His role in the end-of-year show was a great surprise to everyone, because he didn’t like unpredictable things, and there was nothing more unpredictable than the end-of-year show. It had never occurred to me that he himself was unpredictable at times, for example, his voluntary appearance in the end-of-year show.
For a week, I listened to him go over his lines for a watered-down version of Shakespeare for kids interspersed with joyful singing and dancing, by pressing my ear to his bedroom door each night after dinner. It sounded like someone speaking with marbles in their mouth. How will anyone hear him speak with marbles in his mouth? I wondered. How will anyone understand him? Finally, I decided to intervene. I knocked on his door, burst into his room before he answered, and began to go over the lines with him.
Enunciate! I shouted at him like an acting coach. Speak like a normal human! Watch your posture!
So it could be said that I helped him deliver a successful performance. I was once, and perhaps only once, a very helpful person to him. And that is my defense.
The day of the end-of-year show I came down with the flu and was forced to stay home. I wore my pajamas all day and was shut up in my bedroom like a leper. My adoptive mother watched him perform, because even though he had forbidden them to attend, she attended secretly. When it came to his life, she seemed to see her role as less a mother and more a detective.
He never tells us anything, she complained to me once. Does he tell you anything?
Absolutely not, I said.
Like a stalker, she snuck in when the lights went down and stood to the side of the front row in a dark area near the curtain. She took picture after picture of him, and as soon as the cast took a bow, she left so it would seem as if she had spent the entire night at home. I’ll never forget how she came home beaming that night, beaming as if he had won a fucking Oscar. She broke the quarantine and came into my room.
Unbelievable, she said as she recounted her adventure. Who knew he could act like that? He’s been hiding his talent from us all this time. He had them rolling in the aisles. He had the audience in the palm of his hand!
That night my adoptive brother never detected her presence; her plan was a success.
They gave him a standing ovation, she said. You wouldn’t have believed it…
Because he gave such a wonderful performance that night, she registered him for acting lessons on the weekend. He was to attend SCENE ONE acting classes for kids, held in a plaza fifteen minutes away every Saturday morning that summer, where he would learn to sing, dance, smile, bow, etc. For once, my adoptive mother decided not to be cheap; I know for a fact one semester of classes cost over a thousand dollars. Of course he refused to go, but she forced him, and he was miserable the entire summer.
It was an unforeseen consequence of my assisting him, and I do not take any blame, I thought. Because of the nice thing I did for him, he had to do something he hated. It all equaled out. My adoptive father was against the acting classes, he hadn’t witnessed the finesse of my adoptive brother’s performance, he didn’t understand why he had to write out a check for thousands of dollars to SCENE ONE, I overheard him say that he thought she imagined the whole thing. The only proof she attended the end-of-year show was a series of pictures she took. Years later, she told my adoptive brother that she had watched his performance from stage right; he didn’t believe her, even though she never lied to us. He had a faraway look in his eyes, so she repeated herself.
I have pictures of you, she said.
There was no reaction. He acted as if she were talking about someone else, someone he knew in passing. By the time she told him she had attended, he had already detached himself from that experience. He was someone else and not familiar with the person in the end-of-year show. My adoptive mother always told us we were special, I thought, and the truth was we were both merely average. She never lied to us and she rarely said anything that turned out to be true.
Somewhere in this house there were photos of my adoptive brother performing in the end-of-year school play, the shining star of the night. I went into my adoptive father’s wood-paneled study where I knew family albums were kept. I began to sift and sort through them. I picked up and examined a black-and-white photo of my adoptive father as a youth at a summer camp in upstate New York. He had a handkerchief tied around his neck, he was smiling. His family was as dysfunctional as they come! I said to no one. Each member was forced from early childhood to learn how to play or abuse Bach on the piano, violin, viola. He still occasionally abused the piano when he played Mozart or a little Schubert, no one else in my adoptive family liked Schubert, everyone else preferred when he played Mozart in the second living room, a formal room with a piano and leather chairs and nothing alive, the dog and cat weren’t ever allowed in that room. When he played Mozart or Schubert the house filled up with white male European culture. We were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once I went to college, I stopped. There is a world and history of nonwhite culture, I wrote to them once in a furious letter. And you kept us in the dark our entire childhood! The two white people raised their Asian children to think Asian art was decorative: Oriental rugs and vases! Jade elephants! Enamel chopsticks!