Oracle Bones (62 page)

“The orientation is always interesting,” the old man said. “In Anyang all the royal tombs are oriented in the same direction, angled slightly to the west. I think it’s because of the sun—at a certain time of day, the shadow moves in that direction.”

We talked about archaeology, and then Juan Hsing mentioned the election.

“We lost,” she said. “It was a bad result. More support for independence.”

She asked if I had interviewed any candidates, and I mentioned Sisy Chen. “She’s interesting,” the old woman said.

Professor Shih seemed to have fallen asleep—his eyes were closed and the open magazine rested on his birdlike chest. His son said that he agreed with Sisy Chen’s politics, and then the old man’s left eye suddenly flickered open.

“Is the Yangling tomb west of Changling?” he asked, referring to the Xi’an region.

I said that I didn’t know for certain.

“I went there in the thirty-second year of the Republic,” he said. “I also visited Wu Zetian’s tomb. That’s a beautiful spot. Have you been there?”

I told him that I had.

“And I saw Qin Shihuang’s tomb,” he said. “But of course there wasn’t anything in that area back then. They hadn’t discovered the terra-cotta warriors yet.”

The tiny man grew silent. I said that I should go, and I shook his hand—skin as cool and thin as paper. Outside, his son escorted me to the street, and I asked which year he had been born.

“Twenty-third year of the Republic.”

I did the calculation—1934. Confused, I added again, and then I said, “But Juan Hsing said they weren’t married until after they came to Taiwan.”

“That’s right,” Shih Lei said. “She’s not my mother. My father’s first wife—my mother—died more than ten years ago, on the mainland. She never made it to Taiwan. In 1949, she wasn’t in Nanjing, because she was caring for her father-in-law. She stayed behind and hoped that we’d be able to return.”

On the street a light rain was falling. Now I realized why Professor Shih hadn’t recalled the year of his marriage as promptly as the dates of the found artifacts. That was Chinese history: things you remembered and things you tried to forget. His son turned to me while we waited for a cab.

“I came to Taiwan a little bit later than my father,” he said. “Before I left the mainland, my mother gave me a message for him. She said that if something happened, and they were separated for good, then he should go ahead and remarry. I think she sensed that the country was going to be divided.”

PART FOUR

20

Chinatown

January 2002

POLAT’S SECOND LANDLORD WAS CHINESE-AMERICAN. THE MAN HAD
grown up in Guangdong, and during the Cultural Revolution, his father had fled in a rowboat to Hong Kong. Eventually, the father received political asylum in the United States, and then he brought his sons over. For a while, one son ran a Chinese restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area. After selling the restaurant, he invested in a pair of red-brick row houses on Sixth Street NW. The landlord and his family lived in part of one house, and they rented the rest out to other immigrants.

For two hundred and sixty dollars a month, Polat occupied a room on the second floor of the Chinese family’s home. His lodgings were square—nine feet by nine feet—and nothing had been hung on the walls. The room contained a color television, a hot plate, a water boiler, and an electric radiator. All five of his books were English study texts. On the desk, a Chinese tear-away calendar had been frozen on a random date: October 14, 2001. The single window looked out through the thin parallel bars of power lines.

The room was cramped, and Polat would rather not have shared a bathroom with a Chinese family. They rarely spoke—in fact, Polat and the landlord never even exchanged immigration histories. Polat avoided talking to Chinese people about his political background, and the landlord had no interest in sharing his story, either. Polat learned about it from other residents.

The relationship was awkward, but the location was a big improvement over the corner of Franklin and Rhode Island. In the District’s grid, Polat had
moved toward the center; his row house stood near the intersection of Sixth and Q. In the past, this neighborhood had been called Shaw or Mount Vernon, but nowadays it was becoming known as part of Chinatown. The area was changing: the new Washington Convention Center was being built nearby, and the government was about to convert some of the local subsidized housing to conventional market rentals. The neighborhood had been predominately black and poor, but it was becoming more mixed. A number of immigrants had moved in—many of them Chinese—as well as some young middle-class whites. A few blocks away from Polat’s home, a gay congregation had founded the Metropolitan Community Church.

