“Make me a bowl of lentils and don’t let Jimmy eat it,” she answered.
Jason waited anxiously for the man to depart, then followed her to the snack table.
“So tell me who I should read.”
“Read like you want to know yourself.” She stopped suddenly and turned to him, their bodies nearly brushing. “Like you’re not just studying how to be a bak gui.”
He was thrown by this. His mother tongue on her lips. Her indictment. The pendant dangling from her belly. He blinked. Looked around, but no one was watching them.
“You’re a student?” she asked.
“Columbia.”
“Okay, no excuse. They’re in Butler Library. Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ch’ing Chao.”
“Are you also at Columbia?”
“I’m a Columbia dropout.” She stuffed a handful of Doo Dads in her mouth and looked right at him without a hint of shame. Her parents had to be dead, he thought. How else to explain her existence?
She dug into the pocket of her shorts. “Come to this next week.”
A typed flyer. A hand-drawn guitar, paintbrush, and Chinese opera mask.
Basement Workshop Arts Extravaganza.
He thought about her in the days that followed, imagining the ring in her belly. When he made it to the Basement Workshop—said to have once run out of a Chinatown basement, but now located on the twelfth floor of a loft building on Lafayette Street—he found himself surrounded by jook seing in bell-bottoms, with hair to their waists and anti-war buttons up and down their jackets. He fit in well there, and he’d never fit in anywhere.
Gina stood out in the crowd. She was another level of rebel: jook seing in leather and fishnets. She seemed pleased to see him—she grabbed his hand and pulled him onto the floor next to her. They watched the widely ranging art show, which included everything from children’s fingerprint paintings to modern dance, from silk screen prints to a haunting set of portrait photographs by Gina herself. Next, contributors toYellow Perilmagazine read poems and essays from their latest issue. They spoke of racism and colonialism—of their anger, loneliness, and search for self. He understood every line.
The night deepened, and the crowd thinned as some of the Basement Workshop members headed to the subway station. He wasn’t ready to leave, but he’d already missed dinner, and he knew his mother would be worried.
“This is when the goody-goodies go home,” Gina quipped.
“Won’t your ba be mad?” Jason whispered.
“Ba’s in the loony bin. Mom’s in prison.”
“Wait, are you serious?”
“I live ten blocks from here. Alphabet City.”
He’d never ventured to Alphabet City before. But if she lived there, perhaps it wasn’t as dangerous as people said.
“In a squatter house. I don’t know if you’re looking, but we’re trying to fill our extra room.”
“Oh. Well, can I at least make sure you get home all right?”
They both knew it was funny that he offered, but she humored him.
Alphabet City was a menagerie of half-collapsed tenements and vacant lots. Some lots had been converted to gardens, their fences decorated with roses and beads. He told her that he’d loved her photograph of a blind Chinese elder who lived in the A train tunnel, and she nodded, seeming to appreciate his compliment, explaining how she’d met the man. In one garden on Avenue D, a naked white girl with dreadlocks bathed herself with a hose. Gina waved at her; Jason looked away.
They reached “Beloved House,” a commune of some sort, tenor eleven of them in an abandoned building without electricity or stairs. Gina and her housemates had installed canvas tarps to climb from floor to floor; they tapped electricity from the lampposts. The wall paint peeled like tree bark.
He pretended not to be crestfallen when she introduced him to her boyfriend, Jim Gallagher. He was sitting on the edge of a mattress with a guitar in his lap, and he seemed intensely focused on his new composition. Next, they climbed to the roof to meet “the poets”—the decked-out punk he’d seen at the party, and Angelo, who was Filipino. They were passing a joint and discussing Edward Said’sOrientalism, but by then Jason was tired.
She showed him the free room. They were standing beside the mattress when she began unbuttoning his shirt. He looked at her, then at the cracked door of the room, his heart pounding in her hands.
“Jim?” he whispered.
