Literature Homework Help

The day you first noticed. You’d shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe that’s what threw him off. When he answered the door, it took him a moment to recognize you. Two seconds, or twenty, a frozen eternity—then, as he regained himself, his familiar scowl, barking your name

half-exclamation, half-confirmation, as if verifying for both you and himself that he hadn’t forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, don’t just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, let’s get started.

He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but you couldn’t stop thinking about the look he gave you, oblivion or terror, and for the first time you noticed the mess his room had become, not unusual for any other man his age living alone, but for Sifu, who taught and valued order and simplicity in all things, to have allowed his dwelling to reach this state of disorganization should have been a warning sign to all. Maybe not the first, but the first one that came to your attention.

Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be (“You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash?”) but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public. In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank (“good for wrapping fish or fruit”), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. He’d patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table he’d ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of the modest table itself. Come to think of it, Fatty Choy, despite the fact that he was and had always been a total gasbag, a mostly insufferable close-talking blowhard (made all the more insufferable by the fact that he was not infrequently right about things), was simply stating what you all knew but didn’t want to admit: Sifu had gotten old.

OLDER BROTHER

Some say that the person who should have helped the most, was in a position to help the most, having been Sifu’s number-one-most-naturally-gifted-kung-fu-superstar-in-training-pupil all those years and thus having reaped the greatest benefit from Sifu’s teachings, was Older Brother.

Not your actual older brother. Better. Everyone’s Older Brother. The prodigy. The homecoming king. Unofficial mayor of the neighborhood. Guardian of Chinatown.

Once the heir apparent to Sifu, the two of them even starring together in a brief but notable project about father-and-son martial arts experts (Logline: When political considerations make conventional military tactics impossible, the government calls on a highly secretive elite special ops force—a father-son duo among the best hand-to-hand fighters in the world—in order to get the job done, Codename: TWIN DRAGONS).

Older Brother who never had to work his way up the ladder, never had to be Generic Asian Man. Older Brother who was born, bred, and trained to be, and eventually did become, Kung Fu Guy, which meant, of course, making Kung Fu Guy money, which is good for your kind but still basically falls under the general category of secondary roles.

WHITE LADY COP

Good. We’ll pay a visit. Might have some questions for them.

Anyone else?

ATTRACTIVE OFFICER

A brother.

Seems to have gone missing.

Black and White exchange a look.

BLACK DUDE COP

This might be a case of—

WHITE LADY COP

The Wong guy.

GREEN

What are we looking at?

BLACK DUDE COP

Family drama, probably.

Some kind of cultural thing.

CLOSE ON: Black Dude Cop.

MILES TURNER, 33.

Tall and built. Really built. Like, if-gray-T-shirts-hadn’t-been-invented-already-they-would-have-to-be-invented-just-so-Miles-could-wear-the-shit-out-of-them built. That kind of built.

Fade tight, edges perfect, skin flawless. Distractingly handsome. Yale then Goldman then a hedge fund, on his way to even bigger things when his father, twenty-seven-year veteran of the NYPD, was killed in the line of duty. Entered the academy the day after his dad’s funeral, graduated top of his class. Been on the force ever since—going on eleven years now, but starting to get antsy.

Youngest in department history to ever make detective (recruited by the FBI, as well as several NYC billionaires to head private security). Cops don’t usually get this famous, but then again Miles Turner is no ordinary cop. Everyone wants a piece of him. Currently weighing his options, but can’t bring himself to tell Green yet. They’re a team—and, considering the smoldering looks—maybe something more?

TURNER

Who’s there?

GREEN

Hands where we can see them.

GREEN

Sir?

TURNER

I don’t think he understands you.

Turner turns toward Old Asian Man, stoops down a little.

TURNER (CONT’D)

Do you understand me?

OLD ASIAN MAN

Yeah, man. I speak English.

Old Asian Man turns to you and smiles.

Green laughs. Turner, pissed, looks at the director.

The director yells CUT.

INT. CHINATOWN SRO—STAIRWELL—NIGHT

As you climb the stairs to your room, you pass by every floor, each one its own ecosystem, its own set of rules and territories.

The second floor is where your folks live. You should stop in. It would make her happy. Not that she would show it. Not that she would smile. More likely a scowl. You should be a better son. For a moment. But it won’t be a moment. It’ll be more. It will be guilt and that heavy feeling, it will be a deep sigh, it will be heavy and unspoken and you don’t know if you can do that right now.

