Lin-Lin’s Light
Elinor Davis
Lin-Lin was tiny and lithe with a springy walk, like the gymnasts on TV who awed me during the 1988 Olympics. I met her on the first day of seventh grade when our homeroom teacher seated us next to each other at a double desk, with everyone in alphabetical order so he could learn our names. Lin-Lin Cheng and Claire Chatsworth. Ordinarily, I resented regimentation and arbitrary seating formulas, but this one gave me my first friend at a new school where I didn’t know anyone at all.
My Mom had just moved me and my sister, Maggie, four miles north to Albany for its good schools and small-town atmosphere. The pre-gentrification South Berkeley neighborhood we’d lived in since my parents’ divorce was affordable, friendly, and had lots of kids to play with, but then the crack epidemic hit – assorted drugs were openly peddled on our corner and drive-by shootings erupted weekly. That spring, when a man walking home from a bus stop was beaten to death by four teenagers for his watch and wallet within sight of our front porch, Mom decided it was time to leave.
She managed to buy a little three-room house with a big backyard on the Albany-Berkeley border, promising to enlarge it soon. Meanwhile, she let me and Maggie have the bedroom while she slept on the living room floor surrounded by six-foot high stacks of boxes and clothes. Nine-year-old Maggie seemed to think of this as an adventure, like camping, but I was mortified. How could I bring friends, assuming I made any friends, to this hovel that looked more like a storage shed than a home? This was not a quirky Berkeley enclave of aging hippies; this was respectable, middle-class Albany.
Lin-Lin lived several blocks from us in Albany Village, the housing complex for University of California students with families. The shabby World War II barracks-style apartments built as “temporary shelter” were still in use 45 years after the war ended. Her parents were post-doc researchers newly arrived from China, and Lin-Lin could read and understand more English than she could speak. Our first whispered conversations at our double desk were perfunctory attempts to get acquainted, she was tense and straining to pronounce the Rs and Ls correctly, I was trying to enunciate simple words slowly and clearly.
Since the serendipity of our “C” names cast me in the de facto role of her guide and protector, I felt obliged to introduce her to American ways. Though Albany was new to me, this whole country was new to her, and I worried that someone who looked so delicate might be overwhelmed. That first day, I saw the 12-year-old boys shoving each other, making fart jokes, and the shrieking girls in their too-short skirts and teased-up hair through the eyes of a foreigner. I was suddenly embarrassed to be an American. Assuming all Chinese children to be as well-behaved and neatly dressed as Lin-Lin, I wondered what she must think of these hooligans. I politely admired her pink backpack and showed her my fancy new notebook with plastic zippered pockets for pens, pencils, erasers, and a ruler, all held snugly in place with a Velcro flap.
“Do you need some paper?” I asked.
She shook her head and pulled out of her backpack an even fancier vinyl covered binder decorated with big-eyed kittens and puppies. “Target has everything!”
We discovered that nearly all the clothes we each had on came from Target (except for my embroidered jean jacket from the Salvation Army, but I didn’t mention that). We bonded over a mutual love of shopping and pink hair accessories. I needn’t have been concerned about her ability to adjust. After a month of American TV and middle school, she seemed more at home in Albany than I did.
My walk home from school passed through the Village and Lin-Lin invited me in to meet her parents. When I asked if she had any brothers or sisters, she said matter-of-factly, “Kids in China don’t have brothers or sisters.”
Since I couldn’t entertain company at my shed of a house that fall, we did our homework together at her tiny apartment. They only had some leftover furniture from the previous occupants and what they’d brought in their luggage, so the apartment did not feel crowded. We lay on our stomachs on the worn carpet, munching chips, watching TV, and writing in our social studies workbooks. Slipping into stereotypes we didn’t yet know about, she helped me with algebra and biology, and I helped her with history and English, her vocabulary increasing daily.
Somehow Mom wangled a home equity line of credit and as promised, set about enlarging our house. She found an architect to draw up plans for a second story that would double the square footage and hired a contractor to frame, roof, and enclose the addition. We lived in a construction zone for months with workmen arriving before seven a.m. and stepping over our still sleeping bodies on the floor. To save money, she finished the interior herself, with occasional help from friends or a paid handyman. We made countless trips to a giant hardware store to buy drywall, bathroom fixtures, paint, screws, shelves, curtain rods, and carpeting.
I was grateful for the refuge of Lin-Lin’s apartment, which we had to ourselves after school until her parents came home. They seemed glad that Lin-Lin had a friend and always made me feel welcome. I ate half my meals there. Mom sometimes brought them an offering of groceries to thank Mrs. Cheng for feeding me so often and to apologize that our house was not yet fit for guests. She always invited Lin-Lin to come along on our weekend outings – swimming, movies, Marine World, and, of course, Target.
