We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “Keep going,” said Abby.

  “A little help,” said Sue.

  “ ‘Get along with you now, clear this place,’ ” said Abby. She held the book up for the folks in the back to see their parts.

  “ ‘Oh, is it you, Marshal,’ ” said Becca. She recited the lines as if she’d just been poisoned and had lost all feeling in her body. “ ‘I thought sure you be the Devil comin’ for us. Could I have a sip of cider for me goin’-away?’ ”

  “ ‘And where are you off to?’ ” said Abby.

  Sue scrunched up her face again. “ ‘We goin’ to Barbados, soon the Devil gits here with the feathers and the wings.’ ”

  “Buffalo wings sure sound good right about now,” said Abby. She tossed the rest of her tomato out the window. Who knows what she expected to happen, but the thing splattered on the windshield of a parked Ford Fairmont. For some lucky driver, trick or treat had come early. As le Splotch might say, c’est la vie. We were driving through Danversport where the Yacht Club was located. In the distance, you could see the boats bobbing on the shining water, their masts a congregation of middle fingers.

  “Your line, Abby,” said Becca.

  “ ‘Oh? A happy voyage to you,’ ” she replied.

  “Step aside,” said AJ to Becca. She threw her braids over her shoulder and showed us how it was done. “ ‘A pair of bluebirds wingin’ southerly, the two of us!’ ” she cried. Sue tried not to show she was impressed. You had to admit AJ actually made this stuff sound believable. “ ‘Oh, it be a grand transformation, Marshal!’ ”

  Thanks to AJ’s performance, we were starting to get into it. “ ‘You best give me that or you’ll never rise off the ground. Come along now,’ ” said Abby, grabbing at an imaginary bottle of cider.

  “ ‘I’ll speak to him for you, if you desire to come along, Marshal,’ ” said Sue.

  “ ‘I’d not refuse it, Tituba,’ ” said Abby, “ ‘it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.’ ”

  “ ‘Oh, it be no Hell in Barbados,’ ” said Sue. She was fully revved up now, a Korean Sir Laurence Olivier working the craft. “ ‘Devil, him be pleasure-man in Barbados, him be singin’ and dancin’ in Barbados. It’s you folks—you riles him up ’round here; it be too cold round here for that Old Boy. He freeze his soul in Massachusetts, but in Barbados he just as sweet and—’ ”

  And so we rode the rest of the way to Salem in the company of two accused witches and one gentleman of the law, all seven of us crowded into the Panic Mobile and yapping away about the Old Boy. Despite our best efforts to help, Sue was probably still boned, though maybe not as boned as when we’d started. What’d she expect when she tried out for the drama club? There was a reason why folks didn’t compete in a fall sport and go out for a part in the fall play. But this was proving to be an unusual year. Who knew? Maybe for the first time ever the undoable would become doable.

  “ ‘Take me home, Devil, take me home,’ ” Sue screeched. We all nodded our support. Act 4 was slowly but surely coming together, Sue’s Tituba rising off the page. You had to give the Devil his due. By the time we pulled up at Salem High, our minds were far away from the game at hand. We all just wanted to be in Barbados already.

  * * *

  —

  It was only at the Gathering a few weeks back that Sue first confessed she’d landed a part in the fall drama club’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Marilyn Bunroe had been safely tucked away in the earth, our clothing-optional dance party slowly winding down. We were in the process of gathering up the evidence that we’d been there, tools and cigarette butts and the stinky stub of Little Smitty’s cigar, the tire tracks from Girl Cory’s convertible unfortunately permanently etched in the grass.

  “Guys,” said Sue Yoon. “Guess who landed a part in The Crucible?”

  “What’s a crucible?” asked Becca Bjelica. Like most of us, she hadn’t gotten fully naked, as taking off all of her bras would have been a hassle.

  “Technically it’s a kind of kettle where you heat stuff up superhot,” said Heather Houston, “but metaphorically it’s a situation that tests your character.”

  “That doesn’t really answer the question,” said Jen Fiorenza. In the glow of the Harvest Moon and the wake of our various carryings-on, the Claw looked positively postcoital, like It was ready to spoon.

