Christmas Wishlist

This Christmas, I would like:

1. In-ear headphones

2. A pair of soft, white denim pants

3. Two books, On the Road by Jack Kerouac and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, to bring with me on my travels until they are tattered and torn

4. A surfboard

5. Seats at a fashion show

6. Tickets to a Jack's Mannequin concert

7. To snowboard again

8. A train ride across India and a camel ride to see the pyramids

9. To learn how to play my guitar

10. To master Chinese, improve my French, and learn Arabic

11. Perfect vision

12. Time to finish my novel before graduation

13. Occasion to reconnect with the special people I have lost touch with along the way

14. For my parents to lead worry-free lives

15. A second chance to make up for my mistakes and to the people I have wronged

16. The strength to accept the fact that things have changed and some things will never be the same

17. To share the beauty I have witnessed

18. To experience a miracle

19. The courage to be truly thankful for all that I have and all that I am


Of course, there are other things I want, like a yacht in Monaco, peace on earth, or even a complete, true understanding of myself. But I have only lived nineteen years thus far, and have only earned the right to wish for these nineteen mostly-feasible things that I can at least help attain. Someday, I will be forty-two, sixty-five, eighty-eight even, and then I will be able to wish for such things that are currently beyond my grasp.

Until then, I will look forward to Christmases yet to come and smile, knowing that life will only continue to surprise me.

Merry Christmas.

Change of Weather

I'm gonna write and write and write and write a novel.

You might be in it.

It'll be a big break from these little stories and poems, like going to Hong Kong because the only decent dim sum restaurant in metro Detroit went out of business. Bad metaphor, true story.

Ok. It's raining outside but it'll be sunny in my novel. Peace.

Josh

The Great Wall

Note: 100% fiction, even though a few random details may seem to be very in sync with my life.

I was born in Chinatown until I met her.

It was in a small apartment two dirt-stained flights of stairs above a store that sold barbequed meat. My father was a graduate student at the time, and was attending class the very moment I decided I was afraid of the dark. The womb was very dark. Our eighty-two year old neighbor, who had shaking hands but was once - thank whoever the incense is for - a nurse, delivered me. And that is how I came about, in the ointment-lathered hands of an octogenarian above a shop that made money by burning animals.

Every evening around five, old ladies with heavy sweaters and white hair would come to see the store's dead parade, burnt to a delicious golden brown. There were ducks hanging by their necks in the window, their small, beady eyes now represented by a crisp, mysterious hole. Usually there were hunks of barbequed pork, too, sauce dripping from the winking, penetrating hooks. $6.50 a pound, a handwritten piece of cardboard proclaimed beneath. On the weekends, a gleaming behemoth would resume its rightful throne behind the right half of the window, and continue the succulent dynasty of roasted suckling pigs.

I visited the store often with my mother. I mean, we lived right above it. Usually my mother would order a hunk of barbequed pork from the butcher with the grease-stained apron. By which I mean, both of them had grease-stained aprons, and the aprons were always greasy. At three years old, I had developed a jaundiced suspicion that they never washed their aprons. I also didn't trust the neon-orange cuttlefish swimming in their ocean of oily sauce. To this day, I still can't eat squid, or octopus, or anything rubbery. My friends used to ask me why I wouldn't try just one piece of fried calamari. I argued back with baseless but impassioned rhetoric. They haven't tried living in Chinatown.

When it rained, the floors of the barbequed meat store, as well as the stairs leading up to our apartment, would be painted with a mosaic of shoeprints, the grey, watery mementos seeping their way into the blue and white tiles that were designed for a public bathroom. I wasn't allowed to go out when it rained unless my mother said it was ok, not even to the playground in the park. Especially not to playground in the park. The plastic slide and rubber swings were dirty, and strangers wanted to kidnap me. I would also get sick if I didn't wear my jacket with a winking green frog on it. In retrospect, that winking green frog was probably creepier than any of the hobos in the park that asked my parents for spare change.

So, anyhow, I survived. Between getting horrible acne from all the grease that floated up from the meat shop straight onto my face and getting $2 in a red packet from an uncle for my birthday (he tried redeeming himself by saying it was lucky), I managed to eke out a childhood and somehow found my way to college. That's where I met her.

