The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  You and she became an item, sort of, wiring up basements in East Van and shacks in Richmond at-grade. You learned the wiring from her and she had learned it from Brother Number 1 himself, tagging along as a child when he started this racket because her mom had passed on and her father had no daycare. She said she’d look over your shoulder until you got a handle on things.

  It had been years since you went balling with your homies or even did their muling. Now you only saw them when you were wiring up a house, like when Sang and the Moustache would come in the basement and dump their day’s loot, the hot jewels or electronics, like it was show-and-tell for My Linh to see. They talked around you in their own language and snickered glances your way.

  Sometimes they came in with pots of the fully grown weed, lining the empty basement with trembling ferns and that musky smell. My Linh told you they were grow-rips from rivals. “Not like we need them,” she said, “but more to teach the poseurs a lesson. So they know not to dare to compete.”

  Soon you were wiring up grows with a skill that might have made your father proud. But you wanted to be a looter, and so you got the Moustache to let you tag along with him and Sang during their midday raids, with another shorty who was muling by the wheel.

  They made it look easy. The Moustache had spent weeks casing the crib in advance and knew when the cats inside would leave it empty, usually in the middle of the school day. The Moustache knew which window needed to be jimmied or whether you could walk right through a sliding door.

  Your on-court panther skills served you well as a looter. You displayed superior patience, and while Sang’s head did three-sixties from the buzz of panic, you took your sweet time poking under all the nooks and crannies. Even the Moustache got nervous waiting for you, flicking a phantom cigarette, though you always came through with a little something extra if they just kept faith. You had a knack for sniffing out hidden jewels and bills stashed by the beaten-down wife under a loose square of carpet or behind a hockey trophy.

  Once, Sang was so done waiting he locked himself in a bathroom to piss out all the Vietnamese iced coffees he had chugged at lunch. The bathroom had an old-school hook-and-eye latch that was so rusted Sang couldn’t unhook the eye when the owners’ car started raking the gravel driveway. You managed to dart back to the alley, not knowing that Sang was still inside tugging on the door and softly wailing. The Moustache had to kick the door down and pull Sang out with his fly unzipped and piss down his pants. Afterwards, safe in your ride, Sang gave you no fist bump.

  Stealing pearls and stereos from unsuspecting civilians was easy. An enemy’s grow op, though, was a different game, one you weren’t yet allowed to play. You heard about their fortifications from the homies who made it back from a grow-rip, sometimes with their blood trailing on the carpet. There were pit bulls to be wary of, both animal and human. There were coyote traps set at the basement entrance, or venomous darts set off by a tripwire hidden within electrical cables, or sometimes just a silent alarm tripped by a CCTV camera calling forth silent assassins from south of the Fraser River.

  The homies on grow-rip detail were the stealthiest of Brother Number 1’s henchmen, all of them slick and bird-boned, with slitted eyes that seemed to let in no light and betrayed no longing. They were the ones who drove the Ferraris and Maseratis.

  You wanted in. You had now reached the age of majority and had had enough of these mom-and-pop loots. You were stuck venting another basement while My Linh was laying out the cords and the Moustache was emptying his pockets from yet another raid. When you uttered your wish, My Linh kicked the ladder from under you and you pulled the venting down with your fall.

  “Dumb-ass,” she said. “You so don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “I know there’s fat stacks in it,” you said.

  The Moustache said that Sang wanted in on grow-rips too, and that you could go together.

  “You need to talk to my father first,” said My Linh.

  My Linh pencilled you in for a meeting at HQ in the next quarter. In the meantime you got a pointillist tattoo by some scratcher on Main Street, of the Canadian flag entwined with the red banner and yellow star of Vietnam. When you showed your left shoulder off to My Linh, she snarled, took a swipe, and left claw marks on the fresh dotwork.

  “Fool with the Communist signal,” she said. “You got your victors and vanquished all mixed up. And have you ever seen any other homie with a tattoo? Keep your skin clean. That’s my father’s first rule.”

  You put a finger to your shoulder, smiled at your blood that she left as her mark. “What’s the second rule?” you asked.

