Cool, I discover, has a short shelf life.
Sixth grade.
My jaw is growing. Subtly and steadily it advances, protruding Alien-like, a beast inching, crunching forward, unchecked, unstoppable. My mother and I attend countless consultations with dentists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, and jaw specialists. She bombards them with questions. Why is this happening? What did he do? What did he not do? Can you make it stop? In return, we receive a cacophony of theories and explanations accompanied by elaborate charts, milky X-rays, medical mumbo jumbo, and flailing rubber-tipped pointers. The theories include:
• My constant and passionate thumb sucking mangled my bite, causing what dental journals will soon hail as the world’s all-time number one most extreme underbite.
• My thumb sucking played absolutely no part whatsoever. My dentist simply didn’t alert my orthodontist soon enough.
• My dentist alerted my orthodontist in plenty of time. My orthodontist didn’t fit my braces properly.
• My dentist and my orthodontist both screwed up. And my favorite theory and the one I believe:
• I don’t know. It’s just nature. Nature decided to mess me up. It happens. That’s why we have dwarfs and giants and Siamese twins and people with cleft lips and webbed feet and three breasts and girls born with penises and . . . twelve-year-old kids with jaws that won’t stop growing!
My mother puts her faith in the last guy we see, mainly because he’s convincing and we’re exhausted. He decides, bottom line, that my orthodontist, at the very least, put the pressure in the wrong place. He will have to reset the braces, fit me again, and I will have to wear my chin cup and headgear all night and all day. Every day. Twenty-four/seven. At home and at school. We have to pull the front teeth forward and push the back teeth back. We have to correct the correction. Or else—
I can’t envision the or else. I picture a cartoon kid with a massive, jutting Jay Leno jaw. A chiseled chin sticking out like a front porch. Grotesque. Deformed. And I imagine my friends pointing at me and snickering and laughing out loud and making faces, sticking out their chins in comic exaggeration of my own. It’s not bad enough that I’m saddled with thick, goofy glasses, a bowl-cut haircut, Kmart wardrobe, and Korean features with no karate to back me up. I now have to deal with Jawzilla?
As my jaw thrusts forward, my inner nerd rides out with it. I enter middle school and promptly retreat into my room, losing myself in comic books and video games. I discover a knack for drawing. I fill up notebook after notebook with sketches of cartoon characters I copy from my comic books and create on my own. To appease my parents, who want me out of my room, I take up the cello and join the school orchestra. While I play classical music at school, at home I listen secretly to the Carpenters, Olivia Newton-John, and John Denver, whose maudlin sentimentality mirrors my own. Might as well slam the exclamation point after my name—Tony Youn, nerd! In my room, my sanctuary, I devour each new issue of Spider-Man and watch The Karate Kid over and over, memorizing every scene, every line, every inflection, every moment. Both resonate with the same theme: skinny loser nerd overcomes hideous looks, beats up jock bad guy and his stupid jock friends, and of course, gets the cute strawberry-blond girl.
Yes, I’m noticing girls. I differentiate now between those who cause my heart to seize up as they walk by and those I want as science-fair partners. One fateful morning I notice that a small cluster of facial hairs have unmistakably popped up on each cheek. I look as if my cheeks have begun to sprout pathetic minuscule Brillo pads.
At school, as my nerd identity expands along with my jaw, the few authentic Greenville nerds attach themselves to me like magnets. We form our own little nerd fraternity, committing ourselves to the most uncool, socially depressing Saturday nights imaginable. We gather in our finished basements and play marathon games of Risk, Axis & Allies, and Ultima, or watch each other fight monsters, battle armies, and maneuver through mazes in the latest and greatest video game. In our recently deep voices that occasionally crack, we lament that the girls we ogle in the hall ignore us, snub us, or body-check us. No surprise. We are the original Geek Squad. We lob Cheetos at each other and try to catch them in our mouths. We exchange glasses, compare astigmatisms. We make the guys in Big Bang Theory seem like studs.
And then everything flips upside down.
SUMMER BEFORE HIGH school. My parents pack me up and send me to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire to attend a six-week summer session so I can get a jump on my classes and begin studying for the SATs. Yes, I know I won’t be taking my SATs for two years. Have I mentioned that my parents are Korean?
