Only once back then did Tuyen share a family detail with Carla. A letter written by her mother.
Dear My Phuong,
You do not know how my heart is open. You have seen my son, Quy? I am in hopes that he is safe with you. I will give any things I have to meet him. My days is nothing …
But before Carla could read more Tuyen had grabbed the letter, stuffing it back into her bag, saying, “Anyways … my mother’s crazy, huh?” Carla had grinned uncomfortably, and they’d said nothing more about it. After that they acted as if the incident had never happened, yet for all its unfinished nature, it brought them protectively closer. When it came to their families they could only draw half conclusions, make half inferences, for fear of the real things that lay there.
Tuyen’s father owned a restaurant on Elizabeth Street where most of the help and most of the customers spoke Vietnamese only. When she was little, Tuyen rebelled against the language, refusing to speak it. At five she went through a phase of calling herself Tracey because she didn’t like anything Vietnamese. She used to sit at the cash register, her legs hanging from a stool, reprimanding people older than she to speak English. “English, English!” she would yell at them. As a teenager she cut her hair herself in jagged swaths, shaving the left side and having the rest fall to the right over her eyes. Her mother wept, bemoaning the good thick hair she said Tuyen had butchered. Even back then she disobeyed Bo’s warnings to stay close to home, scouring the beaches, the railroads, and the construction sites at night for unattended wood. She said she was going to be an architect, and she actually spent two years in college learning draftsmanship. She dropped out before finishing and started doing sculpture at the college of art, but she dropped out of that too, saying that the people there were vulgar, no-talent assholes who only wanted to suck up to teachers and do the conventional.
After she let the others in on her sorties to silent nighttime building sites and the railway tracks, she dragged them along with her. They all loved going to the railway tracks with a twelve-pack, some ganja, and a boombox.
She was the most daring of the friends. By eighteen Tuyen had already moved out, living above the store on College Street. She considered herself an avant-garde artist, sometimes doing art installations at the small galleries along Queen Street West. With her bright face, her dark, always-inquisitive eyes, her arms elegant with silver bracelets, she became a ubiquitous figure throughout the alternative art scene, dressed dramatically in her self-designed clothing. She wore embroidered sleeveless vests to show off the muscles in her shoulders, well developed from building her elaborate installations, on which she honed her skills of carpentry, carving, and painting. Tuyen was androgynous, a beautiful, perfect mix of the feminine and the masculine, her face sleek and planed. In the winters she wore the great oilskin coat, which she had found rummaging at the Goodwill store.
There were mice running across the ceiling of the apartments, day and night, but they didn’t mind, anything was better than home. The landlord, a Mrs. Chou, didn’t take care of the place, didn’t sweep the hallway, and didn’t paint. Anything that was broken Carla and Tuyen had to fix themselves, like the washers on every tap, the broken bathroom tiles, and the blown fuses. Mrs. Chou called the hovels she rented one-bedrooms, but they were little more than single rooms with a divider, the tiniest of galley kitchens, and a bathroom where you had to leave the door open to sit down on the toilet. Neither Carla nor Tuyen cared. Carla was only too elated when the apartment beside Tuyen became available. The first thing she bought was a stereo so that she could play the Fugees, Missy Elliot, and Lil’ Kim and dance. She slept on the bare floor for the first several months, the stereo booming her to sleep, the light brightly lit. Tuyen wondered how Carla could sleep in all that noise, in all that light.
Tuyen’s and Carla’s apartments became places of refuge, not just for their immediate circle but for all the people they picked up along the way to their twenties. Like the Graffiti Boys across the alleyway, Tuyen’s friends from the gay ghetto, a few hip-hop poets, two girls who made jewellery and knit hats, and an assortment of twenty-somethings who did various things like music and waitering. The two rundown apartments were above a cheap clothing store. Mrs. Chou only made appearances to collect the rents and to say, “No parties,” and other than those predictable visits Carla and Tuyen had free reign of the place. When they did have parties, both apartments and the hallway were full of smoke and music, beer bottles, and loud talk above even louder music. A cloud of smoke hung at the ceiling and blew its way down the staircase. People didn’t go home for days on end until either Tuyen or Carla, mostly Carla, came off the friendly high of Ecstasy to find her face in the toilet or some asshole with his shoes on her bed and turned everybody out. Once, on magic mushrooms, Tuyen saw every detail in the wood on the staircase, she saw that beyond the wood there was a coal-orange glow, and the stairs felt hot and burning for a week after.
Carla had bouts of cleanliness, which could only be called violent, during which she scrubbed and scrubbed her apartment and threw out perfectly good things like plates and knives. Tuyen had no such inclinations. Tuyen’s apartment doubled as an art gallery for her installations. Carla’s thrown-out objects would find
