Dixieland Sushi Page 5

  “You know I’m busy …” I start.

  “Ya-shee—what’s more important? Your family should be more important than anything,” Vivien scolds me.

  “But—”

  “Anyway, I’m going to play bridge next week. I’ll find you a date there. The women are always trying to set up their divorced sons.”

  Vivien often acts as if finding a boyfriend is as easy as ordering takeout. If I could have an acceptable boyfriend delivered, then I would have one by now.

  “Mom, I don’t want to date a Dixieland divorcé.”

  “Ya-shee, I’ve raised such an ungrateful daughter!” Vivien wails. “When I die—and it’ll be soon—you probably won’t even come to my funeral.”

  “Mo-ther!”

  “It’s true. You know the women in the Nakamura family don’t live long. And I have high cholesterol!”

  “You’re fifty-seven. And Grandma Saddie is seventy-five. Her mother lived until she was ninety.”

  “Ya-shee. Still. I have high cholesterol! I’m going to die without grandchildren. And Teri will gloat at my funeral.”

  “Aunt Teri won’t gloat.”

  “Ya-shee, you just watch her!”

  If possible, it’s even more imperative that I find a date. There is, I notice at four in the morning on Monday, a woeful shortage of single men at News Four. There’s Cameraman Barry, recently divorced father of two; Twice Jonathan (twice married, twice divorced, and twice my age), and Dude Chris, the station’s nineteen-year-old intern who can’t begin or end a sentence without inserting the word “dude.”

  I shake myself. Now is not the time to be looking for a date. I have work to do.

  I start trying to organize which news stories should go first. It’s all about flow in TV news. You don’t want to have a terrorism story lead into a feature about a waterskiing squirrel. And that’s part of what I like about being a producer. I get to take a bunch of bits and pieces of news that don’t fit and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  I get up and check the fax machine for press releases and see none. I do, however, find Michelle’s résumé on the fax, along with a cover letter to one of our competitor stations. Once again, not a very smart move by Michelle. I take the résumé and cover letter and put them on her desk. Let her wonder who put them there, I think.

  Back at my desk, an instant message pops up on my computer.

  It’s from Nigel Riley, who also works at News Four, running the station’s website. He also has been, at one time or another, every girl’s crush in the office. He’s fit, dark and handsome, speaks in a clipped British accent, and is known as “The Colins” for his resemblance to both Colin Firth and Colin Farrell. He also happens to be one of my closest friends, and because he has a live-in girlfriend, I have not permitted myself to think of him as anything more. Correction: I haven’t often allowed myself to think of him as anything more.

  Riley is also a raging insomniac and says he needs only three hours of sleep a night so he often catches me online.

  Riley was raised in London and has an American-born mother who claims his father’s brother is an earl. Riley also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport of rugby, of which he is a great fan, including a rather dubious-sounding team called the Harlequins or Quins for short, which, Riley assures me, is a very manly team despite its romance-novel-sounding name. Riley’s online name is Rugger, slang for rugby.

  RUGGER9: How was your date with John Boy?

  Riley’s second-favorite hobby, next to playing rugby with a ragtag bunch of amateurs who call themselves the Chicago Blast, is making fun of the men I date.

  JEN76: I found his Asian/monster porn stash. I had to fake food poisoning.

  RUGGER9: LMAO (stands for “laughing my ass off” for you nontechnical types).

  JEN76: I know what LMAO is, thank you. You’ve used it enough times in reference to my love life.

  RUGGER9: Tsk. Tsk. Bitter? Party of One?

  JEN76: Don’t make me come over there and hurt you.

  RUGGER9: You know that I’m a lover not a fighter.

  JEN76:

  RUGGER9: Ah, poor John. You should give the bloke another chance. Every guy has a porn stash.

  JEN76: His was ALL Asian porn. Does your porn stash have a “theme”?

  RUGGER9: My porn stash is the United Nations of porn. I take all races, creeds, and religions. I feel it’s my responsibility to do so, as a citizen of the world.

  JEN76: Very nice. Well, his porn stash included Japanese cartoons. Women raped by monsters and such.

