Peter Davies - The Fortunes

I left for a while myself. Not the country, of course, just back to the West Coast. I worked my way from Sacramento to Hayward to Oakland over the course of a decade — more running, maybe — until my father started having chest pains and asked me to move back and take over the business. He recovered, thanks to a stent, but the store, already losing ground to Radio Shack when I came home, never did. I like to think I at least persuaded him to cut his losses, get out while the getting was good, and the experience has come in useful anyway. I’ve mostly been doing accounts for small businesses ever since, helping quite a few of them through liquidation or bankruptcy (no shortage of that work in Detroit). I’ve done a little of everything over the years, though, even a spell as a finance guy at a Toyota dealership. (Less of a gesture than I imagined: most Japanese cars are made here now anyway, down South in Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and across the Midwest in Ohio and Indiana, though never Michigan.)

TOYOTA, DATSUN, HONDA… PEARL HARBOR, went a popular Detroit bumper sticker back in the day. Ten years after Vincent’s death, Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s president and pitchman, was still complaining that the Japanese were “beating our brains in.” Recently I read that Buick was a bestseller in China.

I wonder how Mrs. Chin might have felt seeing American cars on the roads there. She lived in China another twenty years but came back to the States for cancer treatment at the end of her life. The Asian American Rosa Parks, the obits called her. She’s buried between Vincent and his father.

They asked me to her funeral too, as they’ve asked me faithfully to anniversaries and conferences and rallies down the years, as they’ve asked me to this latest memorial. I appreciate the sentiment. They forgive me — for lying or not lying well enough, either way. If only I could forgive myself. But it’s too late for the truth now. You can’t say all this stuff at an unveiling, in a documentary or an interview. You can’t say all this when someone calls you a motherfucker.

I RSVPed my regrets this morning. I can’t, and never could, save the day.

Lily used to say, Vincent still be live if I not adopt him. I should have talked to her; we were the two who felt most guilty, the ones who most wanted someone else to pay. This afternoon at least I went to her grave, all their graves, cleaned the stones, left oranges and lit joss. Thought of my own father, long retired to Florida (we sold the house in Oak Park; I rent in Ferndale now). The sod over Vincent and his father is a shade greener than that over his mother’s more recent plot, like jade that darkens from wearing.

That Bicentennial summer of ’76 our two families visited the Freedom Train when it stopped in Detroit. Vincent was at Lawrence Tech by then; I was a sophomore in Palo Alto. We saw the Constitution, Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, a moon rock, an Oscar, Hank Aaron’s home-run record bat. Vincent’s mother read aloud proudly from the program, “Orientals arrive to build rail beds and remain to build new lives.” His father marveled at the 1904 Olds, “first car to drive across the country,” mine at the moon buggy, “wheels by GM.” For Vincent, though, the highlight was Jesse Owens’s medals.

There’s a Canton near Detroit, as it happens (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable; that’s why I didn’t think about it for years). You pass signs for it on the way to the cemetery. A little research tells me there used to be a local Pekin and a Nankin too, all named in the 1830s, when the nation was fascinated by all things Chinese, before any Chinese had arrived. Nankin, in fact, became Westland only a few years before my father opened shop there. There are Cantons dating from the same period all across the country, in Ohio, Mississippi, Georgia, Kansas, Texas — the latter two named because their founders came from still other Cantons. The Canton in South Dakota was said to be on the exact other side of the world from its namesake.

When Vincent first came to Oak Park I thought I’d look out for him, the new kid, even though I only knew him slightly then. I felt protective of him, but he never needed me, fit in so much better than me that I occasionally feared my friendship was a liability (some kids, I knew, called us Ching and Chong behind our backs), that he tolerated it only out of pity. I was careful not to presume on it, seeking him out mostly when he was alone.

Ling-Ling and Sing-Sing was another of their names for us — those kids who’d pull the corners of their eyes back when we passed — after the famous panda pair who’d come back from China with Nixon. The same kids who snickered when I got called on to read Emily Dickenson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” in tenth grade English. For a while we tried calling ourselves Billie and Sammy, after the funky Chinamen in “Kung Fu Fighting,” a hit our senior year. But of course only one of us was fast as lightning.

Sometimes I wonder if anything might have been different if I hadn’t gone along that night. Different for me, of course — how I’ve wished I was never there — but also for him. I’d never been to the Fancy Pants with him before, but I’d heard about it. It was one reason I jumped at the chance. Why hadn’t he asked me along before? He’d taken Jerry and Mike. He might have been worried I’d blab, tell mutual friends, that it’d get back to Vicki, I guess, but it’s not like he didn’t brag about it. No, I think, it was something else. I wasn’t as cool as him, you might say, and I wasn’t, but really any Chinese is less cool alongside another. Maybe we lose our exoticism. More likely it’s that alone, we can define ourselves; with another, we invite all the stereotypes. Alone, or especially with Jerry or Mike, he was Vince. Next to me he was Vincent, Asian. So, I have to ask, would Evans have called us names if there’d only been one of us? “It’s because of you…” he said, and he meant us, you plural. One isn’t a threat, two or more… well, we were them. And would Vincent have gotten so angry if I hadn’t been there? Perhaps; probably. But just maybe he felt he had to represent, answer back. He knew I wouldn’t — later, when the bouncers intervened, I even tried to apologize to Evans, play peacemaker — so Vincent may have figured it fell to him to uphold our honor, even protect me. Then again, maybe he just didn’t want to be like me. Maybe he yelled back, threw the first punch, to prove we weren’t the same. “I’m not a motherfucker,” he said. He didn’t say, “ We’re not.”

Then again, Evans may have said, “It’s because of little motherfuckers like you… ” Accounts vary. Memories differ.

There’s a name for it, okay, this idea that we all look alike. It’s been studied, documented. Cross-race bias, they call it. It’s true of how whites see blacks, even how other races see whites. But with Asians the sameness is magnified. There are so many of us! Squeezed together in our overcrowded cities. And we all have the same names! And dress alike, wear glasses (I kept mine on to look at the girls; Vincent wore contacts). Even the things we make are copies — cheap knockoffs, poor imitations. We may all look alike, but when we try to copy you… well, the differences are obvious (and if they’re not, it just means we’re getting trickier, not to be trusted). Maybe to Evans and Pitts, Vincent was just a pale imitation. Maybe the reason they killed him is not that he was like me but that he was trying to be like them.

If I had a gun I’d shoot you now, I told Evans while we waited for the ambulance, but I didn’t, of course.

And what about all the other what-ifs? Ten thousand of them, as Evans said. What if none of us had gone that night? Or not gotten so drunk? Not cared what a couple of assholes said? What if I hadn’t run? And what if the judge had locked those guys up after the first trial? What if justice was seen to be done? Vincent is still dead, Lily still goes back to China, Vicki is still alone, I’m still yellow. It’s a tragedy, but a small one, forgotten in time. But the verdict, the paltry fines, that’s what made travesty of tragedy, “rubbed insult into injury,” as my father said. Shit, it’s a tossup which was more racist, the crime or the verdict. But it’s the injustice that lives on, the unfairness that ensures Vincent’s death will be remembered. And alongside it, always and forever, my part, like a bass line, a footnote, minor but essential. His friend who ran away. Martyrs and saints, you see, they have to be brave. Otherwise they’re just victims. Vincent could have run away. That’s what my life proves. He chose not to (though some say he slipped). Never mind that he should have run. He had a mother to care for, a wife to live for. Never mind that he was a hothead who didn’t give any more thought to his loved ones than he had in the club. No. He stood up before he was knocked down. And I ran.