Chinatown, Summer, 1984
Michael. That was a good name: Michael. Just two syllables, each announced by short and sharp points, blending with a point like a clearing of the throat, and he rolled it around with his tongue like a piece of hard candy, stretching out his thin lips trying to get the pronunciation right: Michael. Michael. Fourteen and a half hours ago he had heard the pilot say it out loud, over the loudspeaker: errrr, uh, folks: welcome aboard Northwest Orient flight 18 bound for New York, this is your captain, Captain Michael ______ speaking, I’m joined here by First Officer B-, and though he didn’t understand most of it, he knew that it contained a name, and he believed it to be a good name. Worthy of respect.
Years later, after nearly a decade passed him by, whenever he felt high and dizzy and sentimental he would catch a glimpse of this moment as if seeing an old billboard that had survived unnoticed. How easy it had been back then to conjure an identity—almost literally from thin air, at thirty thousand feet—and how quickly he had placed his yearning faith into it.
Back then he had plenty of time to think it over. Kai Tak to Narita to JFK. Across the ocean dark and murky and impenetrable. His appetite was gone, with just a plastic-wrapped thing of biscuits to last him: unremarkable, this first taste of the new world. He did not sleep much. In the middle seat he sat and stared about the darkened cabin, breaking his senses down into minutiae, little points of trivia: he heard the cries of children, the hushed snores, the annoyed stewardesses serving pillows wrapped in plastic, hot towels. He saw flickers of light from the inane American action movie playing overhead. He felt his calves cramping up and did nothing about it. He ran that word across his tongue, speaking it silently to himself, over and over, breathing in that stale air. Michael.
What would happen if this big gleaming metal tube like a roll of Darkie toothpaste dropped out of the sky? Would it scream like a whistle howling to the sea, or would it glide as silently as a bird?
When Michael was a boy, probably 6, maybe 8, he had a memory of fireflies at dusk. Then again, everyone has a memory of fireflies at dusk. But that night, some of the neighborhood boys had dared him to climb the 14 rungs of the ladder to the top of the water tower behind the secondary school, and jump, onto a mound of dirt and creek runoff, where below him soft yellow twinkling points glowed and faded like military signals, and Michael saw below him little pinpricks of light blinking like code, some hidden language telling him jump, jump!, and the moment he jumped he felt his stomach drop away from under him as if it was being pulled out of his body, before the rest of his body followed.
This pain would become the lonely city he would soon inhabit, burrowing into his young and beating heart, his mind fighting unseen silent enemies. The invasion of Shanghai. The surrender of Singapore. The bullies who threw rocks at him. Years later he was still that same frightened boy who had landed funny on his arm, yowling with the pain, lying on his side and watching his so-called friends scatter like stray cats in the headlights.
He would be fine, of course, at least on the outside. Between tests and bribes and English classes and the British capitalists who hovered around his father, spreading rumors of takeover from the mainland, he didn’t know what he wanted—but at least he knew people who could get it for him. All he had to do was ask. This time, he did. Maybe he had to go to the other side of the world to figure out what exactly that was.
Over landfall, soon, across snow-capped white, indistinguishable from the clouds. And then, clouds. Dropping into browns and tans and greens, crisscrossing lines punctuated by thin white wisps, and then the skies turned to red, then purple, signifying night—his first night on this side of the world.
And then the morning sun cracked over the Eastern seaboard, and the interior lights came back on, and that smooth, smooth white man’s voice came back on the loudspeaker folks…uh, we’re approaching our initial descent into New York, it’s a beautiful morning here, a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit on the ground, the boy reborn as Michael clutched the armrests and stared at the detachable telephone on the headrest until he bore a hole into the plastic. And then there was a thump, and the squealing of flaps, and his neck flew forward, and then he heard the scratchy words on behalf of Northwest Orient we thank you for flying with us and he was in America, in New York.
—
Michael stepped hesitantly off the plane, craning his neck, trying to catch any glimpse of a skyline. Thick blast of heat up the sloping noisy jetway. Then, the cool air of the terminal. America! This was America, and this was it—the metallic dirt that floated off the shoes and into the grey carpet, the smell of food from the pushcarts, familiar and strange at the same time. Even the air smelled beautiful. Clean, fragrant, not like smoke so thick like a morning fog. He stood there for a moment clutching his one meager dark velvet suitcase, small enough to fit over his head, large enough to swallow him whole, gawking at the signage, deciphering hidden meanings, and eventually he stepped forth, tracing a path down wide and twisting corridors, marching toward Customs and Immigration with the sea tide of people who practically lifted him up and off his feet.
