Nothing but the truth: (and a few white lies) Read online

  Tonic Soup? Try Toxic Soup. The smell was bad enough, but its name just confirmed what I had been fearing: Mama whipped up some strange new Chinese concoction.

  "What's Tonic Soup?" I demand, starting to back out of the room. "Why do I need to eat it?"

  Mama's eyes glue me to my place on the linoleum floor, cutting off my retreat. Her lips tighten the way they do when she's annoyed with me, which is to say ninety-nine percent of the time.

  "What's it for?" I ask again.

  "You ask too many questions."

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  I back away from the bowl that Mama holds out and bump into the refrigerator. I'd crawl in with the dried pork, tofu bricks, and soy milk if it meant getting away from this poison potion. Sighing heavily, Mama shuffles in her slippers to the kitchen table and places the Tonic Soup on my spot, the far right corner. Our lives are arranged according to feng shui, which means that all our furniture is positioned to bring us more luck. Where, may I ask, is this good fortune? I've been sitting in the relationship area of the table for the past six years, and as far as I can tell, the only relationship I have is with my chair.

  That's when I spot Mama's required reading for her favorite subject, Stupid Girls, on my plate. The way other mothers clip recipes, Mama cuts out articles about girls my age who are killed by their drunk-driving boyfriends, slain by jilted lovers, and stalked by Internet weirdos after foolishly flirting with them online. Great, just serve up a side order of fear with that Tonic Soup, why don't you, Mama?

  "Eat," orders Mama. The hair along her forehead is frizzier than normal from bending over the foul broth. Her cheeks are flushed red. And as usual, she's wearing one of my old junior high school cast-off sweatshirts. I can only hope that no one I know will see her when she goes grocery shopping the way she normally does on Saturday mornings before she locks herself in her bedroom to finish a client's payroll.

  "Hey, maybe it'll make you shrink," says Abe, offering up a feeble grin to me.

  He's still by the back door, like if he steps into the kitchen, his stomach will lose its contents. But his suggestion opens new possibilities. I stare at the steam snaking off the soup

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  and wonder, Is the Tonic Soup supposed to make me smarter? Nicer? More beautiful now that I'm supposed to be Taiwanese boy bait? Or maybe, just maybe, grow a bra size or two? For that, I'd drink vats of Tonic Soup.

  But Mama can hoard secrets, never doling out answers to any of my questions. Especially the ones about Daddy. When I was working on our family tree for a second-grade project, all I got out of her was a hunh of annoyance and a mini-lecture that I was so lucky that Daddy was MIF, Missing In Family. Which is how I'm going to end up if she keeps pushing this soup onto me.

  Now she slips a couple of fried eggs onto Abe's plate. "Eat," Mama commands us both. Her look is so forbidding, we both shuffle to the table. As much as I want to ignore the article next to my bowl of soup, I can't help reading it like a gawker passing a three-car pileup on a highway, eyes drawn to the carnage. This time, a girl got bludgeoned by her boyfriend last night. Mama underlined the choicer bits.

  Not one to pass up such a ripe opportunity to lecture me, Mama taps the article. "See? Be friends first. Take long time to know person. Make sure he Good One." Her lip curls. "This boy Bad One."

  Distinctly greener now, Abe pushes the eggs around on his plate. I hear him swallow hard, but I'm too immersed in my own misery to help him out. Besides, I'm busy poking my white porcelain spoon suspiciously at the tiny black orbs bobbing near the soup's surface. I consider bringing the unidentifiable floating objects into my last chemistry class tomorrow and asking Mrs. McAllister what she thinks they are. But then again, I doubt she or any of my teachers have ever stepped a single lily-white, Ked-sneakered foot into one

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  of those apothecary stores that populate the International District. The ones that are filled from floor to ceiling with large dusty jars of dried sea horses and other ground-up, petrified animals.

  Under Mama's watchful eyes and Abe's queasy ones, I take a tiny sip. Thankfully, I have a stomach of steel, because the broth is so bitter, it vacuums out my mouth.

  "I'm full," I say and push the bowl away from me. "I'm going to do some homework at Janie's house."

  Out of the corner of my eye, I try to see if the Homework word has its desired effect on Mama. It doesn't.

  "Eat." Mama pushes the bowl back toward me.

  "You eat it," I say.

  As soon as the words leave my mouth, I wish I could paddle across the sound waves and harpoon what I've said. But my words have already washed down the canals of Mama's ears. She frowns, eyes narrowing into slivers so thin they can cut.

  I picture a bubble over her head, one with Lecture Number Two formulating: You Are a Disobedient Daughter. Just like the dead girl in the article whose parents begged her to break up with that Bad One, but did she listen?

  "Hey, Ma, I'm feeling sick." Abe waves the peace flag.

  I should feel grateful that Abe averts both the crisis and a lecture. But when Mama scurries over to Abe, hand on his forehead like he's a little kid, all I feel is a hangover from binging on bitter hot jealousy.

  How could she not know that the reason why he's sick is because he snuck out of the house last night and drank until he couldn't see straight? If it had been me, moaning and groaning in my corner of the table, Mama would have stared

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  right through me, told me to stop acting and given me a list of chores to do. Cinder-yella, that's me.

  But Abe is, I realize, and always will be, the eldest son, the beloved Honest Abe, the Golden Child who looks like Mama.

  "You go back to bed." Mama fusses and clears his plate for him.

  The poor invalid hobbles back up the stairs without a backward glance. Mama follows, clucking after him.

  My throat feels burned raw, as though I've already drunk a bowl of bitterness. So I hardly notice the taste when I choke it down, alone.

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  5 * Othering

  One 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

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  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.

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  "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 everything 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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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:

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  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 junior 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 measure. />
  "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

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  my bed only to have my head hit a book instead of my pillow. Lifting up, I slide out Mamas favorite read, Gavin de Becker's Protecting the Gift. The same woman who comparison shops for everything 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.