twenty-seven
Alan’s personal essay was tucked on the bottom half of the page, under an editorial about the rising cost of area housing.
I started to read.
When I first moved to Mount Pierce, Illinois, I thought that assimilation was the only way to live. I believed that you simply
had to become the person who everyone wanted you to be in order to survive, that everyone was playing a version of themselves
that was palatable to the world around them. Some of us were better at it, and others were worse. The people who didn’t fit
in, I assumed were just less adept at this crucial skill.
I was born in Shanghai, a city whose strongest trait was its transformative ability.
In China’s early days, it began as an important seaport for each of the various dynasties, a hub for trade with the outside world.
As foreign powers began to encroach in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shanghai was carved up into different pieces.
Partly British, partly French, partly Japanese, and partly its former self, it became accustomed to adapting to the whims of world influences.
Eventually, it would become a centerpiece of China’s effort to institute economic reforms and modernize.
In an astonishingly short period of time, its raised skyline would be indistinguishable from any major Western city.
Perhaps because of my birthplace, I was a product of this legacy. I attended an international school, mostly staffed with
British teachers, with a healthy population of expat students. My family members were not expats. We were native Shanghainese.
I spoke the dialect at home with my grandparents. I noticed that there was a clear tier of hierarchy at school. The students
who were like me, who were native to the area, were on the lower rung, while the white kids who spoke perfect English, grew
up with nannies, and had access to designer brands were at the top.
From the beginning, I saw what I needed to do to move up, so I did it.
It never occurred to me to do anything else.
I was a fast learner. I watched a lot of TV.
I picked up the accent right away. I paid attention to how the most popular kids behaved.
It was like a game, and I got very good at it.
It became natural for me to code switch once I walked through those double doors.
The expat students saw me as one of them, not one of the Shanghainese kids.
I had perfected my approach by the time my grandparents informed me I would be moving to the United States to join my parents
in some small town called Mount Pierce in the middle of nowhere. Mount Pierce didn’t even show up on world maps. It was as
big a difference as there could be. I was going to have to figure out this new place from scratch.
When I arrived in this nowhere place, I had the chance to start over. I could shed the artifice, which could be heavy, and
stop pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Even if it meant being rejected by others. What is that quote? Better to be hated
for what you are than to be loved for what you are not? It is a lovely sentiment but probably written by someone who was not
a pimply immigrant preteen and desperately afraid to find out that nobody loved me. And old habits die hard.
Yet again, at the most critical juncture, when I had the opportunity to do something else, I chose acceptance over courage, assimilation over authenticity. I acted out of fear and rejected others, so that I myself would not be rejected.
I was lucky that soon after, we moved again. To here. I could only maintain this trick mirror of myself for so long, and every
so often I’d have to reset. I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if I had stayed in one place my whole life.
Would I have made a misstep and eventually be forced from the identity I created for myself, since no facade can last forever?
Or would I have fully become my disguise?
I have seven more months—give or take—before I move again to a new place, and the cycle will begin anew. I imagined that the
persona I would take next would depend on where I ended up. I applied to colleges based on the person I thought I wanted to
be. I think all of us do that, to some degree. We see ourselves Becoming, in the grander sense, where we go. We could become
a Bear or a Titan, even a Bruin or a Leprechaun.
I applied early acceptance to Stanford, because I saw myself there, among the Romanesque sandstone and glass and red-tiled roofs.
I thought going there would confirm who I always wanted to be: intellectual, but in a cool, effortless way; automatically interesting; worldly; socially adept.
I would walk into the grown-up world a graduate of a place that needed no introduction.
It would mean that when people met me, they would know about me just from finding out my alma mater.
They would make all the right assumptions.
But I didn’t get in.
I wasn’t the first person for this to happen to, and I won’t be close to the last. Many of you will probably have the same
experience. When I got the rejection email, I saw pieces of myself floating away, like burnt-up remnants of paper. I felt
like I’d reached a dead end.
Here’s the thing about making and remaking yourself: Do it enough times and you begin to lose who you really are. You start
to wonder if anyone actually likes you or just a constructed idea of you. You start to wonder if you actually even like yourself.
You start to wonder if you are even real.
The truth is, a place does not decide who you are. The people around you do not decide who you are. I realized, when I opened
the message and read those words— we regret to inform you —that I was tired of trying to be what I was not for everyone else. I’d been doing it for as long as I could remember, and
all it had gotten me was an unhealthy dose of identity crisis. I couldn’t fix that with the right college admission. Stanford
wasn’t a shortcut to Becoming. Stanford was just a place.
Now, there is the hard work to do of Becoming, all on my own.
