Not that the place looked artificial: The hotchpotch of buildings was so hung about with extraneous pavement stalls and the grime of use that a person had to look closely to note the uniformity of building materials and the relative lack of wear, to see that they were none of them old enough to have seen the century’s turn.
But the changes had not erased the essential nature of Chinatown. This was a place apart, a small, intricately crafted miniature city with rules and mores all its own. The air here was not the same as that outside of its borders; the people moved differently. The Chinatown of my childhood survived in glimpses—the joyous exoticism of curlicued buildings; the unlikely fragrances, sweet and sharp; the dancing script on buildings and signs; an old woman in silks mincing along on bound feet; a man wearing a pole across his shoulders to carry his baskets of fruit—but even the girls in dresses that matched my own and the men in lounge suits and felt hats walked and spoke as if they knew their place in this delicate, perfect machine that was Chinatown.
Now that I stood on the busy pavement, caught between a lantern store whose rafters were solid with its wares and a noisy poultry shop stacked high with cages of ducks, geese, and roosters, my idea simply to ask among the residents began to seem simplistic. The bustle and press of people, the sheer number of shops and buildings whose signs bore only Chinese characters, made it clear that, Western dress and English-speaking schools notwithstanding, this dozen or so blocks formed a city unto itself—small, yes, but it was easily conceivable that not everyone here knew everyone else.
I did not even know their names, since “Micah” was a highly unlikely appellation for a Chinese man and Mah could have been short for anything. All I had was a photograph, at least fifteen years old, and the likelihood that they were interested in the art, or science, or perhaps even religion, of balancing the energies of the earth’s dragons by the use of small bowls of water, mirrors, and plants.
It took conversations with three impatient shopkeepers to give me a name for this Oriental discipline: fungshwei, the fish-seller called it, shaking an octopus in my face, but no no, he didn’t know no-one, go down to bookstore, please go now he busy. So I left him to his eels and squiggly things and went past the barber shop and around the pavement-seller of small decorated cakes, stepping into the street to avoid hitting my head on a platoon of flattened ducks, in the direction that he had indicated, only what appeared to be a bookstore turned out to be some kind of apothecary, odorous and shadowy with an entire wall of drawers marked only by characters. Further down the street, a building with curlicued roofs that I took to be a temple was revealed as a telephone exchange, so I turned back, narrowly avoiding collision with a heavily laden silver tray of fragrant covered bowls, and made a more methodical search. The bookstore, which I had passed twice, was tucked behind a pavement greengrocer’s; I found it only by spotting a man coming out with a fresh newspaper in his hand.
I pushed between the crates of strange knobbly dark objects on the one side and baskets of strange smooth light objects on the other, to enter a world that was comforting in its familiarity. Books of all sizes, colours, shapes, and languages stretched from floor to ceiling, riding in neat piles on central tables, filling the hands of the half dozen patrons, all of whom glanced up as I entered and watched me unabashedly for a while before their books pulled them back in. The front of the shop displayed newspapers, mostly Chinese although I saw two San Francisco English-language dailies as well as a week-old New York Times. Nothing from England, though.
“May I help you?” asked a voice in lightly accented English, with no trace of the pidgin dialect. I hadn’t noticed him before, as he had been standing behind a high desk, but now he rose up and seated himself on a stool. A Chinese man of about thirty, wearing a brown suit, flecked red tie, and wire-rimmed glasses much like those on my own nose.
“Yes, thank you,” I said. With the recent experience of harried and impatient shopkeepers in mind, I thought I had better pin the man down in a commercial transaction before asking questions about Chinese cooks and gardeners. “I understand there’s something called fungshwei. I’m probably not saying it right—it has to do with balancing energies in a room, or something?” I allowed my voice to rise into a question mark, to say that I was just a harmless white woman with money to spend on oddities that took her fancy.
“Fungshwei,” he repeated, and I took note of his pronunciation. “You wish a book on it?”
“If you have one. In English,” I added with a self-deprecating grin. He responded to my silly-me attitude with a polite smile of his own, although something about it made me wonder if he wasn’t aware that my act was just that. But he turned on the stool, and I was deciding to place the smile under general Oriental inscrutability when he all but vanished behind the counter. I watched the top of his head go past, realising belatedly that the man was only an inch or two more than five feet high.
As he walked towards the back of the store, I saw that his gait was slightly uneven, a twist more than a limp, as if his spine had a kink in it. He tugged a wheeled library ladder from its recesses, allowing it to run along its tracks for about fifteen feet before stopping it to clamber up into the reaches of the shelves. He pulled out two volumes, came down, returned the ladder to its place, and came back to the desk with the books, laying them in front of me on the counter.
“I do not have any English books entirely about fungshwei,” he told me. “Both of these have chapters on the science. The one in this book is longer, with more examples, but it suffers from slight inaccuracies. The other is shorter, the English barely adequate, but the author knows what he is talking about.”
I looked over the offerings, finding among other things that the discipline was rendered as feng shui, and that the first book had clearly been written for an audience of Western ignoramuses and romantics. The second I found intelligible, if idiosyncratic; I placed it on the counter and told him I’d take it. His face did not change, but I felt as though I’d passed some sort of test.
