My phone is vibrating. I flip it over and look at the screen: it’s Darryl, the assistant athletic director. Jules looks up from the page in front of her. We’re sitting with two lukewarm cups of coffee, the stack of paper making up Dad’s document, and a fat Chinese-English dictionary on the table between us. Jules has been building a little mountain of snot- and tear-filled napkins in front of her. It’s 8:30 in the morning.
“Don’t answer it. There’s like fifty words on this page you need to help me with.”
“I have to,” I say. “He called me four times yesterday. Hello?”
“Victor! I’ve been trying to reach you all weekend. Where the hell are you?”
I look around, wondering the same thing.
“IHOP,” I say.
“Victor, it’s February ninth. You didn’t register for classes. The deadline was Friday.”
February ninth. Friday. Classes. My foggy brain wrestles with English, with college, with the space-time continuum.
“Things are a little hectic, Darryl.”
“I know, Victor, I know. It’s really awful about your dad. But you do have to register for classes if you want to play in any more games. There’s no wiggle room on this. The online system is already closed. Just pick some classes and go talk to Shellie in the Dean’s Office, okay? Today before five. That’s all you have to do.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll do it.” Shellie in the Dean’s Office. I feel the onset of a headache scratching at the back of my skull.
“Sorry, Darryl.”
“Hey, it’s all good, Victor. I’ll see you on the court.” The phone makes a clicking sound as he hangs up.
Jules has the last three pages in her hand. Over the course of my phone call, her tears have been replaced with a scowl.
“I wasn’t supposed to see this,” she says.
“What? Why?” I say.
She hands me the pages and folds her arms in front of her.
Xiaozhou, I realize now that it was a mistake to hide these stories from you and Lianying for so long. I wanted us to live in a world without those dark things that I left behind in China. I thought that would be possible here in the United States, but I got it wrong. Those dark things are here, too. I came here looking for a clean and light place, and for some years I thought I had found it. But I learned that there is no such place.
In our first few years in the United States, my brothers back in Beijing did not ask too much. I helped them bring money out of China by setting up dollar-denominated bank accounts and investing in American real estate. Having one foot in the United States also allowed us to get involved in the remittance business. Most Chinese immigrants in the Los Angeles area are not as fortunate as we are. Sending money back to your family in China isn’t easy if you’re an “illegal alien” getting paid in cash. Western Union charges high fees, and besides, there may not be a branch in your village in Fujian. Happy Year could take dollars from these people—waiters, fruit pickers, masseuses—and pay their families in yuan, without ever having to exchange the currencies. In this way we could build up our foreign accounts, launder our profits, and help our fellow Chinese Angelenos all at once. Zhao came up with this idea, and I set it up with the help of Mr. Peng, our attorney, who is well connected in the Chinese community.
Handling remittances didn’t bother me. Mr. Peng did most of the work, and anyway, everything was going great here in the States for Linda and me. The restaurants were a big success, and you and Jules were growing up like real American kids: playing sports, watching MTV, and disrespecting your parents, haha. But Zhao was not settling down like I was. Instead, as China became more capitalistic and cutthroat, so did he. He didn’t have a family of his own, and I think his business ideas were his children. He gave birth to them and watched them grow. But sometimes I had to babysit, and change diapers, haha. Not all his ideas were bad ideas. He hatched a plan to help Chinese parents get American citizenship for their babies. We use our connections to get temporary visas for expectant mothers. Then they come here, and I look after them until they have their babies in an American hospital and become American citizens, just like that. More easy money, and no real victim.
But some of Zhao’s ideas were truly terrible. When Zhao came up with Ice, he knew I would fight it, so he asked Ouyang to take charge so he wouldn’t be directly involved. For your safety, it’s better if you do not know the details of the scheme for now. It’s enough to say that it involves smuggling a dangerous product that I knew right away I could never be involved with. Ouyang began to put a lot of pressure on me. “Brother Zhao says that this project is important to Mr. Dong,” Ouyang told me. “If we do not help him, Happy Year will be in trouble. And don’t think the trouble won’t reach you just because you’re in America.”
As usual, Ai tried to smooth things over. In Beijing, he argued on my behalf, but he also told me that Ouyang and Zhao resented me and didn’t think of me as their brother anymore. Nonetheless, I refused to help, and I doubted that they would harm me after all we had been through together.
If I am wrong about that—if our shared history no longer protects me from their destructive ways—then I will accept my fate. Better to go now than to continue living at the whim of such men. They are unrecognizable to me now, and often I regret ever associating with them. But then, perhaps I would have died long ago without their brotherhood. I certainly would not have made it this far. It shames me to admit that there would be no Happy Year restaurants without Zhao and Ouyang. So perhaps they are right about me; perhaps I am the one who has betrayed them. People and circumstances change. I still follow the words of my father: “Suí jī yìng biàn, suí yù ér ān.”
