How to American Read online

  A few weeks went by and I thought I should strike a long-term deal with Juan to lock in my savings. So I proposed to Juan, “I’ll buy your whole week’s tickets, and I’ll pay you ten bucks for them on Monday. This way, you don’t have to come out here and work every day. You can just have ten bucks every week and enjoy your lunchtime.” Juan tried to make some calculations in his head but he soon gave up; the American public school system has failed him. He said, “Okay, ten bucks, but you have to give me your chocolate milk every day.” Without hesitation I said, “Deal.” I didn’t care much for my Alta Dena boxed milk anyway and I could use the extra dollar I saved to buy whatever soda I wanted. That was the first open-trade agreement between China and Mexico on American soil.

  I was owning these publicly educated kids in the lunchroom and I was owning the public school curriculum in the classroom. Soon I became an honors student at John Burroughs. I didn’t think I was particularly special; the American education system was just particularly easy compared to the high-pressure educational system in Hong Kong. In the States, most kids are still learning the multiplication table in seventh grade. In Hong Kong, we’ve all learned algebra by sixth grade. Aside from English, every subject in the US was at least two years behind compared to Hong Kong. My family came to this country hoping for the best college education, but we didn’t realize how pedestrian the public school system was leading up to it. I didn’t mind that at all. I figured I could just cruise through school and score some easy As. I was like a twenty-year-old Dominican baseball player using a fake birth certificate to play in Little League. But my parents had other plans. They wanted me to be on the fast track; they wanted me to be in the so-called Magnet Program. So my dad went to have a chat with the principal. Dad took me to school and he brought all my textbooks. He stormed into the principal’s office and slammed the textbooks on the principal’s desk.

  “My son has learned this already. He is smart. You need to put him in the smartest classes.”

  The principal was intimidated by this middle-aged Asian man with a comb-over. She responded:

  “Your son is on a good track, he is already in the advanced math class.”

  “That’s too easy, when can he learn calculus? What about game theory?”

  My dad had this weird obsession with game theory, an advanced mathematical prediction model. To him, that was like the Holy Grail of high-end math. I did end up learning it in college, but I’ve forgotten all about it because like most things they taught me in school, it was completely useless. The principal said, “the highest-level math class we have is algebra, the best I can do is put him in the algebra class.”

  Dad turned to me and asked, “Do you already know algebra?”

  I hesitated for a second. Then I replied, “No, not really.”

  I lied. I had already learned algebra in Hong Kong, but I wanted to continue my scam through the American school system. I soon became an honor student, and my dad proudly rocked a MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT IN JOHN BURROUGHS MIDDLE SCHOOL bumper sticker on the back of his Pontiac Grand Am. I would say that’s a win-win.

  Scammer of the month.

  Good grades were nice, but I wanted much more than that. I wanted to be accepted by my peers; I wanted girls; I wanted to experience the American teenage life.

  I had gone to an all-boys school from first to seventh grades in Hong Kong, so I’d had literally zero interactions with the opposite sex. Now I was thrown into a brand new country, with a different language, white girls who were six inches taller than me. Multiply all that by the awkwardness of puberty, forget about it. I had no chance. I was more lost than a dog watching Game of Thrones. There was this really cute girl at John Burroughs named Ally, or so I was told. She was a tall skinny white girl who looked like Molly Sims, every Asian man’s dream. She was the all-American beauty. I stared at her every day during lunch, wishing I had enough courage to just say hi to her. She would sit by the basketball courts with her friends and I would stand twenty yards away at the lunch tables, secretly admiring her. It kind of sounds creepy now, but I was in eighth grade; it was super cute.

  Juan would egg me on. “Just go talk to her, man! It’s not a big deal.” It was the biggest deal in my mind; it was life and death. “Just go!” He pushed me in the back and I stumbled two steps forward. I was so scared that I quickly cowered back to my safe distance. I firmly stood my feeble ground. Juan continued, “Okay fine, I’ll go talk to her, and tell her ‘Jimmy really likes you.’” I grabbed his arm so hard he could have dislocated his shoulder. “No!” I shouted. That was perhaps my only chance, and I was too scared to even have a friend talk to her for me. And for the rest of the school year, I stared at her from a distance as if I had a restraining order. And for the rest of my teenage years, I dreamt about having a girl like Ally.

  I kept my easy-grade scam going and graduated John Burroughs with straight As, and I got my lunch on a government discount through Juan. I survived my first year in America by constantly assimilating and adapting. It was exhausting. But my family was the one constant that kept me sane. Whenever I felt lost in school, I could always count on coming home for a home-cooked Shanghainese dinner. It was a blessing to have a buffer year at middle school before being judged by the unforgiving teenage peers in high school. It was a year of American cultural boot camp, a year for me to learn English, a year for me to assimilate. I went into high school with my pants sagged, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and ready to catch some footballs. ’Murica!

