Fiona and Jane(18)

After the ceremony, her mother would spring for the additional service the university offered for shipping official diplomas, which included professional matting and framing. When it arrives at the apartment a month later, she would hang it up proudly in the living room. Anyone who came over would be sure to hear about it: Ona, my daughter, the college graduate.

Fiona crossed the stage and shook hands with the dean. Squinting against the sun, she found her mother in the audience. She waved, and her mother beamed and waved back. Her stepfather and Conrad sat to her mother’s left, and on her right side, Jasper held a bouquet of sunflowers. Jane, up on her feet and clapping wildly, next to Won—their old friend; he and Jane had driven up from LA together. Fiona felt a thrill, seeing them all together in a row, cheering for her.

She remembered the admiring gaze her mother had cast toward those college students in Taipei, when they slurped down hot noodle bowls after her ballet class. Fiona had thought her mother wanted to be like those young men and women, free to fill up her life with books and learning, if only she wasn’t saddled with a small child. She realized she’d been wrong about her mother’s eyes trailing after those college students in Taipei; her mother’s gaze had always returned to her. Fiona could finally feel the power of her mother’s eyes on her. She turned a silly little pirouette and bowed, surprising herself, then walked down the stairs to exit the stage.





Go Slow


The year we turned sixteen, Fiona decided it was time we learned to drink. We drove to the Norwalk swap meet and laid out fifty bucks each for fake IDs from a passport photo, faxing, and color copy stall. A Gujarati family owned the business, and the girl we paid off had graduated from our high school a few years back. When she handed us the finished IDs, we knew right away we’d been scammed. They were flimsy laminated jobs no better than Blockbuster membership cards, overexposed photos of our unsmiling faces glued onto a rectangle of white paper with california identification card typed across the top, our names and birthdays below, minus those crucial five years to age us up to twenty-one. We were too embarrassed to demand our money back. Still, we were eager to test them out. That was when we called Won. He said he knew a place, and the three of us set out one Saturday night in Shamu, Fiona’s hatchback she named after the Sea World killer whale because of the corroding white patches all over the black paint.

The freeway glowed with stop-and-go brake lights. We barely moved: no more than ten, twelve, fifteen miles an hour. Seven thirty at night, the sky was a washed-out indigo, a few dirty gray wisps hanging low. No doubt Shamu was a hoopty, but she was ours. Well, she was Fiona’s. Which meant she was mine, too. We were best friends; we shared everything.

Won leaned forward from the back seat. “Lucky this place doesn’t card,” he said. “You guys are dumb if you think those janky IDs will get you anywhere.”

“Put on your seat belt before I get a ticket,” Fiona said.

Won told her the name of the exit, somewhere off the 5 in Garden Grove. He was taking us to a “sooljip,” he called it.

“Trust me,” Won said. “It’s gonna work out. Just be cool. You hear that, Jane?”

“Shut up,” I said. “I can be cool—”

“Behind there—it’s that place in the corner.”

I looked out the windshield to where Won was pointing.

Fiona steered into the parking lot of a strip mall. She hesitated. “Should I— Right in front?”

Between a brightly lit twenty-four-hour donut shop and a dry cleaners with its pleated metal shutter pulled down for the night, there stood an unmarked storefront with a row of large windows, the glass tinted black. You couldn’t see inside at all. A neon sign buzzed red in one of the darkened panes, something spelled out in Korean characters.

I exchanged a quick glance with Fiona before we climbed out of Shamu. I could see the excitement in her eyes, and that she was trying to hide it.



* * *



? ? ?

We trailed in behind Won and sat down at a booth. The place looked nothing like the bars I’d seen on TV. First of all, there was no bar to speak of, no bartender standing behind a long countertop lined with stools. There were tables and chairs and booths, just like at a restaurant, except the lights were dimmed. I smelled fry oil and garlic in the air, and some cleaning agent, a chemical scent like a chlorine, but covered by citrus. The walls were papered in newsprint comic strips and glossy magazine ads that people had tagged over with black Sharpie markers in English and Korean.

When the waiter approached, Won did all the talking. His voice sounded different in Korean. Harder, somehow, like stone striking stone. The waiter, unsmiling, tipped his head toward Fiona and me. The name tag pinned to his black button-down shirt read sung. A raised pink scar stretched from his left ear to his chin, where a thin patch of short black hairs sprouted. I noticed Fiona watching him. Won answered him, and the waiter nodded, then backed away.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“It’s cool,” said Won.

“Should we show him our IDs?”

Won just shook his head and laughed. A minute later, the waiter materialized with a tall pitcher of beer and three frosted mugs on a tray. We fell into a nervous silence as he placed everything on the table. Soon as he walked off, Fiona and I looked at each other and busted up laughing.