On Sunday I joined the Red Door Tour in Chinatown. The group met on the corner of Allen and East Broadway, in front of an empty lot where a Chinese grocery store had recently burned to the ground. The clapboard barricades advertised a Japanese vampire movie.
The tour guide was a squat, though not inelegant Chinese woman who balanced a pair of imitation Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses on the upper register of her perm.
You may not be able to tell from the modest exteriors of these homes, the tour guide said as we paused before a triptych of effusive garbage cans. But the inhabitants of these red door apartments have experienced glorious strokes of luck over the years.
“Five people in this house won the immigration services’ Green Card lottery. Unbelievable! They call themselves the ‘Green Five’ and meet once a year at the Red Lobster in Times Square to celebrate their good fortune.”
“A woman on the second floor of this apartment gave birth to three sons, each of whom went to Harvard and did not major in liberal arts.”
“Red is lucky – where does it come from? It is a story that can be traced back to ancient times.
“A young scholar in love with a beautiful courtesan spent day after day composing what he hoped would be the most beautiful love poem in the world. He hoped to present it to her on a scroll of paper tinctured with dew drops and peach blossoms and tied with a braid of his own hair. For two months, he had been whittling the proper metaphor for the curve of her eyebrows.
Through a hole in the wall, the courtesan spied on his impotent labors with mounting turbulence, flipping her silk handkerchief back and forth like a dolphin at a marine amusement park."
“A monkey watched all this unfold atop his perch in a persimmon tree. He found the goings-on so comical that he began rocking back and forth on the branch with laughter, the force of which shook him loose from the tree. Yet the monkey, being a monkey, greedily refused to release the fruit from his hands as he hurtled to the ground. He absorbed the impact entirely with his ass and scampered away unscathed, his bottom reddened.
“‘What a lucky monkey am I! he screeched, causing the scholar’s brush to ricochet across the rice paper and the courtesan to bite down on her tongue, drawing blood.”
“Of course I can speak solely to the luck of those whose legends were told. There are countless others whose private fortunes and joys can only be imagined. Perhaps two lovers possessed of a byzantine sexual fetish found one another without the guidance of the Internet. Or a troublesome cyst that had lodged in the center of a man’s back for nearly half his life burst without incident.”
“Some red door houses, like this one, have Dark Luck. You may delight that your children speak so fluently, indeed, thoughtlessly, in English, only to have them lance you with their canceled sitcom barbs, skulls perpetually clamped between earphones. Or say your husband wins 10 dollars from his first Instant Scratch-off Game. He spends the next 20 years scratching that itch like a skin disease.”
“It won’t do you any good, kissing it and rubbing it like that. This isn’t some Irish stone or African American tree stump. The Chinese believe you have to enter your luck, inhabit it. Feng shui: maybe you’ve heard of it?
“You are asking yourself if such a person called ‘Poop Dick’ exists. He does. Why he was called that when he lived here as a boy doesn’t concern us. Most likely he was either too tiny or too fat; possibly he smelled bad.
“Some of us are born leaning forward like hood ornaments, our ears flattened back with the wind. Others are scrawled on the backs of envelopes or born with wings of lead.”
“To answer your question, yes, I lived in a red door walk-up for many years.
“I am not one for philosophy. If you’ve found that thing to love, you are lucky. It doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a purpose. You will know what it is by your fidelity to it."
“Is it my great fortune now, to be standing here with you sharing the great history and culture of the Chinese people? If it is not, what is it?”
