To be fair, it wasn’t always mahjong that kept my father out at night. Once, he enrolled in a culinary course at a local community college’s satellite campus. He’d come home with American cookbooks, and I’d look over his shoulder as he perused the recipes. Perhaps he had aspirations of a better-paying job.
My father may have also spent his nights frequenting strip clubs. On his desk, tucked away underneath old envelopes, I discovered several coins stamped with naked women and the name of a strip club in North Beach. “Your father’s not a pervert,” my mom said. “Some guys from work probably dragged him there.”
When Willie and my mother would return from her room—really, my parents’ room—Willie’s shades would hang from his collar. He had beady eyes, and the pockmarks on his cheeks made me uncomfortable. Looking at his face was like staring at a scar.
He wouldn’t leave immediately. They’d sip coffee in the kitchen. My mom would speak to Willie in “broken” English, inflected with the giddiness of a teenager. Sometimes, he’d have her sit on his lap. He’d call my mother by her Chinese name, Laih Fong, but he’d mispronounce it, unable to use the correct tones. From his lips, my mother’s name sounded like some sort of Ching-Chong Chinese.
I was set up for a variation of the Oedipus complex: Willie, the father I had to kill. It wasn’t lost on me as a graffiti writer that Willie drove the buses that I treasured. I’d cut class to mark them, some of which I knew he would later drive. I’d tag RANK on the windows, on the ceiling, and on the back wall. The final stroke of my name, the front leg of my K a slash.
two transfers
After my sophomore year in high school, I decided to transfer schools, from McAteer to Galileo. Gal was just a few blocks from my house. More of my friends went there, but that’s not why my mom signed the paperwork. She’d been shocked by my low grades, finally seeing my report card in the mail. Up to then, I’d been beating her to the mailbox and tossing my report cards in the dumpster. She had no clue I’d been fucking up, and nobody from McAteer gave a shit. No phone call home or notice in the mail about my absences. In Geometry class, I amassed sixty-four absences, though miraculously, I passed.
The teacher was a white dude with a gray afro, an ex-hippie who showed us slides of his tie-dyed shirt days. On the day of the final, right before the bell rang for class to begin, the guy sitting next to me told me the final was the same as the study sheet,
multiple-choice questions, but I didn’t have the sheet. I’d skipped the review day. The guy handed me his study sheet so I could scribble the answers on my desk. It turned out there were two versions of the final. One, exactly the same as the study sheet; the other, same questions but in a different order. The other guy received the jumbled version, and I received the replica. I filled out the answers in seconds, but I tried to play it smooth. Waited half an hour to turn it in. Half an hour of watching the guy next to me struggle through the questions, drawing triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, shapes that bewildered him.
After I turned in my test, I was given the second part. I’d have to show my work. There were no answers to select from. Our final grade in the course would be the average of these two tests. Never mind everything else that had been done or not done in the semester. I figured I already had an A on the first part, so I didn’t get flustered with the second test, though I knew I couldn’t solve any of the problems. I rested my head on the desk and knocked out until the bell rang. I passed the second test forward, blank except my name. That’s how I managed a C in Geometry.
When my mom discovered my grades, which included a couple of Fs, along with all my absences, she threw a couple of plates at the wall, finger jabbed my temple, less of a stab than a push, but eventually she acquiesced to my transfer of schools. It offered her hope.
In the second year of June Jordan, we left the college campus and moved into a building in the Excelsior, a neighborhood closer to where most of our students lived. We also needed more room. We were doubling in size. At SF State, we had classrooms on three different floors, some on this end, some down that wing, the main office, somewhere in between. The lack of contiguous space resulted in a dismembered school.
Before we began the second year, we had to set up schedules for our students. In our new main office, a former woodshop, we crowded around a group of tables pushed together. On the tables were piles of index cards, each with the name of a student and their gender, ethnicity, and skill-level noted in the corner of the card. We were to manually program our students’ class schedules to ensure balanced groupings. Losing Javon to another teacher was not a total accident.
At a typical high school, students get a new set of teachers every year, but at our school, we wanted students to remain with the same teacher for two years, for continuity’s sake. Our classes were also intended to be mixed-age, half sophomores, half freshmen, a balance of old and new. Because we only had freshmen in the first year of the school, my returning students couldn’t all return with me. I had to make room for the next freshmen class. Half of my returning sophomores were to be
