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For his twelfth birthday, Shane invited both his friends from school and from his hockey team over for a party. The event took place despite this specific social combination being a source of immense stress every year, and the fact that he was a little old to have a birthday party. He didn’t have the heart to tell his mom that he didn’t want one.
As always, Shane’s hockey friends quickly formed a tight knot, ribbing each other about their recent fuck ups in games, complaining about their coach, repeating crude jokes when out of earshot of Shane’s parents. His school friends looked awkward standing at the edges of the conversations, before they drifted together to form their own group. Shane knew, vaguely, that it was his responsibility to bridge that gap somehow, but had no idea on the exact steps to do so. He wished they were all still seven, so they could play pin the tail on the donkey or something.
At some point, Tyler, a defense player on their team, asked if they would be serving dog during the dinner and Shane, who had heard this joke a million times, laughed.
Later, after cake and presents and a horribly embarrassing kiss his mother planted on his cheek, Shane got to say goodbye to everyone. In bed, too keyed up to sleep, Shane thought about dogs, and about how almost all the kids on the hockey team had them. Big dogs, golden retrievers, labradors, german shepherds; ones he’d see at their birthday parties. Shane thought about how they didn’t have any pets because of his mom’s allergies, about how there was a koinobori raised near the entrance of his home, since children’s day was just a few days ago and Yuna didn’t want to take it down so quickly. Matt B pointed at it and asked what it was, and Shane said it was nothing.
—
Once, after some frantic reciprocal blowjobs, Shane and Ilya lay tangled together on the couch of Shane’s living room. Shane was still dazed and confused when Rozanov shifted a little more into the crook of his neck, and Shane let the familiar smell of Rozanov’s shampoo fill his nose.
He knew they would have to disentangle soon, maybe to go for another round. Shane was a little embarrassed how desperate he was as soon as Ilya stepped over the threshold. They hadn’t seen each other for a bit, and Shane tugged him over to the couch insistently, pushing him down and scrambling at the waistband of Ilya’s sweatpants. Rozanov had chuckled a little and said something demeaning, probably, like “eager” or “slut,” but had shut up soon enough when he got his mouth on his cock.
Rozanov was maybe more relaxed than usual, languid and boneless on the couch. It would be an early morning for Rozanov tomorrow, but he reached to put on a replay of a game. Maybe he’s tired, and needs more time than usual to recover, Shane thought to himself, and that was a satisfying enough explanation that he pushed himself into the cushions and settled in.
At some point, a recent addition to the Drillers’ lineup scored an assist, and Ilya waved vaguely at him.
“You know him?”
Shane had to take a moment to understand what Ilya was asking, thinking maybe he expected Shane to be such a hockey neurotic that he’d be able to recite any random kid’s stats, which was mildly insulting. Then he read the kid’s name properly on the back of his jersey: Cho.
A flush of indignance welled up in Shane. “What?”
“You know,” Ilya said
Shane paused, extremely peeved. He thought, for a moment, of a childhood friend who asked if Shane knew a cousin who apparently had spent a month in Japan. “Are you asking cause he’s Asian?”
Ilya shrugged, fiddling with the drawstrings of his stupid sweatpants. “Russians, we know each other sometimes,” he said.
“Well that’s because,” Shane starts, “That’s because you’re from the same place.” Shane knows that the Russians in the league keep tabs on each other, connected with younger players who came more recently from Russia to help them with the language and visa process. This, of course, was nothing Shane, or Cho, presumably, had to worry about. “Cho isn’t even Japanese.”
Ilya glanced over at Shane then, and Shane’s expression must have been something, because he straightened up a little. “Ah,” he says.
Shane continued, “What, do you ask every Asian person you meet if they’ve heard of your friend Shane Hollander?”
“Well,” Ilya says, “you are a very famous hockey player,”
“Jesus Christ,” Shane said, and turned away.
There was a moment of silence then, Shane staring resolutely ahead, before Ilya shifted into Shane’s side.
“Hollander, of course I do not ask every Asian person if they know you,” he said, voice faintly amused. It was the cadence of someone who had to explain a joke to a child.
Shane suddenly felt ridiculous, making a big deal out of nothing. The initial hot flare of frustration was starting to subside. Was he overreacting? Rozanov didn’t mean anything by it.
“Good,” said Shane, not pouting, “because that would be stupid.”
“That would be stupid,” Ilya agreed. He brushed his fingers gingerly through Shane’s hair.
“I think maybe, you know,” Ilya said, as Shane leaned into his touch, “I think that maybe it is helpful, to meet people like you. I know that hockey can be-”
And Shane cut in, “He isn’t like me, I mean-”
Rozanov continued, “Hockey can be, ah, difficult.”
“We wouldn’t really have anything in common,” Shane was glad he wasn't looking at Ilya right then. A strange lump was stuck at the back of his throat.
