Buddha Baby (15 page)

Michael interjected, "Didn't you tell me you read
China Boy
in a Multicultural Literature class?"

"Yeah, when I handed in my first assignment early, the T.A. said, 'I hope you don't expect preferential treatment just because we're both Chinese.' When I asked what he meant, he replied, 'Oh, I think you already know.' I always remembered the way he refused to make eye contact and fluttered his eyelids like a malfunctioning slot machine. Whatever."

She knew that Michael hadn't called to listen to her ramble, so she stopped talking. "Forget it," she said.

"Cheer up, Baby. We can talk more when I get home."

"Okay. I love you, Mister."

"I love you, too. Now get some sleep."

The next day at St. Maude's, Lindsey checked the office chalkboard to see which tasks Sister Constance had assigned her for the day. In perfect nun cursive it read,

Pick up sheet music and missals from Mrs. Yee's home. Store in basement for archives.

A mild jolt of panic reverberated through Lindseys bones like a note through a tuning fork. She looked at the address on the chalkboard and recognized it immediately as the location of her childhood piano lessons. She would have to go
there? Today
?

Lindsey knew the route well. As she trudged to Mrs. Yee's place, she felt like she was back in fifth grade on the way to her lesson. She walked slowly, stalling because she wasn't quite ready to face her childhood memories of Mrs. Yee's dark, airless abode. Nonetheless, she headed toward the border of Chinatown, and made her way to the red door across the street from the 76 station that used to have the numbers in Chinese on its giant, fiberglass orange ball.

She approached the iron gate with the double happiness geometric design, and rang the bell. Standing there, she waited in the sunlight and tried to make eye contact with the gas-station attendant across the street so there might be a witness just in case she disappeared behind the red door, never to be seen again.

After a minute, the door opened, and there stood Mrs. Yee, just like all those times before.

"Hello," Lindsey said, trying not to stare at the droopy wiglet that sat atop Mrs. Yee's head like a small animal. Looking into the woman's black-outlined cat eyes, she noticed her false eyelashes were lopsided and coming unglued.

In an affected, childlike falsetto, the piano teacher said, "I've been expecting you."

Lindsey stepped inside the narrow doorway. She stood against the gold wallpaper in the foyer and waited as Mrs. Yee retrieved the hymnals for her to take back to school. Lindsey stood in the quiet darkness, and after a few moments Mrs. Yee called down to her from the hallway, "Could you come back here and help me, please?" She sounded as frail and demented as Michael Jackson.

Lindsey headed down the cramped hall toward the room where her childhood piano lessons had taken place. She recognized the Esther Hunt prints of Chinese children, the bamboo-style picture frames with black ink lithographs, and the japanned cabinet which she had always imagined was a repository for shrunken human heads. She stopped and stood against the black shelves overstuffed with books about seances, past lives, Atlantis, and the mummies of ancient Egypt. The musty room radiated a kind of moist heat, like the kind of damp warmth rising from a worm-rich compost heap, or, she imagined, the air inside a sealed mausoleum.

"I'll just take the hymnals and get going," Lindsey said, hoping to beat it out of there.

Mrs. Yee adjusted her rattan bracelets. "Won't you stay? I'll just play one song, for old times' sake…"

Before Lindsey could protest, the woman sat down and began to shake out her wrists as she had always done before playing. She patted the piano bench, signaling for Lindsey to sit down.

So frightening with their perfect red lacquer, Mrs. Yee's fingernails were mesmerizing. Overgrown, they curved slightly inward. Lindsey sat perfectly still as Mrs. Yee twirled her wrists hypnotically and clicked her nails together like Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
contemplating an evil deed. Resting her fingers against the keys, she eventually began to play. She launched into a song Lindsey knew well. The click-clacking of her talons on the ivories conjured the chilling sound of a skeleton dance.

Lindsey recalled how Mrs. Yee used to place her cold, veiny hands atop hers to manipulate her fingers. Mrs. Yee's tapered digits felt shriveled and boneless, like waterlogged segments of baby corn. Pulling her hands away, Lindsey would watch Mrs. Yee's wrists and fingers prance along the keys like a marionette's. When Mrs. Yee invited her to follow her moving hands, touching the plastic-feeling nails reminded Lindsey of the time she once poked the dead, glass eye of the taxidermied antelope at the natural history museum.

As Lindsey sat now and prayed for the song to be over, she glanced out of the corner of her eye at Mrs. Yee and cowered slightly at the sight of the woman's sagging cheeks. Her skin was bluish-white and seemed bloodless beneath smears of rouge that reminded Lindsey of the overapplied handiwork she had seen on corpses at funeral parlors. Starting to get really creeped out, Lindsey suddenly stood up.

"I have to go!" she said, scooting out from the piano bench. She grabbed the stack of hymnals and sprinted down the hallway.

