Paper Daughter (16 page)

"Frankly," Jillian said, "my dad should have it so good. But I'm not calling about my absentee parent. I'm calling about yours, not that dead is exactly the same as absentee. But I've got an idea. You told me he'd been trying to find his birth family."

"I said I
thought
he might have been."

"Well, you're Chinese, right?"

"About a million generations back." I caught myself. "On Mom's side, anyway. I guess I don't know when Dad's people came here."

"My point is," she said, "have you considered that your father might have gone to the International District because he was looking for them there? The area used to be called Chinatown."

I told her it hadn't occurred to me because what I knew involved California. But ...
possible search will end here?
Was it also because some unconscious part of me hadn't wanted a family search to lead to a place—to people—still foreign? I didn't want to think so.

I concentrated on what she was saying. If Dad had gone there hunting for family, it would be the reason I wanted, a reason that had nothing to do with Landin or the others, or with blackmail or bribes. And if I could find someone he'd talked to, I'd have proof.

"But how would I even start trying to find out?" I said. "I can't just go to hundreds, maybe thousands of doors, asking people if my father had been to see them. That's crazy."

"Hey," she said. "I didn't say I had answers for you. Just an idea. But if you do figure out what to do and want my help, call."

***

Right after I hung up, Mom came into the kitchen carrying empty canvas shopping bags. She pointedly ignored the newspaper. "I'll mail those bills you paid yesterday," she said. "Any problems with them?"

"No, except we can probably save some money on phone expenses. Dad must have done a lot more calling than we do."

"Part of his job," she said. "The wire service used to reimburse us for the business portion."

I promised to dig out our plan so we'd know what we could change.

Her comment had made something click, though, and once she was gone I got out the prior month's phone bill from among the business papers I'd dried and put away after the basement flood. It included the last couple of weeks that Dad had made calls, and it listed every one—the number, the place, how long.

And just as I'd thought, right there, about a week before he died, was a long stretch of calls to California. Ignoring only the very shortest, I went to work.

***

The first several calls got me nowhere except to unpromising machine messages or people who hung up or swore. The one man who did recognize Dad's name said, "Is this some kind of a scam? I told him I don't talk to strangers!"

And then I got hold of a woman who not only had talked to Dad but who said to me, "Oh, and it was good to hear from him. As though I could forget my little boy!"

My little boy!
I almost didn't hear what she said next, I was so busy taking in the idea that I might have reached his mother.
My grandmother?

I felt lightheaded for a moment, and dizzy with hope. Excited. In worrying over Dad, I'd almost forgotten this hunt was for me, too.

But then, as the woman kept talking, I realized she wasn't Dad's mom, but a woman who once ran a foster home and had taken care of him when he was in elementary school.

"He was sweet but so sad, and who could blame him?" she said. "All that nonsense about how people pull for underdogs—don't you believe it. Children can be cruel. And as for grownups ... I wanted to shake some of the adults and say it wouldn't hurt you to invite these kids to a birthday party now and then, but they never did. Some of the kids who came here already had shells you couldn't get through, but not Steven. I'd go in to tell him good night and find him staring up at the ceiling, wanting to know why no one had adopted him. I used to call him my lonely heart."

I had to swallow back a lump in my throat before asking the other questions I'd called with.

She said that, yes, when Dad called her, it had been to find out if she could tell him anything about his past.

And no, she hadn't known anything to tell him.

She was glad he'd tracked her down, though, and she was very, very sorry to learn he'd died.

"But you sound like a nice daughter," she said. "I'm glad he finally got a family of his own."

***

I plowed through more California numbers. One got me to a department store and another to a man with a heavy accent—Russian, maybe—who'd never heard of my father. I was getting toward the end of the list when I called a San Francisco number.

A rough-voiced, older-sounding woman answered, "Yes?" In the background a car commercial blared.

She let me get only partway into explaining that I was calling about Steven Chen.

