Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed (ed)

  Playing hockey, I found out that good girls had nothing on strong women, on women who take risks. Putting my physical body on the line every time I stepped into the game became a tangible reminder that the most exciting things in life don’t happen to people who sit on the sidelines.

  I started stepping out into the world, unafraid of how it might perceive me. This is not to say that I don’t, deep to my core, want to be the best person I can be. It’s just that a lot of things—playing hockey, medical school, international travel, motherhood—have expanded my adolescent definition of “good.”

  Ice hockey taught me that being tough didn’t mean you couldn’t be kind. My fiercest teammates were also the most loving.

  Anatomy lab taught me that the best girls aren’t squeamish.

  Travel to South Africa made me realize that the best girls aren’t afraid to be alone. The medical research I did there taught me not to fear doing something completely different.

  My surgery rotation made it very clear that the best girls aren’t afraid of being decisive.

  My urology rotation showed me that the best girls aren’t embarrassed by penises.

  My writing groups impressed upon me that the best girls aren’t afraid of loud truths.

  My children remind me, every day, that there is so much to fight for.

  As my definition of “good” expanded, so did my circle of friends. And I realized the most devastating consequence of the model minority myth: how neatly it plays into bigoted myths of traits that are “good” and those that are “bad,” and how easily it divides the pie graph of our lives into “us” and “them.”

  Writing this piece, I’ve struggled to pinpoint the moment when I realized that my family was more than a little racist. I vaguely remember my father complaining about the “Americans” he had to teach, and I remember the scandalous tone my mother took when she gossiped about one of my cousins dating a “hei ren”—a Black person. But I don’t have to look very far to see evidence of the Asian superiority complex in the here and now. I see it in the soft grumblings about affirmative action that I read in online parent groups. I see it in my Vietnamese patient who railed to me about how “those people” don’t contribute to our country after immigrating the way that “our people” do.

  And so I continue to fight, not only for my children’s right to be seen and valued for who they are, but against the lifelong sense of entitlement that comes from being a teacher’s pet. Being a model doesn’t always mean that you’re the best, just that you’re the most successful at giving people what they expect. I want my children to have the whole world to grow into.

  When I got married, it never even occurred to me to change my name professionally. I was always, and always will be, Dr. Wong. It was only when I needed a nom de plume that I took my husband’s last name. I still wear it uneasily, like a child wearing a plastic mask with eyeholes that are just a few millimeters off. Because, for the first time in my life, I want people to see me as Asian.

  I want them to see me be loud, rebellious, and sometimes profane, and watch their assumptions about the model minority be blown into tiny bits. And at that moment of cognitive dissonance, when their stereotypes are subverted, I want them to remember with a start that we don’t yet live in a post-race society, not by a long shot. But our first step is to look beyond our expectations, not just in other people, but in ourselves.

  NOT LIKE THE OTHER GIRLS

  Martha Brockenbrough

  “A woman who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”

  —Donald Trump

  The first time I took my shirt off in front of a boy who was not a blood relative, he told me to put it back on.

  We were in my bedroom. I sat on the bottom bunk, and he looked down at me. “You’re a girl. You have to wear a shirt.”

  I was six years old and he was seven, a friend of my older brother. He wore faded cutoff jeans, and his skin was taut and tanned over his sun-polished muscles. He was one of a pack of boys who roamed the neighborhood riding bicycles, throwing dirt clods, and best of all, playing baseball on the lumpy dirt field near the shopping center. I wanted to join them.

  “But I’m hot,” I said. “And your shirt is off.”

  I showed him my flat chest. I, too, was muscled, from playing soccer and swimming, though my skin was paler than his, especially on the parts that were always covered by my clothing. “We’re the same, see?”

  “You’re a girl,” he said. “Girls have to wear shirts because they have boobs.”

  I pulled my green cotton ringer close, covering the parts he was talking about. It was so hot out—the kind of summer day that draws the sweat out of you and leaves your skin rimed with salt and dust and your mouth dry and wanting. Going shirtless as I ran through the rhododendrons at my parents’ house made things a little bit better, but more important, had made me feel the equal of my brothers and their friends.

  I put my shirt back on.

  * * *

  It was the mid-1970s then, and my brothers played baseball on a team through the local Boys Club. There was no Girls Club then. That would come later—too late for me ever to play. But I wanted to.

  My older brother was a star athlete. A leftie, he’d stand at the plate in a pose of fierce concentration, his tongue out. Someone took a picture of him and printed it large in black-and-white, making it look like an image from the past, important and true. I’d hold it by the edges, careful not to mark it with my fingerprints. I stuck out my tongue to see if that was the magic that made him such a powerful hitter, the secret that let him snatch a sinking baseball out of the blue with his glove, snapping the leather closed around it.

  My younger brother did not stick out his tongue. He was not a great hitter, and the one time he caught a baseball, it was an accident. He’d been daydreaming behind second base, his glove open wide, and a pop fly dropped into it. Roused from his reverie by cheering, he looked all around for the ball, only to realize slowly that he already had it in his hand.

