A Bitter Feast Read online

“Put that on the list, too. I’ll call you later.”

  I hung up the street corner phone and stared at it. H. B. Yang. Maybe I should go back to my office, call him from where it was quiet, where I could concentrate … Yeah, and where I could put the whole thing off for the ten minutes it would take me to get there. Nuts to that, Lydia. Put the coin in the slot and call.

  So I did. Ignoring the traffic and the pedestrians and the childhood memories of my father’s courteous, correct, but distinctly distant bow to this leather-faced stranger every time they passed in the street, I dialed the first of the two numbers the voice on the phone had given me.

  A young man, answering the first ring, told me in Cantonese that Yang Hao-Bing was not there. I left a message and called the other number. The ring was more high-tech and the answer not quite as immediate, but when it came it was the dry, quiet voice I’d heard on my machine.

  “Yang Hao-Bing,” it said, the name in the Chinese order, the tones the melodic Cantonese of my childhood. There was no English follow-up. Maybe everyone who had this number spoke Cantonese. Then what number did the mayor call on?

  “This is Chin Ling Wan-ju,” I said, automatically speaking Cantonese because he was. I wondered if I got any points as an ABC for speaking the ancient tongue.

  “Ah,” the voice responded. “Thank you for calling. Ling Wan-ju, an unusual name.”

  “My father had planned to call me Ling Wu, after his sister who stayed in China. But I have four older brothers. When they first saw me, this tiny baby, they thought I was a toy.” Which is what Wan-ju means, and why I have one more name than most Chinese people, and why was I telling this to H. B. Yang?

  “Yes, I knew your father,” the voice said. “Not very well, but he once worked for me.”

  He did? Though why was I surprised? My father had been a cook. I was thirteen when he died, and though I’d played on the floor of many of the restaurants he’d worked in, it had never occurred to me to ask who owned them.

  “I would like to speak with you on a matter of some importance,” H. B. Yang continued, oblivious to my memories. “Is it convenient for you to come to my office?”

  “Now?” I asked, and immediately kicked myself for not having come up with some elegant turn of phrase with which to request the same information.

  “Yes,” was the answer, proving H. B. Yang to be, when the situation required it, a man of as few words as I was.

  I gave some quick thought to my clothes as I headed over the few blocks to the Bowery. I was still wearing the navy pants and flat shoes of the cable TV scam. Luckily, I’d switched my cousin’s uniform jacket for one of my own in my office, and I supposed I looked decent enough, though if I’d known I was going to have an audience with H. B. Yang I’d probably have changed outfits three or four times and put on earrings or a necklace, some clinky jade bracelets. Maybe even a touch of lipstick. Just wait until my mother hears about this, I thought.

  “Trousers,” she would sniff. “For an appointment with Yang Hao-Bing! It’s lucky he is a wise man, wise enough to know you are just a headstrong, foolish girl. Also lucky he has many more important things to concern him. Also perhaps, since you don’t know how to dress, he will understand how little you do know. Then he will find you useless to him. That would not be completely unfortunate.”

  I know what you mean, Ma, I agreed as I reached Dragon Garden’s big glass doors.

  H. B. Yang’s office occupied the third-floor front of the Bowery building that held Dragon Garden, a building he’d owned for years. On the first floor were a variety of glass-fronted stores that constituted a Hong Kong-style mall, though from what I’ve read the goods offered in Hong Kong as a rule are considerably more upscale than the polyester and plastic I’d browsed through on my visits here.

  The huge space that was the restaurant took up the second floor. You got there up a polished glass-and-brass escalator, which, on weekends, was staffed at the top and bottom by hostesses with walkie-talkies. Parties of two or four or ten were chosen from among the milling, hungry crowds and dispatched upstairs as the waiters reported empty seats at the large round tables. If you came with fewer than the ten the tables seated, you ate your dim sum in the company of strangers, their chatter mixing with the din of dishes and the clatter of the rolling carts and the calls of the ladies trying to entice you to sample their chicken feet or boiled dumplings or sticky rice. No one seemed to mind the crowding or the noise. Chinese people like our restaurants like that; maybe they remind us of the teeming streets of home, even those of us who’ve never been to China except by way of family stories. And non-Chinese appeared to relish the exotic Chinese authenticity of it all, or at least be willing to put up with it for a chance at the clams with black bean sauce and the shrimp shiu mai.

