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 sense to cut off my nose to spite my face, so I crossed cigarettes off the list and carried on with my science experiment on myself.
By the time I graduated high school, I’d managed to sample quite an assortment of youthful indiscretions, but in the manner of nibbling off a corner of all the pieces of chocolate in a Valentine’s Day box and putting each one back in their paper-lined spot with an airy look of innocence. Given that adults were always pushing foods on me that made me sick, I had no confidence that forbidden fruits were any worse for my system than, say, avocados or crab cakes. To my teenage self, ingesting beer-in-a-can was fraught with the same mixture of fear, hope, and anticipation that I felt before trying the fish eggs-in-a-tube that Anja from Norway received in a care package: even though it was ninety-nine percent likely that I was allergic, how would I know unless I tried it? Same went for Vegemite, Marmite, and Nutella®, exotic spreads that WASPs seemed to love but which landed me in the Infirmary, where I convalesced dyspeptically on a regimen of ginger tea and Saltines.
In the same spirit of doomed experimentation, my plan was to earn my high school diploma and be done with formal education forever, because I’d tried it, didn’t have much use for it, and decided that it was not for me. It irked me that adults were under the impression that I was of a cheerful temperament, whereas in reality I was a misanthropic ball of peevishness. It was almost as if I was two people in one body. I used to think that I’d been a twin in the womb, and I’d eaten the other one while it was still underdone. It would explain a lot, really.
So what’s a surly teenager to do? For lack of a better plan, I went to college. This was where the trouble really started, because my antisocial, colorblind self still really wanted to be an artist.
“Foolish human!” the angels giggled as they threw cold water on my dreams. And lo! I was drenched with new allergies—to ink, clay, and paint. I was a sex-change operation away from being a Bubble Boy, the doctors warned, because making art was extremely bad for my health. Unless I was prepared to move to Antarctica and make ice sculptures for penguins, I had some unpleasant realities to face.
Slowly, and rather against my will, I was turning into a scholar named Double Ch’in. Now all I needed was a dragon to slay. So I decided to go looking for the monster of my dreams. By the time I’d finished my undergraduate degree and started on a Ph.D., I’d begun waddling around small continents in sensible shoes, carting around my precious packet of toilet paper, sunscreen, and a jar of antihistamines. Disappearing for months and years, I burrowed into cities such as Florence, London, and Seoul, but mostly Paris, a place that bears remarkably little resemblance to the romantic fantasies spun about it. This was fine with me. I wasn’t looking for love, drugs, yoga classes or any other “girl” narratives attached to stories about free spirits bravely traveling alone. When your trips abroad are being paid for by your father/divorce settlement/publisher, you’re not free. You’re expensive. Besides which, I grew up foreign in a native country. From birth, you’re an alien being, a world traveler by default: dropped down the chimney by migratory storks.
In cities called Cosmopolitan, everyone is born of a bird. We are all the same kind, fine in our feathers but naked in our skins. Not all birds fly.