SYLVIA CHAN

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Naked and Vulnerable, the Rest Is Circumstance

FROM Prairie Schooner

My foster friend pushes me into the carpet and slides into the sucker punch before I would have taken it. This is 1999, the end of the twentieth century and the advent of Y2K. Of Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s on the Wall. Of Bill Clinton speaking forcefully over our group home mother’s FOX News broadcast. Everything is white in the living room: the walls, the cheap carpet that unraveled with each vacuuming, the couches sooty with grime on the plastic seat covers because Group Mama didn’t tolerate our skins on her furniture. Everything untouched yet blanketed in a run-of-the-mill living—a single mother whose children had grown and departed, who had registered to house a group of four to eight foster kids to make ends meet. She was there, but she left us alone, and as the popular media foster stereotype depicts, she was happy with her check; we were all right if we had a home.

The sucker punch throws Evan Isaiah against the fireplace mantel. Before he hits the fire irons, Maria is on him again, digging her nails into his sternum. At fifteen, she is older and bigger than his fourteen- and my eleven-year-old body, but Evan Isaiah, even when his head slumped on his left shoulder, seems renewed. I watch his wiry muscles tighten and relax and then charge straight into her stomach, hitting her below the belly button. Maria oomphs and falls onto her back. Just when I want to believe they’ll stop, they’re at it again, and all I think is, how many times will he fight for me, did he not break his body enough.

I didn’t want him to fight. Evan Isaiah would age out of the foster system; we knew his mother, an English teacher who taught Harlem Renaissance poetry, had remarried and fostered her stepchildren. I would have a different fate, a successful opportunity to reunite with my biological family, the less popularized but still irrevocable “take me back” story. I wanted every opportunity for us to both get out on our own terms. Meaning: No fighting. No sneaking out. No punishments or slaps against the wrists for Group Mama to report to the Legislative Court Angels, or our case managers, Child Protective Services, and our parents’ attorneys against us.

The brawls were routine. Group Mama retreated into her bedroom when we came home from school or truancy. I was small and quiet, but everyone knew I could read three languages and tell any story so convincingly they would cry. I won over visiting parents with my recitations on Paul Celan and why reading a man who walked out of Auschwitz broke my heart. But I refused to lie. I’d let my mother smile and tell me her truths—that she would never choose a man over her daughter, that she would never let him touch me—and I refused to become my mother.

When the others asked or demanded or tried to force me into writing their papers and coming up with a sob story to win family brownie points, I hid under the bathroom sink cabinet. Nobody except for Evan Isaiah thought to look for me there. And when I emerged, they found me.

All day and night the summer of 1999, I hid and listened to the other foster kids lather their conversations shit talking Evan Isaiah and Sylvia Lin. I remember the slurred juxtapositions of their speeches, how they drifted into the bathroom, used it, and floated away, never pausing to hear that I was there. That, at sixty-eight pounds and four feet ten inches, I fit perfectly and comfortably in the sink cabinet. I remember everything; I dissected every snip at my lisp and my red-brown hair, of Evan Isaiah’s blackness and the sureness they felt he pitied me for being unworthy of saving. That’s what Maria said while bumping her knee against the cabinet knob: “Can’t anyone see she’s not a damsel at all? She’s a sniper. If any of us will grow up to break grown men’s hearts, it will be that little bitch.”

I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a girl whom my world seemed to despise: unattractive and fosterless. Undervalued by my parents, who chose their addictions over me. I hated myself. I tried to take up as little space as possible, to go through my days quietly, because why should I speak? I was someone to be left.

When Maria and her boyfriend grabbed me by my limbs, pinning me to a wall or to the floor, I could never fight like Evan Isaiah. I was frantic, and my kicks meant nothing. My sense of worthlessness followed me: I was miserable. I tried to act stupid, and to do better by avoiding my bullies.

I imagined her mouth forming an O as she pinned me down after hours. Group Mama locked the girls in from the outside and kept the boys downstairs—no hanky business. The only way Evan Isaiah didn’t think of saving me. Twirling the black cap in one hand, Maria grazed the Sharpie on my limbs: snitch, witch, bitch. Rinse and repeat because she ran out of words and I refused to supply her with more. I didn’t scream because I knew she wanted me to protest; she wanted my visceral pain. As a finishing touch, she scrawled foster freak onto my forehead.

