“Wherever you want. You’re the one who wanted dinner.”
“The pho place? Or Japanese?”
“That’s fine.”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Or Hankow?”
“Let’s do that,” I interrupted, before she could say It doesn’t matter again.
The restaurant is on one of the strip malls on De Anza, the older ones, not part of all the newer construction they’ve been putting up lately to give the tech workers their shiny organic fast-casual places. As always, neither one of them will drive us. Sometimes I wonder if my sister is buried somewhere in one of their recurring fears.
My parents like Hankow because it serves Hubei food, which I think—I’m just guessing, because they never talk about it—reminds them of home. My mom thinks her re gan mian is better than theirs, but she loves the dou pi here, sticky rice wrapped in tofu skins and then fried, and the barbecued oysters. The restaurant’s full tonight, and we’re seated near the front. (Hundred percent rule: a freshman girl I’m pretty sure is named Ami is with her family by the back.) Even though it’s not busy it takes forever to get our waters and our menus, and it’s kind of cold. My mom pulls her jacket around herself whenever the door opens. I don’t think she means it pointedly, but I think my dad might be taking it that way.
He opens the menus and says, heartily, “What should we have?”
“Whatever you like. I’m not very hungry.”
I wish my mom would just try. Just say she wants the duck neck or doesn’t want it; what good does it do to advertise your anger like this? It doesn’t just get at my dad—it knifes me, too. Whenever there’s any tension between my parents and I worry I won’t be able to stanch it, I feel that hole blown through our lives more keenly. It would’ve been different if my sister had lived.
“I’m starving,” I say, which is a lie. “Ba, let’s get like fifty skewers.”
He flashes me a look I recognize as grateful, and then we spend a while plotting out the order while my mom stares out the door. It’s stupid, because this is my dad’s fault and I know that, but something inside me hardens against her. It wouldn’t kill her to just try.
It’s better after the food comes, though. We eat the cumin-dusted lamb and pork skewers, the pig’s ear and the dou pi, and my mom can’t stop saying how good the dou pi is tonight. I eat just a few bites so she can have the rest.
“Finish these,” my mom says, pushing the plate of skewers at me. Then she squints at the lamb, her mouth full. She swallows. “Cut it into pieces. They cut it too big. You’ll choke.”
I smile. “I’ve gotten pretty good at eating, actually. I put it in my portfolio. It’s part of why RISD let me in.”
She sighs. “Give it to me.” She reaches for it and hacks at the pieces with her chopsticks. She always worries about choking; she used to cut my grapes into quarters when I was a kid.
When we’re done, and waiting for the bill to come, I say, “Can I ask something?”
My dad says, “Yes.” But he gives me a look that means watch yourself.
“How long do you think it will take to find something new?”
“Aiya, Daniel,” my mom says, a little sharply. “Leave him alone.”
“I just—”
“It doesn’t help to ask so many questions.” Then she adds, “We are on green cards, remember. It’s more complicated on green cards. Finish the dou pi. I am full.”
I feel a surge of guilt for interrogating him, for breaching the fragile peace we’d brokered over dinner. Probably he just wanted to eat here and pretend things were normal, not listen to his son demand when he’d stop being such a failure.
This is the part I keep coming back to—what did he think the experiment would give him? Was it just that he wanted the fame of it, that he dreamed of himself profiled in all those journals he read, giving TED talks? I can’t see it. Or was it something even littler, that he thought publishing the experiment would please his boss and impress his coworkers? I hope not. There’s something heartbreaking about the smallness of that.
“I think it matters when people follow their dreams,” I say impulsively. They both look at me quizzically, and I feel my face going hot. “Like, if there’s something you really care about—I’ve always looked up to people who went after what they wanted.”
“Like you,” my mom says. “And your art school.”
