We were assigned to work in pairs to build a diorama depicting “some of the basic skills of conflict resolution.” Of course, Annette and I decided to work together, and this meant I had to go to her house one day. Ma didn’t want me to socialize too much, but any sort of school assignment was sacrosanct, and so I was given permission to go.
After school, Annette’s mother was waiting for us in a car. Her gaze was direct and kind, and her wavy hair was streaked with gray. There was a small boy with straggly blond hair already strapped into the seat next to hers. He was absorbed in a comic book. Annette climbed into the backseat and I followed. I’d thought a great deal about getting through this meeting correctly, and as soon as Annette was done leaning forward to kiss her mom, I held out my hand for her mother to shake.
“How do you do, Mrs. Avery?” I asked.
She twisted around and looked momentarily surprised, but then grasped my hand firmly. Her hands were extremely large for a woman’s, almost as big as a man’s, and they engulfed mine in warmth. She smiled, so I could see the wrinkles around her eyes deepen. “How do you do, Kimberly? It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
As I sat back in my seat, feeling satisfied that I had managed to get through at least one occasion according to the rules of etiquette we’d been taught back home, Annette was already tugging on the boy’s jacket.
“Let me see that,” she said.
“Get your own,” he said, not looking up.
“Mom!” she said. “He’s not sharing!” She tried to pull the comic book from his hands, but her little brother wrenched it back and then scrunched his wiry body next to the window where Annette couldn’t reach him.
“Stop fighting and let me drive,” said Mrs. Avery.
It went on like that until we turned onto a beautiful, tree-lined street. The ride hadn’t taken long and I’d never imagined that Brooklyn could look like this, especially such a short distance from the school. There was no graffiti anywhere, no housing projects or construction pits. The cobblestone street was lined with low, elegant houses and gardens. Mrs. Avery parked by a three-story house with some kind of stone structure in the front garden. It looked like a well. When I peered in, however, I saw that it was actually a fountain with water spouting from the center, filled with live goldfish and carp. Not long after that, I dreamed of Mrs. Avery giving me an extra goldfish from her fountain in a plastic bag, perhaps a baby that had just been born. I would take it home and keep it alive in one of our rice bowls. Surely, a goldfish couldn’t be too expensive to keep, since it didn’t eat much.
Annette and her brother had already run to the top of the stone staircase that led to the main door. Annette grabbed the comic book. Mrs. Avery and I caught up to them and Annette’s brother wailed, “Mom!”
Mrs. Avery said, “Just give me a minute, okay, honey?” and she managed to get her keys in the lock.
As the front door swung open, I saw a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, sparkling with light like leaves caught in the rain. When we went in, we stood in an entryway with a polished table and a crystal bowl filled with fresh fruit. I wondered how they kept the roaches away from such an uncovered bowl. The smell of lemon cleanser and cookies mingled into a clean and delicious scent, and a thick carpet formed a walkway of flowers into the house.
“We’re home,” Mrs. Avery called. I looked down the hallway but instead of seeing a person, I saw a dog racing toward us. The white chow chow hurled itself upon Annette. A large gray tiger cat with a white-tipped tail had climbed down the staircase and was rubbing itself against her brother’s leg.
“Don’t be afraid,” Mrs. Avery said. “I know they can be over woman if you’re not used to animals but they won’t hot you.”
Annette’s brother had the cat in his arms and was rubbing his cheek against its thick fur. Annette was giggling like a maniac because the dog was licking her entire face. I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Avery allowed this. Weren’t animals filled with both germs and a great desire to bite you?
Mrs. Avery bent down to my eye level. “What you have to do,” she said, “is ex-T your hand like this.” She stretched her hand out to the cat. “Come, Tommy. They like to come up to you and smell you, and then you’ll be great friends.”
I dared to ask a question. I glanced at Annette, who was now sitting on the floor still in her coat and galoshes, bumping her head into the dog’s chest. “They have…?” I didn’t know what to call them and then pretended I was scratching myself.
“Oh!” Mrs. Avery said. “No, they don’t have any feet. See this?” The cat named Tommy had approached and was sniffing her hand. She put her finger under the thin collar he was wearing. “This keeps all the feet away.”
I must have looked confused because then she pretended she was scratching herself under her arms like a monkey. I’d never seen an adult, let alone a lady, do anything so undignified before.
“No scratch,” she said. She took her hands away. “All okay.”
