Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  “So what do you do then?”

  “Oh, I just make a little sloppy.”

  “You mean you fudge?”

  She laughed then, but another time, when she was showing me how to write my name, and I said, just kidding, “Are you sure that’s the right number of dots now?” she was hurt.

  “I mean, of course you know,” I said. “I mean, oy.”

  Meanwhile, what I know is that in the eighth grade, what people want to hear does not include how Chinese people eat sliced tomatoes with sugar on top. For a gross fact, it just isn’t gross enough. On the other hand, the fact that somewhere in China somebody eats or has eaten or once ate living monkey brains—now that’s conversation.

  “They have these special tables,” I say, “kind of like a giant collar. With a hole in the middle, for the monkey’s neck. They put the monkey in the collar, and then they cut off the top of its head.”

  “Whadda they use for cutting?”

  I think. “Scalpels.”

  “Scalpels?” says Andy Kaplan.

  “Kaplan, don’t be dense,” Barbara Gugelstein says. “The Chinese invented scalpels.”

  Once a friend said to me, You know, everybody is valued for something. She explained how some people resented being valued for their looks; others resented being valued for their money. Wasn’t it still better to be beautiful and rich than ugly and poor, though? You should be just glad, she said, that you have something people value. It’s like having a special talent, like being good at ice-skating, or opera singing. She said, You could probably make a career out of it.

  Here’s the irony: I am.

  Anyway, I am ad-libbing my way through eighth grade, as I’ve described. Until one bloomy spring day, I come in late to homeroom, and to my chagrin discover there’s a new kid in class.

  Chinese.

  So what should I do, pretend to have to go to the girls’ room, like Barbara Gugelstein the day Andy Kaplan took his ID back? I sit down; I am so cool I remind myself of Paul Newman. First thing I realize, though, is that no one looking at me is thinking of Paul Newman. The notes fly:

  “I think he’s cute.”

  “Who?” I write back. (I am still at an age, understand, when I believe a person can be saved by aplomb.)

  “I don’t think he talks English too good. Writes it either.”

  “Who?”

  “They might have to put him behind a grade, so don’t worry.”

  “He has a crush on you already, you could tell as soon as you walked in, he turned kind of orangish.”

  I hope I’m not turning orangish as I deal with my mail, I could use a secretary. The second round starts:

  “What do you mean who? Don’t be weird. Didn’t you see him??? Straight back over your right shoulder!!!!”

  I have to look; what else can I do? I think of certain tips I learned in Girl Scouts about poise. I cross my ankles. I hold a pen in my hand. I sit up as though I have a crown on my head. I swivel my head slowly, repeating to myself, I could be Miss America.

  “Miss Mona Chang.”

  Horror raises its hoary head.

  “Notes, please.”

  Mrs. Mandeville’s policy is to read all notes aloud.

  I try to consider what Miss America would do, and see myself, back straight, knees together, crying. Some inspiration. Cool Hand Luke, on the other hand, would, quick, eat the evidence. And why not? I should yawn as I stand up, and boom, the notes are gone. All that’s left is to explain that it’s an old Chinese reflex.

  I shuffle up to the front of the room.

  “One minute, please,” Mrs. Mandeville says.

  I wait, noticing how large and plastic her mouth is.

  She unfolds a piece of paper.

  And I, Miss Mona Chang, who got almost straight A’s her whole life except in math and conduct, am about to start crying in front of everyone.

  I am delivered out of hot Egypt by the bell. General pande-monium. Mrs. Mandeville still has her hand clamped on my shoulder, though. And the next thing I know, I’m holding the new boy’s schedule. He’s standing next to me like a big blank piece of paper. “This is Sherman,” Mrs. Mandeville says.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Non how a,” I say.

  I’m glad Barbara Gugelstein isn’t there to see my Chinese in action.

  “Ji nu,” I say. “Shee-oeh.”

  Later I find out that his mother asked if there were any other Orientals in our grade. She had him put in my class on purpose. For now, though, he looks at me as though I’m much stranger than anything else he’s seen so far. Is this because he understands I’m saying “soy sauce rice gruel” to him or because he doesn’t?

