50 Yen by Joy Guo
Associate editor Olivia Kingery on today’s bonus short: This short is a well-crafted accordion: collapsing inwards with ease to the fine threads of the characters' lives, then back out to the larger framework of the story. The music created by Guo’s movement across the page is full of longing and a tender type of love—both of which linger in a melody after the story ends.
50 Yen
It is Ah Po’s first time in New York.
She does not enjoy the flight over. The sounds of takeoff are gruesome, and she tries not to sob. The woman next to her pats her arm. “Ah yi, look out the window. I find that helps.” At one point, the captain announces the Great Wall is right below them, but Ah Po can’t see a thing. The clouds hang like drabby curtains. “Look, there it is,” a boy squeals to his mother, jabbing the air. Ah Po squints. It’s just a highway.
The flight attendants pass her tea that is the color of bruises.
Her son has arranged for there to be a wheelchair at the gate. Ah Po flaps her hand at it, the way you would at encroaching geese. When she sees him waiting in the terminal, she gives him an earful, she’s not so decrepit that she needs to be rolled around, you know, but he just nods and takes her suitcase and her ire.
“Ma, anything in particular you want to see while you’re here? The Empire State Building? The Statue of Liberty?”
She is going to see Lao Tan to collect on a childhood bet. He owes her fifty yen.
The next day, her son drops her off at the train station with a map of the city, money, and his wife’s cell phone. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” He asks but Ah Po has already walked away.
In the subway, she scuttles along with the other strangers, all looking sad and constipated. She walks around in the half-dark, peering at the map she’s been given, asks a man in a suit for directions, he shrugs, she turns and asks someone else, who swerves neatly around her to avoid having to respond.
Ah Po finally finds her way up to street-level. She spots a red and yellow cart and brightens. This is something Lao Tan has told her about. The vendor asks a lot of questions, but Ah Po can only shake her head and hold out the money. He picks out one of the bills, gives her a foil-wrapped lump in exchange. Ah Po sits down on a bench and eats her first hot dog. The meat has an odd chew. Pigeons strutting around her feet like swarthy businessmen cock their heads expectantly for a bit of bread. She can’t decide if what she just ate is good or wretched but holds the taste in her mouth for as long as possible so she can tell Lao Tan about it later.
One bench over, a couple is fighting. She gets up and walks past, only to realize they are laughing and holding hands. Ah Po pulls out a photo of Lao Tan, holds it up, taps at the background.
They babble at her and she stares uncomprehendingly until the boy finally takes out his phone, thinks for a minute, speaks into it, and the phone chirps back in Mandarin. Ah Po is so taken aback at this that she has to listen to the translated directions three times before they sink in—Look for the 1 train. It’s a red circle. Take it downtown to Cortlandt Street.
On the subway, two people offer up their seat. Just as she is easing herself down, the train lurches, flinging Ah Po forward, her hand planting right into a stranger’s groin. Horrified, she tries to hurry away, but the train doesn’t care and stutters to a stop. She falls to her knees and, resigning to just stay low, crabwalks over shoes and shopping bags until she spies an empty seat and heaves herself onto it. She thinks back to why she is going through all this trouble.
Long ago, when they were children, she and Lao Tan had found a map snarled in a tree.
“Leave it,” he cried. But Ah Po ignored him and scrabbled up the trunk. Higher and higher she climbed, until finally, chancing a peek over her shoulder, Ah Po could barely make him out except for the glint of sun against his glasses.
When she finally squirmed back down, the map between her teeth, Lao Tan’s eyes were still fixed above, as though he had lost her halfway.
“Hey,” she nudged his shoulder, jolting him awake. “You want to look at this or not?”
The paper crimped as it dried but gave enough for the two of them to marvel over the entire world laid out before them.
“Here,” Ah Po said, tapping on one particular spot, “one day, we’ll go and see what it’s like.”
Lao Tan picked at his teeth. “It’s too far.”
“No, it’s not,” she protested, measuring the distance with her fingers. Not far at all. “Fifty years. That’s plenty of time for us to get there. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I say no.”
“I say yes. In fifty years, let’s meet right here.”
They bet fifty yen, one for each year.
Here is how those years unravel.
Lao Tan will arrive first. He’ll careen from Beijing to Kyoto to Boise, coming to rest somewhere along the southern rim of Manhattan. How incredible it is, he writes to Ah Po, to be born in a bamboo-thatched shack and now riding the elevator each morning to the hundredth floor. Taped to his last letter is a photo of himself. He is making the peace sign, a miniature version of the Towers behind him.
Ah Po will one day follow his trail to where it ends. She’ll somehow be both right on time and much too late, pacing city streets, trying to guess which of these buildings must be his, searching for the smallest glimpse of him, the fleck of light against his glasses.
He is too high up, farther than she ever climbed, though she does not yet know this.
She cranes her neck back until all she sees is sky.
Still, Ah Po keeps looking.
Joy Guo currently lives in Manhattan with her husband. She is a white collar and regulatory defense attorney. Her work is published or forthcoming in failbetter, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, and No Contact.
