by YZ Chin
And then a Spartan, a cross-dressing Venus Williams (or her sister? It was hard to be sure) in blackface, and a stereotype of a nerd with a conspicuous pocket protector barged in, letting out a collective yelp of victory. They’d made it, hit the jackpot. The trio had been walking outside, the mostly naked Spartan gesturing wildly with his arms and roaring to ward off the evening chill. Suddenly, through an ivy-framed window, they had espied a glorious nude female form gyrating enthusiastically to loud music, which they could plainly hear because said window was on the second floor and was thrown wide open. Drawn, they leaped up the stairs, tried several doors, found one that wasn’t locked, and piled in, cheering.
Here they were, advancing toward the naked girl, egging each other on, huge grins on their faces.
“Hi!” Ms. Williams fluttered her fake eyelashes.
“I’m a dweeb!” proclaimed the pocket-protector wearer.
The girl fell into helpless giggles. “That’s not very subversive,” she murmured with eyes closed, head lolling back, offering her throat.
The three boys gave each other looks, unsure of the ethics of sharing in such situations. Then, without warning, the Spartan extended a hand and touched the girl, his palm traveling from armpit to waist.
From then on it was chaos. Turned out the naked girl had friends milling in the drunken background, keeping watch like secret police. They swarmed in, girls in swirls of bright colors, ordering the boys to leave. Arguments and half-hearted threats to call the authorities sloshed around in the space. Through it all, the subversive nudist kept on dancing in a space increasingly tiny, her friends hemming her in.
All of the next day, as Howie Ho made his way across campus along sidewalks of trash, glitter, and vomit, he thought about the girl and refined the amazing tale, with which he later regaled every male he knew. He modestly greeted exclamations of disbelief and envy by chalking it all up to an extreme stroke of luck until Eddie, a fellow Malaysian, smirked and asked why he hadn’t touched the skank.
“You were there, right?” Eddie laughed. “Why, no balls, is it?”
Howie Ho went upstairs to his single dorm room. He heaved his laundry bag and upended it over his twin bed. The clothes were warm. He bent to bury his face in them, then touched his erection gingerly through his jeans. The clothes smelled clean and lemony, like a girl.
The time remaining on the dryer above his had read sixteen minutes when he left. So, what, thirteen more minutes now? In thirteen minutes he would casually open his door to catch the girl next door going down for her surprisingly large and lacy bras. He would confirm for himself the size of her breasts, which he had so foolishly overlooked.
Ten more minutes. He looked at his computer. There was enough time to jerk off before the staged run-in, but then he would have to clean up and stuff.
As if on cue, he heard her moaning through the walls. He stared at the bricks, astonished. The bras! What was she doing, with her laundry so close to being done? Another high-pitched groan, this one with a tone of surprise. With annoyance, almost reluctantly, Howie Ho set to work picturing what must be happening beyond the wall.
She was Korean, he recalled. She had long swishy black hair and thighs the same width as her calves, which he found endearing. Neat, in a way. Breasts, large, yes, heaving, those neat legs soft scissors cutting his loneliness away. What? She wasn’t moaning. Or she was, but not in the way he had first heard.
He squinted at his Manchester United poster on the wall. Two rows of men, one standing, one squatting. All with arms crossed. He could now hear a male voice from next door as well, clear as a bell but unintelligible because Howie Ho did not understand Korean.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Why a beautiful girl like her with a great body would choose to tolerate an abusive asshole of a boyfriend, Howie Ho sure didn’t know. The boyfriend was certainly nothing special. Last week, Howie Ho had run into him in the dorm bathrooms across the hall. Howie Ho had immediately cut his eyes away—just a regular Korean dude: hair spiked with gel, narrow eyes prolonging into fishtail wrinkles, skinny, smelling of cigarettes.
One time, she locked him out. He started off sounding calm, if stern. Soon he was yelling, ending sentences with a pound or a kick to her door, sometimes both. Howie Ho had cranked up the volume on his headphones and tried to focus on cramming for his midterm.
