Face (22 page)

“Or redheads.”

He cupped his hand over my shoulder and squeezed. “They’re suspicious of what they don’t know. Human nature.”

“Tai.” The name was beginning to seem natural.

He took his hand away. “It’s all right.”

We entered a large open room filled with card tables, soft pop music, and some fifty players intent on the ivory before them.
Old palms swam through the tiles, cut circles and swirls. They might have been choreographed.

A man at the closest table squinted at me. He had a wispy goatee and balloons of skin beneath his eyes. He stared for a second,
then waggled his fingers low and wild to get his partners’ attention, jabbed the air in my direction until everybody looked
up.

I nudged Tommy. “White eyes?”

He leaned over and spoke to the man in Chinese, and a few seconds later the old face fanned wide open. The man grabbed my
hand and rubbed it between his shrunken palms.

“Miss Chung! Miss Chung! You remember me, yes? Grocer Hu?” He thumped his chest. “You go ’way, all grown-up, come back a beautiful
lady.”

The warmth of his grip, his smile, his words worked together. My face went hot and I had to fight a sudden impulse of tears.

Tommy folded his arms across his chest. “Told you you’d meet some old friends.”

I took a deep breath, squeezed Grocer Hu’s hand, and leaned down to meet his mah-jongg partners. Uncle Fah-chi, a rotund figure
with thick, distorting glasses and a smile like a sideways question mark, used to manage the Long Ho Restaurant on Mulberry
Street, but maybe I never knew him because of his hours, two P.M. to four A.M. most nights. I wouldn’t remember Auntie Mee
and Auntie Soong because they had come to Chinatown only in the past ten years. “Not old-timers like you and me!” Hu cried,
which set off another gale of Chinese laughter like a mad fluttering of wings.

“I do believe you’re in love,” Tommy whispered as we moved on.

“I didn’t think he knew I existed.”

“Everybody knew about you. You had the best view in Chinatown.”

“I did, didn’t I?” I was smiling. I was an old-timer. The notion was as exhilarating as it was absurd. All over the room heads
started to wag, wizened mouths broke into grins, and black eyes snapped with curiosity. Not a single pair of white eyes.

“Maibelle, this is David Ling.”

I turned and came face-to-face with the ponytailed man I’d last seen barking like a seal. His smile curled into a bemused
frown. He knew me but couldn’t place where. I considered not telling him, but the flush of Hu’s recognition still held me
in its protective bubble.

“The bus protest.”

“Oh, no. You’re the lunatic who ran across six lanes of traffic.”

“Trying to get away from you and your welcome wagon.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

“So are you.”

“Mind filling me in?” asked Tommy.

“That bus protest last week. We confused her with the tourists—I’m afraid we came on a little too strong.”

I couldn’t read the dimple that appeared in Tommy’s cheek, but all he said was, “Sounds like an apology is in order. And an
introduction. Maibelle was living on Mott Street when you were still protesting diaper changes back in Taiwan.”

We shook hands cautiously.

“Please forgive me. Sometimes political activism leads to personal stupidity.”

I smiled in spite of myself. Stupidity is such a relative term; what would he think if I told him mine was caused by probable
insanity?

Instead, I calmly—even sedately—answered, “No face lost.”

Tommy explained that David was director of the seniors’ center. It seemed that, while he objected to the tourists taking pictures
of Chinatown, David fully endorsed Tommy’s project. Now, as he strode across the room waving and patting backs like a politician
shilling for votes, he subtly directed me toward the faces that were worth photographing.

This one, he said, was a card shark in Canton before the war, that one sold tires to the Japanese. This man with the scar
across his scalp was shot by the Red Army and left for dead in a ditch. That woman with the glass eye was raped and watched
her husband being beheaded by the Japanese in Nanking. Most of the men had spent their American lives working fourteen-hour
shifts in laundries or restaurants. Some had been caught and sent back to China three or four times.

