Though I Get Home

by YZ Chin

  But there was a loophole, and this was the best spot in the city to exploit that loophole. The game was decently popular, enough so that any nerdy young man walking by might be carrying another copy of it in their back pocket. This was good because the game had a “social” aspect to it. What that meant was, when two players of the game passed within ten feet or so of each other, the game granted them a villager each, fully formed and ready to build, farm, trade, procreate. Of course, there were limitations. You could obtain only one free villager per day from any given person. Grand Central, full of people scurrying across the great hall, could potentially be a huge score for him. It was a numbers game.

  Within an hour, Howie Ho had added six free mature villagers to his ranks. Not bad at all. He smiled and grimaced at the same time as he stood up from his squat. He thought he would wander slowly for a bit on the other side of the hall, catch a different flow of foot traffic. His eyes glued to his screen, he started shuffling on the smooth tiles. An alert sounded: another new villager! Howie Ho glanced up, grinning, turning his head side to side. He had an urge to see who this unexpected friend and partner was.

  A little boy of about six walked by—dragged, rather, by his mother, who was using her stern voice with him. “Put your little computer away!” she scolded. The little boy was holding on to his console with his free hand, spasmodically jabbing at buttons with his thumb.

  Howie Ho tried to catch the boy’s eye and give him a smile, then thought better of it.

  The first weeks of their relationship were the sweetest periods of time Howie Ho had ever known. The white girl was a cool girl who didn’t mind initiating kisses or picking restaurants. Somehow, maybe because she seemed so much out of his league that the whole thing had a tinge of daydream to it, he was not self-conscious with her. He answered her many questions without filter, questions about his parents, his country, his past life and memories. Her eye whites shone brightest when he talked, sometimes even with tears. She always wanted more details.

  He bought her presents. She liked perfume in fine China bottles and books not available on Amazon. They spent Saturdays in one or another of New York’s block-wide parks, listening to street performers toss music like scattered trinkets into the air.

  Then, reading relationship advice online, he realized that he had not done for her what she had done for him. He had not shown that he cared by “getting to know her,” a process that the advice said was really more a demonstration of attentiveness. In fact, he still knew nothing beyond the barest dating profile information—her age, her job (and how much she disliked it), etc.

  So the next time they met for dinner, he made sure to hold her hand, look into her eyes, and ask her about herself.

  Mostly she thought his life story was such a waste on him, with his bland personality. She had teased it all out of him: his grandfather had smuggled himself onto a boat departing for the South China Sea, leaving behind an entire family, generations extending back centuries, all put behind without a note.

  In the new land, he met a compatriot, a Chinese woman beautiful by his standards but unlovely to the foreigners they lived among. They served each other tea and declared themselves married. And then soon after, too soon, the Japanese followed them from old country to new country like vengeful ghosts who could be neither appeased nor banished. The wife, Fook Hing’s grandmother, had to shave her head to look as ugly as possible so they would not rape her.

  So very many terrible things during that war. There was never enough to eat. Every day fresh tales about fetuses ripped from their mother’s sliced stomachs, tossed high into the air, and then called back by gravity to be impaled on the soldiers’ glinting swords, raised upward, waiting.

  It was great with Fook Hing at first, but once she had mined him of his stories, his base character settled full force back in the room. Like a statue of soft clay, so full of possibilities to start, hardening day by day into a form that did not match what she had envisioned in her imagination.

  She wished his stories were hers. Imagine how much she could do with that kind of material.

  Once, drunk, she told Fook Hing that she wished there were no starving children in Africa, so that she wouldn’t have to feel bad about feeling bad.

  Reluctance padded on silent feet into their conversations. He had seemed so authentic when he’d first shared the details of his life and culture, but lately it seemed he was tired of remembering who he was. Fook Hing acted like he wanted more than anything to be “just” a New Yorker, living on the surface like a skim of wet on the sides of a cup, a man no more than the condensation of his current habits. “That happened a long time ago,” he would say impatiently. Or: “I’m a different person now.”

