Chinatown (3)
Tan Guhong followed Luo Jingming and secretly slipped out through the back door of the Palace Hotel. They did not take a car, but left on foot. After crossing Union Square and walking for more than ten minutes, they arrived in Chinatown.
Written across the tall paifang before them were four neat, imposing characters:
天下为公 (The World Belongs to All)
It was a paifang steeped in countless layers of history and vicissitude, cutting San Francisco into two worlds. Outside the gate were Western skyscrapers of steel and concrete; inside were Eastern red walls and green-tiled roofs, their gilded surfaces shimmering with color.
San Francisco's Chinatown was the largest and oldest historic Chinese community outside Asia anywhere in the world. The neighborhood stretched across more than a dozen streets and was home to more than a hundred thousand overseas Chinese. Everywhere the eye could see were Chinese characters, everywhere the ear could hear was Chinese, and the people coming and going along the streets were all Chinese. It was, in every respect, a little China.
It was already past midnight, yet Grant Avenue was still extraordinarily lively. The shops were brightly lit, tourists jostled shoulder to shoulder, and large red lanterns hung at varying heights. Signs flickering with neon lights in every color were dazzling to the eyes.
English and Chinese, simplified and traditional characters, Chinese architecture and Western-style buildings, the time and space of the universe seemed to twist and intersect here. In a daze, it was as though one had stepped into a cycle of history, into Hong Kong Island in the 1980s, or perhaps the Shanghai Bund of the 1930s.
Amid the bustling crowds, Tan Guhong gazed with some novelty at the endless stream of pedestrians and the dazzling array of shops along the streets. Beside her came Luo Jingming's low voice:
“San Francisco is a miraculous city. Several centuries ago, this was a paradise for adventurers, a heaven for gold prospectors and cowboys. People from all over the world gathered here in pursuit of wealth: Spaniards, Italians, Vietnamese, and Chinese. The Eastern immigrants who crossed the ocean and came here last century still retained the most traditional cultural customs deep in their bones. But afterward, they continually clashed and merged with local American culture, reproducing and growing from generation to generation. And that was how this unique cultural atmosphere, along with some very peculiar products, came into being.”
For example, American-style Chinese food, such as the General Tso's chicken and chop suey that Chinese people had never even heard of, or fortune cookies.
An ordinary cookie folded and curled in two, with a slip of paper tucked inside bearing something resembling a maxim or an ambiguous prediction. This was the “Chinese cookie” that had become wildly popular across America, the greatest distinguishing feature of Chinese restaurants in the eyes of Americans.
The two of them each bought a fortune cookie at a particularly popular shop near the Tin Hau Temple. After opening them, Luo Jingming's was written in English. Translated literally, it said: Confucius says, if you want to eat, don't offend the cook.
Perhaps even Confucius himself had no idea when he had ever said such a thing.
Tan Guhong's was somewhat more normal: If you're unhappy, eat me.
But there was also a string of inexplicable numbers on the back of the slip.
“What are these?”
“They're lucky numbers for the lottery.” Luo Jingming smiled. “A lot of people really believe in this. There was an old granny who used to live next door to my family. Every day, she would buy lottery tickets using the numbers on her fortune cookie.”
“Did she ever win?”
“She won second prize. But she got so excited that she had a heart attack and died.”
Tan Guhong was both amused and speechless. “Then that really was a case of losing more than she gained.”
He smiled as well and asked her, “What do you want for a late-night snack?”
She politely declined. “If it's American-style Chinese food, then I'll pass.”
“There are authentic Chinese restaurants too. They're just not on the main roads, so tourists can't easily find them.”
She thought for a moment before answering, “I want wontons. Steaming hot little wontons.”
Preferably with the fragrance of seaweed, dried shrimp, egg ribbons, and cilantro floating above them.
“No problem…” His eyes and brows carried a smile. “But here, they're called ‘yuntun’.”
The two words he had spoken, “wonton,” were in Cantonese.
She gazed into his dark eyes, deep with laughter. Countless little details surfaced chaotically in her mind, and in an instant, she suddenly understood.
“You… grew up in Chinatown?”
Ninety percent of the Chinese immigrants in San Francisco's Chinatown came from Guangdong. Here, people ate Cantonese cuisine, spoke Cantonese, drank morning tea, and worshipped Lord Guan. It had long been known as “Little Guangdong.”
Luo Jingming gave a faint smile, tacitly acknowledging what she had said.
