Imperial (75 page)

When Fu Manchu movies went out of fashion, new authentications of menacing alienness became available. Zulema Rashid, born in Calexico in 1945, remembers being scared every time she had to buy something in the Chinese store on Imperial Avenue
because the Chinese were Communists who tortured people.

Of course they continued to be everywhere, wanted or not. The reliably unreliable
El Dragón en el Desierto
assures me that in 1919 Mexicali held more than eleven thousand Chinese as compared to only fifteen hundred Mexicans. An equally suspect book claims that by 1930, Mexicali’s population was one-third Chinese
.
¹²⁶
(Thirty percent sounds high to me, said the third-generation immigrant Steve Leung. Below ten percent I would say.) Opening another album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, I see a photograph of a Chinese procession, the photograph greyer and a little vaguer than the long perished reality must have looked on the other side of the lens; I see a car with round headlights like eyes, a Chinese banner like some giantess’s half-undone sash, a palanquin which bears two uniformed Chinese boys; and in this picture there’s also something resembling both an altar and a sail, tall and huge; it looms over us in the street like another of Imperial’s dreams.

A FLASHLIGHT ON BLACK WATER

Almost all my life I’ve lived in the Chinesca, said Carmen Jaham, whose mother was Mexican, whose father was Chinese, and whose last name other Chinese fam ilies usually choose to spell either
Hom
or
Tam.
(Her maiden name was Yee.) The shoe store in which she talked to me had belonged to her husband since 1932. He died very young; she was widowed at twenty-four and never remarried. She’d outlived one of her two children; the other one was in Los Angeles. In 2003 her empire consisted of four stores, some for shoes, others for clothes, and she quite naturally opined that
we now have more power, since there are more than three hundred restaurants and shoe stores in Mexicali.
—It’s changed a lot, she said, and of course that’s what she would say; that’s what every old person says. But then she said something which revealed the extent of that vanished universe for me, revealed it in the same eerie, half-illusory sense as a flashlight-gleam upon black water in a Chinese tunnel shows something; what has been shown? It’s opaque; its feculence hinders us; we know neither its depth nor its extent, but the yellow play of light on that black water brings us into the recognition of a previously unknown realm—about which we still know nothing. Señora Jaham’s utterance was of this character. She said to me:
Back then, there was nothing but the Chinesca.

NOTHING BUT WALLETS AND MEDICINES

By the time I began my search for the tunnels, Chinese made up a much smaller proportion of Mexicali’s inhabitants than before. Steve Leung’s figure was
maybe two percent or less in 1950, and now maybe one percent.
—The new Mexican owner of Restaurant Nineteen proposed that
between halfbreeds and fullbreeds there’s fifty thousand in Mexicali,
thus translated by José López from Jalisco, who went on to say: But that’s ridiculous; there’s more than that!

In any event, it wasn’t hard to find them; it was only difficult to get them to say anything.

It was dusk when I closed the door of my hotel room in Calexico and walked across the line, the white taxis and goldfish-gleaming pickup trucks sighing across the wide grey streets beneath the full moon, while in the lefthandmost of four archways a man leaned thoughtfully within the glass window of his
casa de cambio,
whose revolving light seemed policecarlike and whose other light, the electric-blue one, was also vaguely official; beyond him, where the street bent away from the Hotel Imperial, lay the Chinesca with its alleys, hotels, restaurants, its roofed
callejones
with their barbershops and boutiques offering cheap medicines and wallets for sale: an old place, grimy and inconspicuous, the Chinese themselves scarcely noticeable on its streets . . .

“A
RAW
SMELL”

They came out of the ground like ants.
So why shouldn’t there be tunnels?—They exist, asserted Beatriz Limón, who was a reporter for
La Crónica.
She, however, had never seen one. One of her colleagues had entered a tunnel with Chinese guides, but the smell had been too terrible for her—a
raw
smell, said Beatriz with distaste, a smell like a sewage—and Lupe, who’d been my interpreter for this interview, later told me that the way he imagined that it had gone down was that the Chinese took the woman’s money and then said: All right, bitch! You wanna see a tunnel? We’ll show you a tunnel!—and took her to some disgusting place in order to cheat her, scare her away, and amuse themselves; Lupe supposed that those Chinese were still laughing.

