Gingko Season

Chapter Seven #2

I asked the next question without thinking; it seemed a natural progression from the earlier one. As I asked it I realized it was a question I would have refused to answer.

“What about unhappiest? Do you have an unhappiest day?”

“You know,” he said, “I do.”

His parents were boat people. They had known each other as children in Vietnam, fled the country months apart and by different routes, and then ended up in Philadelphia and met again as adults. “They were the best,” he said, and my heart dropped, hearing the past tense. Both of his parents, and his younger sister, his only sibling, had died in a car crash that Hoang had survived. “I didn’t even break a bone,” he said.

I asked him when it had happened.

“When I was eleven. That’s why I lived with my grandma growing up. And then the Eagles lost the championship to the Panthers.” He’d been looking at the floor, but he looked up at me then, and laughed a little, to reassure me or maybe himself. “So it was a really bad year.”

He took off his glasses, and rubbed them on his shirt, and then put them back on.

“Come on, we have to get to the hearts,” he said. He tore off an artichoke leaf. I wanted to say something more, but I wasn’t sure what. I tore off a leaf too. When they were all gone, he used the knife to carve away the prickly tendrils, which would choke you if you consumed them, and we poured the last of the oil over the sweet bulbs of flesh. Our fingers were pruned, as if we’d been swimming in the sea. Hoang got up to clear the dishes we’d used, somehow balancing everything in his arms with what looked like no effort at all. He seemed so agile.

“How are you carrying all that?”

“This?” He grinned. “Child’s play.”

He turned, and again I stared at his shoulder blades and his neck.

“Did you fall asleep in the sun or something?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your neck looks a little toasted.”

He laughed. “I was reading on the roof and smoking a joint and I dozed off.”

“Wasn’t it cold?”

He shook his head. “Remember how warm it was last weekend?”

“Right. Climate change is crazy.”

“Nice sometimes though, right?”

“What were you reading?”

“Something Gus gave me about the history of unions in America. It’s really good, but my attention span is terrible. Probably shouldn’t have smoked at the same time. I think you’d like it, though. I can lend it to you.”

“How’s the union stuff going?”

“It’s been amazing. More people are getting into it, I think we’re gonna go public soon. Then we can start wearing the pins on our shirts at work. My manager’s reaction is gonna be so funny. Chris told me you started volunteering, that’s really cool.”

“He told you?”

“He said there was a new volunteer called Penelope, who knew me and Gus, that’s gotta be you, right? You still doing it?”

“Yes, definitely,” I said, deciding then that I would.

“When I was still at the lab, a couple of the grad students there were trying to unionize too,” Hoang said. “It doesn’t look like they’re gonna succeed, at least not right now, but I think we might. We can’t afford not to, I would say. It’s just wild, like, you’ve talked to Gus, right? He’s got his theories, and I like hearing what he has to say, but I think it’s even more simple than how he makes it out. Like I come into work, I’m here talking to Danny while he’s cutting onions, or I’m upstairs with Gus and everybody else who works at the bar, or trying to speak Spanish with Hector, or hearing the gossip from Crystal and Mariama, they’re like the vanguard of the housekeepers, without them there’s no chance. Crystal read my palm the other day and she said she saw victory on my horizon. That has to mean the union, right? And it’s like, I babysit their kids, we go to each other’s houses for dinner, we already are something, you know? Which makes it feel inevitable. I just think we’re gonna win, I have a really good feeling about it.”

Outside it was snowing, almost imperceptibly, the snowflakes making leisurely revolutions in the air and then touching down on the pavement, where they vanished. I loved the feeling of the frost on my skin. We walked our bikes through the quiet streets, talking at first, and then silent. It was past three in the morning. I was in an internal struggle with my consciousness, between “being” in the present, privileging its sensations and blurring its passing seconds into one continuous moment, and “seeing” it, aware of its rarity and its finitude and irritated that I was already perceiving it the way I would when it would end. I faced ahead, watching the dark street reveal itself to us. The furrowed rubber of our bicycle tires made soft scudding sounds as they cut through the thin filigree of snow.

