Though I Get Home

by YZ Chin

  Think positive, he exhorted. Yes, think about how cheap it would be to move away from America, and how legitimate an excuse. He was exhibiting behaviors of a good member of society, seriously pondering settling down and raising fine children. America’s metropolitan cities are no place for that kind of adult activity, after all. If he had a wife in tow, no one could say he left because he couldn’t cut it in the Big Apple, right?

  Another car honked from behind him. He ignored it. The car honked again. His face immobile against the steering wheel, he raised a hand above his head and pawed at the air, waving the car forward. Finally, he heard it rev and advance. But then it seemed to slow and pull up parallel to his car, idling there next to him.

  Shit, what a bother. They probably thought he was having a heart attack or something. He was about to raise his face when there was thunderous rapping against the glass pane, right in his ear. He jumped, heart jackhammering. The face looming was his sister’s. She looked almost like their mother when she was worried. Behind her, haloing her head, were tree branches gently shaking out their leaves in a gust of breeze.

  She moved her mouth but he couldn’t hear her. Hands shivering, he cranked down his window.

  “You forgot your flowers,” she smiled, holding up a bouquet, one of the nicer ones that came with multiple layers of wrapping. They smelled like a department store, he thought.

  “I din buy flowers,” Howie Ho murmured. Roses, of course, rich and unreal in this tropical weather.

  “Oh . . . Maybe you forgot? They were on the kitchen table. Almost got curry on them . . .”

  Howie Ho peered up at her, framed by illuminated leaves. She shifted the flowers from one hand to the other. Sweat was starting to form on her brow. He took the flowers from her, navigating the bunch awkwardly through the car window. With every move, the inner layer of clear plastic wrapping rasped against the outer layer of pastel paper that had scalloped edges. When he dropped them onto the passenger seat they made a noisy shuffle.

  He turned to thank his sister and saw that she was already getting into her car. “Thank you,” he half shouted. She met his gaze and smiled, then pulled ahead and drove off.

  The Apples’ double swinging gates gaped wide when Howie Ho pulled up, already late. He cut off a song mid-chorus on the car radio.

  The house of his future in-laws was unremarkable, a unit in a row of identical single-story homes. The sameness of the houses seemed to have a side effect of spurring on various spurts of creativity and self-expression. Retirees, housewives, and other homebound owners grew very passionate about gardening, vying to color their front yards with the gaudiest flowers. That, or they decked out their houses with cultural icons and kept assorted decorations swinging in the wind long after their associated holidays had passed. Anything to make their cookie-cutter units stand out from the rest.

  The Apples’ tiled roof, once a bright blue, supported an Astro satellite dish. A gutter lined the roof’s rim, collecting rainwater and brown leaves. At the foot of a cement driveway were the front gates, and just inside the gates’ prison bars lay a garden hose, curled up on itself like a domestic animal.

  He slammed the car door shut, then saw the roses still in the car, almost sagging off the seat. He opened the door again. The flowers now smelled acrid sour. He fondled a petal. The texture somehow reminded him of sashimi, of all things. There was a word for it, wasn’t there? What was it?

  Papa and Mama Apple were sitting prim-legged on a loveseat facing the front door. They accepted his flowers and his apologies for being late with flinty cheeriness. Apple was nowhere to be seen. Howie Ho imagined her lurking in the next room, occasionally peeking around the corner, hair waterfalling over her pretty face.

  Outside, a truck rumbled by, crunching the tar road. Mrs. Apple disappeared with the flowers and returned with tea, biscuits, and a wide grin. She left again almost immediately, to check on her daughter, or so she said.

  “So, young man.” Mr. Apple cleared his throat. “You interested in my daughter, huh? Well first you have to answer some questions. Number one, how many girlfriends you have?”

  “Haha . . . Uncle,” Howie Ho laughed weakly, deciding to start with a safe honorific. “No girlfriends at all, I am a straightforward and loyal man.”

  “Mm. Good. How about in the past? How many before this?”

  “Don’t worry, Uncle. I’m not a playboy.”