Oscar Sánchez from the Archivo Histórico looked up at me from behind his desk and said: They are there. But I can tell you nothing concrete. Originally they were there for shelter from the heat, but then they started to install the casinos. Oh, but it is difficult. These people are very closed!

Men said that there once had been tunnels beneath the dance hall Thirteen Negro, which was whitewashed over its ancientness and cracked through its whitewash, doing business on and on at the center of the brick-fringed archways of arcades, lord of not quite closed sidewalk gratings, with blackness beneath; why wouldn’t there be tunnels under the Thirteen Negro? (José López:
Why not believe it?
) And if they were there, why wouldn’t they still be there? But the waiter denied it. What did his denial mean? I asked him how often he got Chinese customers and he said every night. I asked him if he could introduce me to a Chinese regular; maybe I could buy the man a drink and . . . But the waiter said he didn’t want any trouble.

They live together like cigarettes.
And so I can’t pretend that I was shocked when old Mr. Wong, who’d lived in Calexico for decades and read a Chinese-language newspaper, didn’t know anybody who could help me; his own explanation was that
the Chinese always go back to Mexicali at night.

Once upon a time, in 2002 I think it was, I hired a tour guide named Carlos. He had a very nice car and liked money. We went to a certain restaurant in the Chinesca where Señor Armando, friend of the Chinese owner, sat tranquilly in the cool dimness. He assured me that he had been gambling in a Chinese tunnel on several occasions. I bought him a beer and wondered aloud whether I could make it worth his while to bring me there, and he was happy and sure that he could. Then I paid Carlos a full day’s rate for the half day’s work and waited. After a month he dolefully reported that Armando was afraid; Armando never wanted to see me again. Maybe Armando never knew anything about Chinese tunnels at all. Or maybe
these people are very closed.

THE TALE OF THE AIR DUCTS

My next tactic was to bang on Mexicali’s nearest prominently ideogrammed metal gate, and that is how, ushered down a tree-shaded walkway and into a courtyard, Lupe Vásquez and I had the inestimable pleasure of meeting Professor Eduardo Auyón Gerardo of the Chinese Association “Chung Shan.”

This
world-renowned painter, known especially for his paintings of horses and nude women,
had a Chinese mother and a Mexican father. In 1960, when he was thirteen years old, his father brought him to Mexicali to join his grandmother.

Mr. Auyón was not especially pleased to see me. He told me that I really should have made an appointment. In fact I’d banged on the gate two days ago, and made an appointment through his nephew. This did not mollify the
world-renowned painter,
who sat unsmiling amidst his sumi paintings and brass lions. Well, to business: First he tried to sell me a gold-plated commemorative medallion which he had designed. It was pretty, but expensive. Then he offered me a dusty copy of
El Dragón en el Desierto: Los Pioneros Chinos en Mexicali
for the special price of thirty dollars. On a future occasion he would sell another copy to my new interpreter Terrie for twenty. (I quote from her summary:
The last twenty to twenty-five years in the book only mention cultural activities, visits from dignitaries and beauty queens, and some of the exploits of Mr. Auyón.
) Comprehending that if I didn’t buy something from him my interview would be terminated, I paid for
El Dragón en el Desierto,
after which he brightened slightly and began to relate snippets of Chinese-Mexican history. Wide-eyed with worshipful amazement, I scribbled down everything which Lupe could be bothered to translate. As the younger member of my mother-and-daughter team of Chinese interpreters would later report:
Further cooperation in the future: likely (but must make an appointment first). I also do not know if this guy is telling the absolute truth. He seemed a bit tricky to me, and I got a very strange vibe from him, as did my mother . . .

