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I had stopped buying sandwiches at Winston's in December, when the cold had covered his hands with scales of a grayish brown. I couldn't bear watching him when he put the slices of ham and cheese on the hero with his dirty reptile fingers. Still I came every day to get some milk. As my friend Rich always said: “Gotta stay true to the hood." If you prove yourself loyal to your neighborhood your neighborhood will prove itself loyal to you. A bit sentimental, but he was right. Especially since the Hong Kong Chinese had opened their supermarket around the corner, where the soda was ten cents cheaper and the milk a whole quarter. Should a guy like Winston suffer just because those arrogant Hong Kong entrepreneurs wanted to save their money from the communists?
Winston could have told them what it really means to square off with the communists in Red China. With those narrow minded, uptight polit commissaries. Or even worse with the members of the Red Guard, who had stormed through the hallways of the university just to trample on culture and history. But the Hong Kong Chinese knew nothing about that. They were just afraid that their dividends would slow down or their interest slim and that's why they sold soda for ten cents less than anybody else.
I visited Winston's store mostly in the afternoon. It was more of a storage room with a wooden double door, murky windows, and plastic sign declaring: “Eurasian Trading Company." Inside it was dusky. In the back, the long stretch of the room disappeared into virtual darkness. There were some coolers with sliding glass doors along the walls, the trimmings spotted with rust. To the right of the entrance was the counter with the splintered marble top, the old cash register and a rack that lined up the candy bars like sports fans on the bleachers. In the back, Winston had built a wooden compartment with a mattress. Next to it was his workspace - an old card table with a wooden chair. It smelled dusty in here, like an attic.
Winston kept his post behind the corner seven days a week from seven in the morning to seven at night. You could see the bachelor life in his appearance. Buttons were missing from the plaid shirts that he always bought from the Puerto Rican hawkers on Delancey Street. He combed his thinning black hair over the bald spot on his scalp. You couldn't really tell how old he was. Definitely not young anymore.
When an acquaintance entered the store his face would light up. He would always try to greet me in German. “Tagg, wee gaits", he would holler. If I came around three, he would always try to involve me in a kind of conversation. We would scream across the room. That's when the kids from the Dr. Sun Yat Sen intermediate school from across the street would storm his store. Pubescent brats. The boys sporting the latest hair styles. The girls coquettish, wearing their first make up. They somehow unsettled him.
At seven sharp Winston would close his store. He would step out into the street wearing a coat and hat, carrying an umbrella and a briefcase under his arm. He would let the metal shutters come down with a loud noise, check the padlocks, walk heartily towards the Bowery, and disappear around the corner.
Ten minutes later he would reappear from the other direction, check the street and slip under the shutters, back inside his darkened store. If the health inspectors caught him living back there, they would have probably revoked his license. But there was no reason for worry. Behind the barber on our block was a secret gambling den and behind the beauty parlor a brothel. The Fuk Ching gang who controlled our area had their arrangements with the Fifth Precinct to leave our block alone. They were a bunch of South Chinese gangsters from the province of Fuking who had taken over the new Chinatown around East Broadway.
Of course we didn't know anything about this. Until the afternoon when Rich and I were approached by this monk in front of my house. He was one of those travelling monks with a shaved head and a brown habit who could get everything for free around here. There was always one sitting in front of the Grand Street Station, where people would put dollar bills in his prayer bowl.
The monk started to chat us up in Chinese, but when we pointed towards the temple he shook his head. He kept on chatting and made an obscene gesture. Winston saw the scene from his store and came out laughing. He showed him the beauty parlor where the monk disappeared into the back.
The gang still takes care of the traveling monks. They also guarantee that there are no burglaries, that the muggers don't dear to roam our streets, and that the bums stay away. Only last summer there was a rape. Some guy attacked a young mother in the park. She claimed she had seen him before. Back at the projects around Essex Street. Police came and put up sketches of the perpetrator in all the stores. Winston put one up too.
For the Fuk Ching gang this constituted a serious problem. They didn't want the police searching around their turf. The possibility that some rookie would find out about the arrangements and blow the whistle was way too dangerous. That's why they would mostly take care of problems like this themselves.
In the case of the rapist they were faster then the police. About four weeks after the attack, two cops found the alleged perpetrator down at the FDR Drive in the river. Shot execution style.
But dramatic cases like this were rare. If the young gangs from the projects come out in the summer, was mostly enough for two Fuk Ching enforcers to slowly drive by, and the youngsters would behave. Mostly the Latino and Chinese kids got along very well anyway. At the park they played basketball and roller hockey.
Winston didn't mind paying his two hundred Dollars of protection money every month. He would have paid double, if they had protected him.
Winston never felt home in Chinatown. All the refugees from the Southern provinces who were crammed into those little apartments, who stitched together clothing for ten dollars a day or served tourists in the restaurants - farmers, peasants, wonderful people, but what should he talk to them about?
Back in China, Winston taught at the University of Peking. Languages and history. He had mastered eleven languages. Seven Chinese dialects, two Japanese, English, and French. He was a specialist in Japanese history. In the history of the loathed imperialists who had enslaved the people of China.
“Even if they're our enemies, we must study them" he said during the interrogation. The girl who was asking the questions hit him for that. With a fist in the face. A skinny girl, seventeen, maybe eighteen years old, her hair braided behind her head. She would have been pretty if she hadn't made that silly grimace, as if she wanted to prove to her comrades that she was really behind the cause of the people. That was why every hit really hurt. Because she eagerly put her whole weight behind the punches. And because he had to sit upright in his chair, hands behind the back.