  “So many you can’t remember?” Mr. Apple twisted his mouth sideways, indicating a joke.

  Howie Ho laughed politely again. He felt he was laughing too much and that it somehow put him in a weak position, but what was he supposed to do?

  “Not many, maybe two or three only.”

  “What about ang moh? You dated American girls before?”

  He swallowed. “Only one, Uncle. It wasn’t serious.”

  “Hmm,” Mr. Apple looked thoughtful. Here Mrs. Apple mercifully returned, not with Apple but with a giant bottle of Fanta. She set it down on the coffee table’s glass top, and the Fanta immediately started wetting itself, pooling at its base.

  Mrs. Apple coughed. “The flowers are very sweet,” she said, and for a confused moment Howie Ho wondered why in the world she had eaten them.

  Sometimes it takes an outsider, someone with distance and perspective, to cut to the heart of the matter, especially for such complicated subject matters enmeshed in ethnic enmity.

  I don’t want to listen to you right now, Howie Ho thought sternly to the white girl in his head.

  In the corner of the Apples’ living room was a dust-sheeted piano, an empty, dry fish tank balanced on top.

  You told me yourself that you trust only foreign news about Malaysia, the white girl continued. Because of censorship, remember?

  Howie Ho tried to summon the good feelings he should be having. That first-day-of-the-year, first-visit-back-to-the-gym-after-a-long-hiatus aura of purposefulness, recharged energy, and courage—that’s what should be enveloping him at the moment, one of the biggest in his entire life.

  He began formally, “Uncle, Auntie, I came here today to let you know that I want to—hope to—propose to Apple. I hope you will give your blessing . . .?”

  Mrs. Apple’s eyebrows wagged from side to side. She smirked happily. Mr. Apple, on the other hand, assumed a serious expression.

  “Will you take good care of my daughter?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course. Otherwise, Uncle, you will beat me up, right?”

  From somewhere deep in the house came the accelerating echoes of a metal object dropped and spinning itself in circles until spent. Apple, with a tray? Did he say something wrong?

  “US very good, right? Not like here, everything corruption, police cincai jail people,” Mr. Apple said, smiling broadly as if he were imparting good news.

  “You want to buy house, or you think condo is better investment? I heard real estate there is big, big opportunity!” Mrs. Apple cut in.

  Something was off. He knew it, but he could do nothing except push forward, follow his script.

  “I saw a house the other day—I mean, just a computer model, but looks nice, two stories, got balcony some more, very grand.” He remembered to look each parent in the eye in turn; that was good. “It’s a prime location, not far from Cyberjaya—”

  “You mean you’re not going to live in US?” Mr. Apple interrupted, stressing syllables. It sounded like he’d said you ass, and his frown lines were somehow deeper, liver spots darker.

  The house wasn’t in the United States, Howie Ho explained. He didn’t feel right uprooting Apple and taking her so far away from her family; it was time for him to settle down and what better place than home; he was ready; born a Malaysian, always a Malaysian, ha ha. Momentum kept him going through Mrs. Apple’s rapidly evolving facial contortions, going from surprise to dismay to, finally, anger.

  He petered out. The house was quiet. Howie Ho thought about the white girl, free as a bird, and about Isabella Sin, a stranger to him—jailbird. He kn
ew he had fucked up. He would not be getting married because he was auditioning for the wrong role. As they walked him out, he craned his neck to see if Apple might be watching from somewhere in the back of the house. He saw only cool teal walls and understood that he was nothing without his American identity, borrowed.

  Back home his family rallied around him, exclaiming, maligning the Apples. What blind idiots, as if marrying a wonderful, highly educated young man like Howie Ho were not the luckiest thing that would ever happen to her! They think the moon is brighter in the West! Watch, if you had married her and moved with her to America she would have divorced you for a white guy as soon as you landed. I know her type! Did you see how blond her hair was? Fake to the max.

  Howie Ho, exhausted, begged them to stop. In the sudden silence, Mrs. Ho timidly said, “I din know you wanted to move back here. I thought . . . you had become American.”

  Her voice was tender. She looked at Howie Ho. He shook his head mechanically, kept shaking until her eyes dropped.

