Yaka Mein Lady by Vivian Chou
3600 words, 18 minutes reading time
Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2023)
“After we see Congo Square,” Mama says, “we’ll go to Chinatown and pay a visit to Peng Lau.”
“New Orleans doesn’t have a Chinatown,” I say.
After my doctor’s appointment yesterday, she packed a bag and drove us from Houston to Louisiana overnight. Problem is, I keep seeing things. Whatever I touch, I see everything it’s ever been, and I see things that haven’t happened.
The thing is, Houston has a Chinatown. I don’t understand why Mama’s intent on finding one here in New Orleans, and I don’t think acupuncture is going to cure me. But Mama’s old school–we don’t talk about our feelings, and we definitely don’t medicate them. She barely wants me to take ibuprofen when I have period cramps.
“There is a Chinatown here,” Mama says. “It just got bulldozed in 1937. They tried to rebuild it, but it wasn’t the same.” She wipes sweat from her brow with two thin paper napkins. “Chinese workers went to Cuba after the Taiping Rebellion. Then they came to Louisiana after our Civil War. They needed people to work the plantations after slavery was abolished.”
I haven’t been myself lately, but I swear Mama is the one who’s losing it.
I shake my head. “So there was a Chinatown, but it’s gone now?”
Mama is silent.
We’re at Café du Monde, gaining sustenance in the open-air cafe. The muggy August morning clings to us, repelling our sweat as we try to cool down. On the sidewalk, an undeterred saxophonist belts out “Summertime” in the heat. His metal sax must feel as hot as a grill. Tourists impressed with his dedication throw dollar bills in his instrument case, then pose for selfies in front of the café’s awning.
I take a sip of chicory coffee, savoring the chocolatey overtones as it heats my core. It’s happening again. I clutch my temple. I steady my breathing, and the scent of jasmine curls into my sinuses. It is both familiar and exotic at the same time. My head floods with images of people and places I’ve never seen before: Parisians adding endive root to sparse coffee grounds, Acadians grinding chicory in the French market, immigrant Vietnamese grocers restocking shelves with Café du Monde coffee, endive farmers bankrupt after an endless Bay Area drought. Maybe I should monetize my visions and set up a tarot card table in Jackson Square.
Mama slides a sweating glass of ice water across the table. “Is it happening again? Drink,” she says. “You’ll get dehydrated.”
I glug down the water and bite into a beignet, careful not to inhale the powdered sugar too fast. She’s right about a lot of things, like questioning the wisdom of ingesting boiling caffeine on a ninety-degree bayou afternoon, but I feel rudderless right now. The unwelcome visions keep invading my brain.
“Bena, your doctor is wrong,” Mama says. “You don’t need medication–you need positive karma.”
We walk to Congo Square and take shelter from the blazing sun under a majestic oak tree. It’s too hot to breathe, much less to talk, and we enjoy the faint breeze coming off the Mississippi River. I fumble in my pocket for a tissue to wipe sweat from my face, and it slips from my hand, dropping onto the cobblestone ground. I pick it up, my hand touching the stone, and then the pictures rush in again.
I see Sundays crowded with hundreds of West African free and enslaved people, drumming the long drum, playing banjo-type instruments, pan flutes, triangles. Children dance the Bamboula, women sell baskets of deep-fried rice cakes, and the rhythms flow and mix to evolve into the melodies and beats of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, and Lil Wayne. Then I see rain, wind, another storm, magnolia trees cracked by lightning, crashing to the ground. I exhale, as the image leaves me—it must not have happened yet.
Mama watches me as I return from my own world. She takes my hand.
“What about me?” she squeezes my fingers. “Can you see my future?” She brings my hands together, as if I’m a marionette. “Or yours? Any luck?”
I stare at her blankly. “No.”
“Of course, that would be too easy,” Mama mutters.
“Let’s keep it that way,” I say. “I don’t want to know how we’re going to die.”
Mama laughs. “Death is nothing to fear. But you must make the most of this life.”
Mama pulls our car into a blacktopped pay lot. It’s far from the French Quarter, sparsely populated and devoid of street musicians. The polished mirrored windows of the medical district and empty storefronts glare back at us.
She surveys street numbers over doorways, then stops in front of the Hilton on Tulane Avenue. “We’re going to meet Peng Lau,” she confirms. “Try not to touch anything–we don’t want to trigger your visions.” She pushes the door open and we enter the hotel.
I look around the sterile business-traveler-oriented lobby. The red-haired woman behind the counter glances up at us, her face questioning. I smile and wave, then run to catch up with Mama, who has disappeared around the corner from the reception area.
