“God knows how sorry I am I ever gave birth to you! God knows!”
The voice came up through the floor, hoarse and rhythmic, a woman’s cursing with a natural rapper’s cadence, and it tore straight through the middle of Alex’s dream.
He sighed, sat up, and groped for the sweater at the foot of the bed.
Ten days and counting.
Whether this life fit him or not, all he could do for now was put up with it.
He didn’t answer to Song Ya anymore, and he wasn’t Chinese anymore either, not on paper.
The name on his school records was Alexander Song, fifteen years old, both parents killed in a car crash, living with his aunt on the South Side of Chicago.
“Seventeen! Seventeen years old and already learned to stay out all night like a dog! Motherf—”
The house had no soundproofing to speak of.
Every syllable arrived crisp and clear from downstairs, where Aunt Susie was “educating” her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alex’s cousin Connie.
Here we go, Alex thought.
Where he came from, people swallowed their feelings.
Here, they were served hot.
Calling her own daughter a bitch, and the daughter’s mother a bitch for good measure, was simply Aunt Susie’s morning routine.
“Yeah? Yeah? Talk to me about bitches — who was it had two babies by seventeen?”
Connie had been taking this for years and gave back as good as she got.
Aunt Susie had had Tony at sixteen, Connie the year after, and then the hard-working father of both had vanished without a trace.
“Bitch!” That one had landed where it hurt.
“You bitch! You cold little hussy— you’re just like that cold-hearted man. Fuck you! Fuck you, you motherf—”
Hang on — I thought the point was that she stayed out all night?
Back in China, a parent’s aim on this particular subject never wandered.
Aunt Susie had gotten so busy hollering that Connie’s night out had gone straight out the window.
He finished dressing and went out to the bathroom down the hall, turned on the faucet, and started washing up.
The water noise walled off the argument for a minute.
He looked into the mirror and took another survey of himself in this life.
Grading on a Chinese eye for Black faces, it wasn’t bad at all: a slightly boyish, good-looking face, the skin a shade lighter for the Chinese half of him.
Fifteen years old, a little over five-seven, the proportions decent.
Not that any of it matters in the long run.
However he came out of this, the packaging was beside the point.
This was America.
A country where money bought anything.
Which brings us to the problem.
Fine, no special powers — I can live with that.
But not letting me keep my memories?
That’s just cheap.
Ten days of poking at it and his past life was still a mess of fog.
Math had come roaring back, and that was all.
Not one major event in history.
Not one book, not one movie, not one game he’d played.
And the math wasn’t much of a trophy either.
The South Side was mostly poor and mostly Black, the community schools taught badly, the test papers were easy by design.
Take away the one thing his Chinese schooling had given him and he’d have had nothing to work with at all.
“Is there another slacker up there? Get down here and eat!”
Too many kids, not enough hours; Aunt Susie ran the house on strict equality.
Ten days in and he’d had neither cruelty nor favors from her, and the same went for how she talked to him.
“Coming!”
Alex pulled himself together and went down the stairs.
They creaked, which told you plenty about the age of the place.
A standard slum house — freestanding, though barely, with the neighbors’ walls close on either side, and built out of wood from top to bottom.
The second floor had started with two bedrooms, one big and one small, plus a bathroom; the big one had since been split into halves.
He shared with Tony; Connie shared with ten-year-old Emily; Aunt Susie and baby Freddie had the original small room.
Downstairs held the full set — living room, kitchen, dining room — plus one cramped half-bath tucked under the stairs, no shower.
A screaming match had just happened.
So what?
Everybody got on with their business.
Aunt Susie had a spatula in one hand and her eye on a pan of eggs going gold, and little Freddie propped on her other arm, blue eyes enormous, getting jiggled and cooed at.
Aunt Susie’s newest boyfriend was white, so Freddie had come out mixed.
At the table Connie and Emily were passing the milk and the oat rings back and forth into their bowls.
Tony had his neck craned back and was emptying a can of spray cream into his mouth in long, businesslike squirts.
“Open up.”
He swallowed the whole load of it and turned the nozzle toward Alex.
“I’m good.”
Alex shook his head.
There was a new soul in this body and it had plans.
He had Aunt Susie’s build and Tony’s build in front of him as two barrel-shaped warnings, the horizontal drift visible to the naked eye.
Getting fat was an enemy he’d have to stay alert to in this life.
“You changed a lot lately, Alex,” Tony said.
“Yeah?” Alex’s stomach tightened.
“How so?”
“Mmm…”
Tony started demolishing his milk-and-oats.
“It’s just — like, a feeling. You know.”
“Well, that’s easy! It’s a girl!”
Connie pointed at him and laughed.
“Who you messing with?” And just like that, she’d gotten the conversation off the rails again.
“I—”
Before Alex could get his thoughts anywhere near her, Aunt Susie was dealing soft scrambled eggs onto the four plates.
“Shut your mouth and eat, don’t miss the bus!” She still wouldn’t look at Connie.
“Wait for me to change! I’ll be fast!” This time Connie had no comeback; she was up and bouncing off the stairs.
In America, a girl in yesterday’s clothes generally meant she hadn’t come home last night, which made changing clothes the entire reason Connie had come home this morning.
“Who brought her back this morning?” Aunt Susie asked, quietly, seizing her chance.
So she hadn’t forgotten after all.
“Don’t know. I just heard an engine.” Tony answered and stepped on Alex’s foot under the table.
Alex shook his head — he honestly didn’t know.
Little Emily shook her head too.
Aunt Susie let it drop and went back to scrubbing the pans.
“Lord. Black women…” she sighed, half under her breath.
Milk, oat rings, scrambled eggs.
Three minutes and Alex had cleared the lot.
It was 1990; the American welfare system presumably wasn’t what it would be decades from now, but for a single mother with five children it seemed to cover the basics — food, clothes, a roof, getting around, school — with calories left over on top.
Once Connie was changed, the four of them said goodbye to Aunt Susie and went out the door together.
The neighborhood looked nothing like the America Alex had pictured before the switch.
No lawns front or back, just gray weeds and heaps of whatever had been dumped, fences nobody had fixed in years, and cars in every stage of ruin.
Several houses down the block, Aunt Susie’s included, had a small Cameroonian flag hung by the door — a reminder that the roots ran back to the African continent.
“It’s cold!”
February in Chicago wasn’t just low temperatures; the wind came at you.
Emily shivered and tucked her small body in behind Tony.
Tony turned around, wrapped her up against him, and put a hand over her face to shield it.
Then all of them hunched their necks down into their collars and walked fast toward the bus stop a few hundred yards away.