"I don't like this," William said. "He suspects something."
"There's nothing we can do," his father told him. "Go forward."
"I'll run it."
"No!" Chang muttered. "He may have a gun. He'll shoot us."
William eased the van to the booth and stopped. Would the boy, in his newfound rebellion, disregard Chang's order and speed through the gate?
The man in the booth swallowed and gripped something next to a large cash register. Was it a signal button of some kind? Chang wondered.
William looked down and pulled the U.S. money from the plastic divider between the front seats.
The officer seemed to flinch. He ducked, moving his arm toward the van.
Then he stared at the bill William was offering him.
What was wrong? Had he offered too much? Too little? Did he expect a bribe?
The man in the booth blinked. He took the bill with an unsteady hand, leaning forward to do so, and glanced at the side of the van, on which were the words:
The Home Store
As the guard counted out change he looked into the back of the van itself. All that the man could see--Chang prayed--were the dozens of saplings and bushes that Chang, William and Wu had dug up in a park on the way here from the beach and packed into the van to make it look like they were delivering plants for a local store. The rest of the families were lying on the floor, hidden beneath the foliage.
The officer gave him the change for the toll. "Good place. The Home Store. I shop there all the time."
"Thank you," William replied.
"Bad day for making deliveries, huh?" he asked Chang, nodding up at the stormy skies.
"Thank you," Chang said.
William eased the van forward. He accelerated and a moment later they plunged into a tunnel.
"Okay, we're safe, we're past the guards," Chang announced and the rest of the passengers sat up, brushing leaves and dirt off their clothing.
Well, his idea had worked.
As they'd sped down the highway from the beach Chang realized that the police here might do what the Chinese PLA and security bureau officers did frequently to search for wanted dissidents--set up roadblocks.
So they'd stopped at a huge shopping center, in the middle of which was The Home Store. It was open twenty-four hours and--with few employees so early in the morning--Chang, Wu and William had no trouble slipping in through the loading dock. From the stockroom they stole some cans of paint, brushes and tools, then slipped outside again. But not before Chang had snuck to the doorway that led to the store itself and looked at the astonishing place. He saw acres of aisles. It was breath-taking--Chang had never seen so many tools and supplies and appliances. Kitchens ready-made, a thousand light fixtures, outdoor furniture and grills, doors, windows, carpets. Whole rows devoted to nuts and bolts and nails. Chang's first reaction was to bring Mei-Mei and his father inside, just to show them the place. Well, there would be time for that later.
Chang told William, "I'm taking these things now because we need to--for our survival. But as soon as I get some one-color I'm going to pay them back. I'll send them the money."
"You're crazy," the boy replied. "They have more than they'll need. They expect things to be stolen. It's built into the price."
"We will pay them back!" Chang snapped. This time the boy didn't even bother to respond. Chang found a colorful newspaper in a large pile on the loading dock. Struggling with the English, he realized that this was a sales flyer and that it had the addresses of a number of Home Stores on it. When he got his first pay envelope or converted some yuan he would send them the money.
They'd returned to the van and found a truck parked nearby. William swapped the number plates and then they drove toward the city until they found a deserted factory. They parked in the loading dock, out of the rain, and Chang and Wu painted over the letters spelling the name of the church. After the white paint dried, Chang, a lifelong calligrapher, expertly drew the words "The Home Store" on the side in a typeface similar to that in the flyer he'd taken.
Yes, the trick had worked and, unstopped by security officers and the guard at the tollbooth, they now sailed out of the tunnel into the streets of Manhattan. William had studied the map carefully as they had waited in line at the toll and knew generally where they should go to get to Chinatown. The one-way streets caused a bit of confusion but soon he oriented himself and found the highway he sought.
Through dense rush-hour traffic, further slowed by the intermittent rain and patches of fog, they drove along a river whose shade perfectly matched the ocean they had just survived.
The gray land, Chang reflected. Not highways of gold and a city of diamonds, as the unfortunate Captain Sen had promised.