  “Aren’t you angry at your government for treating you like a second-class citizen?” she prodded.

  “That’s why I left,” he sulked. “They can’t do anything to me here.”

  “But aren’t you still enraged?” she persisted.

  “What do you want me to say?” He looked defiant. “You want me to pity myself, be a victim?”

  He squirmed especially when she asked him to repeat stories, as if he had meant to unburden himself with the first telling. Something like an anti-Proust: he didn’t so much relive memories as he relieved himself of them. By asking him to cover old ground, she was making him take back weight he thought he had dropped.

  Such a goddamn unfeeling man. “Shish kebab,” he had said. That was his chosen metaphor for the story about Chinese babies tossed high and then impaled on Japanese swords. She resented him for making that vulgar connection. It cheapened everything. How could she forgive him for living this way, blinkered and willing his own memories away?

  She took them.

  And just like that, it was over, not even enough time for the ink to dry on the business card, as Howie Ho’s boss would say of any short-lived venture. Howie Ho didn’t want to tell anybody about the breakup, but it couldn’t really be avoided without lies because of his own damn big mouth. He had been on a different plane only such a short time ago, and he hadn’t been able to refrain from bragging, just like he wasn’t able to hide his dejection now.

  They knew right away, his so-called friends, Malaysians one and all. There were five of them, squeezed tight around a small table that was really meant for two. This was because they had been standing in line in nippy fall air for an hour and forty-five minutes now, and they would rather be uncomfortable than miss out on such an in-demand bar. The couple at the next table was trading eye rolls of disgust over the elbows and shoe tips encroaching on their space, but who cared.

  They were consultants, analysts, associates, and senior associates. Once a week they gathered to trade boasts, lamentations, and facts about all things fashionable in NYC. They prided themselves on keeping up with the world—its beat, its health, its fears, and its ids. Their livelihoods depended upon accurate readings of the global market’s various moods, and they excelled at plumbing the depths of the market’s multiple personalities at war with each other. History, culture, and climate were a suite of practical tools applied to corporate or national motives: this country’s bonds should be shorted because its citizens had a welfare mentality (they clung too much to past glory days), and because its population was aging and sex-hating (a result of strict traditions and insular communities).

  In contrast, they did not seem to do so well when it came to understanding real people. They treated Howie Ho like some sort of race hero when they found out he was dating a white girl—a young one.

  “How did you get her to like you?” asked one analyst who earned six figures.

  “Ya, what’s your secret?” grinned an associate who had made a killing by betting that a certain Middle Eastern country would descend into chaos, when conventional market wisdom had it that the dictatorship was strong enough to make short work of the rebels. His lucky guess had outsmarted the market, and he was eagerly awaiting this year’s Christmas bonus.

  Howie Ho had
shrugged modestly and chalked it all up to a “numbers game.” Just try enough times, and statistically speaking, one of your attempts is bound to result in success. Don’t take rejections personally, but simply practice disinterested persistence.

  Now that it was all over, no one asked him for lessons learned or wisdom gained. Instead they huddled against him, trying to cheer him up in their own way. One of these ways involved pointing out hot white women in the bar and calling Howie Ho’s attention to them.

  “What about her?”

  “Looks Eastern European.”

  “Ya, these Eastern European types always have such cold eyes.”

  “Right? I once knew a girl from—what’s that place? Sounds like ‘Russia’ but it’s not Russia.”

  The bar had narrow strips of mirror along the length of its wall, possibly to make the alley-like space look wider. Howie Ho caught sight of his own face. Small head, incongruously ruddy cheeks, hair spiked high to expose a protruding forehead. He looked like a triad dropout. It was a depressing thought.

  “Prussia?” someone said absentmindedly.

  “Is it? No, I don’t think so . . . Something else.”

  “Belarusian? Belarus?”

  “Yes! Belarus. Such ice-cold eyes, like they want you to be dead.”

  “I heard they are giving green cards to foreign women abused by their American boyfriends.”

