“Sherrie,” he says, sitting down now at his desk, “she’s the best at many things, but I know people tend to hold their tongues around her. She’s so intelligent and attractive. Most people don’t handle that package well. Even some reporters cower a little with her. They get awed and start asking questions they think she’d like to answer.”
“They do the same with you,” I say.
“I believe that ended as of last week.”
“Don’t worry about our people,” I offer. “We’re just wondering like everyone else why this happened. Everyone is devastated. We can’t see any good reasons.”
John laughs bitterly, his head in his hands. “What are the bad ones, my friend?”
After a moment of quiet he pulls the bottom drawer and retrieves a folded green-and-white computer printout markered in Eduardo’s hand. I take it in my hands. Somehow it’s been retrieved from the fire, though I notice that it doesn’t at all smell of smoke. He pushes it to me. It is a listing of names and addresses, names and ages of children, occupation, name and address of business or businesses, estimated yearly income, nationality, year-to-date dollar figures, percentage changes. Then, to the far right, double-underlined, the dollar amounts.
“What Eduardo was working on,” John says softly, his voice lower, honorific. “What I ask you to do for us now. Before you look too much you must say yes or no. Say yes, my friend. Say yes to me tonight.”
I tell them cash is acceptable. Please nothing else. Checks, lottery tickets, diamond stud earrings, cases of fruit, VSOP cognac, tubs of fresh tofu, and all other wares will be returned or donated or else thrown away. The money comes in weekly, some of them giving as much as $250 and $500, others as little as $10. Most give fifty. We welcome them all. Ten dollars a week is what it takes to start, ten dollars for the right of knowing a someone in the city for you who are yet nobody. But then no one, no matter the amount, has his ear over another. It matters only that you give what you can. You give with honor and indomitable spirit. You remain loyal. True. These are the simple rules of his house.
He knows all the givers. He continually memorizes and re-memorizes the entire listing of contributors, every one of the nearly two thousand, the feat itself awesome, and then he learns the names of newcomers every Monday morning, so that if just one of them were to bump into him at a dumpling cart or street festival he’d know something about them, that they own a wholesale fabric store or a wig shop, that they have a boy and a girl and a brand-new baby, that they are doing well, better probably than they hoped, just a little better every year.
The Korean money funnels in mostly through the dozens of churches across the metropolitan area. We have connections to most of them, not just from Queens and the other boroughs but from Nassau and Westchester and Bergen counties. The network isn’t so good yet in Connecticut. Maybe Connecticut Koreans are too distant, perhaps they think they have more money or class than other Koreans. They send their kids to private day schools and drive expensive 4X4s and they belong to country clubs that have no blacks and no Jews. They’re too far away from the city, the grimy little shops, the sweat merchants they used to be and know. They think they’ve escaped. They think they don’t need John Kwang.
The church money arrives in bundled manila envelopes from Christian congregations called Presbyterian Glory, Heaven on Earth, Korean Fellowship of Devotion, Building Up The Christ, from Korean Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Evangelicals, even Lutherans. The only missing variety is Episcopalian, the C of E never reaching us, or else never trying. They will never know the devotion they missed.
The rest of the money comes addressed directly to me, to a name of my choosing. Eduardo used his own name, but John wants me to have an alias. So I decide they should write care of a Mr. Dennis. I receive hundreds of small white envelopes each week, some delivered by hand, and there is extra money inside them lately, money for Mr. Fermin. Rest in peace, Eduardo, a handwritten note reads, a five-dollar bill stapled to it. Other bills clipped, bills taped, money falling out to the floor. The writing is in pidgin English and Spanish and Mandarin and then languages I have never seen. I collect this and other monies to bring to his mother, who asked at the funeral that they receive no more from us. She feels funny, she tells me. I will take it to her anyway, jam the money under their steel door.
I use Eduardo’s spreadsheets on the notebook computer John bought him last Christmas. I work alone in the Kwangs’ basement late at night. I black out the basement windows with thick muslin. I leave on one dull light in the corner. I work mostly in silence. The one bug silence. Then the hum of the machine. The phone rings and I stop everything. I pick it up and it’s Janice. She wonders how I’ve been. No one sees me anymore. Have I gone up and died?
I do the same thing every night. I enter the giving in vertical rows. I have the machine sort the figures into two dozen categories. Every way it comes out I add it up, recompiling every bit of information we have to date. I have steadily become a compiler of lives. I am writing a new book of the land.
Like John Kwang, I am remembering every last piece of them. Whether I wish it or not, I possess them, their spouses and children, their jobs and money and life. And the more I see and remember, the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I have lost my old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral graves I have left on a hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed.
Near morning, I print out what I have done in one long continuous sheet, the way he prefers to read the thick stack of names. He says it doesn’t seem right all broken up. This is a family, he reminds me, grasping it with both hands.
He models our program on the ggeh. A Korean money club. Small ggeh, like the one my father had, work because the members all know each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up. Reputation is always worth more than money. In this sense we are all related. The larger ggeh depend solely on this notion, that the lessons of the culture will be stronger than a momentary lack, can subdue any individual weakness or want. This the power lovely and terrible, what we try to engender in Kwang’s giant money club, our huge ggeh for all. What John says it is about.
My father would have thought him crazy to run a ggeh with people other than just our own. Spanish people? Indians? Vietnamese? How could you trust them? Then even if you could, why would you? If my father had possessed the words, he would have said the whole enterprise was bad hubris. But in his own language, the one of fruit stand and cash register, he’d simply make his face of disbelief, then throw up his hands and try hard not to think of it again, the idea that someone as smart as Kwang would so waste his time.
In our ggeh, if you give a few dollars you can expect to receive a few hundred. The more you give, the more you can ask for; everyone comes to learn what’s a fair amount. You send a letter. Then you come at night and you make your request. You spoke with Eduardo, who in the beginning spoke to John. Now you will simply speak to me. Bring an interpreter or phrase book. Everything is in private, we deal like family, among ourselves, without chits or contracts. This is why I must see your face, hear your voice, make certain that you live how you say. It doesn’t matter what your color is, whether your breath reeks of garlic or pork fat or chilis. Just bring your wife or your husband, bring your children. If you want a down payment on a store, bring the owner of the store you work in now. Bring your daughter who wants to attend Columbia, bring her transcripts and civics essay and have her bring her violin. Bring X-rays of your mother who needs a new hip. I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to know the blood you’ve lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately want back from the world.