I met her at a job fair. I’d just finished writing my master’s thesis in Hong Kong, and was slated to graduate from grad school at SUNY Albany by the end of the year, 2008.
I’d had enough of my globe-trotting days and decided I should settle some roots in Boston. Boston is where my dad came to in the 1970s after all, with a one-way ticket from Hong Kong and a semester’s worth of tuition at Northeastern. Four years into college, my mother, who was dating him long-distance from Hong Kong, delivered an ultimatum to him: come back to Hong Kong and marry me, otherwise I’m kicking you to the curb!
So he showed up at the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport, and my mom barely recognized him. “What’s that…thing on your head?” My mom was introduced to a new hairstyle — the mullet. She immediately dragged him to the nearest hair salon and had the mullet chopped off. One wedding banquet with traditional bride pickup games and tea ceremony later, they were married. They came back to Boston and had my sister in Malden Hospital. My mom worked as a seamstress while my dad finished school at Northeastern and got a job in Springfield Massachusetts, which is where my brother and I came into existence. My paternal grandparents moved from Hong Kong to Boston Chinatown’s South Cove Plaza East. After they passed away they were both buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, where my mom, dad, and my aunts and uncles of that generation own plots in their names.
So, Boston, to me, is our American Poon family heung ha, our ancestral village. This is where I’m going to move to, I thought to myself in 2008. This is where I’ll start a career, make a community of good friends, and fall in love. Boston is where I’m gonna start my own family.
The first step in this grand scheme was to find a job. So I drove out to a job fair in Boston. It was in some hotel on the corner of Stuart Street and Charles Street South. I met her there, a pretty young white woman about my age also looking for a job. She was tall and thin, maybe 5’7”, with white skin and brown freckles, blue eyes and long brown hair. I got her number, and over the next 48 hours couldn’t decide whether I should call or text. You see in 2008 it wasn’t considered creepy or desperate to call a girl, rather than text. In fact, it was considered sweet.
So, following the cardinal rule of when you’re supposed to call, I called two days later. We made some easy chit chat, and I set something up for the weekend: Saturday evening, Penang, a Malaysian restaurant in Chinatown.
Penang because the ambiance is nice. And by that, I mean your shoes don’t stick to the floors of the bathroom like they’re double-sided duct tape, as they do in some Chinatown establishments. Chinatown because it’s all I know in Boston. That, and the Museum of Science because my dad had high hopes that my siblings and I would follow in his footsteps and become engineers, or scientists, or anything that’s not a “waste of time”. It was also close to Boston Common and the Public Gardens, where we could take a romantic stroll after dinner. It’s important to be strategic in planning these things!
Saturday rolled around and I spent a minute flipping through the nice button-down shirts and slacks I owned. Once I had those on I spent a good chunk of time on my hair, because its my greatest asset. Once I got that into place I hopped into the family ’94 C-class Mercedes Benz, a car that’s been handed down through the decades from family friend to aunt, and then to me. I drive the hour and a half down the Mass Pike from my parent’s home in Wilbraham, MA to Boston Chinatown.
To this day I remember the table we sat at. I can see it whenever I walk by Penang and look through the windows. She sat with the exposed brick wall at her back and I was opposite her. The restaurant’s decor features a lot of bamboo and twine wrapped around the joins. It tries too hard to be exotic, with sections of the restaurant scaffolded with faux bamboo huts. Even the chairs are styled with bamboo as backrests.
Dinner itself was uneventful, save for the fact she didn’t like the Hainanese chicken. “Why are there still bones in this chicken?” she asked in surprise and disgust as she poked at it with one of her chopsticks. “And why is the skin still on it?” I grew up with this stuff, it’s how my mom prepared chicken.
As I’d planned, we walked around Boston Common and the Public Garden after dinner. I remember walking around here as a kid when my family came out to Boston. Me and my brother would chase the pigeons. I remember the place felt big, like it’d take a day to walk from one end to the other. And there were lots of people. Sometimes my mom and dad bought us fried dough from the stands. I liked that they were doused in sugar. I wanted to grab hold of these sweet yet mundane memories. Moving to Boston at 25 years old was about continuing my family’s story here, and I was excited for the potential. Someday, I thought, I’d take romantic strolls in the Public Garden with my girlfriend, on a double or triple date with good friends. One day it would be my kids chasing pigeons and eating sugary fried dough that I bought them.
So here I was, making it happen, taking my first romantic stroll through the Public Garden to see if she’d be that special someone I’d make all these sweet new memories with.
Indeed, she did leave me with a memory, there on the soil of the Boston Public Garden. It’s a memory I’ll never forget.
“I have to pee,” she said.
“Okay, should we go find a — “
“No, I think I’ll go right here,” she insisted.
“Um…”
“There’s nobody around, right?” she asked.
“For Christ’s sake, it’s the Boston Public Garden! There’s lots of people around.”
“It’s dark. It’s night time. Nobody will see me. Fuck it, I’m going behind this tree.” My date hiked her skirt up. “I’m doing it!”
She pulled her panties down, and squat next to the tree. I was stunned and silent as I listened to the sound of her urine hitting soil and saw a pool of it forming by her feet.
I didn’t know all that was going to happen in the next ten years: the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Black lives matter and #metoo; as for my personal life there were countless dates from online dating apps, girlfriends that came and went, sibling conflict, girlfriend conflict, sibling-girlfriend conflict, the death of a parent, bribery, gaining community, losing community, betrayal, lust, loss, love.
All of that was ahead of me in that moment.
The sound of her urinating stopped. She pulled her panties back up, then she patted her skirt, as if nothing out of the ordinary just happened. And with that, my love life in Boston began.
This blog is published with permission from Felix Poon, to read more blogs by Felix, click here.