“What’s up with your coach, anyway?” Justin asked one day, while driving a couple of us home after practice. “I don’t mean to be a hater,” he continued, “but I could get better conditioning doing tai chi with the ladies in the park. Like, only the left half of my body is getting a workout, man, like if I kept doing this, my muscles will get all imbalanced and I’ll topple over.”
Not sure ourselves, we told him there was nothing to worry about, because sometimes Superking Son got caught up with the store. Sometimes our coach was so stressed out he didn’t think straight.
“It’s amazing that store makes money looking the way it does,” Justin said. “It’s such a dump. I hope you guys are right, though. My mom’s getting on my case about college applications. She wants me to quit badminton and join Model UN, but I keep telling her that the coach is supposed to be this legend and the team can win a bunch of tournaments. Don’t get me wrong, I wanna keep playing badminton, but . . . I mean, Model UN does have cute girls . . . girls that wear cute blazers . . . and know stuff about the world . . .”
As Justin trailed off, thinking about all the girls he could woo with his faux diplomacy and political strategy, we saw him slipping away from our world. We saw this college-bound city kid, this Mustang-driving badminton player, how he might be too good for our team, our school, our community of Cambos. Sure, Justin was Cambodian, but he seemed so different. That’s what happens when your dad’s a pharmacist, we thought. Whenever you wanted, whenever things stopped benefiting you, or whenever you simply got bored, you could just whip out something else, like a skill set in Model UN.
WE HAD THE MIND TO THROW an intervention for Superking Son. We needed to do something to keep Justin around. Every day for a week, we met during lunch as a team—sans Justin and sans Superking Son, obviously—to discuss intervention strategies, our evidence and counterarguments, who would say each point and in what order and where each of us would stand to demonstrate the appropriate amount of solidarity. We even made contingency plans, which detailed an escape route if Superking Son were to freak out and start chucking produce at our heads (it happened more often than not). But when we got to the store, ready for a confrontation, we found Superking Son in the back room surrounded by what came across as a militia, minus the rifles and bulletproof vests. We saw our Hennessy-drenched uncles, the older half siblings no one dared to talk about, and those cousins who attended our school but never seemed to be present at roll call.
Hiding behind the stacked crates, we spied on them. Superking Son was in the center of the circle, staring intently at the floor. His hand seemed stuck to his chin. Some ghostly vision played out in front of his eyes, and it shocked the color out of his face. Cha Quai Factory Son was there, too, his hands on Superking Son’s shoulders, like he was both consoling him and holding him back from doing something stupid. A wave of money flashed around the circle, stopping only to be counted and recounted, probably to make sure no one had slipped any bills into his pocket. We spied on these men, each of us brainstorming reasons for this meeting that were innocent and harmless, not doomed by the laws of faux-Buddhist, karmic retribution. If we’re being honest with ourselves, none of us figured out a reason worth a damn.
BADMINTON PRACTICE ONLY WORSENED. Superking Son coached everyone who wasn’t Justin, hardly acknowledged his existence, really, not even to reprimand him. Yet when we crowded around a Justin match and cheered as he nailed smash after smash, we swore we saw Superking Son in awe of his talent, analyzing Justin’s form and failing to find any faults. Sometimes we saw something darker, something seething, within his stares, some envy-fueled plot being calculated in his expression, but then he’d break his gaze from Justin. He’d check his phone, for the thousandth time, and allow anxiety about his father’s store to overtake, yet again, his love for badminton.
Justin, for his part, ignored Superking Son’s directions and went through practices entirely on his own agenda. That first week, they interacted only through overriding each other’s instructions to Justin’s hitting partner, Ken, that poor (we mean this literally) and unfortunate schmuck. Every practice, Superking Son told Ken to practice his drop shots, Justin said smashes, Superking Son yelled at Ken for not doing drop shots, Justin still refused to change drills, Superking Son made Ken do laps around the court for undermining his authority, and so on until Ken bailed on practice, hid in the locker room, and smoked a cigarette for his nerves. (He stole packs from his dad, who bought wholesale Marlboro Reds from Costco. His dad handed them out to relatives in Cambodia like candy, in an effort to pretend he was a hotshot tycoon of the American stock market.)
