Though I Get Home

by YZ Chin

  Lastly, gatekeeper number three handed him two pieces of paper. One was the national ballot, and the other a state ballot.

  He had of course immediately scoffed at the inefficiency of such a setup, being a consultant by trade. He could pin-point at once ten different ways of optimizing the system. Instead, he sighed. He had spent $1,500 on airfare just to cast a vote. It had felt good back in America, announcing this act of conscience to the other Malaysians staying behind for work or some such lame excuse. So now he should enjoy the moment, or commit it to memory at least. But the classroom setting was seriously killing the vibe. He couldn’t call forth the somber tone and mood he thought the occasion deserved.

  Howie Ho cast one last sweeping look, taking it all in: folding tables draped with fliers, pamphlets, and instructions. Lines of people snaking into each other. Headscarves and curtains stirred, now and then, under the ceiling fans. The curtains made the voting booths look like changing rooms in old-school supermarkets, before malls had become a thing. “I wish I were as patriotic as you are,” Ming had said to him, pronouncing the word pat-trot-tic. Howie Ho wondered whether Ming had been sincere or mocking.

  Two masked men sprinted into the hall, rubber shoes skidding. One of them smacked aside a voting booth’s privacy screen with a hand chop. The interrupted voter, a woman in a sari, let out a staccato of a shriek. The first man pushed her aside, then flattened himself to let the other masked man through. The second man picked up the ballot box within and hugged it to his chest.

  No one was doing anything. Howie Ho cut his eyes to the person standing closest to the outside of the booth. It was a young girl with dyed hair, roots showing, her mouth agape. Scream, girl! he urged in his head. Why aren’t you screaming?

  The masked man hugging the ballot box eyed the neighboring voting booth. He turned to look at his accomplice. Behind them, an uncle with a thick mustache and wavy hair brought up a hand clenching a cell phone, looked at it, hesitated, then made to lunge at the masked men, the phone slightly raised as if meant as a weapon.

  The masked man with hands free nudged his partner. Together, they sprinted across the room by the same route they had entered. As they charged toward the door, a woman standing near it stiffened, stood taller, then hunched smaller. Abruptly she crumpled up a ballot loose between fingers and stuffed the paper into her mouth. Her cheeks puffed. Her eyes bulged.

  And they were gone. The air had the atmosphere of people shuffling out in waves after the end of a movie, but all wrong, a rude mimicry of that collective falling back into the real world after living a fantasy. Now the super charge of base reality was creating an evil vortex of sorts in the air. Howie Ho spun around, looking for his family in that choppy sea of faces: ocher, tawny, dun, sponge cake, crude oil, charred papaya. Back in America, Ming had laughingly warned Howie Ho about Nepalese and “Banglas” used to hijack the election. Scared of defeat and playing dirty, the ruling party was bussing in loads of foreigners with instant or temporary citizenship to up its votes. Howie Ho had gone online in search of proof. On blogs and strangers’ Facebook walls were cell phone photos of these supposed fresh citizens getting off planes and trucks in waves, escorted by army men with long guns. He had squinted, but if he were honest with himself, he would have to admit that they looked pretty much just like Malaysians to him.

  Ming said it was because Howie Ho had been away for too long. He’d lost the ability of discriminatory racial profiling that was innate to everyone born there.

  Howie Ho tried to remember the features of foreigners he’d seen. All he could summon were images of guys pumping cars at petrol stations or sweaty men hanging around construction sites. He thought about a cement mixer, churning round and round. He looked at the hive of strangers around him. People were walking out, some dazed, some brisk and purposeful. He followed the stream out to find his family in the sunshine and chaos.

  The restaurant built up echoes like a cave or like a Central Park tunnel, but without the cool darkness of either. They were back here again, the same space with red tablecloths, ghastly bright from cheap fluorescent lights studded everywhere overhead.

  His eyes were tired. There were too many people at dinner. Four from his family, six from Apple’s. It was his first time meeting Apple’s aunt and uncle. He was not ready for it, not after the clown show and the humidity they’d had today.

