MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith Series) - Plot & Excerpts
On my first birthday my parents moved me out of their bedroom into this one, a room of my own. Andrew and Tim, who had shared this room until then, got piled in with Ted and Elliot across the hall. My brothers were always jealous of my space; I was jealous of their illicit late-night laughter, their sharing clothes and their being able to wake from a scary dream and have other people breathing peacefully right next to them. The night before, I’d gotten home too late to do anything besides take a hot bath and go to bed. My mother, who was sitting fully dressed in the living room watching the Cantonese cable channel when I came in, noticed the bruise on my cheek when I bent to kiss her. My mother notices everything. “Karate class?” she asked me, frowning disapprovingly. “Umm,” I said. Saying it that way wasn’t really lying. “You shouldn’t go,” my mother started. “Too many rough men at that school.” “Ba-ba wanted me to,” I cut her off. That was unfair but accurate, although I’d been eight then, twenty years ago, when my father started my brothers at a Chinatown Kung Fu school and me at a Tae Kwon Do dojo uptown, where they would take girls.
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