The Fortunes (26 page)

Vincent was my friend. So how could I leave him? He
was
my friend, but I didn't always like him. How could I not envy his confidence, his good looks, his fiancée? Even afterward, I hated him a little. Even in death he made me feel like nothing. Worse than nothing. Oh, it wasn't right, those two getting off for killing him. But that's not why I testified at the federal trial. I wanted to stand up, even if belatedly.
I
didn't want to feel like a motherfucker. So I met with Tina, the young Chinese lawyer, and Jerry and Mike, around a cigarette-burned table, and she told us, “You need to get your lines down, agree on what happened, get your stories straight.” I was touching my fingertip to each scorch mark in turn. Tina was slim and a little severe, but her long hair shone like Vicki's. Vincent would have called her
fine,
found a way to make her smile. That's when we remembered the racist talk, heard by all of us above the throbbing music, clearly recalled despite all the booze we'd drunk.

And Vincent's last words? Heard only by me, spoken in Chinese so no one else could understand, never mind that his head was already stove in, jaw shattered, and people wonder how he could even have retained consciousness, let alone spoken. Well, okay, but it
wasn't
fair, was it? None of it. Tell me that's not true.

What did I do? What would you have done?

Evans got twenty-five years.

Out the courtroom window, I watched a jet slowly raise a scar across the sky.

What is truth, anyway? What I testified? This version? What you can read in the papers or online? Chinese whispers, you might say.

Vincent, incidentally, had wanted to be a lawyer when he was a kid. His mother told him no one would believe a Chinese lawyer. He wanted to be a writer too, but she told him he'd never make any money at it. By the time I knew him he was thinking about being a vet, but she reminded him he was scared of blood.

He
was
my friend. But did I like him, or was I just like him?

I couldn't have told you the hits they were playing at the club that night. “Ladies Night.” “Centerfold.” “Ring My Bell.” “Private Eyes.” I couldn't have recalled them, but when I hear those songs now I turn the stereo off.

Maybe, just maybe, if you remember the case at all, if you saw the Oscar-nominated documentary, or studied it in school, or read a blog about it, you'll recall that Evans's federal conviction was later appealed.

Lacey's testimony was called into doubt. Had she received consideration for other charges? Maybe you remember some titillating smear that she wasn't even wearing panties in court. That prim outfit on a stripper invited distrust, I guess.

And the witnesses' testimony—
our
testimony, our
memory
(by this time five years had passed since that night)—was challenged. We'd been coached by our Chinese lawyer, they said.

Maybe you remember that Vincent was partying with white friends, but probably not. Maybe you remember there was a Chinese friend. Maybe you remember his name, but I hope not.

What did I remember? When did I remember it? I don't know. The air conditioning was blasting in court, but my shirt was sticking to me like a Band-Aid. What if I didn't
want
to remember that night? Did anyone think of that?

Maybe you remember that the federal conviction was overturned on appeal.

He never returned my copy of
Jaws.
He lost a tooth chewing taffy. He wore a polka-dot bow tie at the kids' table one Chinese New Year. That's what I remember.

I remember the first time he played me
Sgt. Pepper.
I remember him shoving someone for calling him Yoko. I remember watching the moon landings with him, a crowd of Chinese families gathered in somebody's restaurant. We'd have been thirteen. Some kid at school had tried to spoil my excitement by saying that Aldrin and Armstrong had shot down Chinese MiGs in Korea. It was Vincent who reminded me, “They're gonna be able to see the Great Wall from up there!” I remember him trying to grow a mustache like his hero, Steve Prefontaine; that he owned the first pair of Nikes I ever saw. I remember lighting firecrackers on his lawn for Fourth of July.

There was a civil suit everyone forgets. Evans was ordered to pay restitution, but he never did. He barely worked another day in his life. “Can't get blood from a stone,” as he put it.

Evans also said of Vincent, “He was no choirboy.”

And: “It's too bad, you know, especially for him. At least I'm alive.”

And of the beating: “Something just snapped. I don't remember from there on what happened.”

He called me “a little pest.”

The evening Vincent's life support was switched off Evans was back on the diamond playing ball, taking cuts.

