Fresh Off the Boat (12 page)

THE FUN WASN’T
over after football season. My birthday is March 1. That year my parents threw me a party in the backyard. It was the best birthday party I ever had. All my friends from school, Dave, his friends, and some guys from the team came. My mom went so far as to buy us water guns, balloons, all that good shit. Halfway through, in came the boogie man.

“What, I’m not invited to this party?”

Billie G. and Billie F. Before I could say anything, they started stomping out my balloons and kicking around our chairs, my presents, the tables.

I’d had enough. I wanted to tear Billie G.’s fucking eyes out, but I knew I couldn’t fight him one-on-one without getting my ass kicked, which, even in my rage, I knew was not going to be a good look. So I cleared my head and did what any Zen master would. I waited for them to finish. My friends were all smaller than Billie G., and two years younger so they just stood around, too. Dave was the biggest one, but he’d already left the party. My mom saw the whole thing, but in classic Jessica Huang fashion, she didn’t bail me out. She wanted to see me fight through it. The boys finished laying waste to my party, streamers wrapped around their legs, hands smeared with cupcake icing.

“This shit sucks, man. Happy birthday, Huang, ha, ha.”

The Billies left. Their dumb asses thought it was over, so they just walked next door and stood around on Billie F.’s driveway, laughing about what they’d done. But it wasn’t over.

I took all the water guns and put bleach in them. We didn’t want to permanently disable them—none of us wanted to end up in juvie—so we diluted the bleach but kept just enough so that it’d burn. I gave my friends the water guns and drew up a plan like Joe Gibbs. We ran up on the Billies on that driveway and as soon as they turned and saw us, we shot bleach right into their faces.

“Oh my God, dude, it burns, it burns! There’s something in the water!”

The assholes tried to run, but we had them circled. While they were
distracted, Emery opened one of the windows to Billie F.’s bedroom and put our hose through it and flooded his whole room. Dave saw it going down and joined in with his brother. Kids from the whole neighborhood came out because we all hated the Billies. Even Ryan Sistar, who lived three streets down, heard about what was going on and ran over with his water gun late, waving the loaded Super Soaker around, looking for trouble.

All of a sudden Billie F.’s mom came out of their house and confronted my mom.

“What is going on! Your kids are fucking flooding my house! What kind of parenting is this!”

As this happened, one of my friends started spray painting Billie F.’s driveway with smiley faces. My mother looked at Billie F.’s mom for a second and started sputtering.

“You, you have a shitty nose job!”

I couldn’t believe it: my mom felt no remorse and just blurted out some shit about this woman’s nose job. The Billies were running in circles with their faces on fire, but I wasn’t done. I wanted something they’d taken from me. People say kids always tease and that it’s an innocent rite of passage, but it’s not. Every time an Edgar or Billie called me “chink” or “Chinaman” or “ching chong” it took a piece of me. I didn’t want to talk about it, and kept it to myself. I clenched my teeth waiting to get even. Unlike others who let it eat them up and took it to their graves, I refused to be that Chinese kid walking everywhere with his head down. I wanted my dignity, my identity, and my pride back; I wanted them to know there were repercussions to the things they said. There were no free passes on my soul and everything they stole from me I decided I’d take back double.

I had a Russian wolfhound named Nick, who hated the Billies. Nick was a funny dog. If he saw people hit me playing ball or just fighting in the neighborhood, he’d go after them. My dad kept him on a leash because neighbors complained and tried to put him in the pound. But that day, I let Nick out on the Billies and he chased Billie G. around the whole neighborhood. Kid never came around again. Justice was served. Welcome to America.

W
hen I was in seventh grade, I met my first Asian homie, Joey Vano. We’d hang out at his house almost every weekend, which was perfect because mine was an embarrassing shitshow, but sometimes my parents would insist he come to the crib because they were worried that I was a burden on his family.

