Chapter 10: Giving Home Away

Chapter 10: Giving Home Away
The beginning of summer was always a special feeling. The feeling that school has just ended, and whatever happened has happened and will not happen again. It is a feeling of rebirth, of a fresh start. That morning I smelled the slightly sweet aroma of the dew coming off the freshly trimmed grass as the sun sat low in the sky slowly rising. I can still remember the chirps of the birds in the trees, beeping lazily as if they’ve just awoken as well. That morning my mom had driven us to the apartment buildings across the street from Wilson High School to pick up a junior high aged girl named Eileen and her younger sister Rebecca. As we drove home in my mom’s white Dodge Caravan down Colima past Schabarum Park after running a few more errands, I reached my hand out the window and tried to catch the wind, taking in the chilly morning as Eileen ran her fingers through my hair saying that she really liked boys’ hair because it was short and neat.

In the summer of 2000, when I was nine years old, my mom decided to start a Chinese school. At that point she was tired of being mistreated at various menial jobs that she had the past few years and decided to take a leap by setting up her own business. She, too, wanted a fresh start.

Over the course of a few weeks my mom met with families and children who were interested. We met a Taiwanese family with a toddler named Rika speaking her first words, and her older sister Emma, a six year old who sat in a corner and stared. We met another family that came over, with a six year old girl named Cat and her older brother Victor, who was my age. The parents seemed very finicky, pausing strangely to give a prolonged look at our shoe rack before taking off their shoes at the door. Victor was about to need glasses soon and his dad asked in Chinese if his son could try mine on for a few seconds. Victor gave me a disdainful look as I handed them to him and said in English, ugh dad, these glasses are dirty. As my mom spoke more with Cat and her parents, Victor and I went outside to the front lawn to toss a football around. He threw hard, as if he wanted to hit me. I hurled it back with the same force. The two of us tossed the ball silently, aggressively, without speaking, until I threw it so hard Victor took a few steps back and bumped into his parents’ car and the alarm went off. His dad came outside to turn it off, giving me a disapproving look. They dropped off Cat at our house the first week, but Victor did not enroll.

Mom set up two long folding tables in the back of the family room near the patio doors, the most brightly lit area of the house. On it, she had a stack of Chinese workbooks she had purchased in bulk the month before. Starting then, every day that summer Eileen, Rebecca, and I would learn Chinese, reading somewhat juvenile pieces of stilted dialogue from the workbooks and tracing Chinese characters from outlines in a four box grid with a large X shaped guide. Grandma would often chime in, teaching us etymology, word roots, and proper grammar in between sessions that she spent with Rika, showing her to count to ten, the names of colors, and basic words in Chinese. Mom spent sessions with pinyin flashcards reciting the basic phonetics of Mandarin while Cat and Emma repeated along, sometimes giggling at the sounds. During noontimes Grandpa would cook for all of us, sometimes making dishes such as curry chicken and potatoes, and other times making fried rice. Occasionally, Grandma made us green onion buns. At first, I loved it. I was often lonely and wished I had siblings. I didn’t yet know how quickly the sweetness would turn.

School had always been difficult, full of misunderstandings and encounters with often mean kids, but home was always a haven where I could play checkers with my grandma or ride bicycles with my grandpa. As a child I thought that home would always be my quiet place, not expecting the reality of suddenly living in a home with multiple other children. The noise scared me. Their yelling, the banging of hands against the walls, the thud of bags on the floor, the way the house shook as they ran downstairs. I didn’t think to keep my toys safely locked in my room until too late, when I caught the two six year olds tossing my things around. I always asked them to stop. They never did. I hit a breaking point one day when I was sitting in the kitchen with Grandma and heard the two complaining that one of my books had no pictures. As I walked over I found that they had thrown the book, pages down, on the floor where it lay looking like an injured bird. Angry, I told them not to do that. Emma asked why. Because it’s mine and I don’t want people touching it, I said. Why, she asked again. Why? She kept repeating why at every explanation I gave her yelled at her that she was a jerk. My mom came and pulled us apart. She told me to go practice piano.

Dana’s parents still had pool parties every weekend. But this summer as Edwin and I played pranks on one another in the water, Dana didn’t join in. Instead she sat quietly under the patio, engrossed in a book that had a boy with glasses on the cover. “You’ve never heard of Harry Potter?”, she asked. Dana had always been the cool one, the kid who showed me the new trends each year: Disney movies when we were five, Pokémon when we were eight. Now it was Harry Potter. That day she placed the first book into my hands. “What’s that one?” I asked, pointing at the thick tome she was holding. “Goblet of Fire,” she said. “I just got it. People lined up for hours. You can read it when I’m done.” The following week, whenever I wasn’t tracing Chinese characters, I was lost in Hogwarts, a world I longed to escape into.