Rozanov hummed, and they both let the conversation end. They ended up finishing the game, jerked each other off in the shower, and then bid their goodbyes. Shane didn’t think he was too weird that night. The strange air was gone by the end of the night — Rozanov was in a hurry to leave.
—
When Shane was younger, Yuna would often talk about how important it was that Shane was going to Japanese school.
“You know it was only established a few years ago,” she would always say, “just a few years ago, Japanese kids like you wouldn’t get to know each other.”
Shane hated Japanese school. There were only, like, 30 students, so they were split into two groups, sorted roughly by age, and sat in two next door classrooms in an elementary school they were allowed to use Friday nights. Friday nights were annoying, of course, because Saturday mornings were hockey practice. This one-two punch of activities tired Shane out. He spent the whole week dreading the dull, late hours in Japanese school, and then jittery for the euphoric high of hockey just the next morning.
IWith a tight grip on the steering wheel, Yuna would pull up at the school and walk Shane in, back tall and smiling. She would hurry Shane to switch to indoor shoes as quickly as possible, walk him to his room, and leave after a quick hug. The mothers of the other kids would hang around, speaking in rapid-fire Japanese, until the teacher rang her bell and got the kids to sit down, and the mothers would leave as one group.
The other kids were completely fluent. They could speak it with ease, they could memorize the alphabet, they could read the required texts. When they would read aloud, the whole class fell into a tense hush at Shane’s turn, who would stumble and stop and fall silent. The teachers would have a carefully neutral face as they provided Shane with help, but he knew he was eating up time, that everyone was carefully not looking at him.
In just 12 hours, Shane reminded himself, he would skate so much faster than his teammates that the coach would use him as an example. In just 12 hours, Shane would bury shot after shot, the calls of admiration surrounding him. In just 12 hours, the quiet hush of his peers would not be out of pity, but envy.
As they got older, the gap widened – from hiragana to katakana, to memorizing kanji. Shane would remember the ten assigned characters for the week and find them wiped from his memory the instant he stepped outside the building. Hockey began to eat more and more of his time, and his miniscule mastery of the language slipped further from his grasp. The time he spent sitting listlessly in an empty elementary school is time he could be spending practicing, he’d think bitterly. And then he’d feel guilty for thinking it.
Yuna did not speak much Japanese anymore. This was something she regretted. “Your grandmother and grandfather,” she would say, “were sometimes ashamed of who they were. I never want you to feel that way, Shane. Ashamed, like that.”
—
When Rozanov got to speaking Russian, the sex was usually at a point where Shane could barely articulate a thought. But afterwards, while his senses would slowly trickle back in, he would wonder what Ilya said. His first thought would be that it was probably sexy. Once, he had the thought that maybe he was saying really insulting stuff, stuff that would offend Shane so bad he wouldn’t say it in English. That was unfair, so he dismissed it. If Rozanov wanted to insult Shane, he would to his face, without the barrier of a foreign language.
This time, Rozanov had palmed the back of Shane’s head and beared down, laying his whole weight on Shane, gripping his hair while pushing his nose in the space above his ear. He muttered something, a stream of Russian, picking up the pace. Shane came like that, pinned under his weight. Ilya quickly followed after him, his hips shivering to a stop.
Rozanov chuckled like he did sometimes. He tickled the side of Shane’s ribs, and when he jerked away, Ilya slapped his side with a friendly pat.
“God, leave me alone for a bit,” Shane said. Ilya snickered again.
The familiar tension began, bit by bit, the ticking clock of their arrangement. The tightly twisted elastic slowly began to unwind, before it spun itself undone all at once, quickly and violently. Ilya would putter about, getting towels for them to clean themselves off, while Shane would stare blearily at the ceiling. When Rozanov would at last raise an eyebrow at Shane, still on the bed, Shane would have to mutter something about early mornings, and make his leave.
But for now, Shane was still allowed to stay. “What were you saying, near the end there?”
Rozanov, who was just then starting to get up, sniffed and scratched his nose. He raised an eyebrow at Shane. “You want me to translate all dirty talk now?”
“Fuck off,” Shane said, “I was just curious.”
He was just curious. Sometimes, he admired just how Russian Ilya was – down to how he carried himself. His phone was set up in Russian, he talked to his family in Russian, and he was even sexy in Russian. Shane didn’t think he was sexy in Canadian English. Whatever kind of sexy he was to Rozanov, he really hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Canada, a cultural identity that was a black hole of eroticism.
“Mm, I won’t tell you now. Is less hot right after,” Ilya replied.
—
By the time Shane was 12 years old, his mother knew that he would be playing professional hockey. This was a foregone conclusion – Shane didn’t remember any one moment he realized that it wasn’t a pipe-dream, but a real possible future. But he knew that by the time he was entering junior high, academics were not his expected priority.
