Ed Lin's Posts

(Art by spoon+fork.)

We had to use the bathroom in the lobby of the Seahorse Hotel because the burger shack didn’t have one.  In exchange for such a privilege, we had to pick up trash in the hotel parking lot, most of which was from our customers.

The hotel was run by the hindu couple, Mr. and Mrs. Angrywall.  I thought it was a weird name, but I asked Mrs. Angrywall and that’s what it sounded like. She looked like she was my age, but she spent the whole day slumped like a grandmother behind the counter dressed in her colored togas.   Mr. Angrywall was usually prowling the rooms on the top floor of the hotel.  The ceilings on the top floor had caved in a few winters ago, before they bought it, and he was fixing the rooms himself.

“The dots are taking over, man,” Howard told me.  “Have you been to our old elementary school and high school lately?  They have totally infiltrated.”

“Why the hell are you going to our old schools for?  Are you trying to abduct little boys?”

“No, I’m not a pedophile.  I’m just saying, you’ve got little curries running all over the place.  Our grandkids are going to have to wear turbans.”

“When are you going to have grandkids?” I asked him.

“When I give up on being a free man and decide to settle down.”

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(Art by spoon+fork.)

Once a week I flossed my teeth and went to downtown Highlands to meet my parole officer.  The Shore Points border was the mushy intersection of the Shark River delta with a sand bar that separated the river from the Atlantic Ocean.

I had to take a bus over three bridges to get out. My driver’s license was revoked when I was convicted, but one thing I will swear to is that I had always waited at least half an hour before getting behind the wheel when I was high.

Highlands was the old administrative center for the British when New Jersey was a colony.  It was as close to the beach the British were willing to come.  Over the years I’ve seen and heard tourists from all over the world, but not Britain, although we do have fish and chips on the boardwalk if they showed up.

Highlands looks like Legoland.  Everything’s square, blocky and plastic.  They did a good job of trying to make the district parole office look like a dentist office from the outside, with fake brick walls, trimmed hedges and white gravel.  It didn’t fool anybody.  Cars going both ways would slow down to look at the people getting off the bus at that stop and walking into the building.

My parole officer was a black man named James O’Keefe.  He was about 35 and had short hair that was curled tightly to his scalp, and he had a bald spot near the back.  If you stared at it, he’d glare at you like he was going to hit you with a left hook.  The other parole officers had family pictures or fun little things on their desks like snow globes.  O’Keefe had nothing.  You had no indication what his life outside the office was like.  But the nameplate on his desk was the biggest I’d ever seen, bigger than any of my principals’.

The first time I met him, he said, “Sean Kerry. . .are you Irish?”

“Mostly, yeah,” I said.  “James O’Keefe. . .are you Irish, too?”

“Well, not that I’m sure of, but obviously, somewhere along the line, there was a slave master who was.”  His face told me that he was thinking about how he could rip my head off and make it look like I’d committed suicide.  Luckily for me, he kept talking.

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Is a Screw Ice-Bar better than a cigarette in bed?

(Art by spoon+fork.)

“I’m not your boss or anything,” Howard said when I came back to the stand.  “You know, though, that your lunch hour was too long today.”

“Go take your lunch now,” I told him.  “I’ll give you an extra half hour today.”

“Well, I’d rather wait a little bit,” he said.  “You know I like to eat late in the afternoon.”

“Just go now,” I said annoyed.  “You can take as long as you want.”

“Can’t argue with that!” he said and promptly disappeared.

I turned my back on the order window and sat on the counter.  I decided to make myself a grilled-cheese sandwich because it wasn’t a burger.  I tried to save money by eating as much as I could at the stand, and then taking a burger or two home for reheating and I was already sick of them.

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These lovely ladies will catch you if you fall out.

This Guangzhou ride, which doesn’t seem to have a name in English, takes you up 1,588 feet (as tall as the fifth highest building in the world and only 82 feet shorter than Taipei 101) then drops you! You can build this, but you can’t build better relations with the people of Tibet and Uyghurs in Xinjiang? C’mon, Chinese people!

Chinese women ain’t afraid of no heights.

Isn’t this great, Fred? Fred! Nooooo!!!

(Art by spoon+fork.)

When my sentence was almost up, I chose the one-week job-placement course in food management.  Ben was right.  There weren’t any furniture-making jobs out there.

I was released in late June and got assigned to a restaurant run by these two brothers named Conti.  It was a small place, they told me, next to the boardwalk.  I was going to be paid through deposits into a monitored bank account, but the money was mine and it was even a little bit more than I was making at the Chatterbox.  I was excited, even though I had to sign an employment contract for the duration of my one-year probation.