Customs went by easily. The officer was tall and sharp-jawed with a healthy head of wavy blond hair, a crisp uniform, a perfect American specimen, and under the tall booth and the glare of the lights he shrunk even smaller than he already was, a scrawny boy, barely five feet tall, arms like wet towels. Having not spoken to anybody since leaving Hong Kong, Michael’s voice came out all squeaky and nervous, catching him by surprise. All of his forms were in order: all he had to do was to pull them out of a folder in the correct sequence. Easy. A smart boy of 25 like him, he could figure it out. Brow furrowed, flop sweat exuded, then passport stamped, bang bang bang, then next! Such a simple gesture. He gathered his papers in a hustle.
Relax, the blond man smiled. Welcome to America.
Michael held these papers against his suitcase and stepped past baggage claim and toward the exit, through the sliding doors, into a heat Michael knew too well. This was America! This was–
The stench of human feces enveloping him in the humidity the moment the doors opened: seeping into his skin, invading his nostrils, making his eyes tear up. He could almost taste it. Woody and earthen—he swore he could detect notes of sweetness, juniper berries, lichi, fermented bean paste, chou dofu. He swirled the shit in his mouth. He dug it out of his ear with a finger. He went back inside—faint haze of cigarette smoke, women’s perfume, machinery oil and plastic—and he looked outside, through the clear glass doors, but he hadn’t even taken a step back when the doors whooshed open again, cha-chunk, ding, and he walked once again into the shit.
And then, somewhere beyond a sea of taxis, he heard the sharp blast of a horn, looked up, and saw a man, behind a great black convertible.
Michael saw his gold rings first, shimmering in the heat waves off the asphalt. The man stood by the driver’s door, one huge wrinkled hand on the steering wheel, reached through an open window and honked again. He had a great big belly like a perfect sphere stuffed into a short-sleeved shirt that revealed wide and tanned arms. Thin hair crowning his face, deeply inset with jowls. The man looked right at Michael and with his other hand, waved him over, excitedly.
Michael’s instructions had been clear.
“Hey, you! Little nephew!”
The man was waving an arm around over his head. Michael walked as fast as he could, banging his suitcase against his leg, past the choking diesel smoke, the horns, the chrome grilles and V8 engines and black rubber bumpers of America. Michael had forgotten his name, but it didn’t matter: he was his uncle, his bai bai, his only family in this unknown territory, and he was now wrapping Michael in those big saggy arms like a python’s jaw. Michael smelled sweat and cooking oil and the familiar blast of cigarette breath.
“Eh, you made it!” he yelled, in his harsh Cantonese. “Let’s get out of this stinking place. That’s all you brought?”
Michael had never seen a car so beautiful. It was long and shiny and black, so black that it seemed to pull all the light from his eyes. The chrome wire-spoked wheels gleamed like their own sources of light. The caramel seats looked so smooth and inviting that Michael wanted to lick them. The trunk lid rose silently as Bai Bai heaved Michael’s suitcase inside, though it could have fit four more, so vast it was. Michael, still holding onto his papers, touched the silver door handle with his other hand. Real metal, warm to the touch, a talisman in the heat. He lifted it gingerly and swung the door away as if he was opening a music box.
Even in the shit and the humidity and the stinking choke of Arrivals he could smell the leather as pure and cozy as his parents’ closet, cool and dark and comfortable, where as a frightened boy—broken arm or not—he hid to escape from the world, his parents, his homework, his world-weary boyhood. This time there were no scent of mothballs.
The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar.
“Heh, heh, the car talks!” said Bai Bai. “Look at you, scared by the future. Little dǎn xiǎo guǐ.”
This unexpected Mandarin was new to Michael. Bai Bai climbed inside and before Michael could even say a word, he snatched the folder of papers out of Michael’s hands. As he opened it, his eyes furrowed. “Economics, huh?” he said. “Columbia! Hah! Good school! Very good school! Is that why your father sent you here? He thought you were that good?”
