Chapter 18 The Chins #2
Then one night, he berated her the moment he entered the house.
“Too many shoes,” he said in Toisanese. “How come there’s so many shoes?”
He hung up his hat and coat, then proceeded to the fridge. He’d long ago stopped offering her a kiss, and it was better this way, without them pretending to be the husband and wife in an American movie.
He slammed his fist on the freezer door. “You didn’t buy beer.”
She was, at that moment, spooning beef rice into bowls. Jason was seasoning the eggplant, Jackie setting out the chopsticks and napkins. With the two older girls married off, the house felt empty. Koon Lai crept over to his chair and put a napkin in the neck of his shirt.
“Jason, go to the market and buy your baba a beer,” said Foon Wah. Richard took a seat at the head of the table and helped himself to the potatoes.
Instead of running the errand, Jason opened the fridge, removed two glass bottles of Coke, popped the caps, and put one bottle on his father’s place mat.
“I didn’t ask for a damn Coke!” Richard shouted.
Jason flopped into his own chair, drank his Coke.
Foon Wah didn’t intend to show it that evening, but she was angry.
In fact, she had been angry for a long time but was practiced at swallowing it, the way you swallow ginkgo soup for months during a famine.
While cooking, she never complained about her wrists, which throbbed with pain from the years spent cramped at the sweatshop sewing machine.
And while she sometimes thought she would be driven insane by the whining electric music Jason played on his record player, she only ever muttered that he should turn down the music and study.
He was seventeen now and she was increasingly worried about him, that he would inherit his father’s troubles with money.
For the most part, she had accepted the facts of her life.
She could have been her best friend Mee Lai, married to a man twice her age.
Yet sometimes she fancied that she was among those who the last president referred to as the “chim mak ge ai o su hou ngang jen.” She’d read about it in the Sing Tao Daily: “The Great Silent Majority.” Much quieter than the drugged and long-haired bak gui, the slovenly and menacing hak gui, the hak gui women living off the government dole, the bak gui girls throwing their bras in trash cans.
The Great Silent Majority suffered and persevered in silence.
Foon Wah heaped a second portion of beef rice onto Richard’s plate, but his carping resumed.
“You didn’t iron my uniform,” Richard groused. He always spoke in Toisanese when criticizing her, even though she could have understood the same words in English. “I looked like a mess at work.”
She put the spatula back in the pan, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at her bowl, a posture he might have read as remorse or shame.
And then she spoke.
“You no job.” Her English words were barely audible, but Jason and Jackie looked up from their plates. Richard continued stuffing his mouth.
Perhaps the sound of her own voice gave her courage.
She knew the language, yes. She had taken the night class at the library, studying alongside the Puerto Rican mothers.
She had read the dictionary every night, and she always flipped through the deck of flash cards when she sat on the toilet.
Almost thirty years of this, and you know more than you let on.
“No job.” She lifted her eyes from the plate and looked right at him. “No job. Like a bum.”
Now he’d heard her.
For a moment Richard was as still as marble, his fork lifted halfway to his mouth. Then he dropped the fork, pressed his hands onto the table, and slowly pushed himself up to standing.
“You calling me a bum? I’m a bum, because I served this country? Because every week I pay two mortgage bills?”
“Daddy,” pleaded Jackie.
“Mou tou. To lok hui,” muttered Koon Lai, waving his hand.
“This is my house! I bought this house!”
Foon Wah did not flinch. They were past the point of no return. She would suffer whatever the consequences—and she would speak back to her husband if she felt like it. The time had come to end the silence.
“If anyone thinks I’m a bum,” Richard raged, “they can—”
“They keep the hak gui,” Foon Wah interrupted. “But not you.”
Richard seized his Coke bottle and threw it to the floor by Foon Wah’s feet. The bottle shattered, and pieces of glass whizzed across the kitchen.
“Aiya!” Koon Lai wailed. Jackie screamed. Jason’s chair clattered to the floor.
They looked down at the scattered, sea-green fragments, large and small. Some had fallen centimeters from Foon Wah’s feet.
“Get the hell out of here!” Jason shouted at Richard. “Get out of here now!”
Her husband’s left hand trembled. Koon Lai put his face in his hands.
