Leonard Chang, the author of critically acclaimed classics of Asian American literature, delves into his past, focusing on a pivotal period of his childhood when his mother was preparing to leave his alcoholic father, when he was befriended by and apprenticed with a local marijuana grower and dealer, and when he began finding in his adolescence the voice of adulthood that would reverberate throughout his life. This deeply felt and moving account of his preadolescence gives us a look at a young boy trying to find a sense of self and worth amidst the turmoil of a fractured life.
TRIPLINES
Novels by Leonard Chang
Triplines
Crossings
Dispatches from the Cold
The Fruit ‘N Food
The Allen Choice Trilogy:
Over the Shoulder
Underkill
Fade to Clear
TRIPLINES
Leonard Chang
Copyright © 2014 by Leonard Chang
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
ISBN 978-1-936364-10-7
Black Heron Press
Post Office Box 13396
Mill Creek, Washington 98082
www.blackheronpress.com
For Toni Ann
PART I
A Normal Saturday Night
1
The night begins with Lenny’s father, Yul, sitting in his lounge chair, a tall glass of whiskey on the armrest. He listens to the large stereo under the TV, the turntable encased in an ornate oak cabinet that required three muscular and sweaty men to carry into the house. The Chang family moved here from New York City, from a small dingy apartment on 110th—in between Central Park and East Harlem—to Merrick, Long Island, a commuter town with a railroad station high up on a concrete platform. Yul wanted a house—he had talked on many occasions about his dream to have his own yard, and the privacy they had never had in the various apartments they’d lived in. So he took out a huge mortgage, one that would oppress him for years, especially as his jobs became precarious.
Yul sips Jack Daniel’s first from his tall glass, the caramel brown color reminding Lenny of furniture polish, but eventually he drinks straight from the bottle. The strong alcohol smell wafts through the house. The record on the stereo is Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf, which he bought for his children but ends up listening to himself.
Lenny tries to stay in his bedroom, pacing, occasionally doing push-ups or sit-ups, stretching on the cool wooden floor. It’s too late to go out, too early to go to sleep. He knows his father is getting drunk, and can hear the low mumblings that mark the beginning of a bad night. Yul talks to himself when he drinks, and although Lenny can’t understand Korean, he can easily interpret the rumblings of an unhappy man.
He checks on his younger sister, Mira, who is seven. She’s small and frail with chubby cheeks. She has a page-boy haircut with sharp bangs, and hugs herself when she’s scared, as she is this particular night. She sits cross-legged in her room with her books and looks up at Lenny with wide, uncertain eyes. She blinks, waiting for him to say something. She tilts her head toward the living room, listening to their father bark something angrily.
Lenny says, “You stink.” He shuts the door and hears her sigh.
He returns to his bedroom and plays with his knife collection. Mostly penknives, a few lock blades, and a couple of Swiss Army knives, the collection is part of his secret stash of weapons. He also has Chinese throwing stars; three homemade nunchucks with various chain lengths; a pair of homemade tonfas, small L-shaped clubs; brass knuckles; and a half dozen staffs in his closet. He bought the Chinese throwing stars and brass knuckles through mail order, a recent discovery. Although at eleven years old he’s too young to have a checking account, he learned how to buy a money order from the Post Office, and began receiving martial arts catalogs from around the world. He earns money by raking leaves and shoveling snow.
He wants throwing knives. He wants switchblade knives. He wants sais, thin Chinese daggers, and, of course, ninja swords. These he will have to save up for. He also orders tae kwon do and kung-fu instruction books. He practices by himself in the backyard every day. He even made a punching bag out of a rice sack and old rags, and it hangs off a beam in the boiler room.
He hears his father mumbling louder. Then he hears him bellowing, “What are you looking at?” At first Lenny supposes this is his usual ramblings, but then he hears Mira say in a quiet, frightened voice, “I wanted to get some water.”
“Then get it.”
Lenny hurries out, walking quickly past the living room, glancing at his father, who stands by the window and stares out onto the darkened front lawn. His broad back is hunched, his left hand holding the bottle loosely in his fingers, his right fist resting on the window frame. The music scratches out of the speakers, crackles layered over symphonic strings, and Yul sways to the rhythm.
In the kitchen Mira stands by the open refrigerator, gripping the pale yellow door with grease stains along the handle. The smell of kimchi eases out, because their mother ferments the cabbage in large jars in the back of the fridge. White packs of tofu in water jiggle as Mira reaches up for a bottle of soda. They hear their father speak sharply in Korean. Mira pauses. She doesn’t want to return through the living room, but it’s the only way back to the bedrooms. She remains frozen, her arm still extending up to the top shelf.
“Do you want water or not?” Lenny asks.
She shakes her head quickly.
“Soda?”
She shakes her head again.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m not thirsty anymore.”
“You’re wasting the cold air.”
Their father calls to them, telling them to come to the living room. They look at each other.
“Come here now!” he yells.
Lenny and Mira walk out to the living room, where their father totters drunkenly by the sofa. His eyes are half-closed, his arms floating in front of him. He says, “I don’t like secret talking. You hide in the kitchen and secret talk. What are you talking about?”
