The wispy romance of Hong Kong pop music floated off a compact disk and spread throughout the spacious living room, around the carved Ming armoire, past the set of zitan-wood Imperial chairs, a ballad just loud enough so they never heard Uncle Four enter, closing the door with a pickpocket's touch. He stood behind the lacquered rosewood and inlaid jade screen that set off the foyer and pictured them.
Wife, almost fifty, her hair dyed blacker than fot choy, moss threads, and teased perfect above curved eyebrows redrawn daily. Pancake on the crow's feet at the corners of eyes blinking out from heavy shadow and liner, leaving the red gash of her mouth at a restless angle. She wore gold on one wrist, jade on the other; an aging actress in her sunset performance on the Chinatown stage.
Too much perfume, he could smell it from the door, streaming from the four women at the table. They were talking at each other in choppy, patterned phrases.
Loo je, sister Loo, was married to the treasurer of the Hip Ching, giving her the unofficial rank of daai ga je, elder sister, in their entourage. She wore clothes from The Limited, and spoke in a mannish style.
"Business has been good," she said. "Should be bigger bonuses this year."
Mak mui, her cousin, who was engaged to a senior Black Dragon, cooed, "Wonderful, another gold bracelet for me."
Shirley, which they pronounced, surly, was the oldest. "Sisters," she said, "life is good. Jade and diamonds for everyone. A toast!"
The women clinked glasses and drank, settled back into their game, slapping the mahjong tiles back and forth across the table.
Silly women, thought Uncle Four behind the screen. When he married the second time, it had appeared to be a fortunate match. Using Tam tai's connections in the Taiwanese film industry, he'd established a chain of Chinese videotape rental outlets that stretched from the Chinatowns in San Francisco to New York, from Toronto to Florida.
They had no children.
He had a teenaged daughter from his first marriage and had wanted nothing more to do with children after that. This had suited Tani tai fine. At the time they married she was already in her late-thirties, and he knew, secretly, that she was barren. He gave her a share of the video business and the skim money from the Ting Lee Beauty Salon, in which he was also a partner. She made the collections personally, every week on Monday.
Now, a decade after exchanging vows and toasts, they lived separate lives in the same apartment. Separate bedrooms, separate schedules, and separate vices. The only values left to share were money and jewelry, and never enough of either.
Pung! Mak mui shouted, grabbing the discarded tile. She splayed out her row of thin blocks and grinned.
"Mun wu," she laughed. A full house.
The others groaned and collapsed their hands, then threw dollar bills at her.
The little ivory blocks were crashed and shoved together into a large pile.
Uncle Four stepped out from behind the screen amid the racket and entered the living room. There was a short silence as the surprised women turned their eyes to him. His wife raised her chin, smiled, said nothing.
He murmured lo Dior, wife, at her and nodded at the others, turned and headed for his bedroom at the far end. Lo por drained her vodka tonic as he passed, the others watching him. When he turned to close the door, their attention shifted quickly back to the table, his wife already stacking the tiles, quietly forming a wall.
She glanced at the closing door and listened for the click of the lock that closed off the world of her estranged to gung.
Billy Tofu
The sky had drifted back to a leaden gray when Jack rolled onto Mott, parking the Dodge Fury up the street from On Yee headquarters, around the block from the stationhouse. He saw the busloads of weekend tourists deboarding into the streets, mixing with locals waking to morning errands, and the taking of tea, yum cha.
The tourists moved along in a huddling line, bought T-shirts and fake Chanel scarves, and were herded along the three blocks back to their buses idling at the edge of Chatham Square.
Jack sat in the car. His visit to Pa's apartment, the photographs, all had him thinking of those three rudderless years of his life in the Tofu King. And of Billy Bow.
Billy was the last friendJack still had in Chinatown from the old crowd. Everyone else had married, moved to the suburbs, came to town only on special occasions to visit their parents, grandparents, whoever was abandoned in Chinatown.
Billy was still there, and whenever Jack was in the neighborhood, he went by the Tofu King for a fresh dao jeong, soy bean milk, and to shoot the breeze with him.
They'd become fast friends in those years together in the back of the shop, cooking, slopping beans. The shop was smaller then, and it wasn't until Billy's grandfather renovated the upstairs and expanded into the backyard that it became the Tofu King. That was ten years ago, when Jack left. Billy was still there, thirteen years a captive in his father's business.
And since then Billy'd become hard and cynical. He was divorced, paying child support, and when he was two boilermakers deep, he'd call himself "a deadbeat Chinaman with two princess daughters and a dead-end job."
He'd wanted to be a writer, an actor, something creative, but nothing went his way. He tried college but couldn't keep up. He took the tests for civil service but they weren't hiring Chinamen with nothing on their resume except ten years in a bean-curd shop.
So there he was, drowning in bean milk, and no way out. This time, Jack had called Billy to confirm permission to post composite sketches from the SCU, which had arrived together with a note that said the girl's pregnancy test had come back negative. He'd need to post one sketch inside and one outside of the Tofu King. Some stores considered it bad luck to bring a sign of such an event, an evil presence, into their places of business.
Billy was okay with it.
Outside the Tofu King, a man wearing a white apron sold fried Chinese turnip cakes, attracting a crowd beneath the white plastic fluorescent sign that said tofu, Auto. Wholesale and Retail. Business was brisk. Inside the shop the walls were white tile all the way around. The near wall opened to a window on the street where they sold cold bean milk and hot tofu custard to passersby. Four fifty-gallon barrels of soft tofu lined the left wall, four more barrels of hard tofu on the right. Foo jook, bean curd strips, took shape in the large water tank in back, past the refrigerated counter with the bok tong go, sweet rice cakes, and the gee cheung fun, noodles.
Six workers were on the floor, three of them plastic-wrapping the white bricks of tofu for local groceries. For the restaurants, the workers packed the ivory bricks in water, fitting them snugly into ten-gallon tin cans.
It all started with the beans.
They arrived once a month, sixteen tons of soybeans via Jacky Chew, the trucker. The beans came out of Indiana in tractortrailer loads, in hundred-pound sacks, twenty-thousand beans each sack. They soaked the beans upstairs, then theywere ground down and cooked, mixed, and at different levels in the process became firm tofu, silken tofu, tofu sticks, tofu skins, and soy bean milk drink. The smell was thick upstairs, hanging in the hot air, suffocating. This went on twenty-four hours a day.
Jack looked down the street and saw the line of empty carts moving into the Tofu King. He took a roll of composite sketches of the rapist from the glove compartment and checked his watch. It was ten-thirty.
The sky darkened and a few Ghosts appeared on the street. Jack watched them, four youths with streaked hair and leather jackets, as they took up positions on the corner. Behind them, farther down the street, Jack saw a soft doughy-faced Lucky, his onetime friend Tat Louie, behind sunglasses, chatting easily with Uncle Four, making accommodating gestures with his hands. Jack narrowed his eyes at them, the Pell Street big shot, Ghost Legion gang leader. An arrogant power meeting on the streets they ruled.