The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong

1

Dad was like China, full of sad irony and ancient secrets. These were the words he used to describe the country he abandoned, and they were full of philosophy and poetry, like him, and I didn’t understand them at all. I knew he grew up in a little village along the Yangtze, and I knew he left to become a freethinking American, and I knew he’d never been back and he’d never take me, but everything else I had to imagine. Which usually wasn’t a problem, because I had a crazy imagination, but now it was a problem. Now I needed to know more, which was a big, big problem.

When I imagined Dad in China, I always saw the same thing: a hut, like ones I’d seen in National Geographic, perched on a muddy bank and about to tumble into the insistent current; and Dad as a raggedy, rascally teenager—in many ways just like me, the same slants and bulges, the same horrible sense of humor, the same awkward eagerness and lack of social skills. I always figured social awkwardness was a Chinese curse. I watched Dad putter around the edges of a social circle, never telling the right jokes at the right time, and using the wrong words and pausing in the wrong places.

Because of Dad my upper lip sagged a little and looked swollen, like I’d just been punched in the mouth. My teeth lined up too neatly. They were too small and flat for my mouth. Even though I played basketball, my shoulders sloped unathletically. I also had freckles. On my nose, my shoulders, even the tops of my knees. I had a mole on my left cheek, the cheek down there. It was galactic and had pulled other small moles and freckles into its orbit.

So a man goes to a doctor with a frog growing out of a lump on his head. The doctor asks: When did this all start? The frog replies: It all began with a pimple on my ass.

Frog, lump, pimple, ass. These were words that spoke to me.

What are you laughing for? Dad asked. He stood in front of the stove and cracked eggs into a wok. I was supposed to be setting the table.

Is that lump-o-stuff? I asked. That was our nickname for fried rice.

Yangzhou style, Dad said, which comes from my very own village.

This wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t true that his village invented fried rice. Fried rice, like gravity and cockroaches, had probably been around since the big bang.

He tossed me the empty egg carton and said, I appreciate the flavor of irony. Yangzhou fried rice is not actually from Yangzhou.

I knew all this already. I stomped on the egg carton and put it in the trash. I watched the gunk in the pan—the egg congealing on the rice kernels and char siu and shrimp and carrots and cabbage, binding it all together. Lump-o-stuff.

It’s like French fries and Hawaiian pizza. People desire things that seem exotic, even if just in name.

I rolled my eyes. Most of the time Dad was an ophthalmologist, but sometimes he mentally time-traveled back to 1978 and all the philosophy he studied at Berkeley. Maybe whacked-out on drugs, too, but he’d never talk about that. Mom probably didn’t even know what dope smelled like, and he wouldn’t want to upset her. We didn’t like to upset one another. That’s why we couldn’t talk about anything. That’s why I didn’t know anything. That’s why I couldn’t do my homework, which was why I was going to flunk history. It was all my parents’ fault.

My history class at Liverton High, home of the Fighting Lions and two thousand fuckups, was a joke. Mr. Riley was a joke. He looked like a bellhop on safari: brown hair, brown skin, khaki pants, brown shirt every day. His suede loafers, brown of course, were scuffed at the instep, as if he played soccer in them. His skin was the color of dry dirt, the color of the first layer that you have to dig through to get to anything interesting and valuable. Sometimes he came to class with his Oakleys still on his forehead—his forehead, not in his hair or hanging around his neck—as if he were just stepping out of the sun-soaked pages of some men’s outdoor magazine. He should have been a PE teacher; his peppiness only marginally covered up his dorkiness and his lack of academic inspiration. His favorite idea was the story in history, so as we read about the Sumerians and Egyptians, he always wanted us to pause for a minute to appreciate the life of Hatshepsut: The Noble Queen or Gilgamesh the King.

Normally, I loved ancient history and the little pieces of people’s lives that they left behind without even knowing it; I loved digging to unearth those pieces and connecting them to make sense of a world that was utterly different from our own. Normally, I’d curl up on the couch with my National Geographic or Archaeology and read about the very same people and be in heaven. But I hated reading from our textbook, World Societies, World Histories, which weighed about ten tons and was written for a third grader. I hated that Mr. Riley didn’t know any more than the textbook. We were an honors class. Honors, schmonors. He only loved coaching girls’ basketball and riding his overpriced mountain bike. Every second I suffered through his class, I wished that Mr. Riley knew more and could get us out of our color-coded, outlined, memorizable textbook and into something complicated and real.

