Buddha Baby (14 page)

For the next few weeks, when she wasn't working in her religion notebook and coloring in Jesus's muttonchops just so, Lindsey studied the other Chinese kids in her class:

Dorcas Foo was thick-faced with wiry hair. Nelson Fong had sad eyes and buck teeth. Jefferson Lee was a silent genius. And Ima Ho was skinnier than a piece of Scotch tape. During class it was difficult for Lindsey to scrutinize her Chinese brethren for lurking evil, so eventually she decided to perform her anthropological study on the playground. Over the course of several months, here is what she discovered:

The St. Maude's playground appeared to be a childhood wonderland with its crisply outlined hopscotch squares, tetherball courts, and drinking fountain of gleaming white porcelain and multiple stainless-steel spigots. One day, as Jefferson Lee innocently hydrated himself at the trough, someone pushed him and he cracked his skull wide open, his melon spurting like a giant pomegranate. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, never to be seen again.

The hopscotch corner was where slow runners such as Gina Fang were pummeled with Nutter Butters during tournaments of freeze tag and four square. The various tetherball poles made excellent locations for immigrant-girl Dorcas Foo to be tied to the stake like Joan of Arc until she confessed a crush on Scott Baio. Lindsey suspected that poor Dorcas didn't even know who Scott Baio was, but that somehow made extracting her confession all the more tantalizing to the brats who tormented her.

Lindsey had, in fact, joined in on the torture of her classmate. It was fun to reenact the Salem witch trials and pretend to burn her at the stake. At least it wasn't Lindsey who was being picked on, and she wanted to keep it that way. Even at five years old, she knew she didn't want to be a helpless Chinese victim lashed with Red Vines.

Neither Ima nor Dorcas returned the following school year. It gave Lindsey pause for thought.

By the second grade, Lindsey was the only Chinese girl in class and Nelson Fong was designated as her "boyfriend" by the rest of the class for the sole reason that they were both Chinese. She hated being asked, "When you marry Nelson Fong, will you live in Hong Kong and play Ping Pong with King Kong?" She heard that at least five times a day.

By the fourth grade, two new boys arrived, Franklin Ng and John Goon, but by midyear, young Mr. Goon also vanished. He was sick one recess and cut a path through the handball courts with a series of projectile barf grenades. The schoolyard erupted in mayhem as all the kids ran the gauntlet of spent pasta-shell casings and half-digested cherry Pop-Tarts that lay like splattered, exploded land mines on the battlefield that was the St. Maude's schoolyard. Some speculated that he had the plague, but Lindsey didn't ask any questions. When he didn't return for science class, she just figured that he met the fate of the other Chinese children at St. Maude's. He had either been killed outright or transformed into a furry animal.

After what happened to Dustin Lee at the end of sixth, she became completely convinced that associating with Chinese students slated for certain termination would most definitely worsen her prospects in the afterlife. If she socialized with the unsaved on earth, there would be little chance St. Peter would pluck her from the slush pile of purgatory, especially since all those more deserving, innocent pagan babies were down there wrecking the curve for everyone else.

As the years proceeded, in addition to her mounting concerns over her potentially Satanic destiny, she began to wonder what benefits there were to being Chinese, if any. As far as St. Maude's was concerned, none.

An inventory:

Total students at St. Maude's: 240.

Number of Chinese students: 26.

Number of Chinese boys, school-wide, ever chosen to play Joseph in the Christmas pageant: Zero. Number of Chinese girls ever chosen to play Mary: Zero. Number of Chinese altar boys: Zero. Number of Chinese children forced to sit in the back pew of the church during Friday-morning mass: 26.

Twenty-six. That was every single Chinese kid in the school. Since St. Maude's charged non-Catholics a steeper tuition, weren't those Chinese dollars worth sitting a couple of pews closer to the action, especially when there were sixteen empty pews between them and the rest of their classmates? Didn't their fees earn them a Chinese Mary in a holiday skit every once in a while? Lindsey would have settled for being the innkeeper or even one of the barnyard animals, but she was always crammed anonymously into the chorus, where she resented missing her chance to bleat piously. If the three wise men were supposedly from the "Orient," why couldn't Franklin, Nelson, or another Chinese boy ever be chosen to play one of the "Orientals"? Year after year, Chinese robes and feathered turbans were donned by freckle-faced Irish kids with painted-on pointy eyebrows and slanty eyeliner.

Still cleaning the crucifix, Lindsey dabbed a Q-tip on the Lord's nether regions and was shaken from her daydreaming by Sister Boniface screaming at the little Chinese girl at the end of the hall. The nun's bellowing echoed through the corridor: "If you do it one more time… this… means… WAR!" She thrust her arms into the air and outstretched her hands, wiggling her wee fingers like a squirrel on its hind legs begging for food. Lindsey could practically see the steam shooting out of Sister Boniface's ears as she watched the little Chinese girl nod obediently, looking contrite for whatever transgression she had committed.

As she watched the Chinese girl walk back to her classroom in the wake of Sister Boniface's fury, Lindsey took a moment to wonder what school life was like for the little moppet. Was she as frightened as Lindsey had been? Maybe if Lindsey befriended the girl she could help her feel less alone. She vowed to keep an eye on her from now on.