At Exeter I gravitate first to the Caucasian kids. To my shock, they won’t have anything to do with me. Why? Because I’m Asian. I’m devastated and indescribably lonely. I escape to my dorm room, wriggle my headphones over my ears, and listen to Olivia soothingly croon some sappy melody that brings me to tears. A few days later, as I wait in the cafeteria line for the sullen hairnetted cafeteria worker to scoop some brown glop onto a plate, three Korean-American kids behind me introduce themselves. Two things about this stun me. First, they look sharp. They wear buzz cuts, pilot glasses, and tragically hip clothes that you’d see in a music video. Second, they ask me to hang out with them.
My life changes on the spot. My new friends introduce me to new-wave music by bands like Erasure and Depeche Mode. I like it, although I still prefer my beloved Olivia Newton-John, John Denver, and the Carpenters. I don’t tell my new buddies, though. I’m too busy pretending to be cool.
At night, unable to sleep, eyes tracking the shadow of a lone fly crossing the ceiling, I wrestle with this sudden and violent cultural shift: in the crazy new universe of elite East Coast high schools, Asians—even Koreans—are cool.
What am I supposed to do with this beautiful, mind-blowing, everything-that-was-down-is-up new world order?
I have only one choice.
I bring the cool back to Greenville.
SEPTEMBER.
I walk into school a new man. To start with, I’ve grown. I’m still thin, but I’m no longer short, dumpy, and mousy. I’ve shot up past six feet and I’m still going. I also show up with a new haircut, a new wardrobe, new designer glasses, and new music that I share. I abandon the cello and try out for the tennis team. I don’t abandon my nerd fraternity. Rather, I bring them with me. Or try to. They follow clumsily. But I am clearly their leader, their role model. My kindness to them only adds to my appeal. The cute, popular girls view me as sensitive and accessible and want me around. The jocks, rulers of the school, the ones who didn’t notice me a year ago or wrote me off as a hopeless nerd, now embrace me. I make the tennis team, which adds to my cred. After school, I float in a pack with the in crowd.
Weekends, by decree, I reserve for homework and family. My father declares it his time to relax, to bond, to exercise, and we—in particular, his sons—must relax, bond, and exercise along with him. Whether or not we want to or have plans of our own remains beside the point.
My father prefers individual sports, tennis, golf, and skiing, sports that we can play with or against him. As I become more entrenched with my new group of friends, they accept, reluctantly, that I will run with them during the week and abandon them on weekends. At the same time, as I allow myself the perception, imagined or real, that certain girls I find attractive might—might—find me semi-attractive as well, and could—could—possibly accompany me to maybe a movie or miniature golf or out for a milk shake, if I mustered the courage to ask them, I find my father’s decree to hang out with him on weekends increasingly intrusive. Typically, teenagers choose not to hang out with their parents on weekends. It’s not fair. It’s not right. And it’s way not cool. I begin to resent having to go off and bang tennis balls around or whack golf balls down hard public fairways while schlepping my clubs in the heat. It’s not as if my father and I have fun. At least not my sixteen-year-old self-absorbed version of fun. I begin to resent having to commit this time to him. I don’t say anything. We engage in these weekend exercises mostly in solemn silence.
One Saturday morning at breakfast, my father hits me with a knowing half-smile. “How about we go skiing in Grand Rapids.”
It’s not a question.
I hesitate. “When?”
He dabs his mouth with a napkin. “Right now. Let’s get early start.”
After a second of staring at my hands, I lift my head and allow these words to exit my mouth. “I don’t know if I want to go. I may have plans with my friends.”
My father’s face pulses purple. He stands up, leans his fists into the table, and glowers at me. He has to look up. I have grown taller than he is. It does not feel that way. It feels as if he looms over me, a giant. His voice trembles. “Who you think you are?” He holds, inhales, blows out a tiny torrent of air, then—
“You telling me you’re not gonna GO? You are SON! You get your skis and get into the car. We are GOING SKIING!”
He storms out.
We leave for Grand Rapids fifteen minutes later.
Humiliated, angry, my father seethes. He drives in silence. We ski in silence. We return to Greenville in silence. He refuses to speak to me for two straight days. I am the good son, the accommodator, the one who never rocks the boat, and it occurs to me that by questioning him, I have not just made him angry, I have broken his heart.
I never question him again.
I STEAM TOWARD graduation. I apply to a handful of colleges, receive several acceptances and scholarships, including one to Kalamazoo College, the best small liberal-arts college in Michigan. Weighing my choices, among them a large local university and an Ivy League college in New England, I ask my parents what I should do. To my shock, they back off. My father tells me that this is my decision.
“Consider all factors—location, size, amount of scholarship they give you, and which one prepares you best for medical school. Then decide. Your decision. Up to you.”
