by Lindsay Wong
Eventually, on my block watch, a black BMW came to survey the neighbourhood and a smartly dressed Chinese couple and their daughter got out. They stopped in front of the beige McMansion across from the Belcarra, the one with medieval turrets and bulky buttresses that made it look like an obscene Disneyland theme park castle. There was no moving van and minimal luggage (a carry-on per person), which meant they had to be in the “gardening business.”
The man was young and ordinary and looked like some kind of professional, but the woman, an aging beauty queen, was wearing expensive clothes and five-inch stiletto heels that made her legs look like they belonged to a spidery silicone flamingo. She looked like a once-glamorous Hong Kong movie star with her crimson lipstick, except her teeth were blackish yellow and fanged. The skin on her face had been badly bleached (there were still slug-coloured spots that someone had missed), and this was why people on our block would call her Lesser Michael Jackson. She beckoned me over, but I was unsure if I should talk to her. Looking at her wobbling heels, I decided that I could definitely outrun her if she gave me any trouble.
The woman grinned, flashing her terrible fangs, and asked me which house I belonged to. I pointed at our pink Barbie house, and she nodded. “Tell your parents we’d like to meet them. Are you Hong Kong Chinese? Taiwanese Chinese? Singapore Chinese?”
“Hong Kong,” I said, and she looked incredibly relieved. She must have believed that her kind of Chinese was the best. “Us too. We’ll come by later with your presents.”
“Presents” confirmed that our new neighbours were savvy and practised pot growers, who would do their best to guarantee our silence with gifts.
“You may come play with my daughter,” the woman said, trying to make her voice sound less authoritative and more gracious. She pointed at the miserable-looking girl behind her.
The woman then pulled out a red envelope from her purse and stuck it in my sticky palm. “Here’s a small forty-dollar present for you, little sister. Please remember to tell your parents we’ll come by soon.”
Their daughter, also dressed in beautiful clothes, a pink silk tunic with a collar of boisterous red animal fur, looked seriously unhappy at our introduction, and I decided that she might be acceptable company. She was squat, with a brown dumpling-shaped face and some kind of raccoon snout for a nose. I sensed kindred deformity and shoulder-cringing anguish in her, like head lice that are helplessly drawn to clean hair. Her name was Terrifical Blossom, but everyone, including her own parents called her Pizza Head, on account of her blotchy scalp. She was noticeably bald, her head scabby and red.
She kept clawing at her scalp, and when she thought no one was looking, she stuck her hand inside her pants and scratched. I didn’t know what was wrong with her; it appeared to be some kind of psoriasis, which made patches of her skin look like ancient cottage cheese, but she seemed like she was my age, and I could show my father that I had quickly made a friend. It wasn’t as if we had to even like each other. She was brand new to the neighbourhood and would earn me an easy $10.99.
Unsure of what to say, I blurted hurriedly, “Do you want to be my friend? If you don’t, it’s okay. I don’t want to waste any time, so you should tell me right away.”
Pizza Head blinked and took a few seconds before she said, “Can I think about it?”
It seemed fair; after all, she needed time to decide if I would be a good friend. She didn’t know me. Her English was more stilted and awkward and confusing than mine, except I lisped and she didn’t. In those days, I had trouble with everyday talking noises. My tongue and lips and distended dinosaur teeth (stegosaurus underbite) didn’t like each other, and were at a constant three-way war. My father said that I looked and talked like “the Frankenstein,” which didn’t bother me until I learned what it meant when I was forced to read Mary Shelley in tenth grade.
“Fine,” I agreed, and quickly turned around and marched back to my house, thinking that I had a fifty-fifty chance.
The next day, Pizza Head told me that we could be friends on a trial basis, just in case she found other kids on the block that she liked better. Having no clue that this was a bad idea, I agreed. Pizza Head wasn’t sure if we would get along, and she really wanted to know why I dressed so funny.
