Mambo in Chinatown Read online

  The last time, I’d only been a receptionist at the accounting firm for a few days. The company was small and cheap, and when they needed an important package delivered to Midtown, they’d sent me instead of hiring a courier. Big mistake. As always, I got lost looking for the right bus. When I finally found it, I realized I’d left my wallet back at the office. Determined not to fail, I walked all the way to my destination. But when I finally arrived, I looked down at the thick manila envelope I was supposed to deliver and it was a stained and crumpled mess. I’d been kneading it as I worried my way there. And I was fired again.

  “You may have changed by now. It’s been a while.” Lisa bobbed her head up and down, to show how sure she was of this possibility.

  “I doubt it.” But despite myself, I glanced up at Ma’s photos. A dance studio was a magical place; it represented Ma’s passion and talents. She’d died when Lisa was only three, but we both grew up poring over her photos. Ma, incredibly young at seventeen, in a dress of embroidered silk, poised on one leg with her body turned to the camera, a white fan flicked open above her head. An old Chinese newspaper clipping of a line of star dancers from the Beijing Dance Academy at a diplomatic event. Ma in the foreground, dressed in a dramatic costume from the Beijing Opera, curtseying to the white man in a suit.

  Lisa didn’t remember Ma at all, but I did. Ma had never danced again in public after coming to the U.S. with Pa. She couldn’t speak English, didn’t know anyone in the dance world, hadn’t understood how the system here worked, and soon, her life had been swallowed by hard labor. But she’d trained me. There was only a few feet of space available to us, but Ma was determined. During the week, she worked long hours as a waitress at the noodle restaurant with Pa. As soon as she had a day off, she would push all of the apartment’s furniture aside and teach me while Pa stood in the doorway.

  I suppose it wasn’t so much dancing as exercises she taught me. Stretches, handstands, push-ups, pirouettes, anything we could do in the limited space. I’m sure I wasn’t very good but I felt strong and limber with Ma’s hands correcting me, gentle but firm, pushing my hips, my arms, my neck into place. It was one of the few times I didn’t feel like a failure at everything. Ma became someone else when we trained, someone fierce and merciless.

  “We must do this now, while you’re still young,” she said. “This flexibility, this strength, will always belong to you.”

  I remember wondering why Pa always stayed to watch us even though his face was so sad.

  Underneath Ma’s photos stood a large jar labeled “Broadway Money” in Lisa’s rounded handwriting. We’d pasted ads for different shows all around the sides. It was partially filled with bills and loose change. Lisa and I had been saving for years to go to a Broadway show with Pa. Seeing the dancers would bring Ma back to Pa, if only for an hour or two, we thought. Since we weren’t sure when we’d have enough for tickets for all three of us, we hadn’t decided on the show yet. I’d counted the money recently and we had just enough for a ticket for one person.

  I looked again at the employment ad. Imagine working in a dance studio. I’d be able to watch the dancers every day.

  Lisa’s voice broke into my thoughts. “They’re interviewing on Monday. What do you have to lose?”

  —

  I woke to the slight sounds of Pa moving around in our kitchenette. It was Sunday and Pa and I had the day off. There was no door, only an archway between the living room, where we slept, and the tiny kitchen, which contained the altars to Ma and our ancestors. Pa always made breakfast for Ma’s spirit, even though it’d been eight years since she’d passed away. In fact, we never ate anything at home before putting it in front of Ma’s altar and offering it to her first. On the altar was a close-up framed photo of her young face. Pa was lighting incense now and murmuring, “Here’s your tea, dear one.”

  By the time Lisa and I had put away my mattress and all of the bedding, Pa had finished making egg drop soup and put our bowls on a small table in front of Ma’s altar. Lisa and I went into the kitchen to bow to Ma and light incense for the gods. After Ma’s spirit had eaten, we took the bowls into the living room and sat down at the plastic table to have our own breakfast.

  As the oldest female in the house, I should have been doing most of the housework, but from the time I was a small girl I’d shown myself to be incapable of learning any domestic task Ma had tried to teach me. I burned myself whenever I tried to cook, and even after I’d swept the floor as well as I could, Ma had to do it again. Luckily, Pa was a great cook and we sometimes brought home leftovers from the restaurant. He didn’t seem to mind the way I was, although Uncle Henry and Aunt Monica often reprimanded him for spoiling me.

  As the three of us sat around the fold-up table, I stirred my soup to cool it, first clockwise, then counter.

  Pa shook his head. “Some say for good luck, you need to stir clockwise. Some say counterclockwise. But doing both at random is definitely wrong.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just had something on my mind. Pa, do you think someone could fill in for me tomorrow afternoon?”

  He looked up, concerned. “Why? Are you sick?”

  “Job interview.” I knew we needed every cent the two of us could bring in together. A wave of guilt washed over me at the thought of losing good money for this interview, when I wouldn’t be hired anyway. I started shaking my head. “I don’t need to—”

  “No, no,” Pa said. “That’s good, very good. You deserve a better life. What is the company?”

  Lisa and I exchanged glances. “Computers,” she said.

