by Michelle Kuo
The driving was always more fun than the destination. I never had to tell the kids to look out their windows. Patrick always had his rolled down, as if the wind blowing in was proof that we were going somewhere. A car felt powerful. A car could zoom across vast empty spaces, unceasing flat land, quickly. No place seemed impassable. And no one spoke as we crossed the Helena Bridge over the Mississippi—for most, it was the first or second time.
The quiet in the car as we went over the bridge was the quiet of silent reading.
—
MY PARENTS ARRIVED for a three-night visit. We ate ribs and cornbread. They attended the silent auction my friends had organized for the Boys & Girls Club and bought an expensive drawing of a duck that we knew would end up in the basement. After each performance they clapped genuinely, and my father swayed during the gospel singing. My mother and I shared a look of surprise.
On the last full day of their trip, they came with me to school. I steered them toward the students’ poems on the walls. My dad read one halfway through, then walked away. My mother made herself popular by handing out mechanical pencils that she’d brought from Indiana, where my parents had recently moved. But it was the after-school math class that lit my parents up. Patrick, Miles, Aaron, and others were at the front board, working on their own problems, and my father was unable to stand still. “No, no, this way is faster,” he said, charging to the front. He took my dry-erase marker. My mother laughed to herself, recognizing him.
The students giggled; his style was the opposite of mine—blunt, direct, easy. Now he handed the marker back to Miles. Miles solved it my dad’s way and then turned back to see if I was watching.
“See?” my dad said triumphantly. “Faster.” Maybe I didn’t know my parents at all.
The students towered over my father, so that he looked like a bespectacled Asian elf. He started to do another problem, a tricky one involving subtracting fractions. Explaining it, he got so animated that his glasses nearly fell off.
Later that evening, we drank iced tea on the porch. I was feeling hopeful and my heart was beating very fast. Just tell them, I thought.
“So I’ve been thinking,” I began. “I’ve been thinking I might stay for a couple more years. There’s this thing you can do, it’s called deferring; a lot of—”
“Here?” they said in unison.
My father’s face contorted. My mother put her hands over her face.
“Here?” my dad repeated, shocked.
They had already started telling people that I was headed to law school, they said. What was I trying to do? Make liars out of them? If I wasn’t really planning to go, why did I bother applying?
“You’re so much smarter than this—” my dad continued, waving his hands, gesturing to the street. When he said smarter, his voice hit a strange pitch. I could see the pulse in his neck.
“Are you happy?” my mother interrupted. “Look at you,” she said in Mandarin. “Look at your body.” She was referring to my weight gain. “Do you know how you sound? You don’t know. You sound old. You sound so serious. When I talk to you, I think, my daughter’s forgotten she’s young. You don’t care about how you look; you don’t care that you don’t have a boyfriend. It’s like you don’t want to be happy. It’s just school, kids, school, kids. They’re not your own kids. Do you even want to have kids? All your friends here are couples. They don’t care that you’re lonely. It’s not their fault; it’s just how couples are. I care, only your mom and daddy care.” She took a breath. “You’re not normal. Your cousins, they’re normal. They get married, study science, become happy. It’s so easy for them. They’re so easy. They listen to their parents. Why can’t you be normal? What happened to you? You know, nobody wants to marry Mother Teresa.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t realized how much they hated that I was here.
She kept going. “You’ve changed since you went to college. We shouldn’t have sent you to Harvard; everybody there thinks they can change the world. You think you can? Look at the newspaper; nothing changes. You think you’re so special? You think you’re better than your mom and dad? Because you read all those books, because you like to help people?” She laughed derisively. “You think your mom and dad don’t help people? We help you. We help you go to school. We help you go to college. We give you a house to sleep in and we work every day.”
My father gripped his chest as if it hurt. “You look down on your parents,” he concluded.
Then he stood up and walked away, not waiting for my mom.
She followed him, worried.
