Chapter 3 #7
Once I was asked to edit my cousin’s application essay to a summer program in New York.
My cousin styled herself Vicky in English, though she had never been outside China; she had chosen the name because of the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
The moment I opened Vicky’s essay I understood I was not being asked to do some light editing but rather to rewrite Vicky’s essay from scratch.
Her writing was incomprehensible. She used rules of capitalization, punctuation, and spacing completely at random.
I didn’t understand how Vicky had messed these last two up, because Chinese also had rules about punctuation and spacing, and they weren’t all that different from the English rules.
I had a sneaking suspicion that Vicky had half-assed her essay because she knew that I was going to rewrite it for her, and this made me feel exploited.
I called my father to complain. “Vicky clearly can’t speak English. ”
“Of course she can,” he said. “She’s been learning it every day in high school.”
“Well, then she’s clearly not paying attention, because this is gibberish.”
“Be nice, Lily.”
“I wouldn’t feel responsible sending this in.” I tried to pretend I was acting in Vicky’s best interest, but I was just being mean. “She’s not prepared for a whole summer in New York. She’s going to struggle.”
My father gave me a lecture about supporting our extended family and how Chinese immigrants had only ever gotten ahead because they looked out for their own, and finally I agreed to do my best to clean it up.
I determined to put in as little effort as Vicky had.
I took out all the obvious mistakes, but I made no effort to replace her half-thoughts with substantive ones, or to reorganize the logical flow of her statements.
The essay had no thesis; it read like experimental poetry.
I have always dreamed of improving my English, among Americans.
New York is a magical city—Friends. In the end Vicky never came to New York that summer, and everyone intimated that this was my fault.
But in Chinese, it turned out, I was just as bad as Vicky. This terrified me: the possibility that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t even understand what I had done wrong.
ALL DAY LONG, I HAD FELT THAT SOMETHING WAS OFF AT THE DEPARTMENT.
It wasn’t just the heat wave. I was sure people were looking at me, but I couldn’t catch anyone in the act.
The back of my neck kept prickling. I saw Margrit and Paolo whispering at the lockers, but when I entered the student lounge, they stopped talking.
It was nothing I could put my finger on, but there were too many signs. I couldn’t be imagining them all.
The last time I had felt like this was in the fall of my freshman year. My period came while I was at the gym, and I thought some eyes were lingering on me, but it wasn’t until I got home that I saw the red stain that had spread all over my butt cheeks and crotch.
In the bathroom after class, a girl I hardly knew came out of the stall, glanced sideways at me, and seemed to stare a second longer than normal.
After she left, I checked my appearance in the mirror.
No crotch stains. No toilet paper stuck to my shoes.
I stretched my mouth wide open to check my teeth, but I saw nothing there.
I RAN INTO ANNA AT THE APARTMENT, JUST AS SHE WAS STEPPING out with her backpack. We crossed paths on the staircase. She flinched when she saw me, as if I’d jumped out at her from behind a corner. “Oh, hi.”
“Hey,” I said. “Are you going out to study?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” I knew better than to ask if I could join her. “So I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah, okay.” She stepped past me, paused, and then turned. “Hey, you know people are talking about you.”
My eyes prickled. I clenched my jaw; I didn’t want her to see me cry. “Okay?”
“So you do know.” She shrugged. “Okay, so.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“I mean. I guess I would want to know if people were saying I gave JC a blow job in a hot tub.”
I had known this was coming. Deep down I had suspected it all day, but still hearing it out loud felt like a hammer against my chest. “What?”
“Everyone’s talking about it. Like, they wouldn’t shut up about it in the lounge.”
“But we—but I didn’t do that. The blow job, I mean.”
Anna looked me up and down. Her face churned through several expressions, as if she was trying to decide whether or not to feel sorry for me. “Okay?”
“I really didn’t.”
“Look, I don’t really care what you and JC got up to.” She shrugged her backpack higher on her shoulders and moved toward the door. “But—yeah, that’s what they’re saying. Just so you know.”
THE NEXT DAY, AT LUNCHTIME, I WAITED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE stairs for JC. He flinched when he saw me, the same way Anna had. What were they so afraid of?
“Can I talk to you?”
