Once in a long while, late-night fever takes hold of the building, spreads down one hallway then up and down the stairwells like wildfire. Frustration boils into indignation which condenses into something like, how funny is this shit? Because at some point, this shit kinda is funny. Someone says to hell with it and digs out from the back of the icebox the flank steak they’re supposed to be saving, throws it into a pan, and fries it up with onions and mushrooms, slices bok choy and ginger and garlic, sizzle and grease and the smell floating down and up and all through the corridor. A teenager turns on some music. Once that gets going, doors start opening until they’re all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.
INT. CHINATOWN SRO—EIGHTH FLOOR
You drift off for a while, only realizing you were asleep at the exact moment you wake, roused by the familiar and obnoxious sound of idiots trash-talking one another in various dialects. You open the door to find them all hanging out, shouting, playing cards, seems like every male in the building is there, crowded around your door. The Generic Asian Men, except up here they’ve got names:
The usual suspects. Chen, Lin, Ling, Fong.
And, it goes without saying Huang, Hung, Chang, Li.
Lee, Lim, Wu, Wang.
But also Chu, Yang, Chiu, Tsai, Liao, Fu, Hsieh.
And even Tang, Mo, Dai, Yan, Zhang, Gong, Gu.
Not to mention Long, Jiang, Meng, Bai, Wei, Yu.
Pan, Peng, Ng, Lam, Yip, Sam.
You poke your head out and they pull you by the arms into the hallway.
I’m in my underwear, you say, but half of them are, too. By choice.
Someone slaps you on the back. Sup Willis.
Cousin Tsai, man, how you doing? You call him cousin because your moms are cool.
Someone starts talking smack.
Hey hey, everyone listen up.
What?
I’m gonna tell you something.
What?
I’m going to get the part.
You? You?
What? Why not me? I have good hair.
Yeah, but you’re short.
We’re the same height.
Bullshit.
I bench more than all of you.
You saying we’re weak?
No one said that.
So you do think I’m weak.
I didn’t say that. You said that.
Said what.
That you’re weak.
Say it again.
I didn’t say that. But I have no problem saying it to your face. You’re weak.
Say it to my face.
I just did.
You’re just jealous because my Wing Chun is the best.
No it’s not. Anyway, it’s not about Wing Chun anymore. They want flashy kicks.
No they don’t. They don’t even know what Wing Chun is. They want Taekwondo.
They want Chinese punching and Korean kicks.
They don’t know what they want. They want cool Asian shit.
Finally, agreement all around. Cool Asian shit is what they want. If you could only figure out what that means.
You say, what makes any of you think it’s going to be different this time?
What do you mean?
Maybe they make one of us Kung Fu Guy. Maybe a few good scenes. Maybe a poster, in the back, real small. And then what?
Silence. They all know you’re right.
A beat.
Then Chiu says, man Willis, why you always gotta be such a downer? The other guys all agree and go back to playing cards.
INT. CHINATOWN SRO—EIGHTH FLOOR—YOUR ROOM—NIGHT
The main thing about living on eight is that the shower pan in the bathroom on nine is cracked. It was cracked when you were a kid, crammed in this room with your parents, and it’s still cracked now. They’ve repaired it a half-dozen times in the past few years but always on the cheap, caulking it with cheap stuff when what they really need to do is replace the whole damn thing. Otherwise, it will just keep cracking over and over again. As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.
Which, for those living on the eighth floor, means that every time Old Fong (903) falls asleep in the shower, or Wang Tai Tai (908), or any one of the other Old Asian People up there on nine forgets to shut off the faucet (or can’t shut it tight, on account of rheumatoid arthritis or carpal tunnel or general infirmity), after about five minutes, the whole pan floods, which means, for those of us down here on eight (and parts of seven on this side of the building), you’re sleeping in half a foot of water for the next several nights. One time it went all the way down to six and soaked the little seat cushion that Baby Huang was sleeping on facedown, and Baby Huang sucked gray water through nylon for a couple minutes before her mom woke up to the dripping on her own head, found her little girl looking a strange color. The baby lived, but to this day whenever you see her running down the hall trying to keep up with the other kids, all you can hear is her sloshy wheeze. She seems a little slow, although her dad, who is so nice everyone calls him Nice Guy Huang, is pretty slow himself (he’s never even managed to become a Generic Asian Man, stuck in nonspeaking), so who knows, maybe the whole almost drowning in her own crib didn’t affect Baby Huang that much after all. Not like she was going to the Olympics anyway. Mostly she’s growing up to be a pretty happy kid, living in this building, in Chinatown, it’s fine. She doesn’t know any better.
INT. CHINATOWN SRO—NIGHT
Old Fong fell asleep in the shower again. You know because the water stains on the ceiling are starting to darken and get puffy. In about ten minutes, it’ll be raining inside your bedroom.
INT. CHINATOWN SRO—LITTLE LATER
It’s raining inside your bedroom. You hope Old Fong is enjoying his nap.
INT. CHINATOWN SRO—HALLWAY—LATER