Jason laughed, but then he remembered that Macon’s cousin had said the exact same thing about “Baby Love” on Thanksgiving the prior year. Macon had just gotten it from him.
Later that week in the library, Jason discoveredLeaves of Grass. There were many sentences he didn’t understand, and he looked up dozens of words inWebster’s Dictionary.
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
He said: experience the world, don’t take my word for it. And he wasn’t confined by the body he was given: he didn’t want to be just a man. Whitman sometimes called himself a man-child, sometimes a mother. Whitman wanted to be everything, and he didn’t care about money.
Jason yearned to share in this openness, this expansiveness. He didn’t want to be a boy; he wanted to be a fairy godmother, a woman condemned to wear a big redA, a hairy man raised by apes. Evenwithout understanding all the poems, Jason knew he had met a kindred spirit.
I celebrate myself and sing myself, Jason thought each day of that summer as he biked around East Flatbush, passing Jewish girls rotating their waists to keep Hula-Hoops in orbit and Black girls selling bracelets and lemonade.
What did that mean, celebrate himself? This was beyond cake and cone hats. His mother had told him that in China, people didn’t celebrate all their birthdays, that only American kids were showered in presents every year. “American kid like to party party!” she often said, and then she’d glance at her American-born children, herjook seing. “Now the jook seing too! Spoiled!” And even though she bought him sheet cake from Lords Bakery every year, she was never joking when she said this. Yet how could he help it if he liked birthdays? How could he help his desire to sing?
Jason read books on the way to and from school. He read while his sisters studied for exams and his father watchedBonanza. He wrote more poems, relishing how words gave him a place to talk about the secret, the better-left-unsaid, the laundry list of things his mother would deem unrespectable. How much rice noodle rolls resembled condoms, for instance. He wrote in the margins of his school notebooks in class and on the backs of heng bou envelopes during Chinese banquets.
On Jason’s thirteenth birthday, Koon Lai announced he had a surprise for his grandson, and that they would have to take the bus to Bedford Avenue. Just the two of them set out, holding hands at the crosswalks, saying little. There was something about Koon Lai’s silence, his blueness, that Jason understood without words. Koon Lai had never gone back to work, and he spent most of his time alone in his room, preparing visa applications and refugee appeals for whoever needed.
When they reached Sears, Koon Lai took Jason to the typewriter aisle.
“Pick.”
Jason chose a teal Olivetti, and it was the best gift anyone had ever bought him. The only problem was that he could not keep the pages hidden, and one day, when he was writing in the living room, his father grabbed a half-finished sheet right out of the top.
“Put it back,” Jason growled. Baba crumpled the paper and passed it back and forth like a ball between his hands.
“Go outside. Go to the handball court,” he said, gesturing to the window, and, stretching his elbow back, he simulated a serve, nearly lobbing the paper at the glass. “Stop fooling around all day with that typewriter.”
“I’m not finished.”
Baba shook his head and sat down on the lounge chair.
“Kids at school know about this? All the kids at school know you sit around all day, you don’t have friends—”
“Macon.”
“You don’t have friends, they gonna say you’re a queer.” His father twisted in his chair and looked pointedly at Jason. “You know what that means?”
Someone had once called Macon a queer. Any soft, kind boy, they’d call a queer.
“A faggot,” his father said, almost relishing the opportunity to say the word, it seemed to Jason.
Jason waited for his father to leave him alone. Then Jennifer, Julie, and his mother appeared in the kitchen, and his father brought his complaints to them.
“Ni ga doi hou lazy,” he said to their mother. “Kui just sit around all day playing with the typewriter. Kui no social skills.”
“Ni bong ni baba,” his mother called tiredly into the living room.
“He didn’t ask me for help!” Jason cried. “He doesn’t need me todoanything.”
“Well, come wash dishes, then,” Julie yelled back.
Jason debated whether he ought to assist in the kitchen or runupstairs to escape. His mother appeared in the doorway of the living room and, saying nothing, sat down beside him with a bowl of snow peas in her lap. Pod by pod, she peeled the strings. Swallowing, he set aside the typewriter and gathered a handful from the bowl. Together, they cracked the pod tips, tugging the threads across the pods like jacket zippers, piling the strings on the coffee table.
“What you do today?” she finally asked in English.
