The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read online

  DORETTA LAU

  HOW DOES A SINGLE BLADE

  OF GRASS THANK THE SUN?

  My dragoons and I were gathered to discuss our plans for neighbourhood domination. Yellow Peril, the Chairman, Suzie Wrong, Riceboy, and I, the Sick Man of Asia, converged every Friday night to chop suey like a group of triad bosses. Chingers, all of us. Slanty-eyed teenage disappointments with no better place to haunt but the schoolyard near the abode of my ma ma and ba ba.

  Tags covered the walls of our institution of mediocre learning. Every overzealous territory marker in the area had hit the walls like vicious dogs, making it difficult to discern that the school had once been grey. The poor spelling that appeared in most of the graffiti was evidence of the region’s subpar education system; the choice was not a self-aware homage to hip hop influences. To one-up all the noddies and ain’t-gonna-everbees, last winter the Chairman had stencilled OBEY MAO on the basketball court blacktop. He even included an image based on the portrait of Mao at Tiananmen Square, but the only thing that looked right in the Chairman’s version was Mao’s giant mole, located on his chin. Some of the neighbourhood children thought the tag said OBEY YAO; they had a rather limited knowledge of history, no respect for our people’s illustrious past.

  The Chairman and I had a re-education program for the neighbourhood youths, which consisted primarily of lectures and rigorous beatings. We enjoyed thrashing sense into the ignorant youngsters. The Chairman elected to go the Bruce Lee way of the empty hand, while I preferred the traditional tools of corporal punishment. Nothing pleased me more than placing a dunce cap on an eight-year-old simpleton’s head while making jokes about dimwits and slow learners and applying the strap to tender hands. Riceboy took offence to this, which was why he refused to partake in the re-education scheme – he had been subjected to ESL classes during elementary school despite his fluency in the language of the colonizer.

  Anyhow, the stupider the children were, the harder we would hit them. The Chairman and I made the little noddies stand in urine-stained corners, holding their ears, while we unleashed our fury upon them. No mercy for the retards, either. The Chairman didn’t stand for any PC bullshit. “We’re equal opportunity,” he once said, while smacking a child whose IQ was reported to be in the low seventies. “Retards are kids too. Why should we make them feel lesser than their fellow nose-picking classmates? They should be included in all the reindeer games. As you know, I’m anti-exclusionary policy.”

  My own mantra while administering lashings with the feather duster was, “I’m doing this for you, not for me.” This was my ma ma’s favourite phrase, and she was a wise woman. Anything good enough for me was good enough for that lot of simpletons and punks. From time to time I considered asking my ma ma to etch those very words on my back so I could have my own version of the story of Yueh Fei, one of my favourite heroes of Chinese history. I imagined that, like him, I was on a mission to save my country.

  On this particular Friday night, we were gathered without an agenda. The previous week we had screened Hero and The Emperor and the Assassin, much to the delight of the Chairman, who believed in the first emperor’s concept of tian xia. On this point he and Yellow Peril differed. Peril’s family was Taiwanese and she believed with occidental-eyed earnestness that someday Taiwan would “liberate China from Communism.”

  At the end of that evening, Riceboy and I had to physically restrain Peril – she was ready to get all assassin on the Chairman. I have to say, touching her arm got my heart beating all allegro-like, but I wasn’t ready to act on those feelings.

  This week, a showdown between me and Riceboy was playing out. Riceboy was getting ready to chop friend because I had said that Johnnie To had surpassed John Woo as an action director.

  “You have to admit that John Woo has the most ging shoot-outs,” Riceboy said, adjusting the giant gold chain around his neck.

  “I’m not dismissing Woo,” I said. “I often dream of the day he remakes Le Cercle Rouge with Tony Leung Chiu-wai as the Alain Delon character and Fatty Chow as the alcoholic marksman. It’s just that –”

  “Are you still trying to get the whole Fatty Chow thing to catch on?” Suzie asked. “Chow Yun-Fat is famous in the West now. People know who he is. He’s been in a zillion Hollywood films.”

  “The A Better Tomorrow years are still upon me,” I said in my defence, even though I could sense that the Chairman was growing bored of our conversation. He considered the Cantonese cinema a bourgeois diversion and refused to acknowledge its existence.

