Dixieland Sushi Page 4

  Every five minutes it seems that someone white in the movie is calling the Japanese “Jappos.” If Kimberly were here, she’d set the DVD on fire. But even I find this annoying and say so.

  “You’ve got to cut them some slack, it’s just old,” John says.

  I’m reminded of the time in college when my roommate, Carrie, and I were watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s and I was trying to explain why the upstairs Asian neighbor with the thick glasses and the buck teeth was so offensive.

  “But they didn’t know better at the time,” Carrie had said.

  “Then why are you laughing now?”

  “Because it’s still funny,” she said. “He reminds me of my grandma.”

  “An annoying caricature of an Asian man reminds you of your Irish grandmother?”

  “They both hate loud music,” she’d said at the time.

  Carrie, who calls her ability to hold liquor her Ancient Irish Secret, finds it hilarious when I “get racial.” She says I’m the whitest person she knows (which is why in college she used to call me a Twinkie, as in yellow on the outside, white on the in-side). I prefer, however, to think of myself as successfully assimilated.

  John massages the back of my neck, then starts the not-so-subtle move-in move: the precursor to kissing.

  I try not to think that the source of John’s ardor may be the fact that we just spent three hours watching geisha consorts baby-stepping around in kimonos.

  “You’re beautiful,” he tells me, out of the blue.

  Since I have never been good with compliments, I shrug. Secretly, I love the sound of this, but what I don’t love is the smell of octopus on his breath. I pull back slightly.

  “Can you excuse me for one minute?” I ask him, squeezing away from him and going to the bathroom to regroup and decide what to do next.

  In his bathroom, which is decorated with bamboo wallpaper and has a shower curtain painted with Japanese paper lanterns, I take a deep breath and try to figure out if my sexual drought (going on six months) and my need for a date to Kevin Peterson’s wedding outweigh the fact that I am not even remotely attracted to John.

  This is why I don’t have a boyfriend, I think. I am far too picky. What’s wrong with John? Aside from his AO blood-type tendencies. He isn’t repulsive, objectively. He’s not brain dead. He’s average in looks. And yet … what am I waiting for? An adult Kevin Peterson?

  I realize again why I don’t spend much time dating. It’s because I just end up feeling that I’m never going to find the right guy. It seems like a waste of time.

  I flush the toilet and turn on the faucet to wash my hands. I search around the bathroom for a hand towel. Finding none in obvious places, I open the cabinet below the sink to look for one.

  And there it is, a box with one flap closed and the other open and in it, I can see, are stacks of videotapes. I realize I should probably close the cabinet doors, but I work at a news station, for heaven’s sake. I have to look.

  I pull out the box and take a closer look at those tapes.

  The one on top is called Asian Girls Gone Wild.

  There are others: Barely Legal: Tokyo, Asian Sluts (one through three), Mistress Chin’s Asian Academy Part II, and Lin Rides the Oriental Express, which I don’t think has anything to do with the Orient Express. There is no white porn here, only Asian porn. And worse, below these tapes are Japanese adult comic books, the kind in which cartoons have sex with other cartoons; on the cover of one book a giant blue monster with four supersize dicks is raping two women simultaneously.

  Okay. Asian porn I might be able to deal with. Emphasis on the “might.” But the weird X-rated comic books? I have to draw the line there.

  “Are you okay?” John asks, giving the door a soft knock.

  “Uh, no …” I say, putting on my best fake food-poisoning voice and flushing the toilet again. “I think that sushi was bad.”

  There goes, I think, my best and last hope for a date to Kevin Peterson’s wedding.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  Breathe in through nose. Out through mouth. Don’t forget to breathe. Very important.

  1981

  I first saw Kevin Peterson at the Presidential Fitness Challenge, a grueling, three-day contest of athletic ability on the grade-school playground not matched until the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

  Normal recess activities (avoiding bullies while simultaneously attempting to get chosen for kick-ball teams) were suspended for three days, during which we all competed for a coveted Presidential Fitness Patch—the reward for achieving the highest levels of fitness. We were graded in three categories: aerobic fitness (running laps and jumping rope), upper body strength (push-ups and chin-ups), and core strength (sit-ups).