  The moment was exciting and hilarious, and he won the game ball, making it one of the best events I’d ever watched from the bleachers, where the moms and sisters sat, knitting, chatting, reapplying lipstick, watching. Once, one of the moms was wrapping birthday presents during a game, and she taught me how to fold the ends of the paper so the lines would be crisp and even, the tape concealed. I did not want to watch, or chat, or learn how to wrap birthday presents. I wanted to play.

  There was room for all sorts of boys on the team—boys who dominated, boys who daydreamed. There were cheers for all of them.

  There were none for me, although my gift-wrapping skills remain top-notch.

  * * *

  On the first day of first grade, my mother waited with me at the bus stop. When the bus arrived, she nudged me up the steps. I found a seat near the front, and the bus rumbled down the road, smelling of exhaust and the breath of children. I was barely big enough to see out the steamy window, but I knew when we turned left at the intersection instead of right that something was not quite right.

  Maybe, I thought, the driver knew a different route to my school. Or maybe there would be two stops.

  Maybe.

  And then we arrived at the other elementary school in town. I waited in my seat, still hopeful, but the driver told me to get off and go to class.

  I slouched off the bus. At the base of the stairs were the hands of grown-ups shepherding kids to their classrooms, but I knew these hands were not for me. I couldn’t bear to look at their faces. I didn’t want to ask for help. That only would have made things worse. It might have made me cry, and that was out of the question.

  I slipped away from the hands and quietly crossed the street, and I walked in the direction of my school. I had new sneakers and my lunch box, and I hustled beneath the green-black arms of Douglas firs and alongside glossy laurel hedges. I knew I’d be late, but perhaps I wouldn’t be very late.

  I made my way along the shoulder of the road, for th
ere was no sidewalk, and a car pulled up alongside me. I pretended not to notice. The driver rolled down the window and called my name. I turned to look. She was the mom of a preschool classmate.

  “Do you need a ride?”

  I shook my head. It was easier to pretend none of this had happened, easier to pretend I was invisibly unwinding the disaster of the morning by myself. And yet she would not leave me. She drove beside me slowly as I walked, perhaps understanding my need to keep myself together was as important to me as her need to protect me was to her.

  The more steps I took, the clearer it became that these two schools were not close together, not close at all. I finally accepted a ride just as a squad car drove by. The police officer followed us to school, ensuring my arrival was the opposite of invisible. When I made it to my classroom at last, my kindhearted teacher told me to sit anywhere.

  I chose the table with the books.

  “Anywhere but there,” she said.

  Everyone laughed. My face burning, I chose a regular desk by the blackboard and did everything I could to keep the tears from falling.

  After that day I did not ride the bus. They all looked alike. Any one of them could take me anywhere. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I figured that if I could beat the bus home, no one would be the wiser. It was exhilarating to feel my feet against the pavement and to hear the bus far, far behind me.

  This is how I became a runner.

  In fourth grade, I raced my first 10K, wearing leather Adidas that blistered my heels. My little brother and I finished together. He’d waited for me as we ran up a hill, and I picked him up out of the mud when he slipped near the finish line. Hand in hand, we crossed it.

  “You’re the next Bruce Jenner,” a grown-up told me. Only a few years earlier, Bruce had won Olympic gold medals and appeared on Wheaties boxes. Long before she came out as transgender, she was the athlete the boys wanted to be, the man girls wanted to be with. It was a compliment, and I reveled in it.

  * * *

  The summer after first grade, I took tennis lessons at a court not far from school. To get there, I rode a similar route on my blue one-speed bicycle, which I’d covered in stickers from the Buster Brown shoe store. The route was pretty. It meandered from my evergreen-tree-lined street down a short hill and onto a narrow path alongside the highway. It wasn’t far, a mile or so, and I’d ride my bicycle holding the handlebars with one hand and my tennis racket with the other.

  One day, as I turned off my street and headed toward the hill, I noticed a car. A small red thing whose make and model I can no longer recall. But I remember its headlights looked like eyes. The car circled back and stopped not far from me. The driver rolled down his window. Sunlight glinted off his metal-rimmed spectacles.

  “Do you know where the Turnips live?” he asked.

  I knew of no one named Turnip. I did know of the root vegetable, though. I wanted to be helpful, but I didn’t know how.

  “Why don’t you come over to the car,” he said. “I’ll show you the address.”

  I went to the car. The man’s pants were unzipped. His penis, the first I’d seen that did not belong to one of my brothers, was erect.

  “This is a dolly,” he said. “Girls like to play with it. Will you play with my dolly?”

  A good girl kept her shirt on. A good girl did what she was told. I was a good girl, or at least I wanted to be. So I obeyed. It simply didn’t occur to me to say no. When I could bear it no longer, I excused myself. “I have to go to my tennis lesson.”

  I picked up my racket and my bicycle and I pedaled off, wishing I didn’t have to touch the handlebars. My hands had become disgusting to me. But I had a tennis lesson to go to, and I had to get myself there.

  I arrived at the court, and dropped my bicycle and racket in the grass by the drinking fountain. I had to hold the faucet for water to flow, so I could only wash one hand at a time. I had no soap, and I couldn’t rub my palms together, but this was better than nothing. As I was cleaning myself as well as I could, one of the girls in my class approached. I blurted out what had happened. I can’t remember her reply, or if she even had one.