When the addition was finally done and we had all moved into our new upstairs bedrooms, Mom sat us down and confessed that she could not afford the high loan payments. We would have to watch every penny and skip our annual trip to Gompers, Kansas, for the Cobb family reunion. But that wasn’t the worst part. “We’ll have to rent out the downstairs bedroom to make ends meet,” she said. The room had its own entrance and bathroom, but the tenant would share our kitchen.
“You mean some stranger is going to live with us?” I shrieked.
“Unless you want to get a job,” she said evenly, “this is the most practical way to bring in enough money to support our bigger house.” Mom already had a full-time job, so we resigned ourselves to a roommate.
A few days later, we were picking up burritos at Maria’s Taqueria around the corner and saw a little note taped to the counter. “Wanted: Room to rent in this neighborhood. Talk to Maria.” As Maria assembled our chicken burritos, Mom told her we had a room available.
“Really? My brother Julio, he works here nights and needs a place to stay that’s close. Can he see the room?”
We knew Julio, a big friendly guy, and had met his kids at the taqueria. “Doesn’t he live with his wife?” Mom asked.
“Si, but they’re splitting up and she needs to keep their car,” Maria said with a shrug and a sad What can you do? expression.
Mom looked at me and Maggie for our reaction. I’m sure the prospect of a non-relative male living with us gave her pause. But we shrugged and nodded OK, so Mom gave Maria our address and phone number.
Julio came over that evening and said he’d take the room before he even saw it. “It’s perfect location,” he said. Just two blocks from his job, with buses and shops nearby. He’d been sleeping in a nook behind the taqueria kitchen for a week and Maria was relieved that he had found a place to live so soon. He left and returned 20 minutes later with two large plastic garbage bags full of clothes, and we had our first tenant.
Gregarious and charming, Julio soon alleviated any misgivings we may have had about bringing a male presence into the household. He made himself useful, cleaning up the kitchen, unclogging the sink, repairing annoyances like a loose cupboard door hinge. And he was a prolific cook. He concocted huge pots of soup and stew, which he freely shared, and his burritos and quesadillas were better than Mom’s. He told us that he and 16 siblings grew up on a ranch in Zacatecas, Mexico. They lived a life that revolved around raising and preparing food. Maria had made a business of it, and Julio seemed to enjoy cooking as much as we enjoyed eating.
The most magical of his talents was an ability to grow vegetables and flowers in the weed-infested clay soil of our backyard. On his walks through the neighborhood, he chatted with anyone he met on the street or working in a yard and thereby acquired seeds and cuttings that he planted after clearing the weeds. Tools materialized – a shovel, trowel, hoe – and by mid-summer, he had conjured a thriving, though chaotic, garden. He cut up potatoes and buried the pieces there, stuck a whole avocado in the ground there, drove stakes for tomato plants and constructed a trellis for kiwi, jasmine, and passionflower vines. Orange nasturtiums appeared (“You can eat them in salad,” he assured us), red peppers, garlic, scallions, squash, a blueberry bush, fennel, cilantro, rosemary, whatever he could scrounge. The flowers, vegetables, herbs, and small fruit trees intermingled in a riot of color and foliage, with no discernible rows or pattern. Somehow, he knew what and where each plant was, though he often couldn’t tell us the English name for it, just what it was called in Spanish. We ate an endless variety of organic produce plucked fresh from the yard. Neighbors offered him handyman jobs, paid him to help them move and let him take their discards, which he installed as garden sculptures or used to decorate his room.
Once our house was presentable, Lin-Lin and I started doing our homework in my new bedroom. One day we came home to find Julio building a scrap wood-enclosure on stilts in the backyard. We went out to investigate and he showed us two tiny brown rabbits in a cardboard box. “They eat our scraps, and their poop feeds the garden,” he said, grinning.
I wondered if Mom knew about this escalation from flora to fauna, a heretofore unexplored dimension of home ownership. We had a row of tall bamboo along the back fence, screening us from the businesses and busy street beyond. “Maybe we could have pandas, too, since they eat bamboo,” I said. “And koalas – we could feed them with eucalyptus leaves from the park,” Lin-Lin added. We were giggling over plans for our mini-zoo when Mom came home and Maggie went wild over the bunnies. She wrapped them in a blanket, plopped them in her toy buggy along with several dolls, and perambulated up and down the driveway. Mom didn’t object to the rabbit hutch, but warned us not to get too attached, hinting that when the adorable fur balls got bigger, they might wind up in one of Julio’s stews. We scoffed at such an outlandish notion, as if she’d proposed eating the neighbor’s Chihuahua. She assured us that lots of people hunt and eat rabbits, including our Grandpa and uncles in Kansas.