Every time Joey came, I’d tell myself it would be different. But no matter what I did, how good I was, or how hard I tried to keep Emery under wraps, my mom went apeshit like clockwork. Every Saturday morning before we even woke up for cartoons, Moms would be acting a fool. She’d come busting out of her room yelling, throwing pots, calling my dad an asshole, telling everyone she was going to crash the car into a tree. We never got to sleep in past eight or nine because that’s when the Mom Show came on.

Mom acted out even more when guests were at the crib ’cause she knew it’d embarrass Dad even more. Who was my mom? A Chinese-American woman in the nineties with no career, three kids, and a husband that didn’t pay attention. I felt her pain. It pissed all of us off how much my
dad would cater to guests, outsiders, and Chinese uncles with five rings and a perm, but break out the bullwhip for his own fam. After all their brawls, there was nothing Moms could say that would hurt him, so the best she could do was embarrass him when guests were at the crib, even if the guest was a twelve-year-old Filipino kid who was about to watch a bomb named Jessica obliterate everything he knew about moms, women, or any organism carrying eggs, for that matter.

I had to get away.

Joey loved basketball, playing Twisted Metal, surfing, and alternative rock. I would tell him, “Damn, son, you Filipino, you should be the b-boy, rockin’ snap-backs, listening to Pac, not me!” but that was Orlando. There weren’t many Filipinos in Orlando so they didn’t have an underground smell-road, no places to gather and just be Filipino. Every year, what Filipinos there were would go to Lake Cane Park and roast a pig, eat some adobo and garlic rice, but they weren’t militant about maintaining their identity like the Chinese were. Joey was free to just do him, which meant being an easygoing dude with shoulder-length hair and grunge steez. Also, his brother, Carl, had this dope Italian girlfriend, Joanne, so he didn’t make fun of white people as much as me. I was rocking Starter jackets and Levi’s, but Joey was the opposite; he rocked Airwalks, flannel, and things I’d never seen. I remember this fool listening to Alanis Morissette and I’d ask, “Man, you can just go outside and hear white women whine in the cul-de-sac, why you paying money to hear that shit?” But that was Joey, Filipino in Orlando with a California state of mind.

Joey was happier than me. That might’ve been because he had dope parents. They gave him everything he needed and most of what he wanted, but also made sure he got his work done and was a good kid. I thought to myself, Well, that’s easy. Why is it so hard at my crib? Why can’t we just wake up, eat some SPAM, watch the Lakers, and be like Filipinos. Then I realized, I’d rather stand in a horse stance holding a twenty-pound bucket of rice over my head than rep the Lakers.

I loved going to Joey’s house. When I met white kids’ parents, they always asked me bullshit questions about race, where our family was “from,” and used words like
Oriental
. I was like a toy in their house, but
Joey’s parents were Asian so it felt like family. I never felt like I had to carry the burden of the whole Chinese diaspora, or that everything I did was a statement about my people and where we’re from. Whenever I got to stay at Joey’s, I’d talk to his dad about basketball, food, the news, what I wanted to be when I grew up. Joey’s mom liked me, too, but she could tell I was a troublemaker. Joey’s dad covered for me and said things like “dee boys are boys,” but she was still suspicious. Dr. Vano was hilarious and had the ill accent. I remember one morning he told me about getting circumcised in the Philippines.

“Eddie, you don’t believe how painful this is.”

“I got circumcised and I don’t remember it being so bad.”

“Oh, that’s because they do it to you when you leetle boy. I got circumcised when I was fifteen!”

“Dad, why do you always have to tell this story!”

“Joey, why you embarrassed, this is natural, everyone is circumcised these days.”

“Yo, it’s cool, man, let him tell the story.”

“So, in the Philippines, you go to the doctor when you’re fifteen and they cut your foreskin.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Of course it hurts! It hurts so bad, we would all run to the beach and jump in the salt water to clean it!”

“Wait, you just jump in the water with bloody dicks?”

“Yes! And you come out, your penis looks like a tomato!”

“Dad, I’m eating, man!”

“Yeah, just like Joey’s Vienna sausage there, ha, ha, but beeger, much beeger!”

Joey would get embarrassed and take his food in his room so I went along, too.

