Wing look like a small-timer.
Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother. She wanted to wish him a happy birthday. He had just turned 17.
#
This
scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City of
Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in
the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and
towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves
-- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in,
they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been
incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The
clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a
Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best
airport bookstore in the world for my money!
Powell's
Books : 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323
Wei-Dong's game-suspension lasted all of 20 minutes. That's how long it took him to fake a migraine, get a study-pass, sneak into the resource center, beat the network filter and log on. It was getting very late back in China, but that was OK, the boys stayed up late when they were working, and they were glad to have him.
Wei-Dong's real name wasn't Wei-Dong, of course. His real name was Leonard Goldberg. He'd chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the meanings of Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East, which he liked the sound of. This system for picking names worked well for the Chinese kids he knew -- when their parents immigrated to the States, they'd just pick some English name and that was it. Why not? Why was it better to pick a name because your grandfather had it than because you liked the sound of it?
He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it didn't make much of an impression on them. They were cool with him being interested in other cultures, but that didn't mean he could get out of having a Bar-Mitzvah or that they would call him Wei-Dong. And it didn't mean that they approved of him being up all night with his buds in China, making money.
Wei-Dong knew that this could all be seen as very lame, an outcast kid so desperate to make friends that he abandoned his high school altogether and sucked up to someone in another hemisphere with free labor instead. But it wasn't like that. Wei-Dong had plenty of friends at Ronald Regan Secondary School. Plenty of kids thought that China was the most interesting place in the world, loved the movies and the food and the comics and the games. And there were lots of Chinese kids in school too and while a couple clearly thought he was weird, lots more got it. After all, most of them were into India the way he was into China, so they had that in common.
And so what if he was skipping a class? It was Social Studies, ferchrissakes! They were supposed to be studying China, but Wei-Dong knew about ten times more about the subject than the teacher did. As he whispered in Mandarin into his earwig, he thought that this was like an independent study project. His teachers should be giving him bonus marks.
"Now what?" he said. "What's the mission?"
"We were thinking of running the Walrus's Garden a few more times, now that we've got it fresh in our heads. Maybe we could pick up another vorpal blade." That's what the guys did when there weren't any paying gweilos -- they went raiding for prestige items. It wasn't the most exciting thing of all, but you never knew what might happen.
"I'm into it," he said. He had a free period after this one, then lunch, so technically he could play for three hours solid. They'd all be ready to log off and go to bed by then, anyway.
"You're a good gweilo, you know?" Wei-Dong knew Ping was kidding. He didn't care if the guys called him gweilo. It wasn't a racist term, not really, not like "chink" or "slant-eye." Just a term of affection. And as nicknames went, "Foreign ghost" was actually kind of cool.
So they hit the Garden and ran it and they did pretty well, and they went and put the
Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother. She wanted to wish him a happy birthday. He had just turned 17.
#
This
scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City of
Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in
the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and
towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves
-- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in,
they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been
incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The
clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a
Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best
airport bookstore in the world for my money!
Powell's
Books : 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323
Wei-Dong's game-suspension lasted all of 20 minutes. That's how long it took him to fake a migraine, get a study-pass, sneak into the resource center, beat the network filter and log on. It was getting very late back in China, but that was OK, the boys stayed up late when they were working, and they were glad to have him.
Wei-Dong's real name wasn't Wei-Dong, of course. His real name was Leonard Goldberg. He'd chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the meanings of Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East, which he liked the sound of. This system for picking names worked well for the Chinese kids he knew -- when their parents immigrated to the States, they'd just pick some English name and that was it. Why not? Why was it better to pick a name because your grandfather had it than because you liked the sound of it?
He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it didn't make much of an impression on them. They were cool with him being interested in other cultures, but that didn't mean he could get out of having a Bar-Mitzvah or that they would call him Wei-Dong. And it didn't mean that they approved of him being up all night with his buds in China, making money.
Wei-Dong knew that this could all be seen as very lame, an outcast kid so desperate to make friends that he abandoned his high school altogether and sucked up to someone in another hemisphere with free labor instead. But it wasn't like that. Wei-Dong had plenty of friends at Ronald Regan Secondary School. Plenty of kids thought that China was the most interesting place in the world, loved the movies and the food and the comics and the games. And there were lots of Chinese kids in school too and while a couple clearly thought he was weird, lots more got it. After all, most of them were into India the way he was into China, so they had that in common.
And so what if he was skipping a class? It was Social Studies, ferchrissakes! They were supposed to be studying China, but Wei-Dong knew about ten times more about the subject than the teacher did. As he whispered in Mandarin into his earwig, he thought that this was like an independent study project. His teachers should be giving him bonus marks.
"Now what?" he said. "What's the mission?"
"We were thinking of running the Walrus's Garden a few more times, now that we've got it fresh in our heads. Maybe we could pick up another vorpal blade." That's what the guys did when there weren't any paying gweilos -- they went raiding for prestige items. It wasn't the most exciting thing of all, but you never knew what might happen.
"I'm into it," he said. He had a free period after this one, then lunch, so technically he could play for three hours solid. They'd all be ready to log off and go to bed by then, anyway.
"You're a good gweilo, you know?" Wei-Dong knew Ping was kidding. He didn't care if the guys called him gweilo. It wasn't a racist term, not really, not like "chink" or "slant-eye." Just a term of affection. And as nicknames went, "Foreign ghost" was actually kind of cool.
So they hit the Garden and ran it and they did pretty well, and they went and put the
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