As David talked I had the odd, unsettling feeling that I was looking at surviving shadows of my father’s photographs. These
people had lived the scenes he witnessed. Some may have been his actual subjects. He claimed to know no one in Chinatown,
certainly had never spoken of this common past. If it weren’t for my college professor—and indirectly for Mum urging me to
study photography—I would never have made this connection. Yet it was my father who, by giving me his camera and urging me
to use it, had set me up for this moment and the sense of responsibility that swept over me now. A responsibility quite different
from the one my mother had been hammering into me for years, this had nothing at all to do with Art, and I was utterly unprepared
to fulfill it.

“These people have been through hell,” said David. “But they feel safe here. This—a game of mah-jongg with friends—is their
reward.”

Across the room, Tommy sat next to a lady wearing a black turtle-neck and glossy black wig. He laid out his tape recorder
and notebook.

“Is it wise to make them relive the past?” I asked David.

“They don’t forget because they want to, but because they’re afraid to remember. Tai thinks recording their stories can help
them get over the fear. Break Chinatown’s code of silence.”

“You agree?”

David smiled to a humpbacked man in a plaid beret. “Not sure. But the stories are too important to lose. For all of us.”

I wandered among the players for nearly an hour before they lost interest in me. More than once I felt my body physically
pulling for the
exit, but Tommy or David would catch me with an encouraging glance. I finally extracted the Leica from my pocket and began
to focus.

My first subject was the woman with the glass eye. I couldn’t help it. If what David had said was true, she’d survived unspeakable
horrors. She could conceivably have been the young wife of that headless body in my father’s photograph. But would I know
it to see her now? The glass eye looked at once straight ahead and out to the side—like the moon on a clear night following
its watcher without ever moving. Her other eye pounced and darted from players to tiles. Lacquer birds dangled from her ears,
red chopsticks pierced the knot of stark white hair at the nape of her neck. Her pink Mets sweatshirt covered her knees.

She couldn’t have been taller than five feet or weighed more than eighty pounds, and though I didn’t understand a word she
said, I could see she ran a wicked game of mah-jongg. She played for over an hour winning virtually every hand until a mountain
of chips sealed the space before her, and the others at the table were begging to switch to fan-tan. At which point she gave
me exactly what I only that moment realized I’d been waiting for—a grin of exuberant, toothless triumph. Survivor as victor.
Then she hoisted herself with a great deal of effort and evident pain onto two bamboo canes. Her winnings tucked inside her
sweatshirt, she left her partners to their cards.

I moved on to two deaf couples who managed to simultaneously play, chain-smoke, and talk with their hands. My shot came when
one of the husbands told a joke that annoyed his wife. I caught him weeping with laughter, hands shaping a swan, while she
furiously sliced the air, her manicured fingers joined into a sword.

The more subjects I found, the more seemed to appear and the less I
consciously
thought about what I was doing. A man in a brown felt coat at least thirty years out of style hummed along with the golden
canary he kept in a cage on the floor. His friend with a crewcut and skin like a walnut shell, one jet-black eye and one amber—the
same colors as his teeth—broke spontaneously into a Hank Williams tune. Behind him and completely oblivious to his beat, a
man and a woman in
matching baby-blue sweat suits slowly, hypnotically, practiced t’ai chi. The Leica caught them all.

Finally I returned to the first table to take Lao Hu’s portrait. The two aunties had joined a crew of ladies fixing tea in
the kitchen, but Hu and Fah-chi were only too happy to pose for me. They each gripped the edge of the table and sat up straight,
stared at the camera, and stretched their lips back until their gums showed. With that landscape screen directly behind them,
their identical white shirts and pens in their pockets, with Fah-chi goggled-eyed through those Coke-bottle glasses, they
looked like perfect caricatures of old Chinese power brokers. I lowered the camera, wanting a more accurate way to frame them.

Fah-chi leaned forward and stared at me so hard his eyebrows touched together. I smiled back and shot. Shot again as the old
man bored through the lens. A steady hand, my father said. That’s all it took. But my hand, inevitably, was shaking.

