Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  I used to pray neurotically before bed. Dear God and Buddha, please keep my family safe and healthy and happy. I pray that Daddy is safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. I pray that Mommy is safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. I pray that Mei Mei is . . . I pray that Didi is . . . I pray that the cats are . . . Please keep all of us safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy.

  It helped assuage that sense of chaos I had as a child. Now? Not so much, it appears.

  Instead, I open Find My Friends several times a day to track each of their whereabouts. To know where they are is a comfort. Though my dad is missing, and J is always in one spot—the campus lab.

  My brother texts a compilation video of Jeremy Lin getting smashed, tripped, hit, and ripped on the basketball court without any flagrant fouls called for him. “He got a lot of Jeremy Lin . . . almost decapitates [him],” says the announcer in one. Then, Lin is slapped so hard in the face his nose bleeds. He continues to run for a few seconds before touching his nose and becoming visibly frustrated. A whistle is finally blown. Then, he’s hit as he approaches the hoop. “Did he get hit in the face again?” The announcer’s voice, with a snide lilt. “Looks like it,” the other responds. Oh, just the usual. Then another smack against his nose. Then he’s whacked in the head. He falls. He curls on the ground. He gets on all fours. He rises. He winces.

  I remember my dad on the ground, in front of the toilet. My mom would make him green tea in his favorite mug—the brown ceramic one with the two finger-size handles, like two ears on either side—and place it on the vanity. Close the door, he’d mutter if he noticed us watching.

  “Daddy’s a little sick,” she’d say. “Go back to sleep.”

  My sister and I get into it on the phone. I’m telling her she needs to call our dad more, and she is saying she does call him. She’s also busy, she has class and homework and she works on top of that. I’m saying what’s a phone call? What’s a half hour a week, can’t she make time for that? I’m sure she’s watching tons of Netflix and sitting around with her roommates and not always super busy doing something important. So just call Daddy during one of those times. She says it’s more like an hour or longer. I say, So what? She makes a loud, wordless noise and then screams, “You’re so controlling!”

  My mom now: “You can’t push her like that. You’re always on your father’s side, but Ling Ling doesn’t have the same relationship.”

  I think about the times when I was away at college and all of them would call me to recount a fight from each side. Mei Mei’s stuff out in the yard. Running away or being thrown out. Months of silence between her and our father. Once, they didn’t talk for half a year, despite living under the same roof.

  “Why don’t you tell Didi to call more?” says my mom.

  “Because he doesn’t listen!”

  “That’s true,” she says. “Maybe he learned the best way.”

  Chinese are imbued with the consciousness that each of us is only a link in a long life chain. The important thing is the family. What does it matter that one link shines more brightly than another?

  —Anna May Wong, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 1934

  My brother says everyone’s families are fucked up in their own way. Ours is nothing special.

  What a wise stance for being twenty years old, I think.

  When I ask if his future family will be fucked up, he says oh yeah, it for sure would be, which is exactly why he’s not having one.

  Now the reporter is calling, making me both hate and admire his persistence. He reminds me of what I once chased, what I could have been. I answer the phone. He launches into small talk, faking a longtime friend catching up—How have you been? Where are you living? Whoa, that’s a big change. What have you been up to?—that morphs into digging for the information he wants—I mean, what are you doing for work? Did you see my email and text? I give him short, clipped answers. I tell him yes, I saw his email and text, but he’s mistaken and I don’t know what he heard, but he must have gotten some bad information. I can’t be of help.

  “Oh, really? But somebody reliable told me you’re working for Facebook,” he says, in a condescending tone.

  “Who?”

  “Somebody who assured me you’re doing that work.”

  “Well, I’m not. Who was it?”

  He changes his tactic to bullying. “Are you sure? What’s the big deal? I’m guessing you signed an NDA, but you won’t even talk off the record? This could be a big story. It’s Facebook, it’s not like you’re loyal to them, are you? Come on, what’s the harm?”

  But I don’t budge. “No,” I say. “I don’t have anything to say.”

