Aaargh....

Okay, that was frustrating. I had an extremely busy month with more pressure at work and various family events. I also have been sending out a bunch of my stories to journals. They’ve all been getting rejected. On top of that, I’ve had a couple longtime friends who asked for copies of my stories like a year ago. They’ve never said a word about them and we even had dinner together over the weekend. Ouch!

Writing fiction is a test of self-confidence. Most of us who try this imagine that everyone who reads us will at least like what we do. The truth is that no writer is universally appreciated. In the meantime, I have my own inner critic, that thing that sits inside my head and does its best to stop me from embarrassing myself. “If it’s not perfect, it won’t be universally acclaimed by those who read it, “ says the inner critic.

It’s diabolically circular.

I feel good that I kept pushing nonetheless, but I found myself perpetually rewriting the same few paragraphs. I’d have some thought about “fog”, “walls”, “the passage of time” and want to get it written down and I’d hear this thing tell me that it didn’t fit or that it impeded the flow of the story. I began to forget that there are times to fix that sort of thing and times to simply let ideas flow and set their own shape. I certainly have times when I don’t seem to have any ideas, but having too many ideas can look like the same frustration, the inability to move forward.

So here I am again, I pushed through chapter two and still feel like it doesn’t do what I want it to do. Have I waited too long to start the conventional part of the action? Probably so. Is there a mood shift from chapter one to chapter two that’s not accounted for? Possibly. Am I closer to my goal or not? I have no idea.

The current chapter two has any number of problems, including the fact that I haven’t worked out the logistics of why Jan remembers Lucky better than he remembers her. I probably have more worries than “Wow, I did thats” in the chapter. Right now, I’m trying to decide between just moving on to chapter three or fixing the slow sections of chapter two and running the risk of taking myself sideways once again.

Sometimes, it just isn’t fun.

Read More......

At Home in the Fog ( a stab at Chapter 2)

If you’ve ever been to Paperson, California, you know about the fog. Regardless of temperature, the town is always covered in fog. Scientists will tell you that fog is actually a low lying cloud that forms when the temperature of the air is within a few degrees of the dew point. Those who have lived in Paperson for any length of time will tell you that the fog that matters most there isn’t necessarily visible.

The fog here is no accident. If fog, as the rest of the world knows it, is a substance that’s part air and part moisture, it’s only natural that Paperson is buried beneath a persistent fog. First, Paperson is artificial in the most literal sense. Until the 1880’s, it was part of the Sacramento River. The only people who ever used the occasional islands that would form on the river there during the summer were a small group of Indians, arguably they weren’t even a tribe, who went up and down the river in their canoes trading with gold miners, farmers, and railroad workers. Around that time, a Stockton banker named Andrew Bowen recognized the possibilities tied together in the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the development of mechanized farm machinery, and the very rich soil of the Sacramento River Delta.

Andrew Bowen took an option on the land underneath the river, brought in the Chinese workers from the completed railroad, sold the dredges, and nearly two decades later helped turn malarial swampland into thousands of acres of farmland. The Chinese drained the swamps and built the levees. Their reward was to be turned into illegal immigrants on land that they had made possible. Paperson, the land leased from the Evans Ranch in 1908 by Morris Tang, became the one part of the Delta they thought of as their own. The town actually has no legal name. “Paperson” comes from the fact that most of the Chinese who took up residence near there were in the country either with false papers or none at all.

The truth is that the natural state of Paperson is mud or water suspended in earth. It’s no surprise then that such a place is constantly covered in water suspended in air otherwise known as fog. When Morris Tang leased the land from Dan Evans in 1908, he was not only aware of the persistent fog, he chose this spot between the levee and the Sacramento River for it. Morris was a shrewd man. He recognized that such a fog had its uses. While the fog might make it harder to find the general store he had put up there, it helped to hide the gambling hall next to it. Patrons would like the fact that the hall and its occupants couldn’t be seen from the levee road easily. Morris Tang was right. In fifty five years of continuous operation, the gambling hall would only be raided once without notice. Even then, it was closed for less than a week after the raid by a squad of police officers dressed in black face. Equally significant, none of the many illegal residents of Paperson were ever picked up in the town by the Immigration and Naturalization Service or its predecessor agencies.

Morris was already an old man at the time. No one knew exactly how old. He also spoke very little about most things. Morris had found ways to communicate about most every aspect of daily life through some combination of nods, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Rumor had it that before he had come to California, Morris had grown up in a family of street performers in Canton. They had found ways to entertain the foreign sailors and merchants by acting out entire dramas without words. It was said that this unusual education accounted for Morris’s success in California.

