Paper Names

Chapter 3

10

Tammy

2002

My mother’s head lolled on my shoulder as the train jolted. She snored faintly. Out the window, the Westchester brush grew thinner toward the city, broken only by station stops: Crestwood, Bronxville, Pelham. The names of quaint suburban towns.

The backyards of the run-down houses that sat along the tracks told another s********e had meshed wire fences that shook as the Metro North rolled by. Others were littered with tree bark, two had broken trampolines, and one was filled with stacks of tires. These homes were on the outskirts of their towns.

Just like our house in Scarsdale. We had moved from Flushing to the butter-yellow house three years ago. Even then, the paint was flaked, exposing the gray wood underneath. Our backyard, which abutted a highway, was dry and filled with weeds. The endless sonic swooshing of cars kept me up at night that whole first year.

I hadn’t wanted to leave Flushing. I liked my teachers at PS 164 Q, and I had finally established a cafeteria lunch table with Yumi and five other girls. We moved because, ‘better schools,’ my mother had said. What she meant was whiter.

On my first day of seventh grade, the classroom had erupted with giggles when the teacher introduced me. ‘Let’s welcome Tia, wait, uh – Tianfei?’

‘Tammy,’ I corrected her. ‘I go by Tammy.’

‘Oh, that’s easier!’ she said, relieved.

A curly-haired girl sitting in the front row said, ‘You can be Danny’s girlfriend.’ She pointed at the Japanese boy a few seats away from her. He looked down at his hands while the entire class nodded in agreement. There were no other Asians in the room. No Blacks and no Latinos either, but there were three Stephanies and a William who actually went by William.

The school in Scarsdale had a black box theater and a computer lab. Everyone used mechanical pencils and erasable pens – the fancy kinds that only came in two-packs at the drugstore. The girls wore Tiffany chain bracelets and silicone wristbands debossed with pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness. The hipsters founded an Amnesty International club and the football players sold stale chocolate bars to raise funds for orphanages in Indonesia.

I tried signing up for the improv group, but it was full, so I had to join the Asian Heritage club instead. It consisted of the Japanese boy from my class, two Indian boys from a different grade, and a mixed-race Vietnamese girl whose father owned a pho restaurant in the center of town. The five of us wore clothes from Old Navy and Aeropostale. Button-down plaids and T-shirts without logos. All to say: we’re normal, nothing to look at here.

Then there was Dani. With an ‘i.’ A natural blonde who colored her hair a dark red. She wore mismatched earrings and had a temporary tattoo of an Arabic proverb on her ankle that translated to: If a wind blows, ride it. A Canon digital SLR camera hung from her neck most days. She slipped some of her black-and-white photographs into lockers. Mine had received two pictures – one of my empty chair in science class when I was out sick, and one of me dozing off at a pep rally.

Dani wasn’t part of any clubs or cliques. It only made her cooler and more mysterious. Everyone wanted to be friends with her. Everyone was curious about her. She seemed to know exactly who she was and didn’t need anyone else’s approval, and because of that, she got everybody’s without even trying.

One day, I was behind Dani in the lunch line. She was wearing a violet T-shirt with a cassette tape printed on the chest. The tag was sticking out against the nape of her neck. It read: Urban Outfitters.

‘We have to go,’ I told my mother, months later. It was still summer, but I would be starting high school soon. I needed to wear Urban Outfitters there.

‘Is that at the mall?’ she asked.

‘It’s in SoHo.’

She perked up. ‘Manhattan? We’ll make a day of it.’ She missed the city too.

And so, here we were, en route to Urban Outfitters on the Metro North. The train entered a tunnel and I turned to my mother, fast asleep in the seat next to me. Her long commute and grueling job were taking a toll. I felt guilty shaking her awake.

‘Mom, we’re here,’ I said.

She pulled at the bottom of her pilling cotton shirt, now a few sizes too small. Every weekday morning, she woke up at six, took the Metro North to Grand Central, and then the subway to Long Island City, where she worked as a software programmer at a consulting firm. She arrived by 8:00 a.m. and often didn’t leave until twelve hours later. At night, her feet plodded, barely lifting off the ground, as she came through the front door. By that time, my father and I had already eaten our frozen dinners. Still a year from forty, she was already buying black hair dye to cover the white strands that had sprouted at her temples.

