Year's Best SF 10, page 47
As it happened, the DNA tests run on the two samples showed that the coward was decidedly a Risk-Taker, by my measure, having eight repeats of the D4DR gene on Chromosome 11. The “Big Dog’s” swab, though, indicated an ordinary person. Had I mixed up the samples? No, that was impossible, I concluded. But had he? Both samples were tainted, of course, and I only played along to keep him in play. But if I retested and got the opposite results, I was sure Tommy could put me in touch with the very pool of subjects my study needed. Conversely, the existence of a biologically positive Risk-Taker who expresses negative risk-taking behavior was troubling enough, and I knew I had to find out which was which, though I also hoped I would never see Tommy again.
As soon as the banana let me into his smelly office I ask, “Did you test those blood samples?” He had moved into it like a hermit crab, and now the crab curled up in his shell frowning. Then he nodded—slowly—his lips tighter than a sealed vinegar pot. But why? Something wrong? The yin of me didn’t want to know: imagine a soft-focus shot of me walking past his office, twice, each time deciding to forget the whole stupid show. What’s he gonna tell me anyway? But with him stalling before me, the yang of me was burning to find out. “They stood out, right?” Again he nodded—not giving up his secret—and I could see we were sliding into another scene. Sure enough, squirming like his knickers are in a twist, he says he wants to meet the men himself.
Chì lâo! Where’d this guy get his nose for comedy?—turning every solemn moment into jokey puns, mistaken identities…. In HK cinema, a jilted woman always tears upa photo of her lover; when triad goons murder a detective, his partner always swears revenge. Directors know how to keep it real with age-old types, not the cartoons of people this banana makes by connecting his numbered dots. So I see that if this movie had any hope of staying genuine I had to keep us on script. And in roles that real people could recognize: Jenny-po as the “Cute but Ballsy Girlfriend,” him as “The Professor,” and me? I guess that’s what I was trying to find out.
First I laughed in his face—Ah ha ha ha Ha!—You think your kung-fu powerful but today is day you die!—and say he didn’t need to meet anyone. I had already met them for him. But he wouldn’t let it go, him trying to put a headlock on me [slo-mo] by turning turnips into temples again, telling me that if I wanted a reliable test for Risk-Takers, we would have to follow through on paperwork.
Paper! Aiiiiiiiija!
It was hard not to lose it—go psycho-fu all over his head—this banana lecturing me about Risk-Takers and chicken hearts and I don’t know what, when he doesn’t know anything about breathing water, or despair, or how hard life can be in rural China. Especially for those with no face, or worse, filthy blood: to know your nephew, your sister, get constantly bullied—beat up, too—because sixteen years ago she tried to escape the Suzy-Wong way only to end up stuck and with a baby that has no proper father. You know what it does to you inside to hear your nephew’s voice, made puny and crackly by one of those provincial phones as he tells you, “Uncle, I have to have my blood replaced. Otherwise I see no sense in living.”
Could the banana’s papers replace blood? Could it find a man in all of China who would marry her? Or even hire her? Could it warn someone that a moment’s hesitation in HK could be the last straw on the mainland or go back and undo a split-second’s decision? No, and it all came broiling out: flurry of fists, head-high kicks, manga jump-cuts with him answering back, us two shaolin fighting on speedboats, on flaming ladders, off trampolines and soaring—him on wire, me no net—somersaulting sword fantasy through bounce lighting, him dodging, me countering, double-pistol standoff, then typhoon of bullets, slo-mo of me diving to save sister, me doing all my own stunts while Jenny-po covers my back with two-fisted Uzi volcanoes, a flock of chickens burst out of the kitchen and into crossfire—pause in the action so we can exchange witty quip—resume shooting—amp up the Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack—rack focus of pained expressions, fury, envy, fear—but that’s not the point anymore—a bloodbath for male honor and sacrifice, camera zigzag-tracking through the action, even switch to witchy-nudie-assassin genre, but even that don’t work, and when it becomes clear that I could jump off from my condo to die before he gives in, I give up.