I had figured out that after my probation was up I would go for the ultimate office job, which was the administrative office in the middle of the boardwalk.  There was always an “Office Job” sign in the door.

But I had to get through a year at the burger stand first. It was weird to leave prison on the same public bus the visitors took. I took two transfers and walked 15 blocks to the restaurant attached to the Seahorse Hotel. I was immediately disappointed because the owners, the Conti brothers, weren’t there to meet me and the restaurant was really a nameless burger stand.  Even worse, it was five blocks away from the boardwalk and the hotel was run by hindus.

As I approached the order window I could faintly hear the people on the log flume screaming on the final plunge.

The only guy who was at the burger stand was Howard Peppi.  He was in my class but I lost track of him when he got left back in fifth grade.  It kinda wasn’t his fault.  His mom had died and he needed counseling to deal with it.

I saw Howard a few times in the working world, but I never gave him much more than a nod.  Him, too.

Howard came out from around the side of the stand.  The skin on his face was peeling around his nose.  He shook my hand and I saw that his arms were hairy to the wrists.

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(Hello and welcome to my serial novel. Art by spoon+fork.)

Everything was going great until she wanted to talk about two things I hated:  California and family.

The latter because I didn’t really have one and the former because everyone from there was rich or at least well-off and looked down on New Jersey.  Ever since a surfing magazine listed Shore Points as one of the top places to catch a wave on the East Coast, communes of college kids from L.A. would rent out entire houses for the summer and hog up our beach.  The chamber of commerce even ran ads out there to get more California kids over.

You could tell they weren’t local because they wore expensive body suits. They weren’t used to a cold ocean.

The girl I was having dinner with was from California, but she had nice tits, which definitely made her likeable.  I had found her waiting for the shuttle bus to the mall that got axed in the last recession.   I had got the girl to talking and shared my joint with her.

Her name was Quincy, like the TV show.  She was 19 and was wearing a flower-patterned bikini, cutoffs and Reeboks with socks.  The hair was long, straight and brown.  The only problem was she had a snub nose, but it didn’t bother me enough.

We were having fried clams and beer in the Chatterbox on the pier.  The tartar sauce cup was holding up okay, but we were running low on the cocktail sauce.  I held up the empty bottle and shook it a few times at our waitress.

I turned and saw that the hostess up at the front was glaring at us.  She had had it in for me ever since I first started working at the Chatterbox.  Bon Jovi had stopped by for a drink and I had washed the glass before she could put it up on the wall.  Someone told me later she got her cherry popped to the “Slippery When Wet” album.

The hostess was looking at me so hard, I could hear her voice in my head, and it was loud.

I was the last-shift dishwasher — the hardest position to keep staffed, so the Chatterbox let me run a tab for meals.  Otherwise I’d never take a date there.

When the cocktail refill came, Quincy spun her fried clam on her plate and said, “Someday I wanna have a house full of kids in the Bay Area.  Everyone there is very open-minded.”

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C’mon, Chinese people! Notebook purchased in the People’s Republic. (Thanks, Bryan Ong!)

This list represents a lot of stuff that I just got around to in 2011 and really dug. I hope you get a kick out of it.

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They are warm, brown, juicy and salty – and they actually taste pretty good!

C’mon, Corean people!

The photo isn’t doctored, but these students are.

The Economist recently reported that between 1996 and 2007, the U.S. awarded a whopping 57% of its science and engineering doctorates to Asian nationals, if one needed proof of the continent-wide value of masochism.

Here’s the breakdown: 28% went to Chinese; 11% to Indians; 9% to South Koreans; 7% to Taiwanese; but only 2% to Japanese. C’mon, Japanese people!

(Japan is addressing its relative underperformance.)

Brokers “egging on” transactions between couples and ova sellers.

Young women attending famous universities in Beijing come to a café where couples evaluate the girls and inquire through agents about the girls’ height and blood type. Ovum providers get 5,000 yuan according to an investigation carried out by the Beijing News reporter — that’s about $800.

C’mon, Chinese people!

Wegmans is a regional supermarket chain in the Northeast where “Asian” by itself doesn’t sound appetizing enough. Hickory, dickory…wokery? C’mon!

Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a quiet and disquieting story of the Issei. Written in the first-person plural from the point of view of the picture brides who become wives and then mothers, The Buddha in the Attic begins with the uneasy journey across the ocean. We follow the women and girls (as young as the early teens) as they experience disappointment and heartbreak with only flashes of satisfaction and hope. All the time there is a sense of impending doom that will snatch all of them away — and of course it happens.

The narrative structure allows for multiple and sometimes contrary impressions while providing a uniform voice. Consider the experience of the women on their first night with their husbands.

The tied us up and took us facedown on threadbare carpets that smelled of mouse droppings and mold. They took us frenziedly, on top of yellow-stained sheets. They took us easily, and with a minimum of fuss, for some of us had been taken many times before. They took us drunkenly. They took us roughly, recklessly, and with no mind for our pain.

The voice is most effective when capturing the paranoid time after Pearl Harbor was bombed and men are being rounded up and taken away after possibly having their name on a list.

The list was written in indelible red ink. The list was typewritten on index cards. The list did not exist. The list existed, but only in the mind of the director of military intelligence, who was known for his perfect recall. The list was a figment of our imaginations.

The Buddha in the Attic is a short book that also happens to be a quick read — Otsuka has chosen her words her words with care and the text is tight enough to repel rain. It is among the best fictional renderings of the stories of early Asian Americans who were allowed to exist in this country but never truly live.

That’s how strong my lobe is!

So not only does Zhaozhuang City in Shangdong province have a used-car expo, but they also kick it off with insano publicity stunts like having a man pull a car with his ears. I guess it was a family event, so the iron-penis thing wouldn’t be appropriate.

If only the ears of China’s heartless leaders were so easy to bend!

The latest issue of The Asian American Literary Review is out. It’s a major step up in the young life of The AALR in terms of ambition and production. Guest editors Rajini Srikanth and Parag Khandhar, as well as Editors-in-Chief Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis and Gerald Maa, are to be congratulated heartily. The East Coast-based AALR commemorates a decade in Asian America after 9/11. The entire Asian community in New York has seen things change profoundly in obvious ways (racial profiling of South Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans; the conversion of Chinatown into a parking garage for the Feds) and in subtle ways (Afghani restaurants took down maps of the country from their dining rooms). It is a full-scale multimedia effort: The print journal collects first-person testimonies and transcribed discussions and interviews, while there are also visual art sections and an illuminating DVD.

The pieces range from angry to somber to bitingly satiric. A long-time contributor to Time is eyed carefully after an airport customs official sees a Syria stamp on his passport and thinks the journalist’s chicken-scrawl handwriting is Arabic. A 13-year-old plaintively asks to live in a world “without having the thought of something bad happening to you.”

In words, images and performance, we find that when we view the most unforgettable events from dozens of viewpoints, we not only honor the past but also contemplate our future.

Pushkar Sharma‘s mindblowing “10 Little Coolies” spoken-word piece from the DVD.

One of five of Tomie Arai‘s works in the print issue.

Are you promoting civism or civet-ism?

This is Sichuan Province’s way of promoting good citizenship — dress up your local nubile volunteers as skanky cats and unleash them in the subways.

Dad is getting the message!

It figures. Sichuan is known for spiciness, right?

Looks like open solicitation to me…

After the day was over, these women went home with Chairman Meow. Ba dump dump.

Fake Tiananmen Square looks real, but where are the hawkers?

A “local enterprise” (private business) in Qishan County of China’s Shaanxi province has gone one step further than securing government approval to operate. It became the government by building its headquarters to replicate Tiananmen Square.

Looks like they couldn’t decide where to put the replica tanks.

Hey, maybe they took the Bad Religion song to heart, but what is truly amazing is that this complex is allowed to stand. Has the copyright on the set design of the Square expired? What’s next? Maybe the official organ of the People’s Republic will call the Tiananmen Massacre a myth and having a duplicate Square is one way of wiping away history.

He has no choice but to use his noodle.

Times are tough and in the global recession, not even superheros are immune. Witness the transformation of Ultraman from monster-crusher to noodle slicer in Shijiazhuang, China.

No word yet on his immigration and work-eligibility status.

When you try to change your restaurant’s name, remember the little sign, too.

Let’s say the Chinese restaurant you run is already a couple years old — too old for you to call it “NEW GREEN BO.” Let’s say you want to change it to “NICE GREEN BO,” just so your  regulars aren’t thrown off too much.

If your sign is translucent and lit from the back, it’s probably worth it to properly fix your sign instead of pasting on “NICE” over it, because at night, your restaurant becomes “NIECWE GREEN BO.” Not that that’s a bad name.