“No, but I mean—you too, Ba. Do you remember the time you brought us in to show us your experiment? I always—”
I feel it before I understand, the coldness and the noise happening all at once, and it takes me a few seconds to register. Then my mom jumps up with her napkin and I realize my dad knocked over the pitcher of ice water the waitress left on our table. I’m soaked. The table is dripping, our leftovers drenched, a pool of water on the floor.
“Sorry, sorry,” my dad says. Except—I look at him closely—did he do that on purpose?
Both of them leave me alone at the table in search of napkins. At the wait station they stop, ignoring the rather prominent stack of napkins there, and my dad says something to my mom. She glances back toward me and replies. Then they stand there, whatever words passed between them caught on both their faces, before they snap back into action.
And then when they’re back—I know this play—they’re a flurry of motion, mopping everything up, my mom fussing over me, and it’s not the kind of activity you can have a conversation around. We leave behind a waterlogged mound of napkins on the table, a slippery wet sheen still coating the tile floor.
The Wednesday of midterm season Harry’s SAT tutor gets the stomach flu and has to reschedule, so Harry has a free afternoon and we go to the library to study. I love the Cupertino library; it has this nearly floor-to-ceiling aquarium tank, and it’s kind of mesmerizing watching all the fish. The library’s always crowded, but we find a table and some chairs near the fish tank. When I pull out my Calc textbook Harry makes a face at me.
“Oh, come on, what’s that for?” he says. “You got your acceptance letter. Aren’t you basically a second-semester senior already? Aren’t you supposed to burn all your books or something?”
“Yeah, whatever. Like you’re going to let your GPA slip even a millimeter next semester either.”
“I’m going to slack the eff off next semester.”
“You definitely aren’t.”
“I might,” he says. “You never know.” When he smiles it looks like it takes a little more effort than it should.
I can’t focus on the equations, though. Instead I keep trying to sketch a toddler girl who’s rocking back and forth on her heels in front of the fish tank, squinting suspiciously each time a fish swims near her. I’m better with faces than bodies—I’m not strong enough on anatomy—but even on her face I can’t get the light values right, the way the sun reflects off the glass and shines on her alert, wary eyes.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the 30 Under 30 show. Sometimes—it always seems easier—I wish I could just not care about things, that I could just let it go and not spend the rest of my life wondering if I would’ve had a chance at getting in. At home I’ve been watching a ton of workout videos as makeshift anatomy lessons in case one of them might spark some kind of idea I can use as a submission. But every idea seems solid and hopeful until I try to lasso it, and then it evaporates as soon as I try to wrestle it onto the page.
Harry’s got SAT worksheets he’s ostensibly going through, but he seems distracted, too. He tilts his chair back on two legs, watches a couple little kids pound on the fish tank’s glass. The girl looks at them disapprovingly. Then he brings his chair back to the floor, pushes his binder aside, and says, “I told my parents you got into RISD.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” His phone buzzes and he twists the cap on his water bottle, raising his eyebrows at me in a way that means don’t say it: he has an app to remind him to drink more water, and I always give him crap for
it. “It’s funny because if I told them I wanted to be an artist, even if I were as good as you are, they would flip the eff out. Or you know what? They wouldn’t even bother, they’d just laugh their asses off because they’d know there was no way in hell I’d get to. But then with you, they were all excited. They even made me show them some of our old papers so they could look at your drawings. They keep talking about it.”
It would be douchey to act flattered, I think, since that’s obviously not where he’s going with this. “Well, what do you actually want to be? Do you not want to go to college?”
“Of course I want to go to college. Maybe like—I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe it would be cool to do something like”—he glances around like he wants to make sure no one’s listening—“like maybe acting.”
“Acting?” He looks so embarrassed to say it, like he regretted it as soon as it came out, that I know he isn’t making it up. “Actually, I could see that.”
“Really?”
I grin. “You know how sometimes I tell you you’re kind of fake?”
He reaches under the table and socks my thigh. “Shut up.”
“No, really, though. Why not?”
“Why not? I mean, maybe I’d suck at it.”
“And?”
“What do you mean and? Maybe I’d suck at it, full stop. Also, I don’t have time.”