“All right, all right. The both of them,” I said, breathing hard, meaning the blood donors, “will be at the rocket-rice races tomorrow.” I sketched a map of the area, and show which alley to take, wondering how I had let our fight spill out of the frame, the camera swinging around to show the crew. Then I told him, “Memorize this: Confucius say, ‘Gui ma zhi duo xing.’ Or no, make that, ‘Yige zitou de danshen.’ Whenever you get stopped along the way, repeat those words.”
Seeing that banana strain to make a bootleg Gucci out of my no-good Mandarin, scratches and all, was funny, despite myself. And the more he rehearsed—struggling to myna-bird the words without a clue what they meant—the harder it was to stay mad. He’s such a porcelain chicken that I almost just came out and asked him plain. Or at least I began to think it was okay, it being impossible to lose face before a porcelain chicken. “But if you think you still need your papers after tomorrow,” I say for now, “maybe we’ll both just play for the outtake reel.”
This is absurd, I told myself the next night, stepping off the Chinatown bus. And possibly dangerous. A gaggle of old Chinese women dressed in knit caps and layers of men’s vests shoved by me with their mesh tote bags. Rival tongs sometimes shot at each other, I knew, or turned in each other’s cockfights or gambling parlors. Not to mention the police.
The bus hissed, sliding off into a misty night and leaving me before the bronze statue of Confucius, that symbol of tradition, all marked up with Chinese graffiti as though to memorialize the fact that every country is a state of mind, especially to those who didn’t live there. I wanted to kick myself for allowing Tommy to suck me into his. Neon signs multiplied in the rain-slick street, their candy-colored pinks and greens turning Chinatown as cartoonish as any world must appear to its outsiders. Paper! he said—as if I could forget the true lesson of Paper-Scissors-Rock when without that paper, without the tables and covariants and standardized means, Risk-Taking didn’t exist. At least not in my world.
The tourist shops were closed, but the restaurants that catered to fan-tan clubs and other basement establishments were just beginning to come alive. I assumed the map he had drawn was directing me to one of these and took one last look at it, debating whether or not to go on. No researcher inserts himself into his study to this degree. If some journal published my work—then found out the lengths I had gone to enrich my pool…. Shame. Disgrace.
Suddenly my ankles were wet—I had walked into the spray of a fishmonger who was hosing off the sidewalk before his shop. Perhaps it was the eeriness of the foggy night. Chinese lore is full of ghosts and shape-shifters, and this, along with all the talk I’d been hearing about human smuggling, was surely at work on my subconscious. In any case, the faces of live bullfrogs straining against the chicken wire that held them in their barrel all seemed to be laughing with Tommy at the idea that a researcher could be anywhere else.
I didn’t believe any of that claptrap about reason screening out other modes of reality or the dead being more powerful than the living, of course, so it was easy to move on. Still, this is not to say that the past—an unfaithful wife, for example, who excuses her actions by claiming her mate is a “dull academic”—does not influence the present. And once Tommy pointed it out, certain questions on the RT Personality Questionnaire that I had inherited—“I would like to join a ‘far-out’ group of artists or ‘hippies’”—did seem to be spoken by the ghost of mood rings, astrological signs, and personality tests which were once the rage among researchers—before they morphed into the biochemical measures of the ’70s, which became neurological explanations in the ’80s, which were giving way, in this the age of genetics, to strings of AGCTs.
Measure enough things about enough people and you’ll see something, Tommy had said when we argued in my office. Not so much to mock me, I believe, as out of the same sentiment as those shrines found in every Chinatown business, their incense smoldering with lip service if not utter belief in the miraculous transformations that supposedly permeated the place: moon maidens become brides, paupers turned fabulously rich…. And even if my data did have as much to do with reality as the spirit-filled cosmological maps of medieval Chinese, as Tommy claimed, that didn’t mean it wasn’t valid—if by “reality” we mean what that spirit-filled reality meant to medieval Chinese, the only one that could possibly matter to them—which opens up a real question: would the practical use to which any of this knowledge was put be the true measure of the man?
