I came here to lose. But the wheel won’t let me.
Once again I pile all of my chips on three. People gasp. What are the odds for winning eight straight-ups in a row?
Fools! Don’t they know wheels do not hold memory? That math and luck never go together? With roulette, every spin is new. Probability is as whimsical as life. Who would believe three is not even my lucky number?
You’d sneer at me, Mei. Superstitious, you’d say. But how can I not think that way? On March third, you walked out on me with our three-year-old son. Three years ago, you enrolled in Queens College to study English and computer science, and things began to go downhill.
Nonsense, you’d say. It has nothing to do with school.
But it does. How else could I explain your change of heart? I’m still the same Tiger Fan you loved seventeen years ago. Your mother threatened to disown you for going out with a guard soldier from the countryside. Your father pointed his gun at us when he caught me in your room. But nothing could stop you from loving me. You left your mansion without looking back and took the train with me all the way to the Pearl River. On the bank, we looked through the mist at Hong Kong on the other side. If we swam across, we’d be free. It would have taken only four hours. You shook your head, said you sank like a rock in water. But I knew you couldn’t bear bringing your family down further. Once you crossed over, you’d be an enemy of China. Even if your father denounced you, his military career would be over. At the border town, you slid a Swiss watch into the registrar’s sleeve and got our marriage certificate stamped. You sealed the red paper into a plastic bag and zipped it into my pocket, together with sixty U.S. dollars. How you got the money is still a mystery to me. If you make it, Tiger, you cried, hugging my neck, if we meet again, we’ll never part, dead or alive.
Seventeen years later, you laid quietly on your side of the bed in our Chinatown home. So quiet I couldn’t hear you breathe.
“Do you remember, Mei,” I asked in the dark, “do you remember?”
“I was young, a foolish sixteen-year-old,” you finally mumbled.
I don’t believe it. How can you forget? The scars are there, on your belly, chest, limbs, scars you burnt through the skin to keep me in your heart. Twelve years you waited, though no mail or phone could reach you from Hong Kong. Your family forced you to move on. Tiger Fan is long dead, your father announced. He’s married another woman and has children, your mother said. They brought you a troop of bachelors with great prospects for the future. But you faked insanity and checked yourself into a mental hospital.
And you couldn’t possibly forget the day we met at JFK! The tears we shed without shame, the joy over our first condo on Bayard Street, our first car, my store on Broadway, your green card …
Remember the birth of Jia?
But your ears shut down as soon as I started telling you how I almost drowned in the Pearl River, starved on the streets of Hong Kong, my spirit shattered from working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week in restaurants and antique stores until I saved enough for New York. Useless to point out how I burnt my bridges applying for a green card as a political refugee so that you could come legally, as my wife.
“Sorry, I no longer speak Chinese.” This is all I could get out of you after I spilled my guts.
The wheel shudders, stops at three. The dealer clears the chips from the losers, then stacks them up next to my bets. Thirty-five to one. How much have I won? Do I even care? Such dead silence around the table—all eyes wish me dead. I wish myself dead. I came to forget, but everything in this room—its Chinese name, Chinese customers, Chinese managers, and the damn Ping’s Noodle in the corner—stirs up memories. Even the dealer looks like your twin sister. How her almond eyes glow like embers!
Those ember eyes of yours, Mei. They used to melt me with each blink. Now they spew hate and hunger. How did that happen? What made you start speaking English at home? First with our son, then with me, even when I laughed, mocked and begged you to stop. I can humor every whim of yours, but not this, not at home. After twelve hours of twisting my tongue to please tourists in my store, I need to feel like a person again. Is it too much to ask? Aren’t we still Chinese?
“We’re New Yorkers now,” you said. “Let’s speak like New Yorkers, our first step to success. Look around, Tiger. Do any of your friends live in this ghetto? No! I’m not saying we should live in SoHo like Master Yao and his artist friends. But even Yingying and Bunny Song live somewhere else, although they can barely afford a meal in a cheap restaurant!”
I’m successful, too, just like everyone else, I almost shouted. I built my antique store from scratch in the heart of Chinatown. Do you know that every square inch of land here is worth more than gold, and our condo on Bayard Street is just as valuable as the loft in SoHo? Do you know Master Yao spent more time in my little store on Broadway than in his own grand studio? But the smirk on your lips stopped me cold. Since when did you pick up that white man’s look? I wish I could smack it off your face, once and for all.
