nine
The next morning, we had an uneventful breakfast, bid goodbye for the day to Auntie Chao (Uncle Wang had left hours earlier
for a scheduled surgery), and headed off to tour Caltech.
I stifled a yawn as we exited the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences into the hazy midmorning sun. The tour guide
was an enthusiastic junior in engineering, who had introduced himself as Kai. He was wearing jeans rolled up to the ankle
and a Caltech-branded T-shirt.
He was prepped with facts about the school like a museum curator, and he could deliver them at twenty times a minute. It was
a miracle he could breathe. I kept waiting for him to run out of verbal ammunition, but we were two hours in, and he was still
going. Alan listened attentively, nodding and asking enough questions for two.
I learned that Albert Einstein had once been a visiting scholar, that Caltech had an annual olive festival that harvested a hundred gallons of oil, and that its admittance rate generally hovers around 3 percent.
I tried to imagine myself going here a year from now. Would I walk around campus in my branded clothes? Would I be happy?
I had hoped I would arrive at one of these places and it would click. It wasn’t working. The colleges in California happened
to have more tropical plants, but they all seemed the same to me at the end of the day. Places where people could lose themselves
and never be found.
Sometimes it still surprised me how much my life had changed in the past nine months. How I could have ended up thousands
of miles away from home, because of one singular event.
“So what do you think?” Alan asked. He hadn’t attempted to engage seriously with me since I told him off last night.
“About what?”
“This tour? Caltech?”
I shrugged. “Seems fine. I don’t think I’ll get in. I should focus on more attainable places.”
“It’s probably my second choice.”
“Okay,” I said.
There was a long pause, through which Kai droned on up ahead.
Alan sighed. “What can I do to make it up to you after all this time?”
“I’m not a child. I’m not looking for a bribe.”
“You know that’s not what I meant. I’m just trying to ensure that we get along on this trip. Make it a pleasant experience. Or at least a tolerable one.”
I had a thousand retorts loaded up, but instead, something else came out. “Why did you tell the twins that we were old friends?”
He cocked his head curiously. “What should I have called us?”
“I don’t know. It just felt mean for you to say it.” The memories seemed sharper in relief than they had ever been before.
I was a little embarrassed and surprised at how much they hurt. I had thought I’d put it behind me. I wanted to seem unbothered.
But I was failing at it.
He paused. “I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’m sorry for that too.”
I mumbled some form of acceptance, so I wouldn’t come off as unbearably petty.
We did the rest of the tour in silence.
Kai dropped us back off at the student center. We stood there, facing each other at last with no buffer in between.
His hair was longer than the short close-cropped cut he had when we were children. I had short hair then too. In China, we
were required to have neat, easily manageable hair. Not distracting for class. We had both grown it out in the years since.
The breeze rustled a stray lock of hair in front of his eyes.
I had always thought his eyes were really nice behind his glasses. Big and expressive, impish when he was making a joke, and
so easy to reveal his hurt. They were the one part of him that could never sell a lie.
He spoke up finally. “It’s funny. I used to be able to tell you everything, and now I can’t seem to find anything to say.” The corner of his mouth lifted slightly, but the expression didn’t reach the top half of his face. His eyes were sad.
I did remember that. He had told me all his secrets, the ones that he was too afraid to tell another soul. The truth was,
I knew Alan Zhao better than anyone. At least, I did once. It was strange, in some ways, to be before him now. To not know
what other secrets he might have accumulated since then.
“Maybe there isn’t anything left to say between us. Maybe there’s nothing good here,” I said. It could be easier this way,
I thought. To walk away and not reopen any more wounds.
“I wonder if that’s true. If you really believe that, I mean. I would be surprised. Wo yuan lai ren shi de nu hai zong neng
zhao dao yang guang.”
I blinked, so startled that I forgot to be angry. It was as though he had opened a portal into the past. For a moment, we
were the younger versions of ourselves, before everything between us had burned to ash. I looked away.
Summer afternoons in Mount Pierce had been hot. Hot enough to rival the ones back home, except at least here, we had air-conditioning.
