The first night I went to the China Pink restaurant was the first night I heard my next-door neighbors having sex. The sound came through the thin back wall of my bedroom, in front of my desk, where I was trying to design an annual report. At first, I thought someone was watching a porn flick with the volume up. The man was just grunting, toneless, but the woman’s voice alternated between little moans and long, gaspy squeals. There would be patches of quiet, too long for the movies, then she’d kick in again. It’s not porno, I thought. But she’s a pretty good actress.

I tried not to think too hard about my neighbors, a frumpy woman with tired brown hair and glasses, and a short, clean-cut man who looked about ten years younger. They had just moved in, which I knew because they’d knocked on my door to ask for the super’s phone number, and to see if my hot water had stopped running, too. They had a baby/toddler of unknown sex, maybe a year and a half old. Live it up now, I thought. Carry on like this too much longer, you’ll scar him for life.

I thought about moving my laptop to the kitchen table—really the only place to move in my apartment. It wasn’t even midnight yet, though, on a Friday night. I had plenty of good freelance hours left, and they needed their privacy. So I decided to go out for Chinese.

China Pink was the current name of the storefront Chinese place next door to my laundromat. I had lived in Brooklyn for only one year, and already the restaurant was on its third name, though the employees never seemed to change. When I sat outside the laundromat on sunny days, I would see the same stick-thin, acne-scarred guy going out on his mountain bike to make deliveries, every day, all year. Whenever I was tempted to think things were bad for me, scraping by with my graphic design job in a crumbling Wall Street office, paying outrageous rent, eating Ramen noodle dinners at my desk after hours, I would think of that guy. At least I’m not delivering Chinese food on a mountain bike for sub-minimum wage, I’d think. He looked like he was in his forties.

That night, though, the acned man was nowhere to be seen. The inside of the restaurant was about twenty degrees hotter than the street—this was in June—and saturated with the smell of sizzling oil. There was a Chinese girl at the counter, wide eyes and an expectant face. Her mouth hung slightly open, as if waiting to breathe in my order. Behind her, in the vague kitchen, skinny men moved around in a mass of steam and banging metal. Flickers of orange and oily droplets flew up intermittently from the giant wok where one of them was stir-frying. The orange tile floor was streaked with mud, a mixture of street dust and the grease that seemed to cling to everything.

“Hello,” the girl said. Her voice was abrupt and flat, her mouth slack.

I glanced at a menu, then back at her. “General Tso’s Chicken,” I said. It had been my favorite dish at the one Oriental restaurant in Vermilion, South Dakota, years ago—deep-fried hunks of chicken with a sort of spicy molasses sauce. Sometimes there’d be a shrively red pepper or two mixed in, and look out.

“White rice or fried rice?” she asked. And in an instant, she had my full attention.

“White,” I said. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked down to scribble on her pad. Her hair fell straight and black past her shoulders, and an edge of it scraped across her writing arm. The sleeves of her long-sleeve T-shirt were rolled up, her arms cream-colored and almost baby-fattish, dotted with minute freckles. Her fingers were short, and pale veins moved as she wrote.

She looked back up and raised her eyebrows. “Anything to drink?”

“Yeah.” I pretended to scan the glass cooler behind her. She had an open, happy face—full cheeks, broad nose, eyebrows perpetually raised. They were turned up in an expression that could only be joyful, yet I imagined that in an instant, they could turn down sharply, in anger or disgust. Her complexion was freckled but otherwise clear, except for a redness around her nose, as if she’d just sneezed. She was probably younger than me, I thought, but then you never knew with Asian girls. She could have been sixteen or forty.

“Sure, I’ll take a Coke,” I said.

“We just have Pepsi.” She stretched out the “have” with a flat vowel. I started to say something, to tell her that was fine, but then she turned and yelled in Cantonese to the bustling figures in the steam.

I had, of course, no experience with foreign languages in South Dakota, but I’d picked up a few lessons from the Brooklyn melting pot. My old roommate Jeff claimed he could distinguish Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban Spanish, and I could never call his bluff. But Chinese was easy. Chatty, loud, with the Midwest-esque flat “a,” that was Cantonese. Soft and tonal, with more up-down fluctuation, that was Mandarin. More often than not, these greasy-spoon Chinese places were owned by Koreans, and that was something else altogether. Mandarin was the sexiest of the three, I thought, but Cantonese fit this girl somehow. She had to open her mouth wide for the “aa,” and her tongue flicked out—soft and pink, but agile, too, against the roof of her mouth.

