A Long Stay in a Distant Land Read online

  The song was N.W.A.'s "Fuck Tha Police," and he began mouthing the lines, hopping from foot to foot, swinging his head like a ball on a car antenna. "Isn't this better than your grandmother's music?" he asked.

  Louis remembered what Pastor Elkin had said about demonic possession. "It begins with uncontrollable gyrations and an awkward flailing of limbs. A man possessed speaks an ancient, indecipherable language. For example, Yaka-ah-way mana Beelzebub means 'I serve the dark lord Beelzebub.'"

  By the time Louis's father shouted something about a young nigger going on a warpath that consequently resulted in a bloodbath, Louis was so certain his father's body had been commandeered by fallen angels that he ran screaming out the front door, the old man yelling after him, "I'm trying to teach you some culture! Come back!"

  After he moved back in with his father, Louis felt the bass pumping from the speakers in the old man's room and pulsing through his wall like a heartbeat, and in place of his father's voice, lyrics featuring Dre and Eazy.

  The phone rang and rang until the machine picked up and Grandma Esther spoke. There was a tremble in her voice Louis wasn't accustomed to hearing. He'd never even seen her cry.

  "Sonny, come to my house tomorrow," she said. "I need to see you. Bo's missing."

  New Territory

  (1962)

  Weekday afternoons Esther rocked Bo on the square concrete patio of her Garden Grove home. She enjoyed the weight of his chin on her shoulder, the warm drool wetting her clothes, the heft of his thighs like small sacks of baking powder. She sat for hours with Bo in the shade of a large umbrella while Melvin was at work doing other people's taxes and Larry and Sonny were at school.

  Weekends Melvin stayed in the garage cleaning and polishing his old army uniform and shell casings, and Sonny and Larry scoured the streets on their bicycles like a couple of cats. The boys would ride out with empty paper grocery bags and come back hours later, their bags filled with cookies, candies, and other food donated by neighbors.

  A year younger than Larry, Sonny led the way, having planned their day's route through the various houses in the neighborhood. Afterward, he inspected and divided their spoils.

  "Oatmeal and chocolate both count as pastries," Sonny said in defense of grabbing two chocolate bars for himself. "You got three bags of oatmeal. I prefer the oatmeal, but I want you to have it. It keeps you regular, which means it keeps your face clear of acne. Chocolate can give you cancer. Uncle Phil told me about research that proves it. I don't want you to get sick."

  For weeks afterward and despite Esther's prodding, Larry would not eat chocolate for fear of cancer. He took Sonny's word over hers.

  She was disappointed that one, Sonny was exploiting his gullible older brother, and two, the boys preferred treats from outside the home over treats she'd provided.

  Even after she bought cookies and candies and stored them in bright red jars in the kitchen, the boys continued going out for food.

  She thought Melvin would tell them to stop, but he shrugged when she showed him a pack of gum confiscated from the children.

  "Impressive," he said, sitting on his stool, holding a white rag in one hand and a bullet in the other. It looked like a plain lead .22 caliber, about the size of a thumb, and it glinted under the garage's lone sixty-watt bulb.

  "That's all you're going to say?" she asked, upset that because of him, she knew what a plain lead .22 caliber looked like.

  "That's what I said to them," he said.

  "They already showed you?"

  "Yeah."

  "You encouraged this?"

  "They planned it out themselves. I was just cheering them on.

  "What kind of children are you raising here?" she asked.

  "Self-reliant ones."

  She stared at him and the longer she stared, the more unfamiliar he became, the way her face turned into a stranger's if she stared at a photo of herself long enough. She tried to find something in his face to help her understand why he didn't care that their sons were spending practically all their free time outside the house.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing."

  She lectured her boys. "You aren't orphans. Anything you two want, you ask me or your father. You don't go around begging. How does that make me look? Yes, your father also said no. Roll your eyes again, Sonny, and I will slap the dimples off your face."

  Whenever she ran into Mrs. Walker or Mrs. Alphonse at the market, they would say, "Sonny and Larry stopped by last weekend. They're so cute. I love the dimples on your younger one." Mrs. Walker once said, "And their hair. It's such a dark black."

  Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Alphonse were the widows of the neighborhood and the women the boys visited most often. These women, like everyone else in Orange County with the exception of the Lums, were white. Moving to southern California had been Esther's idea. Orange County had been Melvin's. He'd always insisted on being a lone Chinese man in a sea of white, whether in France or California.

  Chinatown was just thirty miles north in Los Angeles. She'd grown up happily in San Francisco's Chinatown and missed it. Chinatowns were where the Chinese should live in this country. If the boys rode their bicycles around Chinatown, they could visit people who spoke Cantonese and offered them egg tarts and dried prunes.

  Dark black hair! she thought. Her children were parading around the neighborhood for treats like a couple of albino tigers at the circus. They were not exotic. They were disobedient children.

  It angered Esther that the boys were spending more time with these women than with her. When had she ever given them the impression that they weren't welcome at home, that they needed to wander the neighborhood like a couple of gypsies? What did they see in these women that she lacked?

  Even if they were happier outside, they had an obligation to stay home and be unhappy. This was the definition of family, that you are beholden to people not of your choosing. And even the people you did choose, like your husband, you really didn't choose. Because the person you married was not the person you were married to.

  When she married Melvin, she did not know he was the sort of man who would leave her, willingly and enthusiastically, to fight a war on the other side of the world. She did not know he was the sort of man who would prefer the company of brass shells over his family.

  And for the ones you didn't choose, those surprises who came out of your body and announced with cries and tears their presence to the world—as if they had endured some kind of pain during your labor—you raised and fed and gave all the affection you could muster, with the very reasonable expectation that they not go to someone else for food.

  "What's wrong with the cookies here?" she asked.

  "They're too easy," Sonny said.

  "Easy?"

  "It's right there on the counter," Sonny said. "There's no challenge. Food earned through work is twice as tasty as food lying in a jar waiting to be eaten."

  Larry nodded.

  "Who taught you that? Your father?"

  The boys said nothing, which meant yes.

  "No more treats," she said. "Even if they insist, you don't take any. It's wrong. It's dishonorable to take something and give nothing in return."

  "We give these people the joy of our company," Sonny said.

  "We water their plants and help clean up their yards. We tell them stories."

  "About what?"

  "About school," Sonny said. "Softball and math quizzes."

  "And they give you food for these stories?"

  "Yes. And we tell them jokes."

  "Like what?"

  "Knock knock," Sonny said.

  "What?"

  "You're supposed to say, 'Who's there?'" Sonny said.

  "Why?"

  "Knock knock."

  Esther sighed. "Who's there?"

  "Sonny," Sonny said. "Now you're supposed to say, 'Sonny who?'"

  "Why?"

  "Just say it."

  Esther sighed again. "Sonny who?"

  "Sonny Lum."
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br />   "What's funny about that?" Esther asked.

  "I made that one up myself," Sonny said.

  "That's a good one," Larry said.

  "Thanks," Sonny said.

  "They've got nothing to do anyway," Larry said.

  "Who're they?" Esther asked.

  "Mrs. Walker and Alphonse," Sonny said. "They like listening. Anything we say is funny to them."

  "Good point," Larry said.

  "Thanks," Sonny said.

  "From now on," she said, "everything you eat comes from this house."

  They promised her they'd obey, but she began discovering peanut shells and torn Bazooka gum wrappers in the trash. This prompted her to search them after they returned from their bike rides.

  "Against the wall," she'd say. They'd spread their legs and raise their arms, and she'd frisk them the way Lee Marvin patted down cornered suspects on M Squad.

  "Good afternoon, Fascist Woman," Melvin would say if he happened to pass by. The boys would giggle.

  She soon stopped searching them because they would continue eating their cookies and candies outside the house. They'd find places to bury caches of food. They'd stuff themselves to their hearts' content elsewhere and learn to stop bringing evidence home.

  She called Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Alphonse. "I know you're feeding my kids. I put them on a strict diet. One cookie makes a difference. One cookie makes a hell of a difference, so stop it!"

  Her conversations with them at the market became shorter.

