Chapter 15 The Chins #3
He marked Drama, despite their protests. He and Macon had outgrown their make-believe games, but he often missed the wonder of those earlier years.
“You go acting class, then go cry cry after?” his mother asked, shaking her head, and with reluctance, she signed her name on the form. When no one was looking, he crossed out her Chinese characters and wrote “Mrs. Chin.”
On the following Monday, he discovered that despite his selection on the form, he had been placed in Visual Arts anyway. Though he hated speaking to adults, he went right up to Mrs. Sanders and pointed out the mistake.
“The Wongs have always been my best students,” she said, but he shook his head and refused to return to his seat.
She sent him to the dean, who asked him to speak to the guidance counselor, who referred him to the assistant principal.
“I’ll tell you a secret, Mr. Wong,” Mr. Gruber said, leaning forward in a confidential manner.
“As you know, you’re in our Gifted program.
This year, it’s mostly the other kids taking Drama.
” He winked. “Our gifted students usually take Visual Arts, as your sisters did. I know you Wongs are smart, quiet kids, not like some of the others.”
“It’s Chin,” Jason replied, not daring to look up at the assistant principal’s face.
“Chin! My apologies, Mr. Chin. It’s not every day that a family changes its surname.” Mr. Gruber laughed.
But Jason did not belong in Visual Arts and wouldn’t go unless they dragged him there on a leash, and so the assistant principal, relenting, signed the form to correct Jason’s schedule.
On his way to Drama, Jason felt a desire to sing loudly in the hallway, or to slide down the stair banisters hollering like Tarzan. He thought about using the girls’ bathroom or opening the windows in the gymnasium and letting the squirrels inside.
He wanted to be bad because nobody thought he was capable.
And yet he stayed good, out of pity for his mother.
It was true that Jason was shy. He avoided auditioning for the big roles and was given the part of Second Watchman; he only needed to announce having captured Balthasar. He and the other side characters spent most of class behind the curtains, where it was dark and smelled like preteen sweat.
Jason liked watching Elaine McIntosh through a slit in the stage curtain. He adored the way she burst onstage and, hands under her chin, whispered, “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” He was riveted when she drugged herself with imaginary poison and lay shaking into death.
A boy named Caleb Levine played Romeo—he and Elaine were among the handful of bak gui in Drama.
During each rehearsal, Caleb and Elaine would hold hands tenderly, and even real-kiss, because Mr. Youdelman insisted that real actors should not be afraid to real-kiss.
Jason knew through the grapevine that Elaine had ambitions to be a real actress one day.
One afternoon, Mr. Youdelman asked the class to sit in a circle for a lesson on the Shakespearean sonnets. When Elaine settled beside Jason, he forgot how to breathe. She had candy lips of such a bright red that it looked like she’d eaten a cherry ice for breakfast.
He struggled to pick out a few words worthy of her attention.
“You want to be an actress, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, barely looking at him.
“If you were going to act on Broadway, which play would you pick?”
Elaine put her hand on her chin and pondered the question, her eyes twinkling. “West Side Story.”
Jason had seen the movie multiple times.
“Well, you’re already Juliet. You could play Maria.”
She nodded, glancing at him now. He felt called on to amuse her, to perform. Before he could overthink it, he launched into song, in what he hoped sounded like a Puerto Rican accent.
“I like to be in America! Okay by me in America!”
“Everything free in America!” she sang back. “For a small fee in America!”
They laughed, and might have continued, but Mr. Youdelman clapped for the class’s attention. Jason felt his chest turn into a cage of pigeons, and he knew that if someone broke the lock, they would flap out and cover the entire auditorium.
After that day, he could no longer stand to watch Elaine and Caleb onstage, for he feared they would forget the boundary between character and self.
He asked First Watchman to come get him whenever his one line was coming up and spent almost entire rehearsals buried in the prop closet, refining his iambic pentameter.
He was reading The Scarlet Letter when his bedroom window was attacked by a barrage of stuffed animals.
“Chinny Chin Chin!” He heard Macon calling from outside. “Chinny Chinny Choo Choo…”
Jason opened the window and looked down.
“You want to play?” Macon called. He dribbled a handball.
“Nah, I suck.” Jason smiled and put his elbows on the windowsill. It was nice to be wanted, but he had reached the part where Dimmesdale and Hester reunite in the woods. Here was a book about made-up people from the 1600s, but they understood his suffocation better than anyone.
