I should know. After the election loss, I had the gall to start a national nonprofit called Girls Who Code, and I don’t even know how to code, myself.
But thanks to my childhood, growing up with two very brave immigrants as parents—who just like me were children of immigrants in Uganda—I now know it is more important than ever to be brave and proud of my identity, to own my role in changing the world, one election loss at a time.
Yes, I did run for office again a few years later. And yes, I lost again. But bravery is contagious.
* * *
On election day, I was running around in the rain shaking voters’ hands up to the very last minute. I met a woman—I did not catch her name—who was rushing to the polls. As she passed by me, I smiled and said, “Who are you voting for today?”
She hesitated, flustered but kind. Embarrassed she couldn’t pronounce it correctly, she fumbled out an uhh as she frantically pulled one of my fliers from her bag.
“This woman,” she said as she pointed at my name on the piece of paper.
Even though she needed a cheat sheet to remember who she was voting for, I couldn’t help but swell with pride that I had an Indian name. I couldn’t help but think of my parents. When they chose to name me Reshma, did they dream of a world where it would be unthinkable to go by Rita instead? I had spent years assimilating as a child, and for the first time, I thought I knew why my parents named me Reshma.
Maybe they didn’t want me to blend in as much as I thought. They blended in so I wouldn’t have to. They paid the ultimate price for my authenticity. They gave up their community, their careers, their language, their own names. These were the steep taxes they paid to make a better life for me. Assimilating in the ways my parents did can invite accusations. Changing your name and hiding your accent could be seen as passive or fearful gestures. But my parents’ immigrant experience reveals the great reserves of bravery and pride they had in order to survive in a new country with no familiar community of support. I think my parents are the bravest people I know. They traded in their names for the freedom and privilege I experience every day. Because of them, I have the platform to be brave. They built the stage I stood on at the PRISM assembly. They laid the groundwork for a little girl named Reshma to grow up and become the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress.
They changed their names so I wouldn’t have to.
And while I plastered campaign signs all over my district in New York with bold block letters reading RESHMA, they were still signing “Mike” and “Meena” at the bottom of birthday cards and letters. Even though they had initially Americanized their names purely for their résumés, Mike and Meena eventually took a very strong hold—as names have a tendency to do. And now even their closest friends and family members call them by their American names. My husband, Nihal, who is of Indian descent himself, calls them Mike and Meena.
Sometimes Nihal and I watch Bollywood movies with our two-year-old son, Shaan, in the hopes he will learn some of the language. I want him to delight in the music and color, and somehow absorb the culture I did not grow up in. He watches with bright wide eyes, and I consider how he will never see my parents as the struggling refugees walking the fine line of sacrifice and assimilation. To Shaan, they are not Mike and Meena. They are the people with loving arms who bring him red lollipops and soccer balls, who light up his whole face every time he sees them.
To Shaan, Mike and Meena are Granddad and Nana.
But to me, they will always be the people who made it possible for a girl named Reshma to grow up in America and name her son Shaan—the Sanskrit word for pride.
Best known as the senior Latino correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Al Madrigal has made a name for himself in both stand-up comedy and acting. He stars in the movie Night School and is a series regular and writer on Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here. His latest hour special, Shrimpin’ Ain’t Easy, premiered on Showtime in 2017. He is also the cofounder of the All Things Comedy podcast network.
Al Madrigal
IT’S TOUGH TO ADMIT but . . . I’m frugal. I love a deal . . . because I’m cheap. Madrigal men, as far back as I can find, have always been cheap. It’s in our DNA. Our family crest has a knight shoving Tapatío packets into his sheath metal. Most likely our thriftiness comes from the fact that my Mexican grandfather, Liborio Madrigal, came here with nothing. Many immigrants come to this country with nothing. But Liborio had less than that. The only thing he had on him when he entered the state of Texas was a stab wound.
The story is—and I just learned this at a family reunion—my grandfather, a successful rancher in El Chante, Mexico, near Guadalajara, was in his house in the middle of the night. Somebody pounds on his door. My grandfather answers the door; guy stabs him twice in the side. Apparently, this was pre-peephole. I have a difficult time opening the door for Girl Scouts holding my cookies, so I’m definitely not going to open up for someone who’s stab-ready. The backstory is that my grandfather was in love with this guy’s wife and the guy wasn’t taking it so well. So he decided to employ some 1920s Guadalajaran revenge tactics. Couple of stabs.
So my grandfather says, “Not here, not here. Let’s go to the outskirts of town where all the murdering is done.” They get out there. The guy takes out his knife. My grandfather takes out his machete. Rock, paper, scissors . . . Machete beats knife. The guy is dead in one blow. My grandfather knows the guy is a nephew of an infamous Mexican general, so he gets the hell out of there, rides his horse No Country for Old Men–style into Texas, where he works with the Chinese building the railroad. If you’ve ever taken a train, you’re welcome. Then he makes his way up to San Francisco, where he meets my grandmother. Long story short, that’s why I’m sitting here now writing about the roots of my thriftiness.
