LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 2

      When her mother had called her, Emily Tang was still in her tiny office in Chinatown, a Styrofoam container of takeout sitting in the semicircle she had managed to clear on her desk. After she hung up, she regarded her dinner with a jaundiced eye. She’d had the same pan-fried noodles in a brown sauce from the greasy restaurant down the street almost every night this past week, but had ceased to taste it. Once upon a time, when she’d first come to the city from the suburbs as a wide-eyed college student, she’d thought Chinese takeout was charming, the stuff of a thousand romantic comedies involving single women in their well-decorated loft spaces. At home her parents had never allowed takeout, their reasoning being why buy Chinese food when you could cook it yourself? So she ate it in mall food courts with her teenage friends, after hours of trying on clothes and deciding everything made her look fat. Now, all she saw when she looked at takeout was monosodium glutamate and cheap immigrant labor, packaged in a nonbiodegradable container. She dumped it in the trash.

      There were few things more pathetic than someone sitting in their office after seven on a Friday night and eating bad takeout, but Emily had good reason to be working late. For the past month she had been involved in a case that would validate the choice she had made six years ago to give up a judicial clerkship in favor of a junior associate position at the immigration law firm of Lazar and Jenkins. Although immigration law had been part of Emily’s coursework at school, the first image it conjured up for her was the subway ads in which mustachioed male lawyers promised superherolike vengeance, or at least a few thousand dollars in damages. At the time, she was putting in twelve-hour days at the civil courthouse downtown, depressed by the parade of drug addicts, drunks, squatters, wife beaters, homeless people, and plain old crazies. She figured she would be better off dealing with immigrants, although she knew from her parents that they could be just as crazy.

      When she talked about it with her husband—she and Julian had just been married for a year—he had told her to take the job, that she shouldn’t think about the pay cut but what great things she could accomplish for the people who needed it the most. Fired up by his encouragement, Emily had promptly sent in her resignation. Of course, Julian had also seen how she’d come home grumpy and irritable from each day’s events, too exhausted to do more than remove her clothes and slide into bed. She knew she couldn’t have been easy to live with. It wasn’t the first time that she reminded herself how lucky she was to have a husband who supported her decisions, who saw the best in her even if she had trouble seeing it in herself.

      The fifty-year-old firm of Lazar and Jenkins had recently moved to Chinatown for the cheaper rents and had, by default, taken up the causes common to many of its inhabitants. Usually, that meant expired visas and green card applications, but occasionally something interesting would come up: a fire that exposed a landlord who crammed more than ten tenants into windowless six-by-eight-foot rooms; a garment worker who had lost her arm up to the elbow by working faulty equipment. Cases like these reminded Emily of how she’d felt participating in protests in college, only this time everything was happening in real life, to real people, as opposed to some distant cause. She was the only person at her firm who spoke any form of Chinese, although because it was the Mandarin she had learned from her parents, and not the Cantonese or Fujianese that the majority of her clients spoke, she still needed a translator most of the time. Still, she knew that her face often made it easier for them to open up to her. In return, she often searched the faces of the people she represented, hoping to see traces of her parents in them. This had especially been true since her father had died.

      She had received the call on a Tuesday afternoon last summer—Daddy’s gone, her mother had said, just like that. Emily had been hurt by her mother’s insistence that she not hurry to the hospital, until she realized this was the way her mother was coping with the irrevocability of her father’s death. It was final; there was no point in trying to get there any sooner. Her mother had also asked Emily to tell her brother. Emily couldn’t remember exactly what she had said to Michael, only that she would meet him at the train station and they could go home together. She also couldn’t remember what Michael’s reaction had been; she thought he had been oddly silent, although it was hard to gauge someone’s feelings over the phone. All she could recall was that it had been a hot day, and the air conditioner had been broken, so that tears mixed with the perspiration trickling down her cheeks.

      After she had ended the call to her brother, she saw her colleague, Rick Farina, standing in the doorway, a concerned look on his face. Rick was the other associate Lazar and Jenkins had hired at around the same time as she had started. At first Emily hadn’t thought much of him, knowing that he and his wife and three kids lived in a two-family house with his parents in the Bronx. But after working on several cases together, and commiserating over the ineptitude of their bosses, they became close without any hint of petty workplace competition. Sometimes Emily even dared to think that they were friends. Certainly, it felt like it the time Rick invited her and Julian to his house for a barbecue a couple of summers ago. She had always admired the calm, even-handed, respectful way he treated his clients, and seeing where he came from gave her insight into the source of his stability. His Italian parents seemed to be a heartier breed of immigrant than her own, proud of their son and his accomplishments without expecting anything more from him. His wife, Lisa, was a blond, friendly woman who had no qualms about displaying her impressive bosom when she nursed her youngest, a baby girl. Rick’s two boys, with varying degrees of his flashing smile, asked Julian to join them in a game of touch football. To Emily’s surprise, Julian gave in and appeared to actually enjoy himself while she stood on the sidelines and watched the various members of the Farina family mill about in the backyard.

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