by Eddie Huang
“I’m busy! Stop it!”
“What are you doing in there? Why can’t I just get my razor?”
“Eddie, you never shave. Why do you need to shave right now? You don’t even have facial hair.”
“I don’t have facial hair because I shave it. Lemme in!”
“No!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m busy!”
“Are you pooping?”
“No! I’m straightening my hair.”
“Why does your hair smell like poop when it’s straight?”
“YES! OK! I’M POOPING, YOU CRAZY. Leave me alone!”
“I want to see.”
“You are so WEIRD! What is wrong with you? Just let me poop, boo.”
“Why are you so weird about pooping? I poop twice a day, and it’s great. It’s the only time I can talk to my mom.”
“That’s true, you do talk to your mom in the bathroom….Why?”
“Because the feeling of wasted time is relative to the other things you could be doing at that moment. If I’m on the toilet, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time when she asks me the same useless questions every day, but if I was in a cab where I could watch Sandy Kenyon review movies instead of talking to her, I feel like life is passing me by on the phone….Lemme in!”
“You are so annoying, stop it! I don’t want you in here!”
I opened the door and there she was, sitting on the toilet, booty spreading off the sides, hair back, face in hands, feet did,*3 in all her glory.
“Hey, ma, you look great pooping.”
“Go awaaay…”
“Stop it! This is great. We share everything now.”
“What are you talking about? Get out!”
It really wasn’t as endearing to Dena as it was to me.
“OK, OK, I’ll go outside. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I think it’s cool that we can acknowledge you poop.”
“GET OUT!”
I left. It was clearly an egregious intrusion of private and psychological space, but I felt like it was necessary. I needed to know I wasn’t in love with the mirage, and I needed her to know she could let go of her masks with me. That I wasn’t superficial and caught up in her projection of self, but the actual vulnerable, unedited self. We’d been holding back, but we both knew what we were feeling. That day, in the middle of Hurricane Sandy, our feet on the cold tile of my bathroom, it broke open. I was in love.
I know this seems slightly psychotic. It was. I had no idea what unconditional love looked like, so I looked for it in the bathroom. I’ve heard men and women wax rhetorical: “Will you still love me tomorrow?” “next week?” “next year?” “after I have kids?” Connie had the flu test, but I had the poop test. I thought at the time the poop test was: Could I show her that I love her even with her pants down, at her most vulnerable? Could I show myself? Now I realize the poop test’s addendum: would she still love me when I got too close, when I forced vulnerability on her that she wasn’t ready for or ever obliged to provide?
—
That was the beginning. Things went like they do in any other relationship on the fast track, and nine months later on that plane to Mongolia, Gosling spoke to me. I imagined hanging out with Dena for the rest of my life, rolling around in aprons with marinara stains, ripping my Polo bedding, feeding each other capicola. And that’s when my neurosis kicked in. Yes, I was going to propose. Yes, we would be together forever. Yes, my future wife was from Scranton, but she’d never be Chinese.
I wanted my kids to enjoy capicola too, but what if they turned out like those people at dim sum who only ate shrimp dumplings and crab claws? What if they didn’t speak Chinese? What if they put me in a retirement home? What if she woke up and decided she didn’t like Chinese people one day? What would my mom think? As close as we were, would there always be that distance?
Through the stress and strain, Killa Cam came through and spoke to me as he always does, “What means the world to you?”
And finally, I knew why I was going to China.
* * *
*1 Downtown NY club.
*2 She loved looking at interiors on Pinterest.
*3 Pedicure.
Evan
People love Evan. No, wait. People like Evan. In fact, everybody likes Evan. They like him because they know him just enough to like him and you start to wonder if that’s how he likes it.