To Mr. Auyón, 1919 was the magic date when the twenty-eight-odd Chinese organizations (other people sometimes told me twenty-six) amalgamated into the Asociación China de Mexicali. A countryman named Wong Gok Kia donated two lots at Juárez and Altamirano to make it happen. It was this event which his gold-plated commemorative medallion immortalized, he explained, frowningly offering me one more chance to buy. His own Chung Shan organization was one of the original twenty-eight; it was a district organization named after
a hero in China who founded a dynasty.

I asked him if I could please meet a Chinese family.

It’s very difficult, he explained, because my countrymen are not very communicative. But
El Dragón en el Desierto
does have ten chapters. You can read all about Chinese in there.

That was perfect, of course. My research was now at an end. We agreed that if and only if I read his book thoroughly and maybe memorized it, then came back in a month, it was possible that he might have found a Chinese family to tell me something innocuous.

That point having been settled, I asked him about the Chinese tunnels.

They don’t exist, the world-renowned painter of horses assured me. The people couldn’t survive in them if they did. They could not sleep. It would be too hot down there.

He gave me a brief tour of his martial arts school, where a dragon lay on the floor in pieces. I would have rather seen some of his world-renowned paintings of nude women. The paintings of horses weren’t bad. My thirty dollars’ worth of him seemed to have been used up. On a per-minute basis, he was somewhat more expensive than the prostitutes of the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico; he was certainly less good-natured.

Just in case there were tunnels after all, Mr. Auyón, where do you think they might be?

That heat, the body cannot resist it, he replied. In the night time one has to sleep. One has to live down there; that’s why the snakes live underground; but in the summer it’s too hot.

So there are no tunnels?

Every locality has tunnels like a house has a cellar. There are businesses which have two or three branches. They have cellars and connections. On Juárez at Reforma, one man has seven businesses. Underneath, it looks like another city.

Could I see one of those cellars?

He didn’t think that that was possible. He did want most anxiously and insistently to make sure that I would give him credit in my book, which I hereby do. I feel a little sorry for Mr. Auyón.

Then, looking into my face, and this was the one moment when I felt that he was actually being genuine with me, he said: Do you want to know the history of Mexicali?
Every ten acres, one Chinese died.

I’m sorry, I said.

He looked at his watch. The world-renowned medallionist had an important appointment.

I asked him if it was really, really true that there were no tunnels, and he said that it was. I asked him if he could show me one of the cellars that he’d mentioned. He took me into the Hotel Chinesca next door and past the fancy lobby into the open-air courtyard giving onto tiny doublebedded rooms; and from a chambermaid he got the key to the cellar, which smelled like a cellar; there he pointed to a “communication” passage in the corner of the wall; it was small and square and had a screen over it; it was, he said, an air duct. Inside it I could see light and stone-worked walls. A small child could have hidden there. Triumphantly, Mr. Auyón said: This is what they call a tunnel. The tunnels don’t exist.

What about the tunnel you mentioned on Juárez at Reforma?

The tunnels don’t exist.

MY INTERPRETER READS BETWEEN THE LINES

As for Lupe, he thought that Mr. Auyón was a liar, a crook, a goddamned gook. Lupe’s own opinion
¹²⁷
ran as follows: The Chinese used those tunnels to transport illegal immigrants and heroin to the United States. He might have been right. Why not? Here’s a telegram from Northside’s guardians, dateline 1915:

COLLECTOR CUSTOMS

TIAJUANA [
sic
] CALIF.

ALEXANDER REPORTS ATTEMPT WILL BE MADE TONIGHT TO PICK UP FOUR CHINESE NEAR COYOTE WELLS AND TAKE THEM TO SAN DIEGO IN AUTOMOBILE WEBB AND CLARKE LEAVING NOW IN AUTOMOBILE TO TRY TO INTERCEPT THEM

MACUMBER

Did that say anything about tunnels? Never mind. Now back to Lupe’s theories: And another strange thing I’ve seen, Bill: There’s a lot of Chinese restaurants in Mexicali, but I have never seen an old Chinese! I mean, Chinese live to be a hundred! I think they hide ’em and don’t want the Mexicans to make fun of ’em or laugh at ’em. In the streets you never see old Chinese. I’ve heard they have another city down there in the tunnels, for the old people.