L.A. Son by Roy Choi

Author:Roy Choi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 8

EMERIL

When we left the Bicycle Club, it was light outside. I fell asleep in the car and woke up from an Avatar dream and into the detox of infinite Korean love.

There were no words for this detox. My parents and I didn’t talk about what had happened. Sometimes, in Asian culture, it is all about the words—the stress and the lectures and the discipline and the heightened expectations. The constant nagging, the torture of never being good enough.

But sometimes, in the deepest of moments, there are no words. There is only food. There is a bowl of rice. There is kimchi. Broiled fish. Soups and noodles. Chopsticks and the newspaper. The only things that truly communicate forgiveness and repair a broken soul.

I was to be repaired at my parents’ Coto de Caza house in Mission Viejo, the same place I had stolen from and used as a surplus center to supply my low-life pawns. It looked like a Miami bungalow, painted bright flamingo pink, with shaded palm trees and windows cascading light in from everywhere. Around us were meandering foothills, soaring falcons, families on horseback. The Saddleback Mountains loomed over the landscape, and a creek dribbled water across the fairway—frogs straight out of a Disney movie would ribbet throughout the night. You might see a mountain lion on the prowl, a coyote chasing bunny rabbits, or a golf ball sailing across the sky toward a sea of bright green.

I hated the place from the moment they moved in. I hated how boring it was, and I abhorred the senseless affluence. But the day my parents brought me back from the Bicycle Club was the day I finally saw past all that and discovered the genuine beauty in the nature surrounding Coto de Caza. Besides, I was exhausted, I had lost all my friends, and I had nowhere left to run. At least there on the seventeenth fairway, I could hide from everyone. Everyone, that was, but myself.

The detox took weeks. I was just twenty-four years old, but between my lost week in New York and my lost years at the tables, I had become frail to the bone. Everything in me was sick. My mind was filled with white noise. I couldn’t think. I had to come to terms with the fact that I had begged, borrowed, stolen, and lost everything. That I had let everyone down, including my friends and especially my family. For days on end, I stayed in my pajamas and stared at the TV and at the pages of books, trying to relearn how to piece words together to form sentences. When my parents left for work at 9:00 A.M. and returned at 7:00 P.M., I was still on the couch where they had left me, empty bowls of food and crumbs everywhere. Towering over me at the end of the day, my parents could do only what they knew to do: keep feeding me, bowl after bowl, hoping their walking dead of a son would come back to life.

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