In order for us to appreciate history more—appreciate being a flimsy word meaning talk about nicely without learning anything of substance—he’d given us a week to write an account of our own family history. I considered starting with Australopithecus, going into great detail about gradual bipedalism and stone tool development, and ending with Homo sapiens, dot, dot, dot. That could cover the necessary five pages. Or I could write about Peking man, my seven-hundred-thousand-year-old ancestor, a skeleton that had an outside chance of connecting prehumans to humans, who was dug up outside of Beijing and then lost when the Japanese invaded China during World War II. That would be more exciting, like a mystery and an adventure story all rolled into one life. Mine.

I could write some joke of a paper and risk flunking for being a smart ass, or I could blow a hole through my parents’ happiness. I could keep the comfortable silence, or I could ask the impossible questions.

These were the impossible questions: What’s the huge problem with our family? Why is our family history such a big, bad, dirty secret? Where are my grandparents and why can’t I meet them? Why don’t we talk about the past? Why don’t we talk about your families? How come I know, without even asking, that I’m not allowed to ask these questions? That it’s better, it’s always better, to keep my mouth shut?

I only knew my parents in their current daily lives. I knew random things, like their favorite foods and what their sneezes sounded like. What could I possibly mine from their lives that would be a story worth writing about?

•    •    •

My parents met during Dad’s residency in San Francisco, where Mom—my lonely, divorced mom—was a dental assistant. She must have fallen for Dad’s brains, because she was tall and blond and from Texas, and he was a goofy, middle-aged Chinese guy. Despite all their differences, they went ahead and fell in love and for some reason decided to have me. Maybe Mom made Dad more American, and Dad made Mom more exotic and cultural, and it was as easy as wanting what the other had.

Then why me? Why have a kid when you’re not going to give him brothers or sisters or grandparents or cousins? And why name him Vee Crawford-Wong? Who names their kid after a letter in the alphabet, one of those weird ones at the end, one that in third grade no one ever practiced in cursive because it barely ever came up? What was wrong with something normal, like Michael or Joe or Fred? Couldn’t they have guessed that I’d end up with nicknames like Veegina and guys making Vs with their fingers and sticking their tongues in between, which they did for years before I realized what it meant? And then Crawford-Wong. What was so special about either one? There were over two million people in America named Crawford. And Wong. How unique. Half a million in the U.S. and then truckloads more in China.

I was like that joke: If you’re one in a million, there are a thousand people just like you in China!

I was most likely a mistake. They would never have gotten married if it hadn’t been for me. I could imagine them going out for greasy Chinese, and they’d be using their chopsticks to pick mushrooms and snow peas off the lo mein. It’d be raining, because in movies it’s always raining when people are serious and sad, and Mom’s rubber-ducky scrubs would practically glow under the bright fluorescent lights. They’d both look crazy: Mom in her scrubs and Dad with his hair all wild because he’d have rubbed his head a million times.

Dad: Sometimes we choose our destiny, and sometimes our destiny chooses us.

Mom: Kenny . . .

My dad’s real name was Ken-zhi, which meant earnest, but he went by Kenny. Kenny Wong. A good old American boy.

Dad: Now that you’re pregnant, we must do the right thing.

Mom: What is the right thing?

Dad: We will raise a perfect son who will play football and be popular and graduate magna cum summa summa laude magna laude, from Harvard of course, and then he will invent a new way of doing laser eye surgery that will revolutionize sight for the entire universe.

Mom: Well, okay. We could do that.

Mom was always agreeable. She tried too hard; she was almost too sweet; she never talked about her family or her ex-husband or anything else that wasn’t wonderful. The only time she ever cried was once a year when she got a Christmas card from her parents. I’d learned to hide in my room when I saw the envelope leaning against the tacky Santa-shaped candles we could never bring ourselves to light and melt.

