Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [8]
He lingered on the books he’d devoured in libraries of faded hotels with colonial names, the Imperial, the Nelson Arms, the Lord Curzon. Had these same hotels been my backpacking mom’s haunts? He’d self-educated himself, he confessed, on Dorothy Sayers and H. E. Bates, on leatherbound sets of Dickens, Bennett and Galsworthy. I’d never heard of any of these authors except Dickens, but I could feel my fingertips touching Moroccan-leather spines, could see the sparkle of gold dust rubbing off in my hands.
Forget the Asia that Mama raised mission money for, playing bingo every second Thursday night. From that night on, Frankie’s stories of Asia replaced the video as foreplay. And my mystery father became a back-alley customer of almond-eyed whores, a hanger-on in all those clubs in all those cities that Aloysius Fong’d played.
“More!” I cried.
“What? There isn’t any more.”
“I want to know everything!”
“You’re an exigent little tramp, aren’t you?” But he said that after he blew me a kiss. Then he launched into a word game he made up for me.
“First het sex with hermaphrodites in Hyderabad.”
“Jealous jockey jilted in Joliet …”
“Ah, perfect, my pleasing paramour, Deborah! How about … parked with prostitutes playing Parcheesi while his parents performed. Your turn again, my dear.”
“Moi? Let’s see … sultry, suburban, Schenectady schoolgirls studying suspicious signs of …”
“Of what? Of mystic mendicants meditating on meekness?”
“No, meditating on misted-over moons and menacing mango trees and missing mothers!”
But it was just a game of words. It didn’t express what I really felt about mothers discarding daughters. But Frankie’s make-believe Asia of dogs and bats, heat, beggars, police sweeps, corruption, squalor, disease, trans-vestites, prostitutes, crows wheeling low over flat roofs, bony stray cattle ambling down muddy sidewalks, did stir up my desire for what might have been—must have been—a careless hippie mom’s Asia. You see, this is one more side effect of adoption. I can imagine myself into any life; I can wrench myself away from a thousand backgrounds. I can assess damage, then just walk away. Nothing shocked me in Frankie’s tales, nothing seemed absurd or false.
Frankie wasn’t an immigrant the way that Paolo DiMartino had been. No steerage, no crippling gratitude. Ask not what you et cetera; ask what your new country can do for you. Frankie intended to hang on to the fortune he’d made, and not let the mainland or any fool socialist system steal it from him. With Hong Kong about to go down the tubes, he said he’d decided to shift his assets, rebuild an empire and relocate his vast family somewhere within it. Five nations courted the Fongs’ pool of liquid assets. Passports were offered in exchange for new investments. He’d done his homework; he’d scouted London, Vancouver and Toronto, Wellington and Auckland, Sydney and Perth, and chosen cheap and serene New York City.
Why not California, I asked. He favored me with his silky, superior smile. “I might never have met you in Ell-Lay.” Which meant, too many Chinese in California. I might never have noticed him.
He put the complications of the Fong diaspora simply. “I signed; I paid; we filtered south and west,” he said. The “we” included his aging parents, loutish uncles, layabout cousins, and fat-boy hangers-on, most of whom he employed in Fong Home Products or its parent company, Fong Family Growth Fund.
When he handed me the key to my apartment, he joked, “Now you, too, are part of the Fong Family Resettlement Scheme.”
I took the key without argument. Angie, my sister, is still stuck in a one-bedroom four-share in the West Village, and Angie’s twenty-seven. I don’t keep up with the day-to-day politics of Albany let alone of Hong Kong, but I was sure glad that China had timed its takeover for just the moment I came fully into ripeness. I was ready that July. Frankie didn’t have a chance.
The apartment he rented for me was less than a mile from his own ten-bedroom Victorian on Union Avenue, with five