the guy in charge of the lacquered meats hanging like wet, red garlands by the window of this flushing chinese restaurant has the understare of a mean drunk. every time he finishes chopping into bite sized cubes a batch of the roast pork i ordered, he slaps, almost as a reflex, the side of his giant cleaver against the greasy cutting board while looking up at the tv on the wall by the cashier showing a costume drama, imperial ching it looked to me. an idle lady server who look very sour stands beside the free soup counter. she too is engrossed with the cantonese soap.
i don’t know with chinese parents, but my filipino mother, fully initiated into the mysteries of deep south pentecostal protestantism as revealed to her by earnest , never doubting, american missionaries to our country, raised me in the belief that because someone named jesus atoned for all of humanity’s sins, she and i are, for all intents and purposes, given a blank slate here on earth. now that i’m in the country of my mother’s indoctrinators i, as it goes so often in our lives, have now become her nightmare, a full-blown, non-church-attending pagan. i have, in my own circuitous path, delivered myself all too willingly to the yet unconvened cult, the central belief of which is that i, together with the rest of this unautonomous world, just stepped into a stage, a play, where a scene has already been set up in motion a long time ago by some forces we can never discern and there is nary a script in the wings that could be consulted from time to time, or, if at all, only with some minimal and mostly recondite stage directions.