Winter 2022

Tony orders comfort foods that remind him of being seven years old and home with a cold. He wants a grilled cheese sandwich and French fries and chicken noodle soup and two cups of hot cocoa, with a piece of blueberry pie. Lots of whipped cream, on everything.

He smiles at the tense server. “Not really,” he says with a gentle laugh. “Just put whipped cream on the whipped cream-type things. Use your discretion.”

The server turns to me, ready for my order. I start to say, “I’ll just have a cup of coffee and a salad,” but Tony interrupts by naming comfort foods that I enjoyed when I was much younger. Tony tells her I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich—just like him—and tomato soup. No fries. A piece of lemon pie.

Tony talks about vacations we took when we were children.

Like the time we built a mammoth sandcastle at Bar Harbor up in Maine, when he was five, and I was fifteen. How he cried when a rising tide pulled his toy boat from the castle moat. How I leapt for the boat, rolled in the current, and came up sputtering without the prize.

“Remember the time we sat side-by- side on the Blue Streak roller coaster over in Ohio?” he says. “How we both caught air under our behinds on that final, steep descent? How I was practically flung from my seat, but you were the one who screamed?”

Tony’s reminiscing is stream-of- consciousness. He recalls details I’ve forgotten, though he doesn’t remember that he ordered more hot cocoa.

As we sit in front of cold, half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, I realize it’s been too long since Tony and I have been together, just the two of us. We haven’t talked like this in years. The jukebox clicks onto another catchy country tune, and I remember that I’ve always liked my brother.

I tell myself that I mustn’t cave to my welling sorrow.

Not here. Not now.

After I pay the bill and thank the server, Tony and I slowly make our way to the illegally-parked rental car. I’m pleased there’s no ticket on the windshield. Tony says, “If you’d gotten a ticket, you could have fought it. You’d just have to take skinny me to court as Exhibit A.”

I nod in agreement and return my brother to his warm, stuffy apartment.

I’d waffled about attending. Flying in from Seattle for an evening with classmates, some of whom I hardly remembered, seemed a stretch.

My family was one of the few ethnic Chinese families living in Fremont during the 1960s, and even with deep American roots dating back to 1870, we never fully fit in. But, I reminded myself, our thirtieth reunion had surprised me—among my small group of dinner-mates, I’d felt a sense of inclusion that I’d never felt back in high school. Maybe it was time to see, thank, and more broadly acknowledge these people who had once been part of my life. Adding to the urgency was the sad fact that although our graduating class numbered around seven hundred, attrition had thinned our ranks. Over the years, I’d lost track of my best friend, Robin. When I heard about her recent death, I’d felt a sharp pang of loss.

Last, but not least, I was the speaker.

That too had seemed a stretch. A classmate I’d reconnected with at our thirtieth had contacted me. He’d read one of my essays about my family’s history of discrimination and asked whether I could do a reading at our reunion. If there was a speaker’s fee, he assured me, I’d get paid.

“What?” I had laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding! They’re a captive audience, right? I’m the one who should be paying them.”

After the warm welcome, after the food, after visiting the “In Memoriam” table and touching Robin’s name, I stood in front of my graduating class. Nervously, I fingered my papers. When I got to the part of my story about primping for my first high school dance, there was an audible gasp following the punch line, which was something my father had said: “Why do you want to go to a dance?” His tone had been bitter. What he said next had shocked me back then, as it shocked my audience now. “Because no white boy is going to ask you to dance.”

When I finished my reading, I bowed dramatically and returned to my table. As classmates swarmed around, I felt self-conscious as some thanked me for sharing such a personal story.

Memories melt over time, like the gargoyle ice sculptures in the Avalon’s back room, for a Halloween-themed wedding that I passed on my way to the restroom.

I remember the elaborate costumes parading in the door after the venue transitioned rapidly from mopey college girls in flannel to a raging club scene featuring Wonder Woman, red devils, and women in tight black leather outfits dancing on tables. Suddenly, I felt out of place.

For Halloween 2007, you and I dressed up as Ritchie and Margot Tenenbaum. “Needle In the Hay” was the first Elliott Smith song you’d ever heard, when you watched The Royal Tenenbaums. He opened the show in Boston with it, swigging beer between songs. His Figure 8 tour. The last song was “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult.

Was he afraid? Ritchie Tenenbaum made his attempt. I did too. Ritchie and I lived. Elliott Smith did not. What makes some of us survive—even thrive? Is there a preordained map that got me here, to this place of solidity and security? Or do we choose our paths, with each painful step, growing stronger as we go?

