by Alan Tien
Aye I Longwhite
By Alan Tien
Written July, 2014
Contents
Chapter 1: A Hapa Boy in MK
Chapter 2: Willstin Calling
Chapter 3: Journey to the West
Chapter 4: Sleeping on the Job
Chapter 5: The Robot Dilemma
Chapter 6: We are not alone
Chapter 1: A Hapa Boy in MK
“Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Austin Longwhite. Why, God, why was I cursed with such an awful name? It was bad enough to enter high school sophomore year, when everyone else had been together for an eternity. But then to be from the US, half white, and with an “American” accent in my Mandarin, I was doomed to be teased by the alpha males. “Bullied” might be the better word; teasing is done in elementary school, where we learned “Sticks and stones might break my bones, but words don’t hurt me” as our flimsy defense. The reality is, though, hurtful words cut right through to the bone, and mocking words against your name strike at your identity, your soul.
“Austin. What kind of name is that?” one of the boy leaders spat at me, as if just saying the words tainted his mouth.
“It’s the name of a city in the US. In Texas,” I answered neutrally, factually, hoping that they would bore of me and go on their way.
“City? Bah. It’s barely a town. There’s what? Less than 1 million people? In China, we have over 200 cities over 1 million people! There are 10 mega-cities with over 10 million people!” bragged a follower, now that the leader had opened up the attack. As if he had somehow created those cities himself, I thought. “Now those are cities worth being named after. Why would you name yourself after something at the bottom of the list?”
As if I chose my own name, I thought bitterly. You think I would choose such a stupid name? I don’t want to stick out any more than you do; there’s probably some Chinese proverb about the “tallest bamboo is the first to be cut.” Why couldn’t I have some normal name, like “Zhang Wei?” 100 million people named Zhang can’t be wrong.
Luckily I was saved from coming up with a witty retort by a third boy who jumped into the fun. “And what’s up with your family name? White. Huh! Everyone can see you’re white. That’s almost as embarrassing as being named after a fishing village!”
I was embarrassed by being named White after my Caucasian father. My face burned at the indignity of being associated with that loser. I didn’t have the energy to defend Austin, the US city that was the high tech center of the South.
The leader of the group, sensing that he was losing control of the conversation, swept in for the kill. “And adding Long in for good measure. Maybe you mean you have a very, very…” - he dragged out the third “very” for effect – “very long nose!” That was the cue to his posse to break out into uncontrollable laughter, drawing unwanted attention from the other students passing by. They smiled and nodded, whether because they agreed or because they didn’t want to offend the bullies and draw attention to themselves, it wasn’t clear.
Hot tears burned at the corner of my eyes. My heart’s pounding sounded like surf crashing in my ears. Sweat rings expanded under my armpits.
They had gone too far. Long was my mom’s maiden name, and Long-White was the misguided practice of concatenating last names together in deference to something called “Women’s Lib.” I didn’t know what “lib” was, but that’s how my mom had explained it to me. We dropped the hyphen in Long-White and made the “W” lower case when we got our Chinese visa, to avoid confusion with immigration control.
My mom was the breadwinner. She was my idol. She slaved away every day to support my father and me. I don’t know what she ever saw in him. He “let himself go” and became fat, never exercising. I frankly had no idea what he had done all day while I was at school, except to spend Mom’s hard-earned cash. And then, the ingrate, as if life wasn’t good enough for him to be pampered like a stud bull, he ran off with an African woman. Not even someone from one of the rich African countries like Nigeria or Kenya. She was from somewhere like South Sudan, or North Sudan, or for all I know, the newly-liberated Central Sudan.
“Long” is Chinese, I wanted to shout. I’m just like you! Almost. Ok, half. But don’t you see? I have mostly black hair.
But the boys didn’t want to see the similarities; they only wanted to pick on the differences, to show their superiority as if they chose their own names, selected their own birth country, and decided on their own Chinese blood.
Instead of a smart comeback, I swung into action. My limbs had a mind of their own. My martial arts training took over, all reaction, as if the words had been physical blows. My right leg swept out, taking down two of the surprised boys, and tactically, reducing my number of opponents. Using the circular momentum of my sweep, I unslung my backpack in one smooth motion and observed unemotionally as my book-laden bag smacked into the side of the head of one of the other boys.
That left the leader, still sporting the grin from his coup de grace. My brain finally got control of my body and checked my arm swing before it broke his nose. I pulled my right arm punch to the left, causing it to miss, then opened my hand and reversed my swing to backhand-slap his face. It was just enough to stun him and to let all the anger seep out of me. My martial arts master would not be happy with me, defiling my training with this anger-strike, but he was all the way back in the US. If I couldn’t use my training at a time like this, then what was the point of all those hours honing my moves?
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My mother sided with my master.
“Austin! Your first week in school, and you get into a fight? What’s wrong with you? I let you take kung fu training to defend yourself, not to beat up defenseless kids!”
