JESUS ROMERO, TOWN MAYOR
The Double Happiness restaurant used to be over there—you see that large house being renovated near the riverbank? After the old lady died, the girls sold it to the Pham family and now it’s going to be a Vietnamese restaurant. In the beginning, the Wongs were quiet people. They didn’t give us any trouble. Double Happiness was a thriving restaurant for fifteen years. The food was mediocre. You know, the eggrolls were soggy, the sweet and sour pork was bright red like candy, the fried rice was probably three days old. You know, the Chinese who come up here to the hodunks of the Pacific Northwest don’t give us the “real” Chinese food, only the fast Chinese food they think we want. Well, they didn’t give us any problems, except for a rat infestation once in a while, but all restaurants contend with that. Her two granddaughters were really pretty in their red satin hapi coats, and people in town made it a part of their life to eat Chinese food once a week. This is an old logging town, and people are poor. She kept her prices down and hired quite a few neighborhood teenagers to work in the kitchen and deliver take out. She was real conscientious that way. But then, there were stories of her kung fu hocus-pocus, that she was flying around, beating off boys who tried to hit on her granddaughters. I said, “Hogwash.” You know, it’s boring around here. People don’t have much to do but gossip and make up tall tales. Until one day, the missus and I had company from Vancouver and we all went down to the Double Happiness. We ordered their best dishes: moogoogaipan, black bean spareribs, and the house special, soy sauce duck. We had a great evening, drinking and eating, and when we all went home, I realized that I had forgotten my wallet. I had just cashed my paycheck and I had three thousand dollars in it. When I reached the old lady on the phone, she said, “No problem,” and before we blinked an eye, she brought it over. I saw her fly across the sky, do three backward somersaults over Zack’s rooftop to land on my front porch—all four foot nine of her, and my wallet in hand. Then she said to me in that thick accent, “Be careful, Mr. Mayor, you lose your money, you lose your life.”
THE BLOND SURFER DUDE
I’ve been working for the old lady since I was thirteen. I used to deliver for her on my bike. Then when my bike got stolen, I started delivering on my skateboard. Finally, she bought me a cool little Yamaha scooter for Christmas. My parents got divorced and my mother moved us up here from San Diego. She worked at the local drugstore and spent most of her time with bad boyfriends. So the old lady took me under her wing. She called me “number one,” not because I’m her favorite, but because I’ve been at the restaurant the longest now and when I do kitchen work, I get the first shift. She can’t pronounce my real name, which is Jeremy. So sometimes she calls me Jelly. After my grandmother died at the home, she said, “Call me Grandma Wong. I’m your grandma now.”
Before I started to work for her, I heard all kinds of rumors, like she was chopping up people’s dogs and eating them. That she was flying around and capturing bandits. That she knew black magic and caused a Diamond Reo to jackknife on Highway 5. The Fundamentalists here believe she’s Satan. But she has always treated me like her own flesh. Let me tell you this. Once when I was doing kitchen duty with her in late afternoon, she and I were peeling shrimp together. Christ, we had a load of fresh Puget Sound shrimp, and we were peeling thousands of them. Only the two of us, because Nasty Marcus was allergic to shrimp blood. I said, “Asshole, shrimp don’t have blood.” But he said that he was allergic, that liar. He just wanted to sleep in that day. In any case, the old lady and I peeled away so that we could quick-freeze the shrimp before they spoiled. Then two enormous motherfuckers came through the kitchen door. One had a handgun with him. The other was so huge that he didn’t need a gun—he had a bat. He came over and grabbed my hair and kneed me in the groin and then—whack! He hit my legs with the bat. The motherfucker broke my legs right then and there and I fell screaming. He stuffed a rag in my mouth and went into the banquet room to see if there were more people.
