She isn’t often called chink, although sometimes when she speaks, people have a hard time understanding her, or at least they pretend to have a hard time.
Young Wu has a harder time fitting in. Wears pants an inch too short. Short-sleeved shirts boxy and too big for his wiry frame. They split a Coke, just like Dorothy used to do with her whole family, and she drinks too much and gets a stomachache, and he holds her hand and lightly rubs her belly.
Young Wu turns to Dorothy and stops.
What is it?
We’re going to get out of here.
At the end of the night, Young Wu has a look in his eye, and this is the first time Dorothy has ever seen that look on Young Wu’s face. The first time Dorothy had ever seen that look on anyone’s face. It scares her a little. But it is also when she finally falls for him.
MING-CHEN WU
This is how we met. And fell in love.
DOROTHY
In this place? This is no place for a romance. This is a place for the police to find dead bodies. This is a place where day and night are interchangeable, where we don’t know who we are allowed to be, from one day to the next. How do we have a love story in a place like this?
MING-CHEN WU
It’s true. We don’t choose our circumstances. We will have to fall in love when we can. Stolen moments. Between jobs, between scenes. Not a love story. But our story.
They’re married in the restaurant, a small impromptu gathering of the waitstaff and cooks and busboys.
They luck out—two rock crabs get sent back to the kitchen, and a lobster comes back almost untouched, and they use every part of the crustaceans, frying up rice with the eggs, dicing up meat to eat with noodles. Someone turns on the radio. There’s eating and dancing, and it’s hot as hell, everyone sweating through their costumes, but no one cares tonight.
In the swirl of bodies, Wu takes Dorothy’s hand, holds it lightly, whispers to her. Not a love story, he says. Not our story. Just us together. More than enough. She kisses him. A cheer goes up. Some large bottles of Tsingtao are procured, and it’s a good time until they remember where they are. Who they are. The boss comes back to the kitchen and tells everyone to get back to work. Dorothy and Wu take a moment to collect themselves, and with heavy heads and limbs and full stomachs and hearts, put their Asian costumes back on.
GENERIC ASIAN KID
And then you arrive on the scene, Baby Willis. A little tiny Kung Fu Boy. And for a moment the backstories and fragments and scenes filled with background players and nonspeaking parts, it all makes a kind of sense, all of it leading to this. A family. They bring you home from the hospital, at which point everything speeds up. It’s a montage of first moments, all of the major and minor milestones: first step, first word, first time sleeping through the night. There are a few years in a family when, if everything goes right, the parents aren’t alone anymore, they’ve been raising their own companion, the kid who’s going to make them less alone in the world and for those years they are less alone. It’s a blur—dense, raucous, exhausting—feelings and thoughts all jumbled together into days and semesters, routines and first times, rolling along, rambling along, summer nights with all the windows open, lying on top of the covers, and darkening autumn mornings when no one wants to get out of bed, getting ready, getting better at things, wins and losses and days when it doesn’t go anyone’s way at all, and then, just as chaos begins to take some kind of shape, present itself not as a random series of emergencies and things you could have done better, the calendar, the months and years and year after year, stacked up in a messy pile starts to make sense, the sweetness of it all, right at that moment, the first times start turning into last times, as in, last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you’ll all sleep together like this, the three of you. There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.
GENERIC ASIAN FAMILY
You have done this before, all of it. Have done your best to become Americans. Watched the shows, listened to the tapes, eliminated your accents. Dressed right, did your hair, took golf lessons. Encouraged English at home, even. You did everything that was asked of you and more.
Your parents, they work. For the pleasure of strangers, losing themselves in their various guises. Saying the words, hitting the marks, standing near the good light.
From the background, you watch.
At night, your mother puts on the costume.
At night, your father studies kung fu.
They weep, they die. They get by.
Finally, after years, he perfects it. He emerges one day as a kung fu master.
He gets work as Sifu. He’s in high demand.
You celebrate by frying up a steak, the three of you eating happily and washing the greasy meat down with a two-liter of Coke. A toast: to not being other people anymore. Your parents make plans to move from the SRO. Everything is going well. Until it’s not.
Until your father realizes that, despite it all, the bigger check, the honorable title, the status in the show, who he is. Fu Manchu. Yellow Man. Everything has changed, nothing has changed.
Yes, yes, your kung fu is perfect. Immaculate, pristine, Platonically Ideal Kung Fu from the highest plane of martial arts. But, and we hate to ask this—can you still do the accent?
They ask him to put on silly hats. To cook chop suey, jump-kick vegetables into a thousand pieces. He hears a gong wherever he goes.
He is told: you are a legend.
You see where this is all headed, but it’s too late. You can’t control it. Neither can he.
Your mother weeps, and dies. Weeps and dies. Weeps and doesn’t die. Just weeps. Because now, your father is no longer a person, no longer a human. Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman. Her husband is gone, Wu is gone, even Young Asian Man is gone. They took him away from her. He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. Distant. Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used to be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out.
This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad.
* * *
—
He comes in and out of the room, odd hours, waking you and your mother up to rant about this or that, to tell you his plans, how he will show them one day, to imagine a world in which his son can grow up proud to be in this family. He does this regularly if infrequently, then sporadically, then not at all. You get news of him from others in the building, hear rumors. He’s taken to drinking, breaking props. They put him in epics, and he disappears for long stretches, just rumbling drums and violent strings and always gongs, always always gongs. They push in on his eyes, the dead eyes, they’ve turned him into what they wanted, what he was destined for all along, a cheaper version of Bruce Lee. You grow up like this, in Chinatown, your dad no longer your dad. You can hear them talking at night, about how to get out, about the dream of getting out, about never getting out.