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Just as the police leave, a truck driver calls out to Sam, “Hey, buddy get me a piece of that blueberry pie to go, will ya?”
Maybe Sam’s still nervous about the policemen’s visit, because he ignores the request and continues washing glasses. By now it seems like an eternity ago that I learned from my coaching book that Sam was to be the manager of the café, but actually his position is somewhere between a glass washer and a dish washer. I watch him as I serve eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee for thirty-five cents or a jelly roll and coffee for a nickel. Someone asks Sam for a coffee refill, but he doesn’t go over with the pot until the man taps the edge of his cup impatiently. A half hour later, that same man asks for his bill, and Sam points to me. Not once does he say a word to any of our customers.
The breakfast rush slows. Sam gathers dirty plates and silverware, while I follow after him with a wet cloth to wipe the tables and counters.
“Sam,” I say in English, “why don’t you talk to our customers?” When he doesn’t respond, I go on, still in English. “In Shanghai, the lo fan always said that Chinese waiters were surly and bad-mannered. You don’t want our customers to think that about you, do you?”
His look fades into nervousness, and he gnaws his lower lip.
I switch to Sze Yup. “You don’t know English, do you?”
“I know some,” he says. Then he amends this, smiling sheepishly. “A little. Very little.”
“How can that be?”
“I was born in China. Why would I know it?”
“Because you lived here until you were seven.”
“That was a long time ago. I don’t remember the words from then.”
“But didn’t you study it in China?” I ask. Everyone I knew in Shanghai learned English. Even May who was a very poor student, knows the language.
Sam doesn’t respond directly. “I can try to speak English, but the customers refuse to understand me. And when they talk to me, I don’t understand them either.” He nods to the wall clock. “You’d better go.”
He’s always pushing me out the door. I know he goes somewhere in the mornings and in the late afternoons, just as I do. As a fu yen it’s not my place to ask where he goes. If Sam is gambling or has hired someone to do the husband-wife thing with him, what can I do? If he’s one of those womanizer types, what can I do? If he’s a gambler like my father, what can I do? I learned to be a wife from my mother and from watching Yen-yen, and I know there’s nothing you can do if your husband wants to walk out on you. You don’t know where he goes. He comes back when he comes back, and that’s it.
I wash my hands and take off my apron. As I walk to the Golden Lantern, I think about what Sam said. How can he not know English? My English is perfect—and I’ve learned it’s polite to say Occidental instead of lo fan or fan gwaytze and Oriental instead of Chinaman or Chink—but I understand that isn’t the way to get a tip or make a sale. People come to China City to be entertained. Customers like me to speak wantee-chop-suey English—and how easy that is, after I’ve listened to Vern, Old Man Louie, and so many others, who were born here but speak crooked, misshapen English. For me, it’s an act; for Sam, it’s ignorance—country, and as distasteful to me as his secret dalliances with who knows who.
I reach the Golden Lantern, where Yen-yen sells curios and babysits Joy. Together we polish, dust, and sweep. When I finish, I play with Joy for a while. At 11:30, I once again leave Joy with Yen-yen and go back to the café, where as fast as I can I serve hamburgers for fifteen cents. Our hamburgers aren’t as popular as the Chinaburgers at Fook Gay’s Café, with their stir-fried bean sprouts, black mushrooms, and soy sauce, but we do well with our bowls of salted fish with pork for ten cents, and plain bowls of rice and tea for five cents.
After lunch, I work at the Golden Lotus, selling silk flowers until Vern arrives from school. Then I go to the Golden Pagoda. I want to talk to my sister about our plans for Christmas Day, but she’s busy convincing a customer that a piece of lacquer was painted on a raft in the middle of a lake lest a speck of dust mar the perfection of its surface, and I’m busy sweeping, dusting, polishing, and shining.
Before heading back to the café, I return to the Golden Lantern, pick up Joy, and take her for a short walk through China City’s alleys. Much like the tourists, she loves to watch the rickshaws. Golden Rickshaw rides are hugely popular—they’re Old Man Louie’s most successful enterprise. Johnny Yee, one of the local boys, pulls rickshaws for celebrities or for promotional photographs, but usually Miguel, Jose, and Ramon do the job. They earn tips and a small percentage of the twenty-five-cent fare for each ride. They get a little more if they can persuade a customer to buy a photo for an extra twenty-five cents.