The Cheuks live on three. Have lived in the SRO as long as your parents have. A daughter, who was smart, but ended up working downstairs, and a son, Tony Cheuk, who was luckier, was born a boy and had a chance to move to the city so he did, a good son who sent money and packages of food; when you were a kid, a Generic Asian Boy, you’d wander by their door, hoping to catch him on the right day and you might get lucky. Tony might give you an almond cookie from Phoenix Bakery or slip you a buck or two just to show off.

FLASHBACK: YOUR MOTHER

The earliest memories you have of her, she is Young Beautiful Oriental Woman.

She packs lunches for you, in her off-hours costume: floral print blouse, polyester bellbottoms. She crouches by the narrow strip that passes for counter space, assembling a small pian-tong, a kid’s lunch divided into neat compartments: in the main section, three boiled dumplings filled with ground pork and bits of ginger and chopped-up scallions. In the two smaller sections, a dollop of soft rice with yam, and a handful of slightly bruised grapes. She presses the lid down tight, wraps a large rubber band around it for good measure (you’re five, you’ll drop the box at least three times before you eat), and hands it to you.

You remember a hundred quiet dinners the two of you had, your father still at work. For dessert, more grapes or cubed cantaloupe if you’re lucky. If not, a Dixie cup of diluted fruit-punch-flavored Hi-C. Room temperature but you don’t care. You sip carefully, savoring each taste, and then when it’s almost gone, turn the cup all the way over until that last stubborn drop makes its way down the waxy inner surface onto your tongue. You take the last bite of your dinner and announce that you’re done. I’m full, you say, but in truth you want a little more and your mother knows it. She feeds you from her bowl. This close, you can smell her breath, sharp and almost sweet, vegetables and garlic. Telling you stories about how she first came to this country. Her dreams of what life would be here.

FLASHBACK

Your mother studies from a textbook. How to Make $1,000,000 in Real Estate. No experience or capital needed, just a few basic principles (location, location, location) and a willingness to work hard.

The Friday nights she doesn’t have work are the best. A couple minutes to eight, you look at her and she nods, and you click on the television to the kung fu show. The opening credits get your heart racing. The weary traveler. The white dude that they dressed up to look vaguely Asiatic. But you don’t care. You’re here for the sound effects. You’re here for the martial arts.

The steady rhythm of foot strikes, hand strikes, blows to the torso, blows to the head. Then the music kicks in, jarring dissonant strings, conflict in a minor key. Random gongs.

Push in on our hero.

Push in on his opponent.

The eyes, it’s in the eyes.

It’s all too much, you can’t resist, and you’re up, bouncing off the walls of the room, your home, your world, a five-year-old. You are a future Kung Fu Guy in training. Kung Fu Kid.

You repeat it, for effect.

And then one more time, but still no answer from your mother, deeply engrossed in her textbook. On-screen, two fighters crisscrossing six feet above the ground, somersaults in the air, butterfly kicks, twisting horizontally, diagonally, three-sixty, seventy-twenty, ten-eighty. Gravity waiting patiently for the two black-haired masters to succumb, not inevitably bound by the rules of physics like regular mortals, rather by choice, returning to earth only if and when they feel like it and even then in their own manner. Blue sky behind them, the midday sun backlighting the whole scene in such a way as to wash out all details—the sweat on their temples, the features of their chiseled, sinewy torsos—leaving only the outlines, the stylized and timeless archetypes of two masters being masterful. Hi-yah. Kung Fu Kid leaps! Twists! Your leg slicing through empty space, splitting the world in two. Wah. Yah. Foom. Doing your own soundtrack. Gearing up for the big move, full aerial splits, legs horizontal, toes pointed, your lower body one straight line, energy shooting from your feet in both directions…

You pulled it off.

First time ever.

…Or so you thought, so close to completing the move but then, as you land, your foot catching the edge of a plastic tray with your ma’s pot of oolong steeping inside. The tray now tracing out its own arc through the air, everything in super-slow-mo, your mother’s face somehow remaining calm through it all, the only flicker in her expression one of momentary concern, as the pot of scalding tea nearly hits you on its way down. She catches it, or almost does, the bulk of the pot landing on her palm, which must be impervious to pain, because she doesn’t yell or cry out, simply takes it, absorbing the blow, all of the liquid heat and force and letting no harm come to your stupid little head.