When Evan Isaiah saw me the next morning, he pounced on Maria after her shower. Tore off a strand of hair. Told her she was better than this. He climbed to the girls’ second-floor window every night, perched on the sill, and watched me sleep. Watched the other girls sleep. Maria never laid a hand on me again.

What continued was a kinship between Evan Isaiah and myself: he fought to save me, and I told him no. It bothered me that he was willing to jeopardize his body for mine. Why would I be the one to get out? I didn’t want to be saved. I wanted to foster my sense of indignation and pride and fight. I believed in my heroine’s journey: the only savior worth writing was me. It had to come from me. Watching Evan Isaiah’s reckless compassion—the ways he defended myself and others for any little squabble, no matter how wrong we were—made me want to emulate him. I wanted to love someone so much I’d wear his pain as my own.

When he turns fifteen and a half, Evan Isaiah gets in contact with his birth mother, who wants to help. He gets a new case worker. He is assigned a court advocate, or a guardian ad litem, who visits him twice a month. I see the change in Evan Isaiah’s strut, and I know he’s hoping for reunification bad.

It’s 2001. Dusklight slats fall over his windshield. I blink; can’t see through his mom’s dirty car. Someone has even scrawled “Crusty mess” on the passenger side. Okay, I’ll prod him to wash it in the morning, plus I’m pretty sure Nelson, one of the younger foster boys who looks up to Evan Isaiah, did it. I see Evan Isaiah approaching and I slide over to pop open the driver’s door.

He gives me the stink eye. “Why you listenin’ to Eminem? Change it to Tupac.”

I laugh and fiddle with the radio station till we hear the Bay Area stations. We’re eager to paint our ghetto Hayward town red, though he has to bring me back to the group home every night. Even though “Last Wordz” and “Keep Ya Head Up” blast from the speakers, our car rides are mostly quiet.

From group home to juvenile court, we understand two wards of the states—one with a court advocate, bound for reunification with his mother—are tied by circumstance. Friends, families, and strangers give us the stink eye. It’s like, what does a black boy and a yellow girl have in common? Why would anyone think we were brother and sister?

I think we are defined by our actions. For me to hear from my group home guardians, probation officers, police, and other administrators I am lucky to be alive—I understand I should be grateful, and I am. But that doesn’t make it easy for me to live like I’m always fine.

As a writer who has been called “sick” for teaching blackness and whiteness in 2018, I have never been questioned for my authority. Which is not anything beyond my subjective experiences, or what Evan Isaiah has informed me all along. He always told me it didn’t matter I wasn’t black: that I listened and felt for him was enough to make me sound like I’d watched it all. Like I’d been in the kitchen with Evan Isaiah when his mother got the news his father was shot in Prince George’s County for drunk driving. That’s what the cops told her. And it wasn’t every girl who “got” that, even though my father had never been pulled over for drunk driving, but for recklessness, mostly under cocaine and heroin. Evan Isaiah admired that I cared for the American life he could live with his skin, even though I had no reason to empathize because I was simply born whiter.

“Why are our lives supposed to be different, just because we were born?” Birth was a lottery. He didn’t consider us to be the unfortunate; he saw our less favored bodies as two lives that would make a difference.

When I left Group Mama’s home in 2001, Evan Isaiah feared we would never see each other again. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m in the next town over.” And Union City and my family’s home was five minutes away from Group Mama’s house on Sleepy Hollow Avenue, tucked behind the intersection of the old Kaiser and St. Rose Hospitals.

Consider: it’s the last time I recite poetry with Evan Isaiah. It’s dark and we’re outside; Evan Isaiah climbs to my window and lifts me onto his back and we shimmy our way down the tree. Huddled in blankets, I grip a flashlight as he looks at the battered copy of Celan’s Lichtzwang, unseeing.

“Do you know this will be your ticket out this house?” he says, gesturing toward the original Suhrkamp Verlag edition. “Wish I could read it.”

