Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Chieh Chieng was born in Hong Kong and moved to Orange County, California, at the age of seven. He graduated from the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and has been published in several literary magazines.

James Yaegashi has appeared in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions, film, and television roles. He was also a popular radio disc jockey in Japan. He is a four-time winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award for audiobook narration, and his voice-over credits include a featured role in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

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A Long Stay in a Distant Land

Blackstone Audiobooks

Chapter One

Louis Lum's father began calling him. He called early in the morning and late at night to say he wanted to run down Hersey Collins with his car, or crush his skull with a brick. His father never called him at work to discuss such matters, and for that measure of decorum Louis was grateful.

"Doesn't sound like a good idea," Louis would say. "Have you been riding your exercise bike?"

Day after day his father's desire remained unchanged. The old man wanted to end Hersey Collins, who five months before had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed head-on into Louis's mother's car on a narrow stretch of Springdale Street.

"Man shouldn't have been driving," his father said. "Had no business being on the road."

Louis suggested they go to church. "It'll get you out of the house."

"I'll have to wake up Sunday morning."

"You don't sleep anyway. You'll get to be around people." The last time he had attended Golden Harvest Baptist was five years ago, and Louis wanted to return with his father now because he remembered how mellow everyone was at church. His mother had been a longstanding member of the congregation. She'd laughed and poducked with her fellow Baptists, none of whom ever expressed a desire to crack someone's neck with a hammer.

Louis hoped church would calm his father and convince him that physical violence was not the right course of action.

The old man continued calling to say, "I can't believe he's still free on the streets. I want to kill him."

Louis stopped picking up the phone. He let his machine answer his father's threats and then called back to say, "Got your message. Don't do it. Let's go to church."

His father eventually agreed to go and Louis picked him up the following Sunday. They didn't talk on the drive over.

The church was a converted barbershop located at the end of a cul-de-sac in Anaheim. The neighboring buildings housed machine and sewing shops; anyone who didn't have business on this street would have no reason to be here.

They arrived ten minutes late and sat on steel folding chairs near the back exit. In front of them were three rows of chairs facing an old wooden lectern, behind which Pastor Elkin stood. He said, "Don't be shy," and motioned for Louis and his father to come forward and sit with the rest of the congregation. Before Louis could respond, his father said, "Thanks, but we're good here."

Pastor Elkin spoke into a microphone and his voice echoed through two overhead speakers, one of which hung directly above Louis and delivered the sermon with a thumping bass.

The cement floor was flecked with sawdust left over from the parties held by the German Association of Orange County and Boy Scout Troops 145 and 167. During the week, retired Germans clinked steins and chatted here, and boys drank milk and ate brownies while music played through the speakers.

Louis's father shifted continuously throughout the hour-long service, stretching his legs, pulling them back, the steel joints of the chair whining under his weight. During the closing question-and-answer session that followed the doxology and benediction, his father stood and asked over the mostly gray heads of the twenty-five congregation members:

"If someone beat up your brother, wouldn't you feel obligated to beat him up? I've beaten up people on account of my brother. Yeah, we were kids at the time.

"If someone stole a hundred dollars from you and you had a chance to see him again, you wouldn't feel tempted to punch him? What about a slap? Because he did you wrong.

"If someone slaps you, you wouldn't slap him back? It stings, you know, to be slapped. Come on, you know you'd do it."

Each response that came back from Pastor Elkin was an unequivocal no.

No from the pastor. No from the congregation members.

No I wouldn't slap bim back.

Louis fidgeted in his seat while his father posed so many variations of the same question that Pastor Elkin eventually asked, "Something you want to talk about, Sonny?"

"No," his father said, "nothing at all."

Louis's mother had brought him to church because she'd wanted him to accept Jesus into his heart. She'd said it was required for getting into Heaven. "It's like getting a passport, and once you get it you don't have to worry about going to Hell."

"If I get my passport, why do I have to keep going to church?" Louis had asked.

"Because I'm not giving you a choice."

He'd been the only child attending services filled with people in their forties and fifties. "A handsome boy," they'd say. "So smart."

"Not so bright," his mother would respond. "Terrible in geography. Doesn't know Cameroon from Ghana." Once she'd said, "Looks too much like his grandfather. His paternal grand- father."

"Why do you tell them I'm creepy looking?" he'd asked on the drive home.

"I was being humble for you," his mother said, her eyes fixed on the road.

"If they want to say I'm handsome, why do you have to say I look creepy?"

"You don't look creepy. People will like you more if you don't accept their praise. If you tell them you're slow-witted and clumsy, they'll think you're the opposite."

"They'll think I'm slow-witted and clumsy."

"It's called humility."

Louis believed church had been like a party for his mother and she hadn't wanted to attend alone. She'd press his Sunday suit Saturday night and slick his hair with gel Sunday morning.

His father should have been the one to sacrifice his Sunday mornings to accompany her, but she said, "He decided long ago he'd be happy in Hell. You know what he said? He said, `I'd go straight to Hell in exchange for sleeping in Sundays for the rest of my life. Do you have any idea how tired I am by the time I get to Sunday?'

"I said, `Hey buddy, you're not the only one who works fifty-plus hours a week. You don't have to stay up nights prepping for lectures. You don't have to grade exams on your weekends.'

"He told me to stop nagging him, and I was only trying to do him a favor."

When, as a child, Louis asked his father to go to church, he answered, "Why should I?" and his mother said, "Don't nag him. He wants to go to Hell."

Louis had asked his father to go so he himself could sleep in. More important, he hadn't wanted his father to go to Hell.

He first heard Pastor Elkin's sermon on damnation when he was seven. Pastor Elkin had described the Underworld as a place where eternal flames melted the skin off your body, on which baseball-sized boils swelled and exploded, jetting out thick streams of greasy black pus onto the black streets, where packs of the wild dead-with their eternally melting skin and continuously erupting boils-hunted down and vomited on each other.

"Now don't you want Jesus to come into your heart?" his mother asked on the drive home.

That night he prayed, "Jesus, please come into my heart." He made the same request every night for six months, and asked Pastor Elkin if there was a limit to how many times he could do it. "I'm sure once is enough," Pastor Elkin said. Louis didn't believe him and continued inviting Jesus until the end of the year.

Jesus, he believed, was someone who looked like Max von Sydow, who handed out fish and bread to new arrivals, and who said, "See, I told you...