Early the next morning I drove them to the airport in Memphis. We stopped for breakfast along the way, but we spoke little.
“We’re a happy family, aren’t we?” asked my father finally. Then he answered himself decisively. “We’re happy.”
After I’d left them at the airport, I found that I did not want to go home. Instead, I drove up and down Highway 61 between Memphis and Helena, my neck in knots, thinking about my parents.
Once, at a car wash in Kalamazoo, when I was around ten years old, my dad pulled up behind another car and we heard a high-pitched scream: “Hey!” A woman leaned out and shouted at us from behind. “You chink and your chink daughter cut in line.” Had we in fact cut in line? This is the question that preoccupied me, as I didn’t know what a chink was. My dad bolted out of our car and yelled right back at her: “You motherfucking bitch.” I shrank back; everybody in the lot would hear him say bad words. But, to my shock, the woman shrank back, too; she hadn’t expected that he would talk back. His cursing was fluent. His temper was wild. I was scared he might punch her right there. But he didn’t. He returned. Now he was yelling at me, as if I, too, had done something wrong. “Remember you’re American. You’re an American citizen. You were born here. Do you understand? Do you?”
When my parents introduced me to neighbors, I sometimes detected surprise on their faces when I spoke, as if they had momentarily forgotten I lacked an accent and the presence of outsiders had reminded them. My person, and specifically my English, was at once a peace offering, a riposte, a battle cry. Listen to her, my parents seemed to say; she has no accent, she is one of you. To my parents my brother and I were American—not Asian American, not Chinese American, just American. Maybe it was the times. But it was also a sign of what they were willing to give up.
Few of my friends in the Delta understood the power my parents had over me. “You’re like a little girl around them,” one roommate had admonished. “How can they tell you what to do? You’re an adult.” But one can never overestimate the extent to which many Asian parents make their disappointment unbearable. The caricatures in popular culture are untruthful mainly because they never go far enough. For my family, at least, there was the usual stuff, the yelling and tears, the shaming and guilt trips.
But all of that is a red herring. Maybe the secret of their effectiveness was what they declined to say. They thought nothing of emptying their savings for my lessons and my books. They did not hope for too much success in their own lives; ours were more important. They did not think to ask my brother and me to do chores—they believed studying was a full-time job. They didn’t read to me, because they were afraid I would adopt their accents. They cared so little for their own histories that they didn’t make me learn their native tongue. For them the price of immigration had always been that their children would discount them in these ways.
“You look down on us,” they’d said to me, with a stricken expression. This wasn’t the first time my parents had said it, but it was the first time I heard it. And so I could not suppress a reluctant, painful tenderness. So they didn’t know how to talk to me; so they didn’t know how to help me reason out loud what I wanted. So what? Big deal. Grow up. And maybe they knew something about me that I wouldn’t admit.
Once, Ms. Riley heard the kids make their derogatory Chinese noises at me and yelled at them: “Ms. Kuo is a minority just like us. Why you trying to hurt her? You hurt yourself.�
�� The students got very quiet, ashamed. They’d turned their heads to examine my face and my features afresh. I could see them pondering our relationship. Not foreign, not Yao Ming’s relative: I might be somebody like them. How I loved Ms. Riley for saying this. How I loved that she was saying, We are like each other, you and me.
The yellow race, the Mongoloid race (Supreme Court), the obnoxious Chinese (Supreme Court again)—each term separated Asians from whites, amalgamating distinct cultures into a single deportable entity. Until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Chinese kids in Mississippi were prohibited from attending all-white schools on the grounds that they were “colored.” In Arkansas, introducing a formal ban in 1943, a state senator said, “I know none of you gentlemen think Negroes are as good as your children, and I don’t think any member of the yellow race is as good as my children or yours, either.”