“We don’t know if this will work.” Our late-night practices—my recitations to him in languages he didn’t know—were curated to allow me to become the literate daughter fluent in English, German, and Chinese. What parents wouldn’t want to take me back?

He laughs. “Yours is everything a poetic voice should be,” he says.

And until we no longer need the flashlight, he watches as I recite the German, and translate the poems into English. We try short ones and longer excerpts, mixed and matched poetic resonances with melodrama. But I couldn’t victimize myself, he reminds me. That was why our parents got rid of us; we were burdens.

“And play up the fact that you’re translating on the fly, okay? I don’t know any girl who can do that.” He smiles. “You’ll make some boy happy.”

“A green, not from here.” I stop.

“Go on. That’s beautiful. A reminder of who they gave up.” He nods and sits up.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The small stones I wish in my mouth.

“The end, then.” He points to the last three lines. “That’s how great poetry works. You read the beginning and the end, and if you’re hooked, you’ve sold the rest.”

I follow his calloused finger to where it moves back and forth between those three lines. He is right; it is easy. “The orphans buried again and again.”

“Just end on those two snippets: A green, not from here. The orphans buried again. And again.” He speaks them slowly, almost happily, with his eyes closed. Their long fringes flutter even as he remains still.

“Try it.”

It’s the same stance he wears in 2010, the last time I see him as a free man.

On May 16, a drunk driver hits my boyfriend and me on the I-5 at 150 miles per hour. We survive. There is some investigation, but the accident is ruled as reckless endangerment, and the drunk driver confesses to being intoxicated, and nothing else. He takes his life within the year. My boyfriend passes six months later in an accidental shooting. From the car accident injuries, I’ve been sitting in bed for six months and watching the news.

I don’t sleep. I fail my physical rehab tests. I’m not laid off because it’s illegal to fire a disabled body, but the university pays me workers’ compensation and tells me to grade from home.

Evan Isaiah reaches out in July. I’m lying motionless on the couch, tracing curlicues with the hand I didn’t lose. The doctors encourage me to learn to use my right hand because it’d take a couple of surgeries to make my left look whole—to reconstruct it. I will never be able to write again.

I pick up the phone call, even though I let it ring for five minutes. He asks how I’m coping. I hear his cat, Siu Mai, meowing in the background. “Syl,” he says, “all you can do is recover. You’re doing everything right. You know, orphans are the closest to God.”

I roll my eyes, and Evan Isaiah, through the phone, calls me out. “I know you’re not an orphan,” he says, “but you can’t deny everyone treats you as if you’re an orphan. You want to get things right, but you have to consider that not everyone cares for those details. They hear trashbag kid, and think, her parents must be dead.

“Your mom really is horrible,” he adds. “Do me a favor and stop giving her money and bailing her out.”

We spend the next half hour over the phone before we talk in person, when I drive to his house and spend the night philosophizing about God, good and bad characters, and the elusive idea of fate—we are born from different circumstances, that’s undeniable, but we choose how to live.

I climb into bed with him, turning away. He spoons me and throws his arm over my waist, holding me like he had when we were in group home, and when I was scared I’d be attacked in my sleep. I always fell asleep with his arm rising and falling on me. I thanked his God he still breathed, even as I was sick that whoever would kill me would kill him. This has to end someday, I thought. Someday.

Evan Isaiah tells me about bullet holes—that’s what he remembers and sees in his dreams when he returns to that night. “It is kinda God’s intention,” he says. “Yeah, I hope none of this is fatal, but I know he creates holes for us to find him.”

I’m so lost. “Why are you telling me he needs to take a life in order to sustain yours?” I ask.

I don’t tell him I also dream too much about the same holes. In my memories and nightmares, the bullet holes look like pinpricks of blood on a heel, not unlike those of a heroin addict. In the end, children, and then adults like us, are forsaken. The idea that a God could love us, darknesses and all, is laughable.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, Evan Isaiah quotes Sebald and Celan and a bunch of literary luminaries; I forget he was the well-read kid. Evan Isaiah compares me to his former “adult” best friend, a girl who’s not unlike me in that we have parents who didn’t want us. The difference? I’m strong, compassionate, and conscientious—things I’ve heard all my life. Is that shocking in a former trashbag kid? Maybe. To me, being a model citizen and professional is only part of growing out of the system: I did “good,” as Evan Isaiah affirms.

