Our Christmas edition!
We begin with a warm Christmas memory from the mind of Peter Taitano. From there, we go into a narrative about a maturing martial artist by Michael A. Gosalia. It is a very nice way to finish 2010, and we hope to continue featuring work this good next year.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Christmas '93
By Peter Taitano
For Christmas that year, I only wanted ninja stars
I only wanted ninja stars for Christmas that year
That year
for Christmas
I only fucking wanted ninja stars.
Peter Taitano exists in another dimension – at another point in time, in an unimaginable form. He stops by Earth to wander the streets of Manhattan and daydream. He likes it when people say ‘Excuse Me’ after bumping into him.
For Christmas that year, I only wanted ninja stars
I only wanted ninja stars for Christmas that year
That year
for Christmas
I only fucking wanted ninja stars.
Peter Taitano exists in another dimension – at another point in time, in an unimaginable form. He stops by Earth to wander the streets of Manhattan and daydream. He likes it when people say ‘Excuse Me’ after bumping into him.
Ken's Defeat
By Michael A. Gosalia
"These new shoes are great, but I've replaced the new laces with my old ones," said Ken.
"Why?" asked his friend, Norio.
By the way Ken shrugs and puts his new shoes into his locker Norio knows and says something before Ken can speak.
"Don't speak, I already know. No reason, huh?"
"Yup."
"Don't worry I do things sometimes without any reason too. There was this time at my Aunt's house when..."
"Okay everybody, let’s get ready!"
Both Ken and Norio had to hurry as they were late for their sparring session at the dojo. They both took karate lessons and for their age were advanced fighters.
They sparred and as was the usual case, Ken won. It was easy for Ken. Everything the master of the dojo taught Ken picked up with grace and ease. It was much harder for Norio and the others, some of whom were jealous of Ken. It hadn't always been this way, but like an ugly duckling Ken had turned into a fit and durable swan in the past year or so. After ten minutes they had worked up a sweat and after twenty they were getting into it. The match between Ken and Norio lasted only for twenty five minutes. They had to go for an hour anyway, so Ken decided to let up.
"Okay okay Ken, you win, stop torturing my arm."
Ken released Norio's arm out of a strangle hold and got up.
"Help me up, man."
Ken helped him up and they were off on another round. To make things different for Ken, the master asked Ken to practice in a different, slightly more challenging style. When he could do this and still defeat Norio, the master became really surprised, knowing then that he too could be defeated by Ken.
"You've improved. Keep up the good work," he told Ken.
Overhearing the master's generous appraisal of Ken, another one of the fighters asked, "Hey, what about me?"
"Focus on yourself," the master instructed.
The students of the dojo had become so skilled that they could spar without really hurting each other, and so, reckless as teenagers are, they started fighting on school grounds. They knew by now how to control a punch and could test their strengths, who was quicker for example, or who had a better style. By now they could do a series of moves without the punishment of serious injury. By the time Ken got into it a few fights had already taken place.
Late one afternoon, as Ken left the library, he was approached by three members of the dojo. One was the same youth who overheard the master talking to Ken. As there was not much rotation in sparring, the youth knew it would be a long time before he could face Ken. He wanted to see for himself how good he was without waiting, how well he could match up to him, and this was the only place he could do it. Ken didn't want to lose, so he fought. It's funny, Ken thought if he didn't accept the challenge he would lose. He had a long way to go before his maturity matched up with his talent. Nevertheless, in five moves he had his opponent on the ground.
The young fighter, Ken, was not an arrogant type but sometimes he enjoyed the fight a little too much. Some will always become angry at seeing someone else display so easily what they struggle to achieve. And so it was that Ken became the participant of more and more fights.
Ken's parents lived away, but when they found out about this they had a talk with him. They tried to explain to Ken over the phone that he didn't have to take part in these matches and that his breaks were there for him to relax and to get ready for his next class, not to fight.
"It was fun for a while, but now I'm tired of it. I fight, and it's no fun. I even fight my friends. I don't want to practice at my dojo anymore because every week I have to fight at school, but I cannot lose.”
“Why don’t you lose,” Ken’s mother asked. “Then maybe they will stop bothering you.”
Ken became aggressive. “I cannot lose. It is against everything I’ve learned at the dojo.”
“Then you have not learned much,” said Ken’s father.
“I will simply quit the dojo,” said Ken.
Ken's parents explained to Ken that quitting his dojo was not an option and that he had to find a way not to fight.
"I'll try," said Ken. "But it won't be easy..."
It’s true. It wouldn’t be easy for him. He had the heart of a competitor.
"No need to try," his mother said. "Just do...
It was November now. The leaves were falling from the trees and it was raining off and on. Many times after Ken left the library he found himself facing yet another opponent, only to witness the same outcome, himself winning. The fighting started to affect his schoolwork but there was not much he could do about it, no one would dare tell the principal. Even Norio, who was worried about his friend's well-being, would not do it. It was simply common practice for the kids to fight like that. It showed interest in a field of study that was revered and respected throughout the land.
One day Ken heard that a few of the guys were going to have Ken face one of the school's bodybuilders, Daiki. Actually, Ken knew the guy. He knew him to be arrogant and funny, someone who wanted to be the best at everything but not in a mean-spirited way. He would not hold a grudge if Ken played a prank on him. Early the next morning, in between classes, Ken rigged a water pistol in the bodybuilder's locker to go off when the door opened. The class that was going on at the time passed by and when it was over Daiki approached Ken.
"Hey Ken, listen. I need to talk to you about something."
"Okay," said Ken.
“I want to fight you to see how good you really are. You will bow to me before this match is over."
Ken smiled. "Sure thing," he said. By this time Ken agreed with everything that his opponents would say to him, so that when he proved them wrong he could secretly gloat. It was a way for him to get by, to keep with the fighting as it offered no other enjoyment now.
Daiki suddenly attacked Ken. He tried to wrestle him to the ground but Ken was too quick and got away. He got out of another hold but Daiki was too big and the space was way too small to fight and move around. Ken knew Daiki had the upper hand and that he would have to face embarrassment. Daiki forced Ken on his knees and stood by him, pushing the back of his neck down with the great strength of his arms. For a while Ken fought the strength of Daiki, his head wavering in a state of tension, but eventually he had to put his hands on the ground to protect himself from being crushed under the weight of Daiki’s body. It was then that he bowed.
"Now you know to respect your friends," said Daiki.
Daiki, in so many words, tried to explain that Ken had to lose sometimes to keep the peace, just as he had to show his strength every now and then to prove his might. It was yet to be seen if Ken had learned his lesson.
After Ken had left, Daiki opened his locker and was sprayed by some water. Daiki shrugged.
"He's lucky no one saw that," he thought to himself.
Ken still fought, and he fought hard. He hadn't learned his lesson until Norio mentioned something to him one day. One afternoon Ken was standing under an archway waiting for the rain to stop so he could get back to his dorm. It was somewhere near his college. He stood there motionless, gazing at the steady stream of water falling off the rooftops of the buildings.
"Ken, I think I know why you keep your old laces."
Ken looked at Norio and then he took a seat on a bench and looked down at the ground. He sighed. He decided to tell Norio, his closest friend, the truth.
"I didn't want to lose my old shoes,” said Ken. “My mother made me get rid of them. I could only keep the laces."
"That's right," said Norio. "You are afraid to let go of your old things and you cannot accept change. In the same way you cannot stop winning your matches. Pretty soon someone is going to break your arm."
Ken wiped a tear from his eye. "You are right Norio, but I do not know how to stop. My love for fighting is too strong."
"You're love for winning is too strong, and your pride is too great. You should listen to what I say. It is only because we are friends that I tell you this. You do not know the anger of your classmates. You do not even think too teach them. They look up to you."
Now Ken felt really bad. His stomach started to turn over. He never realized that his classmates might want to learn something from him. He just thought they always wanted to fight.
Crying, he told to Norio, "Okay, Norio, I will try."
The weekend came around and Norio found Ken packing his things in the evening after classes were over.
"You’re not leaving school, are you?” asked Norio.
"No, I'm just leaving for the weekend. I need to get away from things so that I can think. I'm going to my native place to visit my temple, where I can remember myself. The past two months many things have happened. A lot of trouble has started," said Ken.
"Can I come with you?" asked Norio.
"If you want," said Ken. "Hurry up and pack your things. I don't want to wait for you."
Norio knew why Ken was in a hurry. The Girl's College was hosting a social for the boys near their campus, and Ken would have to walk that way to get to the bus. He probably didn't want to see anyone, or to get into any fights.
As they walked by the Girl's College they could see that the social had begun.
"Did you ever think of going to the social, Ken?" asked Norio.
"Did you?" Ken replied.
Norio shrugged and said, "No. I am not interested in girls."
"Me neither," said Ken.
"Only fighting, huh?" They both smiled.
Just then two guys with water pistols jumped out from behind some bushes and sprayed them with water. Norio instinctively put his arm over Ken's chest so that he would not move forward. Before they knew it the guys were off, shouting something or the other. Ken felt ashamed. He knew that those guys must have found out about his little prank on Daiki and that they must be following his example. He didn't say anything, though. He didn't want Norio to find out what was, ultimately, a show of respect for Ken plus it didn't seem like such a big deal. As they were walking down the street Ken walked into a pile of leaves and kicked them around. Ken could see the hills from beyond the numerous apartment buildings that surrounded them. Over those hills lay his home town, where he grew up and first learned the martial arts. The two kept walking. The bus stop was nearby now.
"You know, Ken, if we keep going this way we are going to walk straight through the Girl's College."
"I know, but it is the only way to the bus," said Ken.
After two minutes they were in a grand plaza where a group of students had convened. Everyone was dressed well and the girls were there.
"Hey Norio," one of the girls shouted, "Where is your friend going?" They all laughed.
"Going home to run away to mommy and daddy?"
It was hard for Ken to take this. He was the fighting type and a great martial artist. It was not in his nature to be humiliated. It was true, Ken knew that martial arts were an art of non-violence, but not every youngster of his age could understand this so easily. Ken dropped his bag down and ran back, back to his dorm. Norio was left to carry all of their things back to the dorm.
"What a night," said Norio to the crowd of people.
"Yeah, nice night for a walk," someone said.
"No, nice night to make friends," another said, and with that, Norio ended up staying for the social.
The weekend passed. Ken and Norio found themselves again sparring together at their dojo. Then, about halfway through, the master stopped the activity and made an announcement.
"It has come to my attention," he said, "that Ken has proved himself to be a great fighter."
"Yeah,” people said.
"Ken will now show what he has learned and fight me."
"But master, I cannot..."
"No, that is the end of it. If you want to stay in this dojo you will fight me. There is no decision you can make but this one."
"Either that or leave," said someone. That someone was surely one of the guys who had been defeated by Ken at school, so many of them were there. And so the master and the young fighter fought, and it was a good fight. What Ken must have been thinking? At a split second's notice he had to make the decision to fight hard or to bow out and lose gracefully, or even lose disgracefully for that matter. He thought maybe he could win but the truth was he didn't even yet know the limits of his own power. Ken was not really thinking about that, however. What he was thinking about was how bad it felt to have enemies in his own dojo, how Daiki forced him to bow at school and how he ran back home the other night, crying yet again.
With a front kick coming his way, Ken had a choice to block or take it. He made the right decision and took the hard hit, which knocked him ferociously to the ground. That was end of the fight. The wind had been knocked out of him.
Breathing heavily and on his knees, Ken said, "I'm sorry master, I didn't mean to fight you..."
With a bloody nose the master replied, "No, you fought well and therefore can stay amongst us in the dojo.”
A week had passed and Ken found himself eating some food at the local canteen. He didn't know that a famous master, even greater than Ken's master, master Ryu, was sitting with his group a few seats down from him, observing him.
After Ken had finished he had two of his men get up and attack Ken. Ken fended both off with an instant precision that only a fighter of great skill could have possessed.
Ken yelled, "What is the meaning of this?" But then he realized it was hopeless. Ken had learned a few good things recently that really changed his behavior. He no longer had a yearning to win all of the time, he could accept defeat. He sat back down.
Master Ryu got up from his table and walked over to Ken.
"Oh no, not again," Ken thought.
But this time it was okay, the master did not want to fight Ken, but only to sit with him. That day a great friendship had begun, and thus ended the reign of Ken, so to speak. Ken even removed the old laces from his shoes that day and put in his new ones. Norio was impressed.
Michael A. Gosalia is currently a non-matriculated student at the University of Washington. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.
"These new shoes are great, but I've replaced the new laces with my old ones," said Ken.
"Why?" asked his friend, Norio.
By the way Ken shrugs and puts his new shoes into his locker Norio knows and says something before Ken can speak.
"Don't speak, I already know. No reason, huh?"
"Yup."
