Peter Davies - The Fortunes

Part of me wanted to say something— didn’t they know who I was? — but then it came to me that all their talk of a “heinous assault,” a “brutal slaying,” wasn’t the way you’d talk about it if you were there. That wasn’t how I remembered it; that was how they imagined it. They weren’t talking as if they’d been there but as if they wished they had been. What would they have done if they had been? I wondered, and held my peace. It reminded me of Vincent, the way he told me about his father’s mugging. They were spoiling for a fight too.

Back in the kitchen the cooks were preparing dishes for later, hot oil singing in the steel woks.

I didn’t say anything in the end, but Lily was there and she spoke last, halting but firm. She wanted justice for Vincent, and we applauded until our hands stung. But a lot of the people in that room also wanted justice for themselves. Me too, I suppose. I had run, but maybe there was still something I could do.

Sometimes now when people tell the story it’s a triumph. Something good, something important, coming from tragedy. “The death of a man, the birth of a movement.” I guess that’s what Vincent was martyred for, even if he didn’t know it.

Don’t make a federal case out of it. Wasn’t that the Chinese American way? Turn the other cheek, look the other way, water off a Peking duck’s back. “Take it on the chin,” as a sick joke doing the rounds had it. My father had been mistaken for Japanese in the store plenty of times — he was selling Japanese radios, after all — but he knew better than to correct a customer (even if as a boy during the war he wore a button saying CHINESE, NOT JAPANESE.)

But making a federal case is literally what we did — what we had to do to get the case reopened and prosecuted by the Justice Department as a hate crime. Only it had never been done before. Civil rights legislation hadn’t been applied to Asians previously; doing so now was a hot topic, a choice. Whose lot to throw in with? Blacks, for whom the legislation had been written, some of whom were suspicious of a possible usurpation, or dilution, as if Asian struggles were equivalent? Or whites, whom many of us aspired to be like?

I sat at the back of those meetings, between the pay phone and the cigarette machine, watching koi gliding silently back and forth in the aquarium. Every so often the talk would be interrupted, hushed really, by someone trying to come in to eat, the irritated exchanges at the door when they were turned away. I couldn’t see from where I was, but I imagined they were probably white. It was that kind of restaurant, the kind with Chinese zodiac placemats, the kind where white diners point out the few Chinese to each other and whisper how the food must be “authentic.” I wondered what they thought if they glimpsed a crowd of us inside before the door shut on them.

The koi turned, slid back the other way. They were supposed to be lucky fish, good feng shui. Their filter hummed happily. Next to the kitchen was another tank flickering with bass, tilapia, grouper — the unlucky fish, as I deemed them.

As to our question: Were we a minority, or were we honorary members of the majority? I reckon I know what Vincent would have chosen. Vince. But to get justice for him, we chose the other. Later I heard some blacks call us “fleedom riders”; what they meant was “free riders.”

So a federal case, and I was called to testify, to say what I’d heard, what I’d seen, what I’d done. What I remembered.

It was a race thing. No doubt. One of the strippers, Lacey, recalled the line, and then we all did. “It’s because of you little motherfuckers we’re out of work,” Evans said, meaning Japanese, even though he wasn’t out of work himself, even though Vincent wasn’t Japanese.

Pitts had been laid off a couple of years earlier, but he was working again, at a furniture store, and attending community college. Both he and Evans, in fact, went back to work the very next morning, though Evans was eventually fired by Chrysler when his felony plea was accepted. Only then would he really be out of work because of Vincent.

But okay, the car business was in the crapper, as Vincent very well knew. He was working for an auto supplier, after all. He was in the business.

Would it have made a difference if Vincent had said, I’m Chinese ? That his mother had moved to the U.S. because she couldn’t live in China after the war, with her memories of the Japanese bombing? Probably not. Nips, Chinks, gooks, slants — we were all the same to them. Instead he said, “I’m not a little motherfucker,” and Evans came back with drunken magnanimity: “Big fucker, little fucker, we’re all fuckers.” And then Vincent stubbed out his cigarette and went for him. Punches were thrown, a stool. Pitts had his head cut open.

But maybe everyone’s a racist in a strip club. Sexist, sure, goes without saying, but racist too. Afterward Evans tried to say it started because Vincent tipped a black dancer badly. I don’t know; maybe, though it sounds like a smokescreen: we’re all racists. But maybe we all are in a club. The whole point is to pick a girl or girls you like — blond, brunette, redhead, black, white, Asian. Did Vincent like white girls? In the immortal words of Hong Kong Phooey, Could be! I know we both ignored the Asian girls. You want what you can’t have, what you don’t have. Why else would you be in a place like that? And he already had a nice Chinese girl in Vicki. “Going with another Chinese,” he told me sloppily, “would be unfaithful.” But he felt okay about a white girl, because he knew they were unattainable outside of a club. Hell, maybe Evans felt the same about black girls. “I don’t like seeing people picked on,” he said in court. Such chivalry.

Vincent’s father, by the way, was mugged by a black guy. Did I say that already? Or did you assume it?

I don’t recall the black dancer, but Lacey I remember. I was disappointed in the girls at first — they were older, their skin tanned leathery or oiled in a way that made you conscious of the smell of sweat in the room. Lacey wasn’t a beauty either, of course: a dirty blonde with small breasts and a broad pale ass. But those kinds of imperfections, I saw, were part of the appeal of the place. The women were vulnerable, more naked because they were exposing shortcomings. Some of them made a jiggling show of themselves, as if to say they were in on the joke, good sports about it; others cloaked themselves in a tired boredom that I suppose might pass for sultry. But Lacey was still trying, grinding away to “Physical” in a headband and leg warmers and not much else, smiling like it was a good time. When she shook out her mane at the end of the set, I felt a drop of perspiration land on my cheek. Her skin was fever-warm where I tucked a bill in her g-string. Later, on the stand, she called Vince a “nice” customer, said they were “friendly,” and I envied him, even though I knew the defense was trying to suggest some bias, some innuendo, to discredit her. She testified in a prim skirt suit — padded shoulders, blouse buttoned to the throat, still trying — but I remembered her body beneath it.

The thing about racism, I always think, the worst thing, okay, is not that someone has made up their mind about you without knowing you, based on the color of your skin, the way you look, some preconception. The worst thing is that they might be right. Stereotypes cling if they have a little truth; they sting by the same token. A lot of us do work hard; many of us (those who hail from Canton, anyway) are short. Some of us do have small dicks. And yes, as Evans’s complaint about Vincent’s tipping suggests, some of us are cheap (like our food, our goods, our labor). How would you feel if I called you racist? The white stereotype. But some of you are racist, right? It doesn’t mean that what’s true of the many has to be true of the one, any more than what’s true of the one must be true of the many.