This Is a Bust by Ed Lin Read Free Book Online Page B

talked very much about work. We only wanted to talk about the good things in life.”
    â€œLily, you’re going to have to go to the precinct and make
a statement.”
    â€œNo, I can’t! I don’t want any trouble!”
    I stood up and dropped a few bills on the table.
    â€œOfficer Chow! You cannot pay! I invited you out today!”
Yip exclaimed.
    â€œYip, I can’t allow you to pay for me. Nice meeting you, Lily.”
    â€œNice meeting you, officer.”
    The dim-sum crowds on the sidewalks were getting louder, but no tourists came into this cafe. I walked to the door and hit the street. I thought about a little coffee shop that had catered to people who came over in the 1920s. They spoke a dry, sharp Shanghainese you almost never hear in Chinatown anymore. That cafe’s a pharmacy now.
    I got o ff the sidewalk and onto the street, hugging the parked cars. It was the easiest way to get through Chinatown, since the sidewalks were crammed with tourists and vendors. I put my hands in my pockets and thought about people who were dead, places that were gone, things that had changed.
    â€”
    I was born into a batch of kids that Chinatown just loved. Because of the War Bride Act, Chinese women of a child- bearing age had finally been allowed to come over in significant numbers. Before then, a lot of Chinatown consisted of groups of old men getting older. And these old men would stand on a corner all day just to get a look at a Chinese woman, maybe glance at her legs, too. This guy I called “uncle” whom I wasn’t related to at all told me the best place was Mott and Bayard because there were markets nearby, and you’d see the women doing some shopping.
    When the Chinese women started coming over in numbers, it prettied up the scenery. It also increased the sound volume — newly born Chinese kids wailed from their makeshift cribs all night every night. For the first time ever, you could smell diapers in the streets.
    Nobody complained, because us kids were miracles. The Chinese community wasn’t going to die out. Nearly every merchant had loose candies to hand out to us.
    I w as born in 1950, the year after my mother came over  and married my father in a deal that his boss helped fix.
    I still don’t know exactly what happened. He was a 40-year-old waiter and she was 20. She was expecting the Wizard  of Oz, but she got the scarecrow, my dad. They named me after Robert Mitchum, this American B-movie chump my mother liked.
    I had a great time as a kid. Everybody older was “uncle” or “aunt.” Nobody ever hit us. There were no grandmothers or grandfathers to guilt us into doing anything. No older brothers to slap us around or older sisters to snitch on us. Birthday parties every day. The only thing we were forced to do was say, “Thank you,” when we got little candies. Everybody knew Cantonese, but we spoke English to leave out our parents.
    Things started changing when I was around 10. The older kids were shoplifting, smoking, and ripping off dusty bottles of gift booze their parents had forgotten.
    Two gangs set themselves up in different parts of Chinatown . You had to be in one or the other. The group I was in was the Continentals. We used paint scrapers to hack off the metal emblems from Lincoln Continentals. You had to get eight to join. The rival group was the Darts. I joined the Continentals only because those cars looked cooler. Moy was in the Darts, but he was still my friend.
    I guess the Continentals and Darts weren’t really gangs, because when they met up in Columbus Park, something like a softball game would break out. It was tame. Fellow group members were as likely to come to blows (for striking out or missing a catch) as people from rival groups. The only fights we had were against the Italian kids from across Canal Street and the Spanish kids on the east side of Bowery. They’d come into Chinatown and try to