by Angela Ahn
I stared at her angrily.
“I’m sorry, Petey,” she said, looking down at the half she was holding.
I crumpled up the other half and threw it toward the recycling box. It hit the side and bounced in.
She flattened out the paper on her thigh and took another look. “Where is Trixie going?”
I had drawn Trixie standing next to a bus stop.
“Dinosaur school!” I said sarcastically. I hoped that she would think I was joking when I was, in fact, not joking.
“Does Trixie have parents?” she asked.
“I don’t know, L.B. It’s your dinosaur.”
She nodded. “Yes, Trixie does have parents.”
“Whatever, L.B. Can you leave now?”
“Trixie’s parents are huge. They are angry dinosaurs. They don’t let Trixie have any fun! They make him take the bus even though he’s too young to be out by himself. They want him to only eat Triceratops meat, when he wants to try vegetation for once!” L.B. had a wild expression in her eyes.
“What on Earth are you talking about?”
“Do you have paper, Petey?”
I rummaged around on my desk and wordlessly handed her a stack of paper.
“And a pencil.”
“Of course,” I replied, exasperated.
She dropped to the floor and laid down on her stomach. She drew a long rectangle and divided it into four boxes. She wrote “Trixie’s Day Out” at the top in her messy printing and started drawing.
She stopped after she drew an outline. It had the shape of the poo emoji.
“What is that?”
“Trixie,” she replied.
She was a horrible artist—like, truly wretched. I took a deep, cleansing breath and tried to suppress my emerging grin.
“Petey,” she said as she put down her pencil. “I cannot draw Trixie. In my mind’s eye, I see him perfectly. I cannot transfer the picture from my mind to this piece of paper. Frustrating!” She crumpled up the paper and threw it into the recycling box. Swoosh.
“What are you trying to draw?”
“A cartoon. Trixie wants to go wander around the Cretaceous jungle, playing with other dinosaurs, maybe playing headbutt the tree or just swinging from a branch for fun, but his parents won’t let him. ‘Trixie, you need to practice your roaring!’ ‘Trixie, you need to perfect the most efficient way to rip the Coelophysis’s arm out of its socket!’ ” she said, pretending to be an adult T. rex.
“The Coelophysis was not alive at the same time as the T. rex. It lived during the Triassic period.” I tried hard to contain my satisfaction. I couldn’t believe how good I was feeling right now.
L.B. rolled her eyes. “It’s just a cartoon, Petey.”
“I just think that if you’re going to do a dinosaur cartoon, it’s got to be scientifically and chronologically accurate.”
I grabbed a piece of paper and drew out squares across the full length. They were not symmetrical boxes; instead, the different squares were different sizes to make it look more interesting.
I wrote “Trixie’s Day Out” in my fancy font across the top. I saved that writing for cover pages of school reports.
“How about this?” I said as I started to draw Trixie in the first square. “What’s he doing?”
“Dinosaur math.”
“Okay, so he’s hunched over a desk, like this?” I asked. I erased and corrected his body position.
“Yes.” She grinned. “Perfect.”
“Now what?”
“Trixie’s mom and dad come into the room, and they say, ‘Four more sheets of work for you or you get no meat tonight!’ ” she bellowed.
I laughed. “Okay, give me a second.” I thought about what Trixie’s parents might look like.
As I sketched and erased and redrew, L.B. said, “The dad needs glasses.” I drew them in. Then we both took a long look and erupted into giggles. It was our dad. But he was a dinosaur.
“Do Trixie’s grandparents!” L.B. urged enthusiastically, pointing at the paper. Our laughter had started to calm down and we wiped tears from our eyes.
I thought for a minute before I started to draw my best dinosaur Haji and Hammy. I asked, “What should they be doing?”
“Can you make Trixie hug dino Hammy?” she asked quietly. “Trixie is whispering in her ear that everything is going to be okay.”
I nodded somberly. “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter 20
DEFYING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS
Saturday, August 3, early
Conditions: Glorious West Coast sun
Of all the months, August is the best. First, every August during the B.C. Day long weekend there is a big Korean-Canadian celebration in Central Park in Burnaby. Haji gets to wear his favorite baseball hat with the Korean and Canadian flags intertwined, Hammy waves a Korean flag around, and there is the smell of Korean BBQ in the air. It’s like the best perfume. We have never missed a single one of these days for as long as I can remember. More importantly, and the real reason August is the best month, is that my birthday is on August eleventh. This year, I’ll be eleven on August eleventh. That number combination will never happen again, so it’s got to be lucky, right?
On Saturday, we all got up early for the festival. We always arrived early because parking filled up fast. At the edge of the park, lots of vendors were still setting up. Even though it was only ten o’clock, I saw the Hurricane Potato truck and they looked ready for business. I asked Mom for some cash.
She looked at me with disbelief. “We just got here! You want to start eating already?”
“That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Plus, there’s no line right now!”
“Well, if you’re going to get one, I’m partial to the Parmesan cheese flavor,” L.B. said.
“I’m not sharing.”
