Free The Queen of Tears by Chris Mckinney Page A

it’s true, right?”
    “That’s not the point. Donny is his uncle and he should show him respect.”
    Kenny picked out the sports page from the Honolulu Advertiser . The sports and business sections were the only two portions in the paper he read. Though, a couple of times, she caught him reading the funnies. He opened the sports section up, which he had already read in the morning. Won Ju could only see a large picture of Shaquille O’Neal hanging from a basketball rim. “Listen,” he said, “I like Donny. I really do. But I don’t want my son showing respect for people who don’t deserve it. He’s getting older and deserves to know about human nature. I told him the story, and he made his own moral decision.”
    “His own moral decision? Fourteen-year-old boys who never had to make any real decisions yet are not in any position to judge others who have. It’s not right.”
    Kenny put down the paper. “He’s fifteen. And like I said, I like the guy. I like him more than I like your mother. But your mother deserves some damn respect. What was he pitching to her tonight? Another one of his quick-cash money schemes? Your Mom’s a pain in the ass, but I respect her. Your brother, Brandon hit it right on the nose, he’s a loser.”
    “Kenny, fuck you.”
    “No, fuck you. And what was that shit tonight? Feel free to leave? Don’t smart-mouth me like that, especially at the Club.”
    Won Ju walked into the kitchen. The Club. She hated that place. She’d felt the haole members watching the table full of Koreans. She knew they looked down on her and her family. Them with their smug smiles and Filipino servants pouring them water and washing their dishes. She hated that the Filipinos worked their lowest-paying jobs. She felt a kind of kinship with the Filipinos because the Philippines got it just as bad as the Koreans did. There was kinship in pain. The Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans. She’d learned much of her English reading the school books her brother never read in high school. Even though the books downplayed it, she knew what happened. This was why Kenny’s love for the haoles went from puzzling her to angering her. He was Hawaiian. The Hawaiians got it so bad from the whites that there were hardly any pure-blooded Hawaiians left. But Kenny wasn’t pure Hawaiian. His mother was German-Irish and his father was half-Chinese. However, the rule in Hawaii was if you have any Hawaiian blood, you can call yourself Hawaiian. But Kenny grew up rich. So his liking white people was probably a class thing, not a race thing. Won Ju felt you could not choose pride in both class and race. Kenny was proud to be Hawaiian, but to her it was like he didn’t deserve to feel that way because he didn’t suffer the poverty that many Hawaiians did. And when he said, “Don’t smart-mouth me like that, especially in the Club,” she was livid. He couldn’t have his little, docile Asian wife disrespecting him among those of his class: the rich whites. So with her mind running like this she walked to the table, picked up the newspaper, and threw it on the floor. She stepped on Shaquille O’Neal on the way to the bedroom, wanting to leave her husband, but feeling like she wouldn’t and never could.
    “Hey, stop being such a fuckin’ brat,” Kenny yelled as Won Ju walked through the bedroom door.
    Brat. He even spoke to her like she was a child. Right now, he was probably sneaking a peek at Snoopy sitting on his doghouse having another moronic WWI biplane fantasy, and he had the audacity to refer to her as a child. After he’d read the funnies, he’d probably go to bed and take about three seconds to fall asleep. Then he’d wake up at three-thirty, in turn waking her up, if she could even get to sleep by that time, to watch the stock ticker on CNN. Degenerate gambler. Asshole.
    He’d looked so good on paper when she’d decided to marry him. Wealthy, good-looking, college-educated. She’d never even thought until