the Milky Way

Filed under:biographical,writing,Rob Andrews
This is how it went down

Anson handed me a piece of paper. On it, was an address and a name. Zerong. Anson had told me about this girl two days previously. She night before, she had arrived in Canada.

"Oh! She vely nice! She likes movies and dancing. I think that you like this girl." Anson gave me her backstory. When he lived in China, he got in a bad traffic accident and was in a hospital for a while. The girl was the only one that visited him daily and helped him get better.

"I would do anything for her," he told me later that evening, after we dropped her off.

We drove through the crisp January air, navigating through the city like a mouse would run through a maze looking for cheese. I doubled the address scribbled in blue ink on a small coloured paper that Anson gave me, and pulled into an unshoveled driveway. The house was large; two stories high. High class, for Fort St. John. As we walked up the driveway, Anson reminded me that we’ve been here before.

My mind rewinds to the Christmas break and I remember being here. I had dropped off a Korean girl here on her last night in Canada. Earlier that evening, we went to a Christmas party thrown by the Pentacostal Church. After getting bored, we headed to the pub, dressed in our Sunday finest and ordered a couple of pictures of beer and the best nachos in the world. The Korean girl, who Evita called "Honey-butter", was going to Victoria the next day with her brother. In between bouts of beer and mouthfuls of chips, I told her what my life was like there, and told her that she had a lot to look forward to. At the end of that evening, I gave her a big hug, and wished her well. I usually don’t hug people that I know fewer than five hours. I blame the alcohol. It’s ironic to note that the house that I found myself at someone’s last night in town would be the same house that I’d be at for someone’s first night.

At the door, Anson told me the rules for the evening.

"Speak slowly. If you speak too fast, she won’t understand you."

"Like. This. Anson?" I pantomined. No laughter. My sense of humour is lost on non-Canadians. He continued.

"And you must not look at her too much. This is Chinese Rule." That wasn’t the first "Chinese Rule" that Anson had dictated, and I doubt that it would be the last. I practice the girl’s name over and over again. Zerong. Zerong. I’m gonna fuck up the "Zei" sound, I tell myself, and we enter the door.

The doorway is packed with Whites. Anson and I are on the way in, and two twenty something women are on their way out. We introduced ourselves, Anson with more flair than I. He gets a perverse kick out of introductions, I think. Out of the two women whose hands I shake, the younger cuter unmarried one has the better handshake; as first as Andrea’s at the comic shop. They depart and we look up the stairs. On the top was a petite Chinese girl. She wore a red button up shirt; red for good luck, if my understanding of Chinese culture wasn’t fucked. Underneath, a jade pendant. Her eyes, brown as bark. Anson introduced me as "Rob, my best Canadian friend". I shook her hands, tiny, cold.

Because a lot of Chinese names are unprouncable to us Whites, more often than not, an English name is adopted. In some cases, an English name will be used that sounds similar to their Chinese name. For example, my friend Stephen’s mom is called Elanor, similar to her Chinese name of Wang Nor. In other cases, names are chosen because of afinity for the name it’s self. Alice, for example, is called such because one of her favourite stories is "Alice in Wonderland". That said, Zerong inexplicably chose to call herself "Milky".

"Like Johny To’s production company, right?" I quiped. Blank stares from both Anson and she. I know more about the Chinese film industry than they do.

We made idle chit chat. Anson tells her about his working out at the gym and how he’s trying to lose weight (he’ll tell this to anyone who will listen). He flex his arms, showing off the development from the last couple of weeks. Milky looked at him like a cat, and scampered across the room and poked Anson in the chest a couple of times. She then scurried to over where I was sitting and poked me a couple of times. This is how she checked muscle mass. She bit her lips and looked up and smiled at me.

"Rob! Your muscles are bigger than his." Milk got into my good books, straight from the start.

Since our family owns a small business, we get our gas for our fleet of vehicles from a place called the UFA. The UFA is one of those ugly gas stations that they stick on the outskirts of town so that no one can see them. Truckers and rig pigs go there to fuel up. As the van was running low on gas, I had to make a detour to fill up the tank, lest we run out of gas halfway through the evening. Anson graciously gave up shotgun, so I used it as an oportunity to grill Milky for a bit. I learned that "yes", she did like to dance, as Anson said, and "yes", she did like movies. I asked her if she sung too. A couple of the Chinese girls that I know are decent singers. Anson piped up from the back and told us that she was a great singer, the second best in the school. Then, I almost hit a deer. After sliding across the black ice, we came to a halt in front of the deer.

"That’s a doe." I told Milky, "A deer, a female deer."

"Ray, a drop of golden sun, " she sang. And so we went, ping ponging lyrics from the song, back and forth until we hit the gas station.