Fifteen months after the Connie experiment and a year after meeting Dena,*1 I arrived in Chengdu Airport after a week of following goats and camels around the Gobi Desert taping a show for Vice. I chose Mongolia for the show because it’s the least densely populated country in the world. Considering I’d spent the last eight years chasing cabs and anything in leggings, it was nice to be with goats. You know what you’re getting with them: poop and cashmere. I didn’t have to chase goats like I chased money and apple bums. With goats, you just gotta be around. Eventually, if they stop to eat enough grass, you can walk among them. That’s the best way to get to know something. I tell the kids at Baohaus, if you wanna learn something, walk with me. Walk with me to the train; walk with me to the storage unit; walk with me to the first day of class. Walk with a motherfucker so someone can walk with you.
I loved the city when I was walking, but then you see people running and you put your Air Maxes on, too. You start running, you get thirsty, and then you start chasing. You might get what you want, but it’s a blur, because you can’t stop running. You forget what you were chasing in the first place and then you die. You can’t win; the idea of winning is faker than white meat at KFC. But how am I gonna survive if I’m not 1st in line on 1st Ave. at the 1st National Bank so I can fly 1st class?*2
Evan pulled up in a green cab with yellow racing stripes. Luxurious.
“Yo, Ed!”
Still smiling. Son could be an hour late and he’d stay cheesin’. It made me smile, too, but I kept it to myself. Evan had mastered walking with people. He liked being on the flank, he never chased, he never ran, and he never really worried. He was happy to be second or third into the fray and pick off what you’d left behind.
“Why you always late, man?”
“I was watching the flight and then there wasn’t an update so I just waited for you to call me before I left. Then googin-face*3 over here got lost.”
“How does a cab driver get lost going to the airport?”
“Dude! You’re in China, relax.”
That was his safe word when I went Dad: relax.
I worried about Evan because he never chased anything. I know that seems like a contradiction, but peep game. People are naturally thirsty. We get hungry, we get horny, we need things. So of course, you tell people slow down, walk with me, nah nah chill. You tell Kobe to pass the rock ’cause son was born thirsty, but LeBron is a god that has to be told Delonte West is a mortal who under no circumstances should be given the ball or introduced to your moms.*4 I’d drop maxims on Evan like “There’s no free lunch,” “Things aren’t just gonna fall in your lap,” “The only way is hard work,” but I knew I was wrong. Not because I didn’t work hard but because Chris Bosh walks among us. Evan knew I was wrong, too.
“How’s it been?”
“I’ve been eating at KFC for three days. Everything else makes me sick. I found a Din Tai Fung today in the mall, though, so I ate there twice.”
“I drank fermented horse’s milk in the Gobi Desert and then wiped my ass with socks in Ulan Bator.”*5
“Ugh…it’s not that bad here. But I saw people pulling up to street stands with a side of pork on the back of a moped, so I stay at the KFC.”
We loaded everything into the cab: eighteen pairs of shoes, thirty-two outfits, Dri Fit boxer briefs for weeks. I made small talk with Evan for a good six minutes. Mouth moving, head nodding, but my consciousness out to lunch. Over the last four years, that’s what started to happen. Neither of us made sense to the other, neither of us wanted to be around the other, and we did this boss-employee, big brother–youn
ger brother small talk dance.
“How’s OKCupid treating you?”
“Great.”
“Good.”
“Mom wants you to call.”
“Awesome, thanks, man.”
“Cool, thanks, man.”
“No problem, man.”
We sounded like bros rather than brothers when we fell into passive aggression, “fantastics” and “greats” dropped in between the “hey, mans.” Something about two passive aggressive Asian Americans in Chengdu echoed post-collegiate whiteness in Murray Hill. I didn’t like it.
—
My mom used to tell us:
“One chopstick: I break you.
“Two chopsticks: tougher, but eventually, I break you.
“Three chopsticks: if you stick together, unbreakable.”
That’s why our parents had three kids; it’s also why I just picked up three chopsticks and broke the shits. Because the things that sound good and help you sleep at night aren’t fucking true. They sound good precisely because they aren’t true.
