Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
On the day of the rally, the sky was blue. It had rained the night before, and the morning air was bracing and cool. When the sun came out it was balmy, but when the wind and the clouds picked up the cold came back quickly. We kept pulling off our sweatshirts and then pulling them on again, shivering and sweating in five-minute turns. Cherry trees were bursting into flower all over the city, their pink and white petals drifting earthward, where treading feet crushed them into a mulch that lined the sidewalks in pale dirty hills.
When I found Gus and Chris in the crowd of red-shirted people that filled Independence Square, I saw that Apple was with them, holding hands with Gus. When he left to talk to a coworker, I asked her what had happened to Mohd. Even she, for once, looked a little sheepish.
“He’s cool,” said Apple, “I just think I’m too basic for him. You know he doesn’t vote?”
The mood in the square was lively. They were blasting the Rolling Stones and people were dancing as they waited for the first speaker to go on stage. Someone threw me a red T-shirt, and I put it on. The plan was to march up to Rittenhouse Square, then make a loop back to where we started, passing City Hall on the way. There were thousands of people, and they had come from Pennsylvania, from Boston, from Delaware, from Ohio, from New York. I said hi to Chris, and told him I was skipping a party at the museum, a quarterly fundraising drive that my boss had told me I needed to attend.
“It’s happening now?”
“Yeah.”
“Like right now?”
“As we speak.”
“Then why aren’t you there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like big events.”
Chris laughed. “You’re at one.”
I spotted Hoang a few meters away, talking to Mariama and Danny. I waved, and he waved back, and I was shot through with a current of pleasurable pain. The president of the national chapter of the union made a speech, and then a city council member made a speech, and then Crystal, who was emcee for the day, introduced a group of workers from the unionized hotel in Boston, who were also going to speak. This was exciting, because they had just ended a sixty-day strike after management acceded to their demands, so they were very much the ideal of what the Rivebelle workers could achieve.
A young Latina woman made the first speech, and she spoke in Spanish. After a few seconds, Gus started translating for us under his breath. I was shocked by his apparent fluency.
“She says they get triple pay for overtime now, because of the strike. Wow. She’s talking about what it was like during the strike.” Gus hooted. “Oh, fuck yeah. So she’s a housekeeper, and apparently when they were on strike the managers had to clean all the rooms themselves, and were like running between the different hotels in Boston trying to get everything done. She’s making fun of them because they took like four hours to clean a single room, when the housekeepers do eight or nine rooms in the same amount of time. Oh man, they had to bartend too!”
She finished her speech, and an old Asian woman toddled onto the podium. She wore a bucket hat over her perm and the red union bandana tied around her neck like a scarf. Someone lowered the mic for her, and she wrapped her hands around it, coughed, and began to shout in Cantonese. I looked around. It was a very multiracial crowd, but there were comparatively few people who looked like they could understand Cantonese. It didn’t seem to matter. She spoke with force, and whenever she paused, everyone took it as a cue to shout and cheer. Apple started filming on her phone, saying that we could find someone to translate for us later, which gave me an idea. I texted Xinwei, and when she responded, I called her and put her on loudspeaker, holding my phone up to my ear and motioning for Chris and Gus and Apple to crowd around.
“It’s so loud!” Xinwei said. Then she started to translate.
“I’ve been working at this hotel for thirty years and they treat me like I’m . . .”
“Dude,” Gus interrupted, as the crowd cheered, “we can’t speak Chinese.”
“That’s the whole point of this exercise,” said Apple.
“Oh, wait, right,” I said, “she’s translating into Mandarin.”
We decided that I would listen to Xinwei and then translate what she was saying into English for everyone else. I had to press my phone against my ear to hear anything.
“. . . My husband is eighty-four years old. [cheers] I’m seventy-one this year. [cheers] He needs more than ten different medicines, and we don’t have secure health benefits. [uncertain cheers] How can Bonaventure treat us like this? [cheers] Thirty years in one job, and they can’t even give us this?”
Here we paused, because she had paused, and the crowd, sensing the indignation in her last few sentences, and recognizing the word “Bonaventure” amid the foreign sounds, was roaring louder than ever.
“We were resolute. [cheers] We didn’t give up. [cheers] We said we would keep striking until we succeeded, and we did! We won! [cheers] We won, and you here in Philadelphia can do the same! [cheers] So don’t give up! [cheers] We won! [cheers] We won!”
“Gus,” I said, “how come your Spanish is so good?”
“Gotta be able to talk to los camaradas, dude.”
Apple rolled her eyes. “My god,” she said, but she couldn’t suppress her smile.
After the speeches we headed to Market Street and then turned west. The outdoor tables of restaurants and cafés were jammed with people. They watched as we came past. Some took videos on their phones, and one or two whooped or clapped, but mostly they just looked. We passed two Asian girls around the same age as me and Apple, clinking mimosa flutes with two guys. Apple nudged me in the ribs.
“See that crew of Kevins and Vivians brunching over there?”
“For someone who claims to want a normal name, you make a lot of fun of people who have them.”
“Yeah, yeah, see the girl in the Ray-Bans? The one vaping? We went to school together. She’s the one who made everyone call me Scrapple.”
“But you love scrapple.”
“I know, that’s why it was so traumatizing. They turned it against me.”