The only thing that anyone remembers Morris talking about at length in the conventional way was the fog. Given that so little happened in Paperson and the persistence of the fog, Morris’s preoccupation with it wasn’t out of the ordinary. At least a hundred days a year, the tule fog lay in pockets along the river so thickly that it prevented vehicles from moving along the levee road for hours at a time. One fog had been so persistent that it lasted two days in 1918. Some insisted that the fog had inoculated the residents of the Delta from the great influenza epidemic that had mysteriously killed millions across the world that year. It was true that despite the mix of origins among the farmworkers there, the Delta did not see a single fatal case of the flu that year. Every year there was at least one story of people, pets, and even buildings somehow disappearing in the fog. Even more disconcerting, there were sometimes claims that whole portions of the river would be altered between bouts of thick fog. Orchards would go from being barren to bearing huge crops. Bends in the river would appear. Fishing piers would move as much as a mile down river.

Morris though didn’t limit his talk to the more extreme and obvious effects of the fog. If he trusted you, Morris would tell you, “It’s not the fog that you see, that makes this spot special, it’s the fog that you can’t see.”

My Grandfather, two generations younger than Morris, and recently arrived from Toishan village, happened to be one of the person in whom Morris entrusted with the deeper secrets of Paperson’s persistent fog. When I was young, he would warn my father before we drove back to Sacramento at night, “Be careful driving the road. Even if you can’t see the fog, it doesn’t mean that it can’t keep you from seeing.”

I remember my father indulging his father, then as we got further away from Paperson driving us home in pretty much the way he always drove at night, one hand on the steering wheel, the radio on to what would later be called an “easy listening” station, and his free elbow hanging out the open driver’s window. My dad was of the generation that thought of Morris Tang’s “fog” as old timer’s superstitions, the sort of things that should have been left in China, barriers to the Chinese becoming fully modern and respectably American. I doubt that he ever understood the real importance of the fog or the role the passing of its secrets played in Morris Tang’s giving the nominal “mayoralty” of Paperson to my Grandfather.

Just as my father failed to heed everything his father tried to pass on about the fog, my Grandfather had himself failed to understand something that Morris Tang had warned him about the fog. Morris had understood that Paperson lacked the elements of real permanence. As a place where land, water, and air were always in transition from one state to another, Paperson would never sustain a single form. For some reason, my Grandfather insisted on giving a place made of fog and mud the trappings of continuity. He paved the street and built sidewalks. The town acquired a school, a newspaper, a movie theater, and even a six story community center. The more he tried to set the town of Paperson towards an identity that would sustain and grow, the more the place became shrouded in fog.

As I grew up, I sided with my father about the fog. If I thought about the mysteries of the fog at all, it was just to fantasize that it might some evening come through at a time when my grandfather and grandmother happened to be in Sacramento or San Francisco and make the town of Paperson itself disappear. Otherwise, I was simply convinced that the fog was just low-lying moisture and little more, the sort of thing they talked about on Sunday morning television shows like Mr. Wizard, in which a man dressed in a lab coat would explain all mysteries of the natural world to small children.

Still, as I got old enough to drive to Paperson myself, I started to notice that no matter how careful I was and regardless of the time of day, temperature, or presence of the sun, I consistently managed to miss the town along the levee road despite the fact that I had spent four years of my life there. Given the fact that Paperson included the six story Chinese community center and that it stood a few hundred yards from what had once been the tallest television tower in the world, I began to suspect that even Mr. Wizard wouldn’t have had a ready explanation. Though by that time, I had learned enough about real science to understand that even science is least as much about mystery as it is about certainty.

Each time, I couldn’t find some longtime landmark along the river that would lead me to Paperson, I thought a bit more about Morris Tang’s fog. I would remember walking with my Grandfather along the river bank one evening when the fog had begun to build and his skipping a generation by telling me, “It’s not the fog that you see, it’s the fog that you breathe here. Wherever you go, it stays inside you.”

I didn’t exactly begin to believe in the mystery of the fog, but I got to the point where I didn’t disbelieve it either. I didn’t actually believe it until Uncle Leon spent seven thousand dollars to cover the levee side of Paperson with this six foot high cyclone fence.
Uncle Leon is a far more practical man about material things than my father ever was. He has never believed in the power of the fog to protect the now abandoned Paperson from intruders.

I wedge the point of my vibram-soled walking shoe into a diamond of steel wire just above what would ordinarily be the height of my knee. My hands curl around the top bar of the fence. I have known people who take on a fence like this in a single fluid motion. Once they put the tip of their foot into the diamond, they grab the top cross bar, and somehow fling themselves upwards almost vaulting the obstacle while barely touching it with their anything but feet and hands. They land on the other side and then wave for you to follow.

