Yasuko Thanh - Mistakes to Run With

Also by Yasuko Thanh

FLOATING LIKE THE DEAD

MYSTERIOUS FRAGRANCE OF THE YELLOW MOUNTAINS

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada USA UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

First published 2019

Copyright 2019 by Yasuko Thanh

Patrick Geary quote is republished with permission of Princeton University Press from Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium by Patrick Geary, 1994; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Thanh, Yasuko, author

Mistakes to run with : a memoir / Yasuko Thanh.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9780735234413 (softcover).ISBN 9780735234420 (electronic)

1. Thanh, Yasuko. 2. Thanh, YasukoChildhood and youth.

3. Authors, Canadian (English)British ColumbiaBiography. I. Title.

PS8639.H375Z466 2019C813.6C2018-902404-6

C2018-902405-4

Cover design: Terri Nimmo

Cover images: (front) Alex Waber (back) Picsfive / Shutterstock.com

v5.3.2

a

For my children

All memoryis memory for something.

PATRICK GEARY

AUTHOR S NOTE

Many of the names in this work have been changed to protect peoples privacy. Frances is a composite, but the events are true facts.

Chapter titles are based on Buddhisms Eighteen Levels of Hell.

VANCOUVER , 1988. Im seventeen, sitting on an overturned milk crate in the July heat.

My best friend Frances rubbed her toes through the leather of her stilettos. She was black, half Native, and didnt know her real father. People said his name was Fergie and that he was from Barbados. This is all anyone knew.

Although Frances was prettier than the other girls on the track, Japanese dates rarely took her out. No matter that she spoke a little of their language, learned while working at Bradleys nightclub, which catered to Asian businessmen with thick wallets. If she and I were out on the corner together, chances were Id catch a date first.

My hot-pink tube top shimmered in the sun. I sucked a frozen strawberry juice bar, monitoring my tan through my sunglasses. Id flung my six-inch heels aside; they lay in the shadow of the Korner Kitchen coffee shop. I slathered my legs with baby oil, careful not to spill any on my miniskirt.

Five years before, the local newspaper in Victoria, British Columbia, where I grew up, had published an article about my academic, athletic, and civic achievements. My place on the school math team had earned us a spot in the Gauss Contest. Id won a French public-speaking competition that sent provincial finalists to Ottawa to meet the Governor General, Jeanne Sauv. The article featured a grainy picture I hated: skinny face, acne, poodle perm. My parents had saved the clipping and, before gluing it into the pages of a family scrapbook, had sent photocopies to aunts and uncles in Europe.

I need at least four today, Frances said. Her pimp wasnt known for setting quotas. I figured she had rent to pay.

Id already made three hundred dollars that morning and stashed the money in my bra, where the folded bills scratched against my breasts.

Frances often worked double shifts to earn what I did in three hours. At the age of seventeen I was convinced of the righteousness of my behaviour, which showed what a person could do when not intimidated. I ate lobster, drove a Camaro. I wasnt a victim. We smiled from the curb at the men who drove around the block, waved, beckoned with our index fingers, manufacturing a sweetness for even the circle jerks who ogled our flesh through their car windows but never stopped to take us out. This was part of the job, smiling while covering up our fear.

At the age of fifteen, within the space of two months, Id gone from losing my virginity to performing half-and-halfs on the street that cost two hundred bucks, half blow job, half lay. Another year of work had brought me to Vancouver, to this point now, deep in the summer of 1988.

Id never had a violent date like Frances whod been kidnapped, bound with rope, held captive in a garage, and forced to eat dog food before being set free two days later. Another friend had been attacked, her head split open, by a guy driving a station wagon with a childs car seat in the back. Shed tried to block the blows while yelling she was pregnant but he beat her unconscious with his crowbar anyway. I saw her in the Korner Kitchen two weeks later: shed returned to work with her arm in a cast and seventy-two stitches in her head.

I remember thinking I was lucky. I remember thinking I was careful. Such things could never happen to me.