Graduates in Wonderland

by Jessica Pan

  You should have slapped Saul when he took your pulse to see how “excited” you were during sex. This is exactly what I mean about some guys having a goal—­this isn’t going on your résumé, Saul! And what’s with the specific demands to finish him off? I feel like that’s only okay once you’ve been with someone awhile—­not the first time. You aren’t a hooker!

  Also, can I send you a picture of me and can you please honestly tell me if I look fat?

  There’s a café near work that I go to every day except I might stop doing this, because the employees have become very familiar with me. Too familiar. Nearly every day I walk in, they chime my order, “Small mocha!” and then a large Chinese man behind the counter says one of two things:

  “Today, you look so fat!” and then he uses his palms to mime chubby cheeks. OR he greets me with, “Today, your face is so thin!” and then he gestures with his hands in a way that I take to mean, “I can see your cheekbones.”

  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, because my weight doesn’t fluctuate (maybe the fat just moves around or something?)! I tried to see if I could figure out the system by taking note of how I wore my hair, but I just can’t crack it. Yet he always seems certain. I think the worst part (or maybe the second-­worst part after being called fat) is that he then yells it at the girl who makes the coffee and she always turns to look at me and emphatically agrees. “So fat today!” or “So thin today!”

  Anyway, today is a fat day.

  Last week, I went to a Chinese wedding for two of my Chinese coworkers, who no one even knew were dating. They announced their engagement to us last week and invited the entire office. They rented out a bus that took us to a huge banquet on the outskirts of Beijing. The bride wore a red, floor-­length, high-­necked dress called a qipao and then later changed into a white wedding dress. During the ceremony, the groom cried. It’s tradition for the couple to come around and have a shot of alcohol at each table, and there were fifty tables. My coworkers and I were very drunk by the end and on the bus back to the city, a Singaporean photographer from the magazine told me, “Americans have too much fluoride in their water. Your smile is so...smiley.”

  What am I supposed to do with that information?

  When I was watching the groom toast the bride, a Chinese coworker leaned over to tell me that the bride and I were the same age. How can this be when I feel nowhere near ready for that kind of commitment? I’m not sure I ever will.

  Did I tell you that Maxwell left Beijing for good? Romantic feelings for him fizzled out long ago and Astrid and I went to his good-­bye party together. Although we all agreed to stay in touch, we knew that we probably wouldn’t.

  A lot of my friendships here feel similar. Recently, I’ve been going out a lot, meeting a lot of different expats at house parties and bars around town, but it’s not very fulfilling. I’m meeting more people than I ever have in my entire life, but after about ten minutes of banter, I start to feel very flat and want to move on. I end up leaving feeling lonelier than before I came out.

  In addition, I feel really young compared to my boss, Victoria. She seems to have her life together and I do not. I need direction or a new goal or something, because I feel really unsatisfied right now. Even though I’m busy during work hours, I’m too idle on the weekends and I think this is bad for me.

  When I first got to Beijing, I felt strong and brash and fearless, but when I get too comfortable and fall into a routine of not speaking Mandarin to strangers or going around my problems rather than confronting them, I soon revert back to being timid. Do you find that this is a struggle for you as well? I’m learning that I always have to fight to stay confident and strong—­it’s not something I can take for granted. I need to keep challenging myself to keep it up, now that I feel relaxed in my life here.

  I don’t know. Why do I feel so low right now? I’m trying to figure it out. It could just be that I woke up from a three-­hour nap.

  Love,

  Jess

  P.S. Actually, forget what I just said. When’s Oprah’s mail-­order groom supposed to arrive? Is there someone I can contact in case he got lost?

  MARCH 3

  Rachel to Jess

  Yesterday Rosabelle and I opened the mailbox and there were two letters, both from the Fulbright commission: one fat and one thin.

  But the fat one wasn’t for me.

  We’ve both been checking the mailbox every day looking for our Fulbright responses that went out last week. Even in this day and age, they send the acceptances and rejections by mail. MAIL.