"Don't worry I do things sometimes without any reason too. There was this time at my Aunt's house when..."
"Okay everybody, let’s get ready!"
Both Ken and Norio had to hurry as they were late for their sparring session at the dojo. They both took karate lessons and for their age were advanced fighters.
They sparred and as was the usual case, Ken won. It was easy for Ken. Everything the master of the dojo taught Ken picked up with grace and ease. It was much harder for Norio and the others, some of whom were jealous of Ken. It hadn't always been this way, but like an ugly duckling Ken had turned into a fit and durable swan in the past year or so. After ten minutes they had worked up a sweat and after twenty they were getting into it. The match between Ken and Norio lasted only for twenty five minutes. They had to go for an hour anyway, so Ken decided to let up.
"Okay okay Ken, you win, stop torturing my arm."
Ken released Norio's arm out of a strangle hold and got up.
"Help me up, man."
Ken helped him up and they were off on another round. To make things different for Ken, the master asked Ken to practice in a different, slightly more challenging style. When he could do this and still defeat Norio, the master became really surprised, knowing then that he too could be defeated by Ken.
"You've improved. Keep up the good work," he told Ken.
Overhearing the master's generous appraisal of Ken, another one of the fighters asked, "Hey, what about me?"
"Focus on yourself," the master instructed.
The students of the dojo had become so skilled that they could spar without really hurting each other, and so, reckless as teenagers are, they started fighting on school grounds. They knew by now how to control a punch and could test their strengths, who was quicker for example, or who had a better style. By now they could do a series of moves without the punishment of serious injury. By the time Ken got into it a few fights had already taken place.
Late one afternoon, as Ken left the library, he was approached by three members of the dojo. One was the same youth who overheard the master talking to Ken. As there was not much rotation in sparring, the youth knew it would be a long time before he could face Ken. He wanted to see for himself how good he was without waiting, how well he could match up to him, and this was the only place he could do it. Ken didn't want to lose, so he fought. It's funny, Ken thought if he didn't accept the challenge he would lose. He had a long way to go before his maturity matched up with his talent. Nevertheless, in five moves he had his opponent on the ground.
The young fighter, Ken, was not an arrogant type but sometimes he enjoyed the fight a little too much. Some will always become angry at seeing someone else display so easily what they struggle to achieve. And so it was that Ken became the participant of more and more fights.
Ken's parents lived away, but when they found out about this they had a talk with him. They tried to explain to Ken over the phone that he didn't have to take part in these matches and that his breaks were there for him to relax and to get ready for his next class, not to fight.
"It was fun for a while, but now I'm tired of it. I fight, and it's no fun. I even fight my friends. I don't want to practice at my dojo anymore because every week I have to fight at school, but I cannot lose.”
“Why don’t you lose,” Ken’s mother asked. “Then maybe they will stop bothering you.”
Ken became aggressive. “I cannot lose. It is against everything I’ve learned at the dojo.”
“Then you have not learned much,” said Ken’s father.
“I will simply quit the dojo,” said Ken.
Ken's parents explained to Ken that quitting his dojo was not an option and that he had to find a way not to fight.
"I'll try," said Ken. "But it won't be easy..."
It’s true. It wouldn’t be easy for him. He had the heart of a competitor.
"No need to try," his mother said. "Just do...
It was November now. The leaves were falling from the trees and it was raining off and on. Many times after Ken left the library he found himself facing yet another opponent, only to witness the same outcome, himself winning. The fighting started to affect his schoolwork but there was not much he could do about it, no one would dare tell the principal. Even Norio, who was worried about his friend's well-being, would not do it. It was simply common practice for the kids to fight like that. It showed interest in a field of study that was revered and respected throughout the land.
One day Ken heard that a few of the guys were going to have Ken face one of the school's bodybuilders, Daiki. Actually, Ken knew the guy. He knew him to be arrogant and funny, someone who wanted to be the best at everything but not in a mean-spirited way. He would not hold a grudge if Ken played a prank on him. Early the next morning, in between classes, Ken rigged a water pistol in the bodybuilder's locker to go off when the door opened. The class that was going on at the time passed by and when it was over Daiki approached Ken.
"Hey Ken, listen. I need to talk to you about something."
"Okay," said Ken.
“I want to fight you to see how good you really are. You will bow to me before this match is over."
Ken smiled. "Sure thing," he said. By this time Ken agreed with everything that his opponents would say to him, so that when he proved them wrong he could secretly gloat. It was a way for him to get by, to keep with the fighting as it offered no other enjoyment now.
Daiki suddenly attacked Ken. He tried to wrestle him to the ground but Ken was too quick and got away. He got out of another hold but Daiki was too big and the space was way too small to fight and move around. Ken knew Daiki had the upper hand and that he would have to face embarrassment. Daiki forced Ken on his knees and stood by him, pushing the back of his neck down with the great strength of his arms. For a while Ken fought the strength of Daiki, his head wavering in a state of tension, but eventually he had to put his hands on the ground to protect himself from being crushed under the weight of Daiki’s body. It was then that he bowed.
"Now you know to respect your friends," said Daiki.
Daiki, in so many words, tried to explain that Ken had to lose sometimes to keep the peace, just as he had to show his strength every now and then to prove his might. It was yet to be seen if Ken had learned his lesson.
After Ken had left, Daiki opened his locker and was sprayed by some water. Daiki shrugged.
"He's lucky no one saw that," he thought to himself.
Ken still fought, and he fought hard. He hadn't learned his lesson until Norio mentioned something to him one day. One afternoon Ken was standing under an archway waiting for the rain to stop so he could get back to his dorm. It was somewhere near his college. He stood there motionless, gazing at the steady stream of water falling off the rooftops of the buildings.
"Ken, I think I know why you keep your old laces."
Ken looked at Norio and then he took a seat on a bench and looked down at the ground. He sighed. He decided to tell Norio, his closest friend, the truth.
"I didn't want to lose my old shoes,” said Ken. “My mother made me get rid of them. I could only keep the laces."
"That's right," said Norio. "You are afraid to let go of your old things and you cannot accept change. In the same way you cannot stop winning your matches. Pretty soon someone is going to break your arm."
Ken wiped a tear from his eye. "You are right Norio, but I do not know how to stop. My love for fighting is too strong."
"You're love for winning is too strong, and your pride is too great. You should listen to what I say. It is only because we are friends that I tell you this. You do not know the anger of your classmates. You do not even think too teach them. They look up to you."
Now Ken felt really bad. His stomach started to turn over. He never realized that his classmates might want to learn something from him. He just thought they always wanted to fight.
Crying, he told to Norio, "Okay, Norio, I will try."
The weekend came around and Norio found Ken packing his things in the evening after classes were over.
"You’re not leaving school, are you?” asked Norio.
"No, I'm just leaving for the weekend. I need to get away from things so that I can think. I'm going to my native place to visit my temple, where I can remember myself. The past two months many things have happened. A lot of trouble has started," said Ken.
"Can I come with you?" asked Norio.
"If you want," said Ken. "Hurry up and pack your things. I don't want to wait for you."
Norio knew why Ken was in a hurry. The Girl's College was hosting a social for the boys near their campus, and Ken would have to walk that way to get to the bus. He probably didn't want to see anyone, or to get into any fights.
As they walked by the Girl's College they could see that the social had begun.
"Did you ever think of going to the social, Ken?" asked Norio.
"Did you?" Ken replied.
Norio shrugged and said, "No. I am not interested in girls."
"Me neither," said Ken.
"Only fighting, huh?" They both smiled.
Just then two guys with water pistols jumped out from behind some bushes and sprayed them with water. Norio instinctively put his arm over Ken's chest so that he would not move forward. Before they knew it the guys were off, shouting something or the other. Ken felt ashamed. He knew that those guys must have found out about his little prank on Daiki and that they must be following his example. He didn't say anything, though. He didn't want Norio to find out what was, ultimately, a show of respect for Ken plus it didn't seem like such a big deal. As they were walking down the street Ken walked into a pile of leaves and kicked them around. Ken could see the hills from beyond the numerous apartment buildings that surrounded them. Over those hills lay his home town, where he grew up and first learned the martial arts. The two kept walking. The bus stop was nearby now.
"You know, Ken, if we keep going this way we are going to walk straight through the Girl's College."
"I know, but it is the only way to the bus," said Ken.
After two minutes they were in a grand plaza where a group of students had convened. Everyone was dressed well and the girls were there.
"Hey Norio," one of the girls shouted, "Where is your friend going?" They all laughed.
"Going home to run away to mommy and daddy?"
It was hard for Ken to take this. He was the fighting type and a great martial artist. It was not in his nature to be humiliated. It was true, Ken knew that martial arts were an art of non-violence, but not every youngster of his age could understand this so easily. Ken dropped his bag down and ran back, back to his dorm. Norio was left to carry all of their things back to the dorm.
"What a night," said Norio to the crowd of people.
"Yeah, nice night for a walk," someone said.
"No, nice night to make friends," another said, and with that, Norio ended up staying for the social.
The weekend passed. Ken and Norio found themselves again sparring together at their dojo. Then, about halfway through, the master stopped the activity and made an announcement.
"It has come to my attention," he said, "that Ken has proved himself to be a great fighter."
"Yeah,” people said.
"Ken will now show what he has learned and fight me."
"But master, I cannot..."
"No, that is the end of it. If you want to stay in this dojo you will fight me. There is no decision you can make but this one."
"Either that or leave," said someone. That someone was surely one of the guys who had been defeated by Ken at school, so many of them were there. And so the master and the young fighter fought, and it was a good fight. What Ken must have been thinking? At a split second's notice he had to make the decision to fight hard or to bow out and lose gracefully, or even lose disgracefully for that matter. He thought maybe he could win but the truth was he didn't even yet know the limits of his own power. Ken was not really thinking about that, however. What he was thinking about was how bad it felt to have enemies in his own dojo, how Daiki forced him to bow at school and how he ran back home the other night, crying yet again.
With a front kick coming his way, Ken had a choice to block or take it. He made the right decision and took the hard hit, which knocked him ferociously to the ground. That was end of the fight. The wind had been knocked out of him.
Breathing heavily and on his knees, Ken said, "I'm sorry master, I didn't mean to fight you..."
With a bloody nose the master replied, "No, you fought well and therefore can stay amongst us in the dojo.”
A week had passed and Ken found himself eating some food at the local canteen. He didn't know that a famous master, even greater than Ken's master, master Ryu, was sitting with his group a few seats down from him, observing him.
After Ken had finished he had two of his men get up and attack Ken. Ken fended both off with an instant precision that only a fighter of great skill could have possessed.
Ken yelled, "What is the meaning of this?" But then he realized it was hopeless. Ken had learned a few good things recently that really changed his behavior. He no longer had a yearning to win all of the time, he could accept defeat. He sat back down.
Master Ryu got up from his table and walked over to Ken.
"Oh no, not again," Ken thought.
But this time it was okay, the master did not want to fight Ken, but only to sit with him. That day a great friendship had begun, and thus ended the reign of Ken, so to speak. Ken even removed the old laces from his shoes that day and put in his new ones. Norio was impressed.
Michael A. Gosalia is currently a non-matriculated student at the University of Washington. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Hando No Kuzushi - Issue 3
Greetings all,
Hope everyone is enjoying this lovely Autumn weather we're having. To make the seasonal transition more bearable, we are featuring fiction by Kawika Guillermo, as well as a short poem by Peter Taitano. As always, if you like what you read, feel free to drop the writer a comment.
Enjoy!
Hope everyone is enjoying this lovely Autumn weather we're having. To make the seasonal transition more bearable, we are featuring fiction by Kawika Guillermo, as well as a short poem by Peter Taitano. As always, if you like what you read, feel free to drop the writer a comment.
Enjoy!
Angels Speak Chamorro, Don't They?
By Peter Taitano
For Papa
your warmth passed through touch,
smiling glances,
motionless gestures,
drift back into the Yigo jungles where I walked your footprints.
Are you enjoying the company of warriors and fishermen worthy of you
Jokers with your jovial laugh
con men and competitors blessed with your cheat techniques?
Your home still smells of chicken and broth,
potatoes and baked bread
that half a pack of un-smoked cigarettes have been finished for you.
We will consume your chocolates, next.
will your farm again become wilderness?
what of your hunting trails, lookout points, your fishing ponds?
The rustling, wrinkled leaves veil everything, eventually.
Do angels speak Chamorro with you?
Can they speak the words we never could?
Peter Taitano exists in another dimension – at another point in time, in an unimaginable form. He stops by Earth to wander the streets of Manhattan and daydream. He likes it when people say ‘Excuse Me’ after bumping into him.
For Papa
your warmth passed through touch,
smiling glances,
motionless gestures,
drift back into the Yigo jungles where I walked your footprints.