  I was in no shape for serious physical sport, since the most exercise I got was fetching Coke from the refrigerator during commercial breaks of Green Acres (which I watched religiously after school, along with reruns of Buck Rogers, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie). That is, when I managed to properly wrestle away the remote from Kimberly, who preferred to watch Family Feud and Good Times.

  There was very little to do in Dixieland, and TV was a real escape, so it’s no wonder that I ended up working in television.

  As a kid, I’d break from TV only long enough to get my Stouffer’s TV dinner and TV tray, and then the whole family would settle in for the main event: Prime Time. Time was measured in sitcoms, not hours. My bedtime fell, technically, at 9 P.M. Central Time, but more often than not, the entire family would be so engrossed in any given CBS or ABC lineup that I’d wind up watching a good fifteen or twenty minutes of Hart to Hart or Trapper John, M.D. before anyone noticed I was still awake.

  Contrary to the belief at the White House, training your body to be still for seven hours a day required a certain kind of mental toughness. I had learned to move beyond numbness in my fingers and toes, shortness of breath, and muscles that were too soft and atrophied to properly pedal a bicycle for more than three blocks. And while the Cokes I drank sucked precious calcium from my stagnant bones, my mind was introduced to new and exotic places like Hawaii and Milwaukee.

  Not to mention, I was learning important life lessons from television, including:

  How to Properly Slide on the Hood of a Car (T.J. Hooker and The Dukes of Hazzard).

  Be Careful What You Wish For, It Might Come True (Fantasy Island).

  Voice-overs Are Helpful for Solving Crimes (Magnum, P.I.; Simon and Simon; Matt Houston).

  Cross Dressing Is Okay if Done for Comic Effect (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company, Bosom Buddies).

  Abject Poverty Can Be Swell (Good Times, Alice, Sanford and Son).

  I felt sure what I had learned from television could transfer into the know-how I would need to “pass” the Physical Fitness Challenge. Besides, Ronald Reagan said ketchup counted as a vegetable in the school lunch program. A president who saw nutritional value in condiments couldn’t be all that concerned with serious physical fitness.

  I had never attempted chin-ups, push-ups, or sit-ups before. Nor had I really run for any length of time, except in short sprints to flee Debbie Kenilworth, a notorious playground bully who had mastered the ability to inflict swift and tender bruises by punching your arm with her middle knuckle extended for maximum impact. Aside from that, I hadn’t done much running per se. But I had spent hours watching people on television run, and it didn’t seem that hard. Thomas Magnum ran all the time and he barely broke a sweat, even though he lived in a tropical climate with 90 percent humidity.

  Naturally, the first two days of the contest, Kevin Peterson, who had just moved to Dixieland from Little Rock, dominated the competition. No one could catch him. He was the Bruce Jenner of the Dixieland Elementary playground. And with every contest he won, he racked up more popularity points.

  I, on the other hand, barely kept from failing out of the challenge altogether. After coming in dead last in the running competition (note to self: Jelly shoes that make your feet swe
at and give you crisscross blisters don’t lead to speed on the black-top), I had only the chin-up event left to prove that I had what it took to finish in second-to-last place.

  As luck would have it, Kevin Peterson was assigned to my group. He took to the chin bar like he’d been doing it all his life; as if, instead of sinking into brown shag carpet to watch Falcon’s Crest or The Fall Guy, he actually lifted weights.

  His arms began to get a bit shaky only after twenty chin-ups, and even after that, he managed to finish ten more before he dropped from the bar with athletic ease and said simply, “That’s it for me,” as if he’d just decided he’d watched too much television for one day.

  All the other kids around the bar stood and stared. We knew we had been out-done. No one could possibly do that many chin-ups. Nobody.

  Miss Owens, our PE teacher, took her clipboard out and scratched down Kevin’s number, informing the rest of the class that he had just achieved a school record.

