The Girl with the Phony Name (5 page)

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Authors: Charles Mathes

BOOK: The Girl with the Phony Name
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T
ak Wing (whose name was pronounced “take” but spelled without the final
e
) always wished he could remember more about his father.
There was only the one clear memory. It was an afternoon in 1937. Tak Wing was six years old. He and his father were sitting under a plum tree in the courtyard garden of their house in Nanking. Yellow carp swam in the small pool from which a great gnarled stone seemed to grow.
Tak Wing always thought it was funny that he could remember the ladybug crawling up his finger but not his father's face. There was the uniform, the polished boots, the quiet voice, but no face.
“The only thing that doesn't change,” his father was saying, “is the fact that everything changes. That is the Tao. You can accept the Tao or fight it, but still everything will change.”
Things did change. A formation of Japanese Zeros appeared out of the clouds. The planes strafed the garden. Tak Wing's father fell facedown in the chrysanthemums. Moments later the Wing house exploded. When the invaders took the city, Tak Wing was still sitting by his father's body, hoping things had finished changing.
Soldiers dragged the little boy from his garden and brought him before General Todesciu Morehi.
“Do you want to live as a Japanese or die as a Chinese?” demanded the general through an interpreter.
“When I die, won't I still be me no matter who I am?” he replied.
General Morehi thought this was immensely funny. It was funnier still to make a high-ranking Chinese officer's son into
a servant. When the general returned to Tokyo six months later, Taki, as he had come to be called, went with him as a houseboy.
Since fighting the Tao was pointless, Taki abandoned his own language for Japanese and became a cheerful and efficient servant. He did what he was told without complaint, which General Morehi took as further evidence of Chinese cowardice.
The war took its course. Two days after the Emperor commanded the Japanese to surrender, Morehi-san committed
seppuku.
Worried that the Americans might send him back to China, Taki ran away to Tokyo to seek his fortune. But he was not Japanese. In the slums of Tokyo he was shunned as only the Japanese can shun foreigners.
Taki was finally taken in by a refugee Chinese family, but he barely remembered the language and was treated like a dog. He soon left, preferring life in the streets to further humiliation.
He lived in bombed-out buildings, begging for food, stealing when there was something to steal. His only asset was the sense of humor he had developed to survive in Morehi's house. If you could make someone laugh, they were less inclined to beat you.
Ironically it was the Americans who laughed the easiest and were the most generous. Taki spent each day loitering near the U.S. Army base. The MPs threw him out periodically, but Taki picked up enough handouts—and English—to make persisting worthwhile.
When he was seventeen he hooked up with a Negro sergeant named Caesar St. Vincent Marvelle. Marvelle was a “dog robber,” an army scavenger responsible for keeping spare parts in the motor pool and steak in the officers' mess.
Taki, who was small and looked younger than his age, cornered Marvelle outside the Quonset hut where the NCOs held their regular Friday-night poker game.
“GI, GI,” said Taki, tugging at Marvelle's coat. “You will
be lucky tonight.” He actually said, “You wirr be rucky tonight.” His English got better all the time, but he never did get to manage the
l
s.
Marvelle brushed the boy aside.
“No kidding, GI,” said Taki, running after him. “You will draw to inside straight. Win big. You see.”
“What you say, boy? What kinda fool do you take me for, drawin' to an inside straight?”
“You see. You be lucky.”
Marvelle pushed him away and went into the game. Taki waited outside, stamping his feet to keep warm. He had worked this same routine many times before. When the game broke up, Taki would be standing thirty feet from the door of the Quonset hut. When the soldier he had told to draw to the inside straight appeared, Taki would yell, “Hey, GI! What you say now?”
There were three possible outcomes. Most often the soldier just looked back blankly or shot Taki the finger, meaning that he had ignored the advice totally. On a few occasions, GIs who had lost money drawing to inside straights charged after him. This is why Taki stood thirty feet from the door; it gave him a good head start.
Every so often, however, the soldier won a big pot. Taki might then get a few bucks for bringing the man luck. He could eat for a week on a few bucks.
This night Marvelle came out of the game with a big smile on his face.
“GI smart, win big, yes?” Taki yelled happily.
“Yo, kid. Come here.”
Taki ran over for his reward. Marvelle smiled until Taki was a foot away, then grabbed the boy by the lapels of his dilapidated coat and held him three inches off the ground.
“Uh-oh,” said Taki, his feet pedaling uselessly in the air. “I not so clever as I thought.”
“I oughta kill you!” hollered Marvelle.
“You let me live, I help you,” Taki sputtered.
“Help me lose another hundred bucks, you little Jap bastard?”
“Please, please, GI!” hollered Taki. “I worth more alive than dead.”
“How you figure that, boy?”
“Please, I get you samurai sword. Good price.”
American soldiers prized samurai swords over all other souvenirs. To afford food, many Japanese were forced to sell swords that had been in their families for generations. Taki knew a black market for swords in the Ginza; he had been chased away from it often.
“Okay, let's go,” said the sergeant.
“No like Americans. You give me money, I bring back sword,” said Taki optimistically. It was worth a try.
Marvelle laughed and put Taki back on the ground, but didn't let go of him. “You a real character, you know that? What's yo' name?”
“Tak Wing.”
“Tak Wing, huh? Well, you and me's gonna take wing over to this place with the swords, but if you're dickin' me around I'm gonna cut your throat, you unnerstan'?”
“Sure, GI,” Taki gulped with a smile.
Marvelle bought eight antique swords with the $300 he had won at the poker game by drawing to an inside straight. He sold the swords for $1,500.