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOW TO

  THUGLIFE

  My nuclear family has always been the rock in my ever-changing life. We settled into our new lives after our first year in America. My dad had gotten a steady job as a financial adviser, my mom worked as a teller for a Chinese bank and my brother got into UCLA. On the surface, everything was seemingly working out perfectly for this immigrant family. But while I was trying to fit in in school, my parents were dealing with their own struggles as adult immigrants. My dad landed a job as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, but it was a commission-based job. He didn’t know many people here in America yet, let alone people who would trust him to invest their money. He always acted like everything was fine, but I could hear the arguments between him and my mom about the mounting credit card debts. I felt responsible being a vestige in that household, and I stopped asking for the newest Jordans or the newest video games. I’d rather wear flip-flops to school than be homeless.

  Mom had an especially hard time assimilating to America. Her English wasn’t very sharp and the language barrier kept her from getting the jobs she wanted. She took a job as a menial bank teller in a Chinese bank twenty miles away, barely making minimum wage. Aside from hanging with some family friends, she never found her footing in the community. Mom was often quite lost during English conversations; she’d just politely nod and smile. When a foreign person doesn’t understand something, instead of saying, “Pardon me” they’ll just nod their head and smile “yeah, yeah, yeah.” Behind that cordial smile, I knew she felt terribly uncomfortable.

  Mom got a job offer from Shanghai two years after we moved to LA. It was a general manager position at a chic clothing store opened by a famous Chinese artist. It was exactly the kind of job she loved and thrived at back in Hong Kong. It’d be a sizable pay raise from being a bank teller, and some much needed income for the family. But this would also mean she’d have to move to Shanghai, without us. We had a serious family discussion on whether or not she should take the job and go to Shanghai. I still remember that day vividly. Dad is an old-school guy. He wanted her to stay because there was nothing more important than keeping the family together, but I knew her mind was already made up. She said to me:

  “Jimmy, ah, I’m just going there for work. I will always come back and visit.” The thought of her being a visitor in my life was devastating. I cried.

  “Mom, I don’t want you to go. But do whatever you want.”

  I stormed into my room and
buried my face in my pillow. She left for Shanghai a week later, and she lived there for the next ten years.

  I was sad, angry and confused. Deep down I understood why she left, but it was way too much for a fifteen-year-old to process. Mom’s decision to go to Shanghai was the first time the four of us had ever been separated. Being the youngest in the family, it hit me especially hard. I was raised to be the obedient Chinese boy, but my mom seemed to have chosen the American independent spirit to pursue her dreams. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. It took me a long time to come to terms with her leaving. I felt hurt, I felt resentful and I felt abandoned by my own mother. The first night after she left, my brother was out with his college friends, so it was just my dad and me at the dinner table. It felt awfully empty. The usually joyous and rowdy family dinner table was completely silent. My dad tried his best to help me cope with this, in his matter-of-fact way. “It’s just me and you now. Mom is not coming back. Get used to that. Eat.” I couldn’t swallow a bite that night.

  Mom would call us to check in every night when it was daytime in Shanghai, but I didn’t want to talk to her. My dad literally had to press the phone to my face so I’d say hi and bye. She came back for a month every year but I couldn’t really enjoy that time, knowing she was just going to leave again. The world didn’t look quite the same anymore. The contentment I found at home was gone. My family, the only thing I could count on to be a constant in my life, had changed just like everything else. I couldn’t be the obedient Chinese family boy anymore, even if I wanted to; I had no choice but to grow up and be an independent American man.

  90210

  After graduating from John Burroughs Middle School, I was on track to go to Fairfax High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My dad might be foreign, but he knew the LAUSD was a cesspool full of gangs, metal detectors and teenage pregnancy. So in an act of brilliance and desperation, he used my grandpa’s address to register my school district, so I could go to the prestigious Beverly Hills High School, the alma mater of Hollywood stars like Angelina Jolie, Betty White and John Travolta.

  I didn’t care about all the posh stigma of Beverly Hills; I was just glad that I got a second chance to establish who I was in a brand new school district. In John Burroughs, I’d solidified myself as the foreign kid who didn’t know how to sag his pants. Now I had a chance to use the American training I’d learned in middle school to show everyone I knew all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance like it was a Britney Spears song.

  Beverly Hills High was nothing like the TV show 90210. First of all, not everyone was white and they didn’t look like they were thirty-five. Most people picture Beverly Hills High as this glamorous high school with beautiful teenagers who have very cool adult problems; in reality, it was just a public school with a ton of Persian kids who drove Beamers. It was also a predominately Jewish school, which was awesome because we had all the Jewish holidays off as well as the Christian holidays. While other kids were praying and fasting during their days off on Rosh Hashanah and Passover, I was happily playing Grand Theft Auto and eating pork chops.

