“For classes,” he said. “The school is close to Penn Station, easy to get to.”
He looked at the brochure written in Chinese, on the front a picture of a young Chinese woman, smiling, a book splayed open in front of her.
The professor said, “It’s cheaper than taking classes here, which you might not be ready for anyway. This would prepare you.”
He kept staring at the brochures, did not know what to say, what to do.
The professor said, “Let me know if you have any questions, if you need help filling out the forms.” The professor reached out his hand. He looked at the gold band around the professor’s left ring finger, then shook his hand without thanking him.
The rest of the day, as he made his deliveries he wondered about the professor’s life, compared it to his own. On days off he sometimes took the bus to the movie theater in the shopping plaza, and like the baseball games, he could surmise what was happening by the the tone of voice and look on an actor’s face. Afterward he would browse through shops in the plaza, sometimes buying socks or undershirts or small things that he did not necessarily need. Other times he went to the open market and bought vegetables and meat and went home and tried to cook, but always seemed to burn his food. Then he would go to a restaurant where he would be surrounded by brown and black people—no whites, definitely no Chinese. He would look at the menu and point, a kind of guessing game, and he knew that no matter what they brought him he would eat it.
No one bothered him in these places, and was this so different from what an American might call life? He did not feel he was much better or worse off than anyone else around him. Except for when he was lonely, when he would argue with himself as to whether or not to go to the whore.
The professor, he thought, did not need to visit a whore. Nor did he wile away his time watching movies or burning food or hording money and constantly looking over his shoulder. The professor had a wife and children, he imagined; a big house somewhere in a neighborhood of identical houses, did not live within the rows of blocky brick buildings with rusted fire escapes draped top to bottom that surrounded the school. He pictured the professor’s home decorated with classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy, a shiny new car parked in the driveway, next to a green lawn where his children could safely play. He was sure he had more in that suitcase than the professor had in any bank, but the thought did not make him feel any better. What good was it if he could not spend it?
Maybe that was the problem. He could buy a small restaurant, but he knew nothing about the business except how to bus tables and make deliveries. Or he could open a store here in the Bronx that sold groceries and goods for Chinese people; but that would be silly because there were not enough Chinese. In the end he knew there was no way he could do any of these things without spending money and drawing attention to himself; and this was not like Chinatown where he knew he would feel less lonely, feel as if he were part of something again.
He remembered going just a few days after he had arrived, taking a car from the hotel into the city, all arranged by the desk clerk. (Americans, he thought, were no different than Chinese: You give them enough money and they will do anything for you.) The car dropped him off and the white driver got out and leaned on the hood, smoking and reading the paper, and he began walking toward the crowd of Chinese faces, felt relief hearing his own dialect and Cantonese and Mandarin street to street. The stores selling big crates full of herbs and spices, vegetables, fresh fish, roasted ducks, and barbecued meat hanging in the greasy windows. They sold clothes, shoes, perfume, watches, toys. He had been to a thousand markets like these in Fuzhou and Hong Kong, but here the feel of the air, the smell of the streets, even the ground beneath him felt different.
He walked below an overpass and past plain storefronts with Chinese signs advertising for workers. Here there were no blacks or whites or browns, only others like him. “You want to work? You—you want to work?” They were calling out in Fukienese, Cantonese. He ignored them, kept walking, felt his heart and stomach go slithery inside. He knew this was what everyone on the ship had come for—the chance to work nonstop every day to repay the debt that was their lives.
He went to a small restaurant on a side street and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup and small dragon buns. When the food came he did his best to eat slowly, the taste of the broth and beef slivers and noodles soaking into his mouth, his first real meal in months.
He picked up a Chinese newspaper from the table next to him and read about the ship, the
Six escaped.
He lit a cigarette and the waitress came over and said, “No smoking.”
He finished his meal and left. As he walked back to the car he felt the eyes of the city pressing in on him—the people, the buildings, the cars, the birds, the cracks in the concrete walls and streets surrounding. Maybe someone had spotted him and was already following, because this was America, a fast and wild and frightening place. Here, even among his own, he could feel how they were outsiders, transplanted.
On his way back to the hotel he stared out the window, remembered how he had heard the captain and the crew leader talking, how they had not received communication from shore, did not know if and when the boats would meet them out at sea as planned or if they were supposed to press on and dock.
He knew from all the muttering and murmuring that the situation was not good. They had been at sea now for three months. It had been bad from the beginning—those who grew sick and delirious right away, puking and shitting on themselves as if indigent and mad; then the fighting each day, passenger versus passenger, enforcer versus passenger; all of them hungry; breathing the air heavy with the smell of saltwater and sea-soaked metal and piss and shit and bodies festering and congealed. He dreaded his rounds below deck, could not imagine what it was like to be down there every minute of every day, as the passengers were not allowed above deck lest they be spotted from the air.
The things he had done, the horrors he had seen: the short man and the short man’s wife, letting them both die, then rolling them into the sea; swinging a club and cracking a man’s skull for stealing the crew’s water and food; a woman held down and fucked until she bled, and by the time he was inside her, her eyes were still open but she no longer screamed.
He had always thought of himself as a good and simple man, but now he knew this was not true.
He was in one of the sleeping cabins when he felt the crunch of the boat, heard the thunk and grind, thought that they had smashed their way onto shore. He was up on his feet, gliding toward the deck, heard the screaming, the footsteps and pounding, scrambling in the hold below, heard the thwack of the helicopter above, being chased by a swirling beam of light. Then he saw the flood of bodies coming up through the doors and hatches, spewing like a fountain, spreading across the deck like ants. More lights attacking, the helicopter circling, electric voices in
