This Is a Bust (5 page)

I switched to the communist Chinese station on UHF. As
the frame slide down and centered on the screen, I saw that it was an old civil war movie. “Heroic Bravery on Luding Bridge” or “Brave Heroics on Luding Bridge.” Something 
like that. It seemed that there was a movie for every little skirmish in the whole damn war.

The Taiwan station was airing an interview with a famous
Buddhist monk.

“Is it ethical,” began the cute and unemotional female 
interviewer, “for people to eat tofu and gluten formed 
into substitute meat and still say that they have a 
vegetarian diet?”

The monk sucked in his lips and nodded. “No. Absolutely
not,” he said. “While those people are not actually eating meat, they are still eating in the spirit of consuming flesh.

It is definitely wrong.”

Both the communist and the Taiwan stations were
originally recorded in Mandarin, but were dubbed in Cantonese for the New York City market. Everything was subtitled in Chinese characters so that everybody could read what was going on.

I spoke Cantonese almost as good as a native speaker but
my understanding of Mandarin was shaky at best even though both dialects used the same written language.

I settled i
n and drank five more beers. Pretty soon I felt the urge to shift my body over and realized that my eyes were closed.

My year with Vandyne, 1974 to 1975, was spent driving from crisis to crisis. When we had creeps handcuffed in the back, we liked to stop the car short so that their faces would slam into the glass divider. We only did that when they took swipes at us first, though, or if they really deserved it — purse-snatching punks from Canal Street and men who had beaten their children badly.

The murder rate was soaring through the rest of the city,
but being in Chinatown was like being in the rear in Nam, away from the front, with few homicides to speak of. We were relaxed, but always alert to trouble. Some nights nothing happened, and we would just talk.

Still, the Brow was worried for my safety, me being the
precinct's little public-relations poster boy. He made sure to keep the two of us in mostly backup positions. When Vandyne moved onto investigations, they shifted me to a footpost that was as tame as a chihuahua.

The best thing about my friendship with Vandyne was
that
we always pretended that we were hearing the same stories from each other for the first time. Sometimes it would be like you were hearing the story for the first time, because the other person would change around the details or make up new ones. We would even take details from each other's stories and tell them as if we had lived it. It was the right attitude to have, especially when we talked about Nam.

“How many Negroes do you think there are in New York
City?” Vandyne had asked the first time we ate together.

I think he was feeling me out, to see if I was cool or not.
We were at Katz's on Houston Street, and Vandyne had cole slaw on his face.

“There aren't any Negroes. Lot of blacks, though,” I said.

“I like that answer. I like that a lot,” said Vandyne.

“How do you feel about being in Chinatown?” I asked,
looking at him straight on.

“I feel good about it. I have a lot of respect for the Chinese
people and their culture.”

“You good with chopsticks?”

“Pretty good,” he said. I found out soon enough that he'd
poke his eyes out if you didn't watch him closely. “You must be happy to be in Chinatown. You get to be amongst your own kind and do something for the community.”

I dropped my voice. “Honestly, it's lousy. I mean, I can
already see the resentment in the people's faces, like I've been co-opted. I'd rather be in Harlem.”

“You don't want to be in Harlem,” said Vandyne, looking
down as he wiped his hands with a napkin.

A few hours later, we were parked on the corner of Grand
and Elizabeth.

“I don't support Jane Fonda's message,” said Vandyne. “I
support her right to say it, but it was wrong for her to fly in and then fly out. Maybe if she moved to North Vietnam and lived there, then that would have been different.”

“The message that we were killing kids?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Vandyne, I killed a kid in Nam. I mean, one that I'm sure
of.”

He was quiet for a little bit.

Then he said, “Oh yeah?”

I started talking.

“We got the orders to go from village to village, interrogate
people, burn the hooches down. I mean, I wanted to take the backseat to all that, leave it to the gung-ho guys to do the interrogations. But then as we were going from village to village, I'm feeling all the hatred of the Vietnamese directed at me. They knew I was Chinese
—
they can tell, man. And they hate the Chinese there.”

“Because the Chinese are the merchant class in Southeast
Asia. They control the economy.”

“Not only that. The Chinese have charged full retail for
centuries. You have to expect the customers to resent it a little.”

Vandyne shook his head and chuckled.

“So I tried to cover my face up with shades, some mud, but
they'd always zero in on me. Old women would throw rocks at me. Little kids would try to kick me. You know they'd never do this to anyone else in a uniform, black or white.”

I waited for Vandyne to nod. Then I gave up and went on.

“This old man came up to me and said in Cantonese, ‘Excuse
me, are you Chinese?' I said, ‘Yes.' I was sort of relieved, because here's this guy trying to be almost friendly with me. Then he opens up his mouth wide, and he's got like seven teeth and he says, ‘You fucking Chinks have sucked our blood for too long! Ba tàu! You're worse than the French and Americans put together! We're going to kill all the Chinese in Vietnam!'

“I just snapped. I kicked that old man to the ground. I was
the quiet guy in the company, and no one else knew what he was saying, but they knew it had to be pretty bad to get me like that.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Hurt him bad. They told me it could have been a good
kill. After that, I was one of the lead interrogators in the company. I pushed pregnant women around and twisted their arms behind their backs, just waiting for some excuse to shoot them in the head. Being in Nam made me learn to hate Asians. Seeing another Asian face made me want to reach for my gun. Especially when I heard Vietnamese. It sounds like that mint, ‘Tic Tac.'”