Being a middle school student, Eileen was several years older than me. Outside of the Chinese workbooks we both had to complete, she also spent time working through her summer assignments, which she went over in a binder sitting by me whenever I practiced the piano. She said she enjoyed hearing me play. I liked talking to Eileen because she didn’t seem mean like the other “big kids”. She often asked me to show her whichever new pieces I had learned that week. As much as I loved spending time with Eileen, our budding friendship made me a little sad. It made me think about Jade, who used to be Little Big Sister, who now often spent family gatherings teasing me with the others if not excluding me completely. If things were different, could this have been a summer spent with Little Big Sis? Jade was not unkind all of the time. During those years we had some moments that were friendly, for example, during the school year after piano lessons when we would watch Thundercats and then Sailor Moon on Cartoon Network together. But as she aged into her tweens, those moments became fewer and fewer. Nonetheless, even as a nine year old, I clung tightly to those smaller moments, cursed with nostalgia from a young age.

One day as I was playing the piano, Eileen suddenly noticed ants all over my legs. As we slapped and brushed them off she suddenly yelled oh my god they’re all over you! The piano chair and the pedals were crawling with them. It turned out Emma had spilled Caprisun on the piano during her turn to practice, not telling anyone. As the sticky juice dried, it attracted the colony. “Why are you like this?” I shouted, angry at seeing one of my most sacred spaces defiled. She laughed and repeated my words back at me. I kicked the wall and let out a yell, at which point my mom grabbed me and started spanking as the other children laughed. Eileen pleaded with her to stop.

That summer, I noticed Grandma was spending less and less time with me. It started with the afternoons as during the midday lull, she began to tell the other children stories she used to tell me. In the evenings she spoke less as she ate, tired from teaching during the day. I began to long for the days when it was just Grandma and me, playing chess or folding airplanes, just to fill the time. It felt different to be a grandson when there were always other children around. I wondered to myself, why do I have to share my grandmother, as a nasty feeling began to grow in my chest. It spread slowly like poison, becoming a buzzing in my ears that rang all day, becoming something that even blocked out the sound of my piano. It was the first time I learned the feeling of jealousy.

I remember sitting angrily in my room, sulking, absentmindedly playing with a toy piano, poking out a tune stuck in my head with one finger. Years later I learned the song was Teresa Teng’s “The Moon Represents My Heart”, the most overplayed love ballad of our culture. At nine years old, I didn’t know its name, only that the melody carried all the bitterness I couldn’t name. I imagined my grandma and I underwater and I was reaching out my hand trying to hold onto her. But she faded away as I sank deeper into the depths below.

My dad had lots of random junk in the computer room. Floppy disks, CDs, bits of random wires and cables in boxes. Things he collected from here and there. Computers were something very new to him and he was extremely excited to have one. Imagine living through the Cultural Revolution, being sent to the countryside for mandatory farm duty, and learning about the internet two decades later. It was a universe of fascination to him. At first we had an internet provider called Juno with a strange logo of a beam shooting across a semicircle. Then we used America Online, but after a while my dad said they were scammers and canceled the service. He would still receive the free trial CDs in the mail, which he often gave me to play with as frisbees. There were other CDs he had in a case that he told me were not toys to be thrown around. In the CD case, we also kept education games such as Carmen Sandiego that I would play with as well. One of these disks had a big red label that said “CD-ROM TODAY, August 1995”. I think it might have been a demo disk that showcased new computer features and games released that year. I explored the content in the disk little by little, especially the games. They included a creepy story game told from the perspective of Frankenstein’s monster and my favorite, a flight simulator game called Fury3 where you had to shoot down evil alien ships on a faraway planet.

One day I was playing the flying game when Cat and Emma came into the room and watched. I let them because they seemed uncharacteristically calm as they sat by me, wide eyed and curious. I got bored of Fury3 soon since the demo only had a single level and started to look at what else was on the CD. One of the games, through a cutscene, told a science fiction story where the main character, a detective in a dystopian future, is captured by an evil terrorist who swaps faces with him. I found the story fascinating, but closed it as my grandpa called all of us to say that lunch was ready. I didn’t think much about the game until much later that night around 10 when my mom received an angry phone call from Cat’s dad. Cat had woken up crying because she had a nightmare about the story, and her father had called to complain. He asked to talk to me. When I picked up the phone, he called me a bad kid, a horrible influence on his daughter, and a nasty boy who liked to look at sick, perverted things on the internet. I later overheard him warning my mom to watch me closely because his work was handling juvenile hall cases and that I had the markers of a future criminal.

My mother is a brave woman. The first few years in America were not easy, and she refused to accept defeat. She refused a life of mediocrity. After living in the San Gabriel Valley for five years, she looked at Hacienda Heights and saw a generation of children growing up speaking a different language than their parents. She understood the power of words to connect generations, the potential of language to make or break familial bonds. The Chinese school would not stay in our house forever, eventually moving into a classroom at a nearby elementary school. She had taken on the herculean task of transforming her school into what is now a longstanding institution in the community. But I couldn’t see that then.

That summer, other children came into my home and broke what little toys I had. My house had no more hiding places. I had to share my grandma, share my grandpa. My mom was no longer my mom. It is a grim thing to surrender the soul of one’s home.