Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(63)

Where you headed? a man at a gas station in Memphis asks one night. Moving house like that, all those kids.

Florida, says my grandfather.

Nice ’n’ sunny. Where ’bouts? asks the man.

My grandfather looks at Mei Mei as if she might have the answer, as if she’d have the perfect city in mind, a star penned to the map. He had never thought of it before this moment, no, all he knew was far away. All he knew was Florida.

What do you recommend? asks my grandfather. You have a favorite place down there?

This stranger takes a long, hard look at my grandfather. When you get there, just keep driving south, he says. Go far enough ’n’ you’ll disappear.

SUMMER, 1999

BOCA RATON, FLORIDA

I’m watching the Miss Florida pageant on television with my mother and Misty. In one week, I’ll turn eleven. We are judging the contestants—Misty and I—in our own point system of colored penciled tallies pressed into legal pads. We give each girl a score for every round of the pageant, but we also ask our own questions: Does the contestant seem smart? Does the contestant seem funny? Does the contestant seem like she would be nice to dogs? Would the contestant be our friend, or enemy? Does the contestant look like either one of us? If given the choice, would we choose to swap lives with the contestant forever?

I wouldn’t put your money against me, says my mother, because today is July 11.

My mother’s favorite number combination is 7-11. She has always played it on the roulette tables in Vegas, punched it in for alarm and banking passcodes, sworn by the magic of 7:11 on a clock. When these three numbers are arranged in this order, they become charged, lucky. Contestant number two is my favorite of the beauty queens. I have her name written at the top of my pageant chart—Marjorie, #2, Hollywood—but Misty likes a blonde flute player from Miami Lakes. We bet our allowance money on the girls—usually ten dollars.

Here’s why I’m invested: My cousin Teagan is a pageant girl. Chinese and Hawaiian, like me. She’s three years older and we look alike in the eyes, but Teagan’s hair is long, her bangs trimmed ruler straight. Her adult teeth grew in perfectly and her cheeks shine like Baoding balls on the covers of magazines. In an ad for J. C. Penney, Teagan swings on a hammock with three other kids. She is the thirteen-year-old ethnic friend, licking chocolate cake from the prongs of a big fork, and this ad is enlarged on poster board in the corner of her room. Whenever I sleep over, I fall asleep staring at her.

Contestant number two looks related to Teagan, I say.

She’s got a good walk, says my mother. Look at her go.

My mother, too, was once a model. After high school. She tells us about it right now, in this living room, how she modeled clothing through the lobbies of Waikiki beach hotels, tying and untying tropical wraps around her hips for haole men.

Now, she catwalks in her pajamas across the living room steady, open-lipped. She pushes her palms into her hips, each foot landing directly in front of the other. It looks a bit like hula—this grace, the exact point of her toes—before she gets to the kitchen counter, strikes a pose looking left, then right, and marches her way back to the couch.

Still got it?

How could you be a model when you’re a mom? asks Misty.

You’re even better than Contestant number two, I say.

We watch the contestants on television strut through several more rounds. Go, Hapa Haole, Go! I scream. I wonder if my mother once looked like Marjorie, number two, from Hollywood, if she once dreamed of being this very girl—her butter-colored bikini, her braid.

Contestant number two does not win the crown. Instead, she hugs the two contestants by her side, mouths Good luck! before smiling and waving her way offstage.

Shocker, says my mother. Imagine that. A world that chooses white girls!

I guess your number’s off, I say.

No, it’s just that Miss USA could never be a mixy mutt, says Misty. She says this sweetly. She crosses out Contestant number two on her chart.

Misty’s flute player does not win either. None of us take the cash.

The world is so unfair, I say.

More than you know, says my mother.

1973–1974

PLANTATION, FLORIDA

My mother is wearing shoes to her first day of public school. Mary Janes, to be exact, with high-ribbed socks, a pale-green baby doll dress, and a lacy beige bib tucked over her chest. The Mainland. This school is all indoors. There are no picnics outside, no bathing suits in sight. She is the malihini in these halls, new blood, and everyone takes notice. The other students wear Peanut bellbottoms, three buttons at the crotch, their stomachs bare and oiled. Their hair shines the color of driftwood. For the first time in her life, nobody looks like my mother.

A boy wads a spitball and pushes it into a straw. He shoots it at her. My mother spins in circles, rubbing her forehead, her dress fanning out.

Fucking Chink, says the boy, though my mother does not know what this means, and her parents do not tell her.

They called me that, too, I tell her now. Growing up.

My mother laughs. Of course they did. Almost thirty years, and they can’t think of something better.





She meets him in her science class. Let’s call him Samuel. My mother has always looked forward to science class—the gurgling chemicals, the slick cool of test tubes, her teacher, Mr. Jackson, who looks like the Michael Jackson if you squint hard enough—but now science is her absolute favorite subject since Samuel came around. He sits behind her, and he stinks of Marlboros and pot. A haole boy with blonde hair in long waves—sometimes she swears she can feel him breathing on her shoulders.