Fresh Off the Boat (4 page)

“Hmmm, that’s true. Remember to run in zigzags if you see one!”

Phil was smart and knew everything about animals. He told me that if an alligator had its mouth closed, you could put your hands around it and it wouldn’t be strong enough to open again. Shortly after, my parents, aunts, brothers, and Allen came outside as well. The whole family was on the driveway to say goodbye. I really didn’t want to leave, but then the van started to move.… Getting farther and farther, the people got smaller but I could still see Phil in the front waving me goodbye. I remember thinking their hands would stop waving, but they never did. All the way until they disappeared, you saw their hands waving in the air and then poof! They were gone … and there we were, just the five of us going down to Florida in a Starcraft van like the “Definition” video. “Hold your head when the beat drop, Y-O.”

Two days later, we got to Florida late at night, groggy, and stinkin’ from the ride. We pulled into the parking lot of this place called Homewood Suites; I liked it ’cause their logo was a duck. We usually stayed at Red Roof Inns, so I was pretty impressed with this place they called an extended-stay hotel. Emery and I walked around touching everything in the room, but my parents were tired so they made us shower and go to sleep.

We all woke up super-late the next day. It felt like we slept a year! Dad was already at work. The best part about Homewood Suites was that you could look outside and see the sign for Atlantic Bay Seafood and Grill. It was a monstrous neon sign you could see from the highway and follow all the way from the exit.

“Mom! Why does Dad do American food and not what you make at home?”

“Because nobody want to pay for REAL Chinese food.”

“Why not?”

“Because they not Chinese! Stupid question! Your dad is smart, he has white chef so people don’t know Chinese own Atlantic Bay and we can sell seafood for more!”

“Is Atlantic Bay like Chesapeake Bay?”

“Hmm, kind of!”

“Yeah? Do they have hush puppies?” I asked.

Before she could answer, Emery chimed in, too: “We can eat all we want since we own it, right? We don’t have to have more aunts for more free kids meals anymore!”

“Yeaaahhh! I want fried cod and hush puppies with Tabasco!”

“OK, OK, you guys can eat all you want. Let’s go see Dad.”

“We don’t need aunts anymore! We OWN the restaurant!”

Emery and I were dumb excited to see Atlantic Bay. It was huge! Three times bigger than our old house and they had cool uniforms: polo shirts with big blue and white stripes. But my dad wore a suit! We found him in the kitchen and it smelled so bad. It was the first time I’d been in a restaurant kitchen. The food smelled great, but there was this funky old mildewy smell that I’d never smelled before.

“Dad, why’s it smell so bad? Isn’t it supposed to smell good in a kitchen?”

“This is a restaurant! It smells like a … factory or industrial place because we have strong cleaning chemicals.”

“It smells like a dirty dishwasher!”

“Well, the dishwasher is always going so you’ll smell that, but this is just how restaurants are.”

“Mom said it’s like Chesapeake Bay. Do you have hush puppies?”

“No, but we have homemade biscuits! You’ll like them.”

Dad pulled a hot biscuit off a speed rack and handed it to me steaming hot. It had a good hard crust. It wasn’t a super-flaky biscuit, but I broke it open and it was really moist on the inside. I took a bite and remember how distinct the flavor was. It had a sweetness that most biscuits didn’t have. I wasn’t going to forget about hush puppies anytime soon, but it wasn’t bad. I found Emery hanging out by the fish tank at the front of the restaurant.

“Hey! We don’t have hush puppies.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but we got biscuits!”

“Biscuits? Are they good?”

“Yeah, not bad. Kinda sweet, but good.”

“OK, I guess that’s cool.”

“We don’t own a Chesapeake Bay, but I think we have a Red Lobster … ’cause they have biscuits, too.”

THAT SUMMER WE
had no friends because school was over, but Mom dropped us off every morning at the Aquatic Center for swim camp, while she worked with my dad during the day. All the swim groups were named after Florida college teams so I was a Hurricane and Emery was a Gator. It was 1990, so I was pretty happy to be a ’Cane.
^†
All summer, all we did was swim and wait for my mom to pick us up—and she was always late. We’d end up sitting outside the Aquatic Center in lawn chairs for at least an hour after camp was over every day. Luckily, there were lots of lizards around so we tried to catch them while Mom took her sweet-ass time. The months blended into each other and in August, they enrolled me at Bay Meadows Elementary.