The little brother had already disappeared into the kitchen and we followed him. I was introduced to the housekeeper, an angular white woman wrinkled like a piece of beef jerky.
I said, “How do you do,” and shook her hand.
She cocked her head to one side and said, “Aren’t you something.” She made us a snack. It was Ritz crackers, which I’d tasted in Hong Kong, but then she took a block of pale yellow cheese from the refrigerator. She used a metal slicer, which I’d never seen before, and carved thin bits of cheese to put on the crackers. I remembered that taste for a long time: the strange, alien sharpness of the cheese against the buttery crispness of the crackers.
The little brother piled a few crackers in his hands, grabbed the comic book out from under Annette’s arm, and raced toward the staircase in the entryway.
“No crumbs on the carpet!” Mrs. Avery yelled after him.
Annette’s face started to turn blotchy. “Mom! He took-”
“Stop it, Annette. You’ll have time to read it later, and now you have company.” Mrs. Avery turned to me. “Kimberly, you’ll soon see, it’s just a disaster around here.”
Annette turned her concentration to her snack and when we were finished, we headed upstairs to her room. As we passed the living room, I saw a black grand piano and next to it, the dog stretched itself out on the large sectional sofa, which shimmered with gold and red stripes. Even from a distance, I could tell the plump cushions were fuzzy with a matted layer of animal hair.
Annette’s room was almost as big as our classroom at school. There was a wall jammed full with toys: stuffed animals, board games, building blocks. She had a bunk bed with a ladder for going up and a slide for coming down. No one slept on the bottom bunk, she said, but she had a bunk bed because she liked sleeping high. I climbed up after her and at first I was afraid of getting too close to the edge of the mattress, despite the wooden rail. Once I got used to it, though, it was glorious, heady, to be so close to the ceiling, with my shoes off, a friend at my side, and the anticipation of a slide to return to floor level. It was so warm in their house, I could take off several layers and I lay on her bed in just my undershirt. I felt weightless and happy, as if I were in Hong Kong again.
“Ooooooh… the girls are playing in their tree house! Better watch out for bugs!” Her brother’s little head stuck out like a dandelion from behind the door.
“I’m going to kill you!” Annette yelled, and she started down the slide but he disappeared before she got to the bottom. She ran to her bedroom door and poked her head out. “You come in here one more time and I’m telling!”
She slammed the door. “I wish I could keep him out, but we don’t believe in locked doors in the house.” From the way she said it, I could tell it was a phrase she was quoting from her parents. I wished Ma had the luxury of worrying about my behavior; she could barely do more than keep the both of us alive.
I glanced at the clock by her bed. Snoopy’s hands showed the time and it wasn’t long before I had to leave. “Maybe we start work now?”
Mrs. Avery had set up all our materials on Annette’s desk. Everything was new and clean: a large shoe box, sheets of colored cardboard, green and gold glitter paint, watercolors and two types of markers, glue and scissors. Alone at home, I would have needed to do things differently: taking boxes out of other people’s garbage, cutting figures out of old newspaper to stick to the box with packing tape, drawing everything with a ballpoint pen. With our pretty materials, Annette and I quickly finished our diorama, which showed some people sitting in a circle on the ground, holding hands and smiling. We used glitter paint to draw the letters of the word “Communication” behind the figures on the ground. It had been Annette’s idea and I was glad she knew what we were supposed to do.
When Mrs. Avery drove me home, I asked her to drop me off at the school.
“No, I’ll drive you home, dear,” she said. “Just tell me where you live. I work part-time as a really state agent, I can find anyplace something.”
“School is okay,” I lied. “Ma wait for me at school.”
“But the school is cl-” She broke off in the middle of her sentence. She took a breath, then said, “The school? You’re sure?”
I nodded.
“The school it is, then. Here we go!” She sounded very bright.
When we got there, all of the windows were dark and there was no one on the pavement. I was afraid Mrs. Avery would protest because, like Ma, she didn’t seem to be the sort of mother to let a kid out alone at an empty building.
She pulled up to the curb. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I wait for Ma, she come soon. Bye-bye.” I slid out of the car and closed the door behind me. I turned back toward her. This was another moment I’d rehearsed. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“You’re very welcome.” She leaned toward me and hooked a ringed hand around the edge of the open window. “You know, Kim, we’d love to have you over for dinner sometime. You let Annette know when you can come, all right? Just about somethings okay with us!”