This did not stop Yuna Hollander from looking at every report card, tsking at Bs and making concerned comments at Cs. She would later tell Shane that she researched the neighbourhoods of Ottawa, to be sure they’d be living in an area with the best public schools.
In Shane’s middle school class, there were two Chinese kids and one Japanese girl. In the grade above, there were a pair of Black twins. There were a few other Chinese kids in the grade below, and a couple Filipinos.
One of the Chinese kids in Shane’s class was really into basketball, and their only one-on-one interactions largely consisted of him explaining its rules to Shane. Everyone called him Jason, but his name was really something Chinese, apparently unpronounceable. He complained about his parents, once, when they were waiting for the water fountain together.
“They’re always on my ass, you know?” Jason said, huffing, “Like I asked my mom for a DS for my birthday, and all she’s talking about are these Japanese machines ruining our heads, and how I got a B in math.” He stepped up to the water fountain, looked back and rolled his eyes. “Matt F. has all Cs and his parents got him a DS, and he calls his mom a bitch all the time. If I called my mom a name like that, she would slap me so hard I’d see white.”
Shane nodded gravely, as though he knew anything about getting slapped by his parents. One time, when Shane was about 7, he was so jealous of his cousin Lindsay’s new shoes he stole them and threw them into the lake near their cottage. It was maybe the worst thing he ever did. His mother and father sat him down and talked sternly at him about how disappointed they were, and he sobbed so hard he threw up, no slapping necessary.
The one other Japanese girl in his class was named Hillary, and she didn’t go to Japanese school, so Shane didn’t know her well at all. She had a prim, sort of sour look on her face all the time, and would raise her hand at every single question the teacher asked. Shane found her extremely embarrassing, and tried to avoid her.
Matt F. had started it. When Hillary passed their group of friends at lunch, her nose turned up with clear disdain, he called out “Me so hooorny, me so hoooorny,” and all the boys at their table brayed with laughter. She turned bright red, let out an offended scoff, and stormed away, which only guaranteed that the boys would do it again. Even Jason, who didn’t hang out with them that often, would join in.
Shane laughed along, though once Hillary stood stock still at Ryan jeering “I show you good time,” and turned to glare right into Shane's eyes, even though he wasn’t even the one who said it. The boys quieted down for a moment, before she tore her gaze away and left. They commiserated in uneasy laughter. “What was that about?” asked Matt F.
–
In a pumping, writhing club, the kind of place Shane only entered under extreme duress, Shane was being eyed up by an Asian girl.
“Dude,” Drapeau was saying, “She’s perfect for you.”
“And fucking hot, man,” said J.J.
They were gathered at the edge of the dance floor, glancing over at the group of girls clustered near the bar. Stevens was trying to catch the eye of one of them, who was resolutely staring at her phone, but the Asian girl was definitely looking at Shane, in particular.
She was plenty pretty. Her hair was severely parted to the side, straight and black, eyes smokey with a bit of eyeshadow, and sticky, glossy lips. When Shane looked over, she looked down his body, then up, before settling on his eyes. She smiled.
“God,” said Comeau. “Have you ever been with an Asian chick?” He grinned, his teeth glowing blue in the technicolour lights, “You know what they say about them? Completely hairless? And tight, too, it’s all true,” and the other guys groaned.
In fact, Shane had never been with an Asian girl. His girlfriends in high school were all white, and “been with” was a generous term. Asian girls were not a point of fascination for him, unlike with some of his peers. He found it a little weird, even. He thought about his dad talking like that about his mom, for a second, and felt queasy.
“Come on man,” Comeau said, “Are you gonna hit that? If any of us are gonna, it’s you,” and Shane smiled and started to shake his head, when Comeau pushed at him lightheartedly, “It’s not fair man, she won’t wanna get with us.”
“Sounds like an excuse for having no game,” Shane said.
“You know it’s not cause we have no game,”
And Shane did know, really, why all the guys were so excited for him. They probably came to the conclusion, with drunken confidence, that Shane didn’t get any because of racial preference. Shane could tell the boys were very pleased with themselves.
Shane picked his way across the bar, smiled at the girl, and asked if she wanted a drink.
Later, in a more secluded area of the club, she told him her name was Hitomi, that she was an exchange student from Nagoya University, that she was studying English translation, and that she hadn’t met any haafu in Canada yet. “And you, what do you do?” she asked, and Shane so rarely heard that question in Montreal he let out a huff of laughter. She smiled at that, blankly confused, and the sheen of her lipgloss glittered pink.
Rozanov used chapstick. The cold, dry air of a rink does not do wonders for one’s lips, and there’s a sharp divide between the guys who don’t use chapstick (lips visibly flaking, easily split under a fist) and those who do. Once, Shane caught Rozanov swiping some on. Rozanov saw him looking, grinned and applied an egregious amount more, before puckering his lips. Shane wrinkled his nose – he didn’t want to feel the greasy slip against Rozanov’s lips – but he eventually obliged and leaned in.