  Then came my turn. Now, I had convinced myself that I should at least do one chin-up, and that maybe if I did I might attract the attention or even admiration of Kevin Peterson. I kicked one Jelly shoe toe into the dirt and swung my arms back and forth, willing the muscles in them to come alive, even though the heaviest thing I’d lifted in my life was my Barbie Dream House. And it was made mostly of cardboard.

  I reached up and tightened my grip around the bar. I think I could hear the opening chords of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III starting to play. I checked the stance of my feet and adjusted my fingertips on the grip as if I were a weight lifter at the Olympics. Of course, I was just trying to buy time before I actually had to try to lift myself. I’d never tried lifting my body weight before, and I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Miss Taylor,” Miss Owens said, tapping her pencil on her clipboard, her voice clearly sarcastic, and while she hadn’t added “princess” to the end of the sentence, you could tell by her tone that she wanted to.

  It’s now or never, I think.

  I pulled at the bar with all the strength I had in my softened muscles, fueled by Little Debbie Snack Cakes with corn syrup, praying that the adrenaline surging through my veins from knowing that Kevin Peterson was watching me would push me to new fantastic heights of strength, kind of like the mother I saw on That’s Incredible who lifted a car to save her son pinned underneath.

  My eyes were squeezed tight and I felt my face turn red from exertion, and then I heard the voice of Miss Owens.

  “We’re waiting,” she said.

  I opened my eyes.

  My feet were still on the ground. I hadn’t even budged a centimeter. My arms, like strands of spaghetti, had no strength in them at all.

  “I tried already,” I admitted to Miss Owens.

  “You didn’t try,” she corrected me. “Now, go on. Don’t make me send you to the principal’s office.”

  The principal’s office was a dreaded place where children suffered corporal punishment at the hands of a sadistic, grinning maniac wielding a flat wooden paddle. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was a phrase used in Arkansas for years after corporal punishment went out of vogue.

  I tried again, this time adding a little grunt for effect.

  Some of the boys started snickering. Debbie Kenilworth called me a dork.

  And then Kevin Peterson stepped forward, saving me from a trip to the principal’s office and from further public humiliation. Maybe he liked me. Or maybe he just took pity on me. Whatever the case, he stepped out and said, “She just needs a jump start.”

  Then he wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me with surprising ease. Kevin Peterson released me, and I hung there, my chin well above the bar, my arms folded at the elbows and straining to hold myself up. I lasted one second there and then awkwardly dropped to the gravel.

  Miss Owens said the chin-up didn’t count, but by that point it didn’t matter. Kevin Peterson, the fastest, strongest, and coolest boy in class, had helped me, and I could feel his popularity rubbing off on me like glitter.

  And just like that I fell in love.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  Miyagi once had mother, too.

  “I know you’re there!” Vivien sings into my answering machine Sunday morning. Vivien is a morning person and has probably been up since five. My mother is one of those overly industrious people like Donald Trump who claim to need only four hours of sleep a night. “Answer the phone, Jen. I know you’re there! Nakamuras, we always know.”

  Despite her married name of Taylor, my mother still refers to herself as a Nakamura. Bubba even jokes that one day he’ll have his name legally changed. One of the reasons Vivien doesn’t want to give up the Nakamura name is that she thinks the Nakamura family is connected by ESP. I call this phenomenon “Nakamura Telepathy”—the ability to sense what’s happening in other people’s lives without actually talking.

  Nakamura Telepathy has never been proven. As far as I know, no one in my mother’s family has ever accurately predicted a car crash, an earthquake, or even a hangnail. Why the Nakamuras couldn’t just conjure up some useful information like lotto numbers, I don’t know. It’s like some completely useless superpower. If my mother were a member of the Justice League, her power would be the ability to always point out the obvious. Would she be able to deflect bullets? No. But she’d be able to wear down bad guys just by pretending to know everything they planned to do well in advance.

  “Pick up the phone,” Vivien commands. “I have BIG news. BIG.” Big news for Vivien qualifies as anything she read in the National Enquirer.