  I hugged Rosabelle. I’m happy for her. During the whole application process, she was practicing her Spanish around the house while she cooked dinner, as I practiced my French while I ate her dinner. She also pulled out volume after volume of contemporary Argentinian poetry, which she read in a soft melodic voice—­sometimes to herself (borderline acceptable) and sometimes to Buster (gross). And she’s been completely miserable at her job. Each night, she comes home with glossy magazines and her free newspaper that she copy edits. This isn’t the way she imagined it, but now she has a way out.

  Rosabelle and Buster quietly opened champagne when she told him her news. She hesitated when she asked me if I wanted a glass, but of course I wanted to toast her. I remembered the first time the three of us drank champagne here, on our first night in this apartment last June. We climbed the fire escape to the roof and sat drinking out of plastic cups and now they’re both moving to Argentina in a few months.

  Focusing on their happiness actually helps mute some of my disappointment. I thought getting in was a done deal for both of us. To be honest, fresh rejections just bring up the memory of college rejections. How they hurt but also had no rhyme or reason. “How could you do this to me, Georgetown? Brown was twice as competitive as you!” (Rips pink ribbons out of her hair and stomps on North Face fleece.) “I didn’t want to go to Dartmouth anyway, thankyouverymuch.” (Throws away preppy pastel shirts.) Also, yes, I realize that I applied to a lot of schools where it is compulsory to wear polo shirts and pearls.

  Of course, Claudia and I talked about the Fulbright rejection. We decided that not getting things is a necessary step in appreciating the things you do get (even I already knew this) and that there is more than one path to happiness (sometimes it doesn’t feel like it).

  My parents are sympathetic about the Fulbright, but my dad is being strangely conservative about my other dream to study film in Paris. He does make a lot of good points—­namely, that I’d be giving up a good job to get a degree that will only qualify me to do exactly this same job two years from now in a different field.

  However, my mother made the only point that matters to me right now. She said, kind of sadly, “You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—­just leave everything behind and go.”

  So much advice from so many different people. At the end of the day, I still feel like everything’s riding on these Sorbonne applications. With each application, I feel like I’m determining my fate. If I don’t get in, I feel like I’m going to be totally stuck here forever. I’ll know everything by next week.

  It’s weird to think that by summer, Rosabelle, Buster, and, I hope, I will be abroad. There will be three completely new people living in this apartment. Or, if you go by fire codes/our rental contract, one completely new person.

  Love,

  Rachel

  MARCH 4

  Jess to Rachel

  Rachel! What are you talking about? If you don’t get into your Sorbonne program, you’re stuck in your New York life forever? Come on!

  Don’t rest all of your life expectations on one outcome. When you have no expectations, you don’t lose all that money on wasted ribbons and polo shirts. I flew to Beijing without knowing a thing about what to expect or what to bring. Granted, I also had to live without deodorant and the correct prescription of contact lenses for tw
o months, but I survived. And so will you! Even if you don’t get into your program, there will always be other ways to get to Paris and other ways to change your life.

  I’m learning that we can’t predict anything. At the magazine, I feel like Victoria is warming to me, although she still remains wary when I get too excited (she has a steely gaze, which goes with her stick-­straight black hair). When I told her I was waiting until I was in my thirties to start saving money, she sat me down and said she felt morally obligated to tell me about something called “compound interest.” Then she dismissed me. Do older sisters do this?

  In my effort to do more things that challenge me, I’ve asked for a few writing assignments from our company’s cooler, hipper magazine, which is aimed at twentysomethings. One of the perks about writing for a publication is that you get to do things you’ve always wanted to do but would never have the nerve to otherwise by declaring, “It’s for my job, so I am completely justified in interviewing extremely handsome men/backpacking alone through Thailand/asking a jilted wife about her ex-­husband’s new wife.”

