A Bitter Feast Read online

  “The new guys” were the Fukienese power structure now blossoming in Chinatown as Chinatown spread in all directions beyond its decades-old borders to absorb the new flood of immigrants, many of them Fukienese. The new guys had their own family and village associations, their own customs, and their own leaders. They had their own dialect that we Cantonese didn’t speak. Chinatown’s traditional power wielders were finding, in the past few years, that the unquestioning respect they were used to from the community wasn’t automatically theirs any longer from the immigrant-on-the-street; and, worse, that the politicians outside Chinatown, when they had favors to ask or offer, did not necessarily go where they had always gone.

  It was war, in a smiling, bowing, back-stabbing sort of way, and an important skirmish had been fought over the position of Mayor’s Adviser on Community—read, Chinatown—Participation in the East Point Project. East Point was a planned commercial development on the East River, more or less under the Manhattan Bridge, which once wasn’t Chinatown but is now. Because funding for the project was coming from the state and federal governments as well as the city, the mayor wanted the community solidly behind it, no protests, no objections, no “Give us a park, not commercial high rises”; and his choice of H. B. Yang for adviser was a clear signal that he thought H. B. Yang could deliver. The face H. B. Yang would gain by buddying around with the mayor would go a long distance to maintaining his position in the community, but with it would come the responsibility, which New York politicians take very seriously (though they usually phrase it differently), of providing the mayor with some big face, too.

  This responsibility would not be fulfilled by job actions against the Mayor’s Adviser’s restaurant by workers claiming to be making a dollar an hour.

  “You’ve driven some of H. B. Yang’s customers into the arms of Duke Lo,” I said to Peter. “I saw a bunch of them going to Happy Pavilion.”

  Duke Lo was one of the new guys, being watched closely by those who watch these things as Most Likely to Succeed. Happy Pavilion, down the street from Dragon Garden, was his base of operations, his entry in the dim sum palace horse race.

  Peter shrugged, but I saw a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth. “It’s a free country.”

  “It’ll drive H. B. Yang crazy,” I said. “Not only to be losing customers, but losing them to Duke Lo.”

  “I can’t help where people have lunch.”

  “You haven’t changed since second grade,” I said. “Still refusing to speak English when the principal comes around.”

  “If Miss Peters had given the class Mars Bars the way I suggested, that day wouldn’t have gone like that,” he answered, unperturbed.

  “Peter, but really, H. B. Yang doesn’t worry you?”

  He scratched his head and moved his broad shoulders again. “No. It’s not like it used to be. Tongs and hatchet men and all that. Now men like H. B. Yang are community leaders and hang out with the mayor. It’s all done in court these days. And I’m a lawyer.” He looked off in the direction the bus had gone. “Listen, I have to get down there before Warren ends up with six months for contempt.”

  “Warren who?”

  “Warren Tan. From the Clinton Street buildings. The one with the megaphone. You know him?”

  I thought. “Jeremy Tan’s little brother?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s he doing working in a restaurant? I thought he went to Yale.”

  “He did. Honors in twentieth-century American history, with his thesis on the labor movement after World War II.”

  “I can see this coming.”

  “Right. Came back and got a job as a dishwasher at the Peking Duck House and helped found the CRWU. He’s the strategist for actions like this and for long-term operations. Dedicated to the struggle for workers’ rights.” Peter raised his head, suddenly sounding like a stirring documentary film. “Will stop at nothing until the battle’s won! No sacrifice too great!” He dropped his voice back to normal. “The rest of them will keep quiet, but he’ll be on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions inside of five minutes.”

  “Never pass up an opportunity. Except, wait a minute. Isn’t there something wrong with him—his heart or something?”

  Peter nodded. “Apparently he’s been on borrowed time since he was two.”

  “Is this kind of thing good for him?”

