“How long did we keep you waiting?” I said.
“I don’t know.” Yunie held up her phone. “I’ve been too busy playing this game you made to notice the time. How many levels does it have?”
“They’re procedurally generated on the client, so . . . infinity?”
She shook her head. “That’s evil. People are going to waste their lives trying to beat this thing.”
The game that I’d made as coding practice wasn’t very complicated. You played as a little monkey trying to hop between clouds. If you fell, you had a limited number of special items you could use to save yourself, the most common being an iron pole that extended all the way to the pits of death below and propped you back up to safety.
Rutsuo Huang, our school’s resident CompSci wiz, had to look over my shoulder a lot while I developed it. Over the course of our hangouts in the computer labs, I got to see a new side of my quiet, unassuming classmate, the one that had utter contempt for a half-assed job. I could have made the game in much less time if he hadn’t scowled most of my early code into oblivion.
“I never fixed the randomization,” I said. “It’s too hard, and you end up dying every other round. I don’t think anyone’s actually going to play it for real.”
“Uhh, I don’t know about that,” said Yunie. “This says you’re number ninety-six out of one hundred on the app store.”
The three of us gathered around her phone. Sure enough, Monkey King Jumps to Heaven was right there on the bottom of the chart.
“You have to have a ton of users to get any rank at all,” Yunie said. “This is a pretty big deal.”
“Woo!” Quentin shouted, raising his fists into the air. “I’m going to be famous!”
“You’re already famous, you dip,” I said. “I learned who you were through one of the oldest stories still being told. You are literally legendary.”
Quentin grinned. “Yeah, but now I’m going to be New Economy famous. I’ve gone multi-platform.”
I flipped up the hood over his face.
6
Yunie couldn’t stay for dinner despite my mother’s impassioned pleas. She had a prior commitment at her aunt’s, and blood marginally won out in that scenario. But Quentin knew he had to stick around. There was no way in hell that my mother was going zero-for-two on feeding her favorite people in the world.
He sat next to me at our kitchen table while Mom cooked and I brought her up to speed on what happened at school. Today had been so hectic that my promotion on the volleyball team felt like ancient history. It had already petrified. I had to dig the story out from the surrounding layers carefully for my mother, without getting any residue of gods or demons on it.
“Captain?” she said, tossing a pan of string beans into the air and catching them over the burner without looking. “What’s so good about that?”
Yes, she was doing the denigrate my child’s accomplishments compared to other people’s kids thing. But in her defense, the last time she’d heard the term used in relation to one of my sports teams was in grade school gym class, where each kid took turns being the “captain” so everyone would get a chance to feel in charge. It made very little sense on the days we did Parachute.
“It’s a big deal,” Quentin reassured her. “Varsity captain is a position with a huge amount of prestige. It looks great on college applications.” He sat next to me at the table and placed a hand on mine like we were announcing a newborn.
Such a public gesture of affection and commitment made me flinch. “Why are you talking like you’re the expert?” I said, snatching my hand away. “What were you ever captain of?”
“Nothing.” He grinned. “That’s why I was such a horrible person when I was younger.”
I thought back to the story of Sun Wukong. You could have argued that he was technically the head of Team Xuanzang on their quests to find the holy sutras, with Sandy and Pigsy as the subordinates he regularly trod underfoot. But beating the freshmen into submission wasn’t a leadership style I wanted to emulate. Despite what had happened today with the yaoguai.
“It’s going to help a lot when you’re searching for a job, too,” Quentin said. “Companies want to recruit leaders out of college. It’s the number one thing they look for.”
He’d oversold the concept a little, jumping a couple of steps. I didn’t know how he came upon that factoid. “Jobs are like . . . ugh. That’s thinking too far ahead right now.”
“You don’t need to worry about what happens after school,” Mom said over her shoulder. “If you can’t find a job, Quentin will take care of you.”
Quentin’s eyes went wide, like a boxing referee who noticed both fighters were suddenly holding knives. He waved his hands at me behind my mother’s back to show he didn’t share her opinion on the matter.
I took a breath through my nostrils so deep I could have made a wish on a birthday cake. By the time I counted to three and exhaled, the dangerous moment had passed. It was okay. Another one of my mother’s stupid, old-fashioned statements. Not worth picking a whole fight from scratch about.
I felt proud of myself. I was the embodiment of serenity and forgiveness.
“No one has considered whether or not I have time to be captain,” I said. “You know. Given my other extracurriculars?” I made a hint-hint face at Quentin.
“If it’s valuable, then make the time,” Mom said. A mouthwatering bloom of garlic and ginger filled the air as she added the aromatics to the pan. The smell would last in our cramped, unventilated kitchen until tomorrow. “You always have more time than you think, lying around in little bits. Back when your father and I were opening the furniture store, we were so busy that we used to make schedules of what we were doing in fifteen-minute . . .”
She paused. I looked away. I’d seen this before; the sentence wasn’t going to be finished.
The experience of those days, of the unmitigated disaster that was my father, and really my mother, too, going into business for themselves, had surfaced in the disguise of a wistful memory. The clash of feelings caused my mother to short-circuit.
I might have had an American set of values to help relieve the pressure caused by the tragedy. Stuff happens. People change. TV’s too good right now to care.
But to her, what had happened to our family was a fermenting cauldron of bitterness that would only grow thicker and fouler over time. It would be there forever. Asian parents did not have the widest psychological toolset.
Quentin tried to break the silence. “You know, you could make things easier for yourself by delegating. Create an assistant captain position.”
Yeah right. He’d seen how well that worked with Guanyin. Trying to command someone who’d been passed over for your job was only a good idea on paper. The other seniors who’d been playing the sport way longer than me would looove taking my orders. And forget the young’uns. This incoming crop of sophomores and freshmen barely knew which side of the net was theirs.
And secondly, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Mom’s mood had infected me, ruining my short-lived moment of tranquility, and the two of us had regressed into the emotional state we’d spent most of the last five years in. Mother and daughter were both sullen cocoons now. Who knew when we’d emerge. It certainly wouldn’t be this evening.