I thanked her again, and then, to my surprise, she didn’t offer to wait. I watched her disappear down the street and suddenly felt lonely. But when I got to the end of the long walk from school and finally opened the door to our building, a car the same style as hers passed behind me. Could she have followed me all this way?
I headed up the stairs.
I thought about the Averys’ warm, animal-hair-covered house often. I dreamed of staying in Annette’s room. She already had an extra bed and she could smuggle food to me. Sometimes, when I felt the most alone and overwhelmed, I had the fantasy of going to Mrs. Avery for help. Even just the possibility of it gave me real comfort.
But when Annette invited me to her house again, Ma said I couldn’t go. I pleaded until finally Ma held me by the shoulders, looking into my eyes, and said, “Ah-Kim, if you go too many times to her house, we will have to invite her back to ours one day and then what? Little heart’s stem, we already have too many debts we can’t repay.”
It was always easy to see who had a green card and who was illegal on payday. The illegals all got paid in cash, in Uncle Bob’s office. The others had their piecework converted to an hourly wage and that amount was given in check form. We received a check but we also had to go to the office. Each payday, Uncle Bob would limp heavily into our workstation and escort us into the manager’s office, where he would cash our check and divide up the money in front of our eyes.
“I want to make sure everything is absolutely clear,” Uncle Bob said, sounding resigned. He wrote the different amounts on a pad of paper and put the green bills into separate piles. “So, this is for your medicine, when you were sick in Hong Kong. This is for the plane tickets, this is for the visas, this is the interest over the full amount, this is for the rent-no interest on that, of course-this is for the water, gas and electricity, and this is for you.” And then he handed us the smallest pile with a sigh.
The first time this happened, I had been shocked by how little money was left for us. Luckily, we didn’t have a phone, or we would have had to pay for that as well. I hadn’t known that we were repaying anything else and I hadn’t realized how much Ma’s tuberculosis treatment and the immigration expenses had been. So this was a part of the reason we couldn’t afford a better apartment, although I wished Aunt Paula had given us more time to repay our debts to her. Uncle Bob took their share every week, and we paid our rent and everything else in installments.
One day, Ma tried to talk to Uncle Bob about the apartment too. “Ah-Kim is always sick. The apartment is too cold. When will another one be available?”
He looked at me and my perpetually red nose. His face was not unkind. “That’s hard to say. Aunt Paula takes care of all that stuff. But come on, let me buy you an iced tea. Have you ever had one?”
Uncle Bob took us to the soda machine and bought me my first American iced tea while a few kids looked on with awe. It was so cold and lemony, better than any drink I’d ever tasted.
“Thank you, Big Brother Bob,” Ma said. “Will you keep watch for a new place for us?”
“Hmm? Oh, sure, sure,” he said.
In preparation for Christmas, the school was hung with lights and cutout snowflakes and we all sang songs in assembly. I knew Annette was planning to give me a present, because she spent weeks asking me to guess what it was. I thought only of things like pencil cases or schoolbooks, and so I was continually wrong, to her delight.
If Annette was going to give me something, I had to get her a gift too. Ma and I went to Woolworth’s to look for a present. She skipped the toy department because everything was either too expensive or too small. Ma didn’t know what we should buy for a white person either. She didn’t have much money but she wanted the present to be big enough to look like we’d spent a decent amount on it. She finally decided on a big plastic plant for $1.99, which was 133 skirts. The store wrapped it for us for free and I couldn’t wait to give it to Annette.
The last day of school before Christmas vacation, I saw Annette getting out of their car in the morning. I ran up to her, lugging my package.
“Kimberly!” she shrieked. “What’s that?!”
I thrust it into her hands. “For you.”
“Hi, Kim,” Mrs. Avery called from inside the car.
Annette had already torn off the paper. As the green and red mottled leaves were revealed, she held the plastic plant at arm’s length, puzzled. “Does it make music?”
I was just getting over another cold and I wiped my nose with a bit of toilet paper while I tried to figure out what she meant. Why would a plant make music? Only much later did I realize that Annette had thought it was a toy, that she couldn’t figure out why I’d given her such a thing.
Mrs. Avery’s voice interrupted us. “What a lovely plant, Annette. We’ll put it right on the winnie seal in your room. Thank you, Kimberly.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Annette mumbled, and then she brightened as she drew a tiny package from her pocket. “This is for you.”