  That very night he started packing his suitcases, even though his flight was not for a few days.

  “Ma asked me to give you this.” He jumped at his sister’s voice. She was holding out a packet of ginseng tea. He took it and turned it over in his hands, ignoring his sister’s stare. He knew that she knew he would not finish the tea before its expiration date, and that the next time he came back to this house it would be for a funeral.

  She sat down on his bed, next to a tower of sloppily folded clothes.

  “You know, I used to hate you.”

  Howie Ho grimaced, thinking of the time he had punched her for real in the stomach. They had been fighting over a toy he couldn’t even remember.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t very nice.”

  “No, no. You were a good big brother. It wasn’t your fault. But you know why I hated you? You remember the cane on top of the bookshelf?”

  She paused and peered keenly at him. Yes, he remembered. He had scraped up a chair and fumbled at the top of the bookshelf when everyone was out, disturbing dust, convinced he would find porn magazines in such a good hiding place. He remembered the cane, cool to the touch. Rattan or bamboo it felt like, disarmingly light in his hands.

  “Ma beat me with that cane. Well, not that one—she had to buy new one each time after caning me. Ba made me lift up my skirt so he could cane me on my backside. They punished me together, two of them.”

  She was looking at him, wanting something. But what?

  “They never touched you. You did worse things and they never beat you. Why? Because you’re a son?”

  Howie Ho said nothing. What did she expect him to do? It wasn’t his damn fault, like she said. Wasn’t his problem to fix. He couldn’t do anything about it.

  “They saved money to send you overseas, but what about me?”

  She stood up too quickly, making the bed’s surface bounce. The leaning tower of folded clothes toppled, slow and silent, until it fanned itself out into an arc.

  There were video games that he played in which, if he died at a monster’s hand (or claw or fang), he (or rather, his character) would respawn and he would have to face the same monster, again and again, until he beat it.

  That was what this airport scene felt like, each and every time he left home, down to his very same misguided optimism that every repetition would be the last—this time he would finally whup it. Except he wasn’t quite sure what the monster he needed to slay was. All he knew was that he was tired of his mother’s wailing and public scenes, and also of the sickening drop in his stomach whenever an immigration officer frowned.

  Ten years ago, when he had first left for college in America, Mrs. Ho had clung on to him in a desperate hug and sobbed repeatedly, “He’ll never come back!” She cried into his shoulder, talking to him about himself in the third person. “I lost a son today! He won’t want to come back anymore, I know it!”

  How he had protested then, indignant that she could assume such a thing about him. What did she know about him? Not his heart! Not his soul.

  Ten years later it was still the same refrain. It hardly even made sense anymore; everyone knew he was well settled into his life in another country. She was probably just doing it to guilt him, in her usual passive-aggressive way.

  “Time flies,” Mr. Ho said, standing awkwardly to one side. The airport’s bright lights accentuated the thinness of his hair, but they also made the strands shine silver. One thing you could count on from him was trite sayings, delivered especially frequently in the face of Mrs. Ho’s public displays of emotions.

  “Do you miss home?” Americans would sometimes ask Howie Ho. After years of the same question he had a standard answer, offered up automatically and without thought. “I miss the food,” he would say. And they would always nod in understanding. He never questioned what it was they were agreeing with.

  The airport was full of beeps and clicks, an unceasing background noise that made him feel like he was trapped inside a giant machine. And he was, wasn’t he?

  Finally, it was time to go. Mrs. Ho wiped her eyes and waylaid a stranger to help take a cell phone photo of the family. “Who knows, this might be the last one,” she said, serving up a loving parting jab as she put the weight of her arms around Howie Ho’s neck.

  And then he was walking past security guards who protected him from his family. The guards wagged their uniformed necks and droned, “Boarding pass only, boarding pass only.”

  “Bye!” he said.

  “Bye!” “Bye!” “Bye!” they said.

  He crossed the wide hall to the immigration checkpoint. Turning back for one final look, he saw his family waving silently, each of them with one hand up and the other fisted, moored to the railing in front of them.