  "I didn't feed them," Mrs. Walker would say.

  "They didn't come by," Mrs. Alphonse would say. "I swear."

  "Good-bye," they'd say.

  Bo was her last chance. He was the one who'd stay by her side. When she rocked him on the patio, she felt they were the only two people in the world. No Sonny. No Larry. No Melvin. No in-laws, friends, and acquaintances. "You'll never go somewhere else for candy, will you?" she'd ask, and he'd burp or grin in response.

  Mere Foreign than the Foreigners

  (1975)

  They observed a moment of silence before eating, but it was not to pray, not to thank, not to be grateful for, and not to remember. It was a moment they'd replayed every evening for the past year, a moment of approximately thirty seconds, but stretched to a seemingly endless length of time by Bo's nervous, growling stomach and his anxious glances at anything and anyone not Melvin, who gave Bo this one moment to put his plate, spoon, and fork back in the kitchen cabinet and drawers and to "eat like a goddamn normal person, using a goddamn normal rice bowl and chopsticks."

  Esther hated when her husband cursed in front of Bo.

  "Let's get started already," she said.

  Melvin snatched a cauliflower from a center dish with his chopsticks and waved the vegetable at Bo. "Do you even remember how to use this anymore?"

  "Stop fooling around," Esther said.

  "I'm asking him a question." Melvin popped the cauliflower in his mouth. He often complained that Bo at fourteen was skinnier and shorter than either of his brothers had been at the same age.

  This boy and his infatuation with the Rolling Stones, Englishmen as scrawny as he was. This boy who stayed up nights reading comic books, this boy who holed up in his room on weekends instead of going outside, who wouldn't eat rice from a bowl, much less pick up food with chopsticks.

  Bo's preference for the fork and plate had driven Melvin mad, and kept Esther up at night listening to his madness.

  He was skinny, Melvin said, because he wasn't eating with the right utensils, because the flow of his food intake had been disrupted by the steely fork that speared and deformed vegetables mercilessly, the inflexible spoon that could not pluck and pick meat with the precision and grace of a pair of chopsticks, which were themselves extensions of one's fingers, and the flat, rigid plate that could not hold rice the way a bowl did, in a compact and easily accessible mound that retained both heat and flavor.

  "You're confounding your stomach! Your body can't handle it!" he'd shout in the middle of a meal, surprising Bo into dropping his fork or spoon, the steel clanking against the plate.

  What kind of man would Bo become, Melvin asked, if he didn't eat with chopsticks and didn't go outside on weekends? What kind of a boy avoided the sun like a vampire?

  He was convinced that Bo was something foreign, a genetic tangent, a hiccup in the bloodline. His other sons had never acted this way. Bo was more foreign than the Germans who thought sausage and pickled cabbage were such fine stuff, the English who boiled the flavor out of anything that had flavor, and the Indians with their one-trick-pony curry.

  This boy looked Chinese and had his name, but he was more foreign than all the foreigners Melvin had ever met.

  Esther listened to her husband's grievances in bed. She learned to nod her head in agreement because if she called him an idiot or wrong, he'd ask, "How am I an idiot?" or "How am I wrong?" and would not let her sleep until she explained herself to his satisfaction. And he was never satisfied with her reasons for calling him an idiot or wrong, reasons that included, "Because I said so," "Because you are," and "Because I said you are,"

  Neither Melvin nor Bo realized how much they had in common. They were the only two people Esther knew to have put so much thought into the act of eating. As long as she had enough to fill her stomach, she didn't care how the food got in, whether via chopsticks, a fork, or a shovel.

  And what was the boy's explanation? Melvin asked. Efficiency. Efficiency!

  Bo had explained his desire for efficiency the first night he brought a clean, white plate of rice to the table.

  "I gave you a bowl," Melvin said.

  "I want to use this," Bo said.

  "For what purpose?" Melvin asked.

  "To hold my rice."

  "Your bowl holds your rice," Melvin said.

  "I can give you another bowl if yours is dirty," Esther said.

  Melvin put his hand up. "Wait. I think something's going on here." He looked at Bo's plate. "What's wrong with the bowl?"

