“Oh come on!” The voice came from somewhere on the edge of the room. Andrew turned, along with everyone else in the class. As Professor Kalchefsky got more and more riled up, the guy next to Andrew had taken out his cell phone and started recording surreptitiously—now he held it up, tracking the room like a periscope, trying to figure out who was talking.
The voice kept on going. “Okay, let’s just say that it was a plot, right? Doesn’t the West deserve it? Maybe this is just payback. Fact! In the year five hundred something, Christian missionaries stole China’s silkworms and used them to prop up the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years. Fact! In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo went to China and learned about pasta, and now everyone thinks the Italians are the last word on spaghetti.”
It was Mark Foo. He was a militant Asian kid, not the kind of guy Andrew usually hung out with. Foo Man Chu was always organizing protests and group dumpling dinners; he was the kind of guy who made up names for those Asian girls who always dated black guys (the current frontrunner seemed to be “chocolate banana”) or white guys (“lemonhead”); he was president of the Asian American Student Association.
“Payback for ancient crimes. Alright, let’s call it that. A karmic kung fu kick to the balls. But you know who’s getting kicked in the balls? Is it the descendants of those missionaries? The Anglo-Saxons who profited from that original theft? No, they remain in their Martha’s Vineyard mansions, eating lobster and fighting over who gets to give Bill Clinton handjobs. And who really gets jacked off? ME!”
The professor grabbed at the newspaper that he’d held up at the beginning of class, crumpling it in his fist. “Do you know that I make as much each month tutoring rich junior high schoolers in calculus as I do as an adjunct professor? The whole economic mindset of America is warped. Your parents are willing to pay five hundred dollars per credit hour to get you through a good college—if this can be considered a good college, which it isn’t, which means that your particular parents probably didn’t open their wallets wide enough—and the actual professors you came to learn from are barely being given a living wage. In fact, there are so many people who want to go into academia that they could just as reasonably not pay us at all, yet here I am, training my replacements. Academia begets academia. Yet, despite my paltry pay, I managed to accrue a plump little nest egg and now, without warning, it is gone. Wiped out.”
Andrew leaned over to his neighbor. “Isn’t this dude, like, thirty or something? How much could he have saved?” A quiver of anger ran through him. Would Kalchefsky still be such an asshole about their parents if he knew what was going on with the Wangs? “And on a freaking professor’s salary.”
Kalchefsky stopped talking and stared up at Andrew. “Is there something you’d like to share with the class? Did you, maybe, have a funny comment about my retirement savings? You’re the comedian, aren’t you? I remember you from the freshman show last year.”
Glee. That was how Andrew felt whenever someone mentioned the finest seven and a half minutes of his life. A rush of pure sensate pleasure that brought him back to standing onstage and receiving that first laugh, and then a slightly guilty glow of “This is what it’s like to be famous!”
It took a moment to pull himself out of that greedy joy and remember that Kalchefsky had actually called him out.
Andrew shook his head. “No,” he said, “nothing.”
“That’s about as much as I would have expected from that performance.”
Wounded, Andrew felt his mouth gape open. He stood up, knowing that he had to say something, something, but not sure what would come out. It turned out to be this: “You’ve been so insane this whole class, and that’s why? Because you lost a little bit of money? You said your salary is almost nothing, so how much could you have saved? I mean, I thought that those Beanie Babies were like little minigrenades or something and you were about to Columbine this whole place! You’re supposed to be a professor! It’s not our fault you lost the money! Why are you getting mad at us?”
“You seem to be very concerned about attributions of blame, Mr. Wang.”
Everyone was looking at him now. Again.
“Because you’re throwing blame around all over the place! And it doesn’t need to be! You’re acting like it’s everyone else’s fault and no one else lost anything. But you—I mean, I don’t know how big AIG is, or how many people had accounts with them—but you said the bailout was, like, $85 billion, so I’m sure it’s a lot, and they all lost something, too. It wasn’t just you!”
Andrew stopped, even though he could have kept going, because Kalchefsky’s eyebrows raised up and together like a guilty dog’s.
“In a sense, you’re right and I’m sorry. None of you can really know what it’s like to lose the result of years of effort because you haven’t had years to put in. I can’t blame you for failing to grasp a concept that is beyond your scope.”
Condescension. That’s all it was. As if everything mattered more just because he was a few years older.