Are you enjoying the company of warriors and fishermen worthy of you
Jokers with your jovial laugh
con men and competitors blessed with your cheat techniques?
Your home still smells of chicken and broth,
potatoes and baked bread
that half a pack of un-smoked cigarettes have been finished for you.
We will consume your chocolates, next.
will your farm again become wilderness?
what of your hunting trails, lookout points, your fishing ponds?
The rustling, wrinkled leaves veil everything, eventually.
Do angels speak Chamorro with you?
Can they speak the words we never could?
Peter Taitano exists in another dimension – at another point in time, in an unimaginable form. He stops by Earth to wander the streets of Manhattan and daydream. He likes it when people say ‘Excuse Me’ after bumping into him.
Wildcard
By Kawika Guillermo
The sun hovered above her, towering at its apex. She lay on a thin towel, her toes digging into the hot surface of sand, a giant pink rose upon her single piece swimsuit. Even on Kailua Beach, she wouldn't wear a two-piece, and if there was ever an optimal time to do so, surely a one-week vacation in Honolulu was the time. She had considered the thought, that emergence from her puerile shell. After all, she had been born on the island, and dozens had probably seen her naked before she ever had the premonition to cover herself. Seventeen now, she was still the only one on the beach in a single-piece; even the children weren’t so self-conscious. She liked her suit nonetheless, the way it hugged her like a seatbelt.
Her cell-phone buzzed from beneath her yellow beach-towel. It was a text message from her boyfriend, Union, and she had to lift her sunglasses to read it:
What was his name?
She responded:
Lampa
In truth she couldn’t remember the man’s name from the night before. Lampa was the name of the man’s friend, and they were both native Hawaiians, besides, it didn’t really matter anyways, since Union would never meet them. At any rate, the beach had high demands against nostalgia.
She watched a family of Hawaiians walk by. The father was a stout tribal king followed by two young boys throwing sand in each other’s eyes. Even with her mixed Philippine blood, she was amazed at how much they looked like her. Her cheeks were in the locals, her wide, oval cheeks that she despised. They were the cheeks of her father, a man who she had never met and knew nothing about, except that he was born in Hawaii. But she loved the brown skin that her father’s genes had blessed her with. She was a more exotic, rhythmic Las Vegas girl, the brown-skinned beauty, friend to all, lover to many—but her hair, that was her mother’s side, the hairy Scots. Indeed, her arms were the hairiest on that beach, each limb infused with her mother’s whiteness, bleeding though her skin. She left it to the sun to burn her back to that stunning bronze of a traveling young coquette.
Details
Abigail tried to recall the previous night for him.
We were in the
drive thru
She wrote it quickly, having mastered the keypad.
I told him that my
bra itched and that
he should feel it. I
grabbed his hand.
And put it on my
breast
She waited a moment for a response, but thought he might be too enthralled.
When we got to the
bar he parked in
the back. He kissed
me, first on the
lips
She had been buzzed at the time, and tried to remember the details better, given that it was the details that really excited him. She grabbed on her own inner thigh, clutching it, testing the rawness of her own flesh. Did he touch me like that?
I moaned when he
kissed my neck
Her younger brother, Manek, emerged from the blanket of ocean. His body was that of a skinny twerp, thinner than herself, which was reason enough to beat him from time to time. A heap of sand puffed into the air as he lied down on his white beach towel and said nothing. She had moved his towel a good distance away from her so that he wouldn’t be confused for her boyfriend, since nobody could tell that they were related. He was half black, thin, and had not a single strand of hair on his body besides his head and crotch. Yet, as with Abigail, the hair gave his race away. His black father was clearly visible in his untamable curly hair, which exposed itself in a quasi-afro. Not even the ocean water could flatten it.
Then?
She had forgotten Union. Where did she leave off? Oh yeah, the neck.
Sorry. He went
straight for my tits
That might have been an exaggeration. Perhaps it just felt like that’s what happened.
He took out his
cock.
She was going too fast. He liked details, to know how she felt.
I squeezed the
back of his head.
His tongue was
tickling my ear
She thought for a moment.
I thought i was
going to orgasm
instantly.
“Tell him about the money,” Manek said, unmoving. He may have had a different father, but his skin was equally exotic to hers. It glistened in the sun like a polished wooden table. “He’ll like hearing about the money. Trust me.”
It hadn’t been the first time that she was offered cash for sex, but it was the first time she had accepted the exchange. Really it wasn’t that hard. The man gave her the money as she was getting out of the car. She wasn’t a whore, they had met at a bar. Perhaps he was just tipping her for being so malleable in bed—she let him try just about anything, knowing Union would go wild at any taboo behavior. Whatever—she had taken the money and now intended to buy new shoes. Cash was always more honest than a kiss goodbye.
“He’s been waiting for something like this,” Manek said. “He calls you a slut, you might as well tell him about the money. It’s just two adults doing what adults do. You, the nympho, get your nymphoness out for a day. Plus cash. I’m jealous. Why can’t I do that?”
She was silent. She knew that Union would probably get off if he knew about the exchange, but she left it out anyway. His fetish with her sleeping with other men started on Christmas, that ominous holiday, when Union gave her black see-through lingerie, and then later suggested that she model it for other men, just so they could get jealous of him. Then later he gave her permission to kiss one, if she wanted. Then when she went and cheated on him he asked for the details, and suddenly, for the first time, she was able to get him off. Of course her lifestyle had resulted in the occasional herpes scare and love triangle nonsense, but otherwise she was proud of her abilities to please him with stories—stories about love, about her body used and abused by others, about her moans and how different it was and how she felt no guilt over any of it. She and Union had rarely had sex, had blamed it on themselves rather than each other, but they could always make love through stories. With every word she spoke she was thrusting into him, penetrating his frail sensitivity with adulterous episodes.
Abigail finished her story about the previous night, ending with herself shredding the stranger’s skin in orgasmic embrace, feeling lumps of his dead skin forming in her fingernails. When Union didn’t respond back she figured he had climaxed.
In the late afternoon, the air had thickened on the Hawaiian island. Abigail couldn’t imagine ever getting used to it. Already she missed the arid heat of Las Vegas. There, Abigail could hide from the sun in the shade of an awning or umbrella, in the air-conditioned casinos, movie theaters and shopping malls. But in Hawaii there was only outside, and the heat followed her in the scents of the air, the breath of the natives hanging in a humid heat, the water flowing in and out of the body with every breath, the scent of sewage and flowers sharing the same moisture as the oxygen.
As soon as she had finished her conversation with Union she received a text from the man from the night before—what’s his face—inviting her to his family’s potluck, and she figured she’d go as she hadn’t had real roast pig since she was a child. It was better than spending the evening touring the shops with her mother, unable to spend the money that she had earned whoring herself off. With only enough time to return to the hotel, she left her brother on the beach.
In the backyard of the man’s uncle’s father’s something’s house, in an atmosphere of smoky grills and short sharp grass, Abigail found herself surrounded by large men, all either fat or bulky or muscular, exhausted women, and countless children acting somewhat deaf to their mothers who, every now and then, screamed at them until they were out of sight.
“You know I ‘ope dis not like weird fo you,” said the man she had slept with the night before. She had decided already to think of him as the one-night stand guy, to hopefully keep him limited to that single, ambiguous role he had played in her vacation. His real name, she had discovered, was nothing exotic at all like “Lamba,” but was merely “Mark,” a name so phonically similar to her brother’s name, “Manek” that to ever kiss him again would give her the creeps.
“No, your family’s really chill,” she said.
“Ho, I sorry ‘bout my muddah.” He talked to her in-between chews of rice and pork. “She always like dat to haoles.”
She had heard the word haole before, but never asked what it meant. Whatever it was, it was apparently her. “Your mom was cute I thought.”
“Ho God!” he said, putting down his plate. He was shirtless and didn’t notice when a bunch of rice fell from his mouth to his stomach.
“And this city is so beautiful,” she said, meaning Kailua, a suburb just north of Honolulu.
“Dis is da real Oahu,” he said. “Da t’rown out part. Dere’s problems wit our city.”
She had thought as much, with the decayed faces of Mark’s aunties, the suspicious glares of his uncles and father. But wait—she thought, wasn’t she half of them?
She humored his accent and knowledge of the island, trying to avoid the smoke coming from the nearby barbecues and the lines to the buffet tables growing in her direction, until she noticed the eyes of a short Hawaiian woman staring at her in some spiritual fascination. The look was not welcoming like the others, but was that sort of local eyeballing she also gave to tourists in Las Vegas, that look she reserved for privileged white people any time she went to eat at an ethnic restaurant. It was also that look of a person trying to guess her race, staring at her enigmatic face as if trying to decipher the attitude behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. Good luck.
“Why you not eat?” Mark said. “You not like Hawaiian food?”
She looked down at her plate. The smell of roasting pork was all around, and usually she would have eaten half of the pig, if they would have let her. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that.”
“Oh yah?”
“I’m nauseous. It’s the heat, I think.” Her gaze led to the hills that walled off the island’s center. Like her home, Las Vegas, the island too was a valley.
“This is where the Japanese planes flew in,” Mark said, suddenly losing his pidgin English. “They used it for cover from the anti-air guns. That was a long time ago. Now all us locals live between the mountains, the tourists took away the beaches. We’re just locals living in a tourist’s island.”
She thought he must have been lying. Her old family had lived on the beach. “In Las Vegas it’s the opposite,” she said. “The tourist’s have the Strip. We’re pushed to the sides.”
“Not so,” he said. “Yo all da same cola. No push.”
She would have offered a retort, if not for the sudden rainstorm that whisked them into the house, the entire family retreating with them. The rain pattered on the wood-boards of the deck as hard as hail, while two of the older women ran about the deck, saving the hung-out clothes and buffet plates from the rain. A lawn chair propelled by the wind suddenly rammed into the sliding glass door protecting them, and then went tumbling down the rocks leading to the beach. Abigail watched he palm trees leaning to the West, imagined them in synchronized dance. The rain spilling onto the porch reminded her of the Vegas lights pouring into every house.
Suddenly she had to vomit. Perhaps it was something she ate while on the beach, that manapua, that spam musubi, or those white chocolate pretzels. But this type of vomiting was really more of a seven in the morning thing, not seven at night. She made her way past rows of framed family pictures towards the toilet, followed by the clip-clap of wooden sandals. She looked back and saw the old woman who had been staring at her, now chasing her with a gigantic black book in her hands. “Wait, you wait,” the woman said as Abigail retreated from the woman like she was a ghost, then realizing how rude it was to do so, turned and made some attempt to withhold her stomach compulsions.
“Who is yo’ mom? Yo’ muddha?” the woman said. She had a face that may have been a perfect circle, her hair hung like seaweed just above her shoulders, and she was soaked from head to toe. She began shaking Abigail’s arm with wet, small hands. “Yo’ mother! Look. Is dis she?” the woman pointed to the book, a photo-album that was twice as wide as the woman herself. Sure enough, there was a far younger version of Abigail’s dominating mother, back when she was only a white, long-haired teenager of sixteen or seventeen, holding a cigarette and wearing a lei, wearing the same librarian glasses that she still wore, sitting in a wooden chair on a deck surrounded by Hawaiians whose faces could barely be made out. Her mother was the only white woman at a Hawaiian potluck.
“Is dis her? Is dis her?” the old woman said.
The woman flipped through the other pictures in the album: a circle of dancers, some in grass skirts. Her mother, who would grow up to be the successful business woman—this is what she did as a teenager. Getting down with a circle of indigenous, going native all the way, her white skin peeking out like a nude, marble statue in a museum. Abigail couldn’t speak. Her body felt naked. She felt the air around her seeping like steam into her core. There were pictures from a large wedding, where her mother was the bride. The man next to her—could that be her father? Suddenly Abigail felt the mist crawling in her stomach, a visceral body-shot of her hairy arms, widening stomach and inner thighs.
The woman was crying. “You’re Abigail. You’re Abigail.” It was Abigail’s expression that gave it away. That look of dread and fear, that tremulous comportment that made her jaw tremble—it was a lot to handle at one time, and she chose the most immediate priority, jetting to the bathroom, letting her vomit spill into the toilet. This was the third time in the week, and she knew well enough by now to flush during the process.
“Look, look,” that damn voice coming from behind the bathroom door, followed by the slow, tapping of a zombie trying to get in. “It’s you,” the voice said. “Dis picta is you!”
Abigail didn’t wipe her mouth, but somehow crawled to the doorway. Under the door, the woman had slid a picture of a small infant on an old man’s knee. The man had a clownish grin. “Do you got it?” the voice said. The girl in the picture had no pants. She was oblivious, her eyes locked onto the person holding the camera. Her arms were completely hairless. The old man was not a native, but a tanned white man in a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned at his chest, exposing his graying chest hair.