I figured correcting her that my training was in mixed martial arts and not kung fu was a little academic. “But Mom,” I said, realizing I sounded like a 6 year old as I said it, “I was defending myself! They were making fun of me. They were making fun of you!”
My mother took the high road that all Chinese mothers take in arguments – she used guilt. “I had to leave an important meeting to come get you! Do you know how many strings we had to pull just to get you into this school? You know that this is a very competitive school, especially for foreigners such as us! And now, you have a red card already!”
I know my mom was trying to use a soccer – sorry, it’s now called football here – analogy to make it more accessible to me, so I didn’t correct her that a yellow card, not the red card, was the warning one. Her argument worked. I dropped my head in shame.
I give her credit. Seeing that she had won, she didn’t rub it in. “Oh come here Austin.” She opened her arms to me. I wanted to resist it, to show my independence and insolence, but the gravity was too strong, and I was sucked into her warm embrace. I did manage to hold back the sob though. One minor victory.
“I know things have been tough with the move and everything.” Everything must’ve encompassed Dad’s moving out, but she didn’t say it. “I’m sorry we uprooted you from your high school, but this was an offer we couldn’t refuse. I mean, how often does an American get an opportunity to work in the world capital, in China? My company covered our visa. Do you know how much the visa itself costs?”
I have to admit all the fi
nances of expat living were as obscure as calculus to me. I heard my parents talk about it excitedly when the final offer came, but I was busy, probably replaying in my head the last episode of a netshow comedy I had just watched. But I did know my mom got a real sweet deal. Housing, school, car, and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure, it was all covered. But the visa, the permit to enter the Holy Land, the Forbidden Country, that was worth more than all the other stuff added together.
Suddenly concerned not just for myself but for my mom, I blurted out, “Our visa isn’t at risk is it?”
She smiled comfortingly, “No honey, the principal promised to smooth it out with the kids’ parents. He knew they were bullies, but there was no proof to it. But your violence proved it.”
I thought that logic was a bit flawed, but since I was the happy beneficiary of it, I let it go. I guess violence is so shocking that it risked the school’s immaculate image. Rather than blaming the attacker, they rather hide the event itself.
“But Austin, that’s the last time. You have to put a lid on it. I know you have testosterones coursing through your veins, but I expect you to be able to control it.”
Man, that’s an irritating line of argument, to blame my actions on hormones. I don’t point out your crankiness during that time of month, do I Mom, I mentally shot back. But she had a point. I totally lost it. In retrospect, the incident seemed trivial. I wasn’t beyond a bit of self-pitying though.
“I wish I could just have a normal name.” Once the floodgates opened, all my rhetorical complaints poured out. “Why can’t I just have straight black hair, and small single-lid eyes, and a cute small nose? Instead, I have ugly curly brown hair! Dumb cow eyes! A long, long nose!” I was really feeling sorry for myself, for looking like Frankenstein.
My mom’s eyes grew big. She isn’t usually at a loss for words, but this time, she gasped. “Austin, really! Where I’m from, hapa kids are the most beautiful!” Hapa means mixed blood in Hawaiian. My mom’s not from Hawaii, but she likes it so much that she sometimes pretends she’s from there, shaka sign and all. For a moment, she sighed. I think she was thinking about the old screen actor Keanu Reeves, whom she adored. He was hapa, with some Chinese and Hawaiian blood mixed in with English, Irish and Portuguese. Pulling herself back to the present, she reminded me, “You have the best of both worlds!”
“I have the worst of both worlds! In fact, I’m not from any world!” I cried. I mean, I said in a very emotional way. I didn’t actually cry.
“Oh honey.” She held me tight.
I continued my blubbering, “Why did he leave us?”
My mom was silent. My rock shed a tear, dropping hot on my forehead. Was it for me or for her, I don’t know, but it made me scared. My mom was always the strong one. She finally choked, “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Really I am.” She held me tighter and rocked back and forth like I was a baby. I didn’t complain.
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Sometime after Dad had left, I had asked Mom what she saw in him to begin with. “I mean, you’re beautiful and smart and Chinese! Why the hell did you marry Dad?”
My mom frowned at my swearing, but she let it pass, seeing how distraught I was. “He was sweet, a real nice guy, and really smart too.”
“But he was Caucasian!” I thought I had raised the killer argument.
“He was really cute. Big eyes, aristocratic nose, masculine jaw.” My mom almost got dreamy. I was stunned. No accounting for taste.
I tried again, “But he was an engineer! From a nothing school!”
I had once asked my dad why he went to Dalian University, of all the schools in China. He explained as a white kid applying from the US, the odds of getting in were terrible. Even though he had gone to Stanford, the best engineering school in the US, it was still considered a second rate school compared to the ones in China. “I applied for the Masters program from colleges in cities A to Z, and D accepted me with a full scholarship. Even a TA, teaching assistant, job with a stipend. For a poor boy from the Midwest, this was a dream come true.”