  RUGGER9: Aren’t the Japanese your people? You should be used to the Japanese perv tendencies.

  JEN76: You shouldn’t judge a culture by its porn.

  RUGGER9: Why not? Seems as good a meter stick as any.

  “Hi Jen! How are you? We’re going to have beautiful weather today!”

  This is Fred, our meteorologist, appearing from seemingly nowhere. He’s very stealthy. He makes no noise when he walks, and then he’s suddenly right over your shoulder piping cheerful accolades. He, like every other weatherman I’ve ever met, is always far too upbeat for four in the morning.

  Quickly, I shut my IM window. It figures Fred would appear during the thirty seconds of my day when I’m not actually doing work.

  “How’s the weather today?” I ask Fred.

  “I’m going to put in an order of sunshine to the Big Guy just for you,” he says, sending me his too-white smile that almost looks blue under the station’s fluorescent lights. This is what he tells me every morning, even if it’s raining. He seems to be on intimate terms with the “Big Guy” since he references him in every other sentence.

  “Say, you training for the marathon this year?” Fred asks me. As I never train for the marathon, and I don’t see the point of running unless someone is chasing me, I shake my head.

  “Oh, you should try it,” he says. Fred is a wiry, thin man who is always trying to talk to people about the highs you get from marathon running. “Seriously, try it. I could help you train.”

  “I don’t think so, Fred.” I don’t know if Fred is just insanely obsessed with running or if this is part of some really lame come-on. He’s been trying to get me to run with him for months.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Fred says. He leaves my cube, whistling.

  I pull up my IM window.

  JEN76: Sorry. It was Mr. Weather.

  RUGGER9: Tell Fred to FOOK off.

  When Riley says “fuck” it sounds like “fook,” which is what he uses in IM. Along with “shite” for shit and “jaysis” for Jesus.

  RUGGER9: Wanker Fred. Wank. Wank. Wanker.

  Riley and Fred do not get along. This is mainly because Fred keeps saying “G’day, mate” to Riley, because Fred can’t tell the difference between a British and an Australian accent. Being mistaken for an Australian is one of many pitfalls, Riley says, of living in the States. Furthermore, Riley says he is distrustful of anyone who is always so upbeat. His theory is that only serial killers can maintain that level of cheerfulness. “Think about how happy you’d be if you killed anyone who annoyed you,” Riley says.

  JEN76: Unlike you, I am not the son of an earl’s brother. I need this job.

  RUGGER9: The second bastard nephew of a bankrupt earl, which means I am 344th in line to the throne. However, you can call me “your majesty” if you’d like.

  JEN76: You’re in America, now. This is a democracy.

  RUGGER9: That’s where all you Yanks got it wrong.

  JEN76:

  RUGGER9:

  RUGGER9: So, what are you going to do about the Hee Haw wedding?

  JEN76: Take you, if you keep calling it that.

  RUGGER9: You should take me. I’ve always wanted to visit the set of Deliverance.

  JEN76: You aren’t funny.

  RUGGER9: Thousands of my loyal (and indentured) English subjects beg to disagree.

  I would love to take Riley to Kevin Peterson’s wedding, but I doubt I could
live with the torture of spending a weekend with him with all my impure thoughts. Riley is all the things I’d want for my grown-up Kevin Peterson. He’s funny, smart, and handsome (he’s not called The Colins for nothing) and—above that—he seems genuinely interested in me, if only to make jokes about my love life.

  Sometimes when I’m standing close to him and I catch that unique Riley scent (something like clean laundry and vanilla), I have to resist the urge to put my hands on him. I know that being together for forty-eight hours means that at some point I’d probably make a fool of myself. And the last words I want to hear are “You’re a great girl … but …” The but, of course, being his practically perfect girlfriend, Tiffany.

  I met Tiffany at a bar during a casual happy hour after work celebrating the fact that one of our anchors was nominated for an Emmy. Tiffany was tall, skinny, beautiful, and carried the kind of confidence only tall, skinny, gorgeous women have—the sort that’s built up from years of being the target of all the best come-ons in bars, of looking at women’s magazines and actually having her self-image improve, and of being able to take a size two into a dressing room and sigh, “This just hangs on me.”