I wanted her to be impressed on her first night in Canada, so a plan was made. We’d go out for bowling for a while, after that, we’d go out to Backwoods, grab a couple of drinks, and dance for a while. If we were hungry, we’d head off to Humpty’s, like we did on Chinese New Years and fill our bellies with as much eggs and cheese that we could stand. As we drove off to the bowling alley, Anson gave her a quick history lesson about Rob Andrews.

"You know, Rob date a Chinese girl once. She is his ex girlfriend." I’m never sure if this is a good idea, Anson telling another Chinese women that one of my ex’s is Chinese. I usually feel compelled to tell them that I’ve dated whites and a hispanic girl too. But this time, I don’t, and I let it slide. I told Milky that yeah, I did date a Chinese girl and that she ended up cheating on me. I explained to her what a broken heart was and what it meant. She nodded a lot, so I think that she understood.

We compared shoe sizes. Compared to Milky, my shoes looked like oversized clown shoes. Considering the garish colour and style of bowling shoes, this isn’t completely false. Milky was a little apprehensive at first about bowling, but she turned out to be a bowling queen. A queenpin. Despite her protestations about the ball weighing too much for her little body, she managed to get a strike and a couple of spares in the first couple rounds. Each time that she’d knock down a couple of pins, she’d do a little victory dance. It’s hard to explain her victory dance to those who haven’t witnessed it, but I’ll attempt to do it justice. The victory dance would involve her standing on one foot, moving her foot in the same way that Wong Fei Hung would while he did his no shadow kick and waving her arms like a raver. She’d do this for a good 10 seconds after each time a pin was knocked down, and attempt to give Anson and I high fives. Due to her short stature, she’d often have to jump to do it. As the game went on, my bowling got better and better (as it always seems, apperently) and I managed to beat Anson by a couple of points. Milky’s lead at the beginning failed to keep momentum.

We switched gears after bowling and decided to go dancing. Since neither Milky nor Anson were in the mood to drink (Anson never being in the mood to drink due to his heart), we decided to head off to the mall to play some Dance Dance Revolution. I told Milky that my ex-girlfriend, Heather was a DDR fanatic, so I decided that I’d invite her out with us and headed off to her workplace. She wasn’t there, so we headed off to the pool. Since we were in the neighbourhood, I thought that I’d kill two birds with one stone and see if Megan wanted to come with us and phone up Heather and invite her out too. Checking the parking lot for her car (which seemed not to be there), I went in and dialed Heather’s number. After some prostestation, she agreed to come out with us. Megan was there too, and she told me that she did have plans for that evening, much to my surprise. On Thursday, I had asked Megan if she had any plans for Friday. She told me that she would be busy with work and couldn’t do anything with me as she’d have to pick up her sister afterwards.

We picked up Heather and headed to the mall. The arcade was crawling with mallrats. I spotted Megan, already having arrived wrapped around some guy, like a leach. Her arms wrapped around him, she kept on repeating the words "sorry" over and over again until they lost their meaning to me. I introduced her to Milky, and vice versa. After that, we turned our attention to DDR. Milky explained to me that in China that the game was a little different than it is in Canada. Instead of focusing just on feet like we do here, they also have hand movements that you have to follow. This might explain her victory dance during bowling. Who knows? Heather and Megan insisted that they have a couple of dances with Anson (he being irrestible), before Megan headed home with her ex boyfriend. After Anson and Milky were volleyed back in forth between Megan and Heather, I got a chance to dance with Milky. Despite the fact that I’ve been in band and have played music for the most of my life, I totally lack rhythm and the ability to dance. That said, I’m not that bad at following the instructions given out by the machine, assuming that they’re slow and rather clear. We danced until we had to take Heather home.

Heather and I said her goodbyes and she thanked me for the evening, always a pleasure, and all that jazz.

After she departed, Milky said "She is a beautiful girl. She smell so nice."

"Yeah," I replied. I remembered the evenings where she and I would give each other passionate kisses in my truck, sitting across from the theater. I’d bury my head in her neck kissing her there. My nose pressed near her beautiful ears, smelling her perfume. "She smells like yesterday."

Milky rubs my chin while we’re at Tim Hortons, having a coffee to end the evening.

"You are so cute. I love your chin. It’s like beer."

"Beer? Like the drink?"

"No, beer. Like the animal. In China, the beer is cute.:

"You mean a bear"

"Oh yes! Beer!"

"In Canada, bears are considered dangerous. They maul people and eat them. As much as I’m open to eating you, I’m not much into mauling."

She looked at me with a blank expression, showing her teeth, the bottom row slightly jagged.

"Mall? Beers are in the mall?"

"Never mind."

"If I punch both your eyes, you look like panda beer." She smiled. And so did I.