  "It's too small."

  "It holds enough rice to fill me up." Melvin patted his paunch, which had grown considerably in recent years. "And I can eat a lot more than you can."

  "I have to refill the bowl with rice two, even three times for just one dinner," Bo said. "I have to constantly pick vegetables and meat from the center dishes as I eat. With my own plate, I can pile on all the food at one time. Then I won't have to waste energy refilling. I can shorten my dinner by about ten minutes. It's more efficient this way."

  "Part of the fun is picking up food as you go along." Melvin nodded at the three center plates that held broccoli, ong choi, and shrimp. He plucked a shrimp with his chopsticks and waved it in front of Bo's face. "See? Fun." He ate it, then picked up a few pieces of the ong choi, twirling the stringy greens around his chopsticks. "I never know what I'll want next." He chewed and swallowed. "Maybe I'm in the mood to eat more shrimp. Or more vegetables. I'll go with shrimp. There. See? Freedom to choose what I eat, constantly adjusting the ratio of meat to vegetable instead of having it all smashed together on a plate. What if I'm feeling meaty? Then a standard plate of equal meat and vegetable just won't do. Or what if I'm feeling like vegetables? What if I change my mind in the middle of the meal?" He plucked another shrimp. "The chopsticks are a tool of democracy."

  "The bowl and chopsticks are obsolete in our modern world," Bo said. "It's like how the natives in Mexico used to grind food with pestle and mortar. None of the Mexican restaurants here use those tools anymore."

  "Are we eating burritos?" Melvin plopped the shrimp down into his bowl.

  "Lower your voice," Esther said.

  Melvin lowered his voice. "I'm just saying that's a bad example. And misleading. Because no, we're not eating burritos, are we? Menudo? Chimichanga?"

  "Stop it, Melvin."

  "Tortas? Tostadas?"

  "You're acting like a baby," Esther said.

  "BECAUSE WE'RE NOT MEXICAN, ARE WE?"

  Esther tu
rned to Bo and spoke softly. "Why do you need to save time and energy?"

  "I just want to save it."

  "That's fine. But do you not have enough time and energy? Is there anything we can help with?"

  "No."

  "If you eat on a plate with silverware," Esther said, "it doesn't match with our utensils. Don't you want to match?" She wanted to end this argument now because if it didn't end here it'd continue at night, in bed, and the thing she treasured most after Bo, Larry, and Sonny was a good night's sleep of at least eight hours. In that exact order: Bo, Larry/Sonny, eight hours of sleep, Melvin, a filling meal.

  "If you switch to plates and forks, you can match with me," Bo said.

  "I have no problems with that," Esther said.

  "We're not switching," Melvin said.

  "Why do you dislike forks and spoons?" Bo asked.

  "A fair question," Esther said.

  "I don't dislike them," Melvin said. "They do their jobs competently."

  "Americans use them," Bo said. "We're Americans."

  "You're Chinese biologically and American politically," Melvin said, "because politically you were born here. So you take only the best of either culture, like chopsticks, and throw out the things that are only competent, like forks and spoons. Why do you think we speak two languages?"

  "You use Cantonese to say curses you don't think I under­stand," Bo said.

  "I curse in both languages," Melvin said.

  "No cursing here," Esther said.

  "I'm just saying if I wanted to, I can curse in either language," Melvin said. "The Chinese have used chopsticks for thousands of years. What's wrong with using something our ancestors created?"

  "Maybe our ancestors also created forks and spoons," Bo said.

  Esther smiled and noticed Melvin noticing her smile, which made her smile wider. What she enjoyed about arguments between Bo and Melvin was they allowed her to side with her son. She hoped he saw her as a loyal friend.

  "Maybe our ancestors gave forks and spoons to Marco Polo," Bo said.

  Melvin enjoyed spaghetti, and each time he ate it, made sure to note how it was a Chinese invention by way of Marco Polo. The history of spaghetti, like the history of many things in the world, was a Chinese one according to Melvin. "We gave them noodles," he often said, "and they threw tomato sauce and basil leaves on it. Strange, but works for me."