“Fine, get two.” Mom handed me ten dollars from her wallet. I grinned because we all knew that L.B. would eat almost none of hers and then Mom would be “forced” to eat the leftovers rather than “waste” it. Who didn’t like a spiral-cut potato, skewered, deep-fried and sprinkled with flavorings? It was like one long, continuous potato chip that kept on giving.
“Parmesan!” L.B. yelled back to me as Mom dragged her to a booth hosted by a bank that was giving away prizes if you threw a beanbag into a small center hole in a box. If you missed, you got a magnet. Hammy, Haji and Dad went with them, leaving me alone to get my snack.
After I had ordered a Parmesan potato and a Cajun spice for me, I stood waiting by the truck.
“Hey, Peter.”
Samuel said something to his mom and then headed in my direction. I smiled and started to wave, but realized that seemed too enthusiastic, so I just held my hand up without moving it around like an idiot.
“How’s your summer going?” Samuel looked relaxed and casual. I had never seen him in sandals before. I tried not to look at his toes. Other people’s toes were sometimes freaky.
I shrugged. “Okay. You?”
“Pretty boring.” He shrugged back. “Hey, the taekwondo show’s on soon. You gonna watch?”
“I wouldn’t miss it!”
“Those guys are dope,” he said. “We watch every year.”
“Us too!”
My potatoes were ready and I awkwardly held up the two long, spirally potatoes on sticks. I couldn’t eat mine while holding L.B.’s at the same time—it would make too big a mess.
“Well, I’d better go,” he said. “My halmoni wants to go to the mandu lady. She puts this special sauce on top and I could eat, like, twenty of them.”
“There’s a mandu lady?” A few little dumplings would go really well with a Hurricane Potato!
“Yeah, down in the far corner.” He gestured to the end of the field. “I’ll catch you later, okay?”
�
��Bye,” I said. I headed toward the tent where my parents were trying to get free junk.
L.B. saw me and ran up to get her Hurricane Potato. Her hands were full of Frisbees. “Yum!” she said as she dropped the Frisbees and grabbed the stick.
“Why do you have so many Frisbees?” I asked. I took a bite, but it was so hot I had to keep my mouth open to let the steam escape.
“I won them.”
“All of them?” I couldn’t hide my surprise.
“Yes. They found it hard to believe that I could keep hitting the bull’s-eye each time and kept goading me to do it again.” She took a careful bite of the hot potato. “I showed them.” She winked.
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all these Frisbees, though…”
11:15 a.m.
The highlight of the entire day is the Kukkiwon Taekwondo Demonstration Team show. They come from Seoul every year to perform.
“The best part? It’s free!” Dad always says that. He said the same thing last year and the year before that too. I wonder sometimes if he’s actually proud of being a cheapskate.
The show is like watching a martial arts movie in real time. No editing, no CGI. If you saw the team members walking around, you’d never guess that they were martial artists extraordinaire—Korean Clark Kents. Ordinary-looking guys who could do some superhuman things. I get a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I watch them.
Central Park is mostly a massive urban green space, but it also has a miniature golf course, an outdoor swimming pool, a playground area and a stadium. The stadium was built for sporting events, but they use the space for festivals too. The taekwondo team always performs in the center of the stadium, near the covered bleachers. They had a large area of red and blue foam mats set up for the show.
“Come on,” Mom urged, looking at her watch. “Let’s get our seats. It’s filling up fast.”
We liked to sit near the back, so we could be in the shade.
I patted my right pocket for my inhaler before I sat down on the stadium benches and, just out of habit, I patted my left pocket too. I shook my head, angry at myself. I had stopped carrying my notebook around, but some habits are hard to break. I didn’t like to think about it too much.
I watched the crowd fill the seats. Lots of non-Koreans even came to watch. That always made me feel proud, like other people actually appreciated Korean things too. I looked around the stadium at all the people trying to find the best seat they could, jostling and forcing a lot of people who were already seated to bend their knees awkwardly so they could pass.
To my complete horror, I saw Ryan. Ryan Gagnon. Here. At a Korean festival. I’d recognize those stupid bangs anywhere. How dare he enter my domain! He was wearing a track jacket that said “Kee’s Martial Arts Studio” on the back. I sank into my seat and prayed to all the world deities that he wouldn’t see me. I watched him casually looking around and then, in slow motion, our eyed locked. I sat up straighter because now wasn’t the time to slouch. I gave him my best death-glare laser eyes. Because I had the higher seat, he had to turn around first.
At precisely eleven thirty, an announcer in a suit and tie took to the stage and loud music came through the speakers. He said, “And now, all the way from Seoul, the world-famous Kukkiwon Taekwondo Demonstration Team! Please give them a big round of applause!”
While trying to stare Ryan down, I had fallen into a trance-like state of intensity and the announcement suddenly reminded me about the real reason I was sitting here. I could resume hating Ryan when the show was all done.
About twenty men and two women ran out from underneath the stadium seats. They were wearing matching white dobok uniforms with black belts tied tightly around their waists. The word Kukkiwon was stitched in bold black letters across their backs. They formed a line and started clapping to the music, encouraging us to join.
