by Weike Wang
This classmate and I never become friends. I wish I had kicked her.
When I say this to the shrink, she says, Stand in front of a mirror. Your reflection is a way to deal with episodes of anger.
But I’m not angry.
Oh yes, you are.
···
I am now tutoring more students. The ones who write down magnetism and electricity and circuits come to me because other tutors turn them away. Can you help? they ask. I will try. But it is not easy being teacher. How to stick to one topic for a set period of time. How to lesson plan.
The things that I say:
First things first, are you hungry? Do you like chips?
Pen only so that I can see all of your mistakes and, hopefully, correct them.
The chips are gone? They’re gone? All right, you stay here. I will go get more.
During one session, a student who is trying to learn magnetism starts to tell me about where he grew up.
On an island.
In the middle of the Atlantic.
Where there is only one dentist.
Who is his father.
I know he is only trying to kill time, but it is a compelling enough story that I let him finish. Then I tell him another story about teeth.
Have you ever seen radium in person? It is one of those beautiful fluorescent chemicals. At the end of the twentieth century, it was being used to make glow-in-the-dark watches. To paint each watch, girls dipped their brushes in a pint of radium paint and then washed the paint off in their mouths.
What is not known then is that ingest enough radium and it will go straight into your bones. Radium like calcium. There is a reason that these two are in the same column of the periodic table.
The teeth of these girls were the first to decay.
And then everything else.
To completely rid a body of radium, you must cremate it and then boil it in hydrochloric acid.
After this story, the student is ready to get back to magnetism. He passes me the blank worksheet we were supposed to have finished in this time.
·
I read somewhere that a good teacher summarizes every lesson.
Don’t drink the radium paint; drink water.
At least three liters a day.
I hand the worksheet back, completed.
···
We are home. It is raining. The whole apartment has a wet dog smell to it. This happens because we have given him free rein of the furniture. A couch. A bed. A coffee table. Two rugs that he rolls around on as if they were grass. How does he get wet in the first place? Eric takes him outside. When it rains, the dog is thrilled. He is a strange dog that likes to get wet.
Perhaps we don’t do enough together, I suggest to Eric. We don’t go anywhere anymore. Didn’t we used to do more?
What do you want to do? he asks.
What do you want to do? I ask.
Later that week, the best friend says, Oh my god, he’s not made of glass, you know.
Maybe not glass. But porcelain?
I don’t remember ever seeing my parents hold hands, or hug, or kiss. I wonder if this is why when I hear affectionate words, I want to jump off tall buildings despite a crippling fear of heights.
The shrink says, It would be impossible if they never did those things because you’re here.
What do you like about me? I ask Eric that night.
Huh? he says.
Then later when I smile he points to the smile and says that.
···
We decide on the Museum of Science. The museum has a planetarium and a Beatles laser light show.
The song list: “Dear Prudence.” “She Said She Said.” “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.” “Oh! Darling.” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” “Nowhere Man.” “A Day in the Life.”
But I don’t like the Beatles, I say softly to Eric while we are standing in line for the show.
You know I don’t like the Beatles, I say while we are settling down into our seats.
I like Queen and Freddie Mercury, the song “Don’t Stop Me Now.” The lyrics, just listen: I’m a rocket ship on my way to Mars, on a collision course. I am a satellite, I’m out of control, I am a sex machine ready to reload, like an atom bomb about to explode…call me Mister Fahrenheit.
Freddie Mercury made science cool, I say, knowing how cheesy that must sound.
Also, his name was Freddie Mercury.
Eric grew up listening to the Beatles. His mother is a Beatlemania survivor. His father, a reformed hippie.
Give them a chance, he says.
During the show, I get carried away by the lasers. There are so many of them.
A laser is colorful by emission. It is green because it emits green light. It is not like a leaf that is green because it absorbs red light.
Some students have trouble with this—whether the color they perceive is through emission or absorption. Then I tell the student, If you can see the color in the dark, it is its own thing, it is emission. In this way, a green laser is a purer form of color than the world’s greenest leaf.
After the show, everywhere I look—a white wall, the blue sky, Eric’s face—I see lasers in the shape of owls and submarines.
You didn’t like it, he says.
I did. I like trying new things.
You don’t.
I don’t.
What about “Dear Prudence”? he asks.
Which one was that?
When I finally figure it out—the first one. The first one? The one with the owl laser. Which owl? The green owl. Ah, that one, that one was okay. Just okay? Pretty good—he has seen enough of the museum and now wants to leave.
·
Eric introduced me to music. Before him, I was listening to silence. And yet I played piano for ten years.
