A few days ago I heard from my cousin in China after we haven’t connected for years. He asked, “How’s ‘AJ’ in the U.S.?” After I looked it up on the Internet, I discovered “AJ” stands for “Air Jordan”. The question “How’s AJ in the U.S.?” could be further extended to mean, “Are the shoes really cheaper in the U.S.?”, “What do they have in stores there?”, “What’s the international shipping price?” and “How are you?” So I told him I was busy with school, but would check out prices for him when I had the time. I’m afraid of my cousin, because he’s more sensitive than he thinks he is. But he’s also strong. He served in the Chinese military for two years after high school then started helping my mom with her company. He’s pretty skinny, skinny but strong. A young man like him tries to be in control in every situation he’s involved. Sometimes he yelled at my mom for assigning him too much work; sometimes he got stressed and smoked cigarettes indoors. One time I imitated him smoking in front of my dad. My dad scolded me. I giggled and pointed my cigarette at my cousin and left them looking at each other.
We almost grew up together. We have a third cousin, the middle one – someone younger than him, older than me. They would leave me out of the games they played. In his memory, it’s more ‘the two of them grew up together’ than ‘the three of us grew up together.’ The summer before I left for college, I moved to live with my mom in a different city shortly. I also stayed with him as he lived with her. My mom’s apartment is just a few minutes’ walk from her company. One day that summer, the power shut down in the neighborhood after it exceeded a maximum outage. The company had a project due the next morning. My cousin was the one in charge if things went ‘wrong’. It drove him crazy. The weather was suffocating. All rooms were hotter than the outdoors. Approaching the night when it became slightly cooler, I went downstairs to get some ice water from a convenience store. He was out for a cigarette break too. At first I didn’t notice him. I turned around and I saw him squatting on the sidewalk. He was looking in my direction. It might have been me he looked at, or the sky behind me, or the two bottles of fresh ice water in my hands. I still remembered how cool they felt in my palms, as sweat went down my spine. He didn’t move, holding his cigarette like a statue, didn’t smoke. The cigarette was dying between his fingers, glowed once, then quietly submerged in the palette of the night. That was the only time I remembered him not smoking. I was afraid. I’m always afraid of my cousin — his presence was forgotten, exposed in the sultriness, and left behind by the world, by me, by his mother, the way he grew up... I walked to him as fast as I could, as if he would evaporate in the sun the next second. The moment I saw him, I knew I’d have to deliver the water to him, for it was the least I could do. He accepted it and said thanks and told me to go home, “It’s too hot outside.” Then I went home, and he went back to work.
In my childhood memories, my cousin has been many things, a magician, a hip-hop dancer, a dropout, and the only person who went to military service in my family. In the camp, he talked to my mom about his future over the phone, then talked to my two uncles, the adults who ran business in the family; the last, he talked to his mother, because she’s the least educated. She would listen and nod her head on the other side of the phone.
Years before that, he was a magician. He played good card tricks. We sat on the couch and watched him make the cards stand on their own on the soft cushions. He said a good magician never reveals his secrets. But later the reason why he never became a real magician was never revealed with those secrets. He did college exams twice, failed twice. You can’t push someone to become what he’s not. He taught himself hip-hop dancing, and was good at it. But it didn’t do him any good when he failed the exams. People talked. Even relatives judged, but rationalized that he’s not a bad kid for failing the exam twice — he was just not well taken care of by his mother who played Mahjong, a Chinese entertaining and gamblingish game every single day of his childhood. Even after her son was rejected by every college in China, she didn’t change in the slightest. This is where the relatives reassured that, education is important to a family. Because my aunt didn’t attend a college, because her family was poor, now the son couldn’t go, because of what she couldn’t do. Oh the mother, the mother, why does it always have to do with the woman? I remember him growing up standing beside the Mahjong table then became taller than it. He was generally ignored, and often beaten; he would cry in front of us, his younger cousins, out of shame but more because he had done nothing wrong, but the mom slammed him way too hard. In China, every kid loves new year because of candies and new year lucky money that’s wrapped in a red paper bag and given by any older relatives in a family. This is a Chinese tradition through which children gain temporary “financial independence” that would last a few months after the new year. But my cousin never kept the lucky money to himself. He had to “return” it to my aunt and had to be honest about the amount he received. He knew she needed it, or where else she could have the extra money for others’ kids? Perhaps, he urgently wanted to do something with the financial situation of his family. After high school, he went to the military service. And after another two years, he’s back and ready to support the family.
I had no idea what “AJ” stand for when he asked me about it. Is it a brand just like Nike? On the other hand, he knows more fashion brands than I do. He kept himself stylish after he started earning money. The summer I lived with him, he took me on his electric motorcycle to movie theaters, and paid for our tickets. At the end of the summer, we ended up sharing a series of Marvel films — he made sure we arrived the theater on time for midnight premieres. I hugged him from the back on his motorcycle so that the wind didn’t hurt both of us. When I had a fight with my mom which made her cry, he looked at me quite seriously and warned me, “You don’t.” Old memories flashed back while the motorcycle traveled in the street lights. He knew the feeling of breaking a mother’s heart. When he argued with my aunt, they both cried. Her ignorance made him want to be a man one day, so people will listen… On our way to the theater, we shared a pair of earphones, one inside his ear, one inside mine. The wire of the earphones flew in the wind. It was a Kendrick Lamar song he liked.
“Loving you is complicated.”
“Oh loving you is complicated..”
“Oh loving you is complicated..”
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