If you are reading this letter, then the worst has come to pass. Do not mourn me as a victim, as I have left the world in accordance with my principles. But I also made a backup plan. Zhao and Ouyang may take my life, but if you follow my instructions, then you and Sun can put an end to their depravity.
The plan is not complicated, but you will have to be careful. Sun will be a wanted man in Beijing. Zhao and Ouyang will be on the lookout for him, so everybody else will want to keep their distance. You will have to go to Ai and ask for his assistance. He will feel compelled to say yes because you are my son. Next, you will have to find evidence linking Zhao and Ouyang to Ice. I have found a point of vulnerability in their circle: a Russian dealmaker named Feder Fekhlachev.
Feder is greedy, fearful, and not too loyal. He will not give the information to Sun, but I believe he will sell it to you—he is a bit in awe of Americans. You will have to buy information from him and take it to the Western media. Dong can protect Zhao and Ouyang from the Chinese authorities. But if you expose their dirty laundry to the world, then Dong himself will become an embarrassment to the Party leadership, and they will force him to shut down Happy Year’s operations.
When I was your age, I had to fight people all the time. If I were still young, then perhaps I would fight my brothers the old-fashioned way. But I am more mature now, and I know that violence engenders more violence. Instead, I want you to shine a light into the darkness I tried to leave behind in Beijing.
This letter must come as a shock to you, Victor, and I understand you may feel angry with me, but I do not apologize for my choices, because I did what I had to do in order to survive. The life you live has not come free. Now you must help repay that debt.
Also, you must take care of Lianying. You will be the head of the family now. Your sister is sensitive, and you must find the right way to tell her what is happening. Do not tell her before you go to China, because she will try to stop you.
Xiaozhou, I do apologize for deceiving you for so long. The lie has been my life. I never thought I had a choice. You must do as I say so that I can become an honest man, finally, perhaps, after I am already a dead one.
I put down the last page and look up at Jules, who is sitting there with her arms folded, glowering at the table. I can’t think of anything to say, either. For a minute I close my eyes, listen to the restaurant sounds. I imagine my new grandfather making bricks in some dusty labor camp in Qinghai, and Dad with a Danny Zuko ducktail, drinking Bud Light and staring at clown fish in a divey Hong Kong pool hall. I envision Mom patiently pitching the gospel to bemused Beijing grannies in her neat and precise Mandarin. She helps Dad with his English; the two of them huddle together over a map of California. Both dead now.
I picture my future as I thought they intended it: a secure white-collar job; a condo shared with some less-intimidating version of Holly Michaels; pets, children, Brita filter, minivan, timeshare. PowerPoints about corporate synergies or whatever. But then I see Sun’s foot crashing into Ponytail’s chest in the Happy Year kitchen, and, in the dim streetlight leaking in through the saloon doors, I see myself, crouched, alert, and I hear my racing pulse.
“Stop it,” Jules says, finally.
I open my eyes. “Stop what?”
“You’re thinking about going.”
Blinking, I shake my head. “I’m not.”
“I want to know what happened, too, I really do. This letter is heartbreaking, and now there so many questions that I want answered. But going to China with Sun and going after these guys, these killers—it’s too risky. The side of Dad that’s asking you to do this, it’s not his good side, okay? I know how much you adored him, but you need to see past that for a minute and recognize how this letter shows that he was completely two-faced and deceitful.”
“But Jules, I—”
She doesn’t let me finish. She gestures with her hands, her face reddening with some combination of anger and incipient tears. “No, Victor, before you object, please listen to me for a second, okay? Did you never wonder why Mom was estranged from her parents? Why you, you bury yourself in basketball to avoid facing the contradictions in your life—just like he always buried himself in his work? He was faking it, Victor, trying to make us look like a normal family, while he was scooting back and forth to Beijing doing God knows what. He doesn’t even say! Even in this letter, he’s trying to come clean, he’s telling us about the immigrants and pregnant ladies he helped, but he doesn’t say what this Ice shit is all about.”
At some point, she has to breathe, which means I manage to get a word in. “Did we read the same letter just now, Jules? It’s not like he was sitting around looking at grad school brochures, and then he decided he’d prefer a life of crime.”
I’m furious at her for explaining my life to me, sufficiently enraged to drop in the grad school line just to make it sting.
“Maybe Dad didn’t have all the same options that we had, okay? He did some dirty work because he had to, but he gave it up as soon as he could. He married a missionary and moved to the suburbs! If he worked his ass off and lied about his past so that we could have normal lives, don’t you think we should be grateful?”
