Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang Page B

tests, and just talked. We went for like three weeks and afterward she announced her diagnosis.
    “Mrs. Huang, I am pleased to say there is absolutely nothing ‘wrong’ with your boys. The school is concerned, but they’re just a couple of really bored kids.”
    “Bored? What do you mean? They have lots of activities! I take them to piano, swimming, karate, they are busy!”
    “No, by bored, I mean, intellectually. They aren’t being challenged.”
    “I buy them homeworks all year round. I pay for Kumon! Even in summer, I give them more homeworks, there is no way they are bored.”
    The psychologist could tell there was a cultural gap trying to explain this concept to my mom.
    “OK, take a look at these tests. Emery has a very high IQ on this timed test. He tested off the charts.”
    “Oh! He is genius!”
    “Technically, he’s ‘gifted.’ Now, Eddie is interesting. He doesn’t score high or do well on the timed test, but on the IQ test without time constraints, he scored exceptionally high.”
    “What about Evan?”
    “Evan actually scored the highest.”
    “So all three boys, no problem!”
    “It’s not that simple.”
    No, no it wasn’t. On my thirteenth birthday, I won the 740 AM Final Four Pick ’Em, which was open to all of Greater Orlando. I remember the radio station calling my house and not believing it was a thirteen-year-old kid’s entry. I was also running NCAA pools at school, taking bets on NFL games, and selling porno. Emery and I figured out how to download Internet porn before the other kids so we put GIFs on 3.5-inch diskettes and sold them to other kids in school. Mind you, this was when everyone was still reading magazines, before USB drives or CD burners.
    The porno hustle was ill. We’d break up more popular photos into different sets and sell them for more like greatest-hits mixtapes. For people who wanted the physical magazines, Emery found my dad’s stash of
Penthouse
magazines and would tear out individual photos and sell them that way to the highest bidder. Ten years before I ever heard the Clipse talking about breaking down keys and sellin’ ’em like gobstoppers, we were doing the same thing with porno in middle school. I liked selling things or taking bets on sports because it was a challenge. School was easy for me, but no one, not teachers, not parents, not friends, taught me how to hustle but myself. Every time I sold something I felt a sense of pride like a kid taking his first shit. “Look, Mom, I made this myself!” What did we buy with all this money? Video games, trading cards, snap-back hats, and Starter jackets. * All the things our parents wouldn’t get us, and we really fell in love with the paper because to us, money was synonymous with freedom and all we wanted to do was get free from our crazy-ass family.
    One day, we were eating breakfast and my mom comes running out of Emery’s room with pages ripped out of
Penthouse
magazine. Fuck …
    “Soosin! Soosin! Emery wants to be a serial killer!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Look! He cut out these girls from a dirty magazine!”
    “Hey! That’s my magazine!”
    “Who cares whose magazine? He is sick!”
    “Mom, Emery’s not a serial killer. He sells the photos to kids at school.”
    “Wait … people buy this?”
    “Yeah, people love it!”
    “Ahhh, almost heart attack …”
    When my mom found out what we were doing she wasn’t upset. She respected the hustle. Whether it was in school, piano, or porno, her entire American experience was about the paper.
    AFTER THE COPS came to our house, my mom changed a bit. She would try to temper my dad when he hit us. She also realized how close she was to losing her kids. Emery had to go to the nurse’s office and take off his clothes every Friday at school to show he wasn’t being hit. We had to goto counseling sessions and the school kept a close eye on us. We felt like criminals, but we hadn’t done anything wrong. Around this time, we