  Under the guise of writing an article is how I ended up at a speed-­dating event, clutching a notecard, and trying to come up with my answer to the question: What’s your deal breaker? The organizers insisted we all write this down and that way we can use it in case conversation falls flat with any of the ten dates we’d meet that night.

  As soon as I walked in, I knew it was a mistake, which was totally confirmed when I sat down with my first candidate. His name was Andrew, and he was an American who is twenty-­six. He was almost cute, and he had a deep voice...for a woman. This canceled out any cuteness whatsoever. He said that all he does is study Chinese and lead a monk’s life and he did not laugh at any of my jokes about how it seems weird for a celibate monk to speed-­date. I asked him what his deal breaker was.

  “People who don’t take life seriously enough. People who make a joke out of everything.”

  I looked down at my own notecard, on which I had scrawled, “Deal breaker: people who take life too seriously. And mouth breathers.”

  Every other date seemed to have a similar trajectory.

  Until finally, a familiar toothy-­grinned man with green eyes and floppy black hair threw himself down on the chair in front of me, buried his face into his arm before looking up at me from the table, and declared that he just had to tell me about all the crazies he’d just met. He read my name tag and said, “Pan Jessi. Come with me. I need a pint, but beware that once I have had a few, my gentlemanly British manners will disappear. I’ll become crude and I’ll look like a fat red baby.”

  George. I’d met him briefly at my magazine when he was quitting at the same time I was being hired, and he remembered me. Before I could reply to his proposition, George whispered that we should ditch the speed-­dating event to get “the spiciest chicken wings you didn’t know had been missing from your life.” I struggled to find my jacket and he grabbed my hand and said, “Hurry! It’s going to shut soon and if I don’t get chicken wings out of this abysmal night, I’m going to blame you.” I followed him because he was charming and I had nothing to lose. (Also, I don’t take life too seriously.)

  He coaxed me down an alleyway before pulling me into what is best described as a cave that serves food. The hidden diner was loud and crowded, packed with tattooed Chinese punks. The walls were scrawled with colorful graffiti, and waitresses were running around delivering batches of hot chicken wings on skewers.

  In bad Mandarin with British intonations, he ordered us a few plates of chicken wings and two pints of beer. George claimed he only attended the speed-­dating event because he lost a bet about cricket in his office and was forced to accept the dating assignment for work. He began eating as he told me he worked for another expat magazine.

  He seems to know everything and everyone in Beijing, including all of my coworkers. He had opinions on everyone at my office. The art director? Oxygen thievery of the highest order. The tech editor? Gets stoned all the time. The marketing director? Such a penis.

  Do you now see how small the expat circle can feel? I’m in a city of seventeen million, but I run into the same hundred people everywhere I go.

  And on and on the conversation flew off our tongues. We got into a heated debate about what kind of English accent I would have if I were from the United Kingdom, in which he passionately argued that if I were English I would definitely be too high-­class, and also too lovely, to sound like Lily Allen.

  Well, shit.

  I’m a huge sucker for any man who can successfully pull off using the word lovely without talking about a garden party. And he did. (No American man can do this. A refined Australian just might be able to, but it’s pretty much limited to English men.)

  After devouring our wings, I told him the spicy food had permanently burnt my taste buds and that I would kill for ice cream. Then he got up and said he needed to make a phone call, and when he came back, he handed me a packaged ice-­cream cone from the corner shop. Then he snapped his fingers to get the bill.

  When we parted ways after dinner, he put me into a cab and said, “Before anything happens, I want to be clear about something. You do know I’m not Hugh Grant, right?”

  He’s been the leading man in my life ever since.

  We e-mail each other one hundred e-mails a day and send twenty texts every hour, and he sends me music that he insists I must listen to RIGHT NOW. I burst into laughter all the time as we type to each other while we’re at our respective jobs. Or, as Victoria puts it, I “make love to my computer.” But I’m still making deadline, so she puts up with it for now.