These were early signs of gentrification, and perhaps Sixth Street might eventually gain the kind of prosperous diversity that was rare in an American urban neighborhood. But you could still see the old divides between black and Chinese when you walked south from Polat’s apartment. Sixth Street had few business establishments, and a number of row houses were in bad repair. The best-kept plots belonged to traditionally black churches: Springfield Baptist, First Rising Mount Zion Baptist, Galbraith A.M.E. Zion. On the corner of L Street stood the Eritrean Culture and Civic Center, and then on I Street, painted onto the side of a brick building, was an old sign:
FUJIAN RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION
.

After that, the neighborhood shifted to the heart of the District’s small Chinatown. Restaurants and shops lined the streets—China Boy Delicatessen, Chinatown Market—and here almost everybody flew an American flag, which was rare in the black neighborhood. Along H Street, flags hung thick and signs were bilingual: China Doll Restaurant
, Eat First Restaurant
, Wok N Roll Restaurant
. Near the corner of H and Seventh, a Chinese-style
pailou
, or entrance gate, had been erected. Inscriptions noted that the structure had been dedicated in 1986 as a “friendship archway” by Chen Xitong and Marion Barry, the mayors of Beijing and Washington, D.C. The
pailou
had gained unexpected resonance when, in the years following the dedication, both mayors went to jail. In 1990, Barry was convicted of possession of crack cocaine; eight years later, a Beijing court found Chen guilty of corruption. But that particular U.S.-Sino link was left uninscribed on the
pailou
, another irregularity that lurked beneath the capitals’ neat grids.

The Chinatown signs also shifted unevenly between two worlds. The jokey racism of the English names vanished in translation: in Chinese, the China Doll Restaurant blossomed into “Beautiful Chinese Garden,” and the China Boy Delicatessen gained a measure of dignity (as well as an entirely different product line) with “Chinese Child’s Fresh Noodles.” The Wok N Roll Res
taurant transformed itself into “Hall of Precious Flavor.” At H and Eighth, an English sign advertised
CHINATOWN GIFTS
, but the Chinese sign—
—meant something completely different:

SERVICE CENTER FOR PERSONNEL LEAVING THE COUNTRY

“I THINK THAT’S
the sort of business that works with
jiade
visa companies like the one I used in Beijing,” Polat said one evening, when we drove past the Chinatown sign. “Those companies need to have contacts in America, and I think that’s probably what they’re doing at that shop. They arrange letters like the ones I had from Los Angeles. On that sign, when they say ‘country,’ they mean China. Why would anybody need help getting out of America?”

It was a cold January afternoon, and I was accompanying Polat to work. In October, he had found his first American job: a delivery position at a downtown restaurant called Café Asia. Some of his Uighur friends already worked there, and it was a relatively convenient job for an immigrant who didn’t speak much English. Deliverers worked evenings, which left the days free for language classes. Polat had recently completed a two-month course, and he understood a fair amount of English—he often listened to the radio news while driving. But he still didn’t feel comfortable speaking the language, and he preferred using Chinese when possible.

His driving, though, had already acquired the distinctive fluency of a working immigrant. He knew the quirks of the Washington grid—the one-way streets, the sections that locked down during rush hour—and he also knew how to curb-sneak and pass illegally and slide through stop signs as if he didn’t mean it. He could swing a U-turn pretty much anywhere. He kept an eye out for cops, and he was expert at spotting parking places while making a delivery run. When nothing was available, he improvised: stop the car, flash the hazards, hustle and hope. That was one word he always spoke in English—while driving, he muttered it over and over, like a mantra: “Parking, parking, parking.” Since starting the job, he had paid over six hundred dollars in fines. Thus far, his single-day record was three tickets: a pair of twenty-dollar parking violations and then a fifty-dollar penalty for cruising a yellow that went red. At Café Asia he made seven dollars an hour, plus tips.