When he had wrapped my purchase and given me my change, I pulled my mother’s small framed photograph out of my coat pocket and laid it where the book had been.
“I wonder if you know these people? They may also be interested in feng shui.”
Again, I could read no reaction on the man’s face. But I felt a brief beat of stillness before he leant forward, adjusting his spectacles to look at the photograph obediently. After a few seconds, he raised his eyes to mine. “You think I should know these people?”
“They lived in San Francisco, at least they did ten years ago. I knew them as Mah and Micah, although I don’t suppose those were their names. They used to work for my parents. I’m trying to locate them.”
He did not ask why, although I expected him to. I even had a story prepared, about a bequest in the will. Instead, he reached out and ran a curious finger down the frame.
“I found the picture on my mother’s dressing-table,” I said without thinking.
That time, he reacted. Only a quick glance at my face, and completely understandable—what kind of white woman would have a framed photograph of two Orientals on her dressing-table? But what could I say to that? I didn’t even know myself, although I did know that it was very like my mother to look past society’s restrictions.
When he sat upright, his face was once again polite and closed. “I am sorry, I do not think they live around here. But I will ask. How do I get in touch with you, should I find anything about them?”
I took out a visiting card and wrote on the back of it the address of the lawyer and, at a whim, the house itself. “I will only be in San Francisco a few days, but anything to the first address will be sent on to me, at any time.”
He accepted the card, and inclined his head slightly. “I wish you luck, miss.”
As I went out of the shop, I noticed a small mirror, located so low on a wall that only the proprietor would see it. And I wondered if, somewhere in the back of the store, lay a bowl of water
and a small pot-plant.
Another waiter scurried past on his delivery, and as his heavy-laden tray trailed across before me, it emitted odours that tugged at me in a way I had all but forgotten. The hot breath of chilli pepper, the comforting aroma of fresh rice—for the first time in weeks, food had appeal. As I lingered on the pavement, waiting for the waiter to return, my mouth actually watered.
I had to wait for some time, jostled by black-clad women smelling of incense and spices, blue-clad men bearing the odours of laundry and labour, and bright, bobbed young things graced with the perfumes of the downtown shops, all of them intent on the greengrocer’s peculiarly shaped wares, the impossibly long green beans and aubergines the size of eggs. Eventually, however, the young man reappeared, the tray tucked easily under one arm, a cigarette dangling from his lip, exchanging greetings with the people near the stall. I fell into step behind him; when he turned down a narrow alleyway and stepped down into a door-way, I did not hesitate to follow.
Once inside, however, I was not so sure of myself, for this was clearly not a restaurant that catered to outsider trade. A dozen Chinese people holding chop-sticks in their hands turned to see this exotic invader, and I offered them an uncomfortable smile, looking around for my unwitting guide. One of the customers called something in a loud voice, and the man popped out from a door-way, his eyebrows going up when he saw me.
“You like something?” he asked.
“Luncheon, if you’re serving,” I said.
“Sure, sure,” he said, to my relief. “No problem, here, sit here.”
He dashed a clean white cloth over the surface of a corner table, and pulled out the chair. “You need menu?”
Even if it was in English, I probably would not have been able to make much sense of it. Instead, I told him, “Why don’t you just bring me something you think I’d—No, make that something you like yourself.” Heaven only knows what pallid version of his native cuisine he might deem suitable for a white woman. Then I added, “Just nothing with pork or shrimp, please.”
It was only when he had taken himself through the door and was carrying on a full-voiced and unintelligible conversation with the cook that the belated thought occurred: Chinese people were rumoured to enjoy eating dog, and rat.
I told myself not to be squeamish, and fingered the pair of chopsticks lying beside my plate, feeling the eyes of the other diners on me.
My food arrived quickly, although the earlier patrons were still waiting for theirs. One of them, a boy of perhaps fourteen, said something to his two older companions. All three watched me reach for the thin bamboo sticks.
They seemed more amused than disappointed when this white person’s clumsiness with the chop-sticks did not come to pass—I had just spent three weeks in Japan, eating with sticks slicker and more delicate than these, and the skill had not deserted me in crossing the ocean. I grinned at the boy, cautiously seized and lifted a scrap of what appeared to be chicken, and held it out to him for a moment before slipping it into my mouth. He grinned back, and then frowned and said something to his companions.
Having been through this before, I knew what was puzzling them: I was using the chop-sticks in my left hand. I held up the empty sticks, clicked them together, and then bent over the rest of my meal.
The dishes contained neither dog nor rat, so far as I could tell. The soup held a tangle of chicken’s feet, by no means the strangest foodstuff I had been faced with in recent months. The waiter watched surreptitiously until he had seen me suck the flesh from the bones in one quick between-the-teeth motion, then smiled widely. The other bowls appeared to be largely vegetable, although his English got us no further than the aubergine, which he called by the American name, “eggplant.” One dish was hot enough to bring sweat to my face, the second was heavy with garlic and tiny black beans, the third both tangy and sweet.