I was always the one they wave at. I wasn’t built for climbing fences. Despite the fact that I’m of average height even by American standards, my arms and legs are shorter than average. Some people refer to it as short-waisted, a condition that makes it especially embarrassing to buy Levi’s. In addition, my upper body isn’t especially strong. Oddly, my legs and thighs are unusually muscular. Perhaps it’s a sign that I was meant to stay on the ground. Although I swim, I don’t much like water. Other kids always had to coax me into the river. I’ve also never liked heights. On those occasions when other kids would get me to climb a fence, I always did so with an uncommon deliberateness that simply served to make the feat that much more difficult.
“You can do it,” they would call out to me. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

This of course only embarrassed me further. I even remember being shown a photo of the Berlin wall in Look Magazine and hearing my cousins talk about the possibility of simply pole vaulting the barrier between Communist slavery and western freedom and prosperity. “Just one vault and you’re free for the rest of your life,” he claimed, “I’d train a couple hours a day.”

I was the only one of us who seemed to think that it was worth the misery of East Berlin and the Stasi if it meant not having to scale the Berlin Wall. As I tried to keep up with other boys my age and even girls my age, I failed that early childhood marker of status. I couldn’t scale even the easiest fences and thus never got to lead anyone anywhere.

I learned too that I had a peculiar knack for hesitating at the worst possible moment, something which only added to the terror. Instead of completing the climb up my neighbor’s fence, I sometimes would even pretend that I had to go home for dinner or worse yet I’d shrug and try to convince them, “I don’t want to be up in that treehouse with you. I’ll guard the approach in case bandits come.”

I’m way too old to be climbing fences anyway. The only people my age who do it are generally on some sort of Reality TV show or a Japanese game show. It’s just that I’ve lost the key to Uncle Leon’s padlock and I’m already an hour late for the meeting on the other side of the fence. My car is parked along the levee road where it could be sideswiped easily enough by a truck bearing crates of pears from the Evans ranch or by some pleasure boat-bearing trailer. I look back at my car and consider the fact that mine is the only car parked along the cyclone fence and the gate remains padlocked. Could Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy have driven in and locked the gate behind them once I failed to show on time? Could they have taken the entrance through the Evans ranch?

I had considered the latter possibility, but figured that I would only get more lost in the fog and that would make me even later for our appointment. When my grandfather died, the bickering over the fate of the estate had been so extreme that he had named all three of his sons as co-executors. When my father died before my Grandfather, a comma in the will and the words “or his heir” had turned me into the third signature on all transactions involving the estate. Over the years, all but one asset of my grandparents’ estate had been sold, the town of Paperson, which technically isn’t even a town. My Grandfather realized that it was in Paperson’s interest to never be incorporated. As a result, there are no road signs that mark the approach to the town and there is no town limits sign. In fact, this is one of the very few occasions since I started to drive to Paperson on my own that I haven’t gotten lost. Uncle Leon’s fence gave it away.

Other than my waffle-soled walking shoes, I’m more or less dressed for a meeting. My shirt has buttons and a collar. I’m wearing a belt and my pants have cuffs. I’m definitely not dressed for climbing fences. Still after much hesitation, I pull myself upwards. On the way over, my cuff catches on the edge of one of the wires and tears. I reach across instinctively and cut myself on the rough cut edge of another bit of cyclone wire. Much to my surprise though, I make it over and find myself off the fence. Instinctively, I wave to the other side, but the only object on the outside of the fence is my red Nissan Sentra with the bad radio.

After three years with no new prospects, Uncle Leon claims to have found a serious buyer for the town. He made a point of calling me a couple nights ago, “Lucky, you need to know that this is very important. If you don’t mind let me do the talking.”

“Don’t you usually?”

“If you have questions, I was hoping we could use this call for you to ask them now and I promise I’ll figure out how to ask them during the meeting.”

“Well, for one. Who’s the buyer?”

“I shouldn’t say yet.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“Of course, I know who it is. I’m just not sure I’m at liberty to say. He’s a very big player.”

“Okay.”

“Lucky, I’m glad we had this chance to talk first.”

“Sure.”

I step onto the high sidewalk that fronts Paperson’s one main street, Prosperity Boulevard. My Grandfather named the town’s three streets for each of Sun Yat Sen’s Three People’s Principles, the San Min Chui. The family house was located at 10 Democracy Drive. The third street was named and signed as Nationalism Avenue, but no buildings ever went up there. Much to my surprise, there’s no sign of either of my uncles or Uncle Leon’s blue Mercedes sedan. As strange as it seems, this is the first time I’ve ever been alone in Paperson.