“Who’s he? Who’s this?” Abigail said.
“Dat’s yo’ granddaddy,” the voice said. “He German. He pass last year.”
Jesus Christ, she thought, expelling the roasted pig into the toilet water. I’m German too.
For the remainder of the vacation, Abigail was convinced that she would run into her father. It had turned out that the old woman was the best friend of her father’s sister, and now that word had gotten out that Abigail had returned, people would be looking for that little hopa infant who had been shoved by her yuppie mother from one tourist city to another. As she walked through the Aloha flea market, trying to decide what kind of tourist trinkets to spend her whoring money on, she began to notice the diffident stares of the Hawaiian locals, which she usually assumed natural for a girl of such mixed race, but now she guarded herself against these stares, frightened that at any moment they might assault her with tales of a childhood long forgotten. Her father could be any one of them; any Hawaiian local was suspect, any could have been her cousin; her niece or nephew. In the tans of the Hawaiian sun, it didn’t matter if they had descended from Chinese, Japanese, or whatever—she couldn’t tell the difference, and besides, they all shared that same shiny brown glare, a tad darker than hers. Four days into her vacation, and now the only thing she wanted from the island was to get the hell off of it.
She and her brother Manek walked through the spectacle of native culture, most of it grossly exaggerated. Most of the small booths at the flea market around Aloha stadium sold electronic and house-hold trinkets, but Abigail decided that the necklaces and shoes made the trip worthwhile, and found some playful escape in the giant pink balloons in the shape of pigs, the pillows shaped like geckos, the fresh strawberries in Styrofoam boxes, the variegated ukuleles with hibiscus patterns, and the young shirtless Hawaiian men with cavalier smiles speaking that barely comprehensible Hawaiian pidgin. The market made a circle around the stadium, and was perhaps the largest market she had ever been to. Like the Strip in Las Vegas, it seemed to simulate a culture fully unrealized, one sold in trinket form to fill up the knick-knack sections of the home and office.
“I’m so jealous, I hate you now,” Manek said. “I deserve to be German. You’ve never even read Hesse or Schiller. Du kanst Deutsche sprechen nicht. Freude schöner gütterfunken…” He sang something in the tune of Ode to Joy, and though Abigail was sure that he could have gone on for hours with the ridicule, he kindly stopped and touched her shoulder, perhaps to remind her he was still her half-brother, German or not.
They passed by a group of tourists in colorful Hawaiian shirts, all of them wearing sunglasses, none of them wearing sandals. They smiled when they saw her, when they saw anyone. Do they see a native? She had been practicing the Hawaiian pidgin and was convinced she could pull it off if necessary.
“I’ve decided to write a poem to Union,” Manek said, shuffling through a box of colorful geckos. “Titled: ‘A Paean to Union.’ People will think I’m talking about the concept. Or the Civil War.”
Abigail pulled up a gecko carved from wood, wearing a cowboy hat. “Dat’s healing gecko,” the old woman behind the counter said. Abigail knew the whole spiel about Hawaiian magicians, but couldn’t picture the gecko-cowboy as a sacred object at a séance. It was twenty dollars, and she might have bought it, considering she had just run into more money. She had counted it the previous night; the man had given her seventy bucks after sex. It was a lot, but nowhere near what she needed if she was going to stop herself from throwing up in the morning.
She checked her cell-phone:
Im at the zoo right
now. Its a piece of
shit.
It was only Union and not her father.
What animals are
there?
Chickens. Goddamn
chickens. Luv ya.
“I noticed you this morning,” Manek said, hands in his pockets, walking coolly. Everything about his composure would always belie what he was talking about. “If you need to borrow money, I’ve been saving up from working at the movie theater. Of course, you’ll have to tell mom. Stupid Uncle Sam.”
Abigail said nothing, but caught herself wondering if they had an uncle named Sam.
“Life, liberty and property, that’s all the government needs to worry about,” Manek continued, his eyes engaged in an anemically thin girl sitting behind a tray of trinkets. “Who are they to tell you that you have to tell mom before you can have an abortion? She’ll understand anyway, maybe. But seriously, who the hell are they? We should be free to do that.”
The word “abortion,” now unveiled, seemed to release a ghastly presence, as the heat of mid-day finally fell upon her. “Free? Free to fuck-up?” Abigail said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Free to fuck up.”
She moved towards a shaded park bench, wondering if the headache she felt was from a lack of caffeine or from her morning sickness. Manek returned with spam musubi and they ate, surrounded by children who sometimes stared at them with apprehensive faces.
“Union, exemplar of man,” Manek said in a seafaring voice. “For all men to carry your fetishes, to withhold jealousy, glare into the void, oh Union, man par excellence, if all men were you, harmony and enlightened thoughts only. All of men and their brothers, get off on her cheating, daughter’s of Elysion, come and screw, join us in this jubilee, for your men get off on it.” He laughed but she wouldn’t join him. “What is it?” he said. “I’m not cock-blocking you, am I? I’ll sit over there if you want.”
She put her uneaten musubi on the park bench and looked up to the clouds. They were bigger than in Las Vegas, like leeches sucking the blueness out of the sky. “I’m not sure,” she said. The words seemed to stop the flow of the world. She couldn’t look at Manek but knew she had destroyed something, something precious. Maybe she was just trying to psyche him out. She realized that she only had five seconds to make the whole thing a joke and the awkwardness would pass, and the flow would continue. He knew it too. But she couldn’t say it, and when the five seconds were gone he spoke: “Well, that would be the traditional way to go. But you’re always the one who says that you’d be at the clinic in no time. What about Summer? You helped her pay for hers—practically forced her to get one.”
“I know,” she said, though she certainly didn’t force anyone. Perhaps she had just been watching the children in the park for too long. Was it too late for it all to be a joke? It was. A child wearing a white and pink lei fell onto the grass, not a long fall for the child, who simply got right up and checked the flowers to see if any had broken.
“This is sociobiology, it never fails,” Manek said. “Your maternal instinct is kicking in. You feel abandoned by your father, so you can’t abandon—this thing. It’s the same as a parasite, it has the same qualities. Think about your life. You have nothing to offer a child.”
Her face was reddening and still he continued. She dove into tears and the children around her noticed and he still wouldn’t stop.
“Think about how life has been for mom, you want to go through that? Remember when she used to tell us about the way people stared at her in church? You want to go through that? There’s nothing harder than being a single mom, and no offense, but Union’s a moron. You want him as the father? Think of the genes.”
She kept her eyes closed but that made it worse. Manek wouldn’t let up, and very soon he was becoming a voice in her head, turning into German shouts over a city-wide intercom, words she couldn’t understand but she could sense their anger. He was trying to cast something out of her but the demon wouldn’t leave. Her body shook.
“Abigail, think of mom,” he said, finishing her off. “No man will ever want you again.”
She would have hit him, on most occasions she would have, but if she did that she’d have to keep beating him until he couldn’t stand again, she’d have to drive a tiki pole right through that ‘genius’ brain of his. Instead she pushed him like a child and left him there with the local children, marching back to the hotel, hiding her face in case an aunt, cousin or niece recognized her. Along the way a thunderstorm passed and she walked barefoot through puddles created by the concrete holes on the sidewalk. Even in the shade, the heat spread to her through the air.
When she arrived at the empty motel room she cried into the pillows, for hours; it was worse than throwing up, and she wondered if her mother had done the same when she was pregnant with her. “Get me off of this island,” she kept saying into the pillow. Away from the natives who looked more like her than her own family. Away from the trinkets, the invading heat, the sudden storms and giant mountains that made her feel claustrophobic. Back to the minus space of Vegas, place of no surprises, where friends and schools and familiar bike paths were waiting for her routines. She searched for the copy of her birth certificate that her mother always kept in her suitcase, hidden behind pages of printed-out e-mails and talking points. Printed in small engraved blue ink at the bottom was her genetic make-up: German, Chinese, Hawaiian, Scandinavian, Native American. The wildcard in a deck of masters and slaves.
She lay like a cat perched in the stale sunlight through the window. She thought that maybe she could round up some cash from her friends to pay for the abortion. She had nearly a thousand saved up from her job at an arts store. Then the seventy dollars. How many more seventies would she need? She’d never had an operation before. Was it an operation, or a procedure? She thought of a gigantic machine with electric antenna, moving near her legs—how more vulnerable can a girl become? It would make an interesting porno. But how is it even possible? In her physics class she had learned that it was impossible. Potentiality cannot be destroyed. The example: A bottle of cola. Potentially, it could fill to its intended purpose. Nothing could take that away. You had to break the bottle. Maybe she would only stay in the hotel, small as it was. In that free-floating dizziness after hours of sobbing, she was actually considering Union as a father. She might have been joking, and she had five seconds to make it funny somehow. When she received a text message from Manek she tossed the phone onto the floor. Once she had destroyed her phone with a hammer in the middle of her job at the arts store, just to prove to an ex that she wasn’t interested in him, but now, without an audience, it would be pointless.
The cleaning lady interrupted her. Abigail instantly recognized her as a Filipino maid, the same type she had seen carting about in Las Vegas hotel rooms on nebulous morning-afters, before text-messaging Union to tell him all about what she had done. The woman spoke no English to her, but simply cleaned the hotel room around her with a finesse Abigail had never seen before. How routinely the sheets, sprawled onto the floor, were hampered, and new sheets were tossed into the air and tucked beneath the mattress; how swiftly the counters were sprayed and rubbed in circles until the rosewood shone like new, how gracefully were the tissues folded into little doves, only to later be ruined by a single touch from the patron. It all happened instantaneously, as if time had stopped for a few small details. After the maid left, Abigail was shocked to find the coffee beans, toilet paper, tissues, toothbrushes, shower gels and soap had all been replaced, even while Abigail had been focusing on her, the maid must have worked faster than Abigail’s very eyes.
Finally Abigail left the hotel and found the sun still out, sinking into the horizon like quicksand. It had felt like an eternity with her face in the pillow. She read the text that Manek had sent:
Really sorry. Sorry.
Come to the beach
and ill apologize
better.
Her sandals made clacking sounds until she met the sand, and in the sunset over the ocean everything was purple. A crowd of natives lined the ocean, looking out at the water, none of them daring to go in. It took her a moment to realize that a disaster had occurred. The sea waves were completely empty and families were gathering their towels to disperse. Abigail dragged her eyes down the beach, saw the waves seeping through the sand, but her brother was nowhere to be found.
Abigail found Manek’s white towel in the same place where they had sun-bathed the previous day. On top was a left-open black book, thin and covered in sand. He was gone, and nobody was in the water. Instantly she felt a bubble in her stomach, boiling about her heart, pumping vomit into her lungs. A fat white tourist told her what happened: A young boy. A school of jellyfish. Stung from head to toe. Paralyzed. The thought penetrated her like a virus, first she sensed it in her stomach, and then it spread to every vein in her body, manipulating her blood stream. She shook violently, her voice shouting for her, scratching her throat as if she were possessed by a poltergeist. She didn’t recognize the screams. The tourists around her were concerned, but the concern wasn’t enough. The shock had passed for them. “They should have put up a sign” one of them said. “It could have been anyone of us.”
On the way to the hospital she tried to parse out everything that was going on. Was she going to the hospital for Manek, or for her morning sickness? She was waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under her, for the big Other to come out and reveal that it was all a joke. Whoever it was, she thought, they have five seconds to make it funny or else it really is a serious, miserable life.
They weren’t prepared for her at the hospital. She kept saying “my brother my brother,” but the nurses only shrugged. She didn’t look anything thing like Manek. Since they had never taken a family photo together, there was no picture for them to go by. If he were here, she thought, he might find the whole scene laughable. “You’re reenacting the Oedipus complex,” he would say. “You wanted me dead, you imagined killing me over and over, and now that it actually happened, you feel guilty.” He had told her something like that whenever she hit him and apologized, or that time they were playing flashlight tag and he fell in a sudden shock from her flashlight, his head bleeding open from the corner of a table, the blood seeping through his afro.
The nurse took her down the hall, where she was put face-to-face with a Hawaiian boy with a half burnt face.
“Yo’ sista’s here.”
Her hand went to slap the woman but ended up in a fist to her left breast. In the sudden after-shock, she kicked at the bed stand, screeching like an animal and gnawing her teeth at the woman, “My brother! My brother!” Besides a look of squelching pain, the nurse didn’t call security; perhaps she too was in shock.
“Manek. His name is Manek.” she said with dominance. “Jellyfish sting.” The nurse flipped through her charts and found nothing. She went on the intercom but no response came. They searched two floors before they found him.
He had been stung in ten different places, had been paralyzed and had swallowed a lot of water. He was alive, but in terrible pain. When she found him his hair was still in that gigantic, ridiculous afro that not even a near-death experience could flatten out.