"Look," she said. "I told him I can't remember the doings of all the kids who ran through here. He was lucky I had a picture for him. I wouldn't of, if I'd remembered it when I packed him up."

"A photo?" I asked.

"What else? You hoped for something valuable? Kids like him don't have nothing valuable, and if they do, you can bet some agency worker's gonna make it disappear."

"But you kept the photo all these years?"

"In a drawer. Never got around to throwing it away."

And, I bet, never tried to send it to him, either,
I thought, suddenly so angry for my dad's sake I could hardly talk. I willed my voice steady because I had to learn all I could.

"Please," I said, "would you just tell me about the picture? Was it someone's portrait?"

"No. Just a street. Some old Chinatown, it looked like."

"Was anything written on it?"

"Maybe. On the back. A little. I gotta go."

"Wait," I said. "Just tell me, did you mail it to him?"

"When he sent me an envelope with a stamp. I'm not a charity."

"And the words on the back. Do you remember any of them? It's really important."

"There was a name.
LO, LE,
"she spelled. "Something foreign. I'm missing my show," she said, and she hung up.

A
picture of an old-time Chinatown,
I thought. I hadn't seen anything like that when I was sorting though the things from Dad's office. I had no faith that the woman had even sent it, stamped envelope or not.

Maybe it was a picture of San Francisco's Chinatown, since that's where she lived. But if it was, it wouldn't do me any good. I needed it to be Seattle. Or rather, I needed the name on the back to be a Seattle person Dad might have gone to see.

I wished I'd thought to ask the woman if there'd been a date.

I looked up both names in the phone book, locating the addresses on a map. There was only one Lo and no Le listings at all for within a few miles of where Dad got killed. Then I realized I might be spelling Le wrong, and checked Li and Lee. That gave me three possibilities.

I left a note for Mom in case she got home before I did: "Have some things to do in town. Will be back in time to start dinner." And then I got into my car and headed south.

Exiting I-5, I made my way through the International District and into an area of irregular blocks and construction detours. Becoming more and more confused as I drove, I pulled over twice to study the map I'd brought with me.

Finally, though, I got to the first place, only to find scattered bricks and debris where an old building had stood.

Mr. Lo, at the second address, thought I was a Meals on Wheels lady and threatened to report me if I didn't hand over his food. I escaped when the real one arrived, apologizing for being late.

An exchange student lived alone at the third place I drove to.

I got back in my car and went hunting for the last address, backtracking several times before finding the street.

Small older houses lined it, some with plastic toys spilling onto sidewalks. At a couple of places, added-on ramps provided wheelchair access.

The one I wanted was three blocks down, a neat brick home set apart from its neighbors by a garden that took up almost the whole yard. An old man was running a hose at the base of a rosebush laden with white blossoms. A boy on a ladder painted window trim.

Neither person turned around when I parked behind a pickup and got out, probably because the racket of a neighbor's power mower kept them from hearing me. Going up the short walkway, I called, "Hi!" and again, more loudly, "Hello!"

It startled the old man, who turned abruptly. A jet of water hit the cardigan I'd thrown over my shoulders, soaking one sleeve before my startled exclamation made him turn the hose away.

I started to protest and then saw his unfocused gaze searching for me. A long white cane lay by the edge of the garden. "I hope I did not hit you with the water," he said.

"I'm fine," I said, draping the wet sweater over a low fence. "Are you Mr. Li?"

"I am Fai-yi Li. And you? You sound like a young person."

He was even older than I'd first thought—perhaps in his nineties—and I could hear the trace of another language in his carefully enunciated words.

"I'm Maggie Chen. I'm still in high school," I said.

I hesitated, trying to frame the least awkward way to ask what I'd come to find out.

"I would like to know if my father, Steven Chen, visited you recently. He died in an accident near here a few weeks ago, and questions have come up that make it important to know why he was in this part of Seattle."

"Please accept my sympathy for your loss," Mr. Li said. "But I have had no visitors in quite some time. Certainly I did not know Mr. Chen."