  “The Bulletproof Monk years, more like it,” Riceboy scoffed.

  Suzie Wrong started girl-talking with Yellow Peril separate from the group. I thought I heard my name, so I leaned in a fraction, but they were speaking at such a low decibel that I could not eavesdrop. I wanted to agitate Suzie Wrong, all ninety pounds of her. I wanted to cause something of a scene so that Yellow Peril would engage with me, even if only to defend Suzie. So, for lack of Einstein conversation, I started water-torturing Riceboy on his nom de guerre.

  “Why’d you choose such a dickless name?” I said, spitting on the ground with gusto, just like I’d seen those coolie-types and fresh-off-the-boats do in Middle Kingdom Town. I was practising to be the best possible Chinaman I could be, embracing the vices as well as the virtues with equal dedication.

  “The Sick Man of Asia? How’s that any better?” Riceboy hiked up his giant pants, which were riding so low they would have revealed his boxer shorts, except he was wearing a T-shirt that nearly reached his knees. He was taller than me and had a twenty-five-pound advantage, but his style choices were a definite handicap in a fight.

  “It’s a reclamation,” I said. “I’ve taken the slang of the West and altered the meaning for my own usage, thereby exercising a certain mastery over the language of the colonizer. So I ask again, why’d you choose such a dickless name?”

  “Chigga, what?” Riceboy raised his fists at me.

  “Why do you have to emasculate him?” demanded Suzie Wrong. Apparently she had been listening to us the whole time, despite her side conversation with Peril. ‘You say dickless as if it were an insult.”

  It took the kind of willpower it takes to wake up every morning before dawn to tend a rice field to keep from smiling. I had her attention, which meant I had Yellow Peril’s as well. My heart beat faster, as if I’d won a giant stuffed animal doing something manly at the carnival.

  “Yeah, Sick. I don’t feel the lack,” Yellow Peril chimed in, thrusting her pelvis forward. I noticed that she was wearing a very fetching pair of knee-high boots. I wanted to get up in her lack, so I feigned interest in her words. I nodded.

  The Chairman looked at me slantways. Even in his pyjama-like costume he stank of authority. I tolerated his propaganda mongering because he meant well. Our views on the Motherland differed, but we lived in Lotus Land, so that was the tit we had to suck on. No use in raging over petty details and ideologies, especially since the Chairman believed that Riceboy and I were colonized dogs who were resistant to the Chinese voice of reason. The Chairman always had the advantage – his family was from the Mainland, while my family, as well as Riceboy’s, hailed from Hong Kong.

  “The name fits with the nomenclature, comrade,” the Chairman said.

  Finally, Riceboy spoke. He opted to unleash his flawless Cantonese. “I hope your sons are born without asses.” The ultimate curse.

  I spat on the ground and held back a sigh. Yes, I had insulted his manhood, even though I knew from experience how difficult it was to be a yellow man in the new world. I should have known better. Yet, I resented his words – I had insulted him as an individual while he had insulted my family to be. But instead of confronting him, I opted to redirect the evening.

  “Silencio,” I said. “Order, order, and all that. What is our business this fine spring night?”

  “Chaos and destruction,” said Yellow Peril. The way she said it made me worship her all the more. I started imagining what she looked lik
e naked. I wondered if she had freckles on her tits, or if she had funny tan lines from her bikini.

  “Excellent,” I said, snapping out of my daydream. “What to destroy, now that is the question.”

  “No pillaging,” insisted Riceboy, tugging on the waistband of his jeans.

  “That’s something I can’t guarantee, Liceboy,” I said, cooliefying my English, still a little sore that he’d cursed my unborn children.

  Last week, to divert attention away from the feud between Peril and the Chairman, I had suggested we trespass upon the Riceboy family laundry. I thought we could smash a couple of stereotypes in the process. Riceboy did not find this funny in the least. He told me that my ideas were stupid. Ideas. As in, all of them, not just this particular one. Yeah, he was sore about the whole thing, so sore that he had become a festering week-old wound.

