Why does another Mass times site exist? Read my story →
I built a whole self my mother couldn't find. Funded it, dressed it, gave it its own mailing address. The one time she finally saw it, all she could ask was where the money came from. A 1990s Burnaby childhood, a hidden internet business, and the morning the two selves touched.
Loading...
She is sitting on the floor outside the master bathroom, where the hardwood meets the tile. Eight years old. She buys things online the way she breathes. She picks them, I approve them, a wheel spins somewhere and gives her a prize.
This time I said no.
She takes it about as well as you'd expect. So I do the thing I do, which is tell her a story instead of a rule.
"There used to be this store called Sears when Daddy first moved to Canada. Grandpa was already in the US, so Nai Nai would take us. I really wanted this Reebok sweatshirt. Green, with the logo. I begged her and begged her, and she just got annoyed. Kind of like how Daddy and Mommy get sometimes, when you can't have a thing."
She is already leaning in.
"So Daddy got a secret mailbox. A PO Box, downtown. And on weekends I'd take the bus to pick up stuff I bought online and hid from Nai Nai. She never found out."
Her mouth goes wide. "And then what!?"
And then what. I have the rest right there, the clean little legend, the mischievous-genius kid. My teeth touch. The TMJ doctor said never let that happen. For a flash I am not in this hallway. I am in the downstairs bedroom in Burnaby, my mom sitting in silence.
I let the jaw go, slow, on purpose.
I don't finish the story.
Second day of school in Canada. The elementary playground. A girl named Jade.
"It's Michael Chang." I say it the way it sounds at home, the a flat, Chong almost.
"Cheng." She corrects me. To my own name. "My ex was a Michael Chang. It's Cheng."
So I correct her back. She corrects me back. Fifteen minutes, both of us getting hot, a kid on a new continent arguing for the right pronunciation of himself and losing. There is no version of the sound that lands. She has decided what I am called.
She puts an L to her forehead, laughing with a friend. I don't know what it means, so I throw it back. "Loser." She nails me. "Wrong hand."
Next day she looks me up and down, sees the floral lining inside my jacket, and says it like a diagnosis. "That's for girls."
I went home and asked my mom for the jacket. The real one. Nike, Adidas, the labels that meant a kid like Jade had nothing left to point at. That was the Reebok all over again. That was the begging. That was the no.
So I went and got the money myself.
It was 1998. Every business in the world had just figured out it needed a website, and almost nobody knew how to make one.
I did. I'd take an HVAC company, a shoe supplier, an optometrist selling glasses, a handful of wannabe hosting resellers, and put them online for real. I leased hosting upstream and sold it back in slices, marked up, bandwidth I bought wholesale on somebody else's T3. I was thirteen and I had 50 plus clients, and not one of them knew it.
I was good, for what it's worth. I won design contests grown men entered, once a pair of Calvin Klein frames from a catalog that wasn't even out yet.
There was a whole other internet too, the warez boards, where I ran a ratio'd FTP server and went by a different name. I had two lives, and neither one had my real age in it.
A real estate agent had offered me fifty thousand a year to move to Alberta, not knowing I was thirteen. Grown men took me seriously. So when David did, I didn't think twice.
David found me on the same forum the clients did, but David didn't want a website. We talked for months on ICQ. He gave me advice, told me how to make it big, asked how my day was. The clients thanked me and moved on. David stayed. My friends online were as close as the ones at school those years, closer some weeks, and David was one of them. I thought he understood me.
Then David had a job. Three thousand dollars, Maxima Design, a full site. I built it. Every page. I handed it over and waited to get paid.
The payment was coming by Western Union, he said. He gave me a number to check.
Nothing came through.
I was upstairs on the combo fax machine with the phone attached to it, keying David's number into the Western Union line. Nothing. I dialed again. Nothing. By the third call I already knew, and I kept dialing anyway, the way you refresh a screen for a thing that's already gone.
We finally talked on the phone, the first time after all those months. His voice came through easy and sure. The money was sent, he said. The system was just slow. For two weeks he told me it was there.
I played the part. The polite, swallowing Chinese kid who lets a grown man walk all over him. I never knew if David did it because I was a kid or because I was Asian. Either way I acted fooled, and we stopped talking. The friend part cost more than the three thousand.
