Thanks to the list of Great Books, I quickly developed the vocabulary of a fin-de-siècle aesthete obsessed with art and turtles. I also developed breasts. I don’t think the reading part was causative, or even correlative. It was just a coincidence that I was going through the Awful Eights and adolescence at the same time. However, the list does explain why I prematurely waded through Anna Karenina, the greatest novel ever written about a French-speaking Russian adulteress. I didn’t grasp the big themes but somehow, the story of her tragic affair put me off meat for almost two decades. It didn’t make any sense, but why does anyone expect that it should? Let’s just say that my sudden aversion to meat had something to do with the fact that all the women seemed to spend their time heaving their bosoms at innocent bystanders. The bystanders dined well on their free meal. All the women died.
I had a bosom in third grade. It seemed prudent to keep it to myself.
My parents did not understand my decision to become a vegetarian, especially since the fresh flesh of animals was the only food group I could safely eat. From almonds to zucchini, just about everything else produced unfortunate effects, ranging from discordant fits of sneezing to bouts of hyperactive screaming. Some of my earliest memories are of intense itching and being swaddled so I wouldn’t claw myself to bits. Using an old-fashioned washboard and wringer, my parents rinsed out daily dozens of cloth diapers dripping with diarrhea and frowned in confusion when my perpetual rash got infected because I was allergic to detergents. Fish? Allergic! Cats? Allergic! Sunshine? Allergic! Etc. For all that I was a surprisingly functional little kid, but being allergic to just about everything sets up a relationship to the world that is inescapably adversarial. You cannot take anything for granted, including God’s purported benevolence as he watches over the (hmmm . . . tasty?) sparrows. Me, I was being eyeballed by the Almighty of Abraham, the judgmental Old Testament God that was busy smiting sinners and turning unworthy women into pillars of salt. Sulkily sucking my thumb (not allergic. Safe!), I used to imagine that I was Lot’s wife reincarnated, which explained both my liking for salt as well as my instinctive aversion to marriage. It pissed me off that she was “Lot’s wife” instead of, say, Veronica or Betty. These things register when you come from a culture that keeps the family unit sorted by calling you “Oldest Daughter.”
Koreans don’t understand “vegetarian.” In general, people who’ve experienced starvation due to war find it odd when a willful child rejects a perfectly acceptable food group just because. What, no Spam with your eggs? But you love Spam! Dried squid is good! American chop suey is good! Aigu, aigu, my mother wailed. What is wrong with Oldest Daughter?
No eight-year-old has a food philosophy. Refusing to eat meat was just something I had to do. In retrospect, I am glad that my father was assigned to churches in tiny towns where psychiatrists did not practice, because in rural America, food allergies are still namby-pamby liberal myths, setting me up for exceedingly vexed relationships with human authority figures who insisted on making me eat home-grown tomatoes and hand-caught lobsters and did not connect the dots when I began crossly exploding into hives. Adding insult to injury, most of my allergies weren’t fatal. That would have been interesting. No, mine were the kind that merely damned me to the perpetual motions of misery: wiping snot off my nose, knobbling watery eyes, watching my tongue swell, lather, rinse, repeat. Boring!
My dream was to get away from grownups telling me to stop sneezing. My mantra was self-sufficiency, and I started going after it as soon as I was able to crawl. The faster I could learn to fend for myself, the sooner I could set out on my own. I started by running the back roads of Maine, observing the quirks of the local ecology: fiddleheads to eat, pine cones for weapons, and beer cans worth money if you redeemed them. I ran to get out of the house. I ran because I was jumping out of my skin. I ran so I could be alone, running on restless legs that walked in and out of homerooms, kicking bullies in the schoolyard and slamming my brother in the shins. My sister just sat back and watched me fight, blinking bewildered black eyes and sucking contentedly on cookies.
By the following year, we moved again, this time very far north to a town full of snow plows. Not only was Houlton the first town we’d lived in that had shops, it had a real downtown with a shoe store and a movie theater that showed Star Wars. I didn’t live there for very long, because school officials quickly decided that my brother’s brain was turning into a black hole, threatening to become a portal to another dimension. I thought this was super. I couldn’t wait for his cranium to become my own personal TARDIS. To prevent the impending rupture of the space-time continuum, school officials recommended “boarding school.” This was a peculiar institution that my parents had never heard of, but one that might kill a second bird—me—with one stone. My brother would attend Phillips Academy at Exeter, and I would attend the sister school, Phillips Academy at Andover. Insofar as I had no idea what boarding school was—the best approximation I could come up with was “orphanage,” in the manner of Oliver Twist—it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be admitted. In fact, I was sure I’d fit right in, what with my thrift-shop clothes and constant begging for gruel.
Off I went, content in my mediocrity, thrilled that I was no longer going to show up in class and hear, “How come she’s so bad at math? Her brother is so good at it!” From now on, I would hear, “How come she’s so bad at math? Aren’t all Asian kids good at it?” No longer a specific 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