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Hsu stood up in greeting. The older man, who had what seemed like a permanent
sour look on his face, didn't. The jeweler said, "I hope you'll let us buy you
lunch while we talk."
"Do I have a choice?" Paul asked.
"There are always choices," Stanley Hsu answered. Paul didn't like the sound
of that. Stanley Hsu went on, "Why don't you sit down? We'll eat lunch, we'll
talk, and we'll see what some of the choices are."
Paul glanced at the rugged young men who'd brought him to the noodle shop. "Is
one of the choices making them disappear?"
Stanley Hsu looked to the older man. That told Paul something about who bossed
whom. The older man jerked a thumb at the door. The four escorts trooped out
without a backward glance. The older man pointed to a chair. Paul sat down.
Stanley Hsu's eyes went to the older man again. The fellow's frown got deeper
as he thought for a moment. Then he nodded. The jeweler said, "This is Mr.
Lee Bob Lee."
"Hello," Paul said. That let him stay polite without saying he was glad to
meet Bob Lee. Was the Chinese man named for the Confederate general? That
would have been funny. Paul wanted to see what he could get out of the men
from the Tongs. He asked, "How is my father? Do you know?"
Once more, Stanley Hsu looked toward Bob Lee. The sour look didn't leave Lee's
face as he answered, "The Germans are treating him pretty well. They're
treating him very well, in fact. We don't know what that means."
One thing it might mean was that Paul's father was telling the Feldgendarmerie
men what they wanted to hear or maybe what they needed to hear. But would he
do that? Paul hoped not, anyway.
After enough .. . persuasion, anybody might say anything. You couldn't blame
someone for that. Before, though? Before was a different story.
The man behind the counter brought everyone at the table big bowls of noodles
piled high with shrimp and scallops and crab meat and three or four kinds of
mushrooms and even more kinds of vegetables. Nobody had asked Paul if that was
what he wanted, but it looked good. The man gave Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee
chopsticks. He started to hand Paul a fork. "I can use chopsticks, too," Paul
said.
The man blinked, but handed him a pair. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each
other. Lee rattled off a few words in Chinese. If they didn't mean, This I
gotta see, Paul would have been amazed.
/'// show 'em, he thought. He'd been using chopsticks in Chinese and Japanese
and Vietnamese restaurants since he was a little kid. He dug in. He might not
have been quite so neat as the two Chinese men with him, but he had no
trouble. The food disappeared. It tasted as good as it looked.
He'd got halfway down the bowl before he noticed the jeweler and the older man
staring at him. That was when he realized showing he could use chopsticks
might have been a mistake. "You weren't kidding,"
Stanley Hsu said.
Paul swallowed a mouthful. "Should I have been?"
"I don't know," the jeweler said. "I can't remember the last time I saw . . .
someone who wasn't
Chinese or Japanese, I suppose who could handle chopsticks like that."
"I never have," Bob Lee said flatly. "Never."
This was an alternate. They did things differently here. Not all the things
they did differently were obvious.
People who weren't Asian went to Chinese restaurants here. Paul had seen that.
But evidently they ate with knife and fork when they did. Who would notice
something like that. . . till it tripped him up?
"They aren't that hard to learn," Paul said.
Stanley Hsu looked down at the chopsticks in his own hand. "Maybe not," he
said, but he didn't sound as if he believed it.
Bob Lee rattled off several sentences in Chinese. Stanley Hsu answered in the
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same language. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, though they
didn't forget their food. Finally, Bob Lee went back to
English: "I think they are easy to learn, too. But I am old enough to be your
father almost old enough to be your grandfather and I have never seen
Americans or Germans take to them the way you do. You have your tools, we have
ours and not everyone in Chinatown uses chopsticks, either."
"You're Americans, too, aren't you?" Paul said.
Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other yet again. "Yes and no," the
jeweler said after a moment.
"We are American, yes, but we are also something different."
"Something more," Lee added. He might have said, Something better. He didn't
quite, but he might have.
Thoughtfully, Stanley Hsu said, "Young Mr. Gomes also seems to be something
more, if not in the same way we are. The way he eats argues for that, don't
you think?"
Paul wished he'd never heard of chopsticks. He would have thrown them down and
gone back to the fork had he thought it would do any good. Since he thought it
would only make things worse, he went on eating the way he'd started. He'd
lost his appetite for the seafood, which was a shame.
"Where are you from, anyhow?" Stanley Hsu asked him. His tone was just like
Lucy's when she'd asked him the same question.
He gave the jeweler the same answer he'd given Lucy, too: "Me? Thirty-third
Avenue, in the Sunset
District."
Stanley Hsu's head and Bob Lee's went back and forth in exactly the same
rhythm: left, right, left, right, left. It would have got a laugh on a TV
sitcom. Sitting here where they could do whatever they wanted to him, Paul
didn't think they were funny at all. Lee said, "You could be from a lot of
different places, Mr.
Gomes. Wherever you are from, though, that isn't it." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]