I sat at one of the three tables in the storefront foyer and watched her. I opened up the magazine I’d brought, but only read a line or two, and only when she was looking directly at me; otherwise, I gave my imagination full rein. She was shorter than me, of course, but not too short. The wrinkles in her stained T-shirt stretched in all the right directions. Her breasts would be small, I imagined, but in perfect proportion to the rest of her. And she would never age, not even after twenty years in this grease-soaked armpit.

A group of Spanish-speaking boys (Puerto Rican? Dominican?) came in and ordered tubs of fried rice and lo mein. The girl was probably closer to their age, but they paid her no mind—unless the rib jabbing and wild laughter were directed at her.

She looked at me with upturned eyebrows, mouth open, and I looked back to my magazine. “General Tso?” she said. Embarrassed heat rose from my neck. I stood and took the bag from her with a ridiculous smile. “Thank you, come again,” she said, a high monotone.

Should I say something? Introduce myself? I couldn’t—not now, with the boys cutting up at the table behind me. I nodded and left, and thought about her with every gooey, spicy bite.

*

I ran into my next-door neighbor in the hallway the next morning. She was in sweats and glasses, hair loose, taking out her trash. I caught her eye and nodded hello, hoping to escape down the stairs, but she stepped in front of me.

“Remind me your name again?” she said.

“Kenneth,” I said.

“Ah, that’s right. I’m Fran.”

“Yes.”

She stepped closer, trash bag in hand. “Tell me something—has the plumber been by your place yet? We’ve been waiting two weeks.”

I tried to keep out the image of Fran that shoehorned into my head, but to no avail. She had been on top, I imagined, spurring him like a bull. Her hair had gone messy from the bouncing. I tried to replace Fran’s face with the Chinese girl’s, perky eyebrows and slack mouth, but I couldn’t make the switch.

“Yeah, he came,” I said, “but it took about a month.”

I fled downstairs, into the sun and heat of outdoors. I cursed my cheapskate landlord, my neighbors, my own sick mind.

It hadn’t been my idea to live in New York alone with no friends. A year ago, Jeff had seen I was spinning my wheels in South Dakota and arranged an interview for me at his firm. Jeff went to Columbia—he’s always had options I never dreamed of, a confidence with girls I envied. When, by complete fluke, his firm hired me, I took the plunge, an SDSU grad in the big city. A year later, Jeff moved to L.A. And my wheels started spinning here, too.

*

I went back to China Pink that very night, and a few more times the next week. I figured out the schedule pretty quickly—the acned man, and sometimes an older woman, worked the counter in the afternoons. The girl came on at about eight and worked until closing. If it hadn’t been summer, I might have guessed she was going to school during the day. I ordered General Tso’s Chicken every time, and every time she gave me the same dismissal: “Thank you, come again.” I stopped coming on weekends, so she wouldn’t think I had nothing to do.

At random times, usually while trudging home from work, I’d see the mountain bike leaning outside a brownstone building, and the man coming or going with a delivery. Whenever I passed close enough, I smiled pleasantly—was he her father? an older brother?—but he didn’t seem to notice. In those moments, I felt gratitude all over again for my relative good fortune.

In my fantasies, the opening of my eventual conversation with the girl was always vague. But parts of the middle, and most of the end, I rehearsed daily. “You’re too good for this place,” I would say. “Too good to spend the next twenty, thirty, forty years of your life taking orders behind this counter. There’s a whole world out there. There’s something better, and I can help you find it.” In the fantasy, she invited me to her home, a tiny, squalid apartment above the restaurant. It was insanely crowded—the acned man was there, the older woman, and all the skinny cooks, and they served mounds of fried meat. At some point the girl—her name was Kiko, or Ju-Yoon, or Rae-Lee—would move in with me, and finally, grateful to find a quiet space, would unburden all of the tears and humiliation of the past eighteen years. For the last part of the fantasy to become real, I would have to buy a larger replacement for my twin-size bed, but I could cross that bridge when it came.