The gangway my map said to go down was pitch-dark, only wide enough for a single person to pass. Then the building Tommy had indicated by an “X” was there: an enormous industrial building that I knew to be an old coal-fired power plant built in the last century. Dark windows. The upper floors now held garment manufacturers, though the realtor I rented from said that ever since China reclaimed Hong Kong, the capital flight from that financial epicenter had been exerting pressure to turn this building into high-end condos or a mall. Now I saw why nothing ever came of it. The ground floor had plywood for windows, but tellingly, no gang dared tag them. Approaching the building from the back, it looked like a fortress, its single door made of reinforced steel. I knocked softly and a voice from inside answered in Chinese.
“Gui ma zhi duo xing…Yige zitou de danshen,” I replied, and there was muffled laughter. Why? What was I saying? Bolts were drawn back; the door opened.
I was ushered in by an old man whose long braid and embroidered silk tunic and cap made it seem as though I’d stepped into a Charlie Chan movie—was this a joke? No. From the darkness behind him, two large men emerged, and one began to frisk me. “What do you know about classy Chinese quim?” the other asked.
“What?” I stammered—what had I said!—as the old one shooed me toward the noise of what sounded like lots of people arguing deeper in the building; a lawnmower or chain saw revved, the noise of voices and engines growing louder as I neared the one lit doorway. Then I was in a huge, warehouse-sized basement, full of men who, just like in movies, were waving fistfuls of dollars and shouting in Chinese. Young and old, men in thousand-dollar suits, men in mechanics’ coveralls…. The fishmonger I had seen earlier was there. Or someone like him, still in his stained apron and paper cap, jostling with others for the attention of the few men dressed in rumpled white shirts who were holding the bets. Indeed, it seemed as though all of the cabbies, chicken-parts processors, and others I had interviewed were there—a fire marshal’s nightmare—but that was impossible, I knew. They couldn’t all be tong members. But if that were true—
Three men in motorcycle helmets sat on souped-up minibikes, gunning their engines as they eased up to a starting line while some of the men in white shirts yelled at the crowd, pushing people to clear a path for the bikers around the perimeter of the basement.
Tommy appeared at my side, eyes wild, as he yelled over the noise, “Now you’ll see!” At that moment the minibikes roared off, a straggler at the edge of the crowd leaping to get out of the way. The basement was round, as though we were all inside an enormous barrel, but it was tiny as far as racetracks go, and watching the bikers go around and around me and the other spectators was dizzying. The basement itself had obviously been dug by horses as were the basements of many buildings from that time: a team of horses would be hitched to a plowlike digging blade that radiated out from a post in the center of what would be the basement. Then as the horses walked around and around, they dug deeper and deeper, coolies hauling away the loose dirt in baskets. Now, a plywood ramp had been erected so that the curved brick wall itself could be used as part of the track, the minibikes rocketing by so fast that their centrifugal force held them to the wall as they used it as a lane to pass each other.
The dopamine rush that came with just watching these men shoot around the track made my hairs stand on end. The bikers roared off like short-track speed skaters: a burst at the start followed by three laps of jockeying for position, after which they gunned into the final no-rules lap. I understood as never before—understood with my body—the lure of gladiator tournaments, of kick boxing…. It was impossible not to get caught up in the “what if” of one racer recklessly shooting between a pillar and another biker to win, and I practically forgot why I was there until, heat over, Tommy nudged me. He nodded toward the winner, coasting into a fold of men, his green soccer jersey crisp as new cash. Like jerseys in the city’s youth league, this rider’s was emblazoned with the name of a sponsor. And when he turned toward someone, allowing me to read it, my pulse quickened: Three Happiness.
“Blood Sample A or B?” I asked excitedly, trying to catch a look at the man’s face through the narrow eye slit of his helmet. His jersey also sported a number—8—my lucky number, according to the restaurant’s place mats.
Tommy only began to complain about the families who were abandoned by the British when they returned Hong Kong to the Chinese. I thought he was somehow referring to the man before us, but the engines and shouting of bets for the next heat made it hard to hear, and just as I began to think he was actually talking about kung-fu stunts I realized he’d been really referring to his old video-dubbing business. Because bootlegging movies was a business that party members were in, he suddenly found himself a copyright criminal. “Enemies of the state and such….”