  “Oh ya? Too bad I’m not a girl. I could punch myself a couple of times in my face and then I’m all set.”

  “Hahaha! That must be what they do.”

  When the check came Howie Ho reached for it, laughing off protests. He felt better. It was nice to have friends.

  The electronic border control checkpoint at Kuala Lumpur read only Malaysian passports, as the machines had not been taught to read any other kind of embedded RFID chips.

  Howie Ho approached one of these unmanned booths containing the electronic reader, eyes shiftily cutting left and right. He had experienced jamais vu the minute he had stepped out of the aircraft, humidity settling on his shoulders, making itself at home.

  He had seen a Thai horror movie once in which the main character inexplicably gains a lot of weight on the scale, despite his physique changing not a bit. The climax, the twist, portrays that man coming to the realization that he has been walking around all this time carrying a vengeful female ghost on his back, perched piggyback, arms looped around his neck from behind. The ghost is upset at the man about—what was it? Howie Ho couldn’t remember.

  The RFID reader booth was a tiny four-by-four area marked by metal plating on the floor, a flat computer screen its only feature. Howie Ho stepped into the square. His body weight having been detected, clear plastic panels rose swooshing up from the edges of the square, flanking him at waist level.

  He fumbled with his passport until it was out of its clear sleeve. The maroon document went into a metal tray sized to receive just such a thing. The machine processed, an icon whirring on screen. Then it prompted him for his fingers. Howie Ho did as it asked, lightly spreading his hand and pressing fingertips against smudgy glass.

  An error message popped and beeped. Howie Ho checked his impulse to recoil and withdraw his hand. He squinted at the message. His eyes were too goddamn tired to do this, after two flights that had added up to over twenty hours. He shouldn’t have binged on movie after movie. It wasn’t like he could truly enjoy anything on that stupid tiny screen right in his face. Now his eyes were blurry, and he couldn’t quite understand the instructions on the screen because they were in Malay, and he hadn’t had occasion to use that language for years.

  He checked himself again, resisting the urge to lift his face and scan the area imploringly. He knew there would be guards and immigration officers milling about. He didn’t need that kind of attention. He could figure this out. But just in case they accosted him, he would tell them he was coming home to vote in the general election. Fulfilling his duty as a citizen. Surely that would put him in their good books?

  Relief rushed out in a long breath when he realized that there was another line of instructions in English beneath the ones in Malay. All he had to do was press his fingertips down harder and hold them still for longer—that was all the machine wanted, to be able to take his fingerprints more accurately.

  Howie Ho pressed his whole body down onto his arched right hand, the machine supporting his weight. Take it, he thought. Take it quickly so I can go on.

  The machine whirred. The clear barricades went down, and Howie Ho was free to cross into Malaysia, his identity as a citizen ensured by his digits.

  He sighed and walked, first dragging his feet, then picking up speed. Tired as he was, he still had to buy some American ginseng or bourbon or something from duty free, so that he could tell his parents that he had brought the items all the way back from New York.

  As always, his entire family had come to pick him up at the airport, dressed in their finest clothes. His mother waved frantically at him from behind illegal taxi drivers and people holding up names on signs. His father awkwardly patted Howie Ho’s spine a few times. “How was the flight? Did you eat? Are you hungry?” they asked. Every visit home had the same exact opening, fossilizing into ritual.

  Except Howie Ho’s sister was way louder than he remembered her to be. She primped now, the last three or four inches of her dyed hair ionized into instant-noodle curls. She had a boyfriend, and all the long drive home from the airport she reveled in describing how he was curled around her little finger.

  “Yesterday we had a fight.” She paused for reaction. “And he started crying. I wasn’t even crying!” she finished triumphantly. “Clearly I wear the pants in this relationship.”

  They were driving past orderly rows of oil palms marking the length of a plantation. A strong wind was blowing out of earshot. The bending of trees, the ruffling of their heads of fronds, were narrated, instead, by the hiss of air-conditioning cranked high.

  “Nobody needs to wear pants in a relationship,” Howie Ho said. He had never been able to resist thwarting his sister, or disagreeing with her for sport.

