Year's Best SF 10, page 46
Librarians are so helpful, so happy to share the treasures they guard that they set me up in a private room. Just me and the book so I could study in peace. They had me wear a pair of white gloves to keep off fingerprints!—can you believe it? No matter. Not once did they ever check to see if I razored out a page—you know, the ones with si fu calligraphy that academics and rich men trade on Nathan Road. Penand-ink bamboo grooves, Fu-ch’un mountains seen through mist. Just cut deep in the gutter so no one could tell if a mountain was missing unless they squint hard. Which no librarians ever thought to do. They’re not police. Course if they did, professor-po would be shocked to find out her student was a thief. And who’s gonna believe some ah chaan from the mainland over Professor Art Historian? Paper-Scissors-Rock—you know how that works, right? And people with glasses always pay others to take their risks. So okay, I take all the risk, but is it my fault I also pick up how her business works? Things are never as they seem—if you think New York apartments look enormous in TV sitcoms just think how they look from HK—so we’ll see; just because gweilo science put a man on the moon like Jenny keeps saying doesn’t mean this banana can hold chopsticks….
Located on a dead-end off a Chinatown back street, the storefront office space I had rented for the month appeared as small as one of those kiosks crammed with all manner of magazines, candy, watches, phone cards, and 220-to-110-volt converters: that density that the Chinese are accustomed to in everything, from their cities to their alphabet, coming as they do from a nation so populous that to get a sense of it, we in America would have to imagine our entire population squeezed into the east, then multiplied by four. It is for this reason that a dozen immigrants can tolerate living in one of those closet-sized gong si fongs they share, sleeping in shifts in its single bed.
My office was much bigger than it looked, though: as deep as the building that housed it, with a back door that opened onto the alley. Discolored floor tiles formed a ghostly outline of what must have been a long, store-length soda fountain—or rather a pharmacy counter as the place had been the former home of which I was told translated roughly into Wong’s Ancient Cure for Modern People, a business made anachronistic, a grinning realtor informed me, by Viagra.
Ceiling paint, electrical piping, and fluorescent lighting fixtures obscured one of those ornately patterned tin ceilings ubiquitous in Victorian-era stores, but the stench of another time was still distinct in its space—rancid orange peel and fish heads—or so it seemed as I shuttled between the office and a Dumpster in the alley behind the building, cleaning out rags and waterlogged charts, a newsprint manual for bringing this organ into harmony with that bodily factor (cold, wind, dryness, etc.)—the claptrap of a way of ordering the world where Chinese ghosts and qi were as real as the rhino horn used to medicate their effects. Or so I imagined, replacing that ancient refuse with my own lean equipment, a desk and two metal chairs, though I could never completely erase a trace of the Ancient Cure that hung in the air.
This last week saw only four volunteers: a man employed by a chicken-parts processing plant and three Chinese punks—dirty pink hair, tongue studs—who giggled so hard that it took them five minutes to supply the cheek scraping I required of all subjects for the DNA tests that I matched to their questionnaires.
Then he was there—coming in the door—the tong boss I’d seen in Three Happiness, girlfriend in another streamlined dress at his side. In order not to scare him off, I pretended I didn’t recognize them, but he saw through this immediately. “Come on, man, we’re not stupid,” he said in an odd kind of English. British English, that reminded me for some reason of an old Al Capone movie. He spun the metal folding chair around and straddled it, sitting across from me at my desk while his girlfriend walked around to my side and began looking through my papers. “So,” he said, either to distract me, or to tell me to never mind what she was doing, “You still looking for Risk-Takers, or what?”
I told him I was, and he said, “Good. So am I, maybe we help each other.”
While she opened first one desk drawer, then another, I began my standard orientation in the hopes that behaving naturally would be the best way to bring him in. He listened politely as I emphasized my confidentiality statement, and then explained how the results would be used, trying to maintain the best matter-of-fact demeanor I could despite the distractions of his girlfriend. At one point she grunted, working to unscrew the mouthpiece of my phone as though it were a stuck pickle jar and the effort brought out the muscles of her bare arms and shoulders. Jet black, pixie hair…. Had she been brought up in a different social group, I thought, she might have become a famous gymnast. Or rock climber.