  “Sher-man,” he says finally.

  I look at his schedule card. Sherman Matsumoto. What kind of name is that for a nice Chinese boy?

  (Later on, people ask me how I can tell Chinese from Japanese. I shrug. You just kind of know, I say. Oy!)

  Sherman’s got the sort of looks I think of as pretty-boy. Monsignor-black hair (not monk-brown like mine), bouncy. Crayola eyebrows, one with a round bald spot in the middle of it, like a golf hole. I don’t know how anybody can think of him as orangish; his skin looks white to me, with pink triangles hanging down the front of his cheeks like flags. Kind of delicate-looking, but the only truly uncool thing about him is that his spiral notebook has a picture of a kitty cat on it. A big white fluffy one, with a blue ribbon above each perky little ear. I get much opportunity to view this, as all the poor kid understands about life in junior high school is that he should follow me everywhere. It’s embarrassing. On the other hand, he’s obviously even more miserable than I am, so I try not to say anything. Give him a chance to adjust. We communicate by sign language, and by drawing pictures, which he’s better at than I am; he puts in every last detail, even if it takes forever. I try to be patient.

  A week of this. Finally I enlighten him. “You should get a new notebook.”

  His cheeks turn a shade of pink you mostly only see in hyacinths.

  “Notebook.” I point to his. I show him mine, which is psychedelic, with big purple and yellow stick-on flowers. I try to explain he should have one like this, only without the flowers. He nods enigmatically, and the next day brings me a notebook just like his, except that this cat sports pink bows instead of blue.

  “Pret-ty,” he says. “You.”

  He speaks English! I’m dumbfounded. Has he spoken it all this time? I consider: Pretty. You. What does that mean? Plus actually, he’s said plit-ty, much as my parents would; I’m assuming he means pretty, but maybe he means pity. Pity. You.

  “Jeez,” I say finally.

  “You are wel-come,” he says.

  I decorate the back of the notebook with stick-on flowers, and hold it so that these show when I walk through the halls. In class I mostly keep my book open. After all, the kid’s so new; I think I really ought to have a heart. And for a livelong day nobody notices.

  Then Barbara Gugelstein sidles up. “Matching notebooks, huh?”

  I’m speechless.

  “First comes love, then comes marriage, and then come chappies in a baby carriage.”

  “Barbara!”

  “Get it?” she says. “Chinese Japs.”

  “Bar-bra,” I say to get even.

  “Just make sure he doesn’t give you any tea,” she says.

  Are Sherman and I in love? Three days later, I hazard that we are. My thinking proceeds this way: I think he’s cute, and I think he thinks I’m cute. On the other hand, we don’t kiss and we don’t exactly have fantastic conversations. Our talks are getting better, though. We started out, “This is a book.” “Book.” “This is a chair.” “Chair.” Advancing to, “What is this?” “This is a book.” Now, for fun, he tests me.

  “What is this?” he says.

  “This is a book,” I say, as if I’m the one who has to learn how to talk.

  He claps. “Good!”

  Meanwhile, people ask me all about him, I co
uld be his press agent.

  “No, he doesn’t eat raw fish.”

  “No, his father wasn’t a kamikaze pilot.”

  “No, he can’t do karate.”

  “Are you sure?” somebody asks.

  Indeed he doesn’t know karate, but judo he does. I am hurt I’m not the one to find this out; the guys know from gym class. They line up to be flipped, he flips them all onto the floor, and after that he doesn’t eat lunch at the girls’ table with me anymore. I’m more or less glad. Meaning, when he was there, I never knew what to say. Now that he’s gone, though, I seem to be stuck at the “This is a chair” level of conversation. Ancient Chinese eating habits have lost their cachet; all I get are more and more questions about me and Sherman. “I dunno,” I’m saying all the time. Are we going out? We do stuff, it’s true. For example, I take him to the department stores, explain to him who shops in Alexander’s, who shops in Saks. I tell him my family’s the type that shops in Alexander’s. He says he’s sorry. In Saks he gets lost; either that, or else I’m the lost one. (It’s true I find him calmly waiting at the front door, hands behind his back, like a guard.) I take him to the candy store. I take him to the bagel store. Sherman is crazy about bagels. I explain to him that Lender’s is gross, he should get his bagels from the bagel store. He says thank you.