“They told me to pee on myself,” he said. “It didn’t do jack shit.” Nearby, long purple strings stuck out of a bowl, covered in sea-foam. “Those were the tentacles that that son of a bitch stung me with.” She could see the marks on his neck and face, lines of boils covering his body. “Don’t tell mom,” he said. “I can pay for it myself, since you won’t be needing the money.”
She left the room without a word, and spent some time sitting on the lobby chairs. The news was on, but her eyes saw nothing. She only heard her own breath. She checked her cell phone and saw that she had missed a message from an unknown number.
Abby. This is daddy.
Been a while, yah?
Youre 17 now. I
wonder about you.
I wonder what kind
of person youve
grown up to be.
Maybe we can meet
and you can tell me
about your life.
What is it like to
grow up in las
vegas?
Abigail shut the cell-phone. She took some sips from a cup of coffee that one of the nurses had brought her, and then tried to hold back her laughter as she replied to him:
I’ve decided to keep
the baby.
Kawika Guillermo is a Ph.D. student in Asian American literature at the University of Washington. He also writes short stories.
The sun hovered above her, towering at its apex. She lay on a thin towel, her toes digging into the hot surface of sand, a giant pink rose upon her single piece swimsuit. Even on Kailua Beach, she wouldn't wear a two-piece, and if there was ever an optimal time to do so, surely a one-week vacation in Honolulu was the time. She had considered the thought, that emergence from her puerile shell. After all, she had been born on the island, and dozens had probably seen her naked before she ever had the premonition to cover herself. Seventeen now, she was still the only one on the beach in a single-piece; even the children weren’t so self-conscious. She liked her suit nonetheless, the way it hugged her like a seatbelt.
Her cell-phone buzzed from beneath her yellow beach-towel. It was a text message from her boyfriend, Union, and she had to lift her sunglasses to read it:
What was his name?
She responded:
Lampa
In truth she couldn’t remember the man’s name from the night before. Lampa was the name of the man’s friend, and they were both native Hawaiians, besides, it didn’t really matter anyways, since Union would never meet them. At any rate, the beach had high demands against nostalgia.
She watched a family of Hawaiians walk by. The father was a stout tribal king followed by two young boys throwing sand in each other’s eyes. Even with her mixed Philippine blood, she was amazed at how much they looked like her. Her cheeks were in the locals, her wide, oval cheeks that she despised. They were the cheeks of her father, a man who she had never met and knew nothing about, except that he was born in Hawaii. But she loved the brown skin that her father’s genes had blessed her with. She was a more exotic, rhythmic Las Vegas girl, the brown-skinned beauty, friend to all, lover to many—but her hair, that was her mother’s side, the hairy Scots. Indeed, her arms were the hairiest on that beach, each limb infused with her mother’s whiteness, bleeding though her skin. She left it to the sun to burn her back to that stunning bronze of a traveling young coquette.
Details
Abigail tried to recall the previous night for him.
We were in the
drive thru
She wrote it quickly, having mastered the keypad.
I told him that my
bra itched and that
he should feel it. I
grabbed his hand.
And put it on my
breast
She waited a moment for a response, but thought he might be too enthralled.
When we got to the
bar he parked in
the back. He kissed
me, first on the
lips
She had been buzzed at the time, and tried to remember the details better, given that it was the details that really excited him. She grabbed on her own inner thigh, clutching it, testing the rawness of her own flesh. Did he touch me like that?
I moaned when he
kissed my neck
Her younger brother, Manek, emerged from the blanket of ocean. His body was that of a skinny twerp, thinner than herself, which was reason enough to beat him from time to time. A heap of sand puffed into the air as he lied down on his white beach towel and said nothing. She had moved his towel a good distance away from her so that he wouldn’t be confused for her boyfriend, since nobody could tell that they were related. He was half black, thin, and had not a single strand of hair on his body besides his head and crotch. Yet, as with Abigail, the hair gave his race away. His black father was clearly visible in his untamable curly hair, which exposed itself in a quasi-afro. Not even the ocean water could flatten it.
Then?
She had forgotten Union. Where did she leave off? Oh yeah, the neck.
Sorry. He went
straight for my tits
That might have been an exaggeration. Perhaps it just felt like that’s what happened.
He took out his
cock.
She was going too fast. He liked details, to know how she felt.
I squeezed the
back of his head.
His tongue was
tickling my ear
She thought for a moment.
I thought i was
going to orgasm
instantly.
“Tell him about the money,” Manek said, unmoving. He may have had a different father, but his skin was equally exotic to hers. It glistened in the sun like a polished wooden table. “He’ll like hearing about the money. Trust me.”
It hadn’t been the first time that she was offered cash for sex, but it was the first time she had accepted the exchange. Really it wasn’t that hard. The man gave her the money as she was getting out of the car. She wasn’t a whore, they had met at a bar. Perhaps he was just tipping her for being so malleable in bed—she let him try just about anything, knowing Union would go wild at any taboo behavior. Whatever—she had taken the money and now intended to buy new shoes. Cash was always more honest than a kiss goodbye.
“He’s been waiting for something like this,” Manek said. “He calls you a slut, you might as well tell him about the money. It’s just two adults doing what adults do. You, the nympho, get your nymphoness out for a day. Plus cash. I’m jealous. Why can’t I do that?”
She was silent. She knew that Union would probably get off if he knew about the exchange, but she left it out anyway. His fetish with her sleeping with other men started on Christmas, that ominous holiday, when Union gave her black see-through lingerie, and then later suggested that she model it for other men, just so they could get jealous of him. Then later he gave her permission to kiss one, if she wanted. Then when she went and cheated on him he asked for the details, and suddenly, for the first time, she was able to get him off. Of course her lifestyle had resulted in the occasional herpes scare and love triangle nonsense, but otherwise she was proud of her abilities to please him with stories—stories about love, about her body used and abused by others, about her moans and how different it was and how she felt no guilt over any of it. She and Union had rarely had sex, had blamed it on themselves rather than each other, but they could always make love through stories. With every word she spoke she was thrusting into him, penetrating his frail sensitivity with adulterous episodes.
Abigail finished her story about the previous night, ending with herself shredding the stranger’s skin in orgasmic embrace, feeling lumps of his dead skin forming in her fingernails. When Union didn’t respond back she figured he had climaxed.
In the late afternoon, the air had thickened on the Hawaiian island. Abigail couldn’t imagine ever getting used to it. Already she missed the arid heat of Las Vegas. There, Abigail could hide from the sun in the shade of an awning or umbrella, in the air-conditioned casinos, movie theaters and shopping malls. But in Hawaii there was only outside, and the heat followed her in the scents of the air, the breath of the natives hanging in a humid heat, the water flowing in and out of the body with every breath, the scent of sewage and flowers sharing the same moisture as the oxygen.
As soon as she had finished her conversation with Union she received a text from the man from the night before—what’s his face—inviting her to his family’s potluck, and she figured she’d go as she hadn’t had real roast pig since she was a child. It was better than spending the evening touring the shops with her mother, unable to spend the money that she had earned whoring herself off. With only enough time to return to the hotel, she left her brother on the beach.
In the backyard of the man’s uncle’s father’s something’s house, in an atmosphere of smoky grills and short sharp grass, Abigail found herself surrounded by large men, all either fat or bulky or muscular, exhausted women, and countless children acting somewhat deaf to their mothers who, every now and then, screamed at them until they were out of sight.
“You know I ‘ope dis not like weird fo you,” said the man she had slept with the night before. She had decided already to think of him as the one-night stand guy, to hopefully keep him limited to that single, ambiguous role he had played in her vacation. His real name, she had discovered, was nothing exotic at all like “Lamba,” but was merely “Mark,” a name so phonically similar to her brother’s name, “Manek” that to ever kiss him again would give her the creeps.
“No, your family’s really chill,” she said.
“Ho, I sorry ‘bout my muddah.” He talked to her in-between chews of rice and pork. “She always like dat to haoles.”
She had heard the word haole before, but never asked what it meant. Whatever it was, it was apparently her. “Your mom was cute I thought.”
“Ho God!” he said, putting down his plate. He was shirtless and didn’t notice when a bunch of rice fell from his mouth to his stomach.
“And this city is so beautiful,” she said, meaning Kailua, a suburb just north of Honolulu.
“Dis is da real Oahu,” he said. “Da t’rown out part. Dere’s problems wit our city.”
She had thought as much, with the decayed faces of Mark’s aunties, the suspicious glares of his uncles and father. But wait—she thought, wasn’t she half of them?
She humored his accent and knowledge of the island, trying to avoid the smoke coming from the nearby barbecues and the lines to the buffet tables growing in her direction, until she noticed the eyes of a short Hawaiian woman staring at her in some spiritual fascination. The look was not welcoming like the others, but was that sort of local eyeballing she also gave to tourists in Las Vegas, that look she reserved for privileged white people any time she went to eat at an ethnic restaurant. It was also that look of a person trying to guess her race, staring at her enigmatic face as if trying to decipher the attitude behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. Good luck.
“Why you not eat?” Mark said. “You not like Hawaiian food?”
She looked down at her plate. The smell of roasting pork was all around, and usually she would have eaten half of the pig, if they would have let her. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that.”
“Oh yah?”
“I’m nauseous. It’s the heat, I think.” Her gaze led to the hills that walled off the island’s center. Like her home, Las Vegas, the island too was a valley.
“This is where the Japanese planes flew in,” Mark said, suddenly losing his pidgin English. “They used it for cover from the anti-air guns. That was a long time ago. Now all us locals live between the mountains, the tourists took away the beaches. We’re just locals living in a tourist’s island.”
She thought he must have been lying. Her old family had lived on the beach. “In Las Vegas it’s the opposite,” she said. “The tourist’s have the Strip. We’re pushed to the sides.”
“Not so,” he said. “Yo all da same cola. No push.”
She would have offered a retort, if not for the sudden rainstorm that whisked them into the house, the entire family retreating with them. The rain pattered on the wood-boards of the deck as hard as hail, while two of the older women ran about the deck, saving the hung-out clothes and buffet plates from the rain. A lawn chair propelled by the wind suddenly rammed into the sliding glass door protecting them, and then went tumbling down the rocks leading to the beach. Abigail watched he palm trees leaning to the West, imagined them in synchronized dance. The rain spilling onto the porch reminded her of the Vegas lights pouring into every house.
Suddenly she had to vomit. Perhaps it was something she ate while on the beach, that manapua, that spam musubi, or those white chocolate pretzels. But this type of vomiting was really more of a seven in the morning thing, not seven at night. She made her way past rows of framed family pictures towards the toilet, followed by the clip-clap of wooden sandals. She looked back and saw the old woman who had been staring at her, now chasing her with a gigantic black book in her hands. “Wait, you wait,” the woman said as Abigail retreated from the woman like she was a ghost, then realizing how rude it was to do so, turned and made some attempt to withhold her stomach compulsions.
“Who is yo’ mom? Yo’ muddha?” the woman said. She had a face that may have been a perfect circle, her hair hung like seaweed just above her shoulders, and she was soaked from head to toe. She began shaking Abigail’s arm with wet, small hands. “Yo’ mother! Look. Is dis she?” the woman pointed to the book, a photo-album that was twice as wide as the woman herself. Sure enough, there was a far younger version of Abigail’s dominating mother, back when she was only a white, long-haired teenager of sixteen or seventeen, holding a cigarette and wearing a lei, wearing the same librarian glasses that she still wore, sitting in a wooden chair on a deck surrounded by Hawaiians whose faces could barely be made out. Her mother was the only white woman at a Hawaiian potluck.
“Is dis her? Is dis her?” the old woman said.
The woman flipped through the other pictures in the album: a circle of dancers, some in grass skirts. Her mother, who would grow up to be the successful business woman—this is what she did as a teenager. Getting down with a circle of indigenous, going native all the way, her white skin peeking out like a nude, marble statue in a museum. Abigail couldn’t speak. Her body felt naked. She felt the air around her seeping like steam into her core. There were pictures from a large wedding, where her mother was the bride. The man next to her—could that be her father? Suddenly Abigail felt the mist crawling in her stomach, a visceral body-shot of her hairy arms, widening stomach and inner thighs.
The woman was crying. “You’re Abigail. You’re Abigail.” It was Abigail’s expression that gave it away. That look of dread and fear, that tremulous comportment that made her jaw tremble—it was a lot to handle at one time, and she chose the most immediate priority, jetting to the bathroom, letting her vomit spill into the toilet. This was the third time in the week, and she knew well enough by now to flush during the process.
“Look, look,” that damn voice coming from behind the bathroom door, followed by the slow, tapping of a zombie trying to get in. “It’s you,” the voice said. “Dis picta is you!”
