Othering OtheringOne hundred eighty-seven steps separate my home from Janie’s. But a gulf as wide as the South China Sea splits our worlds apart. Guess who’s the yippy-skippy escapee from the side inhabited with a lecture-spitting dragon?
I practically sprint to Janie’s place I’m so happy to be free of Mama. Like always, I can’t wait to cross through Janie’s arbor, my gateway to the West. Today, the only Truth Statement I want to hear is the one about last night’s flinging: who got trashed and who just talked trash, who went all the way and who didn’t. Unless it had anything to do with Mark. Then a couple of white lies would do instead of a blow-by-blow account of how he romanced his date.
“My mom’s trying to poison me,” I announce to Janie as soon as she opens her blue front door. A bad color, according to Mama and her feng shui books, because they might as well be washing out all their good luck.
Janie’s what people once might have called a “healthy” girl, only she’s overweight by Lincoln High’s anorexic standards, where a size four is considered gargantuan. Having curves in all the wrong places doesn’t stop Janie from dressing the way she wants, which usually means miniskirts and cowboy boots, regardless of the season. Today’s no different.
Janie reaches up to give me a sympathetic hug, but rears back with a funny expression. Her grin vanishes and all I’m left with is the mirage of her blue braces glinting in the sun.
“I can tell,” she says with the brutal honesty of a best friend since third grade. Janie grimaces. “Your breath stinks!”
“Sorry,” I mutter, covering my Mama-poisoned breath with my hand.
“Omigod, what weird Chinesey thing is your mom doing to you now?” Janie’s big, green eyes are on high beam as she stares at me from under her mass of tight brown curls.
“Who knows, who cares?” I shrug off the small feeling that I’m betraying Mama as Janie pulls me inside Spa Blanco. Like I need any encouragement. I could have pranced into her gleaming, shining, uncluttered house. In the marble-floored foyer, I automatically start to kick off my sneakers, only to remember to leave them on instead of at the door the way we do at House Ho.
The scent of grilled cheese is perfume to my Tonic Soup–assaulted nose. Right on cue, Janie’s mom calls from the kitchen, “Great, Patty, you’re just in time for lunch.”
“And just in time to hear about the dance,” says Janie, striding toward the kitchen. “I wouldn’t tell my mom a thing until you came.”
Even with oozing, melting cheese beckoning, I pause in the middle of the living room. Good-bye, red walls. Hello, suburban beige. A dilapidated fishing basket on the coffee table overflows with blue-gray river rocks where only a week ago red-pillared candles burned.
“What happened to Morocco?” I ask.
“We’re Wabi-Sabi this week,” says Janie.
“Wabi-what?”
“You know, Japanese shabby chic?”
I shake my head.
“Apparently, the red walls made every thing else look muddy.” Janie rolls her eyes like she’s got the world’s weirdest mom for being an interior decorator who falls in and out of love with colors. Let’s not talk about weirdest moms, shall we? But then it occurs to me that Mama has the Red Wall effect on people: she makes everyone else seem normal.
Janie’s (normal) mom is in the kitchen, rereading her well-earmarked Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus while stirring a pot of soup. Her tiny waist is cinched in one of the 1940s aprons she makes from vintage fabrics and patterns, scoured from flea markets and the Internet.
“Quick, Sharon, we need to detox Patty,” says Janie.
If Mama had been with me, she would have breathed out—hunh!—at Janie for calling her mother by her first name. That alone would have been enough to launch into Lecture Number Three (Disrespectful Daughter), as if by lecturing me, she would be lecturing Janie by proxy.
“Really?” Sharon’s lips quirk up, amused the way she always is when I tell her about the Chinesey things Mama does. After all, she is Mrs. Rationality who told Janie and me to use our heads the summer we thought Janie’s bedroom was haunted. So explain to me again how a breeze could have opened Janie’s door when we had locked it on purpose so that her little sisters couldn’t interrupt our séance?
