How long a bus would run in its current graffitied state was unpredictable. Some tags lasted months. Others half a day. The more we crushed a bus with our tags, the more likely the cleanup crew at the bus yards would take notice and buff away our tags sooner rather than later. Though none of us wanted to see our names erased, we relied on buses to get buffed. Without the removal of prior graffiti, we’d have no space to tag. To write was to accept your own erasure.
lamskino
I retired from graffiti the summer before my senior year of high school. I sensed the ride was nearing the end and began to keep a journal. The first entry: Aug. 8—Wood got sprayed w/ mace by clown.
It was a literal clown, makeup and all. He was sitting near the front of the bus. Hollywood had just tagged his name on the window that day, and before I had the chance to do the same, the clown said, “I saw that!” He stomped toward us with a painted grin. Hollywood stood up to confront him, and the guy pulled out a small device, which at first I assumed was some kind of clown gadget, like a squirting flower, until he sprayed Wood in the face with a mist of mace. He pointed the can at me. “You want some, you punk?” Some of the initial shot had somehow reached me. My eyes began to burn. I grabbed Wood, got us off the bus, and we staggered into a sporting goods store. Fortunately, the manager, a Black guy, let us use their employees-only bathroom. We told him the story, and he gave us his card. Said he could get us jobs, but neither of us wound up calling.
The entries in the journal only last for nine days, taking up just a page and a half of a small notebook. I included a crew meeting, a fight at a park, a truce struck on the bus, two all-nighters I pulled, one tagging up a bus yard. My final entry in the journal had nothing to do with writing. It was about school, senior pictures, me in a rented tuxedo. The rest of the book is blank.
Retirement came early for taggers. Seventeen seemed to be the cutoff, a year after you were eligible for a driver’s license, a year before you’d be tried as an adult. I knew hundreds of writers, bus-hopping fanatics, but only one over seventeen who was still active.
The next time I’d carry around a marker, they were for dry-erase boards. I was a first-year teacher at a school designed for kids on probation. My new monikers were: Lamborghini, Lambambino, Laminator. My favorite: Lamskino. The student who gave me this name explained from the back row, “Lam is your slave name, Lamskino is your hip-hop name.”
a reversal
I’m still a writer, but I labor over words now, not letters, sentences, not tags. Maybe I became a literary writer, a memoirist, for the same reason I became a graffiti writer: to be remembered. A graffiti writer, through their tag, screams to the public, “I will not be forgotten!” A literary writer, though not as pushy about it, says the same through their stories.
As a memoirist, I seek ways to reassemble the past. I composed my own generation poem, combining characters from the names of my relatives. Mine is a reverse generation poem, not constructed to name but from names. It contains blood from both sides of my family, women and men. No hierarchy exists, the characters and generations jumbled. Twenty characters in all, following the form of the Mao family poem, a quatrain comprised of two couplets, each line five characters. I allow myself to cheat once. I don’t use the character 甥, Saang, from my name, too hard to fit “nephew” into the poem. I break that character in half, only using the radical 生, “to be born.” Since it’s also pronounced Saang, a homonym, read aloud, my character can still be heard in the last syllable of the verse.
玉鳳英能曼 A jade phoenix has superior grace.
燕子瑞安靜 A swallow carries luck and peace.
雪約易培誠 Wipe the contract clean, replace, and foster truth.
明天茵麗生 Tomorrow, radiant flowers will bloom.
* * * * * *
chapter 5
Left Behind
the goalie
After my father moved to Minnesota, he still thought of himself as part of the family, the head of our household in fact. My mom thought of herself as a single parent, left to raise three kids on her own. If you were to ask my father, he’d scoff at the notion that my mom had been a single parent. “I was the one working six days a week,” he might say. “Where do you think the money came from?” According to the forms they’d fill out each year for the San Francisco Housing Authority, Bah Ba was right, my mother was not a single parent, by her own admission. But this was on paper. Day-to-day, she was a single parent, thrown into a game where sitting out the next play wasn’t an option. Didn’t have the luxury of a sub. And forget about double-teaming. She was a lone goalie on a vast field, the last line of defense.
left-behind syndrome
One in five children in China has a migrant parent. In a survey of these parents, eighty percent said they sought jobs in the city to improve life for themselves and their children, yet forty percent understood their migration would also negatively impact their children who they’d left in the countryside.
Children of migrant parents were also surveyed. Living in rural villages, a third said they talk to their parents on the phone once a month, and of this number, half