As Chang looked around at the streets and buildings he wondered what now awaited them.
In theory he still owed the Ghost a great deal of money. The going rate for smuggling someone from China to the United States was about U.S.$50,000. Since Chang was a dissident and desperate to leave he expected that the Ghost's agent in Fuzhou would charge him a premium. Yet he'd been surprised to find that the Ghost's fee was only $80,000 for his entire family, his father included. Chang had raided his meager savings and had borrowed the rest from friends and relatives to make up the ten percent down payment.
In his contract with the Ghost, Chang had agreed that he, Mei-Mei and William--and Chang's youngest son when he was old enough--would give money to the Ghost's debt collectors monthly until the remainder of the fee was paid off. Many immigrants worked directly for the snakehead who'd smuggled them into the country--the men generally in Chinatown restaurants, the women in garment factories--and lived in safehouses provided by them for a stiff fee. But Chang didn't trust snakeheads, especially the Ghost. There were too many rumors of immigrants being beaten and raped and kept prisoner in rat-infested safehouses. So he had made his own arrangements for a job for him and William and had located an apartment in New York through the brother of a friend back in China.
Sam Chang had always intended to pay his obligation. But now, with the sinking of the Fuzhou Dragon and the Ghost's attempts to murder them, the contract was void and they were out from under the crushing debt--if, of course, they could stay alive long enough for the Ghost and his bangshous to be captured or killed by the police or to flee back to China, and this meant going to ground as soon as possible.
William drove expertly through the traffic. (Where had he learned that? The family didn't even own a car.) Sam Chang looked back at the others in the van. They were disheveled and stank of seawater. Wu's wife, Yong-Ping, was in a bad way. Her eyes were closed and she shivered, sweat covering her face. Her arm was shattered from their collision with the rocks and the wound was still bleeding through an impromptu bandage. Wu's pretty teenage daughter, Chin-Mei, seemed unhurt but was clearly frightened. Her brother, Lang, was the same age as Chang's youngest son, and the two boys, with nearly identical bowl-shaped haircuts, sat close to each other, staring out the window and whispering.
Elderly Chang Jiechi sat motionless in the back of the van with his legs crossed and arms at his sides, thin white hair slicked back, saying nothing but observing all through eyes half covered by drooping lids. The old man's skin seemed more jaundiced than when they'd left Fuzhou over two weeks ago but perhaps that was just Chang's imagination. In any case, he'd decided that the first thing he'd do after they were settled in their apartment was get the man to a doctor.
The van slowed to a stop because of the traffic. William pressed the horn impatiently.
"Quiet," his father snapped. "Don't draw attention to us."
The boy hit the horn once more.
Chang glanced toward his son, the boy's lean face, the long hair, which fell well below his ears. He asked in a harsh whisper, "The van . . . how did you learn to start it that way?"
"What does it matter?" the boy asked.
"Tell me."
"I heard somebody talking about it at school."
"No, you're lying. You've done it before."
"I only steal from party undersecretaries and commune bosses. That'd be all right with you, wouldn't it?"
"You do what?"
But the boy grinned in a snide way and Chang understood he was joking. The comment, though, was cruelly intended; it was a reference to Chang's anticommunist political writings, which had caused the family so much pain in China--and necessitated the flight to America itself.
"Who do you spend time with, thieves?"
"Oh, Father." The boy shook his head, a condescending gesture, and Chang wanted to slap him.
"And what did you have that knife for?" Chang asked.
"A lot of people have knives. Yeye has one." This was the affectionate term for "grandfather," which many Chinese children used.
"That's a penknife for cleaning pipes," Chang said, "not a weapon." He finally lost his temper. "How can you be so disrespectful?" he shouted.
"If I didn't have the knife," the boy answered angrily, "and if I didn't know how to start the engine we'd probably be dead now."
The traffic sped up and William fell into a moody silence.