  The aunt and uncle thought themselves witty, the complete opposite of the almost obsequious air put on by Apple’s parents. Uncle and aunt must have seen the lazy Susan perched in the middle of the red tablecloth as an elevated stage built just for them, the way they went on. Already they had casually commented on the arrogance of imperialist America and the decrepitude of gun-crazy, burger-eating Americans. Now they were tag-teaming:

  “Oh look, the boy still knows how to use chopsticks!”

  “Oh yes! Very impressive! Maybe he should order for us. You think he can still read Chinese?”

  Synchronized laughter. Mr. and Mrs. Apple were shooting the dynamic duo looks of helpless irritation. Apple herself was the picture of bleached-hair grace, making up for the lack of natural breeze in the food-hot hall by periodically flipping hair away from her face and letting it fan about her profile. She said nothing, but whenever her aunt and uncle fired off yet another cheap shot, she gave Howie Ho a sweet little smile and a look of support.

  “Did you hear? This good boy here flew alllll the way back from America just to vote!” Mrs. Apple said, then immediately glanced at her wristwatch.

  “Yaloh,” Mrs. Ho chimed in. “He said he wanted to do his part, not like that Mrs. Lim’s boy, never come home for five years . . .”

  The uncle responded with a derisive baring of teeth as his wife pounced: “What! He doesn’t even live here! What does he know about life in Malaysia? How can he vote? He’s more American than Malaysian, so how does he know who to vote for? Just like those illegal immigrants smuggled in! Padding ballot boxes!”

  “Yes loh yes loh, all he knows about Malaysia is through ‘hear say.’ He doesn’t live here, so why should he decide who should run the place for the rest of us? Hah?” her husband continued.

  “Who do you want to win?” Mr. Ho cut in. “All the young people overseas support democracy . . .”

  “Ya, they ‘support’ by posting on Facebook and writing poems, cincai-cincai nonsense . . . Look what happened to the girl who wrote that sodomy poem for Anwar! Rotting in jail!”

  Howie Ho’s chopsticks clattered onto his plate. Synchronized laughter rose again. Howie Ho involuntarily turned to look at Apple. She met his eyes, encouraging smile at the ready, but it faded when she saw the fear and shock in his face.

  “What’s wrong?” she mouthed at him from across the table.

  Howie Ho shook his head. The shake was for himself, not for Apple. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be what he thought it was. His hand, shoved deep into his khakis’ pocket and groping, vibrated like a cell phone. He was searching for one, but his pockets were empty. Then he remembered: he had been too cheap to pay for a roaming data plan from Verizon, so his phone was useless, and he had left it in his suitcase.

  Fuck. He needed the internet. It alone could give him the information he needed, in a safe way. Google wouldn’t demand his reasons for being curious, or probe his burning desire to find out exactly what the sodomy poem was.

  Plate after plate of food jiggling on greasy trays came carried by servers. The place felt infernally hot. The others were now talking about something stupid and meaningless. At another polling station in the neighboring state, voting was over and officials were tallying up the results. They were down to the last ballot box, and it was clearly going to be a landslide victory for the opposition candidate. Even if that last box contained nothing but pro-government votes, there was no way the pendulum would be swinging back the other way. Suddenly, there was a blackout. When the lights came back on ten minutes later, two more ballot boxes had appeared as if by magic, consisting almost entirely of votes
for the incumbent, who then managed to “win” by the slightest of margins.

  The diners laughed and clucked their tongues amidst the chewing and spitting of bones. It seemed that nobody at the table believed their votes mattered or harbored any hope that the opposition would win. But they didn’t seem all that outraged, cheerily swapping stories about the dirty tricks used to win elections.

  Finally, the plates stopped coming, and the check was left on the table to be fought over. Howie Ho jiggled one foot after the other, mentally cursing Apple’s relatives. These people were taking forever with their toothpicks, going at their teeth from all different angles, wrist motions as intricate as any Malay traditional dancer’s.

  And then it was over. Mr. Apple cleared his throat as he stood up. He looked first to his left, then his right, as if making sure some coast was clear. Then he bowed his neck and nodded at Howie Ho, saying, “Got time come visit ya. My wife make some almond biscuits, very good.”

