by YZ Chin
When his father called the next morning, Howie Ho apologized and explained that he had gone to bed early the night before, and so had not heard his mother’s message. No, he did not think he would be able to attend the wake or the funeral. He was sorry. Yes, he was sad but doing okay.
The evening of the wake, when the rest of his family was supposed to stay up all night to watch over Gong Gong’s soul, Howie Ho awoke groggily at five in the morning. He sat up in the gray light and looked at his clock. It must be almost dusk by now, halfway across the world where he wasn’t.
There would be a temporary tin roof set up to shelter guests in case it rained. Everyone in his family would be wearing white. Some of them would have patches of black fabric pinned to their left sleeves. A few of them would be crying—probably his aunt, his mother.
Because of time zones, it would be half a day in the future now, where his grandfather was laid out in his living room for all to mourn. Howie Ho wanted to follow along with the proceedings in his imagination, to participate if only in the wrong place and time. Let them denigrate him for failing his duty as the eldest grandson. He was filial and loyal in his own way. He would make it up to his family in the future. Gong Gong would know, wherever he was.
He pictured a chanting monk robed in saffron wisps of incense, then Gong Gong’s face through the viewing window of a casket, powdered and colored, an alien fish seen through a porthole. There would be a framed photograph at the head of the casket, and he dwelled on the contrast between corpse and photo. But they were both strangers, neither resembling the man he had last seen. There seemed something profound in all this, and he felt it in his chest and throat. He tried not to think too hard about it.
He never told his parents about the white girl. He didn’t want them to think that his sudden desire to visit home had to do with heartbreak or weakness. So he went along without protest when his mother dragged him to what was obviously a chaperoned blind date.
They were sitting under the harsh lights of a banquet hall, two youngish people and their parents spaced around a table meant for ten. The banquet hall was just a regular restaurant when no weddings were being hosted, but there were tells, such as perennial red tablecloths on round tables and deafening atmospheric noise, every ding and buzz multiplying when they echoed off the high ceilings.
The girl across from him was incredibly fresh-faced, with an even skin tone and no follicles visible, a miracle in weather as humid as this. Masses and masses of subtly dyed hair slinked around her shoulders, which he watched slacken and tighten as the girl repeatedly remembered, then forgot, to showcase good posture.
Howie Ho spun the lazy Susan in the center of the table, moving a teapot away from the girl and toward himself. The fathers were talking, but he wasn’t paying attention.
“What do you think?” his mother whispered. “Not bad, right?”
Howie Ho gave his crotch a quick one-two scratch. He looked again at the girl across from him, thinking about how his skin was not at all like her skin. Even her fingers were free of the wrinkles and knobs that grew out of his hands like parasitic mushrooms. He grunted to his mother.
“Apple is studying Business Administration at TAR College.” The girl’s mother beamed. Her lips were lip-sticked, but you could still see the creases underneath, like dry earth cracked.
“Oh, what a smart girl!” Mrs. Ho laughed for some reason.
“Aiya, not as smart as your son—making American money!” The other mother also inexplicably roared with laughter.
Howie Ho examined Apple’s skinny plucked eyebrows and her button nose. He wanted to be sure she was actually pretty.
Apple caught his eye and smiled broadly. He smiled back, and it was neither awkward nor terrifying. She lifted a hand and brushed some hair off her forehead. He did not feel inadequate. Maybe it was because he already felt a sense of entitlement over her, since it was her family that had set up this interview of sorts.
The food came. The lazy Susan spun politely. Howie Ho watched as Apple wrapped her mouth around the top inch of chopsticks that were pinching a piece of chicken, swirled the meat around, then extracted two thin bones from between parted lips. The bones went on top of a precarious mound building up on the table in front of her, a stack of discarded shiny bones, gristle, shells, and carapace. But the latest addition was too much—the mound slid and flattened itself, spreading, revealing under it a dark stain seeping through the ruby tablecloth.
The landslide came to a stop with one prawn pereiopod resting against the rim of Apple’s plate.
“Not hungry?” Apple’s mother turned to him, then to Mrs. Ho. “Your son don’t like Asian food?”
Howie Ho grimaced. “Jet lag,” he answered.
The youngish people met without their parents a week later in a high-end shopping mall. Pavilion, it was called. Howie Ho ran his eye down an interminable line of boutique shops, counting clothes, bags, shoes, clothes, clothes, bags, female underwear, clothes, perfume, shoes, shoes, shoes.
Beside him he could sense Apple’s shoulders, the part of her nearest to him. He wanted to say something, but, heck, he still didn’t understand why they were here. His mother and sister had ganged up on him when he’d said he would much rather take a girl to a movie than to the mall. Trust us, they kept saying. You haven’t lived here, you’re not a girl. Eventually they wore him down, and he accepted their “help” as they chattered on about the merits and demerits of various malls, finally settling on Pavilion as the one with an environment most conducive to “serious dating” (as his sister termed it).
