The front of the line will be reserved for me at The Gates of Hell; I'm relieved that Mama's not here to embarrass me in a thousand different ways.
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Behind me, someone says, "My grandfather used to hang out at airports just to see this."
I spin around so fast, I nearly knock myself over. It's Stu. "See what?"
"Happy families."
I choke. Was my longing that obvious?
"After he moved to the states for grad school, you know, he just needed to see people who wanted to be together." Stu clears his throat, looks down at his sneakers, and then points to my suitcase. "Sure you don't need a hand?"
And this time, I tell him I do.
"Our rooms are all different," Stu warns me as he easily hefts my sixty-five pounds of excess baggage. He's right. We pass a condo-sized triple where three girls are squealing at each other, no doubt bonding over the syllabus. My room is an efficient rectangle. Each side has a desk at the head of a twin bed and a closet at its end. Built-in bookshelves flank the window that faces the door where I'm standing. Bad ch'i, I think automatically. All the good luck is going to rush straight from the door, through the barren middle path bisecting the room, and out the window.
As I'm thinking this, Jasmine walks in, and gets a knowing smile on her face, which sets Stu's face on fire. He can't drop my luggage fast enough. "I'll see you," he says.
And just like that, my good luck high-tails it out the door.
I suppose I should be counting my blessings that Jasmine is my roommate instead of Anne, but I'm trying to decide how we should choose sides. Jasmine has no such angst. She dumps her backpack on the desk on the left side of the room,
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the power corner, according to feng shui. It's Mama's side: her bedroom in our house, her place at the table, her sacred spot in the garden. This leaves me the bed on the right, in the creativity section of the room. I tell myself this is a good sign since I'll need every bit of creativity to rewrite my Truth Statement, not to mention finagling my way through not doing four weeks of intensive math.
Jasmine makes a big deal of examining her green sports watch. "An hour and a half, and you've made your first conquest. Not bad."
Suddenly, I am all accountant-efficiency as I open the window to let out the stale air. "I'm really not into Asian guys."
"No?" Jasmine laughs in disbelief and tosses her sunglasses on her desk. "Too bad. Me, I'm an equal opportunity dater. Black, white, brown, yellow. Except for Korean guys."
"What's wrong with Korean guys?"
"You don't want to know." Jasmine turns her back on me, putting a dead end to that conversation. "So, Stu, huh? He's hot."
"He's also seeing someone else, I think."
"You mean that girl from your high school?" Jasmine guesses and snorts. "That would be the big N-O. There is absolutely no hot-cha-cha between them. Purely platonic." She smirks, saying, "But you and Stu..."
... are all hot-ch'i-ch'i, I think to myself. I don't know about Stu, but my personal ch'i energy is moving and flowing toward him.
"God, you're so lucky you're hapa." Jasmine grabs an enormous cosmetics bag out of her backpack and dumps out at least a dozen blue, purple and brown eye shadows. "You can actually use this stuff." She stares into the mirror above
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her bureau, widening her eyes. "Not that I'm ever going to have some doctor cut my eyes just so I get your eyelids. Forget that."
"Hapa?" I don't know whether I'm being insulted or complimented.
Jasmine looks at me as if I am the first immigrant from the Land of Bizarre. "You know, half."
All I'm feeling is that I'm half-witted and a full step behind her. Jasmine must have thought so, too, because she speaks slowly like I've dropped a couple of rungs below stupid. "It's Hawaiian for someone who's half-Asian, half-white." She squints a little like she's trying to see me more clearly, but I'm still a fuzz of an idea to her. "Where are you from again?"
"Seattle. Well, actually, a city further south..." My mouth motors on, why I don't know, but I'm telling her where my house is in relation to the Space Needle.
"Well, that explains it," she interrupts my geography lesson.
I start to flush; now I know I'm being insulted. But then Jasmine continues, "When you visit me in LA, you'll see more white in the ads than you do people in the streets."
