Fresh Off the Boat (6 page)

The rest of the month was a blur. I spent every weekend at the megamall with Peaches, and we promised each other that we would e-mail every day. Dad left for San Francisco first, so he could rent a house and start his business. He never even had a proper good-bye party. He left the country as casually as if he were leaving for a weekend at the beach. It was up to Mom to sell the house, our cars, and secure the maids’ new employment with friends and families. Our chauffeur cried. He’d been with us for fifteen years—before I was even born. My grandmother stuffed twenty-five dollars into my wallet at the airport. It was more money than I ever had in my life, because according to the exchange rate, at fifty pesos to a dollar, Lola had actually given me more than twelve hundred pesos!

To prepare for our move, I had packed my collection of three hundred books into five oversized cardboard boxes. Mom and Dad promised to have them shipped to our new home. They still haven’t done so. My backpack only held ten paperbacks—a couple of Harry Potter books, an
Anne of Green Gables
, and my torn copy of
Little Women
. I still mourn my lost hardbound copies of the entire Classic Treasury series (
Jungle Book, David Copperfield, Black Beauty
). I can’t afford to buy new ones. The boxes are probably sitting in my grandmother’s basement somewhere, attracting dust and mold.

We didn’t own any clothes suitable for cold weather, so Mom had asked her seamstress to sew matching double-breasted velvet trench coats for Brittany and me. They were stunning—a deep violet which sparkled cranberry in the light, with square pockets and yoke stitching. I wore mine the first week of school, but Whitney said I looked Amish. I never wore it again.

The plane ride was endless. On the little personal video screens they have in coach for trans-Pacific flights, I watched
Good Will Hunting
so many times that I memorized every line. (Matt Damon: “She doesn’t need me. Maybe she’s perfect right now.” Robin Williams: “Maybe
you’re
perfect right now.”) I dreamed I was Minnie Driver—curly-haired and kooky but so beautiful I could wear goofy oversized sunglasses and Matt Damon would still fall in love with me.

When we arrived at the immigration counter, there were two lines: one for U.S. citizens and another for all the rest. The Americans were zipped through with barely a nod, but our line snaked down the room, past baggage claim, into the next terminal.

Mom was nervous since we were entering the country on tourist visas but were really planning to immigrate. We’d heard
rumors of instant deportations, friends of friends who had been sent back to Manila the minute they set foot in San Francisco because they had overpacked, because they had answered incorrectly, because the INS officer just didn’t like the way they looked. A relative who had moved to California two decades ago warned us not to pack bagoong, a salty shrimp paste that smelled like feet that Filipinos like to eat with fruit. My parents took the warnings seriously, bemoaning the fact that they would never again have bagoong for their mangos. It was only a few months later that Mom burst out laughing, out of the blue. “Who in their right mind would travel with condiments?”

But we weren’t laughing when we arrived. My mother wore her tan Burberry raincoat and her Christian Dior sunglasses. She was wearing her most expensive dress, her most impressive shoes. She thought it best to disguise the fact that we were leaving our country forever, flying the coop, never going back. Who in their right mind would immigrate in designer heels? We were playing the part of rich tourists.

“Reason for visit?” the immigration officer asked, reviewing our passports (stamped, with our travels to Venice, to Singapore, to Thailand, to Luxembourg.)

“My sister is getting married,” Mom lied, smiling.

“Congratulations,” he said grimly. “Desired length of stay?”

“Six months. We’re helping her get settled.” My mother’s
hands shook as she held on to her Louis Vuitton handbag.

“Taking the kids away from school?” the official asked, eyeing Brittany.

“She’s only four. Not in school yet.”

“And what about your other daughter?” He motioned to me.

“Oh!” Mom said, flustered. “She’s—uh—she’s done.”

He gave me a quick once-over then stamped our passports.

Later, my mother admitted she almost peed in her shoes. She had meant that I had just graduated from elementary school, but luckily the official had mistaken her words, thinking she had meant high school, or even college. I was tall for my age, and in my velvet trench coat, I imagined I looked sophisticated and worldly. But perhaps the Homeland Security officer simply hadn’t bothered to check my birth date.