And there was nothing I could do with any of it. I couldn't sign anything without my mother over my shoulder. My dad was gone. I sat there with the receiver in my hand and the worst thought wasn't the money, it was that she might pick up the upstairs handset by accident and hear what her son had become. My teeth were clenched. I had built an entire life and I had nowhere to put it down.
So I rented one.
Metrotown, downstairs by the parking lot, a wall of little brass doors. I got a deal. I was surprised they let a kid sign for one, and a little proud, the way you're proud of getting away with something you suspect you shouldn't.
Everything routed there. The money orders. The hundred-dollar bills some clients folded into envelopes. The technical manuals from the mail-order book club. The eBay packages, the Yahoo auctions. And the stuff a kid orders when nobody's checking his mail, that I took out without looking.
I told my mom I took the bus to the library on weekends. I took it to the box. I'd turn the little key and the door would swing open on mail addressed to a person she had never met, and the person was me.
It was the one place I got to bleed out of her sight.
Morning. Saxophone case in one hand, Jansport on my back, both bought with my own money.
I'd changed after she went upstairs. That was the ritual. The good clothes never touched me until her car keys went quiet at the top of the stairs, and then I put on the other kid. Hip hop was everything that year. Tommy polo, the flag on the chest. FUBU jeans, the logo big enough to read from a moving car, the F-U-B-U like it was daring you. Italian logos my mom couldn't have pronounced if you spelled them for her. A watch I didn't need. A wallet chain that did nothing but catch the light.
And I swear I walked differently in it. Taller. Slower. The kid who got made to squat in front of a thousand people, who got told his jacket was for girls, who built a man a website and got laughed off the phone about it, that kid did not exist in this outfit. It was the closest thing I had to a fast car, and I drove it to a desk at the back of the room where nobody could touch me.
Footsteps. The carport door opens.
She's on the near side of the '97 Malibu, the beige one. I'm on the far side. We look at each other across the hood.
Her face moves. Annoyance first, the ordinary you're-going-to-be-late annoyance. Then it stops. Then it goes somewhere I haven't seen it go.
「你哪來的錢？」 (Where did you get the money?)
I have nothing. School can wait, apparently, because she turns and goes back inside, toward my room.
I can't let her in. But it's too late.
I sleep on a futon. She has it flipped before I'm through the door, hands going underneath, turning everything over.
The pile grows on the floor. Stacks of money orders. Envelopes postmarked from a box she's never heard of. More Calvin Klein frames. A joystick still half in its packaging.
She picks each one up. Turns it over. Sets it down. None of it tells her a thing.
She sits at the computer and grabs the mouse.
The mouse is moving by itself.
She stares at the screen. 「滑鼠怎麼了？」
She lets go of it. Takes her hand right off, like it might be hot. The cursor keeps drifting across the screen on its own.
I reach past her and kill it. One keystroke. The room goes still.
Somewhere in that pile was a kid who taught himself Photoshop 3.5 and Dreamweaver 1, who cared too much about a menu that opened when you hovered, because there was a place where that made you visible. None of it meant anything to her.
She keeps going. Faster now, both hands.
Her hand lands on the camera.
A brand-new Fujifilm FinePix MX-1200, still in the box.
That one she can read. She can't read server code, but she knows a price tag, and this one is past anything she's ever bought for herself.
She lifts it in both hands and goes quiet. And for once I'm not looking at the wall. I'm looking at a woman who crossed an ocean for me, holding a machine she could never afford, in a room she doesn't recognize that belongs to a son she's no longer sure she knows. She isn't angry now. She's somewhere worse. She's a little afraid, and she's holding the one thing in the pile she can put a number to, because it's the only thing in here she has the words for.
In my head the wall goes up anyway, brick by brick, the same wall it always is. She wouldn't get it. She's never ordered a thing online.
She didn't know what it meant to have to correct my own name. She didn't know what it meant to have a pair of Nike shorts. She didn't know any of it.
She looks up at me.
「你哪來的錢？」 (Where did you get the money?)
Fifteen seconds. My lips stay locked.
"Oh. You're not going to say anything. Okay. That's fine."
She is still holding the camera. She is still looking at me.
「你到底哪來的錢？」
Last post: Nobody Knows I'm Here.