Afterward I couldn't bear to face her—Lily, Mrs. Chin—and she couldn't bear to stay in the U.S. She already had her ticket back to China when the first verdict came down, but it only delayed things. She finally went back forty years after she left. Went home, some might say, to Canton, though by then it was called Guangzhou. She used to say she couldn't remain in a land of injustice, but I always thought it was the vicious ironies that drove her out. She'd left China, after all, to escape her memories of the Japanese invasion, only to have her son killed because he was mistaken for a Japanese, and then to make common cause with Japanese Americans in her search for justice.

I left for a while myself. Not the country, of course, just back to the West Coast. I worked my way from Sacramento to Hayward to Oakland over the course of a decade—more running, maybe—until my father started having chest pains and asked me to move back and take over the business. He recovered, thanks to a stent, but the store, already losing ground to Radio Shack when I came home, never did. I like to think I at least persuaded him to cut his losses, get out while the getting was good, and the experience has come in useful anyway. I've mostly been doing accounts for small businesses ever since, helping quite a few of them through liquidation or bankruptcy (no shortage of that work in Detroit). I've done a little of everything over the years, though, even a spell as a finance guy at a Toyota dealership. (Less of a gesture than I imagined: most Japanese cars are made here now anyway, down South in Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and across the Midwest in Ohio and Indiana, though never Michigan.)

TOYOTA, DATSUN, HONDA . . . PEARL HARBOR,
went a popular Detroit bumper sticker back in the day. Ten years after Vincent's death, Lee Iacocca, Chrysler's president and pitchman, was still complaining that the Japanese were “beating our brains in.” Recently I read that Buick was a bestseller in China.

I wonder how Mrs. Chin might have felt seeing American cars on the roads there. She lived in China another twenty years but came back to the States for cancer treatment at the end of her life. The Asian American Rosa Parks, the obits called her. She's buried between Vincent and his father.

They asked me to her funeral too, as they've asked me faithfully to anniversaries and conferences and rallies down the years, as they've asked me to this latest memorial. I appreciate the sentiment. They forgive me—for lying or not lying well enough, either way. If only I could forgive myself. But it's too late for the truth now. You can't say all this stuff at an unveiling, in a documentary or an interview. You can't say all this when someone calls you a motherfucker.

I RSVPed my regrets this morning. I can't, and never could, save the day.

Lily used to say,
Vincent still be live if I not adopt him.
I should have talked to her; we were the two who felt most guilty, the ones who most wanted someone else to pay. This afternoon at least I went to her grave, all their graves, cleaned the stones, left oranges and lit joss. Thought of my own father, long retired to Florida (we sold the house in Oak Park; I rent in Ferndale now). The sod over Vincent and his father is a shade greener than that over his mother's more recent plot, like jade that darkens from wearing.

That Bicentennial summer of '76 our two families visited the Freedom Train when it stopped in Detroit. Vincent was at Lawrence Tech by then; I was a sophomore in Palo Alto. We saw the Constitution, Lincoln's stovepipe hat, a moon rock, an Oscar, Hank Aaron's home-run record bat. Vincent's mother read aloud proudly from the program, “Orientals arrive to build rail beds and remain to build new lives.” His father marveled at the 1904 Olds, “first car to drive across the country,” mine at the moon buggy, “wheels by GM.” For Vincent, though, the highlight was Jesse Owens's medals.

There's a Canton near Detroit, as it happens (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable; that's why I didn't think about it for years). You pass signs for it on the way to the cemetery. A little research tells me there used to be a local Pekin and a Nankin too, all named in the 1830s, when the nation was fascinated by all things Chinese, before any Chinese had arrived. Nankin, in fact, became Westland only a few years before my father opened shop there. There are Cantons dating from the same period all across the country, in Ohio, Mississippi, Georgia, Kansas, Texas—the latter two named because their founders came from still other Cantons. The Canton in South Dakota was said to be on the exact other side of the world from its namesake.

