This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,8

restaurant for a background image for our new Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, I have no idea where to begin. It’s like how you can enter a room where someone’s thrown a banana into the trash, and at first you’re like, “Oh, shit, someone ate a banana?” Then you wait a few minutes, and you don’t even notice it—you’ve been desensitized to the smell.

I’m a little desensitized to design when it comes to our restaurant. I know it doesn’t look quite right, but it isn’t jarring to me anymore. More importantly, I have no idea how to fix it. I can’t even imagine it looking good, to be honest. Maybe if we made it completely dark and put in strobe lights. At least the floor doesn’t have any obvious stains—it’s a drab brown low-pile carpet that could probably hide a mass murder.

“Do you think we should take pictures in the bathroom?” I ask Priya when she lugs her camera and lighting gear in. “That’s the nicest part of the restaurant since Dad wallpapered it.”

“Don’t worry, I brought some tablecloths and scarves we can use as background, and we can put some food on some special serving plates,” says my genius friend.

Priya’s dad is an applied science professor at the college and her mom is a nurse, which means that she and her brother knew from an early age that they had to go into either engineering or medicine (personally, I also had business and law as options, which made my parents seem really open-minded). We had been friends for about two days when she told me her plan to sabotage her grades so that her parents would let her go to film school to study cinematography.

“Doesn’t it bug you, to have your parents think that you’ve failed?” I asked when she told me how she intentionally put down a few wrong answers for a math test.

“Getting a B isn’t failure,” she said, even though she knew that it kind of was, in our parents’ eyes.

“But don’t you ever think, ‘God, if I’m not any good at this crappy school in the middle of nowhere, how am I ever going to succeed in life?’”

“Einstein failed high school.”

“No he didn’t. That’s a myth.” My dad looked it up once when I used it as an excuse for getting a B plus.

“Fine, then. There are plenty of other people who didn’t get straight As who did great in life. You know how all those college counselors say that you don’t need to be well-rounded, if you’re well-flat?”

“Is that some sort of comment about my bra size?”

The point is, Priya’s determined to go to film school, and I’m 110 percent certain that she’s going to make it. She’s aces with a lens, whether it’s an iPhone or a video camera. She has an eagle eye for the essence of things and always knows how best to frame objects to make a picture more than a bunch of pixels. To make it into art.

I run upstairs to grab our nicest serving plates—the ones that stay in our curio cabinet all year—and a pair of lacquered wooden chopsticks. I bring my amah, too, because she’s the most photogenic member of our family.

When we get downstairs Priya has set up lights and draped cloths to create a shockingly gorgeous background, accented with some jade jewelry.

“Oooh, that’s pretty. Where’d you get that necklace?” I ask.

“It’s your mom’s.”

I look over to where my mom is readying the register. “I’ve never seen those!” I say.

My mom gives a small smile. “Priya need something pretty. I never get chance to wear my nice things.” It’s true. My mom does so much prep work at the restaurant that she never even wears her wedding rings. Her hands are perpetually chapped and Band-Aided to cover her bleeding cuticles.

I swallow hard. “Thanks, Mom.” Then I ask Priya, “What other dishes do you think will look good?”

“How about some kind of sushi and sweet-and-sour chicken?”

“Okay, one Cali roll and one ABC chicken coming up.…”

“I thought chicken and broccoli was ABC chicken?” says Priya.

“No, that’s ABC broccoli.”

It’s no secret that what’s served in American Chinese restaurants isn’t close to what most people in China actually eat. The sad thing is I’m such an ABC (short for “American-born Chinese”) that I’m used to “fake” Chinese food and find most of the dishes my amah cooks to be kind of bland. Except her dumplings, which are perfection.

When we’re done, Priya loads up her images and I show them