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Secret Police, she doesn’t run around the house like those chopsticky people in Flower Drum Song singing "ching-a-ling-a-ling” with her finger in the air. She already knew how to speak English before they sailed into San Francisco Bay, and somehow she wound up launching every one of her civil rights crusades in the theatre column she wrote for the Boston Globe—even when she was reviewing Peter Pan. Now she covers symphonies, social events, and local celebrities. It’s safer for everybody that way. But Mom’s the one who taught me all about original cast albums and black and white movies while I was still learning how to crawl. (Do you know who sang opposite John Raitt in The Pajama Game? Have you ever heard of Reta Shaw? Didn’t think so.)
production of Dragon, and I once played Ethel Merman in a living room musicale for Grandma Lily. Dad graduated from Notre Dame without a chip on his shoulder and opened an independent bookstore on Harvard Street called The Word Shop, which is one of the most popular hangouts in Brookline. For grown-ups it’s the coffee bar, the chocolate chip lattés, and the lemon honey cakes. For kids it’s the polished wood walls, the polished wood shelves, and the polished wood floors. You can skateboard from Naked Travel Destinations to Socratic Theory in under five seconds. Tick is aiming for 4½. Suddenly, so is every other sixteen-year-old in our zip code. Even in first grade everybody wanted to be Tick. If he invented a word like gink, it was part of every kid’s vocabulary by the end of recess. When he wore his Red Sox T-shirt backwards because he felt like it, all the other boys started wearing their T-shirts backwards too because they felt like it. (Which, by the way, is the only fashion statement my brother ever learned to make.) But he always acted like he wasn’t even aware of it. I was. As a professional sideline watcher with plenty of time on my hands, I never missed a thing. In fact, the only day I ever remember being spoken to up until then was when some gink asked me if slanted eyes hurt.
him. Partly because “sorry, dude” seemed kind of ginky for the occasion, and partly because─thinking like six-year-olds─they were afraid to get too close on account of what if a dead mother was catching? But I didn’t have to worry about social graces, seeing as I’d never had a chance to speak to him anyway.
“Huh?” I was sitting on a low brick wall underneath a couple of spruce
day’s menu featured roast beef on rye with something scary peeking out from under the crust. Mom always insisted on adding bok choy, chin-chiang, tat soi, shunkyo, or just about anything else that belonged in a lawn mower. For some reason mustard was out of the question.
“Uh—sprouts,” I stammered. “Want some?” “Trade.” So for a week I took charge of his tuna fish and ham while he had to
plant some of it and see what would happen. Nothing grew, but all of the grass died.) He never ever said anything about his mom, and I learned pretty quick that this was the Forbidden Zone—but he told me about the twenty-foot model of Fenway Park that his dad had built in the basement and about why he thought the rings around Saturn were made out of marbles and about his Carlton Fisk rookie card and about having two aunts who were married to each other. I didn’t realize it just yet, but my future had abruptly made a left turn. After a couple of days all the other kids were talking to me. More important, I was talking to them.
dino hunters, and brothers. But it was “brothers” that turned out to be a lot tougher than it looked. Once we’d thought about it, we figured out that brothers tell each other all of their secrets, buy each other cool birthday presents that nobody else would think of, yell at each other and not mean it, and always believe each other no matter how dumb it sounds. (Brothers also share the same bedroom, but we’d fixed that problem with sleepovers─ because you just can’t play Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling with colored flashlights unless it’s dark.) So going by the rules, we already were brothers. The only thing we didn’t have was the same parents to call Mom, Dad, or Pop.
remembers who’s genetic anymore. Whenever Pop takes us out to the Union Oyster House for dinner, he always introduces us as his kids—and when we went to Daytona Beach over Easter with Mom and Dad, the hotel rooms were reserved for “Mr. and Mrs. Hwong and sons.” Of course, once in a while people look at us funny and you know they’re trying to figure out how both of us can be brothers when only one of us is Asian, but we just tell them that we have different fathers. (Hey, it’s true, isn’t it?) And nobody ever had to ask twice.
went after were quiet, timid, pliable, and all over him—but his new target was headstrong, opinionated, intelligent, an admitted pain in the ass, and she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Most people don’t like challenges. Tick collects them.
TCKeller: DEFCON 3! DEFCON 3! Did you see the new girl in the third row?? AugieHwong: That’s Alejandra. Her father was the ambassador to Mexico, so this one has substance. The Kissing Bandit routine isn’t going to work. (Like it ever did anyway.)
to look for them.
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