Chang turned away, feeling as if he'd been physically assaulted by the boy's words, by this very different side of his son. Oh, certainly there'd been problems with William in the past. As he'd neared his late teens he'd grown sullen and angry and withdrawn. His attendance at school dropped. When he'd brought home a letter from his teacher reprimanding him for bad grades Chang had confronted the boy--whose intelligence had been tested and was far higher than average. William had said that it wasn't his fault. He was persecuted at school and treated unfairly because his father was a dissident who'd flouted the one-child rule, spoke favorably about Taiwanese independence and--the worst sacrilege of all--was critical of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, and its hard-line views on freedom and human rights. Both he and his younger brother were taunted regularly by "superbrats," youngsters who, as only children in comfortable rich and middle-class Communist families, were spoiled by hordes of doting relatives and tended to bully other students. It didn't help that William was named after the most famous American entrepreneur in recent years, and young Ronald for a U.S. president.
But neither his behavior, nor this explanation for it, had seemed to Chang very serious and he hadn't paid much mind to his son's moods. Besides, it was Mei-Mei's task to rear the children, not his.
Why was the boy suddenly behaving so differently?
But then Chang realized that between working ten hours a day at a print shop and engaging in his dissident activities for most of the night, he'd spent virtually no time with his son--not until the voyage from Russia to Meiguo. Perhaps, he thought with a chill, this is how the boy always behaved.
For a moment he felt another burst of anger--though only partially directed toward William himself. Chang couldn't tell exactly what he was furious at. He stared at the crowded streets for a few moments then said to his son, "You're right. I wouldn't have been able to start the car myself. Thank you."
William didn't acknowledge that his father had even spoken and hunched over the wheel, lost in his own thoughts.
Twenty minutes later they were in Chinatown, driving down a broad road that was named in both Chinese and English, "Canal Street." The rain was letting up and there were many people on the sidewalks, which were lined with hundreds of grocery and souvenir shops, fish markets, jewelry stores, bakeries.
"Where should we go?" William asked.
"Park there," Chang instructed and William pulled the van to a curb. Chang and Wu climbed out. They walked into a store and asked the clerk about the neighborhood associations--tongs. These organizations were usually made up of people from common geographic areas in China. Chang was seeking a Fujianese tong, since the two families were from the province of Fujian. They would not, Chang assumed, be welcomed in a tong with roots in Canton, where most of the early Chinese immigrants had come from. But he was surprised to learn that much of Manhattan's Chinatown was now heavily populated with people from Fujian and many of the Cantonese had moved away. There was a major Fujianese tong only a few blocks away.
Chang and Wu left the families in the stolen van and walked through the crowded streets until they found the place. Painted red and sporting a classic Chinese bird-wing roof, the dingy three-story building might have been transported here directly from the shabby neighborhood near the North Bus Station in Fuzhou.
The men stepped inside the tong headquarters quickly, with their heads down, as if the people lounging about in the lobby of the building were about to pull out cell phones and call the INS--or the Ghost--to report their arrival.
*
Jimmy Mah, wearing a gray suit dusted with cigarette ash and about to burst at the seams, greeted them and invited them into his upstairs office.
President of the East Broadway Fujianese Society, Mah was the de facto mayor of this portion of Chinatown.
His office was a large but plain room, containing two desks and a half-dozen mismatched chairs, piles of paper, a fancy computer and a television set. A hundred or so Chinese books sat on a lopsided bookcase. On the wall were faded and fly-blown posters of Chinese landscapes. Chang wasn't fooled by the run-down appearance of the place, however; he suspected that Mah was a millionaire several times over.
"Sit, please," Mah said in Chinese. The broad-faced man with black hair slicked straight back offered them cigarettes. Wu took one. Chang shook his head no. He'd stopped smoking after he lost his teaching job and money grew scarce.
Mah looked over their filthy clothes, their mussed hair. "Ha, you two look like you have a story to tell. Do you have an interesting story? A compelling story? What would it be? I bet I would like very much to hear it."
