Chinatown, Before the Arena

By Eileen Wang

Grandpa worked at a hair salon down the street. Today, his scissors flickered—quick metallic flashes through Aunt Tsai’s hair. She wore floral dresses and had cheeks like orange persimmons, swelling with fleshy, rotund laughter and the long heat of southern China. Locks of hair settled on the floor, and the scent of citrus shampoo followed me into sleep, my knees knocking together to the rhythm of snipping.

When Grandpa came home with me, he carried two straw fans and laid down on the pad set out on the floor, handing me one. Grandpa always told me stories in the evening, lowering himself with a groan. Tales of demons who hunted travelers, the Monkey King with a golden staff, emperors and their advisors.

I told Grandpa that Eric Zhen, the boy next door, had pulled my braids when we played this morning. His bare feet thudded on streets lined with motley buildings as I ran, shrieking. Droplets from yesterday’s rain slipped off eaves, bursting on my shoulders. I looked up. Clotheslines partitioned the sky. Heat-wilted sheets swung suddenly in an uncanny bout of breeze.

“Kids, it’s about to rain!” An old woman shouted from behind her window screen.

Sheds and shanties grew wings that rustled uneasily. TV antennae stretched like vines and curled around window panes, holding on tightly. Light flashed through the screen; flickering, metallic.

An arena with a large, enclosed roof. The air inside was electric, charged with the hum of thousands of voices, the echo of chants, the rhythmic thump of bass from powerful speakers.

Everything cast in sharp relief: glinting sweat, gleaming jerseys, team banners fluttering overhead.

Meanwhile, my neighbors passed steaming bowls between porch steps, whispering generations of stories that read like novels and living scenes that belonged on film. Metallic flashes severed locks of black hair. Scoreboards flashed stats and replays in brilliant LEDs as strands of hair fell to the ground, one by one. Grandpa’s gray hairs swarmed, intermingling with the black strands on the floor. All of the whispered gossip, the secret sentiments, and the squalor clung to my braids, only to be washed away after a rain shower. Sometimes, the citrus smell in the salon was overpowered by antiseptic, and I squirmed and turned, unable to sleep.

I ran outside to the sheds by my neighbor’s house. Don’t go, I said. They shook their heads. It’s about to rain, they screeched, flapping their wings. They pulled themselves from the earth and, beaks snapping, severed the clotheslines. I cried as the clothes fell, sinking into the mud. I saw Aunt Tsai’s florals twist in the dirt.

I told Grandpa we were reading Their Eyes Were Watching God in English class. The main character, Janie, hunted alligators in the Everglades with her husband, Tea Cake. “Look, Tea Cake and his friends dance and eat together in the evening,” I said. Grandpa smiled—tired, like someone remembering rain.

“Grandpa,” I said, glancing out the window, “do you think it’s going to rain soon?”

Now, I can see the angular roof of the arena—plastic and gleaming. Now, the air reeks of prepackaged hot dogs and the rubber of sneaker soles. Rainwater slips from the eaves of buildings, and Grandpa does not answer. Instead, he dons mud-splattered clothes and stands, toes sinking into the street, beside the dustbins, beside the shrieking children, beside the fish guts at the market, beside the cramped buildings, beside the homesickness that can be cured only by herbal remedies drowned in a glass where his son will live out the rest of his life, and where his granddaughter sits by his feet. And he plants his feet there.