Wall Painting in Chicago Bar: “Richard J. Daley, Mayor”
It’s three blocks from where my Cantonese in-laws live since they moved out of Chinatown. Bridgeport, so-called: no bridge, no port, but working class. I’d thought the neighborhood tough—afraid to go out, lock your door at night. But one couple on the corner stools, who could be Torres or Rodriguez, toasts me with pints of...
White Guy
I was in Walmart yesterday, swung around the end of one aisle where a five-foot-high cardboard-display edge stuck out about eight inches and, like an old fuck, caught it with my chest. Back up slightly, proceed on toward the Life Savers. Halfway up the aisle (around the Life Savers) this black guy, twenty-five-ish, slightest smile...
Story Boy
This is sixth grade. We’re in that dim little hallway outside the closet-sized room where they sell popsicles during recess. The big boys are teasing me, but it’s friendly bullying that I don’t mind. They’re asking me leading questions. They just want to get me started. Okay, I’m eleven years old, very hormonal, both smart...
Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages
Stage 1: Fear The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the...
Closing Time
Pedro the dishwasher told me about how his sister died. We were drinking gin at a table by the window. He dried his hands off with a towel, ran his fingers through his black hair and described the way the hot water was still running when he found her hanging from a cord in the...
Somebody Else’s Genocide
After my reading in Atlanta, Georgia, a blond woman asked me, in German-accented English, if my books were translated and published in Germany. “Ja,” I said. I studied German for two years in high school and one semester in college, but I remembered only a few words—abgehetzt, schoner, arschloch—and only one phrase: Ich habe sieben...
A Bear in Tel Aviv
I saw the bear on a spring night in 2004 while walking with some students in Tel Aviv. We were on our way to a restaurant to meet the group that had accompanied the American writer who that afternoon had talked endlessly about basketball to the seminar. I didn’t know this part of the city...
Cairo Tunnel
I nudge through the turnstile, putting the stiff yellow ticket in my pocket and crossing a footbridge to the other side of the tracks, where I head toward the cluster of women on the platform. It’s rush hour. Morning salutations compete with beehive intensity. I scoot forward and back. Soon, the Metro barrels up, and...
I Am
Until I was well into my thirties, I didn’t realize this simple fact: Elhajj is an Arabic word that means pilgrim. I blame Dad. He rarely said anything about our name; never talked about his father, or what it means to be an Arab. In Islam, a pilgrimage is the sacred duty of every Muslim....
Quinto Sol
“All grants of land made by the Mexican government…shall be respected as valid…” —ARTICLE X, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed by representatives of Mexican and U.S. governments in February 1848; stricken from treaty ratified by US Congress in May 1848 “Our people were kings,” your father would whisper after handing over the day’s corn and...
Furniture, Rental Workers, Houston
Was it in high school or college? Before and after Passover I would drive to the rental place and pick up and bring back tablecloths and napkins. My mother rented them for our seders, where we had 25 to 30 people. At the rental place, was it one guy or two? I remember one worker...
Portrait of the Artist’s Great Grandmother as a Young Uncompahgre
She’s in a ceremonial lodge, constructed of underbrush, blankets and jackrabbit skins. To this day it remains ambiguous whether this is a studio mock-up or an actual location shot. Through the exit flap are visible the vast orange sandstone formations of the great southwestern desert—but, even seen through the corneal lens, these look unreal. One...
Leopard, Snowflake, Blanket, Marble, Frost
I think of the Nez Perce, called “Pierced Noses” by French Canadian trappers, who saw some of the tribespeople wearing in their nostrils small, single dentalium shells, traded from Vancouver Island. The Nez Perce were the most skillful horse breeders among North American Indian peoples. I am drawn to their jewel, the appaloosa. Developed in...
In My Aunt’s Apartment
There was a place in my aunt’s apartment, high on a shelf, in the kitchen, above the dishwasher, in a large glass jar with a white screw-on lid, where she kept the dog biscuits. Whenever my sister and I came to visit, my aunt would take the jar down from its shelf and give us...
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