I’m talking to my cousin, the overachieving jock police detective living in the South Bay, over the telephone.
“Talk to me, Chris. How does the 800 block of East Saint James in San Jose sound?” I’m anxious. The sounds of someone winning a car on The Price Is Right play in the background.
He laughs. Apparently, my finding an apartment in Silicon Valley is funny to him. I rephrase my question.
“Okay, how about on a scale of one to ten... one being Walnut Creek, ten being hood Richmond with the bullets flying by my face.”
“Seven or eight.” There’s no pause. “Hope you speak Spanish fluently,” he adds. Police detectives are witty like that, apparently. “I would rather live in the bad part of Sunnyvale or Mountain View than any part of San Jose.” I thank him for being the bearer of low-rent bad news and hang up.
Finding housing shouldn’t be this difficult. I have a nerd job. And while it’s the standard “I just got out of college so pay me like I just got out of college” job, I’m not dancing around in a giant Chuck E. Cheese suit singing “Happy Birthday” to special needs kids. So I’m left with a housing lead given to me by… my mother.
“Ai-Ya! Ernie!” She gets off the phone, all excited. “I found a room for you to rent! See? Here, in the China Daily Journal! And it’s in Cupertino, where you work! For four hundred dollars!” She emphasizes the cost of rent by repeating the phrase “four hundred dollars” in English. She’s obviously very proud of herself; no white person would ever dare to put an apartment rental in an American newspaper.
And they’re Chinese, I think to myself. That’s all I need. Renting a room, living with another set of foster parents while I’m away from home. This has obviously happened before, while I was interning for another company. The million-dollar house in the Los Altos Hills was great until the nice Chinese couple acted like a webcam website without the webcam. “Ernie’s such a nice boy,” the homeowners gushed to my parents, adding a touch of concern over the telephone. “But once he gets home, he leaves the house and doesn’t come back until late! After midnight! On a Wednesday!” Imagine the look of horror on my parents' faces.
But for a rent of a third of what rent usually goes for in the area, it was an idea I wanted to check out. Hell, I’ll give up a couple of my civil liberties as a human if it means I’d be rolling in cash later. Sheesh... $400 a month? This offer is too good to be true.
The first sign that the offer is too good to be true is when the address given turns out to be a swank Chinese restaurant conveniently close to a Ranch 99. The hostess, an abnormally tall woman wearing a leopard skin dress and too much foundation, notices our confusion. “You must be here for the house,” she smiles, walking to the back of the room in stiletto heels and telling the restaurant owner that “the people are here” in a Beijing accent.
“I’m kinda busy,” the owner calls back in Mandarin. “Get Li to show them around.” Apparently, Li is the man with the wifebeater and the weathered face who doesn’t know how to smile, because he’s holding a set of house keys. He gives my mother a brief second of eye contact and walks out the door.
Mom, convinced that she will be the one to find me a place to live and save the day, starts small talk with Mister Li while walking to the “real” house. My mother is the queen of Chinese small talk, and the evidence shows that Li’s responses in his heavy Chinese accent become less curt and more relaxed. “China... Yaoling province... I have two little sisters also in the US... I work at the restaurant and two other jobs... Yeah, China has some good and bad points, but it’s home.”
We pass an elderly white man guarding his ‘66 Chevy, and Li opens the door to the house. I make a mental guess as to the first thing I will see. Will it be bamboo plants? Incense burning? Those cheesy Asian calendar girls advertising their soymilk? Li opens the door, and Mom and I peer in to see...
Sandals.
Fucking sandals. Littered everywhere in the hallway.
And then I take another look and realize that there’s organization behind the chaos. The sandals, in all shapes and sizes, are stacked together, but they gravitate towards one of the five doors in the hallway, each numbered with ACE Hardware labels.
It only hits me when I notice the distinct but not immediately familiar smell of the house. And then it really hits me when an elderly woman, holding a baby, peers out from room number five and smiles at me. There are whole fucking families in these rooms. All from Mainland China, I’ll bet. Most of them probably work at the Chinese restaurant. I lower my head in respect, almost an instinct from my two-week trip visiting relatives in Shanghai the summer before, and glance over at my mom. She knows something’s up, but she ain’t going to go out like that.
“So, which room is it?” she asks politely. Li opens up door number four. Kinda like a fucked up showcase on Let’s Make a Deal, except I won a beat-up mattress and a warped desk instead of a sports car or a donkey.
The substandard state of the room was obviously too much for Mama’s baby. “Thank you. We’ll definitely think about it.”
“Yes,” I say to Li, “Definitely.” I couldn’t look him in the eye for some reason.
The conversation during the walk back to the car was surprisingly (or not surprisingly) short. “You know,” Li says in the Beijing-accented Mandarin, “You can always move in for a couple of weeks and then move out when you see another apartment you like. It’ll save you some money.”
I look up and give him the sincerest Chinese I can muster, for someone who was born in America and learned all his Chinese from his parents and a 14-day trip to China. “I will definitely consider that,” I think I said to him.
My mother and I hopped in the car, and not saying much, endured the two-hour commute home. “You think they were illegal immigrants?” I ask somewhere on the northbound Interstate 280. Mom looks straight ahead and shrugs it off. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Ten minutes later, she says, “That place was dirty anyway.”
I’m still looking for a place to stay.