“Mama, have you lost your mind?” I scurry beside her, balling my hand into a fist. I dropped out of school a few months ago, and it must have sent her over the edge. It’s my fault.
“It’s right around here, somewhere,” Mama murmurs, looking at the empty hallway with a push-handle door that reads EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY on the left, and a nook with two vending machines. Generic abstract prints line the walls over beige carpeting.
Mama squints at a Coke and Fanta vending machine. Then she examines a machine filled with M+M’s and Twix and sighs with relief. “Yes. This is the right one. Facing Tulane Avenue!” She smiles, which I find jarring. I haven’t seen her smile in months.
“I thought you weren’t doing candy anymore with your diabetes,” I say to Mama.
She squints at the cords behind the machine and slips her tiny frame into the crack between them and the wall. Mama leans down, grunting, and pulls on the plug connected to the wall.
“Mama!” I hiss. “What are you doing? We are in a hotel! If you want Twix, I’ll buy you some at the 7-Eleven!”
“The door to Chinatown is always open for those who are willing to find it,” Mama says. “Just don’t let your brain cover it up.”
She pushes back against the vending machine, her feet propped against the wall for leverage, her Michael Kors purse hooked on the crook of her elbow.
“Come!” she says. “Take my hand, Bena! Peng Lau, we are here!” She holds out her hand and I grab it because I’m afraid she will fall. What looks to be the side of the vending machine, black and solid, vanishes behind her back.
Then we both fall, as she pulls me into the crack between the machine and I shut my eyes, squeezing Mama’s hand for dear life.
Pungent horse dung and scallion aromas waft into my nostrils. I wrinkle my nose at the competing scents. I try to orient myself, focusing my gaze and rubbing my head. There’s no vending machine, no fluorescent lights of the hotel, just wooden ceiling.
“Mama,” I say. “Are you okay?”
No answer.
The scene before me shimmers like steam rising from asphalt in the summer sun, and for a moment, I wonder if I have a concussion.
All the people I see are a flickering version of themselves, transparent, outlined. I’m lying on floorboards, but I can put my hand through them. Am I dead, or are the floorboards dead? I want to shiver, but it’s so hot, my sweat soaks through my shirt.
A Black man with tan suspenders is eating chicken and rice in the corner, next to two Asian men playing mahjong, their long hair tied neatly in ponytails behind them. There’s no Mama in sight.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say to one of the mahjong men. “Have you seen a short Chinese woman with a Michael Kors purse run through here? Maybe holding a dozen Twix?”
“She went to laundromat,” one of the men says in a Chinese accent. “Next to Chinese Merchant Association Hall.”
I stumble out onto the street, but it’s not the street we entered from. It’s a dirt road with overdressed men in seersucker suits and women in jackets and long skirts in the sweltering August heat. Horse-drawn carriages rumble along, their hooves soft against the worn earth.
Maybe I’m hallucinating again. I pinch my nail into the fat of my hand. Nope. Still horses.
“Bena!” Mama waves to me from across the street. “I found him! Peng Lau!”
A muscular Chinese man in a white shirt with tattoos of carp on his arms sees me and waves. All around me are Chinese men and women shopping, smoking, and children, laughing and chasing each other. I am both fascinated and chagrined.
Why are moms always right? She really did take me to Chinatown.
We sit on tottering wooden chairs in the laundromat. It’s about a hundred degrees inside and the workers are wearing thin tank tops while scrubbing shirts, and it smells like fresh linen with a sprinkling of body odor.
“So,” I ask Peng Lau as if it were the most normal question in the world: “Are we dead? Crushed in a freak vending machine accident?”
“No, you’re not dead,” Peng Lau says, drawing a drag from his cigarette. “But I am. And Chinatown is. This is the spirit-world you entered.” He smiles and pinches my cheek. “I’m so glad Mei brought you here at last.”
“I’ve only been to New Orleans once before,” I say. “Eighth-grade field trip from Houston. First time to a ghost-world, though.”
“I hear you’re having trouble in school,” Peng Lau says.
“School was fine. I mean, I like anthropology. But–” I glance at Mama, who is watching our conversation with uncharacteristic silence, then I look down my hands. “I have nightmares and I can’t concentrate on reading.”
“What kind of nightmares?” Peng Lau says.
“I’ll be in a dark room and everyone’s smoking long pipes, and then they all turn into corpses. Or I’ll be boiling wheat noodles in a kitchen, and then some drunk guy comes in and hits me in the head with a beer bottle.”
Peng Lau looks at my mother, who shrugs.
“I told her,” Mama says. “She must focus on positive karma and be grateful. She’s always looking at the negative.”