If it were up to me, I’d choose to become a rock star or cartoonist, but since I’ve already taken on my father over skiing and seen how well that went, I opt to stick with the default position—medical school. Ticking off my father once in my lifetime is more than enough.
Ultimately, I choose Kalamazoo because of the hefty scholarship they offer and the school’s manageable size. I worry that I’ll get lost at a large school. I’m a small-town kid at heart and a homebody. Kalamazoo is far enough for me to go away to college and come home for weekends when I feel homesick. Or when I run out of clean clothes.
I end senior year at Greenville High in a blaze of glory. I achieve the highest GPA in the history of the school and earn the honor of class valedictorian. My classmates vote me “Smartest” and “Most Likely to Succeed.” Both great. But nothing compared to the award I worked hardest to achieve: “Best Dressed—Runner-up.”
Thank you, Greenville High Class of 1990.
SUMMER OF THE Jaw.
School ends with a flurry of graduation parties and drunken send-offs. For months I’ve been trying to distract myself from the painful and obvious fact that my jaw has started to jut out more than ever; I look hideously deformed. When I’m hanging out with friends, I try to hold my jaw in tight, the way a heavy guy might hold in his bulging stomach. I know, though, that as mightily as I attempt to impede my jaw’s dreadful progression, nothing can stop it. My jaw continues to grow, millimeter by terrifying millimeter. Finally, my mother and I agree that the week after my last graduation party, I will go under the oral surgeon’s knife.
I don’t fight this at all. I want to have the surgery. I can’t stand my ugly underbite and monstrous chin. I can’t wait to put an end to ten years of braces. I long to shred that bizarre cloth chin-cup contraption I strap over my head every night like a leatherhead football player. I want to start college with a clean slate and a brand-new jaw.
Of course, like most patients, I focus on the result of the surgery and allow my mind to skip over the details of the procedure itself. One example: when Dr. Schwarzman, my oral surgeon, says that he will have to break my jaw, it doesn’t register somehow that he means he is going to break my jaw.
Do you know what happens when someone breaks your jaw?
I’ll tell you.
It hurts beyond any pain you can imagine. We’re talking Guantánamo-type pain. I would’ve given away state secrets, ratted out friends, given Dr. Schwarzman all of my father’s account numbers. That kind of pain. And it isn’t enough for Dr. Schwarzman to break my jaw once. Because he’s a cackling sadist—that’s how I imagine him in my drugged-out stupor—he breaks my jaw twice, in two places, sets it back into its original position, and then wires it shut . . . for six weeks. No solid food—nothing but liquids and mush—for a month and a half. I drop from a rail-thin 135 pounds to a 120-pound stick. After the surgery, I pop pain pills like PEZ and guzzle milk shakes. Mostly, I crave pizza. I stock up on frozen pizzas, microwave them, shove one nuked slice at a time into the blender, liquefy, and drink. Yum.
I HAVE A girlfriend. Sort of. I call Janine my girlfriend. She calls me her—
Not sure what she calls me. I probably shouldn’t go there because it will only hurt. Not to mention that my parents have no idea about Janine. I’ve chosen not to tell them because my father has a unique, rather old-school perspective about dating in high school: “No time for girlfriend, Tony. Time only for study. You have girlfriend later, after medical school.”
Sure, Dad, no problem. I can wait eight years.
I meet Janine at the beginning of junior year. I see her and immediately go into heat. Blond, blue-eyed, dimpled cheeks, slight overbite. A strand of hair covering one eye. A cheerleader. Dating the quarterback. Janine finds me smart, funny, cool. She invites me to become her friend. Her confidant. Her designated driver. I’m tripping all over myself with joy. And I have a plan. The quarterback is an idiot. Janine will tire of him soon. She will realize that we are meant to be, and we will launch into a passionate, hot, sweaty love match. We will become Greenville High’s Top Couple. I’ll have to move in with her and her parents because my father will have a shit fit and disown me, but I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.
I’m on the money. She tires of the quarterback before the second game. She breaks up with him and begins dating the middle linebacker. No worries. He’s even dumber than the quarterback. I’m right again. She drops this dope and takes up with the starting center on the basketball team. Meanwhile, I’m like Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, driving her ass everywhere and listening to all her problems.
At some party senior year, after Janine has run through pretty much every guy at Greenville with a varsity letter jacket, I pop open a beer for her, open one for myself, and listen attentively as she tearfully recounts the sad details of her wanton love life. I nod sympathetically, truly not giving a shit about any of these hicks, when all of a sudden I’m aware of her lips on mine. Or mine on hers. I have no idea who makes the first move, but this is what I’ve been dreaming about for over a year.