“Love conquers all.”
Sounds great. Not true.
“HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women will get at least one type of HPV at some point in their lives.”*6
Sounds horrible, but true.
“Your family will always be there for you.”
I wonder. Evan came up to New York from Orlando to help me open Baohaus. He’s always been there for me. I had an idea, and he believed in it. When he first offered to join me, back when the idea was still just an idea, it didn’t entirely make sense to me.
“I’ll help you.”
“I’ll give you fifty percent of the business!” I countered.
“It’s not about the money. I just want to help you.”
“But I don’t want the help for free.”
“But I don’t want to be paid.”
“You have to be paid. If you work, you should be paid, and if I don’t pay, I’m not going to get what I need.”
“Dude, I just want to help. You’re my brother.”
“Fine, but at work we aren’t brothers. We’re partners.”
“We’re always going to be brothers.”
“No, I know, but trust me. At work, we’re partners.”
Before long our ideas started to diverge. Someone was offering us money for the store and the brand.
“We should sell Baohaus to the group.”
“Fuck that. They’re offering us half of what we make in a year for twenty-five percent of the company FOREVER.”
“I’m tired, man.”
“You’re twenty-four, you’re not supposed to be tired. I’m thirty, let’s go!”
“Yo, I’m the one opening and closing the shop, I’m the one working the register. I’m tired.”
“I came up with the idea, I put up the money, I do all the recipes, I control the food, I do the press, I manage the business. Someone has to work the day-to-day. You get half!”
“I don’t want half! I don’t want to open another restaurant. I don’t want to do this shit the rest of my life.”
“You aren’t going to do it the rest of your life if we open another one, make more money, and hire middle management. Then you’ll be doing what I’m doing, and we all move up.”
“Yeah, but then we’d have to open another restaurant! And you’re writing the book, doing the show, I’m gonna end up doing everything but the cooking myself. I can’t look at another petty cash record or bank statement. I’m twenty-four, I should be exploring the city and doing really reckless irresponsible shit!”
“So you want us to sell Baohaus to these internet cornballs because you want to go do reckless irresponsible shit?”
“No, dickhead, you know I’m not going to go apeshit crazy. I’m just saying, this is my time to be a kid, and I’m sitting here looking at your fucking bank statements all day.”
“Fine, Evan, I’ll do the bank statements.”
“You can’t do the bank statements, ’cause you have to finish the fucking epic story of your life and our family. So I do the bank statements and everyone is happy, but this is it. I’m not opening another restaurant.”
You’re probably wondering why we didn’t just hire someone. Well, that was the plan I discussed with my mom. I was probably on the toilet at the time.
“Mom, I gotta hire a manager.”
“You idiots running a sandwich shop need MANAGER? Give me a break, kidding yourself! You sell three sandwich, have four hundred fifty square feet, MANAGER? Where you put manager? You can’t fit other person behind the counter!”
“Yo, we sell eight hundred of those fucking sandwiches every Friday and Saturday, it’s not like we run a bodega with cats on the counter.”
“What you talk bodega? Why you talk about Spanish food or cat? I don’t say Spanish, I say you sell three sandwich and your stupid ass need manager.”
“Mom, Evan doesn’t want to do this shit anymore. He’s burned out. He wants to quit, and I don’t blame him. We need a manager.”
“Fine, you go hire manager, what have to do with me, but you ask me, I tell you: stupid ass. Two of you should have no problem run this store. And don’t you ever trust anyone look at money besides Evan. Even manager, Evan still watch the money.”
I used to look at Chinese restaurants and think, Why does every family have to own one? You walk down a block in Chinatown and there are five restaurants on every block serving the same Cantonese food with the same price, quality, and indistinguishable atmosphere. They pay similar rents, buy from the same purveyors, and fight for the same customer. It’s bad business for everybody. They should consolidate, diversify offerings, and maximize real estate instead of cutting each other off at the knees with a price war.