But none of us should be dictated by our escapes from the system.

I wake up three hours later. My eyes are swollen, matted from fitful sleeping. I stumble into the bathroom. In the 4 a.m. light, I see cigarette butts in the sink and in the toilet. Dirty towels in the tub. I decide to hold my pee and return to Evan Isaiah, who is still sleeping peacefully.

I throw on his sweatshirt and tuck him in before driving home. In the shower, I think about what I wanted to say had he been awake: Why are you doing coke? Why do you want to look like cigarette butts and as if your face is so sanded by the substance, you can’t promise me you’d shape up? Our books had promised us more when we were younger, that, perhaps, we wouldn’t die without end. We’re twenty-five and twenty-two, I thought. I’m tired of wondering what the hell is wrong with us.

His even-limbed frame a beauty, even in sleep. The dawn turning his face blue. His forehead, a sliver of light. It’s the same color he wears in 2012, when I’m visiting him nearly every week before I move to Tucson for graduate school, round two. We palm each other over the glass window, sooty with other thumbprints. This is the only time I remember Evan Isaiah having to meet me this way, with a partition between us. “What did you do?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Nothing of consequence,” he says.

That has been his answer since he was designated a “condemned A” prisoner two years ago. I could touch and hug him, unless he picked a fight. He was convicted of first-degree murder, rape, and robbery for a woman he assaulted at a gas station on Sleepy Hollow and Hesperian, near my birth hospital and old Group Mama’s home.

He didn’t keep his finger outside the trigger guard. I imagined he tried to take it back, even when he knew it was too late. I could see him standing over her body and placing her hands on her chest and closing her eyelids—to shut her eyes like a woman.

He didn’t try to get far. They caught him later that night, on Mission Boulevard, at the Union City and Hayward junctions. The news said he was trying to make for the hills, but I knew Evan Isaiah didn’t care for rich white people. What the hell would I want with a white picket fence on top of a hill? I’d laughed: that was never in our dreams.

I wanted to be a jazz pianist. He wanted to be a teacher, just like his mother. What did his mother always tell him? “We write to keep hope,” she’d said.

“But I don’t want to be a writer,” he’d said.

He would relay these last words to me again and again, in the backyard, in the living room, on the way to school. We write to give: it is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in ways they couldn’t imagine. To impart these juxtapositions of real and unreal to someone else. That’s what she wanted for him.

On normal visiting days, I could have shown Evan Isaiah my poetry. I was allowed to bring up to ten pages. I wanted to write for a reader, not for a writer. I wanted them to read my experiences and get them thinking about theirs. Wasn’t it obvious?

“Hell no,” Evan Isiah says.

He mimics thumbing through the pages, as if we could hold hands across the table. “You know your problem has always been loving those who don’t love you. Which is admirable and wild. People love and hate you because you are the most kindhearted person I know. You don’t get that they will use this against you—they will call you malicious and stupid and reckless.”

He smiles, cocks his head. “And you’ll still take it. It is crazy beautiful how relentless you are in your refusal to check your compassion.”

Yawning and stretching his arms, Evan Isaiah reveals his tightness in his body. In prison, he’d thinned out. He is still wiry and muscular yet he seems quieter and, I feel, content to settle for next to nothing.

“Only you,” he says. “You ain’t going to jail. Not back then, not ever.”

He asks me to shut my eyes. I feel the religious energy emanating from him; I know this man is going to ask me to pray, or to believe in his God again. I don’t have the heart to tell him no—how do you tell an imprisoned man no?—I cannot, after all these years.

With the partition between us, with our hands face palmed to the glass, he recites: “If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

I shake my head and stare dumbfounded at him. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

He bites his lower lip and smiles. “You need it,” he says. “Promise me one thing. Don’t ever let a man have you believe you need to hate him so much you can’t forgive. You can’t become one of them—our parents, our failed case managers, our social workers. You can’t let hate spurn your body until you’re unable to forgive. I can’t be in a world where you become inhuman.”

He brushes away a strand of hair which has fallen over his forehead. “One day I’ll walk you down the aisle,” he says. “I’ll still be your brother, your best friend, and I’ll be your dad if he’s not there.”