We got off the Metro North and should’ve sailed downtown on the 6 train, but weekend maintenance meant we had to take the F and then the C. A man in a Yankees cap at the end of the subway bench was staring at my mother. I discreetly reached into my purse and clutched my house key like a dagger.

They hate us, my father had said to no one in particular a few weeks back. We were sitting at the kitchen table and his newspaper was open, with a coffee stain on it. A small headline about the raid of a massage parlor in Chinatown.

They hated Muslims for a year and now they’re remembering to hate us too, he continued as he straightened out the American flag pin on his jacket. He didn’t wear it because he was proud of this country. He wore it to say: I’m with you guys and not them, whoever them was at the time.

The subway train screeched to a stop and the Yankees fan walked toward the door. Then he turned around, smiled at my mother, said, ‘Ting Ting Ling Ling, I’ll see you in my dreams tonight,’ and made a j******f gesture with his hand.

My mother put her arm in front of me and said, ‘Thank you.’ After the man walked off the train, she whispered, ‘If you aren’t nice to them, they could get angry and hurt you.’ Her hands were shaking, so I nodded, pretending nothing had happened.

We exited the subway and walked straight into swarms of shoppers. At the intersection of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, I coughed through a smoky waft of street meat. My mother took my hand. ‘This is nothing compared to Tianjin Street,’ she said. Back in her element, she led us through the teeming streets of SoHo.

As we made our way to Urban Outfitters, we passed by a long line of people waiting to get into Louis Vuitton. Jiudian, someone said. Hotel. Not expecting to hear Mandarin here, my brain took an extra second to register it. Upon closer examination of the line, I realized it was made up almost entirely of Chinese people. Doused in cologne, they wore shirts with garish logos and huddled under their parasols.

One of them stepped in front of my mother and said, ‘Ni zhidao Xiang Nai Er zai nali ma?’ Do you know where Chanel is?

‘Go down one block and then make a right,’ said my mother. She spoke in English, but gestured clear directions. She didn’t like to be caught speaking Chinese in public.

My mother pulled me across the street. ‘Must be an empty tour bus nearby,’ she said, before telling me that those people were rich mainlanders. Here to spend their money to look more sophisticated in China. ‘As if those people could just buy class,’ she said. I wondered if those people included us too, but then I spotted the billowing black flags of Urban Outfitters.

The store had high ceilings and was air-conditioned to the hilt. The curated tables and racks were spread out, giving us plenty of room to maneuver around the other shoppers, which were older girls. College girls. They judged the clothing first. Price tags second. My mother shopped the opposite way. I touched the distressed flannel tops, flared corduroy pants, and Nirvana sweatshirts as I browsed through the racks. In the back section, I found two pieces that Dani owned – a tie-dyed racerback and a red bucket hat. I tested out the hat. My mother said I looked like a mushroom.

In the fitting room, I tried on a tank top with a tricycle riding over a rainbow. My mother rubbed the fabric in between her fingers and said, ‘I’m not paying forty dollars for polyester.’

‘But it’s bohemian,’ I whined.

I put on a fluttery blouse with a dragon embroidered on the sleeve.

My mother traced the outline of the mythical creature and said, ‘Better quality, but this makes you look too Asian.’

‘I am Asian,’ I said.

‘But not so much. You’re lucky,’ said my mother, pointing at my features. ‘Slim nose. Big eyes. Even your face is getting less round.’

‘My what?’ I said, rubbing my jawline.

‘Someone once told me that you looked half-white,’ my mother added.

I looked at my face in the mirror and, for a moment, didn’t recognize myself. What exactly did Asian look like? What did I look like? My mother liked to think that I looked white, but to white people, I was other. I would always be other. Even to myself.

After Urban Outfitters, I ushered my mother into nearby boutiques. I would feign interest in the clothes near the front, but then slip to the back – the sales racks – when the store’s associates looked busy.

We carried four bags of clothes by the time we had finished shopping. Every item in them was for me.

It was only late afternoon. Instead of jumping back on the train, my mother wanted to go to Pearl River Mart – the last remaining Chinese market in SoHo. It sold bamboo steamers, traditional iron scissors with the big hand loops, and shiny brocade shirts. ‘Do we have to?’ I said. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me through the throngs of shoppers toward the store.

I dragged my feet, wrestling from her grip in front of a nail salon.

‘Please?’ I said.

