Another Chicago Magazine publishes an excerpt from "As Far as You Can Go .. "

Onions in the Tea Garden

It seems unwieldy to post the 4,000-word short story here on Substack. Here’s the link, which I will also post at the end of the bit, here. I’m hoping you’ll be into the story by then!

It was super hard not drinking on the plane, Bangkok to Tokyo. Probably because I left my cigarettes in the boarding area in Bangkok. As soon as lightly-accented English announced that the in-flight beverage service was ending, I couldn’t stop myself, I chowed down on the peanuts I’d managed to avoid throughout the flight.

Narita Airport—an orderly haze of white tile. I passed through Japanese Immigration and Customs—Mother Mary, was that beer in a vending machine? Swiftly, I looked to buy some Camels. Six dollars. I settled for a random brand, about three bucks, and found a pay phone. I dialed Cho at the department store. A moment later, she was in my ear with, “Hey, girl! Boy, I’d love to—but I’m going into a budget meeting. Write this down.”

Cho interrupted herself with a cough, and then fired off the instructions to get me to a train station in Tokyo, “Oo-way-no. West Gate, two hours. Ask for the nishi guchi. Write it down.”

I had the startling desire to embrace her. Funny, in all the time we spent traveling together, we never once hugged. I wanted to, when we parted in Bangkok, but—no. Too—something.

In the long line for the ticket to Oo-way-no, I nearly panicked with the understanding that the train—spelled U-e-n-o—was going to cost me nearly fifty bucks. And that was for the local. I hadn’t spent fifty dollars on transportation for the two months I was in Thailand. For an hour, overcast sky and patches of green and brown earth crept by, smooth green hills in the distance. I wanted more peanuts. The acres of tilled earth gave way to towns, a metropolis, and eventually, Ueno Station.

There were a zillion people. There was the rumble of mass transit, a diesel smell, all familiar reminders of Southeast Asia with two notable exceptions: the crisp air and beers in vending machines. I consulted my scribbles and asked a uniformed guard for the nishi guchi. The West Gate. I expected large, wooden, and red. Turned out to be normal turnstiles. Leaning my backpack against a post, I had a not-Camel, wishing I was wearing warm shoes instead of sandals, and watching well-dressed men wearing gray or black suits and carrying briefcases—had to be the proverbial Japanese salarymen—and fewer women in dark blue or black; they formed an endless sentence punctuated by neon green pay phones. After a smoke-long epoch, one of the purposeful, passing Japanese broke away from the sentence with a brisk stride and a familiar, “Girl!”

I didn’t expect Cho to embrace me quite so hard or for as long as she did. I didn’t expect it to feel like a home.