  The laundry business had existed for three generations. It had history, the kind that inspires Lotus Land novelists to fill reams of paper with stories featuring multigenerational conflict and politically correct resolution. Riceboy’s parents thought that he would take over once he completed an MBA. One thing about him that I envied: his clothes always looked clean and neatly pressed, even if they were a bit roomy.

  The Chairman sensed tension between us and decreed, “Let’s make like SARS and spread.”

  So we got in Riceboy’s rice rocket – a vehicle recognizable at a hundred paces because of its magnificent spoiler and dozens of anime figurines populating the ledge next to the rear window – and he rickshawed us through the wet Lotus Land streets.

  “Let’s go to Middle Kingdom Town,” Suzie suggested.

  Riceboy floored it. He was excellent behind the wheel, a regular Tokyo-drifting god, which was why I had appointed him our official driver months earlier. Also, he was the only one of us who didn’t have to ask his parents permission to borrow the family car.

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at our destination. Middle Kingdom Town was crowded, a real picture of humanity. There were the coolies, the FOBs, the Lotus Land-born, and the tourists. Oh, how I detested the tourists. They looked for authenticity in a place that could not provide it. Middle Kingdom Town could not stand in for the Motherland. My dragoons and I knew this well. But there were fools who thought that thousands of years of culture could be compressed into the poorest neighbourhood in the city.

  As we walked down Pender, I noticed Scott Wilson, who is sick with yellow fever, standing next to hundreds of little toys. He was flirting with the girl selling them. I imagined he was complimenting her camel toe, saying, “Baby, I love how tight your jeans are. Let me give you herpes.”

  “Hey, three-inch egg roll boy!” he shouted when he saw me. He grabbed his crotch and made a big production of insulting me. The beads in his Buddhist bracelet clattered. For a moment I thought he was going to whip out his penis and a measuring tape to prove his worth in inches. Lucky for all in the vicinity of Middle Kingdom Town, he kept his little boy in his pants.

  Scott’s hostility was deep-rooted. The situation was this: last month he asked Suzie Wrong out on a date. Well, he asked her for a lot more than that, but I’m a gentleman and not some gossip-mongering auntie hunched over a mah-jong table, so I’ll stick to the date euphemism. Suzie had no interest (“Not even if I had AIDS and no one else wanted to touch my sick ass,” she confided to me later) and told him as politely as she could, no. Then he said, “It’s in your Asian genes to be a whore or mail-order bride or work at a massage parlour.” “You forgot about nail-salon technician,” she deadpanned, not losing her cool for a moment. Scott nodded, thinking that he had scored points with Suzie. He was the biggest simpleton that we knew, dimmer than poor Edward Yip, who had suffered some raging fever as an infant and processed thoughts at the pace of a dial-up internet connection.

  When I heard about this incident, I threatened to de-man Scotty boy and make a Rice Queen out of him. I told him that he was cruising for a Bobbitting. This took him a day to decipher because he didn’t have any older sisters who remembered with filtered-water clarity the current events of the nineties. When he finally figured out what I’d meant, after some sleuthing on the internets, he chose to put a brick through the windshield of Riceboy’s rice rocket with a note attached that said YOUR CHINK ASS IS SO DEAD. “Sorry, Riceboy,” I said when I saw the damage. “I guess we all look same.”

  “Hey, villain,” I said to Scott, ignoring the insult to my manhood. “Confucius say diu lei lo mo.”

  Scott looked confused. No amount of studying Suzie Wrong’s ass could prepare him for non-English insults. None of the other Chingers liked him, so he didn’t know the choice swears of any dialect.

  “Whatever, egg roll boy,” he muttered, unable to produce a fresh insult. “Ching chong ching chong, motherfucker.” The expression on his face was comical. He seemed confused and afraid and violent and entitled all at once. His mouth was agape. The girl at the toy stand shot me an amused glance. She knew the mother tongue. My dragoons whooped. Victory! We sauntered past, and stepped into the Noodle Shop.

  Once inside, we got our own table. No sharing for us since we were five. The waitress came up to us and said, “What do you want?” No “hello.” No “how are you tonight?” This was how things were done in Middle Kingdom Town. The masochist in me enjoyed this treatment very much. Plus, we could get away with tipping far less than fifteen per cent.

