Ni hao, companera

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Papa Tao crooked a finger at the waitress and barked, “Boligrafo!” He made a rough sketch–very rough–of the path to Casino Chung Wah and accompanied its production with overly complicated verbal directions. After four visits to Chung Wah–closed each time–I am finally able to speak with Jorge, the secretary of the largest Chinese social organization in Cuba, to make my request for an interview. We are sitting, rather formally, I think, on a divan, and he looks at me curiously for a moment before speaking. “You must request permission from the Ministry of Justice,” he said, “but come see me tomorrow at 9 AM.”

*

At 8:58, I am escorted into a sitting room and tea is poured into a delicate china cup, a few black leaves settling at the bottom. Jorge shuffles into the room and takes the seat at the head of the table. “Ni hao,” I say, greeting him in Mandarin. He smiles broadly. He does not ask if I have managed to navigate the shoals of bureaucracy to get a journalist’s permit to interview him. “Ask what you would like,” he says, and we talk for over an hour about the history of Chinese in Cuba.

Every once in awhile, he pushes back from the table and disappears down the hall, coming back a few minutes later with some piece of ephemera that he wants me to have. In the background, sounds of a bad Chinese action movie fill the otherwise silent space of this expansive building. “The old people like these movies,” Jorge tells me, referring to the dwindling handful of members of the society who come here each day for socialization and recreation. When I enter the room with the TV, I see chairs rocking back and forth as if moved by a mighty breeze. The tiny bodies of the oldest generation of Chinese Cubans swim in the space of wood and wicker, and I can hardly see them… a fitting metaphor for the history of the Chinese in Cuba and the Americas.

*

Jorge offers me a copy of the Chinese newspaper and notes that it is still printed on a press, circa 1900. He explains how the type is hand-set and I think I gasp audibly because he asks me next whether I’d like to visit the empresa. He will request that someone accompany me, and before I can pick up my bag, Angel, a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair, is at my side, ready to walk me to the other side of Havana’s Chinatown to show me the office of Kwong Wah Po.

We walk slowly, and I don’t know whether it’s the heat or the fact that I didn’t eat breakfast or the thought of losing all this history that has me feeling dizzy. We enter the office and greet staff, who are sitting in the doorway, in both Mandarin and Spanish. The lights are out. The press is still. Rows and rows of racks filled with Chinese characters etched on metal nibs are lined up in orderly precision, covered with dust. I fill my cheeks with air and blow, watching as the polvo billows up into the thin shafts of light that push through the front door.

There is a section of letters, too, for the Kwong Wah Po newspaper recently made the decision to publish one page in Spanish. Fluency in the Chinese language is diminishing in the community. Sometimes they don’t have news to even print, although the paper is just four pages, the Spanish back page included. A man walks past and is introduced as the person responsible for setting the Spanish type. “How long does that take you?” I ask him, pointing at the tray of letters that formed the page for the most recent issue, published on March 27. “12-14 hours,” he said. It is meticulous work, but I get the sense that it is important to him and I feel deep admiration for the man.

And then I ask the question for which I know the answer will sadden me: “How old is the person who sets the Chinese type?” “Ay, setenta y pico,” Angel says, sounding neither troubled about nor resigned to the fact. Like so much in Cuba and in life, it is what it is. 70 something. I take a breath. “Is there someone else learning to do this? Does he have an apprentice?”

“Nadie,” Angel says with the same kind of emotion.

“No one.”

He signs his name–in Chinese–on my copy of the newspaper, and I step out of the dark and into the intense light radiating off the street. Signs on every other building announce the renovation of a historic site by the office of Havana’s historiador. The buildings will be rescued, restored. But the stories. The stories. Who will rescue them, preserve them, and pass them on?