When Vincent first came to Oak Park I thought I'd look out for him, the new kid, even though I only knew him slightly then. I felt protective of him, but he never needed me, fit in so much better than me that I occasionally feared my friendship was a liability (some kids, I knew, called us Ching and Chong behind our backs), that he tolerated it only out of pity. I was careful not to presume on it, seeking him out mostly when he was alone.

Ling-Ling and Sing-Sing was another of their names for us—those kids who'd pull the corners of their eyes back when we passed—after the famous panda pair who'd come back from China with Nixon. The same kids who snickered when I got called on to read Emily Dickenson's “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” in tenth grade English. For a while we tried calling ourselves Billie and Sammy, after the funky Chinamen in “Kung Fu Fighting,” a hit our senior year. But of course only one of us was fast as lightning.

Sometimes I wonder if anything might have been different if I hadn't gone along that night. Different for me, of course—how I've wished I was never there—but also for him. I'd never been to the Fancy Pants with him before, but I'd heard about it. It was one reason I jumped at the chance. Why hadn't he asked me along before? He'd taken Jerry and Mike. He might have been worried I'd blab, tell mutual friends, that it'd get back to Vicki, I guess, but it's not like he didn't brag about it. No, I think, it was something else. I wasn't as cool as him, you might say, and I wasn't, but really any Chinese is less cool alongside another. Maybe we lose our exoticism. More likely it's that alone, we can define ourselves; with another, we invite all the stereotypes. Alone, or especially with Jerry or Mike, he was Vince. Next to me he was Vincent, Asian. So, I have to ask, would Evans have called us names if there'd only been one of us? “It's because of you . . .” he said, and he meant us,
you
plural. One isn't a threat, two or more . . . well, we were
them.
And would Vincent have gotten so angry if I hadn't been there? Perhaps; probably. But just maybe he felt he had to represent, answer back. He knew I wouldn't—later, when the bouncers intervened, I even tried to apologize to Evans, play peacemaker—so Vincent may have figured it fell to him to uphold our honor, even protect
me.
Then again, maybe he just didn't want to be like me. Maybe he yelled back, threw the first punch, to prove we weren't the same. “I'm not a motherfucker,” he said. He didn't say, “
We're
not.”

Then again, Evans may have said, “It's because of little motherfuckers
like you . . .
” Accounts vary. Memories differ.

There's a name for it, okay, this idea that we all look alike. It's been studied, documented.
Cross-race bias,
they call it. It's true of how whites see blacks, even how other races see whites. But with Asians the sameness is magnified. There are so many of us! Squeezed together in our overcrowded cities. And we all have the same names! And dress alike, wear glasses (I kept mine on to look at the girls; Vincent wore contacts). Even the things we make are copies—cheap knockoffs, poor imitations. We may all look alike, but when we try to copy you . . . well, the differences are obvious (and if they're not, it just means we're getting trickier, not to be trusted). Maybe to Evans and Pitts, Vincent was just a pale imitation. Maybe the reason they killed him is not that he was like me but that he was trying to be like them.

If I had a gun I'd shoot you now,
I told Evans while we waited for the ambulance, but I didn't, of course.

And what about all the other what-ifs? Ten thousand of them, as Evans said. What if none of us had gone that night? Or not gotten so drunk? Not cared what a couple of assholes said? What if I hadn't run? And what if the judge had locked those guys up after the first trial? What if justice was seen to be done? Vincent is still dead, Lily still goes back to China, Vicki is still alone, I'm still yellow. It's a tragedy, but a small one, forgotten in time. But the verdict, the paltry fines, that's what made travesty of tragedy, “rubbed insult into injury,” as my father said. Shit, it's a tossup which was more racist, the crime or the verdict. But it's the injustice that lives on, the unfairness that ensures Vincent's death will be remembered. And alongside it, always and forever, my part, like a bass line, a footnote, minor but essential. His friend who ran away. Martyrs and saints, you see, they have to be brave. Otherwise they're just victims. Vincent could have run away. That's what my life proves. He chose not to (though some say he slipped). Never mind that he
should
have run. He had a mother to care for, a wife to live for. Never mind that he was a hothead who didn't give any more thought to his loved ones than he had in the club. No. He stood up before he was knocked down. And I ran.