  This was a weekday, and it was toward the late side for lunch, so no one was guarding the entrance to the escalator when I walked through the glass doors that the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union coffin had so recently rested against. As the escalator bore me steeply upward, the carved crimson dragon on the wall at the top of the stairs slowly grew, until it filled my entire view. This restaurant had become a favorite of my mother’s since it opened five years ago, and the drama of the approach was one of the reasons.

  “Beautiful dragon,” she always said as we neared the top of the escalator. “So well done. Looks just like a real one.”

  I’d never asked my mother how she knew what a real dragon looked like, because I was afraid she’d tell me.

  I stepped off the escalator and found myself face to face with a brick wall in a maître d’s jacket. I inquired of him the way to H. B. Yang’s office. “I’m Lydia Chin,” I said. “I have an appointment.”

  He didn’t consult a list or bat an eye. He looked me up and down, then he said, “Yeah?”

  “With H. B. Yang,” I elaborated, because he seemed to need a little more. “He asked me to come see him.”

  “Yeah,” the brick wall said. “He told me.” He spoke the same New York English as mine, and he didn’t move.

  “Well, then,” I said, “maybe you could tell me how to get to his office. I don’t think I should keep him waiting.”

  He scowled at that. “Keep Mr. Yang waiting? Don’t ever do that.” A few seconds later his brain, finished with his mouth, sent out a signal to his arm, and he pointed me through a door concealed in the pattern of the wallpaper. “Stairs,” he said. “Or there’s an elevator.” But he didn’t point at it; his arm stayed where it was, waiting to hear from his brain again. “Around back, the other side of the building.”

  His eyes narrowed slightly as he spoke, and I got the feeling that this might be some sort of test. But did you pass it by being a go-getter who’d choose the stairs any day because time was money, they were closer, and you were tough, or by being a lady who knew your own worth, never mind the sensible shoes, and headed without a backward glance for the two-ton piece of electrical equipment to carry you twelve vertical feet?

  Clueless, I chose the stairs because they don’t break down and trap you inside for hours waiting for a repairman. The maître d’ tugged on the bottom of his black tuxedo jacket and went back to squinting vigilantly across the vast dining floor, on which absolutely nothing was happening.

  The aromas of frying garlic and steaming broccoli and low-tide fish followed me through the wallpapered door, as though they were curious to see what was upstairs, too. Halfway up they fell away. Maybe they’d suddenly remembered that at the top was H. B. Yang.

  The corridor was short and the door near the end of it open. I knocked anyway, peering into the room. A man had been standing, back to the door, looking out the window at the Bowery and the streaming traffic choking itself into two lanes to work its way over the Manhattan Bridge. He turned at my knock, and of course it was H. B. Yang. Though his hair was thinning, it was still black; his face was lined, leathery, and mobile. Smiling, he came around his wooden desk—more Midtown than Ming Dynasty—and extended his hand to me.
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  “Chin Ling Wan-ju,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I am Yang Hao-Bing. Please, come in, sit down.”

  So we were going to speak Chinese, though we weren’t going to bow to each other. I shook his hand, smiled also, and sat in the leather chair facing his desk. “I’m honored to meet you, Uncle,” I said, wondering if that was laying it on a little thick. But something about this place—the heavy American desk and chairs resting on a maroon carpet figured with creamy plum blossoms in blue vases; the tall Chinese cabinet behind me, glowingly lacquered and displaying porcelain figures and bowls, bronze animals and incense burners; the walls hung with plaques and scrolls and photographs of H. B. Yang posing and smiling next to political figures of the last four decades, both New Yorkers and visiting Taiwanese; and the controlled silence, as though the scurrying traffic I could see outside and the restaurant bustle I could sense below were important parts of H. B. Yang’s world, but still, had their places—made it feel right to me to speak to H. B. Yang in the old style, to refer to him as an honorary family member, one who was older and on that basis alone could expect my respect.

