We’re the Lius
There was a record shop on Broadway Avenue in Manhattan registered under our name—Liu Records—and we lived on top of it. We paid taxes for our business like any good Americans and never caused any trouble: never too loud, not encouraging of the wrong company, hardly smoking save for whenever Mom was nervous because Dad flew into a rage, after which you’d see Mom crumpling a Seven Star on a clear, chartreuse ashtray by the cash register. His rage was a quiet one, gentle too. All he’d do with his hands was flip through the albums in International all night. The first time it happened, we figured to leave him be. “Go to bed and let him comb through it all, the international music,” we agreed. Through the floorboards, we’d hear the clacking of jewel cases for hours, and that made it hard to sleep. There was a time when we thought it was annoying, that clacking, but then it became something like a cool balm on our shared wound. My twin sister, Lily, and I would know that things would get better by morning. Dad would wake up beside Mom, and Mom would stop smoking Seven Stars, or at least until it all happened again some other day, the arguing about Grown-Up Things: dates to file personal income taxes, dates to file business taxes, dates to file state taxes. There would just be no more arguing for now. For all of us, that was good enough. If we only argued a few times a week, then we’d be okay with that. We could be happy.
Lily took the cash register on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I took it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was a rock-paper-scissors toss on who had to do weekends. We once fought on a Friday night because Lily had a first date with her classmate, but I won at rock-paper-scissors. “You’re not even busy,” she said. By that Sunday, Lily and her then-boyfriend, now-fiancé, spent all day behind the countertop of Liu Records. They talked about everything they could think of, like all the countries they wanted to visit after graduating from New York University or the end of the world as they might have known it, because the new millennium was coming up and no one knew what was going to happen. When the boy brought up his favorite ’90s music, Lily found them all in both vinyl and disc, and that impressed him forever. He left Liu Records that night with a brand-new album of Hikaru Utada’s still plastic-sealed in its jewel case. Lily had stolen it for him while no one was looking, but somehow Mom and Dad still found out anyway and we all ended up arguing about it. “No good for business,” they said in Mandarin, to which Lily said back like a New Yorker, “Whatever you say.” There wasn’t any yelling about it, though father loomed over the Japanese part of the international music with his fingers resting in the disc’s absence that night, and Lily felt bad for a very long time.
Mom and Dad founded Liu Records before they had us. They’d only been twenty-somethings when they washed up here from the Pearl River, but they were old souls, still are. Lily and I, we spent all our youth here. Through our teens, we fell asleep with price tag guns and voided receipts in hand. All we knew how to do was the business of music, how to listen to it, sell it, talk about it. If we ever went without it, we often wondered what we’d have left, and we were scared to death Looking back at our time in the record shop, I think Mom and Dad wanted us to look after it forever. We’ve never had any arguments about it, though Lily and I still knew of it, that feeling they had. It’s an unspeakable thing, asking someone to stay.
We’re the Lius. My twin sister, Lily, is in Los Angeles now. She’s made it as an actress, and you can see her in major motion pictures. The stolen Hikaru Utada is still in a bookcase in her Beverly Hills condo, though her fiancé has never opened its plastic. It’s just too sentimental. As for me, I’ll be working on Wall Street soon, and while I’ll still be in Manhattan, I won’t get to see much of Mom and Dad anymore. There are just too many Grown-Up Things to do now. They once said they weren’t upset at us for getting up and leaving how we did, even if it meant having to put up the record shop for sale. “Take care of us,” they said. “Of course,” I said. Over Skype, Mom and Dad tell me the shop has finally been sold off and Liu Records is no more. “Done deal,” they say. I want to tell someone about it, but Lily’s much too busy to call nowadays. After Mom and Dad hang up, I call Lily’s personal assistant and break the news to him. In three to five business days, Lily will know.
If the Lius ever caused any trouble, it must’ve been when Lily and I played tag in the record shop. We were five. Jewel cases fell, and records plummeted from way up high and slipped out of dust jackets. I once crashed into the towering legs of a customer, and he laughed as he straightened out his slacks while Mother and Father bombarded him with sorries. Then they sternly lectured us, “No running, no bothering customers, no causing trouble.” From then on, we never dared run in Liu Records again. I want to ask Lily if she remembers that. I’m told that I’ll hear from her soon. “Thank you,” I say. There’s a silence for a few seconds, and then the line drops.
Afterword
Dear class,
Write a poem about anything. No sonnets, please.