I didn’t know why he was telling me all of this. Afterward, I wondered if it was because he knew I suspected he was involved in human smuggling. Everyone wants to be seen as the hero in his own movie. Or maybe he figured this was his best shot at getting whatever answers he really wanted from my study. Or maybe, it occurred to me, he was just a guy. Not a tong boss. Not an immigrant, or even a Chi-Am, just a guy describing the rural province his family was from, a place so hard, so spirit-crushing, he said, and with so little chance of ever being different that suicide was the leading cause of death among the young, fertilizer the poison of choice.
“Hey! Wo xiang da ge du!” Tommy yelled, breaking off his story to grab the attention of one of the bet takers. A quick exchange of cash for betting stub, and then he continued, agitated—but instead of sending money back to a sister, he said, he himself was going to be sent back. Bureaucrats in some office processed his papers along with hundreds of others like so many parking tickets. Just before police arrived, though, a customer, his professor, tipped him off. To save him? To get rid of him?—maybe she both turned him in and tipped him off? In any case, it was clear what they must do. Jump on the motorbike his partner, his girlfriend, used to make deliveries, weaving in and out of Hong Kong traffic. But with the police coming in their building’s front door only one of them did so. The other froze. Just a moment. But the moment was enough to be caught while the other roared away.
“Why?” he asked, grinding out a cigarette with the sole of his boot. “Why did one hesitate? Or obey their order to stop? Because he was from the Mainland, The Servile Chinese? Chicken? Afraid the police would shoot? Confucius says we reveal ourselves to ourselves in the moment we least expect, but what did that hesitation reveal about him? Every day I ask myself that.”
He paused, there in the nicotine sweetness and stench of exhaust, as though waiting to see if I would attempt an answer. When it was obvious to us both that I couldn’t, Tommy shrugged. “The one who pulls the train gets to be the engine, and America is a great place to become an—”
“Gweilo!” someone shouted, and Tommy, indeed the entire basement, fell silent. For an instant. No more than a heartbeat. Then it was instant confusion. “Gweilo!” others began to yell as people scattered. The racist “Chinese Fire Drill” popped into my mind, not so much to describe the people running about as the tumult of details that came rushing in. Tommy was already gone. A bald man was screaming in my face—“Gweilo!”—to me or at me, I couldn’t tell. Not knowing what else to do, I ran, too. I didn’t know if we were running from the vice squad or immigration. Or maybe the building had caught fire. A double report boomed—gun-shots? Engine backfires? I was knocked forward by a scuffle between two of the bet takers and a man trying to retrieve his money, then I was running with others down a dark corridor. “Kuai! Kuai!” I tripped after, then through a boiler room, then up a metal ladder, and past aisle after aisle after aisle of darkened sewing machines, hampers, racks of garments, all the while wondering, Why? What did I have to run from? When I caught up with them, they were going out a back window. We had emerged in a completely different building and were at a level that was higher than the alley, and from this height I had a glimpse of the checkerboard of alleys and backyard fences below. Men vanished into the night. Following their example, I descended a fire escape then hung down as far as my arms let me before dropping to the ground. Then I was on the run again, this time with other men down another alley and away from a red throbbing glow that seemed to fill the fog. Flashing squad-car lights? Or flames? Fear colors everything. From the darkness came the screech of tires—squad cars taking positions? Maybe it was a tong after all, boxing in its rival? Before I could tell, I found myself alone—no, behind one other man, just ahead, the back of his green jersey leaving no doubt who he was:
THREE HAPPINESS
8
“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop!” But this only made him run faster and his backward glances made me realize he thought I was chasing him. Which, I was. He threw off his helmet—threw it at me? To run faster? He was getting away, my academic’s body beginning to lose to fatigue. “Wait!” At that moment all my hopes, my very self, seemed subject to my ability to catch him. But why? It was completely irrational, but still a gut feeling made me cry out, “Wait! Deng! Please!” A car engine gunned somewhere, followed by a siren.