While I showed her boyfriend the basics of the questionnaire, she roamed the office. Like a tourist in a gift shop, she’d pause from time to time, her eyes widening in surprise at some laughable curiosity—maybe the pristine order of sharpened pencils I kept at the ready—and her reactions brought out the strangest feelings in me. For some reason, the pencils, my optimistic stack of questionnaires, the narrow office suddenly seemed petty: a personality embodied and put on display. And I felt embarrassed for her to see how small the boundaries of my life had become.
For his part, her boyfriend didn’t exactly agree to participate in the study, but he didn’t stop me, even after I explained that I would need to take a scraping from inside his cheek. So I pressed on, getting as far as writing his first name at the top of a questionnaire: Tommy.
“Family name?” I asked when he didn’t offer one.
His jaw set in that expression I’d seen in the restaurant. Then he snapped, “Just Tommy.” Taking the exasperated tack parents often use with children he added, “Let me see that,” pulling the form out from under my pencil. He studied it a moment, then read in a flat tone: “True or False. People should dress in individual ways even if the effects are strange.” It was a question from the Disinhibition Subset. I could see him mentally comparing my Sears blazer to his linen shirt, his oval, tinted glasses, gold necklace…. “You really think this works?”
Apparently satisfied with the wastepaper basket, the file cabinet, and the back door, his girlfriend came around to his side of the desk. She stood behind him, her taut, trapeze-artist arms crossed over his chest as I explained the Zuckerman Personality scale for Sensation Seeking that Ebstein, et al. developed into the Tri-Dimensional Risk-Taking Index (RTI) that Hur and Bouchard then applied to identical twins to demonstrate a strong hereditary component in RT Personality Types (RTPT)…. They looked back at me with that glazed expression I often faced in class, their eyes making me aware of the sound of my own voice. “Examining the biochemistry that influences the broad behavioral mechanisms and psycho-physiological reactions in rats,” it was saying, “Resnick found that those rats that exhibited elevated tendencies to explore their surroundings also had elevated levels of dopaminergic—”
“Rats,” he interrupted. He read from the questionnaire: “True or False. The worst social sin is to be a bore.”
With a quick underhand flip, she popped a pack of cigarettes out of his baggy shirt’s pocket, then lit up, exhaling something in Chinese that made him snicker.
I forged ahead. “Building on this research…” Convincing him of the worth of the study was going to be more complicated than I had thought, I saw, for as I explained the Svrakician linkage between twins who were identified as RTPTs, a black-and-white mirage of Wong’s old pharmacy seemed to rise up behind Tommy and his girlfriend, a line of customers standing at the long counter, Mr. Wong himself in black, flowing cheongsam, using a library ladder to ascend a wall of bottled potions, Tommy and his girlfriend superimposed before it in the Technicolor of their Chuppie attire, not so much a break from the past as—“…the enzymes such as MAO and DBH that regulate the neurotransmitters associated with behavior, and hormones such as cortisol and testosterone—”
“Testosterone? You mean being macho?”
Macho. The gang boss. Big man, The Rock and his moll—a way to break in suddenly appeared. “Voila!” I shouted, in the loud tone I sometimes used to shock students awake. “Find the gene that controls the enzyme, and you’ll find the genetic marker for the personality!”
Instead of the “ah ha” of recognition I had hoped for, they only exchanged frowns the way freshmen sometimes did when they realized we weren’t going to be studying Kinsey. “So what?” he ventured. “Only Risk-Takers have balls?”
