Buddha Baby (16 page)

Just then, another man shuffled over.

"Hey, I know your face," he said. "Long time ago you hang out in Jackson Street grocery store."

Lindsey was puzzled for a moment, then said, "Yes! That's Yeh Yeh's store."

As she stood expectantly, the two Chinese men conversed in Cantonese. From their intonations and gestures, she could tell that the second man was explaining to the first that he recognized her, and she strained to hear any names, especially American ones, being mentioned. They went back and forth with questions and explanations, after a while seeming to forget she was even there. Shifting her weight from foot to foot, she concentrated on trying to remember Yeh Yeh's name.

Feeling like an idiot for not knowing it, she picked her brain but couldn't come up with anything.

This is ridiculous
, she scolded herself. Then she thought,
Wait a minute. I have to know this. Think! Start at the beginning
.

She figured that her grandfather had been given a Chinese name at birth, but like all Chinese babies, he was probably just called "Bi Bi" for a while. Some Chinese received a different name when they became adults, and another when they got married. Not that those names would have stuck either. Relatives probably just called him things like "Uncle's brother," or "second son," or whatever. In Chinese, the individual didn't matter as much as the family as a whole. Who you were in relation to everyone else was what defined you and determined how others addressed you.

In addition to the numerous monikers a single Chinese person like Yeh Yeh could have, he probably had an American name too. Lindsey didn't know whether the phenomenon was specific to San Francisco or not, but Chinese who were not given English names at birth often adopted American names, like George or Jenny. She understood why that was useful if your Chinese name was unpronounceable for Westerners, but why was it necessary if your name was Ming? And then there could also be American names heaped upon already-American names. For instance, her dad's name was Earl, but some people called him Bill. When she once asked him why, he just shrugged and said, "same thing," as if neither mattered much anyway.

To confuse things further, there were also nicknames. After having a myriad of Chinese baby names, adult names, familial titles, and then an American name like Maisy or Tom, then, for unknown reasons, on the streets of Chinatown, some people just came to be known as Shorty, Limpy, or some other term of endearment. Lindsey's dad had friends named Chubby Chin, and Dutch Dang. One guy with a thick Toisanese accent used to call the house and simply refer to himself as Uncle Zippy.

Maybe there were lots of old guys shuffling through Chinatown with names like Chuckles Chan and Jingles Jang. It was like the Old West, and everyone seemed to be guarding their true identity to avoid deportation even though their family had already been here for a hundred and twenty years. Old names were forgotten, but no one seemed to object. Maybe it was just easier to forget the past and concentrate on the here and now when you're suddenly just called "Smiley" instead of Serene Mountain of Jade Amongst the Swirling Heavens.

Lindsey thought it was all unnecessarily complex. Her whole life, she'd only thought of herself as an individual, not as someone whose every action could potentially disgrace every Owyang from here to Dailang, China. But then again, maybe the constant reminder of who someone was in relation to you made you think before doing something stupid. Something stupid like asking questions that might be better left alone.

Finally, one of the men seemed to remember that Lindsey was standing there and turned her way. He nodded and exclaimed, "Ah! You lookee Mistah Owyang."

Well, I could have told you that
! she wanted to scream. Instead, she just followed the man down a hallway to another large room at the back of the building. She looked around and saw men playing cards and mahjong while others watched television. She spotted her grandfather by a long table, cutting a huge portion of apple pie with a plastic knife.

"Yeh Yeh?" she said, approaching.

The elderly man sat down at one of the folding tables and proceeded to eat his pie. He didn't seem surprised to see Lindsey, but didn't acknowledge her presence either. After a moment, Lindsey took the seat next to him.

"I was in the area and thought I'd visit you," she said.

Yeh Yeh nodded and continued to chew. Beneath his dandruff-sprinkled overcoat he wore a gray sweater vest, a clip-on tie, and gray pants. His horn-rimmed glasses and mild demeanor gave him the appearance of a weary FBI agent on a coffee break.

"I have extra rain jacket if you need," he said.

Lindsey looked across the window to the bright, sunny sky. "Oh, no thanks," she replied. Screwing up her courage, she added, "I wanted to ask where you grew up."

Yeh Yeh's eyes darted back and forth, and Lindsey wondered if he was mulling over an escape plan in case of a flash flood. He sucked pie through his teeth.

"I grew up right here," he replied. After a moment of quiet, Lindsey heard what sounded like low singing, but the idea of her mild-mannered grandpa breaking into song seemed fairly preposterous.

But she heard right. Yeh Yeh was softly singing the lyrics to "San Francisco."

She looked at him with a puzzled expression until he finally said, "I learned that when I used to empty spittoons in a real, old Frisco brothel!"

Lindsey had never heard her grandpa say something so wacky. She was curious, but unsure how to proceed. It suddenly occurred to her that a man dressed for blizzard conditions on a hot, sunny day might have other Walter Mittyesque delusions.

Nearby, two ancient Chinese men who had been arguing in Chinese switched to perfect English. Lindsey eavesdropped as they discussed the dissent among members of the Chinese Six Companies, debating what to do about the rift between their group's Sun Yat Sen loyalists and others who favored Communist ideas. As their cpnversation grew louder, Yeh Yeh retreated further into his own world.

"What was your father like?" Lindsey asked.

He stabbed at a few pie crumbs. "Chinese labor build all of California. You know that wall that hold up Mark Hopkins Hotel? My grandpa helped build it by hand. No tools, nothing."