“Come on. I never see you anymore.”
Jason sighed, grabbed a jacket, and headed down to the porch to meet his friend.
“How come you’re always so busy now?” Macon complained, rolling the Spalding between his palms. Jason sat down on the stoop, wondering whether Macon was old enough to understand what he was feeling.
“Hey, you ever liked a girl before?” Jason mumbled.
Macon froze. Something like fear flickered in his eyes.
“You got a girlfriend?” he accused.
“What? No!” Jason laughed. “My sisters aren’t even allowed to have boyfriends.”
“You’re always staring at some girl. Who is it now?”
“Elaine McIntosh.”
“Never heard of her,” Macon said, as if this decided the matter.
“She wants to be an actress.”
“Little boy!” Macon put on a high voice in imitation of Jason’s mother. “No time for girl! One day you grow up, find nice nice Chinese girl, okay?”
“Shut up, Whopper-head,” Jason returned. “There’s no Chinese girls in East Flatbush. And you didn’t answer the question. Did you ever like a girl?”
“Yeah,” Macon said, shrugging, like this was obvious. “Of course.”
“Who?”
“Diana Ross. She’s gorgeous. Especially when she’s singing ‘Baby Love.’ ”
“She’s not a kid.”
“I like myself some older women.”
Jason laughed, but then he remembered that Macon’s cousin had said the exact same thing about “Baby Love” on Thanksgiving the prior year. Macon had just gotten it from him.
Later that week in the library, Jason discovered Leaves of Grass. There were many sentences he didn’t understand, and he looked up dozens of words in Webster’s Dictionary.
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
He said: experience the world, don’t take my word for it. And he wasn’t confined by the body he was given: he didn’t want to be just a man. Whitman sometimes called himself a man-child, sometimes a mother. Whitman wanted to be everything, and he didn’t care about money.
Jason yearned to share in this openness, this expansiveness. He didn’t want to be a boy; he wanted to be a fairy godmother, a woman condemned to wear a big red A, a hairy man raised by apes. Even without understanding all the poems, Jason knew he had met a kindred spirit.
I celebrate myself and sing myself, Jason thought each day of that summer as he biked around East Flatbush, passing Jewish girls rotating their waists to keep Hula-Hoops in orbit and Black girls selling bracelets and lemonade.
What did that mean, celebrate himself? This was beyond cake and cone hats.
His mother had told him that in China, people didn’t celebrate all their birthdays, that only American kids were showered in presents every year.
“American kid like to party party!” she often said, and then she’d glance at her American-born children, her jook seing.
“Now the jook seing too! Spoiled!” And even though she bought him sheet cake from Lords Bakery every year, she was never joking when she said this.
Yet how could he help it if he liked birthdays? How could he help his desire to sing?
Jason read books on the way to and from school.
He read while his sisters studied for exams and his father watched Bonanza.
He wrote more poems, relishing how words gave him a place to talk about the secret, the better-left-unsaid, the laundry list of things his mother would deem unrespectable.
How much rice noodle rolls resembled condoms, for instance.
He wrote in the margins of his school notebooks in class and on the backs of heng bou envelopes during Chinese banquets.
On Jason’s thirteenth birthday, Koon Lai announced he had a surprise for his grandson, and that they would have to take the bus to Bedford Avenue.
Just the two of them set out, holding hands at the crosswalks, saying little.
There was something about Koon Lai’s silence, his blueness, that Jason understood without words.
Koon Lai had never gone back to work, and he spent most of his time alone in his room, preparing visa applications and refugee appeals for whoever needed.
When they reached Sears, Koon Lai took Jason to the typewriter aisle.
“Pick.”
Jason chose a teal Olivetti, and it was the best gift anyone had ever bought him. The only problem was that he could not keep the pages hidden, and one day, when he was writing in the living room, his father grabbed a half-finished sheet right out of the top.
“Put it back,” Jason growled. Baba crumpled the paper and passed it back and forth like a ball between his hands.
“Go outside. Go to the handball court,” he said, gesturing to the window, and, stretching his elbow back, he simulated a serve, nearly lobbing the paper at the glass. “Stop fooling around all day with that typewriter.”
“I’m not finished.”