Chapter 1: Thoughts

The sounds of cars passing by on the freeway mesh with the rain on the sunroof, creating a sea of white noise. As I write this, ashen blank clouds drift across the dark night sky. Buildings scroll by in parallax and the occasional imperfections in the paved highway road jostle me in my seat. The rainy windows cast rolling shadows from tall looming light posts along the street. A dim phone screen stares at me as I slowly type out in the notes app.

Slowing down to a milder speed, the car takes the ramp off the highway, stopping at an intersection. The Mazda is heading for a restaurant, presumably a Chinese one, that’s what these Saturday night family excursions usually are. Lights blinking as my father signals right, we turn into traffic.

Accelerating, traffic begins to swiftly pass by again.

Soon, the visage of an outdoor strip mall approaches on the right. Once again, my father signals right, and we turn into a car park in front of the stores. The parking is unusually full, but scanning the area for spots, father rolls forward behind another vehicle to a lot.

Turning sharply into the rectangular box framed by yellow lines, the car shifts into park, and the dashboard hums lightly before dimming, and turning off entirely.

My mother, riding shotgun, stretches her arms as far up as the car will allow, “Finally, we’re here,” she exhales and turns to exit the car. I unclip my seatbelt, and make to exit as well. Grasping the handle on my left, I open the car door.

Stepping out of the Mazda, the numerous light poles in the parking lot flood my vision with bright light. My eyes had acclimated to the lower level of illumination in the car, caused by tinted windows filtering out harsher tones. Unused to the light, it takes a moment of orientation before I can see my brother stepping out of the opposite side of the car. The sound of all four car doors closing shut with momentum one after the other can be heard as we walk away from the car.

My father makes a contemplative noise and notes a passing remark, “We never park the far out from the restaurant, seems really busy tonight,” I respond mindlessly with a gentle grunt indicating some agreement. To my right I can hear my brother make a similar response. The restaurant my father was referring to stood to the right of where we parked. A neon sign reads “Crown Royal Seafood”, alongside some bright pictures of said seafood. Walking towards the storefront, a busy Chinese diner can be seen operating. Underneath the sign, windows show the faces of families eating with mostly happy faces. Stepping up to the glass door, I pull open to enter the restaurant.

My grandmother and uncle have already arrived, I know that. So I walk to the back of the restaurant, with my family trailing behind, to meet them sitting around a circular table. “Hello Mama, hello uncle” I greet and nod as I pull out one of the six chairs at the table to sit down on. My uncle nods back with a smile, “Good evening Jun”, Mama does the same, albeit with some more enthusiasm, “Good evening!”. “Jun, can you take my jacket and hang it up on your chair?” my mother asks, and I hold out my arm, placing the purple article of clothing around the back of my chair. The rest of my family sits down, and the restaurant cacophony of noise drowns out to a blanket of background noise.

Glancing around, Chinese lettering adorns the restaurant on colourful strips of paper that spell out a myriad of dishes not listed on the english menu. I wish I could tell you what they said, but I’ve already forgotten my Chinese school teachings from many years past in my adolescent ages. I sit back and relax, listening to the familiar clinking of plastic chopsticks on ceramic plates, bowls, and teacups.

Our waiter comes over with a teapot brewing leaves, and a pot of hot water. In cantonese, he asks for our order, and my father responds in kind. While I have absolutely no reading skills, I have been trying to build up some proficiency in my cantonese speech. I used to speak cantonese even better than english at some point, but when school became the centre of my life, it slowly depreciated until I had to spend minutes thinking of words to say. Recently, I came to a realisation that cantonese is one of my only ties to my heritage, and that I found myself liking how the language sounded more and more. So I began to make more efforts in speaking cantonese. Something I hope will build to a proficiency high enough that I feel comfortable speaking to people who have zero knowledge of any language except cantonese.

Anyways, back to the food, the waiter takes our order, and we begin to talk about various topics of interest, meandering from idea to idea. Soon, a clear pork bone soup arrives, and alongside it, the rest of the dishes; soy sauce marinated chicken, braised pork, deep fried fish, pineapple sweet and sour beef, and tofu fish bowl. The conversation continues through the meal, and I fall back into my mind.

