{Sketches of Chinatown}
A Morning at Sing Wah Bakery
The dirty white plaster walls and sun-faded storefront of Sing Wah blend the bakery in with the many other time-worn establishments of Stockton Street. Entire chunks of the red lettering on the windows of Sing Wah are gone, resembling Tibetan script gone askew more so than traditional Chinese.
Sing Wah is famous for its fragrant green onion bread and crisp yellow egg tarts. On a wet April morning in the year 1978, the ovens were heated for the first time and brought to life lumps of dough that would change the smells of Stockton street forever.
On a Wednesday morning, the store is brimming with old people. Aside from the preschooler who toddles in with his harried-looking father for a quick grab-and-go, youngest patron in the store will be the man who was thirteen years old when Mao Zedong’s little red books were distributed for the first time.
Elderly men wearing flat caps and muted windbreakers are scattered in the front tables of the shop. They hold newspapers, but do not read them. They make small talk about family and work, voicing the same questions they’ve asked for the last thirty years, since they first started coming to this bakery as off-duty waiters, laundrymen, shopkeepers, and security guards.
How is your back feeling?
How has business been for you these days? Did you hear about the accident this morning?
Did you know they’re planning to raise the price again?
The answers are given, and quickly forgotten, for it is not what is voiced that bonds these men together. It is the act of sitting together, a tiny pleasure before a day’s worth of labor that forges bridges between the hearts of these men.
A single table of elderly women sits in the back. Unshared memories lie between them: of stuffing cash won from Mahjong games under cheap mattresses, brewing bitter black soup for sick children, silent meals with their husbands, and the rods that their mothers used to beat them with. Yet they find much to exchange –
tales of how they have been wronged
for trying to tell the truth to their daughter-in-laws, the nightly delinquencies of their neighbors’ daughters,
black men with the low riding pants who ride the same bus as them, the progress of their grandchildren’s teething,
and the pains in their gums.
...
Pigeons and Granny Gamblers
It is high noon at New Chinatown Park. The fat pigeons waddle, moving only slightly faster than the tennis ball rollers that roll inches behind them. They cluster all around the park, clogging up the concrete space with their feathered bosoms and flapping wings.
Second in population size at this city park are the elderly women with penciled eyebrows and brimmed hats, who sit on overturned Berkeley Farm milk crates from the settling of the morning sun to the beginning of its departure. Four of women congregate around each cardboard box. Their jade bracelets, which dangle from their frail wrists, slap against the cardboard as they deal. The conversations of the Granny gamblers are in loud, casual Toisanese.
“Ai yah, I’m just so unlucky today. It’s probably because of my new-daughter in law, she brings bad luck to the family. She can’t do anything right, and expects my son to cook for the family. You’re lucky, your daughter in law can cook so well.”
“Can you pass me that one? Can you tell Yip that I won’t be coming by for Mahjong tomorrow? I have to see my grandkid’s ribbon performance. I don’t think she dances very prettily, but my son told me her coach has many praises for her talent.”
“Hey, it’s your turn. Where was I? Oh right, so I was telling her, does he know he’s adopted? He should know. That would help him know his place in the family. It’s such a shame to see their family like this.”
...
How My Uncle and Aunt Met My Aunt and Uncle
Before colors of night start blending into the afternoon sky, and as the last customer is finishing his dinner, my aunt and uncle start preparing for the next day. Yee Ma swipes water over the edges of the circular dumpling skin in the background as Yee Jerng pours hot tea onto the restaurant tables, wiping the plastic covers down with a discolored rag. Yee Jerng’s eyes continue to watch the tin kettle in his right hand as he recounts a time forty years ago, in a faraway place called Toisan.
“Every day, your aunt would walk by our house, which was next to the only well in our village. She would be with her brother, who stood out with his factory made shoes and sunrise Hawaiian shirt.”
Distracted by the shrill steam of the soup kettle, my uncle trailed off. I see my aunt in the background set down the half-filled dumpling skin and head toward the stove. As Yee Jerng went on to weave the next scene of how he stood at the Hawaiian airport terminal, dark skinned and clueless as he answered the questions that one asks of a Chinese immigrant, my mind couldn’t help but wander back to that scene of my Yee Ma, perhaps even more docile at the age of 16, pulling out a wooden bucket from the well as 23 year old Yee Jerng watched her from the glassless window of his concrete hut.
...
The People of Muni Bus 8x
At the front of the bus, sits a middle aged woman. She is white and looks to be in her early fifties. She speaks only to the bus driver, a middle aged white man, and talks only of ingrates. Though her voice is sharp and loud, there’s no rancor in her opinions as she talks about all that unions have done for the city and the people of the city who don’t support unions. In her youth, she spent fighting the man, but now she’s just upset with men. The bus driver occasionally responds with a monosyllabic word or grunt. In the seats next to her are an elderly Chinese man and woman mired in a distant past. They swap stories in accented Cantonese of what they had been doing when the Japanese invaded. It’s unclear, whether they are talking to escape the mundane of the present or because their hearts are still mired in a distant past.
The riders of Muni bus 8x sit within the same bus, but each race seems a million miles apart as the bus drives through the dark of the night, bringing fleeting beacons of light to the streets of San Francisco.