As I walk I hear voices coming from what I know to be abandoned buildings. There is Benny Tang, wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair, and white shirt with a bow tie, standing behind the candy counter at the town’s liquor store, his palm is opened to the counter, “Your choice, you pick something, anything you want. You can have it. Just for you.”

It’s all the English he seems to know. I remember the pleasure of the struggle of deciding between a pack of root beer lifesavers and a Hershey’s bar with almonds. The lifesavers could last an entire afternoon. The Hershey bar tasted better and you could use the silver-wrapped paper to make toy gun barrels. Was it the Hershey Bar that had the silver paper or was it wax paper? There is the cook at the diner that fronted the gambling house, The Imperial Kitchen, asking me what I wanted him to make for me if I didn’t happen to like the food he’d made for everyone else that day. I was a prince in Paperson yet never managed to understand or appreciate that fact. I hear Mona, the woman who sold tickets at the movie theater calling me over to tell me that next Friday, they’d be showing a new “Roadrunner” only with the “r’s” mangled.

It had never occurred to me that they were ordering the cartoons just for my cousins and I. The movies themselves were Chinese sorcery dramas complete with combatants flying off of tile roofs, soap operas about family devotion, and war stories filled with Japanese treachery. The audience was mostly old bachelors munching on pine nuts and talking through all the scenes. Of course, they had no interest in the fate of the coyote, his latest purchase from ACME, and the impossibly fast roadrunner with his talent for just missing danger.

The buildings remain, but the people and establishments who go with the voices either died or left for Sacramento and Stockton at the end of the seventies not long after Jimmy Carter recognized Communist China. I take a moment by a metal tripod that used to dispense newspapers, The China First Weekly, the only weekly in America that published twice a month. The plastic that kept the papers dry in the fog cracked to pieces years ago. There is no slot for coins.

The China First Weekly was always distributed free. The newspaper itself had a circulation ten times bigger than the town of Paperson itself even when the town was the largest self-contained Chinatown in North America. It’s just that it was never clear that anyone actually read it. When I was in junior high, I used to make fun of the headlines in the English language portion of the paper. In its last years, China First managed to combine fervent Chinese Nationalism with the Weekly World News. Typical front page stories alternated between tales of the hundreds of million mainland Chinese who were awaiting a secret radio signal to assist in Mao’s overthrow when Chiang Kai Shek began his re-invasion of the mainland to gruesome stories about the Communists that always seemed to involve severed body parts and unnatural acts.

I still remember the China First headlines the day the estate sold the linotype printing press and Royal typewriters that had been sitting around the China First building to a scrap dealer. I made the trip to Paperson just to see how they'd get all that metal out that little door. China First’s last edition bore a headline claiming that the Communists had started using Chinese political prisoners as an involuntary source of involuntary organ donations for wealthy and desperate westerners and Japanese.

Four years at an Ivy League college in the late seventies had so convinced me that China First was an anti-communist's Weekly World News or the Nationalist Enquirer that it never occurred to me that those stories might be true. The tales of Koumintang sympathizers being fed to the pigs, forced abortions, and adults who had never seen an orange had simply been one of the staples of old man conversation in the mini-park that stood between Prosperity Boulevard and Democracy Drive.

I remembered hearing them repeat these bits of China First editorials when we'd walk by them to retrieve stray baseballs or as we threw pennies off the bottom of the statue of Sun Yat Sen in the middle of the park. We didn't believe their any more than the filial piety parables they forced us to read in Chinese school. After all, the only American kid who would ever take seriously some story about good sons cutting off body parts to put in stews for hungry parents had to be Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

I was thirty before I realized that China First also published that book of Confucian parables that set out to make every kid born who grew up in Paperson before 1965 feel guilty for being too selfish and too Americanized. Instead, the little red book (China first chose the color quite purposefully), strengthened our resolve to waste our youths here in the Sacramento Valley by mastering un-Chinese activities like roller-skating, watching the Monkees, or turning our Stingray bikes into Harleys with baseball cards in the spokes. I was convinced that some of my cousins had third degree black belts in watching Roadrunner cartoons.

I suppose too that my college professors never predicted that the Berlin Wall would come down. The day that Grandfather waited for, the fall of Communism in China, may have lurked just beyond his lifetime, but it seems that some of my old professors are now insisting that it might happen during mine. That may be the irony of the cyclone fence around Paperson and the not so discreet for sale listing these last eighteen months in the investment section of the Wall Street Journal. Now that it's about to happen, there's no one left in Grandfather's town to celebrate.