  Howie Ho nodded back without thinking.

  Back at his parents’ house, he waited until everyone was settled in to watch live news of the election results on TV. Snacks were being passed around, as if they were watching an action movie. He declined. The opposition had won one key state so far. The mood in the living room was buoyant.

  A commercial break came on. Howie Ho crept away to his sister’s room to use her laptop. Through the closed door, he could still hear his blood relatives. He breathed out heavily and slumped in her chair. He was exhausted. In America, you stood in long lines and at the end you were given a reward, an exquisite meal or a show Time Out had featured. But today he had waited and waited in vain. No vote from him—and not that it mattered, apparently.

  He typed in “sodomy poem malaysia.” The page loaded slowly, rows of pixels at a time. Staring at the struggling page he felt physically sick, like he had the one time he’d been to a strip club. He hadn’t wanted to go. It was a work thing. His boss was there. How could he say no?

  “Pop his cherry!” his boss had shouted, choking with laughter, gesturing to a stripper while clapping Howie Ho on the back.

  The woman smiled like she was seven and Howie Ho was Santa. She led him to a couch in a corner. When she gently pushed his chest he sat down obediently, nestling low and deep into the seat. She straddled him and began to do her thing. He blinked. Without knowing why, he found that he was watching a pole dance about fifteen feet away, sneaking peeks at snatches of the strip tease that weren’t blocked by the woman on his lap.

  “Are you looking at my armpit?” She suddenly laughed. It seemed like such a natural laugh. She didn’t stop. He felt nauseous, his stomach churning.

  Before the search results had finished displaying, he picked a couple of links at random and opened them in new tabs. One of them was just someone’s blog, no ads, so that finished loading first. He scanned it. The piece seemed to be an op-ed of sorts reposted via copy and paste. Plain and ballsy. That was what it had to say about the poem.

  He moved. His spine creaked. The whole thing made no sense to him. Why was this such a big deal? Poems were harmless, unimportant. Nobody gave a shit about them.

  Vulgar. Said a different tab. NSFW. His heart raced again. That was what he had been waiting for, that pre-knowing deep in his guts.

  A wheel stopped spinning in the last tab. He navigated to it, and there it was, the poem. Bellies belie / anus’ onus. He read it twice, his eyes flying over the words. No. No. The white girl had written those lines; he’d seen them on a piece of paper she used as a bookmark, nestled in a book she was reading. That had been almost four months ago. He’d picked up that book and flipped through it, wanting to get inside her mind more. When he found the poem draft, he squinted at her handwriting, the strikethroughs and revisions making him more and more alarmed as he read.

  At first he wondered whether she was fantasizing about exotic sex positions. He squirmed, imagining bringing the topic up with her. But the more he read, the more it sank in: it wasn’t about him. He put the book down and surveyed her living room for other clues. He glanced at the closed bathroom door. The sound of water running continued from behind it.

  There. On the coffee table, half-pinned by an open New Yorker, was a book about Anwar Ibrahim, written by an Australian lawyer. He brushed the magazine aside, revealing the book. “SODOMY II,” the cover screamed. He smiled unconsciously. She must be wanting to know him better, too. That’s why she was reading dry books on Malaysian politics and even composing poems about them. He marveled at his powers of influence. Imagine, an American caring about a small Southeast Asian country halfway across the world, so much so that a work of art was created!

  It was morning, and the opposition had indeed lost the country, just like everyone had known it would. The country that Howie Ho had wanted to do his part in saving. The nation that had lost its bearings after being bounced around multiple colonial masters like an ugly ornament that kept on being regifted.

  “I’m sorry you flew all the way back for nothing,” Mr. Ho said. Then he changed the subject, complaining about his left eyelid that wouldn’t stop twitching.

  “That signals disaster,” Howie Ho’s sister said helpfully. “If it’s right eyelid that’s okay, that means you get rich.”

  Mrs. Ho was dejected. She had gone to bed when initial numbers pointed to an opposition victory, dreaming of a new dawn. Now she blamed herself for the overnight robbery, which, it seemed to her, wouldn’t have happened if she had kept vigil.

