I WAS DRINKING COFFEE WITH THE MIDGET AT THE TOY STORE. His new air conditioner was working great, and it made the glass in his window rattle loudly enough so that we could have a private conversation right in the open. If we had something important to talk about.
“Seems like it’s brighter in here,” I said. “Did you get new lights or something?”
“Naw, I had a new ceiling put in,” said the midget, drinking alternately from a cup of coffee and a mug of hot water. “Asbestos tiles. They were unbelievably cheap!”
“Asbestos! Are you nuts? You’re going to give all the kids here cancer!”
“Were you born in the year of the chicken, Robert?”
“I’m a tiger.”
“I don’t think a real tiger would be scared of ceilings. Asbestos tiles are safe. The fibers are sealed up. You’d have to grate them up and eat them for them to be a problem.”
“What about all the cancer lawsuits?”
“There are slip-and-fall lawsuits in the city. Are you going to stop walking on the sidewalks? Anyway, everything causes cancer. Coffee probably kills more people than asbestos. I’ll bet that the halls of Maxwell House are haunted by ghosts. Maybe that’s why so many people burn Hell Bank Notes in Maxwell House tins.”
“Hey,” I said, then paused to take in a breath. “Do you believe that we can contact spirits of the dead?”
“Are you trying to get in touch with your father?”
“Not really, because I don’t know what I would say. This is a little creepy, but I feel his spirit in me.”
“He was your father,” said the midget as he shifted a little in his chair. “He is a part of you, genetically.”
“We were never close, you know?”
“Of course I know. It’s a typical Chinatown story. The men have to work such long hours or lose themselves to gambling, whoring, and drinking, the kids grow up without fathers. I think these boys want the action figures because they are hungry for male role models.”
Just then my eyes fell upon a model of an alligator trying to eat a soldier. “What do the girls want?”
“You don’t know by now?” the midget joked.
“C’mon, I’m not kidding around,” I said. “I wasn’t close with my father when he was alive, but I’ve been feeling anger from his spirit. And it’s not directed at me, either. It’s the snakeheads.”
“Everybody hates them. But they’re there because people are willing to do almost anything to come here. They make reliable workers who work overtime, never call in sick or go on vacation. Oh, and they’ll never organize a union. But you know what, Robert? Picking off snakeheads isn’t going to solve the issue. As long as Chinese in China think they can have a better life in America, they’ll make deals with the devil to get here. Especially the Fukienese and Cantonese. Going abroad is in their blood.”
“How do we stop them from thinking they need to come here by any means?”
“We can’t. When their relatives send letters telling them of the hard life they’re having here, they don’t believe it. They just think all the complaining is meant to discourage others from coming in and getting their piece of the pie. It doesn’t help that they send back money and gifts in that fine Chinese tradition of starving yourself to feed your family and friends.”
“I get it. They see the money and it talks louder than the letter. They should send pictures of the calluses, cuts, and burn marks on their hands.”
“How about a book of pictures about how hard life is here? About all the hardships.” Then he smirked. “We’ll put you on the cover. That’ll turn off all the ladies.”
“We’ll use your picture to scare all the kids.”
“My picture won’t scare anybody. They’ll think that life is a circus here. Trapeze artists, the human cannonball, and, of course, a midget act. Popcorn and peanuts. They won’t know they’ll be shoveling up all the elephant shit.”
“It’s probably a union job. My father would have been better off shoveling shit.”
“Your father and every other Chinaman.”
“My father wasn’t just another Chinaman.”
“He was the same as all Chinamen in the sense that he worked long and hard at a job he wasn’t guaranteed to have the next day. He had the same slouch. He didn’t talk very much to anybody in his family, but when he ran into another man in the street they could talk so loud and so long, you’d have to pull him away or you’d never eat. I’ll also bet he snored like a garbage truck.”
“Jesus, he could shake pantry doors open,” I said, smiling. “But you didn’t actually know my dad, did you?”
The midget shrugged. “The story of men in Chinatown is the story of struggle—the struggle against the same things, unfortunately. The guys who made it out of the cycle, from what I saw, didn’t get out until their kids finished college and sent back money.” The midget looked up at me, raising an eyebrow. “I guess your dad had it all riding on you. He was treading water, waiting for his son to come back with a lifeboat.”
“He wasn’t struggling to keep his head up, you know? He gambled away money and spent a good chunk on prostitutes, too!”
“Robert,” said the midget in a soothing voice, “don’t you know by now that the duty of a Chinese son is to overlook the shortcomings of his parents?”
“What are the other duties of a son?”
“Having more sons to continue the line.”
“That’s it?”
“You say that like it’s easy to raise kids. You don’t know how hard it is dealing with a smaller version of yourself.”
I was about to say something when the midget jumped up and pointed his finger at me.
“No! Don’t you dare say it!” he said, smiling with his mouth open.
I couldn’t say anything because I was laughing too hard at the thought of it.