I smiled at him.
“Yeah, but Mary is, you know, a Betty,” said Ted, with a doubtful glance at me. “The actress in this role needs to be really hot.”
“Esther’s really hot.” John added to me, “No disrespect intended.”
“No problem.” I appreciated John’s support, but I hadn’t taken offense at Ted’s comment. This was business, not personal, and actors need to know what people see when they look at us. My looks are all right, but I’m no Hollywood bombshell. On the other hand, I also knew that what Ted was seeing right now was an incomplete picture. I didn’t have any of my headshots with me, and I certainly wasn’t dressed for an audition—let alone to try out for the role of a “really hot” love interest.
So I said to Ted, “Look, I came here through sleet and snow, at the end of a long day of pounding the pavement, and then I wound up in the middle of your aunt’s violent brawl with a hooker and a corpse. So you’re not seeing me at my most attractive. Put me in good makeup and hair, with the right clothes, and I can play a Betty.” And when I did my reading for him, I would convince him by showing up dressed for the role.
“I think you look nice,” said John.
“Well, I suppose I really do need to recast that part,” Ted said unhappily. “Mary says there’s no way she can come back to work. Her broken leg was just one thing too many.”
“I’m not surprised,” John said. “She’s a trooper, but she’s really had a rough time lately.”
“So I guess I should hear you read, Esther,” Ted concluded with unflattering reluctance.
I smiled warmly at him. I wanted work more than I wanted flattery, after all. “Great!”
We agreed to meet late the following afternoon on the set where Ted hoped to resume filming soon. It was a loft on Hester Street, which served as the main character’s apartment in the film.
Then John, who was scanning the crowd, drew in a quick breath. “Look who just arrived.”
Ted followed his gaze, then said with pleasure, “Oh, good, he’s here.”
Other people in the hall were also murmuring about the new arrival, as were members of the Yee family.
Lily paused in her conversation with Max to look in the same direction as everyone else. I noticed that her warm, animated expression suddenly grew cold.
Ted whispered to John, just loud enough for me to hear, “I really need to talk to him.”
Quite curious by now, I watched as the crowd parted to let a short, homely, plump older man in a cheap suit approach the coffin to pay his respects. He bowed three times before Benny with his palms pressed together, then paused at the altar before coming over to greet Grace Yee and her family.
My business with Ted was concluded, so I was reluctant to continue intruding on the family. I tugged on John’s arm to pull him some distance away from them. Max remained with Lily, whose gaze was fixed coolly on the new arrival. It was clear from everyone’s behavior that he was an important man. Grace Yee seemed particularly pleased to see him. Despite her sore leg, she rose from her chair to speak with him.
“Who is he?” I murmured.
“Uncle Six.” John’s answer made me think of Fleming’s Double-Oh-Seven or Star Trek’s Seven-of-Nine.
“Who?”
He smiled. “It’s what people call him. Real name, Joe Ning. He’s head of the Five Brothers tong.”
“Ah.”
“‘Uncle’ is respectful, a way of saying he’s everyone’s benefactor. And six is a good number. It represents wealth, prosperity, and success in business.”
“He doesn’t look wealthy and successful,” I noted.
“He’s one of the most powerful men in Chinatown,” said John. “But he’s traditional. He’s ruthless about maintaining his power, but he doesn’t flaunt his wealth.”
I noticed that Uncle Six was soft-spoken and his manner was humbly courteous. He took time to speak to each member of the Yee family. Due to Max’s proximity to Lily, Uncle Six even made a point of patting Nelli on the head. She accepted this cheerfully, then went back to looking around the room with interest.
When Uncle Six greeted Lily, I was surprised by how friendly she seemed; it was a contrast to the negative way she’d reacted to his arrival. I supposed she didn’t want to slight such an important man, especially not when the rest of the family seemed so pleased by his arrival.
Now that he was closer to us, I could see his features more clearly. His face was chubby and a bit froglike, but there was nothing cute about it. His eyes were too shrewd and intense for that—and also cold, even when he smiled, as he was doing now. Watching him as he spoke with more members of the family, I found it easy to believe that Uncle Six was a ruthless man.
“He’s showing a lot of respect, spending this much time with them,” said John. “It’s a little surprising, since he didn’t like Benny. But it’s good for the family. They’re regaining some of the face they lost when Benny’s girlfriend showed up and Mrs. Yee jumped her. Plus there was this whole thing with a white girl flying through the air and landing on the corpse.”
“You’d have had another body to embalm if I hadn’t done that.”
“True. And killing someone at a wake is such bad manners, the Yees would never be able to regain face if you hadn’t walloped Grace and tackled the girl.”
“I didn’t wallop . . .” I realized he was kidding and rolled my eyes at him. “Anyhow, surely going to prison would have mattered more than losing face?” Having recently been jailed, I had strong feelings on the matter.
“Not around here. Almost nothing matters more than losing face,” John said seriously. “If anything, it’s a custom that’s even stronger in Chinatown today than it was back in the old country. You can survive a prison sentence, or the death of a family member, or anything else as long as you still have face. But without face, life is very tough in Chinatown. And the Yee family is well established, so they have a lot of status to protect. It’s a lot more visible to everyone in the community if they lose face than if a penniless, unknown sweatshop worker with no connections does.”
“Hmm. So maybe Mrs. Yee thought she’d lose more face by letting Benny’s overdressed girlfriend weep over his body in front of all these people than by clobbering the girl in the middle of her husband’s wake,” I suggested.
John smiled and shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe for a few minutes there, Mrs. Yee just wasn’t thinking at all. She’s got a hot temper, after all.”
“So I gathered.” I changed the subject. “By the way, thank you for introducing me to Ted.”
“You’re welcome. I think it would be fun to have you on the film.”
I asked a little more about the Yees and learned that Lily’s late husband, Benny’s younger brother, had died of cancer several years ago, after a long battle with the illness. He had been a successful merchant who’d left Lily a thriving Chinatown souvenir shop that was bequeathed to him by his father—who had cut Benny out of his will for being involved in the criminal world.
It seemed like a complicated family. But as John had said, most things in Chinatown were complicated.
Uncle Six finished paying his respects to the Yee family, then started to mingle with the crowd. He was obviously very well-known around here. I saw Danny Teng approach him and, from then on, stick to him like a burr, which the old man accepted as if accustomed to it. But I also saw perfectly respectable-looking people warmly greet and chat with Uncle Six, and I recalled what John had said about the complex nature of Chinatown’s tongs.
Ted joined me and John then, and the three of us talked a little about his movie. It was called ABC and was the story of Brian, a young man trying to find his own path as a first-generation American in a Chinese immigrant family. His conflict was represented by his attraction to two very different women: Mei, a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) immigrant living and working in Chinatown, who represented the Old World that Brian found restrictive; and Alicia, a modern American woman who represented the New World and freedom.