The next thing I know, Jasmine is unrolling a poster of a buffed out Chinese guy with the best six-pack abs I have ever seen. He's scaling a mountain cliff so sheer that my hands get clammy.
"Welcome to California," says Jasmine, shimmying behind the poster. "I hope you're good with a stapler." Grinning like she's heard a good joke, she says, "They have those where you come from, don't they?"
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14 * Kung Fu Queen
My first dinner at summer camp is a Welcome Barbecue, served up outside Synergy. The two professors are grilling the requisite hot dogs, hamburgers and garden burgers. And in the midst of this ail-American cookout is an inexplicable side of sweet-and-sour pork. Only it looks nothing like any Chinese food I've ever seen. Not even when Mrs. Shang tries to whip up something other than Jell-O. The sauce, a nail-polish red, clings like glue to rice that's falling apart, white particles with a hands-off policy for their fellow rice grains.
It's like looking at a dead animal on the road; I can't stop staring at my plate even as I sit down in the open spot at Jasmine's picnic table.
Jasmine grins up at me. "Would your mom have a heart attack, too, if she saw this?"
"No, she'd push her way into the kitchen and make the cook take notes on how to make it right," I say. Everyone at the table laughs, and I smile shyly, squishing down the voice in my mind that sounds suspiciously like Mama, demanding why I have to crucify her to fit in.
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Jasmine barely spares a second to chuckle with us before she turns to Brian. "Do you like good Chinese food?" she asks. Translation: Would you like coffee or Jasmine tea after dinner tonight?
"You bet," says Brian.
"Well, is there any really good Chinese food nearby?" Jasmine's eyes widen. Translation: Just open your big blue eyes, Brian, and take a swig of me.
The only other girl at our table is Katie Winthrop, Malibu Barbie. Her sherpa-father left her a parting gift that could feed an entire village in China for two years, new earrings that are blinding people on the other end of the yard. She pipes up, "Isn't Chinese food all the same?"
While I shoot Katie a veiled look of disgust, so gossamer she probably doesn't notice, Jasmine karate chops her with a comment of transparent dislike: "I suppose in the same way all white bread is the same."
Hi-yah, White Girl! Katie flushes, sweet-and-sour dork.
With a triumphant shake of her long hair, the Kung Fu Queen turns back to Brian, who has missed this great martial arts skirmish of words. Jasmine morphs back into innocent Asian gal. "There's really fabulous dim sum in Chinatown. Chef Cheng's. Have you ever been?"
"No, but I'd love to try it," says Brian.
"Great, it's a date," says Jasmine, her eyes gleaming.
Hi-yah, Counselor Boy! Jasmine's just made it to Camp One. The guy may be a couple of years older than us, he may even be a math guru. But if he is, he's got to be an idiot savant because he is pure idiot about girls.
Stu saunters into my view with Anne, bouncing a tennis ball on a racquet and dripping sweat from a squeezed-in
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match. He's right in time to be my dessert. If I were Jasmine, I would intercept him, ask him what the deal is with Anne, and tell him we should order in pizza later rather than eat this slop. But I'm not Jasmine. I wonder how she got to be so comfortable in her skin that she could color outside of race lines, even scribble across a bright white girl.
After dinner in the common room, I meet my future, and it's not a pretty schedule. Professor Drake is a slight man with hair shorn to a crew cut and mod black glasses. He clears his throat and proceeds to tell us that for the
next four weeks, from Monday to Thursday, we'll be spending every beach-perfect, cloud-free morning in class. And that's not all. There's literally going to be an endless amount of homework, enough problem sets every day so that all of us will remain "challenged." While Janie is lolling around on the hot Hawaiian sand, being buried up to her neck by some cute beach boy, I will be up to my ears with numbers.