Now her bras were spinning prettily in a small round hole while she got shoved around again. Howie Ho never saw any marks on her when he checked her out, and Lord knows she bared enough flesh with her outfits, so how bad could it be? The dude probably pulled her hair a little, maybe spanked her ass, the kind of kinky stuff that belonged to a couple’s realm, none of his business. Besides, she had voluntarily unlocked her door that time the boyfriend tried to kick it down, hadn’t she? Didn’t she always?
A loud crash sounded, then a thud into the wall that separated their rooms. Howie Ho’s desk shuddered. There was a very high-pitched scream. Howie Ho watched as the two speaker towers on his desk swayed on their bases, rocking. He held his breath. Another scream, another thud, and one speaker toppled.
Howie Ho picked up a rapidly cooling polo shirt and started folding. He made it through that and three undershirts before padding to his door and slowly opening it, making sure it didn’t squeak. All down the long, carpeted hallway he tiptoed and strained his ears, waiting for the point when the begging and crying could no longer be heard. He very gingerly pressed the button for the elevator. While he waited, he looked down at his hands.
In this dream, it was his first day in America. He was standing in the harshly lit hall of an airport, very glad to be done with the awfully long flights and the slow-crawling line at Immigration, where he had spent twenty minutes watching the girl ahead of him get in trouble with the mustachioed, uniformed officer behind bulletproof glass. His terror had mounted as he witnessed her plead, try not to cry, cry, and then be led away. She had dark skin and wore a headscarf.
Now he was out of Immigration, idling indecisively, trying to figure out the best way to get to his college. He was dragging two humongous suitcases by himself, and he had to unwrap his fists from their handles every now and then to negotiate confusing city maps. Not touching his luggage made him nervous as hell.
He walked up to a ticket machine of some sort. When it asked him which language he preferred, he was offended. What the fuck? Of course he wanted English! Were the machines in on it too? This whole country was participating in some kind of conspiracy, pretending they couldn’t understand his perfect English.
He felt dizzy. This was a nightmare. He was pretty sure he had a great grasp of the English language, since he had to pass the SAT and the laughable TOEFL test in order to be accepted into an American college. But since his plane landed he had been unable to get anybody to understand him. He would open his mouth and form speeches that corresponded perfectly to the English language in his head, but people here either gave him confused looks and responded impatiently with more words spoken even quicker, or they would start hunching a little, and their faces would assume this sweet look of false understanding, and they would speak very slowly, and very loudly, accentuating every word.
It was beyond frustrating. He wished he were in a movie with subtitles.
The TOEFL test had featured picture after picture of two people, usually a man and a woman, frequently of different races, facing off with polite smiles. They had eighties outfits and eighties hairdos, all frizz and volume and billowy, boxy cuts. He was supposed to interpret their conversation, regular human speech broken down into multiple choice answers. For example, a woman who is lost on campus asks a man for help finding her way. The man remarks, “You’re a freshman, huh?” And the woman snorts, responding with a “How’d you guess?”
Q: Why does the young woman say this: “How’d you guess?”
A. She’s uncomfortable with his curiosity.
B. She thinks she looks older.
C. She thinks it’s obvious.
D. She’s mystified at his observation.
Howie Ho thought this was more of a psychology question than a question of English competency, really.
A man appeared out of the blue, wearing a cowboy hat and Converse sneakers that, improbably, had spurs attached to them.
“Need some help there?” the man drawled, sounding just like Matthew McConaughey. He was short, with a wayward beard and patchy sideburns but impeccably combed blond hair. Cowboy propped himself against the ticket machine like it was a set piece. When Howie Ho looked up, the sky was a dirty color.
“What’s yernaime?” Cowboy asked.
“Ho . . .” he started, then caught himself. Here, in America, family names went last, after personal names. There was a joke that this was because Americans were not filial and did not respect their parents or ancestors, and that is why they put themselves before their family names. He made some mental rearrangements and said, tentatively, “Fook Hing . . . Ho.”