Mrs. Yee stopped playing and swiveled her neck slowly as she watched Lindsey bolt for the door. In an eerie, monotonous singsong just like the voice of the dead-bride hologram at the end of Disneyland's haunted mansion ride, she said, "Hope you'll return…"

When Lindsey emerged into the late morning sunlight, she felt like a mole that could barely see. Had her soul been sucked from her body during
Fur Elise
? She patted her chest and knocked herself on the head to make sure she hadn't been rendered a zombie in those ten minutes of darkness. She hurriedly walked down Stockton Street until she was safely away, far enough so Mrs. Yee couldn't see her with those Cleopatra eyes. In her fright and paranoia Lindsey speculated that perhaps Mrs. Yee always wore that wiglet to hide another set of peepers in the back of her head. Maybe she could pop one of those eyes out and hold it in her palm to look around corners.

Glad to be several blocks away now, Lindsey was so near to Chinatown she figured she would pick up some lunch before heading back to work. Turning down Washington Street, she was comforted to see the curly edges of the pagoda rooftops in the near distance. Her mood lightened as she approached the bright turquoise lampposts with their red and gold dragons reaching toward the blue sky.

She was reminded of Arnold Genthe, a German photographer whose pictures of Chinatown in the late nineteenth century remained the oldest existing record of any American neighborhood. Lindsey owned a book of his pictures, and even though she knew some critics thought his work perpetuated stereotypes of Chinese people, she was grateful he had taken the time to record the old scenes. He even had the fore-sight to store his glass negatives in another part of the city so they were spared destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire. She didn't mind too much that he was a white person who filtered Chinatown through his own lens, perhaps having added artistic details to heighten the exoticism. She figured that without him there would have been no pictures at all.

Staring at the ornate balconies of the second-story temples, Lindsey thought of another person from the past, Look Tin Eli. After the earthquake had destroyed the original Chinatown, politicians in San Francisco wanted to move all the Chinese people to the outskirts of the city, but Look Tin Eli, a Chinese-American, convinced the city elders to keep the original site. He promoted the idea of Chinatown as a tourist attraction reconstructed with Chinese architectural nourishes. Partnering with white builders, he helped resurrect the neighborhood as a picturesque Asian wonderland that played to the public's fantasies of the East more than it represented any specific place in China. As Lindsey looked above and enjoyed the sight of the tiled rooftops, she wondered, if Look Tin Eli were alive today, would he be lauded as an innovative businessman or criticized as a sellout? Personally, she couldn't imagine Chinatown without its bright colors and unique, sinocized buildings.

On Grant Avenue she passed a plaque that marked the spot where the first rickety tent had been erected in the old city, then called Yerba Buena. Ducking into a storefront that sold dim sum to go, she grabbed some snacks, then zigzagged through a couple of alleys, stopping to munch on a piping-hot
ha gow
shrimp dumpling. Looking up, she spotted a familiar sign.

Her dad had once mentioned that Yeh Yeh spent every Tuesday at the Family Association visiting his cronies and playing cards. Lindsey wondered if her grandpa was there now. Still standing in the alley, she scarfed down a couple of
siu mai
. Then, on a whim, she decided to peek inside the brick building.

She walked up the stairway, her shoes hitting the aluminum floorstrips and making a flat, clapping sound. When she reached the top, she navigated a complex hallway with sharp turns, dips, and inclines that suggested that the layout of the building had been reconfigured many times. Eventually the maze opened onto a large room sparsely populated with a few gray-haired men. One was hunched in the corner, a trio sipped tea, and another read a Chinese-language newspaper, flipping it from back to front, which, she remembered, was the way Chinese books opened.

Lindsey noticed that all the men were wearing suits—dark gray—with white shirts. A couple even had fedoras by their sides. They all looked vaguely the same, like in pictures of men from a bygone era when everyone wore a suit and hat, no matter how rich or poor (or Chinese). From the odor of cigars she knew she was in a men's club, and the white walls, fluorescent lights, and minimalist decor gave the place the aura of a waiting room in heaven.

A man approached.

"What you lookee for?" he said. "Lookee nice shoppee?"

How bizarre. It wasn't like Lindsey was a constable coming to shake down a money-laundering dry cleaner. Why was this old Chinese man putting on his ching-chongy "I'm talking to whitey" voice?

She stood for a moment without saying anything. The man seemed to be in his late seventies, with slicked-down hair and smiling eyes. As he nodded and bowed, Lindsey felt uneasy.

"Urn, I'm looking for… Yeh Yeh," she said.

"Yessee?" the man waited for her to say more, still nodding in the meantime.

"My grandfather," she said, "Yeh Yeh."

The man smiled patiently. "Yessee, many Yeh Yeh here." He stood there as if he could smile all day long.

Uh-oh. Trying to think of her grandfather's name, her mind drew a blank. Thinking she was being clever, she told the man, "I'm here to see Mr. Owyang."

He looked at her for a moment, then erupted in a high wheezing laugh. "You funny, Missee! All Mr. Owyang here!" He pointed to the black letters on the frosted glass door, which read OWYANG FAMILY ASSOCIATION.

Stymied, Lindsey then figured she'd describe Yeh Yeh, but what was she gonna say—he's Chinese, with gray hair, hella long earlobes, and a coupla moles sprouting hair? That described every old guy in the place.