Money Boy (2 page)

“The posts are strong enough?” I ask.

“Today we will finish the roof.” He points to a
stack of wooden beams, neatly sorted by length and width.

It could take all afternoon!

Ba and I raise one end of the scaffolding to Uncle
Bei.

“Push!” Ba shouts. “Not so fast! Pull it back!”

Bit by bit, we thrust the walkway up. Uncle Bei
pulls it over a top beam. Ba climbs the other ladder across from Uncle Bei. They
slide the scaffold into the middle. Then they come down to read the
instructions. Ba has laid out his tools on the bench as tidily as trinkets at an
outdoor market. Too bad he doesn't know what half the tools are for.

I head to the house but Ba calls, “Not finished
yet!”

I don't always obey Ba, but I never defy him in
front of other adults. Nothing makes him madder than losing face, even before
family like Uncle Bei.

I wait.

In our neighborhood, people build high fences, so
each backyard is private. There, they do whatever they want: tan their bodies
into tree bark, barbecue entire goats, or let their dogs use the yard as an
outdoor toilet. Some people grow flowers, while others put up playground sets.
It's not like the front, where no fences mar the long slope of lawn. Everyone
competes to grow the softest, greenest grass. All this is a farting headache of
extra work because I have to cut the lawn and set out the sprinkler. In China,
we never paid attention to the outside of our building.

This house is still Ba's new toy, even after we've
lived here for two years. Our first two years in Canada were spent in a condo,
so Ba came late to house care. He still asks the Chinese radio station for
handyman advice. Should the air-conditioner be covered in the winter? How high
should lawn grass grow? Can he remove black smudges from a white-painted wall?

I hear a sharp creak and a rasping cracking sound.

Uh-oh. Two bandstand posts are tilting, bending at
the foundation. Other posts stay firmly planted. The frame breaks apart in
pieces. Looks like the scaffold was too heavy.

Ba runs forward but Uncle Bei shouts, “Back off!
Want to die?”

With a dull thud, the scaffold crashes to the
ground, along with half of the upper frame.

“I told you, but you didn't listen!” Uncle Bei
laughs so hard that his teeth are going to fly out. “You measured wrong for your
batch of concrete. Look at my posts! Nothing wrong with them!”

“You should have stopped me!” Ba mutters. “This is
blood-and-sweat money wasted.”

Ba's face falls apart from disbelief. It's not a
look I see often. My father thinks he is close to perfection.

This collapse will enrage him, coming so soon after
the failure of his fitness studio. Good.

A car door slams in the driveway. Niang has come
home to shower and change from slacks into a dress for the evening. She enters
the backyard.

Uncle Bei dances over, laughing all the while.

“Look at that dumb melon husband of yours,” he
gloats. “I told him to follow me in mixing the concrete, but he didn't
listen.”

If Niang starts to chuckle, I may join in. Ba will
be humiliated. She told him several times to hire real carpenters. She doubted
that his English was good enough to read the instructions.

Niang walks around the wrecked bandstand. She tugs
at the standing posts, testing their strength.

I am edging away when she says to Ba, “What are you
waiting for? We need to move the metal off the wood.”

She hollers for me, and I move quickly. I never
give her any reason to scold me. Niang gets things done quickly, which is good
for a house of lazy guys. As a teenager, she trekked alone into the city to look
for wage work. After several hungry days, she started washing dishes in the
laneway behind a restaurant. Then she learned the business by watching.

“Your daughter, Yan, brought friends to the
restaurant,” she tells Uncle Bei.

Together, the four of us lift the aluminum off the
wood. No one knows which way we should go.

“I told them not to pay,” Niang continues, “but
they wouldn't listen. They left a stack of cash behind.”

“Stupid girl,” Uncle Bei grunts. “You should remind
her that she's spending my money.”

“She needs foreigner friends.”

“She'll make them at university.”

“She should broaden her circle now.”

Ba orders us to lean the scaffold against the fence
in order to prevent damage to his precious lawn. Head down, he trudges inside.

“I have to make a phone call,” he mumbles.

He's trying to save face, that's all.

“Good thing you're not building the Beijing
Stadium,” Uncle Bei calls. “Otherwise our Olympic Games would have been
cancelled this year!”

I get back to the raid just in time. Monkey and
Long Range are angry.

Shit Egg, you will regret
jerking us around.

You Dog Fart, go play
elsewhere if you can't be on time.

No time to explain. Long Range and I are stronger,
so we row the skiff. The sea is calm. It's so dark that the enemy can't see us,
nor can we see them. We almost crash into the warships.

The signal comes, Monkey strikes the flint, and
Long Range shoots flaming arrows at the ships.

We hear loud splashes and then our retreat signal.
Enemy Water Warriors are coming!

We're rowing as fast as we can when a dark figure
swings aboard our skiff. I charge forward with my sword. He twists to the side.
We both sway.