“Mama took me to see some crazy old lady last night who reads fortunes.” Again, I brush off the niggling feeling that I’m being disloyal to Mama. “She told my mom that I needed to drink this soup or something.”
“That is so Chinese,” says Janie, as if that’s a bad thing. As if I’m not so Chinese myself. I feel vaguely offended, but I’m more relieved that she sees me as unlike Mama that it washes away any irritation.
Amen, I think, but say, “I know,” like I’m just as weirded out as Janie is.
“Don’t go overboard on drinking that soup.” Instead, Sharon stirs her all-American, good-for-you tomato soup. “I don’t think the FDA has totally approved Chinese herbs.”
“Trust me, I won’t,” I promise.
For a split second, I half-wish that Sharon would tell Mama that, too. But I don’t dare suggest it because Sharon just might. She had, after all, bought me a training bra back in seventh grade when Mama refused to waste her hard-earned money on something I clearly didn’t need. Still don’t, if you want the Honest Abe truth, but I’m not about to go around with nipple pokage under my T-shirts.
“So, how was It?” I ask Janie as we sit down to a table with color-coordinated plates and napkins, so different from my hodgepodge home.
The “It” in question only makes Janie shrug, but Sharon, a glutton for any high school gossip, echoes, “Yes, how was It?”
“Great, until Mark and Lindsey were kicked out for getting it on, on the dance floor. It was disgusting.”
When the only dates I go on with Mark are in my head, the last image I need hardwired there is of him entwined with someone else. I try to shove Lindsey out of my head: Bye-bye, bimbo. It doesn’t work. She and her rah-rah baby blues are there to stay.
Janie slurps a huge mouthful of soup, which would have harmonized in my kitchen where conversations routinely take place at the same time as chewing. But in this stainless steel kitchen, only Immaculate Conversation is allowed, and Sharon looks horrified.
“Janie!” Sharon tuts, shooting her a meaningful look while dabbing her own mouth with a napkin.
“What? I’m starving,” says Janie, but she wipes her droplets away. “You know, I didn’t want to make a pig of myself at dinner.”
What is with this eat-like-a-bird in the company of boys? I mean, do guys really think that girls subsist on their conversation when we eat in their presence? I take an extra-large bite out of my sandwich and nearly need to use the international symbol for choking.
Janie laughs with me, her own cheeks bulging with grilled cheese. But her next remark is so salacious, Sharon forgets to remind us of our manners: “Oh! Lindsey and Anne Wong wore the same dress.”
“You’re kidding!” Scandalized, Sharon’s eyes widen at this Revenge of the Wallflower moment: how the Queen Bee of the Proud Crowd wouldn’t budge out of her chair for the first hour because the Statewide Spelling Bee Champ was buzzing around the dance floor in the same dress.
While Janie and Sharon dissect the matching red dresses—such a winter color for a spring dance, no?—I’m fuming because I wanted to go to the Spring Fling. Badly. So what if the only shopping scenario I could imagine was Mama scouring the sales racks until she found a sea-foam green dress marked down seventy percent because no one could look remotely human in it.
I don’t realize I’ve sighed until Sharon puts one perfectly manicured hand on top of mine.
“You’ll go to dances one day, too,” Sharon tells me firmly. “These high school boys might not appreciate your unique looks, but trust me, someday, someone will.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, trying not to dwell on how her words make it sound like I’m going to need a miracle for “someone” to appreciate my “unique looks” someday in the way off, very distant future.
“And really, it’s not like you missed anything big,” says Janie.
I doubt that very much, but say brightly, “There’s always Homecoming next year. I think I’m allowed to go to dances now.”
“That’s great!” Sharon pushes away her half-full plate like a couple of naked spinach leaves could stuff her and squeezes my hand. “Watch out, Lincoln High.”
“Just Taiwanese guys.”
“But your mother married a white man,” says Sharon, who exchanges a bewildered look with Janie. Their eyebrows lift like a double set of parentheses fencing in their not-so-private thoughts: Mrs. Ho is so Chinese. I decide I better keep math camp to myself because that would confirm that I’m so Chinese, too.