I'm waiting for a collective groan from the other thirty-four kids assembled around me, some sitting on the floor, others piled on the stained sofas and chairs. Ten of the especially advanced math prodigies are in Program II, leaving the rest of us twenty-five in Program I. For more proof that I can do math without math camp, I count eleven other girls aside from me, Jasmine, Anne and Katie of the Big Hair. (Never mind it blows my eighty-twenty rule.) On one side of Stu is his roommate, David Watanabe; Katie is perched on an armchair to Stu's right, his own golden-eyed retriever dog for the summer. The way Katie keeps leaning down to Stu, her blond hair brushing his cheek, I can guess who's got herself a bad case of Yellow Fever.
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Anne, the girl who barely made a single acquaintance at Lincoln High all year, sits up front and center, surrounded by guys who are vying for her attention. Including the math celebrity, the redheaded, acne-attacked Harry whom everyone was whispering about at dinner. He literally just won this year's gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, and looks jet-lagged from flying in from some Eastern European country yesterday. Apparently, hormones are hormones, travel-weary math genius or not. He and Anne are flirting, geekzoid style, batting their equations and whispering sweet null sets to each other.
"All right, everyone, go get your homework," says Brian, dragging over a portable chalkboard. "We'll meet back here in ten minutes."
He has to be joking, right? How can we possibly have homework before camp has even officially started? When all we've done is get checked in, unpack, and be poisoned with pseudo-Chinese food?
The weird thing is, it isn't just Anne who looks like she's waited her whole life to talk about math. Thirty-three math addicts surge out of the common room. Even Jasmine, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to me, pops up to her feet. The one person I counted on being my fellow rebel without a math cause holds her hand down to me. "You coming?"
I tread up the stairs, legs heavy with reluctance, and remember what I did with the pre-camp homework. I shoved it with all the other camp papers into my desk at home. Out of sight, out of mind. Clearly, I was out of my mind to think this camp was a good escape plan. I've escaped from House Ho to Camp Hellhole.
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Later, as I sit in the common room with my fellow campers, listening to them discuss the problem (how to break a chocolate bar into small squares with a minimum number of breaks), I realize I truly have nothing in common with anyone here at all.
I would have answered, "Duh? Zero breaks." That chocolate bar would never have had a chance to make it out of its wrapper without me devouring it.
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15 * Hapa
It's nearly one in the morning, and I can't sleep any better here than I do at home. I study the ceiling, wondering how I can franchise my brilliant new concept: Mama's Rehab program. Spend two weeks in Halfway House Ho, and you won't need drugs to feel high once you're released. Freedom from Mama will pump you up permanently, better than any drug. Anyway, it's tough to snooze with the overhead lights burning a hole in your corneas and your roommate yakking away on her fifth call since the math-attack downstairs.
Jasmine's tilting in her chair, her back to me and both feet on her desk.
"OK, ciao." Finally, Jasmine hangs up her cell phone and her chair's legs hit the ground with a smack.
Lucky her, her social life is marching forward as if SUMaC hasn't poisoned her summer fun. For the hundredth time, I wonder how she could think being me could possibly be enviable. Hapa is just a fancy way of saying half-breed, blended mutt, isn't it?
Jasmine is singing to herself, so completely tunelessly I
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can't recognize the song. My question that's been chomping at the bit finally bolts out: "Why would you think being hapa is so great?"
Jasmine finishes her lyric, throwing her body into the last line, her head rocking, hips swaying. She's performing on some personal stage no one but she can see. For a moment, I don't think she's heard my question. She finishes her song, pauses for a moment, grinning like she's listening to a cheering crowd, and then says, "Because you hapas are so damned exotic."
Janie's house is exotic. Flamingoes are exotic. Pattypuses are just weird. Still, I try "exotic" on, but it's not a one-size-fits-all word. Now, "normal" -- that's a bargain basement word I wish I could wear every day. While Jasmine's changing, I'm busy trying on adjectives: Striking, no. Beautiful, definitely no. Strange, perfect fit!
I hear a clinking sound as Jasmine throws something into her backpack. My eyes bug out when I see that she's wearing cropped, black workout pants and a tight, long-sleeved shirt, not pajamas. She heads for the door.