  I ordered a red bean ice and fried egg sandwich, Suzie had a half-and-half and dumplings, Peril wanted fish balls and noodles, the Chairman refused to eat in public, and Riceboy, well, he had fried rice and a Diet Coke.

  “What’s wrong with sugar?” I asked.

  “Chigga, what?” Riceboy glowered at me.

  “You heard me. What’s wrong with sugar?” I hit his can of Diet Coke with a pair of chopsticks.

  “Why you have to be that way, son?”

  “Your chigga accent does us no favours,” I said. “Why do you have to appropriate another culture when you speak? We have our own trials and tribulations to draw from. We don’t have to pilfer the pain of others in order to achieve some kind of authenticity.”

  The food arrived, ending the conversation.

  I was hard on Riceboy because I loved him like the brother I didn’t have – I had two older sisters. My parents tried very hard to have me, precious son, keeper of the family name. Or so they said, but they seemed rather disinterested in me. It was as if they had exhausted their all-star parenting skills on my sisters. One was a doctor and the other a lawyer. Suffice to say, they were prime specimens, a credit, as it were, to the race. That’s what our neighbour said last year. She’s ninety, so instead of leaving a bag of burning dogshit on her front porch, I forgave her for being an ignoramus.

  I looked around the table. Yellow Peril was slurping up her noodles with gusto. Riceboy was shovelling rice into his mouth like a champion competitive eater, while Suzie Wrong took big gulps of her drink. The Chairman looked on as if he was posing for a painting. I was poking at the red beans in my glass. We had so much potential, but sometimes it seemed as if we would amount to nothing. It was clear – my dragoons and I needed a little structure in our lives. We needed to achieve a goal.

  “We must do something tonight,” I said. “We need an activity.”

  “Cat burglary!’ Yellow Peril suggested.

  “Revolution,” the Chairman said.

  “What we need, dear friends, is a heist,” I said.

  “What about the mural?” asked Yellow Peril. There was a mural down by one of the beaches that we wanted to paint over. We talked about doing this at least once a month. The mural depicted the joys of colonial life, roughing it in the wilderness, and the triumph of the settlers over the natives. We wanted to remove the near-naked depictions of First Nations people (the region was far too cold for the skimpy traditional costumes pictured, of this I was almost sure) and paint moustaches on all the settlers.

  “We don’t have any paint,” I said.

  “There�
�s a ton of leftover paint at my house,” Suzie said. “My parents just painted the kitchen. There should be enough left for our purposes.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  We paid the bill, leaving a ten per cent tip, and walked out onto the sidewalk. The air was cool and smelled clean, like rain. It was a perfect Lotus Land night.

  We got in the rice rocket and sped toward Suzie’s house. The thing about Suzie is that her surname is Wong, but her first name isn’t really Suzie. Her parents are not so lacking in English skills or understanding of Western popular culture to give her the same name as a fictional hooker.

  When we reached the Wong residence, I gave out a series of commands. “Suzie, show Riceboy and the Chairman where the paint is. They’ll carry it back.”

  The three left the car. My plan had worked. I was alone with Yellow Peril.

  “So, Peril, did you just get your hair cut?” I asked, brushing a lock of hair away from her face. I knew the answer, because I had overheard Peril telling Suzie all about her genius Japanese stylist.

  “Yesterday,” she said, touching her hair. I noticed that she had on a bright red lip gloss that made her mouth look like a delicious hard candy.

  “You look fetching,” I said. I was all ready to move in for the kill, to lean in and kiss her shellacked shiny lips, when Riceboy threw the door open.

  “Am I interrupting something?” He smirked knowingly, and slid into the driver’s seat. He let a big fart rip and it had the unfortunate characteristics of being both loud and stinky.

  I sighed. Peril opened the door to get some air. I really had to mend my relationship with Riceboy, or he would go around festering and foiling all my plans. If I didn’t do anything, he would continue on like this, acting as if he was just goofing things up by mistake, all the while pulling up his pants. There would always be an edge of malice in all his dealings with me if I didn’t apologize in some way.