That part is probably true. The drama crowd is forever doing auditions or rehearsals or performances, always siphoned from the outside world into the black paint and velour of the theater. It’s why I only ever see Mike Narvin during PE. And Harry’s already up until one or two most mornings studying as it is.
“Are you serious about this? It’s actually something you—”
“No, no, it’s stupid. I’m definitely not serious. It would never work out.”
He’s lying. “Maybe you could—”
“No, it’s stupid. Forget I said anything. I don’t know, maybe I’m just too stressed. I just keep thinking how if I don’t get in—what was the point of anything I did here? What’s the point of anything at all?”
Those dull flashes of heat in his tone—I know he doesn’t talk like this around anyone else. “So you’re not feeling great about the SAT, I take it.”
“It just all seems so stupid and arbitrary. I’ve worked my ass off the past four years but who knows, maybe the admissions officer I get hates my essay or something. Bam. Done. Just like that.”
It’s cruel to try to tell someone the most important thing in their life doesn’t matter, I know that. I keep picturing my dad having imaginary conversations trying to defend his research to his boss, stumbling over why he didn’t just dismantle the whole thing. And what do you say? It matters because it matters to me. That’s the worst thing Mr. X always levels at me, that those things I hold dearest just don’t matter. You can’t mount a solid argument against someone who’d just as soon burn down the things you love, shrugging as they pour the gasoline.
“It’s not a great system,” I say. “Or maybe it’s better if you’re at a less competitive high school.”
“You’re so lucky you’re in already. You’re luckier than you know.”
“Yeah, but—yeah.” I stop myself, because he’s right; I am lucky.
“But what?”
“Eh—I’m just kind of worried about my parents.”
“About those files still?”
“No—they’ve just been really stressed out.”
“Your dad didn’t find a new job yet?”
He hasn’t. But the other thing is that I went through his search history last night, and it’s strange—he’s been looking up what feel like totally unrelated jobs. He’s looked at Craigslist postings for things like a household manager and an Uber driver, and yesterday he searched job Cupertino cash only. He’s looked at nothing that feels like a logical transition. “It kind of feels like he’s barely even trying. Like he already gave up or he’s just going about it the worst possible way, which is functionally the same thing, right? I don’t even think he’s looking at the kind of job he could actually do. And the weird thing is he’s only looking at like—these under the table type jobs. Like the other day I saw he was looking at, like, construction gigs on Craigslist, which makes zero sense. He has a bad back. Do you think what he did was really that bad that he can literally never get another job in his field?”
“In the Silicon Valley? Not a chance. I’m sure there’s like a zillion startups that would see getting fired for doing some secret experiment as all bold and groundbreaking and like”—he makes air quotes—“‘disruptive’ and crap. Why doesn’t he apply at one of those?”
“Yeah, that’s…not a terrible idea, actually.” Why doesn’t he? My dad’s a lot of things, but he isn’t stupid. Wouldn’t he have thought about all this, too?
“Why don’t you just ask him about all this?”
“I’ve tried.”
“Well, why don’t you keep trying? How hard could it be to wear them down?”
“Yeah, keep it.” Harry always says my parents are Asian lite—how they’ve never taken me to China, how they barely taught me Chinese, how they’re soft. It bugs me every time. Partly I’m sure he really does think my parents are Americanized, and in some ways they are, but partly I think it’s just that they’re from a random town in mainland China. Harry’s a snob. (For his part, he goes to Taiwan, where his parents’ grandparents all fled with the Kuomintang, two or three times a year, and he speaks Chinese like a regular adult and not at the first-grade level I do.) “They just don’t talk about things they don’t want to. I’m not even sure my mom knows why he got fired.”
“Oh, she’s not violating his privacy like you are, you mean?”
“Shut up.”
He smiles. Then he puts headphones in and buckles down to work, scribbling across his worksheets while I draw. We stay at the library another hour or so, and then he has to go home for his tennis lesson, and I fight back that old vague hollowness—that same one you get when a movie ends, or when a storm that’s encased you all day gives way again to empty skies.