Shit escalated one day when Superking Son was so late that Justin, fed up with waiting, assumed the role of the coach and started practice. We knew that Superking Son would be pissed. We’d seen him fire cashiers for breaking his policy of absolutely no double-bagging, and butchers for using his personal office bathroom. (Of course, he always rehired who he fired, regardless of how much pig blood they got on his toilet and fake granite tile, because his mom would hear from so-and-so’s Ming about so-and-so’s kids needing food on the table and braces to fix their fucked-up teeth, because they couldn’t eat said “food on the table” with overbites or crooked-ass incisors.) At the same time, we were with Justin. We felt his exasperation. We looked like a gang of dopey assholes on the floor of the gym, sitting in our butterfly stretches, acting like we were doing substantial exercises, so the janitors would refrain from kicking everyone out to start polishing the floor.
Justin had charisma, so he was able to take charge of us—high schoolers the same age as him, more or less—and not sound like a douche. For once, practice was going smoothly, with nothing jamming the flow of our hitting drills, no kinks or delays or conflicting instructions. We became a well-oiled machine of flying birdies, of perfect wrist technique. Not a single one of us smacked another player in the head with a racket.
“What the hell is going on here?” someone yelled, and we looked over to find Superking Son at the double doors. His phone seemed permanently attached to his hand, he was gripping it so hard. Muffled voices, all sinister and incomprehensible, issued from the speakers.
“You weren’t here, so I started everyone on drills,” Justin replied, his back facing our coach. He resumed correcting the way Kyle was gripping his racket, while Superking Son stormed across the gym. Soon they were standing within inches of each other. The eyes of Superking Son were fiery. Justin’s stayed cold.
“You wanna repeat that, boy?” Superking Son said, sounding like he was competing in a who-can-breathe-more-heavily contest. He straightened his posture, locking his shoulders in place, and we noticed how much taller Justin was than our coach.
“We waited over an hour. You expected us to sit around doing nothing until you got here?” Only a whiff of defiance, of sarcasm, could be heard in Justin’s voice, but still, Superking Son puffed up his chest. Still, his face blazed with anger, the red color rushing to his hairless scalp. We braced ourselves for Superking Son to power up into fire-breathing uncle mode, for Justin’s even-toned facade to disintegrate in the face of pent-up refugee shit and the frustration of premature balding. We thought this was the last of Justin the effective team captain, the stand-in coach, or at least that their confrontation would make practices even more awkward, and then drive Ken into a full-blown, black-lungs kind of smoking addiction.
Superking Son sucked in a deep breath, and right when we thought he was on the verge of exhaling some grade-A-level-beef insults, hesitation rippled through his expression. Maybe he’d realized it was petty for a business owner, a full-ass adult who paid taxes, to pick fights with a baby-faced high school junior. He could’ve been the levelheaded coach we knew he could be. Superking Son, after all, was one of the good Cambo dudes. He didn’t belong to that long legacy of shitty guys who spent their adulthood sleeping on their mom’s couch and eating their mom’s food. (Kevin’s older brother, for instance, had a decent job at the DMV, and still, he li
ved with his mom, paid her jack shit in rent, and never did chores because he was too busy playing his video games. One day his mom snapped, of course, how could she not? She ended up lighting his PlayStation on fire, just as he was reaching the end of a Call of Duty campaign.) By taking over the grocery store, Superking Son had done right by his father’s life. He had sustained his father’s hard work, and made sure that that poor refugee’s lifetime of suffering didn’t go to waste. We looked up to Superking Son. We wanted to keep it that way.
