failure, I was a generic one. Huzzah! If I was a dunderhead with numbers, however, I excelled at being ornery. Wherefore, I planned to use my excellent schooling to become an artist. To my parents, I might as well have declared: “When I grow up, I want to be homeless!” They hoped it was just a phase, like my sister’s purple hair or my brother’s garage rock band. But I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and figured that I had no claim unless I was paying my own bills.
This was my father’s influence. He loved cowboy westerns, so what little television we watched tended to have dialogue such as: “I got two bits and a buffalo hide. That enough to buy me South Dakota?” In the black-and-white world of my childhood, a “bit” was enough to make small-town dreams come true, and a dime could feed a family of five for a week. “God watches over . . . ,” “loaves and the fishes . . . ,” “manna from heaven . . . ,” etc. What can I say? My dad was plugged into the God hotline; miracles worked for him. He also drew a straight line between education and getting money to pay for . . . more education. One summer back home from boarding school, I’d been hoping to work as an agricultural laborer, because that’s how kids in Maine used to earn their allowances. To no one’s surprise except for mine, I was a lousy farm hand, because my wheezing scared the milk cows, and my hives scared everybody else. I was left with the next best option: auditioning for the role of Window Girl at the Dairy Queen. Solemnly, my father offered me the choice: I could work for minimum wage and end up with a few dozen dollars after taxes. Or, I could earn terrific grades and get academic scholarships for thousands. I was trapped by the implacable logic of numbers. For me, there was no escaping their maddening grasp: as a full-fledged member of the lumpenproletariat, I could barely handle addition, let alone offer a counterargument to Marxist theories of the labor-based marketplace. As a result, I ended up forever unable to make a perfect swirly cone, for some skills require a lifetime of practice, like producing flaky pie crusts or forging metal for swords. Amazingly, however, my dad’s plan worked and I ended up winning essay contests where scholarships were the prizes.
This is why Asian kids are good at school, because their parents trick them into believing that it’s a slot machine guaranteed to pay off if you keep feeding it. Where do they get such insane ideas? Along with just about every other cultural belief, the explanation can be found in the storyline of a fairytale. The Chinese ones go like this:
There once was a man named Wu Ch’in, who studied hard and became very learned but no woman would marry him, because he stank of fish. A soothsayer had predicted that Wu Ch’in would become a great man, yet he lived in poverty and drowned his sorrows in drink. Decades dragged on, and all the people who’d heard the soothsayer’s prophecy were dead of old age. Now, as it happened, the southern provinces were being plagued by a dragon. The Emperor issued a proclamation, calling on his people to help solve this problem. “Maybe Ch’in knows the answer?” the villagers mocked him. Roused out of his stupor by their kicks, Wu Ch’in realized that he did know the answer. So he got to his feet, bowed to the startled bullies, and staggered off to see the Emperor, taking advantage of the long walk to get sober. At the palace, he impressed everyone with his great learning. Conveyed into the Emperor’s presence, he shared the information that quelled the dragon and cured the Emperor’s bunions. In gratitude, the Emperor named him Imperial physician and gave him three beautiful wives plus a most valuable singing canary. Thus the soothsayer’s prediction came true, and Wu Ch’in became a great man.
Thanks to the Confucian tradition, the crabby intellectual saves the day and gets the girls. Here’s the part that counts: these girls couldn’t care less about the beefcake warriors who carried out the Emperor’s orders, because they’re just dragon fodder. It’s a good reminder that the game of love is rigged: if you want to win, you have to bribe the soothsayer.
No surprise, then, that Asian families like to have at least one scholar in the family, the same way that Irish families like one son to be a priest: they’re handy to have around in case there’s a supernatural emergency involving a soothsayer with a lisp. I enjoyed the studying part, and frankly I was temperamentally inclined to be a drunken bum, but my every attempt at the lush life was promptly smacked down by the better angels of my nature, otherwise known as “allergies.” Name a vice, and I’m allergic to it. In my defense, I’m also allergic to most virtues. Every time I tried to break the rules in the predictable adolescent ways—smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, attempting to inhale—I ended up with some weird side effect that made strangers scream at the sight of me.
Eventually, though not as quickly as you might think, I learned that I did not possess the skills to become an amiable pothead. My incompetence at behaving like a normal American teenager did not improve my mood. Making matters worse, my freakishly omniscient dorm mother failed to be bamboozled by clever ruses to throw parties in my room. Not only did Ms. Amster know exactly what I’d been up to, she figured that as soon as I sampled contraband substance X and extracted all the relevant data from the experience, I’d lose all interest in it, because what I was really doing was conducting a dorky science experiment on myself. Take, for example, cigarettes. I was allowed to smoke smugly for exactly one week, after which point my dorm mother informed my parents that I’d developed a few very bad habits, including failing physics, snorting hot chocolate mix straight from the packet, and smoking a pack a day of Marlboro cigarettes. My parents responded by giving me permission to smoke in my room. However, I was to stop with the hot chocolate business immediately. So I responded exactly as they expected, and studied until my eyes fell out of my head.
I passed the class by reading every physics book I could get my hands on and memorizing all the solutions to the sample equations, which made me the human equivalent of a parrot squawking “one plus one equals two!” (Don’t tell anyone, but the parrot can’t really add.) It was a perfect example of how a dyslexic kid can succeed spectacularly in school by learning all the wrong things, but none of the people in charge seemed to care as long as I gave them the answer they wanted. In Sunday school, for example, my takeaway from the story of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, who threw Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego into a burning pit of fire for defying his will, was that 1) a vegetarian diet makes you fireproof, and 2) to be a proper biblical villain, your name must be unpronounceable. I did not, however, correctly internalize that great piety is a virtue rewarded by God, and that I should practice praying fervently, just in case I too ended up tossed in a fire pit by an angry potentate—a fate that, given my congenital inability to worship rich people, was not as farfetched as it might seem. When a strange man came by my all-girls dorm at Andover and started giving out sexist, possibly feminist, but indisputably ugly t-shirts saying “Vote for Bush,” I asked him nicely to state his purpose. His name was George Bush, he said; he’d come by to visit the daughter of a family friend, and he was running for president. (Of what? The Rotary?) It never occurred to me to genuflect, because I was too busy mistrusting him, eyeballing him warily until Katie sauntered into the Clement House common room and drawled delightedly at the stranger, “Y’all are so nice to come and see me!” dispensing beauty-queen air kisses and pacifying “Uncle George” sufficiently that he forgot to sic the Secret Service on me.
This would have been a better story if George had accepted the cigarette I’d offered him while we were waiting for Katie to appear, but no. For several weeks, however, I wore the BUSH button he gave me, because I was too lazy to remove it from my sweatshirt. Meeting the future AAAUGH! didn’t inspire me to become a Republican, but shortly thereafter it dawned on me that puffing on cigarettes had turned me into a remarkable facsimile of him, shriveling my skin and stiffening my joints as well as killing off what few spare brain cells I possessed. (I later learned that, yes, I was allergic to tobacco, wherefore smoking it was a bad idea, and eating it was even worse.) So I was stuck with a conundrum. Should I quit smoking and make the adults think they’d won? Should I keep smoking, just for the pleasure of thumbing my nose at authority? My parents were horrified by my habit, but by giving me permission, they were counting on the fact that I’d be so dismayed by their approval that I’d immediately stop. The truly aggravating part was that I’d already decided to quit, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of believing their ploy had worked. In the end, I decided that it made no