So now we’re friends with benefits. Or call me her driver who gets an extra-nice tip. Not sure what we are, exactly, but I’m saying she’s my girlfriend. We never do anything more than kiss, but that’s okay. I don’t see her as that type of girl. I see her whole person. I see her heart and, okay, her breasts. But only because they’re located right over her heart. Janine may be a cheerleader, and some of my friends may call her shallow or whatever, but I see beyond all that. And when I get my jaw surgery, Janine is there for me, meeting me at her house while her parents are at work, making out with me on the living room couch, even when my jaw is wired shut. Now, that is love. That is devotion. That is a girlfriend. Of course, my parents have no idea that when I say I’m going out for a milk shake, I’m actually going out for a milk shake and a make-out session.
A few days after Dr. Schwarzman unwires my jaw and pronounces it fit for solid food, Janine dumps me.
I take it hard.
I choke up.
“You’re never gonna find anyone like me again,” I tell her.
I shout this. We’re at a party, pressed into a corner. People bang into us as they slam-dance to deafening, throbbing hard rock, which I’m starting to despise.
“I know,” she admits. “You’re wonderful.”
“Don’t say that. It only makes me feel worse.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?” I scream, a plea. I am both heartbroken and deaf in one ear. “We’re going separate ways. You’re going off to school.”
“So are you.”
“I’m going to beauty school. It’s different.”
“We could see each other every weekend. I’ll come home.”
Janine shakes her head sadly and kisses me on the cheek.
I drive home alone, feeling as if I’ve been kicked in the stomach. For a week I lie in bed, drawing cartoons of men in pain, pining over lost or stolen lovers. I pull myself together enough to pack up my room and shove everything into the pint-sized trunk of my used Ford Tempo, a present from my parents. A few days before I leave for Kalamazoo, I gather enough strength to attend one last party. It’s a party like any other—townies and college-bound seniors dancing pathetically, smashing potato chips into their absent parents’ carpeting, beer cans popping, beer spilling over, Guns N’ Roses wailing their guts out, the bass knob flipped to red line. I lean against a back wall, thinking, I won’t miss this.
“Hi.”
I whip around, nearly spill my beer.
Janine.
Looking really fine. I try to see her whole person, but honestly, I see only her mouth, her eyes, her breasts.
“When do you leave?”
My voice cracks. “Couple days.”
She rolls her mouth into a pout and says, “I have a confession.” I lean in. Close. Her hair brushes my lips. “I miss you.”
I nod. It’s the best I can do. I’m struck mute. My knees clang into each other so loudly, they threaten to drown out Axl Rose.
“I was hoping we could still be friends,” she says.
“That would be, you know, excellent.”
So smooth.
“Maybe we could spend some time tonight and talk. Or.”
She touches her finger to my mouth. She squeezes past me. I want to reach out, bar her moving by me with my arm, but I don’t think of that move until about two hours later. I run a hand over my chin, my newly minted jaw, and feel its smooth, freshly chiseled surface. I like how it feels. It feels like the hood of a brand-new Porsche.
I begin to fantasize. I imagine a whole new start for Janine and me. I’ll bust ass home after Friday classes, pick her up at beauty college, and we’ll shack up for the rest of the weekend, living on cold beer, pretzels, and the heat of our passion. At some point, in, say, seven years, I’ll break the news to my father. First he’ll have to get over that she’s not Korean. No. First he’ll have to get over that I have a girlfriend. No. First he’ll have to get over that I kept Janine’s existence from him. Wait, wait. I have to get my father out of my head . . .
Maybe we could spend some time tonight and talk. Or.
She means what I think she means, right? It’s the or that got my attention. I need to track her down. Now.
I can’t find her. I search the house. I go from room to room. I check all the bathrooms. I ask people if they’ve seen her. I look in the closets. No sign of her. I guess she’ll call me. Or I’ll call her. I slide my nearly full beer can onto a hall table and leave.
And there in the driveway, sitting in the passenger seat of a battered old Impala, making out with the driver, is Janine.
The guy looks familiar. I think he once worked construction on our street. Or snaked our toilet. Or bagged my groceries. Now he’s bagging my girlfriend. Ex. My ex-girlfriend. Then a light goes off in my head. A cloud bubble appears, the word duh dancing inside. News flash.
“Reporting for CNN, I’m Tony Youn from Greenville, Michigan. In breaking news, I’m the only guy in town who hasn’t screwed my girlfriend. Anderson?”