  In other words, the sort of glamorous life I could only imagine.

  I expected to hate Tiffany on principle, but Tiffany was funny. More than funny, crass. She belched. She downed entire beers in one, open-throat gulp. She had an impressive knowledge of Cubs baseball. Worse, I couldn’t even say she was dumb, since she graduated from Princeton. There was literally no way on earth I could compete with her. She could be any man’s soul mate. And she didn’t even have the courtesy to be mean or petty with me. She actually showed interest in me, included me in the conversation, and complimented me on my shoes.

  Despite all her obvious attributes, she also had an honest, down-to-earth quality that simply sucked you in. She was impossible to hate. And I hated her for it.

  Even worse, she had her own PR firm, and thereafter became responsible for giving me some of my best morning show guests, including Mayor Daley, Kirsten Dunst, and Bachelor stars Alex Michel and Andrew Firestone.

  I should simply get used to the idea of going to the wedding alone, but something, namely the idea of seeing Kevin Peterson again, makes me feel that if only I could find someone willing to be my date, I could manage to scrape together the dignity that eluded me as a ten-year-old. I am very close to calling an escort service. The only thing stopping me is the image of the stripper that arrived at my friend Carrie’s bachelorette party two years ago. He was a greasy, hairy little guy who kept gyrating his pelvis in people’s faces, and when he wasn’t doing that he was shaking his G-string-clad butt nauseatingly close to the guacamole dip. The thought of some hairy guy slick with baby oil asking Grandma Saddie if she wants “the windmill” during the wedding reception makes me abandon that plan entirely.

  I glance over at Fred, the meteorologist. He’s doing his warm-up exercises for his face and voice, which make him look like a fish gasping for air. No, I think, I’m not that desperate. Yet.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid III

  You no look answer in Miyagi. Like bonsai live inside tree, answer live inside you.

  1982

  On Halloween in 1982, I tried to convince Grandma Saddie to let me borrow one of her old kimonos so that I could go as a Kung Fu Princess. This was an idea that I’d somehow gleaned from old Bruce Lee movies and the Hong Kong Phooey cartoon, with the janitor dog who moonlighted as a martial arts expert.

  Not to mention I somehow thought being a Kung Fu Princess would impress Kevin Peterson. I’d be both boyish and tough (the kung fu part) but also girly and alluring (the princess part).

  Back then, I didn’t realize there was a difference between kung fu and karate (for instance, that one was Chinese and one was Japanese), although Grandma Saddie informed me of this fact quickly.

  “You aren’t Chinese!” she exclaimed when I told her I wanted to be a Kung Fu Princess. Grandma Saddie was even less enamored of the idea of my wobbling around in her platform Japanese sandals, which I started calling “flip-flops on stilts.”

  “Ya-shee!” she’d exclaim in alarm when I’d wobble out in the family room in her mother’s shoes.

  Grandma Saddie would often call her mother’s heirlooms “ugly” or “not very interesting.” She would say, of the kimono that she married in, “Oh, it’s so ugly, that thing!”

  But I later came to realize that she didn’t really think they were ugly. It was more of a show of false modesty. The more she called something ugly and useless, the more she really thought it was beautiful and precious.

  It turns out that her parents—and many of the issei (first) generation who immigrated to America—believed that bragging about one’s possessions or accomplishments was the worst thing you could do. This was a learned behavior and not genetic, since Kimberly would often run through the house with her report card littered with gold stars and demand that Vivien submit her story to Ripley’s Believe It or Not for “smartest living girl on earth.”

  After Grandma Saddie told me I could not be a Kung Fu Princess for Halloween, naturally, I set my sights on being Princess Leia. She was the next-best thing to a Kung Fu Princess. Kimberly, however, immediately claimed that she had already decided to be Princess Leia, and because she could pinch harder and she outweighed me by thirty pounds, she won. Kimberly suggested I go as Han Solo so that I could be her “date” (a Han Solo that was four inches shorter than his Princess Leia). In the end, I went as a Regular Old Princess, wearing a plastic tiara and a gauzy pink dress made out of ballerina tutus, which seemed highly anticlimatic, although Vivien tried to convince me that Regular Old Princesses still held a degree of mystique.