“Get out of here!” Jason cried again, and his voice was strange, both a man’s and a boy’s, low and angry, but also breaking, tearful.
His fists were clenched, but she knew he didn’t know how to use them.
Full-grown, her son was taller than Richard, but also lean, gaunt; he’d resisted all of Richard’s efforts to toughen him up, and all of Foon Wah’s attempts to beef up his frame.
Yet she had never seen Jason this angry before, and for a moment she wondered if he would hurt his father, and she was afraid.
Richard glanced at his son. He grabbed his coat, stuffed his feet in his leather shoes, and left through the front door.
Foon Wah gripped the napkin in her lap.
Jason was still standing, the others sitting, frozen. Then Jackie rose from her chair, swept up the glass, and put her arms around Foon Wah’s shoulders.
Foon Wah couldn’t help but push her daughter away.
“Eat your dinner,” she said, at which Jackie began to cry. Koon Lai continued to sit with his hands over his face, avoiding Foon Wah’s eyes. She pitied him.
“Eat your dinner,” Foon Wah repeated. “Sit down. Don’t waste your food. Children in China are starving.”
They understood this refrain of hers as a call to order. Jackie slunk back to her seat, and slowly, they picked up their spoons and chopsticks, chewing in silence.
Foon Wah strained to hear, above the clinking of cutlery, her husband’s footsteps on the porch outside. She wondered when he would be returning, and she hoped she would be asleep when he did.
Quietly, Foon Wah pushed back her chair, folded her napkin beside her plate, and took herself to bed. There were dishes to do, laundry to fold, and yet for once, she would neglect them.
She had done them, unthanked and unpaid, for thirty years, and she was tired.
Based on his writing portfolio, Jason was accepted to Columbia University on full scholarship.
The news gave Foon Wah and Richard a distraction from their bitterness, and for Jason, it was the best escape.
To get from East Flatbush to Columbia, he had to walk half a mile, take a bus, and ride two different trains—a two-hour commute each way.
Decades earlier, Robert Moses had ignored a proposal to build a subway line down Flatbush Avenue, forever condemning the residents of East Flatbush to isolation.
But Jason didn’t mind the inconvenience.
The distance gave him an excuse to stay out late.
The night of the shattered bottle had taught him something.
Of course, there’d been a moment when he’d feared he’d fallen into some kind of trap.
That his father had conjured the son he’d always wanted—a man’s man, capable of fighting with his fists and toppling chairs to the ground.
And yet what ultimately had thrilled him that night was not confronting his father. It was locking him out.
After his mother had left the table, Jason had bolted all the house doors.
Three hours later, a summer storm had engulfed the neighborhood, and his father had rung the doorbell.
Jason had enjoyed disregarding it. He’d imagined his father collapsing, resigned, onto one of the wet chairs on the porch, sleeping there with his hat over his face.
Or maybe: walking to the subway, hoping to book a Midtown hotel, only to fall asleep on the train and ride it all the way to the Bronx and back. Like a bum.
But the fantasy had been short-lived. His mother had risen to admit his father.
Jason had stood at the top of the stairs and watched her: barefoot and frail, wearing her lilac pajamas and without her lipstick and blush.
A woman who had come across the world to serve others’ whims, to catch others’ spit.
Jason was indignant on her behalf, but in the weeks ahead, every time he tried to ask how she was feeling, she would change the subject, or nitpick, or send Jason to complete a chore.
She would never leave their father, this much was clear.
No matter how cruel he was, no matter how belligerent.
He hated how easily she accepted this mediocrity.
Now knowing the peace of a home without his father, he was loath to be home at all.
Matriculating at Columbia also gave him the opportunity to explore Manhattan on his own.
He frequented the standing room section of Avery Fisher Hall, spent hours roaming in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and attended performances of Chekhov and Ibsen in the little black box theaters of the cobblestoned West Village.
And he was not alone; people came to New York from all corners of the country and the world seeking songs, poetry, and music, craving a life of the mind.
Of course, the city was also bankrupt. He skirted around the men and women who wore blankets in lieu of coats, whose bodies smelled of urine and who wore the thinnest flip-flops on their swollen purple feet. He never stopped to tell strangers the time, and always avoided the last train car.