What We All Long For

In the morning, Oku is still at Carla’s; Tuyen feels a pang of jealousy, as she did the night before, worried that Oku has given up on Jackie and moved onto Carla (and unaware that Oku and Jackie are now, and finally, sleeping together). She shakes the feeling and falls into the music with the two of them. As they listen to the jazz music, Tuyen and Oku talk about their fathers’ ability to understand it: “Order and practicality are all he sees,” Tuyen says of her own father; Oku says that his would see the beauty of the music, then ignore it because it “can’t feed you” (230).

Carla says that there was never any music in her house after her mother died. However, listening to it now helps her to understand “why Jamal is in jail and everything” (230). Carla bids farewell and leaves to finally confront her father. Oku asks if he can stay a few days, which he sometimes does, only this time it’s because he is hiding out from Kwesi rather than his father. 

Following his hearing, Jamal and Carla speak on the phone. Nadine had been by with some money for him, although she wasn’t allowed to see him because she had no identification on her. Jamal asks Carla again for bail money, but Carla has to remind him that she doesn’t have as much as he needs. He is beginning to sound more frightened. However, Carla reflects upon the fact that she doesn’t have to feel frightened for him while he’s in jail; it’s when he’s out that she worries about him: “Now she at least knew where he was” (236).

Carla thinks about going to Derek’s house with her mother so many years ago. Derek and Nadine had been together first, and they had a son together; Derek had promised Angie that he was going to leave Nadine, and when he didn’t, Angie used to take Carla every Saturday afternoon, stand across the street, and watch him and Nadine as he left for work. They knew Angie and Carla were there, but they tried hard to ignore them. Only once did Derek cross the street to meet them, but even then, he only stared them down before leaving. Another time, Angie went after him, screaming. Surprised, he stumbled and fled.

When Angie had become pregnant, he had told her that he would support the baby but would not be there for her. He reconsidered and moved in with Angie for six months, but then returned to Nadine. He returned once, then told Angie to leave his family alone. However, when she continued to show up at the house, “he was relieved. He didn’t want the feeling of crisis to end” (244).

One morning, Angie took Carla and Jamal with her to the bank and played a game with herself: as she continued on her day, she listed things that might happen—e.g., if someone said hello to her, or the bus arrived before she got to the stop, etc.—she wouldn’t “do it. […] Angie was waiting for a look that said that she existed, that her life was understandable. That was what the game meant” (245). When they returned, she gave Carla pencils to draw with, then held Jamal on the balcony for a bit. After, she asked Carla to hold the baby, and once Carla had gone back inside, “she stepped off the balcony” (247).

As Carla approaches Derek’s house, she feels apprehension and thinks that this must be what her mother used to feel every time. She thinks about Nadine having taken her and Jamal in. Despite being her husband’s illegitimate children, Nadine had raised them lovingly; still, Carla had pushed her away, becoming efficient and meticulously clean in order to limit the amount of time she had to spend with her father and stepmother.

Nadine greets Carla, tells her she’s going to make some lunch for them, then goes to get Derek. Her intention is to speak to him calmly and lay out her reasons. However, when he tries to tell Carla that he’s done his best for Jamal, Carla flies into a rage, smashing her glass of orange juice against the wall. Derek stutters in response, and his daughter recognizes him for what he is:

[S]he realized that she’d always found him weak at the core, there was always a cowardice there, a shrinking, under expensive shoes, expensive cars […] Today she’d noticed a small protruding gut and an old conceit that in his younger face must have seemed like daring but now was a calcified lechery (254).

When he tries to call Angie “a crazy bitch,” Carla flies at him before he can get the second word out, “slapping his face and kicking him” (255). She gets her things and departs. 

Oku is walking through Alexandra Park, figuring that walking through Jackie’s neighborhood might tell him something about her. When he’d visited years prior, he only noticed what he thought were easygoing parents; he hadn’t noticed her discomfort, and he hadn’t noticed the poverty of Jackie’s neighborhood.

Although Oku has never met Jackie’s father, when he sees a tall man with a limp walking toward him, he recognizes him as Jackie’s father immediately. Oku tries to say hello, but their conversation turns into a web of hidden meanings as Jackie’s father assesses Oku and his intentions. He says he hasn’t seen her, then stops, seemingly puzzled by something. Oku asks him to tell her he said hello, then continues on.

As Oku continues to walk around Jackie’s neighborhood, he thinks about its distinct lack of beauty, and how “[w]ith one thought they could have made it beautiful, but perhaps they didn’t think that poor people deserved beauty” (260). He begins to redesign the neighborhood—“an oasis of flowers, grasses, bushes, with perhaps a cobbled walk” (260-261), or a rose bush in front of her apartment building. He concedes that doing so might have cost a bit more, but that the general outlook of the residents might have been better for it.

As he walks, he begins to understand why Jackie is with Reiner: “He knew that to Jackie, [Oku] probably looked like so many burned-out guys” (265) in her neighborhood, and she didn’t want Alexandra Park to burn her as it had her parents. He decides that he’s going to work, then finish his master’s, both to show her he isn’t wreckage and as a promise to himself.

As Tuyen thinks about the photographs, she considers the best route. She briefly considers going to her sisters, but her relationship with them is worse than with her brother Binh. She decides she needs a release, so she heads to Pope Joan, a queer bar populated mostly by lesbians to which Tuyen goes when she is looking for a casual encounter: “Women who smoked too much, drank too much, did too much dope. Women, therefore, whom she didn’t have to keep” (269). Carla never understood the desire for casual sex, and Tuyen was never able to describe it to her. Despite that, Tuyen continually invited Carla to Pope Joan, hoping to awaken something in her; nevertheless, she declined. On this particular night, Tuyen finds a young professional. In the morning, she heads home, resolving to confront Binh about the man in the photograph. 

After Carla leaves, Nadine herself turns on Derek, and they argue about Angie and his responsibilities toward Carla and Jamal. Derek raises his hand to hit Nadine, then backs down and leaves. After Angie’s death, Angie’s sister had dropped the children at their doorstep. Nadine had known about Carla, but not Jamal, and Derek denied that Jamal was his. Nadine wanted to refuse, and her family thought she should have, but she finally decided against that, in part because they were children and in part because she knew “he would never be able to thank her” (275).

Nadine tried to resent the children at first, but she was unable to, being keenly aware that it was Derek “who should suffer” (276). She eventually grew to love them: “That’s the thing with children. They opened a person up. They came with their own presences and opened you up” (277). Nadine decides that she is going to see Carla and open up to her in the hopes that they can finally develop a relationship. Before that, she finds Derek at the car wash he manages and informs him that, no matter what, he is going to get his son out of jail.

“Quy” Summary

Quy opens this chapter in the present tense; it’s late spring in Toronto, shortly after Korea’s victory over Italy, the day Tuyen spotted him with Binh. Back in Thailand, Quy had gone to work for a more powerful boss with hands in “the unofficial refugee trade from Malaysia and Thailand to China and out” (284). The new boss, another monk, fell in love with a girl who worked in a sweatshop. He tried to win her favor by blowing up the factory, but instead she was now out of work and he had the police hunting him. Quy stole his laptop with all his business contacts and fled to Canada.

On the laptop, Quy finds messages and evidence that the monk had “been taking money from [a] woman for more than ten years to find a boy named Quy” (287). The monk had carefully orchestrated it so that he could keep dragging money out of her. At first, Quy considers that the monk could have been this “Quy,” trying to extort the woman. Then, he considers that the subject could have been himself: “[F]or one of the names I go by is Quy and I was lost one night in a bay, or so I’ve told myself” (288).