Just then the painter, who appeared to be about my age, joined us. Glancing at the
Herald
parking decal on my car window, he said, "If you're selling newspaper subscriptions, my uncle doesn't want one."

"Ian," Mr. Li said, "this young lady's father died recently, and she came to ask if he had been here."

"Oh! Sorry! But why would he?"

"He was searching for information about his birth family," I said. "Or at least I think he was. He didn't have a lot to go on, but I think that just before his death he'd gotten a name. I'm not sure, but it might have been
Li.
"

"As I have told you, that is my name," the old man said. "But I think your father must have been looking for someone else. I have no family except for a sister who never married and my great-nephew, Ian, here, and his parents."

"But perhaps you might know of someone who..."

Mr. Li shook his head. "I know few people outside my own family, which, as I said, is very small."

"But years ago?" I persisted. "My dad was in his late forties, so he'd have been born—"

"Years ago, I was a laundryman. From the time we came here in 1932, that is what I was. A laundryman and the owner of laundries. Almost the only people I saw were customers, and all I knew of them was how they liked their shirts to be finished."

A slow
scritch
sounded behind us. A frail, tiny woman dressed in black had turned in, pushing a wheeled walker. I could see a few vegetables in a net bag that hung from one handle. She moved carefully, watching the path, her head bent.

"Ah!" Mr. Li tilted his head toward the sound. "Here is my sister now. Sucheng," he said, "this young woman would like to know if her father, Mr. Steven Chen, came to see us."

The woman looked up then, and I saw her face, pitted and bitterly lined. An emotion that I couldn't read shone briefly in her eyes.

"No," she told me, "there has been no one here. And we do not like to be bothered by strangers."

"Sucheng!" Mr. Li exclaimed.

At that moment a pet flap in the front door squeaked open, and a large gray cat slipped out. It looked at me and then streaked away. Maybe no one at that house, not even Mr. Li with his careful politeness, liked strangers.

I left almost immediately afterward, feeling embarrassed and disappointed and mad at myself for believing I might clear Dad with a short car trip and a few questions.

And thinking about that, I didn't pay close enough attention to driving back more directly than I'd arrived, so that pretty soon I was turned around again.

Then I saw a street name I recognized. Without consciously deciding to do so, I turned and drove past a straggle of small businesses and houses with multiple mailboxes to an intersection that was burned in my mind, though I'd never been there before.

A tire shop with a
CLOSED
sign stood on one corner, a pawnshop on another. There was a boarded-up gas station and, opposite, the dirty-windowed convenience store where Dad had parked the night he was killed.

I pulled over and sat there for five, maybe ten minutes, trying to imagine and trying not to, and I couldn't have said why I stayed. I hadn't wanted to see where Dad died, and now that I had, it made me angry that the last place he ever saw was this dreary, failed corner.

A patrol car stopped next to me, and the policeman on the passenger side rolled down his window. He nodded toward the map on my dashboard. "Need directions?"

He told me how to get back to the interstate, and the patrol car followed till I'd made the first couple of turns and could see a sign to I-5 in the distance.

I waved a thanks for their help, though sooner or later I'd have found my way without it. It occurred to me, though, that in getting lost twice, I had at least proved to myself how easy it would have been for Dad, if he had gone to see someone in the International District, to have wound up at the convenience store by mistake. Yet since I hadn't established that he had...

Caught up in those thoughts, I almost reached the freeway's entrance ramp before I remembered my sweater. I made a U-turn and went back to retrieve it.

***

By the time I found the Li house, the afternoon sun was slanting at such an angle that blinds were closed all along their side of the street. No one was in the garden, and the pickup truck was gone and also my cardigan.

I went to the door, intending to ring the bell, but querulous voices coming clearly through the thin pet flap stopped me. I heard Mr. Li's sister, Sucheng, say, "You are an old fool, is still what I say. Why did you talk to her?"