K
Sent from my iPhone
The last real poem I ever wrote was for K. Everyone at Berkeley liked K and wanted to study under him. In the semester I did, the spring of my first year, he’d just gotten back from a yearlong sabbatical during which he wrote ten-something poems. He wrote them while staying in Taiwan’s hostels, hiking along the Nine Streams, and partying at the Club CUBIC in Macau, the last of which wasn’t something he told us outright, only subtly through the poem, titled “Partying at the Club CUBIC in Macau,” from his forthcoming chapbook. Once, as a secret, K told me he had never gone to Macau. He was a poet who believed that you could say whatever you wanted to in poetry, and for that, I loved K dearly, reverently. I didn’t actually know-know him.
Toward the semester’s end, I struggled to write something for K. I went to his office hours once, dumbfounded. He told me to write about my mother. I asked him, “What of her in particular?” He offered, “Anything.” He told me that poets often liked to return to childhood. The crueler, the better, he seemed to imply. Before he could elaborate any further, he left his office to take a phone call. An agent of his, he elaborated.
Later that afternoon, I went back to my apartment a few blocks away from campus. It had been raining in bursts. Lying in bed, I opened WeChat and went to my mother’s contact. She picked up right away. “What?” she said. “Hi, Mom,” I said. I asked her if she could tell me more about herself. She had grown up in Vietnam as a Vietnamese woman with a Vietnamese-sounding name like Van, though both of her parents were Chinese. I had never bothered to ask about any of it before, though I knew it had something to do with history. Now was the time, I thought. “Tell you about what?” she said in an irritated tone. “Something, anything,” I said. I told her that I was writing a paper about the Chinese Civil War and needed family testimony. It was a lie, because I knew she didn’t believe in poems.
“I have nothing to tell you,” Mom said. As always, because Mom had a way of agitating me, I grew upset. “What do you mean you have nothing to tell me?” We argued back and forth. She said I was bothering her. I said she should just help me out. We found ourselves arguing about other things: the Chinese New Year dishes I never washed when I was little, not taking her to Disneyland with my Facebook internship money, how I began calling her less after I left Sacramento. I still can’t remember who hung up. I haven’t forgotten how there was an unbearable emptiness that filled our WeChat conversations for a very long time. By evening, I turned in a poem to K. It was chock-full of lies about my mom. After spring break, I finally declared my major, and it had nothing to do with literature. I stopped writing poetry altogether.
Years later, just before graduation, I stumbled upon K once more. Mom had already passed then. I encountered him in a café on Telegraph. We sat down for tea. “White Ferrari” by Frank Ocean was playing on a home speaker. K asked me about my poetry, and I told him that I had stopped writing and instead learned how to program. He nodded. He told me that he had liked the poem I sent him all those years ago very much. I then remembered that I had never bothered to check the email he sent me after that semester’s end. I asked him what he had liked about it. He only hummed. Often, back when we had class together, he would always say something like, “I can’t put my finger on it, but it works.” In that café, I found that he hadn’t changed. We parted ways after ten minutes. There was only so much to talk about.
After meeting with K, I packed up my apartment’s possessions in Bankers Boxes; my lease was set to expire once I graduated. Finally, I sifted through my email inbox. I found notices from the Office of the Registrar, “Happy Birthdays” and “Sorry For Your Losses,” spammers foretelling “The End Of The World As We Know It!!!!!!!!!” I waded through them until I found the poem I had written for K three years ago. It was sparse, and there were lines that were enjambed much too soon or too late, and I couldn’t stomach it, how careless and rough around the edges I’d been. I read it once, and I read it again, as K advised to do with all work. When I did, I reminded myself that none of it was true, or if it was, I never would’ve known it. I didn’t know my mother like that.
Still today, I don’t write poems. I’m struggling to make sense of the things around me, like what K’s up to now that he’s retired from teaching, why my WeChat messages were deleted after I bought a new iPhone, or where to put Mom and her ashes if not behind the glass of a china hutch. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the bottom of it. There’s something painful about being here in San Francisco. I can’t say what. I’m always losing my words. My 401(k) has my Google salary trickling into it. I still wire cash back to Beijing because none of my family is in Vietnam anymore. My mother’s nephews tell me there’s an aircraft carrier amusement park in nearby Tianjin, how they’d like to go someday. Shenzhen’s full of bright lights now, they add. How cool, I think to myself. On WeChat, they’re asking me when I’ll come: when, when, when.