"Really?"

"Sure, sure. Chinese do all work in this city no one else want to do. Dig ditch… There's even tunnel right by Golden Gate Bridge, dug by all Chinese hands. Dynamite blow your finger off!"

He coughed, then pulled his coat tighter around himself. Tapping his fingers on the table, he said, "Bridge game start at twelve noon."

Lindsey looked at the clock on the wall, and realized that Yeh Yeh was politely waiting for her to leave.

"Can I come see you again?" she asked.

Her grandfather pulled his woolen cap down past his ears. He replied, "I work in grocery store on Wednesday through Saturday, sometimes different schedule if Elmore is busy. But you can see me there."

Lindsey nodded, then leaned over to give her grandfather a hug. He did not return her embrace or acknowledge in any way that another human being was touching him. He seemed uncomfortable, but managed to say "Okey-dokey," before nudging away from her. Lindsey patted his shoulder, then gathered her things and left.

Sitting on the bus on her way back to St. Maude's, Lindsey listened to The Violent Femmes on her discman and thought about the Permanent Record.

For her entire school career at St. Maude's, Lindsey had lived in fear of the Permanent Record. It was the threat that all teachers had dangled over students' heads since the beginning of time. Caught chewing gum in the hallway? On your Permanent Record. Ate meat on Good Friday? Jotted down for all eternity. God saw everything and nuns remembered everything. Lindsey wondered if there was a giant, fluffy cloud in the sky upon which a massive card catalog floated, the lesser saints periodically updating a venial sin here or there in red pencil. In her imagination, heaven was too dignified to go digital.

She entered the building and returned to her desk to find a note from Sister Constance requesting that she clean the taxidermied baby alligator that resided in the seventh-grade homeroom. After checking her voice mail to see if Michael had called, she went to the closet to find some latex gloves, then proceeded to the classroom. She was jittery as she made her way along the squeaky floors and up to the third floor. However, upon arriving at the door to the seventh-grade room, she was relieved to find a posted card which pronounced that Ms. Abilene had gone to lunch.

Turning the brass key, she quickly stepped inside. She made sure not to slam the door because the heavy glass windows had a tendency to rattle. She stood by the chalkboard and surveyed the rows of desks, the shelves of encyclopedia volumes, the coat rack, and the student-made mobiles that floated overhead. The room seemed smaller than she remembered, but the smell was the same: anxiety, deceit, sexual confusion. And what did that smell like? Vaguely: acne astringent, Mop & Glo, preteen sweat, and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo.

Ah, the seventh-grade classroom. The scene of many crimes.

Atop a shoulder-high bookshelf, the taxidermied alligator squatted with jaws agape and eyelids peeled back. The creature's head was thrown back and its tail whipped up to the side, coiled in a permanent attack position as if it might lunge forward at any second, despite having been stuffed for at least twenty years. Lindsey took a deep breath and spritzed the animal with a can of compressed air. She hopped back as clumps of dust blasted from between the reptile's sharp teeth and wafted down to the floor.

As Lindsey continued to clean the baby alligator, she glanced around nervously. Being inside the seventh-grade room, she couldn't help but remember another St. Maude's incident that had resulted in the demise of a Chinese boy. It was a bizarre story that involved conspiracy, strappy sandals, and poo-poo.

While the Mork Incident at the end of sixth grade had presumably sent Dustin Lee back to the land of rodeos and chain-saw massacres, Texan charm had revisited the St. Maude's population in the shapely form of Ms. Kathleen Abilene, the new seventh-grade teacher. As Lindsey and the other students sat through her introductory speech, they watched skeptically as she spelled her name on the chalkboard and explained that, coincidentally, she had also been born and raised in a town called Abilene, located in glorious central Texas. The kids immediately were suspicious of her, not only because she was the first non-nun teacher they ever had, but she also had a strangeness about her, a kind of Terminator-cyborg quality, like she was actually a mechanized robot underneath a skin of living tissue. In addition, the details of her life were too perfect to be true. Her name was Abilene and she was
from
Abilene?
Come on
. The kids weren't dopes. Ms. Abilene's story was the kind of fiction created by former criminals and actresses with questionable pasts. Although Ms. Abilene managed to act somewhat normal, the savvy seventh graders were convinced she must have been a showgirl in her sordid dust-bowl past.

The leggy, titian-haired cyborg's appearance contributed much to the kids' imaginations of her. They were used to seeing plain black smocks and nary a stray hair revealed from the nuns' headbands. In contrast, Ms. Abilene's fiery, harlot hair tumbled against her jewel-toned dresses in such a way that they knew a vixen lay beneath those polyester ruffles. Also, there was a fallen-flower quality about her that the students were too young to fully understand, yet they knew that something wasn't right. Oftentimes she didn't sing the hymns in church and didn't seem to know the standard prayers by heart. This led Lindsey to suspect that Ms. Abilene was like Faye Dun-away in
Little Big Man
, the wife of a preacher who was just pretending to fall for the Jesus crap while spending her off-hours sponge-bathing the succulent contours of Dustin Hoffman's naked booty. Additionally, Ms. Abilene's face was always shiny, inspiring further speculation about potentially sweaty nights engaged in un-Christlike activities. She oozed a kind of Christian-swinger vibe which convinced the kids that their seventh-grade teacher liked pina coladas and getting caught in the rain.