The language had never seemed pretty. But there was something about Bai Bai, the way he talked, guttural and straining, the way he shouted everything—that permanent sneer on his mouth. Michael felt heat on his neck. He wondered how the man’s English sounded. As long as Bai Bai was alive Michael would never know if he was kidding or not, even after he finished his sentence with a full-bodied laugh that somehow put him at ease, just for a moment: just a bit of family joshing, a friendly rivalry. What was that phrase he read in an English comic book once? Breaking your balls.
Visas, secondary school transcripts, test results. An acceptance letter painstakingly recreated. Just in case. “Big fancy school,” Bai Bai said under his breath as he held onto the papers, tucking them into the driver’s side door panel, “there’s enough of us there already.”
He had been calling him by his Chinese name this whole time, but Michael, resolutely, corrected him.
“Is that what your father named you? Crazy man!”
“No, I named me.”
Bai Bai snorted. He stared at the boy. He had hugged him, yes, but he hadn’t even taken him in. Michael: stringy bowl cut hair, a weak jaw, fat cheeks, dull brown eyes, the collar on his striped polo shirt all the way out to here—isn’t that how they all dressed? What was that movie that had just come out, with that Japanese fellow? Ah, yes: another Long Duk Dong, another sexless nerd, another weakling. He could probably snap him in half. So far this boy who called himself Michael looked perpetually confused, opening his tiny eyes as wide as they could go, so much to take in at once—he didn’t envy that at all. Don’t anyone dare say he saw his own past in the boy; he held that thought, then swallowed the notion, burying it deep in his stomach.
Just another ugly Chinaman in the city.
Bai Bai pressed a magical silver switch that would surely impress him. “You wait, heh heh, watch this.” And then entire rear end opened up, and these skinny metal arms lifted upward like reaching for heaven, and a white canvas cloud enveloped the two people underneath, propelled forward with a motorized sound of tomorrow, and they were plunged into quiet. Michael suddenly was back inside that closet, curled up on the floor, hands wrapped around bare feet, playing hide-and-seek with himself because few ever did. He looked at his beaming, grinning uncle, and even though he hadn’t remembered him since he was what, five? he knew that he was making up for lost time—anyone who could bring him back to that moment, to stir up what had been forgotten, was worth following. He wanted him to do it again, that roof thing, again and again forever.
“Look at me!” said Bai Bai. “I never had a fancy degree. I left before they gave me the chance! And see this car? Chrysler turbo!” Michael winced at the pronunciation. “Fifteen! thousand! American! dollars!” Emphasizing every word like he was selling the car to a stadium. “See this?” He flashed for Michael the watch on his right wrist, large and gold, which caught a passing police car’s lights, dazzling Michael’s eyes. It was thirteen minutes past eight.
“Of course, your father, he was always the smart one, the old hero. He knows best.”
Even Michael in his innocence could detect the sarcasm in his voice.
Another pause. Then he put an arm around Michael, a big fat hand on his bony shoulder, and his tone was softer now. “Everything I have, it will be yours. I’m old, but I can still teach you a few things. See what America does to an old foreigner like us, my son?” He said the colloquial son, the one that meant a big and handsome boy.
“Yes,” Michael said, “thank you.”
He felt some energy he hadn’t felt since he said goodbye to his father, seemingly years ago now—equal parts anxiety and hope, hope for the future, a future where he could believe anything, from anyone.
—
Now they were traversing the length of Atlantic Avenue, across what Michael would later learn was Brooklyn. Bai Bai wanted to take the local route because, he said, he had a point to make. The sun cast shadows across the boulevard, while the road cast its own waves in the heat. Inside the car where the air conditioning was so strong that Michael shivered but was too nervous to speak up, the view outward looked no different than what he had left behind—and yet it was a completely different world: trash floating in puddles against the curb; black bags piled high above dark-tinged liquid pooling like blood; crumpled shells of great hulking cars like tombs robbed of their memories; crude hand-painted signs in languages Michael could recognize (Vietnamese, Thai, Indian) and ones he couldn’t fathom (Greek, Hebrew). Maybe the whole world was like this. If you stripped away a city’s details, the languages, the landmarks, the architectural flourishes jutting past the rooflines, you would end up with the same sweaty-looking people on the stairs, the same boarded-up windows. Michael felt a slight twinge of guilt. So far to go to be nowhere at all.