  And it made him smile. “Yes, we have not met before,” he said, sitting in the chair behind the desk only after I sat. “Have you eaten yet? You will have tea?”

  That wasn’t really a question, of course; it was a dance step, and I did my step, saying yes, I’d eaten, and no, I wouldn’t think of putting him to any trouble, to which he replied that it wasn’t any trouble. It wasn’t, either; he moved to a sideboard where, on a hot plate, a small iron kettle was steaming. H. B. Yang poured the water from the kettle into a delicate blue-and-white teapot, which he covered and brought to a laquered tray already sitting on the edge of his desk, where I could reach it handily. On the tray were two covered tea bowls of the old-fashioned sort, two larger covered plates, and two small plates, all of them the same translucent porcelain as the teapot—not standard Dragon Garden tableware.

  H. B. Yang sat behind his desk again while we waited for the tea to steep. “No, we have not met,” he said, “although I have, naturally, followed your career with some interest.”

  “Mine? Uncle, I’m flattered,” was what I said, managing to keep the sudden dryness of my mouth out of my words. Was this how bugs felt when, having thought all along they were just going about their own buggy business, they suddenly realized they were under a microscope?

  “Yes, of course. I have been privileged to serve this community for many years.” He gestured to the pictures on the walls. “I am always pleased to see young people remaining here. So many of the best leave Chinatown; the ones to be commended are those like yourself, establishing your businesses here, using your talents in ways that make the community stronger.”

  Chinatown boosterism could not be what this visit was about, I acknowledged to myself, though I also acknowledged that I sort of wished it were.

  “This is my home,” I said simply.

  H. B. Yang nodded, looking gratified. “Please,” he said, “help yourself,” and he pointed to the covered blue-and-white dishes. I lifted the tops to find in one preserved plums, and in the other the little sesame-covered balls of fried dough my father used to make for us on his rare days off. Their warm, rich scent suddenly brought back to me our cramped kitchen and my father’s voice. “See how they smile when you cook them?” he’d say as the balls split in the hot oil. And my mother would reply, “It’s a lucky thing the dough is smiling, because all the children in this house are quarrelsome.” And my father’s face would grow sad. “Quarrelsome, ah? Such a shame. Quarrelsome children cannot eat Smiling Faces.” And suddenly, the insurmountable difficulties between Ted and me, or Elliot and Andrew, or Tim and anybody, would vanish in the face of the crispy, chewy little pastries.

  I reached for a Smiling Face from H. B. Yang’s dish, wondering whether it would live up to my memories. Surprisingly, it did, or almost. The seeds were crunchy, the dough was soft and sweet. What was missing was the sense that came with the taste, of being surrounded by people who, confining, annoying, and dismissive as they were, nevertheless wanted the best for you.

  “This is delicious,” I told H. B. Yang.

  “Yes, the chef who makes my sweets is quite good,” he told me. “He has been here some time. He’s the son of an old friend from my village.”

  H. B. Yang’s face held a look of contentment as he poured tea, first for me, then for himself. I lifted the covered bowl, moved the cover slightly back, and drank, finally grateful for my mother’s nagging at us all to learn the ancient and difficult art of drinking gracefully from one of these.

  “All your chefs are good, I think,” I told H. B. Yang as I put my tea bowl down. “I’ve enjoyed all the meals I’ve had in your restaurant.”

  “I’m honored to hear you say so. That, in a way, is why I have asked you to come here.”

  Uh-oh, I thought, I was right; it’s about the waiters. He knows I’m working for Peter, and he’s playing divide and conquer.

  “My staff is, as you say, quite good,” he went on. “Some, like my sweets chef, have been in this country for many years. Some of the others were trained as restaurant workers in China. But most are peasants: farmers, laborers with no skills, when they come to me. I train them. I look after them. I am a stern but fair employer. They are, most of them, loyal men. They think of Dragon Garden as their home. I am proud that they do so.”

