Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“Tuberculosis and suicide.”

Even now, my father seemed robust and ageless, like he could crush me with his fists at will. His hair had gone white as rapidly as my hair had fallen out; there were no transitional salt-and-pepper years. “Do you know what kills Chinese women, Peter?”

I waited.

“Chinese men.”

I looked up. It sounded simultaneously like a joke and a threat.

“They carry China in their hearts and their lungs and eventually it kills them all. My father, on the other hand, died like a real man. A Western man. In a mine explosion.”

In sixth grade, we had to make a family tree. Our teacher handed each of us a worksheet of empty boxes connected by lines. Your own name went in the middle. The kids around me started filling in the boxes immediately.

I didn’t even know my parents’ first names.

The sound of scratching pencils made me self-conscious. The teacher tapped me with her pen and told me to stop dawdling.

You would think that my father’s rigorous scrubbing of heritage and the unavoidable fact of race in central Ontario would have made me more curious, but it hadn’t. The other children, who knew the names of their aunts and uncles and cousins, hadn’t been curious either. The information had been forced upon them at weddings and funerals and on Sundays at their grandparents’ homes. Children of the wrong age they’d been forced to play with. Houseguests who’d overstayed their welcome. Crude calculations of wealth: who would die, how much they would leave and to whom.

I made it up. I invented whole families. I gave my grandfather my own Chinese name, Juan Chaun. Everyone else got arbitrary Western names — Bob and Mary and Sue. China was known then as conformist, polluted, censorious. I thought for the first time about my parents’ childhoods. I imagined their schools had been vast and orderly, straight lines of genderless children in black shorts and white shirts, eating government lunches of rice and choy under a foul, snot-colored sky. I imagined they escaped together by sea. For Canada! For the cold, clean, empty wilderness. But I didn’t ask. None of us asked.

Died in a mine explosion, Father said, like a point of pride. “That was forty years ago,” he said. He paused, and then he said it again. “He died forty years ago. Still, I’m careful, every day, not to shame him. Not to do anything that would make him ashamed. I know he’s watching.”

Father’s eyes were alight, glowing like coals. It might have been fever. “I want to tell you that I’m proud of you. I’ve known men like you. Men with… weaknesses.” I closed my eyes. His voice grew stronger in the darkness. “They were weaker than you. They always gave in, and let it destroy them. I want to thank you,” he said, “for not shaming me.”

I opened my eyes. He was reaching out as though he wanted to hold my hand. I let his clawed hand rest in mine. I remembered, as I held my breath, how disgusted my father got when he saw me cry. You cry more than your sisters, he’d said, and it was true.

We released our hands. He settled back into the blankets. “You don’t have to visit me again until I die,” he said. There was no malice or irony in his voice. He meant it. “Just know that I will be watching you from the other side.”

It was only around four o’clock when I got back to Montreal. I went to the club on south Saint-Laurent where Bonnie worked. On the sign above the door, neon hands touched neon breasts in two-state animation.

Past the first door, there was a buffer hallway and then a second door, as in a photographic darkroom, to ensure that no daylight got inside. A sign under a UV light reminded patrons that there was no cover before 11:00 P.M. but you had to buy a new drink every twenty minutes.

In the perpetual midnight, a few guys sat far away from one another. A handful were scattered along the bar that surrounded three sides of the stage, and another sat in one of the stained, upholstered armchairs at the back. Bonnie sat in the far corner, eating a meatball sub. She paused to wipe off orange grease that had dripped all over her hands, up to the wrists. Her feet were up on a second chair in front of her. I went to join her.

“Doesn’t it ruin the magic if customers see you wolfing down a sandwich?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to show me the balled mulch of bread and beef and sauce inside. “I don’t go on for an hour.”

As a kid, Bonnie had always been plain and pug-nosed, but she was so popular and beloved then that I hadn’t really noticed. The first time I saw her dance, the first time I tried to see her as the audience might — men who had come just to look at her, who had never and would never hear her speak — I realized that she was ugly. Her nostrils pointed outward instead of down, her eyes were tiny, deep-set beads, and her forehead and lips were flat and wide. Her face looked like it was being pressed against an invisible pane of glass. But I saw the appeal: she was the only Asian dancer, and she had hard, ice-cream-scoop tits on the frame of a little girl.

The naked beat of the music stopped long enough for a radio-announcer voice to say, “Coming to the stage… say hello to Brand-eeee!”

The girl stepped out from between the curtains wearing a translucent blue baby-doll slip over a matching blue bra and thong. She took off all three items of clothing right away, without ceremony, as though undressing for bed. She walked the perimeter of the stage. She took big, deliberate steps in her see-through plastic heels.

“Are you even allowed to eat in here?” I asked.

Bonnie licked her fingers as she stuffed the napkins and wrapper back in the bag they’d come from. She gestured at a sign over the bar with a picture of scrambled eggs. “On weekends, there’s a breakfast buffet. To encourage guys to stay all night.”

Onstage, Brandy went down to her knees and leaned back so her vulva was directly in the beam of the footlights. The outer lips were wavy around the round, silver stud that pierced the hood of her clit.

“Oh shit,” Bonnie said, noticing a greasy spot on her white T-shirt. She held the fabric toward her and squinted at it in the dark.

The girl onstage put her hand over her mound, the index and middle finger spread in a V, catching the piercing between them. Her hand flitted left and right. I’d tried to masturbate the same way: the thing held between my two longest fingers, wagging it side to side, my head turned away, my other hand pressed so hard into the edge of my desk that it left a red, imprinted slice. It worked for a while. I had to end clutching the thing in a fist, feeling its whole, disgusting, senseless mass.

“I have to go get ready,” Bonnie said. “Want to come backstage with me?”

“Won’t that make the other dancers uncomfortable?”

“There’s no one else back there at this time of day.”

Backstage was actually the women’s washroom. There weren’t enough female customers for that to be a problem, except in September, when co-ed groups of freshmen came in squealing and laughing before falling into a silent stupor. At night, girls in matching sets of lingerie would sit on the sinks to smoke and gossip. They peed with the stall doors hanging open, rolls of fat and track scars from needles all exposed in the regular lights.

Now it was empty. A pair of beige underwear was wadded up in a pair of shoes, and an overturned bottle of glue was stuck to the floor where it had landed. “You hear from Helen lately?” I asked.

Bonnie opened a locker. The waxy, nutty smell of dirty hair poured out. The lockers weren’t attached to the wall and were severely dented; they’d clearly come from somewhere else. “She sent a card for my birthday. Just a signature. You?”