The first day I got there, I recognized all the books. They were using the same books for third grade that we had for second grade in Virginia. These Florida kids were kinda slow, too. No one really asked questions in class and recess was pretty boring. We used to wrestle during recess and lunch at Oakton Elementary, but no one wrestled at Bay Meadows. This one kid with a birthmark played tetherball with himself every day, so I went to hang out with him. He was pretty good; every time he hit the ball, it wrapped around the pole at least three times. His name was Jared. I guess he was my friend, but he didn’t talk much.

Unlike D.C., there weren’t many Chinese kids around. The only one was a girl that spoke Chinese, who got moved to our class because she couldn’t speak English. I was the only other person at school who spoke Chinese so I helped translate for her every day. My Chinese wasn’t great, but I guess it was good enough because I won Student of the Month for helping her out. I never won anything before, but my parents ruined everything.

“Louis, we need to put him in private school.”

“Ahhh, it’s so expensive!”

“Eh! Don’t be cheap, school is important! He never wins award in D.C. then all of a sudden he wins Student of the Month here! I don’t want him to be like you with bad grades!”

“So? I own my own restaurant now! And he doesn’t have bad grades. He’s winning things here!”

My parents always insulted each other. Mom was a good student and thought school was important. Dad agreed even though he had a chip on his shoulder because he never got good grades. He learned most things from running around on the street, but in a funny way, my dad was smarter. He’d always tell me stories of old generals, emperors, and philosophers. My mom never remembered what she learned in school because she just memorized stuff for tests; it was my dad, who had bad grades, that actually remembered everything he learned. After arguing for a few weeks, my dad gave in and they pulled me out of Bay Meadows. That’s when it all went down the shitter.

We rolled up to this joint and it looked like a compound—huge white buildings that looked like Decepticons, a skyscraper-sized cross on the front lawn, and minivans everywhere. This was my new school, Baptist soccer mom heaven. Pinks and pastels, ribbon sandals and croakies, oh my. First Academy went from kindergarten to twelfth grade but when I scanned the crowds streaming through the front doors, somehow Emery and I were the only Asian kids. I’m even counting Eurasia. Up north, even if you’re the only chino in a working town, at least you got some Eastern Bloc homies from Poland or Russia, but down south it was you, yourself, and I.

Since kindergarten my parents had been sending me to Christian schools, where the teachers would feed me soap and made me use my right hand even though I’m a lefty, because we supposedly got a better education at parochial schools even if we weren’t actually Christians. If you asked my parents, they’d say they were Buddhist. Buddhists that ate meat, never went to temple, but did say
A-mi-tuo-fuo
seven times if they saw roadkill. Religion wasn’t a big deal in our house. I don’t think it was a
big deal in most Chinese households. We always had photos of ancestors, oranges, and incense in bowls, but the family unit was bigger than any religion, or government for that matter. Besides education, there weren’t any social issues I remember my parents getting down for. I remember watching TV or listening to the radio; anytime there was crime, you could hear my parents in the background screaming “Where are the parents?” It was never about what you could do for your country or your country could do for you, but what were you going to do for your parents?

What we did do was go to Chinese school. Whether you lived in D.C., Ann Arbor, New York, or Orlando, if there were Chinese people, there were Chinese schools where you went every Sunday to take Chinese language and culture classes. Chinese people would drive hours from every direction to take their kids to school. All teachers were volunteers and the parents chipped in to keep it going. While the rest of America went to church, we learned how to read right to left.

WHEN I ENTERED
the classroom at First Academy that first day, instead of math, science, or English books under my chair, I found
The Storybook Bible
. That blue one with photos of Joseph, Mary, and Big Baby Jesus
^‡
on the cover. I’d seen this version before; they ran commercials for it in the afternoons during
Wonder Woman
and
The Dukes of Hazzard
. For the first few days of school, all we did was read out of this book, starting from the beginning. The teacher was Ms. Truex, this tall white brunette that a lot of the kids and parents thought was cute, but I didn’t get it—she was pasty, cold, and vanilla, a good look for ice cream, I guess. She kept telling us Adam and Eve were our “parents,” so by Thursday, I had to say something.

