“Biming,” she says. “My mom’s is Margaret. They own a—a restaurant. In Chinatown.”
“Here?”
“No—no. San Francisco. That’s where I’m from. We lived above the restaurant in a little apartment, and the wallpaper in the kitchen was green and gold, and my sisters and I shared a room and we—we had a cat. We had a cat and a pot of flowers by the front door and a picture of my po po next to the phone.”
“Okay,” August says. “What else do you remember?”
“I think…” A smile spreads across her face, awestruck and distant. “I think I remember everything.”
9
The party’s gone. August has been on the train for five hours straight, glitter in her hair, dollar bills on Jane’s collar, riding the line and listening to the flow of Jane’s memories. They watched the sun rise over the East River with the first commuters of the day, recorded a slew of voice notes on August’s phone, waited for Niko to return with an encouraging smile, two coffees, and a stack of blank stenos.
August writes and Jane talks and—wedged between half-asleep rastas and mothers of three—they rebuild a whole life from the beginning. And more than ever, more than when she asked Jane out, more than the first time they kissed, August wishes Jane could leave the goddamn subway.
“Barbara,” Jane says. “I was two when my sister Barbara was born. Betty came the next year. My parents gave me the only Chinese name because I was the oldest, but they didn’t want any trouble for my sisters. They always told me, ‘Biyu, look after the girls.’ And I left them. That’s … fuck. I forgot how that felt. I left them.”
She swallows, and they both wait for her voice to even out before she explains that she left when she was eighteen.
“My—my parents—they wanted me to take over the restaurant. My dad taught me to cook, and I loved it, but I didn’t want to be tied down. I mean, I was sneaking out at night to see girls, and my parents wanted me to care about balancing the books. I—I don’t even think I fully knew I was gay yet? I was just different, and my dad and I would fight, and my mom would cry, and I felt like shit all the time. I couldn’t make them happy. I thought running away would be better than letting them down.”
Leaving, she says, was the hardest thing she ever did. Her family had been in San Francisco for generations. It never felt like the right choice. But it felt like the only choice.
“Summer ’71, I was eighteen, and this band—some no-name band, total proto-punk trash playing the absolute worst shit—asked my dad if they could play at the restaurant. And he let them. And I fell in love—with the music, the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves. I went upstairs, cut off all my hair, and packed my backpack.”
In the van, they asked her name, and she said, “Biyu.”
“It was LA first,” she goes on. “Three months working for a fishmonger because my uncle back home owned a fish market—that’s this tattoo, right here.” She points to the anchor. Her first one. “I had a friend who’d moved there, so he put me up, then he took a job in Pittsburgh and I left. That was when I started hitching rides wherever people were going and seeing how I liked it. I did Cleveland for a couple of weeks, that was a nightmare. Des Moines, Philly, Houston. And in ’72, I ended up in New Orleans.”
She remembers stray details about every city she passed through. An apartment with bars on the windows. Reciting her parents’ phone number to the rafters of an attic in the Houston Heights, wondering if she should call. Almost breaking her arm at a Vietnam protest in Philadelphia.
New Orleans is blurry, but August thinks that’s because it meant more. For Jane, the most important memories are either razor-sharp Technicolor or pixelated and muted, like they’re too much to hold in her head. She remembers two years, an apartment with a sweet-faced roommate whose name still won’t come, a basket of clothes in the kitchen between their rooms that they’d both pull from.
She remembers meeting other lesbians in grungy bars—she learned to cook burgers and fries in the kitchen of one called Drunk Jane’s. The girls spent her first month watching her across the bar, daring one another to talk to her, until one asked her