“Did you know,” I said, “that the Mongols, like Genghis Khan and his soldiers, when they were on a campaign and ran low on food and water, would cut their horses and drink their blood? They didn’t kill them, they took just enough to survive.”

“That’s so cool.”

“Right?” Encouraged, I added, “The Mongols also had the world’s first postal service.”

“Like a Pony Express?”

“But way bigger. And earlier.”

The snow continued to fall. It felt like the city had emptied out, and we were the only ones left. We walked over a sidewalk grate just as a cloud of sweet-smelling steam erupted from it, and we were briefly warmed by the strange dew. From my experience, the more detail you amassed about someone and the more time you spent with them, the harder it was to idealize them. This hadn’t yet happened with Hoang. Maybe it was because we only saw each other in a limited set of situations. We had never spent time together in any way except alone with each other, and see ing someone interact with people who weren’t you was an easy way to realize they were a normal person, a person who also succumbed to social pressure or said stupid things, and then they lost their sheen. Hoang still had a sheen. He was all promise, no disappointment. Was there a way to keep it like that forever?

“Hey, stop for a second,” he said. We were in front of the First Presbyterian Church. On the other side of the street was a sex shop and the psychic that Apple once forced me to pay ten dollars to consult, because she was embarrassed to go in alone. The psychic told Apple that a life of prosperity and happiness awaited her, and then told me I had enemies who wanted to harm me across distant seas, and that I should avoid elevators. Next to the church was a beautiful townhouse, Jacobean revival. The stairs and the railings of the church were coated with snow, almost an inch thick.

“I don’t think it’s open, you know,” I said, looking at the church.

Hoang didn’t say anything. He scooped a small portion of snow from the railing into his hand and held it up for me to inspect. Then he took a bite of it. He laughed when he saw my expression. “It’s like bingsu.” He chewed, and reflected. “Or maybe more like water ice.”

I was transfixed.

“You’ve never done this before?”

I shook my head.

“Try. It’s nice.”

It was, as he said, like bingsu, fresh and springy. We started walking again.

“Have you ever been to the zoo?” he said.

“Like, in general?”

“No, like the Philadelphia Zoo.”

“Never.”

“Do you want to go sometime?”

“To the zoo?”

“There’s a new giraffe. A baby.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Okay. Like next week? Sunday?”

“Yeah, okay,” I was laughing at his enthusiasm for this simple thing. “Sunday.”

“Awesome. I have Sunday off, and I never have Sunday off, so it has to be Sunday.”

“Okay, Sunday!”

When we got to his house, I rested my bike against his in the hallway and waited on the sofa while he went to change out of his work clothes. He took my dead phone with him upstairs; he said he still had his old charger. I had forgotten he lived in the house across the street from the koala house, and not the koala house itself. He came back down wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, and I remembered the tattoo on his arm, which was visible now that he was in short sleeves. I asked to see it. He sat beside me and stretched out his arm. What I thought was just a jumble of lines looked now like the penciled outlines of trees, no leaves, just thin trunks and branches, the way they looked in the winter. I reached out to touch it, brushing my fingers against his skin.

“So cool,” I said. I was overwhelmed by my own action. Had I touched him before?

It turned out I was mistaken, and the lines did not depict trees. Mohd was an aspiring tattoo artist, apprenticing somewhere in North Philly, and Hoang let him practice with the tattoo gun on his skin. Maybe some were trees, Hoang said, but mostly Mohd just wanted to be able to draw lines and curves without his hand shaking from the effort, which, as Hoang’s skin proved, it still sometimes did. We talked more about the union campaign. I told him about my work at the museum, and he promised to come see the exhibit when it opened. He asked me again about Inno, because he said he felt like our conversation had been interrupted and he was interested in hearing more. The delay had given me time to think about it, and I admitted I was disturbed by Inno’s sudden change of plans. Out of everyone I knew, he was the one I thought might go on to do something special with his life.