  “They’re very well known,” I added. We both knew that Pa would worry if he knew it was a dance studio. Were they doing indecent forms of dance? Would men there want to corrupt his daughter? And so on.

  “Ah, good,” Pa said. “I will go to restaurant and tell Mr. Hu today.”

  —

  An hour later, Pa left to do the shopping and chat with his friends in Gossip Park, our nickname for the large park in Chinatown. Lisa and I used the time to try to find something I could wear to the interview. We searched through all of the closets, and I thought it was a good thing Pa never threw anything away. In the end, buried in a garbage bag filled with clothing that had been given to us, we found a red dress. It was so long on me that I had to belt it around my hips to make it reach midcalf instead of my ankles.

  My hair was not in the best shape. I’d recently allowed Mrs. Tam, who owned the beauty salon on our street, to have her way with it.

  “I give you a big discount because we are neighbors,” she said. “I know how to make girls beautiful. Trust me.”

  So despite the expense, I’d let Mrs. Tam do my hair instead of having Lisa chop it off the way she usually did. Mrs. Tam layered my hair in hopes of “bringing out its natural curl.” With my thick, coarse hair, I wound up with a big ball of frizz on my head, chunks sticking up all over the place. At that point, Mrs. Tam wanted to perm my hair to make it look better, but thankfully, I didn’t have the money for that.

  “I found it!” Lisa pulled a long piece of red cloth out of an old suitcase. She came over to me and wound it all the way around my head, hiding most of the haircut.

  Together, we looked at me in the mirror.

  “Does the scarf match the dress?” I asked.

  Lisa squinted. “Almost.”

  “I guess it’s close enough.” The big, sacklike red dress covered my entire body and it seemed as if I was wearing a red turban on my head, with the ends of the scarf trailing down behind me like a tail. “Do you think it’s too much red?”

  “No,” said Lisa loyally, “you look like a gypsy, Charlie.”

  I gave her a quick hug. Then we stared down at my shoes. I was wearing my sturdy dishwasher shoes.

  “They’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I think you have to wear high heels,” she said. “Isn’t that what they
dance in? It might make a better impression. And you have such pretty feet.”

  “Smarty-pants,” I muttered as I got down on my hands and knees to search in the back of the closet again. Lisa knew my weaknesses. My feet, narrow and arched, were the one thing I’d inherited from Ma. Lisa used to call them “Cinderella feet” before I started wearing the sturdy shoes I needed at the restaurant.

  I finally dug out the only pair of pumps I owned. The heels were scuffed and the black vinyl surface was peeling off at the toes to reveal light gray patches underneath.

  “Wait.” Lisa rummaged through the kitchen drawer until she pulled out a black permanent marker.

  I used a pair of scissors to cut off the bits that were sticking out. Then I started drawing on the shoes with the black marker, coloring in all of the gray and scuffed parts. When I was done, the shoes still appeared awful if you looked closely. The colored-in areas had a completely different texture from the rest of the material, but from a distance I thought they looked all right.

  “They’re great now,” Lisa said.

  “You’re just worried I’m going to chicken out,” I said.

  “Are you?”

  I glanced at the photo of Ma, posed in her one-legged stance, then I looked at the redness that was me in the mirror. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Two

  I could already tell in the elevator that I was out of my league. The building was on the Upper East Side, a world away from downtown Chinatown. I squeezed myself into the corner, trying to avoid my blurred reflection on the metal walls. The man standing across from me had streaks of gray in his hair and the shiniest black shoes I’d ever seen. His pants had been perfectly pressed. I was dripping with sweat, but he seemed collected and fresh in his crisp shirt. I took a deep breath as the doors slid open. We stepped out of the elevator together and he allowed me to precede him down the carpeted hallway to the gilded double doors. Another blast of air-conditioning hit me as he held a door open for me. Some sort of fast classical music was playing.

  “Oh, my dear Nina,” he said to the young woman sitting behind the reception desk. He had a hint of a Southern drawl. “Are they still torturing you like this?”

  She looked up, one hand clutching her long brown hair, and blew out a sigh. “Hi, Keith, I can’t take this anymore. I just disconnected someone by accident again. Go on in, Simone’s already in the ballroom.”

  The man named Keith laughed, then glanced at me. “Maybe she’ll rescue you.”

  Nina looked at me as Keith stepped through another set of doors. Her features flowed into each other so smoothly that she seemed to have been carved from marble. “Are you here for the position?”

  “Yes. I’m Charlie Wong.” How did they both know I wasn’t a dance student? I shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying not to look as nervous as I felt.

  “I thought you’d be a guy.” She looked down to check her list. I couldn’t help staring at her a little when she couldn’t see. She was probably one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen and she was doing the job I wanted. Nina found my name, then gave me a quick genuine grin. “Glad you’re a girl, though. Just go through those doors into the ballroom, hang a left and the manager’s office is tucked in the corner,” she said, pointing. “And watch out, they’re doing quickstep.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about but as soon as I stepped through the next set of glass doors, I shrank back as a dancing couple ran toward me at full speed. They pivoted gracefully out of the way, staying in place while they did a series of little synchronized kicks in time to the music, and then raced off again.