It was a marvel that I didn’t take for granted. Sam was not much interested in spending time with me that summer, so it was
mostly Alan and me left to our own devices.
When we couldn’t bear to be outside, we had taken to spending time in the basement of his house, which was fully underground and mostly unfinished. It was cool down there. The cement floor pressed against the underside of our legs like a blessing.
We played tiao qi, Chinese checkers. Alan had a set with beautiful glass marbles with different-colored swirls inside that
looked like flower petals. I was obsessed with them. They were the prettiest version I’d seen. Sam and I had a cheap one at
home with plain, solid-colored marbles. Three of the colors had at least one missing marble, making those colors unplayable.
He would let me pick my color first. I picked a different one each time, except I left the orange one for him, because it
was his favorite. He always played orange.
It was an easy game that didn’t require too much attention. We could mindlessly play match after match, exchanging wins and
losses while chattering about other things.
There seemed to be so much to talk about. By then I had been in the United States for a year, and I hadn’t encountered another
soul who shared any commonality with my childhood. None of the kids at Mount Pierce Elementary had watched the same shows
or had the same favorite food or knew the right words for what I wanted to say. In school, I was quiet, preferring to keep
to myself than sound a fool by letting people hear my broken English. As a result, no one ever wanted to talk to me.
With Alan, it was easy. He talked enough for three people and made it easy for me to chime in every once in a while.
He would tell me about his life in Shanghai, which I could hardly imagine.
The glittering buildings and neon lights.
The way the night market smelled. How it always hummed and roared with life, no matter the hour.
My village in China was nothing like it.
Some of the houses didn’t even have running water.
Sam and I had gone to Xi’An on sporadic trips with Nai Nai.
I marveled then at the size and scale of it, but even Xi’An was different from Shanghai.
It retained an air of gu dai, antiquity, about it, whereas Shanghai was sleek and Western.
It occurred to me that the two of us would never have become friends in China. We came from such different worlds. But here
in the nowhere space between I-55 and I-70, our backgrounds were practically indistinguishable. We were both from a place
that people here couldn’t begin to conjure up in their wildest dreams.
“I miss the way the air would smell,” I told him. I could never describe it right. A little sweet, a little burnt. It was
the air pollution, I realized only later, when the scent of it wafted across Mount Pierce from the wildfires in Canada the
following year. But to me, it smelled like home.
“I miss the breakfast food,” he said. “The yogurt was better.”
“I miss the way people would look at you with honest faces. People here smile too much without it being real. It freaks me
out.”
“I kind of like it.”
I sat up, confused. “Why?”
“My dad used to tell me that I shared too much of myself for a boy. I cried a lot as a kid. The first day of school, whenever I would take a fall. I was quick to anger. I was fussy. I warmed up too fast to strangers. He thought I should’ve been more stoic.
More of a nan zi han.” He shrugged, flushing slightly.
“Maybe it feels better that other people here have to hide themselves too, you know?”
I didn’t know how to comfort him. That sounded horrible, yet it was unsurprising. I had heard Baba say similar things to Sam.
But Sam wasn’t like Alan. He was always more introspective and reserved. A little old man as a child. The way that Alan would
light up when he was excited about something—it made me sad that his father would want to change that.
“I like you the way you are. I like that you’re friendly.”
He smiled at me. “I like you too.” He glanced out the egress window at the sliver of deepening blue sky. “It’s probably cooler
now. Do you want to go outside and check out the pond?”
We put away the tiao qi set and scrambled out the door with only Alan’s mother’s voice echoing in our ears to be back for
dinner. A small man-made lake in our neighborhood was stocked with fish and ringed with trees. It was much more manicured
than the pond I remembered in front of Nai Nai’s house. A paved path surrounded it where people could take walks. Still, there
was more wildlife there than anywhere else.
We treaded carefully along the banks, combing through the long grass for bird feathers, for which we each had a collection.
Although he undoubtedly missed home, he delighted in the rural setting Mount Pierce provided. He was endlessly fascinated
by the range of bird species that proliferated the area. He had never seen anything much beyond a pigeon before moving here.