INT. GOLDEN PALACE—MORNING
In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as Generic Asian Man. Everyone who looks like you, anyway. Unless you’re a woman, in which case you start out as Pretty Asian Woman.
You all work at Golden Palace, formerly Jade Palace, formerly Palace of Good Fortune. There’s an aquarium in the front and cloudy tanks of rock crabs and two-pound lobsters crawling over each other in the back. Laminated menus offer the lunch special, which comes with a bowl of fluffy white rice and choice of soup, egg drop or hot and sour. A neon Tsingtao sign blinks and buzzes behind the bar in the dimly lit space, a dropped-ceiling room with lacquered ornate woodwork (or some imitation thereof), everything simmering in a warm, seedy red glow thrown off by the dollar-store paper lanterns festooned above, many of them darkened by dead moths, the paper yellowing, ripped, curling in on itself.
The bar is fully stocked with top-shelf spirits up top, middle-shelf liquor at eye level, and down at the bottom, a happy hour shelf of booze that you will regret for sure. The new thing everyone is excited about is called the lychee margarita-tini, which seems like a lot of flavors. Not that you’ve had one. They’re fourteen bucks. Sometimes patrons leave a sip at the bottom of the glass and if you’re quick, while you go through the swinging door that separates the front of the house from the back, you can have a taste—you’ve seen some of the other Generic Asian Men do it. It’s a risk, though. The director’s always got an eye out, ready to fire someone for the smallest infraction.
You wear the uniform: white shirt, black pants. Black slipperlike shoes that have no traction whatsoever. Your haircut is not good, to say the least.
Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They’re the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White’s face just right, anyway.
Someday you want the light to hit your face like that. To look like the hero. Or for a moment to actually be the hero.
ROLES
First, you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes:
5. Background Oriental Male
4. Dead Asian Man
3. Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy
2. Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter
1. Generic Asian Man Number One
and then if you make it that far (hardly anyone does) you get stuck at Number One for a while and hope and pray for the light to find you and that when it does you’ll have something to say and when you say that something it will come out just right and have everyone in Black and White turning their heads saying wow who is that, that is not just some Generic Asian Man, that is a star, maybe not a real, regular star, let’s not get crazy, we’re talking about Chinatown here, but perhaps a Very Special Guest Star, which for your people is the ceiling, is the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world, the thing every Oriental Male dreams of when he’s in the Background, trying to blend in.
Kung Fu Guy.
Kung Fu Guy is not like the other slots in the hierarchy—there isn’t always someone occupying the position, as in whoever the top guy is at any given time, that’s the default guy who gets trotted out whenever there’s kung fu to be done. Only a very special Asian can be worthy of the title. It takes years of dedication and sacrifice, and after all that only a few have even a slim chance of making it. Despite the odds, you all grew up training for this and only this. All the scrawny yellow boys up and down the block dreaming the same dream.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are still not Kung Fu Guy.
You are currently Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy. Your kung fu is B, B-plus on a good day, and Sifu once proclaimed your drunken monkey to be nearly at a level of competence that he could perhaps at some point in the future imagine not being completely embarrassed of you. Which, if you know him, well, that’s a pretty big deal.
To be honest though it can sometimes be hard to tell with Sifu, who is famously inscrutable. If you could only show him what you’ve become. All you want is for him to make that face, the one that looks like internal distress possibly of a gastrointestinal nature but actually indicates something closer to Deeply Repressed Secret Pride Honorable Father Has for His Young but Promising Son; means Deliciously Bittersweet Pain That Comes from Knowing Honorable Teacher Is No Longer Needed. That’s how you see it in your head: he would make that face, smile, you’d smile back. Credits roll and you’d walk off, arm in arm, to the horizon.
OLD ASIAN MAN
These days he is mostly Old Asian Man. No longer Sifu, with the pants and the muscles and the look in his eye. All of that is gone now, but when did it happen? Over years and overnight.
The day you first noticed. You’d shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe that’s what threw him off. When he answered the door, it took him a moment to recognize you. Two seconds, or twenty, a frozen eternity—then, as he regained himself, his familiar scowl, barking your name
WILLIS WU!
half-exclamation, half-confirmation, as if verifying for both you and himself that he hadn’t forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, don’t just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, let’s get started.
He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but you couldn’t stop thinking about the look he gave you, oblivion or terror, and for the first time you noticed the mess his room had become, not unusual for any other man his age living alone, but for Sifu, who taught and valued order and simplicity in all things, to have allowed his dwelling to reach this state of disorganization should have been a warning sign to all. Maybe not the first, but the first one that came to your attention.
Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be (“You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash?”) but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public. In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank (“good for wrapping fish or fruit”), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. He’d patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table he’d ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of the modest table itself. Come to think of it, Fatty Choy, despite the fact that he was and had always been a total gasbag, a mostly insufferable close-talking blowhard (made all the more insufferable by the fact that he was not infrequently right about things), was simply stating what you all knew but didn’t want to admit: Sifu had gotten old.