Joey’s pops was a Laker fan like most FOBs who grew up in the Magic era, but Joey was a die-hard Orlando Magic fan. I loved Shaq in fourth grade, but Orlando was full of idiots who didn’t know the game. When Shaq became a free agent they ran an article in the
Orlando Sentinel
asking
if he was worth $100 million. No doubt he’s worth $100 million! Goddamn, Juwan Howard got $100 that summer and he was a six-nine power forward that got his buckets with line-drive fifteen-footers. Your boy Shaq was rippin’ backboards just eatin’ everybody’s food, there was no question he was worth $100. In the stands, you’d always hear people complaining about how much athletes made, wearing their Washington Mutual polo shirts. One time, I even turned around and said to a guy, “Every one of my friends could do your job, but not one motherfucker between Orlando and Houston can do what Shaq does, so fall the fuck back and watch the show.” Surprisingly, no one said a word after; motherfuckers started leaving the crazy Chinaman alone.

When draft time came around, Joey would get excited and I’d tell him every single year that they were just gonna draft the best available white guy and I was right. Go back and look: Geert Hammink, Brooks Thompson, Brian Evans, Michael Doleac, Matt Harpring, Mike Miller, Curtis Borchardt, Zaza Pachulia, Travis Diener, and the whitest NBA player of all time, J. J. Redick. I was surprised these fools didn’t draft Frederic Weis twice.

I couldn’t fuck with the Magic. I went for the Suns, Hornets, and Knicks: Barkley, ’Zo, and Patrick. I had a problem watching ball at Joey’s, though. No matter how hard I tried, I’d be yelling at the TV, cursing, making fun of the Magic, and Mrs. Vano always overheard. In front of his parents, I spoke good English, kept it clean, but around Joey I was just wildin’. There was nothing two-faced about it, but Mrs. Vano didn’t really like it.

She started to see a change in Joey once he started hanging out with me. He left 2Pac
All Eyez on Me
in his mom’s car one day and she got real upset when she heard it so, of course, I got blamed. We’d always fuck around in class and end up in detention, but it was just hijinks. I never felt like I was transforming Joey into a “bad” person; I was just helping him live a little more. One week got especially funky, though. There was this science teacher we hated, Mr. Mazza, a passive-aggressive dick that always assumed we were fucking around when we weren’t. So, in the great self-destructive
tradition of minority adolescents everywhere,
^*
we figured, “Why not cause trouble, he gonna assume it anyway.” This was when Biggie’s “Big Poppa” was a hit, so when he walked into class I’d always yell, “I love it when you call me Fat Mazza!” and we all laughed at the fool.

That Friday, Fat Mazza gave us an assignment. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a teacher do: “All right, class, this week, I want you all to design a weapon using the things we’ve learned in class about force.” We couldn’t believe it, this fool really gave us free rein to make weapons, test them at school, and present them in class. Mazza made it clear we weren’t allowed to make explosives or use materials like knives, BB guns, paintball guns, and so on. It had to be something that would represent the principles of physics, but not actually hurt people. For the rest of the day, all anyone could talk about was the weapons they were going to build. Some people wanted to make potato shooters, others catapults. Joey and I were trying to figure out what we could do that would really wreck shop, but we were blank.

After school, his mom took us to the mall so we could get ideas. We went straight for the comics shop.
Punisher
always had the best weapons but they were all guns. The X-Men had wild mutant abilities that they clearly weren’t selling at K-B Toys. Comics weren’t very helpful, it turned out. We went to K-B, though, and found a Nerf slingshot. It was meant for shooting small toys or tennis balls but we wanted to move more heavy-duty objects. I’m pretty sure we went to Sports Authority, where we found a metal slingshot with a heavy, rugged sling. The joint could launch anything easily a hundred yards. But we decided that slingshots are boring. We still needed to figure out what we were going to shoot. All night at Joey’s we played Twisted Metal 2. The next morning we woke up for breakfast and of course it was eggs, toast, OJ, and Vienna sausage at Joey’s. But then it hit us, the answer was right in front of our noses, fucking up our sense of smell.