My fancy, grandiose younger brother visited my house today. His face full of affection or sympathy, he eyed up and down the dirty fluff coming from my couch cushions. As we left to get lunch, his smiling face cut into my heart, that same face that failed to cushion the blows from my stepfather’s pulverizing arms when we were younger. How he can smile and I can only smirk with false earnestness is the mark of how we cope with our past. And our past is bonded and glued together by wicked memories of pain, of crying, of a prison-house we had to return to every night. It was a house where my brother and I hid from the living room where my stepfather–his father–watched television, isolating ourselves in separate rooms to seclude ourselves into the mind-numbing, comfortable alter-reality of video games and books, where pain is merely virtual and not felt like it is with pulled hair, bruised bones, and felled egos. Books and video games were a world that made sense, where if you got hurt it was your own fault and nobody else’s. We starved ourselves in our rooms, save for the snacks we would sneak up with us. We knew the risks of going to the kitchen, which required traveling through the living room, which was a minefield of his biting words, arguments, and physical pain. But sometimes the pain would come upstairs. So when we heard his heavy footsteps coming up the stairs we would pause our game or look up from our book and hope he wouldn’t burst into our room furious about something. We would hope those infinite moments of his coming up the stairs would pass like a bad nightmare. But when he came for you there wasn’t much to do. What was there to do? It was the worst sort of pain–senseless pain, pain without being given a reason why, pain that felt unjust, pain you couldn’t do anything about except go back to day after day.
Our waitress served us tortilla chips and salsa with two plastic glasses of ice-water. She spoke English dappled with Spanish accents. I ordered the dollar-fifty tacos, one carne asada and one vegetarian. He got a shrimp torta. We munched on the complimentary tortilla chips and salsa while we waited for the food. We didn’t talk much aside from my strained, almost unnatural seeming questions about his work, his family, his health. He worked as an accountant, and was a damned good one. We both excelled in school throughout our childhood, but in high school our achievements diverged. While I, being the older brother by two years, meandered through my classes with an eye more on girls and good times than on my grades, he went on to join our school’s state-title-winning math team and scored a perfect 36 on his math ACT scores. I became a temp bouncing from corporate cubicles to unemployment offices. Yet my brother, Timmy, still looks up to me with all the admiration of a child reading about a comic book superhero. I’ve always found him fascinating for that. The waitress came to fill up our glasses. After she finished and we thanked her, Thomas spoke.
“Are you happy?” he asks me.
“What do you think?” I say.
“You’re not somebody that I can imagine being truly unhappy. You’ve got stamina in you, and I know because I’ve seen it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Come on, Phuong, you’re the only one I know that can make due with what you have under what you’ve gone through. Your car getting towed, your apartment flat getting burned to the ground, and mom dying–all within a matter of weeks–that’s not something anybody can endure, you know?”
“What’s it matter? I’m not going to get those fuckers to give me my car back, I’m not expecting my apartment and possessions to reconstruct itself, I’m not…”
“You’re not expecting mom to come back?”
“She’s not coming back, no.”
He glared at me with an open pondering mouth and those intelligent eyes of his.
“You don’t have any emotion left, do you?” he asked. “Not once did you call me, or any of us for that matter, after she died.”
I don’t say anything. I look at my chips, eat them, the crunches breaking up his truthful words. Frightening truths are lessened by focus on something else, like eating tortilla chips and thinking about their texture or discerning each individual deep-fried crunch on the tongue. It was the same focus on the details that got me through the times when you were getting yelled at and waiting for the pain to come. You would stare at a corner of the ceiling so as not to look at the deliverer of senseless pain in the eyes, waiting patiently for the blows to rain down but thinking only about the dusty texture of the corner of the ceiling of the living room. The truth was I didn’t think anybody should need to depend on anyone else. Tragedies should be endured independently. We only have ourselves to rely on, it’s just that most of us are blessed with good enough friends or family to never know this terrifying truth. To be alone is beautiful in that way.
“You’re breaking apart from the family,” he said. “Every year that goes by that you don’t call or come home, you’re floating away from us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean you think it’s normal to skip out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, to just completely forget that your family is there celebrating it without you? Your very own family that saw you grow up and leave on your own?”
“You think I fucking don’t know this dude?” I snapped.
Silence. Timmy looks about, glad that there aren’t a lot of people dining around us, listening to us. He faces back toward me, blinkingly aggravated.
“Well just tell me why?”
“I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home or any damn Thanksgiving or Christmas that I was ever a part of.”
“You’re crazy, you know that? You really are.”
I don’t know what’s worse about his berating me: his not knowing my daily torment of berating myself for having such a loveless life or my inability to reach out to him, my half-brother who endured the hard years along with me. And I blame his father, who had married my mother seemingly out of the blue one day and came into my life like a black, cancerous infection.
“Do you think it would have been different had mom divorced?” I asked.
