Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (23 page)

GISH JEN

There we are, nice Chinese family—father, mother, two born-here girls. Where should we live next? My parents slide the question back and forth like a cup of ginseng neither one wants to drink. Until finally it comes to them, what they really want is a milkshake (chocolate) and to go with it a house in Scarsdale. What else? The broker tries to hint: the neighborhood, she says. Moneyed. Many delis. Meaning rich and Jewish. But someone has sent my parents a list of the top ten schools nationwide (based on the opinion of selected educators and others) and so
many-deli
or not we nestle into a Dutch colonial on the Bronx River Parkway. The road’s windy where we are, very charming; drivers miss their turns, plough up our flower beds, then want to use our telephone. “Of course,” my mom tells them, like it’s no big deal, we can replant. We’re the type to adjust. You know—the lady drivers weep, my mom gets out the Kleenex for them. We’re a bit down the hill from the private plane set, in other words. Only in our dreams do our jacket zippers jam, what with all the lift tickets we have stapled to them, Killington on top of Sugarbush on top of Stowe, and we don’t even know where the Virgin Islands are—although certain of us do know that virgins are like priests and nuns, which there were a lot more of in Yonkers, where we just moved from, than there are here.

This is my first understanding of class. In our old neighborhood everybody knew everything about virgins and non-virgins, not to say the technicalities of staying in between. Or
almost everybody, I should say; in Yonkers I was the laugh-along type. Here I’m an expert.

“You mean the man … ?” Pigtailed Barbara Gugelstein spits a mouthful of Coke back into her can. “That is
so
gross!

Pretty soon I’m getting popular for a new girl, the only problem is Danielle Meyers, who wears blue mascara and has gone steady with two boys. “How do
you
know,” she starts to ask, proceeding to edify us all with how she French-kissed one boyfriend and just regular-kissed another. (“Because, you know, he had braces.”) We hear about his rubber bands, how once one popped right into her mouth. I begin to realize I need to find somebody to kiss too. But how?

Luckily, I just about then happen to tell Barbara Gugelstein I know karate. I don’t know why I tell her this. My sister Callie’s the liar in the family; ask anybody. I’m the one who doesn’t see why we should have to hold our heads up. But for some reason I tell Barbara Gugelstein I can make my hands like steel by thinking hard. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” I say.

The way she backs away, blinking, I could be the burning bush.

“I can’t do bricks,” I say—a bit of expectation management. “But I can do your arm if you want.” I set my hand in chop position.

“Uhh, it’s okay,” she says. “I know you can, I saw it on TV last night.”

That’s when I recall that I too saw it on TV last night—in fact, at her house. I rush on to tell her I know how to get pregnant with tea.

“With
tea?
”

“That’s how they do it in China.”

She agrees that China is an ancient and great civilization that ought to be known for more than spaghetti and
gun-powder. I tell her I know Chinese. “
Be-yeh fa-foon
,” I say. “
Shee-veh. Ji nu.
” Meaning, “Stop acting crazy. Rice gruel. Soy sauce.” She’s impressed. At lunch the next day, Danielle Meyers and Amy Weinstein and Barbara’s crush, Andy Kaplan, are all impressed too. Scarsdale is a liberal town, not like Yonkers, where the Whitman Road Gang used to throw crabapple mash at my sister Callie and me and tell us it would make our eyes stick shut. Here we’re like permanent exchange students. In another ten years, there’ll be so many Orientals we’ll turn into Asians; a Japanese grocery will buy out that one deli too many. But for now, the mid-sixties, what with civil rights on TV, we’re not so much accepted as embraced. Especially by the Jewish part of town—which, it turns out, is not all of town at all. That’s just an idea people have, Callie says, and lots of them could take us or leave us same as the Christians, who are nice too; I shouldn’t generalize. So let me not generalize except to say that pretty soon I’ve been to so many bar and bas mitzvahs, I can almost say myself whether the kid chants like an angel or like a train conductor, maybe they could use him on the commuter line. At seder I know to forget the bricks, get a good pile of that mortar. Also I know what is schmaltz. I know that I am a goy. This is not why people like me, though. People like me because I do not need to use deodorant, as I demonstrate in the locker room before and after gym. Also, I can explain to them, for example, what is tofu (
der-voo
, we say at home). Their mothers invite me to taste-test their Chinese cooking.