Bai Bai was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
When the lights turned green Bai Bai buried his foot as far as it could go into the lush carpeting and the ensuing pshoooosh drove Michael’s shoulders into the seat, bringing forth all the acceleration that the world could summon. What was that one mangled word his uncle had said? Turbo. Some engine filled with magic forces that could produce the same twist in his stomach as a 747 on takeoff.
Out of the corner of his eye Bai Bai saw Michael smile, but a half-hearted, tight-lipped one, arising at the corner of his thin lips. Michael, that name, some old foreigner’s name. Let’s see how long that would last. “Tell me,” he asked, “your parents, your mom, did she ever teach you to cook?”
Yes, Michael once helped his father out in the kitchen; it was just another set of responsibilities.
“All the Songs, we’ve all been good cooks. Your dad and I, we used to haul the rice up from the cellar, these big wooden buckets, heavy, heavy buckets, and we’d put our arms in the rice and stir it around, we’d do that for hours. Makes your arms nice and strong. Good for fighting. He was always a better fighter than me. How is your father? Does he ever talk about me?”
On the side of the road underneath a yellow Chevrolet a stray cat waited, grey and white, about to take its chances across the six lanes of Atlantic.
Michael’s father could have been a celebrity, the way he waxed nostalgic about his most memorable meals, describing the scent and tang of his beloved dishes until it seemed like you could taste them through his words—whenever he entertained his fellow government officials or the foreign investors in their boxy three-piece suits. One could almost see the tears forming at the corners of his eyes: happy, confident, self-assured. The way he could take control of a kitchen, conjuring wonders from nothing. In the year before the sickness began to take hold of his father, Michael began to take over cooking duties, buoyed by his father’s encouragement, a rarity among men of that generation almost to be considered a weakness; Michael had at some point even believed that he had a knack for it.
Michael wanted to ask him about his life here, but he figured he would receive the same lecture. Twenty years he hadn’t seen his uncle and yet the man was keeping awfully quiet to himself.
At the next stoplight Michael watched a mighty stream of water arcing from a fire hydrant cranked open and flooding the intersection, where children were dancing in and out of the torrent, their shirts and jean shorts soaked and clinging to their dark skin, and even through the glass Michael could hear their laughter. He had never seen a black person before in his life. A repeating beat from a hidden source reverberated through the intersection and therefore through the entire world, and Michael felt ashamed to stare. For a moment he wished that he could join them.
“These people,” Bai Bai began: dirty, lazy, they did drugs all day, they ran around shooting each other, harassing the Chinese. They didn’t work hard, in this beautiful country, not like us. They didn’t’ deserve it like us. Michael sunk down into the seats and stared at the small black sign on the dashboard which read, in sparkling script, LeBaron. He touched it, rubbing his finger over the silver letters.
A Chrysler. Michael had remembered, a few years ago, that a Chinese man had been killed by a Chrysler. All the newspapers mentioned it. Oh, wait, he was killed by people who built the Chryslers, people in Detroit who thought the man was instead Japanese. To be insulted like that! Michael felt his face growing hot. But it was all the same in America, the papers had shouted: a vicious place. Don’t be black or brown or yellow in America.
Did his uncle remember?
It didn’t matter. If he could drive a Chrysler with pride then it meant progress, it meant that they’d be integrated into this rich tapestry of Americana, from sea to shining sea, amber waves of grain, etc; it meant that Michael could learn to love such a fine automobile. Turbo. Bai Bai took out a small metal lighter and lit a cigarette. The fumes swirled in the air conditioning. Michael coughed and his uncle laughed and he tried to reach for the chromed switch on the armrest and realized: his uncle had locked the doors and windows.
—
Down another boulevard and then another and Michael caught a glimpse of glass, framed by columns of white: the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The World Trade Center. A brief flash. Bai Bai ashed his cigarette in the center console, squeaked opened a window, and all the smoke escaped, pushed out by the dashboard vents.
“I’m sorry to hear that your father’s still sick,” he said. “I’ll be sure to give him a call, if he’ll talk to me. I can get calling cards anytime. You want to call him, you talk to me. Ai ya,” he swore, nearly hitting a woman with a stroller, who could be seen mouthing curses back at them from before the glass, “where are your fucking eyes, bitch?”
