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!"