“Really?”

He nods. “Promise.” Forget the fact he’s in for life.

“Help me figure out what I should say about my family when I get to Arizona,” I say. “When they ask where do you come from. Where are your parents.”

The prison light catches his face, which tilts toward me, ready to take on the task. He’s beautiful.

There are things we do for the ones we love. That’s how Evan Isaiah ends our last conversation. A Thursday morning. I’d driven from Oakland at 4:30 a.m. I preferred missing Bay Area traffic so I could be one of the first persons Evan Isaiah would see for his day. I liked sitting in my Altima in the parking lot, waiting for dawn to break and watching the sun spread its horizon over the pink striated sky. The tips of the clouds touching the shadow of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge reminded me of Evan Isaiah’s drawings—he penciled images to match my poetry, even when it was still Celan’s.

The drive was just me. I had broken up with my boyfriend because I wanted a clean start leaving California. Evan Isaiah didn’t ask about him; he knew. I’d thrown up around Point Reyes; driving in the hills always got to me. What kind of California girl are you? I thought he’d throw the quip, as he usually did when he saw me pressing my lips together.

Instead, he reminds me how he’d mailed the CDCR 106 form for first-time visitors to him. “I wanted to meet the love of your life,” he said. Two years ago, I’d held the request in my hands and filled it out immediately, never thinking for a moment my boyfriend didn’t want to meet Evan Isaiah. I’d paced our Temescal studio, sealed the form, and then cooked a chicken curry for dinner. It was over dinner I’d admitted I’d signed it for him.

It was my turn to laugh. “It sounds stupid,” I say, “expecting him to say yes.”

“But that’s what you wanted,” Evan Isaiah replies. “Those who love you will always be around. He would’ve gotten over the whole convict thing.” He grins.

I feel the pit of my stomach growl. It’s not hunger; it’s the coffee. Or the dry heaving. I feel like I’m on top of the world, talking to my best friend; my body feels otherwise.

“I got a feeling you’ll be the last,” he says. “You are going somewhere.”

He doesn’t talk about the dream job: I want to be a teacher. No: I want to save other kids like us. Neither: I want to get out of jail. Even after visiting him for two years, he’d been fine. I thought he made peace with the fact he’d spend his life there because he’d looked at those with him who were angry they’d messed up, and listened to them. Maybe I forgot he was one of them. Maybe, when he was coming off the coke, he saw he was dying inside. Maybe he didn’t tell me because he saw I was no longer part of his world; I was outside.

I forget he carried a darkness; I didn’t see him when he turned complacent, frustrated, and depressed. I was too selfish to remember at the time I carried my darkness—my conviction of self-abasement and terror—that was his, too.

“Don’t say that shit.” I think about the times we walked the train tracks on the south side of St. Rose Hospital because it was the fastest way to get to the Dairy Queen or Mickey D’s. Evan Isaiah would stride easily over debris and granite, almost dancing on each wooden crosstie. I always heard the train first, or maybe I was the one to admit it. I’d lope faster and cross over the rails long before Evan Isaiah would turn around and jump out of harm’s way.

But I never forgot how long it took. His hesitance, until he waited for the train’s blast, for the horn to pulse in my eardrums. He knew exactly how long it would take for him to live another day.

“You are going somewhere,” he repeats. He holds up his hands. “Talk to me,” he says.

“I’m all wrong,” I say, biting my lip. “No, I’m not. You’re not wrong, either.

“Evan Isaiah,” I say. “I love you.”

He looks at me, puts a palm against the partition, and waits for me to match him.

Few persons are willing to face death for a principle. On Thursday, December 8, 2016, I receive the “returned to sender” letter I’d mailed to Evan Isaiah a month ago. My stomach flips. I run into my house and look up San Quentin, call, and wait. For a human on the other end.

The reality is he’d passed nearly eight months ago. How could I have been so detached from him? I think about my year—most of it spent with a man who didn’t love me, the one Evan Isaiah always cautioned against: a man who looked at me and saw himself a savior. A man who didn’t love me for my own.

