Laura Resnick - The Misfortune Cookie

“I gather Mr. Yee is an influential man?” said Max, clinging to his seat as we skidded a little when turning onto Canal Street.

“ Was, you mean,” I said, deciding not to open the sauce I’d found, since the ride wasn’t that smooth. I bit into a juicy dumpling and sighed.

“He was a Chinatown businessman,” said John. “And a pretty prominent member of the Five Brothers tong.”

“Ah-hah!” I said, perceiving the connection with Lucky. “A tong. That’s like the Mafia, right? Only Chinese.”

“Well, not really. I mean, yes, there’s a certain aspect of—”

“Perhaps you should keep both hands on the wheel,” Max said anxiously to John, who had lifted his right hand for a moment to waggle it ambiguously in response to my question.

“We’ll be there soon, Dr. Zadok,” John said soothingly, returning his full attention to the road.

So was John a tong member? Or was he simply, like me and Max, a normal person inadvertently connected to some underworld figures? (Well, “normal” in the sense of not being professional criminals.)

Traffic was heavy here, as it usually was, as well as perilous. On Canal Street, Chinatown’s main east-west artery, a two-way thoroughfare that was crowded with impatient drivers and daredevil cabbies, pedestrians were crossing the street against the lights, wading through moving cars, and stepping off the curb without warning. But despite Max’s obvious anxiety and occasional little gasps of alarm, John was handling this big vehicle well in the tight traffic, and he was alert in his reactions to the human obstacle course. So I thought we had a good chance of reaching our destination without mowing down a reckless pedestrian.

I heard panting in my ear and felt Nelli’s breath on my neck as she peered over my shoulder, from her commodious spot in the back of the hearse, to examine the steamed dumplings. Rather than argue about it, I gave her one, being careful not to let her accidentally take a finger with it.

“But that’s the only one you’re getting,” I said firmly.

As always, Chinatown was an explosion of light, color, bustle, life, and chaos. Even in this rotten weather, outdoor vendors lined Canal Street. The merchants, huddled deep in their coats and hooded parkas, were eagerly waving down pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks, urging them to stop, shop, and buy. We drove slowly past restaurants with duck carcasses hanging in the windows, their crispy skin burnished reddish-bronze by flavorful sauce and slow roasting. Chinese women carrying shopping bags bartered with fish vendors whose fresh-caught wares lay on piles of ice and glistened under the bright electric lights. A profusion of red, yellow, white, and green signs and billboards displayed Chinese calligraphy. The Chinese characters on all the stores and shops were followed, almost as an afterthought, by brief English translations: Happy Family Chinese Bakery; Shanghai Gourmet Restaurant; Glamorous Clothes; Kosher Dim Sum (food being a bond between Chinese and Jews); Herbal Remedies; Tea Imports.

When we stopped at another traffic light, John pointed to a nearby building with golden pagoda-like flourishes around the doorway. “Speaking of tongs, as we were . . . Have a look at the Chinese characters above the window there, Miss Diamond.”

“Call me, Esther.”

“Esther,” he repeated with a nod. “See the third character there? The one that looks sort of like a stick-figure man wearing a big straw hat?”

I peered at it. “Yes.”

“Ah,” said Max with a nod. “The symbol for tong. ”

“You read Chinese?” I asked Max, not that surprised. I had heard him speak it once, and I knew he read English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German.

“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head briskly to disclaim any such accomplishment. “I only know a few dozen common Chinese characters. You’d have to be familiar with several thousand to read the language competently.”

I’m no linguist, but I knew that in contrast to the phonetic way that Western writing had developed over the millennia, with each alphabetical symbol representing a sound, Chinese writing had arisen from ideograms and pictographs. I nodded in response to what Max had said, adding, “Because every word in the language has its own unique symbol, right?” I’d learned my ABCs when I was a small child, which is where literacy starts in our language. Kids in China don’t have it nearly so easy. If you memorized twenty-six symbols in Chinese, you’d only know twenty-six words, rather than knowing all the symbols used to write your whole language.

“And a lot of the characters are easy to confuse with each other, too.” John added ruefully, “I’m a good student, but my father finally gave up hoping I’d ever learn to read Chinese.”

“But you can read that symbol?” I asked. “The character for tong?”

“Well, there are a hundred or so symbols that are so common—especially in daily life in Chinatown—that most people around here know them,” John replied. “Even people like me who were hopeless at our Chinese lessons. Or immigrants from the bottom rungs of society who never really learned to read and write.”

“That’s why I recognize it,” said Max. “I know even fewer characters than our able young escort, but tong is a common one. And easy to remember.”

I found Chinese writing beautiful and exotic, but it all just looked like abstract art to me, without identifiable patterns, so I had never noticed this symbol—or any other—in particular, though I came often to this part of town.

“A stick-figure man with a straw hat,” I said to John with a smile. “I’ll remember that.”

“It’s one that you’ll see all over Chinatown,” he said.

“That seems very bold,” I commented. “Sort of an in-your-face challenge to law enforcement, isn’t it?”

I really couldn’t picture the Gambellos—or the other Mafia families with whom they competed—writing La Cosa Nostra on their buildings.

As traffic started moving again, John said, “No, not at all. The literal meaning of tong is ‘gathering place’ or ‘meeting hall.’ It applies to any space in which people congregate, for whatever reason.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, understanding now. “It’s similar to the way ‘family’ is a common word with a harmless meaning—unless we’re specifically talking about something like the Gambello family.” In which case, family meant a criminal organization, most of whose members weren’t actually related to each other.

“Um . . . yeah,” said John, keeping his eyes on the road.

I wondered if it had been tactless of me to bring that up, given that Lucky was evidently relying on the Chen family while he was hiding from the cops. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. I was curious and a little puzzled now, so I asked more questions as we proceeded through the center of Chinatown, passing Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth. Fortunately, John didn’t seem to mind answering.

“But I’m sure ‘tong’ has some kind of criminal connotation,” I said. “I sometimes read in the news about tong leaders being investigated or arrested for running extortion, prostitution, and gambling rackets. And whenever there’s a sweep of street gangs in Chinatown, the media usually describe the gangs as the enforcers for the tong bosses.”

“Yes, that’s certainly an aspect of Chinatown’s tongs,” said John as the hearse approached the Bowery. “A well-known one. They’re secret societies, in a sense, like Uncle Lucky’s work family—which my brother and I were never allowed to ask him about. Being kids we asked anyhow, of course, but my parents chewed us out if they found out about it, and Lucky mostly just told us not to ask.”