My mom weakly defended my dad, “Dalian University has a decent engineering school… Anyway, that’s not the point. I loved your dad. He was different from all the other Chinese boys who chased me. He was shy, polite, humble. He didn’t expect to get me, which ironically I found attractive. When I started dating him, it was quite the scandal!” She smiled thinking about how she had shocked all the Chinese suitors who just couldn’t believe that she would spurn them, all with such great earning potential, for an engineer from a second rate school, and a white kid to add insult to injury.
She continued, “There was something about him. Something I couldn’t pinpoint or put in words. I guess we just had chemistry. The minute I saw him, I fell in love. I actually tried to avoid him, turn him down. I knew my parents and friends would disapprove, but that something kept me from entirely shutting the door. He felt that slight opening, and kept hanging around, always the ultimate gentleman, until I got tired of the preening Chinese boys and started going out with him.
“It was just simple things at first, like a tea date. He was the one who first introduced me to coffee. I made a deal with him. I would try his bitter black drink if he would try my ‘baijiu.’ ”
Baijiu directly translates to “white wine” but it’s really a Chinese clear liquor made from some grain like sorghum. It’s a traditional drink for the Chinese and a must for toasting government officials at banquets, but for the uninitiated, I’m told it tastes like horse piss and burns like moonshine. Who first drank horse piss to make that comparison, I wondered.
“Well, I got the better end of that deal. It turns out I love coffee. But your dad puked all night from holding up his end of the bargain. After that, I figured I owed it to him to go on a real date with him. Well, as they say, it was all history from there on out.”
“Yeah, he’s history to me,” I said, ending the story.
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The bullies avoided me like the plague. In fact, everyone avoided me like I was defected. I used violence in a pacifist society. It was like having Tourette Syndrome in a British tea party. That was fine by me. I wanted to be alone.
The classes weren’t particularly hard from a content perspective, since I went to a “Gifted and Talented” magnet school back in the US. I didn’t consider myself that smart; it’s just that everyone else seemed a bit slow. Before I got into the magnet school, I could get a B with my eyes closed. Getting an A just took a tiny bit of studying since the teachers essentially told you what was going to be on the test. However, it was my Chinese mom who drove me to get straight A’s.
I would come home with a test score of 97, being pretty proud of myself. My mom would quickly deflate my bubble and ask sharply, “Where’s the other 3 points?”
I knew the American parents of the other students would have been an ecstatic with a test score of 97, which was already in the A+ range. But I wanted my mom’s approval, so I studied a bit harder. My studiousness paid off, and I got a 100 on my next test. “Mom, mom, look, I got a 100 this time!”
My mom not only popped my bubble, then she stomped on it. “How many other people got a 100?”
What kind of question was that? “Uh, I think 3 or 4.”
“Are there extra points?”
Damn, she knew the system. “Um yeah.”
“So…” She could be pretty sparse with her words when she wanted to be.
“Yeah, the max was 105. I think a kid might have gotten it. But he’s super smart, and he doesn’t do any sports. All he does is study!” Wrong line of argument.
My mom threatened to pull me from basketball if I couldn’t get my priorities straight. “Don’t compare yourself to the bottom, or you will become a garbage man.” Human beings didn’t pick up garbage any more; that’s what robots did. But I could tell my mom was just reciting a line Chinese mom’s have used since the beginning of China’s illustrious history. “Compare yourself to the top so you can be
a doctor one day. Or a lawyer if you must. Worst case, an engineer.” I didn’t mention Dad was an engineer. A work-from-home one at that. I had learned the hard way that the best way to win an argument with my mom was to not argue, to tap out of the ring with “mea culpas” while sidling away.
So I pretty much got straight A’s, not really for myself, not to gain my mother’s approval, but to avoid her berating. However, straight A’s weren’t enough to get into my Gifted and Talented magnet school. I also had to do well on tests. And that was where my magic was. I was awesome at standardized tests. I certainly don’t feel awesome when I am taking the tests. I usually feel like I have failed, that I had guessed on all the hard questions, which were the ones that separated the gifted from the merely smart. But when the test scores come back, I am usually in the 99th percentile. The scores don’t differentiate any more on the last 1%, but I deduced from the guidance counselor’s whispers that I had done very well, surprisingly well, on the statewide high school standardized test. I was the first from our small middle school to go to the state’s G&T magnet school in many years. I now had to ride a bus for an hour each way to attend, but it wasn’t ever really a question whether I would go or not. Education was priority #1, at least for Mom. Dad didn’t get a vote.
But in my new Chinese school, though the actual material wasn’t that hard, I was constantly being tripped up just when I thought I was figuring things out.
I was shocked at how bad my Chinese was, even though I had been learning it since kindergarten. I had gotten A’s in all my Chinese classes in the US, but it was a whole different story using it in real life. I could name any object – chair, spoon, book – and put them in a nice sentence. However, anything slightly more complex, like expressing emotions or saying something witty, was beyond me. I’m sure I learned those words or phrases along the way. The words always felt like they were on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t spit them out. I would sometimes remember what I wanted to say 5 minutes later, but by then it was far too late to gain any benefit from the recall.