  “Are you going steady?” people want to know.

  How can we go steady when he doesn’t have an ID bracelet? On the other hand, he brings me more presents than I think any girl’s ever gotten before. Oranges. Flowers. A little bag of bagels. But what do they mean? Do they mean thank you, I enjoyed our trip; do they mean I like you; do they mean I decided I liked the Lender’s better even if they are gross, you can have these? Sometimes I think he’s acting on his mother’s instructions. Also I know at least a couple of the presents were supposed to go to our teachers. He told me that once and turned red. I figured it still might mean something that he didn’t throw them out.

  More and more now, we joke. Like, instead of “I’m thinking,” he always says, “I’m sinking,” which we both think is so funny, that all either one of us has to do is pretend to be drowning and the other one cracks up. And he tells me things—for example, that there are electric lights everywhere in Tokyo now.

  “You mean you didn’t have them before?”

  “Everywhere now!” He’s amazed too. “Since Olympics!”

  “Olympics?”

  “Nineteen sixty,” he says proudly, and as proof, hums for me the Olympic theme song. “You know?”

  “Sure,” I say, and hum with him happily. We could be a picture on a UNICEF poster. The only problem is that I don’t really understand what the Olympics have to do with the modernization of Japan, any more than I get this other story he tells me, about that hole in his left eyebrow, which is from some time his father accidentally hit him with a lit cigarette. When Sherman was a baby. His father was drunk, having been out carousing; his mother was very mad but didn’t say anything, just cleaned the whole house. Then his father was so ashamed he bowed to ask her forgiveness.

  “Your mother cleaned the house?”

  Sherman nods solemnly.

  “And your father bowed?” I find this more astounding than anything I ever thought to make up. “That is so weird.” I tell him.

  “Weird,” he agrees. “This I no forget, forever. Father bow to mother!”

  We shake our heads.

  As for the things he asks me, they’re not topics I ever discussed before. Do I like it here? Of course I like it here, I was born here, I say. Am I Jewish? Jewish! I laugh. Oy! Am I American? “Sure I’m American,” I say. “Everybody who’s born here is American, and also some people who convert from what they were before. You could become American.” But he says no, he could never. “Sure you could,” I say. “You only have to learn some rules and speeches.”

  “But I Japanese,” he says.

  “You could become American anyway,” I say. “Like I could become Jewish, if I wanted to. I’d just have to switch, that’s all.”

  “But you Catholic,” he says.

  I think maybe he doesn’t get what means switch.

  I introduce him to Mrs. Wilder’s turkey pot pies. “Gross?” he asks. I say they are, but we like them anyway. “Don’t tell anybody.” He promises. We bake them, eat them. While we’re eating, he’s drawing me pictures.

  “This American,” he says, and he draws something that looks like John Wayne. “This Jewish,” he says, and draws something that looks like the Wicked Witch of the West, only male.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  He’s undeterred. “This Japanese,” he says, and draws a fair rendition of himself. “This Chinese,” he says, and draws what looks to be another fair rendition of himself.

  “How can you tell them apart?”

  “This way,” he says, and he puts the picture of the Chinese so that it is looking at the pictures of the American and the Jew. The Japanese faces the wall. Then he draws another picture, of a Japanese flag, so that the Japanese has that to contemplate. “Chinese lost in department store,” he says. “Japanese know how go.” For fun, he then takes the Japanese flag and fastens it to the refrigerator door with magnets. “In school, in ceremony, we this way,” he explains, and bows to the picture.

  When my mother comes in, her face is so red that with the white wall behind her she looks a bit like the Japanese flag herself. Yet I get the feeling I better not say so. First she doesn’t move. Then she snatches the flag off the refrigerator, so fast the magnets go flying. Two of them land on the stove. She crumples up the paper. She hisses at Sherman, “This is the U.S. of A., do you hear me!”