  Vivien continues. “I think I found the perfect date for you for the wedding. Remember Billy Connor? Well, he’s single and …”

  Billy Connor is the boy in fifth grade who once ate an entire canister of goldfish food for a dollar. I scramble out of bed to pick up the phone, which is on the other side of the room.

  “Hello? Hello!”

  “I knew you were there,” Vivien says, sounding smug.

  “I am not going on a date with Billy Connor.”

  “But he’s such a nice boy,” Vivien exclaims.

  “He once ate dirt on a dare,” I remind her. “The kids used to call him ‘The Hoover’ because he’d eat anything if you paid him a dollar. Even worms.”

  “Really?” Vivien asks, sounding surprised. “Well, he’s an Arkansas State Trooper now.”

  “The state actually gave him a gun?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Another reason not to date him.” This is not the first time Vivien has attempted to play matchmaker with someone from Dixieland. It’s the diehard Japanese mother in her that’s led to the incessant matchmaking. Despite the fact that she’s claimed to have forgotten every single Japanese phrase she once knew, there are some things that are far too ingrained in the Asian DNA to avoid. Like the desire for parents to arrange their children’s weddings.

  “Ya-shee, it was only a suggestion,” Vivien says. “Ya-shee” is the hissing sound all the women in my family make. My mother and my grandmother both do it when they’re frustrated or startled. I don’t know if it actually has any Japanese meaning or if it’s just a spitting sound.

  “I’m just saying I’m not sure why you and your sister aren’t married yet.” Given Vivien’s love of good weddings (she roused me from bed to watch Princess Di walk down the aisle, and let me stay home from school to watch Luke and Laura get married on General Hospital), it’s no wonder she’s anxious for one of her two daughters to get married. “You’re pretty girls.”

  “Maybe we don’t want to be married,” I suggest.

  “Ya-shee!” Vivien exclaims. “You always have to be a smart alan.”

  “I think you mean smart aleck.” Vivien is always mixing up her metaphors—the result, I think, of speaking only Japanese until age six.

  “Same difference. Anyway, speaking of your sister, have you heard from her lately?”

>   “No,” I lie.

  “I’ve been calling her, but I think her phone is broken.”

  I think this is what’s called screening, but I don’t say so.

  “Anyhow, if you do, tell her we still need her dress measure-ments,” Vivien adds. “The early horse gets the worm you know.”

  “I think you mean bird. Horses don’t eat worms.”

  “Whatever. Same difference,” Vivien says, dismissive. “So? You sure you don’t want to go with Billy Connor?”

  “No,” I say, firmly.

  “What about Danny Webber?”

  “Absolutely not.” Webber is the one who used to drag-race cars in the alley behind the Dairy Queen in high school. In my yearbook, he wrote “Dude—school sucks!” but spelled “sucks” “sux.”

  “Well, there are plenty of other eligible bachelors in Dixieland. If you lived here …”

  “Mom, I prefer my boyfriends to have all their original teeth.”

  “Ya-shee, so much a drama princess. I’m the one who has to live with your Aunt Teri. You know she’s been strutting around here like the cat that ate the parrot.”

  “Canary,” I correct.

  Vivien barrels on. “She just can’t help rubbing it in, you know. About her daughter getting married first. You’d think she was the only mother ever to have a daughter get married.”

  Vivien is very competitive. The fact that her sister-in-law’s daughter is getting married before either of hers is very disconcerting. Vivien is in a constant contest of one-upmanship with everyone in the family. When I got my master’s degree in journalism, the first in the family to go for an advanced degree, she photocopied the diploma and gave it, framed, to every other member of the family at Christmas.

  “Ya-shee, I’d have an easier time setting you up if I saw you more often,” Vivien says. “I barely remember what my own daughter looks like! At least Kimberly comes home for Thanks-giving.”

  Here it is, the Guilt Trip. It happens in every one of my conversations with Vivien, who doesn’t understand why I am not home to visit every three months like Kimberly. Of course, explaining that Kimberly’s part-time work for a nonprofit organization for women’s rights in Asia allows her more flexibility than my ten days of vacation time a year generally falls on deaf ears.