“Very authentic.” I try to be reassuring. After all, they’re nice people, I like them. “De-lish.” I have seconds. On the question of what we eat, though, I have to admit, “Well, no, it’s different than that.” I have thirds. “What my mom makes is home style, it’s not in the cookbooks.”

Not in the cookbooks!
Everyone’s jealous. Meanwhile, the big deal at home is when we have turkey pot pie. My sister Callie’s
the one introduced them—Mrs. Wilder’s, they come in this green-and-brown box—and when we have them, we both get suddenly interested in helping out in the kitchen. You know, we stand in front of the oven and help them bake. Twenty-five minutes. She and I have a deal, though, to keep it secret from school, as everybody else thinks they’re gross. We think they’re a big improvement over authentic Chinese home cooking. Oxtail soup—now that’s gross. Stir-fried beef with tomatoes. One day I say, “You know, Ma, I have never seen a stir-fried tomato in any Chinese restaurant we have ever been in, ever.”

“In China,” she says, real lofty, “we consider tomatoes are a delicacy.”

“Ma,” I say. “Tomatoes are
Italian.
”

“No respect for elders.” She wags her finger at me, but I can tell it’s just to try and shame me into believing her. “I’m tell you, tomatoes
invented
in China.”

“
Ma.
”

“Is true. Like noodles. Invented in China.”

“That’s not what they said in
school.
”

“In
China
,” my mother counters, “we also eat tomatoes uncooked, like apple. And in summertime we slice them, and put some sugar on top.”

“Are you sure?”

My mom says of course she’s sure, and in the end I give in, even though she once told me that China was such a long time ago, a lot of things she can hardly remember. She said sometimes she has trouble remembering her characters, that sometimes she’ll be writing a letter, just writing along, and all of sudden she won’t be sure if she should put four dots or three.

“So what do you do then?”

“Oh, I just make a little sloppy.”

“You mean you
fudge?
”

She laughed then, but another time, when she was
showing me how to write my name, and I said, just kidding, “Are you sure that’s the right number of dots now?” she was hurt.

“I mean, of course you know,” I said. “I mean,
oy.
”

Meanwhile, what
I
know is that in the eighth grade, what people want to hear does not include how Chinese people eat sliced tomatoes with sugar on top. For a gross fact, it just isn’t gross enough. On the other hand, the fact that somewhere in China somebody eats or has eaten or once ate living monkey brains—now that’s conversation.

“They have these special tables,” I say, “kind of like a giant collar. With a hole in the middle, for the monkey’s neck. They put the monkey in the collar, and then they cut off the top of its head.”

“Whadda they use for cutting?”

I think. “Scalpels.”

“
Scalpels?
” says Andy Kaplan.

“Kaplan, don’t be dense,” Barbara Gugelstein says. “The Chinese
invented
scalpels.”

Once a friend said to me, You know, everybody is valued for something. She explained how some people resented being valued for their looks; others resented being valued for their money. Wasn’t it still better to be beautiful and rich than ugly and poor, though? You should be just glad, she said, that you have something people value. It’s like having a special talent, like being good at ice-skating, or opera singing. She said, You could probably make a career out of it.

Here’s the irony: I am.

Anyway, I am ad-libbing my way through eighth grade, as I’ve described. Until one bloomy spring day, I come in late to homeroom, and to my chagrin discover there’s a new kid in class.

Chinese.

So what should I do, pretend to have to go to the girls’
room, like Barbara Gugelstein the day Andy Kaplan took his ID back? I sit down; I am so cool I remind myself of Paul Newman. First thing I realize, though, is that no one looking at me is thinking of Paul Newman. The notes fly:

“
I
think he’s cute.”

“Who?” I write back. (I am still at an age, understand, when I believe a person can be saved by aplomb.)

“I don’t think he talks English too good. Writes it either.”

“Who?”

“They might have to put him behind a grade, so don’t worry.”

“He has a crush on you already, you could tell as soon as you walked in, he turned kind of orangish.”

I hope I’m not turning orangish as I deal with my mail, I could use a secretary. The second round starts:

“What do you mean who? Don’t be weird. Didn’t you
see
him??? Straight back over your right shoulder!!!!”