He shook his head no, but more as if he were saying he didn’t want to answer the question, and looked down at his hands. Our mother would talk to me about divorce, about her loneliness and depression. She told me these things when I was older, when our relationship was already estranged by her crazy work schedule and my bouts of passing out drunk and sleeping in parking lots in my car so I didn’t have to come home to my stepfather’s disapproving eyes. Eventually my being out of the house worked, in a way. The house eventually felt alien to me, like a cheap hotel shared by unhappy tenants. And when I would stumble up the stairs into my room in the early morning to catch some sleep and leave again, my mother would be splayed out in her bed sometimes, crying. I would stand there frozen in the middle of the flight of stairs, out of her sight, listening to her quiet sobs that held a low whimper underneath tiny sniffling. It was terrifying facing my mother like this, her usually resolute, strong face that she bared against my stepfather in their arguments seemed so distant when she was alone crying. And I told her to catch a movie, to pick up a hobby or travel more…anything, anywhere. And I used to recommend her books but she brushed books off as uninteresting and unable to hold her interest. She would ask me about divorcing my stepfather a lot. At first, when I was younger, I would plead with her to go through with a divorce, trying to bring up the worst of times to her mind, telling her it’s a terrible situation she’s in and telling her how much I hated him. “No,” she would say to me, “He’s a good man, he’s a good man for what he’s done for us.” Then she would look at me with big wet eyes like a child begging you reassure her that Santa was really real and say, “He got us our citizenship into this country.” Truthfully, that fact has always kept me from completely running away from the family altogether. My green card and citizenship certificate are because of this wretched man and we both saw him as the price we paid. When I grew older, I no longer pleaded for her to take action. I knew that she would continue to rationalize her marriage with him, but not out of love or even gratitude for the legal and financial security he’s provided for us. She is deeply afraid, absolutely sickened by fear of being old and alone with nobody to turn to in this legendary country she had so much hope in, where her only blood-family are two quiet sons.
We decide to walk around the city after our lunch. It’s a yellow-gray day, one of those days where the clouds are so everywhere-gray and mixed with sun that you don’t know whether to bring an umbrella or sunscreen. But the people didn’t care, the people were out and about like they are every afternoon, walking across the street and driving down them and foraging in garbage bins for bottles to recycle and giving you a look and not minding you at all and sad and grinning and friendly.
“For a long time I didn’t really know you,” I told Thomas.
“Well there’s not a lot you did to try,” he said. “You can at least try.”
We were walking past a group of teenagers lounging on a stoop with loose clothing and mean faces. Two were laid back on their elbows on the steps and one was standing, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He watched me pass him and muttered something in Spanish before flicking his flaming cigarette at me. I glared at him. He walked up to me and said, “What you lookin’ at, bro?”
“Why’d you have to do that?” I asked.
His friends got up and began walking toward us, snickering with each other. The main guy held his arms up like a cross, I guess in an attempt at seeming larger than he was, like a peacock would. “Don’t fuckin’ look at me, bro,” he said.
Thomas grabbed my elbow. “Come on, Phuong, let’s go,” he urged.
“You better listen to your boyfriend there if you know what’s good for you,” said one of the minions standing behind the leader.
Without looking away from them, without blinking even, I said, “He’s my brother.” At this, the group burst out laughing, one of the minions nudging the other with his arm, saying, “Hey what kinda whore bitch they’re mother is, man, squeezing these two ugly ass motherfuckers out of her whore pussy!”
At this, I lunged at the group, my skinny, languid body fueled by a rage against meaningless hostility, fueled by a subliminal racist hatred, fueled by a searing embarrassment for not trying to be a good son, a good brother, or a loving family man. What happened was obvious. I got my ass kicked, the feeling of a bag of fists being dumped onto my face drilled away my blinding rage and left me a limp, ghost-like body on the sidewalk.
I sat in the hospital bed staring out the window. I didn’t think about the black eye or the stitches on my face or the bruises on my ribcage like purple-blue stains. They put me on the top floor, where I asked the nurse to draw back the blinds so I could look at the painfully bright city stretching into the distance as if it were sown into the horizon line. My brother had just left.
“Sorry I ran, Phuong,” he said. “I just couldn’t, you know, I didn’t want to…”
“I know, it’s okay, it was my battle.”
“No, it wasn’t, it was both ours, I just thought it wasn’t worth it, you know?”
“I was just asking for it. But look…about what we talked about earlier. What I meant when I said I didn’t really know you was that I didn’t really know myself,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re you. You’re my brother.”
“Listen, you’re half white, man. Your dad’s a fucking white Irish American. Do you know what it’s like growing up Vietnamese, growing up with my mother like this? Do you know what it’s like comparing yourself to others, trying to be someone else all the time to pass off as American? Do you know what it’s like years later when you run out of people you look up to who you can compare yourself to and then one day you wake up and you’re no longer sure who to be anymore? I thank God that his blood, your father’s irrational, abusive blood isn’t in my blood. I just don’t want that. But you have to understand that I can never be a part of the pumpkin-pie Thanksgiving family member or visiting your brother family member or even the unconditional love family member for you. I’m sorry.”
Now, in the hospital bed surrounded by people hurting and dying, all of them thinking about the afterlife and family and their personal philosophies or just hoping to make it another day, I feel so much a part of a family. If only for a few days, this white-walled room is my warm, dreamy, legendary America.
