On the map, it is a jeweled blue, sandwiched between Canada (salmon pink) and Mexico (lime green). Young Wu dreams of the American air. Barbecues, baseball on the radio and in the streets.
In his dreams, he arrives on a bright Monday morning, the ship pulling into the port, friendly strangers waving him and the others onto shore.
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—THE UNITED STATES
In reality, Young Wu arrives in the dead of night. He waits in line to have some papers stamped, and then waits again in an area, sitting with fellow arrivals from seemingly every country on earth. It is cold, and except for the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead, it is quiet. There is no one there to greet him. Once he is done here, he will get on a bus, where he will sit for the next four days, except for twice-daily stops to eat and use the restroom, and at the end of four days, he will arrive in Mississippi, where he will step off of the bus, in the dead of night, into a swarm of mosquitoes.
INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—MISSISSIPPI—1965—DAY
He lives in a house with five other graduate students, most of them from other countries. Nakamoto from Japan. Kim and Park from Korea. Singh, a Punjabi Sikh. And one more: Allen Chen, also from Taiwan. Young Wu wonders if he and Allen might be the first two people from Taiwan to ever live in Mississippi.
He will be paid a modest stipend to teach students at a university, and to begin graduate studies, to explore his own field. Young Wu’s share of the rent is fourteen dollars per month. This is Mississippi, in a college town, in the 1960s. His graduate student stipend is one hundred dollars a month. The first time he sees the check, he thinks there has been a mistake. There has not been a mistake. Young Wu, for the first and only time in his life, feels rich.
On top of the hundred dollars per month, he receives a twenty-five-dollar allowance, once per quarter, for housing. One semester, he wins an award for being the best teaching assistant. Half of the class calls him Chinaman, but mostly they mean it affectionately. He is an overwhelming selection for the award. He receives a check for fifty dollars and a certificate. He makes a frame for the certificate, and sends the check home, as he does with almost all of his other checks. In general, he does well enough that he can afford to eat at a restaurant, once a month. He does not like hamburgers at first, but learns to ask for no mayonnaise or ketchup and eats the meat separately from the bun, lettuce, and tomato.
One day he comes home to find his roommate opening a can of cat food. Young Wu hadn’t even known they had a cat in the house. He realizes they don’t have a cat, that his friend, Allen Chen, is going to eat the cat food himself.
Young Wu takes the can from Allen, asks him not to do this ever again. Allen points to a whole bag of cat food he has just bought from the market in town. Young Wu says they will find a cat to give it to. He takes Allen to a diner and buys him a hamburger that night, and from then on leaves a couple of dollars on Allen’s desk, or in his graduate department mail slot, every week. They look for a cat, together. Allen eventually finds one, and feeds the cat well, for a while.
When the food runs out, the cat keeps coming around, so they feed it leftovers.
All five of Young Wu’s housemates are called names. They compare names. Chink, of course, and also slope, jap, nip, gook. Towelhead. Some names are specific, others are quite universal in their function and application. But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.
But mostly the roommates are grad students, and men, and they do what male grad students do. They sit at the table, and smoke cigarettes, pooling money to buy packs.
Young Wu will occasionally take a drag off of Allen. They smoke, and drink watered-down beer or cheap whiskey one of them has swiped from a faculty reception. They laugh and play cards and compare names they have been called, mostly by the undergraduates. The faculty are generally respectful, although for the most part unmistakably distant. Some are even reasonably warm. A few. The people in town are the most varied. Many are polite, if silent. Most are wary, with an edge of slightly menacing disdain.
One day, Young Wu comes home in an unusually good mood. Actually humming as he walks into the house. The day is perfect, jewel blue. Birds sing along. Young Wu sings himself into the kitchen, where all of his housemates were sitting at the table. He stops singing when he sees the looks on their faces.
It’s Allen.
What?
He’s in the hospital. Someone beat him unconscious. Called him a jap.
According to a witness, as the first man hit Allen in the temple, knocking him to the ground, they said, “This is for Pearl Harbor.”
Young Wu thinks: it could have been him. Nakamoto says: it should have been him.
All of the housemates realize: it was them. All of them. That was the point. They are all the same. All the same to the people who struck Allen in the head until his eyes swelled shut. All the same as they filled a large sack with batteries and stones, and hit Allen in the stomach with it until blood came up from his throat. Allen was Wu and Park and Kim and Nakamoto, and they were all Allen. Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever. Anywhere over there. Slope. Jap. Nip. Chink. Towelhead. Whatever. All of them in the house, after that, they should become closer. But they don’t. They don’t sit around the table anymore, comparing names. Because now they know what they are. Will always be.
Asian Man.
More and more, they spend time in their rooms studying, or pretending to study. Lying in bed, looking at the ceiling. Singh leaves at the end of the year, transfers to Oregon State. Park and Kim move out, share an apartment on the other side of campus. Young Wu loses track of the others quickly. Eventually, as people do, they all lose track of each other. Except for Allen.
He keeps in touch with Wu, writing letters, which Wu returns, guiltily and belatedly, about one for every three received.
Coming to enjoy, over the years, hearing of Allen’s exploits, as he climbs the ladder of academia, then industry, as he turns out to be the best and brightest of them all.
They never catch the three men who beat Allen ninety-five percent of the way to dead. Not that they need to be caught. Everyone knows who did it. Allen goes on to star in American Dream—Immigrant Success Story, that rare variation, the mythical promised land, someone leaving Chinatown for the suburbs. Living among the mainstream, which everyone knows means whites.
He goes on to get his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He gets married, and has two children, a son and a daughter. He suffers headaches for the rest of his life, from the concussion he received in the beating. When he is fifty-one, he is granted a patent, which turns out to have a wide range of industrial applications, opening up whole new possibilities in several fields. The patent is acquired by General Electric for almost three million dollars. It’s the first of several dozen patents Allen will go on to file.