Now they were here, and he thought the whole experience rather like binge-watching bad TV. The mall’s floors, waxed smooth and offering just the right amount of friction, seemed to carry his feet along as a conveyor belt would. Like a TV, the mall asked nothing of him except to take in frame after shopwindow frame of attractive things coming into view as he glided along the course set out for them. He didn’t have to do anything, think anything, except: Am I bored? If so, change the channel. If not, great.
Sensing a change in the angle of Apple’s shoulders, he stopped and followed her line of sight. Seemed to him that she was looking at a jean blouse with fake fur trimming at the collar and cuffs, her head cocked in a cute way to one side. The jean blouse was filled out by a headless torso bust, tightened with safety pins in the back. The hands were cut off at the wrist.
He blanched. Shocking how he’d never thought of it before, but wouldn’t he be effectively halving his finances if he were to take a wife? He did some mental math, unable to avoid imaginary assaults on his paychecks staged by mortgages, loans, college funds, and jean blouses with fur trimming.
Apple was looking at him, a shy smile lifting one peak of a lip to hint at teeth and tongue. Howie Ho cleared his throat. “You like that blouse?” he asked.
Apple trilled, a delightful SMS ringtone. Then she snorted, covered her mouth in giggling embarrassment, and said, “That is the ugliest thing I have ever seen!”
Howie Ho turned, confused, to examine the blouse. It looked like a regular woman’s top to him. Then he looked at Apple, still laughing, and tried to picture it on her. Yeah . . . it was atrocious.
Apple on the table, skin shiny. Howie Ho shot his sister a look of disgust, setting off waves of wide-mouthed, unfeminine laughter from her.
“I know you’ve been thinking of her all night . . .” she jeered. “So here’s an apple for your breakfast, since you are now on the apple diet!” She laughed again, all gullet.
“You should eat it,” his mother chimed in. “No time later today.”
Howie Ho scooped up the fruit and ran it under sink water, ignoring his sister’s claims that it had been prewashed. He absentmindedly ran his nails around the orb, searching for a wet sticker to peel off, before remembering that his mother always bought her groceries from the wet market, where prices lived not on labels, but in the heads of the hawkers.
“I tried to buy some kuih for you because I know y
ou like them,” his mother said. “But all the stalls closed today lah, you know, prolly lining up for money in exchange for their votes. Why work when you can just get free money, right? All the protests won’t change anything!”
Howie Ho loudly declared that corruption and fraud at the level she described was simply unheard of in America. He firmly believed it was a mark of patriotism to point out the flaws of his country and turn them into jokes. It was also a mark of patriotism to denounce any foreigners who highlighted Malaysia’s deficiencies. Both were ways to love a country.
Right before he’d boarded the plane that would take him here, he had felt clean, good, even moral, for coming all the way back home to cast his vote in the latest election. It was the right thing to do, as a citizen. But now everything he heard seemed to tell him that it was a meaningless act because the incumbent party was just going to win by hook and crook. What was one honest vote against a thousand tricks by the government?
Yesterday, a tiny polling station in a neighboring state was burned down. There were either no witnesses or no witnesses brave enough to come forward. Everyone had theories about who the perpetrators were. And by “who,” everyone meant “which”—government or opposition?
It must be the government, Mr. Ho explained confidently. It was common knowledge that the government was giving out citizenships left and right to border people and other immigrants just in time for these “new Malaysians” to vote. Anybody would do, as long as they had at least one functioning hand that could palm money and scribble down votes dictated to them. With such dirty tactics, clearly the government was scared by the opposition. Polling station arson fit in with such desperation.
Mrs. Ho shook her head, sighing melodramatically. “No, no, seems more like the opposition. Angry youngsters, you know, setting things on fire because they’ve lost hope. They’re saying, what’s the point of voting? What can we do? What can anyone do?”
“But then,” his sister interjected, “that Sodomy Poet caused a lot of attention, you know, young people especially, who never used to care about politics. They’re all like ‘free speech, free speech’ now, so maybe there’s still hope!”
“Is the sodomy thing really drawing the right kind of attention?” Mr. Ho seemed doubtful. “It might make conservative people support the government even more!”
“Aiya, there are more young people who want to be free . . . laws of nature mah, right?”
“What are you trying to say? Can’t wait for us old people to die?”
“No lah . . .”
They set out to vote after breakfast. It seemed like an ordinary day at first, but as they neared the town center, traffic slowed to a crawl. Police milled about, standing under the shades of storefront verandas or leaning against parking meters. Something didn’t feel right. Howie Ho screwed up his eyes. The buildings were the same ones he had grown up with, sides all peeling paint and dirty with whitewash from decades ago, roofs either low and flat or sloped and shingled. He had once shown a picture of this exact street to the white girl, who had remarked that it reminded her of parts of Mexico. He had been inexplicably offended. She then jumped on him, accusing him of racism, which he quite sincerely denied. Nevertheless, he could offer no coherent explanation of why he’d felt offended. How smug she was, when she argued with him.
He kept screwing and unscrewing his eyes until he figured out what was bothering him. It was the uniforms. Something different about the police outfits, maybe some embellishment or the shade of blue—some minor update that had been carried out between his leaving and his returning.
It probably meant nothing, he told himself.
“AHHHH!” his sister shrieked.