I’m not suggesting that all Mexicans are penny-pinchers or that all immigrants are cheap, only that we have to do the most with what little we have—and Madrigals are no different. My dad, like a true Madrigal, loved nothing more than negotiating with people and getting a great deal. He passed that on to me and I certainly have passed that on to my kids. Dad had a taste for the finer things in life. He just didn’t want to pay full price for them.
So here are some guidelines that I learned from my father. Not because he formally laid anything out but just my own list I compiled through watching him operate.
Number 1: Prey on the new guy. You think you want the veteran salesperson. You’re wrong. That guy already has a Jacuzzi. You ideally want the person who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. You’re looking for the weak in the herd. My father would call up car dealers and manipulate his way into getting the new guy on the phone. He’d say, “I was just talking to the new guy . . . What’s his name again?” You wanna show up at the end of the month when he has to meet his quota and they want to give those guys some wins.
Number 2: Show very little interest. As a matter of fact, go a step further and insult the thing you want. “Gray interior? I really had my heart set on tan.” If it looks like you want it, they know they got you. And everybody’s gotta be down with the plan. You can’t have your spouse there saying, “Honey, you don’t love tan! Remember?! You hate the tan. Remember how you said you spit on tan? It was either gray or you’d rather take the bus! Remember when you said that?”
Number 3: Get deep into the process. Then walk away. If you don’t walk away at least once from the thing you want to buy and the person who’s trying to sell you that thing, you’re not even trying. And tell them exactly where you’re going. “I’m gonna go check out another place in—[insert shithole city right here.]” If they know you’re willing to drive to Van Nuys or Rancho Cucamonga or Stockton, they know you mean business. What you’re saying is, there are better deals out there, and if you don’t give us a better price, we’re going to go consider them. You’ve got to be the fish that got away.
Number 4: Whenever possible, have cash. Your cash needs to be organized. Your cash needs to be ready
to go at a moment’s notice, ’cause you’re gonna show ’em that cash. And you want the person that you’re dealing with to be convinced they’re getting all the cash you have. “This amount in my hand, that you’re seeing, is all I’ve got. . . . And it could be yours . . . If you would just take it . . . and give me that vintage mid-century lamp.”
When I was twelve, I remember my father running into the house and saying, “I found it, I found it. And I need cash now!”
My mother had no idea what was going on. “What?! You found what?!”
“The Mercedes. Boz Scaggs is getting a divorce, and it’s ugly! He’s having a fire sale before his wife can get her hands on any of the money!”
So we went to the bank to get cash, and then we drove over to Boz Scaggs’s Russian Hill apartment as a family. And that day, my dad drove away with his 1972 dark champagne 450SEL. And that car, that was sold to him out of spite, couldn’t have made him any happier. Please imagine my little five-foot-six dad wearing driving gloves and humming “Lido Shuffle.” We got a taste for the finer things in life, but we didn’t want to pay anywhere close to full price for them.
So Boz Scaggs’s messy divorce leads me to my fifth and final guideline: Where there is deep sorrow, there are deep savings. That Mercedes wasn’t the only time a celebrity’s troubled life allowed my father to practically steal a luxury item. No, that car just whet his appetite. Now, I’m not going to say the boxer’s name. Let’s just say it rhymes with Oscar De La Oya. That boxer may or may not have gotten in trouble with the Federales, who told him to never return to Cabo San Lucas. To this day we are the proud owners of his bodyguard’s condominium. Not his! His bodyguard’s. Now, why does a boxer need a bodyguard? I don’t know. But what I do know is it’s on the sand, has a full ocean view, and currently appraises for 600 percent of its purchase price. Boom!
Remember: Deep sorrow, deep savings. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna buy a murder house, but a messy divorce? I’ll take that flat-screen off your hands. To this day, when I drive by an estate sale, something tingles inside me. You see a dead grandma; I see a cabinet full of jadeite bowls. Am I right?
Having internalized the Madrigalean methods and techniques, I have proudly passed these lessons along to my children. I found the perfect opportunity with my son when he was just eight years old. The two of us were walking our dog in Eagle Rock and we stumbled upon a garage sale. Not just any garage sale. Divorced dad and his two young product-of-divorce sons. Deep sorrow? Check! On display was an entire table dedicated to kids’ toys. The tit-for-tat one-upmanship of their broken relationship on full display. Me and my son made our way over to the toy table and he noticed hundreds of Pokémon cards.
To this day, I don’t know how the game works. All I do know is that from eight to nine years old, kids love Pokémon. At exactly the age of nine, they fall out of favor, and you’re left with hundreds of unwanted cards. I knew he wanted the cards, mainly because his eyes lit up, and he started shaking, which I quickly shut down. I told him to go look at the puzzles so we could come up with a plan.
Rule number two, don’t show any interest. The two sales kids were even more excited that someone was showing interest in something on their table. And then their dad came over to supervise the possible transaction. So I asked the kids, “How much for these puzzles?”
“Fifty cents for the puzzles.”
I said, “Okay, and what are these? Pokémon cards?”