The others sneered at him. Boys and girls in blue and black uniforms. But what really hurt was the condescending way they talked to him. Not that he was that much older. Also he was just a lecturer, not a professor. Still he thought that even in communism there should be a place for respect for the elders.
His neighbors here in Chinatown had very different stories they wanted to forget. Most of them were from the rural areas and many had fled from hunger and drought. Or they had tried their luck in the Southern cities and got caught up with the law.
Only once Winston found a friend. An engineer from the Fukinese province. They spent whole evenings in his store, drank tea, and debated. Talked about China, Taiwan, Buddhism, the values and politics. But then his friend's family came, his mother, his wife, and the four children. After that, he only worried how he would keep them all alive in this expensive city.
The second time Winston was held up was in the summer. This time it was a black boy with a pistol. A tiny .22 with a barrel that ended right above the trigger guard. The boy was very nervous and screamed at Winston in a high pitched staccato: “Money! Get moving! Give it up! All of it, all of it! Come on, faster! The money!" Winston was shaking for days.
“Do you know what is the worst? Not the few Dollars. But when something like that happens I can't really work for two or three weeks." He didn't mean the store. He meant his book.
Winston had found a small university in Texas that was willing to credit his time as a lecturer in Peking. In the evenings, when Winston slipped back inside his store, he sat next to his sleeping compartment and studied old volumes of the “Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan". Or he typed away on his old typewriter. Page after page he developed his thesis, how the Japanese elite had shaped their country, how they watched over their culture despite foreign influences, and how they kept the masses in check. Once a month he would photocopy the pages and send them to Texas, where Professor Brown would read them.
Winston got happier and happier the closer he got to his deadline. At the same time he got more and more impatient with the noisy school kids during the day. That's when he hired Nancy, a plump 13-year-old girl who would guard the register in the afternoons while Winston would watch so nobody would steal anything. He somehow liked Nancy, even if she was a bit slow in calculating. He liked her like an uncle likes his niece.
In the meantime Hester Street had become a fought-over turf. From the West Side, Vietnamese gangs tried to get a foothold in [on] the neighborhood because the old established organizations like the Hip Sing Tong and the On Leong Tong had chased them out of the Canal Street area.
In the fall, just before Winston's deadline, they came the first time. Five young guys armed with baseball bats snuck through the park. Five Vietnamese thugs, fresh off the boat, already sporting the gangster hair cuts - spiked on top, long in the back. They didn't make a sound on their air-cushioned sneakers.
In front of the brothel stood the Toyota of one of the Fuk Ching officers. The guy in the red jacket smashed it with one hearty swing. The shrill sound of the alarm echoed through the street and the five guys ran back into the park. Then it was silent again.
A few minutes later they returned. Nothing had moved on the street. Now they started to pummel the car in blind rage. Nonstop the baseball bats rained down on the car - windows, lights, doors. Over the sound of the pounding bats, the alarm was screeching.
Winston hadn't seen anything. He would have had to open his shutters. Much too conspicuous. That's why he hovered behind his door and listened, which filled him with even more fear than peering out. He listened and thought about the day when he sat in his office and heard the Red Guards make their way from room to room towards him. How they were barking commands and shouting down the professors. Then the door swung open and the angry girl with the braids stood before him.
The masters thesis for Texas was a total success. Professor Brown almost gave him a summa cum laude. Winston had the thesis printed as a slim book with a cover in blue and red that showed a map of Japan. He ordered two thousand copies. One he hung over the cooler with the cheese and the cold cuts; a carton next to it said “10 $". I bought two copies. A few of the teachers bought some. Most of the copies he sent to libraries all over the world, hoping for a late place in science.
That winter Winston disappeared. He just closed the store. In the days before his departure, he was too wired and euphoric to really make sense. He said something about a job offer from Japan that he had taken immediately, even though the job was not quite worthy of a former lecturer of the University of Peking. But he only had the from the Baylor University in Texas. He wanted to leave an address, but one day the door to his store was shut for good.
Nobody knows where Winston went. Some job agency took over his store. They painted everything white, put up sheetrock walls and lit the place with bright neon. You can't see much from the outside, just a waiting room with three plastic chairs and a calendar that shows a Chinese landscape with a river. The agency brokers low wage jobs for waiters and seamstresses. At least that's what they say.
Now I have to walk for two blocks to buy a carton of milk. On a corner Sami and Khaled have opened a 24-hour convenience store. Two brother from Yemen who spend their nights behind their counter chewing Khat so they don't fall asleep. It's a brand new store with bright neon lights, coolers with shiny chrome trimmings, and a huge sandwich bar. I have heard they pay the Fuk Ching. The Vietnamese haven't been around lately. Khaled and Sami charge ten cents more for the Soda than the Hong Kong supermarket. But as Rich always says: “Gotta stay true to the hood."
Next to the modern computer register there's two photos. One shows a bungalow in a stark, hilly landscape. In the other one, Khaled and Sami are standing in a field, khafiyahs on their heads, showing off AK-47 rifles. “Back home they first confiscated our grain trading company in the name of the people" Sami, the younger one, told me. “Later the sheiks came from the North and shot everything to pieces." Khaled smiled, shoved my sandwich and the soda over the counter and said in his best TV gangster English: “That's all, boss?"
Award winning story from "Grand Central", |
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