“Okay.” He waited, hands in his pockets.
“Downstairs,” I said. “I think we’d better use English.”
“Um, okay.”
We walked outside the building, just under the awning where we could stand in the shade. We didn’t move to cross the street. I didn’t know whether we were stalling because of me or JC. But we obviously weren’t walking to lunch together.
JC stretched his arms over his head. “So what’s up?”
This irked me. He knew what this was about—he was making me spell it out.
“So there’s this weird rumor going around.”
“Yeah?”
“About what people think happened in Beitou.” I folded my arms against my chest. “Sexually?”
“Ah,” he said.
“And I know I wasn’t going around telling people about it.”
“Ah,” JC said again. “I mean.”
The doors to the lobby kept opening, and our classmates kept walking by.
The lunchtime rush had begun. Several people glanced our way.
We stepped toward a shaded corner and lowered our voices.
“And people have been staring at me all day, and I think the whole program knows, so you see why I might be upset.”
JC hemmed and hawed for a bit, tapping his fingers against his elbows. At last he said, “Look. I didn’t tell people what we did, exactly—”
“So it just came from nowhere? This highly specific detail about a blow job in the hotel bath?”
JC reddened. “So maybe I told a few people. Just Skipper, honestly. But it’s not my fault if Skipper’s gone and spread it around—”
“But what about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think it does to me to be the girl who gave you a blow job in a hot tub?” My voice hitched. “I mean, this is a pretty small program, so what consequences does that create for me socially, do you think?”
He looked surprised at this—genuinely, innocently surprised. “Well, that’s kind of regressive.”
“What?”
“I mean, that’s classic slut-shaming? We’re adults, who cares what we did?”
Was I losing my mind? How had this become my fault? “But I didn’t even blow you!”
“Well, it was a close thing.”
“Oh my God—”
“Listen, Lily.” JC had his hands up in the most condescending gesture—as if I were a raging bull, and I had to be tamed.
Whoa, Nelly. “I think the vibes aren’t—I mean, between you and me, they’re just not there.
Anyways, I’m not looking for a committed relationship this summer. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”
“I don’t want to be in a committed relationship with you!”
“Okay, so what are we fighting about, then?”
The way he said this—the way he drawled out the “okay,” the way he actually backed away, as if I were about to charge—felt worse than a slap.
Some part of me still thought we had ended on good terms—that our Beitou adventure, awkward as it was, would have become a funny story between friends.
Now I saw there was a certain generosity of friendship that simply was not there, and perhaps never had been.
JC did not actually like me. He did not care about me at all; in this moment, I was just a problem he wished would go away.
“Never mind.” I wasn’t even angry anymore; I just didn’t want to be around him. “I just—fine, it’s fine.”
“Lily, don’t be like that.” Again, he did that thing with his hands. “Come on—”
“Please leave me alone.”
I hurried up the stairs. JC didn’t follow me, or even so much as call my name.
I SPENT THE LUNCH brEAK IN THE LIbrARY, TRYING TO FORCE MYSELF to read.
I didn’t care about JC or Anna or anything anyone had said about me.
From now on, I would live like a monk: I would devote my life to study and quiet contemplation.
I flipped open to a random chapter in my Modern Chinese Literature book, and as I worked through the characters, my pulse slowed, and my ears stopped buzzing.
Studying had always worked to calm me down.
I liked the rhythmic dependency, the continual motion, the stable referents.
There was a right and a wrong and no confusion in the middle, and if I was studying, then I was being virtuous, and no one could yell at me.
I had learned this trick a long time ago, disappearing into the page.
It helped that reading in Chinese demanded intense concentration.
Sometimes—very rarely—I would get into a flow and lose myself in the plot.
But more often I had to go word by word, pausing every so often to look something up in the dictionary.
But that took so long that often I forgot how the sentence began, or what to do with the multiple glosses of pivotal words.
Complex clauses were hopeless. I always had to retrace my steps just to see how we had started on a sentence about a woman’s relationship to her mother and ended on a metaphor about geese flying south.
It was like looking at a Chuck Close painting and being able to see only one little square at a time.
The point always hovered just a bit beyond my grasp.
“Lily-tóngxué!”