“What you talking about? I said, confused. “I’m wearing shirt, you’re wearing shirt. I’m wearing pants, you’re wearing pants.”
“Yes,” she said, wrinkling her compact little nose so that it disappeared inside her face, “but why you wearing boy clothes? And why your sneaker too big?”
“What you talking about?” I said, not realizing she was embarrassed that I was dressed like a cellphone advertisement. I rotated between baggy men’s Motorola and LG logo T-shirts sent over by a rich uncle who owned a cellphone chain store in Australia. I had noticed a distinct difference between our clothes, but I assumed it was because my family was extremely poor (we lived off hand-me-downs) and she was in the “gardening” business, which meant that her parents had to spend a lot of money on finessing their upper-class appearance. It was like comparing someone who owned all the Manchu Wok fast food franchises in the province to someone who owned just one lowly Chinese restaurant in a rundown strip mall. Besides, she was the typical overseas Hong Kong princess who demanded everything that was girly, pink, and designer, and I was the rough tomboy CBC (Chinese-Born Canadian), which meant that I only liked food and all forms of hockey.
“But your house look way bigger than my house, so why you dress like that?” Pizza Head persisted.
I shrugged, and then her mother came out to give us glutinous red bean candies and a dish of deep-fried hot dogs drowning in black garlic bean curd, so I forgot what we were talking about.
You knew someone had a successful drug business when they wouldn’t tell you their real name, or their parents claimed they were successful travel agents but didn’t know the name of the company they worked for. Those in the standard marijuana occupation or the riskier meth business did not allow visitors inside. If their children invited you to play, you were confined to the front steps or the rusty backyard swings, where dishes of semi-frozen hot dogs and gluey sweets were served, their bowing parents apologizing about the sad, skunky smell.
This was our immigrant interpretation of suburbia: Chinese parents trying to be accommodating and white and country-club attending as much as possible. Pot was something assimilated people mass produced and distributed in British Columbia; it was a marker of success, like sending your children to Ivy League schools.
In fact, Lesser Michael Jackson proved to be a fabulous Poteau hostess, always smiling and bowing; she rotated between serving us the usual fried rice and undercooked spaghetti glued together by mustard, relish, and coagulated ketchup. Having been raised on fast food from the mall and easy Chinese food (fried rice, lo mein, chop suey), I could eat anything and didn’t yet know the difference between margarine and mayonnaise. My taste buds for Western cuisine were seriously undeveloped, and if someone handed me a sandwich full of gummy bears and potato chips, I would gladly eat it with a handful of sugar.
When Lesser Michael Jackson, who also didn’t quite understand Western cooking, brought out jumbo marshmallows smeared with mayonnaise and strawberry jam, I thought I had found my fairy godmother. Did this woman also exist just to feed me? She was the only Chinese lady I knew who cooked North American food, which made her a celebrity chef in a way. No grown-up I knew could read the English directions on packaged food, but Lesser Michael Jackson claimed she could, which is why she had mastered chicken nugget rice, spaghetti with ketchup like “the Italian,” and mayonnaise marshmallow casserole. She invented Western dishes like she made up stories about her life as a travel agent.
In contrast, at our house we ate a simple buffet of steamed fish, chicken, or pork on dry, gravelly rice if my mother was in a cooking mood; if she wasn’t, we devoured turd-shaped beef jerky from the box and slurped peppery instant noodles. Although she was a drug lady, Lesser Michael Jackson c
onstantly fed Pizza Head home cooking and decorated her front steps with cheerful paper plants from Costco. My mother couldn’t be bothered to cook or clean the house when she was afraid and depressed, so I preferred Lesser Michael Jackson’s ersatz gourmet version of motherhood.
Because of their daughter’s memorable nickname, our newest pot-growing neighbours became known as the generous Pizza Family: friendly Mrs and Mr Pizza (Lesser Michael Jackson and Three Decade Younger Husband behind their backs), who had produced such a yeasty Pizza Head. It was rumoured that Pizza Head wasn’t really their daughter, just some sad, unfortunate girl who had been assigned to the sensational drug couple. The adults in our neighbourhood did not seem particularly concerned about Pizza Head, but there was an unspoken policy on the Poteau to never get involved if you didn’t want “your head blown up.”