The whole audience clapped for a while, but when the music changed and they broke their line to start the show, we all fell silent.
They split off into groups and lined up at the four corners of the mats laid out on the ground. As an introduction, one by one, they flew across the mats, punching, kicking and twisting through the air. Backward flips, forward flips and handsprings. Each team member performed a unique trick. They moved in elaborate, highly choregraphed poses across the mats, sometimes as a large group, sometimes just showcasing one performer. After just a few minutes, they already had us all on the edges of our seats.
When the wooden boards came out, the action got even more intense. The boards are slotted into prongs on the top end of thin poles over ten feet high and you don’t even notice them being carried onto the mats because there is so much going on and your eyes can’t keep up with all the activity on the sides. One of the performers would use their teammates like springboards and leap off somebody’s thigh or from interlocked fingers. Sometimes they didn’t even need anybody else and they would just launch up to do an impossibly high jump and kick the board with their feet, do a backflip and land perfectly.
Sometimes they set up multiple poles and one of the performers kicked all of them with one continuous long jump. Crack, crack, crack, crack.
“I want to do that!” L.B. shrieked as she dug her nails into my forearm.
Then one of them put on a blindfold. A blindfold! One person rang a bell and held an apple on a stick. The blindfolded performer listened intently and adjusted his feet to ready himself. He let out a roar so ferocious I thought the apple would burst from the power of his scream. He flew into a giant roundhouse kick and smashed the apple into a pulp with the top of his foot. Juice sprayed onto the first four rows of the audience.
During the entire show, my family gasped, clutched their chests or grabbed each other’s arms. It was a blur of scissor kicks, ax kicks, elbow strikes and backfists. Bodies sailed through the air sideways, upside down, straight up and in circles. Shattered pieces of wooden boards littered the stadium ground.
The end of the show was Haji’s favorite part. The team did this part every year. They ran out with Korean and Canadian flags and waved them around all while dancing and weaving in and out of intricate formations. Haji would sit up straight and adjust his Korean-Canadian baseball cap proudly. The audience clapped in beat to the music.
When they finished, we all stood up and applauded until our hands were raw, cheering so loudly our throats were hoarse. My family finally sat down to collect our things. I felt drained having just witnessed an intense display of awesome Koreanness.
Each one of these amazing Korean performers had fully mastered every single law of motion. They even did things that they should not have been able to do. Their ability to control their center of mass and their mastery of kinetic energy blew my mind. And, really, the coolest thing of all was that after they’d finish their performance, they would probably go put on some sneakers and eat some rice and kimchi for lunch.
“Cha!” Haji said. “Amazing!” He shook his head in disbelief.
L.B. sighed and looked happy. “Oh, they looked so free.”
Hammy tapped my leg. “Peter, you should try taekwondo lesson. Good for all Korean boys.”
I stopped cold and so did L.B. I snuck a peek over at my parents, but they were talking to each other and not paying attention.
I had taken taekwondo lessons. For three years. Hammy and Haji were the ones who had taken me every week. I was having a bad asthma day when I took my last belt test. I couldn’t catch my breath after the board-breaking component. I asked if I could rest and Master refused to let me take a break. Hammy stood up from the seating area and yelled at him in Korean for quite some time. To this day I don’t know what she said to him, but after she sat down, he reluctantly let me get my inhaler and take a short break.
That story is a legend in my house.
“Hammy,” I said tentatively. “Remember,
I used to take taekwondo lessons. I have my orange belt.”
She looked confused. “Oh, really?”
I looked over at L.B. and she grimaced. Then she reached over and held Hammy’s hand. I caught sight of Ryan standing up, casually staring at me with his malevolent, dastardly, criminal-in-the-making eyes while walking out of the stadium with his parents and other kids wearing the same jacket as him. The day that started off with such crispy deliciousness ended with a bad taste in my mouth.
Chapter 21
TOO GROGGY TO REPORT
Friday, August 9, 1:30 a.m.
Conditions: Cover of night
I thought I was having a dream, but when the ringing wouldn’t stop, I forced my eyes open. Our telephone was ringing. I heard the answering machine pick up. From downstairs, I heard Mom’s cell ringtone, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Then it stopped. Next I heard Dad’s cell phone; his ringtone was the first few bars of “New York, New York.” Then it stopped. I was groggy and not sure if I was imagining it all.
When the landline went off again, I was almost awake. I rolled over and looked at the clock. Ugh. I heard one of my parents walking down the hall. Then I heard voices.
My bedroom door cracked open, letting a ribbon of light into my room.
“Peter,” Mom said softly.
“I’m up, I’m up,” I mumbled as I squinted my eyes and looked at her. She was fully dressed, in sweatpants and a hoodie. Her hair was uncombed.
“I have to go to the hospital. Hammy’s been in an accident,” she said.
I sat up. “Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. It was the police on the phone. They just told me to go to the hospital. She was in a car accident,” she said with a worried sound in her voice.
“Is Haji hurt too?”
“No, Haji wasn’t with her.”