't sleep.

“If life gives you lemon,” Mr. Chin used to joke, “make lemon chicken!” I assumed he made it up till I saw it in a fortune cookie.

First his dad, now Vincent himself. Part of what was so moving was that his mother's desire for justice, her thirst for vengeance, they were ways of forgiving his most unfilial act: dying before her (beside which sneaking off to strip clubs under Vicki's nose was a pale betrayal). The night it happened, when I finally got home from the hospital and told my father everything, he pulled me close and hugged me. I couldn't remember the last time we'd touched. I thought I'd failed my friend, but it turns out I'd been a good son.

Vincent was the same age when he died as his mother had been when she started her new life in America.

After his death, to support herself, she went back to work for a while at a local factory, making those little plastic ice scrapers for windshields.

They called themselves the ACJ, American Citizens for Justice—no mention of Chinese or Asian in the name—and insisted that placards at marches be in English, which may explain the painful, plaintive pun of
CHIN UP FOR JUSTICE
on one popular sign. But they're the ones—journalists, lawyers, church leaders, and local businessmen—who helped Lily get the case reopened. And their coming together—Chinese and Japanese, those old enemies, as well as Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino—marked the start of a pan-Asian political movement. And me along with the rest, attending meetings, giving interviews, marching beneath a neatly lettered sign. You could say it's when we became Asian American. Two drunk white guys couldn't tell us apart, and we realized we were more alike than we'd thought.

There'd been Asian student coalitions and alliances and collectives when I was in Palo Alto—holdovers from the antiwar movement—but I'd kept my nose in my books (my “political” involvement at Stanford began and ended with my vote for the football team to be called the Robber Barons; the administration shot that one down). Vincent and I had missed the draft by a couple of years, but he'd always said he'd serve if called, “like my Dad” (I always said Canada was a thirty-minute drive).

“Pan-Asian,” I could imagine Vincent joking, for Mike or Jerry's benefit. “What is that, like a wok?” “Sure, a melting wok!” I'd say, and we'd all laugh.

The first meetings were held in the Golden Star, the restaurant where Vincent had worked, everyone sitting around the freshly laid tables—vinyl tablecloths and melamine rice bowls—trying not to disturb the settings, looking less angry or sad in that context than hungry. It reminded me of his funeral the previous summer, only these weren't all the same people who'd come then. I didn't know many of them; many of them didn't know Vincent, and yet they spoke of that night as if they'd been there, as if
they'd
been attacked. In a way, I guess, they felt they had, if not by Evans, then by the verdict.

Part of me wanted to say something—
didn't they know who I was?
—but then it came to me that all their talk of a “heinous assault,” a “brutal slaying,” wasn't the way you'd talk about it if you were there. That wasn't how I remembered it; that was how they imagined it. They weren't talking as if they'd been there but as if they
wished
they had been. What would they have done if they had been? I wondered, and held my peace. It reminded me of Vincent, the way he told me about his father's mugging. They were spoiling for a fight too.

Back in the kitchen the cooks were preparing dishes for later, hot oil singing in the steel woks.

I didn't say anything in the end, but Lily was there and she spoke last, halting but firm. She wanted justice for Vincent, and we applauded until our hands stung. But a lot of the people in that room also wanted justice for themselves. Me too, I suppose. I had run, but maybe there was still something I could do.

Sometimes now when people tell the story it's a triumph. Something good, something important, coming from tragedy. “The death of a man, the birth of a movement.” I guess that's what Vincent was martyred for, even if he didn't know it.

Don't make a federal case out of it. Wasn't that the Chinese American way? Turn the other cheek, look the other way, water off a Peking duck's back. “Take it on the chin,” as a sick joke doing the rounds had it. My father had been mistaken for Japanese in the store plenty of times—he was selling Japanese radios, after all—but he knew better than to correct a customer (even if as a boy during the war he wore a button saying
CHINESE, NOT JAPANESE.
)

But making a federal case is literally what we did—what we had to do to get the case reopened and prosecuted by the Justice Department as a hate crime. Only it had never been done before. Civil rights legislation hadn't been applied to Asians previously; doing so now was a hot topic, a
choice.
Whose lot to throw in with? Blacks, for whom the legislation had been written, some of whom were suspicious of a possible usurpation, or dilution, as if Asian struggles were equivalent? Or whites, whom many of us aspired to be like?

I sat at the back of those meetings, between the pay phone and the cigarette machine, watching koi gliding silently back and forth in the aquarium. Every so often the talk would be interrupted, hushed really, by someone trying to come in to eat, the irritated exchanges at the door when they were turned away. I couldn't see from where I was, but I imagined they were probably white. It was that kind of restaurant, the kind with Chinese zodiac placemats, the kind where white diners point out the few Chinese to each other and whisper how the food must be “authentic.” I wondered what they thought if they glimpsed a crowd of us inside before the door shut on them.

The koi turned, slid back the other way. They were supposed to be lucky fish, good feng shui. Their filter hummed happily. Next to the kitchen was another tank flickering with bass, tilapia, grouper—the unlucky fish, as I deemed them.

As to our question: Were we a minority, or were we honorary members of the majority? I reckon I know what Vincent would have chosen. Vince. But to get justice for him, we chose the other. Later I heard some blacks call us “fleedom riders”; what they meant was “free riders.”

So a federal case, and I was called to testify, to say what I'd heard, what I'd seen, what I'd done. What I remembered.

It
was
a race thing. No doubt. One of the strippers, Lacey, recalled the line, and then we all did. “It's because of you little motherfuckers we're out of work,” Evans said, meaning Japanese, even though he wasn't out of work himself, even though Vincent wasn't Japanese.

