Read Online Typical American by Gish Jen - Free Book Online

"With a long red string. From the time she's born."
    "Well, I think maybe my ankle was tied to my husband's and sister-in-law's both."
    "Ah no! To both? To my ankle too?" Theresa protested, laughing. Then, in English, "Are you trying to pull my leg?"
    Tliey all laughed. "Good joke!" cried Ralph.
    "Good one!" Helen agreed.
    Weren't they happy, though? At least until it was time for them to move to a run-down walk-up north of 125th Street, whose air smelled of mildew and dog. It was the kind of place where the poorest of students lived, where the differences in housekeeping between the halls and the rooms were as dramatic as the occupants could manage. An economy. Ralph and Helen and Theresa had agreed on it. Yet they were belatedly shocked. So many Negroes! Years later, they would shake their heads and call themselves prejudiced, but at the time they were profoundly disconcerted. And what kind of an apartment was this? This apartment sagged. Theresa poked a finger in a soft spot of plaster, occasioning a moist avalanche. "We're not the kind of people who live like this," she said.
    But their super, it seemed, thought they were. That Pete! He expected them to stand endlessly in his doorway, his half German shepherd jumping up on them as he rambled on about the boiler. As for their situation — Was it an "urgency"? he'd ask. Only,

    yes or no, to not be coming — not to see about their plumbing problems, not to see about their ceiling problems, not to see about the crack in the back bedroom wall that seemed quite definitely to be widening.
    "Leaks," said Ralph, batting the dog away. "Paint come down. Big crack." Politely at first. Then, with more vigor, "You do nothing! This building falling down!" The result was that Pete once said he'd "swing by sometime," once explained that his boss, the owner, had some months ago done a bit of work on the roof.
    "So?"
    "Well now, I don't know that ever'thing a body says has got to have a point" he said.
    Fan tong, Ralph called him — rice barrel. Helen and Theresa laughed. And here was the most irritating thing: fly open, feet up on his legless desk, dog at the door, he'd often be thumbing through course catalogs, exchanging one for another, sometimes working through two at once. Should he be a lawyer? A doctor? An engineer? As if he could be an engineer! As if he could get a Ph.D.!
    A man, Pete said, was what he made up his mind to be.
    "That man is fooling himself!" Ralph shook his head.
    Helen, meanwhile, hired a plumber, scraped the loose paint so it wouldn't hang, walked Ralph's file cabinet into the back bedroom to hide the crack. Could this place ever be a home? Next to the file cabinet she put a tall bookcase, and straddling them, a small, wide one that only just cleared the ceiling.
    "Smart y " admired Ralph.
    "I saw it in a magazine," she told him. "This is called wall unit."
    "Wall-unit," repeated Ralph. And later he observed that it was exactly in solutions like hers that a person could see how well they Changs were going to do in their new life.
    "Not like that Pete," he said. "He's fooling himself"
    Entertainment: Ralph took to imitating Pete's walk. He'd slump, a finger cleaning his ear, only to have Theresa gamely

    cry out, "No, no like this," and add a shuffle, turning out her knees as Helen laughed. They studied the way Pete blew his nose, that they might get it right; they studied his sneeze, his laugh, the self-important way he flipped through his calendar. "Well, now, let me have some look-see," growled Theresa. "Typical Pete!" Ralph roared in approval. "Typical, typical Pete!" Ralph even mimicked Boyboy, Pete's mutt — strutting around, barking showily, calling himself "Ralph-Ralph." He paced back and forth, guarding the door with wide swishes of a brush tail; he jumped up on Helen and Theresa as they tried to dodge by with grocery bags. And pretty soon, no one knew quite how, "typical Pete" turned "typical American" turned typical American this, typical American