pronounciation: jah/jaw/jia
The house was falling apart. Fence slats bordering their small yard slowly bowing towards the ground. Water mold speckling the living room ceiling, from years of living through monsoons and storms. An old HP computer with a growing mess of cords connected to a medley of devices. Each scene was another calling- a calling to be repaired, cleaned, or organized. Leo found it increasingly overwhelming to even be at home, as any spare moments only reminded him of all the remaining tasks to complete. He’d only been back for a few months, and it felt that every time he checked one off the list, another leaky toilet or disconnected fuse appended itself to the bottom of it.
Of course, he could hire someone. But pride, Confucianism, frugality, or a combination of all the above kept him from it. What he really wanted to do was to sell it- it was the shittiest three bedroom house on the block by far, and Mom used less and less of the home each day. The lived boundaries of their interior would continue to shrink, until one day that boundary would look like the chalk outline of a murder scene.
“Why do we still have this?”
Leo motioned to an old television sitting in the middle of Mom’s bedroom. She had asked a neighbor to help move it to the garage about five years ago, but he had promptly hurt his back, dropped it in on the carpeted floor, and there it had sat since.
“I don’t mind. I’m used to walking around it now. Tai ma fan lah.” Leo’s mother barely averted her eyes from the episode of China’s Got Talent that she was watching on her tablet. “Really Leo, I don’t need you organizing my room.”
A quick flutter of her hand showed that she was ending the conversation. Leo grunted and nudged the corner of the set with his foot. It didn’t budge one inch. Admitting defeat, he scooped up a box filled with Time magazines from 2009 to transport to the garage as a compromise. Mom had been slowly transforming their garage into a makeshift Buddhist temple, and so amongst the leftover childhood artifacts, there was now a bronze Buddha, incense holders, and a smattering of half melted candles. Leo always bemused at the contradiction of zen minimalist ideals against Mom’s attempts at using the remaining half of the space as a storage facility. The logistics didn’t really work- in order to carve out a dedicated section of the floor to kneel on, she’d been forced to move the stepladder and lawnmower directly in front of the entrance back into the house.
Leo maneuvered himself through those various obstacles, and managed to hoist the box he was carrying onto a shelf that still had some vacancy. Unsurprisingly, the process resulted in him scattering a shoebox’s contents across the ground.
Six months ago, Mom had fallen and broken her ankle. She was in great shape for her age, but Leo felt compelled to make the drive from Austin every week to make sure she made it to physical therapy–that the groceries were bought and the yard was trimmed. Eventually, the weekends turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into him never leaving. He’d been a project manager at the same semiconductor company since graduating, but he officially put in his notice four months ago. Last month, an old buddy from school, Johnny, had hooked him up with a marketing gig at his family business franchising Frenchy’s chicken joints, so Leo decided to make the move final. With just a two and a half hour drive on I-10, his ‘99 Civic packed to the brim with neatly labeled cardboard boxes, Leo traded desert hills for swampland, barbecue for banh mis, and yuppie water cooler talk for the macho bluster of Johnny’s cousins.
It seemed as though everyone he knew from childhood had made it back home on the same path. Or really, upon closer inspection, it was all the Asians that had performed this ritual. No matter if you were Chinese or Viet or Pinoy, from hood Alief or posh Memorial or cookie-cutter Sugarland; tall, fat, angry, ambitious, a little bit crazy; the aging of your parents eventually called and beckoned to even the most adventurous. James, who had followed Leo to UT, roommates freshman year until graduation, had moved immediately back. He lived in an apartment off Montrose, just close enough to Bellaire so that he could keep an eye on his chronically depressed mother. Tina took a year from grad school because her mom got uterus cancer, then extended her leave of absence another year because of her father’s pressing diabetes. The high school homies Ray and Tim had never left, and now were being groomed to eventually take over their parents’ grocery store.
Even the ones who had migrated to the coasts, the ones chasing better culture and opportunities, were measuring time only by the number of years they had left before the return home. How long do I think I’ll stay in the Bay? Oh, I love it here but I’m going to move back to Texas in the next few years to be with the family. And so it would go. There was no country, job, or calling that could break the filial duty that each Houston Asian was born with. In this world, Austin really was the farthest you could ultimately go, a frontierland that was the only accepted compromise between old and new values.
