Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel China Boy by Gus Lee(©1991 by Augustus S.M.S. Lee).

The On-On was a cafeteria. For fifty cents I got a huge caldron of rice overlaid with oyster-sauce beef, finely chopped scallions and onion, and a raw egg. The rice and beef were so hot that stirring the egg with the other ingredients cooked it.

I inhaled food. It was my addiction, my habit, my habit, my love. Chinese food brought more than splendid sauces, delightful flavor, wonderful textures, and all of the pleasures of a child’s innocent tastes. My mother's spirit lay within the wafting aromas.

I ate quickly, lest it get away, or rude fortune interrupt my work, or a worthier child be found suddenly to receive my unfinished servings. Whether sitting in a restaurant or walking down a street, I could pack away a meal before the others had found their napkins.

Chinatown is like its host city—small and compressed in physical dimensions, boundless and ephemeral in spirit.

Like the old and no-longer-noble Victorian structures in the Handle, the structures of Chinatown were obtuse and complicated, filled with shadowed side alleys, curiously angled doors, hidden fences, gabled attics, brooding and silent second stories, quiet spiritualism, and dark unknowns.

I had seen much of the city by the time I was seven. The Mission barrios, the hard, bitter streets of the Western Addition and the Fillmore. The museum-like quiet of St. Francis Woods, and the picture-book neighborhoods in the Sunset and the Richmond.

The Handle and Chinatown were neighborhoods that revered customs drawn from continents far distant from North America, whose features were now only memory. Both neighborhoods were filled with people who had arrived en masse—not as single family migrants. Most others had come to the City as economically independent families.

Both neighborhoods had a strong spiritual sense, a different musical culture, and unique foods. Everyone had black hair, brown eyes, and darker skin than the majority. That is, the majority is the San Francisco.

I was energetically drawn to the Flowering Nation Grocery. The place was more zoo than store, more a museum of oddities than a grocery, more a continuum of East Asia than the fading recollections of China in our own home. It was a small, congested three-dimensional picture box of my heritage.

I always thought that being in this shop was akin to reviewing the brown-paged photographs in our family album.

Flowering Nation Grocery stood between a modest school-supply store called the Wing-Wing Company and a resplendent antiques and clothing store, The City of Kunming. The Wing-Wing sold calligraphy brushes, plastic pencil boxes with the multiplication table on the top, and cheap school purses, which boys and girls in Chinatown carried on schooldays. The City of Kunming sold the most expensive cheongsam dresses in the world and had photos of famous actresses to prove it.

The Flowering Nation storefront was a bright red-tile front acting as a base for a huge plate-glass window. Inserted into the middle of the tile, below the picture window, was a smaller, rectangular window that was the front of an aquarium, in which catfish swam at the height of my knees.

Children knelt on the sidewalk. We waggled fingers at the slow, dull fish, circling in the dirty, tepid brownness of their confined world. We would tap on the glass for hours, hoping for a response, for the beginning of the communication, receiving as our only answers the swish of an indifferent tail, the streamlining of thick, uneven catfish whiskers.

The Hom family ran the store. Mr. Hom spoke with the rapidity of an excited machine gun. He loved his store, his goods, his customers, and his trade, and it showed. Smiling, shouting, jumping, throwing money and packages, he surrendered his vital essence, his shigong, to his enterprise, and never looked back. He made Mrs. Timms look uninterested in her store, the Reliance Market, and she was a hard worker.

Mr. Hom was a perfectionist and a micromanager, attending to every detail, imagined or extant, historical or projected, frowning between his cajoling laughter, pondering problems with likely solutions.

I would edge up to the counter, my face concealed by dangling Chinese celery and bok choy, watching him wrap meats and fish and produce, darting back and forth, shouting and laughing. After waiting in line, I put two pennies on the counter and pointed above to the sausages. Mr. Hom would shout, "Hey, Songhai!" and, without looking, pull down a lop chong sausage from above his head, dropping it into my hands, scooping the pennies into a cigar box deep in change, and jabbering to three people behind me as he began to extract and wrap their orders.