Yeung Sau Ka was born in a rural rice-farming village in Fujian in 1955, the first year of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. The youngest of four, he was left behind when his parents fled to Hong Kong. His parents sent for him to join them when he was five, when the country was in the grip of a devastating famine from Mao's failed project. Some of Yeung's earliest memories of China are of hunger.
He landed in Los Angeles at age 23, in 1978, and made his way east, joining his brothers and sisters who had already settled in New Jersey.
His wife and son, who was born the year he left Hong Kong, joined him in the U.S. in 1980. The family was naturalized in 1981, and his daughter was born here.
For his first five years in America, Yeung worked in his family's restaurants in Jersey. Eventually, he managed to scrape together $20,000 to buy his own business.
In 1983, a classified ad for a cheap building for sale lured Yeung to the corner of Sutter and Euclid. He knew it was a tough neighborhood, but the storefront was what he could afford.
"Of course I wouldn't choose to be here," he says.
Like others in the neighborhood, Yeung says he didn't feel safe walking down the street during most of the 1980s and early 1990s, even during the daytime. He was mugged twice outside the restaurant. And two other times, he was attacked and robbed inside the store while mopping up the waiting area after-hours.
The scariest incident, he recalls, took place during one of the rare occasions he wasn't at work. A gunman tried to rob the place and fired his weapon down the narrow passage used for passing money and food. No one was injured, but the wall still bears a scar where the bullet chipped a tile below a photo of fish sticks that is taped to a kitchen wall.
The violence got to Yeung, and so began his third exile, in 1991: He leased out May May Restaurant and set up an American-style diner in Andover, New Jersey. The business failed within two years—Yeung blames his shaky command of English. He moved back to Brooklyn and resumed running May May Restaurant.
Shortly after he moved back to Brooklyn, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Yeung credits him with cleaning up the neighborhood: "Now, apart from isolated incidents, it's much better," he says.
Irascible at work, Yeung seems to be living an American dream of sorts: He owns the restaurant and lives above it, and he owns another property in Queens. His son manages a franchise restaurant in midtown, and his daughter works for a company whose name he doesn't know, but he's visibly proud of her, too.
"If you're willing to work really hard, America does offer you a better life," he says. And the work is hard: Yeung describes his life as "work and sleep, work and sleep."
The restaurant is open every day, from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and until 1 a.m. on weekends. On Wednesdays, Yeung travels to Chinatown for supplies. "No time," he says, to even accept the offer of tea from someone. His only days off, he says, are Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Over time, Yeung says he has developed a certain understanding of his neighbors, as they have of him. "I've gotten to know people and their children," he says. "They aren't bad people."
But he does acknowledge that his dealings with the neighborhood have changed him. He has learned to raise his voice to be taken seriously: "Sometimes, it's like they don't hear you the first time," he says. "I say it once, twice, three times, and then I raise my voice, and then they get it."
After all these years, however, Yeung has never managed to adapt to the violence. The first time in his life that he saw a dead body, he says, was outside his restaurant. And he says he remembers every time someone dies because it makes him reconsider his decision to stick it out in the neighborhood.
Why does he clean up the blood?
"Chinese people have a tradition," he says, "especially if you're a store owner. You don't want to make your employees do the dirty work."
Which is why he didn't rely on anyone else to clean up after Golphin was killed.
In the weeks following her death, the spot in front of May May's where Golphin fell attracted a legion of flickering candles as well as a cross adorned with pink plastic roses. A poster on the brick wall above the spot featured her sweet, round face, and people wrote messages to her on it. And then, one morning, the memorial was gone, and all that was left were tiny puddles of hardened wax and the word "REPENT" scrawled on the brick wall in white paint. No doubt when the next body drops, May May will be out there again, trying to scrub away the blood.
With reporting by Edward Gauvin
ebrady@villagevoice.com
