Cheese

Mr. Shiu

I come home. No one there. Good. Then she comes. My wife. She doesn’t usually come so easily. I usually have to call after her for hours. She comes out of the bed room. She is happy to see me. Good.

No one knows. I have cheese. In my jacket. Got it just now. It’s surprise cheese. No one knows I have it. I don’t know. Cheese is okay. Cheese is respected in the United States. Every American must eat cheese. Cheese is where Americans unite. It’s like that Beatles song: “Come together/Right now/Over Cheese.” Am I mistaken? There’s nothing wrong with cheese.

I try to ignore my wife. Not attract her attention. I say hi. I say I love you, honey. She looks at me as if she can see I have cheese. I say, honey-pot. As in I love you, honey pot, but I don’t say I love you again. Once is enough. I walk to the door. My son’s room. I knock. Open the door. He’s reading Son of Satan comic books. I say hi. He says hi. Silence. I want to tell him about the cheese. I want it to be our secret from his mother. But what does that mean: Son of Satan? I don’t know what to say, what to think about Son of Satan comic books. So I save the secret for another day. I ask him how he’s doing in school.

Irvine Shiu

My name is Irvine Shiu. I am fourteen years old and a freshman in high school. My sister is named Berkeley and thirteen and a half. My father has a thing for University of California schools. He is also Satan.

I am the son of Satan. Let me explain. When he said, “I love you” to Mom, I knew there was something wrong. He doesn’t mean anything like that. He walked into his room right afterward and started with his cursing of Wallace and calling for tea. He talked about Wallace for a while with Mom, and then Mom left the room to cook dinner, and he added a few things about Wallace as she walked out the door. And then as I got the newspaper from out of the living room, he screamed for my mother to get him some tea as he lay on the bed casting an evil spell on Wallace, and in Chinese, of course. Whenever he speaks about Wallace, he says it in Chinese so I don’t know what he’s talking about. To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for Wallace; he probably has to listen to my father criticizing him, and with a bad accent too: “Walrus,” I can hear him say, “You must nern to have some initiative.” That’s what he tells me: to learn initiative and ambition.

I get the newspaper when he comes home and lays in bed on top of the big pillow and his “little wife” pillow, which is an old, yellowed and browned pillow filled with probably the softest material known to man. It’s probably so soft because he keeps it between his legs all day and night, or under his greasy hair. I imagine the pillow melts to a degree. Anyway it never fails. Just as I am about to walk into his room with his newspaper, he yells out the door, “Irvine! Get the newspaper!”

He loves to tell people to do things they are already doing. Or tell them things they already know, like when he talked to me at my bedroom door, he told me to study hard. I know that already. If I don’t get an A in my Biology class, we’re going to do something “educational” to my comic book collection. That might mean like a scientific experiment involving, say, acid or combustion. He’s a professor of Molecular Biology at Texas A&M.

I give him the newspaper and he looks at me like he is going to say something. He’s always surprised at my “initiative” when I get...