  Sherman hears her.

  “You call your mother right now, tell her come pick you up.”

  He understands perfectly. I, on the other hand, am stymied. How can two people who don’t really speak English understand each other better than I can understand them? “But Ma,” I say.

  “Don’t Ma me,” she says.

  Later on she explains that World War II was in China, too. “Hitler,” I say. “Nazis. Volkswagens.” I know the Japanese were on the wrong side, because they bombed Pearl Harbor. My mother explains about before that. The Napkin Massacre. “Nan-king,” she corrects me.

  “Are you sure?” I say. “In school, they said the war was about putting the Jews in ovens.”

  “Also about ovens.”

  “About both?”

  “Both.”

  “That’s not what they said in school.”

  “Just forget about school.”

  Forget about school? “I thought we moved here for the schools.”

  “We moved here,” she says, “for your education.”

  Sometimes I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “I like Sherman,” I say after a while.

  “He’s nice boy,” she agrees.

  Meaning what? I would ask, except that my dad’s just come home, which means it’s time to start talking about whether we should build a brick wall across the front of the lawn. Recently a car made it almost into our living room, which was so scary, the driver fainted and an ambulance had to come. “We should have discussion,” my dad said after that. And so for about a week, every night we do.

  “Are you just friends, or more than just friends?” Barbara Gugelstein is giving me the cross-ex.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Come on,” she says, “I told you everything about me and Andy.”

  I actually am trying to tell Barbara everything about Sherman, but everything turns out to be nothing. Meaning, I can’t locate the conversation in what I have to say. Sherman and I go places, we talk, one time my mother threw him out of the house because of World War II.

  “I think we’re just friends,” I say.

  “You think or you’re sure?”

  Now that I do less of the talking at lunch, I notice more what other people talk about—cheerleading, who likes who, this place in White Plains to get ea
rrings. On none of these topics am I an expert. Of course, I’m still friends with Barbara Gugelstein, but I notice Danielle Meyers has spun away to other groups.

  Barbara’s analysis goes this way: To be popular, you have to have big boobs, a note from your mother that lets you use her Lord and Taylor credit card, and a boyfriend. On the other hand, what’s so wrong with being unpopular? “We’ll get them in the end,” she says. It’s what her dad tells her. “Like they’ll turn out too dumb to do their own investing, and then they’ll get killed in fees and then they’ll have to move to towns where the schools stink. And my dad should know,” she winds up. “He’s a broker.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  But the next thing I know, I have a true crush on Sherman Matsumoto. Mister Judo, the guys call him now, with real respect; and the more they call him that, the more I don’t care that he carries a notebook with a cat on it.

  I sigh. “Sherman.”

  “I thought you were just friends,” says Barbara Gugelstein.

  “We were,” I say mysteriously. This, I’ve noticed, is how Danielle Meyers talks; everything’s secret, she only lets out so much, it’s like she didn’t grow up with everybody telling her she had to share.

  And here’s the funny thing: The more I intimate that Sherman and I are more than just friends, the more it seems we actually are. It’s the old imagination giving reality a nudge. When I start to blush, he starts to blush; we reach a point where we can hardly talk at all.

  “Well, there’s first base with tongue, and first base without,” I tell Barbara Gugelstein.

  In fact, Sherman and I have brushed shoulders, which was equivalent to first base I was sure, maybe even second. I felt as though I’d turned into one huge shoulder; that’s all I was, one huge shoulder. We not only didn’t talk, we didn’t breathe. But how can I tell Barbara Gugelstein that? So instead I say, “Well, there’s second base and second base.”

  Danielle Meyers is my friend again. She says, “I know exactly what you mean,” just to make Barbara Gugelstein feel bad.

  “Like what do I mean?” I say.

  Danielle Meyers can’t answer.

  “You know what I think?” I tell Barbara the next day. “I think Danielle’s giving us a line.”