Truthfully, she did not look like either of her enigmatic parents, and she bitterly referred to her mother as “That Woman” and her father as “Him.” I could certainly relate and began addressing both my parents as “You,” which they did not like.
Whether this was unsophisticated adolescent rebellion, or she had truly been sold/kidnapped/hostaged, poor Pizza Head despised both her parents and did not consider That Woman and Him to be her family. There might have been some unhappy truth to her story because the Poteau was known for stranger things, but I had been raised not to interfere or ask questions, especially when I had two or three delicious meals on their front porch a day. Like me, Pizza Head had an overbearing, dramatic mother and an emotionally distant, unavailable father, and I thought I knew why she loathed me so much—because That Woman and Him insisted that we be “the best friend OR ELSE.”
The “OR ELSE” in an immigrant Chinese family could mean many different things, and if your parents were old-fashioned like mine, you might have to sleep outside for talking back and relinquish half your Lunar New Year money. My parents believed that punishment was supposed to be practical and intensive, none of that go-to-your-room-and-meekly-apologize Western bullshit. Punishment had to hurt a little bit. In Pizza Head’s case, she had to sleep on an air mattress in the garage and hand over her platinum credit cards, which was just considered average according to my lofty Chinese Old Testament standards.
You really had to feel sorry for that Pizza Head. First, her head was always snowing like textured confetti, and second, she had no choice but to be my friend. Even I did not want to be friends with myself. In retrospect, I felt alien and apart from my surroundings, believing myself to be disgusting, inferior, and brain-damaged—a carbon copy of my parents’ projected phobias and insults. Because I struggled socially, I felt as if I had crash-landed from Pluto and could not fathom how to interact with the human species. With no idea how to be kind or generous or even mildly entertaining, I admit that I was lousy company. If I did not make friends with Pizza Head, I would not have $10.99, and I would incur the wrath of my father, who did not like losers and wimps.
“This is the only reason why I’m talking to you, you know,” Pizza Head explained to me. She had the refreshing honesty of someone who had to lie about everything else. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be the best friend at all.”
Because childhood misery tends to cut off oxygen to the brain, it makes the sufferer not only irrational but also irritable—it puts everything in a wholly negative and nightmarish light. My gloominess was like being a portly hamster forced to run on a never-stopping wheel, whereas Pizza Head was like a timid ladybug that had been inelegantly stuffed into a jar, taken from a lush botanical garden, and forced to live among a few scraggly maple leaves. We should have been miserable together, forced into unsavoury surroundings and situations by unstable adults who were too busy looking after themselves.
Unfortunately, even such a low-bar friendship wasn’t going to work—my father had elbowed me towards sociability, but he didn’t seem to think Pizza Head was good enough, even for me.
“Out of all the kid on the block, you choose that leper to be your friend?” he had asked me, shocked, when the smiley Pizza family first came by to pay their bribes, giving us three dozen fresh lobsters and two bottles of good merlot. “She looks like a fucking potato! There are fleas eating her head!”
I didn’t look much better, my father finally conceded, but thank Buddha I didn’t have a pepperoni pizza for a head.
Accustomed to his outrageous remarks, I could only pretend that I hadn’t heard, secretly rolling my eyes. It was an early defence mechanism that I was slowly developing, not engaging fully with either of my parents; that is, if I didn’t want to hear any stomach-churning screaming that could shatter my precarious, indistinct sense of self. The answer seemed so simple: if you didn’t react, you didn’t receive a fat stake in the chest. Yet it would take me many years before I could fully disengage. I was learning self-preservation, in the same way it was better not to walk outside during a lightning storm or to be caught outside when the black bears and coyotes were out. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, and through adolescence to adulthood, I had to adapt: retreating so wholly into myself that I was afraid to convey any pulp-like vulnerability.
