When I was in the first grade at Beacon Hill Elementary in Seattle, where most of my classmates were from poor, Asian-immigrant homes like my own, there was one child I refused to play with. No, it was worse than that-I poked fun at her, and at whim I wouldn't even acknowledge her existence. Was she fat? Ugly? Leprous? She was none of the above. Nor did I ignore her for any of the usual petty reasons children ignore some and embrace others.
So why was she the object of my scorn?
She was from Hong Kong.
A new immigrant then, Victoria knew no English. She responded to everything either in tears or in Cantonese or sometimes in both at once. I felt no sympathy. I was an American-born, assimilated, melting-pot snob. The gospel of multiculturalism was still years away. Victoria was what we assimilated, melting-pot children called "F.O.B."(Fresh Off the Boat).
Though I understood every word Victoria spoke, when the teacher asked if I could help her translate, I said we only spoke English at home. It was a lie, the first of many to hide my own proximity to F.O.B. status; having Victoria in my class showed me that the line I drew between "us" and "them" was tenuous at best. The world around me saw me as Chinese, and I saw myself as Chinese until I started school. As soon as I began kindergarten and saw how much the white families smiled and hugged, and the beautiful makeup on the mommies' faces, I focused all my energy on being American.
My parents were immigrants. BaBa (my father) worked in the greasy, hot kitchens of Chinatown restaurants, toiling from lunch time through most of the night. At dawn, when he arrived home and went to sleep, MaMa would get up to go to her job at the sewing factory, where she got paid pennies by the piece, piece by piece. They smiled little, and MaMa wore no makeup. At home, they spoke only in their village dialect of Toisanese, and when they spoke, it was always in arguments or reprimands.
There were endless arguments and reprimands because there were endless rules for being Chinese, all of which had to be beaten into my thick skull every day. Most, if not all, of these rules, as I remember them, involved the washing of hair. I was not permitted to wash my hair on New Year's Day, my birthday, my parents' birthdays, after a baby was born, all major and minor holidays on two calendars (lunar and Christian), and on many other occasions too numerous to list. The reason: to avoid washing away good luck.
By the first grade, however, after learning to speak American English in kindergarten and lusting after the silky, washed hair of my non-Chinese counterparts, I had emerged as a precocious child in the discreet use of shampoo. Victoria had not. Besides wailing in her very tonal and slippery Cantonese, she had flat and very greasy hair. She was the antithesis of my ambitions, the ideal of every Chinese mothers' dreams. Being associated with her would have been counterproductive to my goals of smiling, hugging, and wearing makeup, the only rules for being American.
Time passed, and I grew up and became a writer. But ignoring Victoria, I found, had exacted a price: a lien on my art. Last year, I paid the first installment. Almost three decades since Victoria got off the boat and walked into my first-grade class, I "got off the boat" in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong had been a place of passage for my parents when they fled the Chinese Communists in 1949, so I felt that it would be an appropriate place of passage for me as a writer. I went looking for something I had lost; I nurtured the possibility of being reborn, of finding rebirth for the person I had killed inside myself when I was young and so eager for acceptance as an American. I wanted badly to know what I had for so long squelched: fairy tales and stories that I had heard as a child about people and places in Hong Kong and nearby Canton, and all the rules for being Chinese. I pictured a big lost-and-found waiting for me in Hong Kong, filled with all my lost things, my missing half-color for my fiction. Now that I was fully American, I also wanted to become fully Chinese.
Hong Kong turned out to be a beautiful city. Crystal buildings in the sunlight cast a thousand rainbows. A giant goddess sat peacefully watching the lapis beach in moonlight. Steep hills led to gilded temples. In the streets, vendors sold kumquats the size of peaches and peaches the size of melons. And the smell of fresh noodles and soup and dumplings was everywhere. All around me I heard in Cantonese: "Buy! Buy my fruits! Come, try my noodles! Freshest on earth! No better anywhere!"
But I walked on. It was a sweltering morning in Sham Shui Po, the ghetto where my mother had lived as a refugee. On every street, at the tiny noodle shops, people lifted steaming noodles of long life from their bowls. I salivated as discreetly as a mad dog and stubbornly fed my hunger with dry granola bars that I had brought from America. My years of resistance to speaking my parents' tongue kept me from asking for even a bowl of soup.
By midafternoon, however, I was beginning to look like the dogs there: hollowed, ribs sticking out, starved. My stomach began to growl like a dog, softly at first, then louder and louder until I could think of nothing else but food. All of Hong Kong seemed to fade into one giant cauldron of soup floating with meat and vegetables, delicate dumplings, and fresh noodles. I felt rabid, delirious. Desperate, I stepped into the nearest noodle shop.
"Big Brother," I said, addressing a waiter with respect, in my best and most polite Toisanese. "Will you give me a bowl of wonton soup?"
"Hey!" he called to the other waiters. "Will you come and listen to this!"
"Say it again, Sister," he said to me in his smooth Cantonese.
I obliged, smiling my American smile, batting my charcoaled eyelids. The waiters held their bellies and laughed.
"What are you?" One of them asked.
"Chinese."
"What part of China are you from?" asked another, skeptically.
"Uh, America."
They held their bellies again and doubled over in paroxysms of laughter. I laughed too, grateful for the balm of mutual hysterics; but inside I wept. With my first taste of the most delicious soup on earth, I saw who I truly was: a penniless refugee, having washed away my luck long ago. It was my turn now to be ridiculed, scorned: a pariah.
I elicited the same reaction throughout Hong Kong: at vendors' stalls, in restaurants, at the opticians, even in a designer boutique where they could hardly suppress their giggles and whispers while I tried on expensive suits from Italy.
Was I fat? Ugly? Leprous? Not at all. I've learned to smile and hug with moderate success, and I wear some makeup, but the only Chinese I speak is a stuttering Toisanese, a Cantonese mimic, and a few textbook phrases of college Mandarin. And in the midst of what is likely the world's most cosmopolitan city, the line between us and them was no longer tenuous: I was clearly the F.O.B.