Abigail didn’t wipe her mouth, but somehow crawled to the doorway. Under the door, the woman had slid a picture of a small infant on an old man’s knee. The man had a clownish grin. “Do you got it?” the voice said. The girl in the picture had no pants. She was oblivious, her eyes locked onto the person holding the camera. Her arms were completely hairless. The old man was not a native, but a tanned white man in a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned at his chest, exposing his graying chest hair.
“Who’s he? Who’s this?” Abigail said.
“Dat’s yo’ granddaddy,” the voice said. “He German. He pass last year.”
Jesus Christ, she thought, expelling the roasted pig into the toilet water. I’m German too.
For the remainder of the vacation, Abigail was convinced that she would run into her father. It had turned out that the old woman was the best friend of her father’s sister, and now that word had gotten out that Abigail had returned, people would be looking for that little hopa infant who had been shoved by her yuppie mother from one tourist city to another. As she walked through the Aloha flea market, trying to decide what kind of tourist trinkets to spend her whoring money on, she began to notice the diffident stares of the Hawaiian locals, which she usually assumed natural for a girl of such mixed race, but now she guarded herself against these stares, frightened that at any moment they might assault her with tales of a childhood long forgotten. Her father could be any one of them; any Hawaiian local was suspect, any could have been her cousin; her niece or nephew. In the tans of the Hawaiian sun, it didn’t matter if they had descended from Chinese, Japanese, or whatever—she couldn’t tell the difference, and besides, they all shared that same shiny brown glare, a tad darker than hers. Four days into her vacation, and now the only thing she wanted from the island was to get the hell off of it.
She and her brother Manek walked through the spectacle of native culture, most of it grossly exaggerated. Most of the small booths at the flea market around Aloha stadium sold electronic and house-hold trinkets, but Abigail decided that the necklaces and shoes made the trip worthwhile, and found some playful escape in the giant pink balloons in the shape of pigs, the pillows shaped like geckos, the fresh strawberries in Styrofoam boxes, the variegated ukuleles with hibiscus patterns, and the young shirtless Hawaiian men with cavalier smiles speaking that barely comprehensible Hawaiian pidgin. The market made a circle around the stadium, and was perhaps the largest market she had ever been to. Like the Strip in Las Vegas, it seemed to simulate a culture fully unrealized, one sold in trinket form to fill up the knick-knack sections of the home and office.
“I’m so jealous, I hate you now,” Manek said. “I deserve to be German. You’ve never even read Hesse or Schiller. Du kanst Deutsche sprechen nicht. Freude schöner gütterfunken…” He sang something in the tune of Ode to Joy, and though Abigail was sure that he could have gone on for hours with the ridicule, he kindly stopped and touched her shoulder, perhaps to remind her he was still her half-brother, German or not.
They passed by a group of tourists in colorful Hawaiian shirts, all of them wearing sunglasses, none of them wearing sandals. They smiled when they saw her, when they saw anyone. Do they see a native? She had been practicing the Hawaiian pidgin and was convinced she could pull it off if necessary.
“I’ve decided to write a poem to Union,” Manek said, shuffling through a box of colorful geckos. “Titled: ‘A Paean to Union.’ People will think I’m talking about the concept. Or the Civil War.”
Abigail pulled up a gecko carved from wood, wearing a cowboy hat. “Dat’s healing gecko,” the old woman behind the counter said. Abigail knew the whole spiel about Hawaiian magicians, but couldn’t picture the gecko-cowboy as a sacred object at a séance. It was twenty dollars, and she might have bought it, considering she had just run into more money. She had counted it the previous night; the man had given her seventy bucks after sex. It was a lot, but nowhere near what she needed if she was going to stop herself from throwing up in the morning.
She checked her cell-phone:
Im at the zoo right
now. Its a piece of
shit.
It was only Union and not her father.
What animals are
there?
Chickens. Goddamn
chickens. Luv ya.
“I noticed you this morning,” Manek said, hands in his pockets, walking coolly. Everything about his composure would always belie what he was talking about. “If you need to borrow money, I’ve been saving up from working at the movie theater. Of course, you’ll have to tell mom. Stupid Uncle Sam.”
Abigail said nothing, but caught herself wondering if they had an uncle named Sam.
“Life, liberty and property, that’s all the government needs to worry about,” Manek continued, his eyes engaged in an anemically thin girl sitting behind a tray of trinkets. “Who are they to tell you that you have to tell mom before you can have an abortion? She’ll understand anyway, maybe. But seriously, who the hell are they? We should be free to do that.”
The word “abortion,” now unveiled, seemed to release a ghastly presence, as the heat of mid-day finally fell upon her. “Free? Free to fuck-up?” Abigail said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Free to fuck up.”
She moved towards a shaded park bench, wondering if the headache she felt was from a lack of caffeine or from her morning sickness. Manek returned with spam musubi and they ate, surrounded by children who sometimes stared at them with apprehensive faces.
“Union, exemplar of man,” Manek said in a seafaring voice. “For all men to carry your fetishes, to withhold jealousy, glare into the void, oh Union, man par excellence, if all men were you, harmony and enlightened thoughts only. All of men and their brothers, get off on her cheating, daughter’s of Elysion, come and screw, join us in this jubilee, for your men get off on it.” He laughed but she wouldn’t join him. “What is it?” he said. “I’m not cock-blocking you, am I? I’ll sit over there if you want.”
She put her uneaten musubi on the park bench and looked up to the clouds. They were bigger than in Las Vegas, like leeches sucking the blueness out of the sky. “I’m not sure,” she said. The words seemed to stop the flow of the world. She couldn’t look at Manek but knew she had destroyed something, something precious. Maybe she was just trying to psyche him out. She realized that she only had five seconds to make the whole thing a joke and the awkwardness would pass, and the flow would continue. He knew it too. But she couldn’t say it, and when the five seconds were gone he spoke: “Well, that would be the traditional way to go. But you’re always the one who says that you’d be at the clinic in no time. What about Summer? You helped her pay for hers—practically forced her to get one.”
“I know,” she said, though she certainly didn’t force anyone. Perhaps she had just been watching the children in the park for too long. Was it too late for it all to be a joke? It was. A child wearing a white and pink lei fell onto the grass, not a long fall for the child, who simply got right up and checked the flowers to see if any had broken.
“This is sociobiology, it never fails,” Manek said. “Your maternal instinct is kicking in. You feel abandoned by your father, so you can’t abandon—this thing. It’s the same as a parasite, it has the same qualities. Think about your life. You have nothing to offer a child.”
Her face was reddening and still he continued. She dove into tears and the children around her noticed and he still wouldn’t stop.
“Think about how life has been for mom, you want to go through that? Remember when she used to tell us about the way people stared at her in church? You want to go through that? There’s nothing harder than being a single mom, and no offense, but Union’s a moron. You want him as the father? Think of the genes.”
She kept her eyes closed but that made it worse. Manek wouldn’t let up, and very soon he was becoming a voice in her head, turning into German shouts over a city-wide intercom, words she couldn’t understand but she could sense their anger. He was trying to cast something out of her but the demon wouldn’t leave. Her body shook.
“Abigail, think of mom,” he said, finishing her off. “No man will ever want you again.”
She would have hit him, on most occasions she would have, but if she did that she’d have to keep beating him until he couldn’t stand again, she’d have to drive a tiki pole right through that ‘genius’ brain of his. Instead she pushed him like a child and left him there with the local children, marching back to the hotel, hiding her face in case an aunt, cousin or niece recognized her. Along the way a thunderstorm passed and she walked barefoot through puddles created by the concrete holes on the sidewalk. Even in the shade, the heat spread to her through the air.
When she arrived at the empty motel room she cried into the pillows, for hours; it was worse than throwing up, and she wondered if her mother had done the same when she was pregnant with her. “Get me off of this island,” she kept saying into the pillow. Away from the natives who looked more like her than her own family. Away from the trinkets, the invading heat, the sudden storms and giant mountains that made her feel claustrophobic. Back to the minus space of Vegas, place of no surprises, where friends and schools and familiar bike paths were waiting for her routines. She searched for the copy of her birth certificate that her mother always kept in her suitcase, hidden behind pages of printed-out e-mails and talking points. Printed in small engraved blue ink at the bottom was her genetic make-up: German, Chinese, Hawaiian, Scandinavian, Native American. The wildcard in a deck of masters and slaves.
She lay like a cat perched in the stale sunlight through the window. She thought that maybe she could round up some cash from her friends to pay for the abortion. She had nearly a thousand saved up from her job at an arts store. Then the seventy dollars. How many more seventies would she need? She’d never had an operation before. Was it an operation, or a procedure? She thought of a gigantic machine with electric antenna, moving near her legs—how more vulnerable can a girl become? It would make an interesting porno. But how is it even possible? In her physics class she had learned that it was impossible. Potentiality cannot be destroyed. The example: A bottle of cola. Potentially, it could fill to its intended purpose. Nothing could take that away. You had to break the bottle. Maybe she would only stay in the hotel, small as it was. In that free-floating dizziness after hours of sobbing, she was actually considering Union as a father. She might have been joking, and she had five seconds to make it funny somehow. When she received a text message from Manek she tossed the phone onto the floor. Once she had destroyed her phone with a hammer in the middle of her job at the arts store, just to prove to an ex that she wasn’t interested in him, but now, without an audience, it would be pointless.
The cleaning lady interrupted her. Abigail instantly recognized her as a Filipino maid, the same type she had seen carting about in Las Vegas hotel rooms on nebulous morning-afters, before text-messaging Union to tell him all about what she had done. The woman spoke no English to her, but simply cleaned the hotel room around her with a finesse Abigail had never seen before. How routinely the sheets, sprawled onto the floor, were hampered, and new sheets were tossed into the air and tucked beneath the mattress; how swiftly the counters were sprayed and rubbed in circles until the rosewood shone like new, how gracefully were the tissues folded into little doves, only to later be ruined by a single touch from the patron. It all happened instantaneously, as if time had stopped for a few small details. After the maid left, Abigail was shocked to find the coffee beans, toilet paper, tissues, toothbrushes, shower gels and soap had all been replaced, even while Abigail had been focusing on her, the maid must have worked faster than Abigail’s very eyes.
Finally Abigail left the hotel and found the sun still out, sinking into the horizon like quicksand. It had felt like an eternity with her face in the pillow. She read the text that Manek had sent:
Really sorry. Sorry.
Come to the beach
and ill apologize
better.
Her sandals made clacking sounds until she met the sand, and in the sunset over the ocean everything was purple. A crowd of natives lined the ocean, looking out at the water, none of them daring to go in. It took her a moment to realize that a disaster had occurred. The sea waves were completely empty and families were gathering their towels to disperse. Abigail dragged her eyes down the beach, saw the waves seeping through the sand, but her brother was nowhere to be found.
Abigail found Manek’s white towel in the same place where they had sun-bathed the previous day. On top was a left-open black book, thin and covered in sand. He was gone, and nobody was in the water. Instantly she felt a bubble in her stomach, boiling about her heart, pumping vomit into her lungs. A fat white tourist told her what happened: A young boy. A school of jellyfish. Stung from head to toe. Paralyzed. The thought penetrated her like a virus, first she sensed it in her stomach, and then it spread to every vein in her body, manipulating her blood stream. She shook violently, her voice shouting for her, scratching her throat as if she were possessed by a poltergeist. She didn’t recognize the screams. The tourists around her were concerned, but the concern wasn’t enough. The shock had passed for them. “They should have put up a sign” one of them said. “It could have been anyone of us.”
On the way to the hospital she tried to parse out everything that was going on. Was she going to the hospital for Manek, or for her morning sickness? She was waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under her, for the big Other to come out and reveal that it was all a joke. Whoever it was, she thought, they have five seconds to make it funny or else it really is a serious, miserable life.
They weren’t prepared for her at the hospital. She kept saying “my brother my brother,” but the nurses only shrugged. She didn’t look anything thing like Manek. Since they had never taken a family photo together, there was no picture for them to go by. If he were here, she thought, he might find the whole scene laughable. “You’re reenacting the Oedipus complex,” he would say. “You wanted me dead, you imagined killing me over and over, and now that it actually happened, you feel guilty.” He had told her something like that whenever she hit him and apologized, or that time they were playing flashlight tag and he fell in a sudden shock from her flashlight, his head bleeding open from the corner of a table, the blood seeping through his afro.
The nurse took her down the hall, where she was put face-to-face with a Hawaiian boy with a half burnt face.
“Yo’ sista’s here.”
Her hand went to slap the woman but ended up in a fist to her left breast. In the sudden after-shock, she kicked at the bed stand, screeching like an animal and gnawing her teeth at the woman, “My brother! My brother!” Besides a look of squelching pain, the nurse didn’t call security; perhaps she too was in shock.