"Hello?" Lindsey said sleepily. It was two in the morning.

Michael's voice was low and soothing. "Hi, Cutie Pie. It's me. Sorry to call so late, but the Owsla are asleep so it's the only time I could get a chance to call you."

"How's it going?" she asked, awake now.

"Okay, I guess. The food's crap. How are you?"

"I don't know," she said vaguely.

In all honesty, she hadn't been doing so great. She'd been restless and lonely, and since her encounter with the Angry Asian Man and her talk with Dustin, she'd been reflecting on her dearth of Asian friends. Furthermore, despite the fact that she was positively in love with Michael, she'd been thinking about the finality of marriage. For a single gal, the dating world was a smorgasbord, at least in theory. The idea that she'd never spin the lazy susan again just made her a little nervous. Would she really be happy forever without ever tasting again from the banquet of hotties she imagined were out there somewhere?

Michael interrupted her thoughts. He said, "What's on your mind, Babykins? Just because I'm down here in this wasteland of good vibes doesn't mean we can't talk. Just pretend I'm in bed right next to you, talking like we always do before we go to sleep."

"Have you ever noticed," she said, "that we don't hang out with many other Asian people?"

"We hang out with your family all the time."

"They're relatives. They don't count."

"Oh?"

"I think I'm having an Asian identity crisis."

"At two in the morning on a Tuesday night?"

"I know it sounds kind of ridiculous."

"No it doesn't. Tell me."

Lindsey collected her thoughts as she readjusted a pillow under her neck in the dark. "Well," she began, "to be my age, Chinese-American, and raised in San Francisco is practically synonymous with going to Lowell High School, listening to Kool & the Gang, and experimenting with permanent-wave hairdos. I've never drag raced a souped-up Honda down Nineteenth Avenue, gone out for midnight snacks at Golden Dragon, or stood in the freezing cold tinkering all night with a midget-sized pocket bike. And Asian guys who do that sort of stuff would never look twice at me."

"That's good for me," Michael interjected. "But go on."

In the sleepy darkness, Lindsey's thoughts turned wistful. "Maybe from my experiences at St. Maude's, I give off a vibe that tells Chinese guys that even talking to me would render them jinxed or zapped into a guinea pig. It probably doesn't endear me to them that I went to a private high school where I subscribed to a kind of teen conformity that had me wearing safety pins in my ears and Doc Marten boots while pogo-ing to ska music, instead of sporting hair scrunchies and L.A. Gear cross-trainers while slow dancing like a metronome to the latest by El DeBarge."

"Yeah?" Michael said patiently.

Lindsey continued, "Lowell had a huge Asian contingent, but at my school I was one of a total of five Asians. Instead of banding together in solidarity, we all stayed away from one another. We never acknowledged our Asianness to one another. I've been thinking about it and have come to the conclusion that we each had our hands full trying to fit in and dared not risk doing anything that would further exclude us from the J. Crew world.

"There were two of us girls, me and a girl named Leslie. We shared several classes and the teachers always mixed up our names, which sucked. Of the boys, there was one exchange student from Beijing, and the school counselor tried to play matchmaker with us, even though we hated each other. When no one else was around, he called me names in Chinese, one of which was
jook sing
. I went home and asked my mom what that meant, and she told me it meant 'hollow bamboo,' like I was an empty shell of a Chinese person. She goes, 'Who called you that? Some fresh-off-the-boat
fob
with "little emperor" syndrome?'"

"What about the other Chinese guys?"

"The other Chinese boys paid no attention to me whatsoever. One was pounded every day after school on his way to working in his family's restaurant. Of course, carrying a violin didn't help his coolness quotient. The other boy had actually reached the upper echelons of the Super Clique, so far out of my social league that it would have been laughable for me to even attempt touching the purposely frayed hem of his designer clothes. By the way, thanks for listening to me. You're being really patient."

"I want to know," Michael said. "You've never told me any of this before."

He was right. Lindsey didn't know why it was all pouring out now. Maybe she wanted to make sure she told him all about herself before they got married, as if there was stuff he hadn't figured out in their two years of living together. Maybe she wanted to let him know what he was getting into, that he was marrying a "hollow bamboo." Perhaps she wanted him to judge for himself if that was a good or a bad thing. Maybe if he assured her that he accepted her the way she was, she could stop doubting her self-worth.

She said, "In college I didn't make any Asian friends either. Can you imagine that? At Berkeley, where everyone is Asian. During lunch I sometimes found myself in a deluge of O-Chem students just released from their lab, but the geniuses were too busy thinking about molecular structures and cures for cancer to notice me. And I dismissed them all as nerds because they weren't in Art History. When I tried to befriend the few Asians who were in my English classes, my attempts left me feeling like the troll I was. Like the time I approached this haughty Korean girl who wore lacy Jessica McClintock frocks, cameo pins, and white gloves every Tuesday to Shakespeare. I asked how her midterm paper was coming along, and she said, 'Why are you even talking to me? You're not in Honors.'"