From age seven, I start to learn. I am classically trained. At the beginning, I practice three hours a day with Ping-Pong balls strapped to the palms of my hands. My fingers grow. I can span an octave. My favorite piece is the “Raindrop Prelude,” but I can play “Für Elise” through without music. I don’t because of stage fright and because the one time that I do, in a café, during high school, a man comes over and says, If I hear “Für Elise” again I think I will scream, it’s so overrated. For a moment, I almost scream. I perform well enough to play for the choir and accompany singers but not well enough to carry my own concert. You don’t have the emotion, my Russian piano teacher says. You play everything correctly, the pedaling precise, but you play like a robot, without pain or sorrow, without happiness or joy.
Eric is so musically inclined that at any moment, a song is playing through his head. Hence why he can often be found humming. He grows up forming bands with his friends. They call themselves names like the Derk or Aqua Hamster. At one point, he is in five bands, along with marching band at school. He is told that playing the drums will get him chicks. Actually the friend says it will get him laid. Not once does that happen. He does not get laid until college and not because of drums. The girl just finds him cute. There is a jazz band at this college and he signs up.
In jazz, they teach you how to improvise, he says, so that you are not just playing the music on the page.
I don’t know what to make of that. Not play the music on the page?
Last year, at Macy’s, he stops to inform me that the song playing overhead is in five-four. We have not been talking about music; instead we are walking through and admiring the holiday decor. But the time signature, two measures in and he will know.
I tell him that he must have a gift and he shakes his head. Every musician can tell you that.
Not me.
There are musicians and then there are people who know how to play instruments.
What are you trying to say?
Not you specifically but people in general.
Still we fight beside clothing racks.
One thing he says: If you could be an emotion, it would be spite.<
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One thing I say: If you could be an animal, it would be a sloth.
But I only say that out of spite.
·
My ears must be broken. I know what “Dear Prudence” sounds like. I have heard it a dozen or so times. Eric has also played it for me on the stereo and said many things about it. The following day, he says, I was hoping you would have said something else besides good or okay.
I take a stab at what I should have said. Something about the beat perhaps.
Was it beat-y? Beat-ish? Beat-le-ful?
None of those, it seems, as he looks away without laughing.
···
Every day in December, the weatherman calls for snow. Finally, it snows. I don’t know what I am more surprised by, the flakes or the weatherman being right, though he did stack his odds.
I get up early, at five a.m., to admire how white everything is, before the plow trucks come through and the dogs pee on all of it.
···
You need to know at least three thousand Chinese characters to read the newspaper and I might know a thousand. I cannot write any of them.
I have visited China only twice after leaving: once in the middle of junior high and once at the end of high school. When I go back the second time, I am given more freedom. I am allowed to go places by myself. This is nice I think until I get into a cab and ask the driver to take me to a restaurant where I am supposed to meet my mother and her friends. I can say the restaurant’s name fluently, without an accent, but the driver doesn’t know where the restaurant is. He asks me to write it down so he can type it into the GPS. In the end, I have to get out of the cab and find another.
I don’t find another cab. I just walk the twenty blocks or so, mortified.
A new fear I have is that I am losing my Chinese-ness. It is just flaking off me like dead skin.
And below that skin is my American-ness.
As a child, I often dreamed in Chinese, but I have not dreamed in Chinese for a long time. The steps in my logic, thus, ergo, hence, are now all in English. Oddly enough, I still count in Chinese, so I try my best to count everything that I pass.
Three bananas.
Seven bicycles.
Twelve babies strapped to twelve adults.
This way the skin stays intact.
It is a strange sensation to not be entirely at home in either language. I am more comfortable in English, but Eric says that he can still tell I am not a native speaker—Your idioms are always a little off and you say close for everything. Close the lights, the TV, the oven. You say close when you really mean turn off.
Because in Chinese, there is only one word for it. Guan.
Before Eric is there to correct me, I say things like tone death or don’t judge a book’s cover or furried brows.
Brows are furry, are they not?
They are, he says, but furriness is not a state of frustration.
After losing a game of anything, I will say, Don’t rub my face.
You mean Don’t rub my face in it.
Yes, that, but also don’t rub my face.
Of the many Chinese dialects, I speak only one. My mother speaks an additional one.
With her family and friends in China, she speaks Shanghainese. The dialect sounds entirely different from Mandarin. It is more lyrical, more beautiful, considered by some (my mother) to be the most beautiful dialect of Chinese. The first time I hear French, I think of her. The blending of syllables is similar, the sung nature of it. After learning that the French have tremendous pride for their language, I understand a little more about her.
Although he lived eight years in Shanghai, my father cannot speak it. This might be because she does not speak it with him—they speak only in Mandarin. When I am born, she does not speak it with me.
Studies have shown that the brain feels exclusion not like a broken heart but like a broken bone. It is physical pain that the brain feels.
I know a little Shanghainese. It is impossible not to learn any. La ta means extremely unkempt. She says this when describing me, my room. Dan di means to call a taxi.