“Asian American” Fiction
After the doctor’s checkup, Qiwu takes his sick mother to shop at 99 Ranch. She named him Qiwu because there was a man in a film she’d seen named Qiwu, a handsome cop played by the Taiwanese-Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro. They’re gonna say, “ki-wu,” “si-wu,” anything and everything but Qiwu with a “ch” sound. All the time, the ill mother tells her son, “Oh, you’ll grow up to be handsome, too, someday, I know it.” Maybe you should give him a name like Eric or Vincent or Paul. Perhaps then, they won’t spend half of your workshop talking about how inconvenient is to have a foreign-sounding name. All the oldies are playing on the overhead speaker now: Teresa Teng, Faye Wong, Jay Chou, and others, their words barely heard through the old sound system’s static. Qiwu’s mother hums along as they go down each aisle carefully. “I had to Google those people!” Together, mother and son pluck jars of furikake seasoning and bulk ramen from the metal shelves, rice cakes and frozen dumplings from the wall of refrigerators, even a live lobster. It’s been some time since they’d shopped together last. Back when Qiwu was little, he’d follow along with his mother to the grocery store every week. Where did the time go? Hair was now growing out of his face, and Qiwu was all of a sudden busier, concerned with so many other things like grades and math tutoring. There’ll be a smart one who’ll say, “But aren’t furikake and ramen, like, Japanese things?” He’ll really, really enunciate the “Japanese,” and someway or somehow, he’ll bring Haruki Murakami into it, as those kinds of guys always do, especially when it’s a mother-son coming of age story, those sick fucks. While Qiwu’s father waits in the parking lot, he and his mother wade through crowds of Chinese, the Silicon Valley types with quarter-zips. They have to prep for the Spring Festival later today, and by festival, they mean the dinner at Qiwu’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s daughter’s tiny apartment in Fremont. Five hours from now, it’ll be packed, and Qiwu’s relatives will drink Heineken and sing karaoke, and they’ll jump when all of the firecrackers pop, and there’ll be so many hongbao to go around. Before that, in half an hour, they’ll come back to their Sunnyvale townhouse to make yimian and chao nian gao first. Come on, just say red envelope, lobster stir fry, and stir-fried rice cakes. They’ll know what stir-frying is. They’ll only somewhat know what the whole red envelope thing is. Also, does he really have to have so many people in his family? What do they offer here? Are they important to your story at all? Ma’s wrists are getting weak, so Qiwu picks up and sets down everything for her. He pushes the cart faithfully behind her as she limps aisle to aisle. When they get home, he’ll be the one to make everything. Something something immigrant trauma, they’ll say. That’s what it is, right? It has to be a story about immigrant trauma! The mom is bad to her son (we can infer), the dad is bad to his son (we can infer), the son is unhappy with himself and for no other reason than his parents (we can infer). Those are, of course, all in the text. They get it! No, they think they get it. After ten minutes, Qiwu looks at his wristwatch, a Seiko that his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday. Eighteen was a special birthday for Qiwu. Not only did he turn eighteen, but he passed his California driving test, and he’d gotten in to Harvard, Princeton, and other impressive-sounding schools. Again with the Japanese things! You know, it’s kind of insensitive to give a Chinese guy a Japanese watch. Are you really breaking Chinese American stereotypes here with the whole Harvard thing? In a few months from now, Qiwu’s family will throw a grand party to send him off with balloons and cake. For now, he has trouble thinking about it. He can’t imagine leaving home. Everything is so far away. His mother is sick, deathly so. Kaiser Permanente says she only has a year. No matter where Qiwu goes, his mother won’t see him graduate. In the first draft, Qiwu and his mother were still shopping through 99 Ranch. They were running late, and they argued about punctuality. Later, they had trouble making the Spring Festival food, but even for the nasty words they shared, they still got it done. At the party later that day, Qiwu is asked by all of his relatives about his future. He doesn’t know, and he struggles to answer. That’s the whole story, and you didn’t think it was interesting enough. You felt as though Qiwu’s loneliness, continuous yet changing with age, was inadequate. You needed the story to do more. It’s already so damn hard to read because nobody in your workshop knows what the hell you’re talking about. After a while, you think to yourself, “Take his mother.” Oh, but how could you? She’s done nothing wrong. She might be a bit hot-headed, but there’s nothing wrong with her. “Take his mother,” you think again. Oh, it only makes sense. The story would have more drama, there’d be something for the others to talk about, and you’d get the gut punch that you wanted. “Take his mother,” you think one last time, so you do. You rewrite the first draft. You make Qiwu’s mother fatally sick. You flip the hourglass of time, and there are only so many grains of sand left. Just like that, you get the story that you wanted. No, the story everyone else wanted. In the middle of 99 Ranch, Qiwu comes to a stop. His watch tells him that it’s still only 3:35 p.m. There’s still time, so much time, before the Spring Festival party. His mother has stopped behind him. They’re going to make it in time.
***
Rumpus original art by Carl Dimitri