Afterward, he led her away from the main streets crowded with tourists and into a relatively secluded and quiet residential area. Moving through the streets and alleys with practiced ease, they eventually arrived at a small, nearly deserted restaurant. Its plain sign outside bore two characters: 吴记, Wu Ji.
They pushed open the door and entered. Unlike the Chinese-style restaurants outside, which had been decorated specifically to appeal to tourists, this place had ordinary, old-fashioned wallpaper, simple tables and chairs, and a menu on the wall mixing English and Chinese. It offered only a few simple set meals and looked somewhat like a Hong Kong-style casual diner.
There were very few people inside. A young man wearing glasses was sitting near the entrance playing a game on his phone. When he saw them come in, he muttered a curse under his breath, put down his phone, and hurried over, greeting them in very unstandard Mandarin:
“Sir, miss, table for two?”
Luo Jingming said, “Two bowls of wonton noodles.”
The more the bespectacled young man looked at the person before him, the more familiar he seemed. After studying him carefully for several seconds, he suddenly seemed to have a stroke of inspiration and tentatively called out:
“Ming-ge?”
Luo Jingming nodded, his eyes smiling. “A-Wen has grown this big.”
“Ah, Ming-ge, it really is you?!” A-Wen was both excited and delighted, somewhat at a loss for what to do.
Several chefs, servers, and familiar patrons who had been sitting around playing cards inside the restaurant got up as well. Two of the older ones even rose to their feet.
“Ming-ge.”
“It really is Ming-ge.”
Their voices carried no shortage of countless emotions and complicated feelings.
Luo Jingming said indifferently, “No need to fuss over me. Carry on. I just brought a friend here for a late-night snack.”
Tan Guhong followed Luo Jingming to a table in the corner and sat down. The few people over there seemed to have a stomach full of questions they wanted to ask but did not dare to. When one of the younger men asked who she was, he was quietly silenced with a rebuke. The group continued playing cards, but every one of them was distracted, secretly glancing over in their direction from time to time.
A-Wen deftly brought the two of them tableware and tea, speaking excitedly in Cantonese without pause:
“Ming-ge, you've been gone for so long. I still remember how you used to come to our place for wontons when I was little. After you left, I stopped going to school and learned to look after the shop with my dad. Business is hard these days, you know, and the shop's in such a tucked-away spot. But who in the whole of Chinatown doesn't know that the wontons at our place are the most authentic? Eh, is this sister-in-law? Ming-ge, introduce us!”
Luo Jingming glanced at Tan Guhong, who was drinking her tea with her head lowered as though she had heard nothing. He neither confirmed nor denied it, only asking, “Where's Uncle Wu?”
“Dad died of a stroke last year. His ashes are still at home. Diu! A grave for a dead person costs more than a house for a living one these days. If I can't save enough money after a few more years, I'll have to close the shop and go sell fortune cookies too.”
“Is the record player still here?”
“Of course. That's the only family heirloom my dad left me. Ming-ge wants to listen? I'll put it on right now. Still number thirteen?”
After Luo Jingming confirmed it, A-Wen immediately directed the staff to bring out a very old-fashioned vintage upright record player. He wiped away the dust.
“I don't even know if it still works. It's been sitting in the storeroom for four or five years.”
He placed a vinyl record on the turntable. The needle began to rotate leisurely. After a long stretch of muddy, grating static, the music finally managed to play. Although the sound was inevitably blurred and the melody distorted, it was instead filled with the atmosphere of another time, possessing a charm all its own.
“This is all I can do.”
A-Wen let out a long breath and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Tan Guhong listened to the familiar, old English song, carefully trying to make it out for quite some time. Only when she heard the crucial lines did she hesitate before asking:
“Is it Tell Laura I Love Her?”
A popular hit that had once swept through the streets and lanes of America, telling the story of the love between a young man and woman. She had happened to hear someone request it on the radio before.
Luo Jingming nodded. “This was my mother's favorite song. Back then, my father proposed to my mother while singing this song.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
She took a sip of the tea in her cup, sighed faintly, and raised her eyes to look at him.
“You really make me more and more curious.”
The more she came to know him, the more she could not understand him; the more time she spent with him, the less she could see through him. For a traveling companion she had met by chance, she should not have been prying too deeply. Yet this person had deliberately placed layer upon layer of mysteries before her, making it impossible for her to continue pretending not to see them.
He smiled. “Curious about what?”
“Why did you grow up here?”