You and I shared a moment of silence for Elliott Smith in my car on a November day in 2003. You barely knew me, but when I put on my Elliott Smith mix-tape as I drove us to the Safeway near our church to buy salad, you looked at me differently. And that, I joke, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, I can’t find that Elliott Smith tape. Rebecca made it for me when she decided I needed an education in music. I knew him as the guy in the white suit standing on stage at the Oscars in 1998, playing “Miss Misery” from Good Will Hunting. He lost best original song that year to “My Heart Will Go On.” A titanic mistake. You don’t think my jokes are funny.

The condom broke—or you broke it—but we kept going, because I was tired and lonely. When you finished, you didn’t say anything; you just got up, my skin still numb from the weight of your huge body.

You grabbed my ukulele and started playing some song I didn’t recognize, something bad. I asked (my mistake), “What is this?” and you replied, “You don’t know? If you really want to be more American, you need to know Gorillaz.”

And this was when I thought of everything that was wrong about what you had just said:

The assumption that if I didn’t recognize the initial riff of a hit like “Feel Good Inc.,” it was because I didn’t know the band, and not because you played like ass;

The implication that I really wanted to be “more American,” because let’s admit it, Americans always think everyone wants to be American;

The assumption that if a band sings in English, they must be American—because Gorillaz is British;

The fact that I had a big Gorillaz poster right above the brown-leather couch where you’d held me down and you didn’t even see it, just like you didn’t see me, just like you never asked how I was handling living alone in America during a global pandemic while my whole family and all my friends were in Italy, or how my loved ones were doing in a country that had been hit so hard that lines of hearses clogged beautiful towns—towns that Americans only imagined shining with the green glass of wine bottles and red-and-white checkered tablecloths—Mamma Mia!—big gestures and laughter, comforting laughter in a foreign language, too far away to be worth understanding.

the anxiety confusion coughing rash slurred speech facial swelling trouble breathing low pulse wheezing difficulty swallowing itchy skin swelling in mouth and throat nausea shock—

all you remember is disappearing for a while, with an anchor wrapped around your neck, tugging you to the bottom of the ocean, landing on that shifting sand, and a humpback whale and her baby watching you with stern eyes, schools of angelfish and the ghosts of shipwrecked sailors playing the violin, feeding you scraps of plankton and seaweed and it’s good, you like it, you’d stay here longer but for the fact that your bones float to the surface, and you come up gasping, drenched in seawater and sweat, lying on the itchy plaid couch with a man beside you pressing a plastic mask over your face, tapping your cheeks, your wrists, feeling your pulse, saying, “She’s coming back,”

2. Lindsay, at age 12

For her older sister, who put her on a first-name basis with the seventh-grade boys in our church youth group as a sixth grader—the boys who snickered in the back row, sprouted patchy mustaches, spiked their highlighted hair, popped their collars, and attended Dave Matthews Band concerts with older siblings (Calm my beating heart!),

For casually wearing a bikini at the Young Life Camp all the church kids attended over the summer, while I was stuck in a one- piece by parental decree,

And for that smile, which meant she would never need braces, or rubber bands, or headgear, or any other mortifying metal contraption in her mouth to look cute.

So what do you do when you hear a mystery explosion in the night? When you hear a big one? When I was eleven, the household was jolted awake by an enormous boom out of the sky, something that sure wasn’t thunder.

What do you do?

Howie took a stroll around outside, wondering about the sirens starting up in the distance. That story could wait until morning, he decided, and he walked through the house, checking each bedroom
and reassuring each kid, still with no idea of what had actually happened. This was a Butte instinct honed by years of troubles in the mines—this urge to secure the home front when you heard the sirens and whistles and bells, when you saw the lights in the sky.

On the other hand, there were people out in the night heading toward the trouble, racing to discover what the Big Blast had blasted—and that was Butte, too. Sure, a few of those racers were likely exhilarated by the possibilities of cheap entertainment, of pure gawkery. But my friend Patrice’s father grabbed his oldest son, and they ran outside and jumped into his jeep. They swung by St. Ann’s Rectory to pick up Father Joe Pat, and off they zoomed.

My friends Dave and Dan ended up going out that night, too. Their Dad was a volunteer fireman, and sometimes when he got calls in the middle of the night, he’d wake his three oldest sons—Dave and Dan and Marty—and bring them along, leaving the other ten kids at home with their mom. Dave and Dan and Marty would wait in the car, watching their father handling the emergency, whatever it was, maybe dozing off now and again. They all showed up at the site of the Big Blast. Already, everybody was calling it that, the Big Blast.