And I think, before she tells me there was a brawl, perhaps he defended someone. I could see him pushing me to the floor again and taking from the other man’s thrust into his own torso. A fatal sucker punch.

I’m still depicting the scene in my mind. The lady on the other end jolts me back with her Is that all?

After she hangs up, I call Charlie, Evan Isaiah’s mother.

“It’s Evan Isaiah,” she says, almost matter-of-factly. “He’s been in an accident.”

“I know,” I say. “I already did this. It took me eight months. I am not the best friend he deserves.”

It’s like we’ve never stopped talking, even though I was always the short Asian with Evan Isaiah. I cannot ask her about the facts of his death. I don’t want her to think about if he was still alive after the rod pierced his torso. I don’t ask if he spoke to his assailant when he tried backing away and running for it. I don’t ask if he was still conscious when the guards reached him and yelled at one another. I cannot ask if what killed him was his volition in protecting others, always, at the cost of himself.

I want to call his people. I think about Nelson and Maria and Rys in old Group Mama’s home, that, no matter the time, we’d find each other because we had been bound by the same circumstance. We loved and hated each other.

I cover my eyes and breathe. “What the fuck,” I say.

I feel as if Evan Isaiah and I are still in our tree in Group Mama’s backyard, as though our world is visceral: the dirt pricking my legs, the ants crawling over my bare feet and forming a line around me, as if they could obscure me. I can’t forget it. What is the physical representation of my hate and grief, of the darkness embodying all the times in Hayward when I’d been terrorized or sexually assaulted and Evan Isaiah had been there to fight for me?

“I know,” Charlie responds. “If I had talked to him more,” she continues, and I hear the break in her voice. “If I would have stayed with him, he’d be alive.”

We are burdens to our parents, Evan Isaiah told me long ago. That’s why our parents got rid of us. How relentless: that the burden of blame and regret could follow a parent when her son was killed, long after they’d parted from one another.

Recall: Evan Isaiah fights Nelson or Rys or Maria, knocking on their bodies, jumping on them after he’d learned they’d picked on someone else. I would take my anger and frustration and watch him defend me, and forget about trying so hard to fight. I would let him fight for me.

And, perhaps, this is the way he had written all along. I’m eleven and my best friend, Evan Isaiah, is fourteen, and it is two weeks after we became witnesses—two kids tied by being there for the same event. We’re sitting in an oak tree tire swing reading June Jordan. Watching the dusklight. He says, “Whatever has to be in our guardian has to be in us. Whatever encouraged him is also for us. We deserve to die.”

I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now. I refuse to believe we were bad kids because we were cut from different circumstances. And I refuse to believe that to want a family is to deserve to die.

This came from the same person who taught me we don’t choose our families. Evan Isaiah taught me to be reckless with my heart, even though it meant I had to learn to be hurt. I think good acts, like good writing, offer the writer’s compassion: I would wear my beloved’s pain. This is not popular, fostered or unfostered: it takes incredible duress to take someone’s pain and live with it. Not get rid of—to live with it.

 

Today, I am a court advocate for foster kids, the same woman Evan Isaiah had as his legal and compassionate voice eighteen years ago. I can’t believe it has taken me so long to be brave enough to return to the court, to the same system which validated and betrayed me. I think about how every trashbag kid desires reunification with their parents, even when we know it’s no good. Better a life with people who love you than none. Better to have my mother drive up in another man’s car and to have my father disappear every four months than to know they’d never come back for me.

Court advocacy requires me to listen, and I mean, learn to listen to others’ stillnesses and restlessnesses and darknesses, which return to mine. There are fewer rules for this work. Just that I love, period.

It’s cleaner this way, like Evan Isaiah grafting his limbs to mine eighteen years ago. Who can represent the tradition out of which we come better than I can? Who can speak for us?

At the oak tree, he would scrub his palms against its trunk. “Does it hurt?” I’d ask.

“I can’t get the feeling off my hands,” he’d said.

“What feeling?”

“Our names.” And, with a pocketknife he’d knicked from Nelson, he’d proceed to scratch “E.I.” and “S.L.” into the trunk.

Call him Evan Isaiah. Call me Sylvia Lin. We are born naked and vulnerable; the rest is circumstance.