Eat a Bowl of Tea. Louis Chu

sudden intensity of the early summer heat had caught everyone unprepared. A few days before, it had been so damp and chilly and windy that Wah Gay had to turn on the gas heater.

      The door creaked open.

      “Nice and cool here,” said the newcomer. He turned and made sure the door closed tight.

      “Thought you went to the race track,” said Wah Gay.

      “I overslept,” replied the man. “Might just as well. On a day like this.” He looked around the room. “Where is everybody? Still early, huh?” He walked over to an easy chair in the corner and sat down. He took out a cigar and lit it. “You know, on a day like this, I think this is the best place in the city. Nice and cool, with natural air conditioning.”

      Lee Gong was slight of build, with silvery black hair. He continued puffing on the Admiration which had been given him at a banquet the night before. He and Wah Gay had come over to America from China on the President Madison together and had shared the confined quarters of Ellis Island as two teen-age immigrants many springs ago.

      In his early days in the United States, Lee Gong worked in various laundries in New York. Later he, himself, owned one in the Bronx. In 1928, he went back to China. He remained there only long enough to marry. Then he returned to the Golden Mountain, leaving his wife in China. He received the news of the birth of his daughter, Mei Oi, several months after he had returned to the United States.

      Some ten years later, he sold his laundry. With the proceeds from the sale of the laundry plus his small savings, he had planned to spend the late evening of his life in the rural quiet of Sunwei. The Sino-Japanese War had prevented him from realizing this long-cherished goal. The unsettled conditions of subsequent years in the Far East, which saw Mao Tse-tung grab control of the Central Government of China from Chiang Kai-shek, had weighed heavily in his decision not to return to Sunwei. While there were intermittent periods of peaceful travel in China for those who wanted it, Lee Gong could not bring himself to see anything permanently stable for a retired Gimshunhock in China. So reluctantly he remained in New York.

      “Ah Song, my boy,” said Lee Gong from his easy chair. “You have good results lately?”

      “What good results? I haven’t been to the tracks for a whole week. No luck and no money.”

      “Ah Song is a smart boy,” said Wah Gay. “He wouldn’t go to the races unless he’s lucky, heh heh.”

      “You go to hell.” Ah Song folded his paper, got up and stretched his arms. He yawned. Yawning was a habit with him, almost as natural as breathing. “It’s so hot you don’t want to move.”

      “You just moved, you sonovabitch,” said Wah Gay.

      Ah Song ignored the remark and started toward the door.

      “Where are you going to die?” Wah Gay called after him. “Be smart. Go get someone down here and start a little game. Where can you go in this hot weather?”

      “To the race tracks!” Ah Song slammed the door behind him.

      Lee Gong went over to the mah-jong table and sat in the chair that Ah Song had just vacated. He picked up the paper. “That sonovabitch Ah Song eats good, dresses good, and he never works!”

      “He’s got what you’d call Life of the Peach Blossoms,” chuckled Wah Gay. “The women like him. He’s a beautiful boy.”

      “Maybe he was born under the right stars.”

      “Three years ago he went to Canada and I’ve heard he married a rich widow from Vancouver and she bought him a car and gave him money.”

      “What has happened to the widow now?” Lee Gong asked, surprised that Ah Song was ever married. As far as he knew, Ah Song was living the life of a bachelor in New York.

      “Nobody knows,” the club house proprietor shook his head. “You know Ah Song’s type. He never tells you anything. I heard he had some trouble with the police out in Portland when they caught him without proper registration for his car two years ago.”

      “I’ve never heard of that,” said Lee Gong. “But you don’t have to go back that far. Just a year ago he was mixed up with that Lao Woo’s wife. Someone saw him and Woo’s wife together around Times Square on a Saturday night. Soon the news got back to the husband, who took the matter up with the elders of the Woo Association. The chairman of the Woo Association sent a representative to see Ah Song …”

      “What happened?”

      “Ah Song was squeezed for $1,000.”

      “Did he pay?”

      “Of course.”

      The afternoon was unusually quiet at the club house, and the two friends found this light talk helped pass the time away.

      “This generation of girls is not what it used to be,” lamented Wah Gay. “In nine cases out of ten, if the girl were good and honest, no trouble would come to her.” Wah Gay got up and started pacing the floor. “You look at this generation of jook sing boys and jook sing girls. They have no respect for elder people. H’mn, they would call you by name. They would call you Lao Lee even though you are almost twice as old as their old man.”

      “Regardless what anybody might say,” put in Lee Gong. The words seemed to flow out of his mouth effortlessly. “Girls born in China are better. They are courteous and modest. Not like these jook sings born in New York. They can tell good from bad.” He paused. The newspaper remained unread on the table. “Summer is coming. You’ll see them running out on the streets almost naked. You could almost see their underpants.”

      They both chuckled.

      The afternoon moved slowly. Even the sidewalk outside was deserted on this hot, sticky day. The perennial voices of children playing, the roar of their roller-skates against the pavement, were missing. An occasional rumble of passing trucks could be heard in the quiet retreat of the Money Come club house.

      “A very deteriorating influence,” continued Lee Gong dryly. “This Western civilization.” He picked up the Chinese Compass again and tried to read it. The only illumination in the room was the circle of light that now played directly on the newspaper. “Nowadays girls go out and get a big belly before they get married.”

      “Heh, heh,” laughed Wah Gay. “What more do you want? One gets a grandchild with a brand new daughter-in-law at the same time.”

      The door swung open.

      Chong Loo, the rent collector, had returned. This time he was without his brief case. Wah Gay had started walking back to the anteroom when he saw Chong Loo enter, and now he came out with an aluminum pot in one hand and a dollar bill in the other.

      “Here,” he said to Chong Loo, “go and get a few cents’ worth of coffee.”

      Chong Loo, beaming, left with the pot and the dollar. In the meantime, Ah Song returned with two companions.

      “You have lucky footsteps today,” greeted Wah Gay. “I thought you said you were going to the race tracks?”

      “I did,” replied Ah Song. “I came back already.”

      “You big gun.”

      From the back room, the club house owner brought out six cups and placed them on the square mah-jong table, which was now covered with old Chinese newspapers serving as a table cloth. He rubbed his palms and bent his head forward a little. “You are lucky. You just walked in and we’re going to serve you coffee!”

      The two men who had just come in with Ah Song were Tuck King, a second cook on his day off, and his roommate, who, because of his generous proportions, was nicknamed Fat Man; but was politely referred to as the Kitchen Master in his presence.

      “We were still sleeping when this sonovabitch Ah Song pounded on the door and woke us up,” the Kitchen Master said. He removed his Panama hat and put it on a hook on the wall. His right hand