When Sasha moved to New Jersey, he bequeathed his whole collection of pigeons to Mei Ling and Moonie. Since they all lived in the same building, it was easy for Sasha to give them the keys to the rooftop coop and say, “They’re all yours, suckers!” By year end, there were 155 birds and counting. The girls could identify each of the birds by their markings and had renamed them after flowers and famous women.
There was Dandelion, Iris, Fleabane, Peony, Jonquil…Tiger-lily had fancy horizontal stripes on her wings…Jackie, Eleanor, Madonna, Lilith…Anna Akhmatova was an especially beautiful bird, with long lashes and blue, sultry eyes. Each time a new chick hatched, the girls would go to the library and search through both the Encyclopedia of Famous Women and The Sunset Almanac of Wildflowers for a new name.
They fed the birds breadcrumbs from Zack’s bakery. After school, they helped Zack sweep his street front in exchange for all the leftover bread. They also brought home scraps and day-old rice from the Double Happiness, their family restaurant.
At first, their Grandmother Wong was not opposed to this hobby because it did not cost the family anything and because it kept the girls home after school instead of playing ball with Sven and Lem or banging on their guitars with Igor and Ivor in the neighborhood garage band. Or ruining their pretty complexions in the late afternoon sun skateboarding and break-dancing with Julio and Coolio. To their grandmother’s dismay, the neighborhood was rife with rambunctious twins since the onset of fertility drugs, which meant that Mei Ling and Moonie had too many opportunities to get into mischief.
One day, for a variety of reasons, this pigeon hobby became a nuisance in the grandmother’s eyes. Perhaps the Matriarch was tired of the girls bringing feathers home on their clothes. There were flying wisps everywhere. She also had the suspicion that the girls were not doing their homework in the library, but spending most of their time culling names for the chicks. Furthermore, the Great Matriarch started thinking about the idea of raising animals not for food but for entertainment, and her proletariat instincts came back to her. She was worried that the girls were getting lax in their work ethic. Breeding pigeons for fun is not a worthy working-class pastime: it’s a bourgeois vanity sport. This was a remnant of corrupt feudalism, she thought, where crickets, trapped in quaint bamboo cages, sang for their supper like catamites…where desperate parents raised young girls for the flesh trade…where fat colorful carp decorated the huge elaborate moats in the imperial gardens while the masses starved at the palace gate.
And in this decadent era of late American capitalism, she saw the diners at the restaurant appear with their lapdogs, groomed and pedicured, while the homeless rummaged through the restaurant garbage cans after midnight. One fat red-faced man, who drove a Rolls-Royce, carried his yapping Chihuahua under his coat and fed him like a baby. He always ordered Peking duck for the dog and the ghastly sweet and sour pork for himself. The cooks would throw in extra sugar and grease in the godawful recipe to please him. As the years went by, Grandmother Wong watched both the man and the little dog get fatter and fatter until both had to get quadruple bypass surgery.
She noticed that the neighborhood cats would give birth to more cats—fat, clawless mutants—meaningless creatures, raised not to catch mice but to purr beneath the table. They’ve forgotten their role in the order of things. The stealthy king of the jungle, top-of-the-food-chain monster, was now a disgrace to its race. It could never return to the jungle and face its relatives.
One day, Grandmother Wong had this great idea. The restaurant was about to have a wedding party for the son of a local Chinatown merchant. She was told that this son loved squab. She thought that a perfect dragon and phoenix dish would be minced squab and oyster in lettuce cups. So she decided that when the girls were in school, she would go up on the roof with a large net and capture some of the birds while they slept in their giant cage. Squab was expensive these days. She thought about the money she would save by slaughtering the captive birds instead of buying dozens of them from a local farmer. Finally, these birds would be useful and contribute to the economy of the people.
When she got to the rooftop though, they all flew away in one wing-flapping fury. They acted as if they knew what she was up to. And they stayed away for weeks. The old lady was angry at their outsmarting her. Finally, she told the girls to call them. She said, “Summon them to me. I want to query them.” Mei Ling gave her secret call and Moonie blew into her silent whistle. But the pigeons didn’t come. Mei Ling said, “Grandmother, you always told us that Buddha knows our bad intentions. Perhaps the pigeons are the souls of the Buddha and they know that you have bad intentions.”
Suddenly, the Matriarch felt ashamed and sang a verse:
What flower yearns to be mulch
What pigeon wants to be minced
She decided that these were very wise and virtuous pigeons. And like herself they were survivors and were probably exiles from a distant land. Their ancestors suffered both natural and man-made disasters: horrific, bloody world wars; long seasons of drought and famine; clear-cut deforestation; the atom bomb; powerful pesticides; and even bourgeois pleasure shooting. And besides, they were born hated creatures. People were prejudiced against them and despised them for no reason. It was a kind of racism! She decided after much thought that these birds deserved a long life.
She let them return and thrive on the rooftop, and when the girls went away to college, she would go up to the roof and hand-feed them herself. Two days before her ninety-fifth birthday, she was found dead on the roof…she was in the midst of feeding the birds a New Year’s treat of sunflower seeds that she roasted in peanut oil. She fell asleep among them and never woke up. Moonie and Mei Ling, who both grew up into fine ambitious women with careers and families of their own, and who no longer had the time or the interest in keeping the birds, decided to set them free.
Meanwhile, a new wave of immigrants moved into the neighborhood. A Thai Laotian family named Chinalai moved into the Wong apartment. The Gonzalez family now lives in Sasha’s apartment but with a set of rambunctious teenage quadruplet girls! But the tale of Grandmother Wong’s magnificent pigeons lives on in the children’s imaginations. And to this day, when young kids in the neighborhood see a group of pigeons flying high in a kindred flock, they point up and say, “There they go, Grandmother Wong’s pigeons, they’re looking for her in paradise.”