  “Keep your thoughts pure,” she said.

  On the appointed day the Moustache picked you up in his beater. You were heading to Brother Number 1’s farm in Richmond. It was harvest season. Sang did the muling, the Moustache took shotgun, and you sat in the back with My Linh. She looked like she was going to church, with a caramel wool dress that reached over her knees and a thin leather handbag meant for nothing but a diamond rosary. You wore a long-sleeved shirt to cover up the swelling on your arm from the botched tattoo removal.

  You drove through the security gate, past rolling hills and stout trees that spat apples at the slightest breeze, parked in the circular drive, then walked on paving stones to the farmhouse. My Linh led the way and Sang hovered around her like a dragonfly, while you pulled the rear behind the Moustache, sidestepping free-range chickens pecking at the apples. There were three elders sitting on wooden chairs on the porch. You assumed one of them was Brother Number 1. My Linh dropped away from Sang and walked next to you, matching your pace in the rear, matching your slouch and, for all you knew, your rising heartbeat.

  Brother Number 1 was dressed like a professor in chinos and a cardigan, but he had a boxer’s face — pug-nosed, craggy, and pounded down to its ruby essence. He told the Moustache that he needed to eat more and Sang to eat less. He said it in English, maybe just for your benefit. Then he cut you with a smile. It was a slant carved into granite — deliberate and with permanent intent. He gave My Linh only a passing glance, told her to get the tea.

  She got the steaming pot and cups from inside and served her father and the elders first, but then served you next. You felt everyone’s eyes on you when she poured the cup in your hand, and then you felt the steam on your face like a wet kiss.

  You spoke only when spoken to, though you were ready for all the questions — on why you wanted in on the core competencies, on how you were made to mission in grow-rips, on why you wanted to be a baller. But Brother Number 1 wasn’t interested in talking about the business.

  Instead, he told you about the harvest. About the different types of apples that they grew, about the different breeds of chicken that he had ordered from a catalogue — the Cornishes, the local Red Shavers, and even a Ga Noi special from Vietnam, looking like a hairless, itchy little buzzard. Then he showed you the grounds, walking you and the homies to the fenced-in garden with cabbages and carrots ready to be dug up. He showed you his new piglets, how’d they be gaining two pounds a day — almost as much as Sang, he said. He took a stick and poked around nooks of hay where the ducks had hidden their eggs.

  Your homies disappeared around a turn, leaving you to follow Brother Number 1 with My Linh by your side, her face all demure and tilted down whenever her father spoke. He showed you the field for grazing cows and beside that the obstacle course that he lined with old tires. Then he showed you the engineered tree house among the giant maples that he had built for My Linh, that he had always promised her. He pointed up at the struts and bracings and said that back in Vietnam he had been a civil engineer. When he had finally finished the tree house, My Linh was too old for it, and now he knew it was for his grandchildren. He smiled at her when he said “grandchildren,” and My Linh touched your shoulder and smiled at him, and it was like the two of them were talking to each other but using you as a prop.

  Then they talked in Vietnamese like they were arg
uing, and then he gave you a two-fingered salute and left you two alone. My Linh took you to the greenhouse, her favourite spot on the farm. She liked the gush of pungent air that hit her face when she opened the double glass doors. Inside, you could smell a dozen tropical blooms — a small tamarind tree, dwarf bananas, a baby mangosteen tree, a lychee tree. Her father’s treasures, she said, were the herbs, like the perilla with the leaves a rich purple on the underside, and a sharp and spicy taste of the kind you couldn’t find at the T&T market.

  Then she plucked a bunch of lychees. You followed her back to the farmhouse, through the back door, and up to a room with a bed covered with fluffy pink pillows and a couple of teddy bears lying on a puff pastry blanket. The room was mostly bare — no posters on the walls, no purple nighties oozing from the dresser drawers or tubes of lipstick in front of a glamour-bulb dressing mirror. Along the far wall there were beach balls lined row after row like headstones.

  “My father decorated this place, not me,” said My Linh. “When I was small and it was just us two at the refugee camp, I must have told him I wanted a beach ball, and he said he’d get me as many as I wanted. He didn’t get around to it until he bought this farm, but by then I was, like, almost driving. I never sleep here.”