  “His feeling is, he’ll do whatever he wants as long as he can. It’s better than worrying all the time, he says. Luckily for the union, he’s brilliant. This coffin thing was his idea. Listen, I have to go. Thanks for coming. Give my love to your mom.”

  “And mine to yours, and to Uncle Liang.”

  Peter was already walking away; he waved without turning back. He’d be spending a good part of the rest of this gorgeous day in the dingy corridors and sweat-scented rooms of Central Booking, bailing out his clients and arranging for their court appearances. As I watched his large form shambling down the Bowery I reflected, for a moment, on how lucky Mary was.

  Then I turned and walked the other way, thinking about tongs, and hatchet men, and how things were really done these days.

  Two

  And I thought that was it for the waiters. I’d done what Peter wanted, been his witness at an event that hadn’t needed much witnessing. If he wanted a P.I. for anything else that had to do with the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union, he’d call me, but the kind of lawyering he was doing for them wasn’t the kind that required any investigating of anything. So the waiters and I were through.

  That was how I thought about it, and that was how I conducted the rest of that glorious day, and the days that followed. I whizzed along through Battery Park City next to the river on my Rollerblades, catching the scent of the river and of the beach roses they’ve planted there. I read the paper and went to my brother Ted’s oldest son’s fifth grade play. I called other P.I.s I know, and a few lawyers, in the hope of getting some work, and when there wasn’t much work I went to the dojo and practiced my roundhouse kick. I bought groceries and brought them home to my mother.

  I was sitting in the living room with my mother, in fact, about a week and a half later, watching the Cantonese early-evening news, when Peter called. My mother always had high hopes for Peter: he’s Chinese, a professional, and breathing. So she handed me the red kitchen telephone and watched me through narrowed eyes as we spoke, even though she knows he’s dating my oldest friend, but also because our conversation was in English, which she believes Chinese-speaking children only use to hide things from their mothers.

  “Lydia? I think I have a big problem,” Peter said to me.

  “You think you have it, or you think it’s big?”

  “Both. Can you come down?”

  “To your office?” I glanced at my mother. “Ma has this chicken—”

  “Tell her you’re eating with me.”

  “Am I?”

  He sighed. “If that’s what it takes.”

  “She’ll be on the phone to Mary’s mother before the door shuts behind me.”

  “I’ll fix it later. Will you come?”

  “You know I can’t resist riding in on a white horse to rescue a desperate lawyer.”

  “Please, Lydia.” He sighed again. “If I’m right, this isn’t funny.”

  “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “Me? Sure. Meet me at the office. We’ll go around the corner.”

  So I slipped on my leather jacket and kissed my mother on the cheek, her complaints about her chicken only perfunctory in the face of my having been invited to dinner by a living unmarried Chinese male.

  Peter’s office was on the second floor of a building on the corner of Mott and Pell, above his Uncle Lee Liang’s crammed import shop and about three steps from our apartment on Mosco Street. He was stacking papers and turning off lights when I got there. Jacketless in what I thought of as the cool of the evening, he locked up and followed me back down the stairs.

  When Peter says “around the
corner” he means “down the block” at No. 8 Pell Street, a restaurant with no more name than that. Why do you need a name, the owner, Shen Chiang, had asked totally rhetorically when he set the place up, when your address is a lucky number? Peter had helped him with the endless paperwork it takes to open a restaurant in New York, at a time when Mr. Shen needed all his ready cash— and all his cousins’ ready cash—to get the establishment going. The agreement was that Peter would take it out in trade, and though I was sure that by now Peter had eaten his way through an entire restaurant chain, Mr. Shen not only welcomed him and his guests with glowing smiles every time he went but actually appeared offended if he ever heard that Peter had eaten somewhere else.

