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Gratitude lifted my baseline mood up from being constantly seared by the pain of existence to living a largely satisfying life. Joy returned for the first time in a long time. I laughed easily, enjoyed the company of friends, hated myself less. I felt mostly like I had before my recent meltdown…effective, happyish. I took a couple of freelance editing gigs to get back into the game with work, and the experience was fulfilling. But all this new pleasure was still delicate. It was not robust enough to battle the power of time travel.
I could be grounded and grateful as hell. I could meditate for an hour. But if, after I got off my cushion, I walked into the living room and saw Joey angrily break a pencil in half, I would still burst into tears. If I ran into my former co-workers at a party and had a stilted conversation with them about my boss’s newest victims, there I was—my hair gathered in my mother’s fist. I’d spend the next two hours jittery, afraid, transported back into my childhood, where unfortunately there was not much to be grateful for at all.
I could breathe and count colors to get myself out of that terrified state. But grounding and gratitude were palliative care versus curative care. I was still treating the symptoms without treating the source, and I would never truly be healed unless I confronted it. Now that I had stabilized the present, it was time for me to dive back into the past.
PART III
CHAPTER 23
Here is what I remember about San Jose.
Our parents had other names. In mixed company, we might call them mom and dad. But when those people left, our fathers became appa or baba or papá, our mothers umma or mama or maan. Our parents washed and reused our Ziploc bags and takeout containers and put their yarn in cookie tins. They watched Home Improvement and Chinese soap operas and Bollywood films while darning holes in our jeans with cloth left over from the dresses we outgrew. Our parents didn’t talk much to our friends, but our friends didn’t mind because they’d be occupied eating our mothers’ big trays of pancit and lumpia, or Burmese pancakes, or ph? with ch? l?a, or fluffy taro buns and Yan Yan. Our parents didn’t know what butternut squash was, or Walter Benjamin, or hegemony, or the difference between Bush and Gore because neither seemed particularly like a fascist or a communist, so whatever. The entire point of America was that you didn’t always have to understand; the system could be trusted to function on its own.
Ours was a city of immigrants. None of our parents were born here, and many of us weren’t, either. They all touched down at SFO and drove forty-five minutes south, past the It’s-It Ice Cream factory off the 101, until they reached San Jose. They took the exit and saw strip malls with towering block-lettered signs for mercados and fish-fronted Asian supermarkets. Like home, our parents thought. With the windows down, they smelled flowers in the warm air. San Jose is almost never cold. This area used to be called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight,” because until the 1960s, most of our nation’s flowers and fruit grew abundantly here, a veritable Eden. Like home, but better, our parents told themselves. We saw it as suburbia. They saw it as paradise.
All of our parents had accents, and some of us did, too, but none of us could hear them. When I was a teenager, the headlines read San Jose Becomes Majority Minority City. If you’re growing up in it, majority minority seems like a nonsensical term, a paradoxical way of saying, “This is not how you are supposed to exist.” But exist we did.
As we got older, we came to resent that the census lumped us all together as Asians or Hispanics, and we chafed at the stereotypes that diffused us into simplified cartoons of ourselves. But when we were young, we the minority majority did consider ourselves a singular unit. We came to experience our respective cultures with such regularity that that which was strange became normal to us.
We knew to take off our shoes before we barged into our friends’ houses to watch Power Rangers. The smell of their homes, always a surprise the first time, soon became familiar: curry, incense, stale rice, al pastor. We understood not to ask what one another’s fathers did because nobody knew, just that they put on a tie and drove to Silicon Valley every morning to do something vaguely techy. We knew that Indians and Filipinos were the best dancers because of their weddings and cotillions. At the Indian weddings, we hopped around and pretended to screw in lightbulbs until it felt as if all the gulab jamun was going to come back up, and at the Filipino cotillions for our friends’ big sisters, we line-danced with the lolas, who always knew every turn and dip. We ate with joy and curiosity whatever our friends’ mothers put in front of us and teased the few white kids mercilessly when they wouldn’t, waving cracked balut under their noses and shrieking with laughter when they gagged. We knew that Filipinos always had good streetwear from 555 Soul; the white girls and hot Viets could hook us up with discounts at Abercrombie; Taiwanese girls went home for the summer and brought back outfits with bows and lace in odd places; and aZn and Mexican girls knew how to apply impeccable eye and lip liner.
But we also knew that as this unit, we were allowed to borrow from one another: You could bring chana masala to school even if you weren’t Indian; I was vice president of the Japanese Club. Sometimes we wore each other’s lip gloss or denim miniskirts at homecoming, but we always knew to put on a long skirt when we left the house and change in the bathroom once we got to school. Some of us drank, some of us smoked, a few of us had sex. None of us snitched. We knew what the consequences would be.
Now, let’s be fair. Some parents thought their kids could do no wrong. Gerald Chan’s mother wouldn’t hear a bad word about him. She thought he was God’s gift to mankind, and Gerald agreed. Alice Ngo’s and Betty Chin’s mothers would bring them fresh, lovingly made meals every day at lunch. Lucy Tran and her crew went on massive parent-sponsored shopping sprees at the Great Mall on weekends.
And plenty of parents were reasonably easy to please. When their children failed, these parents were merely disappointed. Jill Cheng said her parents never hit her. They only shook their heads and were sad if she brought home a bad grade and then encouraged her to do better next time, just like the dad on Full House. Leslie Nguyen’s mom grounded her sometimes, and once I saw her yell at Leslie for not making curfew, but that was about as bad as it got.