  A mosquito attached itself to a spot just below Howie Ho’s elbow. Its crawling legs blended in perfectly with the hairs on his arm. He froze. He couldn’t think. Isa Sin, the real one, the scapegoat rotting in jail—he had looked up a picture of her after reading the sodomy poems. It had been a whole month. They must have kicked her ribs in by now, made her tiny bosom concave. And then they must have starved her before splashing boiling-hot broth all over her, laughing while she bit down her screams and licked her own burning arms for scraps of soup, red red red.

  “Ahhh!” he yelled. His sister had brought an open palm vigorously down on his forearm. The clap was like thunder. Ears ringing, he shoved her hand away. There was a little smear of blood and hair-thin legs splaying out of the blob.

  “What’s wrong?” his mother asked.

  “I feel bad,” he muttered.

  He went back to his room, waving off her concerned tittering. Good thing the landline in there still worked. He drew his chair close to the desk and called his airline. He cleared his throat and scratched himself as the phone rang.

  “Hello?” he whispered when the dial tone stopped. Best if his family didn’t hear him. He wanted to leave, right away—he couldn’t stay here anymore.

  But it couldn’t be done. All the flights to America were already booked over capacity. He would have to keep the return date on his current ticket. He hung up, fearful.

  “Where are you going?” Mr. Ho asked when Howie Ho hurried past the kitchen.

  “Going out!” He didn’t stop. “For fresh air,” he added.

  “There’s no such thing in this place!” Mr. Ho shouted after him.

  Nobody could call him selfish for trying to be a good son. A good son was someone who married a nice Malaysian girl and made nice Malaysian babies. Today was the day; it was now or never; time waits for no man; etc. His parents had always nagged him about being a good Asian man who respected his roots and continued important traditions like filial piety. “The tree wants to be still, but the wind will not cease,” his mother often cajoled in her backhanded way. The rest of the proverb went, “A son wants to take care of his parents, but they are no longer present.”

  He felt as he did before big meetings at work, when the PowerPoint presentations were as polished as they would ever be and he was sitting in an empty meeting room, having arrived ten minutes earlier than everyone else. He was ready. Nothing could go wrong as long as he was prepared. And he always was.

  He had crunched the numbers three times an
d each time the satisfactory answer was that, yes, he could indeed well afford to get married, thus fulfilling his parents’ fondest wish. Thanks to the prudent financial decisions of his early twenties, he was now able to comfortably take on a mortgage and a wife who spent moderately (no more than two overseas trips per year).

  The only wrinkle so far was that he had left the house later than expected, all because Mrs. Ho had taken issue with his choice of clothing. Unfit for such an important occasion, she had lectured. He protested that Malaysian weather was much too hot and humid for something like a Western suit, but his mother vehemently insisted that he not bring shame to the family, an admonishment that always worked in the end.

  Howie Ho crouched into his father’s car. A jet of air-conditioning hit him squarely in the neck. He shuddered. For no reason, he turned to look at the empty back seat. Somehow Gong Gong seemed to be with him. Maybe Howie Ho would be forgiven now, on his way to be a good son, one who married a nice Malaysian girl and settled down within driving distance of his parents so that he could play mahjong with them once a week. Through this he would be redeemed.

  It was indeed blazingly hot. He pulled to a stop at a traffic light and stared at the windshields of cars on the opposite side, shimmering, opaque, looking one moment hard as diamonds and the next on the verge of melting. His brain felt like that: blank and yet not quite blank, alternating between invincibility and vulnerability.

  The light changed. The car behind him honked, startling him into making a rash wrong turn. He braked almost immediately when he realized his mistake. The other car screeched and honked even louder. He stalled on the shoulder of the road, barely looking up when the other driver pulled past with an open palm jabbed energetically toward Howie Ho.

  He was nauseous from the sun. Funny how your body evolves so quickly, he thought confusedly. My cells must no longer be accustomed to this brutal weather. He put his head down on the steering wheel to stop himself from imagining the individual shriveling of each capillary.