She sets her jaw and glares at me for a moment. “I am grateful, but Victor, for once in your life, will you try to see some nuance? You’re your own person, not some extension of Dad, and you don’t have to buy all this patriarchal ‘head-of-the-family’ bullshit, all these melodramatic lines about shame and loyalty and debt. If you would spend just two minutes thinking about it rationally, you’d see that he’s asking too much. You’d realize that going to China to fight Dad’s enemies is a terrible, terrible idea.”
Jules: always so great at seeing both sides of the coin. Always so great at coming up with reasons to avoid commitments, reasons to criticize, reasons to separate herself from the pack. I want to say, you don’t understand this letter because it’s about caring a lot about something. I want to say, you didn’t pick up that he was ashamed of us, too, he’s asking so much because he made all these sacrifices for a couple of big babies who don’t think about anything but ourselves, our basketball season, our dreams, our love lives. We don’t care about the past or the future, the vast imbalances in the world that we benefit from. The painful compromises people make just to get a decent job making dinner for people like us. We’re blind to that, we’re desensitized, we live in a bubble, and he knew it.
He’s only asking me to be human, to give a shit, to stand up for what’s right. I want to say, you’ll notice he didn’t bother asking you.
“You’re always telling me to think for myself, to be my own person. But in the next breath, you’re telling me what to do,” I say instead. “You know, I’m so glad you’ve got everything figured out. You’ve got Dad figured out, you’ve got me figured out. Maybe sometime soon you’ll have your own life figured out as well.”
“Look, Victor, this isn’t about me, this is about you.” Jules drops her voice low and glares at me across the table. “Dad was good at making you feel special. He manipulated you just like he manipulated Sun. You don’t think it’s a bit messed up that he pulled Sun off the streets to use him as a mule? That he trained him to become his gang enforcer? That he raised another little one-man fan club for himself in China?”
“That’s a typical way for you to see things,” I bark back at her. “You don’t think even for a minute what Sun’s life would be like without Dad, because you take for granted all the love and support you’ve received. Dad gave Sun a home and taught him to read and write. He taught him to speak English. He gave him a future, even if it’s not a perfect future. But you, you want everybody to be perfect just like you are, which is why you’ve never been happy, and you never will be.”
“I wish you didn’t speak English, you superior little shit,” Jules hisses.
Then she glares daggers at my phone, which is vibrating again. I flip it over to look at the screen. Lang.
I take a deep breath before picking up.
“Hello?”
“Victor. Where are you?”
“I’m at IHOP.”
“Arrow or Foothill?”
“Um. Arrow.”
“Don’t move. I’ll be there in ten.”
“Wait—” But the line’s already dead.
I put the phone down, put my elbows on the table, put my face in my hands.
After a minute, Jules says, “Wow, that conversation got nasty really fast. Look, I’m sorry, Victor. I don’t want to fight. It’s just that you’re all the family I’ve got left, and I don’t want you to leave me here by myself. I’m genuinely afraid of what would happen if you went to China, and I’d say I have good reasons to be.”
I don’t say anything back to her. I just stay there with my hands over my face, waiting for an asteroid to strike the earth.
“So Lang is coming here, now?” she says.
I grunt.
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“So what do you say, Victor? Do we tell him about the ketamine, and hand off this law-enforcement business to the professionals?”
I take my hands off my face, blink a few times, give my head a shake. “Jules, that would involve confessing to a break-in that we committed, like, six hours ago.”
Jules widens her eyes, then rubs them with the heels of her hands. “I’m honestly so fucking exhausted that I forgot that part.”
I don’t say anything.
“He might even be planning to ask you about that.”
“Uh-huh.”
We look at the pages strewn around the table, the Chinese-English dictionary, the mountain of snotty napkins.
“Okay. I’ll leave and take this stuff with me,” she says. “Are you all right to talk with him right now?”
“He’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes.”
“Fine. But Victor, maybe test the waters a bit, because we might need his help. I’m going to get some sleep, and I suggest you do the same. Let’s think things over and talk later. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Promise me you’ll call me later.”
“Okay,” I say. “I promise.”
Jules packs the letter and the dictionary into her handbag. She gets up to go. She gives my shoulder a squeeze.
I make the requisite eye contact and nod my head.
Jules lingers for a moment with her hand on my shoulder and then walks away with her head down, her mask of nonchalance left behind on the blue pleather bench of the IHOP booth, her small shoulders sagging beneath the weight of too many sensitivities and indecisions, too much vulnerability and love. Those burdens and also a large calfskin handbag stuffed with the last testament of our father’s life.
I’m already feeling terrible for talking to her the way I did. I don’t want to fight, either. I have no idea what I want; I wonder if I ever have. All I know is what Dad wants, what Jules wants, what Andre wants, what Coach Fucking Vaughn wants. But now I need everyone else to shut the fuck up and let me think for myself for once.