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With a shock Wu suddenly understood. He looked away from the girl and gestured angrily toward the bathroom. "Use something in there."
"I can't. It's uncomfortable."
Wu was furious. It was his wife's job to take care of matters like this. No man he ever knew bought those . . . things. "All right!" he snapped. "All right. I'll buy you what you need." He refused to ask her what kind she wanted. He'd get the first box of whatever was in the closest store. She'd have to use that. He stepped outside and locked the door behind him.
Wu Qichen walked down the busy streets of Chinatown, hearing a cacophony of languages--Minnanhua, Cantonese, Putonghua, Vietnamese and Korean. English too, laced with more accents and dialects than he'd ever known existed.
He gazed at the stores and shops, the piles of merchandise, the huge high-rises ringing the city. New York seemed ten times bigger than Hong Kong and a hundred times the size of Fuzhou.
I'm scared for our children. We have to leave. We have to get as far away from here as we can . . . .
But Wu Qichen had no intention of leaving Manhattan. The forty-year-old man had nurtured a dream all his life and he wouldn't let his wife's sickness or the faint threat from a bully of a snakehead deter him from it. Wu Qichen was going to become a wealthy man, the richest ever in his family.
In his twenties he'd been a bellboy then a junior assistant manager at the Paradise Hotel on Hundong Road, near Hot Springs Park, in the heart of Fuzhou, waiting on rich Chinese and Europeans. Wu had decided then that he would be a successful businessman. He worked hard at the hotel and, even though he gave his parents a quarter of his income, he managed to save enough to buy a sundries and souvenir shop near the famous statue of Mao Zedong on Gutian Road with his two brothers. With the money they made from that store they bought one grocery then two more. They intended to run the businesses for several years and save as much money as they could then buy a building and make their fortune at real estate.
But Wu Qichen made one mistake.
The economic face of China was changing drastically. Economic free zones were prospering and even the top politicos had been speaking favorably of private business--the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping himself had said, "To be wealthy is glorious." But Wu neglected to remember the first rule of Chinese life: that the CCP--the Chinese Communist Party--runs the show. Wu was bluntly vocal in his call for closer economic ties with Taiwan, ending the iron rice bowl system of guaranteed employment regardless of productivity, and cracking down on party and government officials' taking bribes and levying arbitrary taxes on businesses. Ironically Wu didn't even care about what he advocated; his point was merely to attract the attention of Western trading partners--in Europe and America--who, he dreamed, would come to him with money to invest because he was the voice of the new Chinese economy.
But it wasn't the West who listened to the skinny man; it was the cadres and secretaries of the Communist Party. Suddenly governmental inspectors began appearing at the Wus' stores, finding dozens of violations of health and safety codes--many of which they simply made up on the spot. Unable to pay the crushing fines, the brothers were soon broke.
As shamed as he was by his lowered station, though, Wu refused to give up on his goal of becoming rich. And so, seduced by the fat opportunities in the Beautiful Country, Wu Qichen had bundled up his family and risked immigrating illegally. He would become a landlord in Chinatown. He would ride to work in a limousine and--when, finally, he was able to travel back to China--he would walk into the Paradise Hotel and stay in the grandest suite, the penthouse, the very room to which as a young man he had carried hundreds of bags.
No, his dreams had been delayed too long; the Ghost would not drive him from the city of money.
Wu now found a Chinese medicine store. He stepped inside and talked to the herbalist about his wife's condition. The doctor listened carefully and diagnosed deficient qi--the life spirit--and obstructed blood, both of which were aggravated by excessive cold. He put together a bundle of herbs for Wu, who reluctantly paid the huge bill of eighteen dollars, furious once again that he'd been taken advantage of.
Leaving the herbalist, he continued down the street to a Chinese grocery store. He stepped inside quickly, before his courage broke, found a basket and grabbed some groceries he didn't need. He swooped past the drug section, picking up a box of women's pads for his daughter. He walked quickly to the counter and kept his eyes on a glass container of ginseng root throughout the entire transaction. The gray-haired woman rang up the purchase and, though she didn't smile or call attention to his purchase, Wu knew she was laughing at him. He left the store with his head down and his face as red as the Chinese flag.
Wu turned in the direction of his apartment but after five minutes of fast walking he slowed and began meandering through the side streets. He was concerned about his wife, of course, and about leaving his children but, gods of heaven, this day had been a nightmare. He'd nearly been killed in a shipwreck, he'd lost all his possessions, had been cheated by Jimmy Mah and the real estate broker. And, worst of all, he'd endured the shame and humiliation of buying what was in the bag in his hand right now. He decided that he needed some diversion, some male companionship.
It took only a few minutes to find what he'd sought: A Fujianese gambling den. After showing his money to the guard in front he was admitted.
He sat silently for a time, playing thirteen points, smoking and
drinking some baijiu. He won a little money and began to feel better. Another cup of the powerful, clear spirits, then another and finally he relaxed--making sure, though, that the grocery bag was completely hidden beneath his chair.
Eventually he struck up a conversation with the men around him and from the thirty dollars he won--a huge sum to him--he bought them drinks. Drunk and in good humor, he told a joke and a number of the men laughed hard. With the conspiratorial tone of men alone they all shared stories of disobedient wives and disrespectful children, the places they now lived and what jobs they had--or were seeking.
Wu lifted his cup. "Here is to Zai Chen," he announced drunkenly. This was the god of wealth and one of the most revered throughout China. Wu believed that he had a special connection with this folk deity.
The men all tossed back their drinks.
"You're new here," an old man said. "When did you come over?"
Pleased that he had the spotlight among his equals, Wu bragged in a whisper, "Just this morning. On the ship that sank."
"The Fuzhou Dragon?" one man asked, his eyebrow raised. "It was on the news. They said the seas were terrible."
"Ah," Wu said, "the waves were fifteen meters high! The snakehead tried to kill us all but I got a dozen people out of the hold. And then I had to swim underwater to cut a life raft off the deck. I nearly drowned. But I managed to get us to shore."
"You did that yourself?"
He looked down sadly. "I couldn't save them all. But I tried."
Another asked him, "Is your family all right?"
"Yes," Wu answered drunkenly.