It was a huge crowd, and we were chanting, and in between the chanting, inside the swell of people that swept down the carless avenue, we were talking to the people beside us, introducing ourselves to strangers, shaking hands as we walked. And everyone was doing the same thing. I understood a little more of what Hoang had meant about community, about already being something, and how that made success seem inevitable. I could hear Gus telling Apple about the theory of the general strike. I could see Mariama’s bobbing head and what looked like her two teenagers on either side of her, linking arms with their mother. I caught up with Chris for a moment, and he told me again that the union was hiring campaign researchers. I promised him I would apply. I had no idea where within the thousands of participants we were located, no idea where Hoang might be. We must have been near the middle, because I couldn’t see where the procession began, nor its end. Someone had a trumpet, and its raucous blare sounded in short happy bursts. When we passed City Hall, I shook Apple’s shoulder, and she said, “I know, I know, it was the tallest building in the world, taller than all the churches, so tall, so crazy . . .”
I said, “Tallest habitable building. You have to specify, because of the Eiffel Tower.”
After the march ended, Apple and Gus disappeared somewhere together. Everyone else dispersed quickly too; the workers who had come in from other cities had long bus rides ahead of them, and most of those from Philly had to go straight back to work. I spotted Hoang in the thinning crowd. His black hair glinted in the sun. He was wearing basketball shorts, and I noticed that he had beautiful calves. I ran up to him and touched his shoulder. I was worried he might be standoffish after the last time we saw each other, but his face relaxed into its usual smile.
“Look,” I said. “Listen—”
No words were coming into my head, but he was looking at me, listening, like I’d told him to. It was enough of a sign. I put my hand on his chest, and stood on my toes, and kissed him. The spell didn’t break. When I stepped back I was smiling, and so was he.
“It just felt too perfect,” I said. “The other night. I know that sounds insane.”
“It doesn’t sound insane.”
“Really?”
He pulled me in and kissed me again, his arms around me, pressing me closer.
“I mean,” he said, “maybe a little.”
We walked without aim, past rowhouses, gas stations, fast-food outlets, construction sites, blossom-strewn streets. Everything was luminous. The puddles on the street looked brighter, like disks that each contained their own sun. We passed a huge empty lot where a woman was walking a terrier in a blue coat, and a few kids were throwing a basketball around.
“This used to be a chocolate factory,” Hoang said.
“Really?”
“Since like, the eighteen hundreds. My best friend in elementary school lived around here. I loved visiting him because the air smelled so good.”
“When did they tear it down?”
“Pretty recently, I think. It’s kind of sad. Chocolate air for a hundred and fifty years, and now it’s going to be a bunch of fancy apartments.” He shrugged, and we stopped to consider the empty space, which smelled, now, of nothing in particular. “At least they’re letting people use it before they start construction.”
We stood there for a while, watching the kids play basketball.
“So,” said Hoang, “I got that job in Antarctica. They emailed me last night. It doesn’t start for a few months, it’s winter there, but I think I might spend the summer—the normal summer, our summer—in Vietnam, since I have this passport now.”
“When would you leave?” I said.
“Maybe August, or July? I want to see this through first. The union. I mean I don’t know where it’ll be at by then, but I’ll be back eventually either way.”
I nodded, and tried not to dwell on the fact that July was very soon, and eventually was far away.
“Do you want to head to the river?” I said.
“Let’s do it.”
We started walking north, parallel to the Schuylkill, searching for a good point to cut in. As we waited at a stoplight, I realized that because of the rally we were wearing the same shirt, like those Chinese couples who only ever went around in matching outfits. When the light turned green, we stepped across the road, and Hoang put his arm around my shoulders. He was humming.
“Are you excited about Antarctica?”
“I am, I am. I’m excited about everything. I’m excited to fly on a plane.”
His excitement was contagious. It was strange: the despair I had anticipated I would feel upon receiving this news, which I had sensed was coming, had not arrived. Being around Hoang, I had somehow integrated his worldview into my own, and his was this: everything is great, and everything will be okay. Maybe that was an oversimplification. But it seemed to me that it was what you had to tell yourself, what you really had to believe, if you wanted it to be true, or become true one day.
We reached the banks of the Schuylkill, where there was a thin strip of park and a running trail, and huge boulders on which people sunned themselves with their eyes closed and their T-shirts balled up as pillows. The new towers and their attendant cranes hulked over the water on the other side of the river.
“Philly and Antarctica are kinda far apart,” Hoang said.
“Everywhere and Antarctica are far apart.”
“I’ll send you postcards from there. And from Vietnam. How cool will that be?”
We sat in the grass. A swallowtail landed on a pebble very near us. Its wings were pale yellow.
“Sometimes you look at a butterfly and you just know he used to be a caterpillar,” Hoang said, and I laughed out loud. I thought of all the things I hadn’t known half a year ago—the way he held himself, the way his face opened up when he was talking to a stranger, his eyes bright and trusting because he was never suspicious of anybody; the way he hummed or sang under his breath, but never whistled; the way he made me hopeful, and a little more brave.
“That night you showed up at my house,” Hoang said, “I was like, whoa.”
“You must have thought I was so weird.”
“A little,” he said. He was smiling. “But not like, ‘Oh, she’s weird.’ Like, ‘Oh . . . she’s weird .’ ”
“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” I said. I was thinking that one year might as well be one hundred, it seemed so long. At the same time, though, I felt certain everything was great, and everything would be okay.
He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, and I turned to face him, surprised by the gesture.
“I still have a little while,” he said.
We lay down in the grass. It was soft, and it smelled like spring, fresh and clean in the warm sun. All around us, the park bristled with life. I could hear the newly leafed branches of the trees moving in the wind, making their whooshing sound. Black cherry, box elder, birch.