I hear two real voices. It’s my Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy. Uncle Leon wears a brown business suit with a striped tie. His shoes are a polished mirror black. He wears a gold Rolex that looks like a big gold doughnut. He’s seventy years old. Uncle Persy is two years younger. He wears a gray Italian suit, the jacket of which is folded over his arm. He’s not wearing a tie. He looks like the successful Seattle industrial stylist that he is.

“Lucky, you’re early. Good to see you taking today so seriously.”

I open my hands and shrug. “Actually, I thought I was late.”

“You didn’t get the call?... Ms. Grady had to attend to something first.”
A five minute silence that takes the form of a conversation about children and houses follows. I haven’t seen any of my cousins in ten years, but we talk as if that weren’t the case.

We are standing beneath the twenty foot neon dragon that hangs bug eyed above what used to be a movie theater. The six story Community Center is directly across from us. Uncle Persy breaks our non-conversation to look at his digital watch.

"What time did she say she'd get here? ..She's running late."

Uncle Persy has a habit of answering his own questions. It may have something to do with his being the youngest of the six children in Dad's family, although now that he's sixty eight it's harder for me to think of him as the youngest anything.

"Have you met this woman?" he asks Uncle Leon who shakes his head.

Uncle Leon pulls out a stack of blue appraiser's reports from a rectangular leather briefcase, "I've put fourteen years into this sale. This is the first looker that has the money to do the deal. You remember, we spent the money on a development appraisal. This is where it comes in handy."

"Is that it?" I ask, pointing to the thickest of the blue reports.

"I thought I sent you a copy," Uncle Leon says.

"I don't know, can't tell you until I see it.," I say.

My uncles shake their heads, but Uncle Leon hands me a copy of the report. I read the first paragraph and look at a table of numbers detailing the costs involved in bulldozing Sam-Yup, sub-dividing, and turning it into a promising riverside development less than half an hour from downtown Sacramento and within commuting distance of the Greater Bay Area. A paragraph in bold type near the bottom points out that the value of the property quadruples from two million dollars to eight, if a proposed bypass to Highway 80 goes forward. Naturally, I try to calculate my undivided one fifth interest for either possibility.

“Leon, I thought they contacted us.”

“But I’m sure they contacted me because they saw the development plan. This is a very shrewd group. I’m sure they recognize the potential here.”

Ms. Grady is now an hour and a half late. Uncle Persy has twice remarked on how hard it is to take a day off from clients like Boeing and fly from Seattle. Finally, Uncle Leon can't contain himself, "You might both be familiar with the Howard Company?"

"I guess not," I say. "Should I be?"

"Well, I thought you might have seen some of their movies," Uncle Leon tries to hide his smirk, the same expression my Dad always hated. Dad insisted that his younger brother would always break it out any time he knew something about my Grandfather’s financial plans that my Dad didn’t.

"Why didn't you tell me that this was Luke Howard's Company?" Uncle Persy shakes his arms as he says it. For the first time since I got here, he seems to be smiling.

"I didn't tell you the best part," Uncle Leon continues, "I found a contact at CalTrans. He golfs with Harvey, my brother in law."

"I thought you didn't talk to Harvey," I say.

When we were younger, the cousins used to whisper about Aunt Sunny's sister who married a "Hok-guay", a word our elders used casually and that we repeated innocently enough until we grew up and bothered to translate it with our limited Cantonese into its literal meaning, "black devil". Sunny and Uncle Leon had tried to disown her sister and Harvey only to run into the fact that they lived three blocks away, sent their kids to the same school, shopped at the same stores, and the fact that Harvey was the only non-union electrician in their part of Sacramento.

Uncle Leon shakes his head. "Times change. Harvey's okay. His buddy says the bypass is going to happen, they're already doing the crew assignments."

"Does Luke Howard know the same thing?" Uncle Persy asks. "Probably does, wouldn't be coming here if he didn't." He answers himself.

Before we can speculate further, a brown Toyota Corolla sedan pulls to the sidewalk along Prosperity Boulevard. A woman, who's voice and bearing suggest that she's no older than I am, hops out of the car, "Mr. Tang," she calls out, "So sorry to be late.”

“No problem Ms. Grady, everyone gets lost near Paperson,” my uncle’s voice oozes with a business-inspired over friendliness.

“Actually, I got stuck on the Bay Bridge. Once I caught the levee road, it was easy.”

I start to say something about the fog, then catch myself.

“You know the nice thing about working for Luke Howard, is I can never be too late for any of these meetings. Everyone is incredibly patient with me.”