I may as well have been building him an elaborate temple of gods, demigods, lesser demons and monkeys, all baroquely entangled. But what else was I to do other than finish the door: “Van Tol, Wu, Guan, O’Hara and others have already put forth a candidate: variations in the DNA coding sequence of the D4 receptor, a forty-eight base-pair sequence that controls clozapine and spiperone binding, especially when it appears as an eightfold repeat. Put simply, people without this redundancy of DNA are no more or less sensitive to the enzymes that control behavior.” I showed him the DNA sequences on a chromosome stain—CCCC GCG CCC GGC CTC CCC CCG GAC CCC TGC GGC TCC AAC TGT GCT—explaining how when a person carries a sequence that repeats itself eight times—
“Come on, get to the practical stuff.”
“In practical terms…” I cut to the conclusion “…an analysis of the genetic phenotype could tell you which poker player will be prone to take risks, to bluff with a mixed hand, and which will tend to play it safe and fold.”
A faint smile came over Tommy’s lips, and in silence they both looked over the questionnaire for the longest time. Then sheepishly he asked, “There’s one question I’m not sure how to answer.”
“Yes?”
He read: “ ‘Rate yourself on a scale of one to ten, one equals fully Asian, ten equals fully American.’ I mean, I drive big American car….” Then he growled, “But my rickshaw is 110% Chinese!” and his girlfriend shrieked as he pulled her onto his lap, simulating a bumpy ride.
When they finished laughing, I pointed out, “As a token of appreciation you will be paid a gratuity of forty dollars.”
“Fourti ho Yhankee dohlars?” his girlfriend asked, exaggerating a Yan-Can-Cook accent.
“Chì lâo,” he said, sliding the questionnaire back, “you don’t need that crap. I’ll tell you what you need to know about Risk-Takers.”
“Oh, do you know some Risk-Takers?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
He pulled out his cell phone and spoke into it. Then he proceeded to tell me about a great uncle who swam the Niagara to get into this country. “The whole while, miners shot at him from the bluff. Like they’re shooting at rats at the dump. Uncle says when he made it and lay on the bank exhausted from swimming for his life, he could hear them up there hooting, drinking and shooting at other bubbles in the water.” Today, he continued, jets and ATMs and container shipping have made that swim 12,000 miles long: from Fujian by mule train across the Yunman Province. Aunties did it. Brothers. He talked about an uncle who hung onto the undercarriage of a train despite blowing snow and a cold so deep that when guards discovered him, he couldn’t let go. “They amputated two fingers just to arrest him,” he said, holding up a hand with his fingers folded at the knuckles to illustrate. “But the next year he tied himself to the undercarriage and tried again….” Nieces. Nephews. All trekking through the jungles of Burma and into Chiang Mai, being passed from handler to handler, some of whom were robbers. Some murderers. “Sometimes you are a mule for heroin. One way or another your body is your dollar—all you got—and you pay as you go till you emerge from a crate, or a trunk, or a hold with other shitting, puking rats to North America. And there your troubles begin.”
A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and several men filed in. It was the men from Three Happiness; not the men who had been with Tommy and his girlfriend at the table. It was the old men who’d been sitting around reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes before his gang showed up. “You were expecting Jet Li?” Tommy asked. One of them, I noticed, was missing two fingers from his right hand. As they stood in line along the footprint left by the store’s old counter, it was as if the ghosts I had imagined earlier materialized before me, each in turn stepping forward so I could take a scraping from the inside of a cheek for the DNA samples, listing them in the manifest only as Uncle A, Uncle B, Uncle C, through F. Was there a G? When Tommy saw me looking at him, he pulled out two small squares of gauze, wrapped in Saran Wrap and stained with blood.
“You run your test on these two, too,” he said. “This one,” he said holding up the first sample, “came from someone without balls.”
“Zheng ben wei shi me bu you ta qu?” his girlfriend said, pouting.
“This other is from someone who always thought he could piss with the big dogs.” He shook his head wistfully, handing it over. “When in Rome you’ve got no choice but act in Italian movies, huh, Jenny?” he asked his girlfriend. “Even if they’re Spaghetti-Vampire-Westerns.” She smiled wanly, looking down.
