Allen, newly rich, with a devoted wife and well-loved and loving children, decides to move out of his house for a while. He thinks about going back to Taiwan, but he had lost his immigration privileges and is afraid he will not be allowed back in if he leaves.
He does not feel at ease in the United States. Taiwan is not home anymore. Increasingly, he finds himself drifting back to Chinatown, where he’s treated as a local celebrity. One of us, done good. Made it big. When Allen is fifty-eight years old, he takes half a bottle of sleeping pills and never wakes up. Two years later, Allen’s daughter, Christine Chen, graduates from Stanford. Her mother and brother are at the graduation as Christine accepts the departmental citation in physics. She gives a short speech, in which she thanks her mother and her father. Her mother cries, and her brother claps. They all go out to dinner afterward. Two weeks after graduation, Christine is filling her car with gas at a rest stop off of the I-5. Someone yells out the window of a car moving at close to forty miles per hour that she should go back to where she came from, and throws a half-full beer bottle at her head. She is taken to the emergency room, where her scalp is sewn up with eleven stitches. She goes on to be a lead researcher at CERN, but like her father, suffers headaches for the rest of her life. She never visits Chinatown anymore.
Young Wu finishes his two years at Mississippi with a 3.94 grade point average. When he graduates, he is accepted in a doctoral program at UCLA.
Wu passes his qualifying exams at the end of his first year. Halfway through his second year, his mother falls ill, requiring him to drop out to earn money. He looks for work in his field. In other fields. Willing to apply his skills. But there are few takers, despite his grades. After one particularly bad interview, the recruiter offers some unsolicited advice.
“No one really wants to hire you,” he says. “It’s your accent.”
“I don’t have an accent,” Wu replies.
“Exactly. It’s weird.”
So Wu learns to do an accent, and then gets a job, the only one he can, as Young Asian Man, at Fortune Palace, a restaurant. Washing dishes, busing tables. In Chinatown.
He does the accent, learns how the place works. It is not who he is, but he learns how to be Young Asian Man, gets good at it.
EXT. DOROTHY’S BACKSTORY
She moves to Chinatown from Ohio, packs her one blue suitcase. She brings six blouses, four pairs of polyester pants. She brings a picture of her mother and father, standing up straight and about a foot apart, not touching, taken on the street in Taipei where they first met. They are both looking right into the camera.
She brings seven pairs of underwear, two pairs of shoes. She brings an anxious disposition. She brings a rowdy, somewhat unexpected laugh, the kind that erupts suddenly in a noisy party and then just as quickly disappears. She brings a memory of her mother dying in her bed at home, surrounded by her ten children, wondering aloud why, why, the question, undisguised. Why? Dorothy, throughout her life, will wonder now and then if that memory is trustworthy, or her own thoughts bleeding, over time, seepage from the frame into the picture.
She brings incense, and a shrine to her ancestors, and a smaller one for a particular, minor deity. The minor god of immigration and prosperity in real estate transactions. Which started out, a long time ago, as the greater spirit of irrigation and good fortune in agriculture. This is a deity who understands, above all: location, location, location.
To pray to the minor god, you close your eyes and you imagine a home for you and your family, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths, and you open your eyes and see yourself in southern California, and then you are.
But despite her prayers, people do not want to sell Dorothy and Wu a house. And that’s okay, because they can’t afford one. But people also do not want to rent them an apartment. Which would also be understandable, as Dorothy and Wu have a meager income, except that their income isn’t the reason no one will rent to them. The reason no one will rent to them is the color of their skin, and although technically at this point in the story of America this reason for not renting to someone is illegal, the reality is, no one cares. The minor god of immigration has gotten Dorothy this far, but the real estate spirits have failed her. She and Wu rent in the only place they can go, which has the benefit of being a place they can afford. The Chinatown SRO.
They take the biggest room they can find, on the best floor (the eighth), in a room that is twelve feet by ten (half again as large as the standard ten by eight), their double incomes, as Young Asian Man and Pretty Asian Hostess affording them a life of relative comfort, which is not saying much. But they can eat fish with most meals, and meat once a week, and they don’t have to buy broken rice like many who live on the floors below.
They go downstairs together, working nights in the restaurant. She in the front of the house, he in the back. In her new job, she is scanned and studied, admired and assessed, pinched, grabbed, slapped, and, worst of all, caressed. The caressers fancy themselves to be gentlemen. They imagine that Dorothy returns their affections, plays coy or demure or even outraged, as part of the role. These gentlemen don’t go for the quick palmful of buttock or breast, the momentary violation. Instead, they imagine a world where they could keep her, in some small apartment, and visit their little China doll.
Wu watches this, and bites his tongue. This is not the story. He is not a kung fu master yet, not supposed to defend her by taking out all these suckers with lightning strikes from his left foot. It takes great restraint, and constant reassurance from Dorothy, that he’s doing the right thing, that they must do this to survive. Pretty Asian Hostess is what pays the bills for them, and he knows it, and that makes it even worse. In this place, Golden Palace, Dorothy is almost a star, the light hits her just so, focusing on the curve of her hip, the way the qipao fits her. This is what she is, and all she is, good for some eye candy while the businessmen talk to the crime bosses, the seedy underworld scene plays out. Sometimes she lives. Many nights, she dies. Opium, maybe, or a revenge killing. Some spurned lover. Or caught in the cross fire.
Sometimes she gets to weep before she dies, and on those nights, Wu will stop what he’s doing, stand in the background, and watch her work. Watch everyone else watching her, too. Transfixed. And he’ll know she’s destined for more. She weeps, then she dies, then they go upstairs and wash up, celebrate by sharing a bowl of noodles with a few preserved radishes on top.
On off days, they venture out into EXT. CHINATOWN, not able to make it very far before they reach the end of the block, the area where the scenery ends. But it’s enough, to get some fresh air, to see real daylight, to hear sounds without a soundtrack.
Dorothy tends toward those polyester bellbottoms and floral print blouses, with long, low, pointy collars. She pushes her midnight black hair back out of her face with a headband. She tries on looks, American woman looks, and with her fair complexion, she gets a kind of soft pass—begrudging admiration from the women, straight-up ogling from the men.