Janet Grady laughs at her own joke. I laugh, but my Uncles don't at first. Uncle Leon finally smiles and answers her, "Well, I hear that it's not going to be so hard to find soon. I guess renting a car and all...."

The representative from the Howard Company doesn't seem to respond to his hint about the bypass.

"Renting a car? I don't understand."

Uncle Leon is a bit flustered. "Oh, I just assumed...."

"He thought someone from the Howard Company would be in a BMW," I jump into the conversation. Jan Grady has now made it on the sidewalk and she moves directly for me.

Uncle Persy looks at me in horror. Uncle Leon starts to apologize, "That's just Lucky's sense of humor. Toyota Camrys are great cars. I almost bought one myself.”

“Instead of your Mercedes SLK?”

Uncle Leon gives me another look. “Lucky, we talked about this,” he whispers.

Janet Grady shows no signs of taking offense. "Well, my Toyota does have power windows and a CD player."

I hold out my hand. "I'm Lucky Tang, I'm one of the nominal trustees."

Uncle Leon steps between us as quickly as possible without turning it into a shove. "Janet, thank you for coming out. I'm Napoleon Tang, we spoke on the phone a few times."

He hands her his business card. Janet Grady hands us each a copy of hers.

Uncle Leon's card reveals far more than he intends about himself. His full name appears in flat black letters across a plain white background, Leonardo Woodrow Wilson Tang. Just beneath that, his title fills several lines by itself, President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, Trustee, Tang Investments Inc. At the bottom of the card, Tang Investments claims offices in Hong Kong, Newport Beach, Honolulu, Seattle, and Sacramento. When I was younger, my copy of Uncle Leon's card had high school graduate scrawled between the title and the offices.

Janet Grady's card offers as strong a contrast in style as possible to Uncle Leon's. Her name is printed in raised letters on two-toned stock. Her title follows the current vogue by implying importance through its simplicity, Project Coordinator. The card offers no physical address, just a phone number and jgrady@howard.org. The Howard Company logo, an "H" somehow stylized to look like an extended multi-colored hand, appears in the otherwise blank left side of the card.
Janet Grady barely glances at Uncle Leon's card as she slips it into bright blue nylon bound organizer. As a peek across Uncle Leon's shoulder, I can see that it has dedicated pockets for the things I always tend to misplace, business cards, pens, a calculator, a trio of labeled three and a half inch floppy disks. Uncle Leon starts to follow suit by slipping the Howard Company's card into his thick black leather wallet, but stops himself. Instead, he holds it up in front of us seemingly admiring the printing. After nearly two years of having Paperson on the market and after several members have repeatedly questioned his real estate judgment, Uncle Leon wants to revel in the pleasure of having managed to attract the investment interest of the most famous movie maker in the world.

As I stuff Janet Grady's information aged business card into my front pants pocket, I am reminded that at almost forty I have no card of my own to toss into he mix. My business identity hasn't changed much since twenty years ago when dad first started bringing me to family business meetings. I think he did it partly hoping that I'd get interested in business partly because my Grandfather never did the same for him. The only real changes are that Dad's passed away and that I've gone from being his son to a Tang nephew.

Uncle Leon quickly sets in to show Janet Grady a series of charts and numbers supporting the value of Paperson for development. He tries to hand her a copy of the development plan/appraisal, but she refuses him politely. I tag along a step back my two uncles between Janet Grady and myself until she stops walking for a moment, steps in front of Uncle Leon, and starts to talk to me, "Lucky, your name is so familiar and so is your face."

I shake my head. My uncles shrug. I look at Janet Grady. She tilts her head, stares at me again. I stare back. It's a pleasant thing. She's quite attractive in a business-like fashion.

"Did you live on the third floor of Dempster House in the late seventies?" her voice rises into a kind of casual girlishness.

I nod.

"I'm Jan Free. Do you remember? We used to share notes from Craig's Modern Asia survey class."

"I think I used to borrow your notes. I don't think you ever had to borrow mine," I say.

She laughs. We are now walking together and my uncles are walking slightly behind us. Uncle Leon keeps rubbing his forehead with his fingers. Uncle Persy keeps asking and answering questions in Cantonese that translate roughly into, "What did he get all that money for school for? So, he could make connections like this. Why did I fly down for Seattle. For a college reunion."

Jan Free and I are now laughing and talking excitedly about classmates. At one point, she spontaneously gives me a hug. I hug her back awkwardly. I'm not sure just how hard to hug a prospective buyer. Uncle Leon bumps into us just as Jan Free-Grady pulls away from me.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

I take the opportunity to move back to my former spot, something that seems to make Uncle Leon stop touching at his forehead. As soon as he gets Janet's attention again, he begins discussing possible lot sizes and zoning ordinances.