  I realized I was standing on the edge of the main ballroom. It was the sort of room that felt as if chandeliers were hanging from the high ceilings, although there weren’t any. Perhaps it was the wood paneling, or the tasteful lighting. A few small tables were placed against the right wall and several couples sped across the room counterclockwise. Some were posing in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which covered every wall except for the one by the tables. In the distance, I could glimpse my reflection. I resembled a ball of red yarn.

  I couldn’t seem to start breathing again. To the left of me, set in the corner of the ballroom, was a closed door. I started to walk toward it, feeling the dancers notice me with just a tiny angling of their heads, a swivel of their hips to position their bodies so they could keep me in sight. I clenched my jaw and knocked on the door.

  It cracked open and a tall African-American woman with pronounced cheekbones peered out. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Charlie Wong.”

  She pulled the door the rest of the way open. She had short tight curls that accentuated her oval face and a body rounded with pregnancy. As she stepped aside to let me pass, I saw her eyes flicker to the cloth wrapped around my head.

  The office was small but luxurious. Framed photographs and posters of dance couples in different poses covered the walls. I stood in front of the massive desk until the woman seated herself behind it.

  “I’m Adrienne,” she said. “Sit down.”

  I took a seat, then we studied each other for a moment. In her tight sleeveless white top, her stomach bulged but her arms and shoulders were muscled and sinewy. She didn’t blink as she gazed at me. Her eyes were tilted, a light hazel, striking against the dark creaminess of her skin. She was clearly someone who did not suffer fools gladly. I fumbled in my bag for my résumé. It was a bit crinkled when I pulled it out and I braced myself for what she would say when she read about my old jobs that had ended too quickly. To my relief, she hardly glanced at it before tossing it onto the pile on her desk.

  She steepled her fingers together. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”

  Images of Lisa, Pa, the noodle restaurant, my high school, rushed into my head and strangled my voice. What could I say that would be relevant to this beautiful place, these gorgeous people? “I’m not sure where to begin.”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me why we should hire you?” The door behind me opened and a man stepped in. “Ah, there’s Dominic.”

  Dominic had pale skin in contrast to his dark hair and eyes. He was wearing a light suit that appeared simple but must have been expensive from the way it fit him, as if it’d been poured over his body. He arched one spidery eyebrow at me in what seemed to be both a question and a challenge. He then leaned silently on the wall behind Adrienne next to an enormous poster: a stunning dark dancer poised in the arms of her partner as if she were about to take flight. I realized the poster was of the two of them.

  She saw the understanding in my eyes. For the first time she smiled. “I haven’t always been five months pregnant, you know. That was taken after the first time we won the American Ten Dance title.”

  Although I had no idea what that was, I nodded. I hadn’t even known there were ten dances. I swallowed, then tried to answer her question. “I don’t really know why you should hire me over all of the other people who are probably dying to work here.”

  Adrienne gave a snort caught between surprise and laughter. “Well, you’re honest, I’ll give you that.” She leaned back in her chair and stared at me, then said, “So what’s Charlie short for? Charlotte? Charmaine?”

  I cleared my throat. “Umm, nothing. It’s just Charlie.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, then Adrienne continued, “What’s your deal, Charlie-short-for-nothing?”

  When I gazed at her blankly, she linked her fingers across the top of her belly and said, “What do you really do? Tap dancer, writer, musician, fire-eater?”

  “Dishwasher.”

  Her full lips quirked. There was a pause, then from behind Adrienne, Dominic said, “Interesting.” He had a slight foreign accent. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  Adrienne asked, “And after your day job?”

  “It�
�s actually a day and night job,” I said.

  Now they both choked back a laugh.

  While I was trying to figure out if I should say something else or not, Dominic asked, “Do you have any administrative experience?”

  “I’ve worked in three different offices as a receptionist,” I said with perfect honesty. I hoped they wouldn’t check my résumé, which would reveal I’d only lasted a few weeks at each job before being fired.

  “Have you ever had any dance training?” Adrienne asked.

  I wished I could claim something that would impress her, anything, but I had to be truthful. “No.”

  “Really? No ballet lessons as a child, no secret dreams to become a dancer?”

  Surprised and appalled, I said, “I’m the clumsiest person you ever saw. I could never dance.”

  “Everyone can dance,” she said automatically, as if she were quoting something she’d learned by heart. “That’s the Avery Studios principle. But we are indeed not hiring any dancers. Is that clear?”

  “My mother was a dancer,” I said. “But I didn’t inherit any of her talent. I’m more like my father.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a noodle-maker in Chinatown.”

  Now Adrienne smiled. “Charlie, why in the world do you want this job?”

  I didn’t allow myself to think. I didn’t know how to get this job, which I didn’t deserve in any way, so I told them the truth. “Because this place is so beautiful. If I worked here, I’d be able to be around the dancers. Because it reminds me of my mother, who died when I was fourteen.”

  Adrienne’s face had grown serious. When she finally spoke, she addressed Dominic instead of me, and her voice was almost a whisper. “What innocence. Were we ever this young?”