This Is My Brain on Drama

JOCELYN

A couple of nights before the Boilermaker, Priya and I Skype to work on the short film we want to submit to the All American High School Film Festival. Before we start brainstorming, though, Priya announces, “I think our film should be set in a restaurant. Specifically, this one.”

“You want to make a film about A-Plus?” Why would anyone with two minutes to spare want to waste it watching a movie about our eyesore of a restaurant? No offense to eyesores.

“Well, it wouldn’t be, like, a documentary. The story would still be original. It’d make it so much easier for you to be involved—you wouldn’t have to take time away from the stuff you’re already doing, and we could set shots up when things are slow. This is what I’m thinking.” Priya puts on what I call her “auteur look.” “The heart of the movie should be about how food can be a vehicle to show love. It’s a cliché because it’s true, right? The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach.”

I nod slowly, the pieces of the story falling into place in my head. “So one character is the ‘Eating Lunch Alone’ dude who comes into the restaurant at the end of a long, hard workday. Is that too tropey, though?”

“Maybe we can invert the trope?” Priya says, scrunching up the side of her mouth in concentration. “It’s not the customer who’s tired, it’s the waitress.”

“Maybe she just started working there, and she’s totally not into the job. And he’s a regular customer, so he orders all these things not on the menu and she’s, like, totally confused.”

“Yeah, so the guy is the one to take the waitress back to the kitchen and feed her the real stuff.” Priya goes distant the way she does when she’s framing shots in her head. Suddenly, her eyes widen. “What if the first part is in black and white and when she heads back into the kitchen it goes full color? Deliberate monochrome, like in The Wizard of Oz or Pleasantville?”

“Yes! We can have a lot of color: red peppers, carrots, green beans, bright shrimp.”

After a bit more brainstorming, Priya has to sign off (her parents are actually around to enforce an electronic curfew). Not for the first time, I wonder what my life would be like without Priya Venkatram. It’s one of the reasons I’m so desperate to stay in Utica—I’m pretty sure I’d be a miserable witch without her. Right now I’m only a melancholy one, which she’s apparently okay with, but sometimes my fear that she’ll realize that I’m the butt end of a cool-kid-and-loser friendship makes me so desperate that I want to chain myself to her person. Other times, for the same basic reason, I pull away from her, try to play it chill so that she’ll be less likely to see my weirdness.

Growing up, Alan and I didn’t really have the best role models for friendship cultivation. My parents’ lives consisted of work, nagging my brother and me about our homework, and sleeping. Our family’s social calendar was perpetually blank, except for the occasional Mohawk Valley Chinese Association meeting that Amah dragged us to.

That’s where Peggy Cheng and I began our long frenemyship. Alan and I were the new kids on the block, used to living in a city where you could walk down the street and hear half a dozen different languages. It was honestly kind of disconcerting to realize that all of a sudden diversity wasn’t the default—it was an oddity, something to be pinned like a butterfly and examined with a magnifying lens. Maybe it’s because of this that the Asian kids in Utica seem to have this constant desire to blend in. It’s funny to me because a lot of my friends in NYC were the exact opposite. Some were a little too militant about their Asian pride and used to dis people for being “bananas” (yellow on the outside and white on the inside) for the silliest reasons: wearing the wrong kind of graphic T-shirt, being too devoted to Taylor Swift, or preferring Oreos to mochi.

They had no idea how white a Chinese person could be. Utica is home to some next-level Twinkiehood.

The thing is, I don’t blame the kids here at all. Pretty much everyone just wants to fit in at some point or another; Taylor Swift really is a great songwriter, and Oreos must have some sort of drug in them, they’re so addictive. Plus, it’s not the fault of the kids in the Mohawk Valley Chinese Association that their families wanted to assimilate. Peggy, for instance, barely knew any Mandarin at all, because her parents were both second-generation. That’s how we first met: Alan was six at the time, and he literally could not keep his eyes off Peggy’s shiny new iPad. She was doing some sort of Mandarin language program with flashcards of apples and trains, the sort of graphic catnip that Alan could never resist. After a while he started blurting out the answers to each question, and that was history.

“You’re the new family from New York!” she exclaimed. “Your Mandarin is so good,” she told Alan. “Are you fluent?”

“Meh, kind of?” I said, because compared to her, I was.

“That is awesome. My mom has been all over me about learning it. She says it’s super useful for business these days.”

I was new, so I shrugged and figured it’d be as good a way as any to make a friend. When the school year came around, Peggy made an honest attempt to introduce me to her social circle, but it soon became clear that aside from both being Chinese, Peggy and I had nothing in common.

She was relentlessly cheerful to the point where I started to seriously wonder whether there were substances involved. (There couldn’t be, of course. She was way too Goody Two-shoes.) And why shouldn’t she be happy? Peggy’s family is rich, so she wore all the right clothes (first Justice, then Abercrombie and Banana Republic) and got to go to fancy summer camps that had the words “Cove” or “Retreat” in their names. She had long, shiny, aggressively treated hair that didn’t have an endless halo of flyaways and split ends like mine did. She did all the right activities: student council, volleyball, marching band. Nowadays, I would recognize her instantly as the “Girl Who Has It All.”

For a couple of months, I hovered on the fringes of Peggy’s social scene like a shriveled, misshapen pea in a pod, until the day when I overheard Sarah Martin say, “I don’t know why Peggy is friends with that Wu girl. She’s so negative. Does she ever smile?” Sarah said the word “negative” in the way that other people might say “herpes” or “alcoholic.”

It stung because I knew Sarah was right. I drifted away from their group. They didn’t try especially hard to keep me in the fold. Then Priya came along. Our puzzle pieces slotted together perfectly, and I tried my damnedest not to sabotage it, the way I do everything else in my life.

Here’s the thing: If we move back to NYC, my family might have more money, more help, and more free time. To me, none of that is worth having less Priya Venkatram.