Lenny replies, “What to drink.”
“Where is your mother?”
“Church.”
“Always secret talk. I am tired of it. Talk talk talk. Everyone lies to me! Why do you all lie?”
Mira steps back and looks at Lenny, frightened.
Their father picks up the whiskey bottle from the table and hurls it toward the fireplace, the bottle spiraling across the living room, and it clanks sharply against the brick, bounces off and slides and spins across the carpet. He laughs, and begins dancing to the music, shifting back and forth on his feet, his hands extended in front of him like a marionette’s. A sheen of sweat covers his mottled red forehead. He sings in a hoarse, monotone voice, “Secret talk! Secret talk! Everybody lies to me and gives secret talk!”
Mira bursts into tears. Their father stops dancing. He glares at her and says “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
She shakes her head, unable to speak.
Lenny says, “You’re scaring her!”
“You b-be quiet!” he yells, which only makes Mira cry more.
“Go to your rooms!”
“What did we do?” Lenny asks.
Their father rears up, and Lenny knows better than to argue. He grabs his sister’s thin arm and pulls her down the hall. She sniffles and wipes her nose.
Lenny says, “Stop that.”
“I can’t.”
He leads her to her room
and tells her to read. She nods her head. They hear their father rambling to himself again, and Lenny closes her door softly.
2
His mother isn’t at church, but at sok-keh, or bible study. Lenny usually clumps his mother’s religious activities around this time into one gibbering, incomprehensible mess. That she latches onto Christianity is understandable, given her unhappy and miserable marriage. She goes to church on Sundays and prayer meetings once or twice a week, and Lenny once accidentally stumbles upon one at their house. He hears them before seeing anything—the mumbling prayers in Korean slowly rising in intensity as he walks through the back door and wonders what’s going on. The voices are all women, all in Korean, and have a chanting sing-song quality that makes his neck tingle with unease. He creeps toward the living room and peers around the corner. His mother and five other women sit in a circle, bibles on their laps, their heads bowed and bobbing. Their eyes are closed and they mumble their prayers aloud, a few voices cracking with emotion.
Lenny stares at his mother, who seems to be pleading to God. He never knows precisely what she says, but he has a good idea of where her anguish lies.
She’s in her mid-thirties, pale and gaunt, and has a Jackie-O hairdo that’s sprayed stiff, a style she won’t change for decades. She’s small, thin and energetic, and she practices yoga long before yoga is popular. Lenny often sees her doing Downward Dog on the carpet, reminding him of a stretching cat. She also does strange eye, tongue, and breathing exercises that are supposed to strengthen her chi.
Lenny’s memories begin in Merrick, Long Island. When he thinks about his childhood he thinks of Merrick. They live in a large, three bedroom house on William Place, across the street from a Presbyterian church, a block away from the Long Island Railroad station.
The railroad station is particularly memorable. Lenny stands on the station platform, looking out over his town, and he flattens pennies and nickels on the railroad tracks. The warped coins remind him of copper moths.
The train tracks sit on huge concrete structures, smooth and grey and bright in the afternoon sun. Often, after school, when Lenny avoids the bus and walks the three miles along Sunrise Highway, he’ll climb up the concrete steps to the top of the station and take in the view.
Although his house is one block away from the station, the church obstructs his view of his street. However, he can see his favorite climbing tree, a maple with a U-shaped branch near the top that fits his back perfectly—so perfectly that he often falls asleep in the branch, awakening with a jerk to find himself twenty feet off the ground.
To the south: his house, more neighborhoods shrouded under leafy trees and utility poles with webbed telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing the streets. To the north: mini-malls, auto shops and small warehouses.
Up here on the platform blue, rippled, plastic wind guards separate the east- and westbound benches. Posters of movies and Broadway shows rattle in the wind. Beyond the blue dividers is a small indoor waiting room with Plexiglas windows scratched and spray-painted with graffiti. Payphones stand at each main column. A few people linger up here, waiting for the next train, but it’s usually quiet before rush hour.
The afternoons are a perfect time to explore the platform, and Lenny discovers the joy of flattening pennies. He has to jump down onto the tracks, which always unnerves him because it’s a five-foot drop, and he often has trouble shimmying his way back up to the platform. Once, when he first started doing this, he saw the train lights in the distance and almost panicked, his hands sweating and slipping off the edge.
The pennies are flattened and scraped shiny, sometimes even twisted into artful shapes. They glint in the sun. He once threw a handful into the air and watched them twinkle down to the street below.
During one of these penny-flattening sessions he tries to use the coins in the payphone, tricking it to give him cheap calls. But the uneven edges cause the flat penny to jam in the slot. He dials the operator and tells her that his coin is stuck, and she offers to credit his home telephone number for the loss of the coin. He doesn’t want to give her his real number, but he says that all he wants to do is make a call.
“You can make a collect call. What’s the number?”
Lenny isn’t sure what number to give, so offers his home number but changes the last few digits. When the operator connects to the line, she asks him what his name is.
“William,” he says, trying to deepen his voice, thinking of his street name.
The man on the other line says, “William? William who?”