  “It’s a play the drama club’s putting on in December,” said Sue. “And yours truly is none other than Tituba.”

  “Holy crap!” gushed Heather.

  “Yeah, the state championship’s December 8th,” said Abby, obviously much concerned. “How’re you gonna pull that off?”

  Sue began to explain her plan. “If we make it to States—”

  “When we make it to States,” Jen roared.

  “When we make it to States,” Sue continued, nonplussed, “I’ll play Tituba at the Thursday-night opening. Then my understudy can take Friday when we’re off kicking ass in Worcester. I’ll swoop back in for Saturday night and the Sunday matinee. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”

  “Cool. Tituba’s the best character in The Crucible,” Heather said. “If I had a time machine and could go back and talk to famous people during important historical moments, she’d be on my list.”

  “What about Jesus of Nazareth or the Big Man upstairs?” said Julie Minh, her finger pointed up. It was as if as midnight approached, she was reverting to a simple country girl dressed in rags with a handful of mice for footmen.

  AJ Johnson was trying to hide her skepticism. “Why?” she asked Sue, ignoring Julie Minh’s religious concerns all together. In general, drama club wasn’t a place where you saw too many brown faces. Actually, you usually saw absolutely none, even when they were doing stuff like Show Boat, which is why the year before had brought the world pasty Charlie Houlihan standing shirtless and oiled up onstage as he belted out “Ol’ Man River.” AJ suspected Sue had been cast as a slave because somebody figured same same, close enough. When she was student council president, she’d pass a resolution that the drama club would have to put on the freaking Sound of Music every year.

  “Nobody knows if Tituba was black or an indigenous woman,” Heather added. “Yeah, she lived in Barbados for a while, which is where the Reverend Samuel Parris buys her before he brings her back to Salem Village, but she could’ve been a native person who was enslaved.”

  “Fascinating,” yawned the Claw.

  “Zip it,” said Heather testily. At the reprimand, the Claw momentarily wobbled. We all put on our thinking caps as Heather’s tone seemed to require. “Imagine,” she instructed us. For a moment the hot-pink frames of her glasses seemed to be glowing. “Just a couple of miles from here a group of teen girls who had nothing better to do than make butter and wash all the bedding by hand used to hang out in the kitchen of the Salem Village parsonage to hear Tituba tell stories about what seemed to them to be the paradise of Barbados.” We could feel the excitement ramping up in Heather’s blood. Spontaneous lectures like this were why we sometimes called her the Professor. “Nobody knows for sure what happened, but it’s possible Tituba showed them a thing or two she’d picked up in the islands, like how to predict who your husband will be or at what age you’ll get married.”

  “And how’d that work out for them?” said Mel Boucher. Judging from le Splotch’s shit-eating grin, the question was purely rhetorical.

  Collectively we felt Heather deflate a little. “Nineteen people ended up hanging plus two dogs got shot,” she admitted. “Oh, and a man got pressed to death.” Still, you had to hand it to Heather Houston. She could always find the silver lining. “But for several months, this band of teen girls were the most powerful beings in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

  “Look,” said Sue. “Long story short, I was born to play Tituba, and I’m gonna make it work.”
She slipped her shirt back on. Of the eleven of us, she was the only one who’d taken it all the way, doing a series of naked cartwheels around the field. The whole time she was gallivanting about, we could feel Boy Cory’s face burning as he tried to look anywhere but where she was.

  Come to think of it, in the moonlight, Sue had looked particularly resplendent, like one of those fish living at the bottom of the sea that secretes its own bioluminescence. Yeah, it was an apt metaphor for both her and Tituba. One was a teen girl constantly sticking her finger in the eye of the model immigrant community she was a member of. The other was an enslaved woman ripped from her people. Through circumstance, they were both forced to rely on their imaginations to show the world they contained legions and were not the one-dimensional plot devices the world—and sometimes even us, their friends—took them for.