The other bastard put a gun to the old lady’s head and said, “Where’s the money, you old chink?” She said, “Not nice to break boy’s leg,” and before I saw it, she grabbed two sharp kitchen knives from the table and—whish whish—sliced off the gunman’s hand. She was so fast he didn’t see it coming. The gun flew off with the hand still holding it. He stood there staring at his stump gushing blood, screaming, “Fuck, fuck, you bitch.” And the bastard who broke my leg came back and before he could think, she did a flying flail kick and popped him in the head. He fell backward over a pile of shrimp shells. She took his bat from him and whacked him again and again until he was out like a light. She stuffed his mouth with a bunch of shrimp because, she said, he used bad words. Then she called the police. Apparently, he almost died because he was allergic to shrimp. His whole face swelled up like a balloon. The other guy got his hand sewed back on by a famous hand surgeon like it was nothing.
Well, I took most of the credit for capturing the creeps. I guess they’d been on a spree, robbing small-town gas stations and truck stops and hurting people. I got a ten-thousand-dollar reward for being the hero. I put it in the bank for college. Grandma Wong won’t take any of the credit. “The boy did it, the boy did it,” she said. She put her finger to her lip to shush me. I think she didn’t want people to know about her powers.
SCARS
Sometimes, after a long prosperous night, Grandma Wong would have a few drinks with her staff. Usually, the Chinese cooks would not join. They knew better than to show their vulnerable side to her. But, once in a while, she would sit and drink Vodka gimlets, straight up, without the twist (she wanted to save the extra rinds for her customers). This day she was celebrating her orange Manchurian carp’s—Rice Cake’s—fortieth birthday. She had smuggled him out of the labs in Guangdong when she was a biochemist for the People’s Fish Ponds. She had experimented with genetic engineering to create the biggest food fish. Rice Cake was an ordinary orange carp, but he was also an important experiment. She and her team engineered him to be bigger and to live longer. He’s a fifty-pound, forty-year-old carp. “He’s my son I never had,” she said, although everybody knew that she had a genetic human son who embezzled money from the accounts to pay for his gambling debts. “I think Buddha make joke: Men give you bad luck, so I give you two granddaughters and a fish.”
That evening Surfer Dude proceeded to pour her a second gimlet and one for himself, and he didn’t take the twist to show respect. He knew that the old lady was frugal about little things and he knew how to please her. Then Nasty Marcus, who would rather toke than drink, took a Bud. He knew not to take a Tsingtao because imports are more expensive. And Eric sipped an herbal green tea infusion that he and Grandma Wong had invented. (His father’s an alcoholic, so Eric had sworn never to touch the stuff.) On special occasions, they would all sit around, relax and talk about various topics. The topic, then, was battle scars, to which the old lady had a lot to contribute. First of all, she was ancient. She had more years to accumulate wounds. Nobody actually knew how old she was. She would say, “Oh, I’m a hundred years old. I’m old enough to be your ancestor.” Or “I’m ninety-five. Just one year older, my mother would have bound my feet.”…“Oh, I hated those Manchus.”…“Oh, I was the star of the Boxer Rebellion.” Well, it would be impossible to date her. Her granddaughters decided that she was between 80 and 140.
After downing the second gimlet, she became very loud. She pulled up her trousers and showed off a large gouge on her inner left thigh covered by a patch of pink and purple shiny scar tissue. “One day, I came home from the fish pond. I was too tired to cook and I said to husband, ‘Chairman Mao says that the sexes are equal, so you cook tonight.’ My husband said, ‘I no cook,’ and he went to the kitchen and took out a cleaver and chased me around house. I throw salt in his eyes, kicked him in groin and he fell back, but I scrape leg against a broken hinge my husband not fix. I told him, ‘You touch me again, I chop off head when you’re asleep.’ He was scared. He moved back to his mother. Then he brought me to trial for husband beating and I say no, I no beat him. He gambling roosters and got in fight. Then I showed the comrade officers my scar and they make him drop charges and let us divorce. Otherwise, they don’t let divorce.”