Hoang and I discovered that neither of us had a driver’s license.

“We gotta learn to drive,” he said.

“How come you can’t?” I said. I liked that he’d said “we.”

“I think maybe I was scared to for a while. Because of what happened with my family. I didn’t want to go into cars for a few years. I walked, I took the train, the bus. Then one day I was on the bus and I was like, wait, this is just a car. It’s bigger, but, you know, it’s on the road, somebody’s driving it. Stupid, right? And then Mohd got his license and the stuff I would miss out on if I kept avoiding cars multiplied by like a thousand. So I got in the car, and it was fine. Sitting in the backseat still creeps me out though, I won’t do it. Which is maybe stupid too.”

“It’s not stupid,” I said. “So you always call shotgun.”

“Exactly. I’ll override everybody else too, I’m ruthless. It’s fine now, but when I was still sort of spooked, we would do these test drives, where Mohd drove me around the empty parking lot at school at like ten, fifteen an hour. He’s a really good guy, that’s why I was so bummed about the mouse traps, you know? But nobody’s perfect. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? What about you, why can’t you drive, what’s your excuse?”

I picked at a thread of sofa fabric. “I didn’t grow up in the U.S., and I guess I’ve just been lazy since I got here.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“China.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re American?”

“Yeah, I was born here,” I said. It wasn’t true, I was born in Beijing. I was American because my mother was American.

“It’s cool you grew up there. I’ve never been to Vietnam.”

“Do you want to go?”

“For sure. I’ve never been outside the U.S. I actually just applied for my first passport, because I’m trying to get this job as a cook in Antarctica, you know how they always need people to staff the research stations?”

“Antarctica,” I repeated.

“Yeah, how cool would it be if the first time I left the U.S., it was to go to Antarctica? And if I get the job, I was thinking I could stop by Vietnam, hang out with some distant relatives, see how good my Vietnamese is compared to everybody there.”

“When would you be going?”

“Not till next year.”

I had to admit that it would be cool. Then I said, “This is weird, but just now I told you I was born in the U.S. I wasn’t. I was born in Beijing.”

“So you lied?”

“I guess. I don’t know why.”

“It’s okay. You’re telling me now.”

“Yeah,” I said. In fact, it wasn’t okay, because I had lied again, when I said I didn’t know why I’d lied the first time: because of an irrational worry that he might have asked how I was American if I was born in China and my father was Chinese, and I would have had to say because my mother is American, which would have meant mentioning my mother.

Possibly my father’s text, or the phantasm of the woman doing laps in the pool below Inno’s party, had dislodged some of my resistance to talking about the past. It wasn’t as if there was much to tell when it came down to it. I hated to drag things on, and I was also paranoid, in light of Hoang’s own familial circumstances, of mak ing too much of my own, a soap opera subplot in comparison. But I didn’t like the feeling that I was keeping something from him, even though this never bothered me with other people. I think it helped that I knew he wasn’t the type to tell me I was traumatized and needed a therapist, as Apple had done when I told her my mother had abandoned our family without warning, and that because I was the last one to see her, my father sometimes casually wondered aloud if it was something I’d done or said that had made her leave. He didn’t mean to hurt me, it was just the way he was.

So I told Hoang about my mother: her breakdowns, her illness, her spite, her cruelty, her disappearance, the years of radio silence, wondering if she was even still alive, and, now, finding out from my father that she apparently was.

“Sorry if this is a dumb question, but when you say she went off her meds—she was bipolar?” Hoang said.