Cowboy hooted and slapped the ticket machine on its side, creating a terrifying sound of hollowness, a metal monster screaming hunger.
Cowboy stopped, and the metal hulk hummed for a bit. Then a dime clattered into the change dispensing tray. Cowboy slinked around Howie Ho and pinched the coin.
“So, ha, Fucking Ho, what’s yernaime mean?”
Behind him he could hear train doors closing, a monologue admonishing and warning.
“Prosperity . . . Rise.” It wasn’t easy, this negotiation of two languages.
Cowboy’s mouth widened in amusement. “That’s what I thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry ’bout it, buddy. Hey, there’s this party. Yerwanna come?”
On the train, Fucking Ho stared dubiously at an empty seat’s texture of fake grass. To him it seemed that those seats were excellent trappers of bacteria and filth, but then a woman wearing a shirt for a dress came on and sat down, squirming her almost bare buttocks into the fake grass to get comfortable. She seemed fine. He shot a hand out to steady the bigger of his suitcases as the train lurched around a corner.
“So, Malaysia is a Muslim country, right?” Cowboy asked, leaning back, arms sprawled across seat backs, every limb as loose as could be.
“Well . . .” Fucking Ho hemmed. “Kind of . . .”
“Don’t worry, buddy.” Cowboy laughed loudly. Fucking Ho grinned back. They seemed to be getting along well.
They walked a few blocks after they got off the train, and then they were standing in front of a house with a small flight of stairs leading up to a wooden patio. It was halfway to dusk. The air smelled cold and quiet.
The door opened and loud music billowed like fire pushing itself out of a room without really leaving it. Howie Ho stopped when he saw how packed the room was with togas, helmets, masks, and duct tape. “Whoa,” Cowboy said, bumping a suitcase into the back of Fucking Ho’s calves.
“You didn’t tell me this was a cus-tom party,” Fucking Ho said. He didn’t understand why the only response he got was brays of mirth.
In the foyer were small framed pictures of children bending over the remains of a campfire, a tent in the background. Nearby, capes and coats hung like stage curtains from a coat tree, concealing some mysterious act in the dark corner. A long wig trailed from the very top of the tree.
“Buddy!” Cowboy exclaimed and waved to someone deep in the living room. He pressed a palm into Fucking Ho’s back and steered forward.
“Mikey! I want you to meet this nice young man. His name is Fucking Ho!” Cowboy paused for effect. “Yeeyap! Hey Ho, here’s a drink-o!” He turned around, grinned and shoved a drink into Fucking Ho’s hands, then swung back and said in a stage whisper, “He’s a Muslim, you know.”
Fucking Ho blinked. Suddenly Cowboy’s clothes had disappeared. All of it—broad-brimmed hat, heavy belt buckle, Converse with spurs. Cowboy was now stark naked, happy as a clam, or a peach, or a lark, all living things, beautiful as they breathed. Cowboy breathed too, an excited wheeze that made his chest expand and cave. Howie Ho understood in a snap that he, Ho Fook Hing a.k.a. Fucking Ho a.k.a. Prosperity Rise, was Cowboy’s Halloween costume.
He glanced helplessly around the room. Discarded on the floor, presumably because they got in the way of drinking or making out, lay Viking horns, wizard staffs, juggling balls. Tools just like me, he thought.
He swiped a cardboard sword off the floor and hacked his way through to find a bathroom. When he found it, he pressed down on the door handle gratefully. Inside, taking up almost all the space, was a basin, tiny and round like an ornamental bird’s nest. He wanted to wake up and become Howie again.
They’d met at a Southeast Asian food fair in Union Square, which, in retrospect, should have told him something. She was by herself, shuffling with neck bent to puff cooling breaths onto a Styrofoam bowl of soup noodles lifted high in two hands. Her eyes were rolled dramatically upward as she kept her sight trained ahead of her to maneuver the crowd. To Howie Ho she looked like she was worshipping the bowl of noodles. She had the whitest, shiniest eye whites he had ever seen.