Marcus said, “Shit, it’s a good thing that you knew how to defend yourself. He would have butchered you.” Then Marcus pulled up his T-shirt. There was a small bullet scar down on his left hip. “I was delivering pizzas in Portland and a big long-haired greasy speed freak said, ‘I ain’t gonna pay you.’ I said, ‘Twenty-two fifty, asshole, or I’ll call the cops.’ He and his three chicks laughed at me and then he punched me in the face and took my money-belt with all the night’s cash in it. I went back to the pizza truck and called the boss on the cell. The boss called the cops, and he told me to stay put until the cops come. When the cops came, the freak and his chicks had gone. Then the young rookie cop shot me. He thought that I was the bad guy cause I’m black.”
The old lady inspected the scar and said, “You lucky, they could have shoot your kidney.” Surfer Dude laughed, “Got you in the ass.” The old lady laughed, “That’s why you deliver Chinese food now and not pizza.” There was a short silence after a few cackles, and then Eric stepped forward.
Eric pulled up his shirt. On his back, a huge rope of scars that turned into a giant oval shape covered his entire back. “Look closely,” he said. “What’s the matter, Marcus, did you flunk geography? It’s the map of America.” When the old lady got close and saw that the scar was actually a series of cigarette burns linked together in an attempt to make a map of the United States, she gasped and said, “Your father, no good, your father.”
BIG BOY
You know we really thought that she was a vampire. Once, Surfer Dude took a picture of her, but her body didn’t show up in the prints. Dude said, “I swear to God. I took a picture of her.” Then we took a photo of the whole summer staff, and for some reason her face got cut out of the picture. All we got was her shoulder. So we decided that chink was really a vampire. I told my friends—Buz and Ralphie—about it and I decided that we should put a stake through her heart. You know, she sort of body-snatched the Dude, Eric and Marcus. They never come out anymore. They just hang around the restaurant. I worked the late shift and did mostly cleanup and vacuuming. She used to walk by and scowl at me. I said, “Do I stink or something?” But the old bitch never liked me. She told Marcus that she thinks I have an evil heart. She said that she saw disaster in my eyes. It really freaked me out when Marcus told me that. So I said to Buz, maybe she’s a vampire, and she turned all those guys into baby vampires. I told some lies, that I saw her fly up to the giant tree and catch a squirrel in her teeth, suck its blood and throw its carcass in the garbage can. I found a roadkill and showed it to Ralphie for proof.
Then when Patsy and Ratsy’s dog disappeared, I said that I saw the chink chop him up into moogoogaipan. When Eric’s father disappeared, too, I said that I saw the old lady chop him up, put him in the meat-grinder and make dumplings out of him. I said that every night she sucks blood from the necks of her granddaughters and that’s why they don’t age like white people do. They stay pretty. The mistake was wearing those stupid garlic bulbs. Buz, Ralphie and I went to the hardware store and got hammers and wooden stakes and strung garlic around our necks. She smelled us from miles away and ambushed us. She flung her broom around and broke my arm, donkey-kicked Ralphie unconscious, elbowed Buz in the ribs and knocked the wind out of him. She made those Bruce Lee yipping sounds, and—bam, bam, bam—we all went down. We were too ashamed to talk about this, to admit that a little old lady beat the shit out of us, so we told our parents that we got into a fight with some bad-ass Indian boys from Clackamas. She fired me the next day, and I ended up working at Safeway as a stock boy. Twenty years later and I’m still working there. That bitch put a hex on me. I’m stuck in Piss River, Oregon, forever.
ERIC THE RED
Mrs. Wong called me the red-haired demon because I had bright flaming Rastafarian kinky hair. It still sticks up like fire. Mrs. Wong made me wear a hairnet when I worked in the kitchen. I was studying a little Mandarin in college and some eastern religion and I took a semester off from Reed College because I was flunking all my classes and didn’t know what I wanted to do. But Mrs. Wong was patient and taught me a few qigung exercises. I also liked rapping with her about plants and hydroponics. We were really good chums until I started falling in love with Mei Ling.