“Yeah. And yeah, she took them sometimes. She was fine when I was growing up, but my father has since told me that she was really bad about it before I was born. She said they blunted her creativity, and she thought she did her best work in the beginning stages of the manic episodes. It’s fucked up but it’s probably true. But she was convinced she could control it, and she couldn’t. She would push herself, and go too far, and when you’re that deep in it you don’t believe the things you believed at first, you think you’re like, a god, of course you’re not going to think you need medication. But she was taking them consistently until I was like, eleven? I think she got bored. But even before that, she was always very cold. She was a cold person. She never treated me like a kid, even when I was really little. I would try to make her laugh at something I was doing and she would give me this look that was like, I know you want me to laugh and I’m not going to do that for you because I don’t think it’s funny. But of course I still loved her. I admired her. She was like this beautiful person who lived in the house with us, who I got to talk to whenever I wanted. I didn’t even know she was bipolar until I was a teenager, way after she was gone, and my dad finally told me all this stuff he had kept from me, and only because I asked so many times. It’s very Chinese, just straight up not telling your children about huge parts of your life—their life—because you’ve deemed it unnecessary for them to know. So I didn’t know she was ever on medication, or that she stopped taking it. Which made a lot of stuff make more sense. Like later on, when she wouldn’t shower, and then wouldn’t talk, and my father took all the knives in the kitchen to his studio and brought her takeaway food to eat in her room. Which she didn’t eat. It’s the two sides, right, and that was the depression. And the other side—”

I stopped speaking. Beneath the silence of the room, I thought I could hear a high-pitched noise. I could feel Hoang listening to me, the pressure of it. I rubbed my eyes.

“I’m sorry, I don’t like talking about it. Normally I don’t. For a long time, I told myself that every mean thing she said or did to me was because of the illness, but really she was fine, mentally, for most of my childhood. It was just her personality. I can understand that now, but it took a while. It’s a lot harder to accept, and it’s hard to disentangle one from the other. And then when I was thirteen, she was going through a manic episode—things happened—she left, and she never came back, and, like I said, I thought maybe she was dead. But I don’t like talking about it. I find it,” I paused, “I find it circular. Going over the past. It never leads to anything new.”

“Do you want to see her now?”

“I don’t know.” I shifted around on the sofa. I felt agitated, and I was trying to figure out why. I had divulged my past to Hoang because I wanted him to know me, but it was not like me to divulge, and so now that I had done it I did not feel like myself. It was a lie that confessions unburdened you. It seemed to me that they reminded you of the weight you carried, rather than lightening it. For years I hadn’t thought about my father hiding the knives, and leaving the meals, and now I was thinking about it, and remembering the smell of all the food she wasn’t eating, and the sound of his knuckles on the locked door, soft raps.

“I never talk about her,” I said again. I laughed, and it was like the way Hoang had laughed in the kitchen of the Rivebelle earlier in the night. “I feel worse now, having told you.”

Hoang said, “Well, I’m glad you did.”

“Apple hates that I don’t like dwelling on sad stuff. She thinks it’s good to dwell.”

Hoang nodded. He said, “It’s like you’re living with a big hole in the middle of your life, you can’t fill it ever, so you just skate around it. Or you can chip away at the edges, making it bigger and bigger, but why would you want to do that? Maybe that’s what it feels like when you talk about your mom. That’s how it felt when I talked about my parents and my sister, for years. It still does sometimes. And it’s always hard telling somebody who doesn’t know, because you’re thinking about what they’re going to think, and you know how it’s going to make them feel. But you have to tell them some time. Once is usually enough for me. Maybe for you too. But like I said, I’m glad you told me. And I’m glad I told you about me, too.”