Pitts
had
been laid off a couple of years earlier, but he was working again, at a furniture store, and attending community college. Both he and Evans, in fact, went back to work the very next morning, though Evans was eventually fired by Chrysler when his felony plea was accepted. Only then would he really be out of work because of Vincent.

But okay, the car business
was
in the crapper, as Vincent very well knew. He was working for an auto supplier, after all. He was
in
the business.

Would it have made a difference if Vincent had said,
I'm Chinese
? That his mother had moved to the U.S. because she couldn't live in China after the war, with her memories of the Japanese bombing? Probably not. Nips, Chinks, gooks, slants—we were all the same to them. Instead he said, “I'm not a little motherfucker,” and Evans came back with drunken magnanimity: “Big fucker, little fucker, we're all fuckers.” And then Vincent stubbed out his cigarette and went for him. Punches were thrown, a stool. Pitts had his head cut open.

But maybe everyone's a racist in a strip club. Sexist, sure, goes without saying, but racist too. Afterward Evans tried to say it started because Vincent tipped a black dancer badly. I don't know; maybe, though it sounds like a smokescreen:
we're all racists.
But maybe we all are in a club. The whole point is to pick a girl or girls you like—blond, brunette, redhead, black, white, Asian. Did Vincent like white girls? In the immortal words of Hong Kong Phooey,
Could be!
I know we both ignored the Asian girls. You want what you can't have, what you don't have. Why else would you be in a place like that? And he already had a nice Chinese girl in Vicki. “Going with another Chinese,” he told me sloppily, “would be unfaithful.” But he felt okay about a white girl, because he knew they were unattainable outside of a club. Hell, maybe Evans felt the same about black girls. “I don't like seeing people picked on,” he said in court. Such chivalry.

Vincent's father, by the way, was mugged by a black guy. Did I say that already? Or did you assume it?

I don't recall the black dancer, but Lacey I remember. I was disappointed in the girls at first—they were older, their skin tanned leathery or oiled in a way that made you conscious of the smell of sweat in the room. Lacey wasn't a beauty either, of course: a dirty blonde with small breasts and a broad pale ass. But those kinds of imperfections, I saw, were part of the appeal of the place. The women were vulnerable, more naked because they were exposing shortcomings. Some of them made a jiggling show of themselves, as if to say they were in on the joke, good sports about it; others cloaked themselves in a tired boredom that I suppose might pass for sultry. But Lacey was still trying, grinding away to “Physical” in a headband and leg warmers and not much else, smiling like it was a good time. When she shook out her mane at the end of the set, I felt a drop of perspiration land on my cheek. Her skin was fever-warm where I tucked a bill in her g-string. Later, on the stand, she called Vince a “nice” customer, said they were “friendly,” and I envied him, even though I knew the defense was trying to suggest some bias, some innuendo, to discredit her. She testified in a prim skirt suit—padded shoulders, blouse buttoned to the throat, still trying—but I remembered her body beneath it.

The thing about racism, I always think, the
worst
thing, okay, is not that someone has made up their mind about you without knowing you, based on the color of your skin, the way you look, some preconception. The worst thing is that they might be right. Stereotypes cling if they have a little truth; they sting by the same token. A lot of us
do
work hard; many of us (those who hail from Canton, anyway)
are
short. Some of us
do
have small dicks. And yes, as Evans's complaint about Vincent's tipping suggests, some of us are cheap (like our food, our goods, our labor). How would you feel if I called you racist? The
white
stereotype. But some of you
are
racist, right? It doesn't mean that what's true of the many has to be true of the one, any more than what's true of the one must be true of the many.

That's why Vincent's case was so empowering. They thought he was
Japanese
! They were manifestly wrong, completely refutable. We didn't all look alike—that old racist fallacy—but even if we did, we weren't.

His name was Chin, for god's sake! As in
China.

And yet—it has sometimes nagged me—what if Vincent had been Japanese? His death wouldn't have been more or less, just
differently
unfair, I guess. But would it have brought us together? I doubt it.

And what of me? Weren't Vincent and I alike that night? Evans and Pitts chased us outside the club, ignoring Jerry and Mike. Except Vincent fought back, and they killed him. So we're not all alike, though I sometimes feel guilty for not being more like him.

I'm not a motherfucker,
he said. And he wasn't. But it's that word that set him off, I think. More than the race thing, even.
That
we heard every day anyhow. But he didn't like
motherfucker.
He was an adoptee, his father had died less than a year earlier, he still lived at home, and he was about to get married. He didn't like that word. It's unfilial, okay? Disrespectful. We worship our ancestors.

I asked him once about his birth parents—he was cooling down after a practice—and he said he didn't know. Dead, he figured, or unmarried, or so poor they had to sell him or give him away. He'd come from Hong Kong, so they might have been refugees from the Communist mainland. He was taking deep breaths, chest rising and falling, beads of sweat in his hair like dew. I don't know what I expected. I might have been probing for vulnerability, looking for an opening to express sympathy. But this was the opposite of self-pity. “I feel bad for them, but it's not like I remember them.” Yet what if they'd kept him? I pressed. He had his thumb to his wrist, counting his pulse. “That kid wouldn't have been me, couldn't have been.”

I read somewhere once that in China during the Cultural Revolution, they called bashing someone's brains in
opening the flower.

I wonder sometimes about the odd echoes—an adoptee and his mother, a father and a stepson. Perhaps they all had something to prove. Evans did say, “I was just defending my boy.” He was a superintendant at Chrysler when Pitts was laid off; maybe he felt he owed him. Maybe he loved him like his own. They still played baseball together is why they had the bat in the trunk in the first place. Turns out Evans only took Pitts to the club that night because the boy had just had a fight with his girlfriend. And the day after (the only day either of them ever woke up in a cell)? Father's Day.