Another thing happened during this time; I started putting on weight. Breaded chicken and rice four times a week caught up fast. So I took up running. I knew I cut a ridiculous figure, chugging along in a wrinkly T-shirt, sweating fountains, so I chose my routes carefully. I ran toward the park, the opposite direction from the restaurant, and I always ran after eight, so I would be sure not to run into her, by chance, on her way to work. My runs were tortured, panting affairs, and my sides nearly split from the early efforts, but over the weeks I improved. Better yet, I built up a healthy appetite. My body grew accustomed, after every run, to its routine infusion of spicy sugar.

After one of these runs, on a Thursday night, several coincidences lined up in just the order I needed. It was about half past ten. I had showered, pulled on a new button-down salmon shirt and khakis, and checked myself in the mirror. The extra weight had evaporated by this point, and as I looked, running fingers through my hair, I realized I was in better fighting shape than I had been before I’d taken up Chinese food. Even if nothing else happened, I thought, the girl had done this much for me. I was out the door and almost to the bottom of the stairs when I met my neighbors coming up. She wore a modest dress, he a blazer and tie. Go crazy, kids, I thought—I’ll be out for twenty minutes at least.

Fran sized me up from a couple steps below. “Looking sharp,” she said. “Hot date?”

“Well, you know.” I met the husband’s eyes and we shrugged together.

“All right then, good luck.”

I couldn’t explain why, but her generic compliment built my confidence as I walked through muggy Brooklyn to the restaurant. My quads had that spent, tingly feeling of finished exercise, the kind that hurts even as it puts a little more kick in your step. I sucked air in and felt thin, broad-shouldered, and strong. The girl was at the counter, the same as always. I started to give my order, but she cut me off.

“General Tso?” she asked.

I took a step back, a smile crawling up involuntarily. She recognized me, knew what I wanted. I had become a regular. “Yes,” I said, and she turned around to yell to the kitchen.

My confidence disappeared in an instant when she turned back. A steep slope of panic opened out in front of me. Now was the time to move forward, I thought, or risk being stuck here forever. The next few seconds would define us.

“Say, my name’s Kenneth,” I said. It was weak, so weak—the words, my voice.

Her mouth stayed open, and she nodded.

“So. What’s your name?”

“Oh,” she said, and she rocked her head back. Her eyebrows arced as they did when asking customers a question. “I’m Anna.”

“Anna?”

“Yes.”

A surprisingly all-American name, I thought. But two lovely flat a’s. I wondered how I could get her to say it again. We locked eyes for an uncomfortable amount of time, but I could do nothing—my throat had seized up. Her eyebrows stayed in their question mark position.

“Are you a lawyer?” she asked.

I laughed as my throat was released. “No, no. Why would you think that?”

“You look like a lawyer.” I scrambled for a return that wouldn’t come. “So what do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a graphic designer.” A pause. “I design illustrated material, like brochures, annual reports . . .”

“Ah, very nice,” she said, and now she was nodding. Smiling and nodding—if I could keep her in that state forever.

“So look, I don’t know if you get a night off or anything like that . . .” I stuttered. The panic went through my body like waves, but I’d gone too far to turn back. “. . . but would you want to hang out sometime, I don’t know, maybe get some dinner?” Lame, lame! Was I in junior high? It took physical effort to keep looking at her—I focused on her nose, wide and red against her face.

She dropped her eyebrows, and at once her whole face seemed to change—as if suddenly she had picked up the missing piece of a mystery that allowed her to relax. She smiled and leaned forward on the counter. “Sure,” she said softly. “I can get off early tomorrow. Come here around ten, and we’ll see.”

“All right, will do.” I was weak with excitement, but now wanted nothing more than to get out of there, not give her a chance to rethink. With future plans on the table, we had run into a wall with the small talk—but I still had to wait for my order. She went back to the kitchen, on a pointless errand no doubt, and I sat with my magazine. For once, I actually read an article.

“Thank you, see you then,” Anna said when she handed me the bag.

 

Of course, I agonized over every detail. I wished I hadn’t wasted the new salmon shirt yesterday, but went with a passable dark blue instead. I shaved with a blade for the first time in months, and tidied up the apartment, where I hoped we’d end up. I opted out of dressing too nicely, jacket or tie, since I had a feeling others at China Pink weren’t supposed to know about this outing. Anna had practically whispered the instructions to me, after all.

