The flower of flushing
by Victoria Eng
Flushing
Let’s get this party started!” Lily calls out to me from across the street. She’s late, as usual. I’ve been waiting for her by the train station on the corner of Main and Roosevelt, breathing in the greasy aroma of hot dogs and frying noodles from various sidewalk carts. Sunlight washes over Main Street and its procession of festive store signs, all red and yellow with black Chinese lettering. As Lily approaches, the traffic lights change; cars brake at the crosswalk in succession, like they’re bowing to her. She smiles brightly and bumps her hip against mine. I roll my eyes at her and don’t bump back, but inside I’m relieved that she even showed up. Today is important: I’m determined to talk to my crush, Jimmy Lee, a junior at my school. I know he plays basketball at Bowne Park on the weekends, so I made Lily promise to come with me so that I could “run into him” there. We head down Main toward Sanford Avenue, weaving around weekend shoppers and double-parked trucks.
“Think he’ll be there today?” I ask.
“Who? Yao Ming?” she says, her dimples showing.
“Stop calling him that.” I poke her arm. “You know his name.”
“Hey, look! There he is.”
My breath catches in my chest. I look around without moving my head, hoping that he’s too far away to have heard me talking about him. We’re approaching the underpass of the Long Island Rail Road station and I expect to see him perusing magazines at the newsstand, or worse, walking right toward me. But Lily points to a store window with a life-sized poster of Yao Ming, the NBA player from China, and starts cracking up.
“Oh, reeeeally funny, Lil,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster. I exhale through my mouth, the tension in my neck subsiding. “You almost made me puke, you know.”
She’s laughing so hard no sound is coming out of her mouth.
“Um, maybe you’re the one who’s gonna puke. You okay?”
She nods and gasps. I’m tempted to tickle her sides to make her throw up — she’s always been sensitive like that — but I’m too anxious to get going.
Jimmy Lee looks nothing like the famous athlete, but he’s 6'2" — way taller than most Asian guys — and he plays on the basketball team. That was enough for Lily to make fun of him. It made no difference to her that he’s Korean.
“Really, quit calling him Yao Ming. Jimmy’s not even Chinese.”
“I know,” she sighs. “Well, he’s far from perfect. A jock. What’s he going to do for you? Buy you pom-poms?” She catches her reflection in the window of a café and runs her fingers through her hair.
Lily Tong is the kind of girl who makes heads turn. She’s only fifteen, one year older than me, but she looks at least twenty. She’s curvy like the women in the music videos, and she wears her makeup and hair like she’s one too. As usual, she’s dressed in something slinky: an expensive, cut-up T-shirt that keeps falling off her shoulder, low-cut jeans that hug her curves, and black pumps. Dangling off her arm is a new purse, its print of interlocking letters broadcasting its expense. Along the street, old Chinese ladies carrying plastic bags full of groceries pause from scrutinizing vegetables to shake their heads at her disapprovingly. Men gawk at her from the open backdoors of restaurants; one worker almost falls from his perch on an overturned bucket into the pile of carrots he’s peeling. As usual, Lily pretends not to notice, but she lifts her chin a little bit higher, and swings her hips a little bit wider.
I hold my head higher too, proud to be her best friend. At 5'5", I’m taller than Lily, but I look like a child next to her, in my maroon tank top and green Old Navy cargo pants. Even if I had the courage to wear the kinds of clothes as Lily, everything would just hang on me loosely. My hair falls straight down in stringy strands no matter what I do to it, so I never even bother curling it like Lily does. I’m glad that I chose to paint my toenails red instead of pink; at least my feet look grown-up.
As we turn onto Sanford, someone calls out Lily’s name. We both turn around and see Peter Wong getting out of the passenger side of a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade.
He walks up to us casually and puts his arm around Lily’s shoulders. The sun glints off the rock-star shades he’s wearing. He’s older, in his twenties or maybe even thirties; I don’t know what he’s doing talking to Lily, but I figure he must know her through her father, who owns one of the biggest dim sum houses in Flushing. As a big businessman, her father knows a lot of people.
“Dai Guo!” She smiles and kisses him on the cheek. She called him Big Brother, but the way he’s looking at her is anything but brotherly. His hand lingers on her hair as he releases her shoulder. He barely looks at me when she introduces us. I know he’s headed to the park too; he and his friends are always there.
They continue walking together, Lily between us so I can’t hear most of their conversation. He calls her Xiao Mei — Little Sister — and coos at her as if she’s a baby. She’s all giggly with him, which I think is gross. Still, I wonder what it would feel like if a guy like him paid so much attention to me, if I were that beautiful. He tells her about the kinds of things he can get for her from his “connections.”
“I already have a Prada bag,” I hear her pouting. “Can you get me a Louis Vuitton?” She pronounces it Loo-iss Voy-tahn.
As we near the entrance to the park, we can hear people on the basketball court, the slap of rubber on cement followed by occasional grunts and metallic dunks. The park, or Bowne Playground as it’s officially called, is divided into sections separated by chain-link fences: The basketball court takes up the most space and is flanked by a kiddie playground and a treelined yard where old men pass their retirement days on its benches, reading Chinese newspapers or feeding pigeons. I scan through the trees for a glimpse of Jimmy, but I can’t recognize his voice over the faraway laughter of children.
We reach the yard first and I see Peter’s friends there — four guys and three girls. Most of them go to my school, seniors reputed to be gangsters. They have claimed the concrete chess tables set in the corner, but instead of chess pieces, there are mah-jongg tiles. Despite the heat of the day, the guys are in black and have spiky hair like Peter, and the girls wear their hair long and carefully frozen into voluminous curls. They’re all smoking cigarettes; I wonder how smart that is, given all the hair spray in the air. Snippets of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujianese rise from their conversation.
I recognize one of the guys from my algebra class. He’s a few years older, but he’s in my class because he doesn’t speak much English. We’ve never talked to each other, so I just kind of nod at him. He gives me a strange look, as if he recognizes me but doesn’t know why.
To my dismay, Lily follows Peter to the girls’ table, where a new game of mah-jongg is about to commence. It’s hard to look away from the mesmerizing whirl of pink and green, as pretty manicured hands shuffle and stack the jade tiles expertly.
“You play MJ?” Peter is actually addressing me as well as Lily.
“Uh, not really.” I learned how to play from watching my mom and aunts, but I couldn’t see myself doing it, here, with them. It strikes me as just so Chinese. I mean, sure, I’m Chinese, but not the same way they are, or even the same way Lily is. I was born and raised on Thirty-Ninth Avenue, but my neighbors were Dominican and Jewish, not just Chinese. My parents work in Manhattan’s Chinatown and commute from Flushing on the dollar vans, my mom to a doctor’s office and my dad to a TV repair shop. I grew up hearing almost as much Spanish as Chinese, whereas Lily’s parents made sure that she stayed immersed in Chinese culture and cultivated friendships only with Chinese kids.