Read The Chinese Beverly Hills for Free Online Page B

for later in life after the milk name wear out.”
    “What a great idea,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m getting tired of Jack. Could you tell me about Sabine?”
    “I got it all. Friends. Photos. High school diploma. Acceptance letter to Williams. But I tell you anything you want, too.” He took the fat manila envelope that she stabbed at him.
    Williams. Just about the top of the heap these days. Even Maeve hadn’t had an acceptance there, though she could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, Amherst, or several others if she’d had a rich uncle. “I’m sorry I have to ask this: Would anyone in town here be angry at Sabine?”
    Mr. Roh stirred himself for the first time since barely acknowledging Jack Liffey’s presence twenty minutes earlier. “ Thong miao ,” he blurted out, glancing over fiercely. He appeared to smile, fleetingly, then subsided and turned away again.
    Jack Liffey pretty much knew what the expression meant, from deep in his Vietnam memory box. He looked at Mrs. Roh, and she appeared embarrassed. “It’s bad word, Mr. Liff,” she said.
    “Roughly?”
    She smiled a little, not as easily embarrassed as all that. Tien had told him that the Chinese, unlike the obsessively polite Japanese, had no difficulty at all being rude when they felt like it.
    “It Vietnamese slang for bad white guy.”
    He caught Mr. Roh smiling privately. “I’m not sensitive, Mrs. Roh. Why do you think thong miao are Sabine’s enemy?”
    “They hate us all,” she said matter-of-factly. “They say we take their town away. They say we buy everything, we buy all the good house. They think we all rich and we stuck up. You need to talk to somebody about the big fight here in 1970 and 1980 time. They still angry.”
    “I will.” He turned. “ Mr . Roh, you okay with that same-same? Thong miaos numbah ten?” Jack Liffey figured that the Saigon street slang might be a grievous insult to the man, a former college professor, and he wanted to see his reaction.
    The man bit his lower lip and didn’t budge.
    “I’ll find your daughter,” he said finally to Mrs. Roh.
    Mr. Roh snapped his head around and stared like a death’s head at Jack Liffey.
    “How many languages do you speak, sir?” the man demanded.
    “I try hard, but it’s very difficult for my weak brain.”
    “I speak eleven languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin, Mr. Liffey. I have five university degrees. I was dean of Russian and French Literature at the Faculty of Letters, Saigon University. I think I can still speak all those languages, though my best is still Vietnamese. And my second is Mandarin.”
    So, the G.I. slang had indeed insulted him. “Sir, you have me beat,” Jack Liffey said. “I said that to get a reaction. I don’t like being ignored.”
    Mr. Roh smiled a little. “I apologize.”
    “Sir, may I visit your daughter’s bedroom? I’m not a linguist, but I know how to look for missing children. I realize it isn’t comfortable to allow this, but it’s helped me before.”
    The Rohs exchanged glances.
    “You may do so, Mr. Liffey,” the father said. “My wife will show you to our daughter’s room. Please do not be disrespectful as you look it over. And please keep us informed.”
    “I’ll keep your daughter in my heart.”
    *
    “What was the very first song you ever bought, and on what media?” Maeve said, realizing immediately she should have said “medium.” But who cared? The sensibility of the world now didn’t care about rules; the sensibility of now was more about transgression.
    Maeve was sitting on the edge of Bunny’s bed, a little shaken by the talk with Gloria and feeling very needy, though Bunny was clearly glancing out of the corner of her eye at the laptop screen on her small desk. Maeve tried to ignore Bunny’s hints of preoccupation.
    Greenwood Avenue had been the last vestige of a stable home in her life. She needed it stay stable.
    “‘Losing my Religion,’ by REM,” Bunny said. “A CD.”
    “I