  I hear him typing in the background. Then he is silent for long enough that I think about hanging up on him. Finally he says, “Fine, get in touch if you change your mind?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” I say, and hang up. Why so much anger? I ask myself. But here’s a novel idea: a form of technology that would allow me to kick this reporter in the shin from across the country.

  J asks if it’s such a good idea to quit only four months in. I tell him it’s not a big deal, since it was a freelance gig, not a real job. I didn’t like it anyway. I will never put it on my résumé or ask them for a reference. It was soul sucking and I was a sellout and now at least I am not, technically, lying to that reporter. I’ll find other work.

  “But wasn’t it good for you to have something consistent to do?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Work to keep you busy. You’ve always needed work as long as I’ve known you.”

  “Well, maybe I’m evolving. Maybe I want to become something beyond work. Or maybe I deserve a break. And besides, there’s still the museum. Don’t worry about me,” I say. “When have you ever had to worry about me?”

  He looks at me with suspicion, then shrugs and says okay.

  Here, in part, an answer about Yamei Kin and her husband, from the San Francisco Call in August 1904:

  Superior Judge Hunt at yesterday’s noon hour granted a divorce in a case that has probably never found its equal in this city. It will probably shock certain women’s organizations which, according to the husband’s testimony, listened for a long time to the lectures of his wife, who was then the only Japanese woman holding a degree as a doctor of medicine from an American college.

  The plaintiff in the case is Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eca da Silva and the defendant Yamei Ken [sic] Eca da Silva. He was a Chinese interpreter employed by the Government. She is a graduate of a New York school of medicine and became sufficiently versed in the ways of doctors and women to gain a hearing before the clubs of her sex. Her husband was not “up to date,” according to his testimony yesterday, and she, declaring herself a “new woman,” left him. . . .

  When she returned to San Francisco Da Silva met her and asked her to live with him again, but she declined on the ground that she had lecture engagements to fill in the East.

  It’s unclear from the sentence whether the article’s author or her husband mistakenly calls Yamei Kin Japanese, instead of Chinese.

  But this much is clear: She wearied of him. He was not up to date. She declared herself a new woman and left him. She had better things to do than to live with him.

  “You always need a backup,” says my dad, now sounding his composed self. “Like in war. That’s why Chiang Kai-shek lost. No backup. And why the Americans lost in the Korean War. Well, technically, that war hasn’t ended. Because there was nobody to back them up to begin with.”

  “I thought you were talking about a backup plan for my work.”

  “Both. You need
a backup plan and backup power, like a generator when you lose electricity.”

  “Okay, I get that, but as for war, I don’t like to think of my life like that.”

  “You can learn from war, though, how to think abstract, strategize, win. You know what I always say. My way—”

  “Or the highway.”

  He laughs, that familiar high-pitched, breathy sound, like a cool breeze. “That’s right. You know, I will always back you up. I hope your bonehead does the same.” He pauses to think. His talking has taken a slower pace over the last couple of years, though he still talks as much, if not more. “There’s a very old Chinese book you could learn from, I don’t know the American title. It’s written by a famous general about war.”

  “Yeah, The Art of War. I’ve never read it. The only people I know who love it are white guys.”

  “You better catch up and learn then. That’s your history.”

  Instead of reading it in full, I look up Sun Tzu quotes.

  “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”

  “Great results can be achieved with small forces.”

  And this line of thinking again: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

  But upon further research, all appear to be diluted renderings. The closest thing I can find to the third is this, from an official translation by Lionel Giles: “Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat.”

  Watching J dance and wrestle with the dog, laughing and laughing. I have never felt more comfortable with another person. And our beginning was so strong. He was my first everything, including the first to whom I explained my entire family situation, and he is still the only. Of course I love him, despite this place, despite our differences, despite these changes. I could die now knowing that I have loved and been loved. I don’t need a backup plan, do I? We are not in the same situation, Yamei Kin and I, now, are we.