A dial tone emitted from his phone, and its dull beat gradually subdued Superking Son. “Everyone go back to what you were doing,” he yelled, before scrambling his way to the exit. Frantically, he called back the person he was so afraid of snubbing, and as he disappeared into the hallway, we heard him chant, Sorry, sorry, sorry, off into the distance.
THE NEXT WEEK Superking Son posted the roster for our first meet of the season. We crowded around the sheet, ready to be disappointed or excited by our ranking, to see if we had secured a lucrative JV or varsity spot, or whether—god help us, humble Buddha bless us—Superking Son had cast us aside to the exhibition matches, where we would rot away with the freshmen. We knew Justin would be rank 1 for varsity singles—the official team captain. For weeks, we’d been saying that he would destroy the other rank 1 players, to the point of making them all cry, even the smug kid from Edison with the racket that cost a thousand dollars. (Joke was on him, he got scammed into buying a counterfeit Yonex deluxe by Kyle’s enterprising cousin.)
“Come on, guys, hurry up,” Justin said, standing behind us with his arms crossed. “I wanna score some food from the 7-Eleven.” Slowly, each of us turned our heads. We stared at him. “What’s the deal?” he asked. “You know I need my steak-and-cheese taquitos.”
It straight up stunned us, the revelation that Justin was not rank 1 for varsity singles, not even rank 2, but a laughable rank 3. Our jaws dropped to the floor; we were speechless. Ken—who was now rank 1, our appointed team captain, and totally unprepared to take on that burden—started breathing so heavily he was almost hyperventilating (the cigarettes didn’t help). But Justin only stood there, silent, staring at the roster, though there was so much space between him and that piece of paper, who knew where he was looking?
Maybe Justin was scheming a course of action, a vengeful and ingenious plot, that challenged Superking Son’s decision. He could raise hell the way his mom did when Mr. White had the gall to give him a B minus on his Civil War paper. He could also quit, call it a day, and take his taquitos home to eat. Studying his face, we couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking or feeling. What we did see wasn’t so much anger as pity. It was sad for Superking Son to stoop this low. Here was one of the good Cambo dudes, fucking over a teenager half his age. Maybe we saw in Justin’s expression what we all thought ourselves.
THIS TIME WE CONFRONTED SUPERKING SON, for real. We found him sitting on a footstool, in the aisle at the edge of the building, where customers hardly ever went. Surrounding him were pots and pans, cheap oriental dishes and bowls, and the incense packets for praying that Mas bought to convert their bedrooms into DIY mausoleums for those who had died in the genocide.
We squinted because the store’s lights didn’t reach this aisle, and we looked down on him because he was basically squatting on the ground. Please, Coach, we pleaded, you have to reconsider the rankings for our team.
“Don’t you fools get tired of coming to my shithole?” he asked in a daze, looking straight through us, either at some vision of his life, or at the spilled rice he would be—sooner or later, after harassing his cashiers to do the job—forced to sweep up himself.
We appealed that we were being serious, that it didn’t make sense for Justin to be rank 3, not even in terms of stacking our roster against other teams. We would lose all our number 1 and number 2 matches, we argued. Superking Son sighed, not really registering our words. His face beamed the mug-shot look that our Gongs wore when we dragged them to eat unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks at the Olive Garden—that expression of unresisting contempt.
“Badminton,” he said, and sighed again. “My body was made for it, I swear. Never had to think, formulate decisions, be all stressed out when I played a match. I just . . . did it, you know? I used to think, like really I fucking did, that something about Cambos like me, Cambos who grew in the real hood, just made for good badminton. We didn’t have it as good as you guys do now. We dealt with a fuckload of bullshit.” He spread his arms wide, signaling to us that the store was simply that, a fuckload of bullshit. Or maybe he was referring to us, our problem with his latest decision as a coach, how we always consulted him for guidance, and the pressure of living up to all our bullshit.
Superking Son went on talking, and a couple of us peeled off to grab Gatorades and snacks. We needed sustenance to keep listening to his tirade on the generational ethics of badminton. “You motherfuckers will never really get it,” he said. “Just like those deadbeats my age, who will never understand the Pol Pot crap.”
