On foot again with his brothers and the China woman, he kept
wishing to be a boy that year that his parents opened what they
referred to as a real restaurant. He wished for the strange faces in
the familiar space: an area no different than a garage with some
metallic tables and chairs in the center and woks, burners, a
refrigerator, and Coke machine in the front. It had taken the family so
many years of working on the street to be able to afford this space.
This restaurant was more legitimate and less beggarly in appearance
although not exempt from taxes. His parents were exhilarated for a
while until they discovered that the added customers only compensated
for rent and taxation and the same subsistence level prevailed. Soon
the mundane set in and the discomfort of working on the streets was
forgotten. Then he thought of a better time: that sweet time that very
young children have in harmony with the parents' wishes and the
fruition of love. He could see himself pouring ice and water into
small metallic cups and bringing them to the customers on the sidewalk
or making his foray into salesmanship by draping from his arms the
jasmine rosaries that his mother linked together from a long needle.
One day, as that boy, had he not just looked down briefly to zip
his pants and found that they did not fit all that well; and that, no
longer a cute or special one, he wasn't the same (or wasn't perceived
the same) being within his new clothes? A metamorphosis had altered
him to a taller and more aggravating expense and only by working hard
could he avert the faces of scorn. In those years in some bedroom or
another he found some peace. The plastic blinds had the same sounds of
fingers wedged between them as they bounced around in the December
breeze or in a June storm; and the piecemeal environment seen in the
crevices of those blinds were of the same trash cans on the same
pavement near some gravel. That had been reassuring to him. Now, he had
been extracted from that environment.