  No. 8 Pell Street has another peculiarity, too. Along with the various city licenses that grant a business permission to operate, Chinatown has another set of required permits, unwritten but just as vital. The entire neighborhood is carved up, divided into turfs. Gangs—sometimes tong related, sometimes not—are the acknowledged holders of these territories. The gang controlling the turf your place is in acts like a feudal lord: your loyalty, expressed in protection dollars, guarantees smooth daily operation uninterrupted by pipes that mysteriously burst in your basement or armed men who mysteriously burst through your front door. If your uncle is a city councilman you might be able to avoid paying cash, although you will carry, then, a different kind of debt; but otherwise, everyone belongs to some feudal lord, and everyone pays.

  With a very few exceptions. Because, among the various lords, disputes of various natures can’t help but arise, it’s useful to have a place to sit down and discuss things before deciding whether the Uzis and AK-47s are called for. No Chinatown gangster trusts another, so dropping in on one another is out of the question. Thus has arisen the need for places with no loyalties—not to the gangs, and not to the police, either.

  No. 8 Pell Street is one of maybe half a dozen Chinatown eateries that fills this need. Interestingly, in a neighborhood with as many basement and second-floor restaurants as street-level ones, all the neutral places open directly onto the sidewalk and have huge windows. No one owned No. 8 Pell Street except Shen Chiang, and no one was turned away.

  Which might be just as well, I reflected, if Peter’s union succeeded in organizing the restaurants of Chinatown. At least Peter would still have a place to eat.

  At No. 8 Pell Street, handshakes and greetings and long-time-haven’t-seen-yous were exchanged, Peter and I were seated, and the first blue-and-white pot of jasmine-scented tea was rushed to our table.

  “I heard my mom dialing Mary’s mom as I left the apartment,” I told Peter while he poured me a cup of tea. “Actually, she calls about once a week to sympathize with Mary’s mom about how you’ll never be a partner in a major firm or make a lot of money or anything.”

  “I won’t?”

  “But tonight,” I said, “you can bet she’s offering her sympathy that things aren’t going so well between you two, and such a nice boy, that Lee Bi-Da.” I gave Peter’s name the full treatment, as though I’d been speaking Chinese. I wasn’t; in spite of all the years of Chinese school and the need to speak Chinese at home, Peter and I are both more comfortable in English.

  “Between me and Mary? They’re not going well?”

  “Well, obviously they’re not, or you wouldn’t be out to dinner with me.”

  Peter nodded, put down the teapot, and perused the menu, which I was sure he must have memorized by now. Mr. Shen came over to recommend, beaming as though he’d harvested them himself, the particular freshness of today’s scallops. So we ordered them, along with a platter of sauteed watercress with fermented tofu. Then, munching on the crispy strips of noodle and the inch-long, deep-fried, pepper-sprinkled strings of dried fish No. 8 Pell Street gives you for starters, we got down to business.

  “One of my guys has disappeared,” Peter told me.

  “One of your guys?”

  “From the union. One of the organizers, the only one they still had inside Dragon Garden.”

  “I thought they’d been fired.”

  “Two of them. They hadn’t caught on to the third one yet. His name’s Chi-Chun Ho. He’s been here about three years.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “He hasn’t shown up for work for the last two days.”

  “Umm.” I dipped a pinch of tiny fish into Mr. Shen’s fiery mustard while I thought. “He couldn’t just have gotten another job?”

  “The union had a strategy meeting Tuesday night; he wasn’t there. No one had seen him, and when they tried to call, no one answered.”

  A slight pause in Peter’s voice before “no one answered” made me look up. “No one?”

  “He lives in a basement apartment in Elmhurst with three other men from Dragon Garden, two other waiters and a busboy. Named”—he pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket—“Yuan Lee, Song Chan, and Gai-Lo Lu. Not with the union, just men who work there. Anyway, no one answered.”

  “And the others—?”

  “Haven’t been to work either.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But, Peter—”

  I stopped as our oil-dipped scallops, glistening in a plump white mound and surrounded by thick slabs of black mushroom, were settled on our table next to a platter of emerald watercress. A clay casserole full of fragrant, steaming rice and a Chinese beer for Peter followed, and then the tide of waiters receded and we were alone again.