The dad then quickly explained that they weren’t just any Pokémon cards. The Pokémon cards had been divided into three categories. Category one: a shoebox full of loose, run-of-the-mill, lower-end cards. Category two: a binder filled with your better, midrange cards organized neatly in protective sleeves. And category three: a small, hardcover leather-bound Pokémon book with only the highest-quality, rare Pokémon cards. The kind only a true Pokémon aficionado or a sad divorced dad, willing to throw money at his kids’ affection, would dare to buy. The father confirmed that the book did not contain just any cards, and that his boys didn’t just casually play Pokémon at school. He had spent hundreds of dollars on these cards. They went to tournaments and, with the contents of this book, fucked up some other divorced dads and their kids. I acknowledged that they were something. I could see how proud he was of them.
It was time for rule number three. We walked away. My son couldn’t understand what was happening. Those were the best cards he’d ever seen. I produced a ten-dollar bill and explained the plan. “We’re going to go back to those Pokémon cards and we’re going to listen to everything that they have to say without saying a word. The dad’s going to talk about the tournaments again. Which I will never do by the way. I don’t care how good these cards are. He’s going to talk about how much money they spent on the cards. And how rare they are. He’s gonna try and sell you some of the cards from the shoebox. Maybe some from the binder. But when they’re done talking I want you to take this ten-dollar bill out of your pocket. Show it to the younger of the two kids. The shorter one with the sad eyes. And say, ‘All I have is this ten dollars. And I want the book.’ ”
And as that boy snatched the ten dollars out of my son’s hand, the dad looked at me as if to say, “You motherfucker. I know what you did. You preyed on the new guy.” But I was too busy holding my son’s hand, walking away, humming “Lido Shuffle.”
Watching my son execute that deal was one of the proudest moments I’ve had as a father. Sure, I was happy he’d gotten his Pokémon cards, as short-lived as his interest in them would be. But I was happier that he’d learned this skill. He was now a true Madrigal man. I knew I had passed on a lesson that would serve him well for the rest of his life. Only suckers pay full price, and Madrigals are no suckers.
I realized something else that day. We’re not actually cheap. It’s not about frugality; it’s about resourcefulness. Just like my grandfather talked his enemy into changing locations so he could win the great stabbing battle of El Chante, my father had employed his own resourcefulness and passed it on to me. And then I passed it on to my son, who used it to score some badass Pokémon cards. Sure, the stakes in those two stories aren’t the same, but the lesson is: do what you can with what you have. If my grandfather hadn’t known this lesson, I wouldn’t be here today to share this story with my own son. Knowing where I came from made all the difference.
Someday, my own grandson might be hearing a story about his father and me while he learns how to strike a deal of his own. I hope so, and I hope he remembers to prey on the new guy.
PHOTO BY JENNY ZHANG’S MOM
Jenny Zhang is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and the story collection Sour Heart, which won the 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She was born in Shanghai and grew up in Queens.
Jenny Zhang
SIZZLER WAS WHERE WE went to have steak and salad, not to mention one of the rare instances when my family used forks and knives (we had exactly two forks in the house growing up and some butter knives my grandfather scavenged from a literal dumpster) instead of chopsticks (we ate everything with chopsticks—fried eggs; pork chops; tiny, little green peas—nothing was too big or too small). It was also one of the few times I was permitted to order a soft drink (normally ordering a beverage at a restaurant was seen by my parents as a colossal waste, as it didn’t require any significant human labor or ingenuity to pour liquid into a glass, and, on top of that, it was cheaper to buy soda in bulk at the supermarket). The rationale behind allowing it at Sizzler was because dinner was so cheap that it made my parents feel rich. It was the highest order of indulgence, and I loved it. Fruit punch was my potion of choice. It came with free refills and tasted like bubble gum, the latter of which, in my estimation, was double magic, how the flavor of one thing could conjure up the chewy gumminess of another. Sizzler was where I became a budding synesthete.
At home, my parents mercilessly mocked American habits of eating: steak was nothing more than “a slab of rubbery meat without any seasoni
ng,” salad was a pathetic assortment of bottom-shelf reject vegetables like iceberg lettuce, soggy cucumbers, soapy shreds of carrots, thrown together—“you can hardly call that cooking!” By contrast, in our culinary lives, we were used to food with flavor, depth, complexity—sautéed strips of beef with asparagus seasoned with oyster sauce; hand-folded dumplings plump with ginger, pork, and chives; massive hot pots crammed full of fresh crab; fish balls stuffed with minced meat, shrimp, vermicelli noodles, daikon radish, tofu sheets, six different types of mushrooms, eight different types of green, leafy vegetables that didn’t even have English names. We dined like royalty while living like vermin, often four or five families crammed into a single-family house, everyone sleeping and sitting and eating off furniture found on the sidewalk on garbage days. It was a strange kind of poetry how my family managed to eat so decadently on a fraction of the income our white counterparts raked in. Even stranger were the things white people were willing to shell out money for: a dry slice of turkey, a pile of steamed vegetables. These people are mad! I would often overhear my father saying to my mother.
American Like Me Page 3