When I opened it, I saw it was a little panda clip-on bear, similar to the other stuffed animals she had clipped to her book bag. It had soft brown eyes and neat black ears that were politely folded down; its paws had tiny claws on them that held on to your finger. I had longed for such a bear without even knowing it, although I think Ma felt a bit disappointed that we’d gotten such a tiny present in return.
On that last day of school before Christmas vacation, Ma surprised me. Instead of leaving for the factory in the morning as she always did, she walked to school with me.
“You’ll be late,” I said.
“Aunt Paula is usually collecting rent today,” Ma answered. “And I have a bit of time before the shipment goes out.”
“You can’t be sure she’ll be gone.” I had seen Aunt Paula correcting the other workers for small faults like being late. Sometimes, she fired them on the spot.
“I know.” Although I was trying to catch her eye, Ma looked only at my school, now appearing in the distance.
“Ma.” I pulled on her thin coat. Ma was risking her job and our survival. I was sure that Aunt Paula would fire us too if she got angry enough. In the freezing morning air, puffs of white rose from my mouth. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer me, but I saw she had looped through her arm a small plastic bag with a take-out container in it. Could this have something to do with my problems with Mr. Bogart? Was she going to throw food at him? With each step, the sidewalk pounded against the rubber of my boots in time with the frightened thud of my heart.
When we arrived at school, I tried to say good-bye to her at the door, but she walked right past the guard and followed me into the school basement, where I had to line up. Mr. Bogart was standing against the wall, talking to the other sixth-grade teacher, Miss Kumar. Ma marched up to them and I trailed behind her, wishing I had the power to make us both disappear.
“Yes?” Mr. Bogart said, drawing the sides of his mouth down into a frown.
“Merry X-y-masy,” Ma said in English. Her voice shook. She placed the take-out container in Mr. Bogart’s hands.
He raised his eyebrows and then slowly flipped open the cover of the container to reveal a large soy sauce drumstick inside. It was worse than I had expected. For Ma, this was a luxury that we could rarely afford ourselves, but to give Mr. Bogart something as common as a drumstick…
His expression was caught between disdain and something else I couldn’t identify-could it have been surprise, or even gratitude? I waited for some sarcastic comment, but because of the unusual nature of the gift or Miss Kumar’s presence, Mr. Bogart seemed stunned into silence.
Miss Kumar, on the other hand, was smiling openly. “And Nick, you always say you never get any appreciation,” she said. She turned to Ma. “Kimberly seems to be settling in just fine, Mrs. Chang.”
Ma didn’t understand a word Miss Kumar had said, of course, but Ma knew enough to answer, “Dank you.”
Mr. Bogart nodded abruptly at Ma and then gathered together our class, most of whom were gaping in surprise at the hated Mr. Bogart’s getting any kind of present from a parent.
Ma left quickly and Aunt Paula was indeed away that morning, so we didn’t get fired. That incident made Mr. Bogart neither kinder nor crueler to me, for which I was grateful, but I understood Ma was doing what she could to help me with him.
One day close to Christmas at the factory, I saw Matt working with his mother, and I rubbed the panda’s forehead in my pocket with my finger.
I walked over and said, “Joyful Christmas.” Then I swiftly pulled out the panda and offered it to him. I had thought about this. Much as I liked Tyrone at school, I had never really spoken to him. I was grateful to Matt and he was my only friend who knew what my life was really like; he shared it. I wanted to give him a present even more than I wanted to keep the panda for myself, because it was the only thing I had.
Matt tossed it up in the air and caught it with a quick flick of his wrist. “What’s this for?” he asked.
“You helped me before,” I said. I wanted to add, “And I really like you,” but I didn’t.
He smiled at me then, and I saw that he had a bruise smudged across his cheekbone. “Seems to me that this panda wants to be with you,” he said, and gently, he put it back in my hand.
I was torn between relief and disappointment that he’d refused my present. I stared at my fingers, then looked up and asked, “What happened to you?” I nodded at the bruise.
“Oh, that. Some jerks were trying to pick on my brother.” He gave a shrug, trying to appear nonchalant, and he looked so small and skinny that I hurt for him.
I already knew the answer but I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “Do you get into fights a lot?”
“Nah,” he said, grinning at me again. I knew he was lying. “You’re a sweet kid.”
“I’m not a kid, I’m just as tall as you are.”
“Just wait a couple of years,” he said, as he walked away with a swagger.