And they were over the water now, rising, rising up the Manhattan Bridge, and Michael traced his eyes along the parabola of the suspension ropes, the dizziness of it, the river. Ferries plying their way past the docks. Helicopters above. And then the skyscrapers, rising and falling like mountain ranges, all the way to the horizon. They would be into it soon, into the rows and rows of neatly ordered civilization. Into something bigger than themselves.
“You can call, won’t you?”
Michael, entranced by the view, didn’t even realize that he was being asked a question.
I will, he responded. I will try to call my father, for you.
“Your father would be proud. If he could see me now! Twenty years, my son! I keep saying to him, the war hero, I’m ready to put things aside, but what does he do? Calls me for a favor! For you! His heart must have softened in the sickness.”
And now Michael remembered a vision of his uncle.
He was five.
Perched on a seat, resting his head on the table, smelling all the dishes: steamed fish, eggplant with pork, har gow, char siu. His cousins were running about, tripping over the toy trucks scattered across the floor, the men were in the kitchen, flash-frying something in the wok which emanated as a bright and loud whoosh, and his mother and his aunts were perched around the television, laughing, and everything felt jubilant and right, right up until the room felt silent.
—
Once the LeBaron descended from Manhattan Bridge, the signs erupted into a language Michael could finally recognize: bright, garish, stark, faded on the sides of trucks, flapping from vinyl sheets in the faint wind, fancy hand-painted brushstrokes and geometric monotony. Past fire escapes and statues of Sun Yat-Sen. Past a big gold dome on the corner of Bowery and Canal. Down on the street were finally the teeming Chinese: old men playing checkers, yelling in Cantonese; women squatting on milk crates, peeling roasted peanut shells; young men in leather jackets and baseball caps mugging tough for each other’s Polaroids. Behind tables stacked with VHS tapes a skinny man dumped icy water from a cooler packed with fish, pale pink blood running like veins down the sidewalk, underneath people’s feet. Nobody seemed to notice. An elderly Chinese woman was plucking glass bottles delicately out of garbage bags, stacking them in a neat half-moon inside a shopping cart held down with bungee cords. The J train rumbled like an earthquake. Up on a fire escape, above a window of roast fowl whose oily skin glistened the color of cherries, Michael stared at a deeply tanned middle-aged man eating out of a chipped white bowl. He was wearing nothing but underwear.
Michael glanced at his uncle, who for the first time since the airport seemed lost in thought.
Bai Bai turned the car through a busy crosswalk, honking. The car now creeped down a quiet alleyway; the crowds and the shouting disappeared. Finally, he opened a window, cracked it just a bit. Gears were turning in his mind, turbochargers spooling in his brain. Toward the pinpoint of light at the other side, there was nothing except dumpsters and cardboard boxes, drums of oil and garbage bags.
The car stopped in front of a metal door, rusted and black, except for the words written in faded, hand-painted yellow letters: PROSPERITY.
He shut the car off and lit another cigarette. Michael waited patiently.
After a moment, Bai Bai spoke. “Did I ever tell you about your father?”
Smell of raw fish, cigarettes, piss, weed, fish, the metallic tinge of leafy greens.
Now Michael remembered.
His father: a good head taller than his uncle, a lean and tanned soldier’s build. His father had fought the Japanese at Chongqing and the Communists at Hua Shan and you didn’t want to know what he had to do to get to Hong Kong. His uncle: pudgy, fists balled, neck craned upward, eyes glaring, unwavering. Between them, the broken bottle that he had slammed. Beer soaking into his bare feet. His father asking, softly, repeating himself: where was the money.
There is no money, you bastard, I never took your money, you owed me, remember? So quick to accuse!
Clean this up. You won’t make a mess in my home.
Brother, shouldn’t you be happy I’m back? Proud of me? All of you!
What’s so great about America? [An aunt now, one who rarely visited.]
Ah, all of you, this land is dead, this city, nothing more than a graveyard of ghosts. I took my money and I earned it and I’m going to be more wealthy than you all because I’m smarter than you and I’ll laugh!
You’re better off staying there, someone yelled, and then Michael’s father grabbed Michael’s uncle by the arm, wrenching it behind his back like he had learned in the army, and led him toward the door, and his uncle struggled with his three remaining limbs, and he swept a leg out from the folding card table, and the entire dinner spread fell crashing to the ground. His aunts screamed. Michael’s father said nothing as his eyes scanned the room, taking in the noise, the smells, the yelling, the textures of broken plates and glistening meat, and his eyes met Michael’s. In that span of a moment, at that blank slate of an age, Michael knew.