  He finally agrees to a kitten. More life, more anchors to this place. We go to the local SPCA and ask a young volunteer if we can bring the dog inside to test his reaction to cats. She agrees to our, as we soon learn, dangerous experiment. J takes the dog into a room and holds his leash tight. The volunteer and I carry kittens toward the room, but most fight back. They flail and scratch at us as soon as they see or smell the dog, and we all retreat. Two kittens make it into the room. The dog whines. He wags his tail. He does not look like he wants to kill. We bring the kittens closer. One shits right there in the volunteer’s arms. The other, a black one with a white patch on his chest, does not bristle or flinch. I crouch and inch him closer and closer, until the dog nudges his nose against the kitten’s face and licks the kitten’s ear. The kitten looks at the dog, then looks away.

  “Wow,” the volunteer says. “This one isn’t scared at all.”

  So he is the one we take with us in a little cardboard box.

  “We’re a happy family,” J sings during the drive home.

  In the matter of singing, it is worthy of note that the Chinese learn by ear; with but little practice, they sing the more common tunes and words with commendable accuracy, and take such pleasure in the exercise.

  —L. T. Townsend, The Chinese Problem, 1876

  But J and I have this in common: We can’t control our pitch and we remember lyrics to almost no songs at all. We sing, but what comes out of our mouths does not merit the praise of that verb.

  J also sings “Ebony and Ivory” to the cat and dog. This, however, makes me uncomfortable.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “They aren’t races,” I say. “They’re pets.”

  “I just meant that they’re literally black and white,” he says. He starts to sing again. “And they live, dog and cat, in perfect harmony.”

  I go out to the bars with people from J’s program, even though he stays home. He’s had a long week of twelve-to-thirteen-hour days and isn’t interested in staying out late with people he’s seen at school and in lab. But he says, Go, have fun, I know you need to get out of the house. I kiss him on the forehead and leave.

  But the scientists are hard to have fun with. They talk mostly of science, and to me they say things like “Is all of California that liberal?” and “What exactly do you do all day?” and “Are you considering graduate school?”

  Two drinks in and I have determined my night’s goal: find weed. I know J will appreciate it, too. It used to be a nightly activity for him in San Francisco, and now we’ve gone months without it. He will be happy with me if I can find it, all on my own, as he had done many times back home. (Wait, is that why things haven’t been great in Ithaca? Because we haven’t had weed? What an easy fix!) I squeeze through the crowd, weaving through, searching for the right kind of person. Then, while scanning the outdoor patio, somebody says beside me, “You look like you’re ready to pounce.”

  I turn and see a tall man with long dark hair and a cigarette in his mouth wearing a white T-shirt that suggests toned muscle underneath. Yes, this could work. I ask if he smokes. He looks at me like I’m an idiot. He waves his cigarette in front of his face. “Do you want one?”

  I decline, and clarify that I mean weed—does he smoke weed and would he know where I could get some. I reclarify that I don’t mean at this very moment, but more generally, to buy. To buy sometime soon. He nods and puts out his cigarette, then asks for my phone. Good job, I tell myself. This isn’t so hard. He has a nice face. Somebody comes from somewhere to slap him on the back. A small thrill. The exchange is over quickly; I say thanks and go back home, feeling accomplished.

  The next morning, in bed, I tell J about the weed guy, who put his name in my phone as Rob. J, like I predicted, is happy and asks when I will make the call.

  “Call him? I’m not calling him! I’m going to text.”

  “Hm, okay. Whatever works.” And like on all Saturday mornings, he leaves for the lab.

  Alone, I wonder how quick I need to be about initiating the transaction. I figure the sooner the better. Hey, this is the girl from the bar last night, I type out. Then I realize he may have met many girls at the bar last night. I try not to think about the fact that he looked like a guy who would meet a lot of women at a bar. Then I begin to hate myself for describing myself as a “girl” to some random guy, so I delete the whole thing and retype: Hey, I asked you about weed last night. Can you meet up? I’m free whenever.

  Then I delete the last sentence, so as not to sound too desperate. Rob texts back that he can meet in a couple of hours.