“Excuse me.” Wonder of wonders, she stopped him. “What’s that you’re having?”
He flushed and gave his crotch a single scratch, a stupid habit he didn’t know he had.
“Rojak.”
“What is it?”
“It’s . . . Malaysian.”
She laughed. It was an unusual sound, like a snort turned inside out. “And what does that mean?”
“Well. Let’s see. The sauce is sweet, sour, salty, and spicy, combining all the flavors possible to be experienced.”
“Wow!” She showed more of her eye whites. “How do you do that?”
She had fallen into step with him, still cupping her noodles. He couldn’t believe it. A pretty white girl interested enough to make conversation with him.
“Uh, not sure. I only know how to eat, not cook,” he grinned and scratched. “Some people say rojak symbolizes my country. So many different races and cultures mixed together, but somehow it all tastes good. I mean, works good.”
She smiled. “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe what?”
“That you’re Malaysian. If you are truly Malaysian, tell me one thing only real Malaysians would ever know.”
His mouth opened as he thought hard. Around them, the heat from warm bodies and cooked food seemed to echo and skid off every surface, balling their conversation up into a dull roar.
“We either think we are the best country in the world or the worst country in the world,” he said at last. The pretty white girl frowned at him with her eyebrows, but her lips were curled into a smile.
Afterward, he replayed their conversation over and over, cringing whenever he came to the part where he delivered his lame answer to her question about what real Malaysians knew. What a loser! It was an opening, a wide one, and he had blown it. He could have said something like “We make the best lovers” or “We have the most charming men in the world” or anything, just not that earnest answer that was nevertheless nonsensical. Argh! Fucking English! Fuck the language. It was never good enough or big enough for what he had in his brain.
All in all, he was glad he had asked his boss for the day off. It was his first real job, and he definitely wanted to be in his manager’s good books. But it was also Lunar New Year, and he thought he deserved the day off to embrace his roots and all, even if all he could do was wander around Union Square in the cold winter air, taking comfort from knowing he was in proximity of fellow Malaysians, who surely were attending a Southeast Asian food fair in great numbers.
And now, because of the day off, he had her number. They had spent about half an hour together at the food fair, with him doing most of the talking because she had so many questions, almost as if she were interviewing him. She wanted to know the difference between Malay and Malaysian, how many languages he spoke, whether the food she was eating was “authentic enough,” the difference
between Thai curries and Malaysian curries, and so on.
In contrast, he knew nothing about her, except that she was pretty and, for some inexplicable reason, in pursuit of him.
On his way home after the fair, he paused when he was halfway across the great starry hall of Grand Central. He felt lucky. He looked up at the comforting complexity of the dome, filled with line tracings done as if by an adult yearning to be a child. If someone had asked him to describe the individual depictions of zodiac figures painted on the roof, he would not have been able to recall any single one, but he had always thought of the ceiling as beautiful, and he had told people so.
He looked around him, trying to estimate how many people were there, milling or going. He picked out the younger men, on the lookout especially for T-shirts with funny sayings or bowed heads sporting practical haircuts. Anything that said “nerd.”
Satisfied, he went up to a wall of ticket counters and crouched into an Asian squat, feet flat against ground. He took in the hall of people. From his back pocket, he withdrew a Nintendo 3DS. He flipped the lid open and rubbed the screen with a corner of his shirt, in case there was any dust obscuring the surface.
Howie Ho started up Conquerors, a game in which his objective was to build sprawling empires from the ground up. He was still at the village stage, with half a dozen mud-and-straw huts and more animals than inhabitants. He needed more villagers to build faster, so that he could get to the township level, but the game’s simulated breeding and rearing process was painfully slow, requiring a good thirty minutes before any newborn inhabitant could become a useful contributor to his town.