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Swing State
By
Abeer Hoque
“Are you going to vote?” My father’s accented and professorial voice booms into my ear without preamble.
“I’m in line to vote, Abbu,” I shift my cell to my other hand and shove my book into my backpack.
“Good. What about your sister?”
“She’s voting in Oakland, and I’m voting in San Francisco, so we have different polling stations.”
“Ok... Did you know that someone attacked our house this weekend?”
“What?! What happened?”
“It was a ferocious attack. Your mother has been very nervous since. Three times they came to our house!” His voice cracks with anger.
Maybe what you need to know first, in order to understand my father’s rage, my mother’s fear, is what happened on Devil’s Night 17 years ago. It was our first Halloween in America. I was 13 and my sister 12, my brother 6. My sister and I were too old to go trick or treating, and my brother was too young. My sister and I wanted to though, badly, with that childish desire of older immigrant children. In some ways, immigrant children are way ahead of the game. We have stalwart vocabularies that we dutifully dumb down, not to mention English is often our second language. We had learned all the
countries in the world, I mean, the British Empire, via corporal punishment, and we know what a crumpet is (though we've never eaten one before). But hum the theme of the Wicked Witch of the West, or ask us whachoo talking about, Willis, or dress up like Skeletor for Halloween, and we are baffled, sitting prim in front of the bus not knowing that that’s so not cool. Like totally. When I said dumbed down, I didn’t mean fewer words, because that would be too easy. It’s true that there are fewer different words in American teenage slang, but certainly not fewer words, and the order, repetition, and tonality is complicated enough that only a teenager would care to figure it out. For sure.
Anyway, that first crisp Pennsylvania Halloween, we had nothing to wear. Making costumes was out of the question. It would have been too embarrassing to join the hoards of department store outfitted ghouls and vampires wearing homemade princess dresses. We hadn’t been in America that long but we knew that much. Public high schools offer a wealth of social information, attainable as fast as your capacity for fitting in affords. Buying costumes, on the other hand, was an expense for my voluntarily spendthrift parents. But I’m being unfair. It’s just that I thought we were poorer than we actually were. I only found that out last year, when my sister told me we weren’t poor - we just didn’t ever spend any money. Apparently, when she needed money, she just asked, and my parents more often than not, gave it to her. Meanwhile, I laboured under a humpback of self-imposed poverty imagining that $5 for a matinee would mean less food on the table. It amazes me how 1) you can grow up in the same house and live in a different economic stratum, and 2) younger siblings always get off easier.
It’s not that our family was all “our second car is a Honda Accord” (the first being a Mercedes, of course) and allowances and Guess jeans and swim camp, and I somehow thought we were in living in Angela’s ashes. No, my father was an engineer, which as any college graduate knows is great when you’re 22 and $50,000 a year is a fucking fortune, man. But when you’re 45 and have 3 kids and a mortgage, then it’s not living so large. We lived in a sunlight deprived house in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, had a used lawn mower, a 1983 sedan on loan from my father's company, and all K-Mart clothes. So I wasn't totally off base, just more of a glass-half-empty kind of girl than my sister.
So, there we were, the night before Halloween, not dressed up and not going anywhere. Based on some groundwork sleuthing and overhearing (this was before the Internet), we knew one had to have candy to pass out to the costumed children. So my mother had prepared a big bowl full of Jolly Ranchers (her favourite) and some Kit Kat bars (our favourite). Since there weren’t that many Kit Kat bars, we were instructed to be judicious (actual word used) in our treating. The trick part of the ritual was mysterious and thus frightening to us, and we weren’t planning on asking anyone for one of those. If you know any immigrants, you know that we don't have a very good sense of humour at the start. It's too hard to laugh at yourself when you don't know where you are.
As it would turn out, we didn’t get enough visitors to warrant the hoarding of the Kit Kat bars. There were even a couple left over, but by then, we didn’t really care, because our first Devil’s Night had gone badly. Of course, we didn’t know there was such a thing as Devil’s Night. Sleuthing and overhearing only goes so far when only one person talks to you in your entire high school. I probably didn’t help matters by being ugly, awkward, and uncool (read: shy, intense, and overly serious).
While I was hiding the Kit Kat bars among the Jolly Ranchers, we heard a series of sharp cracks outside our living room window. Perplexed, we rushed to the window and instead of suburban Pittsburgh Bloods on our smooth black tar driveway, we saw nothing. This was because egg yolk was profusely coating the outside of the window. The concept of throwing perfectly good eggs at a window is something only a rich Western country would come up with, which is why we didn’t even realise what the mess was at first. Upon further reconnaissance performed a furtive hour later, my sister and I found no other houses in our neighbourhood so wastefully treated. But why?
After little deliberation, we decided it was because we were brown. Except for one Filipino family that lived way out in the boondocks, our little South Asian family were the only non-whites in town. This should have been abundantly clear on my first day of high school, but when you’re 13, the last thing you want to be is unique, and so I can’t say that I took a proper look around then, or during the following 4 miserable years.
Interestingly enough, none of us was afraid at the time. I remember my overriding emotion was one of annoyance. How the hell were we supposed to clean the outside of that window? It was on the second floor for God’s sake. The fear would come with time. 17 years, to be precise.
The next time our house was attacked (and even then, we thought of it as the house being attacked, and not us), we had almost 2 decades of American living under our belts. We had watched Peter Jennings every night, and then CNN, and then the Daily Show. My siblings and I had marched for women’s rights and then minority rights and then gay rights. My parents had funded the Bangladeshi American Association, the PTA, and the Green Party. We knew who did what, how they did it, and most importantly, why. Which made this second assault more infuriating, and more frightening. After all this time and research, because that’s how we figured out our brave new world – through logical rational study – after figuring out that being different can become cool again in adulthood, that America is more crazy and conservative than we knew, and that the Wizard of Oz is also a movie, after all this painstaking knowledge, what had gone wrong?
“People are ignorant,” my father bursts out.
I step out of the Chabad Jewish Community Center in the Mission so I don’t disturb the other voters, although I think twice about losing my place in line. A Dominican family smiles at my Lichtenstein-look-alike t shirt depicting a lovely 1950’s housewife sobbing,
Not another four years of Bush – Vote!
My father continues, “Your mother saw them the first time. She was home alone, hiding behind the curtains.”
I immediately think of Devil’s Night and our dripped egg window. I wonder if he remembers that incident as clearly as I do.
“They drove over our lawn, destroyed our cable and telephone boxes, ran over our Kerry-Edwards signs, banged into the basketball hoop-“
“When did this happen?”
“Three times they came! Saturday night, Sunday at 4 in the morning, and then Sunday night again. I have filed a police report. This kind of behaviour is outrageous. Untenable.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“No, on Sunday morning, by the time we got to the window, they had gone. And Sunday night, when they came to steal the broken Kerry-Edwards signs and gauge out a hole in our lawn with their car, we were all watching the football game and didn’t hear anything.”
Living in San Francisco makes stories like these seem surreal. You’d see an anti-Bush act before anything else, and it’d more likely be funny than violent. “Are you guys ok? Did you have any trouble at the polls?”
“We sent in our ballots absentee. That way, there is no hickery pickery with counting it.”
Go, dad. My father wasn’t taking any chances. Not in a swing state.
“I should have registered in Pennsylvania,” I tell him.
“I had half a mind to tell you the same thing. Well, go vote,” he says, charged and confident, “I have to write letters to the editors of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Tribune-Review.”
“Peace be with you, Abbu,”
“Peace be with you.”
Copyright © 2005 Abeer Hoque
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