  He emerged into the international terminal of the airport. The first thing he registered was a lady with pasty skin getting a pedicure right there in the open, sitting hunched in a massage chair that was tilted all the way back. A very young woman was serving her, wearing a mask, a cap, and an apron, scrubbing dead skin off feet. The next stall over was a bakery, its enticing smells mingling with nail polish to produce a truly foul odor.

  His eyes glazed over as he took in the signs of each storefront, pushing his baggage slowly along. His plan was to treat the airport like a shopping mall and kill time until he had to board. He looked at his watch, converting the time to Eastern. Already he could feel his shoulders relaxing. Being in transit was always one of his favorite things. It was when he felt absolutely no guilt over eating McDonald’s or watching six blockbuster action movies in a row. Nothing counted when you were in transit—it wasn’t really you, gorging on junk. You were on vacation from yourself.

  A man in a shirt and tie strode past, trailed by a soldier cradling a machine gun. The man’s plain white shirt was crumpled in the back and tufting from his waistband. Howie Ho tried to take a closer look at the gun, which looked longer than his arm. He blinked and the man had turned around, meeting his eye. He paled. Man and soldier were beelining for him. He slipped his hand into his trouser pockets and felt for the reassuring edges of his passport. He ran his finger flesh along the rim in nervous strokes.

  “Sir,” the man said. Nipples showed faintly through the front of his shirt. The soldier stopped a few feet behind the man. The machine gun had a sling that the soldier wore in textbook anti-street-theft style, cross-body, the same way Mrs. Ho carried her handbag when she felt she was walking through unsafe neighborhoods.

  “Passport, please,” the man said. Howie Ho snapped to, fumbling with his pocket. “Just a routine inspection, sir,” the man continued.

  He bent his head to examine Howie Ho’s maroon passport. Howie Ho could see the clearly demarcated lanes of the man’s gelled hair, lines perfectly parallel, as if the man were in the habit of using his crown as a Zen garden.

  “Hmm,” the man breathed, flipping a page. Howie Ho’s heart was dive-bombing against his rib cage. No, it couldn’t be that. Isa Sin? C
ould it be? He had done nothing wrong. But was that why? He would be punished. They would not let him go to America now, not now, not after—or was it before?—what he—didn’t?—do.

  His hand rose weakly to press down the pain in his chest. The soldier tracked the movement from the corner of his eye. He had a head-on view of Howie Ho, but somehow managed to convey a slit-eyed, sideways look.

  The man with the tie wiggled Howie Ho’s boarding pass out of the passport. I don’t know her, Howie Ho wanted to announce in a calm and dignified voice. He stopped breathing, waiting with dread for the man to slowly tear the boarding pass into halves, quarters, confetti. Instead the man took out a pen and uncapped it. With a flourish, he made a mysterious marking on the boarding pass, a rune, sharp angles alternating with round corners, a severe line cutting through the whole.

  Howie Ho looked at the man’s face, waiting for something to be revealed, but the man was already handing the most important thing in his life back to him, and Howie Ho breathed out to realize his ears were ringing.

  Later, seat belt snug against body in his assigned seat, Howie Ho caressed the screen of his cell phone, finger-printing it again and again. Soon a stewardess would come by and admonish everyone to turn off their electronics, and then it would be too late to send his family one last message of love or something. He fondled the phone’s little micro-USB slot and headphone jack until the admonishment did come. Then he put the device away and closed his eyes. He tried to call up details of his father, mother, and sister’s faces, the back of his head shoved into the headrest like he wanted to prevent memory from leaking out.

  Oh, but he wanted to do the right thing, he really did. Of course he felt bad about an innocent woman locked up for poetic crimes she didn’t commit. But he wasn’t the perpetrator. Why should it fall on him to do something?

  Slowly, he realized that he had of course been massively relieved earlier, yes, when they’d handed back his passport, but he had also been disappointed. It was the same feeling that had cocooned him when the Apples had rejected him. He knew the right answer, and he did want to make everyone happy. If only the man had confiscated his passport—then he could do his duty—then he could be good.