In short, there were times when I became too much like my father—assholian and unliked.
I figured that as long as my father paid me for acquiring my new friend, which he eventually did, I would not tell him that it all seemed like a very poor investment. Besides, I was the first-born and the first generation of Chinese immigrants, and I knew that if I did not succeed, there would be punishment. For instance, once my father forced my mother to buy me a box of cookies from the grocery store and ordered me to hand them out to some random kids playing roller hockey on the street. But they didn’t like me and said I looked and talked funny. So I took back all my cookies, including the half-eaten ones (they were worth $2.99 each), and everyone got incredibly upset, and I couldn’t see what the big deal was. I could not bear to go back on the street and hand out cookies like flyers to kids who had previously rejected me.
During the first two weeks of our friendship, Pizza Head and I sat companionably on her front steps, devouring whatever food Lesser Michael Jackson brought out. Our eating continued uneventfully until one day we had made our way through two plates of That Woman’s chewy specialty spaghetti and, for dessert, twenty plain soft taco shells (she had mistaken tortillas for puff pastry) when Pizza Head told me that she could not be my friend anymore. Without an ounce of false remorse, Pizza Head explained that there was a potential opening for her in someone else’s friend group and they had invited her to play tennis. This was a private invite-only audition, and I was not welcome, on account of my smell and terrible clothing choices, which had never even occurred to me. It wasn’t just one bad choice that I had made, she said, but I was wearing too many unforgivable choices that could not be ignored.
The news was shocking—when was clothing a decision-maker in this petty game called friendship? I certainly did not smell like pee anymore and washed my hair with some regularity, so why wasn’t that enough? Besides, we had spent a lot of time sitting and chewing on the porch together, even if we hadn’t ever talked. After all, I might have argued, in movies and television shows, cows and other intelligent livestock that grazed together often seemed to form silent and intense bonds. I was shocked at this sudden betrayal and testy judgment, especially from someone who had such an obvious skin affliction.
“I don’t smell!” I protested. “I shower every day now because the teacher said so. Before I didn’t, but I do now!”
“Well, a lot of other girl say you smell funny,” Pizza Head pointed out, as if this were an encyclopedic fact. “They say you go to special ed because there’s something wrong with you. I guess you should probably leave soon because I don’t want the other girls to see me talking to you. If they like me, they might invite me to go to mall.”
“I order you to be my friend!” I shouted, furious at her for dismissing me so easily.
In her place, I would have probably done the same thing
except I would have ended our friendship with a strong farewell punch. I’d have given myself a broken or bloody nose if I’d been Pizza-Head, if I were ever so lucky as to be invited anywhere. She was exactly the type of friend that I would latch onto as an older teenager and adult, someone who had access to foreign food and money, and maintained a cool deformity. At the time, though, I saw her through my father’s eyes: she wasn’t even a delectable frozen pizza from Safeway; she was just a spud. A cheap potato.
Even though I was not fully attached to our version of friendship, I felt that I should have gotten a little more return for the efforts I had made. It was like handing over all your Lunar New Year and Christmas money to a jerky older cousin who promised you his Pokémon trading card collection and did not follow through, but what you really should have done was deposit the eighty dollars from your aunties and uncles in a savings account until you could afford the Pokémon deluxe collector’s edition.
I stomped off into the evergreens and chucked a rock at a fat singing blue jay, which missed. I felt wounded and bewildered. What just happened? My father had not explained the bratty betrayals of little-girl friendships. He made it seem like you showed up, paid a person in cookies or cash, and were thus entitled to make them do whatever you wanted.
Furious, the next time I saw Pizza Head lounging alone on her front steps, minus her new cool friends, I stuck out my tongue and gave her the finger—the only thing I knew how to do.
The very next morning, a pouting Pizza Head came by with a necklace, a lumpy translucent rock on a flimsy silver chain—a peace offering.