  “Peter,” I said, “what do the cops think?”

  Peter placed serving spoons in each dish, all their handles pointing in my direction. I reached for the rice, dolloped a mound into the center of my plate.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “They think nothing?”

  “There’s no crime. Four immigrants not showing up for work; they’re not impressed.”

  “You called Missing Persons?”

  “Sure, but all they could tell me was that he’s not in the morgue. No Asians this week at all.”

  Peter and I both knew what that meant: nothing. Missing Persons doesn’t look; they just keep track of the unidentified dead who’ve been found. If there weren’t any anonymous Asian bodies in the morgue, it only meant that none had been turned over to the NYPD for ID if possible. If ID wasn’t possible, then they’d be buried, courtesy of the city, on Hart Island, that breezy place in the East River where all the unknown dead spend eternity together.

  “What about Mary?” I asked Peter. “I mean, dating a cop must have some advantages.”

  “It does,” he agreed, helping himself to mushrooms. “She asked the local precinct out there if they’d send someone around this afternoon, as a favor, just to check the place, and they did. But they said everything seemed normal.”

  “They got inside?”

  “No. No one was there to let them in, and they didn’t have a warrant or probable cause. They wandered around, looked through the windows. Everything seemed in order.”

  “That was it? That’s an investigation? Didn’t they even ask the landlord to let them in?”

  “No one answered the landlord’s doorbell upstairs. Though one of the cops swears someone was home.”

  “Well, but maybe it’s an illegal apartment and they thought the cops had come to arrest them for that. The landlord’s Chinese?”

  He nodded.

  That made sense. Although twenty years ago Elmhurst was Archie Bunker territory, now it’s one of New York’s most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. New immigrants—Chinese, Dominican, Colombian, Pakistani—flock there and live three or four to a room in illegal apartments in what are supposed to be one- or two-family houses. Renting these apartments is a big business in Elmhurst, and it’s an ethnic business; both landlords and tenants seem to feel safer speaking the same language. You can think of it as middle-class oppressors preying on their newly arrived countrymen, or as the first generation giving a vital though societally unacceptable boost to newcomers, whichever suits you.

  “And th
e four of them,” I said to Peter, “including your guy, are they illegals?”

  “My guy isn’t, and one of the others. I didn’t ask about the other two.”

  “Hmm. In my experience, lawyers only don’t ask a question when they already know the answer and they don’t like it.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows but didn’t deny my point.

  I popped a piece of scallop and a slice of mushroom into my mouth. I could taste the ocean, bright and wide and salty, in the sweet silkiness of the scallop, and the chewy thick mushroom was redolent of the dark, musty earth.

  I said, “You’re afraid something bad’s happened to Ho because Dragon Garden found out about his union work?”

  Peter shook his head as he swallowed some beer. “Not exactly. I told you, it’s not done that way anymore. Violence is messy and hard to explain away. I don’t think they’d bother. It’s too easy just to fire people and then blackball them so they can’t work. Then they leave town and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  “Then … ?”

  “Well, Chi-Chun Ho might not know that. He might have been threatened, and the other guys with him just because they room together. They might have disappeared because of that.”

  “No violence, but threats?” I asked skeptically.

  “The antiunion forces,” Peter said, delicately not mentioning any names, such as H. B. Yang, for example, “would know that a guy like Ho wouldn’t know that. If that happened and that’s why they disappeared I want to know about it. It’ll help our side. And maybe the poor guy’s on the run when he doesn’t have to be.”

  “But the other two organizers at Dragon Garden were fired, you said. They weren’t threatened, were they?”

  “Not.”

  “Then why would Ho have been?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m right to be worried. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I went for some watercress, scooped up some chunks of vinegary bean curd with it. “Okay,” I said.

  Peter looked up over his glasses. “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, I’ll check it out.”