She was the most beautiful thing I had seen since a dancing lion was lit on fire during a Chinese New Year festival accident. I didn't have half the nerves needed to even go near her, what with her sleek, indigo dress and duchess-like poise. Also, it was a formal, yes, a dance, and yes, I had gone stag. For all I knew, some guy was poised in the shadows to leap out, grab a candle from the centerpiece, and beat the first thing that dared approach her. But my uncle's $2 must have been acting up that night, because the only open seat was at her table. Beside her. I almost died - from fright, not excitement.

To my right was some Korean guy with large, trendy glasses that didn't want anything to do with me. Oh, did I mention it was a Korean students club formal? Anyways, as it turned out, she did have a guy waiting in the shadows. And not just any guy, either - he was the president of the club, and had to go make a speech. Everyone listened. I fiddled with my salad fork, too scared to look left or right. When his speech was over, he stayed onstage while some Korean girl recited some poem I couldn't understand half of. The Korean half. It was a very long poem, and having nowhere to look but straight ahead, I began studying my menu. Grilled chicken salad, seared cuttlefish cutlet, or eggplant for the vegetarians. It didn't say how the eggplant was cooked, just eggplant in wide, bold letters.

"I'm getting the cuttlefish. What are you having?"

I turned my head slightly to the left. "Uhh..." I stammered, "anything but the cuttlefish?"

She let a chuckle escape. "Why? I love cuttlefish!"

"I just, I..." This time, I actually turned to face her. Her hair cascaded elegantly instead of drooping wearily, her skin was delicate and smooth, not oily, and she smelled faintly of jasmine flowers, not barbequed meat shops. "I'm allergic."

The poem ended and the president returned. We didn't say much to each other after that, just small talk that I'd bet neither of us remembered a half hour later. In fact, I didn't see her again for almost three weeks, which is a pretty long time for our decently small campus.

I was down seven drinks the night I bumped into her on my way to the bathroom. "Heyyyyy!!" I exclaimed, "it's octopus girl!"

She remembered me. "Cuttlefish," she corrected, smiling, although obviously nowhere near seven. "Are you allergic to octopus too?"

"Allergic? What?"

"You know, you don't eat cuttlefish..."

"Of course not. It's disgusting. Grosssssss. If you saw how they made them back in Chinato..." I almost bit off half my tongue. She just stood there, silently. I couldn't tell if she was confused or had it all figured out. I put my drink down on the table. "Look." I rubbed my forehead and sighed. "I'm not allergic. When I was young, I watched them dangle from these hooks dripping something that was an evil shade of neon orange, and I just never tried them. I had to look at them everyday going home, because I lived two floors above the barbeque store in Chinatown. I couldn't tell you because..."

"Where?"

I stared at her. I could feel the blood lightly pounding in my head. "Where what?"

"Chinatown in which city?"

"Vancouver..."

"No way! I grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown!"

This Fishbowl Life

I was driving along the beach boardwalk just as the sun was peeking out from across the ocean, misting puffs of red and orange into the great, dark blue sky. She was clutching a fishbowl in the passenger seat, and our single goldfish floated around in dull circles. The radio was humming some quiet pop song, and I rolled the windows down to catch the salty morning air.

We pulled up at a red light. It was much too early for anyone to be driving along the shoreline, but I stopped anyways. There were no pedestrians, either, except for a hobo shuffling along the sidewalk a couple of blocks ahead, carrying a sign. I pressed the car forward as the light shifted, and glanced over at his sign as we passed. It read, "Need money for peace."

The storefronts gently bounced the sunlight back and forth as I pulled into an empty parking lot marked by a few rows of logs. I turned off the engine and we silently filed out of the car. She was still clutching the fishbowl; the goldfish was motionless, its wide, giant eyes staring forever into something I didn't understand.

We took off our shoes and left them on the hood of the car. A light wind swept the ocean's secrets inland as we walked towards the water, the sand weaving between our toes. When we reached the ocean, she crouched down among the soft, lapping waves, and I rolled up my jeans so I could crouch down in the water with her. Together, we looked into the glass bowl, at the dead goldfish, floating in circles once again. She had discovered it dead this morning.

