And with that, I rose from the table a good thirty minutes before the meeting was over and, having said nothing at all of any significance, I got the smiling nods of approval from the folks in the room, as if I had just imparted some great scrap of wisdom that would last for generations.
“Thanks for all your help,” someone commented without even a trace of sarcasm.
I did have a legitimate conflict that kept me from staying the entire hour. I had an appointment to meet a Mr. Li in Chinatown. The previous evening, Valenti impressed upon me the importance of setting up some time with him as he was convinced Li had a hand in his granddaughter’s disappearance. Exactly what kind of role he played was hazy.
“You can do anything you want,” he told me after leading me back to the car to see me off. “You can dig into my past if that makes you feel better. You can talk to any and every one remotely connected to me. But do me one favor — talk to Li first.”
I promised him I would. What I didn’t promise was that I would do it with Hector. The knife-wielding tattletale was a nuisance and as such, unnecessary to the investigation. I instructed Hector to meet me at the office at eleven but left for the meeting with Li at ten.
***
The sign for the “Society for the Preservation of Chinese-American Culture and Heritage” wasn’t wide enough to hold all the words and had to be laid out in two rows. The narrow storefront masquerading as its headquarters literally sat in the shadow of Valenti’s proposed new art museum. The glass display windows were wallpapered in “Yes on 57” posters and created a dizzying collage of red and gold.
I entered the small office and felt like I had stumbled upon a miniature version of the Eighteenth National Conference of the Communist Party of China. The narrow room was lined on each side by around a dozen chairs occupied by middle-aged Asian men wearing near-identical suits and ties. No one said anything but all eyes were on me. At the far end was the unassuming “chairman” who was about half their age and looked like a former skate urchin from Huntington Beach. It was the same man I ran into outside Jeff Schwartzman’s office. He rose from behind a long table to greet me.
“Mr. Restic,” he said and pressed his hand into mine. “I’m Gao Li. Thank you for reaching out.”
“Well, thank you for meeting me on such short notice.”
“Please have a seat,” he said and motioned to a chair in front of the long table.
I casually glanced behind me to see if anyone else was going to join, but no one made any such move. I reluctantly took a seat with my back to the rest of the room. What at first resembled a conference now felt more like a tribunal.
I sat down before Li’s penetrating gaze. For a man in his late twenties, he exuded a lot of confidence. Li spoke first.
“Mr. Restic, I am a proud man,” he began. “And come from very proud people. Ours is a story of struggle. And Chinatown is the living proof of that struggle.” I shifted uncomfortably in the hard chair. One thing the corporate world had taught me was to recognize when a long speech was coming. This one exceeded even my worst expectations.
Somewhere around the fifteen minute mark I added an “I understand” even though I understood very little. They were the words of the village elder in a trite, period-piece movie spoken by an American kid in a baggy sweatshirt. He spoke about present day Chinatown like it was a cultural jewel of Chinese history. He didn’t mention that half the restaurants were Vietnamese and the other half served Chinese food but were owned and operated by Vietnamese. The migration of the Chinese out of Chinatown was decades in the making. Alhambra and Arcadia to the east was where the real Chinese-American community resided.
“But we will never forget the road we’ve taken to arrive here,” he further explained. “Nor the treatment we were subjected to along the way.”
I was then forced to listen to the entire history of the Chinese struggle in Southern California culminating in the “holocaust” of 1938 when the city decided to build a train station in Chinatown. To make room for the new structure they “tore at the fabric of the Chinese community” and “ripped families from their homes” and “dropped them in a desolate spot in the city,” the current location. Left unsaid in this narrative of Chinese diaspora was the Italian community the Chinese displaced in settling in the new neighborhood. Also left unsaid, was the money made by men like Mr. Li’s grandfather in the whole affair. Valenti had coached me on this part of the young man’s narrative. And although I didn’t want to be the old man’s pawn in some disagreement between profiteers, I didn’t appreciate being spoken to as if I were one of the perpetrators behind said holocaust.
“Was your grandfather active in real estate at that time?” I asked innocently enough. I achieved a cessation of the lecture, but was then subjected to its opposite form of torture — the silent treatment. “I apologize if I offended you,” I told the young man.
“A wise man makes his own decisions,” he intoned. “An ignorant man follows public opinion.”
“I beg your pardon?” I snapped.
Li was taking the “village elder” role too far. He could spout Confucian pearls until he was blue in the face but no punk kid was going to call me an idiot to my face. And no one, and I mean no one, was going to trade pithy one-liners with a corporate hack like me and expect to come out on top.
“It is better to conceal one’s knowledge than it is to reveal one’s ignorance,” I countered. “And you never answered the question about your grandfather.”
From Li spewed forth a litany of threats to me and all white people, which were interspersed with hollow excuses that attempted to absolve his bloodline of choices it had to make. His head was a muddled mess of ancient Chinese philosophy, Marxist slogans, and self-help validations. He was living proof of another gem of the corporate vernacular: He had just enough information to make him dangerous.
“On the phone you mentioned Mr. Valenti suggesting we meet,” he said curtly. He was back in his village elder persona. He seemed able to switch back and forth with ease, perhaps because he didn’t realize he was doing it. “Can we jump to the matter at hand?”
“Of course,” I answered. But not sure exactly what matter he was referring to, I remained silent.
“Is there a new development that you’d like to discuss?” he tried to tease it out of me.
“Could you be more specific?”
“Is there something we need to discuss regarding our…disagreement with Mr. Valenti?”
And then the roomful of low-level party hacks suddenly made sense — they thought I had come with an offer to negotiate on the museum deal. Given the overall instability of this young man in sneakers, I didn’t want to break to him the bad news.
“This is definitely awkward,” I told them. “But I don’t have an offer.”
The gang behind began to murmur.
“You said you are working for Mr. Valenti,” Li tried to clarify.
“Yes, I am but—”
“And that Mr. Valenti suggested we talk.”
“—but I am working with him on an entirely different matter. Not the museum.”
The murmuring behind me grew louder. Word spread quickly that what was once victory for the cause was not that at all. A couple of them got out of their chairs and spat words at me before shuffling out of the room.
“You can’t push us around any longer,” Li shouted over them. “While you’ve gotten fat and lazy with your entitlements, we have risen to our rightly place.” He prattled on about the rise of New China and the fall of the West. It was tired prose. But behind it was an anger that went deeper than some riff over racial inequality. “We fucking own San Marino, dude!” he finished with a flourish.