INT. CHINATOWN SRO—EIGHTH FLOOR

You drift off for a while, only realizing you were asleep at the exact moment you wake, roused by the familiar and obnoxious sound of idiots trash-talking one another in various dialects. You open the door to find them all hanging out, shouting, playing cards, seems like every male in the building is there, crowded around your door. The Generic Asian Men, except up here they’ve got names:

The usual suspects. Chen, Lin, Ling, Fong.

And, it goes without saying Huang, Hung, Chang, Li.

Lee, Lim, Wu, Wang.

But also Chu, Yang, Chiu, Tsai, Liao, Fu, Hsieh.

And even Tang, Mo, Dai, Yan, Zhang, Gong, Gu.

Not to mention Long, Jiang, Meng, Bai, Wei, Yu.

Pan, Peng, Ng, Lam, Yip, Sam.

You poke your head out and they pull you by the arms into the hallway.

Which, for those living on the eighth floor, means that every time Old Fong (903) falls asleep in the shower, or Wang Tai Tai (908), or any one of the other Old Asian People up there on nine forgets to shut off the faucet (or can’t shut it tight, on account of rheumatoid arthritis or carpal tunnel or general infirmity), after about five minutes, the whole pan floods, which means, for those of us down here on eight (and parts of seven on this side of the building), you’re sleeping in half a foot of water for the next several nights. One time it went all the way down to six and soaked the little seat cushion that Baby Huang was sleeping on facedown, and Baby Huang sucked gray water through nylon for a couple minutes before her mom woke up to the dripping on her own head, found her little girl looking a strange color. The baby lived, but to this day whenever you see her running down the hall trying to keep up with the other kids, all you can hear is her sloshy wheeze. She seems a little slow, although her dad, who is so nice everyone calls him Nice Guy Huang, is pretty slow himself (he’s never even managed to become a Generic Asian Man, stuck in nonspeaking), so who knows, maybe the whole almost drowning in her own crib didn’t affect Baby Huang that much after all. Not like she was going to the Olympics anyway. Mostly she’s growing up to be a pretty happy kid, living in this building, in Chinatown, it’s fine. She doesn’t know any better.

INT. CHINATOWN SRO—NIGHT

Old Fong fell asleep in the shower again. You know because the water stains on the ceiling are starting to darken and get puffy. In about ten minutes, it’ll be raining inside your bedroom.

Fatty Choy was apparently the one who found him. For once, Choy didn’t have much to say. He was quiet for a long time. It took a shot of warm Christian Brothers and half a can of Coors Light to get him to stop crying. Then Fatty sat there stone-faced for another half-hour before explaining what happened.

Found him on the ground, Fatty says between slugs of beer. The water pooling. Must have hit the corner of the sink. Head getting soft like a fruit.

“He kept asking me,” he says, “one eye shut. Asking what happened to his head.”

INT. GOLDEN PALACE—AFTER CLOSING

Back inside, the restaurant is closed. The tables are cleaned, the kitchen is dark.

It’s karaoke time at the Golden Palace Chinese Restaurant.

After all the patrons have finished their smirky renditions of Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, tourists tipsy on one too many lychee margarita-tinis done wailing Whitney or Céline a half-step flat, after all of that it’s the staff’s turn at the microphone. And they don’t waste it. Off-duty busboys warble corridos between long pulls from cans of Tecate, buried in their twang about a dozen different emotions you forgot you had. But even they’re just the warm-up for the main event. At the appointed hour, right on time, he appears at the foot of the stage.

Old Asian Man is on the mic.

Everything goes silent while he adjusts his glasses, wipes his forehead, takes a sip of water.

“For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver.

Green looks at Turner, who now looks less sure of himself.

TURNER

Go ahead. You talk first.

GREEN

Really? Why?

TURNER

He might be scared of me. A lot of older Asians are pretty racist.

Sorry. It’s true.

Green steps to Old Asian Man.

GREEN (CONT’D)

Hello sir.

Have a second? We’d like to ask you a few questions.

Turner has a hand on his weapon. Green looks at Turner as in: come on dude. Really?

Turner looks at Green like: what?

Green looks at Turner like: the gun?

Turner rolls his eyes like: fine.

He reluctantly stands down. Clenches his jaw muscle. It looks awesome when he does this. People like the clenching, so Turner clenches a lot.

TURNER

Hands where we can see them.

GREEN

Will you stop it with the gun?

