“One time a muhnt!” the Korean insisted.
The man shook his head and mouthed, “Bullshit.” He explained he’d originally come to get an exchange, but the owner was so rude and hard to understand (intentionally, he thought) that he decided to demand a full refund instead. He wasn’t going to leave until he got one. He showed us the receipt. Kwang nodded and then gestured for the storekeeper to speak with him inside the store. I waited outside with the customer. I remember him particularly well because his name, Henry, was embossed on a tag clipped to his shirt pocket. When I told him my name he smiled weakly and looked in the store for Kwang. I didn’t say anything else and he coughed and adjusted his glasses and said he was tired and frustrated and just wanted his money or an exchange so he could get on home. He was a salesman at the big discount office furniture store off 108th Street.
“I don’t know why I keep shopping here,” he said to me, searching the wares in the bins. “It’s mostly junk anyway. My wife kind of enjoys the jewelry, though, and it’s pretty inexpensive, I suppose. Buying a watch here was my mistake. I should know better. Thirteen ninety-nine. And I know I wasn’t born yesterday.”
We laughed a little. Henry explained that it was easy to stop here on Fridays to buy something for his wife, a pair of earrings or a bracelet. “She works real hard all week and I like to give her a little present, to let her know I know what’s going on.” She was a registered nurse. He showed me a five-dollar set of silver earrings. “I was gonna buy these, but I don’t know, you don’t expect anybody to be nice anymore, but that man in there, he can be cold.”
I didn’t try to explain the store owner to Henry, or otherwise defend him. I don’t know what stopped me. Maybe there was too much to say. Where to begin?
Certainly my father ran his stores with an iron attitude. It was amazing how successful he still was. He generally saw his customers as adversaries. He disliked the petty complaints about the prices, especially from the customers in Manhattan. “Those millionaires is biggest trouble,” he often said when he got home. “They don’t like anybody else making good money.” He hated explaining to them why his prices were higher than at other stores, even the other Korean ones, though he always did. He would say without flinching that his produce was simply the best. The freshest. They should shop at other stores and see for themselves. He tried to put on a good face, but it irked him all the same.
With blacks he just turned to stone. He never bothered to explain his prices to them. He didn’t follow them around the aisles like some storekeepers do, but he always let them know there wasn’t going to be any funny business here. When a young black man or woman came in — old people or those with children in tow didn’t seem to alarm him — he took his broom and started sweeping at the store entrance very slowly, deliberately, not looking at the floor. He wouldn’t make any attempt to hide what he was doing. At certain stores there were at least two or three incidents a day. Shoplifting, accusations of shoplifting, complaints and arguments. Always arguments.
To hear those cries now: the scene a stand of oranges, a wall of canned ham. I see my father in his white apron, sleeves rolled up. A woman in a dirty coat. They lean in and let each other have it, though the giving is almost in turns. It’s like the most awful and sad opera, the strong music of his English, then her black English; her colorful, almost elevated, mocking of him, and his grim explosions. They fight like lovers, scarred, knowing. Their song circular and vicious. For she always comes back the next day, and so does he. It’s like they are here to torture each other. He can’t afford a store anywhere else but where she lives, and she has no other place to buy a good apple or a fresh loaf of bread.
In the end, after all those years, he felt nothing for them. Not even pity. To him a black face meant inconvenience, or trouble, or the threat of death. He never met any blacks who measured up to his idea of decency; of course he’d never give a man like Henry half a chance. It was too risky. He personally knew several merchants who had been killed in their stores, all by blacks, and he knew of others who had shot or killed someone trying to rob them. He had that one close call himself, of which he never spoke.
For a time, he tried not to hate them. I will say this. In one of his first stores, a half-wide fruit and vegetable shop on 173rd Street off Jerome in the Bronx, he hired a few black men to haul and clean the produce. I remember my mother looking worried when he told her. But none of them worked out. He said they either came to work late or never and when they did often passed off fruit and candy and six-packs of beer to their friends. Of course, he never let them work the register.
Eventually, he replaced them with Puerto Ricans and Peruvians. The “Spanish” ones were harder working, he said, because they didn’t speak English too well, just like us. This became a kind of rule of thumb for him, to hire somebody if they couldn’t speak English, even blacks from Haiti or Ethiopia, because he figured they were new to the land and understood that no one would help them for nothing. The most important thing was that they hadn’t been in America too long.
I asked Henry instead if he had known of Kwang before. He didn’t, not caring much for politics or politicians. “But you know,” he said, “he’s not like all the other Koreans around here, all tense and everything.”
When they returned, the shop owner approached Henry and nodded very slightly, in the barest bow, and offered him another watch, this one boxed in clear plastic. “I give you betteh one!” he said, indicating the higher price on the sticker. “Puh-rease accept earring too. Pfor your wifuh. No chargeh!”
Henry looked confused and was about to decline when John Kwang reached over and vigorously shook his hand, pinning the jewelry there. “This is a gift,” he said firmly. “Mr. Baeh would like you to accept it.”
Henry shook our hands and left for home. As we waited for the traffic to pass so we could pull away from the curb, I saw Baeh inside his tiny store shaking his head as he quickly hung handbags. Every third or fourth one he banged hard against the plastic display grid. He wouldn’t look back out at us. Kwang saw him, too. We drove a few blocks before he said anything.
“He knows what’s good for us is good for him,” Kwang said grimly. “He doesn’t have to like it. Right now, he doesn’t have any choice.”
At the time I didn’t know what Kwang meant by that last notion, what kind of dominion or direct influence he had over people like Baeh. I only considered the fact of his position and stature in the community as what had persuaded the storekeeper to deal fairly with Henry. I assumed Baeh was honoring the traditional Confucian structure of community, where in each village a prominent elder man heard the townspeople’s grievances and arbitrated and ruled. Though in that world Baeh would have shown displeasure only in private. He would have acted as the dutiful younger until the wise man was far down the road.
But respect is often altered or lost in translation. Here on 39th Avenue of old Queens, in the mixed lot of peoples, respect (and honor and kindness) is a matter of margins, what you can clear on a $13.99 quartz watch, or how much selling it takes to recover when you give one away. I knew that Mr. Baeh would stay open late tonight, maybe for no more of a chance than to catch the dance club overflow a full five hours later, drunk and high kids who might blow a few bucks on one of his gun-metal rings or satin scarves or T-shirts. The other merchants on the block would do the same. The Vietnamese deli, the West Indian takeout. Stay open. Keep the eyes open. You are your cheapest labor. Here is the great secret, the great mystery to an immigrant’s success, the dwindle of irredeemable hours beneath the cheap tube lights. Pass them like a machine. Believe only in chronology. This will be your coin-small salvation.