Footnotes on Chinese-American Girlhoods

Abstract

Footnotes on Chinese-American Girlhoods May Hathaway The Xias moved out of their house last week after four years of gossip. "Like a presidency," someone's father quipped at the Chinese school dinner party yesterday, and we all laughed because we knew we were supposed to. It was the first dinner party that none of the Xias had attended, and our parents were drunk on giddy schadenfreude and Costco wine. The Xias had entered our orbits pleasantly enough, what with Caroline's enrollment at Chinese school. It was the exiting that was thornier. The Xias were unremarkable people: two sullen-looking third-wave1 immigrant parents and a petite girl named Caroline. Her brother occasionally came into the picture too; he was off at a good college.2 They both had particularly nice smiles, wedge-shaped and bright. That was all we knew about them until Mrs. Xia signed Caroline up for Chinese school and Caroline became our friend. Our middle-of-nowhere suburb's surprisingly vibrant Chinese community revolved around Chinese school. As longtime Chinese school attendees, we had banded together more out of necessity than out of choice. Chinese school is a lonely place without friends, and boredom is especially painful for tweens. We knew each other loosely; gaining close friends would mean that something good had come out of Chinese school, which we refused to admit. Every Saturday, our parents drove us to the high school at the center of town, where we sat in musty classrooms with posters of literary terms plastered on the yellow walls. Caroline often read them when she was bored of copying characters from the Chinese textbooks. She confused Romanticism with romance once, which is funny in retrospect, but back then, we took her word for it. We didn't know any literary theory either. The blind leading the blind. Mira Zhang had been the quintessential cool girl of Chinese school until she dropped out in her last year. It was from her that we [End Page 71] learned that Chinese girls could dye their hair blonde, that eyeliner worked magic if you knew how to use it properly, that white kids would let you be reckless with them if you were smart about it. Mira was perhaps too smart about it because pretty soon she stopped showing up to class, so we were devoid of a role model. Our parents told us to be more like Katherine Chu, but frankly, we would have rather died. Katherine, with her heavy eyebrow-grazing bangs and thick wire-frame glasses, was not the kind of girl we aspired to become. Sure, she was polite to adults. But we knew that Katherine was lonely, that she hated playing the violin, that she was never going to win Mathcounts3 no matter how hard she tried. Caroline was different. Only filial4 kids went to Chinese school, but we didn't know that. Caroline Xia knew that from the very beginning, and she also knew that she was anything but filial, and she went anyway. She was so good at blending in. We really, really liked Caroline. That's not an exaggeration. Nowadays, we brush off gossipy inquiries from our parents with echoes of I barely even knew her or We never talked, but that's only because we've gotten good at lying.5 We adored Caroline, the only girl in the entire world who knew how to be Chinese and American at the same time. But there was a lot we didn't know about how she straddled that line. Chinese school was a place of community—we had a running theory that our parents had only enrolled us in order to meet fellow Chinese-American immigrants to gossip and commiserate with—but it was also a place of subtle competition. We wore sweaters that we had received at bat mitzvahs to prove that we had Jewish friends, and from time to time, we stirred up drama at the dinner table by pushing our bowls of rice aside and asking for spaghetti. We liked to pretend that we were cool, that even though everyone else was having trouble making white kids like them, we...