I took out my notebook, telling myself to make a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish before I turned seventeen. But the problem with me was that as soon as I started thinking about getting it together, I got this mad craving desire to fuck it up.

No one served me at Ming’s. I didn’t know what was going on. In the kitchen, a small man’s head was swaddled in steam. Our eyes met, he nodded, but he stayed in the steam. The loggers were helping themselves to coffee, just grabbing the pot right off the counter. I wanted a root beer. My throat was dry and I had a bad sugar urge. Lately, it seemed either I got a lot of attention or I was completely ignored. One or the other, but nothing in between. I wondered if the loggers knew who my father was. I was afraid they’d start joking about him. That goddamn crazy hippie called me a murderer just ’cause I chainsaw trees. I hated hearing people laugh about my father. But I didn’t really care.

The empty pages of my notebook glared at me like I was some kind of traitor. What are you gonna do? Come on. Let’s see some motivation, some ambition, some brilliant plan.

I sat there, staring at the street. Pretending I was real exotic. To do this, I had to deny a few facts.

Our Chinatown was only one street. And maybe the street was great, with sleazy show-off neon and murder red everywhere, but I’d seen fashion spreads in magazines. New York or Toronto: their Chinatowns veered and swerved, mobbed with people rushing around their thrilling lives, rushing and pushing their way through a tangled maze of maybe two hundred streets.

Some guys in the back of Ming’s were looking at skin mags. That was how I first heard about Ming’s. These fat guys on the bus were talking about how they’d go to Ming’s to look at the skin mags because there was no chance of anyone like the little lady or the baby-sitter walking in on them. This one guy was saying once he’d been at Book World looking at Hustler, and his daughter came in to buy Bop. You should go to Ming’s, the other guy said. You know, the chink store. It’s always empty; they’ve got a lot of skin mags. No one comes in but a greasy chink now and then.