Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang Page B

years of that. Pa didn't understand. He thought I was nuts, or suicidal, or maybe I wanted to spite him by jumping out of airplanes."
    "What happened with that?"
    "I broke my ankle two weeks into Airborne out of Fort Ben- ning. I went into Computer-Tech after that, but a year later they decided Computers was overloaded and I volunteered out. Two years, I did."
    There was a silence that brought the jukebox music back between them, until Billy rapped his knuckles against the wooden bar, and spoke like he was seeing a warm summer memory.
    "Whatever happened to that foxy Chinese babe you used to hang with? The one used to live on Mulberry, with the crazy mother?"
    It was just Billy's way of changing the conversation, Jack knew, but the question made bittersweet the grief he was already feeling, and though he didn't have a choice, feeling sad or mad, he decided he didn't want either, settling for more whiskey and oblivion instead. Zero feeling, he knew, was better than bad feeling, better than searching for answers that never came.
    Still, the question caught him off guard. He remained silent, his eyes searching the dim blue-lit room for an answer to something he'd allowed himself to forget, something he'd felt long ago, when women seemed more important, and love was full of possibilities.
    Maylee. At eighteen, his Chinatown beauty queen.
    He hadn't thought of her in the eight years since college, before he'd dropped out, before the Tofu King, before the army, and the NYPD.
    Maylee. His first love, and first heartbreak. It taught him to dull his expectations, to be cautious with the giving of his heart.
    The memory was a rush. Three tenements apart, they'd made love every day that long summer after high school, before college, except for the days she cramped, and then he'd pamper her, head to foot. Their love ended when the fall semester began, bringing college boys with BMWs cruising the campuses like matriculated hustlers.
    Maylee noticed. She'd long wanted out of the dilapidated tenement, away from summer streets that stank raw with spoiled seafood, rotten fruit, restaurant garbage, overrun by rats and vermin. She was ashamed of how they lived, embarrassed by poverty and the narrow-mindedness of her culture.
    JackYu, the boy next door, was sweet, but he wasn't the way out.
    Her mother wasn't crazy; just afraid. Afraid her daughter would join the street gangs. Afraid she'd drop out of school, take up with a gwuailo, a blue-eyed white devil. Afraid she'd get pregnant. Afraid she'd lose her Chineseness, forget her name, where she came from.
    Afraid, afraid, afraid.
    Afraid of all the things lofan-foreigner-white, and American that her daughter desired to be, until finally that mother's fear drove the daughter away, but not until she had broken Jack's heart and made him want to leave also.
    Maylee enrolled at Barnard. Jack squeezed into City College. Their classrooms just a mile of city streets apart, but their worlds already tumbling in opposite directions: she, edging her way uptown; he, falling back into Chinatown. It was Maylee who made him wary, but it was Wing's murder that made him hard-hearted, that erected the great wall around his emotions that protected him, isolated him.
    "She cut loose, Billy. Got sick of Chinatown, married a to fan white boy, moved to Connecticut. Became a lawyer, or doctor," Jack heard his whiskey voice answering, ice cubes clinking the glass in his hand.
    "Haven't seen her in years," he said carelessly, drinking away the contradictions in his private life, gaining short bursts of clarity in the alcoholic reaching for oblivion. Halfway gone, only then was he able to make some sense of it all.
    After Maylee, there came a series of unrewarding, unsatisfying affairs, with Asian girls he'd figured he had something in common with, affairs ultimately overshadowed by the differences in their cultural attitudes. The Japanese considered themselves superior to the Chinese. The Chinese never forgot the Japanese