I'd feel bad about naming names, but I knew, like, four Sungs.

My flight is completely full, so I took a middle seat between two of my people. By “my people”, I mean, of course, two shaven-head, buffed out, wristcuff and dogtag wearing, cut-off camouflage and flipflopped southeast Asian boys. They probably want to look all urban and hardd, but to me they look adorable, like every boy I went to high school with. I took out my knitting, the better to patronize them, and reminisced.

The boys we went to high school with were mostly car thieves (Korean) or ran gambling rings (Vietnamese). That didn’t interrupt their schooling much; I think they’re mostly surgeons or lawyers now. One guy, Sung, was in loooOOOOoooove with my sister and wanted to prove his devotion by stealing a car for her. I remember thinking that was the most useless gift ever. Did he think my parents wouldn’t notice if a slammed Honda Civic just appeared at the house? That they wouldn’t make my sister account for a surprise new car? Where would she keep it? What if she got caught driving it? I was of the opinion that Sung had not thought this gift through. Sung didn’t get caught stealing cars until our first year of college, when he was busted for GTA. It was a bummer, ‘cause his folks were in Korea at the time, so mutual friends had to bail him out. I never heard how his court case came out, but I do know he was sent to live with his uncle in Bakersfield, which seems unduly harsh. Still, I can imagine him bragging that he could drive to LA in an hour and a half, listening to the VTEC symphony of his engine as he drove the Grapevine.

My sister hung out with a harder crew than I did. My friends just sold SAT scores, but I totally heard from my friend who went to school with those guys that her friend saw my sister’s friends carrying guns that time. She spent a lot of time with Nam, whose guy-code included the rule that you can’t make a U-turn with a girl in the car (lest you look like you didn’t know where you were going). She called him on it the second time she noticed that they’d made three right turns in a row, but he still wouldn’t make a U-turn in her presence. If they did carry guns, I made the rudest gesture of my life to an armed teenage boy at one of our parties. My sister was standing around talking to three of her friends when I went over to yell at her for something (in fact, I may have been pissed to hear that they’d brought guns to our party). I was super angry, so I went over and yanked her arm or something. One guy got fired up to defend her, so he got in my face to tell me to back off. I put my hand on the side of his face (not hard or anything), said “I’m talking to her” and spun him 120 degrees away (because if you aren’t braced you have to follow your head and neck.). It was incredibly dismissive. I hate confrontation and I was always intimidated by those guys, so I can’t imagine how I did that. But picking on my little sister is my fundamental right. It would take more than a few pseudo-gangster National Merit Scholars to stop me.