I’d heard about the myth of Santa Claus in Hong Kong, although we’d assumed that he chose not to visit the warmer countries. Since he wasn’t an active presence there and no one talked about him much, I hadn’t learned that he wasn’t real, unlike most other kids my age. Now that I was in the U.S., I assumed he would be appearing like all the other strange things I had heard of but had not seen until now, like red hair and mittens.
We gave Mr. Al a small wooden elephant from Chinatown, to bring him money and a long life. Ma wasn’t afraid to give him things she actually liked, because she knew he was crazy about everything Chinese. His wife had died long before and he said that he was going to settle down with a nice Chinese woman someday. He always made me ask Ma if she had any pretty friends and how to say things like “I love you” in Chinese.
“I’m going to keep this next to my cash register, bring me good luck,” Mr. Al said. And he’d given us a small red desk lamp from his store. I put it on the table I did my homework on.
We didn’t have a Christmas tree or lights in the apartment, but Ma did her best. She bought a used paperback book of Christmas carols and we sang them together. I’d heard some of them at school, and Ma could read the music if not the English words. She provided the melody wordlessly while I sang in English loudly and off-key. She tried accompanying us with her violin, but it was much too cold and she couldn’t play with her gloves on.
I didn’t have a stocking, though on Christmas Eve, I laid one of Ma’s socks, which was bigger than mine, on the low table I did my homework on. When I woke up, there was an orange and a Chinese red envelope with two dollars in it, a fortune. I saw immediately there was no Santa Claus, only Ma, but that was enough.
A few days after the Western New Year, we found a true gift. Our regular route to the subway took us past a big building and one morning we saw some men working near its dumpster. Soon, they left and we saw what they’d thrown away: several rolls of the plush cloth used to make stuffed animals. The building must have been a toy factory.
We both stopped short, riveted by the sight of the warm material.
“Maybe if we are very fast-” Ma began.
“No, Ma. We can’t risk being late with Aunt Paula again,” I said. “We have to come back later.”
Throughout the long day at the factory, Ma kept asking me questions. “Do you think other people would take something like that? Is there trash collection today?”
The only answer I had for her was, “I don’t know.” It would be my fault if the material was gone by the time we could leave the factory that evening.
When we finally hurried out of the subway station and rushed to the toy factory, we saw that everything was still there. Ma laughed with joy at the glorious find. Yards and yards of material that could keep us warmer. Even though the cloth was fake fur, lime green and prickly, it was better than anything we had. The streets were deserted in the bitter cold but Ma and I made several trips to pull as many rolls out of the trash as we could and dragged them home.
Ma made us robes, sweaters, pants and blankets out of the toy factory cloth. She used it to cover parts of the floor and windows. She even made tablecloths out of it. We must have been a funny sight, dressed up at home as two large stuffed animals, but we didn’t have the luxury of minding. Since then, I have wondered if we would have survived the winter without that gift from the gods. The material was heavy and carpetlike, not having been intended as clothing, and when I slept under our new blankets, I woke with my limbs aching from the weight. However, at least they covered our entire bodies at once, unlike the piles of clothes we’d used in the past, and they were warm.
All of the gods leave at midnight on the night before Chinese New Year, which came at the end of January then. Every year, they return to us at a different time and from a different direction. Ma consulted the Tong Sing to find out when and where we had to go to welcome them as they returned. She rubbed a sewing needle against a magnet and then floated the needle in a bowl of water to figure out where the directions were. At four in the morning, Ma and I ventured into the deserted streets, the white clouds of our breaths drifting upward in the frosty gleam of the streetlamps. We headed southeast to greet the returning gods, our gloved hands filled with offerings of mandarin oranges and peanuts.
For the Chinese New Year, the factory was closed because no Chinese would work on this day. I was even allowed to stay home from school. Ma made us the traditional yellow steamed pastries and a vegetarian monk’s meal for lunch, and for the night she’d bought us a roasted chicken from Chinatown. Anything that happened on this day was symbolic of the entire year to come, and so we were extremely careful, making sure we didn’t break or drop anything.
The next day was the opening of the year, and Ma and I prepared the religious ceremonies to honor the dead. We always celebrated the important holidays first at home and then later at temple. Ma had found one in Chinatown. How many times had my hands laid the small squares of sacred paper into the required patterns over the years: first silver, then gold, then the two rectangular pieces laid horizontally.