Turner lowers his firearm slowly. Green approaches, gets close enough to your face that you can smell her expensive perfume, see how good her bone structure is.

She looks into your eyes.

GREEN

And who are you?

Sir, please identify yourself.

GENERIC ASIAN MAN

I’m no one. But I might be able to help you.

Green and Turner look at each other.

GREEN

Excuse us for a minute.

They sidebar.

TURNER

Can we trust him?

Old Asian Man is in the corner. You go to him quickly, to have a word in private before Green and Turner catch up.

“Ba,” you say, under your breath. He’s manning the deep fryer, in a stained undershirt, hair pulled back and tucked under the edges of a white paper hat. As if this were the most natural thing in the world. As if this were all he’d ever done for half a century. As if he hadn’t been a dragon, once, not that long ago, hadn’t fought epic battles on the streets of Chinatown, and above its rooftops. None of that matters now. None of that counts toward the final tally. Now he’s this: a leading man trapped in the body of an extra. He looks tired. He is tired. He spent decades in this place, in the interior of Chinatown, taking the work he could get. Gangster, cook, inscrutable, mystical, nonsensical Oriental.

Now trapped in the back of the house, speaking lines that need subtitles. Thousands of hours of work at something and then in a moment, the work gone. Kung fu master to fry cook, the easiest transition in the world. Change wardrobe, hair, a career forgotten. A lifetime repurposed. A kind of amnesia that he has internalized, a fog of amnesia that hangs over this whole place.

LOWLIFE ORIENTAL

I don’t know anything about no gambling. I’m just security guard. You can’t arrest me for me just doing my job.

TURNER

How about I arrest you for an aggravated assault last week? As well as public intoxication and a couple counts of resisting arrest? How’s that sound, Choy? Yeah, we know who you are.

After close, he lingers, waiting to see if she’ll have some tea with him.

Home not being much of a safe haven. She’d stepped off the boat and into the home of her sister and her sister’s husband, a guest (she thought) whose chores and responsibilities quickly began to feel more like payment. Her older sister, Angela, perhaps envious of her younger sister’s looks. How angry Angela had been when she’d borrowed Angela’s sweater, how her brother-in-law had looked at her in her sweater, how Angela pretended not to notice. Could draw a line from that moment to the moment, not three months later, when she found herself kicked out of the house, sent packing to live with a different sister in Ohio. How Angela packed her suitcase for her, bought a one-way bus ticket to Akron.

(A few months later, Dorothy gets a letter. From her sister Angela. She opens it, curious. Inside is a bill, itemized, for the twelve weeks that Dorothy lived with her sister. Ten cents: bowl of rice. Fifteen cents: long shower surcharge. Twenty cents: laundry. Included in the bill is the price of Dorothy’s bus ticket.)

To add injury to the insult of having been kicked out by Angela, Dorothy realizes that her sister has kept all but one of her books (no doubt as collateral for the asserted debt). The sole book now in Dorothy’s possession is a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology. A book she has loved since childhood, when she spied the tattered paperback in a bin in her local library, passed over by all the other kids for its ruined state. It says on the back, published in the U.S.A. She has learned to read this foreign language from this book, this book of myths. She loves each of the little chapters, how they are short, and self-contained, but also all fit together in a larger universe of gods and goddesses, spirits, lower and higher, deities of all types and their seconds, their assistants, their rivalries and hierarchies, their relative powers and weaknesses. Their petty squabbles and sordid doings and secret crushes. Every time she opens the book, she hopes to turn to a new page, a new god, a little tiny thing. She likes the minor gods the best, because they are easier to master, to learn everything about. She can search out and soak up all of the other things that other people had written or said about this minor god, and in that way become an authority on such a god. And when she becomes an authority someday, an expert in her own right, she thinks that maybe she might be able to make her own entry in the book. To create a tiny god from scratch. She has not named it yet.

Dorothy will clean her sister up, carry her to bed. Make arrangements for her long-term care, Angela’s husband paying for it with their savings. When the money runs out, and her husband proves that he’s not up to the task, Dorothy will end up bringing Angela back home with her. She will wipe and feed her older sister for a year, two days shy of a year, until Angela expires on a cool autumn morning.

In 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists are finally and decisively driven from the mainland by Mao, Chiang and his loyalists flee to Taiwan, where they impose martial law again. This period begins on May 19, 1949. At the time it is lifted in the summer of 1987, thirty-eight years and fifty-seven days later, it is the longest period of martial law in the world. During this time, known as the “White Terror,” thousands of Taiwanese are beaten, killed, or disappeared by the regime.

INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT

But Wu doesn’t know this at this moment. What he knows is that the box is valuable, because he just watched his father run into a house on fire for it. Also watching were two Nationalist soldiers, a private and a corporal, who wait until Wu’s father emerges, then calmly shoot him through the back, the bullet exiting from his throat. The box, along with the deed, is casually scooped up by the corporal, and the two walk off, leaving Wu’s family there, without a father, or a house, or a future.

INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—JOURNEY TO AMERICA

We see Young Wu, moving, in progress, making his way to the new world. Bright-eyed, full of hope.

As a young student in Central Taiwan, gazing at a map of the world in his classroom.

On the map, it is a jeweled blue, sandwiched between Canada (salmon pink) and Mexico (lime green). Young Wu dreams of the American air. Barbecues, baseball on the radio and in the streets.

In his dreams, he arrives on a bright Monday morning, the ship pulling into the port, friendly strangers waving him and the others onto shore.

INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—MISSISSIPPI—1965—DAY

He lives in a house with five other graduate students, most of them from other countries. Nakamoto from Japan. Kim and Park from Korea. Singh, a Punjabi Sikh. And one more: Allen Chen, also from Taiwan. Young Wu wonders if he and Allen might be the first two people from Taiwan to ever live in Mississippi.

He will be paid a modest stipend to teach students at a university, and to begin graduate studies, to explore his own field. Young Wu’s share of the rent is fourteen dollars per month. This is Mississippi, in a college town, in the 1960s. His graduate student stipend is one hundred dollars a month. The first time he sees the check, he thinks there has been a mistake. There has not been a mistake. Young Wu, for the first and only time in his life, feels rich.

On top of the hundred dollars per month, he receives a twenty-five-dollar allowance, once per quarter, for housing. One semester, he wins an award for being the best teaching assistant. Half of the class calls him Chinaman, but mostly they mean it affectionately. He is an overwhelming selection for the award. He receives a check for fifty dollars and a certificate. He makes a frame for the certificate, and sends the check home, as he does with almost all of his other checks. In general, he does well enough that he can afford to eat at a restaurant, once a month. He does not like hamburgers at first, but learns to ask for no mayonnaise or ketchup and eats the meat separately from the bun, lettuce, and tomato.

EXT. DOROTHY’S BACKSTORY

She moves to Chinatown from Ohio, packs her one blue suitcase. She brings six blouses, four pairs of polyester pants. She brings a picture of her mother and father, standing up straight and about a foot apart, not touching, taken on the street in Taipei where they first met. They are both looking right into the camera.

She brings seven pairs of underwear, two pairs of shoes. She brings an anxious disposition. She brings a rowdy, somewhat unexpected laugh, the kind that erupts suddenly in a noisy party and then just as quickly disappears. She brings a memory of her mother dying in her bed at home, surrounded by her ten children, wondering aloud why, why, the question, undisguised. Why? Dorothy, throughout her life, will wonder now and then if that memory is trustworthy, or her own thoughts bleeding, over time, seepage from the frame into the picture.

She brings incense, and a shrine to her ancestors, and a smaller one for a particular, minor deity. The minor god of immigration and prosperity in real estate transactions. Which started out, a long time ago, as the greater spirit of irrigation and good fortune in agriculture. This is a deity who understands, above all: location, location, location.

Mei Mei can move freely between these places, just by stepping through a doorway, into the next room. Space and time, apparently, being highly malleable, as Mei Mei navigates her new country, learning words for foods, and places, questions (“Where is the bathroom?” and “How much are the squash?”), directions (“Turn left for the police station, turn right for the bank”).

Strangers are friendly, for the most part, and why not, given Mei Mei’s pink-cheeked post-toddler disposition, precocious for a five-year-old but still innocent enough to not have encountered anyone at school who might make fun of her short-sleeved flowered silk shirt, or, even more likely, recoil at the smell of the fermented black beans in the lunch box her a-kong packed for her.

Xie Xie Mei Mei, you sing.

Xie Xie Mei Mei, the other kids sing.

KUNG FU DAD

Didn’t realize you were there, honey.

PHOEBE

It’s okay.

KUNG FU DAD

Also, sorry for being a, uh, crappy dad.

PHOEBE

It’s fine. You tried.