  My Linh told you to chill next to her on the puffy bed, since there was nowhere else to sit. You wondered how you and she could be alone with no one messing you up, what with her father sharking downstairs along with the homies with their brass and chains. She put a napkin between you and her, then the bunch of lychees on top. They were ripe, each the colour of a fading bruise, the flesh inside pressing against skin that looked tough and leathery but which she peeled off like new money.

  “Just a snack before dinner,” she said. She licked the juice from her fingers, then reached underneath her bed and pulled up a red Samsonite. She opened it and showed you fat stacks of scarlet-and-purple bills printed with tigers and sampans and temples.

  South Vietnamese dong, she told you. They were her grandfather’s life savings, a final bequest to her and only her that was now just Monopoly money. He died in a Communist re-education camp. This suitcase was her favourite thing in the world.

  You felt the bed tilt towards her from the weight of the suitcase, and you puckered your lips and made your move. My Linh swerved her neck and your tongue ended up slick against her cheek. She clawed the back of your hand with her nails, making it look like you got a fresh five-dot tattoo.

  “Straight-up, don’t lose your focus,” she said, then got up. She wanted to know what was up with dinner.

  You followed her downstairs. Brother Number 1 was with the elders, along with Sang and the Moustache slouched in wooden chairs and cleaning out their teeth with toothpicks. Brother Number 1 said in English that there were leftovers for you two in the kitchen. My Linh planted her fists on her hips, said, “What gives? Why didn’t you call us down?”

  Her pops snorted, said, “You and your boy seemed busy,” and then the two of them had it out in Vietnamese, her face turning as red as her father’s. The Moustache lit a cigarette and Sang smiled at you like you were his next meal.

  You excused yourself to take a piss and when you came back, Sang and the Moustache were gone.

  “Come on,” said My Linh, “I’ll drive you home.” She had the keys to a Porsche 911 parked next to the barn.

  “That’s you?” you said.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” she said.

  You had no idea she drove, never mind how she could handle the wet curves of Southeast Marine Drive in a 911 at night. You wanted to ask her what it was between her and her pops, and who dissed who by not sitting down together for dinner, but instead you said, “Sweet ride.”

  “I earned it,” she said. Then she said, “Never mind the haters.”

  “I’m not a hater,” you said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m telling you. To pay them no mind.”

  “Who are the haters?”

  “The ones with small lives, of course. The ones with zero imaginations, who want your life because they can’t think of how to live their own.”

  She pulled up to your grandfather’s house and you felt like you were eleven again. You asked her if she wanted to hang out some more, but she said it was late, she needed to get home.

  “To the farm?” you said.

  “Shit no,” she said. “My condo.” You watched the back lights of her car from behind the blinds of the house.

  That night you sweated your sheets wondering if you had somehow mortally offended Brother Number 1, but the next day you got the call to your first grow-rip. This was no mom-and-pop heist in the middle of the day. You hit these grows at night, in houses where no one slept.

  During the rip you had crack ninjas who watched your behind, not a geezer like the Moustache or a poseur like Sang. These homies taught you how to use a silencer and night-vision goggles. Though you wondered if you needed any of that high-tech. The rival grows that you hit were ghetto affairs, wired like amateurs and less secure than a baby’s bare ass. Coyote traps in plain view, doors with hook-and-eye locks that could be easily kicked in, droopy-eyed guard dogs, alarm systems that were easily suppressed. The plants themselves were subpar, and you believed that your mission was to rid humanity of this dank product.

  That and the fat stacks, which you were soon rolling in after hitting a bunch of these rips. Enough so that you could no longer keep them in tins under your bed. Enough so that your mom and her boss looked at you cross-eyed with your shiny new threads and designer kicks. Enough so that you could tell your pops to screw off with trying to keep you in line. And before too long, enough to buy your own matte-painted Maserati.

