Fresh Off the Boat (26 page)

“Eddie, stop the car! They got us, man!”

“Naw, I can go up the grass.”

“Son, get the fuck out of the car! We’re surrounded!”

Ben was right. There was no way out …

“Stop the vehicle and step out with your hands in the air!”

“We goin’ out like this?”

“We don’t have a choice! Fucking stop the car, Eddie!”

I put the car in park, ate the weed in my pocket, and got out.

“Put your hands in the air!”

Everyone sees this scene in movies or hears about it from friends, but the first time you get popped for some real shit is no joke. I knew that I wouldn’t face serious charges for the fight in high school, but this was bad. We were drunk, high, driving, and I hit someone with a car. I looked into the lights and for the first time in my life, things started to blur. Usually I was calm and collected, but I knew it was over. I looked into the blue, got stuck in the red. Time’s up.

“Get on the ground! Get the fuck on the ground!”

I felt like I was sleepwalking. Everything slowed down. Like the first time you get high and think, This can’t be real.

“Get the fuck on the ground!”

“Eddie! Get on the fucking ground, man! They’re gonna shoot you!”

I looked up and the cops were in position. Doors out, crouched behind with MP-5s, one dude sitting in the car talking into the intercom.

“This is your last warning! Get on the ground with your hands behind your back!”

It took everything I had to get down. I wasn’t ready to go away. For some reason, I knew to get down, I wanted to get down, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know when I’d be free again. I felt like I was looking at myself from the outside when my hands finally went up slowly, I kneeled in the middle of the street, and lay the fuck down. Jared and Ben were already down so as soon as I hit the deck, the cops rushed us. I couldn’t see with my face down but I felt it. Cold steel on the back of my head. There’s nothing that can prepare you for that feeling. All the hair on your neck stands up and you feel the chill down your spine to the toes. Cops apply the chokehold, cuff you, and the whole time there’s the barrel of an MP-5 on the back of your head. I watched my life flash by me in those sirens. It was surreal. I knew I wasn’t going to be in jail forever, but it was definitely gonna fuck my life like Rick James on a couch. As it’s all happening, I hear this kid I served yelling from the window of the frat.

“That kid Eddie sells short bags!”

“Check his pockets! I just copped from him this week!”

I didn’t respect those kids at all, always knew they had it in them to snitch if things got hot. But they were the least of my worries. Before we knew it, Ben switched sides and started singing on the street.

“I’ll tell you anything you want! Eddie always gets me in trouble! I didn’t do shit this time!”

“Ben, shut the fuck up!”

“Naw, man, I’m not going down for y’all this time. You guys fucked up this time. I’m not going down.”

He lost it. The cops were even shook because Ben was out on front street literally telling cops he’d say anything about Jared and me. He was still on probation for a prior assault charge, but he didn’t have to give us up—even if he just said he was a passenger in the car and didn’t see what happened, he would have been fine. Within a few minutes, the cops put Ben in a squad car and he was gone.

“Yo, is he for real?”

“I don’t know, man. You shouldn’t have hit him with the car!”

“And you shouldn’t have fuckin’ broken the window, man. Are you serious right now?”

“Shut the fuck up. I’m not talkin’.”

“Me neither.”

Within minutes, the entire school was on the block. Everyone heard the sirens, saw the lights, and there I was with Jared, standing cuffed up on the corner like zoo animals. I knew I was done. When Jared and I finally got to a holding center in Winter Park, Ben was nowhere to be found.

“Where’d you guys take Ben?”

“Oh, your friend’s already out.”

“Motherfucker …”

“Jared, you hear that shit?”

“Yeah …”

“We’re going to need statements from you two.”

“Fine.”

First mistake I made was giving the statement. We knew better, but for some reason we just weren’t thinking and wrote the damn statements. They took us out one at a time. Jared first, then me.

“You boys know we’ve never had a call like this at Rollins ever, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Which one of you had the gun? Or should I say ‘gat’?”

“We don’t have a gun.”

“Somebody has the gun and you’re going to tell me who.”

“Nobody has a gun, man.”

“We got a call from a student saying someone ran to get a ‘gat.’ So somebody’s telling me where the gun is or you’re going to Thirty-third.”

“Do what you gotta do, but there’s no gun.”

I found out later that this kid Connelly jumped behind a bush while the whole thing was going down and called the cops when Ben ran to get the car. That’s why the SWAT team showed up. The cops thought there was a gun involved, but we never even had one. About three hours later, the cops put us back in a cop car and drove us to the Thirty-third Street Jail.

L
ike Huo Yuanjia in
Fearless
fleeing Tianjin in shame, I was down and out. Not in a good Cam’ron ft. Kanye with the 1970s Heron flow, either. I was down and out facing trial for aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, a third-degree, level six charge with a maximum five-year sentence. Enter the motherland.

I didn’t want to go to Taiwan. The last time I went, I was twelve. We stayed at my aunt’s crib in the middle of the summer with no AC and there were mosquitos and moldy-smelling clothes hanging everywhere. I got diarrhea eating street food and the Chinese kids looked like Sanrio characters flashing peace fingers and jazz hands. Fortunately, the parents knew better. I’d fallen completely off the tracks and the only trick they had left in their kung-fu manuals was to send the kid home to marinate on things.

The trip was part of a program that officially went by the name of Study Tour, but people called it “Loveboat.” The concept was simple from our parents’ point of view: go home, see the motherland, and, eventually, get someone from the same tribe pregnant. I wasn’t opposed to getting anyone pregnant. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to hitch the rest of my life to an island whose only real draws were cheap video games and stinky tofu.