Peng Lau smiles a sad smile. “It is common to focus on the pain, and then numb yourself to feelings. Why don’t we have some lunch?” He disappears into the back room and emerges with a tray bearing bowls of beef noodle soup. “This is Yaka Mein, my wife Coco’s recipe. It’s Creole and Chinese all mixed in one.”
Cilantro and chili oil decorate rich beef soup, golden fatty globules rising to the top to coalesce. The scent of scallions coaxes my stomach awake. A half-cut hard-boiled egg, the gem, rests on top. I wonder how humans can digest ghost food as I slurp down the wheat noodles, and maybe I’m eating ghost mein. The thought evaporates, as do the noodles as I devour them.
“This is delicious,” I say.
“We call it Old Sober,” Peng Lau says. “Coco named it herself. Let me get her,” he says, eyes on me.
“He seems nice enough for a spirit guide,” I say.
Mama says nothing but eats her Yaka Mein with gusto.
Coco comes to the table, and she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen: brown skin, green eyes, head held high. She looks like a trained ballet dancer, not born to sling noodles in Chinatown.
“This is Coco,” Peng Lau says. “Coco—you know Mei, and this is her daughter Bena.”
I rise from my chair and Coco envelops me in a hug. She smells like both lavender and chocolate chip cookies, somehow, at the same time.
“Bena!” Coco says. “I’ve heard all about you.”
“Thanks,” I say. I can’t say the same. Mama never told me the ghost tours in New Orleans were real.
“Peng Lau,” Mama says, eyeing me. “Why don’t you take me to the fan shop down the street? I love to window-shop, even if I can’t bring anything home.”
“You ladies have fun,” Peng Lau says as they rise from the table together.
“Is Peng Lau like the Chinatown mayor or something?” I say.
Coco smiles. “Unofficially. He came from Cuba to work, but he despised those plantation owners and quit. Came straight to the city and set up shop in the laundromat down the street from the Christian mission. My father works in the gumbo shop on Rampart. Peng eats at our place, we give him laundry business, and before you know it, he’s asking my dad for my hand in marriage.”
Coco sips tea and crushes a small white block resembling dried mushroom into her cup. She rubs her forehead and smiles.
“Fu ling fixes everything. I swear by herbal medicine,” she says.
“Do you get headaches a lot?” I ask.
“Yes,” Coco says.
“If I’d known, I would’ve brought you a Tylenol from the living world.”
“You’re a sweetie,” Coco says. “Peng Lau says the headaches are from my timeless karma.”
“What’s that mean?” I ask.
“Well, there are doors between the realms, like how your Mama found our realm of spirit Chinatown. But then there are those of us who can experience the minds of others across time. I think my visions are of the future.”
“Coco!” I say. “I get those too.” I can’t believe it. Someone else has the same problem as I do. Maybe I’m not crazy. I tell her about my dreams that remind me of this ghost Chinatown.
Coco nods, and then: “Is that all you see?”
I swallow. “When I touch something, I can see all its lives—its creation, how it was used, and if it's a person—how they died. It weighs on me, the pain. Sometimes I can’t get out of bed.”
I touch a hop pipe left on the table next to us.
What I see is infinity, stretching in both directions. I see poppies in a field with dread and suffering, chests of opium traded to Canton from London, Oxycontin sold in clinics by cheerleaders in Nordstrom suits, a needle exchange in South San Francisco, chemical fentanyl bought on the dark web, a two-year-old girl foaming at the mouth after ingesting candy-colored tablets.
I exhale. How am I supposed to just live my life, knowing that suffering is a fact of life, it just changes forms?
Coco nods. Can she read my mind? “What do you see when you touch this?” she says, handing me Peng’s handkerchief.
I close my eyes.
I see Chinese laborers in coolie hats working sugar cane fields in Cuba, shipped on boats to New Orleans, the same men arguing with plantation owners. I see Chinese men laying down railroad ties in the California sun. I see white men climbing on rooftops and hacking into homes with axes, lynching, shooting Chinese men in a Los Angeles massacre. I see thousands of Chinese workers assembling iPhones, hunched over long tables. I see Chinese women seaming jeans for sixteen hours a day, sewing hundreds of flip sequins on a single unicorn t-shirt until their hands bleed, sleeping in wooden bunk beds in the factory, washing their feet in buckets before bed, sending money home. They only get to visit their children once per year during Lunar New Year, leaving them to be raised by their grandparents the rest of the time. I see American mothers roll their eyes in disgust at the department store as they inspect labels on the backs of dinner plates. They say, Made in China, no thanks, God knows what this is made of?