“What? What?”
She was holding her hands away from her, limp-wristed claws that she now pushed toward Howie Ho.
“I forgot! I got a manicure yesterday!”
Mrs. Ho expelled an “Aiya!” from the front seat.
“How much was it? Can’t you just get another one after you vote?” Mr. Ho asked.
“No! It’s called indelible ink, Ba. It’s going to stay on my finger for two weeks! Maybe I shouldn’t vote?”
Howie Ho surprised everyone by reaching over and gently cradling one of his sister’s hands. Once, twice, he swiped his thumb along the nail of her index finger. The nail was lime green, an even, professional coating without any lumps. The polish did not spill over the boundary separating nail and skin, nor did it stay within the border. No, it perfectly became the border.
“This is a nice color,” he said.
His sister withdrew her hand, uncertain. She blinked a few times.
Standing in line at the polling station triggered a memory, of him and the white girl walking past a clan of Asian smokers loitering in front of a bodega.
She had said, “I’m convinced smoking is a sign of regression. People want to suck on their momma’s tits; that’s all there is to it. The ‘cool’ factor was made up to disguise this infantile urge.”
He turned to look at her face, to see if she was serious.
Why did such memory associations harass him? Standing in line, passing judgment on other people—the connection was the flimsiest possible. He could be thinking about a million other things instead. Why this?
He slowly pulled his wallet out and butterflied it. It took a bit of rifling before he found his Malaysian IC, nestled layers deep behind his American state ID, credit cards, and punch cards. He frowned. The wallet was too damn thick, with too many damn cards he had to carry.
He looked about. Where was the cleanliness, the moral goodness he was supposed to feel, standing ready to perform his civic duty? Really the scene was one not of solemn ceremony but rather of agitated boredom. This particular polling station was in a boxy secondary school classroom just like the ones he had left years ago. Four long picnic-length tables formed a second, inner wall, hemming in two clear plastic boxes in the center of the room. The boxes were directly under a ceiling fan spinning so fast it was a disc of whirring. Inside the boxes were the votes, mere paper, halved or quartered, the topmost layer occasionally fluttering under the fan’s mechanical draft.
They had taken away the usual rows of little wooden chairs and desks native to such classrooms. Howie Ho rubbed his thumb against his index finger, remembering the texture of those crude canals carved into desktops by pen knife blades, next to mounds of correction fluid that iced whatever surface remained. In the last year of primary school, his assigned seat had been right under a fan that looked just like this one in the polling station. He had spent many a class daydreaming about the instant gory death that would befall him when the fan detached itself from the ceiling and landed on his head like a spider with legs akimbo. It would happen one day, he knew, just like fruit inevitably ripens and leaves its tree.
There was one afternoon when something like that did nearly happen. It was monsoon season, and so it had been exceptionally windy in their fifth-floor classroom. The jalousie windows that lined two sides of the room were rotated at a forty-five-degree angle to let in air, which began to whistle as the afternoon lengthened.
The girl in front of him kept patting her ponytail every time a strong gust sang. Howie Ho watched her fluttery hands for a while. Then he slid one of his own forward, a supplicating palm held flat to receive the tips of her hair, swaying, brushing him. It tickled in a pleasant way.
His ears popped. He had no time to react. A high-pitched scream bloomed papers off every desk and shoved them sideways across the room, fighting the jealous hold of the ceiling fan, now a cyclone, struggling to beam up anything it could.
By now his classmates were also screaming, pushing themselves up and out of their seats and racing through the door, as if they, too, were being swept away by the gale. Howie Ho looked up as the fan eked out its loudest screech yet, fighting to maintain its independent, artificial revolution against Mother Nature’s single-minded currents blowing through. The savage monsoon winds entered via one set of windows and s
liced out another. The fan was losing, sorely and loudly. Howie Ho watched, neck craned, trying to stay still as the fan’s whir became choppier. Individual blades started showing themselves through the blurry shield until, seemingly in slow motion, one single arm groaned and peeled inward, folding into itself. With each dying spin, the blade deepened into its painful sit-up, until it was finally shaped like a Come Hither finger.
Howie Ho waited for the whole thing to fall on him, but it never did. The spider spun erratically, no longer in charge.
The day before the election, his father had knocked on his door and given him a pamphlet, all awkwardness. Howie Ho flipped through it, dismissive. Just because he hadn’t done it before in his life didn’t mean he needed written instructions on How to Vote. How hard could it be?
He put off going to bed by watching a YouTube tutorial anyway, just in case. Thanks to it, he now knew exactly what to do, and what would happen in this crowded repurposed classroom. First, he had to go through three checkpoints before he could step into an actual voting booth. Gatekeeper number one took his IC and presumably made sure he was not pretending to be a dead person. His hand was demanded. He obediently splayed and displayed a palm, showing that his fingers were free of indelible ink.
Next, gatekeeper number two swiped his right index finger with the casualness of a government official marrying a couple. The ink, royal blue, was to prevent him from immediately returning to the back of the queue after casting a vote. If this were allowed, it was thought that a patient person could easily vote up to eight times—more if they were accomplished queue jumpers.