After that day, he noticed that, with increasing frequency, it was the factory version of his mother who came home from work. In the lines of Factory Mommy’s forehead was an unending script of worry. Jason loved helping her in the kitchen, peeling shrimp scales and removing the strings of pea pods. Yet Factory Mommy’s hands were shaky, and she often burned herself on the pot.
Factory Mommy reminded them not to talk to strangers, to spurn offers of candy. If there was a stranger coming down the block, she would yank Jason to the opposite side of the street. Fear was like chicken pox, and soon Jennifer, Julie, and Jackie caught it too. Passing a haunted house, Jennifer made them hold their breaths until it was far behind. In Julie’s make-believe games, there was always a girl murdered by a bad man. And at night, after their mother had put the four to bed, Jackie would creep downstairs to check the locks on the doors. Sometimes, she’d go down there three, even four times.
Jason didn’t like Jack Schmidt, the man with the Cheshire cat grin and the honky voice who came to slap backs with his father and always called his mother “Foo Foo.” At dinner, Mr. Schmidt spoke of lawns and big bedrooms like an ad man on the television. Baba loved this kind of talk. He grinned and served Jack leg after leg of soy sauce chicken until there was none left for their lunch boxes.
It wasn’t until seven-year-old Jason found his toys sealed with duct tape in a cardboard box that he realized Schmidt had sold his father a new house. The women nestled into the back of the truck with the boxes, and Jason sat in front with Yia Yia and Baba. Their father drove by the pool and the playground. Out the window, Pete rolled by on a wooden scooter, maybe coming to look for him. He would never see Pete again.
They drove past the haunted houses, which seemed less scary, more sad in the morning light. Then they were in unfamiliar territory, merging into the flat expanse know as Kings Highway, above them a wide, cowboy-prairie sky. Though in truth it was only about a mile to East Flatbush, it felt to Jason like they had traveled an eternity when they arrived at the new house.
As Jason would realize later, Richard was chasing the receding edge of bak gui Brooklyn.
Richard was in one of his best moods that day. The new neighborhood, he said, was “just like Brownsville used to be.” In their new house, there was a washing machine and a walk-in closet. The sidewalks were clean, and there were no haunted houses on the block. In the weeks that followed, their mother fixed the garden, and their father ingratiated himself with the neighbors, each week barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill until all the bak gui followed the scent into their backyard. The Chin sisters befriended the Hoffman girls and introduced Jason to the Hoffman boy. Yet as soon as the girls disappeared into the house, the Hoffman boy took two fingers and pulled up the corners of his eyes.
“Guess what I am!” the boy, Lucas, shouted. “A Chineeeee!”
Jason stood still, suspended in time. Then understanding cleaved him clean and wet like chives on a cutting board, and his eyes grew spicy. “I’m not Chinese!” Jason cried, but that wasn’t what he meant, and not knowing what to say next, he bolted into the house, into a dark corner where he could be alone with Layla the Stuffed Bunny and his daydreams.
At the end of the summer, he enrolled at a new, prettier school, with freshly painted walls and working bathrooms on each floor, and a woodwind instrument gifted to each second grader. Even so, he missed his old school in Brownsville.
“I want to go home,” he whined to his mother.
“Don’t you remember what I said?” Foon Wah replied in the language he could somewhat understand but barely speak. “When I was a girl, we had to leave our home with nothing. When the Japanesethrew the bombs, we had to hide in the caves. That was where my mother died, and I had to raise my brothers and sister on my own.”
Jason began to keep his feelings to himself.
It took about a year to accept his new home. Maybe this was just a gradual surrender, a coming to terms with loss. Or maybe it had to do with the new family moving into the house next door, an event that prompted his father to grumble, “Here we go again.”
One morning, Jason was playing with Layla in the grass of the backyard when suddenly he felt, in the crook of his neck, a cold and tickling buzz. He yelped in shock, touched a hand to his neck, and heard a giggling from beyond the bushes. He approached gingerly, until a stream of water sprinkled his shirt, and then he saw the tip of a plastic water gun poking through the wire.
There, he discovered his assailant’s face nestled within leaves: another little boy, no bigger than him, maybe even smaller, and smiling.
He said his name was Macon George, but Jason grinned because he looked like Pete.
Jason’s imagination had always been his house of refuge, but after meeting Macon, all the windows and doors of his house swung open. Extracting the jokes fromAlice in Wonderland, the moodiness fromPeanuts, the magic fromSnow WhiteandCinderella—all the books and movies Jason had consumed during his friendless year, sitting in front of the black-and-white Philco—he produced story plots unceasingly, and found he had the power to enchant Macon, to wrap him up in the fabric of his fantasies.
Foon Wah noticed with what care the hak gui boy double-bowed his shoelaces, how perfectly his mother pressed his clothes, and how patiently he awaited Jason on the stoop, and so eventually, she welcomed Macon to the kitchen table and subjected him to squares of sesame jelly, which he politely consumed with quivering lips. Jason visited the Georges and gladly gobbled up the sweet potato pie, baked fish, and collards.
For as long as he could remember, he had watched the news each Saturday night with his family. He’d seen the young men sitting quietly at the lunch counters while others broke plates on their heads.
His family gawked at these news clips, but never discussed them, as if all that bak gui and hak gui craziness was no realer than the spaghetti Westerns on channel four. When his parents talked about America, it was the America that they’d been sold: paper turkeys on the windows, handshakes and saying, “Break a leg.” Yet all that time, there was still the America of bak gui–hak gui craziness, and it was coming closer and closer, rattling the walls of their America.
One day in bak gui–hak gui America, the teachers decided to stop teaching. Instead, they marched outside the school buildings with signs that said,END MOB RULE!Jason didn’t know what this sign meant, only that as a result, he and all the children of East Flatbush were herded into a church to watch a film about Eleanor Roosevelt projected dimly on a white sheet. It was drafty in the church and impossible to hear the documentary above the screaming children.
He searched for Stella, a girl in his class with strawberry blond Rapunzel hair, but when he found her, he lacked the courage to speak. Instead, he grabbed Macon, and they squeezed beneath a pew in the back and, lying on their stomachs, filled a notebook with stories about the blue, green, and pink fairies.
“You’re not blue, Jason. You’re yellow.”
“I’m blue!”
“You’re yellow. You’re Chinese.”
“I’m not yellow! How is this yellow?” Jason shouted, shoving his arm in front of Macon’s face. “What color is this?”
“Oh yeah! You’re not yellow.” Macon grabbed hold of Jason’s arm and began examining it. “You look like sand! No—like this wood. Wait—you’re an apricot!”
“I’m an apricot,” Jason agreed. “And what are you? You’re not black.”
“Yeah, how about me?”