  When you got the call from My Linh to meet her for dinner, you put on your new Jordache jeans from the Bay and the collared shirt from Eaton’s gentlemen’s club section. It was early spring and the plum blossoms were out. You met My Linh at this Vietnamese noodle shop on Victoria Drive as the sun was nodding off. You sat across from her at a little table in the centre of the restaurant, which had mirrored walls like in a Penthouse spread. She wore a sleeveless blouse with these yellow print flowers, ironed crisp like a power suit. The other customers weren’t the usual hyenas, but huddled quietly around their steaming bowls like a campfire in the rain. It was like they knew her, like they knew you.

  The waitress gave you a once-over and asked My Linh for both your orders, like you were in My Linh’s custody. “He can tell you what he wants,” said My Linh.

  You ordered the spicy Hue noodles. My Linh said, “Back home in Vietnam, people ate noodles only at breakfast.” Then she smiled and said, “That’s why I like you. Outside you make me invisible and in here you make them come to me. With you I can be a chameleon or a peacock.”

  You asked her if that was why she brought you here.

  “You’ve got game and you’re my find,” she said. When you didn’t say anything, she told you about the filthy, noisy refugee camp in Hong Kong. She was eight, and it was just her and Brother Number 1 among hundreds in a warehouse. My Linh slept on top of her father in a table space like the one you were now sitting at. Her father cut a screen out of a cardboard box for a little privacy. Then he told her stories, and for the little while that he yarned, they were the only two in the world.

  While My Linh talked, the other customers began emptying the restaurant. It was closing time. A young waitress slipped a bill on your table, and you reached for it. “I’m rolling now,” you said.

  My Linh took your hand off the bill, held it for a moment in her own. “I know,” she said. “I’m the one cutting your stacks.”

  She left the bill on the table, told the girl to get more tea, got a dank potion in a smudged glass that she sipped like Cristal. The two of you sat until there was a tap on the front glass, and the girl went to the door to say that the shop was closed. “Keep your hands off the chain-lock,” said My Linh. “They’re with me.”

  In came your homies — the grow-rip ninjas. They slid pas
t your table, lifted their hoods out of respect to My Linh but ignored your face, then settled in tables by the mirror walls. They weren’t given menus. Instead, the girl’s ma came out and started vacuuming around your feet. You lifted a leg to let the vacuum snout go under.

  More of your homies came in, those you had known since you were a shorty under the school awning, all of them eyeballing you but giving nothing up, taking seats on the edges. The Moustache came in with Sang, who was the only one who gave you eyes.

  Then someone turned off all the lights, except for a halogen tube right above your head. It felt like you were under a grow lamp.

  Then the ma came to your table, told My Linh that the shop was closed. The ma was in tears, with her glitter-glam mascara all smudged.

  “We’re still hungry,” said My Linh.

  “No more food,” said the ma.

  “Then how about some tea at least,” said My Linh.

  The shop was now bumping with your homies, and with the girl and her ma busting their asses to get tea glasses for them all. All the homies drained their tea at the same time, and then they started banging their glasses on the tables with the same bongo drum rhythm. You felt like your head was about to shatter.

  Then a man your pop’s age came out from the kitchen with a fistful of cash that he laid out in front of My Linh. “There, you can go home now,” he said, then crawled back to his corner with his sniffling wife and daughter.

  My Linh counted the money, peeling each bill like it was lychee skin. “It’s for his own good,” she told you. “He pays us and we protect his shop.”

  “From what?” you said.

  She smiled at you. “Trouble,” she said.

  “You’re trouble,” you said.

  My Linh took a deep breath, then told you her favourite story from her father in the refugee camp: the Mayfly and the Glow-worm. “Once upon a time,” she said, “the Mayfly asked the Glow-worm why the Glow-worm had a dim fire in its belly. When the Glow-worm told the Mayfly that it was the light that he lived by after the sun sets, the Mayfly looked pissed and confused, just like you right now. ‘What do you mean?’ said the Mayfly. ‘The sun never sets. I’ve lived half my life and the sun is straight above our heads!’ The Mayfly turned around, still pissed, and fluttered away from the Glow-worm. The Glow-worm didn’t have the heart to tell the Mayfly about sunsets.