  I call J and update him on the entire process. “Shit, I wrote ‘weed’ in a text, is that really bad? Do drug dealers hate that?”

  J laughs. “It will be fine. Okay, I need to go back to work.” He is always calm. Laid-back. Not worried.

  “Wait, wait, wait. What if he calls the cops? Or what if he’s a psychopath? Should I bring the dog, just in case?”

  “Sure, bring the dog. I have to go.”

  “Okay, but if I go missing, the dog will be wandering around and somebody will call you and then you’ll know something bad has happened!”

  But he hasn’t heard this last plea because he’s already hung up.

  The drug dealer and I decide to meet at the Gimme! Coffee shop. On the way there, I rub the money in my pocket until it is warm. I think about a time in San Francisco when J went out with his labmates and didn’t come home when I’d expected. He wasn’t responding to texts or calls. It was past midnight on a weekday, unusual for him, and I worried. I tracked him on Find My Friends and watched his little blue dot move around the eastern parts of Golden Gate Park. Finally, after I’d envisioned all sorts of horrible scenarios, he texted that he was fine. He returned soon after and said he’d had an adventure. He’d gone into the park to find somebody who would sell him weed. (Why? Why didn’t you just ask your usual person? J shrugged and said he wanted it that night
.) He walked up to a group of bros, skinhead types, J called them. But they refused him, saying he looked like a cop. He’d started to bike home when a guy playing his guitar in some bushes called after J. The guitar-playing guy talked to J for a long time, about a friend who had been killed on the nearby street. The guy asked if J would watch his belongings while he went to do something for his friend. J said sure. (Why? I asked again. And all J could say was, He looked like somebody who would sell me weed.) The guitar-playing guy walked into the middle of the street and spun in circles, playing his guitar and singing. After he was done, he returned to J and said, You want weed? Follow me. The two of them biked for a while, through the park and out to some commercial building. (Did you know where you were? Again, he shrugged and said, Sort of.) They got off their bikes behind the building, then the guitar-playing guy threw J up against a wall. Are you a cop? Are you a fucking cop? J shook his head and said no. The guy patted him down. Okay, the guy said, satisfied. How much do you want? When the exchange was complete, the guy jumped on his bike and sped off.

  What if he stabbed you? What if he robbed you? Weren’t you scared? I asked.

  J said he was surprised when he got pushed and patted, but the guy was harmless.

  I told J to never, ever, ever do that again.

  He laughed. Don’t be mad, he said. He held up the bag of weed. It turned out fine.

  I arrive early and sit on the bench outside, waiting. The dog pulls like crazy whenever somebody walks in or out. I am too early. I wait for a long time and am certain Rob won’t show up. I consider going back home. I consider texting Rob that I’ve changed my mind, or that I got sick, or something came up and I can’t make it. But I need to decide quickly or else I might run into him as I’m walking back. A father and daughter approach, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Is your dog friendly?” the father asks. I say yes, and ask if his daughter wants to pet the dog. The daughter is pressed up against her father’s legs, shaking her head, but he holds her tightly in place and says it’s okay. He explains that his daughter is afraid of dogs, and that he, too, is a little afraid, because of the many wild street dogs where he’d grown up, but that he is trying to overcome this fear with and for his daughter. Go on, the dad says, and begins to nudge her toward the dog. The daughter tucks her chin into her chest and squirms, closes her eyes. The dog pulls forward. Both father and daughter shrink back. But the leash is tight, so the dog does not reach them. The father laughs. “See, he wants to meet you,” he says. “Go on, it’s okay.” It seems he is speaking as much to himself as to his daughter. The father reaches a hand out to the dog, slowly, cautiously. “See, it’s okay.” His voice wavers, but he lets the dog sniff his hand, then leans farther in and pets the top of the dog’s head. It reminds me of a time my father carried me down into our San Francisco home’s pitch-black crawl space. Don’t be afraid, he said. There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark. Then he let go of my hand and wandered off somewhere I could not see. Come back, I said. I cried. I closed my eyes, as though the darkness I put myself in would be more bearable than the darkness beyond.