  His sister exchanged a look with his mother. Howie Ho ignored it. On both sides, trees continued streaming past, bent taut like an army of slingshots at the ready.

  At his grandmother’s house, he was surprised he couldn’t recognize his grandfather, hung high over the holy altar. It was a black-and-white photo of him in his prime, whereas Howie Ho had known him only as a taciturn old man, wrung dry by life of both words and, it seemed, bodily fluids. His skin was wrinkled everywhere and yet oddly spread thin across his scarecrow body. It wasn’t like other old people Howie Ho had seen. Other people’s grandparents had jiggly furrows and sloughs for wrinkles, a person rattling loosely somewhere within a creased pouch. His grandfather, on the other hand, had the skinniest possible fault lines running almost under the surface, snaking in every direction, holding his frame up. Something like a kite, or those wayang kulit things, Howie Ho thought—something with a lot of skin, pulled rigid, supported by mere twigs out of sight.

  They were here because his mother had insisted that he come pay his respects. He was supposed to set the tip of three joss sticks on fire, bow with them held up to his face, and stick them into the pot placed in front of a red plaque that was supposed to represent his grandfather. Howie Ho did it to make his mother happy. He had known better than to protest, even though he was tired as hell and wanted nothing more than to drive straight to his parents’ home, where he would wash his feet (again, to make his mother happy) and then fall straight into the twin-size bed from his childhood.

  He knew that if he had so much as murmured, she would have started in with the guilt business, berating him for failing his duties as a grandson.

  “Stay so long overseas become ang moh adi lah! Too good to be Chinese anymore, is it? Gong Gong die that time also dowwan come back, now you ashamed to see him, is it?”

  Howie Ho found himself resorting to the familiar tactics of childhoo
d: grunting and avoiding eye contact with his mother. Let her nag at him if she wanted to. He alone knew what he had done on the day of Gong Gong’s death. And it wasn’t so straightforward as she thought anyway. He hadn’t been able to come home for the funeral because he’d had midterms. He might have lost his scholarship if he had flunked those—who knew? At the time, it had seemed an easy enough decision because, quite simply, Gong Gong could not feel his absence, being dead, and so would not miss him at the funeral.

  Now, feeling his mother’s eyes on his bowed back, he felt a strand of regret. A half-formed thought fluttered, then danced madly away like a fly shooed: Maybe funerals were not for the dead.

  It’d been a dark winter afternoon, and he’d just gotten back from class. The mailbox icon was blinking on his dorm-room landline. Kicking off his shoes, he half fell onto his unmade bed and contemplated whether to listen to his messages. It could be that girl he’d left three voice mails for. But if she hadn’t bothered to return his calls after a month, why would she do so now?

  The blue light blinked on, and he felt hope rising within, to his annoyance. He leaned over and pressed play.

  His mother sounded calm enough on the machine. She just spoke very slowly, that was all.

  How many hours had it been since Gong Gong had died? And why did it always have to be like this, that delay between reality and his inner life? Every single argument Howie Ho had ever won took place only after the fact, inside his head when he was alone and eloquent. Why could he live only in retroaction, and was this what made him feel dull, not smart? Even incredibly basic things like eating and drinking—he never knew he had passed the point of satiation or drunkenness until he was hurting. But maybe, just maybe, this was a blessing because wouldn’t that mean he would not recognize his own death until after his body had lost the ability to register the fact? And wouldn’t this mean he would never really die?

  Howie Ho nearly laughed but started sobbing instead, his facial muscles belatedly realizing that he was in grief and not amused. He stumbled up to call his mother back, but ended on his knees instead, almost cracking his forehead on one leg of his desk. Suddenly he was praying out loud, reciting religious texts he’d memorized in his childhood. They had never been useful to him when he’d had to learn them, and now that he had a use for them, of course he remembered only the sounds to make and not the meanings behind them. Over and over he chanted sounds he did not understand, mourning his grandfather and his inadequate memory both.