Since Julio worked evenings at the taqueria and was home while we were out, we didn’t see much of him during the week, especially after he managed to buy a used Chevy. He loved that car and spent many hours washing and polishing it in our driveway while we were at school. I heard Mom tell a neighbor that having a man on the property probably helped deter would-be daytime burglars. He came home late at night and slept late into the morning, so our paths rarely crossed in the kitchen except on weekends. I didn’t think much about where he went after the taqueria closed or why he began to fall behind on his rent. But there were clues. Racing forms from nearby Golden Gate Fields racetrack on the counter, lottery tickets in the trash, messages left on our answering machine demanding that Julio “pay up.”
Once Lin-Lin and I came home and there was a man sitting on the porch, smoking. “Where’s Julio?” he asked. I just shook my head and mumbled that I didn’t know. “You tell him Robbie needs to see him.” His raspy voice sounded like some of the phone messages.
A few days after this encounter, I realized I hadn’t seen the Chevy parked out front for a while, even when Julio was home. “Where’s your car?”
Julio just stared into the pot of beans he was stirring on the stove. “Oh… I owe a guy some money and he, uh, took the car. Just till I pay him.”
“Robbie? Is that what he wanted?”
“Yeah, sorry he bothered you.”
I’d never seen Julio so dejected.
By the following fall, our garden was a jungle of vegetables, berries, and herbs that found their way into our kitchen and onto our plates. Maggie and I ate all sorts of things we never would have tried if we hadn’t watched them growing in our own yard. Once Mom threw a garden party and one of the guests asked, “Do you use pesticide, Fran?” Mom shook her head: no.
“Then how do you keep the plants looking so healthy?” Mom shrugged and said something about Julio’s green thumb. Years later, I read an article about flowers and herbs that naturally repel various pests and realized that Julio had practiced what the magazine called “companion planting” to discourage bugs and diseases from ravaging our garden. Multiple litters of rabbits came and went; Julio sold the babies at a flea market when they were old enough to leave their mother.
Lin-Lin and I had two classes together in eighth grade and continued doing homework together at my house, which required crossing busy San Pablo Avenue at an intersection with no stoplight. The elementary schools had crossing guards with orange vests and big signs, but middle school kids were on their own. One late October afternoon we were waiting at the corner for a break in the traffic, eager to get home and work on our Halloween costumes. An SUV stopped to let us cross, and Lin-Lin took off into the street.
As she stepped out ahead of me and past the SUV, a car in the next lane approached too fast, not taking the cue from the SUV that a pedestrian was in the crosswalk. With a sickening thud, the car slammed into Lin-Lin, tossing her aloft like a doll. The car never stopped; Lin-Lin landed 30 feet away.
Some woman grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the street, my screams soon blending with sirens. An EMT hovered over Lin-Lin for a moment, then lifted her crumpled form onto a gurney and covered her with a sheet that slowly turned red. After the ambulance pulled away, I saw something bright pink in the gutter. Lin-Lin’s hair clip. She’ll want that when she wakes up, I thought, projecting myself into an alternate future in which she was not dead and would appreciate getting her favorite hair ornament back.
A memorial service was held in the school auditorium, the stage awash in flowers, photos of Lin-Lin, and posters made by classmates. Her teachers and a few students spoke. “So quick to learn, always curious, helping her classmates, everyone loved her laugh…” Her parents looked frozen in grief, small, desolate, alone in a room full of people. They had no family members there to console them, just some neighbors and University friends. I heard someone whisper something about the “one-child policy” and remembered Lin-Lin saying, “Kids in China don’t have brothers or sisters.” It was only years later that I understood what this meant for parents like hers, too old to have more children.
The next day, two police officers came to our door and asked to speak to Julio Mendez. He wasn’t home, but they wanted to see his car. He doesn’t have a car anymore, Mom said.
“A Chevy Nova registered to him at this address was involved in a hit and run accident on San Pablo Avenue, according to a witness who saw the license plate. Do you know where he was on October 28 at 3:30 p.m.?”
At work, he would have been at work then, she said. They gave her a business card and asked her to have Julio call them when he returned. Later, she told Julio about the police visit and he blanched. He said he would call them, but that night he left, and we never saw him again. If Maria knew where he was, she wouldn’t tell us.
That winter the garden devolved, reverting eventually to its pre-Julio state, overrun with bamboo and blackberries. We got a new tenant, a grad student who spent most of her time in the library studying and never cooked. I gladly left middle school for Albany High and never let myself have another best friend. After Maggie and I finished college, Mom sold the house and moved to an apartment with no yard to maintain and we rarely spoke of those years.
Recently, I had the opportunity to drive through Albany on a shopping errand. I felt my stomach tense as I neared the corner where I had crossed San Pablo Avenue every day on the way to and from middle school. The WWII barracks were finally gone and some of the storefronts had been remodeled. Maria’s was now a Thai restaurant.
Then I saw it.
A big red traffic light suspended over the intersection, commanding me and everyone else to stop. Lin-Lin’s legacy. I wish I knew how to reach her parents, to let them know. There’s a stoplight now. We remember her.