Later that week after work, Leo rushed to make a dinner meeting with his uncle Mike, fighting the viscous congestion on Bellaire Boulevard at 6:30pm. This had become something of an evening ritual for him. Ever since moving back home, old friends and acquaintances had come out of the woodwork to reconnect. Chinatown was his natural suggestion for catching up. In his mind, one of the redeemable qualities of his hometown was its Chinese food (versus the barren landscape of options in Austin), and he found himself dearly craving beef noodles and dumplings every week. His uncle in this case happened to be visiting from New York for a business trip, and Leo had suggested a new beef noodle spot that had opened in one of the newer developments on Bellaire.
Leo’s watch hit 7:10, quite a bit after when they were supposed to meet. He was stuck in a terrible traffic jam, all the Toyotas and Fords caught snared in a web, with the A/C cranked to the maximum and Beyonce, Drake, or maybe UGK blaring through the speakers. There was a period when he, Mom, and his two younger sisters lived out of a small apartment three blocks from the main Chinatown strip, before they found the current house a couple of highways away. But even after the move, the weekend trips where Mom would lug everyone for grocery shopping, lunch, and maybe a haircut, seemed to snap by. Hundreds of thunderstorms, bowls of soup, $10 trims, cups of boba, all washed together into a blend of memories. Today was more like molasses, Leo just as haplessly stuck as everyone else, the humidity from outside leaking through every crevice in his car.
It was one of those summer days that every Houstonite grows to dread. The type of day where the heat is thick and wet, and your glasses fog the moment you step outside. The type of day that lulls you into a sleepy daze, the air like a warm blanket enveloping your body. It was a day where driving was equally about pushing against the traffic as it was pushing against the warmed air currents, where every inch of fabric on your skin feels suffocating, and where surfaces are left with a glimmer that makes it look like the buildings are sweating along with the people. Enough of these types of days, and you start building your own set of coping strategies: a cooling bong hit for college students, Hennessy on ice for the dads, loitering at a boba shop for the teens. Leo’s mechanism of escape on this day, was of course a piping hot bowl of beef noodle soup.
Uncle Mike was actually the son of Leo’s mom’s godmother, but Leo had called him Uncle Mike for as long as he could remember. He was already standing outside the front of the restaurant when Leo arrived, dressed in a sweat stained polo and a pair of loafers.
“You didn’t tell me this place wasn’t big enough to have a waiting area! Left me outsidie to suffer while you took your sweet ass time.”
Mike’s face seemed to have aged dramatically in the year since Leo had seen him last, yet that signature toothy smile still showed through his wrinkled cheek lines, and his hug accompanied by a slap on the back was delivered with a force that betrayed his youthfully energetic nature. Leo wryly grabbed his uncle’s shoulder, partially to return the jest, but also partially because had been knocked a little off balance.
“It looks like you could afford to sweat off a couple of extra pounds though, I was doing ya a favor. Welcome to Houston Uncle Mike.”
Leo swung the door open to a blast of sharp air conditioned air, and the two moved to enter the restaurant. His uncle paused momentarily.
“I know you’re ribbing me, but let’s be honest. This year has not been good to me.” He sighed. “It’s honestly why I cam down to Houston. I wanted to see your mom, she always sets me straight, and she’s been through it all. But I also know you’ve been cooped up here, and now I need your help.”
Leo was uncomfortable at his uncle’s vulnerability, and also fidgeting from the stabs of hunger in his stomach as he realized he hadn’t eaten in almost 10 hours.
“Is…are you saying you need help with the divorce? Because you know, I don’t think I’d be really good there, and honestly mom’s going to be able to talk you through it a lot better than I am.”
“Separation.” His uncle grunted in correction. “It’s a separation. There’s no divorce yet. But no, no, I didn’t fly cross country to ask my baby nephew about marriage. This is about something else. Let’s get some niu rou mien and I’ll fill you in.”
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