This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,48
asks my mom with a confused expression on her face. She apparently doesn’t even know what Will’s name is, even though he’s worked for us for weeks.
My dad explains, impatiently, that Will is the boy I hired to help out with the restaurant.
I see the exact nanosecond that the penny drops, that my mother connects the name to the face. Her eyes widen, and her hands cup her mouth and nose as if she could block out the news if she doesn’t breathe in any of the air it was spoken into.
“Nage hei ren?” she asks, the words like a sucker punch. My chest clenches up, and I can barely breathe with bewildered outrage.
“The black boy?” is the most generous way for me to interpret my mom’s words, but my second-generation brain translates her Mandarin more literally at first, so what hits me initially is the word-by-word translation, which is “that black person.”
It’s a quirk of the language that in Mandarin a person isn’t “American” or “British”; they’re “that American person” or “that British person.” It’s a lot like the subtle difference between saying that someone’s “Jewish” versus calling them “a Jew.”
I want to say, “Hey, Mom. Your bias is showing.” At the same time, my instinct is to make excuses for her. The first-generation Chinese community I grew up with in NYC didn’t have the time or energy to give a damn about cultural sensitivity. Like everyone else in the world, she’s just internalized a shit ton of racist ideas, right?
None of this is an excuse, though. None of it makes it any easier to hear the mixture of contempt and panicked scandal in my mom’s voice. And let’s face it: Even as I try to justify my mom’s comments, I know in my heart that it’s more than innocent fresh-off-the-boat confusion. I think of the summer days when my mother insists on slathering me with Dollar Tree suntan lotion, not to prevent melanoma but because she’s worried that my skin will “be too dark.” When I tried to explain to her that some people in my school spent hundreds of dollars trying to get artificial tans, she scoffed. “You know who have dark skin in China? Peasants!”
All of a sudden I’ve reached my limit. I’ve played the role of the silently guilty child for as long as I can.
“I’m sorry for sneaking around, okay? But I’m not sorry for kissing Will. He’s a really good guy who’s already done a ton to help the restaurant. And let’s just cut to the chase. You’re maddest at me because he’s black. That’s bullshit, and you know it.” I’m loud. I have to be, to cut through my dad’s tirade. I hate that I don’t sound sorry at all. Somewhere underneath all the rage, there’s a part of me that’s terrified by how little I actually care. “Can we just move on to how I’m grounded?”
My punishment is pretty much what I expected: no cell, no internet for two weeks. I’ll basically be a prisoner to the restaurant. Not like that’s so different from my summer so far. The worst thing, though, is that Will’s fired. My dad eyes me suspiciously when I don’t argue, or cry, or stomp off in a fit. I like to think it’s a sign of maturity, but really it’s a sign of not giving a flying fig about their arbitrary restrictions.
I’m already calculating how I’ll contact Will behind my parents’ back.
This Is My Brain on Radio Silence
WILL
Fake news expands to fill the space allotted to it.
The days after kissing Jocelyn are torture. After getting an e-mail from her father saying that I won’t be needed at the restaurant anymore, I have to explain to my mother that I was let go because I was caught fraternizing with my boss. Jocelyn hasn’t responded to my e-mail or texts, and by Sunday night my brain is so saturated with worst-case scenarios that I’m desperate enough to actually call her. As usual I have a couple of false starts, but on the third attempt my thumb hovers over the green call button for only a minute before I close my eyes and tap it.
It’s probably the first time in my life that I’ve ever been disappointed to get a voice mail. If that isn’t proof positive that I’ve got it bad, I don’t know what is.
I don’t leave a message the first go-around. Instead, I call again after writing down a few notes, a loose script that I