Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  We walk back through the celebration. J throws the card in a trash bin.

  “Let’s not live in Fall Creek,” I say.

  “That’s where the sublet is; that’s where we’re living right now,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say. “That’s, like, a ten-minute walk away. What the hell.”

  Is this an Ithaca thing?

  A festival held annually on the nineteenth of June by African Americans (especially in the southern states), to commemorate emancipation from slavery in Texas on that day in 1865.

  Back at the couple’s apartment, I tap another article, read more. “In essence, Juneteenth marks what is arguably the most significant event in American history after independence itself—the eradication of American slavery,” states the Smithsonian writer. “Today, 39 states and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth, although most don’t grant it full ‘holiday’ status.”

  “Huh, never heard of it before,” says J. “Wonder why we didn’t learn about this in school.”

  And that guy. Is this an Ithaca thing?

  No. Of course not. It only feels more acute in conjunction with the place’s newness and unfamiliarity.

  J turns off all the lights inside the apartment. I ask what he’s doing. Just wait, he says. He goes outside and returns with his palms cupped together. He opens his hands and inside is a blinking greenish-yellow dot. The first firefly I’ve seen in real life. It hovers up into the living room. We coo together as it blinks about. He calls it our magic lightning bug. He is trying to show me what is good here.

  And now, just as I am learning how to take longer breaks from this work, he goes. He is one of the few selected for a summer rotation, before most of his cohort arrive. For this, I feel proud, as though his success is partly mine. He starts in a lab that studies how intestines develop their winding shape, using chicken embryos as models. No more mice. I want to remember accurately what he is doing with his days.

  “So, you’re alone now,” says my mom. “How are you?”

  “Good. Just working and looking for housing and stuff.”

  I sit at the couple’s big dining table, round, like our old dining room table, but polished and used for its intended purpose. I stare out the kitchen window. In the neighboring backyard, a handyman sands, methodical and slow, a plank of wood. He moves from one end to the other in small circular motions.

  “Your new job is good?”

  “It’s freelancing.”

  “How much it pays?”

  “Thirty dollars an hour, but it’s part-time.”

  “Then is it enough?”

  The whir of the sander is muffled by the distance and the walls, but I can see the spray of fine wood dust coming off the plank, gathering in a thin layer on the stone beneath. I want to be that man, the one deeply involved in a singular task.

  “Supposedly there are graduate students who support whole families on their stipends.”

  “You will let him take care of you?”

  “No. This job is plenty. It’s cheap here. I’ll probably even save money.”

  “It’s good, then?”

  “It’s good because it’s easy.”

  “That’s not you, though, taking things easy.”

  Or I want to be the plank, waiting still and patient to be smoothed out. Or the wood dust, falling away from its former self.

  “It could be. I can be laid-back. I can be happy with just this.”

  “Yeah, right. You? Your boyfriend can help you be a little more laid-back. But you need to keep busy, or else who knows.” My mom laughs. I laugh, too, even though I wish she were not right. “I want to retire when I’m fifty-five, find a nice guy, get a fun side job for a little bit extra money,” she says.

  “What kind of side job? Isn’t your job already fun and easy?”

  “Not that fun. Faculty can sometimes be demanding. Why don’t you say anything about me finding a guy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want me to date. You think I have to be with your father.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t think you should be with him at all.”

  The handyman has stopped sanding. He wipes at his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. That is one thing I do not want to be, the dirty glove.

  “Have you talked to your father since you got there?”

  “Yes, on Father’s Day.”

  “Good. Have you sent him his social security money this month?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he has enough? He’s not spending it all on drinks? You should tell him not to.”

  I have the urge to hang up, or punch something. “Yes, okay? It’s all fine.”

  “Okay, I just want to make sure!”

  “You tell me you don’t want anything to do with him, but then you ask me all of these questions, and it’s very annoying to me!”

  “Geez, okay, okay.”

  The handyman has left; he has taken the plank of wood with him. My mom and I both don’t say anything for a while, then she asks what I’m having for lunch.

  “Frozen corn dogs. Ha ha.”

  “Yuck. You eat craps when your boyfriend doesn’t cook for you, huh? You should cook if you’re so bored. Or go for walks. Exercise. Hi, yes, you need to email the form. The ID number need—”

  “What? Okay, I guess I’m hanging up now. Okay, bye then.”

  “Can I talk to you later? I’m busy now.”

  I go through the couple’s drawers. There is a handmade scrapbook of the guy as a high school teen. One section is dedicated to photos of him playing water polo. Somebody has written in bold letters captioning them throughout: GREAT SHOT! and THE BIG GUY and ATHLETE OF THE YEAR!!! He looks a lot like J did in high school—chlorine-bleached hair, triangular molded body, sunburned pink skin. I call J, excited about the coincidence of them both being former water polo boys, but he does not pick up. Everybody is busy but me. Or, I am busy, but not in the same way. I spend the next hour, between work, reading a box of old birthday and holiday cards, then I flip through some notebooks on their shelves, though most are blank except for the first few pages of meaningless, irrelevant notes, then I recheck their bathroom cabinets, testing bottles of lotion and perfume, pretending that I am them, living here. Then, I remember that I do. Live here, I mean.