A new, more exciting fantasy began to rewrite the old one—I wondered, in fact, why I hadn’t thought of it before. Her parents and/or brothers, opposed to her dating outside their strict culture, perhaps with something already arranged. The two of us meeting secretly, climbing down fire escapes, running through the streets, Anna knocking on my door late at night, nowhere else to turn. Eventually, I would confront the family. The story split into several possibilities from there—fist fights, impassioned arguments, poignant moments of understanding, I wasn’t sure which direction to take it. In the end, though, I would win.

I could hardly take a full breath for nervous fear as I walked the eternal three blocks to China Pink at ten that night. My nerves were swept under with sick dread when I saw, through the window, that Anna was not at the counter. The acne-scarred man was there instead. He was taking a customer’s order and didn’t see me.

I stood frozen, debating the options. She’d said she would get off early, which explained the presence of another order-taker. But where was she? In the apartment above the restaurant, getting ready? Of course, that must be it. She wouldn’t want to go out in a stained work shirt, smelling of burnt oil. My fantasy must be all wrong —surely I could just tell the man I was here to pick her up. I stepped inside, and her voice greeted me.

“Kenny?” She was standing by a side table, smiling. “Is that it?”

To my relief, she was not overdressed, but still miles away from her behind-the-counter look. Her top was a crinkled baby blue, the collar turned down and neck unbuttoned just far enough. Her skirt was tan and coarse and wrapped around her like a beach towel, to her knees. Her hair was loose, draped over her shoulders like shiny brushstrokes.

It took me a moment to respond, since no one had used my boyhood nickname since the fifth grade. It sounded child-like on my ears even now. I wondered if she had simply misheard or forgotten, or if she’d come up with the abbreviation herself. I hoped it was her own. She could call me any names she liked, the more the better.

“That’s right,” I said. “And you’re Anna.” I gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

She turned toward the guy behind the counter and, as if cranking up an internal volume control, loosed a barrage of Cantonese that echoed through the tile chamber. He fired a few slapshots back, and then she was with me, hooking her arm through mine. Then we were on the street, just the two of us, Jesus God. Alone.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Who—oh, my dad.” She smiled and shook her head.

“What did he say?”

“Oh, he just told me not to stay out late. He needs me back at eleven thirty.”

Eleven thirty. Just one hour, and a few minutes to spare—I would have to spend them like gold. “That’s kind of early,” I said, “for a Saturday night. Does your dad make you keep a curfew or something?” And how old are you, I thought, but held back from asking. I didn’t want to disqualify myself this early in the game.

“He usually wants me home before the store closes, yeah.”

“And do you always do what he wants?”

She tilted her head up toward me, mouth open as if expecting words to come out of their own free will. With her head tipped back, her chin nearly bumped the bottom of mine. “Well, he is my dad.” She paused. “And if I don’t come back, he has to clean up on his own.”

Conversation slammed to a halt. The panic I had held off with my own voice now pulsed through my chest. Here she was, I thought. Beside me. Her physical presence, keeping pace on the sidewalk, was a strange terror. She walked with an even, methodical step, but her hair jumped from her shoulders and gave it a bouncy look. I realized I had never really seen her walk before. Nor had I studied her in profile. She looked different from this angle, her nose elongated and eyes (her right one, anyway) puffier. I might not have recognized her, before, in a photo that wasn’t head-on.

“So where are we going?” Her voice was chatty as ever, but now it was directed at me, wanting to know what we were going to do. The dingy storefronts and take-out joints on the street around us shimmered in the surreal collision of dream and reality.

“I don’t know. To eat somewhere, I guess. What do you want?” I suddenly couldn’t bring myself to look to my left, but I knew she was there, tilting her face.

“Do you like sushi?” she asked. And then she was leading me by the arm, a few blocks further than I’d planned, guiding me into a cool, clean room with knee-level tables and seats sunk into the floor. The menu was pricey, and I recognized nothing on it. I’d eaten raw fish before, and it wasn’t bad, but what exactly had I ordered, and how much? I had hit the ATM on the way over, but seemed poised now to blow it all in one shot.