Whatever he was looking at or for, I told myself, I mustn’t take it as an affront. The day had been a success. I’d passed
inspection. I’d kept my head, even enjoyed myself. No villains. No demons. Now Tommy, who had spent the past half hour interviewing
the Hank Williams fan, was striding across the room. In a minute or two we’d be gone.

“I know!” The tiles leapt as Fah-chi’s hand slammed the table. “You are Li’s girl! Mei-bi Chung, yes? His little Jade Maiden.”

I glanced at Tommy, who stood just outside our circle. He folded his arms.

“You were friends?” I asked Fah-chi cautiously.

“Same fong. Same barber. I hear a lot about you for some time. I hear he taught you to write Chinese.”

“No.” I waved my hand to force down the blush I again felt stinging my cheeks. “No. He tried but I wasn’t a very good student.”

“You are like a daughter to him.”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t a very good daughter, either.”

“Ah, you show Chinese humility. Li would be proud of you.”

But I wasn’t being humble at all. I was simply telling the truth.

A few minutes later I left Tommy on the corner of Canal Street with
an honest hug. The morning had been a success, after all. The whole way home I couldn’t stop thinking about Lao Li.

I’d ignored my father’s prohibition, of course. Lao Li’s tacit offer of stories and friendship had the power of a spell. In
no time I was visiting once or twice a week.

Always he greeted me with a cup of tea and a cookie from the pink box under his desk. He asked after my family’s health, then
had me select an object in his shop. Every one of Li’s artifacts, it seemed, had a mystical tale to go with it. The falling-apart
rickshaw, for example, had belonged to a leper who was transformed into a monkey after helping the Emperor Yung Yen’s third
son escape from an evil warlord. When I asked if the leper really preferred to be a monkey, Mr. Li answered, “Monkeys very
powerful. They keep away evil spirits.” As if the leper could not have asked for a better fate.

A set of porcelain wine cups prompted a story of scholar-poets gathered by a country stream to drink themselves into a state
of grace and compose by the light of the moon. From the ornamental dragons on an opium pipe came a tale of men enslaved by
demons. And when Li took me into the river gorges of a landscape scroll, I heard the dying sighs of coolies, the cries of
drowning men. The China Lao Li taught me to fear and love was a world where magic and real life mingled without warning.

One day he gave me a set of miniature masks in the form of finger puppets. Made of clay, they were smooth and cool as eggshell,
the painted surface chalky.

“This story is called Pearl-sewn Shirt.”

On one forefinger he placed the mask of a beautiful young woman, pink as a baby with curving red mouth and gentle, lifting
eyes. On the other he placed a young merchant’s face, white with darkened eyes and a serious half-smile. Lao Li danced the
man and woman together, accompanying them with the high-pitched wail of Chinese opera: quick,
teasing movements and song, slowing to the low swoon of courtship, then picking up to the measured beat of marriage.

“Great joy. Pure bliss. Young bride demonstrate her love by sewing for husband a shirt of pearls. Alas, husband must soon
go away to sell his silks and jewels.” The bride’s mask plucks a white embroidered cloth. “But as reminder of fidelity, wife
will keep that pearl-sewn shirt and show her face to no man until beloved returns.

“Days pour into months, months into years. Neighbors begin to whisper that young wife has been abandoned, husband killed.
But one day young wife peek around compound wall. Beloved returns!” A new man’s mask, all white with swooping eyes and bloodred
lips, swaggers to and fro.

“No! No! This is not husband but no-name silver trader. She pull away but too late. He has seen her great beauty and cannot
rest.” An orange puppet quivers to a high note. “New man find town matchmaker! She bewitches our lady with stories of love
and pleasure. Young wife beg her new friend stay, talk late. Deep in night, matchmaker secretly push this silver trader into
our lady’s bed.” The white and pink masks roll together. “Such rapture! Such passion!”