  The last time I laughed this much was with Maxwell, but even he pales in comparison to George, who makes me laugh until I can’t breathe. And Maxwell was always too busy mooning over Astrid—­which isn’t funny to me at all. For some reason, I seem to have fallen into George’s favor. He’s everyone’s favorite person, but all of his attention is on me.

  Suddenly my world has color. I want to tell George everything—­everything that has ever happened to me, every observation I have had, ever, and I want to share every book, song, or movie I have ever loved. Spring finally arrived in Beijing, and I walk around in the warm air, perpetually heavy with the threat of rain, with a permanent grin on my face. Today, I walked into a construction site because I was giggling at something he had written to me earlier.

  I love his voice and his hearty laugh and his smooth accent and the way he tells stories with his hands. He confessed to me in one breath that when he was fifteen he loved the Marx Brothers so much, and he wanted so desperately to be Jewish like them, that he would tell people that his uncle was a rabbi and that, no, he likes me for other reasons besides my lineage.

  But despite all this constant correspondence, I keep turning down his invitations to dinner or to meet up with him at night—­I only agree to meet up with our mutual friends from work or during the day. There’s something stopping me from giving in to romance, even though our messages are rife with flirtation.

  On the night we first met, when he came back and handed me an ice cream, I looked into his eyes and saw Will, my old boyfriend who went to Boston University. I think you met briefly in our freshman dorm hall right before I dumped him. The funniest, most intelligent, wonderful guy who adored me—­whom I wanted to spend every waking minute with, whom I loved so much, and yet whom I never wanted to kiss.

  There. I said it. Sort of. I think you get it.

  Maybe, because nothing has happened yet, I just can’t imagine kissing him. But I’m basking in my George-­filled life, and I’m afraid I’m going to mess this up somehow. I don’t want to lose my colorful world, but I can tell that he is smitten. I wake up to text messages about how nice my hair smells. I don’t reply to them.

  He’s too smart not to realize what’s going on and is trying to persuade me to have just one romantic dinner with him, where he
is utterly convinced he will successfully woo me.

  “You’ll be nervous. I’ll be awkward and speak too much. I’ll say something inappropriate whilst trying to be funny. You’ll get offended. You’ll shake your head. I’ll make you laugh accidentally. You’ll slowly fall in love with me. You’ll realize that what’s missing from your life is a crude Englishman.”

  I’m in deep. How do I handle this situation?

  I keep waiting to fall in love with him.

  Love,

  Jess Pan(ts)

  P.S. He calls me Jessi Trousers. And when we’re arguing, he calls me “Jessica the Bestica.” And when he gets drunk, he calls me Jessibelle.

  P.P.S. Oh, maybe I do love him so much.

  MARCH 9

  Rachel to Jess

  Jess! I am so excited you’ve met your witty future British husband! When you two move to London, you’ll only be a train ride away from me BECAUSE I GOT INTO MY PROGRAM IN PARIS!

  Yes, I know you told me that there are many other ways to happiness, but I felt such relief and excitement when this time I opened the mailbox and found out that I got into my dream program at the Sorbonne. Cinematographic Studies with a brilliant professor: light, aesthetics, narrative, Fellini and Godard and a whole bunch of stuff you probably don’t care about! The Cinémathèque and a million movie theaters, midnight showings of Charlie Chaplin, strange French farces involving slapping people in the face with fish!

  Do you know what this really means? Obviously you do. Cobblestones! Croissants! Ballerina flats! Rodin Museum! PARIS! I keep thinking: It will be such a beautiful life.

  Also, Eurostar straight to London, which is why you must make George take you there. This is all in a kaleidoscope cluster of images inside my head, by the way.

  Amélie! Bicycles and red lipstick and negligees!

  Okay. Focus, Rach. The countdown now commences.

  I’m writing to you from my Fort Greene café. The waitress is actually a French girl who is totally incompetent, but has a lopsided smile and likes to argue with me in French about why New York is better than Paris. Her reason today: because New York is new and exciting, whereas Paris is old-­fashioned, stuck in the nineteenth century, and full of romantics.