Later that evening, I waited in the Y Hotel’s cocktail lounge for Lawrence, my only friend from Princeton in the city, who was running late. After twenty minutes of sitting alone I started to feel self-conscious, then I noticed the “paintings” on the walls—high-resolution, low-luminosity LED screens that displayed digital oil portraits with subtly animated eyes that blinked and seemed to follow you around the room. Suddenly I remembered reading about this place in one of my interior design magazines. Even though sitting alone in busy social spaces always made me feel conspicuous and anxious, being able to attribute the cause of that feeling to something concrete in the environment somehow made me feel calmer on the inside.
At half past nine o’clock, Lawrence finally showed up. He squeezed my shoulder, recited some apology about a client meeting that ran over, and ordered us Negronis without asking what I wanted. The bartender seemed to know him. Then he started talking, about what exactly I can’t quite remember. It hardly mattered. Lawrence was an excellent talker and came from a long line of prominent lawyers in Hong Kong. He had that elusive thing called “polish,” a certain social and verbal finesse that made people enjoy conversing with him.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying you look a bit glum, Michael. What’s the matter?”
I weighed my desire for emotional support against my desire for Lawrence’s approval. “It’s nothing. Just some shit going on at work,” I said.
“I see. Stressful project? An important deadline coming up?”
“No, it’s not that. The thing is I feel a little underappreciated.”
“Now that I can relate to. Say more.”
I told Lawrence what happened at my review with Lucas and he listened with grave concern. When I finished, he ordered me another drink.
“Michael,” he said, “during your studies, did you ever learn the history of the transcontinental railroad?”
“Sort of—the one that the Chinese worked on, right?”
“Yes, that one. In the mid-1860s, during the aftermath of the bloody Taiping Rebellion, between ten and fifteen thousand Chinese workers from Guangdong Province set sail to California to work on the transcontinental railroad. The job was treacherous. The Chinese were often lowered down cliffs in man-sized baskets packed with explosives to blow tunnels into the mountain. Many died, but at $28 a month, life was cheap—and plentiful. The Central Pacific Railroad Company sent ships to Guangdong to scoop thousands more desperate young men straight off the dock. In the end, the railroad company saved about one third of the cost of a white laborer for each Chinaman they brought on…”
I noticed that Lawrence used the word Chinaman without flinching, even though he himself was Korean.
“And then they lampooned us in the newspapers, called us chinks and mongrels and the ‘yellow horde,’ forbade us from bringing our women into the country with us, eventually banned us from coming at all after we had served our purpose. Would you like to hear the punchline, Michael? The punchline is that we didn’t learn our lesson. Only now instead of Central Pacific, it’s Intel, Siemens, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard. Nothing’s changed, only this time what the Chinese who come to California are giving away for pennies on the dollar is the work of their minds, not their limbs. How many Asian guys you know were raised by brilliant, spineless deaf-mutes? Dad comes over with a suitcase and a foreign PhD in hard science. Lands right in an R&D lab and convinces himself that science is his only love, toils for thirty years with no promotions, no raises, keeps his head down, and never, ever asks to eat at the table. Does that sound familiar?”
I nodded discreetly as certain memories of my father that I hadn’t revisited in a long time flickered into consciousness.
“I’m an IP lawyer, Michael. I’ve had the opportunity to observe this phenomenon in the field. I can tell you the patents these humble scientists crank out are often worth tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. And they know it too, but they’ll never say a thing. So tell me, Michael, what kind of a Chinaman would you have been, if you had been born a century and a half earlier? A railroad Chinaman, or a gold field Chinaman?”
I scanned the room to see if anyone was listening, since Lawrence was being pretty loud. “Dude, what the fuck?”
“You heard me. Would you have panned under risk of life and limb for the white man’s gold, or quietly poured your sweat over his railroad? Would you have taken what you deserved or what you were given?”
“Of course I’m a fucking gold field Chinaman,” I whispered angrily. Instinctively, I looked around again; no one had heard me.
Lawrence gave me this amused yet somewhat approving smirk. “If that’s what you say. When’s the last time you were with an American woman?”
“I’m not sure, I can’t remember exactly—”
“We have our goal for tonight,” he said, directing my attention to two girls sitting on the other side of the lounge, a normal-looking brunette and an intimidatingly attractive redhead. They were about our age or younger, looking bored and sipping their espresso martinis. Lawrence led the way over and asked if we could join them. The brunette said yes immediately, while the redhead kept looking at her phone. We switched over to a four-person table and Lawrence ordered a bottle of Gusbourne Blanc de Blancs. Due to global warming, he said, the soil in certain parts of England is projected to become chemically similar to the soil in the Champagne region of France today, and in forty years we’ll all be drinking English champagne. For some reason the girls found this delightful and fascinating; even the redhead had stopped looking at her phone. It turns out the girls had been Alpha Phis at Rutgers and came to party at Princeton a few times every month when Lawrence and I were upperclassmen. “Where?” Lawrence asked, giving himself the opening to drop the name of the eating club he’d been a part of, which had its intended effect. When the brunette looked at me expectantly, I had no choice but to defer and felt my perceived relevancy drop. The girls and Lawrence continued to talk excitedly about parties they’d attended at Princeton—Gatsby at Cottage, Black and Yellow at Cap, Casino Night at Ivy—all of which I knew far too much about secondhand from Facebook pictures, which made it impossible for me to insert myself into the stories from a first-person perspective. Lawrence listened sympathetically as the brunette complained about the disrespectful “State night” party Tiger Inn threw in 2012, where they had everyone dress up in state school gear (she’d brought her entire sorority anyway), how mean and catty the Princeton girls had been to her sorority sisters even while they were all dressed in Rutgers hoodies and basketball shorts. I started to get the peculiar sense that although these girls knew that I went to Princeton, they didn’t consider me to be of Princeton in the same way that Lawrence was.
