The Fortunes (24 page)

Maybe I even hoped so secretly. It was the first time he'd asked me along since I moved home after college, my first time ever in a strip club. I'd dressed preppy—pastel polo over khakis and Topsiders. Jerry in his mullet and acid-washed jeans laughed when I got in the car.

“It's not a disco, man! The girls dance
for
you, not
with
you.”

“Ah, lay off him.”

I was working toward my CPA back then. Vincent had come straight from the restaurant, still in his black slacks and white shirt, but he'd slipped on his Members Only jacket. He was riding shotgun, and from the back seat I watched him spread the wings of his collar in the visor mirror to reveal a thin gold chain.

The papers also said what a filial son he was, working two jobs—draftsman by day, waiter by night—to support his poor widowed mother as well as save for his wedding. They made him out to be a model citizen of the model minority. Saint and stereotype. But think. That night he must have had fifty bucks in smoothed-out singles on him—“Tips, baby!”—so what exactly was he working so hard for? Two jobs to pay for two lives, maybe.

So, no saint.

Our generation's Bruce Lee, someone once called him. Meaning our generation's tragic martyr. Such an American concept (see Lincoln, Abe; Kennedys, assorted; Doctor King; not to mention James Dean, Marilyn Monroe). But Bruce Lee, for all that he was born in the U.S., always felt more Chinese than Chinese American and was at least as popular with whites and blacks. Plus his death—from an allergic reaction to medication—lacked a bad guy (one reason rumors of triad plots or drug abuse, shades of those old Chinatown evils, abounded).

But now we had our own martyr.

I always wondered how I was supposed to feel about that. I was the friend, after all. Could I have saved him? Should I have died with him? But then he wouldn't be a martyr, or perhaps we both would be (though martyrs, like all symbols, come best in ones). Instead I was the witness. In all the newspaper accounts, and now online if you care to look it up, “his friend who ran away.”

If you can be a friend and run away.

Without Bruce Lee, though, would two white men have brought a baseball bat to a fight with an Asian? Had they seen his movies? Did they think they were only being smart, evening the odds against some kung-fu fighter? Vincent did look a little like Bruce—that same thick mop of coal-black hair. So did I, for that matter. We didn't look alike, but we looked like Bruce, more like him than each other, probably. We'd spent our teens practicing his sprung stride and sudden, panting punches, flashing his switchblade smile in the mirror.

Horse walks into a bar—You know this one?—and the bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

Yeah? How about this one?

Two Chinamen walk into a bar and the barkeep goes, “Why the same face?”

Okay. But we weren't the same. That's my point.
That's
what got him killed.

On the one hand, he was more Chinese than me and most of the other Chinese American kids I knew. He was born there—the mainland, not Taiwan, like my parents—lived there until he was six before he was adopted (itself pretty rare back then), didn't even speak English in first grade. Then again, his parents didn't live in or around Chinatown like most of ours. They were in Highland Park, with no Chinese neighbors. Oh, they came to Chinatown to do their shopping every weekend—I'd see him around, knew who he was—but Highland Park was where he lived, where he went to school. With white kids. Poles, Irish, Italians. (This was before the riots, white flight.) So he was always more at ease with them, more at ease with them than we were, for sure, but also maybe more at ease with them than with
us.
That's where he met Mike and Jerry, in grade school. I only knew him well in high school; they always had that first claim on him (the three of them had gone to see the Grand Prix a couple of weeks earlier—they were still talking about it in the car that night, Mike goofing on
grand pricks.
I hadn't been asked).

It's one reason Vincent liked the Fancy Pants, even though it was a rat hole—an old grindhouse with rows of movie seats still in back and the girls up onstage beneath the peeling gilt proscenium. It meant he got to go back to Highland Park, back home (his mother remembered seeing
Flower Drum Song
there when it was still a respectable joint). He'd always hated having to leave.
Driven out,
as he saw it. His dad had been mugged, so they'd moved to the suburbs and Vincent had finished high school there. They traded a third-floor walkup for a nice little ranch with a carport and scalloped aluminum awnings two blocks over from ours.