  In high school, everyone was part of a clique, and they had a specific hangout spot at lunch. The cool athletes sat in front of the swim gym, the skaters sat on the front lawn and the Persians with Phat Beamers roamed the cafeteria. It was like the scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone introduces all the groups. As a matter of fact, research for Clueless was done at Beverly Hills High School, and our real English teacher Mr. Hall played the principal who introduces Brittany Murphy in the movie. That was his claim to fame in Hollywood and everybody in school thought Mr. Hall was a big-time celebrity. As the new fish that didn’t come from the Beverly Hills elementary school track, I was once again among a sea of strangers. I didn’t know anyone going into my first day of high school and I didn’t belong to any of those cliques. With no place to hang out at lunch, I just stood with my back against the lockers, hoping nobody would notice me, quietly eating my weird Chinese lunch that my dad had packed for me. My usual lunch was Chinese food my dad made from the night before packed into a Tupperware; anything from pork belly with pickled vegetables to eel braised in soy sauce. Once a week, my dad packed me a hot pocket. It wasn’t your normal American Hot Pocket with ham and cheese; it was a hot pouch filled with sticky rice bought from the Chinese grocery store. It looked like astronaut food but it smelled like the back alley of Chinatown. To be honest, it was pretty delicious, but the sticky rice pouch definitely didn’t help me look like a normal cool American kid. I badly wanted to find an identity so I could belong. Is there a group for short kids? Is there a group for kids who used to play Ping-Pong? And as much as I didn’t want to be the foreign kid again… Is there a group for foreign kids?

  An old but energetic Chinese art teacher in Beverly High named Po Lau hosted the school’s Chinese Culture Club. It wasn’t really a club with a mission statement; it was just a bunch of Chinese students gathering in Po Lau’s classroom playing cards and video games at lunch. As much as I wanted to be American, the Chinese Culture Club became my lunchtime refuge. I hung out with Po Lau and the only three other Chinese kids in school, eating our weird Chinese lunches every day. It felt like visiting my uncle’s house in Hong Kong. Po Lau would even heckle us with his terrible jokes in his thick Cantonese accent:

  “Hey, where is your playing cards?”

  “We are playing with them right now, Po.”

  “You have the red cards and black cards, right?”

  “Yeah…”

  “But where is your green card?!”

  He folded over laughing at his own shitty punch line, while we shook our heads in embarrassment for him.

  The Chinese Culture Club was a nice safety net, but it felt like a regression. I didn’t want to spend the next four years of high school hibernating with three other Chinese kids inside of a dank classroom; I could have done that back in Hong Kong. I wanted to have the all-American high school adolescent experience. I wanted to play in the homecoming football game, I wanted to take a road trip in my dad’s car and I wanted to go to prom with a white girl. I didn’t care about hanging out with the cool kids, but I was tired of being the foreign kid. All I wanted to be was a “normal” American kid.

  I met my first non-Chinese friend in Beverly Hills High during the second semester of freshman year. Jeremy was a Persian kid on the football team, but he didn’t act particularly Persian or particularly like a football jock. We hit it off making fun of the other kids in our sixth-period computer class. Jeremy and his friends had a table on the top floor next to the cafeteria. And I started to sneak away from the Chinese Culture Club to hang out with them. They were the most diverse group of dudes I’d seen since the We Are the World music video. Jeremy and his cousin Phil Yadegari were Persians who were into normal American teenager stuff like Star Wars, Madden and the Justice League; Zaki Hashem was an honor student from Bangladesh; Bo Kim was a quiet Korean immigrant; Chris O’Connor was a tall, lanky half-white, half–Native American dude who wore T-shirts three sizes too big; and Derek Wah was an ABC (American-born Chinese) whose parents were also from Shanghai and he spoke Shanghainese. When a Shanghainese person finds another Shanghainese in America, it’s like finding a best friend who has the same birthday and who also happens to be a long lost cousin. It’s an instant connection. The best part was that Derek and I could make fun of everyone else in Shanghainese. Derek, Jeremy, Phil, Zaki, Bo, Chris and I soon became best friends.

  Nobody in this group fit into any particular high school archetype, and nobody cared to. This group of mish-moshed friends became my clique for the rest of my high school career. We weren’t the coolest kids in school but we weren’t nerds either. We didn’t really care what others thought about us. I’d always pictured the American high school experience as a handsome, white high school quarterback scoring a game-winning touchdown at homecoming, then slow-dancing with the head cheerleader at the homecoming dance. But this diverse group of human beings from
different backgrounds reflected an even more truthful version of America: a country of immigrants.

  We never did anything cool like partying or underage drinking; we just threw around the football after school and played Madden at Phil’s house. I had a hard curfew to go home for dinner every night. If I wasn’t home by seven, my dad would call me and scream bloody murder in angry Shanghainese:

  “Are you dead?!”

  “No, I’m at Jeremy’s house playing video games.”

  “If you’re not dead, then why aren’t you home for dinner?”

  “I will come back later.”

  Then he’d switch gear to some classic Asian parent guilt-tripping. “Do you think I’m dead?”

  “What? No.”

  “Then why do you disrespect your father like that?”

  “Dad, I’ll—”

  “Come home for dinner now!” And he hung up.

  I’m pretty sure these phone calls emotionally scarred me for life.