When I sat back down at our table, Eunjin stared at my bowl, confused.
“Did they forget to give you pasta?” she asked.
“No, I just asked for it without pasta.”
“But you love carbs.”
I shrugged and took a bite of alfredo-covered chicken.
—
It was the last weekof November and, like every year, I was going home to visit my mom for Thanksgiving break. On the last Wednesday of the month, I took the subway to JFK, the AirTrain to my terminal, a plane to Minneapolis, then a second plane to Sioux Falls. My mother picked me up from the airport and drove the sixty miles to Brookings. The sky was lit aglow in a peachy haze that faded to indigo and lavender as we cruised through the flat landscape. The bare trees looked like whiskers against the bruised clouds. I refreshed my email during the drive. Laura still had not responded to the message from Suzie Ehrlich, but I held out hope that the response would come soon. Without class, she’d have plenty of time to catch up on communications.
Whenever I returned home, I liked to explore each inch of the house as though I were in a museum. I’d walk into the pantry to look at the assortment of snacks my mother always purchased for me in preparation for my arrival, even if I could never finish them, even though I told her to stop buying so many. There was sachima, a chewy, sweet snack made of fried dough bound with sugar syrup; Wang Wang snow crackers, light and crispy biscuits with specks of white sugar on top; and White Rabbit candy. In the freezer, ice cream drumsticks and blueberry bagels purchased in bulk from Sam’s Club.
I’d brush my fingers against the spines packed like sardines on the bookshelf in my room. The wood was splintering, straining under the weight of standardized test workbooks, old college textbooks, and guides on writing successful college application essays. I’d observe certificates and medals hanging on the wall.Student of the year in fifth grade, first place at a state-level speech competition in seventh, national merit scholar in twelfth, dean’s list in college. I flipped through old yearbooks, carefully moving each page so I wouldn’t leave a crease. I was in every picture in the extracurricular activities section, except for in the section on sports. I was smiling in the center of the six kids in the chess club and standing in the third row for the National Honor Society. Under “Science Club” there was a picture of me in lab goggles dripping a pipette.
The next few days, I regressed to an inferior version of myself. I slept in and ate junk food in bed. I cycled through the pilled sweatshirts and sweatpants from high school that smelled like detergent and air-conditioning vents from sitting in my closet. Those few days I probably devolved into 40th percentile attractiveness. Then again, I was one of the few people who wasn’t overweight in the public places I went to around here—so maybe back to 70th percentile. But I was also Asian, and that didn’t exactly make you appealing in South Dakota, so I was probably still closer to 40th.
I tried not to think too much about my conversation with Robert. I tried not to think about how Laura had managed to make herself not boring while I had somehow failed. I tried not to think about the fundamental irony that there were plenty of Lauras on campus. Laura Kims were the default, not the exception. They hailed from boarding schools or international academies or, at the bare minimum, a selective charter school in an upper-middle-class area or a public school in a wealthy area. The type of school that was free, but only if you could afford one of the multimillion-dollar homes whose property taxes funded the district. When they got into Columbia, they were excited butnot surprised. They knew they were just taking their rightful place in the world. They came to college already knowing people who they had met at expensive summer camps or through family friends. If anything, Laura Kim was the Boring Asian Female. I was not.
If my mother noticed me sulking, she didn’t say anything. Perhaps she chalked it up to burnout, or just a need for solitude. Sometimes we went shopping together and I’d do a double take because I’d think that I spotted Laura. It was delusional to think that Laura would appear, out of all places, in South Dakota, but I couldn’t help but imagine her grabbing a carton of soy milk at the grocery store or waiting in line at the Starbucks inside of Target. When I did these double takes, my mother would ask me what was wrong, and I’d tell her I was fine, maybe still a little stressed from midterms.
—
The night of Thanksgiving, mymother made Nanjing salted duck for dinner, and I prepared the mashed potatoes and green bean salad. The duck always reminded me of the first apartment we lived in after my dad left, a stuffy one-bedroom near the Chinese buffet where my mom worked as a waitress. At night I’d watch her counting the fives and twenties next to me in bed, smelling that inky scent that elicited images of strangers’ fingers and dread that our ability to exist in the world depended on these small slips of paper. Or I’d fall asleep to her voice on the phone with my aunt. “I don’t even mind the smaller place,” she’d say in Mandarin. “It’s cozier. I get to sleep with Elizabeth.” Or she’d repeat for the billionth time that she wasn’t tired, that she was energized by the restaurant and the smell of grease,energized by navigating the world as a single mother for the first time in a country where she knew no one and had not wanted to move in the first place. But during the day there were always dark circles under her eyes, and when the shower was running I’d hear her muffled sobs.
For dinner my mom would bring us leftovers from work in oversized ziplock bags. Fried sesame balls and orange chicken and string beans drenched with soy sauce. It was only on the special occasions that we’d eat salted duck, like my birthday or Thanksgiving or Christmas, and as she sliced the dish piece by piece she’d tell me about her home, Nanjing, with its unbearable summer humidity and the giant stone statues, FuZiMiao with vendors selling Tang Yu Miao and juicy pork buns. I’d ask her when we could go, when I could see my extended family with unfamiliar names who I was too young to remember from the last time we visited, and she’d simply smile and look at me. “Soon.”
The apartment was a lot smaller than the house we had lived in with my dad. The other place wasn’t that nice either, but it was clean and modern, and I had my own bedroom. The first week my mother and I moved to the new place, I left my juice box on top of the bed. When I returned to fetch it ten minutes later, it was covered with ants. But my mother turned it into a game. Whenever one of us spotted a speck of movement on the white stucco walls, we’d have to call out “Ant!” and the other person would come into the room. She taught me to dab a little water on a scrunched paper towel so the ants would stick when I pressed it against them. “Bye-bye, ants!” I would say as I flushed them down the limescale-stained toilet bowl. “See you next time!”
—
The day after Thanksgiving, Iwoke up to my mother’s face hovering over mine. Sunlight was spilling out of the window above my desk, casting a glow over the Columbia poster and my framed acceptance letter that hung across from the bed. For a moment, I forgot where I was, and wondered why my mother had showed up to my dorm. “When did you fly here?” I almost asked. “You shouldn’t have inconvenienced yourself.”
“Come,” she said. “Let’s go get lunch.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Now?”
“Elizabeth. It’s noon.” I wobbled out of bed and went to the bathroom. She waited by the door while I brushed my teeth with my winter coat tossed over her left arm.
I was barely awake by the time we were pulling out of the driveway. She waved at our next-door neighbor, Steve, who was walking from the mailbox. When we first moved in, his wife knocked on our door to bring us homemade cheesecake. Later that year, when they found out that it was just the two of us living there, Steve always shoveled our driveway after blizzards, even after my mother had repeatedly insisted that there was no need, that we could do it ourselves.
“Steve keeps telling me it’s such a shame that I sent you to a communist school,” she said. I always spoke to my mom in English, but she usually replied in Mandarin, and she pronounced Steve as two syllables.
I scoffed. “I’m not even going to entertain that.”
We went to the local “Asian noodle” place owned by some of my mother’s friends, a couple from Fujian that had moved herein the ’90s. “They’re what the Americans call ‘boat people,’ ” my mother whispered to me. I shushed her.
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“They can’t understand me anyway.”
“You said ‘boat people’ in English.”
“But it’s okay. I’m not sayingIcall them that. I’m saying other people call them that.”
The waitress brought us two glasses of ice water. My mom ordered a Coke, and I asked if they had seltzer.