One day Mei Ling and I were messing around in the old pigeon house on top of the restaurant roof. Mrs. Wong said she could smell my penis all the way from the beauty parlor, where she was having her weekly appointment. With curlers still in her hair, she flew out of the parlor and up to the roof, did a double backward somersault and threw a ninja star at me. I had my pants down around my ankles—still hot into it with Mei Ling. I wanted to pull up my pants as soon as I saw her airborne, but Mei Ling said, “Don’t stop, fool, I haven’t come yet. What are you, afraid of my little grandmother?”
The ninja star hit me, impaled my naked ass. The points were cured with some kind of sleeping herb that she grew in the garden. I immediately felt paralyzed and couldn’t pull my pants up. My body was like rubber. I stayed there facedown on the roof for two hours. Mrs. Wong called my father at work and both my mother and father came to fetch me. They had to see me in this humiliating position, pants down, dick wilted, groggy and weak. My mother burst out in tears and called me a sinner and a degenerate. My father said, “Calm down, calm down, Mildred, let’s not make a scene. The good Lord will take care of this.” My mother stopped speaking to me, and my father kicked the shit out of me saying, “Praise God.” I woke up the next day with three broken ribs and my eyes bruised and swollen shut.
I went back to the restaurant the next week and confessed to Mrs. Wong that I loved her granddaughter. I said, “I want to marry her and take her away from this terrible hellhole. We will run away to California and become rich and famous.” She laughed so hard she popped a button from her blouse. Then she hardened her face and said, “You no love my granddaughter and my granddaughter no love you. You good boy, finish college, become somebody. Marry your own people and be happy.” I said, “But I don’t want to marry my own people, I don’t like my own people.” She pressed her little fist against my chest and said, “Go, marry your own people, don’t come back.”
THE RUMORS BUZZED
—I heard she cut off Eric’s dick and cooked it in a curry stew and fed it to the Rosenblatts at table six.
—I heard she placed a restraining order against him for ten thousand years.
—I heard that when Surfer Dude smelled something terrible in the garbage can and saw Eric’s dad’s hand sticking out, it was bloody-purple, carved to the bone.
—I heard that it was Eric’s father’s eyeballs floating in Rusty Tallman’s hot and sour soup.
—I heard that she put a hex on Eric’s father and he turned into a zombie and drove his car to the edge of the St. John’s Bridge in Portland and disappeared.
—They say she hated the fathers and forgave the sons, except for her own son, whom she could never forgive.
MING (THE SILENT COOK)
I came with one suitcase. My uncle and I tried to escape the Khmer Rouge, paying for passage aboard a pirate boat from Cambodia. I floated on this one suitcase and lived. So this is my lucky suitcase. The truth is this is not even my suitcase. It belonged to somebody named Ming, who drowned with my uncle and the others when the boat sprung open and sank. Ming had a green card, a clean suit and a letter from Grandma Wong to come to work as a cook in beautiful Rose River, Oregon. I got here and everybody calls it Piss River because the local paper mill has turned the place into a smelly, contaminated cesspool. The rain that falls all year round smells like piss.
When I got here, I was only thirteen. I couldn’t speak Cantonese very well because I was raised in Cambodia. We spoke a different dialect. Grandma Wong was suspicious of me at first, but then she smiled and said, “Ming—Ming means bright. You will give us good luck and bring brightness into the restaurant.” I was very happy to hear this because I didn’t want her to call the INS and send me back. I would be killed with the rest of my family. They’re killed because they’re teachers. I come from a long line of teachers, and the Khmer Rouge hate teachers.
Apparently, Mrs. Wong’s son embezzled over $100,000 from the restaurant payroll. He also took money from the mortgage but still couldn’t pay for his gambling debt. So when he died suddenly, he left Grandma Wong with his debts and the Triads to contend with. These gangsters are from Macau, and they have Chinese Portuguese blood and they’re really brutal. Grandma Wong knew that sooner or later, the gangsters would come to the restaurant to collect. Her guess was that they’d come to take all her money, then kill her and her granddaughters as a payback for her son’s debts.