“Your father’s a rotten egg,” said Bai Bai. “I was barely your age, all these years ago, twenty years. He thinks he’s forgotten, but I haven’t. We don’t forget a thing.” As he spoke, Bai Bai turned to the left and reached below him and pulled something out. The folder. “And now he wants me to help you!”
In his other hand was the silver lighter.
“Big shot official, war hero, did he really think you had a devil’s chance in hell to get into Columbia? I’d fart on that.”
Another memory. When Michael was a teenager some British boys had cornered him in the schoolyard after classes and forced him to pull his pants down so they could laugh at his tiny penis, his shriveled yellow instrument of inconsequence. He was lucky that that was all they did. But when Jere and Xander and Geoff had finally trapped him against the concrete, mocking his futile attempts at running past them, Michael he had the same sinking sense of uncertainty, paranoia, worst-case scenarios unfolding before him—what he would experience years later when his flight hit turbulence. It could have been so much worse. Years later, as he subjected his body to a litany of war crimes—alcohol, drugs, napalm, firebombing, the razing of ghettos—he was fortunate not to feel any pain, to escape with merely his inferiority complex intact, not just intact but thriving, a tumor on his self-esteem, growing with his every interaction with anyone in this land of perfect American specimens.
Bai Bai’s fingers found the acceptance letter, the forgery, the document that his father worked so hard to provide, pulled so many connections to see him here. As he yanked out the papers he muttered, “no heart, you’ve got no heart. No character. I saw it in you when you were young. And I’ve seen it now.”
First it was a tear straight down the pages. Then he crumpled them up in his meaty hands, under his hairy knuckles. His right arm, the one with the gold watch, dangled the lighter below the entire folder, and he lit this ball as casually as one of his Kents. Michael’s eyes were wide open but he said nothing. Bai Bai flipped the ball in his fingertips so that the flame burned from the top, and when the charring fire almost touched his fingers he opened the door and casually tossed it onto the pavement.
He got out of the car, brushing ashes off his crotch. Watching him round the front end of the car, Michael was too frightened to lift himself up from his seat. Get up, his brain shouted, get up, and get out, and run, and find someone else, yell for help, go anywhere, just get away—and years later during another rush of blood to the head he would mentally kick himself for not doing exactly just that. And then Bai Bai grabbed Michael’s arm, rough, wrenching it into unnatural positions, and stared at Michael wide-eyed, so angry that his face was practically aglow, and just before he dragged Michael into the pitch-black maw of Prosperity he said, in a tone that cut like a longsword: “Do you know what it’s like to never go home?”
Michael stared at the ashes flowing down a rivulet of dirty water into a storm drain before he was pushed inside.
—
Inside was the stench of cooking oil, rotting fish bones, the sweet tang of sauces, syrupy and heavy-laden, enveloping him in the dark humid steam of the kitchen. His eyes adjusted to the dim yellow light reflecting off the faint gleam of stoves and overhead hoods, and he was shocked to find that there were people inside, wretched young boys in filthy aprons frantically cleaning the burners, wiping down the countertops, chopping scallions and napa cabbage and bok choy and century eggs, dropping raw meat on the floor and picking it up again and flinging it into the woks.
Bai Bai picked up a broom and snorted. “You lot! All you bastards! This is my nephew, and he needs to be taught a lesson.”
The lunch rush was soon, his uncle barked to all of them; the potatoes needed peeling, the shrimp needed deveining, the dough needed mixing. More importantly, show this ungrateful little worm the ropes. Michael turned to protest but from the boys turned from their stations to glare at him, and he shrunk back into himself. As if he was naked. As if he was falling. As if he had been ripped out of the dark comforts of his family’s closet by a firm and meaty hand.
“You keep complaining,” said Bai Bai, “and I’m going to hit you.”
Blake Z. Rong is a writer and journalist in Brooklyn, New York. He recently received an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. As an editor in the automotive industry, his longform journalism has been previously published in Autoweek Magazine, Jalopnik, and Road & Track. He hails from central Massachusetts and is currently working on a collection of stories