She was too tired to argue. She handed me some cash, said, ‘Get light pink,’ and made her way to Pearl River without me.

The salon was sparkling clean. Recess lights glared off the vinyl floor. At the polish rack, I thought of Dani. Her bangled wrists. Her lime-green nails – chipped in a cool way. I grabbed a green bottle and held it against my skin. Not quite right. I sighed as I picked up the light pink bottle and brought it over to the manicure table.

It wasn’t until after my manicure girl had cleaned my cuticles and already painted three nails that I stopped her. I wasn’t light pink.

‘Sorry, can I change colors?’ I said.

I went back to the polish rack, scrutinizing all four rows.

‘This one,’ I said, handing a bottle to the girl.

‘This will look good on you,’ she said.

I had picked Big Apple Red. It screamed bold, fiery, confident.

The girl next to her, who was clipping the nails of a Cameron Diaz look-alike, said, ‘Ni you dei qing li le.’ You have to clean her nails again.

My manicure girl scoffed. ‘Zhen fan ren. Tiao le ban tian.’ So annoying. She took half a day to pick a color.

My elbow twitched but she didn’t notice.

Then the other girl said, ‘Ta tiao le ge lao taitai de yanse.’ She picked a color for old ladies.

My manicure girl snorted.

A lightning bolt of anger shot straight to my head. These girls had the nerve to mock me? My own people? Other people – I could brush it off, try to forget about it. But this. This was worse than any other offensive remarks I had swallowed. This was a betrayal.

Before I got up to make a scene with the manager, my manicure girl rubbed the back of her neck and said, ‘Wo hao lei. Jintian you zheme duo keren. Wo hai meiyou chi dongxi.’ I am so tired. There have been so many customers today. I still haven’t eaten. My indignation melted as I heard the ache in her voice. Saw the eye bags that she had earned. Felt her hands, flaky and dry from all the soap and chemicals they had to touch every day. She couldn’t be much older than me. We looked like we could be sisters.

‘Where do you live?’ I said, settling on English so as not to embarrass her.

‘Flushing,’ she said, eyes widening, meeting mine for the first time.

‘With your family?’

She hesitated before saying, ‘Seven girls.’

I stopped with the questions, worried that she might only be answering me because she thought that she had to be polite.

‘I came to study,’ she said, after applying the first coat of polish. ‘But I cannot pay now.’

‘What do you want to study?’

‘Law,’ she said.

‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ I said. ‘What made you choose that?’

‘It’s important that we know our rights,’ she said.

‘So true,’ I said, nodding.

‘I know it very hard. OK if I be a little lawyer.’

‘A paralegal?’ I asked.

She nodded. She had originally planned on working at the salon to save up money for night school, but then her parents got sick. ‘I send money to them in Shanghai,’ she said.

‘You’re a good daughter,’ I said.

She tilted her head and asked, ‘You Korean?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Chinese?’ She put her hand over her mouth and blushed.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, having forgotten my anger. ‘My parents are Chinese.’

‘You been to China?’ she said.

‘No,’ I whispered.

An older woman came over, her hair pulled back in a severe bun. ‘Kuai yidian! Laoban mashang dao. Ni hai de ca diban.’ Hurry it up! The manager is coming soon. You still have to mop the floor.

My manicure girl nodded vigorously, glanced at my puka shell necklace, and looked back down, concentrating on my nails.

Not wanting to bother her, I turned my head to see what else was going on in the salon. But the entire place looked different to me now. The all-female staff stayed small, keeping their heads down except when they’d look up briefly, to meet each other’s eyes. A secret acknowledgment of something that I couldn’t understand.

I realized that the picture of the beach in front of me was a stock photo – the one that came with the frame. It had ‘8x10’ printed on its shoreline.

In the corner of the room, near the door where the staff disappeared behind, I spotted a Chinese calendar that seemed to follow me everywhere in Flushing. It hung in my dentist’s office, my favorite noodles restaurant, the post office. We had one in our kitchen even though it was too gaudy for my mother’s taste. I had meant to ask my parents what was special about this particular wall calendar but kept forgetting.

A character was drawn with a heavy gold brush against a red background. Fu. It meant good fortune. It filled up the whole page above the boxes with the days of the month. A girl working at a pedicure station wiped the sweat on her forehead and looked up at it.

It wasn’t just a character. It was hope. A prayer for good fortune. For better luck.