Then we set food and wine in front of all five altars in the kitchen, lit incense and bowed to them with stacks of the sacred papers in our hands. We included a set to bring good luck for Ma and me: a promise to the gods that if we made it through this coming year safely, we would offer them roast pork next year. The kitchen was hazy with incense and the smoke crept into our clothes and hair. Ma invoked each of the gods by name, our most vital ancestors, and then our own dead, which meant all of the grandparents on both sides of my family, and Pa. When Ma chanted the prayers for her parents and Pa, she said, “Drink another cup, loved ones,” and she poured an extra cup of wine on the floor in front of the ancestor altar.
When she was finally finished, Ma and I took the sacred papers and rice wine downstairs. The backyard of the building was overgrown with weeds and trees that stuck up through the two-foot-high layer of garbage covering the ground. A few days earlier, Ma and I had made a clearing in the trash in preparation. A thin layer of ice covered the ground now. We would burn the papers here.
Ma lit the first papers and dropped them in a metal bucket she’d bought in Chinatown. Then she took the flask and swung a chain of glistening rice wine three times counterclockwise around the bucket. The fire leaped under the alcohol. The wine ensured that the petty spirits hidden in the heavens would not be able to steal these gifts from their intended recipients. As she stirred the papers with a long metal stick, the heat radiating outward from the bottom of the bucket first melted the ice underneath it and then dried the concrete in a widening circle. I pictured the sacred gold and silver paper transforming into heavy gold and silver bars in the heavens, the colored papers into the finest silks. The more we burned, the more money our gods and loved ones would have to spend in the heavens, and the more material they would have to clothe themselves. The burning released the essence of the paper from its ashes and created it anew in the spirit world.
The trees were veiled by a haze of gray smoke and a funnel of ash, and partly burned wisps of gold and silver swirled upward into the skies, carrying our offerings to the heavens. Tiny flakes of ash clung to my face and hair.
Ma, her head bowed in prayer, was standing alone at the border of where the earth met concrete in our backyard, and I caught a trace of her words. Merciful Kuan Yin, beloved relatives, please let good people come to us and allow the bad ones to walk away. I went over and linked my arm through hers. I thought, Pa, I wish you were here to help us. Please help me perfect my English so I can take care of us. Ma pressed my hand gently and we prayed together for our future.
The following Sunday, Ma and I had just returned from buying our weekly groceries in Chinatown when I noticed that the lights were on inside Mr. Al’s shop. He also had a large sign in his window that said “Clearance-Everything Must Go.” I looked through the door and saw Mr. Al moving some of his things around inside.
Ma shifted her shopping bags to one hand so she could find her keys. “We shouldn’t bother him. He looks busy.”
At that moment, Mr. Al caught sight of us. He came and unlocked his door. “Come in.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “We have to put food in refrigerator. But why you here on Sunday?”
“I have a lot of things I have to do. Need to sort out which things I want to get rid of, which ones I want to take with me.”
I was aghast. “You are going somewhere?” Mr. Al waved to us whenever he saw us. He was our friend and looked out for us. After we’d gotten to know him better, I told him about the ice-cream-buying incident at the grocery store when the owner had made us pay more than we should have paid.
Mr. Al said, “That guy don’t have any right to rip off decent people like that.” He must have said something to the owner because the next time we came in, the owner gave me a candy necklace for free.
“What’s wrong?” Ma asked me now. She hadn’t understood any of this.
Mr. Al looked concerned. “Don’t you know? Sweetheart, everybody’s gradually moving out of here. This whole area’s boomed.”
“What?” I sounded as confused as I felt.
“Ended. No hope left. The government’s going to build some huge compicks here. All the buildings on this block and across the street are going to be broken down.”
“When?”
“What is happening?” Ma asked again. She was worried.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said in Chinese. I waited for Mr. Al to speak.
He said, “Was supposed to happen next year, but it keeps getting put off. Lots of people are complaining and trying to stop it. Will probably be another ten years before it actually happens, but could be next year too. Ant no one’s going to hang around waiting to get thrown out. This is a sinking ship.” He patted me on the shoulder with his long brown hand. “You ladies are good people. You should get out while you can. Those landlords aren’t going to do nothing for us while we’re waiting. No one wants to put any more money in here. My window’s been broken in the back for months now. Business is bad, everybody’s leaving.”
“When you going?”
“My lease is up March first. I’m going to move near my brother back in Virginia.”