“Manek. His name is Manek.” she said with dominance. “Jellyfish sting.” The nurse flipped through her charts and found nothing. She went on the intercom but no response came. They searched two floors before they found him.
He had been stung in ten different places, had been paralyzed and had swallowed a lot of water. He was alive, but in terrible pain. When she found him his hair was still in that gigantic, ridiculous afro that not even a near-death experience could flatten out.
“They told me to pee on myself,” he said. “It didn’t do jack shit.” Nearby, long purple strings stuck out of a bowl, covered in sea-foam. “Those were the tentacles that that son of a bitch stung me with.” She could see the marks on his neck and face, lines of boils covering his body. “Don’t tell mom,” he said. “I can pay for it myself, since you won’t be needing the money.”
She left the room without a word, and spent some time sitting on the lobby chairs. The news was on, but her eyes saw nothing. She only heard her own breath. She checked her cell phone and saw that she had missed a message from an unknown number.
Abby. This is daddy.
Been a while, yah?
Youre 17 now. I
wonder about you.
I wonder what kind
of person youve
grown up to be.
Maybe we can meet
and you can tell me
about your life.
What is it like to
grow up in las
vegas?
Abigail shut the cell-phone. She took some sips from a cup of coffee that one of the nurses had brought her, and then tried to hold back her laughter as she replied to him:
I’ve decided to keep
the baby.
Kawika Guillermo is a Ph.D. student in Asian American literature at the University of Washington. He also writes short stories.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Issue 2
Looks like this is an all poetry edition of Hando No Kuzushi.
No worries - it is our honor to publish the work of Lillianna Marie and Mike Pak, two poets that we will definitely be following from now on. They represent the splintered and playful aspects of the Asian American experience that often goes un-noticed. We can only hope to receive work of this caliber in the future.
Editors,
Hando No Kuzushi
No worries - it is our honor to publish the work of Lillianna Marie and Mike Pak, two poets that we will definitely be following from now on. They represent the splintered and playful aspects of the Asian American experience that often goes un-noticed. We can only hope to receive work of this caliber in the future.
Editors,
Hando No Kuzushi
the wormhole Jaegwon Kim crawled through
By Lillianna Marie
my sister is Hyoni Kang in the morning
she flaunts her Kim Yu-Na mini-skirt as i sip my coffee.
cello is in the living room making a movie in his mind;
cello is fluffing his ( Hong Sangsoo
Ahn Byeong-ki
Im Kwon-taek
Song Hae-seong) feathers.
i slide into my brand new Lee Dong Youb shoes, & matching t-shirt,
i hum the electro-pop jam of 10:24 a.m.
we are returning to the neon Nam June Paik island,
the avant-garde sun is up &
we are on our way
Lillianna Marie is a poet, and scholar who recently completed two years of service as a Teach for America Corps member. Her interests lie at the intersections of experimental art objects and radical models of temporality. Her work has previously been published in the Hawai'i Review, the Long River Review, and Helix Magazine.
my sister is Hyoni Kang in the morning
she flaunts her Kim Yu-Na mini-skirt as i sip my coffee.
cello is in the living room making a movie in his mind;
cello is fluffing his ( Hong Sangsoo
Ahn Byeong-ki
Im Kwon-taek
Song Hae-seong) feathers.
i slide into my brand new Lee Dong Youb shoes, & matching t-shirt,
i hum the electro-pop jam of 10:24 a.m.
we are returning to the neon Nam June Paik island,
the avant-garde sun is up &
we are on our way
Lillianna Marie is a poet, and scholar who recently completed two years of service as a Teach for America Corps member. Her interests lie at the intersections of experimental art objects and radical models of temporality. Her work has previously been published in the Hawai'i Review, the Long River Review, and Helix Magazine.
Wordlessness (not Worldlessness)
By Mike Pak
Some days I wish not to speak
to abstain from language
fold it neatly and
hide it in my pockets,
not letting it schism my thoughts
my world
and the wind that pulls leaves
from trees I've never seen.
But not all nights are patient,
and some nights the stars
seem to taunt me
and the moon laughs
at my attempts to avoid language
and the stones language chips away.
How can I tell others of
my war on language
when my words themselves are cloven
from the mountains
I fear are crumbling?
Michael Pak has lived and travelled around the world, most recently across the continental states from coast to coast. His poetry blog Farts! (http://braddagod.blogspot.com) is updated every Tuesday and Thursday. He lives in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
Some days I wish not to speak
to abstain from language
fold it neatly and
hide it in my pockets,
not letting it schism my thoughts
my world
and the wind that pulls leaves
from trees I've never seen.
But not all nights are patient,
and some nights the stars
seem to taunt me
and the moon laughs
at my attempts to avoid language
and the stones language chips away.
How can I tell others of
my war on language
when my words themselves are cloven
from the mountains
I fear are crumbling?
Michael Pak has lived and travelled around the world, most recently across the continental states from coast to coast. His poetry blog Farts! (http://braddagod.blogspot.com) is updated every Tuesday and Thursday. He lives in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Two Poems by Changming Yuan
“East vs. West”
breaking, broken
bare bricks on the Berlin Wall
collected from the ruins
to build a transparent bridge
between the past and the future
broken, breaking
earthen bricks for Badalin Ridge
baked in a dragon fire
to repair and strengthen the long wall
separating the prairies farther from the Gobi
“Dao: An Other Origin of Species”
before that big blast
there was neither time
nor space
nor matter
nor laws of physics
nor gods of course
so they say
or believe
but somewhere
out of all that void
Dao grew into one point of being
divided into two
two into four
four into myriads
until it has become
a whole universe
still growing
together with man and god
alike
Changming Yuan, a two-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics (2009), grew up in rural China and published several books before moving to Canada. She teaches writing in Vancouver and has had her poetry featured in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine and 270 other literary publications worldwide.
breaking, broken
bare bricks on the Berlin Wall
collected from the ruins
to build a transparent bridge
between the past and the future
broken, breaking
earthen bricks for Badalin Ridge
baked in a dragon fire
to repair and strengthen the long wall
separating the prairies farther from the Gobi
“Dao: An Other Origin of Species”
before that big blast
there was neither time
nor space
nor matter
nor laws of physics
nor gods of course
so they say
or believe
but somewhere
out of all that void
Dao grew into one point of being
divided into two
two into four
four into myriads
until it has become
a whole universe
still growing
together with man and god
alike
Changming Yuan, a two-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics (2009), grew up in rural China and published several books before moving to Canada. She teaches writing in Vancouver and has had her poetry featured in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine and 270 other literary publications worldwide.
A Lesson In Racism
By Nathaniel Tower
“So I was at this buffet with my fiancée, and she got pissed at me because I only left one dollar on the table for a tip.”
Parker was on one of his anti-serving class power trips.
We were at lunch break from the firm, at some large Chinese restaurant probably with “King” or “Panda” in the title. It was a hotspot for all the firms in the metro area, likely for its ridiculously creamy crab Rangoon. Parker had been a little late, a sign that he was probably with another woman, so I had ordered without him.
“I mean, all the bitch did was ask me if I wanted more water and clear my plates after we left.
She didn’t even earn the damn dollar, and now Clarissa is pissed at me.”
Parker’s complaints were flying faster than I could chew my eggrolls.
“You know, Parker, you do make well over six figures, and you hardly do jack shit. You could have thrown her a fiver,” I suggested, siding with Clarissa mainly to piss him off.
A short Asian woman, probably Chinese, with short brown hair tied back in a ponytail interrupted our conversation to take Parker’s order.
“What you have?” she asked impatiently.
Parker placed his order, mispronouncing General Tsao’s chicken, likely on purpose. He had ordered it at least fifty times.
“Steam lice o’ fly lice?” was the next question.
“Fly lice? That’s disgusting. What the hell are you people serving here?” Parker said without a smile.
“Steam wice o’ fwy wice,” the woman repeated, rolling her eyes as much as she could.
“What the hell is wice?”
“Parker, you ass, what kind of rice do you want?” I whispered with a swift kick under the table.
“Ohhh, fried rice,” he said, somehow making the words polysyllabic. “I love me some fried rice. Bring me some extra,” he added with a wink.
The woman wrote down his order and stormed away with a grumpy face. If the rice wasn’t as sticky as usual, we would know why.
“Parker, you’re a dick. You knew what she was asking,” I said with a sigh.
“That’s not the point. The point is that she should learn the damn language. I mean, come on. And how is it that she knows that I’m saying it wrong if she can’t say it right?”
“You’re just an asshole. It’s a cultural thing. You ruined her day. Did you see how grumpy she looked?” This was a part I was used to playing when around Parker. Were it not for me, I’m not sure how many times the man would’ve been sued for sexual harassment. He certainly wouldn’t have a job anymore.
“They always look grumpy. Either that or slutty. And the only people that come to their restaurants are good ole fashion American bluebloods like us.” He slapped me on the back. “My culture is her culture.”
“You’re an arrogant prick.”
“And that’s why you always go to lunch with me.”
“No, I always go to lunch with you because I know that I need to save your ass.”
When Parker’s food came, he ate silently, not wanting to test my patience. Besides, I had been finished eating for a good ten minutes, and even though I knew I would be hungry again in twenty, I didn’t bother to order anything else partly because I didn’t want to be in public with Parker any longer than necessary and partly because I wasn’t sure which one was our waitress.
“We better ask the waitress for our check,” Parker said before his teeth had even begun to chew his last bite.
“Yeah, we don’t want to be late getting back to the office. Lots of work to do,” I said with a roll of the eyes. I knew he only wanted to leave because he wanted to have enough time to rendezvous with Melissa in the elevator before the lunch break was officially over. The bastard liked to begin and end every lunch with a quickie, although I wasn’t really sure what precisely he had time to do in the few minutes he piddled around with the office assistants.
“Which one is our waitress?”
We looked around and spotted three short Asian women waiting on nearby tables.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, “but I’m sure she’ll come back.”
“They all look the same to m—”
“Shh, she’ll hear you.”
“Yeah, don’t want to offend the woman who brought me this delicious meal before you give her a big fat tip for doing jack sh—”
“Here’s your check,” a suddenly friendly voice spoke before he could finish. We looked up hesitantly, cards ready to hand to her, and saw a goofy smile plastered crookedly across her face. Neither of us could muster a word, but it wasn’t long before she broke the silence. “And don’t worry, you all look the same to me, too.”
Parker had never left a bigger tip.
And he didn’t have sex with Melissa that day either.
Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes (www.bartlebysnopes.com). His stories have appeared in dozens of print and online journals.
“So I was at this buffet with my fiancée, and she got pissed at me because I only left one dollar on the table for a tip.”
Parker was on one of his anti-serving class power trips.
We were at lunch break from the firm, at some large Chinese restaurant probably with “King” or “Panda” in the title. It was a hotspot for all the firms in the metro area, likely for its ridiculously creamy crab Rangoon. Parker had been a little late, a sign that he was probably with another woman, so I had ordered without him.
“I mean, all the bitch did was ask me if I wanted more water and clear my plates after we left.
She didn’t even earn the damn dollar, and now Clarissa is pissed at me.”
Parker’s complaints were flying faster than I could chew my eggrolls.
“You know, Parker, you do make well over six figures, and you hardly do jack shit. You could have thrown her a fiver,” I suggested, siding with Clarissa mainly to piss him off.
A short Asian woman, probably Chinese, with short brown hair tied back in a ponytail interrupted our conversation to take Parker’s order.
“What you have?” she asked impatiently.
Parker placed his order, mispronouncing General Tsao’s chicken, likely on purpose. He had ordered it at least fifty times.
“Steam lice o’ fly lice?” was the next question.
“Fly lice? That’s disgusting. What the hell are you people serving here?” Parker said without a smile.
“Steam wice o’ fwy wice,” the woman repeated, rolling her eyes as much as she could.
“What the hell is wice?”
“Parker, you ass, what kind of rice do you want?” I whispered with a swift kick under the table.
“Ohhh, fried rice,” he said, somehow making the words polysyllabic. “I love me some fried rice. Bring me some extra,” he added with a wink.
The woman wrote down his order and stormed away with a grumpy face. If the rice wasn’t as sticky as usual, we would know why.
“Parker, you’re a dick. You knew what she was asking,” I said with a sigh.
“That’s not the point. The point is that she should learn the damn language. I mean, come on. And how is it that she knows that I’m saying it wrong if she can’t say it right?”
“You’re just an asshole. It’s a cultural thing. You ruined her day. Did you see how grumpy she looked?” This was a part I was used to playing when around Parker. Were it not for me, I’m not sure how many times the man would’ve been sued for sexual harassment. He certainly wouldn’t have a job anymore.
“They always look grumpy. Either that or slutty. And the only people that come to their restaurants are good ole fashion American bluebloods like us.” He slapped me on the back. “My culture is her culture.”