Janet Grady is pleasant, polite, but curiously uninterested. She nods her head as Uncle Leon speaks, but takes no notes and asks almost no follow up questions. The only questions she does ask are about the buildings that do stand. She comments on the moon-shaped entrance to the restaurant that my father once owned. She asks about the statue of Sun Yat Sen. Uncle Persy starts to explain something about Sun Yat Sen being the Chinese George Washington, but Janet surprises him, "I understand he came here to Paperson to raise money."

Uncle Leon whistles and decides to downshift from his investment banker mode to more of a small town boy act, "Gee, your company sure does its homework. I guess you probably already have all the numbers yourself. What else do you know about Paperson."

Janet shakes her head and smiles "Well, I looked into it a little bit. I understand that this was once the fourth biggest Chinatown in North America and that there's a story that Chop Suey was invented here, that some of the locals believe that Dr. Sun might have fathered a daughter during his stay here, that the town had a movie theater and a newspaper. Lucky probably doesn’t remember, but I first heard about this place from him.”

My uncles are staring at me. I’m staring at Jan Grady.

“That reminds me."

Luke Howard's project coordinator pulls a modest auto-focus camera from her shoulder bag.
"Would it be all right if I took some pictures, Luke always prefers to look at pictures before we discuss possibilities."

She then begins snapping photos of the peeling paint and broken windows that now amount to Paperson. She seems to take a special interest in two buildings, the community center, once the largest and most expensive Chinese community center in America, and the non-descript lunch counter, the Emperor’s kitchen, that served as the front for Grandfather's gambling house. Throughout this, she keeps asking me to pose in front of the buildings to establish scale or some such thing.

I've seen Uncle Leon this puzzled before. One time just before I went off to college, he was trying to find out if Dad was going to get a loan from Grandfather to remodel the restaurant. At the same time, Uncle Leon needed money to fix up one of the duplexes that he'd bought as an investment in Sacramento. Grandfather then announced that he wanted to visit both of his sons and see how they were doing. Uncle Leon, who had just finished a night accounting class, busied himself with a profit and loss statement, cleaning gutters, repainting a kitchen. Dad, on the other hand, did nothing. A week later, Grandfather announced that he would lend my father what he'd asked for and lent Uncle Leon only half the money because someone had told him that Leon's duplex faced the wrong way for the money spirits to work prosperously.

As Uncle Leon pointed however, things change. Twenty years ago, he blew up and yelled at Grandfather for being a "superstitious old fool".

As an old man, he hides his frustration better. In twenty five years as co-executor, I have watched Uncle Leon work at least half a dozen real estate sales. Whether the buyer was a retired school teacher or representatives from the Teamsters Pension Fund, believe it or not we did make a deal with them, Uncle Leon has always taken complete control of the transaction from beginning to end. He answers all questions, has all the facts at hand, and works up all the projections. At least twice, Uncle Leon's perseverance got him a price at least twenty five percent higher than even an optimistic appraiser. But, in all of those deals, Uncle Leon was working with buyers who like him slipped their business cards into steak and martinis wallets, who wore business suits, and drove Cadillacs or Mercedes.

As Janet Grady photographs Chinese street signs and facsimiles of the Nationalist flag, I can see the uncertainty in Uncle Leon's eyes as he struggles to find the approach that will let him feel like this encounter is back under control.

As we walk past a row of houses, we stop in front of the largest one. Actually it's far larger than the rest and closer inspection reveals that it's not just one house but a cluster of four houses joined together by a shared courtyard.

"This was our house," Uncle Leon says. "I think my father would be happy to know that whoever redeveloped his town still appreciated its history like you do, Janet."

Janet barely seems to hear him.

"Lucky, I can't believe it. Is this where you grew up?"

I squirm slightly. When I was younger, I was always very self-conscious about having spent any part of my life in a Chinatown. When I went to Sacramento private schools, I never even told my closest friends there that two nights a week my mother drove me the half hour down the river to a special Chinese school in Paperson. I even missed half a year of Little League because of it.

"Well, sort of...We moved to the suburbs when I was 8 or 10."