One day they wrote her and said they wanted $500,000. Otherwise, they would torch the restaurant and kill everybody in it. She set traps all over the house. Marcus and I made beds of nails for her, cured with a potion she made from deadly herbs. It took us all night to pound hundreds of nails into planks, with all the sharp points forming standing beds. Then Eric and I dug a huge “tiger pit” in the backyard and put five bags of lime in it. She sent her granddaughters to Salem to a friend’s house. She gave all the rest of her workers a vacation, closed the restaurant, turned off all the lights at the circuit board and waited. I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard kicks and screams and gunshots. I tried to leave my room to help her, but she had locked me in. Two hours later, she knocked on my door. The bodies were too heavy for her, so I used a wheelbarrow and threw the bodies into the tiger pit.
Mrs. Wong and I both have secrets that bond us. Or perhaps we have enough evidence against each other so that if one breaks, the other would be destroyed. She would not ask about my real identity, and I will never again mention this incident. In gratitude, she built a little house in the back of the restaurant, with a bath and a kitchenette, for me to live in. She designed a nice skylight for the roof so that I could look up and see the heavens.
SINGING WAITRESS
(As Recorded by the Northwest Chinese American Oral History Project)
I was born on the road, burst into the world between Nanping and Fuzhou. My father was the manager of an acrobatic troupe. My mother was called the “pink contortionist.” We went from town to town performing Peking opera skits for our supper. When I was small, I had a brilliant falsetto. My mother said, “You’re my little sparrow. You will sing us out of poverty.” But my father said, “You sound like a wounded deer. You’ll bring predators to the table.” My mother watched me all the time, fearful that my father would sell me or leave me in a faraway village. A girlchild was a burden on the road, just another mouth to feed.
The more we traveled, the more I sang. And with the coming of the Cultural Revolution, I became indispensable to the troupe because I sang our new nation’s anthem, “The East Is Red, the Sun Is Rising.” Madame Mao’s people heard about my singing. So they cleaned me up, put rouge on my face, and I became the poster child of the Cultural Revolution. I recruited my gang of lost children and orphans, and we quickly rose to power. We put the grown-ups on trial. I loved putting a dunce cap on my father’s head and shouting, “Traitor Hound, Decadent Rightist!” I made my father get on his bare knees and confess his guilt. I would make him pay for hating me all those years. We sent him to hard labor camp and never heard from him again. After the sentencing, they placed all the prisoners on an oxcart. When my mother ran after the cart to see him off, her shirt got caught in the spokes and she was dragged for half a mile before she was finally killed.
I didn’t shed a tear for my mother or my father. I was bold and ignorant then. I led my band of orphans all over the small towns of China, waving red books and slashing the faces of Buddhas. Then the tides changed again. Our protectorate, Madame Mao, was arrested with the Gang of Four—and the Cultural Revolution was over. My small band of hoodlums had to beg from town to town for food. Somehow, we ended up in Guangdong and a group of elderly peasants started beating us with brooms and hoes. My friends scattered to the four winds, but I was too sick and hungry to leave and I sat in a ditch for three days, waiting to die. A man’s giant shadow hovered over me and said, “Dog Puke, Pig Rot! Where is your Madame Mao now?” He picked me up from the ditch and smuggled me to Hong Kong to be a sex slave. He passed me on from cathouse to cathouse and I was forced to have sex with at least twenty men a night.
I met Auntie Wu at a cathouse on Christopher Street called The Cage. She lived in the flat straight across from the waiting room. One day she heard me singing on the balcony an ancient folksong that my Hakka grandmother taught me. “We are both from the same tribe,” she said, then climbed out of her window and onto my balcony and sang with me. That afternoon, I told her the story about my sad life and she held my hand and said, “Don’t blame yourself, girlchild. History is filled with ruts and fissures. It’s time to make a new Long March!”
The next week, Auntie Wu brought me a large envelope. It was a perfect escape kit with detailed instructions, a fake passport, a tourist visa, a ticket to Portland, Oregon, and a Greyhound bus ticket to Rose River. She also included a bamboo straw, ten blow-darts cured with sleeping potion and a manual called “The Secrets of the Snake Escape.” I studied the secret manual closely and did snake exercises every day to condition my body.
