Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang Page A

like their parents?” I looked for laughs, but none. I remember almost to the word what I said to them.
    “I’m sure you guys can tell, Emery is a bit goofy and last night he fell down the stairs. I told my mom not to let him go to school, but she sent him anyway because she never thought anyone would think it was from anything but a fall. I mean, I thought it was pretty obvious she should have kept him at home, but she’s clueless. Look around, I hate them, but they’re good parents. We have food, clothes, a nice house, we’re clean, we have a dog, there’s really nothing a kid needs that we don’t have. Do you see anything wrong?”
    I baited them with exactly what my dad had been using as a cover for years. Show good face, always put your best foot forward in public, don’t show any cracks in the family unit, stick together. All our values still derived from the mind of Shihuangdi, the man who built the Great Wall and unified China.
    After deliberating for a half hour, they brought me back in with my brothers to see my mom.
    “Mrs. Huang, we are going to keep an eye on you guys, but this one here … You’ve done a good job. There’s an old man hiding in that kid.”
    From that point on, my mom kept calling me
Lao Erzi
: old son. She was proud of me and once the cops left she was apologetic. Evan forgave her. He was just happy to be home. Emery felt guilty because in his mind, he had brought the trouble, but me? I was fucking pissed. I didn’t want to defend them, but I did because it was the right thing to do for my brothers. Evan and Emery still needed parents. I remember thinking to myself, Motherfuckers owe me a pair of Vs for this one …

    THE HOME SITUATION made it extra difficult to stomach the kids at private school. These kids had parents picking them up in Benzes, blessin’ them with kicks, throwing them birthday parties, surprising them with cupcakes and shit. Not only did they have all that good shit, but they had to stunt on me, too. They couldn’t just leave me, my chinky eyes, and my hand-me-down clothes alone. There’s nothing worse than someone who got shit and can’t recognize other people don’t. I just wanted to dance on their motherfucking cupcakes. So around this time, I started to scrap with these kids. I remember kicking a kid into a bush and throwing him into the air conditioner when he laughed at my lunch. Another kid was taunting me because my parents wouldn’t buy me Mad Libs so I put him in the Rick Flair Figure Four Leg Lock and stole his Mad Libs. One kid was talking shit saying he had a Batmobile and I didn’t so I put his toy on the ground and DDT’d his face on the joint. I saw these kids just livin’ the cupcake life while I was limping around because my dad went opposite field on my right leg. I didn’t feel bad because they stepped to me first. They should have just let wounded dogs lie.
    By the time I hit seventh grade, I wasn’t the same anymore. My mom noticed, too. The complaints from teachers went from “Eddie needs to stop telling jokes” to “Eddie purposely threw a basketball in another student’s face when he wouldn’t let him play.” I didn’t take shit from anyone at this point. I only had one rule: don’t pick on people who were already being picked on.
    One school got so sick of Emery and me that they demanded we get psychological counseling before we could go back. We had good grades, but we disrupted class telling jokes or arguing with teachers. I didn’t need Howard Zinn to know Christopher Columbus was a punk-ass stealing from colored people and I let it be known. Emery was a beast, too. I started lifting weights and he did it with me. He wasn’t even eleven years old when he started. I think it stunted his growth, but by the time the boy hit eighth grade he was Megatron just stompin’ out the other kids that fucked with him.
    When we went to see the psychologist she asked us questions, we did the Rorschach blot shit, we took IQ