Long Range has one last arrow, but she can't see in
the dark. If she shoots blindly, then there's a fifty-fifty chance that she'll
kill me. And Monkey is too far away to help.

Next day, I rush home after school. Music and graphics are sharper and clearer on the desktop, so I'd rather play my games there.

This morning, Central's navy sailed into our harbor, using two damaged ships as shields against our fireballs. One ship was the one my team attacked yesterday. We should have sunk it by diving underwater and drilling into it. But once Long Range shot the Water Warrior, we raced back to the shore. Then Rebel Command raised a Red Flag, calling its teams to a beachhead battle this afternoon. It's a good time for me to build up my Honor.

Wei is taking his mother to the doctor, so he drives me home. He loves cruising in his father's new BMW but grumbles about being away from the gang. This afternoon they're going to the mall. I complain about the English exam, which was a disaster for me. Wei doesn't reply, so he must have done okay.

I want my driver's license, too, but Ba won't pay for the course until my grades improve. I hate how everything in my life is tied to school.

While my ancient computer grunts slowly through boot-up, I visit Ba's muscle machine. There's just enough time for two sets of bench presses, chest flies and pullovers. In my head I hear the gym teacher shouting, “Go slow for bulk!” but my counting speeds up as soon as I think of the upcoming battle. At the mirror, I flex my chest. My body looks more and more like Steel's.

Logging onto
Rebel State
, I sense someone watching me. My head jerks up. The house should be empty.

Ba is at the door holding a sheaf of papers and staring at me. His gaze is still and intense. The desktop screen is reflected in his eyes. I wait for his lecture to start. No doubt it'll be the same one about wasting time on this game.

“You're home early,” I say, breaking the deadly silence. If I had known he was home, I would have gone to the Milky Way Café to play in peace on my laptop. At this time of the day, Ba usually goes to Uncle Bei's computer store in the Great Lakes Mall. He says he needs a break from the restaurant.

He drops sheets of computer printout onto my keyboard. Each page contains lines that are highlighted with a marker.

A chill cuts through me. The list shows all the websites I visited in the past two weeks.
Rebel State
appears the most. But the sites that stand out in bright green are all the gay Chinese ones — some in North America, some in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“Why are you snooping through my computer?” I demand. “Privacy is protected in this country, don't you know?”

“Those sites, did you visit them?” he barks.

Why does he bother to ask? His snoop program gives him plenty of proof. I'm not stupid enough to accuse a computer of making mistakes.

“I was doing research for a school project.”

“Show me the document. Which class was it for?”

“Maybe I didn't save a copy on this machine.” I try to sound annoyed. “I can't remember.”

“Is it on your laptop?” Ba demands.

I scroll through my desktop as my brain begs some faraway god for a miracle.

Take Ba away, I pray, and I'll quit the game forever. I won't waste another penny on this evil habit!

My throat tightens and my stomach clenches.

I want to scream out, I haven't done anything! I want a girlfriend. I want to get drunk with my buddies, sing karaoke all night long. All I want is a normal life, passing one day at a time. I don't want my friends backing away from me in the shower room or in a row of seats at the theater.

Here's the file full of gay stuff from the net. Delete, delete, delete.

All the websites say that it's best if you choose the time and place to talk to people about gay topics, especially your parents.
Every family is different, so only you will know the ideal time. Plan carefully
.

Too bad there's no such time for a father who has actually killed people in the line of duty. In the army, Ba was in charge of training new recruits. His specialty was hand-to-hand combat. Only drunken fools who had lost all their worldly sense dared to challenge him.

He and I are the same height now. I'm still strong from gymnastics, even though I quit during middle school. But Ba is the one who knows how to fight.

“You know, all my life, I behaved well,” Ba says quietly. “It is important that people respect you.”

Here comes the standard lecture about proper behavior. Serve the people. Strengthen yourself. Stand tall. Don't wait until the cooked duck has flown. He complains that we young people have no idea how terribly the Chinese people suffered in earlier times.

“I quit school at age fourteen to help your grandfather,” he starts. “Farmers were finally allowed to sell produce on the free market. Everyone rushed to grow crops.”

He turns to my chest of drawers and pulls out the top one. He dumps my socks and underwear onto the floor and flings the drawer aside.

Hey! Niang just did the laundry yesterday. Who's cleaning this up? Not me!

“Farm life was wretched. Your grandfather forced me to join the army, did you know that?”

Ba empties more drawers. I sniff the air. Is he drunk?

“He wanted his son to become a four-star general,” Ba declares sourly. “I served ten years. Then I got discharged. Your grandfather blamed me, called me stupid. He said that so many countries planned to attack China, its leaders would never dare shrink its army!”

I've heard this before, whenever Ba drinks. I never saw Ba show respect to Grandfather, not at family gatherings, not at New Year's. To be called stupid by Grandfather, was that enough to make Ba angry all his life?