“If you need help, I can recommend something,” Anna said. I jerked my head from the menu, and money worries evaporated. This was her favorite place, surely, her favorite type of food, but she couldn’t possibly come here often. I could sacrifice to treat her.

“No, no, I’ve got it,” I said. “I’m just trying to decide.”

With no apparent nervousness at all, she asked me questions, and for the first excruciating minutes while we waited, I talked about myself. I hated listening to my own voice, but her expressions kept me going, honest in their interest, open and fresh. I kept things as vague as possible —from South Dakota, college grad, a nice apartment she could check out sometime; sure, I’d met lots of great people in the city. The sushi arrived, and I swung things around.

“So, I assume you’ve lived here just a few years yourself?” I asked.

“Yes. Before that, we were in Hong Kong.”

“And you work at your family’s restaurant.”

“When I’m not in school, yeah. My sister and her husband help out sometimes, too.”

“Where is school for you?” I asked.

“It’s away from here, in Boston. Cambridge.” She tucked a piece of fish in her mouth and chewed it quickly, eyes averted.

“Cambridge?” Her dark features, the ones I had studied and memorized and built epic stories around, morphed before my eyes, into a pattern I hadn’t considered. “As in Massachusetts?” I asked. “As in Harvard and M.I.T.?”

“Harvard, actually.” She tilted her head, but down this time, away. Her face flushed, suddenly and noticeably.

I scooped a piece of rice in my awkward chopsticks and chewed, trying to let my mind regroup. “Wow, that’s . . . that’s something. Your father must be proud.”

“Yeah. He thinks I’ll find a nice Chinese doctor or engineer there.”

The clump of rice seemed to have grown to monstrous size in the back of my throat. “And . . . have you?”

She smiled, flipped her hair, relaxed a bit. “Well, you know, there’s a lot of them around. I can take my time.”

My well-fed fantasy had not disappeared yet—if it had, I might have tried to rewrite it and move forward. No, it loomed before me larger than ever, taunting me for having mistaken my role inside it. I wasn’t the gunslinging cowboy, I realized —I was the town drunk, the dwarf, the sideshow freak. And Anna was this story’s author.

How had she imagined me, I wondered, while I had told her the story of my life? An uncouth white guy she could tame? A low-class struggler she could lift from the muck? Did she think I would be her slumming summer fling, to go with her temporary minimum-wage job at the restaurant?

Any offense I might have felt, however, was matched by a new attraction —different from the first, but just as powerful. She looked more beautiful than ever, her face flushed, brushing hair from her eyes. So my first impression had been mistaken, but what else was I looking for, if not a smart, sexy girl like this, out of my league? I was in Jeff’s territory now, I thought —how would he glide through this one? I wanted to let the mythical cowboy inside me take over, to vault the table right now and pin her back with an earth-shaking kiss, drag her struggling up the stairs of my apartment, make her mine.

Instead, I cleared my throat. “So your father just wants you to go with Chinese guys.” I searched for an appropriate cocky tone, but my voice just sounded strained. “Do you agree with that? Or do you do what you want?”

“He doesn’t rule my life, if that’s what you mean.” She answered quickly, but considered the rest of her answer long enough that I wondered. “He’s got some old ideas, but he’s not dumb. He does know what would be easiest for all of us.”

“Easiest?”

“You know, if I was with someone from the same culture, same language, someone my dad could talk to. Who I could understand better in some ways, too.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, as slow, creeping sickness drained my lower body.

“He does get a little too involved sometimes, though.” She shook her head and smiled as if I would understand. “You should see the way he tries to set me up, with the sons of his friends. He shoves me out the door on these dates, then he grills me for hours after I come home. He asks me about their jobs, their parents, how many children they want.” Anna tossed her head back and laughed aloud.

When I didn’t join her, she stopped quickly and leaned forward. Her eyebrows pointed down into a V-shape, the expression of concern I had accurately imagined. “Actually, I should be upfront with you, Kenny. I’m flattered you took me to dinner, and I’m happy to hang out with you and your friends, but I can’t promise anything more than that.”

“Because of your father?”

“No, no,” she said softly, and ducked her head. “I’m only in town for a few more weeks. I would need more time to bring somebody like . . . somebody new around to my family.” She paused. “I’m not really looking for that kind of thing anyway. So.”