  Wafted by wind and steam, the Chinese are pouring into this country as the frogs did into Egypt. Like their prototypes, they not only cover the face of the ground, but find their way into dairies, laundries, and “dough-troughs.” But they are not a plague, at least in my opinion; and the fact that they continue to come, still finding ready employment and good wages, proves that the labor market is not yet overstocked. . . .

  Some of them will become rich, all will make a living, and many will possess themselves of homesteads and settle down as permanent occupants of the soil. The negro, if too thriftless to prevent or oppose this threatened invasion, deserves to decay away before a more energetic race. . . .

  . . . I shall have something to say about the Japanese. The refugees from that island kingdom, who lately sought asylum in this country, are making a good beginning. They have gathered their first harvest, and have tea plants more than an inch high. A promising class of their young men are studying English and the useful arts.

  —New York Times, “The Chinese Question,” August 11, 1869

  The Pacific railroads have a perfect right to employ Chinese labor, as have all other people. It is not a crime to do so, but a most natural and prudent thing. These railroads, however, employ all the skilled white labor they can get, and only use the Chinese for the hardest kind of drudgery such as white Americans no longer care to undertake. But they are not called upon to defend themselves in this connection. They are entitled to go into the labor market precisely as all the rest of the world does, and take the cheapest they can find. We all do the same thing. The Chronicle does it even while vilifying its neighbors for acting on its own ruling principle. The workingmen do it. The people
who are trying to get up boycotting organizations do it. And therefore we have a right to say that those who seek to make the employment of Chinese by any one a cause of offense are either hypocrites or fools. The laws of political economy are such that cheap labor will always command the market while it is procurable. That is why we are justified in demanding the exclusion of the Chinese. In a nominally free country, where no man has the least right to abuse his neighbor or to threaten him for employing whatever labor element he chooses, it is impossible to prevent the Chinese from interfering with white labor so long as they are suffered to come here.

  —Daily Record-Union (Sacramento), Saturday, May 13, 1887

  Excerpt one: Pit minority races against one another to benefit white supremacy. The creation of the model minority.

  Excerpt two, eighteen years later: This model minority no longer benefits white supremacy. Therefore, no more allowed in this country.

  A few blocks down the street is the tiny Gimme! Coffee shop, reminiscent of San Francisco, because everybody inside sits with their laptops. Plus there’s air-conditioning (not very San Francisco), so I, too, sit there for hours, aggregating. I also scroll through Petfinder for a dog and Craigslist for an apartment, send emails to strangers, sell ourselves as a nice, responsible couple. My boyfriend is a graduate student, I write. I work from home as a— I wonder how best to describe what I do, but cannot come up with a term that is correct and not nonsensical or long-winded, so I simply leave it as is: I work from home.

  The first time I saw a young couple’s home, I was an undergrad going to a friend of a friend’s housewarming party. It was in an unimpressive gray complex on the north side of campus. I trudged up the carpeted stairs expecting to see an average college apartment, the kind of place where kids play beer pong and put their feet up on wobbly chairs. The awe hit me hard. It was a stunning adult space, glittering with touches of the couple’s life together—potted plants, paintings on the walls, nice rugs. Plates of cheese and crackers rested on the coffee table. A bright woven blanket was draped effortlessly on the back of a big gray couch. The hosts poured wine into glass glasses. Their youth made it impressive—that they could saunter effortlessly ahead of the rest. I wondered how they afforded it, if their parents were rich, or if there was another way to access this life that I had yet to understand. They were an interracial couple, too, a white woman (and though I still thought of myself as a girl, and we were the same age, I saw her as distinctly older) and a brown Latino man. Hand towels, red-and-white checkered, hung from the silver oven’s handle. I watched the host wash his hands, then wipe them on one of the towels. That small gesture seemed to convey all I wanted at the time. An adult domestic life with quiet, sweetness, and peace.

  There are typically two paths available to the child of an unhappy marriage: unknowingly repeat the same offenses as your parents or deliberately go far off in the other direction to prove you will not be them.

  In the couple’s kitchen, I look through their multilevel spice rack. Things I’ve never considered using: dill weed, sage, celery seed, white truffle salt. “Why don’t you cook for him, since you’re home?” my mother said. But the thought of cooking exhausts me. It was a grand enough gesture of love, wasn’t it, to follow him here?

  “When you have the idea for what you want, you obsess and just do that without listen to anybody,” my mom says. “That’s you.”

  She says I did the same thing with J.