The video games were bootlegged, but the stinky tofu was real: an ugly, smelly tofu that’s cured in rotten cabbage. In Taiwan, they take the tofu, fry it, and serve it with garlic oil, vinegar, chili sauce, and
pao tsai—
pickled vegetables, usually carrots, cabbage, and radish. My mom and her friends used to go to a Taiwanese restaurant in D.C. to eat it, but even there they’d only serve it for
xiao ye
(midnight snack) after 11
P.M.
, when most of the
lao wai
(foreigners) had left, because the smell from the tofu was so funky. This shit-smelling food was my favorite thing about Taiwan. But after a plea deal, I had an opportunity. I could get approval to visit Taiwan, or sit at home on felony probation. So off I went.

I was sleepwalking on my way to Taiwan. That’s how I felt when I got to Taoyuan International Airport. For months, I’d dreaded the trip, but then all of a sudden it was on me.

It was the same airport I flew into when I was twelve, but it was different this time. Everywhere I looked, Taiwanese people in suits, in sandals, in tank tops, in Iverson jerseys, with mole-hair growths, without mole-hair growths. No matter where you turned, slanted eyes were watching. The cabdrivers were on that dress shoes and socks flow with shorts waaayyy before Thom Browne! I mean, it definitely doesn’t look the same when you have a belly-out tank top and bowl cut, but you get the picture. Like RZA said, “Protons Electrons Always Cause Explosions,” and fireworks went off in my head.

WHEN I ARRIVED
in Taipei, to the college that hosted the trip, I was late as usual.

“Meester Huang?”

“Yeah, checking in.”

“Ay yah! You are very late, sirs!”

“My bad.”

“What do you means ‘my bad’?”

“Like my fault, my bad. It’s all good, can I still check in?”

“No, not good! We thought you weren’t coming and gave your room away.”

“Yo, I just flew nineteen hours. I’ll sleep in a bathroom if I have to.”

“Let me check …”

The woman at registration went to the office and started speaking to her supervisor in Chinese. Apparently, they’d given my room away to someone who was on standby. I overheard their conversation, but there were two other guys who were late as well and in the same position as me.

“I don’t know if you want to do these, but there ees one room on the girls’ floor that has a bed availables. There are two other males roommates to be your companion, though, so not awkwards with all the females on floor.”

Taiwan, I love you. I felt like King Jaffe Joffer up in the joint.
Please feel free to serve me your most eligible shawties
. I went to the room, saw one bed free, and slept for twelve hours. The next day, I woke up stankin’. All in, it had been about thirty-two hours since my last shower—this for a dude who doesn’t go eight days without a shape-up and ten hours without a shower. I mean, baby girl, I make Cool Water smell good. My first day in Taiwan, it was middle school dance party steez; I sprayed on whatever cheap cologne I could find.

I grabbed a towel, put on my Iceberg Muttley flip-flops, and went to the bathroom. In front of the sink was a girl with long black hair in a turquoise American Eagle shirt and shorts, putting in her contacts. Even though she had a finger in one eye, I thought to myself, If the other side looks like this one, just without a finger in the eye, she’s pretty damn fly. Despite being from stankonia and only wearing a towel, I figured it’d be OK to say hello.

“Wassup!”

The girl totally bugged out, threw in her other contact lens, and ran out without saying a word.

Despite crashing and burning, I figured I could still enjoy my shower. I walked into the stall and next to the shower was the toilet. Not just any shitter, but a squatter: a hole in the floor with a wastebasket next to it for your shit tickets. You could take a shit, brush your teeth, and wash your dick at the same time if you wanted to. I mean, I respect the creativity, but the last thing I want to do while showering is take a shit or fall in the squatter with a sign next to it that says, “Put dirty papers in can.” To complete the décor they had a neon green flyswatter hanging on one side of the
window in case you wanted to kill mosquitos while doing all four of the above. I didn’t have to work out all summer, I just did the circuit in the shit-shower-swat room.

After going to the “gym,” I got back to the room and met my roommates. They were pretty much what I expected. Glasses, Hang Ten gear, goofy T-shirts that said MIT: Made in Taiwan. You know, not God body shit. This was always a funny negotiation for me. On one hand, I had childhood photos of me wearing the same uniform and it cracked me up, but once I decided I didn’t want to be the Taiwanese Balki Bartokomous, I made money to buy Nike and ’Lo.

“Hey, I’m Richard. What’s your name?”

“Eddie, wassup, man.”

“I’m Tim!”

“You Taiwanese, dude?”

To go on the trip, you had to be Taiwanese because the government paid for it. Tim had orange hair, so I figured daddy was a white man.

“Ha, ha, yeah, man, I’m half Taiwanese, dude!”

“Oh, that’s what’s really good. I was just curious. Yo, y’all know we’re on the girls floor, right?”

As I said those words, Richard looked like he was about to puke on his MIT shirt. Even as a nineteen-year-old, he was still working his way through the cootie stage.

“Yeah, it’s kinda weird, but I think we’ll be OK.”

Tim gave me the universal eye-roll for “this dude needs GPS to find his dick.” We all got dressed and went down to eat breakfast. I got in the elevator and saw the girl with the contact lenses.

“Hey, weren’t you just in the bathroom?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yo, stop playin’, you remember me! What’s your name?”

“Ning.”

“I’m Eddie!”

We went down to the cafeteria for breakfast: rice porridge, black pickles, dried pork
sung
, fried peanuts, vegetables, tofu. It went on and on.
Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it’s pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn’t get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg–Canal Street Chinamen.