We began stuffing our mouths with Funyuns wrapped in dry seaweed. We asked him how any of this was related to our team roster, with Justin’s ranking, with us.
“How many times do I have to hammer this into your dense skulls?” he said. “Badminton is a balancing act. You need both strength and grace. You need to smash the birdie with just the flick of your wrist. None of that tennis nonsense of swinging with your whole stupid arm. And to master the gentle tap of a drop shot, you gotta use the force of your entire body to lunge across the court. Then you halt your momentum, right before impact, and make the hit. You think your all-star player is good, but I’ve seen him driving around that tacky-ass Mustang.” For a second, we were scared that he would call us out for getting rides from Justin, for buying into his richness. “He’s a spoiled dipshit,” Superking Son continued. “His dad walks around like that flashy pharmacy makes him better than the rest of us. And his mom, don’t get me started—she doesn’t even shop here! She considers my store beneath her, can you believe that? You should hear the way his parents talk big and proud to anyone stupid enough to listen. They brag and brag that their son’s a genius, that he will go to a real university, that he studies so fucking hard, like he’s slaving away by reading SAT books and studying calculus. Man, that dumbass kid doesn’t know shit about working hard. Which means he doesn’t know shit about badminton, because badminton takes work—real work! You gotta practice until your racket wrist feels like it’s on fire. When I was your age, I used to do conditioning workouts while stocking these very shelves. I’d curl boxes of those fucking chips you’re eating, with only my wrists!”
Just then, he jerked backward and knocked over a stack of dishes, which prompted half of us to nearly choke on our Funyuns. We had no response to Superking Son, of course, partly because of his crazed logic, but mostly because we didn’t agree. It was hard to do well in school, especially as a Cambo. And weren’t we supposed to aspire to the status of Justin’s family? Weren’t we supposed to attend college and become pharmacists? Wasn’t that what our parents had been working for? Why our ancestors had freaking died? But we couldn’t think of how to express this, how to reason against a guy who carried so much emotional baggage that we almost felt obligated to tip him for his labor.
“Shit,” Superking Son said, “badminton was the only thing that made me happy. What a goddamn joke.” He dropped his face into his palms. “This place is so fucked.”
We looked around the store—at the meat counter lined with blood and guts, at the sacks of long-grain rice piled to the ceiling, and at the oily Khmer donuts supplied by Cha Quai Factory Son, the ones that tasted so good it was difficult not to eat yourself sick. All of a sudden, the building looked sparser, paler, like the walls had caught the flu. Were the fluorescent lights dying above us and messing with our vision? Had we never seen the store from this aisle? We asked, Why not take a break from coaching, just for a couple of weeks. We urged Superking Son to focus on his fa
ther’s business, assured him that in the meantime, we could run practices on our own. Justin could watch over our drills and give us pointers, though we didn’t mention this last point. We weren’t dumbasses. We sensed that the store was off, and we needed him to fix it.
“I can’t stay here all day. There’s no good reason.” We watched him slowly rise to his feet. He prepared himself to face whatever had driven him to the aisle in the first place. “This store . . . disgusts me,” he said, mostly to himself. “It always has.” He brushed his shirt off, like he saw what was so disgusting crawling over his belly, like the literal essence of Superking Grocery Store had laid claim to his body.
IT WAS QUIET the next few days. Superking Son kept canceling practices, ordering us each time to stay at home and rest. We noticed strange behaviors, and no one would explain them to us, not our loudmouthed Mings and Mas, not Cha Quai Factory Son—why Superking Son had closed the store randomly in the middle of the weekday, why he had failed to appear at Kevin’s second cousin’s engagement party. Justin, too, was a mystery. He skulked the halls, calculating his next move against Superking Son. At lunch, he ranted that not holding practices, so close to an upcoming meet, was an affront to our manhoods.
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