Free Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

had to do with the net of favors both her father and her mother had bestowed in the past and might bestow in the future to various residents of Chinatown. Besides this, the elders of the association had allowed themselves to be charmed by the idea of a gwailo child who spoke their language so well, rather as they might have been charmed by a performing dog, and Chinese-American parents were wont to use her example as a rod to inspire their less willing offspring to excel in their studies.
    The accomplishment had not been anticipated, although Lucy had been playing with Chinese children since before kindergarten, picking up Cantonese. It had turned out, much to her own and her parents’ surprise, that Lucy had something of a genius for languages. Besides Cantonese (in which she was perfectly bilingual and now affected a slangy Hong Kong accent) she had learned Mandarin in school, spoke enough Sicilian to impress the few remaining speakers of that tongue in Little Italy and delight her aged great-grandmother, and was working successfully on several other tongues.
    She slouched against the wall, swinging her book bag, chatting casually with other students and people she knew. Chinatown is a tight community, and Lucy was mildly famous in it; people would actually seek her out to converse in Chinese with the prodigy. But, of course, Lucy was not actually Chinese, not bound by the loving, merciless bonds of family and clan, and her demeanor was not all that could be wished from a young girl, the lowest and most useless of the ten thousand things, not sufficiently deferent at all, which was why, when the young people said her name in Cantonese they slightly lifted the tone of the first syllable so that it came out almost as lóuhsai, which in that language is a less-than-respectful word for boss.
    Lucy felt a hand on her shoulder and started, and then relaxed and smiled when she saw who it was, a reedy oriental man in his early fifties, dressed in a cheap plastic raincoat over a navy blue suit and a white shirt, tie-less, buttoned to the collar. He looked at first glance like a clerk in one of the many trading firms of the neighborhood, but closer inspection would have made that assessment unlikely. For one thing, his face was curiously scarred, in particular by an indentation in the skull behind his right eye, as if someone had battered it in with a pipe. The hand he laid on the girl was scarred too, its nails malformed and yellow. And he did not move like a clerk.
    “ Cháo ông, Tran,” said Lucy.
    “ Cháo cô, Lucy,” said Tran Vinh, and he continued in Vietnamese. “How was your day in school? Did you study hard?”
    “I studied sufficiently,” said Lucy in the same language, sliding past the question. School was a bore, and she studied just enough to keep out of trouble. Learning Chinese or other languages was no work at all, so she preferred to devote her energy to that. Unfortunately, this is often a consequence of special genius. “Can we go for goûter, Uncle Tran?” she said, switching to French. He had taught her French in four weeks, much to her mother’s annoyance, since she no longer had a private tongue for discussions with Tran. Tran worked for Marlene in various capacities, some of which required a good deal of privacy.
    “Of course, my dear,” said Tran. “Noodles or cake?”
    They continued down the street, holding hands, chatting in a mixture of French and Vietnamese, she asking for translations of things seen and thought of, he answering, making small jokes. He was happy, more than he could recall being for a long time. The girl was about the age his daughter had been when she was killed, along with his wife, by American bombs. After that the war and hope for victory had kept him alive, and after the victory, when the northerners had purged the people who had led the war in the south, especially those like Tran who came from old bourgeois families, nothing had kept him alive, except his apparently