Chang indeed did have a story. Whether it was interesting or compelling he couldn't have said but one thing he did know: it was fictional. He had decided not to tell any strangers that they'd been on the Fuzhou Dragon and that the Ghost might be searching for them. He said to Mah, "We've just come into the port on a Honduran ship."
"Who was your snakehead?"
"We never learned his name. He called himself Moxige."
"Mexican?" Mah shook his head. "I don't work with Latino snakeheads." Mah's dialect was tainted with an American accent.
"He took our money," Chang said bitterly, "but then he just left us on the dock. He was going to get us papers and transportation. He vanished."
With curiosity Wu watched him spin this tale. Chang had told the man to keep quiet and let him talk to Mah. On the Dragon Wu drank too much and grew impulsive. He'd been careless about what he'd told the immigrants and crew in the hold.
"Don't they do that sometimes?" Mah said jovially. "Why do they cheat people? Isn't it bad for business? Fuck Mexicans. Where are you from?"
"Fuzhou," Wu offered. Chang stirred. He was going to mention a different city in Fujian--to minimize any connection between the immigrants and the Ghost.
Chang continued, feigning anger. "I have two children and a baby. My father too. He's old. And my friend here, his wife is sick. We need help."
"Ah, help. Well, that is an interesting story, isn't it? But what kind of help do you want? I can do some things. Other things I can't do. Am I one of the Eight Immortals? No, of course I'm not. What do you need?"
"Papers. ID papers. For myself, my wife and my oldest son."
"Sure, sure, I can do some of them. Drivers' licenses, Social Security cards, some old company ID cards--bankrupt companies so no one can check on you. Aren't I clever? Only Jimmy Mah thinks of things like this. These cards, they'll make you look like citizens but you won't be able to get a real job with them. The INS bastards make companies check everything nowadays."
"I've got an arrangement for work," Chang said.
"And I don't do passports," Mah added. "Too dangerous. No green cards either."
"What is that?"
"Resident permits."
"We're going to stay underground and wa
it for an amnesty," Chang explained.
"Are you? May wait a long time."
Chang shrugged. He then said, "My father needs to see a doctor." A nod toward Wu. "His wife too. Can you get us health cards?"
"I don't do health cards. Too easy to trace. You'll have to go to a private doctor."
"Are they expensive?"
"Yes, very expensive. But if you don't have money go to a city hospital. They will take you."
"Is the care good?"
"What do I know if the care is good? Besides, what choice do you have?"
"All right," Chang said. "For the other documents. How much?"
"Fifteen hundred."
"Yuan?"
Mah laughed. "One-color."
Chang showed no emotion but he thought: Fifteen hundred U.S. dollars! That was insane. In the money belt around his waist he had about five thousand dollars' worth of Chinese yuan. It was all the cash that his family had left in the world. Shaking his head. "No, impossible." After a few minutes of animated haggling they settled on $900 for all the documents.
"You too?" Mah asked Wu.
The gaunt man nodded but added, "Only for myself. That will be less, won't it?"
Mah drew heavily on his cigarette. "Five hundred. I won't go lower than that."
Wu tried to bargain too but Mah held firm. Finally the skinny man grudgingly agreed.
Mah said, "You'll have to get me pictures of everybody for the drivers' licenses and employee cards. Go into an amusement arcade. You can have the pictures made there."
Chang remembered poignantly the night he sat with Mei-Mei in such a booth at a large entertainment center in Xiamen years ago, not long after they'd first met. The pictures were presently in a suitcase sitting within the corpse of the Fuzhou Dragon at the bottom of the dark ocean.
"We also need a van. I can't afford to buy one. Can I rent one from you?"
The tong leader scoffed. "Don't I have everything? Of course, of course." After more bargaining, they agreed on a rental. Mah calculated the total that the men owed and then figured the exchange rate for paying in yuan. He told the men the astonishing sum and they reluctantly agreed. "Give me the names and address for the documents." He turned to his computer and, as Chang dictated the information, Mah typed with fast keystrokes.