Lawrence was now focusing the entirety of his conversation on the redhead, forcing the brunette to reluctantly shift her attention toward me. When the bottle was finished, the suggestion to continue with a nightcap at Lawrence’s apartment in Pac Heights was floated and immediately accepted. He ushered us into an Uber Black that was somehow already right around the corner, me sitting shotgun, him with the two girls in the back. It faintly occurred to me as the unfamiliar intersections went by that this would actually be the first time, for the two years Lawrence and I had been friends in San Francisco together, that he invited me to his apartment.
The driver let us out in front of a wood-and-gold toned high-rise condominium at the end of a quiet street. Lawrence gave the doorman a discreet nod, marched us to the elevator, and pressed the PH button. The two girls were clearly excited that the PH button had been pressed and were now whispering to each other a bit too loudly. There was a ding and the elevators doors opened directly to the inside of Lawrence’s living room. We took our shoes off and changed into velvet house slippers, which changed the boisterous energy from the bar into something more subdued. I seethed with jealously at how exquisitely tasteful and Scandinavian his place looked. Nothing I’d never seen in a catalog; each piece of furniture seemed to have a distinct aura and personality. There were hundreds of books on shelves lining every wall as well as an impressive collection of contemporary East Asian paintings. During the tour, the redhead mentioned that she had studied art history in college, which pleased Lawrence immensely and set off a conversation about the John Singer Sargent exhibit at the de Young that apparently everyone except me had seen last week.
We reconvened on the couch in the living room. Lawrence disappeared to the kitchen and returned with four crystal glasses and a green bottle of Korean plum wine that the girls evidently found very exotic and charming. We all sat down on the couch and Lawrence started playing bossa nova, as if that was a normal thing to do. The redhead started talking about studying abroad in Barcelona and Lawrence responded with a well-received anecdote about the construction of the Sagrada Familia. Then, seemingly in the middle of a sentence, he took the redhead’s hand and they got up and started to slow dance. A total change had come over her previously lukewarm attitude. For a while I just stared at them; it was only a brief, annoyed look from Lawrence that made me turn back to the brunette, who was now anxiously sipping her drink and tapping furiously on her phone. I knew I had to ask her if she wanted to dance, or the mood would be spoiled for everyone.
“Sure,” she said flatly. We rose to our feet and joined our bodies awkwardly via hands on shoulders and waists. I didn’t quite know where to look; every time I tried to make eye contact she seemed to look to the side or past me. I noticed she was still chewing gum. We glided like this for a few minutes, before I saw that Lawrence and the redhead were gone.
It turns out that I should not have looked back, because when the brunette caught on she hopped away from me immediately, mumbling something about checking in on her friend. I started to say something about how they probably shouldn’t be bothered, but it was too late, she’d already picked up her phone and marched into the bedroom without knocking. I heard some low whispers through the doors, some sharp shushing sounds. After a minute or so, I sank back into the couch and poured myself another drink.
It probably took another ten minutes for me to realize that they were waiting for me to leave. So I finished what was left of my drink and called an Uber back to my apartment.
After I managed to stumble up all three flights of stairs to my loft, I collapsed onto the sofa and started scrolling through my food delivery apps. While I waited for my crispy chicken sandwich with four-piece buttermilk crispy tenders to arrive, I pulled out my laptop, which was still open on Samarkand, and stared at viv798’s message. Then, for some reason, I pulled out my phone and called the number. To my horror, it didn’t go straight to voicemail, but rang several times. Thankfully, after what seemed like an eternity, I heard the familiar beep and a machine voice that said, “The wireless customer is not available right now. Please leave a message after the beep.” I cleared my throat.
“Hello, viv798,” I stammered. “This is Michael from, uh… from Samarkand. I got your message earlier, and you said you wanted to hear what my voice sounded like, so here it is. By the way, you said you wanted to talk in person?”
Fuck. That would never do. I hit 0 to rerecord.
“Hey, what up? Michael here. Sorry if I sound a little drunk, just got back from a party. Old Princeton buddy’s place in Pac Heights…”
Beep. Please rerecord your message.
“This is Michael. Who are you anyway? Don’t you think it’s a little unfair, making me leave a message like this, when you haven’t told me anything about yourself? What kind of a weird game is this?”
Beep.
Anyway, I went through probably another five or six of these, the excruciating contents of which I won’t subject you to, before I hit on the winner:
“Hey, Vivian. This is Michael. Call me back.”
And then I passed out.