Wow. Mom’s not that extreme, but still, it all rings true. I try out something weird Mom said once: “Pair of socks is good Christmas present for teacher,” and Reggie high-fives me.
“Total Asian mom!” cries Hanh, and then she squawks in that heavy Vietnamese accent, “Cut the toenail at night is bad luck! Don’t eat too much, you get fat! Only A minus? Why you not work harder? Teenager wear makeup is for prostitute!”
I look around at Hanh, Reggie, and Elaine, and feel something I’ve never felt before. I’ve only just met them, but they get me like none of my Midwestern friends ever did. They don’t think I’m weird or feel sorry for me. They make me feel normal. And special at the same time, somehow, like we’re all part of an exclusive club with a secret handshake and everything.
I hadn’t realized how much of my life—of myself—I’d been trying to keep hidden in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, I was constantly trying to escape the fact that I was Asian, and hoping that people either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Now, I feel like it’s springtime and my new friends have just peeled off a hot, heavy jacket. I can be openly Asian. For the first time in my life, I feel like I belong.
Hanh says, “You’re lucky you got your mom to say yes. I wanted to do cross-country when I was a freshman, but my mom wouldn’t let me.”
I’m a little surprised to hear this from Hanh. I mean, I don’t really know her yet, but she doesn’t seem the type. The girls who ran cross-country at my old school were typically Plain Janes who didn’t mind toiling in obscurity and getting hot and sweaty for nothing, as Reggie puts it. But Hanh is fashion-model pretty, and I get the feeling she knows it, the way she’s always flipping her hair and checking out guys. Not only that, but here she is in full makeup. And she doesn’t dress like she has an Asian mom, either. Today she has on a spaghetti-strap cami covered up with a cute crocheted shrug.
“Why wouldn’t your mom let you do cross-country?” I ask.
“Well, it was actually my grandmother.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she didn’t want me running around in shorts and a tank top where you could see the bra underneath. She said it was ‘immodest.’” Hanh puts air quotes around “immodest” and rolls her eyes. “She was like, ‘I’m not going to let you run all over town looking like a prostitute.’”
“Whoa. For real?”
“The old ones are the worst,” says Elaine. “They want everything to be like it was when they grew up, so it’s like, old-fashioned even for being Asian.”
“And she’s my dad’s mom,” says Hanh, “and my mom pretty much just does whatever she says. It sucks.”
“Your grandma’s the worst, for sure. Even my mom feels sorry for you,” Reggie says, shaking her head. “Thank God my grandparents are still in Hong Kong.”
I look at Hanh’s cute little camisole. “How come you get to wear that, then?”
“She doesn’t know I’m wearing it. I give my friend Janet money, and she buys my ‘inappropriate’ clothes online and brings them to school for me. Then I put a jacket on over stuff like this before I leave my room.”
“What about laundry?”
“Hanh just gives me all the clothes that she’s not allowed to wear, and I take them home and do them with my laundry,” says Elaine. “My mom makes me do my own laundry, so I’m the only other one who knows. Except Reggie and you.”
“Genius,” I say, impressed.
“You do what you have to,” says Hanh, looking down modestly.
Reggie grins. “It’s in our sneaky Asian blood.”
“Hell, yeah.” Hanh and Reggie high-five.
I could get used to being a member of this club.
Anderson High School is on a block schedule, which means that from Monday through Thursday, we have four classes a day for eighty minutes each, and on Fridays we have eight classes for forty minutes each. Mondays and Wednesdays are my big days, with trig, Spanish, Honors American Lit, and psychology. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have physics, P.E., a blessed eighty-minute free period—which almost makes up for the exercise in torture that is block-schedule periods of trig—and Honors American History.
Ms. Owen, who I have for Honors American Lit, is my favorite teacher so far. She’s probably Mom’s age, but much cooler, with a swingy bob haircut, lots of black clothes, and a laid-back attitude. And it doesn’t hurt that she’s a big Emily Dickinson fan.
“Dickinson might be my favorite—my favorite—writer to teach,” Ms. Owen says as she goes over the curriculum for the year on the second day of class. (The first day was spent entirely on touchy-feely get-to-know-you activities.) Then she’s off on a tangent about poetry in general. “Poetry demands exploration. It demands excavation. But we just don’t have enough time this year to give it the attention it deserves. So I want you to take some initiative to discover what excites you.”
She hands out a bunch of blank notebooks—poetry journals, she calls them—which we’re supposed to write in throughout the year. All we have to do is look for cool poems (“Poems that speak to you,” Ms. Owen says. “Poems that resonate.”), copy them down, and write about them. We can do literary analysis, write our personal reactions, write about the poet, whatever. Just explore and excavate. Talk about easy points. And I know just what to start with.
POETRY JOURNAL, HONORS AMERICAN LITERATURE
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
by Emily Dickinson
This is the poem that inspired me to get my own book of Emily Dickinson poems. Dickinson is cool (and sometimes frustrating) because her poems seem really short and simple, but they’re not.
I sometimes used to feel like I was nobody. Like no one cared about me. In this poem, Dickinson makes being nobody into something cool: “I’m Nobody!” When you capitalize a word, it becomes more important, like a name or a title. Or maybe it’s like Truth-with-a-capital-T, like it’s the universal concept of Nobody-ness. The exclamation mark makes being Nobody kind of exciting and fun. And she says that she and the reader get to be Nobodies together without telling anyone, like a secret club.
In the next stanza she talks about how “dreary” it would be to be Somebody, like a frog announcing your name all day long to “an admiring Bog!” It reminds me of popular people who think their group is the center of the universe. Except that being a frog announcing your name over and over in a bog seems lonely, too. So I don’t know for sure about that one.
If you’re Nobody together with someone, doesn’t that make you Somebody? At least to each other? That can’t be bad, right?
This is what I mean by Emily Dickinson being more complicated than she seems at first.
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