  Later that day, when I told my brothers and sisters what had happened, they didn’t believe me, and I didn’t argue the point. I didn’t want it to be true, so why would I? Because my siblings didn’t believe me, I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t want them to know what I had done.

  But the girl in my tennis class told her mother, and about two weeks later word got back to my mom. When she came to pick me up at a sewing lesson that day, her face was gray. I suspected I was in trouble, the worst I’d been in. I said as little as I could about what had happened, and then she dropped it. Afterward, I tried to forget about what happened. I had tried to be a good girl and, in the process, I’d been bad. The worst. This was not a game I could win.

  Here is a true thing: no matter how fast you run, you cannot leave your own body behind. The things that happen to your body stay with your body. Cells die and are replaced, but each one of them carries the memory of what happened to the ones that came before. You can sometimes outrun other people. But you cannot outrun yourself.

  “You’re not like the other girls.”

  —Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables

  This is what I believed: You can’t win the game as a girl. But you can become as much like a boy as possible. You can play soccer with the boys at recess. You can become a fierce long-distance runner and swimmer, beating all but the fastest boys. You can be funny. Strong. Competitive. Hilarious. You can wear jeans and sweatshirts. You can cut your hair short.

  Then you can grow your hair out again because it turns out it’s not all that fun being mistaken for a boy, and besides, you don’t want to become so much like a boy that you are no longer wanted as a girl.

  You do not yet have the word for this thing you are feeling.

  But you can angle for some magic-sounding words that promise to bridge the divide: You’re not like the other girls.

  These words were a compliment. Gilbert Blythe said them in Anne of Green Gables, and this was the best thing a girl could be. There are so many ways of being not like other girls. Don’t be catty or give the appearance of vanity. Be fast. Be strong. Be good at sports and science. Never cry. Never show anyone you can be hurt.

  Because of your body, you must be a girl. But you don’t have to be like one.

  * * *

  “She runs like a guy,” my older brother said.

  He was praising one of the stars of our cross-country team, a girl who was a senior when I was a freshman. And even though I often beat her across the finish line, there was apparently something about her that was better than me in my brother’s eyes.

  I studied her form to understand it. She held her elbows high and out, with her arms at something of an acute angle. They looked like elbows that could do damage to a competitor’s ribs. I tried it, but it felt exhausting to run that way, exhausting and untrue to my own natural form, which was efficient and low to the ground. It was tiring and false in the way that taking AP math and science classes was tiring and false. I was one of the only girls in these classes, and I took them not because I loved them—I loved writing and art and music—but because I wanted to prove that I could keep up with the boys.

  Girls can do anything boys can do.

  You can do anything a boy can do. I was told this again and again. With every goal I set, keeping up with or beating the boys became my benchmark. I earned a dozen varsity letters in high school. I was the captain of four teams. Along with two boys, I was the editor in chief of the school newspaper, and of our trio, I wrote the hardest-hitting editorials. This was feminism to me. Be like the boys. It was the best way to be a girl.

  I competed with the boys, but I wanted to be noticed by them. I wanted to be wanted by them, even as I purposely rejected the feminine. I was skinny. Intense. Opinionated. Nearsighted enough to need glasses. And although I cultivated a small group of female friends I l
oved, I took no particular pride in them.

  “Most of my friends are guys,” I’d sometimes say. Although this wasn’t true, really. They were my older brother’s friends, and I had attached myself to this crowd because I could spend time in the company of boys and study them closely, the way a biologist might study captive apes.

  The male of the species likes watching horror movies. He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of physics by shotgunning beer. His games often involve hitting his fellow males in the shoulder for failing to say a nonsense word quickly enough.

  One night I fell asleep on the carpet while I was with my brother and one of his friends. I woke up and heard them talking about a girl’s body. I had a crush on this friend of my brother, and to hear him talk with admiration about this other girl’s curves turned my heart into a pincushion. And then he said, “But don’t tell Martha. She’ll tell everyone.”

  This was the moment I knew I’d failed. I wasn’t a boy. Nor was I an object of desire. I was a leaking mouth and nothing more. I kept my eyes closed and tried to breathe like a person lost to sleep.

  “Women can play poker because anyone who can fake an orgasm can raise on a pair of deuces.”

  —Brett Butler on Grace Under Fire

  Proximity and quiet desperation have their benefits, though. I dated several of my brother’s friends. One of these boys was an athlete, with a tanned and muscular body and jet-black hair that framed the edges of his face. In short, he was hot, and it surprised me to no end that he liked me. He once slipped his jacket over my shoulders at the homecoming football game when I looked cold, and months later, as we sat on the bleachers between events at a spring track meet, he told me I was cute.

  Just before the school year gave way to summer, we sat side by side in the little room the trainer used to tape up injured athletes. The union of our fingers and palms felt like an event horizon, a point of no return with galactic consequence. Outside observers might see something as benign as two teenagers clasping hands, but inside my soul felt pulled someplace unmapped, even in my imagination. Could someone really care about me, despite the many ways I was flawed and broken? Or was he after something else?