“Dump that bitch, fast,” my friends say. “She’s your ill star, bringing you nothing but misfortune since you met her. She’s not even pretty, jaw too square, cheeks too high, signs of a man-killer. You’re still young, only thirty-five. With your looks and money, you can pick the most beautiful girls from Chinatown or Flushing.”
It’s true that women flock to my bed like moths to a light. Singles, divorcees, married women with husbands on the mainland, all beautiful and young, eager to please. They scream and writhe in my bed. They call me a true tiger and make me feel like a man. But as soon they’re out my door, I get sick to my stomach. I don’t know what they’re after, my money or my American passport. Probably both.
Ah, here comes another spin. My tablemates move their bets around as the ball leaps and rolls over the slot. Some pinch their chips between their fingers, waiting for me to make a move. I count out thirty-five chips and place them carefully on thirty-three.
Yesterday was your birthday. I made six dishes—three vegetarian and three seafood, your favorites—and a chocolate cake for our son Jia. I thought the little banquet might cheer you up. You often get depressed on your own birthdays. I dialed the number for your apartment in Sunset Park. It still blows me up whenever I think that you rented this tiny one-bedroom behind my back when we were still living together. Say whatever you want, but I just don’t believe that a normal person can find happiness in a rat hole. For a long time, you wouldn’t give me your phone number or address. Need to be alone for a while to clear your mind, you said. Clear my ass. Haven’t you figured out you can’t live without me? Don’t you know it isn’t that hard to find out where someone lives? Still so naïve, after all these years.
I listened to the ring with a clear conscience. It was your birthday, for heaven’s sake. I was inviting my wife to her birthday dinner. I wanted to hear you laugh, tell you that thirty-three was an auspicious number, like cuddling lovers, the symbol of “double happiness” on the door of the newly-wed. The phone rang and rang. Finally you picked it up, but you sounded nervous, anxious to hang up. Then I heard him, reading a story to my son behind a closed door. It was deep, muffled, a voice that didn’t need to shout to claim authority, a white man’s voice.
“Come back home, Mei. Now!” I screamed.
You waited till I lost my steam, then said, “Tiger, I just want a normal life. I want Jia to grow up good, not a hoodlum.”
You hung up and unplugged the phone.
I dumped the dinner into the garbage can.
You think I’m a tong, bitch! But how can I blame you? All the movies and TV shows you watch, the rumors behind doors, the bullets flying around the dark streets. Yes, there are tongs everywhere. But that’s only half of the truth. You never gave me a chance to tell my story.
The day I opened my shop, they drifted into the door like ghosts. Through their sunglasses, they looked at me without a word. I knew what they wanted. But instead of giving them the envelope with cash, I shouted, “Welcome to my store. Please have some candy and peanuts.”
They couldn’t believe their ears. You should see how their mouths dropped open like dead fish. The next day they came back and smashed a few plates and vases. They picked the biggest and shiniest ones, not knowing everything on display was imitation. The real stuff was locked in the safe. I opened the cash register.
“Look, it’s empty. I haven’t made a penny yet. If you loiter around my store every day, how can I get any customers? If I can’t do business, how can I make money to pay you guys?”
They looked at me as if I were nuts. I bet nobody had ever talked to them like that. Two days later, they came and placed a little black box on my counter. I opened it. It was an ear, dried and shriveled like an autumn leaf. I looked at it, looked at the two young thugs, who had no idea what tough meat tasted like.
“O.K.,” I said. “Tell your boss to meet me tonight, nine sharp, in the back room of Seafood Palace on Center Street.”
I took out my gun for Russian roulette. It was the first thing I’d bought after I made my pledge to Uncle Sam. It had taken me six years and forty thousand bucks to become an alien in this Yankee town. A perfect gift for the celebration. I’d played it in Beijing and Hong Kong. Not my choice at first. But it was the only way I could fend off the soldiers and thugs. The only way to show them I could play, and play hard, despite my pale skin and my girly face. I’m good, real good. Know when to stop. It’d be the first time I’d use it on American soil, and I hoped it’d be the last.
I got there at eight-thirty, ordered an eighteen-dish banquet, poured two glasses of white grain spirit, and waited. The boss arrived, a scrawny little guy, guarded by his seven brothers. I stood up, showed him my full glass, bottomed it, then pushed his glass over. He stared in disbelief. His bodyguards lifted their shirts, showing off the knives that dangled on their belts. I laughed, pulled out my gun, put a bullet in, twirled the cylinder, and put it against my temple. I pulled the trigger.
