Hotel Honolulu

61 A Chinese Story

Tran, one of the bartenders, was looking past Pinky, through the lounge, at the next building, but he saw hot blue ocean and, without a horizontal seam, hot blue sky. He, too, was thinking of death. But he could hold two whole ideas in his head, and said, "Freshen your drink?"

Pinky's head possessed one crowding idea. In a hissing voice she had told Buddy that she planned to kill him with a razor some night when he was asleep. ("It gave me insomnia," Buddy explained to me.) But after issuing the threat, Pinky spent five days at the hotel, in the Owner's Suite, hiding from him. Glad for the break, Buddy pretended he couldn't find her. She had succeeded in terrifying him — not only the threat, but something in her smile.

"After I kill you they never catch me."

"In your dreams, baby."

This was when she had smiled her wicked, toothy smile.

Speaking like a troubled child to whom everything is logical, she had said, "Because after I kill you, I kill myself."

"Keep an eye on her," Buddy said to me. "She's figured out the perfect crime."

Downstairs, she kept to the bar, always at odd hours. Even when she was doing something as simple as drinking root beer, she stared bug-eyed over the rim of the glass, looking for Buddy; or eating pretzels, she chewed and scanned the doorway; sometimes smiling — though it was never a smile — she was swivelheaded like a feral cat.

Tran had an eye for upset people. He said, "So, you come from the Philippines?"

Skinny and uncertain, she bent over, got smaller on the bar stool, her knobby elbows and knees making her seem suspicious, and even her big teeth were like protruding yellow bones. She had death in her face — murder, suicide, illness, mayhem. She was capable of anything, Tran knew.

"Me, I was on Palawan Island," Tran said.

This fact from the Chinese man made no sense to her. She squinted at her empty glass and went back to her suite. Buddy picked her up. She sobbed, not in sorrow but in confusion, as though her head were full of violent plans. Her fingernails were bitten, her hair clawed into strings. Her small body and loose clothes showed how reckless, how dangerous she might be.

Tran had mentioned the Philippines because Pinky looked so desperate and unhappy. He was sympathetic, moved by misfortune, upset by misery in a way that made him compassionate. He was a good listener, quick with his hands, unflappable — the perfect barman.

Even an expression of slight inconvenience could rouse his pity.

"So did they care that my cable was down for two hours and I missed my soaps?" one bar patron groused.

"So sorry," Tran said.

Another drinker, a local woman who had dropped in, complained that because her daughter's social worker had been late, she had had to spend the night, and "Try sleeping without an air conditioner sometime."

Not having an air conditioner himself made Tran more sympathetic, not less. He lived alone in one room in McCully, behind a Korean bar, with music, screaming, the whine of industrial air conditioners, and foul-smelling noise until two every morning.

"So I'm at the beach," a man said in a suffering voice. "The whole entire afternoon without a drink. The sun's brutal here. Any idea what that's like?"

"Very hard!" Tran said. The man smirked, doubting his sincerity. Tran added, "I once didn't drink for eleven days."

"That's hysterical. How come?"

"Long story." Tran made a face to indicate too long.

"Un cuento Chino, the Spanish say. A Chinese story." The man sipped his drink. "It means a long story."

"Thank you," Tran said. He murmured the expression in order to remember it.

On the King Street bus a man complained to the other passengers, Tran among them, that it was his first time and why was the goddamned bus always stopping? His car was in the garage, he said, having the windows tinted.

Tran offered to change seats with him.

"What good would that do?"

Tran felt that the man who had never taken the bus before was uncomfortable in that seat, and as a regular bus passenger it was his duty to be accommodating.

Another day on the bus, a woman said, "Want to know something? They don't take food stamps for cat food. They could care less if your cat starves."

Tran did not say that he had once eagerly eaten cats. He fumbled in his brown bag and said the woman could have a slice of Spam out of his sandwich for her cat.

"Trixie would just spit that out!"

Tran smiled in confusion.

The woman chanted, "Trixie wants her fish! She's going hungry! You know what that's like?"

