Chapter Seven
Mei Lan
She went to Clay Street on Tuesday afternoon, after her daughter's school pickup and before the dinner shift she'd asked Marcus to hold for her.
Chinatown smelled like it always had — roast duck fat, star anise, rain on old stone — and the Mei Lan Community Center sat where it had sat for sixty years, a brick building with green awnings faded to the color of sea glass. Naomi stood across the street for a full minute before she went in, because part of her wanted to be wrong about what she'd seen on that map. Red hatching could mean anything. She had learned, translating, that words on paper and truth in the world were not always the same thing.
Inside, the air was warm and loud: the clatter of mahjong tiles from one room, the nasal whine of an erhu from another, a hundred conversations in Cantonese, Mandarin, Toisanese overlapping like chords. A folding table near the door held a sign-up sheet for Thursday's flu clinic and a vase of plastic chrysanthemums.
She had come to look, maybe to ask a question or two. She had not expected the cry that went up from the lunch room.
"哎呀！是小卡特！" Aiya! It's little Carter!
Mrs. Chow was smaller than Naomi remembered — time had done that, pressing her down like dough — but her eyes were the same: quick, bright, missing nothing. She crossed the room at a speed that defied her eighty-two years and took Naomi's face in both hands.
"The girl who taught us English," Mrs. Chow announced to the room, in Cantonese. "Look at her now. A lady."
Naomi had to laugh, though her throat was tight. "Chow Po," she said. "You haven't changed."
"Liar," Mrs. Chow said cheerfully. "I have shrunk. Come. Eat. You are too thin."
Resistance was futile. Naomi found herself seated at a long table with a bowl of congee, a tea egg, and six elderly women studying her with open curiosity. The congee was perfect — silken, ginger-warmed — and she realized with a small shock that she had forgotten how food could taste like being known.
"How is your mother? And the little one — the dragon girl?" Mrs. Chow asked. Lily had drawn a dragon for the center's Lunar New Year wall when she was five. It was probably still up.
"Gloria's fine. Lily's eight now. Third grade."
"Eight!" Mrs. Chow pressed her hand to her chest. "Time is a thief."
After lunch, Mrs. Chow gave her the tour, and the building unfolded like a memory Naomi hadn't known she was still carrying: the ESL classroom where she'd volunteered at sixteen, drilling appointment and prescription with women who patted her hands when she stumbled over their names; the kitchen where volunteers served the only hot lunch for three dollars that four hundred seniors could count on; the health screening room, the calligraphy corner, the bulletin board dense with bus schedules and clinic flyers.
Four hundred people. Naomi did the math the way Daniel Zhang would have, and the number sat in her chest like a stone.
"Chow Po," she said carefully, in the courtyard where a persimmon tree was dropping its fruit, "have you heard anything about the building? About the land?"
Mrs. Chow's face changed — not surprised, which surprised Naomi. "A man in a suit came last month. He talked about progress. He talked about a corridor." She said the word like it tasted bad. "They want us gone, little Carter. The vote is in twelve days."
"Do the seniors know?"
"Some. Most don't read English well enough to follow the notices." Mrs. Chow looked at the persimmon tree. "I have been coming here forty years. My husband died in the winter and these women —" she gestured at the building — "they brought soup every day for a month. Where will we go? A corridor is not a home."
Naomi thought of the red hatching on the map. Acquisition/demolition. Two bloodless words for the end of a world.
"What can I do?" she asked, and hated how small the question sounded.
Mrs. Chow studied her for a long moment. Then she reached into her sleeve — the old women still kept things in their sleeves, like magicians — and pressed a red envelope into Naomi's hand. It was soft with age, the gold characters faded.
"For Lily," she said. "For the New Year. Don't argue with an old woman."
"Chow Po, I can't —"
"You can." Mrs. Chow folded Naomi's fingers over the envelope. "You were always a good girl. Now you are a woman with a loud voice. Use it."
Naomi walked out into the late afternoon with the envelope burning in her pocket. She made it to her car, a ten-year-old Corolla with Lily's dragon stickers on the bumper, and sat behind the wheel while Chinatown moved past the windshield — grandmothers with shopping carts, kids spilling out of language school, the whole breathing organism of a neighborhood that some man in a suit had called a corridor.
She thought of the check in her bank account, still pending. She thought of Victor Hale's cold smile across the conference table. She thought of four hundred seniors and a persimmon tree and a red envelope from a woman who had nothing and gave anyway.
Then Naomi Carter put her forehead on the steering wheel and cried — not the delicate tears of the movies, but the ugly, gasping kind, the kind you only cry when no one is watching.
When she finally lifted her head, the sun had dropped behind the rooftops and the streetlights were coming on. She wiped her face, opened the red envelope, and found two crisp twenty-dollar bills and a folded slip of paper. On it, in shaky English, Mrs. Chow had written: For Lily's dragon. Draw big.
Naomi folded the note back up with hands that shook, started the car, and drove toward the dinner shift with a plan already forming — not a good one, not yet, but a beginning.
Chapter Eight
Beijing
She had been nineteen the first time she heard Beijing breathe.