The Dead Do Not Improve Read Online Free
Author: Jay Caspian Kang
father, clumsy bear, did his best to corral us into a renewed paradigm of fatherhood. It was an admirable resolution, sure, but one without a target audience. There wasn’t much wrong with my sister, so he just kind of checked over her homework and monitored her always-modest hemlines. My own algorithm of GPA (4.67 weighted), test scores (1,480 SAT), athletic achievement (two years of JV baseball), extracurricular activity (two-time North Carolina policy debate champion), and socialization (virginity lost in 1994 to Ruth Stein), while not optimal, wasn’t bad enough to warrant attention. My assorted troubles (two suspensions for mouthing off to teachers, five reported fights, two wins over Amos Mays, two clear losses to Daunte Degraffenreid, one inconclusive with Javon Jeffries, marijuana possession, general surliness) fit in somewhere in his conception of an appropriate youth.
Hungry bear, my father, he rooted around until he found something. Try to understand, his brother lost his liquor store in the Rodney King riots. When my father heard the news, he grabbed a wrench and banged out a dent in the pole that held up my basketball hoop. Who knows if he intended the troubling symbolism, but there it was. And so, three years later, when he witnessed his only son accumulate a very specific set of affectations—the slurring of mannered syllables, a darkening ofdenims, Clark Wallabees with disastrous dye jobs (candy apple red and the blue ones on the Ghostface album cover), camo hoodies, Maxwell tapes wrapped in poorly photocopied images of project buildings, a copy of
Soul on Ice
(never read), a legal pad filled with doodles of imagined teks and snippets of my very own battle punch lines (mostly involving rhyming “mental” with “Oriental”)—how could he have not seen my slow, accessorized descent into blackness as his great cause?
Toothless bear now, the slowness of my mother’s death had sapped out his meanness. Instead of simply beating the hip-hop out of me, he took me to a Bob Dylan concert up in Richmond. He let me drive. I can still remember the trees along the 85 and how each one looked the same, cut in a straight line, and how my father, at ease in the passenger’s seat, had his small hands folded on his flat stomach. When the endlessness of Virginia became intolerable, he told me about how he and my mother would order takeout black bean noodles to their apartment in Seoul and crouch over the radio in their cramped, grimy kitchen. Every Wednesday at 6 P.M ., their friend had a show on their college’s station. He played anything in English but always ended the show with his favorite Bob Dylan song: “I’m a Believer.”
I didn’t correct him, but the damage was done. I pictured my father and my mother sharing a bowl of noodles in their apartment in Seoul. In the photos they have from that time, even poor lighting and communist film cannot hide the cracked paint on the walls, my mother’s incandescent beauty. A small radio is playing the Monkees, and my parents, equipped with two years of college English, are feverishly trying to decipher the revolutionary message in “I’m a Believer”:
“I’m in rub. Now I a be-ree-vah. I a be-ree-vah, I couldn’t reave her if I try.”
THE CROWD THAT day was a chorus of satisfied exhales. We found a spot on a hillside, just a stone’s throw from a historical preservation placard, but neither of us could quite make out the text. I said it was probably something about the Civil War. The crowd filled in, the air thickened. My father, starving bear, shrank in the grass and disappeared.
On the drive back, he leaned up against the door with his eyes shut and toggled the power locks in time with the music from the oldies station. When we began to drift out of range, he asked if I had brought any of my rap tapes along. I only had
The Shogun’s Decapitator
. When it was over, we grabbed a snack at a Bojangles drive-through near the Virginia–North Carolina
Hungry bear, my father, he rooted around until he found something. Try to understand, his brother lost his liquor store in the Rodney King riots. When my father heard the news, he grabbed a wrench and banged out a dent in the pole that held up my basketball hoop. Who knows if he intended the troubling symbolism, but there it was. And so, three years later, when he witnessed his only son accumulate a very specific set of affectations—the slurring of mannered syllables, a darkening ofdenims, Clark Wallabees with disastrous dye jobs (candy apple red and the blue ones on the Ghostface album cover), camo hoodies, Maxwell tapes wrapped in poorly photocopied images of project buildings, a copy of
Soul on Ice
(never read), a legal pad filled with doodles of imagined teks and snippets of my very own battle punch lines (mostly involving rhyming “mental” with “Oriental”)—how could he have not seen my slow, accessorized descent into blackness as his great cause?
Toothless bear now, the slowness of my mother’s death had sapped out his meanness. Instead of simply beating the hip-hop out of me, he took me to a Bob Dylan concert up in Richmond. He let me drive. I can still remember the trees along the 85 and how each one looked the same, cut in a straight line, and how my father, at ease in the passenger’s seat, had his small hands folded on his flat stomach. When the endlessness of Virginia became intolerable, he told me about how he and my mother would order takeout black bean noodles to their apartment in Seoul and crouch over the radio in their cramped, grimy kitchen. Every Wednesday at 6 P.M ., their friend had a show on their college’s station. He played anything in English but always ended the show with his favorite Bob Dylan song: “I’m a Believer.”
I didn’t correct him, but the damage was done. I pictured my father and my mother sharing a bowl of noodles in their apartment in Seoul. In the photos they have from that time, even poor lighting and communist film cannot hide the cracked paint on the walls, my mother’s incandescent beauty. A small radio is playing the Monkees, and my parents, equipped with two years of college English, are feverishly trying to decipher the revolutionary message in “I’m a Believer”:
“I’m in rub. Now I a be-ree-vah. I a be-ree-vah, I couldn’t reave her if I try.”
THE CROWD THAT day was a chorus of satisfied exhales. We found a spot on a hillside, just a stone’s throw from a historical preservation placard, but neither of us could quite make out the text. I said it was probably something about the Civil War. The crowd filled in, the air thickened. My father, starving bear, shrank in the grass and disappeared.
On the drive back, he leaned up against the door with his eyes shut and toggled the power locks in time with the music from the oldies station. When we began to drift out of range, he asked if I had brought any of my rap tapes along. I only had
The Shogun’s Decapitator
. When it was over, we grabbed a snack at a Bojangles drive-through near the Virginia–North Carolina
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