  To prove her point, Vivien decided to dress up as a princess, too. A Real Life Princess: Princess Di. Vivien had been enamored with Princess Di ever since she had roused us all out of bed at three in the morning in 1981 so we could watch the live procession of her wedding to Prince Charles. Somehow, Vivien got her hands on a blond feathered wig and a powder blue suit, but even when she put on a tiara, no one could guess who she was trying to be. She looked like an Asian man in drag.

  Kimberly would later call Vivien’s insistence on being Princess Di for Halloween “racial amnesia”—which is the ability to disassociate yourself from your true ethnic identity. It’s a term that she would later apply to Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Justin Timberlake, and Vanilla Ice. The Nakamuras all had brushes with racial amnesia. It’s why they still occasionally used the word “Oriental,” and not in an ironic sense.

  It was probably developed as a safety mechanism, like a chameleon’s ability to blend into its environment and elude predators. If you pretended you weren’t Japanese, and tried to look less Japanese, maybe people wouldn’t notice that you actually were Japanese.

  * * *

  Vivien had her share of prejudice to deal with, after all. Take her in-laws. My father’s family disapproved of his marrying what they called “Bubba’s Little Geisha” and refused even to attend the wedding under the erroneous assumption that the Nakamuras could not speak English. Eventually, my paternal grandparents overcame some of their prejudices, after Kimberly was born. They even started coming over for Thanksgiving after Bubba convinced them we eat cooked turkey, not giant slabs of raw fish.

  Aunt Teri, Bubba’s younger sister, was far more open-minded than my grandparents. Then again, Aunt Teri moved to Chinatown in San Francisco in 1977 hoping to find some remnants of hippie free love but instead got a whole lot of disco.

  She returned to Dixieland two weeks before Halloween in 1982, very obviously pregnant and unmarried, and claiming to have fallen in love with a man named Patrick Woo, who was wanted in five states for check fraud. It was only later that we would learn, after Lucy was born, that her father’s name—Woo—was actually short for “Woodstein.” Disowned by her very conservative parents, Aunt Teri came to live with Bubba and Vivien, even though Vivien did not approve of “Aunt Teri’s
lifestyle” or her being a role model for my sister and me.

  While living in San Francisco, Aunt Teri adopted many Chinese customs as her own, including avidly following the Chinese zodiac, drinking green tea, wearing Chinese dresses, and cooking Chinese food. Every morning she’d insist on brewing a giant pot of oolong tea, and when Vivien wasn’t looking, she’d read our I Ching fortunes. Vivien, who had just gotten her real estate license, also didn’t approve of Aunt Teri’s “free-loading” and told us on more than one occasion that only “lazy hippies” live in California. Vivien told my sister and me, “See what happens when you go to California?”

  Vivien was referring to the fact that Aunt Teri had gotten knocked up by a two-timing pathological liar, but Kimberly and I came to believe that living in California somehow turned you Chinese.

  That Halloween, Aunt Teri wore a silk kimono she’d brought back with her from San Francisco, painted her face in kabuki makeup and put her blond hair up with lacquered sticks.

  Aunt Teri’s labor pains started that very night. Bubba had taken Kimberly and me out for trick or treating, and so it fell to Vivien, dressed in full Princess Di regalia, to drive Aunt Teri to the hospital. The two women arrived in the emergency room—one Asian woman dressed as a white woman, and a white woman dressed as an Asian woman.

  Later that night, Aunt Teri gave birth to Lucy, whom she attempted to name Lin Woo, but Vivien persuaded her that the blond baby looked more like a Lucy than a Lin. Aunt Teri compromised and named her Lucy Lin Woo Taylor.

  I suggested adding “Kung Fu Princess” to the name, but Vivien said there wasn’t room on the birth certificate.

  Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid III

  If karate use to defense honor, defend life, karate mean something. If karate use to defend plastic trophy, karate no mean nothing.