She slowly lowered the fishbowl and the water in the bowl faded into the ocean. Then the goldfish went, drifting, floating, into the world.

We stood up. Her white dress and my jeans were dripping, but I don't think we noticed. She reached for my hand, and I took it as the goldfish floated further and further out to sea.

The sun was breaking through the waves by now, its golden embrace reaching deeper into the city behind us, but we stood there, hand in hand, until the boardwalk called forth the joggers, the strollers, the tourists, the swimmers, the cyclists, the tanners, and the city was awake. Then we turned and headed back to the car, our shoes still resting on the hood.

As we put our shoes back on, she finally broke the silence. "Maybe we should have freed him earlier." She smiled feebly.

I rolled down my dried jeans and stood up to look at her. "I would have missed his big, stupid eyes too much." She bit her lower lip and chuckled. "Well, hey," I smiled, "at least he finally found his way. Most of us don't even get that."

Then we jumped into the car, drove away from the ocean and back to our homes, our jobs, our families, our friends, our supermarkets, our gyms, our theaters, and, of course, the endless, endless, swimming.

Something Novel

There are wise men and there are dead men, and of these, he is neither.

His head swims with wine and the room sways to the heavy swings of the music, and oh! how the women do dance! The gaiety rings in chortling echoes, making light promises of how the night shall never end, like a page of history being written with a shriveling pen. But it does not concern him - tonight, as most nights, he is a star for the books, of the books - the novel of the century! newspapers proclaim, and such a phenomenal success! The top of charts, lists, guest lists, minds, everywhere and anywhere - they swear it: he lives, and how!

And now another lady adores him, embraces him, her slender arms arching ever so delicately around his neck; whiskey pours in to bring forth coquettish whispers; all around the room, they are whispering. "Oh, how mysterious..." "Such a charming man, and that wit of his!..." Charming, they decide, in an ineffable manner - much like how aeroplane bears an indescribable charisma while airplane does not. Charming, indeed, so that he soon finds her lips to be gentle and smooth, like a faint spring wind that hints of fragrant blooms. So very sweet, as she leads him up the stairs, even with a feverish shiver hiding under her polished legs, up into the bedroom as the door slowly clicks shut.

"I'll just be a minute, darling." Her smile is ever so sultry as she slides into the bathroom.

He seats himself on the bed and glances around the room. The walls are a weary pale yellow, as if jaded of its former glory, and are obviously painted over wallpaper that is beginning to peel - and just then, through the wine that swims so wildly in his head, he remembers, how once, he knew such a room, how he ate and slept alone in his fading apartment of mismatched furniture, how the refrigerator stank of mildew, and how the wallpaper had peeled and peeled. How he had been like a mannequin suspended in the emptiness that filled the void between the ocean and sky - neither swimming nor flying but ever so quiet, an unchanging speck that spun with the world around the sun.

And now, it seemed as if the world had stopped for him.

He stands up and walks over to the mirror that hangs crooked on the wall. Fifty-five, more dead than alive, and he sees the cold feet he once knew turn to crow's feet, hears the war stories he heard as a child turn to sensationalist stories of war he belches as a grown man. Fifty-five, and he is none the wiser, and all the closer to death. And for what?

He turns to leave, but just then, she slides the bathroom door open. He opens his mouth to speak, and hesitates. Gosh, she is sexy. Not beautiful, but still.

"What's wrong, honey? Don't you like it?"

"Oh no, it's beautiful," he lies, "just, um, just, why don't you turn off the lights and c'mere?" He puts on a devilish grin, a façade of seduction as medication for the tense disillusionment.

"Turn off the lights?" her face twists in disbelief, "turn off the lights? You don't like this." The last sentence hangs in the air, dripping of accusation.

He sits down on the bed. "No, it's not that." His voice drops an octave. He looks up at her, no longer smiling. "I just can't stand the color of this room."

She laughs and saunters over to the light switch. "Oh, honey, you're so funny." Flipping off the light switch, she slides into bed and the lovers become ever so quiet, another unchanging speck that spins with the world around the sun.