Harry was wrong: I’m definitely not going to be able to just wear my parents down. There’s a certain way they make a room go cold when you tread too closely to our ghosts, and so I don’t ask why my dad restarted his experiment or if my mom knows that’s what happened or why he’s not looking at reasonable jobs. I’ve been raised to know how not to talk about things. There are shades of answers anyway in the way my mom’s lips press together as she riffles through the mail or closes her eyes and lays her fingers on her wrist to check her pulse when she doesn’t think I’m looking, in the way my dad spends whole days locked in the study, coming out only to eat.
Without fanfare, we get onto a lower data plan and end the Netflix subscription with all the nature shows my dad loves. We don’t go out to eat.
One afternoon when my dad goes to the grocery store I go back to look at that box of files in the cabinet. When I get into the closet, though, the box isn’t there. While my dad’s gone I go hunting all over the house, but I can’t find it anywhere. I should’ve paid more attention to what was in it.
I take the laptop back to my room and I look the Ballards up again, scrolling through the first few pages of results that I’ve clicked on already. And then on the third page I learn something that sends a flash through my spine: they used to live in Texas. Or Clay Ballard did, at least, because he has an MBA from UT Austin.
I spend nearly an hour trying to locate him in any kind of specific time frame—I look up his LinkedIn, all his public profiles, every mention of Clay Ballard UT Austin I can find to try to find a graduation year. I can’t find one. But still—is it just a coincidence that all of us were there at one point? All those files printed out and collected—they have to all point backward to some locus that my dad’s private obsession spans out from. It never occurred to me it could’ve reached back as far as Texas.
I was six when we left Austin. I was born t
here, and when I was little I expected to live there forever. Even now, the texture and the colors of living there still drift back to me. I remember the velvet-blue nights my dad was teaching class sections and my mom and I would go to the green-lettered grocery store and each pick a brightly colored frozen entrée and a Popsicle and we’d eat them together in front of the flickering TV and she’d let me stay up late so I could see him before I went to bed; I remember the weekends when we’d go with other families to drive out to Krause Springs or Hamilton Pool, all that slate and tree growth and green water that was so striking that later I always tried to draw it and always gave up, because you could never capture the way it felt to be there. We all used to live in university housing together—two-bedroom apartments that all opened onto a common lawn. During the day all the families would leave their doors open and the kids would flow in and out. My best friend back then was Ethan Parker-McEvoy, who lived next door to us but basically lived at our house as much as I lived at his.
I look him up every now and then when the mood hits; there are people so enshrined in your past they’ll never stop mattering to you, and Ethan, who was my whole childhood in Texas, is that to me. I found him on Facebook years ago. He looks basically just like he did when he was seven, the same angular cheekbones and crooked smile, his hair (which was always buzzed when I knew him) in an afro now. All his accounts are locked down, so that profile picture is all I’ve seen. I look at it often. I don’t know what’s stopped me from reaching out. I guess it’s the fear that I won’t matter to him anymore or that he won’t remember me. At least when you hoard the past for yourself it’s still yours. It’s like art, really: you tack it down somewhere flat and static, and then no one can take it away from you.
Anyway. This was Texas, the last time—
I was staying at Ethan’s place for a few days because my parents had gone out of town on some kind of trip. They’d been excited about it, telling me when they came back they’d have some kind of surprise for me. And I remember beforehand they were in great moods, laughing together over things I didn’t understand, and sometimes my dad would catch my mom as she was walking through the house and touch her shoulder or the small of her back. While they were gone Ethan’s parents took us on a walk to get tacos at Guero’s and let us watch movies and then I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor in Ethan’s room and we stayed up half the night talking about how we wished my parents would leave like this all the time and we could live together. I think maybe you’re never quite friends with anyone the way you are when you’re a kid. I thought of him like a brother.
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