Hitomi tasted like vanilla, and her waist was small in Shane’s hands. At some point, she squinted up at him and laughed. “You’re so tall,” she said, “tall nose, too,” and she brushed the tip of her finger against the bridge of it.
Outside, while they were waiting for a cab, Hitomi asked more questions. “You were born here?”
“Yeah, uh," he replied. “My grandparents moved here while my mom was kid”
“Do you know where they are from?” she asked. Shane didn’t remember the name, but they pulled up an image of Japan on her ipod and he pointed to the island.
“Oh,” she said, and raised her eyebrows, “From Kyushu.”
“Is that bad?” Shane asked. He didn’t know people had beef with Kyushu.
“In Kyushu, they are very, um,” Hitomi grinned, a little shy. Her dark eyes glimmered in the dark, highlighted by the light from her phone. “Conservative? Very traditional. Macho-man.”
The term “Macho-man” in a Japanese accent was new to his ears, and surprised a smile out of him. “Really?” Shane said.
“Yes,” Hitomi replied, “The men from Kyushu, they are,” and she wrinkled her nose, searching for the word. “My mother told me not to date men from there,” she ended up saying, and giggled.
“Sexist?” Shane supplied, and she nodded.
Shane could not remember much about his grandpa. He died when he was pretty young, though he remembered a few snippets of memories. Watching hockey together on the television. His warm, dry, wrinkled hand. There was one memory though, not as pleasant: a roaring argument with his mother. For a moment, he raised his hand up to make a gesture, and his mother flinched, like he was going to slap her.
“Would your mom approve of me, then?” Shane asked, trying to sound suave, but maybe missed the mark, because Hitomi just laughed and shook her head.
“My mom would like you,” she said, “so handsome, so tall, polite,” she inched closer as she listed these traits, “speaks Japanese, too-”
“Not really,” he cut in, but she just shook her head.
“Any Japanese is good,” she said. Some of her hair slipped from her clip, so it hung in front of her face. Shane itched to tuck it back behind her ear, but the muscles in his body seemed locked in place. A thought flashed, unbidden, of a stubborn curl that was stuck to Rozanov’s forehead, last time they were face to face.
Hitomi’s cab came, and she invited him in, but he shook his head and muttered something about an early morning.
—
“Do you eat sushi?” Ilya asked. They were cleaning up the kitchen together, after a dinner Shane had prepared. It involved brown rice, to which Ilya made faces the whole time, and lightly seasoned chicken breast. Ilya ate without (verbal) complaint.
The question was sudden, and put Shane immediately on the defensive. But he was a little pleased too, the question so out of left-field it implied Ilya was wondering about him. Wondering about what foods he allowed himself to eat, wondering about his Japanese-ness, whatever that meant. Even if, to Ilya, all he could conceptualize about “Japanese-ness” was sushi. Which was also a little bit funny.
So Shane, defensive, pleased, and amused in that split moment while drying the dishes, could only reply, “Huh?”
“You know, with diet,” Ilya said, and he saw Shane looking at him and his face crumpled into something a little sheepish. “This question is offensive again?”
“Uh, no well,” Shane found himself smiling. Ilya was looking a little like a guilty dog, head ducked downwards, while still soaping up a fry pan.
Shane took a deep breath, trying to parse out what to say.
Before Shane could elaborate, Ilya cut in. “I was just thinking, it must be difficult with white rice, yes? And the fish, there is not a lot of protein, lots of sodium in soy sauce.”
“Yes Ilya, no, I get it,” Shane could feel the grin on his face getting bigger. A bubble of laughter threatened to escape, but he bit it back, “Sushi, um, I don’t eat it, and I never really liked it anyways.”
It was then that Ilya turned to look at him with wide, unbelieving eyes. Offended eyes, even. “What?”
“Not every Japanese person has to like sushi, Ilya.” Shane said.
“I think every person in the world has to like sushi!” Ilya exclaimed.
Of course city slicker Ilya, fast cars and sexy models Ilya, would love sushi. It was a decadent, exotic, strange food for people who loved to feel cultured. Shane had been on the receiving end of many offended scoffs.
“I just don’t like the texture,” Shane said, suddenly less amused, “I like when my fish is cooked. So yeah, sashimi is off the table too.”
They fell into a silence. Shane felt bad, for a moment. He had definitely ruined the mood by being pissy about this, when there was nothing really to be pissy about. While he was ruminating on this, Ilya finally piped up.
“What about ikura?”
“What?” Shane asked.
“Ikura, ikra, like… salmon roe? Is what it is in English? The texture is different from fish.”
