Jason flopped into his own chair, drank his Coke.
Foon Wah didn’t intend to show it that evening, but she was angry. In fact, she had been angry for a long time but was practiced at swallowing it, the way you swallow ginkgo soup for months during a famine. While cooking, she never complained about her wrists, which throbbed with pain from the years spent cramped at the sweatshop sewing machine. And while she sometimes thought she would be driven insane by the whining electric music Jason played on his record player, she only ever muttered that he should turn down the music and study. He was seventeen now and she was increasingly worried about him, that he would inherit his father’s troubles with money.
For the most part, she had accepted the facts of her life. She could have been her best friend Mee Lai, married to a man twice her age. Yet sometimes she fancied that she was among those who the last president referred to as the “chim mak ge ai o su hou ngang jen.” She’d read about it in theSing Tao Daily: “The Great Silent Majority.”Much quieter than the drugged and long-haired bak gui, the slovenly and menacing hak gui, the hak gui women living off the government dole, the bak gui girls throwing their bras in trash cans. The Great Silent Majority suffered and persevered in silence.
Foon Wah heaped a second portion of beef rice onto Richard’s plate, but his carping resumed.
“You didn’t iron my uniform,” Richard groused. He always spoke in Toisanese when criticizing her, even though she could have understood the same words in English. “I looked like a mess at work.”
She put the spatula back in the pan, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at her bowl, a posture he might have read as remorse or shame.
And then she spoke.
“You no job.” Her English words were barely audible, but Jason and Jackie looked up from their plates. Richard continued stuffing his mouth.
Perhaps the sound of her own voice gave her courage. She knew the language, yes. She had taken the night class at the library, studying alongside the Puerto Rican mothers. She had read the dictionary every night, and she always flipped through the deck of flash cards when she sat on the toilet. Almost thirty years of this, and you know more than you let on.
“No job.” She lifted her eyes from the plate and looked right at him. “No job. Like a bum.”
Now he’d heard her.
For a moment Richard was as still as marble, his fork lifted halfway to his mouth. Then he dropped the fork, pressed his hands onto the table, and slowly pushed himself up to standing.
“You calling me a bum? I’m a bum, because I served this country? Because every week I pay two mortgage bills?”
“Daddy,” pleaded Jackie.
“Mou tou. To lok hui,” muttered Koon Lai, waving his hand.
“This is my house! I bought this house!”
Foon Wah did not flinch. They were past the point of no return.She would suffer whatever the consequences—and she would speak back to her husband if she felt like it. The time had come to end the silence.
“If anyone thinks I’m a bum,” Richard raged, “they can—”
“They keep the hak gui,” Foon Wah interrupted. “But not you.”
Richard seized his Coke bottle and threw it to the floor by Foon Wah’s feet. The bottle shattered, and pieces of glass whizzed across the kitchen.
“Aiya!” Koon Lai wailed. Jackie screamed. Jason’s chair clattered to the floor.
They looked down at the scattered, sea-green fragments, large and small. Some had fallen centimeters from Foon Wah’s feet.
“Get the hell out of here!” Jason shouted at Richard. “Get out of here now!”
Her husband’s left hand trembled. Koon Lai put his face in his hands.
“Get out of here!” Jason cried again, and his voice was strange, both a man’s and a boy’s, low and angry, but also breaking, tearful. His fists were clenched, but she knew he didn’t know how to use them. Full-grown, her son was taller than Richard, but also lean, gaunt; he’d resisted all of Richard’s efforts to toughen him up, and all of Foon Wah’s attempts to beef up his frame. Yet she had never seen Jason this angry before, and for a moment she wondered if he would hurt his father, and she was afraid.
Richard glanced at his son. He grabbed his coat, stuffed his feet in his leather shoes, and left through the front door.
Foon Wah gripped the napkin in her lap.
Jason was still standing, the others sitting, frozen. Then Jackie rose from her chair, swept up the glass, and put her arms around Foon Wah’s shoulders.
Foon Wah couldn’t help but push her daughter away.
“Eat your dinner,” she said, at which Jackie began to cry. Koon Lai continued to sit with his hands over his face, avoiding Foon Wah’s eyes. She pitied him.