  So, too, did Salvador Roldan and Marjorie Rogers. The year was 1930. Like many people who want to get married, Salvador and Marjorie met, liked the look of one another, fell in love, and decided to spend their lives together. They went to the county clerk of Los Angeles County for a marriage license. The county refused. Salvador was Filipino American and Marjorie white, British American, and California’s anti-miscegenation statute had been in place since 1850. Originally, it banned marriages between “negroes and mulattoes” and “whites,” but in 1880, the state revised the statute to include “Mongolians,” in response to the influx of Chinese immigrants. Salvador and Marjorie brought their application to court. The basis for the case was a simple one of technicality and misclassification: Salvador Roldan argued that Filipinos did not fall under the category of “Mongolians,” but rather that of “Malay, Malaysian or Brown Race,” which was not listed in the statute, and therefore, legally, he had the right to marry Marjorie. The court agreed, and in its long-winded way officially determined, three years later, in Roldan v. Los Angeles County:

  In 1880, in a group that would compare very favorably with the average legislature, there was no thought of applying the name Mongolian to a Malay; that the word was used to designate the class of residents whose presence caused the problem at which all the legislation was directed, viz., the Chinese and possibly contiguous peoples of like characteristics; that the common classification of the races was Blumenbach’s, which made the “Malay” one of the five grand subdivisions, i.e., the “brown race,” and that such classification persisted until after section 60 of the Civil Code was amended in 1905 to make it consistent with section 69 of the same code. As counsel for appellants have well pointed out, this is not a social question before us, as that was decided by the legislature at the time the code was amended; and if the common thought of to-day is different from what it was at such time, the matter is one that addresses itself to the legislature and not to the courts.

  Salvador and Marjorie were married, though not as happily as they would have been years prior. One week later California revised its statutes to include “Malays” as another race banned from marrying whites.

  The white-haired woman behind the cash register swivels in her chair by pressing her puffy hands against the scuffed, dirty burgundy countertop, then opens her mouth. “Look at my teeth,” she says. “This one’s loose.” With a middle finger, she wiggles a gray upper molar. “Says she’ll take me to the dentist soon, my daughter.” She grins wide. Her hair is wavy, tall, and thin. Patches of pink scalp show through the cotton candy–like wisps.

  “Oh, that’s good!”

  “This tooth will fall right out if she doesn’t!” She coughs into the hand she is using to hold my change, which she thrusts toward me. “See you next time, honey.”

  Slotted for That’s So Ithaca. This town is a giant Reuben sandwich from an eager old white woman with loose teeth.

  On the phone with my dad, I say it’s scary not to know what I’m going to do, though I hope I’ll get used to it.

  “You think that’s scary? That’s not scary. What you really need to be scared of is number one, the U.S. or a European country waging war with China. Number two, terrorist attacks. That’s why I’m always telling you: avoid crowds. Number three is the destruction of the earth through global warming. Without Mother Earth, none of us matter anymore, none of us will be around, none of us can survive. That’s what’s truly scary. I’m glad I won’t have to live to see it happen. But you need to be prepared for all that.”

  “Okay, okay, Daddy. I have to go help cook dinner.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Pasta and salad.”

  “When you visit me,” he says, the way he’s started many sentences, “I’m going to ask you to bring me some special foods. Tabasco sauce, pepperoni, cheese, just something hard like Swiss or cheddar, and let’s see, what else, a good leather cleaner and conditioner, the stuff they have here isn’t high quality, it’s all toxic. Check where it’s made. Don’t get anything made in China. I need to clean my bag and boots. And those things your mother uses, the dusters, what are those called?”

  “Swiffer duster,” I say.

  “Yeah, bring a few of those.”

  “Okay, well we can talk about it again when I’m actually coming. I need to settle down here first,” I say.

  “How’s the bonehead liking school?”

  “I think he likes it. He’s busy. He’s at work from, like, seven to six or seven.”

  “Good. Working hard is good for
someone like him. Tell him that he needs to be serious about what he’s doing, study, prove himself, and he’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about you?” he asks, as though he’s forgotten what I’ve just told him and his lecture about my being scared. Then I have the fear that he is losing his memory.

  “I just said,” I say. “We just talked about it. Don’t you remember?”

  “Right, right. You’re worried about work, yes, I heard you. I meant, what about you and New York. You like it?”

  “It’s fine. But I really have to go now. Love you,” by which I mean it’s time to hang up now, meaning we’ve talked for long enough, meaning I’m done with this conversation, meaning I’m tired and need a break. And yes, also, I love you.

  I grew up hearing his stories of survival. He beat tuberculosis as a child through willpower and a diet of pure onion and garlic. His father threw him out of the third-story window of his home. He landed with only scratches and bruises, thanks to his resilient body, plus tree branches slowing his fall. He and his brothers jumped on and off moving Shanghai trams so as not to pay the fares. They would narrowly avoid getting hit by cyclists and cars. As a taxi driver in New York, he escaped several mugging attempts. He had a gun is how. In Hong Kong, he fought off robbers in his apartment by throwing one off the balcony. That man died. It was an unfortunate circumstance. He had asked them to leave; he had warned them. All those Hong Kong boys made fun of him for not speaking English or Cantonese. The fights were numerous. Six months later, he spoke better than them all. In San Francisco, he raced cars on the hills and spun out, almost crashing to his death. Yes, he and his friends were reckless and wild, but they knew how to be young and alive. Just like in life, he bounced around, but he always walked away. Even with a full mouth of shattered glass.

  Some stories I knew to be true. Some I considered plausible. And others, I brushed off as gross exaggeration. But every time I wondered, How did I, so cautious and fearsome, descend from somebody like him?