Shane, from the beginning of their acquaintanceship, thought Ilya was especially intuitive about Shane in particular. It was like a magic trick, the way he could take one look at Shane and know exactly what he was thinking, exactly what he wanted. Now, in the cottage, it started to feel a little less like magic, and instead like maybe Ilya was always just thinking.
“Yeah uh, I like ikura.”
Shane loved ikura. It was the first food he remembered liking. He used to be an absolute nightmare to feed, according to his dad. He would only eat white rice, white bread, tofu, plain noodles, and milk, until around age 6. Every day, his dad would have to prepare another safe meal for him. But he remembers ikura, the realization that maybe food could be more than something he was only required to engage with. Little round balls that would pop in his mouth, fishy and delicious, good on his safe white rice. David and Yuna had to go to great lengths to acquire it, from the little Japanese import store that was basically a single homesick man’s residential basement.
“We have ikra in Russia too, this is why I ask,” Ilya said, and he smiled, his handsome, genuine smile, eyes crinkling at the corners, “I think the Japanese must have learned it from us, yes? Even the word is the same. My favourite thing to order at a sushi restaurant.”
—
Shane’s grandma was a sweet woman with round sagging cheeks and eyes that disappeared into slits when she smiled. She did not do hugs or kisses, but she gave Shane little hard candies every time he saw her, asking “飴欲しい?” She worried constantly, talking to his mother in Japanese too fast for him to fully grasp, until Yuna would throw her hands up in the air and storm away.
She would speak in Japanese to Shane too, though she did so slowly and deliberately, and talked in English when he asked. After his grandpa died, she moved in with them for about a year, during which Shane spent every afternoon with her watching the news set to a low din to echo through the house. When grandma was home, the tv was always on.
She’d ask how many friends he had, his favourite subject in school, about hockey practice, about which players he liked. It was like she could never get enough of him, chuckling at every morsel of information he gave her. She would compare him to his grandpa a lot. “He did that too,” she said, “He loved to do that too.” She would hold his hand all the way to the park, and wouldn’t get frustrated even when Shane cried, which he did often, and for reasons he could rarely articulate.
They would go to restaurants, one big family, Shane’s grandmother speaking only in Japanese, fussing and swaying. Shane’s father sat patiently at one corner of the table, none the wiser to what she was saying, while Shane’s mother would glance periodically at him, worried he was left out of the conversation. It was the worst when they were ordering. His grandmother would insist on ordering for herself, and each time the waiter would ask her to repeat what she said, eyes carefully blank, Yuna’s fist would tighten on the table, knuckles stark white.
“She never spoke a word of Japanese at home,” Yuna said once, bitterly. They were on the way home from the nursing home Yuna had to beg her to go to, where his grandma refused to speak any English, even though David was present. “Never breathed a word of it. Only English at the dinner table for us.” And Yuna hit the turn signal, pointedly.
—
Dylan Wang was the one other Asian kid on Shane’s junior hockey team in Kingston. That there were two Asian boys on the team was maybe a miracle, though the guys quickly decided that really, essentially there was only one.
Dylan Wang would hear a lot about his “Wang,” He was called “Wanger,” and the guys would say things like “Wang the man,” make jokes about how allegedly huge his dick was, which was ironic, of course, because Asian guys don’t have big dicks. He got the other stuff too. The eyelids pulled back, the dog jokes. A guy once made fun of the girl he was with the other night, saying she must’ve loved his “wang,” and made obscene moaning noises, interspersing them with the old classic; “Me so horny, me so horny, me love you long time!”
Dylan, as far as Shane could tell, thought it was all really funny. He was a good sport through all the hazing shit too; he took all the shots with no complaint, he stripped down and stood face to face with Shane until one of them laughed, after which whoever broke had to let a guy draw a penis on them. Dylan signed them all as Wanger.
Shane didn’t get anything like that. The guys made fun of his height, but it wasn’t exactly cutting stuff to make fun of a guy who got on the team younger than everyone for still growing. Shane instead got shit about his little rituals, the weird way he sat sometimes, how bad he was with girls. Dylan got along with everyone on the team, except for Shane, it seemed. He hated Shane.
Tyler Artyukh was tall and blonde, and when he smiled he had matching dimples on each cheek. When he skated, he used huge, sweeping motions; he looked like he was heaving himself across the ice, his effort clearly visible. This was admirable, of course, because he was impossibly fast.
Arty seemed so much older at the time. It didn’t help that he was so tall, and that he held his head in a way that made him look like he was a little bit amused at everything. He sometimes asked Shane if he wanted to stay at the rink a little after practice, and face off together, do little competitions, little drills. Arty was definitely going to end up playing for the major leagues. He might spend some time in the AHL, but everyone could see it. He was a future player.
Of course, he didn’t get talked about as much as Shane. Everyone talked about Shane. But Arty was a good sport about it. They were on a line together, even. Shane centre, Arty left wing. When Shane would assist on his goals Arty would bump their helmets together, his dimples flashing.