Grandfather's family complex. (My Dad was the one who came up with the name and the joke).is really the one part of Paperson that now looks like it could be moved straight from China. For the most part it is shaped and colored like a traditional wealthy man's home in Southern China. The odd thing about Paperson is that it has little of the tourist's eyed Chineseness of San Francisco Chinatown and yet it does not look fully Americanized either. For the most part, little details have always set it apart as neither Chinese nor American. Stores and streets are a little to tidy to be in South China, building's are too close together to fit into the Sacramento Valley. More than anything it's the colors. The concrete blocks are a lime green. Wooden buildings are a dark-stained redwood. Whenever Paperson, in its dying days, would get its occasional newspaper article or local news report, reporters would always comment on the sense one always got that it looked and felt like no other place on either continent.

"Boy, I can't believe you lived here. It must have been so fascinating," Janet continues.

"Would you like to take a look inside?" Uncle Persy offers.

"Absolutely."

"Just understand that no one's lived here in ten years," Uncle Leon warns.

"Well, it wasn't that exciting really," I mutter. “Before we go in though, I should warn you about the squatters.”

Uncle Leon gives me a dirty look.

"We had a little problem with squatters after the last Chinese family moved out of town eight years ago. It was a family of illegal immigrants who were picking pears for the Evans family. They were harmless once I found a Spanish translator, we found them a place to stay. Ever since we put the fence up, it hasn’t been a problem again.”

"I'm not worried. I've been in my share of abandoned buildings." Janet says.

Uncle Leon reaches for the key.

“But have you been in haunted buildings?" I ask.

"Really?"

Uncle Leon shakes his head.

"Well there was a story about thirty years ago about a group of robbers who tried to break in to find the safe, having things mysteriously thrown at them keeping them away from the house.”

For the first time, Janet Grady pulls a pad from her organizer and takes notes. They start to go in. I don't follow.

"Look, I don't understand why you're interested in all of this, if you're just going to take it all down for houses?" Uncle Leon doesn’t hide his exasperation well.

Janet stops at the entryway. Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy are already standing inside the door. Uncle Persy brushes a cobweb off the suit jacket that he still holds in the crook of his elbow.

"But, we're not. The Howard Company isn't in the residential housing business."

"Well, I'd wondered what a movie company wanted with this property anyway,” Uncle Leon jumps in with new confidence. "The development plan we commissioned looked at the possibility of turning the site into an outlet mall. You guys are right on top if it. In some ways, that might be the most promising use of all. It's the only land for fifteen miles that can be zoned commercial. Paperson isn’t a town, it’s not controlled by county zoning ordinances."

Uncle Leon begins to spouts off an entire paragraph from the report surprisingly quickly. Janet Grady’s answer pushes him back into renewed confusion, "I'm terribly sorry. Please unerstand I couldn’t make our interest clear over the phone. People take such an interest in anything to do with Luke Howard projects, we have to be extraordinarily careful. Naturally, you were thinking that we were interested in buying Paperson as real estate?"

My Uncles have stepped back out of the doorway. My mind speeds wildly, in a way that has not always been helpful in my adult life until a single possibility pops through, "You mean you're thinking of making a movie?"

"A movie? A Luke Howard movie? "My uncles open mouths reveal their half dozen gold fillings.

"Not exactly." Now it's Janet Grady's turn to pull paper from her shoulder bag and start passing it out.

"I'm sorry, I actually only brought two copies with me. She hands one to Uncle Leon and starts to hand the other to me.

"That's okay, I'll get a copy from my Uncle," I say.

Uncle Persy clicks his tongue at me anyway and shakes his head.

"I have to confess, I really don't know much about real estate Mr. Tang. We're interested in licensing Paperson. We'd like to...."

As Janet speaks, my uncles have opened their brochure to a brightly illustrated artist's rendering that folds out to the size of a road map.
"Well, for want of a better phrase for it. We're interested in developing Paperson into a kind of theme park. I apologize for not going into more detail over the phone. I was little afraid that you'd think I was crazy."

My uncles are talking rapidly and heatedly in Cantonese. They are speaking too quickly for me to even attempt to understand them. They have now turned one of the reports to a page that seems to be describing some sort of Silicon Graphics computer system.

"I imagine you've heard something about virtual reality," Janet starts in.

They nod cautiously as if they don’t dare reveal the fact that they know nothing about virtual reality.

After several minutes of folding and unfolding brochures and disconnected spinning questions, Uncle Persy is the first to recover. "Miss Grady, how big a deal is Howard film talking about? Are we talking Disneyland here?"

"Well, if you'll sign the non-disclosures I've brought along here....I can tell you that we're not talking about spec houses and agent's commissions here. We're hoping to make this something like nothing anyone's ever imagined

I look at my uncles, at Jan Grady, at the booklet from the Howard Company. I take a second to close my eyes and inhale, but on the inside, I am nothing but fog.

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