AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jane lowers her hand slowly and says, “I am.”
August’s feet hit the floor.
“I’m Biyu,” Jane goes on. August reaches out blindly and gets a handful of Jane’s jacket, watching her face, holding on to her as she trips backward into memories. “That’s my name—what my parents named me. Su Biyu. I was the oldest, and my sisters and me, we used to—we used to eat all the fah sung tong before the New Year party was even over, so my dad would hide them on top of the fridge in a sewing tin, but I always knew where it was, and he always knew when I stole some because he’d catch me smelling like—like peanuts.”
August tightens her grip. The music keeps playing. She thinks of storm surges, of rushes and walls of water, and holds on tighter, feels it coming and plants her feet.
“His name, Jane,” she says, suddenly and startlingly sober. “Tell me his name.”
“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 on a date and confessed they’d been calling her Drunk Jane because no one had the nerve to ask her name. Every lesbian in the neighborhood had a nickname—Birdy, Noochie, T-Bev, Natty Light, a million hilarious names born from a million messy stories. She used to joke they sounded like a band of pirates. She considered herself lucky, really, that the name that stuck on her was Drunk Jane, and that over the months it became one word. Jane.
New Orleans was the first place she felt at home since the Bay, but the specifics are hard, and the reason she left is gone.
Something happened there, something that sent her running again. The first time someone asked her name afterward—a bus driver in Biloxi—she swallowed and gave her nickname, because it was the one thing from that part of her life she chose to keep: Jane. It stuck.
After New Orleans, a year of hitchhiking from city to city on the East Coast, falling halfway in love with a girl in every one and then cutting and running. She says she loved every girl like summer: bright and warm and fleeting, never too deep because she’d be gone soon.
“There were people in the punk scene and the anti-war crowd who hated gays, and people in the lesbian crowd who hated Asians,” Jane explains. “Some of the girls wanted me to wear a dress like it’d make straight people take us seriously. Everywhere I went, someone loved me. But everywhere I went, someone hated me. And then there were other girls who were like me, who… I don’t know, they were stronger than me, or more patient. They’d stay and build bridges. Or at least try. I wasn’t a builder. I wasn’t a leader. I was a fighter. I cooked people dinner. I took them to the hospital. I stitched them up. But I only stayed long enough to take the good, and I always left when the bad got bad.”
(Jane says she’s not a hero. August disagrees, but she doesn’t want to interrupt, so she puts a pin in it for later.)
She read about San Francisco, about the movements happening there, about Asian lesbians riding on the backs of cable cars just to show the city they existed, about leather bars on Fulton Street and basement meetings in Castro, but she couldn’t go back.
She didn’t stop until New York.