I paid, slid a generous tip beneath the side of my plate, and was halfway out of the door before I recalled my reasons for coming to Chinatown. With the experience of the impatient shopkeepers in mind, I hesitated briefly before I ducked back into the warm, fragrant room. The waiter again greeted me with raised eyebrows. When I took out the framed photograph and explained what I wanted, the eyebrows went down and the face closed. He handed it back to me with scarcely a glance.
“No, sorry, don’t know them.”
“Look, I’m not out to cause them any trouble, I’m not with the government or anything—” (although surely he could hear that in my English accent?) “but they worked for my parents until ten years ago and I’d like to see that they get a small pension. You understand pension? Income? Money?”
“I understand pension,” he said. “We don’t know them.”
Stubbornly, I bypassed his authoritative stand and set the photograph on the table containing the largest number of diners, face up so they could all see the faces. “If anyone knows who these people are, could they leave a message for me at the St Francis? My name is Russell.”
The picture was gathered back into my hands before more than six or eight people could have looked on it, and I was ushered, politely but inexorably, out of the restaurant. I thanked the waiter who was shutting the door in my face, and stood in the damp alley, buttoning my coat against the sudden chill and feeling somewhat queasy with the unwonted amount of food in my belly.
I showed the picture at twenty-five or thirty other places, sometimes leaving my card, other times only able to say my name and that of the hotel before I was deposited on the pavement again. By that time I had exhausted the Chinese quarter, so I continued into the Italian quarter then worked my way back on either side of the main streets of Chinatown, but with no luck.
Sadly, I slipped the pretty frame back into my pocket and turned back down Grant, Chinatown’s high street. It was later than I had thought. Some of the shops were closing—the greengrocer’s wares had been depleted, the bookseller’s behind it was dark: Time to go.
According to Holmes’ map, going due west on the grid of streets from this, the northern section of the Chinese district, would lead directly to the house. Two streets over, I came to a cable-car, parked in the middle of the street as if waiting for me. Hesitantly, I climbed onto it, inserting myself amongst the homeward-bound office workers and shop-girls. The brakeman’s play on the bell, the shudder and rumble of the boxy vehicle and the constant sing of the underground cable that pulled it along the tracks, all teased out memories of childhood expeditions. Father’s outings were best, I remembered, for he permitted us to ride standing within arm’s reach of the posts, delirious with our daring. Mother, while she allowed us to ride outside, made us sit on the benches, while when Nanny was in charge we were forced to go inside, behind the steamed-up windows with the staid old ladies. Five streets up, the tracks turned north, and I jumped down from the quaint transport to watch it churn away, the cable singing through its slots.
How long had I lived here?
My body’s memory was saying: Longer than you thought.
Connecting cable-cars rose up into Pacific Heights, but I continued on foot, caught in reverie. Names that shouldn’t have been familiar, but were: Larkin and Polk, the wide Van Ness—I paused, to flow across the busy street with the other pedestrians—and the quieter reaches of Franklin and Gough. There was a park over to my left, I knew without looking, and down the hill to my right was a place where cattle were brought, although I could not remember if I had actually seen them, or if it was merely a story told by my father. But I did know that had I remained on the cable-car, I would have come to a busy waterfront smelling peculiarly of fish and chocolate.
I had been here. I had walked these pavements with my hand in my nanny’s iron fist, and later with my adolescent head held high. I once had a friend in this house here, a friend named . . . Iris? No—Lily. Lily with the black hair that her mother insisted on curling, torturously and regularly, Lily with the red lips that always made her look as if she had been eating cherries. Lily with the dollhouse I had bo
th scorned and secretly envied. She had moved away, to . . . where? Los Angeles, I thought, and as her farewell gift had given me—yes, the doll-family’s porcelain baby, the figure I had found in my bedroom that fit so nicely into the hand. We had sworn undying loyalty, Lily and I, and I had never written to her after the accident.
As I walked through the gathering dusk, with each beat of my heels on the pavement the neighbourhood came more alive around me. Here was where I had been terrified by a dog that had bared its teeth until driven away by a delivery boy. And the strange old woman here had owned a pet monkey, letting it out in a big cage on the porch where it flung itself about and screamed curses at passers-by. And next to her, the man with the parrots, two of them that competed with the monkey in screams, so that my mother thanked heaven that we did not live any nearer. And behind those lighted curtains, a child had died of the polio; there, a woman had been rushed to hospital when she had fallen down the stairs (and the whispers that followed, saying she was pushed—my first experience with criminality); at the now-boisterous house next door had lived a boy with pale green eyes who talked to himself and . . .
And then without warning the slow unfurling flower of my past was hacked away, with a sudden fast scuttle of feet behind me and an urgent shout that I should Get down, get down!
I whirled, prepared for battle, but he was too close, and ploughed straight into my diaphragm with a sharp banging noise, driving all breath from my lungs and sending me flying backward. I struggled to do battle, in spite of a desperate lack of oxygen and the dizziness throbbing out from the back of my skull, but before I could so much as get my hands raised, my attacker was up and away. Completely confused, I fought to sit upright against the dizziness of the impact and the panic of no breath. After far too long, my compressed lungs finally remembered their function and, with a great whooping noise, sucked in several gallons of glorious cold night air.