Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang Page A

could jump over a backboard and was on his way to six rings, so it went without saying that he had the best technology in his shoes. The Jordans were packaged with these cards that would tell you about the materials with a level of seriousness that matched the Manhattan Project. Whether it was Spike’s, Mars’s, Phil’s (Knight), or Jordan’s fault I can’t say, but we swore we could jump higher with J’s. They were a rite of passage. I remember when my friends got Jordans we’d lower the hoop to seven feet and try to dunk. Every ten-year-old back then thought you needed the Jordans if you were gonna yam it someday. The shoes were literally your hopes and dreams in a box. My mom took one look at the shoes and she knew, too.
    “Hmm, that’s a pretty shoe.”
    “It looks expensive,” my father said.
    “Dad, it’s an investment! I can go to the NBA if you buy me these!”
    “Ha, ha, man, you suck at basketball!”
    “That’s because you buy me shitty shoes!”
    “No, it’s because you’re fat!”
    I saw a sales rep standing around in the store so I asked him for a pair of size 7 Jordan Vs, but before he went off to the back, my dad had a question.
    “How much are these shoes?”
    Before it even started, it was over.
    “A hundred dollars! No, no, no, no, no, that’s too expensive.”
    “Dad, just let me try them on, you’ll see, they’re worth it!”
    Of course, Emery had to chime in.
    “A hundred dollars is crazy! We never buy anything for a hundred dollars!”
    “Shut up, Emery!”
    “Hey! Don’t yell at your brother, now you definitely aren’t getting those shoes!”
    The sales rep didn’t move. There would be no Jordan Vs that day. I didn’t even get to try them on. But my dad walked over to the wall of shoes and found a pair of orange and white Air Force high-tops.
    “Who wears these shoes?”
    “Charles Barkley! They’re only sixty-five dollars, too,” said the sales rep.
    “Hey, you love Charles Barkley, why don’t you try these shoes.”
    “Dad, they’re heavy! You can’t jump in those shoes.”
    “Eh, these commercials are lies. No shoe is going to make you jump higher when you’re this fat anyway.”
    This is how it always went. Before we even had a chance to believe in Santa Claus, my dad told us he was fake. Santa Claus, Jesus, the Tooth Fairy, and Jordan Vs never existed in our house. When I ran in after a touch football triumph and told them I’d play quarterback for the Redskins, they laughed at me. When they beat that dream out of me, I said I’d be a sportscaster on ESPN and I’ll never forget what my father said:
    “They’ll never let someone with a face like you on television.”
    To this day, I wake up at times, look in the mirror, and just stare, obsessed with the idea that the person I am in my head is something entirely different than what everyone else sees. That the way I look will prevent me from doing the things I want; that there really are sneetches with stars and I’m not one of them. I touch my face, I feel my skin, I check my color every day, and I swear it all feels right. But then someone says something and that sense of security and identity is gone before I know it.
    THAT SUMMER, MY cousin Allen came to visit from Virginia and he had on the new Bo Jacksons. I didn’t understand. We were all the same family, we were all Chinese, why did he have stuff and we didn’t? I don’t think it was money, ’cause at the time, things were starting to come around at Atlantic Bay; Dad always wore nice suits to work but Emery and I wore his old hand-me-downs or Allen’s old stuff that Aunt Beth gave us. Allen was three years older than me so he knew just about everything before I did,
and
he even had a white girlfriend. I really looked up to Allen, but he didn’t like me because when we went to Taco Bell, Aunt Beth would get the family pack of tacos that had half soft tacos and half hard shell. We both liked the hard shells, but I was younger so Aunt Beth