KUNG FU DAD

Do you want to play something?

PHOEBE

We need to retreat to the castle!

Phoebe runs off, the sobs trailing after her now, bursting into full-fledged running and crying.

KUNG FU DAD

The castle?

INT. CASTLE (AKA PHOEBE’S CLOSET)—DAY

You follow the sound of her talking to herself, climbing up a tower, the winding staircase narrowing as it ascends, until you come to a door just big enough for you to crawl through.

The door is ajar, and from the room inside, you catch Phoebe, mid-story.

INT. PHOEBE’S ROOM—NIGHT

The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn about all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.

INT. PHOEBE’S ROOM—NIGHT

You do mealtime, you do bedtime. No kung fu. Just spaghetti, and broccoli. PJs and story. Brush. Floss. Pee. Glass of water. Feed your fishes. Okay. Okay. Kiss kiss. Wait! What? You didn’t kiss the baby lion. Where is the baby lion? I don’t know. Oh come on. Here it is. Okay, I kissed it. And the hamster dog. And the hamster dog. All of them are kissed. Okay. Night night. Stop talking. I’m not talking. Stop whispering. Phoebe, really, no more. She washes her face. Small, chubby hands, holding the soap. Scrubbing her cheeks and forehead with her soft baby hands. It looks familiar and then you understand. That’s how you do it. She’s been watching you. Learning. Brush. Floss. Pee. Glass of water. Feed your fishes. Kiss the baby lion. Kiss the hamster dog. Kiss, kiss. Finally, after what feels like months without a break, the moon comes out, with its creepy but sweet moon face, the sun closes its eyes and sinks down to the painted horizon, and Phoebe, along with the rest of Phoebe Land, goes to sleep.

You go to the window, peek out.

OLDER BROTHER

How is he?

YOU

Sifu?

OLDER BROTHER

He need money?

YOU

Nah. I mean, yeah. But nah.

OLDER BROTHER

All of those roles. He never got a story.

YOU

You were the story. Supposed to be.

OLDER BROTHER

I know that’s what everyone wanted. A kung fu hero. But I couldn’t.

YOU

I think I’m starting to understand what you mean.

OLDER BROTHER

I never left. Not really. Not in the way that counts—inside. In my mind. Another part of me is in a different place now. Interior Chinatown isn’t the whole world anymore. I had to leave in my own way. Just like you tried to do.

Acting upon the hypothesis, he gave to the Islanders the name Indian. From that time…

The American Indian and the Mongolian or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of human species.

OLDER BROTHER

Murray’s reasoning here is breathtaking in its twisted audacity. The legitimacy of categorizing “Asiatics” in such a way as to justify lumping them into the clause “Blacks and Indians” (in order to deny them the right to testify against Whites) is based on the subjective state of mind of a single man (Christopher Columbus) at a particular historical moment hundreds of years ago, who happened at that moment to be spectacularly and egregiously mistaken about where on the globe he had drifted into; thus a navigational misunderstanding of the world itself becomes the justification for a legally binding category.

JUDGE

Basically, a mistake.

Julie and Tim: this book would literally not exist without your patience, guidance, and extraordinary contributions. (And thanks as well to Nicole Cunningham at The Book Group.)

As evidenced by the epigraphs, certain books were invaluable resources to me in the writing of this novel (in addition to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, a book I will keep rereading until I can’t read anymore):

American Chinatown…………………Bonnie Tsui

San Francisco Chinatown…………………Philip Choy

For generous financial support provided during the long, sometimes lean, years between books, I am grateful to:

Santa Monica Artist Fellowship………………………City of Santa Monica

Nathan Birnbaum………………………Cultural Affairs Director

There are certain other people whose support has been essential, both professionally and personally. Having the opportunity to work with people this smart is a privilege, but having them believe in me has been more important than they may realize:

Super Smarty Pants………………………Jason Richman

Super Smarty Pants………………………Mickey Berman

Super Smarty Pants………………………Mark Ceryak

Super Smarty Pants………………………David Levine

Super Smarty Pants………………………Katy Rozelle

Super Smarty Pants………………………Howie Sanders

The people whose lives and love inspire and motivate me to write:

Mom………………………………………Betty Lin Yu

Dad………………………………………Jin Yu

Daughter…………………………………Sophia Yu

Son……………………………………Dylan Yu

Father-in-law……………………………………Val Jue

The Real Star of the Show…………………Michelle Jue