I couldn’t stand watching Mom cry. Maybe when she found out about me, she had cried and then had covered up her sadness and done her best to make Dad happy, hoping that the lima-bean-like lump inside her would grow up to be a magna cum dream boy. And instead of a dream boy she got lumpy old me, who even at five preferred digging up the yard to studying Latin or doing whatever else a dream boy would do. Maybe she’d been trying to be happy for fifteen years, but here I was, bigger than her now, and still someone she’d never even wanted.

I prided myself on my investigative skills, my ability to navigate the past with the smallest of clues, but I was a total failure when it came to my family. All my imaginings—that Dad was Chinese royalty or some top secret intelligence official, that Mom’s family in Texas were oil billionaires, that one or both of them was running away from a heinous crime or hiding out in the witness protection program—all of these ideas were straight out of HBO and I knew I couldn’t believe them. I always had a complete failure of imagination when it came to my parents. They were simply Mom and Dad, and I was their weird, mediocre son, and there were endless things we couldn’t and didn’t talk about.

2

Contact sports were a constant negotiation of touching: where, when, how hard, and to what end. You had to find that shifting, invisible line between bully and fag and walk it like a high wire. So it was no surprise that no one jumped for joy or clicked his heels when word got out we were wrestling in PE.

PE, in general, was a bad way to start any day, particularly a Monday, even more particularly a cloudy October day that was otherwise filled with quizzes and oral presentations and looming essay deadlines. I wished we were playing basketball in the gym or flag football in the mud or that I could go back to kindergarten and have mandatory nap time.

The wrestling room smelled only slightly better than the locker room, which smelled like smelly ass all the time. We got in a circle and did push-ups and sit-ups and pull-ups and some strange yogalike stretches. The only reason I didn’t give up entirely was because of Coach Wilson. He was our PE teacher but also the JV football and basketball coach. He’d cut me from each team last season, but I was planning on trying out for basketball again this year. I’d been running and doing some wind sprints (thirty-seven seconds from my driveway to the stop sign; twenty-two to the stop sign the other way) and playing pickup basketball most Fridays at lunch.

Coach Wilson suckered two guys from the wrestling team—Russell Reed, who could probably lift a truck, and Greg Haynes, who weighed about as much as Russell’s left leg—to demonstrate the basic takedowns. Russell could have thrown Greg across the room like a Wiffle ball, but instead he half-assed the moves with a smirk on his stubbly face. Since most guys didn’t give a shit about one another anyway, as soon as we broke into pairs to practice, everyone began to kung fu at each other, and Coach Wilson lost all control over us. Two guys had to leave and get ice for jammed fingers and scratched eyeballs, and someone punched Kyle Diamond in the jaw for grabbing crotch on a hold.

I didn’t like most of the guys in my class, and I was a reluctant participator. Anytime I got my elbow folded into someone’s armpit, I imagined I was doing it for a real reason: pulling someone out of a burning building, or forcing him down to dodge a bullet. But as soon as the other guy got adamant, I became the victim, the helpless one. I would sort of collapse on the mat like I’d been shot. The other guy could be the hero if he was really dying for it.

For the last ten minutes of class we came back to the circle and Coach Wilson called guys out, one on one, to wrestle in front of everyone. Of course Coach Wilson chose Greg Haynes to pick on Kyle Diamond; it was his teacherly way of telling Kyle he shouldn’t have grabbed crotch. It felt like a boxing ring, guys cheering and lunging in to egg someone on. I looked at the clock. Two minutes left. I looked at Coach Wilson, and he was looking at me.

Go, go! I yelled, and pumped my fist halfheartedly in the air. Panic engulfed me and sweat pricked my forehead. I tried to look involved and enthusiastic. I watched Greg crouch and go for Kyle’s ankle. Greg pulled Kyle’s legs out from underneath him. Kyle’s back made a thudding noise on the mat. He slowly sat up and scooted to the edge of the mat, not even bothering to stand up.

One more, Coach Wilson said. Vee Wong and . . . He scanned the circle. I held my breath. And Mark White. Last one, boys.

Coach Wilson, like most teachers, knew exactly who couldn’t stand each other. And of course, he’d paired me with Mark White: the embodiment of everything I disliked.

