Imperial (84 page)

When you came to Mexicali in 1957, were people still living in the tunnels?

Yes.

Why did they stop?

Back then, there was no air-conditioning, so people had to live like rabbits. I never slept underground but I sometimes used to go there just to take a break from the heat. As time progressed and Mexicali progressed, they left those places. It was in the seventies that they started leaving.

I’ve heard there were a few old men who still live there.

Not anymore, he said softly, folding his arms. Most of that generation are retired. They may have their rooms under the stairs; there are rooms where they go and relax in the summertime.

Could you introduce me to one of those people?

Hardly any of them are left. Either they’re dead or they’ve gone back to China to die.

He might have said more; after I’d entreated him three or four times he even took me down into his cellar, which once had been much more than a cellar although the bricked-up door was almost hidden behind boxes of shoes; he remarked that once this cellar had been connected to the cellar of the store across the street but that was long ago when they had been one business, he said; he urged me to proceed to the other business since its cellar was larger. Had he ever been down in that cellar? No; he didn’t know anything about it. He refused to let me photograph him in his cellar, which he angrily insisted was indeed a cellar, a
sotano,
by no means a
subterráneo;
and he declined to give me his name for my book because his wife, who stood beside him behind the counter, kept angrily reading a Chinese newspaper and making deadly-sounding Chinese remarks in a very low voice; I think that by the time I left him he was in trouble with his spouse. The tunnels don’t exist.
¹⁴⁵

Meanwhile, at the Chinese Association, Mr. Auyón was thankfully absent, so a sort of deputy showed me around; when I asked him about tunnels he said that the tunnel under the Hotel Chinesca was going to be turned into a museum! Which tunnel? I wanted to know. It turned out to be the cellar that Mr. Auyón had taken me to in order to prove that there were no tunnels. The Mexican girl at the reception desk of the Chinesca had heard about the museum, but she didn’t think it would be a museum, actually, because they were Chinese, so they would use it for drinking and gambling . . .

She kindly took me back down there. I looked around and saw not much more than darkness. There was the square opening which Mr. Auyón had named an air duct; the girl said that it was a tunnel; it went all the way under the Chinesca, she said . . .

I asked her why Chinese didn’t live underground anymore, and she said that they still did. Then she thought twice and advised me to discuss the matter with Mr. Auyón.
¹⁴⁶

The elderly clerk of a store who didn’t possess the key to that particular tunnel (the owner did, but he just happened to be in Los Angeles for an indefinite period) said that her brother had gone down into the darkness in the 1940s to do something with the water; he was an engineer. He’d seen so much depravity down there: wine, opium, prostitutes . . .

Why did it all stop? I asked her.

Nobody talks about it, she said. Nobody knows.

I asked Steve Leung what happened to his own family in the big fire, and he replied: At that time we owned a complete block in the Chinesca that we had rented. It was affected. It was in the 1950s that that fire happened. We had to make a big loan.

Did the fire drive any Chinese businesses away?

Some, yes.

How would you describe the Chinese influence in Mexicali now as compared to when you first arrived?

Chinese power and presence in the Chinesca is less. Before, Mexican Immigration was very touchy issuing Chinese people to come in; since Cedillo, which is five or six years ago, they opened up quite a bit. Now I would say that seventy percent of the Chinese people here has their own family and have brought them in from China even though we have a special rate from the Mexican Immigration. Cur rently they charge about eight thousand dollars per person for the Chinese, just to make them come in legally. Japanese and Koreans don’t pay anything.

That’s not nice.

Well, that’s the way it is.

And why did the Chinese presence in Chinesca decrease?

The Immigration was getting tougher with the Chinese, and normally when the old Chinese get old, they take their money back to China. No replenishment was coming in.

Mr. Auyón had asserted that all twenty-six (or twenty-eight) Chinese associations remained in business; Steve Leung for his part said calmly: Should be around ten or twelve that are still active. In 1969 there were more. Lot of people died and went back to China, and the new guys don’t care about those things.

Which one has the most power?

The biggest association is the general one. They still have an income of about ten thousand a month.

And what about your association?

Sam Yap, our income is about five hundred dollars a month. Our members is about five, ten. Well, technically around twelve, actually.

How much are your dues?

Twenty dollars a month. Most of the Chinese associations, we charge twenty, thirty, forty dollars a month.—He then remarked: There is another association in the United States with my last name and the President was getting tired and wanted me to step in but I said forget it.

Does it make you sad to think that the organizations are fading away?

Well, the purpose of these association was since the guys came in and left behind all the families in China and didn’t know what to do here, they were spending time with their friends and other Chinese. So they were kinda lonely here. But nowadays, the young generation, they are not in the same situation. For instance, in Sam Yap, we have about fourteen rooms. The purpose of those rooms is if you have a problem, you can have those rooms but just for a short time. But right now our members don’t have any problems, so I think there’s just one person. So if the associations disappear now, the purpose is served.

Why did you choose Sam Yap? Was it for family reasons?

Of course. My father used to be the oldest member there . . .

On my next visit he took me there. Behind the iron gate was what so often appeared in Imperial: a surprising vastness. The unroofed corridor, walled with white doors, went on and on, although its concrete might have contained a little sand, since it was crumbly and in one spot I could see down into darkness. Mr. Leung’s Mexican assistant busily wrenched the nails out of doors so that I could see what was inside: two storehouses of dead men’s belongings (what I remember most is a cheap little frame with a cheaper print inside it, brochure quality, of an Asian beauty who was captioned
MADE IN HONG KONG
. Then came the
sótano,
which Mr. Leung called simply a place to play mah-jongg. There was no light, but my friend Larry, who was along for this tour, clicked his cigarette lighter a few times so that we could see how small and square the place was; a table leaned against the wall; I assumed that like the chairs in the main office or the tables in the rental living quarters it was stencilled with the Chinese characters for Sam Yap Association. In one corner, light came down through a pinhole.