They all went pale.
I placed my blue beauty next to his glass, still untouched.
He stared at it like a zombie.
I slid a red envelope to the scrawny shrimp. It was swollen with fifty twenty-dollar bills. “Believe it or not, you’re the first people who stepped in my store. According to the custom of my trade, you get a present from me, as a lucky omen. Tomorrow I’ll receive my regular clients. One of them is the head of the police station on Elizabeth Street, known as Hawk. I’m sure you’re well acquainted with him. But I bet you don’t know he’s a fanatic antique collector. If you have a chance to visit his home, you’ll see his collection. Perhaps you guys should drop by my store also, have a chat with him. He’s not as ferocious as he looks, if you get to know him.”
If you had seen the way they ran, Mei, you’d know they’d never show their pimpled faces in my store again. I sat down, alone, ate the eighteen-course dinner, drank the whole bottle of liquor. It’s a shame to waste food, under any circumstance.
I wish you would believe that I run my business clean in Chinatown.
The wheel is slowing down. The dealer gives me a look, clears her throat. She seems to wait for me to change my mind before she calls out “No more bets.” Thirty-three is just a column. It pays only two to one, far less exciting than straight-ups or splits. But what do I care? I didn’t come here to win in the first place. Besides, once I make up my mind, I stand firm. I’m pigheaded like you. We have twin spirits.
The first night of our reunion, you wouldn’t let me keep the light on. I thought you were just being shy. As I buried my face between your breasts, I felt the scars. I switched on the light. Your torso was covered, some perfectly round, like cigarette burns, some with perforated edges like a poppy pod.
“Who did that to you?” I screamed in horror. “Tell me who did it. I swear I’ll get them, one by one.”
“Shh,” you hushed, sealing my lips with your slender fingers. “I did it to myself, just to prove I was mad, a real huachi who lost her mind for love, no longer fit for marriage.”
I bawled into your belly. How could I ever pay back such love in this life?
“Tiger, Tiger, look at me.” You cradled my face and cooed like a pigeon at my ear. “It wasn’t painful, not at all, not compared to the pain of longing for you, for not knowing where you were, how you were doing. I knew you were alive, no matter what they told me. I knew you were alive because I was still hanging on. Tiger, my sweetheart and lover, look at me, look at my belly. What do you see? It’s your face, your profile, if you link the dots together. Here’s the forehead, the nose, the lips, and chin. Here, here, feel them.” You grabbed my finger to trace the scars that formed a constellation.
And I remembered the first time I met you, outside your father’s mansion. You were reading on the front steps, the breeze blowing the fuzzy hair of your nape this way and that, like the waves of a golden harvest. I felt dizzy, weightless, a buoy in space. I have been floating in your universe ever since.
But it all disappeared when you exploded without a warning. No, not true. There were signs. First the change from Mei to May, then the abandonment of Chinese, your hatred for Chinatown, and the constant nagging about me being a gangster. I shouldn’t have laughed it off. I should have paid more attention.
I tried everything I could to clear my name. But you just yelled, despair in your eyes, “How could you survive in this town otherwise? Those damn tourists stare at me like a whore. They even have the nerve to ask why I don’t wear the sexy gown that split at my thighs.”
“All right,” I said finally. “Give me a year to sell out. We’ll move wherever you want, SoHo, Flushing, Brooklyn, White Plains, even New Jersey.”
I thought you’d jump with joy.
“Doesn’t matter where you live,” you screamed. “You are Chinatown.”
Bitch!
But you’re right. I am Chinatown. I live there, buy and sell stuff robbed from tombs hundreds, thousands of years old. I wear my watermelon hat and silk robe, just like a Chinaman in a movie, to amuse tourists. I even smell like Chinatown—the stink of fish, garlic, and soy sauce. Is it a crime? I do whatever it takes to support my family. But are you grateful? Jia wouldn’t even say hello when he came home from school. He chatted only with you, in English. The other day, I told him to speak Chinese like a good son, like a human being. Guess what he said after making a horrific face?
“Can you talk like a grown-up?”
I spanked him, for the first time. He’s only five, already he acts like a little devil. What will he be like when he reaches fifteen, twenty-five? I might as well strangle him right now, to save trouble for the future.
I guess it pushed you over the edge.