“Yeah,” chimes in Janie. “So how come you can’t date white guys? What’s with that?”
I shake my head like the answer is a mystery to me, too, when the truth is so clear, it could be lit up with a blinking, neon sign. The only mistake Mama ever admits to is marrying my white guy of a dad. So the chances of me dating a white guy are the same as me squirming out of math camp: zero. But how do I explain that to a girl who dishes with her mother about boys and birth control?
“So, who does that leave?” asks Janie. Her smile gleams with possibility. “Dylan Nguyen.”
Dylan Nguyen is a ju nior with such a bad case of acne, he makes my complexion look flawless. But Sharon nods like this makes perfect sense, like this is the inevitable, logical solution. Like dating a white guy is totally out of the realm of my possibility. After all, canaries of a feather flock together.
Newsflash: this canary wants to fly solo.
“He’s Vietnamese,” I tell them.
They exchange befuddled looks again and Sharon mumbles something about splitting hairs. What they don’t know is that Mama can parse the finest strand of hair into a thousand clearly delineated pieces.
After I go for a long, hard run, I return to a House Ho that still stinks of Tonic Soup. Really, one does wonder whether that soup is Mama’s attempt to keep boys away from me. As if my “unique looks” really merit that extreme mea sure.
“You finish homework?” Mama asks by way of greeting me, her fingers still click-click-clicking on her ten-key calculator while she scans a ledger, not sparing me a glance. Files are spread all over the dining table, an avalanche of accounts. It must be quarterly reporting time for her clients.
“Just about,” I say and hurry into the kitchen to fix dinner before she finds out that my homework accounting isn’t reconciling. Homework to do does not equal homework done.
Safe in my bedroom after stir-frying noodles for everyone, and yes, guzzling down bowl two of Tonic Soup, I flop on my bed only to have my head hit a book instead of my pillow. Lifting up, I slide out Mama’s favorite read, Gavin de Becker’s Protecting the Gift. The same woman who comparison shops for every thing had run to the bookstore to pay full price for this hardback book after the author, a security guru, talked on Oprah about the creeps and crazies who prey on women and children. I interpret this light bedtime read as permission to whack a geek where it counts if he tries to seduce me with an equation at math camp.
Ironically, the book about protecting yourself looks battle-worn, wearing Mama’s sticky notes like bandages. I set it gently on my bedside table and wander to my desk. The call of geometry can’t be denied any longer—procrastinated again, can you stand it?
At midnight, I escape math and tiptoe downstairs to make some tea to settle my upset stomach.
Two doses of Mama’s Tonic Soup + (Sharon’s grilled cheese sandwich + my lactose intolerance) = gastronomical mistake of peptic proportions.
The dining room lights are on, which isn’t weird given that Mama is a late-to-bed, early-to-riser who thinks sleep is for the weak, not for the weary. What is weird is Mama using a huge pile of spreadsheets as a pillow, one hand on her big calculator and the other grazing her laptop computer. Her hangnailed fingers twitch like she’s trying to crunch numbers even in her sleep.
Part of me wants to wake Mama, lead her to her bedroom, take off her tiny slippers and tuck her in. But I know that once her eyes are open, Mama will dose herself with some exceptionally strong, highly caffeinated green tea and keep toiling until her clients’ receipts reconcile their bank statements, not one penny misplaced. Her persistence and fiscal fluency is why clients overlook her broken English. It’s how she’s paying for Harvard. And summer camp.
Guilt, more substantial than any of her lectures could produce, bloats my heart. I pad softly to the living room and grab a pilled-up crocheted afghan, one with so many snags that Janie’s mother would have incinerated it on sight. When I drape it carefully over Mama, her thin shoulders lift in a soft sigh.
“It’s OK, Mama,” I murmur and her face relaxes. Not exactly into a smile, but close enough to approximate satisfaction.
Before I dim the light, I drink in Mama’s expression, the way I wish she’d look at me when we’re both awake.