Thus the attack on the White Dragons was disturbing. He was supposed to be invisible in his character as a no-name Chinatown gangster, a loyal vassal of the Hap Tai tong, a nobody, the creeping fisherman. Who had ordered the interference? The men who took the ma jai off the street so smoothly and professionally were unlikely to be local talent. Most of the people Chinatown called gangsters were petty extortionists, clowns who thought that a big score was a bunch of them ordering a meal in a restaurant and not paying. The ma jai had not seen the faces of their captors, which had been concealed behind ski masks, but they claimed that the leader had spoken to them in what sounded like Viet-accented Cantonese. That made more sense. One would use a Vietnamese or a Fujianese for that sort of thing. He himself had used a Vietnamese for the business in the Asia Mall. Thinking about that, he considered the possibility that Chen had hired protection for his daughter, and then dismissed it. Chen would not dare, although he did have the temerity to complain about the killings taking place on his property, which was why the demonstration against his daughter had been necessary.
If the Chens were of no consequence, who had intervened? Leung could not imagine that the thing had any other purpose than to send him a message. As he read it, it was this: we know who you are; we are watching; we can get to your people; and we can get to you. That was the message he himself would have sent with the action on Canal Street-a daylight abduction, which meant an additional footnote: we’re tough and competent. The message could not be from the Wo Hop To triad. If they thought he had betrayed the Sings, he would already be dead in some particularly unpleasant way. His comrades in the Da Qan Zi triad might have sold him out. That was always a possibility, and he certainly had rivals enough. But he had carefully balanced the rivalries heretofore, and the promise to his triad leadership of what he intended to bring to them was more than sufficient to stifle with avarice any move against him, at least until the fisherman had the snipe and the clam firmly in hand. That left the Italians. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that this was the correct solution. He had expected something like this, but not in so subtle a fashion. That was the Vietnamese influence. The Italian had given the contract to a Viet gang, both to insulate himself from suspicion and because he wanted to see what Leung would do under pressure. He had, of course, no idea that Leung was all by himself in New York, that he was operating with only the barest toleration of his triad, on speculation, that the yu bang plan was his alone. If they penetrated this veil, he was finished.
He thought briefly about the little American in Macao, and what he had learned from him about the absurd machinations of American law. The man could talk for hours about it, introducing strange concepts that had no Chinese equivalent. Due process. Conflict of interest. Plea bargaining. Immunity. He was a drunk and an opium addict, but he had long periods of lucidity, and Leung had listened with close attention. The man was dead now, but what he had taught Leung had fermented like a tub of soy beans in the young gangster’s head and become, after the passage of years, a part of the plan.
Leung slurped the last of his tea and rose to leave. They wanted to see what he would do under moderate pressure, perhaps expecting a tentative push in return. Instead he would advance his plan and respond with a devastating counter blow, one that would remove the Italian entirely from the board.
Mary Ma washed dishes in the kitchen of the Golden Pheasant, a big, brightly lit, old-fashioned tourist restaurant on the second floor of a building on Mott, a few doors up from Pell. The appreciation of Chinese cuisine had recently come a long way in the city, and there were now large numbers of gwailo New Yorkers who could distinguish between the various regional cuisines and be boring about how to eat Peking duck. The old Golden Pheasant, however, catered to the tour-bus trade, terrified gaggles of ladies from Indiana shrieking with nervous laughter over chopsticks, soy sauce, and lobster Cantonese with flied lice. The Ma family was three years in the country, six years out of the PRC, beginning to make it in America in the good old way, working two jobs apiece, living like dogs in two tenement rooms, keeping their one kid in school, saving every penny. (Mrs. Ma was shocked to her soul when, a few days after her arrival in town, she observed a group of children tossing pennies against a wall. Playing! With real coins! What if they lost one?)
Aside from violating the child labor and minimum wage laws of the state of New York for eight hours a day, Mary Ma was more or less on her own. From the age of ten she had worn the latchkey necklace, that badge of striving families, and saw her parents mainly at work, where Mrs. Ma was a prep cook and Mr. Ma a waiter. Mary Ma had started school in Guangdong in the PRC, continued in Hong Kong, and had been registered in public school on the second day after the family’s arrival in New York, speaking little English, and that with a faint British accent. She was lonely, as all such children are and more than most, since she was a member of the Chinese generation that has no siblings by order of the leaders of the PRC. In the fourth grade, however, she had with uncharacteristic boldness advised the gwailo girl at the next desk, who was having incomprehensible difficulty with a math problem that Mary Ma had solved in eight seconds, and to her immense surprise the girl had thanked her profusely in Cantonese.
Thus was born her friendship with Lucy Karp, and thus was she brought into the charmed circle of the Chens and the Karps, and supplied with the role models every immigrant child needs to become American. From Janice she learned how to be Chinese and cool, she learned that thick leather boy’s oxfords are never appropriate no matter how well they wear, that iridescent blue-framed harlequin-shaped eyeglasses are a bargain for a good reason and that small wire-framed ones are better and nearly as cheap, she learned that makeup is not the unmistakable sign of prostitution, that the cheap brands of blusher are about as good as the costly ones, that it is not a sin against the ancestors to have some spending money of one’s own, that parents deserve respect and obedience but do not necessarily represent the source of all earthly wisdom.
From Lucy there came lessons more thrilling, even terrifying: about films and music-who is hip, who not; that girls are the equal of boys, and often smarter, that making a boy look a fool is not a sin but amusing; that the correct response to insult is not shame but counter-insult and aggression; that the street has its own rules, some of them not thought of by Confucius; and (this, of course, indirectly, but the most important of all) that a big part of growing up in America is the invention of the self, and there are no real constraints on this choice-not class, not race, not even sex.
And Lucy introduced the immigrant child to the bosom of the American family. (With what difficulty did Mary Ma explain to her parents what a sleepover was, and its purpose, and assure them that they would not have to reciprocate, and that there was no loss of face in this!) Used to analyzing the deeper meaning of every act for political consequences, the Ma parents were flabbergasted that their offspring was being entertained in the home of a public prosecutor (the honor!), something that could never have happened in the Red mandarin society of the PRC, but naturally they were terrified that she would let something slip about the provenance of their green cards. Mary would never have revealed to her parents that Lucy Karp knew all there was to know about this aspect of the Mas’ American journey, and that secret was one of the things that tied her most closely to Lucy and Janice. A certain amount of foolish secrecy is involved in most friendships among girls of that age, but in this case the secrets were not foolish at all, were real and dire. It made the friendship closer, more intimate, and as water to the thirst of Mary Ma, who had almost no one else to love. That was another lesson: there was American stuff that your folks could never, ever understand, even if, as in Lucy’s case, they were Americans born.