On the night of September 19, on the tail of the Moon festival, I made my escape. Exactly at midnight, I took my bamboo straw and blew a dart into the night watchman’s thigh. He quickly fell into a deep sleep. Then I made myself into a snake and crawled out between the bars of the window. With one change of clothing, my fake passport and my airline ticket stuffed in my large tote bag, I took a cab to the airport and began my new life.
At the Rose River terminal, a short Chinese girl with a shaved head came up to me and said in bad Mandarin, “Welcome, I am Little Sister Moon.” She was holding a large white sign with bright gold Chinese characters on it that said “Double Happiness Restaurant.” This made me smile with all my heart. I sighed, “Finally, I’ve reached paradise.” But how curious Americans are. When I asked her, “The slogan on the back of your T-shirt, what does it say?” She laughed and said, “Eat Shit and Die.”
MING AND MEI LING
I must tell you about me and Mei Ling. For some reason, that little girl took a liking to me. We were friends from the start. I was eighteen, getting trained as a cook. She was thirteen, cute and quick and fresh as a flower in her little red hapi coat. When she was not at the cash register guiding customers in, she was at a side table folding napkins or making wontons. She had beautiful little hands and when she was not folding, she read and did her homework. Sometimes, she would sit with me and help me with my English lessons.
But something happened when she turned sixteen. They say a ripening peach cannot know its own dangerous sweetness. She started wearing skimpy dresses and paraded around the boys. All of us in the kitchen were afraid. If anything went wrong, the old lady would deport us or flay us alive.
Mei Ling loved to tease me. She’d walk into my little room in the back of the restaurant to ask for a pencil. I knew very well that she had her own pencils, and she would rub past me. Her perky little breasts and her sweet smell would make me dizzy. I would turn my head and not say anything. One day, she said, “Look, my sweet cousin, look and look hard,” and suddenly she was naked before me. She put her little perfect fingers on her little mound and started stroking herself. I quickly turned away. From then on, I locked the door to my room and didn’t open when she called.
Then she slipped notes under the door. They were little sexy love poems: “Roses are red, violets are blue, your cock is pretty and I love you.” The poems were both childish and pornographic. I knew that I shouldn’t keep them. If the old lady found out, she would kill me. But I couldn’t throw them away. I kept every one of them. I wanted to possess them as I wanted to possess Mei Ling.
I put all her little poems into my lucky suitcase. Sometimes, when I was sad, I would pull the suitcase out from under the bed to reread the poems and go through the few things that belonged to the real Ming. I have taken the identity of this poor boy who was much prettier than I and much smarter. In the suitcase was a class photo taken in Phenom Phen. He was the healthy, happy one in the middle. There was a blue ribbon he won for an essay contest. The beautiful suit that I kept perfectly folded and starched is now a little moldy. I still hug it and cry quietly into it.
I can’t imagine where the real Ming is, under the ocean perhaps, fishes living in his cavities. Or he’s in heaven with my parents playing mahjong. I feel sad for him and for myself. I wonder how fate has brought us into these worlds. How is it that he has drowned and I have survived? Am I really alive? I feel dead, smothered in this little dying town. Day in and day out, I wake carving flesh and reeking of stale soy sauce. I greet the same stars when I open my door to the kitchen in the morning, and I say goodnight to the same stars when I go to sleep. They don’t seem to want to change their pattern. The long days in between are blurs. My body aches from swinging the knife, and my ears burn with the shrieks of sizzling woks.
The white kids that work in the kitchen come and go in the summer. The kitchen was like a train stop. They would leave eventually for a better destination. Some of them would send postcards from their universities or exotic places. The undocumented, the unidentified, the brown boys paid under the table—we all call little brother, cousin. They, too, keep moving, changing. They move from sweatshop to sweatshop, from kitchen to groves. One ended up in the Piss River and Mrs. Wong had to go to the morgue and identify the body. “He was a good boy,” she said.