Taki became Marvelle's assistant. Together they traded in food, currency, and defective army equipment, which Taki, who had an uncanny knack with machinery, was always able to fix. By the time Marvelle returned to the States a few years later, Taki was a successful dealer in contraband in his own right.
The authorities had begun to crack down on the black market, however. Without the protection of the Americans, Taki was at the mercy of the
yakuza,
or Japanese gangsters. He was persuaded to retire by a man missing several finger
joints with tattoos running up his neck and spilling out of his cuffs onto his wrists.
It was 1951, the Japanese economy was in shambles, and Taki was Chinese, a nonperson. Within a few years he was reduced to sweeping the floors of a Tokyo fish market. He did his job and waited for things to change.
It took a decade for Taki to save enough to open his own stall in the fish market. The humorless Japanese men for whom he had mopped, cleaned fish, and repaired equipment congratulated Taki on his industry, then forced him out of business in a matter of months.
Taki was thirty-two years old and had nothing to show for a lifetime of work. One night, after drinking sake until two in the morning, he dreamed he was sitting in the middle of a busy crossroads when a bull walked up and pissed on his head. Taki awoke enlightened. He had been sitting at the fish market, waiting for the Tao to stop for him. All the while the world had been moving, passing him by.
Through friends Taki was able to get a berth on a commercial tuna boat. In less than a week he was on his way to the Philippines, as happy as his seasickness allowed, all his belongings stuffed in a canvas sack. He would go where the winds took him.
Tak Wing sailed around the China Sea for a few years. It was a busy life, full of hard work and a certain wary camaraderie. Taki was happy and could have done it forever, but then one day the boat was impounded in the harbor at Sydney—the Korean owners had gone bankrupt. Taki was stranded in Australia.
Taki had no incentive to make his way back to Japan, but to remain in Australia he needed someone to sponsor him. After being thrown out of a dozen offices, Taki found Bartlett Hewby, the flamboyant president of an Australian development company.
“Come, come, my little slant-eyed friend,” said the big
man, sipping tea behind a long desk. “What on earth do I need a translator for?”
“Much Asian money shopping in Australia. I fluent in all Oriental languages,” said Taki, though he was barely understandable in anything but Japanese. “You need clever fella. Keep Japs honest in dealings with you.”
Hewby smoothed his patrician head with a manicured hand. “My dear boy, why would I trust one Wog over another?”
“I bring you luck,” said Tak Wing. “You engaged in big deal right now, yes?”
“I'm always engaged in big deals,” sniffed Hewby.
“No, no. One in particular.”
“Well, yes, I suppose. There is the Owens Flats contract. What are you leading to?”
Taki nodded happily. “I study this carefully. They bluffing.”
“Really?”
“You can do twice as well as you think,” said Taki confidently, not knowing whether Hewby was the buyer or seller, but recognizing an inside straight when he saw one.
Taki called a week later (a phone call was even safer than thirty feet). Hewby had been able to purchase the Owens Flats property for half the original asking price and wanted Taki to be his new assistant.
Things had changed. Taki had a new career, a new country, a new life.
By the time Hewby decided to retire to London a few years later, Taki had learned the real-estate business inside out. He wasn't rich, but he was able to offer Hewby a complex leveraged buyout for the company: an Australian bank would advance Hewby half the purchase price and Taki would pay out the balance over ten years.
For a while Taki prospered, developing properties. Then he got involved in the Adelaide water deal. Adelaide was a friendly little town in South Australia cursed with some of the
worst-tasting tap water on earth. Always a tinkerer, Taki designed a new type of water desalinization plant. It was a golden opportunity, his chance to make some money as well as a real contribution to the country. If his ideas could bring good water to Adelaide, the government might let him become a citizen!
To finance the huge project, Taki leveraged his Sydney real estate and raised the remainder by private subscription. Within a year, however, cost overruns, technical problems, and underestimated graft had doubled the initial estimate. While Tak Wing frantically cut corners and scrambled to find additional backing, Bartlett Hewby was having trouble maintaining his standard of living in London and chose this moment to sell Taki's note. The buyers, a real-estate syndicate, found a loophole in the legal work and demanded payment in full.
Tak Wing was woefully overextended. His financing collapsed, millions of investor dollars were lost, and Taki was forced into bankruptcy. He was virtually destitute, his visa was revoked, and he barely avoided criminal prosecution.
Bartlett Hewby was distressed to learn of his protégé's troubles. Feeling partly responsible, Hewby sent Taki a plane ticket to London and put him up in his Mayfair flat.
Taki took the only job he could find, sweeping out a pub in Kensington. He began coming home increasingly late and increasingly drunk. Finally Hewby couldn't stand it anymore. He called in all his favors and helped his poor friend emigrate to the United States. Anything to be rid of him!
When Tak Wing arrived in New York he was forty-four years old. He had $100 in his pocket and a few belongings in a canvas bag.
Taki took a room at the YMCA and went through a lunatic series of jobs to support his drinking: making hats, modeling shoes, driving a fish truck for the Fulton Street market.
One day Taki was dispatched to New Jersey in his fish
truck. As he exited the Lincoln Tunnel, he looked up and saw a sign for Weehawken.
Shivering with awe, Taki nearly ran off the road. Weehawken! The very name was magical. Weehawken was the place his friend, Sgt. Caesar St. Vincent Marvelle, had always talked about so many years before.
He pulled off the highway and found a phone book at a grocery store. The only listing under Marvelle was for a Cassandra. A few minutes later Taki was standing in front of the address, a decaying mansion on a cliff overlooking Manhattan. The sign in front of the building read LORD GOD ALMIGHTY SALVATION CHAPEL AND FUNERAL PARLOR.

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