Honestly, I don’t like to think about why or how something went wrong.
Despite the heavy factory smog, central Beijing slowly comes into view. The historical areas are well-preserved. There are long winding alleyways containing traditional houses with tiled roofs, and narrow streets that Frank refers to as hutongs, in their postcard white, reds, and grays.
“They’re so beautiful!” he says, grinning strangely. “They haven’t been bulldozed yet for commercial buildings like those big chain hotels.”
On the streets, there are vendors and hustling people, but I’m still too worried about the man on the bicycle to fully enjoy the scenery. What if he has a heart attack while pulling us up this ginormous hill? Is it unfair of us to force him to carry our weight? He’s not a donkey!
What if he needs what my dad keeps warning me about, a full knee and hip replacement due to overexercising, in his golden years?
Finally, we stop at Fucheng Food Market in the Haidian District, and I hand our driver a lot of Uncle Dai’s money and don’t even count it. This practically counts as charity work. The rickshaw driver grins at me, revealing stumps of blackened teeth. Yikes. He grabs my hand and shakes it, thanking me profusely in Mandarin. Despite my astonishment, I still manage to smile gratefully. Honestly, I love giving people money and making others happy. Maybe he can visit a dentist or go on a weekend vacation.
I’m surprised when we enter a street market, and at first I don’t want to eat anything until Frank insists that it’s safe, since my stomach should now be accustomed to the food in Beijing. Street vendors are roasting fat ducks, geese, piglets, and chickens on spits. People are rolling large doughy pancakes and stir-frying plates of white onions, scrambled eggs, carrots, crushed tomatoes, and rice in gigantic, hissing woks.
The smell, all of it exotic and familiar, fried and fresh, saturates my nostrils. I sniff hungrily.
“This is local food,” Frank explains. “This is the real Beijing. What you’ve been eating is the fine dining stuff that they think foreigners like. No authentic flavor.”
Eagerly, I hand over some yuan, and Frank orders twenty of the fattest and juiciest xiāo long bao that I have ever seen. They’re like the size of small helium balloons. They smell beefy and divine. At another stall, a dude rolls the sticky flour dough before yanking and hacking it into fresh hand-pulled noodles. He cooks the yellow shoestring bundles in bubbling water and then dumps them into a spicy, red-hot simmering seafood soup. He ladles green Chinese veggies on top. Last, we walk to a stall that has boiling vats of clacking lobsters, mussels, baby crabs, squid, and freshly shucked oysters. It’s like food sample day at Costco. I want to eat all of these immediately, and a smiling woman hands me a generous portion of each in a bucket.
An actual-size bucket!
Like she thinks we’re giant, slobbering mastiffs!
We sit down at an outdoor table and feast.
I’m too busy stuffing my face to make conversation, and then I notice that Frank is just watching me. He’s not eating. Is he not hungry? Is there something on my face? I touch my mouth and chin to make sure that no more hairs are popping up like weeds. Frank’s staring at me intently, as if he has something important to say. Thankfully, he’s not lecturing me and I can happily eat my food without listening to another speech on history.
Frank keeps staring at me.
I blush, averting my eyes.
Then I realize that he’s studying me. Like I’m a no-price-tag art piece at NAMOC.
Was last night so horrible?
Then why is he looking at me like a fun new party drug that he wants to dissolve under his tongue but knows that he has to wake up early the next day for school? If I were him, I would just cancel all my obligations and follow the dangerous rabbit hole to wherever the drug led me. New friends, hot shocking hookups, and unforgettable adventures that could replace the horrible mundane memory of day-to-day life.
There’s also a hungry longing in Frank’s eyes, and I honestly hope to the gods of all the major shopping malls in the world that it’s meant exclusively for me.
After he’s been staring at me so much, I finally wonder if Frank is horrified by my inability to properly hold chopsticks or the fact that I’m using my fingers to eat seafood. Then I wonder if he’s embarrassed about our wet and sloppy makeout session from last night. I did use Nair on my Tiger mustache this morning just in case.
Deliberately, I touch my bare knee to his under the wooden table.
We’re skin to skin. And it’s like he’s paralyzed.
Hmmmm.
I’ve never had to make such a monumental superhero effort on a dude before. But I also don’t want to move my knee away. It just feels so completely natural. We stay that way, interconnected like magnets, until a janitor clears our buckets. We don’t speak. Frank’s face is as red as the lobster that we have just ingested.
He can’t stop smiling at me.
I can’t stop grinning back.
It’s like we’re both stoned, but we haven’t partaken of Beijing weed since last night. The same fantastical trance current from outer space is running through us. It’s a powerful frequency because it’s like being zapped by a falling constellation made of extra-fiery heat. Honestly, when I’m looking at Frank, it’s like hurtling through the unknown universe and landing headfirst on Planet Earth for the very first time.
Winking at him on purpose, I lick my lips in anticipation of what could possibly come.
For dessert, Frank mischievously offers me a deep-fried scorpion on a stick.
I recoil.
“What the hell is that?” I exclaim, pushing it away.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid,” he says. He grins wickedly, as if daring me to try it. Some of the fun, spontaneous, pot-smoking Frank from last night’s party is returning.
Suddenly, my tutor chomps off the head of the fried insect. He chews. Then he grins at me, like I’m the only other person who survived a zombie apocalypse. No one else matters except for me. For a second, the hustling world of Fucheng Food Market tilts, fragments into itsy-bitsy pieces, and completely disappears.
Then I notice that Frank has a humongous chunk of scorpion stuck between his front teeth!
I thought that watching a boy you like eat an insect would be the scariest, most traumatizing thing in the world, but it’s actually kind of hilarious. I double over and can’t stop laughing.
“I thought you Americans were brave,” Frank teases me. A bit of fried scorpion, like chewing gum, is stuck to his lower lip. He holds the bug-stick in front of me like it’s a roasted marshmallow.
In response, I make a face. But I lean over and bite off one of the scorpion’s back legs or feelers. I don’t know which part I’m eating. Yet I have done more reckless things for a boy that have resulted in intense heartbreak, hospital visits, STIs, and zero college acceptances. I could have killed myself and our seven-bedroom house by accidentally backing through a garage door.
How dangerous can eating a dead scorpion be?
Doesn’t the poison automatically evaporate in a deep fryer?
At least hundreds of thousands of people seem to be enjoying these creatures at the Fucheng Food Market. If I die, at least I was poisoned from attempting to be internationally adventurous.
For a moment, as I chew, my mind goes blank and I think that this is the exact moment that I’m going to die. It seems that at my eulogy and also when I give the reason for death in my afterlife, I will have to say that Iris Wang died by eating a bug. She died by trying her best to fit in. How fitting.