One memorable game, they were playing Sudbury in their barn. Dylan had gotten an assist and a goal by the second period. Something about that night, Dylan was playing better than he ever had. He was always alright, maybe a little too quick to pass. But he was connecting, he was there when he had to, he was playing selfishly, in a good way. After his goal, everyone brayed “Wang the man!” and rushed him, grabbing and laughing.
It was a good night, a highlight for Dylan, probably, but halfway through the second period, after Dylan got his second goal–
“How many times are we going to let this chink score?”
Everyone must have heard it. It seemed to ring across the rink.
Dylan stood still for a moment, skates drifting backwards, face turned towards the stands, where the voice came from. The look on his face, Shane didn’t know, it was blank, like a mannequin. Maybe, his eyes – they were disbelieving.
Later that night, after a narrower win than they were expecting, Arty breathed the only word about Dylan that Shane heard after the incident.
“Man, he played like shit tonight,” Arty said, like he was spitting the words out, “hogging the puck the first period, basically a ghost for the rest. I can’t believe they let players like that in the league.”
Shane had liked that Arty didn’t join in on the Wang jokes. He seemed to reserve himself to smirking at a few chirps, but he never initiated anything. Shane thought he was too cool for that kind of thing, like he didn’t have to lower himself to make rowdy jokes with the rabble. And he was nice about Shane too, never asked any weird questions or offhand comments.
But Arty’s face, when he said this about Dylan, or Wanger or whatever, was pure disgust.
Dylan never ended up liking Shane, and Shane never attempted more than a greeting with him. Shane kept hanging out with Arty sometimes, even though by the time they’d say goodbye Shane’s body was bone-tired, exhausted from a constant low frequency hum of anxiety. Shane watched very closely the few times he’d see them interact, but he didn’t see anything else, until Arty left the team and it didn’t matter anymore.
—
“The worst part,” Yuna Hollander was saying, “was the food.”
Across from her, Ilya was nodding thoughtfully, two glasses of wine deep. They had already finished dinner, and the empty plates had been sitting neglected for at least 20 minutes now. The conversation just didn’t seem to hit a lull for them to get up and take care of the dishes; Shane was starting to feel antsy, thinking about the pasta sauce slowly crusting stuck on the plates, getting harder and harder to scrub away.
Ilya had been joking about first moving to the US, how shocked he was at how big everything was; the size of the cars, the size of the grocery stores, the size of parking lots. Yuna nodded, eyes shut in solidarity, at all of these observations, and launched into her own stories of when she first moved to Canada: hugs, bizarre questions about China, how many yappy dogs were out and about all the time.
“It was so lonely, you know,” his mother said, a little buzzed and contemplative. “My mom, she was so sad, she couldn’t find anything, not even miso. All there was was soy sauce and a sushi restaurant. There was one guy, by the time Shane was born, who started running an import business, buying stuff from Japan and selling it from his home. But before that, well…
“It was like I could never eat my favourite foods again. No more curry rice, no more korokke, no more miso-fried fish, no taiyaki or dango or any kind of wagashi, not even miso soup! I think I missed miso soup the most. We used to have it every day. I didn’t know I loved it so much until it was gone.”
Ilya hummed, nodding. “I know this feeling,” he said, “I miss grechka more every day. Just buckwheat. I did not think I cared for it before.” Shane hadn’t thought much about how Ilya and his mother had this in common. Immigrants, the both of them. The term didn’t seem to fit with Ilya in his head, for some reason.
“Once,” Yuna said, beginning to smile, “My mom went to the store and saw this stuff, instant ramen, you know it’s everywhere now, but it was new then, for Canada. And she got so excited, she bought three cups for us and brought it home, her face was splitting open with her smile. I’d never seen her so happy.”
“She made it for us for dinner, she poured in those cup noodles and set it out for us. And we laughed, since it was a western cup noodle, and it tasted nothing like real ramen. Honestly, it was bad,” Yuna shook her head, amused. “Afterwards, my dad set his chopsticks down, and said very seriously – ‘Mother, never buy this again,’ and she never did.”
Shane had never heard that story. The image was vivid in his mind; his grandma and grandpa, young and worn down, Yuna with her hair short, wrinkling their nose at the flimsy styrofoam Mr. Noodles cup. His grandpa laying down an order – no more trying at what we can’t have.
Ilya laughed, and caught Shane’s eye, his face open and delighted. A strange part of Shane whispered that Ilya wouldn’t know what that feels like, at least. He moved to Boston in 2010, near a thriving Russian cultural centre, not to white Ottawa in the 1970s. Then he remembered that Ilya moved to that white Ottawa for him, and that sourness turned to guilt.