So, indeed. I wasn’t the dwarf or the town drunk, after all. I wasn’t even in the book. Empty outrage filled my stomach like a kick to the gut.

Anna straightened up in her chair and tried to smile. “But you can order General Tso from me anytime.”

In the space beneath my offense and self-pity, beneath my secret dreams, I had no defense. I just sat quietly for the next hour, choking down cold slabs of limp fish. I watched her as if through a long, thin tunnel, a removed observer, and I ached over every stretched vowel.

When it was over, at last, I paid all of the bill and walked her back.

The front door to the restaurant was locked, so Anna rapped the glass until her father appeared behind the counter. He looked vaguely angry as he came toward us, forehead focused in a way that accented his scarred ugliness. Here he was, I thought —the minimum-wage loser, the man I had deigned to pity. I hadn’t known his threadbare bike seat was actually a throne.

The lock unlatched, the door swung open, and his first word was something that sounded like “How-la.” I wondered, briefly, if it was Anna’s real name. They exchanged several meaningless shouts, and she glanced back at me with the same smile I had seen at dinner. Ah, her silly domineering father —whose commands she planned to obey to the letter.

I stood on the sidewalk, hands folded, and watched. It was a remnant of my old politeness training —wait until the lady is safely through the door, asshole, I don’t care how poorly the date went.

She turned away, while her father was yet in mid-sentence, and stepped toward me. The spring-loaded door bumped against her father’s shoulder and stayed open. He stopped talking as she placed a hand on my shoulder, then tipped up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Her lips were dry and lukewarm, and made a “ puck” sound as they popped apart. Her father didn’t say anything to this obvious breach of etiquette, but I could practically feel the air stiffen. She pulled away and gave me a sad, hopeful smile, meant to make everything right.

“It was a wonderful time,” she said. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” I said, by rote. It was too late for a kiss to mean anything, or even spark a fantasy. I knew exactly for whom it was intended.

When she was inside, the father appraised me with an instant eye-flick. Assured of my minimal threat, he turned away. He didn’t slam the door, but he made no move to slow its closing. The lock clicked shut on its own, with almost melodramatic finality. I tried to catch Anna’s eye before she disappeared into the kitchen, but all I saw from behind were her flash-quick hands, tying up her hair.

*

I didn’t go back to China Pink again until mid-September, when I knew it would be safe. By then, it had been renamed “The General’s Palace.” I looked up at the red neon letters over the awning and tried to puzzle them out. Was this a reference to the illustrious General Tso? A tribute to my dish of choice, perhaps Anna’s call for me to return? Or was it just the opposite, her father’s way of paying tribute to his absolute reign?

The older woman, presumably the sister, was working the counter that night. In her face, wrinkled with a few more years in the steamy kitchen, I could see traces of Anna’s hanging mouth, the arced brows that pulled her eyes wide. Anna would fade from my memory eventually, I thought, but my love affair with spicy fried chicken would last forever.

I turned around to lounge against the counter and nearly bumped into the man behind me. It was Fran’s husband.

“A little takeout for two?” I asked.

He gave me a tight smile. “Actually, I’m dining alone tonight.”

“Oh,” I said, and didn’t ask. He was in rumpled shirt sleeves, an untied tie over his shoulders. After placing his order, he stood outside and pulled at a cigarette in the awkward, overhand way of an infrequent smoker. Our food came at the same time, and I slid into a booth across from him. He didn’t object.

He chewed his sesame beef and looked out the window at passing cars. After a while, he asked, “Have you ever been in one of those situations where you know you’re in the dog house, but you’re not sure why?”

This guy, in the dog house? This sexual dynamo? It couldn’t be. “All too often,” I said.

He snuffled a laugh. “These women, man, I’m telling you. You think after a few years you really know them, you got the rules figured out. You think you’ve got a handle on what she wants, but then just when you hit your stride, bam. Turns out you’re wrong.”

He took a few more bites, then turned back to me. “Wouldn’t it be nice to find somebody simple? You know what I mean?”

“Somebody who could fit right in to that story you’ve been telling yourself your whole life?” I asked.

“Exactly.” He shook his head and returned to his food. We didn’t say much more.

I ate too much, too fast. With each sloppy hunk of chicken, I could see a piece of my future, that lonely world I was preparing to confront.