We'd been in Oak Park for five years by then, my father and me. He owned a grocery in Chinatown but made his fortune from a sideline. He'd always stocked a few rice cookers, but on a whim he tried some pocket transistor radios from the same Japanese suppliers, just as the market for them took off (this was Motown in the sixties, after all). I can still remember his suspicion when white and black teens started coming in for them. A few years later he ditched the bok choy and the scallions for good and relocated the electronics business to the Westland mall, where he cashed in on early video game consoles, Walkmans, and VCRs. But he'd already moved us from the apartment over the grocery store a couple of months after the riots in '67.

My father talked about Oak Park like it was the promised land. But it never sat well with Vincent. “Can't sleep right,” he complained; he missed the shush of traffic at night. Really, it felt like running away, I think. He didn't blame his dad—Mr. Chin was an older guy, in his sixties by then—but Vincent always figured he'd have fought back if it were him. You could say he'd been spoiling for that fight for years.

Irony is, he was a great runner. That was his thing in high school—track. I was heavy as a kid, shy in the cafeteria, so I'd take my lunch on the bleachers, watch him doing his laps. I told him running suited his name, and he looked at me blankly.
Vincent,
I said,
means winner.
He liked that, as I hoped he would, but it surprised me he hadn't known. Then again, he went by Vince, at school at least, itself unusual among us, our boys' names, even in English, often echoing the two syllables of a Chinese name: Roland or Robin, Henry or Melvin, Eddie or Peter, like me (I even knew a Nixon once). Myself, I used to call him “InVince,” because he was invincible, I told him, but also because he was
in
, in a way I never could be. Really I knew “Vince” just meant American.

On the wedding invitation it was “Vincent” in embossed italics. Vincent and Victoria. Both winners. Vicki and Vince, to their friends. As a couple they couldn't have sounded more all-American. They were planning two ceremonies; Vicki had two dresses picked out, one Chinese, one Western. When I asked him that night how the preparations were going, he told me his mother was arguing with Vicki over guests throwing rice. “She says Chinese don't waste food, still remembers going hungry during the war.” The wedding was planned for a Monday, when all the Chinese restaurants were closed, so that everyone could attend. Afterward they had tickets for Aruba.

His middle name was Jen, though I only learned it when he died. He never used it, and it only shows as
J.
on his gravestone. I had to ask what it stood for. Jen: the great Confucian virtue of doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

What do I remember? What do you?

If you remember the case at all, if you're Asian American, say, you might recall that the killers, Evans and Pitts, father and stepson (and what father takes his stepson to a strip club?), pleaded manslaughter. It was just a barroom brawl gone wrong, heat-of-the-moment stuff—an honest mistake!—never mind it took them thirty minutes to hunt Vincent down. The victim had thrown the first punch, after all. They got off with probation and fines of $3000 each. Plus court costs.

Less than the price of a used car, people said.

Maybe you remember that the judge had been in a Japanese POW camp during the war.

Remember when Chinese couldn't testify against whites? people said, as if it were yesterday and not a hundred years ago.

It was Vincent's idea. He told me to run. Only he didn't say
run.
He said, “Scram.” It was the last word I heard from him in English, so I've given it a lot of thought.
Scram.
It's what you say to a kid, isn't it? A nuisance. Or maybe what naughty kids say to each other after they ring a doorbell. Scram. Not run.
He
was a runner. Running to him meant winning. Running
toward
something. Scram, I think, meant running away. If he'd said
run
we might both have run, but
scram
was for me. Because he didn't scram. He waited for them. He could have gotten away. When Evans hopped out of the car—a Plymouth, for the record—it was still moving. It ran over his foot, for god's sake! It was the Keystone Klan out there! You think Vincent couldn't have outrun these guys? He lettered in track. But he was done running. He started it at the club, after all. He would have fought in the gravel and dog-shit parking lot outside too if Evans hadn't gone for the bat. He
wanted
to fight them. Maybe he figured he could make Evans drop the bat, shame him into a fair fight. Maybe he figured just two on one they wouldn't feel they needed the bat.

This was on Woodward, under the golden arches there, fluorescent tubes in the sign humming like cicadas.

I didn't run far. To the edge of the light. Just far enough to live, just far enough to watch.

Scram! Who was he to tell me to scram? Who was I to listen?