Mei Ling, when I reread the little poems, I remember how I loved you. You were a complete mystery. Your grandmother told me to stay away from you, that you were a fox girl and that you had inherited the fleshly desires from your vixen mother. That you would doom any man that touches you. But in those early years of the restaurant, you were the glimmer of hope in my life. When I heard you giggle or saw you doing your homework, reading great Western literature, or merely sitting in the corner with your sister and your friends, how your intense focus could flitter into sparrows. How American life could seem so comfortable.
Tomorrow, I will not be alive. I will put on Ming’s moldy suit—and walk into the river with stones sewn into my pockets.
MING, REDUX
One day, I thought about killing myself, but at the last minute I changed my mind. When I walked into the river with stones in my pockets, I heard frogs croaking on the fragrant banks. I remembered my childhood near the Mekong River and how I enjoyed hearing the frogs at night. They cry “love, love.” I turned around and walked home in a brief calm between rains under a full moon. The highway was black and empty except for a bright white line that disappeared in the horizon. I was happy to see the restaurant’s neon flickering in the distance. I changed my wet clothes and went to the kitchen to prep for a twenty-course dragon and phoenix banquet. One hundred ducks were waiting to be dressed. Ten thousand shrimps sang to be eaten. I found peace in dicing carrots, calm in slicing onions, dignity in carving rosettes out of common radishes.
The next year, Grandma Wong legally adopted me and sent me to Oregon State at Corvallis, where I got a degree in agricultural science. I took over her little hybrid experiments, and we started a huge organic agribusiness together. We have a seaweed farm down near Coosbay and an experimental salmon run in Tillamook.
Once in a while I see Mei Ling, and we laugh about the silly pornographic poems that she used to send me. She’s now a poet/professor in southern California who is well-known for her research on immigrant erotica. I said to her, “Well, you had a good start.” Remembering how flirty she was, she blushed. Every year for spring break, she would fly up to Corvallis for a visit. We would have tea together and laugh a bit, and I would give her a check from the business because in Grandma Wong’s will, she named all of us, Marcus, Surfer Dude, the singing waitress, Mei Ling, Moonie, and I, equal partners. Mei Ling is as mysterious and untouchable now as she was at thirteen. I know that I can never know her again. The country is vast and each of us, frogs in our own ponds. And poor Rice Cake. He fell ill shortly after Grandma Wong’s death, died of a broken heart. We buried him at a bend of the river.
RICE CAKE CARP SONG
I am a fish, a big fat fish, I have no father or mother
I am a fish, a big fat fish, I am spawn from an ancient river
I am a fish, a big fat fish, I grow fatter and fatter
Each day I munch on tasty scraps, handfed by my sisters
Each night I sleep in my sooty bed unafraid of anglers
Flay me, eat me, I am eternal flesh
I’ll reborn myself over and over
I’ll return to earth as a big fat fish
To feed the Great Hunger
PATSY AND RATSY
(Patricia and Rebecca, twins)
We hate Mei Ling and Moonie. We had to grow up in their shadows. They were always straight A students. We were B–students. Our mother always said, “Why can’t you be smart like Mei Ling and Moonie?”
One day our dog, Maggie, disappeared and we told the police that their grandmother chopped him up and ate him. And Ralphie witnessed it. This made them start an investigation and the animal rights crazies found out and picketed their restaurant. They had to close it for a month. Then one day somebody in Spokane found Maggie and took down the number from her collar and called us. Apparently, she took a ride on a northeast-bound freight train and ended up four hundred miles away in Spokane. How weird is that? We were suspended from school for spreading malicious rumors.
When old Granny Wong died, our father and his corporation tried to buy the property. They wanted to tear the restaurant down and build a shopping mall. Mei Ling and Moonie refused to deal with us and ended up selling it very cheap to a Vietnamese family. My father said, “How do you like that, gooks will only do business with gooks.”