“At least there’s ramen here now! Real ramen!” Yuna exclaimed, and Ilya added a “Hear, hear!” and lifted his glass. They all laughed at the toast, and it was finally a good time to clear away the plates, much to Shane’s relief.
—
“I don’t really think about stuff like that,” Shane replies in interviews, his lips wooden at the words.
And yeah, he doesn’t. He doesn’t have it that bad, anyways. Sure, he gets comments, but they’re not usually mean spirited. It’s not as bad as the black guys in the league, who get called slurs constantly, by fans, by opponents, even by teammates, from what JJ describes.
“This is so cute!” his mom wrote in a message, along with a facebook post. Two parents, Japanese or Chinese or Korean or Filipino or mixed or anything, their cheeks pressed to their son’s face, who was smiling so hard his eyes disappeared into slits. Gripped in his little mitts is a Hollander jersey, number 24 stark on the deep blue, same white as the slushy snow in the background of the image.
Shane really doesn’t have it so bad, really, it’s just upsides, inspiring kids, that kind of thing. A guy called him a chink once, but he was a dick, anyways, no one really liked him. Sports commentators regularly complain about his lack of physicality, but you know, he’s not the biggest guy anyways, so it’s only really weird that it seems to come up so often. His old white superiors put their foot in their mouth, talking about the beauty of the Japanese zen gardens or whatever, but an awkward conversation can be sat through.
Shane studied his mom’s message, the gummy, gap toothed smile of the kid, and had the vague sense of being an imposter. What’s he done for that kid, except grin and bear it?
But no, Shane doesn’t really think about stuff like that.
—
Shane was not going through Ilya’s things, in his defence. He wasn’t trying to pry, or anything. He was just tidying up. The upcoming New Year was looming in the back of his head, the deep clean was approaching. And Ilya’s desk was a nightmare. He was just… gathering information. A pre-emptive survey of the extent of the disaster.
So yeah, it wasn’t prying that led him to finding a Japanese workbook, tucked away in the back of Ilya’s pull out drawer. It was maybe crossing a boundary when he opened it to find some of the exercises filled out, but to be fair, it was a Japanese workbook. The thing gave him a fright the instant he laid eyes on it, like the dread of summer homework ran its finger down his spine. He thought he reserved the right to look, at least, when he was tormented by the things for years.
Shane did put the workbook back where he found it, resisted the urge to bury it further in loose documents, and gingerly closed the drawer. He then went to sit on the couch for a few minutes, taking deep breaths, watching the numbers on the digital clock mounted on the wall click by.
When Shane heard the slam of Ilya’s car door, he panicked to recall how he usually acted when Ilya got home. While following that train of thought Ilya opened the front door, calling out “I’m hooome, help me with groceries,” sing-songy.
Groceries were normal. Ilya was in a good mood today; he whistled while carrying the bags, setting them down for Shane to unpack into the fridge. Shane didn’t have to meet his eyes until all was done, and when he did Ilya raised his eyebrows and asked “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Shane replied, annoyed he was immediately seen through.
There was a moment of silence, during which Shane was determined not to budge. What would he even say about this? Why was he even upset?
Ilya then shook his head conciliatorily. “Ok, sure, nothing is wrong,” he said, and grabbed some scissors to open the net of oranges set carefully in the fruit bowl.
They maintained this equilibrium through the afternoon, during which Shane was increasingly guilty. Somehow, the fact that it was nothing made keeping the discovery from Ilya even worse. By freaking out and covering it up, he was willing it into a big deal. But Shane couldn’t find the words to bring this up with Ilya. While watching tape and taking notes, he could not stop thinking back to that workbook, Ilya’s careful pencil filling out the greyed out hiragana, and then the subsequent boxes, repeated 1, 2, 3 times, just like Shane did when he was little. While printing his neat notes in English, he realized he now could not recall some of the characters.
Ilya was clearly giving him some space, which made it even worse. Shane did not need to have his feelings considered, he wasn’t even upset. Ilya kept puttering around, grabbing something from the kitchen or something, giving Shane a little kiss on the head or ruffling his hair before retreating.
It was over dinner Shane finally brought it up. “I found the Japanese workbook in your desk today,” he said, like he rehearsed.
Ilya stopped, and stared at Shane for a moment. Something flashed in his eyes, before he wiped it away.
With a carefully blank face, Ilya said “You were snooping,” before stuffing a massive spoonful of rice in his mouth.
“I was not snooping,” Shane replied. “I was trying to see how bad your drawers were. We’re gonna deep clean soon, if you remember.”
“Yes, I remember, for New Years, yes. So you snooped and you found the Japanese workbook,” Ilya shrugged, “My surprise is ruined, but at least for good Shane Hollander reason.”
Shane’s stomach swooped a little. Ok, so Shane ruined Ilya’s thoughtful surprise. Ok. Somehow, Shane felt like he wasn’t feeling the right way about this.