“If Adam and Eve are my parents, then why does Cole have blond hair and I have straight black?”

“Eddie, that’s a good question and the Tower of Babel will answer your questions about that.”

“What happens in the tower?”

“We’re not there yet, Eddie, so you’ll just have to wait.”

That was the end of the exchange. It all seemed pretty mild to me, but the whole class was shook. Thirty sets of eyeballs turned and ice-grilled me as if I’d just taken my book to the front of the class and set it on fire. Three days in and no one wanted to hang with me. We kept reading the Bible, but from then on every time I challenged a story that didn’t make sense to me—how the universe was created in six days, why Cain killed Abel, how fucking big was that ark?—Ms. Truex put me in time-out. By the time Christmas came around, while all the other kids made cards, she had me sit in a corner and face the wall because I wasn’t a “believer.”

The time-outs were worse than that time Optimus Prime died in the first twenty minutes of
Transformers
, so I gave up. I waved the white flag and asked Ms. Truex what I needed to do to be like everyone else. She told me that if I wanted to participate in class and go to Heaven, I had to “let Jesus into my heart.” So for the first time in my life, I sold out. One winter day, just after Christmas break, Ms. Truex asked me to stay late. The classroom emptied out until it was just me and her. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be down.

Ms. Truex walked behind her desk and broke out her Bible. I remember that Bible. Black, leather-bound, King James Version. She asked me to come to the front of the class and sit in one of those Kentucky-Taco-Hut school chairs. You know the joints with the desk, chair, and basket in one? Then she told me to repeat after her, “God almighty, I let you into my heart and believe that you sent your only son to forgive me of my sins.”

She looked down at me with a smile and prompted me with a nod to repeat it. I was ready to sell out but was stuck between wanting to laugh and wanting to run screaming for my mom. It was creepy, like playing “Bloody Mary.” I don’t think people realize how fucking weird Christianity is if you’re not raised around it. But, hey, it got me off time-out. And, who knows, maybe a billion white people can’t be wrong and it’s all really true.

When I told Emery what I did, he laughed.

“Ha, ha, you ‘let God into your heart’?”

“Yeah, man, it’s a good deal! You gotta do it, too, or we can’t hang out after we die.”

“But you don’t believe it!”

“So? If God is real, you should let him in just in case. If it’s real and you didn’t, then you go to Hell. It only takes two minutes!”

“But if God is real, then doesn’t he know you don’t reaaaallllyyy believe?”

“Well, I’ll convince myself.”

“You can’t convince yourself! You either believe or you don’t believe.”

“People can be convinced of anything! We’re stupid. Plus, this is like those lottery tickets Mom buys. We know she’s not gonna win but just in case, naw mean?”

“You and Mom … crazy ideas all the time.”

My conversion only got me so far with these Christians. Months into the school year I made one friend: Chris Nostro. Peep the last name, you already know. His pops owned a pizza shop and he had the biggest schnoz you’ve ever seen. We became friends betting on sports, specifically the 1991 NBA All-Star Game. I remember coming to school the day after the game.

“Man, did you see the end of that game?” Chris said.

The other kids didn’t know what he was talking about, but I did.

“The All-Star Game?”

“Yeah! I bet on the West but Karl Malone ruined it!”

“You should have won; Kevin Johnson’s shot was going in!”

“I know! I lost five bucks! Stupid Karl Malone!”

I mean, come on, who
does
like Karl Malone? Karl Malone doesn’t like Karl Malone!

Even though I made a friend in Chris, the other kids avoided me like spinach. When we’d get together to ball after school the kids, led by this older boy named Blake, elbowed me whenever I tried to get rebounds or pushed me to the ground when I tried to drive the lane. I’m not going to say it’s just because I’m Chinese, but it didn’t happen to anyone else. I didn’t fight it—I was outnumbered. My mom would pick me up after
school and see the bruises on my face from the elbows or cuts on my arms from the hard fouls and trips. Soon she’d seen enough.