I have to look; what else can I do? I think of certain tips I learned in Girl Scouts about poise. I cross my ankles. I hold a pen in my hand. I sit up as though I have a crown on my head. I swivel my head slowly, repeating to myself,
I
could be Miss America.

“Miss Mona Chang.”

Horror raises its hoary head.

“Notes, please.”

Mrs. Mandeville’s policy is to read all notes aloud.

I try to consider what Miss America would do, and see myself, back straight, knees together, crying. Some inspiration. Cool Hand Luke, on the other hand, would, quick, eat the evidence. And why not? I should yawn as I stand up, and boom, the notes are gone. All that’s left is to explain that it’s an old Chinese reflex.

I shuffle up to the front of the room.

“One minute, please,” Mrs. Mandeville says.

I wait, noticing how large and plastic her mouth is.

She unfolds a piece of paper.

And I, Miss Mona Chang, who got almost straight A’s her whole life except in math and conduct, am about to start crying in front of everyone.

I am delivered out of hot Egypt by the bell. General pande-monium. Mrs. Mandeville still has her hand clamped on my shoulder, though. And the next thing I know, I’m holding the new boy’s schedule. He’s standing next to me like a big blank piece of paper. “This is Sherman,” Mrs. Mandeville says.

“Hello,” I say.

“
Non how a
,” I say.

I’m glad Barbara Gugelstein isn’t there to see my Chinese in action.

“
Ji nu
,” I say. “
Shee-oeh.
”

Later I find out that his mother asked if there were any other Orientals in our grade. She had him put in my class on purpose. For now, though, he looks at me as though I’m much stranger than anything else he’s seen so far. Is this because he understands I’m saying “soy sauce rice gruel” to him or because he doesn’t?

“Sher-man,” he says finally.

I look at his schedule card. Sherman Matsumoto. What kind of name is that for a nice Chinese boy?

(Later on, people ask me how I can tell Chinese from Japanese. I shrug. You just kind of know, I say.
Oy!
)

Sherman’s got the sort of looks I think of as pretty-boy. Monsignor-black hair (not monk-brown like mine), bouncy. Crayola eyebrows, one with a round bald spot in the middle
of it, like a golf hole. I don’t know how anybody can think of him as orangish; his skin looks white to me, with pink triangles hanging down the front of his cheeks like flags. Kind of delicate-looking, but the only truly uncool thing about him is that his spiral notebook has a picture of a kitty cat on it. A big white fluffy one, with a blue ribbon above each perky little ear. I get much opportunity to view this, as all the poor kid understands about life in junior high school is that he should follow me everywhere. It’s embarrassing. On the other hand, he’s obviously even more miserable than I am, so I try not to say anything. Give him a chance to adjust. We communicate by sign language, and by drawing pictures, which he’s better at than I am; he puts in every last detail, even if it takes forever. I try to be patient.

A week of this. Finally I enlighten him. “You should get a new notebook.”

His cheeks turn a shade of pink you mostly only see in hyacinths.

“Notebook.” I point to his. I show him mine, which is psychedelic, with big purple and yellow stick-on flowers. I try to explain he should have one like this, only without the flowers. He nods enigmatically, and the next day brings me a notebook just like his, except that this cat sports pink bows instead of blue.

“Pret-ty,” he says. “You.”

He speaks English! I’m dumbfounded. Has he spoken it all this time? I consider: Pretty. You. What does that mean? Plus actually, he’s said
plit-ty
, much as my parents would; I’m assuming he means pretty, but maybe he means pity. Pity. You.

“Jeez,” I say finally.

“You are wel-come,” he says.

I decorate the back of the notebook with stick-on flowers, and hold it so that these show when I walk through the halls.
In class I mostly keep my book open. After all, the kid’s so new; I think I really ought to have a heart. And for a livelong day nobody notices.

Then Barbara Gugelstein sidles up. “Matching notebooks, huh?”

I’m speechless.

“First comes love, then comes marriage, and then come chappies in a baby carriage.”

“Barbara!”

“Get it?” she says. “Chinese Japs.”

“Bar-
bra
,” I say to get even.

“Just make sure he doesn’t give you any
tea
,” she says.