My introduction to Mark White had been in Spanish class on the first day of freshman year, when Ms. Garcia came around and gave us Spanish names. They were translations of our regular English names. "Juana! Isabel! Ricardo! Estéban!" She sprinkled names down the aisles until she got to my desk.

Hm, she said. "Difícil. Veh. Hm. Veh. Every time she said Veh," her front teeth spit out her lower lip with a rush of coffee-scented air.

"But Veh is not a llamo," I protested. I’d taken Spanglish all through junior high, so of course I still couldn’t talk in complete sentences.

Okay, okay, good. You pick, she said.

I wasn’t ready with a good name. I hadn’t expected her to let me protest.

Hey. I felt the back of my chair dent with the force of someone’s foot. Hey, I want to be Paco.

I turned around to look at the guy behind me. His meaty face was spotted with freckles and zits, and he had on an Oakland Raiders jersey.

"No, no! Es perfecto! she said, glancing at her seating chart. Mark es Marco."

How come he gets to pick?

I hated kids who did that. I hated the way teachers caved into this kind of bad logic. Life wasn’t fair. Rules weren’t fair. To her credit, Ms. Garcia ignored him and moved on to the next guy. I wondered, later, if she had caved in and let him be Paco, if things would have been different between Mark and me. If in some parallel universe we would have been friends or, better yet, polite strangers.

I wrenched my body around so I was facing him again, and I asked, Hey, do you play football?

You? he asked.

I nodded.

You kidding me? He scratched a zit near his ear.

What? Chinese people can’t play football?

That made him laugh, and I smiled a little. Racist prick.

He sneered again and called me something—faggot, fat-ass—something mean and not at all clever. I decided he was an idiot who wasn’t worth my time, but it turned out we were also in the same freshman honors history class. And this year, as sophomores, again we were together in Spanish and PE and honors history. He wasn’t brilliant, but he also wasn’t retarded, and this was what got under my skin the most. I was okay with the way the world was divided: the jocks, the nerds, the stoners, the emos, et cetera. Very few people were allowed to cross over, and Mark White wasn’t special enough to be a football and basketball player (while I wasn’t) and also an honors student. To make matters worse, over the summer he’d gone from big and zitty to solid and tanned (while I remained forever goofy-looking and soft around the edges).

Mark and I were like oil and water. Like iron and oxygen. Like Chinese and Japanese. I would rather have wrestled Coach Wilson, or Russell, or a rabid alligator, before facing Mark White.

Most guys cheered for Mark. As we squared off, he gave me a shit-eating smile. We grappled and his face glowed, his tan turning ruddy and mottled. My legs felt wobbly, like I might pitch over and collapse without anyone’s assistance. My body lunged forward and my shoulder cracked against Mark’s, and I breathed through my teeth. I got my hand on his elbow, but he snaked his arm around my waist. I leaned away so he couldn’t hug me too tight, and I felt my foot slipping. One of my palms was up against his chest, and his fingers were digging into the skin around my waist. A kind of whine came from one of us. It sounded like a little kid about to burst into tears. It sounded weak and stupid. It made me mad. Stupid, popular prick. I felt him scratching for a foothold that would topple me, and I bent down and let him start to swing me, then I copied Greg’s foot move and Mark went down like a sleeping giant. He had grabbed both my wrists on his way down, so I came down over and on top of him. My face hit the mat. I could feel him pushing me off him, and I rolled over and did the worst thing possible. I smiled. He glared at me, his nostrils bubbling with clear snot.

Ugh, Mark said, pointing to my face.

I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. It came away sticky and red.

Pinch it, Coach Wilson said. Nice job. Get some ice.

That was as much of a compliment as anyone ever got from him. He’d remember this come basketball season. I smiled again and tasted blood.

•    •    •

Next stop: history. Out of habit I avoided Mark and ogled Adele Frank, the smoking-hot senior who was Riley’s go-to basketball girl. She usually camped out in Riley’s room during our history class, and I wondered if she had a free period or if she just never went to her own classes. This morning she sat in Riley’s chair like it was her personal throne. Her bare feet, with blue polish on the toes, waggled on top of a stack of quizzes. Her yellow shirt, so thin and so tight that I could see the outline of her bra, rode up her back, exposing pale skin that puckered slightly near the top of her jeans.