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Recently, while things haven’t been going horribly, many decisions could have been better made. 

I’ll start with school, usually, my worst subject ends up being english, something I’ve come to expect. Among all of my other marks english tends to drift to a high eighty, whereas most of my other marks would land on a low ninety. Given that my english is currently sitting at a mid to high ninety, it’s the only accomplishment I feel entitled to at the moment. Moving to my other subjects, history and physics, they aren’t doing horrible, my history is a high eighty, and my physics is a low ninety, but I feel saddened by a notion of disappointment. I know I could have done better. I have a history of doing well in maths, and normally my math marks sit as my highest mark, around the high ninety’s. Physics is something I found pretty easy at the start of the school, year, and I still find it not that too difficult. However, I’ve been getting back a number of dissatisfactory assessments. And the major reason for the lower marks is not a lack of understanding, but making stupid mistakes. Forgetting to go from kilometres per hour to meters per second, mindlessly plugging in wrong numbers, all easily avoidable mistakes. Just this last week, I received a test marked in the low eighty’s, something I haven’t seen in years for math. I feel… despondent, like I can’t be successful because I’ll go the rest of my life making mistakes.

“Jun, can you pass the teapot?” my uncle asks. “mhm, yeah”, I pull out of my ruminating to fill my uncle’s teacup, holding the lid and tilting the pot over. I take a look around the restaurant, while it’s still quite busy, the previous wave of customers has cleared out, leaving some vacant tables for some waiting families standing at the doorway of the store. I fade out the stimuli of the restaurant once more, thinking back to earlier in the afternoon.

Last school year, I needed a laptop to type up work on, and I wanted one that would be capable of running fast for video games I wanted to play. The cost of the laptop ended up being around fifteen hundred dollars after an additional upgrade I did to increase it’s performance capabilities. I was incredibly happy with my acquisition.

Within the last two days however, I began to have problems with the laptop. The problem lay with the charging. When the laptop was plugged in, a light would indicate that the laptop was receiving charge. The light would turn off and blink periodically, disconnecting, and stop charging the computer. I began to worry about the laptop, so I backed up the system to an external hard drive. This morning, the problem was even worse, the charging would only happen sometimes, and the laptop wouldn’t charge for long periods of time. Then, when I plugged the laptop in after lunch, the screen turned off, and the charge light died. My stomach sank. I pushed the power button in the hopes that it would turn on, but nothing occurred. Now, I’m in the possession of a dead laptop, and I have to tell my father when I get home, as I’ve been nervous to break the news to him. The laptop has been in my ownership for only around a year and a half, less than half the amount of time I wanted to use it for. Not only that, the laptop costed my father a large sum of money, something I now wasted. As I believe the laptop died as a result of mishandling I did with the computer. Putting me at direct fault for it.

Eventually, desert comes in, a red bean soup that is quite an acquired taste for most. We finish the soup, and stand up from the table. “Here mommy”, I pass the weighty jacket back to her, and follow my family back out the restaurant.

A long shadow follows me out to the car, walking between parked cars, stepping over shallow puddles left by the rain long over by now. I stand by the Mazda, waiting for my father to unlock the car, before stepping inside. Resting my head against the seat, I close my heavy eyelids, and feel the car back out of the parking lot, and drive back home.

Turning into the sloped driveway of our home, the car slows to a crawl before parking, and the vehicle beeps, indicating the doors opening. The night sky has darkened, even more so than a couple of hours ago. The only nearby lamp post illuminates the wet soil and sidewalk still yet to dry. The air rests heavy on the area, if it were colder, fog would blanket my vision and I would see puffs of cold mist from my mouth as I exhaled. Step after step, my stride takes my up a number of stairs to the front door. I’m the first to get there, so I take my key out of my wallet and  unlock the door. I put my key back, and enter the house.

Taking off my running shoes, and putting on a pair of slippers, I make my way into the washroom, relieving myself and washing my hands on the way out into my room.

Palms sweaty, I approach my laptop sitting on top of my desk and press the start button. Nothing happens, it’s still dead. I just feel defeated. At what feels like is my lowest point.

I stand up, and make my way over to my father.

“Hey, daddy?”

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