  * * *

  —

  Look, it’s simple. When she was only 365 days old, Sue Yoon decided when she grew up, she’d be anything she goddamn wanted to be. Then came the hard part: convincing other people there was more to her than just Brainy Asian Girl.

  Sujin Yoon was born in Busan but celebrated her doljanchi in a tiny garret apartment in Montreal’s McGill ghetto. The only celebrants present were Mr. and Mrs. Yoon plus young Wooshik, whose anglicized name was Thomas. At the age of four, Thomas was already making various improvements around the apartment, mostly involving taking things apart and putting them back together; though when he did, said things often worked better than they had. When the baby’s first year arrived, Mrs. Yoon cooked up the miyeok she’d smuggled back from Korea into miyeok-guk, seaweed soup. A table was heaped with traditional Korean foods. As a finishing touch, red bean cakes were scattered around the apartment in the four cardinal directions because apparently that’s what auspicious winds need to enter a household. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Yoon, in addition to inviting auspicious winds into one’s home, red bean cakes lying around also invite in the common house mouse.

  At the doljanchi, Sue’s parents dutifully bowed their heads to the Korean birth goddess Samshin for her help with the pregnancy and delivery. Then Sue was placed on a blanket and surrounded by various objects, which nine times out of ten you’d never put in reach of a baby unless you wanted to practice the Heimlich on your child. According to tradition, whichever item Sue reached for first would determine her future. The family crowded around and held their breath. Mr. Yoon had studied his way up out of the rice fields of Busan. He was working on a master’s in structural engineering at McGill. Secretly he wished Baby Sujin would pick the calligraphy brush, which meant she’d grow up to be a great scholar. Having remembered times of hunger in postwar Korea, Mrs. Yoon was hoping the baby would choose the rice bowl, signifying that little Sujin’s belly would always be full and that she’d always know abundance in her life. Thomas was himself drawn to the colorful bills from Korea arranged on the table. He didn’t know how much they were worth, but he found the colors aesthetically pleasing. At his own doljanchi three years earlier in Busan, he’d picked an apple an aunt had carelessly left lying around. When his aunt pried the glossy red fruit out of his fingers, he’d cried.

  Like her brother before her, Sue chose (d) none of the above. She was one year old and ten thousand miles away from the old country. The West was her oyster, and as everyone knows, you need grit to make a pearl. With a look of intent, she reached deep into her mother’s hair and pulled out a single bobby pin. She held it up in the light, brandishing it in her fat little fist like a conductor’s baton.

  “She’ll be a hairdresser?” ventured Mr. Yoon.

  “No,” said Mrs. Yoon happily. “She’ll be a traditionalist. Someone who stays in her place.”

  “No,” said Thomas in English. He took the bobby pin from his sister’s chubby fist and began to bend it into various shapes for the baby’s consideration. A triangle, an L, a diamond. When he made it into a star, Sue gurgled contentedly, a stream of clear drool running down her chin. And so it was decided. Sue Yoon would be anything she wanted to be. She would contain multitudes.

  Actually, in hindsight, the malleability of the bobby pin explains a helluva lot. A few years later Mr. Yoon relocated the family to Cambridge in order to pursue a Ph.D. in architecture at MIT. Newly Americanized, Thomas kept his eye on the prize from day one. Talk about focus. The same could not be said of his baby sister.

  Poor Sue Yoon, girl of a thousand faces! In the Yoon clan, Thomas was the bright and shining star. Thomas’ Korean was positively Confucian, Thomas’ English immaculate, Thomas’ French magnifique. Thomas played three sports, Thomas mastered two instruments, Thomas was captain of the debate team, Thomas founded the Multicultural Club, in middle school Thomas built a stationary bicycle that powered a small black-and-white television. It was Thomas’ TV-bike that saved his little sister’s life.

  Sue would come to think of her existence as having two distinct periods: BTT and ATT—Before Thomas’ Television and After Thomas’ Television. More and more she was having trouble remembering the Before.