“You’re learning Japanese as a surprise for me?” Shane asked.
Ilya shrugged again, but then seemed to think better of himself, and lifted his eyes to look at Shane. “Yes, Shane, I am taking classes.”
“Why?”
Ilya raised his eyebrows, a wrinkle in his forehead deepening as he chewed, then swallowed. “You are learning Russian for me. I want to do the same for you.”
“Well,” Shane looked down at his plate. The food looked more inedible than usual. “That’s very sweet.”
There was a beat, before Ilya asked, “Shane, did I do something wrong?” and Shane, vaguely, felt like he was going to throw up. He couldn’t look up to meet Ilya’s eyes.
“You know I barely speak it, right?” Shane said, words falling out of his mouth like stones. His hands felt very cold on the table.
“Shane,” and Ilya’s voice had a new note of comfort in it, “Shane, I think you tell yourself you can not speak Japanese, but you speak French and English and so much Russian, yes? Yuna said you speak it very well-”
“Yeah, when I was like six,” Shane cut in, much louder than he meant to. He lowered his voice, “When I was like six, when our grandma lived with us, yeah I could speak it. It’s different now, ok?”
Ilya did not look like he understood. His eyebrows were screwing together, “So you are upset with me because?”
“I’m not upset with you!” Shane exclaimed, half lying.
“If this is true, if you really do not know Japanese, maybe we can learn together, yes?” and those words, said in that comforting, compromising tone, were a spark that lit his queasy stomach into roiling hot rage. Shane shoved away from the table, grabbing his plate, and stormed over to the kitchen, ready to throw his tasteless meal away.
“Shane, what are you doing,” Ilya was getting up too, trying to stand in Shane’s way, Shane could see his shoes come into view where his eyes were trained on the ground.
“Shane, sweetheart, I don’t know what you are thinking,” Ilya was saying. Shane wasn’t used to being on this side of the argument. “I don’t know why you are upset, what did I do wrong!”
Shane put his plate down with a decisive clatter. “Sure, yeah! We can take a Japanese class together, where I’ll be surrounded by white people who are better at it than me! Sounds like fun!”
Ilya paused, his face bewildered. "I don't understand where this is coming from," he said.
“Of course you wouldn’t understand, you grew up speaking Russian, Russian in Russia, how the fuck would you know? You’ve never had to even… you can’t fucking… you’ve been surrounded by people like you your whole life!”
He finally looked up and into Ilya’s eyes, which were wide and incredulous, and Shane realized, “I mean-”
“I see, yes. I have been surrounded by Russian all my life. And what we are speaking right now? A dialect?”
“I mean, no, I’m sorry Ilya, I didn’t mean-” Shane’s anger was quickly deflating out of him, only the familiar upset remaining.
“And I’ve always felt at home in Russia too, of course, what did you say? Around people like me? Yes, Shane, I knew so much acceptance and understanding in Russia.”
“You know I didn’t mean that!” Shane said, not yelling. Truthfully, even he didn’t know what exactly he meant. “It’s just,” Shane tried, “Your parents and and all your grandparents and your friends and everyone you knew were like. One thing. And nothing came in between that.”
“Sure,” Ilya said, “This is about being Asian in snow white Canada?”
Shane shook his head, but said “Maybe a little,” and Ilya was nodding, though Shane still didn’t think he grasped the size of it. How could Shane explain it to Ilya, being barely Asian, essentially white, but not fully white, slowly forgetting what made you Japanese before you knew it, and then, what, your boyfriend decides to learn the damn language, ask your mom about it, without even asking you? Asking if you’re still Japanese enough for the effort to be worth it?
“Can we stop talking about this?” Shane asked.
—
“So you’re worried I’ll become, what, more Japanese than you?” Ilya said. They were sat across from each other at Shane’s austere dining table, since he thought this was the best neutral ground to be having this conversation.
“I didn’t say that. I said that you might get better at Japanese than me, and,” Shane tugged on the collar of his shirt, the coarse feeling of the fabric constricting on his throat. “I wouldn't like that.”
Ilya pursed his lips, clearly thinking.
“I will not be better at Japanese than you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well, even if the world was crazy and I was better than you…” Ilya said, drumming his fingers on the table.
“I grew up eating cake with spoon, in Russia. And you ate cake with fork like an American. And if the world was crazy, and you were better at Russian than me, I still have grown up eating cake with spoon, and you haven’t.” He nodded like he said something profound.
“What?” Shane replied.
“I do not know what it’s like to… I don’t know. Grow up eating rice with chopsticks. Even if I got better at Japanese.”
That was stupid, not just because Shane actually figured chopsticks out pretty late, and stopped eating white rice around age 15. It shouldn’t have been touching at all. So it was silly that Shane reached across the table, warm and grateful, and grabbed Ilya’s hand.