Fine. We live in America. Spanking is not hip. I speak Chinglish. My clothes smell of rice and old graves. But do you have to get a white devil into your bed and have my son call him “father?”
I pulled out my gun. The cold metal soothed my throbbing temple.
The ball drops. I won again. Two to one. No big deal. But the message is clear. I’m not yet finished, not yet.
I’m tired of being out. I want to be in the game, before it’s too late, you said.
Translated: you’re bored as a merchant’s wife in Chinatown. You want to be pampered by some white man.
With your China eyes and yellow skin? With your permanently accented English? Your job behind a receptionist desk in the Seagram Building and your rat-infested one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? You forget this is America, not Beijing. General’s daughter or not, white men don’t give a shit about your past.
I want to be in, too. Why do you think I swam through the night to cross the river? Why I cut off my ties with China and applied for citizenship as a refugee? Do you know how I felt when I stood on the harbor of Hong Kong, gazing at the mainland’s shadow poking through the mist? For sixteen years I haven’t returned home. Sixteen years. I want to see my mother one more time before she goes. She’s blind, ready to join her husband, the father I’ve never met. Her coffin is made and varnished, her name chiseled on the stone. But she can’t go without me, her only son, at her bedside, to guide her soul into heaven with my cry.
“What are you afraid of?” Mom asks whenever I call. “You’re a foreigner now, a rich foreigner. Nobody can touch you.”
“Yes, nothing to be afraid of.” You tell me the same thing, when you see the pinched look on my face, knowing I’m homesick. “Now that you have an American passport, the old man won’t dare harm you.”
I laugh. What do you know about your father’s other side? He can toast to his enemies at a banquet and have them eliminated before they have a chance to burp the gas out of their stomachs. He was so furious when he found out I married his only daughter that he instantly put me on the list of top spy suspects. He won’t give a shit that I’m a “foreigner” with an American passport. As soon as my name appears on the computer screen at customs, he’ll have me dragged to his cell. My only hope is to wait till he retires or dies.
Not a totally bad end, perhaps? At least he treats me as if I were still Chinese, not a “foreign devil.” Even my own mother calls me a “foreigner.” Being my mother, she doesn’t say the word devil, but I can hear it in the awkward silence, the way she bites her tongue to stop it from slipping out of her mouth. Foreign devil, foreign ghost. Once you cross that bridge, once you turn your back to your mother, you become a ghost, a ghost without a grave, without a country.
“Nonsense,” you said when I tried to tell you my morbid thoughts, your voice loud and shrill as if you were trying to scare away ghosts. “America is your home now. You belong here. We all do, dead or alive.”
I looked past your shoulder, at the antique vase on the nightstand. It captured the scene of a slender maiden chasing a butterfly in the garden and a young man peeking at her from the wall, his eyes full of lust. It’s the kind of vase that would have sold quickly, if not for the crack at the bottom. So I drilled a hole and turned it into a lamp. Tourists love Chinese antiques. Americans. Europeans. They come into my store. “I’m looking for a vase or plate with Chinese faces like you and her.” They point their fat, hairy fingers at me, at my young assistant from Shanghai. When they get what they want, they pat me on my shoulder. “Hsie hsie, China Fan.” Their thanks come out like “shit shit.”
I gaze into their eyes: blue, hazel, brown, gray. Will they ever look at me and say: Perhaps he’s an American too, just like us?
Do you know, Mei, that you’re a walking Chinatown yourself?
But no matter. Nothing stops you. The stubborn dreamer.
Somewhere far away, slot machines sing in many voices: a Christmas bell, an alarm, a combat song. They remind me of those sleepless nights in Beijing, under my cotton quilt, my ear pressed against the old plastic radio for the static sound from the Voice of America. Turn to the dealer, now. Do not weep. Must not weep. Not here.
She returns my glare with a smile and turns the wheel.
Let’s play then, Mei, you from your rat hole in Sunset Park, me from this Chinese casino room in Atlantic City. Ruyilou—House of Anything You Wish. See how I pile everything on the big red one? It stands tall, quivering, a pickax hacking into the belly of the game.
Wang Ping’s latest collection of short stories, The Last Communist Virgin, will be available from Coffee House Press April 1. Her photo and video installation, “Behind the Gate: China in Flux After the Flood of the Three Gorges Dam,” is on exhibit at Macalester Art Gallery March 3–27. Born in Shanghai, she now lives in St. Paul.