Liem hurried past Marcus and into his room. As soon as he shut the door, he leaned against it, ear pressed to wood, but another burst of canned laughter from downstairs made it impossible to hear Marcus’s footsteps fading down the hallway.
On an overcast Thursday morning in mid-November, Marcus and Liem drove Parrish to the airport. He was spending the weekend in Washington, at a conference on nuclear power’s threat to the environment. As the wind beat against the windows, Parrish explained how the government buried its spent plutonium and uranium in the desert, where they poisoned land and threatened lives for millennia. “And mostly poor lives at that,” Parrish said. “Just think of it as a gigantic minefield in our backyard.” Marcus drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, but Parrish gave no sign of noticing. On the curb at the airport, his suitcase at his feet, he kissed Marcus good-bye and hugged Liem. “See you Sunday night,” Parrish said before shutting the passenger door behind Liem. Liem was waving through the window, and Parrish was waving back, when Marcus accelerated into traffic without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
“When’s he going to stop trying to save the world?” Marcus demanded. “It’s getting to be a bore.”
Liem buckled his seat belt. “But Parrish is a good person.”
“There’s a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.”
They rode in silence for the next quarter of an hour, until they neared the center of the city. There, the sight of a bakery truck entering the freeway from Army Street made Liem ask, “Are you hungry? I am hungry.”
“Don’t say I am hungry, say I’m hungry. You have to learn how to use contractions if you want to speak like a native.”
“I’m hungry. Are you?”
The restaurant Marcus chose in Chinatown was on Jackson Street and nearly the size of a ballroom, with pillars of dark cherrywood and tasseled red lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Even on a Thursday morning it was noisy and bustling; waitresses in smocks pushed carts up and down the aisles while bow-tied waiters hurried from table to table, checks and pots of tea in hand. They sat by a window overlooking Jackson Street, the sight of Asian crowds comforting to Liem. As the train of carts rolled by, Marcus picked and rejected expertly from the offerings, ordering in Cantonese and explaining in English as the varieties of dim sum were heaped before them in a daunting display, including shiu mai, dumplings of minced pork and scallions, long-stemmed Chinese broccoli, and sliced roasted pork with candied skin the color of watermelon seeds. “Parrish won’t touch those,” Marcus said approvingly as he watched Liem suck the dimpled skin off a chicken’s foot, leaving only the twiggy bones.
After the waiter swept away the dishes, they sat quietly with a tin pot of chrysanthemum tea between them. Liem rolled the bottom of his teacup in a circle around a grease stain on the tablecloth before he asked Marcus about his family, something Marcus had never discussed in front of him. All Liem knew about Marcus was that he’d lived in Hong Kong until he was eighteen, that he was enrolled in business administration at San Francisco State but hardly ever went there, and that he worked out at the gym every day. His father, Marcus said with a snort, was an executive at a rubber company who had sent him to study overseas, expecting he would eventually return to help run the business. But three years ago a spiteful ex-lover had mailed his father one of Marcus’s love letters, with candid pictures tucked into the folds. “Very candid pictures,” Marcus said darkly. After that, his father had disowned him, and now Parrish paid his expenses. “Can you imagine anything worse?” Marcus concluded.
Liem wasn’t sure whether Marcus was referring to the lover’s betrayal, the father’s plans, or Parrish’s money. What he really wanted to know was what “candid” meant, but when Marcus only sipped his tea, not seeming to expect an answer, Liem spoke instead about his own family, all farmers, hawkers, and draftees. Nobody had ever traveled very far from Long Xuyen, unless he was drafted by the army. Liem was the family’s first explorer, and perhaps that was the reason his parents were so anxious at the bus station in Long Xuyen, one of the few moments of his past he recalled with any clarity. The patch of unshaded dirt and cement was crowded with passengers ready to board, holding cartons tied with twine and keeping close watch on their pigs and chickens, shuffling in wire cages. As the heat rose in waves, the odor of human sweat and animal dung, thickened by the dust, rose with it.