Wipe up your drool, Madison said.

Madison was both a genuine friend and a genuine pain in the ass. Her life was full of pink: pink purses and scarves and fuzzy book covers. Also, she’d never gotten an A- in her life.

Yo, Miao-ling, I said. Her real name was Miao-ling, but she hated her name almost as much as I hated mine. Drool is attractive. Did you know that lionesses salivate in the presence of their mates? It’s like a turn-on.

Wow, Emily said as she drew a line of connected hearts on the front of her binder. Emily was Madison’s unofficial sidekick. She had long, stringy blond hair, and she asked those questions that everyone in an honors class was too afraid to ask for fear of looking retarded.

He made that up, Madison said. Didn’t you, Vee?

If you know the answer, I said, why are you asking?

Riley interrupted our fun by marching us down the hall to the computer lab and telling us to work on our family history essays. I hated him and his stupid assignment. We weren’t learning anything. He was making the rich world of the past about as exciting as dry toast.

Ughhh, I said. I grabbed the computer next to Madison even though, as fate would have it, that meant I was within spitting distance of Mark White. My nose throbbed and threatened to bleed again every time I turned in his general direction.

Madison’s computer binged to life. It’s better than doing it at home.

I forgot my log-in name, I said.

Use mine, she said. It’s ‘mingming38.’ All one word, no spaces. She already had a new document up on her screen.

I stared at her. Thirty-eight?

It’s a good luck number.

I knew that, I said. How about ‘mingming’?

She chewed her forefinger, which she only did when she was embarrassed.

As in Sun Ming Ming, that old, gigantic basketball player? Are you a secret basketball fan? How could you forget to tell me? I loved basketball. I loved playing, and last year, even after I’d gotten cut, I sometimes went to the JV and always went to the varsity games. This year I’d make all the JV games—hopefully wearing those shiny orange warm-ups that reminded me of Syracuse’s home jerseys. I also religiously watched the Warriors and March Madness. Dad and I sometimes even went to Berkeley to watch the Cal team thunder up and down the court. I liked the cold, empty smell of the gym and the squeak of shoes on the shiny floor. I liked the whooshing of the ball in the net and of course the cheerleaders with their bouncing smiles and smooth spandex crotches constantly flashing at the crowd.

Basketball is ridiculous and barbaric, Madison said.

I thought you said that about football.

Football is also ridiculous and barbaric, she said. Everyone just smashing around into each other, all nasty and sweaty.

Just like a school dance, I said.

Like you’d know, Mark said.

I should have known he’d eavesdrop on any conversation that involved sports.

What are you even talking about? I said.

Like you go to dances, he said.

I do. I went and usually plastered myself against the gym wall and bobbed my head for hours and hours, pretending to really be grooving to the thumping music.

It means ‘bright,’ Madison said. Ming-ming. My parents call me that.

I bet you just have your pick of dates to the Halloween dance, Mark said to me. I just bet.

Riley came strolling around, and Madison started typing like a possessed secretary. She didn’t even look at her fingers.

I’m not a betting man, I said after Riley had finished his drive-by and returned to his desk. I stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. But I’m happy to wrestle.

I almost flinched, expecting Mark to punch me in the face or tip the computer over and electrocute me. I stared at the pixilated screen and felt it burning tiny electric holes in my retinas.

Who? Mark said. Who’d go with you?

Gosh, I said, who wouldn’t?

Adele had followed us to the computer lab and was sitting next to Riley and texting on her phone. Occasionally she’d lean into him and make him read what she’d written. And he got paid for this? He called this teaching? I watched her comb her fingers through her hair. I knew I was staring, but I couldn’t help myself.

Uh-huh, Mark said. Right. Adele Frank. You’re shitting me.

He was right. I didn’t even have a chance of taking Adele’s dirty gym socks to the dance with me. I wasn’t a stud football player or a party-hopping senior. Adele moved in another circle, and each circle at school was like its own fiefdom. Moving circles, breaking ranks, threatened the whole permanence of the system and made everyone uncomfortable. I was at most allowed to ogle her from a distance, which I did.

I haven’t technically asked her yet, I said. Technically.

Mark snorted. Someone more intelligent might have used this opportunity to