I helped my mother wheel away our nine oversized suitcases, laden with all the material possessions we owned in the world. Mom had brought her Ming vases, cleverly wrapped inside Dad’s trousers and filled with his socks. My sister had packed her three-story Barbie town house. There was a VCR in there somewhere, too.

We walked out to the terminal and found Dad standing past the security checkpoint. He was grinning.
“Ano?”

“Six months!” Mom cried. “We got our six months!”

Six months was the longest time tourists were allowed to stay
in the country. Dad was counting on our tourist visas lasting that long, until our immigration lawyer was able to petition his company for a business visa and eventually get us resident visas, otherwise known as green cards, so we would be able to stay in America forever.

Mom drove a ten-year-old Toyota, instead of a new Lexus. She had on her Christian Dior sunglasses, but she never wore her old shoes anymore. In Manila, she had worn only four-inch heels, delicate kidskin mules, buttery cream-colored slingbacks, or else gold leather or snakeskin or crocodile stilettos that tied around her ankles. It was a shock to see her in pink canvas sneakers from Payless for the first time. I didn’t even recognize her. For one thing, I had never realized she was so short.

“Let’s go shopping!” she said gaily, as she put the car in reverse and backed out of the Sears parking lot. “Want to?” she asked, peering at me in the rearview mirror.

I shrugged. “Okay.”

We drove out of the mall and made our way across town, to the nearest Salvation Army store. A friend from church had advised us it was a good place to shop on a limited budget. Except for our televisions, everything we owned was secondhand. The Dalugdugans had given us a folding table and several plastic chairs for the dining room. Our brown plaid couch was from Goodwill, as were the matching chipboard bureaus in each
bedroom. We couldn’t afford bed frames, so we placed bricks and wooden planks under the mattresses to keep them off the floor.

When we arrived, Mom rifled through the racks as expertly and as enthusiastically as if she were still shopping at Rustan’s, the high-priced department store she had favored in Manila. At Rustan’s, white-gloved attendants presented her with Chanel suits and Dolce & Gabbana gowns. A man in a military uniform used a public address system to call in your car and driver when you were done shopping. (“Driver Arambullo…to the front, please.”) We’d stand inside the frosted doors, in the airconditioned foyer, until Mang Remus drove up with the Lexus. Three salesclerks would load up the trunk with our packages.

“Look at this! A fur coat!” Mom said, holding up a black, knee-length jacket made of fur of an indeterminate origin. The price tag was stapled to the front collar. It was one of the little details about thrift stores I found so depressing. Why did the prices have to be
stapled
? Were the clothes so unworthy of care that they couldn’t even make an effort to create proper tags?

“Forty dollars.” Mom sighed, patting the luxurious pelt.

“Try it on,” I urged. The weather was the hardest on my mother. Like me, she was always cold. She took off her puffy 49ers jacket and hung it on a nearby hook. She struggled into the fur coat, placing it over her khaki pants and thin cotton sweater,
and surveyed herself in the mirror. Her eyes shone. “It’s beautiful,” she said, turning around to see the side and back.

“What do you think?” she asked me. “Okay
ba
?”

“Get it.” I nodded. I missed the days when Mom bought the same heels in three different colors.

“It’s not too big?” she asked, fluffing her hair.

“No, it looks great, Mom.”

It really did. Mom had a good eye for fashion. She could find vintage Oleg Cassini in a rack of polyester or unearth an Art Deco brooch in a pile of cheap goldplated trinkets. Unlike the other coats and jackets that were hanging in the fur rack, the coat Mom had picked wasn’t threadbare, moth-eaten, or smelly. It had the sweep and grandeur appropriate for a 1930s movie star. You could imagine Marlene Dietrich in it.

I left my mother at the mirror to do a little shopping of my own. The store was divided into departments, just like an ordinary shop. On the right were men’s clothes—stained T-shirts, yellowing button-downs, the occasional Charter Club three-piece wool suit. Next were the “ladies” garments, printed cotton housedresses and muumuus, acid-washed jeans, dowdy tartan skirts, a vat of acrylic sweaters, decrepit Easter bonnets, and two shelves of rotten shoes. There was even a table of underwear—but Mom and I had always tacitly agreed we would never stoop so low as to select from it.

