"Quiet," his father snapped. "Don't draw attention to us."
The boy hit the horn once more.
Chang glanced toward his son, the boy's lean face, the long hair, which fell well below his ears. He asked in a harsh whisper, "The van . . . how did you learn to start it that way?"
"What does it matter?" the boy asked.
"Tell me."
"I heard somebody talking about it at school."
"No, you're lying. You've done it before."
"I only steal from party undersecretaries and commune bosses. That'd be all right with you, wouldn't it?"
"You do what?"
But the boy grinned in a snide way and Chang understood he was joking. The comment, though, was cruelly intended; it was a reference to Chang's anticommunist political writings, which had caused the family so much pain in China--and necessitated the flight to America itself.
"Who do you spend time with, thieves?"
"Oh, Father." The boy shook his head, a condescending gesture, and Chang wanted to slap him.
"And what did you have that knife for?" Chang asked.
"A lot of people have knives. Yeye has one." This was the affectionate term for "grandfather," which many Chinese children used.
"That's a penknife for cleaning pipes," Chang said, "not a weapon." He finally lost his temper. "How can you be so disrespectful?" he shouted.
"If I didn't have the knife," the boy answered angrily, "and if I didn't know how to start the engine we'd probably be dead now."
The traffic sped up and William fell into a moody silence.
Chang turned away, feeling as if he'd been physically assaulted by the boy's words, by this very different side of his son. Oh, certainly there'd been problems with William in the past. As he'd neared his late teens he'd grown sullen and angry and withdrawn. His attendance at school dropped. When he'd brought home a letter from his teacher reprimanding him for bad grades Chang had confronted the boy--whose intelligence had been tested and was far higher than average. William had said that it wasn't his fault. He was persecuted at school and treated unfairly because his father was a dissident who'd flouted the one-child rule, spoke favorably about Taiwanese independence and--the worst sacrilege of all--was critical of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, and its hard-line views on freedom and human rights. Both he and his younger brother were taunted regularly by "superbrats," youngsters who, as only children in comfortable rich and middle-class Communist families, were spoiled by hordes of doting relatives and tended to bully other students. It didn't help that William was named after the most famous American entrepreneur in recent years, and young Ronald for a U.S. president.
But neither his behavior, nor this explanation for it, had seemed to Chang very serious and he hadn't paid much mind to his son's moods. Besides, it was Mei-Mei's task to rear the children, not his.
Why was the boy suddenly behaving so differently?
But then Chang realized that between working ten hours a day at a print shop and engaging in his dissident activities for most of the night, he'd spent virtually no time with his son--not until the voyage from Russia to Meiguo. Perhaps, he thought with a chill, this is how the boy always behaved.
For a moment he felt another burst of anger--though only partially directed toward William himself. Chang couldn't tell exactly what he was furious at. He stared at the crowded streets for a few moments then said to his son, "You're right. I wouldn't have been able to start the car myself. Thank you."
William didn't acknowledge that his father had even spoken and hunched over the wheel, lost in his own thoughts.
Twenty minutes later they were in Chinatown, driving down a broad road that was named in both Chinese and English, "Canal Street." The rain was letting up and there were many people on the sidewalks, which were lined with hundreds of grocery and souvenir shops, fish markets, jewelry stores, bakeries.
"Where should we go?" William asked.
"Park there," Chang instructed and William pulled the van to a curb. Chang and Wu climbed out. They walked into a store and asked the clerk about the neighborhood associations--tongs. These organizations were usually made up of people from common geographic areas in China. Chang was seeking a Fujianese tong, since the two families were from the province of Fujian. They would not, Chang assumed, be welcomed in a tong with roots in Canton, where most of the early Chinese immigrants had come from. But he was surprised to learn that much of Manhattan's Chinatown was now heavily populated with people from Fujian and many of the Cantonese had moved away. There was a major Fujianese tong only a few blocks away.
Chang and Wu left the families in the stolen van and walked through the crowded streets until they found the place. Painted red and sporting a classic Chinese bird-wing roof, the dingy three-story building might have been transported here directly from the shabby neighborhood near the North Bus Station in Fuzhou.
The men stepped inside the tong headquarters quickly, with their heads down, as if the people lounging about in the lobby of the building were about to pull out cell phones and call the INS--or the Ghost--to report their arrival.
*
Jimmy Mah, wearing a gray suit dusted with cigarette ash and about to burst at the seams, greeted them and invited them into his upstairs office.