"Oh, yes," Tran said, which made the woman snort.

On his shift at the bar one afternoon, he was wiping an outside table at which a man was watching a football game on a small portable television set. The man's wife sat nearby.

"Please?" Tran said, asking permission to wipe around the set.

"Can't you see I'm busy?" the man said, misunderstanding Tran's intention. "Patience is a virtue — anyone ever tell you that?"

Tran smiled. The man was right. Patience was necessary. The man's wife said, "Move the umbrella, okay? I'm boiling in all this sun." As Tran adjusted the umbrella, putting the woman in the shade, she said, "Listen, too much sun can make you real sick."

"Yes, yes," Tran said, returning to wiping the tables. "That is right."

An African American at the bar, drinking Wild Turkey, confided in Tran, saying, "People think that things have changed, but I'm here to tell you that nothing has changed. We seek empowerment. But this is two countries. White and black."

"Yes," Tran said as the man signaled for a new drink with one hand while tipping his glass back to finish it.

"What I want to know is, when are you going to give me my rightful share?"

Tran said, "Anytime."

"You're blowing sunshine up my ass."

Keola heard this. After the man left, he said, "What's he complaining about? We Whyans went cheated out for our land. We worship the Eye- nah. But we got none. That no fair."

"Not fair," Tran said.

"You're standing on my land. Dis my Eye-nah."

Even I complained. "My wife is late again. Is your wife ever late like

that?"

Tran laughed in a miserable sympathizing way. "Got no wife!" A big friendly Chicagoan sat at the bar one night and said to Tran, "I'm a sightseer, but not the usual kind. I want to see something special.

Wherever I go — islands, foreign countries, France, Cancun — people say to me, 'You want to see the ruins? You want to see the museum?"

Tran was smiling, saying yes, as he mixed the man's third mai tai.

"I say the hell with the museum. Take me to your house. I want to see where you live."

"Pow-hanna at five," Tran said, and they went in a taxi to McCully after Tran finished his shift, pau hana.

The man kicked the weeds growing through the cracks in the sidewalk and narrowed his eyes at the Club Lucky Lips sign and said, "I was fifteen when I saw my mother for the first time. Never saw my father. People were paid money to raise me."

"Too bad," Tran said. "I'm sorry."

"My father was a bum. My mother was institutionalized. I went to night school. I own my own company now."

"This is where I live," Tran said, indicating the flat-faced building, the alley, the stairs to his room.

Inside, the man said, "You have no idea how fortunate you are."

"I know. Very lucky."

"Don't let success spoil you." He picked up a coconut shell ashtray and turned it over as if looking for a brand name. "I've never told that story to my children. Who's that of?"

It was a family photo, water-stained, faded, seven people standing and sitting stiffly, taken one day in a studio in Saigon, in 1962. Tran was a boy. The man had mistaken his father for Tran, his mother for Tran's wife.

"My family."

"Lovely family," the man said. "You're lucky. I never had a family."

Except for Tran, all the people in the picture were dead, though Tran didn't say so.

Just married, Tran had left the Mekong Delta in 1978 with his wife and his parents, his two younger brothers and two younger sisters. The boat, not more than forty feet long, held 550 people, all Chinese from Vietnam. It was a five-day trip to Malaysia, where they were turned away by soldiers with rifles. "Guam is America," the captain said, and headed there. After three days at sea there was a terrible noise as the boat hit a

reef and stopped. There was no sign of land, nor even of birds. Eleven days passed, and in that time forty-five people died and their bodies were thrown overboard. The people prayed, they wept, some drank urine. On the twelfth day clouds appeared, rain came down, and a swell lifted the boat. But even under way more people died, thirty-seven more, the rest of Tran's family, and lastly his wife, before they sighted land — an outlying island of the Philippines. The survivors were taken to Palawan, and after three years in a camp, Tran was given permission to enter the United States. Now he was glad to have a phrase for what had happened to him.

"Long story — Chinese story," Tran wanted to say. He said to me, "I can write a book."