But the worst is when I am grazed by a stranger on the street, I can hear their thoughts: don’t trust them, they’re rude, the food smells funny, when they talk they sound like they’re yelling, all they care about is money, why are their restaurants always open on Christmas? It doesn’t look right with them walking around with expensive bags and iPads. They have no personality, you can’t promote them, they’re too shy, their men are not real men, and our men always want their women. They’re taking our jobs, our kids’ college spots, how do they have everything, when it should always be ours, ours, ours.
I open my eyes. “I see everything.”
Coco nods and covers my hand with both of hers. Her skin is soft and smooth.
“I have everything in my head too,” she says softly. “But you have enough weighing down your mind as it is. Let me show you some family history.”
I see Coco’s grandfather, a Frenchman, desperate for a wife in New Orleans. I see him married to her grandmother, born enslaved on a plantation, through plaçage. She doesn’t show me the fear and pain I know is there, covered up, sped through. Does she think I can’t handle it? She shows me her grandmother, as an adult, buying land, setting up a restaurant in the city, raising her family with toddler Coco running through the kitchen. Coco meeting Peng Lau. Soon, Chinatown is razed with nothing left but the rubble of mud bricks from Lake Pontchartrain and the scent of star anise, their children dispersed to the call of Atlanta and Houston and white-collar jobs but their roots forgotten, mowed over by blacktop and hotel reception and parking lots.
I open my eyes. Somehow, I had a feeling. Mama wouldn’t take me to see random stranger ghosts, no matter how well they cooked.
“Po Po?” I say. “Are you my great-great-way-back Po Po? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Coco smiles. “It’s a lot to take in, meeting so much family all at once. But you need to train your mind. I see everything like you do, but you are only opening your mind to the negative. I was like you once.”
“How did you fix it?” I say. “I only see the wheel of suffering. I can’t feel anything else.”
“There is no negative without the positive,” Coco says. “You are stuck in a loop. But we are all tied together, from life to life, ghost or human, past or present. You need to move forward, reverse your karma, and every drop of positive thought will help. You need to look up, and not down.”
She wraps my hands around the bowl of Yaka Mein, and I see her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren growing up, becoming my cousins and aunts and grandparents. They are flourishing: a car dealer in Atlanta, an acclaimed New Orleans chef, a jazz saxophonist touring Europe with her band, a physics professor at MIT. I see, I think, my grandchildren, a civil engineer in Canada, an architect of Singaporean skyscrapers, a wildlife photographer, a high school principal. I see my family and even though Chinatown in New Orleans has been relegated to the spirit world, my family is alive in America now, and we are real and unique and amazing.
They are my great-to-the-nth-power Po Pos and Gong Gongs, and I have never seen their power before, all over America, this land of cruelty and survival and love and mystery. They are strong and bold and true.
I am this bowl of Yaka Mein, Made in America.
I feel a seed of hope take root in my soul.
Mama and Peng Lau return from the fan shop.
“How was your talk?” Mama says.
“Good,” I say. “Coco showed me Yaka Mein.”
I touch Mama’s arm and I see all of Mama, and I look up, like Coco tells me.
Mama is my strongest ally—she knows what I need before I say it, and I know what she is thinking. Her voice is always in my head telling me to be better, try harder, be strong. No one else will tell me these things and we are tied from life to life, for infinity. Our time in this life is too short, as always, and she loves me more than all the lifetimes of Tulane Avenue, from the Choctaw to the French and Spanish and Cuban and Haitian and Louisiana Voodoo and Creole and Cajun and Mardi Gras revelers and convention tourists and bachelorette partiers and East Coast transplants.
We kiss and hug my Po Po and Gong Gong good-bye and promise to visit again before too long.
Back at the Hilton lobby, we wipe sweat off our brows and savor the sweet air conditioning.
“I know you miss Twix, Mama,” I say. “But let’s go for a walk. It’ll be good for your blood sugar. I heard City Park is nice?”
Mama beams.
The park is lively at dusk: kids climbing a massive, gnarled oak tree like small pirates on a mighty ship, white ibis birds pecking at the water bugs in the lagoon, mosquitoes coming to feast in the pink evening light.
“Thanks for taking me to Chinatown,” I say. I lift my head to admire a giant weeping willow, graceful green leaves dipping a canopy over its reflection in the water. I think I might still need medication, but Mama was right about Chinatown.
“You’re welcome,” Mama says. “I knew you were strong, just like your Po Po.”
I take her arm in mine and pat her hand for reassurance. I don’t think about the past or the future anymore. I just savor the moment of walking with my Mama in the city where we have roots as deep as the willow.