Why do you need to know everything that we are saying? she asks at the restaurant I finally get to, her childhood friends around her.
I guess I don’t need to know; I would just like to.
I think of this later, that maybe she doesn’t teach me because Shanghainese is hers just as English becomes mine. I am fluent by age six and it must annoy her. Even now, people still talk to her in loud voices, as if speaking English poorly is the same as being deaf. People still laugh, as if it is the same as being very funny.
Though at times it is a little funny. The summer before college, painters came to work on our house. My mother could never say the word painters. She says panthers. When the neighbors asked, she told them there were three panthers in the house.
···
Reflection is the easiest property of light to explain. The front side of a spoon is a concave mirror. The backside is a convex one. At dinner, I carve out extra time to admire this interesting fact. I pull the spoon toward and away from my face and stop at the moment my nose turns upside down.
What are you doing? Eric asks.
Spoon staring.
But why?
To rid myself of anger.
···
All comedies end in marriage. All tragedies end in death. But what about everything else in between? Life happens in the middle, I heard someone very smart say.
I ask Eric about us. So what do you call this?
Limbo, he says.
A word that reminds me of a Latin dance.
What has changed while we are in this dance:
We no longer share the same blanket in bed; we have two separate blankets.
In a field, I throw a ball from one end and he throws it from another and the dog must choose.
The dog just sits there. This is a trap, he thinks.
TV watching is a struggle. He says, No more Food Network. Or Bravo. Or TLC.
Then what is there to watch?
The best friend says, Whatever happens, happens, but do no harm. Don’t just break it off for the sake of it. Don’t do something drastic just to prove a point.
She would rather it come down to the wire than have the patient throw in the towel too early.
Do you guys still cuddle? she asks.
Not at first. But then when I wake up we are, my legs over his, his arms over mine, the dog on top of all that. We must move into these positions when we sleep.
···
How do you explain color to a blind person? Not completely blind but almost. A task I have because one of my students is like this. She can see a glimmer of things but only if she looks long and hard. She can see that the sky is somewhat blue and that the sun is somewhat yellow.
Very good, I say. That’s dispersion. That’s when boring white light goes through a prism and comes out a rainbow. Blue light disperses the most, hence the blue sky you see everywhere. Yellow light disperses the least, hence the yellow sun you see in one place.
I am supposed to be helping her prepare for the GRE. Instead, we spend most of the time talking about color.
The color of my clothes and shoes.
The color of other people’s clothes and shoes.
The color of the sky when the sun has dipped just low enough to cause red light to bend the most and then, voilà, a sunset.
In the middle of the periodic table are transition metals. These metals have weird properties and are colorful. Manganese is lavender. Copper is royal blue. Nickel is seafoam green. Cobalt is dark orange. And chromium has lots of colors, depending on what state it wants to be in. I tell her that I used to work with these metals in lab.
So don’t ever say gray like metal.
Say gray like fog, like smoke, like ash.
She says, Gray like elephants?
I suppose that works too.
The next day, I get a call from this student’s mother.
My dau
ghter has said nothing about the GRE. All she ever talks about is color. Is color on the GREs?
No, it’s not. But it should be.
What are you really teaching her?
How to make sense of sunsets.
After I say that, the line goes dead. On the day of our next session, no one shows up, and I come home to Eric talking to his mother on speakerphone. I hear him describe to her his day in detail, down to the condiments he used for lunch. Ketchup with cracked pepper. Mayonnaise with honey.
He says the job search is going well. He has many interviews lined up.
I’m not surprised, his mother says.
My sun and stars.
Brilliant, brilliant.
·
Some advice on happiness: the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
The shrink adds, And if you can’t do that, then fake it.
···
Every so often, the school calls to see how my leave of absence is going.
It’s going, I reply.
And your health?
That too.
To the students who tell me they want to be scientists, I say, Are you sure? Do you know?
Scientists are mere mortals and mere mortals make mistakes.
Theorems are only theorems because they have never been proven wrong, but they have also never been proven right.
It is all a great big loophole.
Then what am I actually learning? one student asks.
Correct. So do you really want to be a scientist?
·
There is no snow in January but there is this deadly freezing air. From the window it looks deceptively warm and sunny, but once outside you feel your skin cells start to die. I wrap myself in a blanket just to go get the mail.
The best friend has sent me a present. It is a stuffed doll with yellow yarn for hair and two Xs for eyes and a line for a mouth. It is called a Dammit Doll. I am to grasp this doll by the legs and whack the stuffing out of it, while shouting, Dammit, dammit, dammit. I try, but the doll has proven to be made from industrial-grade stuff. I have named it Science, You Motherfucker.
···
Before we started dating, Eric would walk by my hood and compliment my vials—how pretty they were. Pretty chemistry for a pretty girl. And I blushed. I didn’t think I was that pretty. I wasn’t as pretty as manganese.