During the war, nearly seventeen thousand Japanese Americans came to the Arkansas Delta a hundred miles south of Helena as prisoners. Rounded up mostly in California and put on a seven-day train ride across the country, they encountered abandoned and snake-infested land on which dirty, half-finished barracks had been built. In some areas, there was a watchtower but no running water. It did not matter that the majority of the newly incarcerated were born in the United States. The Japanese race is an enemy race, wrote the general who headed the Western Defense Command, and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted.
In the Delta, the Japanese Americans cut down trees, cleared the land, and planted crops. Some had farmed in California; others had been office workers who had to learn for the first time how to use an ax. Their work would increase the value of the land—previously worthless—seven- to fifteen-fold. Fearing that the Japanese would buy this land and stay after the war, the state legislature passed an act declaring no Japanese or a descendant of a Japanese shall ever purchase or hold title to any lands in the State of Arkansas.
Ms. Riley was telling the students we belonged in the same picture—the Delta’s history of white supremacy. Her words expressed the very reason I had come to the Delta: to show my solidarity. Yet now they seemed far-fetched. The struggles of those Asians in the Delta were no more mine than were the struggles of my students and of Ms. Riley. My ancestors were not from here. My grandparents hadn’t been interned during the war or prohibited from attending these schools. I had a very short and simple history in America: My parents had come from a country nobody had heard of and that I didn’t know much about. And so I had turned—it was becoming obvious now—to the black tradition as a surrogate, as a way to fill in the absence of my own history and claim an American past.
I kept driving. I pulled into the Lucky Strike casino and then pulled out. I went north and south and then north again. Along the highway there was a stand of pecan trees, mysterious crosses, fields that had gone fallow, and an old tree that stood in water.
“Here?” my father had said, swinging his arms to gesture at the place. This was not the America he and my mother had come for. They did not know it. In Helena, one immigrant group after another had disappeared: the Delta Jews, the Delta Lebanese, the Delta Chinese, all once significant parts of Helena, all gone. They were immigrants: This is what made them who they were. They moved. It was an oddly clear moment. How my parents saw the Delta was closer to how my students saw it, as a dead end, a place to escape.
In proclaiming our bond, Ms. Riley had prompted me to wonder where my loyalties did lie. My parents had been too modest. They hadn’t told me much about their histories because they thought there was nothing special about them, about their journey. And I thought, my heart breaking a little, that my error had been to take them at their word. They should be the first with whom I claimed solidarity, these fleshly, plodding, scolding beings who treated me as if I belonged to them. And perhaps I did. Perhaps I did have a duty to them.
As was often the case, the things my mother said made me recoil in part because they were true. My closest friends were almost all coupled. Almost daily I was down the street at Danny and Lucy’s house; they had two cats, and I was like their third, coming in and out when I pleased, dozing off on their couch. Often when I came to, there was chili on the stove and a blanket on me, and the two would be tiptoeing about, whispering softly so as to not wake me. After dinner Danny tried to teach me guitar as Lucy sang to the tunes we played. My roommates this year were also a couple, a Catholic and a Jew, who argued about whether, when they eventually had children, they should have a Christmas tree. Even the repetition of the argument was a glimpse of a domestic life that I wasn’t close to having.
But the real smoking gun for my mother’s charges lay in my conversations with my only single friend, Vivian. We talked about the Delta as being like a remote island: If you were single, you’d stay that way. There wasn’t anyone our age. We whined about how much weight we gained from stress and all the fried food we ate. We noted pointedly that nearly all of our friends who had decided to stay for the long haul were coupled.
I had to admit that I was lonely. The unattractive truth was that I was nearly twenty-five years old and had never had a boyfriend. The year before I came to the Delta, I had gone to England on a scholarship. It was there that I really drank for the first time, had my ears pierced, and suffered the humiliation of a relationship that went unrecognized. I left England a bit sorry for myself, but by the time I got to the Delta that summer, I pretended none of it had happened, reverting to my high ideals from college, where I had decided dating was what other women did and behaved as if this showcased the intensity of my commitments and my disinterest in triviality. I had been proud, very proud, of contradicting the stereotype of Asian women as feminine and exotic. I had joked to people that I was a feminist celibate; I wore overalls and mismatched colors; I spoke passionately about the superiority of female friendships over bourgeois heterosexual romance. But now I felt embarrassed. My proclamations seemed too loud. A significant way to interact with the world eluded me.