  Okay, I thought, probably the best answer to that is no answer, so I sipped some tea and smiled. H. B. Yang was serving me an aromatic black tea, deep-tasting with no bitterness. He sipped his tea also; I had a feeling he understood my silence and didn’t mind at all. “Now,” he said, “I must rely on your discretion, Chin Ling Wan-ju.”

  “Whatever I can do,” I said ambiguously, trying to look helpful.

  He nodded and went on. “The laws governing immigration from China have changed since the time of my arrival. Even since the time your father came here, as you no doubt know,” he said. “Still, as with any bureaucracy, the requirements of government can be arcane. Often they conflict with the needs of thousands desiring a better life.” He smiled. “It was the Chinese people who invented bureaucracy as well as gunpowder, of course. Might the world have been better off, do you suppose, if we had created neither?”

  “Probably,” I answered. “But what’s done is done.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Sometimes the things that are done are regrettable, but cannot be withdrawn. Instead they commit one to a course of action that must, then, be followed through. I need you, Chin Ling Wan-ju, to follow something through for me.”

  I reached for a preserved plum to hide my confusion. I’d thought I was going to be told to follow my nose out the door and leave Dragon Garden and its union problems alone. And, I reflected, maybe that’s what I was being told, just in a roundabout and very Chinese way.

  But it turned out it wasn’t. As I bit into the salty-tart plum, H. B. Yang continued. “I’ve lost something,” he said. “In fact, someone. Four men, employees of mine. I would like you to find them for me.”

  Eight

  Back out on the Bowery, in what had turned out to be a sunny, breezy, and very complicated afternoon, I grabbed up the first phone I came to and called Bill.

  “You’re hired,” I said. “Or fired, or rehired, or whatever we were up to. Can I come over?”

  “You’d better,” he said. “I don’t think you’re safe wandering the streets.”

  When I got to the Laight Street building Bill’s lived in since before, as he points out, I got my first female undergarments, he was actually waiting outside, leaning on his own doorjamb and smoking a cigarette.

  “What are you doing there?” I demanded, suspicious.

  “It’s a beautiful day. I thought I’d come down here and watch you stagger up the street.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m always mean,” he said, moving aside and pushing open the street door for me. “It’s at the top of my list of faults.”


  “No, it isn’t.” I started the steep two-story climb. “At the top is your tendency to be a smart-ass.”

  “Is that the same as my being always right?”

  “They’re related.”

  The upstairs door was open, so I walked right in and flopped on Bill’s sofa.

  I shut my eyes, just for a minute. Now that I was here, at Bill’s, where no one was going to jump out of the shadows and jam a rice bag over my head and the scary figures of my youth weren’t going to phone, I realized I was feeling my day. I heard the door click shut behind Bill as I let myself relax into the familiar soft wool of his sofa cushions. A breeze from the open front windows trailed gently across my face on its way through the apartment and out the back.

  Even without the breeze I’d have known the windows were open. They always are. Bill was born in Kentucky, and his father, who had a desk job in the army, started moving the family from one subtropical Pacific base to another when Bill was nine. Bill claims to enjoy the heat, and he loves open windows. He even likes the hot air stirred up by fans much better than air-conditioning. I just put that on his list of faults. Although on a sweltering summer day, I have to admit, open windows and a ceiling fan have a certain amount to recommend them in the exoticism department; and on a warm spring day like this, the breeze from the windows moving through the room seems to tie this place to other places in the city in an offhand, intimate way, like the way something you see or hear during the day brings to mind an old friend. You might not call and tell them about it—you might even forget it the next minute—but the connection’s been made.

  “You okay?”

  I opened one eye to see Bill standing above me, trying to look casual, not doing it so well.

  “I’m perfect,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. But are you okay?”

  I opened both eyes and straightened up. “I’m fine. Fine fine fine.”

  “Fine,” said Bill. He might not have believed me, but he knows when not to press. “You want some tea, or something to eat? I have cookies. I bought them in case someday you showed up.” He headed for the kitchen, an area separated from the living room by a counter he’d built, as he had everything in the place, walls included.