"We're not supposed to go out after ten," I say. As soon as my words are out, I could kick myself. Do I sound like mini-Mama, a prim and proper prude, or what?
"No, we're not," says Jasmine. And without another word, Jasmine leaves with her backpack, shutting the door so quietly I barely hear its click.
And then "we" -- my white self and Asian self, my skinny self and flat self -- close our eyes and fall even wider awake. How can I sleep knowing that I'm nothing but a stay-at-home tease who never strips down enough to let anyone see the real me?
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16 * Truth Theorem
So much for thinking I escaped lectures. Math Camp begins with one.
Why did Mama pay good money so that I could get lectured when I could have stayed at home for the same privilege and saved her a bundle?
Professor Drake, decked today in hip, red glasses, stands in front of the blackboard. Written on it: "There are ten kinds of people in the world -- those who understand binary numbers and those who don't."
Spare me the math humor at nine in the morning. (One-Zero, it's a binary number. Get it? There are ten kinds of people in this camp, those who are laughing and those who aren't. Ha ha.) But the rest of the campers are cracking up like the professor is a stand-up comedian. He nods, grinning at his appreciative crowd (minus one), and then launches into an overview of the curriculum.
"Later on, we'll be studying the mathematics behind the three-by-three Rubik's Cube," Professor Drake says, lifting the red, orange, blue, green, yellow and white puzzle.
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Eager faces, all bright-eyed, are glued onto him as he tells us that since this cube was unleashed onto the world in 1974, some 100,000,000 copies of it have been sold. Normal people -- that is to say, people who play with it for fun -- scramble up the cube and then try to return it back to its original state. But we, on the other hand, are going to use this toy to learn about Group Theory.
I'm half-tempted to raise my hand and announce that I solved the Rubik's Cube when I was seven years old. Mama was driving us on an endless road trip to the Northwest since we couldn't afford airplane tickets and she wouldn't drive on the freeways, and I was rotating the squares one way, and another way, when I noticed, oh my God!, all the colors had found their way back home. That was the one and only time Mama had actually talked herself into believing that I was a certifiable genius. Her smiles at me have never been wider. That just made her disappointment so much more acute when I walked out of the IQ test, labeled above average but nowhere in the heady realms of potluck envy.
The happy campers around me laugh, even Jasmine, who looks remarkably refreshed for someone who got less than four hours of sleep last night. I suppose if I focused on the professor with a few of my brain cells, I might be giggling at his math jokes, too. Chances are, no matter how witty I found the man, I would not be staring at him with awe the way Anne is. Drooling, I should tell her, is never particularly becoming. Still, I have a
pretty good idea what the hero of Anne's romance novel is going to look like.
Slouched in his seat in the second row with his legs stretched in front of him, Stu is the math babe starring in my
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own romance novel. Too bad the only relationship Professor Drake wants us to have in class is one with numbers. He scans the room of math acolytes, checking to see if we are all tracking with his math puns. Hurriedly, I chuckle, too, as if I'm in on the joke when the truth is, I'm the only math joke among these math jocks.
What I loved about geometry last year was how there's no single right answer to the proofs. Any statement that ends in the theorem is right. So while twenty-three pairs of eyes are on the professor and Jasmine's are on Brian, mine return to my open notebook and my new-and-to-be-proved Truth Theorems.
Patty Ho Truth Theorem One
Given: Jasmine is a Chinese-American, soon-to-be senior in high school.
Prove: Jasmine is like no Chinese-American girl I know.
Statement
Reason
1. Jasmine can kickbox white girls with a single comment.
1. Hi-yah, Malibu Barbie. Need I write more?
2. China Doll Club members giggle, look pretty, and their pointed comments only scratch.
2. Given. Come to any one of my potluck groups.
3. China Dolls do not have tattoos. And if they do, they hide them so they don't invoke parental wrath and get kicked out of the potluck group.
3. Given. As above.
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4. Jasmine breaks all the rules stereotypes, math camp and China Doll.
Nothing but the truth: (and a few white lies) Page 8