  Life BTT was a fairly regimented undertaking. Outside the Yoon home was a young and wild continent called America where children did things like ride around on two wheels and run screaming under a garden hose when it got hot while spending each summer day outside until the streetlights came on. But behind the closed doors of 184 Orchard Lane the world was different. Life inside Orchard Lane involved hours spent sitting in front of the Yamaha. It involved doing the entire year’s workbook in two weeks and then asking the teacher for more. It involved a table being piled high several times a year with a mass of Korean foods and a glossy 8" × 10" of some old person Sujin had never met, the person’s name written in fancy Chinese calligraphy, the letters like snake tracks in snow. It involved various pickled dishes and strong odors emanating nightly from the kitchen. It involved a Tupperware container the size of a birdbath filled with rice forever sitting in their refrigerator.

  There was only one TV in the Yoon household BTT, and by local edict, it wasn’t used for watching network TV. Mr. Yoon was an early adapter to the VCR. Once Thomas hooked up the new device to their mammoth 29" Sylvania, each week when the family drove the forty minutes into Boston’s Combat Zone to shop at the only Korean market east of New York City, they’d also stop in at Kim’s Video Heaven, where they’d indiscriminately grab enough tapes to last the week. The tapes from Kim’s weren’t Korean movies. Nothing coming out of Kim’s was that narratively fancy. Instead, they were simply tapes of broadcast Korean TV, hours and hours of the various local stations in Seoul. Hours of game shows and family dramas with ads for cars and sauces and shampoos and detergents and soft news about the dictatorship and women standing in colorful hanbok talking about their skin.

  It wasn’t until Thomas created his Frankenstein of a bicycle that Sue even realized TV was supposed to be entertaining. After her genius brother won the Northeast Young Inventors Award, he put the bike in the basement, sheeted it, and skipped away. But within twenty-four hours, Sue had snuck downstairs and pulled off the sheet. There it was, gleaming in the dark, its small black-and-white screen a window into an alternate reality. For the next few years she would spend hours down there, pedaling across America and back both literally and metaphorically as she watched a crosshatch of what life was like in the land beyond Orchard Lane.

  Within only a few weeks of pedaling, Sue had transformed from a shy elementary-school student with a haircut that made her look fresh off the boat into two parts Punky Brewster, one part the Valley Girls from Square Pegs, all poured over a generous helping of the wisecracking waitresses from It’s a Living, garnished with a side of fashion sense from Blair on The Facts of Life.

  TV became Sue’s gateway drug to America. There was Mr. Rogers strolling blandly around the neighborhood. There was The Wizard of Oz, shown once a year on CBS, a movie so long in duration she had to carb load on kimchi in order to watch it. There were sitcoms and police
procedurals, talk shows and late night, PBS and UHF, where you could find Channel 56’s Saturday afternoon Creature Double Feature, with oldies but goodies like The Blob and Attack of the Crab Monsters.

  And why did Mr. and Mrs. Yoon let it slide? Why did they let their young daughter develop a set of quad muscles so big her pants looked painfully tight? Maybe they knew what was happening down there in the dark, that their only daughter was slowly metamorphosing into an American, that one day she would emerge from her chrysalis and grab them both by the hand and lead them out into the bounty of this strange land, a tour guide to the culturally clueless. Yeah, either that or they thought she was using the new junior scientist microscope they’d bought and stored down on Mr. Yoon’s workbench.

  Whatever the origin story, one day at the start of seventh grade Sue Yoon did emerge from her basement cocoon, her hair bright orange, a fireball, three of her mother’s favorite towels ruined in the process, the bleach container by the washing machine left pretty much empty. And as all good Asians know, bleach first, dye later. Within forty-eight hours, Sue had discovered her true color medium. Kool-Aid. The possibilities were endless. Say goodbye to the standard black bob every Asian girl was required by law to sport. Instead, World, meet Sue Yoon, a rebel who admittedly was often unsure if she had a cause. The Americanization of the Yoon family was complete as the family daughter ascended the stairs with hair the color of Oh Yeah Lemon Lime. Well, almost complete. It would be completely complete when her brother, Thomas, came out of his own cocoon while a junior at Yale and told the family there would never be a Mrs. Yoon. Apples, the forbidden fruit, never lie.