He was grappling with Pitts when Evans caught him across the knees, as if reaching for a grounder, after which Vincent couldn't have run even if he'd wanted. Then a line drive to the chest—
pop!
—as he went down, two more to the head when he was on all fours. Swinging for the fences.

I ran back, but too late. Before or after the two off-duty cops working security at the Mickey D's drew on Evans? You might wonder. Me too.

Vincent's last words—“It's not fair”—to me, in Chinese, while I cradled his ruined head, blood bubbling from his mouth and nose as he spoke, blood pouring from his ears like oil. His skull felt like rotten fruit. I thought I'd pissed myself, but the warm wetness in my lap was his brains.

The blow to the chest broke a jade charm, a little carved elephant that had been his mother's, that Vincent wore on his chain—a bad omen to Chinese, though you hardly needed an omen to foretell what was coming next.

The ambulance took him to Henry Ford Hospital, the same hospital he used to take his dad for dialysis, where he lingered for a few days, his mother by his bedside, calling him—“Vincent! Mama coming. Vincent! Mama coming”—as if from a great distance, before she finally gave consent to turn him off. The same hospital where they told her thirty years earlier that she'd never have a child.

I couldn't look at his mother at the funeral, or at Vicki beside her, her eyes veiled by oversized shades. Instead I concentrated on this girl I knew called Patty, a friend of Vicki's, standing with them on the other side of the grave. She was a nervous thing, this Patty, loud and fidgety, but stilled now in her grief, her pale skin glowing against her dark blouse (half the mourners were in white, the traditional color of Chinese mourning, half in black). I realized how beautiful she was. I yearned to comfort her, imagined moving to her across the open grave as if I could walk on air. She was going to be a bridesmaid, and Vincent had promised to set me up with her, but I'd been doubtful, wary. “She's
into
you, man,” he'd assured me with a nudge. Now she wouldn't meet my eye.

I watched them walk away after, the older woman between the two younger, leaning against each other for balance when their heels sank into the turf. Then I filled a spadeful of earth, watched it slide off the bright steel blade into shadow.

If you remember the case at all (and maybe it's coming back to you?), if you were watching TV back then, you might recall her, Vincent's mother—Lily—going on
Donahue
(remember him?), or meeting with Jesse Jackson (remember
him
?) at one of his presidential campaign rallies. She put the yellow in the Rainbow Coalition, people said.

She still had one of those comedy Chinglish accents:
What I live for? I don't have happy anymore. I not care my life.
The kind of accent that makes my generation cringe; Vincent used to do a choice imitation of it. But her voice cracked, daring anyone to laugh, daring anyone to feel embarrassed.
Vely hurt my heart.

To me, watching at home, Phil leaning in solicitously looked disconcertingly like Evans—the same pasty complexion, the same shock of white hair.
Laugh and I'll kill you,
I thought.

Lily. But Mrs. Chin to me, always. Just another mom, but stouter, shriller, fiercer, and more doting than all the rest, so that she seemed somehow like everyone's mother. (Everyone
else's;
mine had died of throat cancer before I turned seven.) When we were kids she always had treats—egg tarts, mooncakes in fall, her homemade prawn crackers—and praised my good appetite. When we grew up she was always asking when I was going to get married, telling Vincent to introduce me to some nice girl (to which he would roll his eyes, though whether for my benefit or hers, I was never quite sure).

All I learned about her life came from the papers. Some of it I doubt even Vincent knew. She'd grown up in Canton. Her family owned a department store. They must have been well-off, but they lost it all in the war. She'd come from China in '47 to marry his dad, who'd lived here since the twenties and earned his citizenship by enlisting. Mrs. Chin's own father had resisted the match—an ancestor had worked on the railroads and been driven out—but she was sure it would be a better life. She'd seen so much violence in China at the hands of the Japanese, she wanted to start over. She'd have been twenty-seven—old to marry, delayed by the war—and Vincent's dad even older at forty-four. I guess they tried to start a family of their own, but she miscarried and the docs told her she couldn't have kids. It took them more than a decade to adopt Vincent from Hong Kong. His dad was in his late fifties by then, and even Lily in her forties—the oldest parents of anyone I knew.