And Vivian was leaving. She had gotten into graduate school for public policy at the University of Michigan and had stopped by for dinner earlier that week. “Today Mr. Cooper”— her principal at Miller—“chased a kid down the hallway with his paddle. I think the kid started a fight or something.” She raised her arm to demonstrate the gesture: fist gripped, ready to strike. “Anyways, the kid got away.” Vivian laughed ruefully, and for a moment I didn’t recognize her. Her laughter at the school’s dysfunction felt like permission to leave.
In a functional school, like the ones I’d gone to growing up, the staff acts as a basic unit, and a troublesome student is handed off between adults like team members handing off a baton. The principal sets up a parent-teacher conference, the counselor organizes regular sessions, adults convene and design a plan for the child. But central to the experience of a dysfunctional school is the feeling of giving up. To give up is to send a disruptive student out of one’s classroom, excluding him from the lesson you hoped would change him. To give up is to banish her to the whims from which the school ought to be a protection. When our principal was absent, students who were sent out of a room as punishment had nowhere to go. They wandered around Stars, banging on doors, trying to get into any classroom. “Lock your door,” Ms. Riley had advised. “They’ll bang and bang but they’ll go away.”
Were my parents so wrong? Most parents, immigrant or not, don’t want their kids to move to the Delta. My parents wanted me to get married, have kids, a good job, money. Their idea of happiness was very American. It seemed to me that just about all the people in my life had already given me permission to leave. Why would I stay? It was an outrageous idea. I was an Asian American woman from Michigan—what ties could I have to this place? Now I saw only the absurdity of my whole attempt to live here. Who did I think I was?
By the time I pulled into my house, in the near dark, I had deci
ded to leave. I took a long, hot shower. When I got out, I happened to catch myself in the mirror. For the first time since I got to the Delta, I saw that I looked pretty, and I felt startled.
—
TWO WEEKS AFTER I’d made my decision, the district announced that there was not enough money to keep Stars going. All of its students and teachers would be sent back to Central, the main high school. So the district’s experiment, if it could be called that, with alternative learning had lasted seven years. Stars would disappear from Helena with scarcely a conversation. The only murmur of reflection came from white families who lived in the wealthy neighborhood hundreds of feet from Central; they voiced concerns about the “danger” of bad kids being so close to their homes. You couldn’t blame them, really; were they any more objectionable than the majority of middle- and upper-class families, of all races, who chose to live in suburbs because of safety—because of their distance from “danger”? In other neighborhoods in this tiny city, bricks were lobbed randomly at the front windows of homes, the elderly were beaten and burglarized, and people were held up at gunpoint in their driveways.
Students turned to me and asked, “You gonna be at Central, too?”
I shook my head.
Patrick put down his pen. The class got very quiet. The computer made a dull buzzing sound.
“I’m going to law school,” I said. “I won’t be here next year.”
There was a long silence. Finally Monica, one of my most sweet-tempered students, broke it.
“Ms. Kuo, you’re not gonna be a good lawyer.”
“Why?” I threw my hands on my hips, mock-offended.
“Because you’re too nice.”
I looked at everyone.
I said, “I am going to miss you.” I said, “You are the strongest people I know.” Patrick looked at me, not blinking. He seemed to drink my words in. Aaron did, too. Gina. Monica. Kayla. They all believed me. That they believed me—that they didn’t think I was just being nice, or trying to get paid, or trying to get them to do something—struck me. In the grand scheme of things, a year isn’t long. But we’d spent every day together, and had come to trust each other.