Lenny hangs up. He stands there for a while, wondering whom else he can call collect, impressed by this discovery of free calls. But he can’t think of anyone. He has no friends.
3
Lenny is being punished for losing Yul’s slide ruler—Lenny had used it as a toy and misplaced it—and his punishment had initially been to run around the backyard one hundred times. Minor infractions resulted in this common penalty, but when Lenny begins walking and even resting against a tree and Yul sees him, Yul has already started his nightly ritual with Jack Daniel’s.
Yul opens the back door and stands on the steps, staring. He is a barrel-chested blunt man with once muscular arms that have become flabby with age. When he’s drunk his face flushes and his usual solid stance wavers, as it does now, and he yells at Lenny to continue running.
Lenny does.
Watching his son with disgust and disappointment, Yul says, “Look how slow you are! Feet up! B-Body straight!” He has a severe stutter that recedes when he’s drunk.
Lenny sweats, his thighs burning, but he runs faster. Yul continues to taunt Lenny, who glances up at the kitchen window, where his mother watches from the sink. Her expression is shrouded by the shadows from the young maple tree by the window, but he can sense her familiar concern.
Finally, too exhausted, and long having lost count, Lenny slows down. Yul barks at him to continue, but he can’t. He begins walking, and this only sets Yul off more. He hurries down the steps toward Lenny, and Umee rushes to the back door. Yul grabs Lenny’s neck and shoves him forward, ordering him to run, but Lenny tells him he can’t. He’s too tired.
Yul mutters in Korean, and then says in English, “You’ve been babied too much and are too weak.” He points to Lenny’s skinny, pale arms. “Can you even do a pull-up? A simple pull-up?” Yul frowns. “Do a pull-up right now.” He motions to the swing set that a neighbor had given him years ago; the lime green paint has been overtaken by rust, the swings broken, and neither Lenny nor Mira ever play near this.
Yul pushes him toward the swing set and again orders him to do a pull-up. Lenny reaches for the side bar that’s chest high, and he hangs down on it, his feet dragging. But his father tells him to use the top bar.
“How?” Lenny asks.
“Climb up it.”
Lenny tries, but flakes of rust dig into his hand, and he whines, “It hurts.”
“You must be tougher. This world is too hard on the weak. Get on the b-b-bar!”
When Yul sees his son struggling, he lifts Lenny up easily. Lenny grabs the top of the swing set, but as soon as his father releases him Lenny feels the rust digging into his hands and he lets go.
He falls to the ground, hard, and cries out. He then lies still, breathing in the cool, dewy grass scent.
Umee yells at her husband in Korean. He turns to her and stares without speaking. Umee freezes, and after a moment of his full attention, she looks away. Yul then hoists Lenny back up and orders him to hold on. The rust flakes cut into Lenny’s palm and he whimpers. Yul stands behind Lenny and says, “Do not let go. You must be strong.”
Lenny’s grip loosens, but Yul moves closer behind him and presses a finger into his back, saying, “Don’t.”
Lenny’s vision blurs, his hands stinging, and he feels his shoulders aching. The jabbing finger hurts his back. Lenny lets go of one hand, and Yul says, “Stay on!”
Lenny latches his hands back on, tightly, and feels more
cuts in his fingers and palms, and cries out, “It hurts!”
“Stay on!”
But then Lenny falls to the ground, collapsing into a ball, and he cradles his stinging, aching hands. His father nudges his back with his slipper, the toe digging into Lenny’s shoulder blade, and Yul says something in Korean, his tone laced with disgust. Lenny’s mother runs to him, yelling at his father, who turns and lumbers away.
“Come, Lenny,” his mother says quietly, helping him up.
“My hands,” he says, shocked by the little beads of blood. “My hands.”
“Come inside.”
Lenny stares at the blood, at the tiny specks of rust in his palm, and then, finally, begins to cry.
His mother hushes him, telling him it will be fine. She spends thirty minutes plucking out the rust splinters with tweezers, his sobbing muted only by his fascination with the way his blood stains the blotted paper towel, turning it pink. His mother, feigning a smile, tells him his favorite folktale about a bear and a tiger to distract him, but he stares at the blood, mesmerized.
4
Umee’s experiences upon arriving in the U.S. were traumatic. She came to Boston alone for graduate school, knowing no one. She was supposed to stay with a host family, one set up by the school, but the first night she stayed there the husband crept into her room and tried to rape her. She screamed and scared him away, and immediately left the house. She had nowhere to go. She tried the local YWCA, which was fully booked, and it appeared as if she was going to be homeless until she broke down and begged the YWCA administrator for anything, even a sofa. Finally, they found her a bed, and the next day she had to beg another administrator, this one at the Northeastern University Housing and Residential Life offices, to help her find somewhere new to live.
She was terrified of this country, of starting over here after fleeing her discontented life in Seoul, which included an annulled marriage, the circumstances of which were mildly scandalous: the groom’s physical and sexual handicaps had not been revealed to her until after the arranged marriage. She tells this and many other stories about herself to Lenny when he’s a child; he suffers from severe hay fever and is often unable to sleep. She sits on his bed and talks about everything. He becomes her confidant, even as a child too young to understand everything.
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