While yet in graduate school, my thesis director invited me onto a study he was conducting. The subject was the relation between biochemistry and social cooperation, and at the stipulation of his funders my director drew test subjects from the employees of an enormous maquiladora just south of Laredo. This particular maquiladora was Japanese-owned, the most high-tech manufacturer of air conditioners in North America, I was told, though one would never have guessed it from the slum that sprawled out from the plant: hundreds upon hundreds of shacks constructed from discarded shipping crates, oil drums and cinder blocks, and lived in by employees and their families, sweltering without electricity, or even running water. The plant was only running at seventy-percent capacity because of the predilection of employees to supplement their wages by selling copper tubing meant for the air conditioners and even the very tools supplied them to do their jobs.
When I confided to my mentor that I didn’t think the plant managers really cared about discoveries in social science, he snorted. So I explained my suspicion: that the Japanese, with their lingering notions of racial superiority, were actually hoping to use our study to biologically screen out those who wouldn’t pull together for the profitability of the company. He walked away, chuckling at what I thought he considered unwarranted cynicism in his young apprentice, until years later, when I learned that he had listed me on his proposal as co-investigator not because I was an outstanding student, as I had also believed at the time, but because I had a Japanese surname. And my surname, in fact, may have been the reason his study was funded ahead of competing proposals, including one by my present department head, who provided this explanation, recounting how he and my mentor had once shared a laugh about my “Mexican question” over a few beers. I would have chalked up the whole story to jealousy, professional gossip, if it weren’t for the ring of truth sounded by one of his details: that the Japanese managers also blamed me for the failure of our study after they discovered I was only a Hapa-Hadle, heavy on the Caucasian side at that, though I maintain even now that the real reason thefts increased after they did, in fact, implement a blood test based on our study was because smuggling copper from a tightly controlled factory requires more social cooperation than does being a dutiful cog in its assembly line.
Everyone in the sciences has had a brush with or knows someone whose work has intersected that of one government lab or another: the study of migratory birds, for example, that arouses the interest of those trying to invent creative ways to conduct germ warfare, or the latest snowflake-pattern-recognition software that might somehow be employed in riot control. It did not take much to imagine others watching from the shadows to see if the genetic linkage I was seeking between DNA and risk-taking could ever be used to identify suicide bombers, or perhaps those who would risk their student visas by illegally taking a job. This wasn’t just idle speculation. Already, Korea was completing banks of DNA fingerprints, while in Germany, would-be immigrants had to prove their German-ness by submitting a saliva sample along with their applications—just two examples of a worldwide genes race that was extending the surveillance and control of many populations down to the level of the human cell.
Did Tommy also have some such ulterior motive? When he asked if I was still looking for Risk-Takers, hadn’t he added, “Good, so am I”?
Then an item in The Chinatown Lantern turned me cold. A boat trying to smuggle illegal Chinese immigrants had drawn the suspicion of a Coast Guard cutter. The boat had been disguised as a fishing trawler. But instead of playing their ruse through, the smugglers—or snakeheads, as they are called—panicked at the sight of the cutter and threw their real cargo, the illegal aliens, into the sea. They knew that the Coast Guard would have to stop to rescue the illegals, and so the snakeheads managed to escape. None of the illegals could swim, though, so they drowned before the Coast Guard could find them. The article was simply restating the fact that these smugglers were still at large, just one of the many “consumer alerts” that circulated as news.
Was Tommy involved somehow? Is this why he was so intent on finding “macho” henchmen who would follow through on risks rather than turn tail at the first sign of danger? Looking at one of the blood samples he’d supplied, I wondered if that was what he meant by it coming from “someone who thought he could piss with the big dogs.” If so, wouldn’t that make him an accomplice to murder? Even if he was only looking for men willing to risk smaller crimes, numbers running, drugs, or whatever, did I implicate myself by having that blood analyzed?
