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him out. He tried to run, but the guards cuffed his hands and ankles and called the police.
    In the courtyard, Wah-lung looked helplessly up at the rows of stony barred windows and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Jee-yun, are you there? It’s me, Wah-lung. I came to see you! Jee-yun, are you there?”
    Jee-yun ran to the window only to see him thrown aboard a paddy wagon. She slid to the floor weeping and choking.
    From then on, she wrote no more poems. When she gazed at the distant seawall where young couples strolled freely, the pain cut so deeply that she moaned.
    In court, an exhausted Wah-lung appeared before a stern-looking judge. The young man hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten and was crushed by his failure to free Jee-yun. When he was pronounced guilty, the judge ordered him deported to China immediately.
    â€œNo!” cried Wah-lung. “Let me stay in prison here. My beloved is locked in Pig Pen.”
    But the judge ignored his plea, because a steamer ticket cost less than a term in prison.
    In Pig Pen, Jee-yun wept into her cot until her
eyes
were swollen and red. Finally, she begged to be sent home. Weary officials issued a deportation order and put her on a freighter bound for Hong Kong.
    Imagine the joy when Jee-yun and Wah-lung found each other aboard the ship. They embraced and vowed never to be parted. As the ship left the harbor, they clung to each other and watched Pig Pen and the park’s great seawall glide by.
    But before they got far, a violent storm battered the ship. The cargo of steel beams in the hold shifted and the boat overturned. There were no survivors.
    No one in Jee-yun or Wah-lung’s family even suspected they had died. Their bodies were lost to flesh-eating fish and corrosive saltwater. The only evidence of their love had been etched into the walls of Pig Pen, and it was there that their two souls returned until the building was torn down.
    If you spot Jee-yun and Wah-lung on the seawall one evening, don’t be afraid of the young lovers. They are neither angry nor vengeful, for they are content to be in one another’s company, and the view of ocean, trees and mountains remains magnificent.

SIX The Peddler
    THE RESIDENTS of Chinatown didn’t know much about Little Lo, but they all agreed he should never have come to North America. These were not cruel comments, for people genuinely worried about simpletons trying to survive in a harsh new country. Litte Lo had no steady job. Instead, he loitered at the game-halls sweeping floors and washing teacups, emptying spittoons and scrubbing brown-stained toilets. No one asked him to do the work, so no one paid him.
    But everyone told tales about him.
    â€œI saw him squatting at the back door with a bowl of rice heaped with meat and vegetables. A stray dog ambled by, and Little Lo fed it with his own chopsticks. No wonder he’s so thin.”
    â€œHe was strolling along Main Street with his fly wide open. Passersby were pointing and chuckling, but he paid no attention. When someone finally told him, he bowed at everyone, grinning like some grand entertainer.”
    â€œYou know he’s awkward, right? One day he tripped and fell and thumped down two long flights of stairs. Any normal human would have broken a bone or bruised himself. Instead, he started giggling. The man is crazy!

    Nobody knew Little Lo’s exact age because his head was cleanly shaved (to avoid fleas, people muttered). Nor did anyone know his home village because he rarely spoke. Little Lo had no friends, no home other than the gambling tables he slept under, and no known relatives. It was rumored his family in China had sent him abroad to eliminate an embarrassing problem. Others claimed he had been a smart young man until white boys rammed his head against a telephone pole during a robbery.
    One day, Old Poon the vegetable peddler won the biggest jackpot ever at fan-tan. He had bet all his savings against the highest odds,