Joan Is Okay(21)

At every secondary school we enrolled in, Fang and I had qualified for free lunch, which our mother refused to sign us up for. No such thing as a free lunch in this country, and a Chinese saying that means the same: meat pies are never going to fall from the sky. Besides, a program like that was welfare, and being on welfare gave someone else a chance, later on, to tell you that your success was not your own.

Fang figured it out quick. The popular kids had money, or their parents had money, which gave these kids the illusion that they did too.

Our first place in Wichita had a capacity limit of three. We were told that we would be evicted with a fourth. Not the fondest memory of my father followed, but an indelible one, the four of us sneaking into a Super 8 motel for which he had paid the price of only one guest. Once the receptionist told the other receptionist, a security guard came to block our path. We were asked to leave even before my father started flipping them off. For a small fee, an older Chinese couple with no kids took us in for a month, before my father decided we were moving to Scranton. The room was in the back of their one-story ranch, hidden from view by a tall evergreen bush they planted by no coincidence after we arrived. We were forbidden from walking where we could be seen or using the kitchen during the day.

I was never hungry, never without clothes or proper shelter, but the second the woman saw me go in the bathroom, she started pounding on the door. It was either that or the projects, and we were not going to live in the projects.

A good memory. A fond one. The most frugal member of our family and yet my father would end up doing the most unfrugal of things. Spend a week’s worth of dishwashing money, for instance, on what he promised to be a surprise. We wondered what it could be. Maybe bed frames, since we had been sleeping on floor mattresses all this time. Weeks passed and we forgot about it. Then on our last day of school, the first of summer, he and my mother picked us up in a lime-green Mustang, rented for the afternoon. There was nothing more American to him than American cars, American muscle, because inside a car like that, even the weak could feel strong. We blasted the radio and went to the nearest Wendy’s drive-through. My father pulled the car beyond the intercom and I stuck my head out of the rear window to place the order. Everything on the value menu and two cups of hot water. Yes, just hot water. My father drove us to a park and we ate in the car. Then he drove around an empty parking lot as fast as he could, while my mother kept hitting him in the arm and telling him to slow down. Bystanders must have said, Whatever the story is there, those people are reckless and certainly living beyond their means. They then told their kids, Kids, this is why the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich.

Probably that day was one of the times my mother reminded me that a woman needed power, and power came from money, so a woman needed money.

I wouldn’t admit to being poor in conversation, but for colleges, on paper, I did. Below a certain household income, some of the best schools were free. Then you applied for book allowances each semester and winter coat funds. You ate only at dining halls, never out. Fang got a full ride first and helped me do the same. Forms like these were straightforward enough to fill out. We had been filing our parents’ taxes for years.

Merit-based scholarships, we told our parents, who we both agreed never needed to know. But had my mother just checked, she would have seen that neither place Fang or I went to offered merit-based aid.

Certain Americans could be two-faced. Acquaintances and other parents from our school made their implications about us clear.

You must be so proud of your children.

But how had your son really gotten into Yale? Because Yale looks out for minorities. They save a certain percentage of seats for them.

How had your daughter really gotten into Harvard? Because Harvard is even easier on minorities and on women too.

Settling the question that I’d always had then. No success of mine had anything to do with me, my work ethic, or my brain.

During college, Fang began coming back home in newer and more expensive clothes.

Scholarship money? my mother would ask, rubbing the lapel of his blue wool blazer with gold buttons, but perhaps already knowing full well that it wasn’t. Borrowed from a roommate. But in short order he was able to afford his own.

Fang in his late twenties, taking me out to lunch. I was a senior at Harvard then, and he had driven up from Manhattan, where he’d just been promoted to associate of something, or in my own head, the associate of money. No more D-hall food for once, and I could pick any place I liked. I requested Asian food, some semblance of what our mother would’ve made, which the D-hall never served. Think bigger, he told me, arriving outside my dorm, dressed in fine long linen pants and a cashmere T-shirt sweater, before I knew that T-shirt sweaters were a thing. Per his suggestion, we went to a French restaurant, Boston’s most expensive, where in the parking lane, I watched him toss his new Audi car keys to a white valet and say, Take care of this for me, will you? and then tip this man fifty bucks.

Inside, I had my own white server who stood next to me the entire time like a bodyguard. Each crumb that fell out of my mouth, he scooped away with a silver scraper. Warm bread slices were held out to me with silver tongs. And then when I had to use the restroom, my bodyguard followed, opened the soundproof bathroom door, closed the soundproof door, and stood outside while I peed.

Did I remember anything about the food? The actual taste of it? No. I wanted my mother’s food the entire time.

Back at the table with our bodyguards, my brother asked whom I had befriended at Harvard, whom I’d connected with. Because I was, he said, at the most well-connected place in the country, the starting place of future presidents, industry scions, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and Silicon Valley tycoons.