MARCUS MARCUS
One day, Grandma Wong caught a cold and died. They said they looked at her birth certificate and she was actually 124 years old. Although she was a lifelong Buddhist, we had a quiet Christian ceremony for her because we couldn’t find a Buddhist priest in the yellow pages. The dude and I took time from college to be there. Eric was there quietly weeping behind a tree because there is still a restraining order against him to stay a thousand feet away from Mei Ling. When Mei Ling and Moonie walked up to the gravesite, Moonie was so absorbed in trying to capture the funeral with her hand-cam that she tripped over a headstone and fell into a nearby ditch. Grandma Wong’s ghost sprang out of her coffin, pulled Moonie from the ditch and said, “You must rise up, girlchild, you must change the world!” She then flew into the trees. And there she is. A silhouette between moon and branches, she sings to us every night—a Chinese song that is soft and soothing. You can hear her precisely at midnight when she would normally be turning off the neon signs of the restaurant. She must have put a spell on all of us. Because the song she sings is a fuckin’ sad song. Although we don’t understand a word of it, it makes us all cry when we hear it.
RESTAURANT SESTINA
They have all gone away. The restaurant is shut and still. There’s nothing left to say. The abacus is idle. Silent is the till. They have all gone away. Mei Ling is here for just a day. Moonie pays the rest of the bills. Nothing more to say. The Old Lady planned it just this way. The symbol of toil and love, they shall sell, sell. They have all gone away. They’ve sold it to Mrs. Pham, the restaurant on the hill. There’s nothing left to say. Only the crying cockroaches will stay. The restaurant is shut and still. We have all gone away. Nothing left to say.
Sign off: Marcus Marcus, poet/anarchist, celestial skateboarder, fool.
COCKROACH LATE-SONG
A brown girl is as juicy as a white girl, although an old lady is less so, she’s the first to let go. Ho, Ho, Ho! Bits of meat on the carpet, pretty little morsels, sweet and sour to my nose. Ho, Ho, Ho! A brown girl’s as juicy as a white girl, although an old lady’s less so: be patient, be patient, I can smell her cooking through the mouse hole. She’s wokking up some old rice with egg and scallion, she’ll drop a few crumbs behind the stove. Na na na, we’re fast we’re bold, we’ll escape her broom and foot-soles. Ho, Ho, Ho! Our kind is hard, our kind is patient, hold the door, hold the door.
Our cousins are coming. Here come the uncles. We have our green cards, our underground passes, our fake photos. Ho, Ho, Ho! Our ancestors are older than your ancestors! One dead cockroach is a tragedy, ten million is a statistic! Ho, Ho, Ho!
Our kind will be patient, patient. We’ll crawl in and out of her ears, in and out of her nostrils, in and out of her eyeholes. Ho, Ho, Ho! First, we’ll take over the restaurant, then take over the world. Ho, Ho, Ho! We are courageous, we’re bold, we’re not afraid of your foot-soles!
MEI LING LAST SONG
How is it that some of us go away and some of us stay? Some sink into the ocean and some ride a dead man’s suitcase to safety. Some of us are beautiful Chinese girls who don’t age, or dishwashers who die with hands soft as a baby’s.
Perhaps the only bright light in a dying western town may be the neon of a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps that same bright light may be a take out joint in Bethlehem.
Some of us are born with wings and some of us crawl on our bellies. Some of us could spin shit into gold. Some of us pan and pan and come up empty.
Some of us are Chinese from China. Some of us from Africa, from Vietnam and Cambodia, from Timbuktu, from Andalusia—the whole world is our diaspora.
Some of us arrive in the promised land. Some of us land in Piss River, Oregon. Glittering sand, putrid rain, it’s all the same to us.
Some of us love too much and some of us don’t love much at all. Some of us, like Mei Ling, love the wrong people, over and over. Some of us, like Moonie, wary Moonie, prefer to keep the score. And who is to say who loves whom more?
Some of us work our knuckles black. Some of us sleep facing the stars.
Some of us are prized fish. Some of us are common swine raised for slaughter.
Some of us are like Mei Ling, or we are more like her than we would like to admit—although we have plenty, we cry more, more, more….