The problem with Chinese restaurants is that the employees are family. The lady at the register isn’t just a lady at the register, it’s your aunt. The server isn’t just a server, it’s your cousin. The bookkeeper isn’t just a bookkeeper, the bookkeeper is your mom. No one gets fired, but everybody fights because you eat, sleep, and shit family. You can’t scale up and grow because you can’t hire management from the outside. You are stuck with your cousin as the head server even if he’s a thirty-five-year-old virgin who still greets a table with “Haro, prease.” Your family is the government, the economy, and the workforce. Come to think of it, the family is communist. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I just mean there are a lot of slanted-eyed Chris Boshes on the payroll.
—
Finally, our Chengdu cab driver spoke to us, in Mandarin, of course.
“You Chinese?”
“Yeah, Chinese.”
“But you speak English.”
“We were born in America.”
“Ahhh, I knew it. I can’t speak English, but I know good English when I hear it. You got that smooth English. English is some good shit.”
Did he say “good shit”? Nah, but the way he said what he said could only be translated as an emphatic “good shit.” These are the calculations I make when traveling in China. I register the literal definition of the word, listen to the emotional cues, and then find its equivalent in the Taiwanese-Chinese-American culture I live. And they would reciprocate when translating my third-grade Taiwanese-Chinese-American attempts at Mandarin.
“Ha ha, it’s all right, I guess.”
“Lemme ask you….Does America respect China now? Like, really respect us…as a country and people.”
“Growing up, no, they laugh at us. They still laugh at us. But because of the economy, they fear the future.”
“Ahhh, I understand. But fear is not the same as respect.”
“Absolutely not. It’s not even close.”
“One day they’ll respect us, I know it.”
We traded off like Jadakiss and Styles P as Chengdu breezed past my window, but I watched the driver’s eyes through the rearview mirror.
“Do you like America, though?” I asked.
/> “No, I don’t like Americans or Japanese. But then I think…people all the same! Go out of town, first thing you learn is to curse at people. FACK U! Argentina, Dubai, India, I’ve been to them all. Everywhere, FACK U!…Oh, but I have another question.”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Airport. How do I say airport in English?”
“Airport.”
“Ahhh, air pert.”
“No, airport.”
“Air put.”
“No, air port.”
“Air poot.”
“Yeah, air poot. You got it, homie.”
“Ahhh, good, now I don’t have to flap my wings when I try to say air poot.”
“Are Americans rude to you when you can’t communicate?”
“Nah, they get it. You know, today, America still big brother. Right? I welcome them.”
The arm-flapping cab driver pulled up to the Soho Building at 60 Kehua Bei Lu right next to ATV Karaoke and across from a giant hot pot restaurant the size of Macy’s. I got out of the cab with my big blue hippo suitcase, a lopsided old Victorinox*7 box on wheels, and a Bart Simpson drawstring backpack. Within seconds, I was bumrushed.
“Da gu! Da gu!” (big brother, big brother)
“Xiong di! Xiong di!” (my brother, my brother)
“Shwai gu! Shwai gu!” (suave brother, suave brother)
“Lai ba, lai ba!” (come on, come on)
The three peons came dressed in belly-out tank tops, jeans embroidered with metaphysical animals (e.g., dragons & phoenixes), black cowboy shirts with rhinestones, and the requisite knock-off straight leg Lees. They swarmed from all sides, forcing escort trading cards into our hands, faces, pockets, and luggage. Designed in the exquisite style of early ’00s online pornography pop-ups, the cards had naked photos of bright-skinned Chinese women on one side, stats and phone numbers on the other. It was like arriving as a scout on the banks of Hooker Normandy Beach.
This was the entrance to our “hotel.” Three months ago, we had booked rooms online at a place called Hakka Homes, run by someone named Hakka Heather, but upon arrival I remembered that everything you see on the internet is not in fact true.