“So how did you kill that kid?”

“We were walking down this road when this kid with a
ball comes running over to us. He's got a rubber ball with him, but it might be filled with explosives. You really don't know.”

“So you shot him?”

“I shot him in the head and heart.”

“Was it a bomb?”

“It was just a ball. But the worst thing was that I never even
told him to stop. He should've known not to come running at us, though, right?”

Vandyne was quiet. After a while, he said, “I killed a kid,
too.”

“What happened?”

“We were camped out, sitting quiet,” said Vandyne. He
was talking slow. I couldn't look at him. I turned my head and watched steam come out of the gutter and curl into nothingness. “All of a sudden, shots are going out all over the place. We couldn't figure out where they were coming from. Then I saw a little flash coming from this tree, you know, the trunk of the tree itself. I'm thinking, the VCs are training fucking trees to shoot at us? I shot that tree up. Then it didn't fire no more and blood was coming out of
the holes. I was scared out of my mind when I saw that.
We got shovels and dug up the roots of the tree, and found a tunnel and the body of a little man, still holding his gun. In fact, the gun
was bigger than him. He'd dug that tunnel under the tree, then hollowed out the tree from the inside and crawled up in there and fired at us. He'd killed two and wounded five. They told us later it wasn't a little man—it was a 12-year-old boy.”

I waited for a few minutes. Then I asked, “How do you feel
about it?”

“I don't feel anything about it, man,” Vandyne snapped. “I
don't care if it's the Easter Bunny. If it's got a gun pointing at you, you shoot it.”

I wanted to ask him if he ever saw that little boy again, but
I decided I not to. I didn't want him to think I was crazy the first day.

Sometimes I dream about that little boy I killed. He still
runs in at me, only I don't have my gun anymore. If he gets close enough before I wake up, he explodes in my face.

—

My phone rang loudly, foreign and yet familiar. I checked the clock. It was 14 minutes after 1000. That meant it was okay to answer. I even considered opening my other eye.

I have this rule about answering the phone: Never pick up
the phone when it rings on the hour or half hour, because it probably means bad news. Whenever someone has to make a tough phone call, they delay it until the hour or half past, because they're reluctant and need a deadline. Maybe they turn on the TV and then resolve to make the call when the show is over. That's what I do.

When
there's something good to say, people can't wait to
call you, so they tend to call at odd times. Six after. Forty-eight after. Fourteen after.

I picked up the phone and waited to hear who it was.

“Officer Chow?” said a thin voice.

“Yip, how are you?” I asked, surprised and suspicious.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No. I'm usually up this early on Saturday.”

“I was calling to see if you wanted to join me for a late
breakfast.” A vision of me having a beer before heading downstairs came into my head and then faded.

“Sure, yes. I'll
meet you. I'm allergic to seafood, though.”
I
had to tell him that because nearly every dim-sum dish has some shrimp squeezed into it. He gave a heavy sigh. No one has any patience with food allergies. Chinese think it's all in your head, even when you're covered in hives, struggling to breathe.

“Okay, no seafood. We'll go to a cafe,” said Yip.

I met him at a coffee shop that only people who came
over before 1943 go to. Those were the people who spoke the Toisan dialect. After 1943, they changed immigration laws, and Chinese who spoke Cantonese started coming in. Toisan and Cantonese are different enough so that the Toisanese stuck together and so did the Cantonese. Native
Toisan speakers generally know Cantonese as well, but not the other way around. They didn't need to talk to each other, anyway. Each group had their own coffee shops to go to.

I stirred s
ome more sugar into my coffee and looked around.
An old man at the far end of the counter brushed crumbs off his lap. A lopsided booth held two other old men. And then there was me and Yip, sitting on chairs at a table where an old booth had been ripped out. Hanging on the wall behind the cash register were scratch-and-win New York Lottery tickets for sale. Those probably kept this joint in business.

“He can't eat shrimp,” Yip said to the waiter, who didn't
have a notepad and lingered only a moment. You didn't have to order here. Everyone got the regular. Then Yip said to me, “Have you heard any more information?”

“I'm sorry, I haven't. But you know it's not something I
handle. It belongs to the detective squad.”

“But you'r
e Chinese. Shouldn't you be the one in charge
of
this?”

“It's not like that, Yip. I can't talk about the case. Actually, I
shouldn't even be talking to you.”

“They don't give you a high enough position. They keep you
at a low-level job because you're Chinese.”

“I don't like to think about it that way.”

Yip sighed. “First time I came to this country, I got a job
with this contracting company mopping office floors. I was the only Chinese. I was lucky to get such a high-paying job. I was working with Italians, Irish, Spanish, and some blacks. We all worked really hard. Overtime with no overtime pay. Then I voted for having a union. We won, but the bosses closed the cleaning company and started a new one. We all lost our jobs.”

A waiter dropped off two coffees, two plates of steamed
rice noodles with ground pork, and two small dishes of pork spare ribs with black-bean sauce.

“So
that was when I started with the restaurant in
Chinatown. I got paid less, but it was in cash and food was free.” He paused to pick his teeth, then indicated he wanted to be close friends by asking, “Where is your father from?”

“My father's dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm still mad at him.”

“What did he do to you?”

“He gambled away a lot of our money. My mother's the
only reason we pulled through.”

“I'm glad your mother was good to you.”

“She was tough.”

“Your parents came from a different time, a different place.
But I'm sure they're proud that you became a policeman.”

“That was when my father stopped talking to me. He
wanted me to do something better.”