Aboveground, at the very end of the shut up rooms, a man’s laundry was hanging. It belonged to Sam Yap’s last remaining tenant, a very old man whom Mr. Leung implied was not all there. I couldn’t help but think of that hideous dark cell by the old supermarket where the unknown Chinese had lived and died.

I should probably also describe the main office, with its old group photographs leaning against the wall, its stacks of folded chairs, a few of which might have been broken, and its long table. The last time the association had met here was New Year’s. Mr. Leung said that as usual they had impressed upon one another the necessity not to be “high key,” not to display their successes, because the Mexicans needed to feel that this was still their country. Hearing this made me feel very sad, but I said nothing. Mr. Leung shut up the office and locked it, leaving darkness and broken chairs within.

“WHAT KIND OF LIFE IT IS?”

This decent, honest man who shared his life with me when he hardly knew me seemed dissatisfied, I won’t say disappointed, for he had succeeded according to his stated cultural lights; certainly he would leave his extra one percent or more for the next family generation; his clean, cool establishment with the glass cases of cameras and tripods and graduated cylinders and darkroom chemicals was far superior to anything of its kind in the whole Imperial Valley; all the same; that flat
that’s the way it is,
which he said in a calm and almost cheerful tone of voice, I suppose because he was proud and he was strong, made me melancholy, although not to the same degree as when Mr. Auyón had told me:
Every ten acres, one Chinese died.

It is hardly surprising that a person who’d lived out most of his years in a place whose inhabitants said about his race:
They live like cigarettes. They’re very closed. They came out like ants. They came out like cockroaches!
would have suffered from a bit of animus, all the more so because his behavioral code required him to believe or pretend that there was better harmony between Chinese Mexicans and Mexican Mexicans than there actually was.
¹⁴⁷
—You know, he said at one point, there’s a mix of a culture here; you got Chinese, Japanese, everything; they think different from the Mexicans; that’s one reason that I think Mexicans can’t hang on to the
maquiladora
businesses.

This was the style in which he usually expressed his feelings. Sometimes he got more direct.

I asked Mr. Leung to tell me about his life, and he wanted me to ask him a more specific question, so I said: What kind of house did you grow up in?

An old house. I was eight; that was forty years ago; I was there in Ensenada until 1961. I was born in 1950. My grandfather, when he came here to Mexico, he started doing jewel repairing. Then afterwards he was married already. So after they built up a little capital, he put up a grocery store, and he brought my grandmother from China, to Ensenada, and she stayed in Ensenada for ten or twelve years; she had two boys and one girl; by the time they were about ten or twelve years old she went back to China and stayed there another ten or twelve years; one of the two boys was my father.

(Unless he were specifically asked to do so, it is unlikely that an American would have begun his autobiography with anybody but himself—a fact founded not only on my culture’s egotism, but also on its own definition of consideration for the other: cut to the chase; don’t bore the other with context; avoid riding on your ancestors’ coattails. For his own part, a Mexican heeded his lineage. Lupe Vásquez took great pride in his wife’s Indian blood, his outlaw-murderer grandfather from Sonora who wouldn’t be pushed around. He derived himself from adventures and legends; his people were storybook people, larger than others. A Chinese knew more about his forebears and romanticized them less. They
were
his context, necessary and ordinary. Moreover, Lupe might enjoy imagining his ancestors on the same plane as himself—he was the equal of gunslinging heroes—whereas Chinese Confucianism exalts the ancestor. I feel uncomfortable in going too far with this; it would be easy for me to fall into a tunnel of ignorance. But I remember all the New Year’s Days in Los Angeles when I have seen Chinese, the men in suits, the ladies often in their traditional pastel-gauzy dresses, praying at Forest Lawn, singing hymns, occasionally bowing outright. And I quote you this undated letter from the Chinese tunnels:
I received your letter yesterday. We’re all very happy to learn that our family temple has been rebuilt. Your passion and love for the clan is highly appreciated. We will arrange your son’s trip to Sheng City through our place.
Was Sheng City the same as Third City? Was Third City Mexicali? I don’t know. But I see Steve Leung here.)

And when I was eleven years old, he said, they sent me to Hong Kong to study Chinese; then they sent me to United States. I stayed for two or three years; and then they sent me back to Ensenada, to my home town. I stayed there for one year and did some high school; then I came here to Mexicali because we didn’t have university at that time in Ensenada; so I came all by myself. I was studying for my business degree, and staying in a boardinghouse. From 1969 up to today I’ve been in Mexicali.

How did you learn photography?

These two brothers, my father and my uncle, they started by repairing things; then they went into the grocery store business for twenty or thirty years; then they split up and my father started a photography business in Ensenada. He didn’t quite learn; he just hired somebody from the competition. Then later on he set up another branch in Tijuana and put my uncle up there. Afterward, when I came up to Mexicali, this store had a financial problem, so my father bought the Mexican owner out and gave it to me. In high school I was already a businessman; I already had my own checking account and my car. And now this building has now been about fifty, sixty years doing business in photography.

Did you feel any particular distance between yourself and the Mexican majority?

Even for myself, I studied four years in China and three years in the United States, but I grew up here in Mexico, so I don’t have too much problem thinking like them. I felt myself as part of the Mexican society. Actually I was expecting to get married to a Mexican girl, at which my father was very angry, but I was going to break that rule; I think race doesn’t have anything to do with it. But I knew that was one way that my parents were raised: race discrimination. So I respect that in a way. As you see, I married a Chinese girl. I didn’t have much problem to be accepted in the Mexican society, nor in the Chinese society, since our roots were pretty strong in Baja California.