“You’re an arrogant prick.”
“And that’s why you always go to lunch with me.”
“No, I always go to lunch with you because I know that I need to save your ass.”
When Parker’s food came, he ate silently, not wanting to test my patience. Besides, I had been finished eating for a good ten minutes, and even though I knew I would be hungry again in twenty, I didn’t bother to order anything else partly because I didn’t want to be in public with Parker any longer than necessary and partly because I wasn’t sure which one was our waitress.
“We better ask the waitress for our check,” Parker said before his teeth had even begun to chew his last bite.
“Yeah, we don’t want to be late getting back to the office. Lots of work to do,” I said with a roll of the eyes. I knew he only wanted to leave because he wanted to have enough time to rendezvous with Melissa in the elevator before the lunch break was officially over. The bastard liked to begin and end every lunch with a quickie, although I wasn’t really sure what precisely he had time to do in the few minutes he piddled around with the office assistants.
“Which one is our waitress?”
We looked around and spotted three short Asian women waiting on nearby tables.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, “but I’m sure she’ll come back.”
“They all look the same to m—”
“Shh, she’ll hear you.”
“Yeah, don’t want to offend the woman who brought me this delicious meal before you give her a big fat tip for doing jack sh—”
“Here’s your check,” a suddenly friendly voice spoke before he could finish. We looked up hesitantly, cards ready to hand to her, and saw a goofy smile plastered crookedly across her face. Neither of us could muster a word, but it wasn’t long before she broke the silence. “And don’t worry, you all look the same to me, too.”
Parker had never left a bigger tip.
And he didn’t have sex with Melissa that day either.
Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes (www.bartlebysnopes.com). His stories have appeared in dozens of print and online journals.
Admiral Cheng Ho’s Lost Compass
By Marko Fong
When I was a child, Yeh-Yeh, my grandfather, reminded me nine times that the Chinese invented the compass. The last time, I lost patience with the story, “Yeh-Yeh, it’s just a magnet, they occur naturally.”
“Lucky, you know Cheng Ho?”
“The eunuch admiral? He sailed to Cape Horn, first navigator to master the compass,” I repeated a line from the Encyclopedia Britannica that Yeh-Yeh made us read aloud over and over. At ten, I didn’t understand what a eunuch was.
“Cheng Ho didn’t go just Cape Horn; treasure ships visit Australia and America. His very advanced compass. Not just point north-south. Show east-west too.”
“Magnets don’t point east-west, Yeh-Yeh.”
“Not just magnet, case made from dragon bones. Cheng Moslem. He pray Mecca five times a day. He had to know which way pray at sea to find his God. He know world round, look for eastern route Mecca. That why called Ameccans.”
“So what happened to the Admiral’s compass?”
“Big storm. Cheng claim saw Buddha just before flagship find shore. He land then bury prayer compass in Californ. After Cheng see Buddha, compass no tell east from west. He go home by follow coast up Bering Sea and never find Californ again. Cheng Ho compass, the one he use find God, he bury right here.”
Paperson, California, my home town, has the mysterious capacity to escape detection by authorities. My parents' generation called it “old-country superstition” until GPS revealed the genius of the town’s builders. Paperson refuses to keep stable coordinates. Its latitude stays constant but the longitude twitches as much as 121 degrees. The most eccentric reading coincides with my grandfather’s native Toisan, the district from which Paperson’s builders also came. According to GPS, Paperson swings between the banks of the Sacramento River and Southeastern China several thousand times a day. It blinks too rapidly for the naked eye to detect.
As peasants in Toisan and as displaced-railway workers near Sacramento, the men who created Paperson knew how to go unnoticed. They had little book knowledge and no access to magic. If they had expertise in anything, it was in the art of being overlooked. Until 1875, what we now know as Paperson and the thousands of acres around it spent most of the year beneath the Sacramento River. After tying the coasts of America together with steel track, the same Chinese workers transformed the Delta mud south of Sacramento into farmland.
Their efforts earned them the privilege of toiling in orchards and fields they had made possible near Orchard Vista. Later, the Exclusion Act turned their successors into America’s- first-illegal immigrants. For fifty years, any new Chinese worker had come to the Delta either with false papers or none at all.
When Orchard Vista’s Chinese quarter burned in 1911, the residents seized their opportunity to move out. Dr. Sun’s revolution had returned China to Chinese rule and it gave them confidence. They built five-hundred feet downriver acreage leased from Franklin Edwards, grower of the Emerald Water Pear. The variety, firm on the outside and juicy on the inside, the first pear suitable for shipment by rail to the East Coast, had really been created by Bing Tang.
Bing was Edwards’ orchard man and the second son of the inventor of the bing cherry in Washington State. His father returned to China after anti-Chinese violence in the northwest forced him into hiding. Edwards feared that his foreman would do the same unless he granted Bing's request for the ninety-nine-year lease. The Delta’s Cantonese workers took refuge in Bing’s town. Here, they could eat their own food, speak their dialect, purchase traditional medicines, and gamble without interference from American authorities. Because so many of its residents used false papers identifying them as the “paper sons” of merchants, scholars, or diplomats (the only legal Chinese immigrants), Bing jokingly named his town Paperson.
The understanding of the hidden properties of sunlight, soil, and water that went into making cherries reliably sweet and pears impervious to bruising certainly contributed to the town’s mysterious ability to stay hidden from the authorities. One of Bing’s first acts as Paperson’s “mayor” was to plant a line of trees just above the levee to cast shade and shadow at strategic moments. Although Paperson is just five-hundred feet away, you can’t see it from Orchard Vista even from the third floor of the Japanese Presbyterian Church built on what had been that town’s Chinese quarter.
As Bing’s-last successor, my grandfather, no horticulturalist, used his own techniques to hide Paperson. After he bought the land beneath the town in 1936 in my American-born grandmother’s name, he tricked the title company. By using an 1882 map from prior to the completion of the dredging, he persuaded Delta Title and Trust to show Paperson as a skinny-triangular parcel off the Edwards Ranch. The actual-post-1882 shape of the Edwards lease was a rectangle. The map's quarter acre is really fifty acres. For sixty years, the town never appeared on even the most-detailed maps of the region and my grandfather’s gambling house stayed hidden in plain sight.
The wizardry behind Paperson goes beyond any of Bing or my grandfather’s tricks. If one visits the now empty town for any length of time it becomes apparent that the town is not made from wood as much as it's constructed from shadow. When it came to shadows, the builders of Paperson were wizards. They understood that the mind casts the most impenetrable shadows, and they used mind shadows to turn their town despite its six-story-community center, fire house, newspaper, movie theater, four blocks of businesses and gambling house into a shadow hole for memory.
Maybe the generation of laborers who filled the swamp and built the levees sowed Paperson’s capacity to elude both maps and memory into its soil. Maybe it was yet another Bing secret: old timers once talked about his selling a seedless mango in his grocery and then acting as if the fruit didn’t exist.
I choose to believe that it's because Cheng Ho's broken compass is buried there. Whatever ferrous metal a magnet touches becomes similarly polarized. Last year, I drove past Paperson three times before I could recognize the town where I grew up.
Please accept these as the best directions I can offer.
Marko Fong lives in Northern California and published most recently in Eclectica, Kartika Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. His fiction has been nominated for both a Pushcart and a PEN/OHenry prize.
When I was a child, Yeh-Yeh, my grandfather, reminded me nine times that the Chinese invented the compass. The last time, I lost patience with the story, “Yeh-Yeh, it’s just a magnet, they occur naturally.”
“Lucky, you know Cheng Ho?”
“The eunuch admiral? He sailed to Cape Horn, first navigator to master the compass,” I repeated a line from the Encyclopedia Britannica that Yeh-Yeh made us read aloud over and over. At ten, I didn’t understand what a eunuch was.
“Cheng Ho didn’t go just Cape Horn; treasure ships visit Australia and America. His very advanced compass. Not just point north-south. Show east-west too.”
“Magnets don’t point east-west, Yeh-Yeh.”
“Not just magnet, case made from dragon bones. Cheng Moslem. He pray Mecca five times a day. He had to know which way pray at sea to find his God. He know world round, look for eastern route Mecca. That why called Ameccans.”
“So what happened to the Admiral’s compass?”
“Big storm. Cheng claim saw Buddha just before flagship find shore. He land then bury prayer compass in Californ. After Cheng see Buddha, compass no tell east from west. He go home by follow coast up Bering Sea and never find Californ again. Cheng Ho compass, the one he use find God, he bury right here.”
Paperson, California, my home town, has the mysterious capacity to escape detection by authorities. My parents' generation called it “old-country superstition” until GPS revealed the genius of the town’s builders. Paperson refuses to keep stable coordinates. Its latitude stays constant but the longitude twitches as much as 121 degrees. The most eccentric reading coincides with my grandfather’s native Toisan, the district from which Paperson’s builders also came. According to GPS, Paperson swings between the banks of the Sacramento River and Southeastern China several thousand times a day. It blinks too rapidly for the naked eye to detect.
As peasants in Toisan and as displaced-railway workers near Sacramento, the men who created Paperson knew how to go unnoticed. They had little book knowledge and no access to magic. If they had expertise in anything, it was in the art of being overlooked. Until 1875, what we now know as Paperson and the thousands of acres around it spent most of the year beneath the Sacramento River. After tying the coasts of America together with steel track, the same Chinese workers transformed the Delta mud south of Sacramento into farmland.
Their efforts earned them the privilege of toiling in orchards and fields they had made possible near Orchard Vista. Later, the Exclusion Act turned their successors into America’s- first-illegal immigrants. For fifty years, any new Chinese worker had come to the Delta either with false papers or none at all.
When Orchard Vista’s Chinese quarter burned in 1911, the residents seized their opportunity to move out. Dr. Sun’s revolution had returned China to Chinese rule and it gave them confidence. They built five-hundred feet downriver acreage leased from Franklin Edwards, grower of the Emerald Water Pear. The variety, firm on the outside and juicy on the inside, the first pear suitable for shipment by rail to the East Coast, had really been created by Bing Tang.
Bing was Edwards’ orchard man and the second son of the inventor of the bing cherry in Washington State. His father returned to China after anti-Chinese violence in the northwest forced him into hiding. Edwards feared that his foreman would do the same unless he granted Bing's request for the ninety-nine-year lease. The Delta’s Cantonese workers took refuge in Bing’s town. Here, they could eat their own food, speak their dialect, purchase traditional medicines, and gamble without interference from American authorities. Because so many of its residents used false papers identifying them as the “paper sons” of merchants, scholars, or diplomats (the only legal Chinese immigrants), Bing jokingly named his town Paperson.
The understanding of the hidden properties of sunlight, soil, and water that went into making cherries reliably sweet and pears impervious to bruising certainly contributed to the town’s mysterious ability to stay hidden from the authorities. One of Bing’s first acts as Paperson’s “mayor” was to plant a line of trees just above the levee to cast shade and shadow at strategic moments. Although Paperson is just five-hundred feet away, you can’t see it from Orchard Vista even from the third floor of the Japanese Presbyterian Church built on what had been that town’s Chinese quarter.
As Bing’s-last successor, my grandfather, no horticulturalist, used his own techniques to hide Paperson. After he bought the land beneath the town in 1936 in my American-born grandmother’s name, he tricked the title company. By using an 1882 map from prior to the completion of the dredging, he persuaded Delta Title and Trust to show Paperson as a skinny-triangular parcel off the Edwards Ranch. The actual-post-1882 shape of the Edwards lease was a rectangle. The map's quarter acre is really fifty acres. For sixty years, the town never appeared on even the most-detailed maps of the region and my grandfather’s gambling house stayed hidden in plain sight.
The wizardry behind Paperson goes beyond any of Bing or my grandfather’s tricks. If one visits the now empty town for any length of time it becomes apparent that the town is not made from wood as much as it's constructed from shadow. When it came to shadows, the builders of Paperson were wizards. They understood that the mind casts the most impenetrable shadows, and they used mind shadows to turn their town despite its six-story-community center, fire house, newspaper, movie theater, four blocks of businesses and gambling house into a shadow hole for memory.
Maybe the generation of laborers who filled the swamp and built the levees sowed Paperson’s capacity to elude both maps and memory into its soil. Maybe it was yet another Bing secret: old timers once talked about his selling a seedless mango in his grocery and then acting as if the fruit didn’t exist.
I choose to believe that it's because Cheng Ho's broken compass is buried there. Whatever ferrous metal a magnet touches becomes similarly polarized. Last year, I drove past Paperson three times before I could recognize the town where I grew up.
Please accept these as the best directions I can offer.
Marko Fong lives in Northern California and published most recently in Eclectica, Kartika Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. His fiction has been nominated for both a Pushcart and a PEN/OHenry prize.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
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