Ba walks into my closet, bigger than our living room back in China. He dumps my clothes onto the carpet.

“Ba!” I shout. “What are you doing?”

“Then I joined the police force,” he says, sighing. He scoops up an armful of my clothes and strolls away.

By the time I reach the front door, my fashion choices are front-page news on the lawn.

Luckily, I live by a labels-only motto. Every piece of underwear bears a high-end logo, in case anyone is looking. I run down to grab my jockstrap, even though Ba's doing a great job of shaming our family all by himself.

It dawns on me that Ba is throwing me out. This is serious!

Can he do that?

Of course he can.

The autumn was dry, and tattered red and yellow leaves lie everywhere. Across the street, Mrs. Lo is raking her lawn and averting her eyes.

Ba has gone crazy. You don't throw your son out of the house just because he visited a few controversial websites.

Do you?

I run around the pile of clothes, rescuing items. It took me ages to find the perfect graphics on my T-shirts. My gray hoodie is just two weeks old. Which should I grab, old jeans or newer ones? What about my combats? Jenny liked how mine were different from everyone else's. I can wear plain white T-shirts with anything.

Good thing the westerner people live too far down the street to watch us shame ourselves in public. They are friendly enough, always waving and smiling so that no one can accuse them of racism. We take great care never to step on their lawns, and never to park in front of their houses. We must never give them reason to complain about immigrants or to look down at us.

Ba hurries by with my backpacks and gym bags, and then shakes out my shoes. This must give him great pleasure. He has long grumbled about the steep prices of sneakers and how we own far too many pairs.

The red ones are for basketball. I wear the white Nikes for gym class. The black high-tops are good for slave labor at the restaurant. And I wear my Jordans when the gang plans a day at the mall or goes to a movie. I should have thrown out the other pairs long ago, but they're old friends.

Is Ba going to toss gasoline over them and click his lighter? He might be crazy enough.

I dash into the house for my laptop. Should I grab my CDs? I told myself to load them onto my iPod long ago. Now it's too late.

Ba puts an arm around me and walks me toward the front door.

“Canada was to be a new start,” he says, “but how many failed businesses have I had? Four. One for each year — ”

“Ba, wait! Let's talk!”

“Now you want to be gay. What should I think?” he says. “Your grandfather was right. I am a failure. I should have used more discipline to raise you. Now it is too late. Get going.”

He pushes me out the front door as if he's escorting a drunken customer from the restaurant.

I'm speechless. I'm waiting for him to lose his temper and storm around like he does after parent-teacher meetings. Those times, he hurls dishes to the floor and shatters them. He threatens to cut off high-speed Internet at home, crush my cellphone or put locks on my computer. He shouts until he thinks he has scared me into obeying him.

But what do I do when Ba acts like this?

He shuts the door firmly. The lock clicks into place and the chain rattles. The radio station said we needed industrial-strength locks and a steel-plated door to be safe.

Rot him!

I kick the pile of clothes and one blue Converse flies next door.

I haven't done anything!

In China, he bragged about how wonderful Canada was, and how we would enjoy great freedom here.

Hah! He never meant for me to enjoy living here.

He told his friends that immigration was stressful and required hard work, but said he would sacrifice everything for my sake. He wanted me to have more choices than were available in China.

This is all his fault. If he hadn't forced me to come to Canada, I would never have logged onto those sites. They're not available in China. Even if they were, I wouldn't risk getting China's Internet police on my back.

Two westerner boys stop on the sidewalk. They sit back on their bicycles, eyeing me as if I am a toddler with a dripping diaper. They are in junior middle school. One runs a hand through his long brown hair and then shakes it loose. He says something that ends with, “. . . yard sale?”

“Get the hell out of here!” I bark.

Startled, they leave right away. I don't care if the fart-baskets tell their parents that I swore at them.

I grab some clothes and jam them into a backpack. At the last minute, I take socks and underwear. I zip up my down jacket. Winter isn't here yet, but I feel chilled.

“No trouble, is there?” asks Mrs. Lo.

I almost jump. She crossed the street quietly, carrying Ching-ching, the white puffball that is supposed to be a dog.

Ching-ching wriggles in Mrs. Lo's arms, blinking its big brown eyes and batting its paws at me. Mrs. Lo holds it up, and the dog licks my face.

My face crumples.

I back off and take a deep breath.

“Oh, no.” I answer her question cheerfully and scratch the dog's ears. “No trouble. No trouble at all.”

It's impossible to be rude to her. She moves slowly and gracefully, exactly like my popo in China. She even wears the same half-black, half-transparent eyeglass frames as my grandmother.

“Want to come over and sit for a while?” she asks.

I open my mouth but all that comes out is a strangled croak. I shake my head and shove the rest of the clothes beside the stairs, out of sight.

I'm being kicked out of home by an insane father, yet I'm trying to make sure our house looks good. Go figure.