The conversation meandered on. He was interested in my life in China, so I told him about wearing a little red scarf and a tracksuit, singing the national anthem on the sports field in the dead heat of August, laughing at the children who fainted in the sun and had to be carried off on stretchers. I described the daily routine of cleaning the windows and blackboards, mopping the floors of our classroom and fetching and serving lunch from the kitchen, which we ate on metal trays at our individual desks. While I retained no love for the marching exercises, I had grown to appreciate over time the merits of the group caretaking of our classroom, in which we spent most of our time and which we felt already was ours. Instead of a hamster or rabbit on which to focus our collective feeling, we polished the windows out of which we longingly gazed when lessons recommenced, watching the clouds move across the sky and dreaming of escape and play. At Hoang’s high school—a high-ranking magnet school, which he didn’t mention, but which I knew because it was famous in Philadelphia for its extremely competitive entry requirements—cockroaches lorded over the hallways, and black mold bloomed on the walls, and the students were taught from decades-old textbooks with missing pages and lewd scrawlings. He said he thought my idea of a universal program of classroom cleaning was a good one, but he wouldn’t want it to imperil the jobs of the janitors, who had been cool. I assured him that my school still had janitors. We called the female cleaners ayi, aunties, and one of them once caught my friend smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and whacked it out of her hand with a broom.

“What time do you think it is?” I said at some point.

“Late. It might even be morning soon.”

“Do you often stay up late?”

He shook his head. “Not unless I’m working. Do you?”

“I do. But I feel bad. I feel like you’re too polite to tell me to leave.”

He smiled, which I took as assent.

“How about this,” I said. “When you want to go to bed, just make a signal, and I’ll go.”

“What kind of signal?”

“You could whistle.”

“I actually can’t whistle.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Then maybe, maybe you could slap me or something.”

“Slap you?”

“Like a light slap?”

He was smiling. “I don’t think I want to do that.”

“It doesn’t have to be—” I could feel my face getting hot. How had I ended up in this conversation? Why did I ever talk at all? “I just meant, like, lightly. As a nonverbal indication. For when you want to go to bed.”

“Alright.” Hoang said. He reached out and touched the side of my face, a mock-slap. “I want to go to bed.” His hand was cool on my cheek, which felt flushed. He kept it there. “Do you want to come get your phone?”

I nodded, and the motion caused his hand to move, as if he was stroking my face. He laughed softly, and thumbed my chin. “Come on,” he said.

Mutely, I followed him. My heart was pounding. My throat felt constricted, and I was afraid to speak, lest I unleash some kind of unsexy croak.

His room faced the street. There were books heaped on the floor, some stacked like Jenga tiles and some just scattered around. I saw a slim volume that said Field Notes , and a book with a red cover that said The Sympathizer , and, facedown on the carpet, Farewell to the Horse. Its placement suggested he might have been reading it in bed, the book I had told him to read. There was a large poster with labeled illustrations of different types of fish, eels, crabs, and one octopus. The poster said norskekysten in block letters, and it was right above his headboard. His bedsheets were pale blue, creased from the last time he had slept in them, the bed unmade.

“Here you go,” Hoang said. He was holding out my phone.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

We were facing each other now. He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses with the thin fabric of his shirt. My phone was in my hand, and I automatically pressed the button to power it on.

“I like your socks, Forest.”

We looked at my socks. They were mismatched, one stripey and one patterned with cartoon hamburgers.

“I can never find the same ones.”

“You pull it off, though.”

I looked up at him. I could see his stubble and smell the detergent on his clothes. The silence was leavening between us. I grasped his wrist, and he grasped mine, and tugged me minutely closer. Under my thumb, I could feel his pulse.

In my other hand, my phone vibrated, and, instinctively, I looked at it.

“Oh my god.”

Unthinkingly I hurled my phone at the floor.

“Whoa, Forest, what’s wrong?”

An email—it had to be an email, because I had him blocked on everything else—from Paul. I glimpsed one phrase: in New York if you’re around

“Are you okay?” Hoang said. He picked up my phone and handed it to me. “Is it about your mom?”

I shook my head. “I think I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Hoang said, and then hesitated. “Did I do something?”

I shook my head again. My entire body felt cold, shocked out of the heat that had coursed through it just a moment before. I wanted to say more, so he would know that he had done no wrong, but I couldn’t speak.

He held the door open for me while I hauled out my bike. I cycled home, mindful of the slick surface of the road, where the snowflakes were already on their way to becoming ice.