We will all face this, as we leave Weston High.
Who we are, and who we want to be. Maybe it is okay to try out various skins, but to do so in a way that doesn’t compromise your core values or sense of self.
We should all be loved for ourselves, because that is the only love that really matters.
I finished the piece. My thumb clutched the page, leaving an indent in the paper.
Before I could lose my nerve, I pulled out my phone and sent a text to Alan.
Hey. I read your essay. Can I see you sometime?
I figured we might find a time after school tomorrow, before I flew to China the day after.
It was late. I was about to go upstairs and go to bed, but almost immediately, there was a knock on the front door.
I opened it and was astonished to see Alan standing there.
“What the hell? Were you waiting outside the entire time?”
“Not right outside,” he said sheepishly. “In my car.”
“I thought you said it would be creepy for you to wait outside my house, and that’s why you didn’t do it before.”
“Yeah, well, honestly? I thought you were going to text me earlier, so it would be less weird. I dropped off The Standard , like, two hours ago. I figured you’d read it right away, and I’d just happen to be on my way to the car. I wanted to be
here for when you did get through it.”
“That’s an excessive amount of confidence. I mean, that you thought I’d definitely read it. And that I’d want to see you afterward.”
He shrugged. “I was right, wasn’t I? It was my Hail Mary pass at getting you to talk to me again. So what did you think?”
I had a whirl of thoughts about it. My tenderness at his childhood and fear of being ostracized. His admission that he had
hurt people in Mount Pierce. I hadn’t planned for what I was going to say. I hadn’t expected him to be on my doorstep seconds
after I’d texted him. “You didn’t get into Stanford?” was what actually came out of my mouth first. “When did you find out?”
“The day after we got back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. It was sort of silly to even write about, because nobody’s biggest life problem is that they didn’t get into Stanford,
you know? It’ll be fine. I felt whiny even talking about it.”
“I know you really wanted to go. It’s their loss.”
“Ugh. Please never say those three words again. It’s what everyone says when they find out. I guess I’m glad that we didn’t
do the student visit there. Would’ve been a waste of time, with neither of us actually going.”
“You’re a good writer,” I told him. “Maybe you should be the one majoring in journalism instead of me.”
“It’s all that practice from the Neon Nights fic.”
“So you weren’t bringing your whole self to the essay, because you definitely didn’t share how you’re writing Neon Nights romance on the side. What’s your AO3 username? That’s going to be one of your confessions, right?”
We were both smiling now.
“It wasn’t, actually. A guy has to have some secrets. But I did have one more thing to tell you that didn’t make the essay.”
“And what’s that?” I was expecting something silly, something funny.
“I didn’t tell you the truth about what happened in Mount Pierce. I did know, the night before school, that we were going
to stop being friends.”
It cooled the room instantly.
“That you were going to dump me, you mean.”
He winced. “Yes.”
“I worked that out. You left me the marble on purpose. Like a strange goodbye, except that you couldn’t tell me to my face.”
“I didn’t do it because I was afraid of the other kids in school,” he said slowly. “I did it because I was afraid of you.”
I swallowed. “Why were you afraid of me?”
“Can’t you see? Because I loved you. I’ve always loved you, even when we were little. I remember when we met, and you liked
my magic trick, and I don’t know, I think that was it. You were so hopeful, so strong. Every time I looked at you, I couldn’t
believe you even wanted to hang out with me. I was so afraid that you would hurt me one day, I preferred for you to hate me.
It was ridiculous. It hurt me anyway. I thought about you all the time. When I saw you again here, it just felt like—I had
to fix it. I missed you too much.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. So many years ago, so many miles away, and yet here he was, at my door. He was saying these things to me, all the things I’d been waiting my whole life to hear.
“I loved you even when I hated you,” I confessed. Once I said it, I knew it was true. “That’s why I kept the marble. I just
couldn’t let it go.”
I looked into his face, the curves and lines of it so startling yet familiar, and the way he was holding me with his gaze
made me want to cry. He was the only person who ever saw me, all my weaknesses and brittle fears. He took a step into the
house, tentatively, as if he was nervous.
“Can I?” he asked.
He seemed to be asking many different things. Can I come inside? Can I kiss you? Can we find each other again? Can we go back
to the beginning? I couldn’t parse all the questions, but it didn’t matter because the answer to all of them was yes.
He leaned in. He brushed my temple. At long last, we had closed the gap between us. He kissed me as though we’d been waiting
our whole lives for this, because we had.
In the darkness, I closed my eyes. It was nighttime, but all I could feel was the piercing brightness of a full orange sunrise.