Today, perhaps because of the frequent exchanges between China and the outside world, and because of the development of tourism, this community had become a second home overseas for Chinese people in China, carrying countless strands of history and sentiment. But at least in the last century, even as recently as ten years ago, this place had still been full of poverty and backwardness, dirty and disorderly, scarcely different from a slum.
But what about the man before her? He was plainly the biological grandson of the world's Chinese shipping magnate. His maternal grandfather was fabulously wealthy, with businesses spread across the globe. His magnificent and luxurious private castle was even located just several hundred kilometers away on the west coast of California. So why had Luo Jingming grown up here from childhood?
“The answer to that question is actually very simple.”
He paused, letting the male voice from the record player sing with lingering tenderness:
“Tell Laura I love her
Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry
My love for her will never die…”
“Do you know the story behind this song?”
She shook her head.
“This is a love story, but a tragic love story. A boy fell in love with a girl named Laura. To buy a ring and propose to her, he entered an illegal street race, only to die in an accident. His final murmur before death was, ‘Tell Laura I love her.’”
“The beginning of my parents' story was very similar to this song.”
Heaven's temperament had always been impossible to fathom. It seemed to take particular pleasure in making people who clearly could not be together encounter one another, then come to know and understand each other.
More than thirty years ago, his father, Luo Zhanfei, had been a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, a thoroughly down-and-out young hoodlum, while his mother, Liang Peishan, was the youngest daughter of the world's Chinese shipping magnate, a pampered young heiress who had grown up surrounded by fine clothes and good food, innocent and carefree. He had never known exactly how, at the very beginning, they had first met. His parents' respective versions were not entirely the same. In any case, these two people from different social classes, with different identities and completely mismatched family backgrounds, had fallen desperately in love with each other. The family opposition, class barriers, and pressure from society that this brought about could be imagined.
They went through everything Romeo and Juliet were supposed to go through. She was scolded, betrothed to someone else, and confined at home. He was disciplined, beaten, and nearly deported. Yet none of these things could separate them. He knelt before Old Master Liang and kowtowed; she silently went on hunger strike in protest. They secretly met in the middle of the night, seizing every opportunity they could to see each other. He desperately tried to make money, determined to rise above his circumstances. Anything that could make money quickly, no matter how dangerous, he pursued without hesitation. Finally, in an underground black-market race where he wagered his life, he nearly paid for it with his own.
She secretly went to the hospital and saw him wrapped in bandages from head to toe, barely alive, yet still smiling as he apologized that he would need to save a little longer before he could afford the ring. She collapsed against his hospital bed, crying uncontrollably.
After that, she became determined to spend the rest of her life with this man, regardless of the cost. She broke with her family and even, right in front of her father, jumped from the balcony of the fourth floor.
It was the 1980s, and the spring breeze from across the ocean was stirring the hearts of all the overseas Chinese. The Liang family moved back to China, while she remained alone in San Francisco, never again having any contact with her family.
It is difficult to judge who was right and who was wrong in a love story. Other than the people involved themselves, no one else has the right to say whether it was worth it or not. As the saying goes, only the one who drinks the water knows whether it is cold or warm.
Tan Guhong could only sigh silently in her heart: Silly girl, silly boy.
“Did they get married after that?”
“They did.”
Even though at the time they had nothing at all, no wedding dress, no diamond ring, they could only hold their wedding banquet in a humble little noodle shop.
“Were they happy together?”
“Very happy.”
He swore that he would give her the best life possible, and so he clawed his way upward by any means necessary.
“They loved each other their whole lives?”
“Their whole lives.”
For all his life, he never once lost his temper with her or quarreled with her, never allowed her to suffer the slightest grievance. Every morning, there were flowers beside her bed. Every night, there was a good-night kiss. He remembered every tiny anniversary. She never had to do housework, never had to worry about making a living, never spent a single day living through hardship. Forever and ever, she was the princess living in a castle from a fairy tale, lovingly protected by her knight.
“Until death separated them.”
On their tenth wedding anniversary, they held a celebration at the Peace Hotel. Suddenly, a group of masked assailants stormed in. Carrying machine guns, they opened fire wildly on the crowd. He died on the spot. She was taken to the hospital, but efforts to save her failed, and she died as well.
“They were buried together at Green Hill Cemetery, in a place facing the Pacific coast. When spring arrives, kapok flowers will bloom before their graves.”
“Living together beneath one quilt, sleeping together beneath the same earth.”
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