A rack of “evening wear” contained old sixties prom dresses in garish pastel colors, and for a while there, I had a
Pretty in Pink
fantasy. Claude, playing the part of Andrew McCarthy, the rich popular boy, would ask me, the Filipino Molly Ringwald, to the Soirée, and I would sew myself a dress from an old taffeta one…except mine wouldn’t look shapeless and weird like Molly’s. I’d wear something black, with lace, and I’d fashion an asymmetrical hem that dipped low in the back but high in the front.

One thing I grudgingly admired about the Salvation Army was that everything was so very affordable. I bought two T-shirts (twenty-five cents each), one that said
BENETTON
in capital letters and another that still had its bedraggled Esprit label. I found an oversized black blazer and a few flannel shirts that reminded me of the one Pink wore on the cover of
Teen People
. I tried on a pair of jeans priced at three dollars. They weren’t boot-leg cut, but at least they were Levi’s. I even found an old cashmere sweater with only one tiny hole on the shoulder.

Dad was embarrassed that we had to shop at the Salvation Army, so Mom and I always went after work, in secret. He never set foot in it, and Mom never bought him any clothes from there. “Used clothes?” he’d say, making a face. “Yecch. Who knows who died in them?”

“It’s called vintage,” I would argue, defending our purchases.

It embarrassed me as well, since most of the people who shopped at the Salvation Army were either elderly or painfully indigent. Once in a while, I would notice cool-looking older kids trying on beaded cardigans or gas station attendant shirts that had “Gus” or “Johnny” on the front pockets, but they would pay for them with platinum credit cards. It was all a lark, a bit of fun, slumming, for them and it always made me angry. We were here because we couldn’t afford to shop anywhere else. They had a choice. I wished they would go back to Urban Outfitters where they belonged.

“Are you ready?” Mom asked, her face flushed.

“Yes. Are you getting it?”

“I don’t know—do you think I should?” she asked, clasping it tightly in her arms.

“It’s really nice, Mom. Get it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I will!”

We walked to the cashier line, where an old man in a fedora and plaid golf pants was counting out eighty-five cents for a green cardigan. The cashier threw it into a crumpled plastic bag and handed it to him.

“Can I just hold it?” Mom asked, taking the coat away from the indifferent saleslady when it was our turn. She paid for her coat with cash from the red tin can.

I placed my choices on the table and handed over my ten dollars. Mom snatched the money out of my hand and pressed it back into my palm. “No, no—today, my treat,” she said. I was only too happy to oblige.

We walked back to the Corolla. I swung my plastic bag filled with second-hand treasures while Mom cradled her new fur coat in her arms.

“Put it on,” I said.

“Okay,” she agreed, stuffing her football jacket in the backseat and slipping her new fur over her shoulders.

Outside the Salvation Army store, away from the racks of old, soiled, and discarded goods, it didn’t look like a used coat. She put on her designer sunglasses even if it was starting to get dark outside. When she climbed into the car, she sat up a little straighter and I saw her smile at me in the rearview mirror. The setting sun shone through the auburn highlights of her hair. The dark, liquid softness of her coat matched her gold-tinted designer frames. For a moment, she looked like herself again.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SENT: Sunday, October 18, 6:11 PM

SUBJECT: Shopping Spree

Hi, Peaches,

Whitney and I were so bad! We spent so much money! Mom is totally going to take away my allowance when she finds out. Here’s what I bought at the mall yesterday:

• really cute flannel shirts from Abercrombie & Fitch
  
• T-shirts from Esprit and Benetton
  
• boot-cut jeans from the Gap
  
• black blazer and cashmere sweater from Bloomingdale’s
  

Spending like a fiend,
V

6
Mathematical Miracles

C
LAUDE CALIGARI IS
my geometry partner!!

How did this happen???

Am I the luckiest girl alive???

Maybe!

It’s so weird. One day, he almost runs me over with his car—a few weeks later, I have to help him graph linear equations. This is so cool.

And I owe it all to a chair.

Let me explain.

I’m in the higher math class since I’d already taken algebra in Manila so now I was in geometry with the sophomores. It’s not like I’m some Asian math whiz or anything. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. I abhor math. I slept through fractions in second grade and I feel like I haven’t caught up since.