Today a woman passenger kicks Miguel and then swats him with her purse. Why would she do that? Because she can. The way pullers were treated in Shanghai never bothered me. Was it because my father owned the business? Because I was like this white woman—above the pullers? Because in Shanghai pullers were barely better than dogs, whereas here May and I are now in their class? I have to say yes, yes, and yes again.
I drop Joy back with her grandmother, kiss my baby good
night because I won’t see her again until I go home, and then spend the rest of the evening serving sweet-and-sour pork, cashew chicken, and chop suey—all dishes I never saw or even heard of in Shanghai—until closing time at ten. Sam stays to lock up, and I start out for the apartment alone, wending my way through the festive Christmas Eve crowds on Olvera Street rather than walk alone on Main.
I’m ashamed that May and I have ended up here. I blame myself that we work so hard and never receive even one of the lo fan dimes. Once when I held out my hand to Old Man Louie and asked for pay, he spit on my palm. “You have food to eat and a place to sleep,” he said. “You and your sister don’t need any money.” And that was the end of that, except that I’m starting to get a sense of what we might be worth. Most people in China City make thirty to fifty dollars a month. Glass washers make only twenty dollars a month, while dish washers and waiters take home between forty and fifty dollars a month. Uncle Wilburt earns seventy dollars a month, which is considered a very good wage.
“How much money did you make this week?” I ask Sam every Saturday night. “Have you put any money aside?” I hope that someday, somehow, he will give me some of those funds to leave this place. But he never tells me what he earns. He just bends his head, cleans a table, scoops Joy off the floor, or goes down the hall to the bathroom and shuts the door.
Looking back, I can see how Mama, Baba, May, and I believed Old Man Louie was wealthy. In Shanghai, our family had been well-to-do. Baba had his own business. We had a house and servants. We thought the old man had to be considerably richer than we were. Now I see things differently. An American dollar went a long way in Shanghai, where everything from housing and clothes to wives like us was cheap. In Shanghai, we looked at Old Man Louie and saw what we chose to see: a man who bragged through money. He made us look and feel insignificant by treating Baba with great disdain during his visits. But it was all a lie, because here in the Land of the Flowery Flag, Old Man Louie is better off than most in China City but poor nevertheless. Yes, he has five businesses, but they’re small—minuscule really, at fifty square feet here and a hundred square feet there—and even together don’t add up to much. After all, his fifty thousand dollars in merchandise has zero value if no one buys it. But if my family had come here, we would have been at the bottom of the heap with the laundrymen, glass washers, and vegetable peddlers.
On that dreary thought, I climb the stairs to the apartment, strip off my smelly clothes, and leave them in a pile in a corner of the room. I get in bed and try to stay awake to enjoy a few minutes of quiet and stillness with my baby already asleep in her drawer.
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, we dress and join the others in the main room. Yen-yen and Old Man Louie repair broken vases that arrived in a shipment from a curio shop in San Francisco that went out of business. May stirs a pot of jook on the hot plate in the kitchen. Vern sits with his parents, looking around, hopeful yet forlorn. He’s grown up here and goes to American school, so he knows about Christmas. In the last two weeks, he’s brought home a few Christmas decorations that he made in art class, but other than these there isn’t a single thing to suggest the holiday: no stockings, no tree, and no gifts. Vern looks like he wants to celebrate, but what can he do or say? He’s a son in his parents’ home and he has to accept their rules. May and I glance at each other, then at Vern, and back at each other. We understand how he feels. In Shanghai, May and I celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus at the mission school, but it wasn’t a holiday Mama and Papa acknowledged in any way. Now that we’re here, we want to celebrate like lo fan.
“What shall we do today?” May asks optimistically. “Shall we go to the Plaza church and Olvera Street? They’ll have festivities.”
“We don’t do things with those people,” Old Man Louie says.
“I’m not saying we have to do something with them,” May responds. “I just think it would be interesting to see how they celebrate.”
But by now May and I have learned there’s no point in arguing with our in-laws. We just have to be happy that we have a day off from work.
