Nothing But the Truth (8 page)

With a few deft twists of The Baby’s wispy hair, the China Dolls convert
Mei-Mei
into Bebe, complete with a sophisticated up-do. In less than five minutes, The Baby accomplishes what I haven’t been able to do in six years: be inducted into the China Doll private sorority, an exclusive club only for the petite, beautiful and all-Asian.

“This would have been cute for the last school dance,” says China Doll One, taking The Baby’s hand and twirling her around.

China Doll Two looks at me curiously. “What did you wear to yours?”

They are so lucky, those China Dolls. Their dad is a second-generationer, meaning he was born in America. The fallout of that good luck is that the China Dolls can wear makeup, dress in the latest fashions and even hear a
compliment or two straight from his mouth, if not their mom’s. It’s why the China Dolls have such, shall we say, healthy self-esteems.

While I try to figure out a way to be honest yet save face, I look away to where Anne is studying a math book, not paying attention to what the China Dolls are doing to her baby sister. What a geek-and-a-half. School’s over, summer’s begun. But even Anne somehow convinced her first-generation parents to let her go to a school dance with some hunk from another school. So that makes me a double geek. I’ve never even been asked.

“I didn’t go,” I mumble, reaching new lows on the Social Scale.

“Really?” shrieks China Doll Two so loud, she could have gone vocal cord to vocal cord with her mom, The Gossip Lady. “But Mama told us that you can go to dances now.”

“Yeah, but only with Taiwanese guys.”

“But you’re white!” says China Doll One.

My cheeks flame. Whatever whiteness there is on my skin burns to a crisp. I am too white to be one of the China Dolls, not white enough for Steve Kosanko.

China Doll One giggles. “Well, we can only date Taiwanese guys, too, right, Grace?”

“Right,” says China Doll Two, grinning secretively at her twin.

Anne, the other outcast shunned from the China Dolls Club for her flat seaweed hair and stumpy legs, looks up from her math book. “I think Asian guys are cute.”

At this, China Doll One snorts. “Like, when have you ever dated an Asian guy?”

“Like, when have you?” asks Anne.

Panic wrinkles the China Dolls’ foreheads, making them look like overgrown Shar-Pei puppies. Had they known lines pleated their precious skin, the China Dolls would have sprinted home in their tiny sandals to slather on a mud mask. China Doll Two demands, “How do you know?”

“Know what?” I ask.

“Duh! They date white guys,” says Anne.

“White guys?” I blurt out. Instantly, my heart shrinks a couple of sizes as I remember my white guy who betrayed me.

“Shhh!” The China Dolls cast anxious looks at the living room, where all the parents are sitting, blissfully ignorant of the white-guy dating that’s gone on under their flat noses. No matter what generation our parents are, the most important mandate in their lives is to marry us girls off to a “good one.” Good, of course, meaning a rich Taiwanese man.

“Duh! Add two and two together.” Anne scowls at me like I’m the first half-witted, part-Asian twit she’s encountered in her life. “God, you really need our math camp, don’t you?”

Our
math camp?

Our?
As in hers and mine?

That tidbit of information isn’t lost on the China Dolls either. They stare at me as if my IQ jumped a full thirty points. China Doll One asks, “You’re going to math camp?”

China Doll Two whispers, “Where?”

“Stanford,” answers their mother. Mrs. Shang charges into the family room with her gossip-sensing nose twitching in the air. Everything about this woman is wide—hips, nose and mouth.

I can tell by the way the China Dolls tilt forward on the
orange sofa that their panic is mounting as they try to detect whether their mom—she of the bionic ears—overheard their white guy revelation. Lucky for them, Mrs. Shang is looking at me greedily. I know she wishes she could steal my one potluck-worthy accomplishment and wing it to her son who’s upstairs with Abe, playing computer games. “Your mama just told us. So maybe you go to Stanford for college, right?”

I mumble something incomprehensible about college being three years away, hoping Mrs. Shang will find something else to gossip about.

“You kids want?” Mrs. Shang holds out her Jell-O, green this time.

The China Dolls shake their heads, not because of their obsessive weight watching (God forbid they break the three-digit pound barrier), but because their stomachs are full of envy for me. Me, Mama’s disappointment of a daughter. Me, the too-white girl who will never be part of the exclusive China Doll club. Me, the newly dubbed math wizard who hasn’t stepped one big foot onto the Stanford campus. It’s dizzying that all those self-help books that Janie and her mother devour are right: perception is every thing.

“How could you do this to us?” wails China Doll One as soon as their mother marches back to gossip with the adults.

“Now all we’re going to hear this summer is how you and Anne are going to get into Stanford!” cries China Doll Two.

“It’s not fair,” they repeat like broken dolls.

Stanford trumps beauty. And the only way for the China Dolls to regain their position as the reigning Empresses of The Potluck Group is to marry billionaires. Can you say,
“Yahoo!” Oh, sorry, girls. The founders of that company were from Stanford.

It’s funny how fast you can develop a taste for someone else’s just desserts. Suddenly, I’m craving Jell-O, the greener the better. I’m ready for seconds and I haven’t even started on my first serving.

10
The Three Stooges

I
am such a twit.

How did I get so swept up in Mama’s propaganda campaign that for a couple of weeks there, I actually believed I wanted to go to the Stanford University Math Camp for “mathematically talented and motivated high school students”? After getting sick of hearing me gloat, “I’m going to SUMaC,” Abe pointed out that sumac is a poison plant. A cousin to poison oak and poison ivy. Well, no kidding. With a few minutes left before I head to the airport, I am itching all over with anxiety and dread.

“Come on, four weeks will go by fast,” says Laura, lying on my red comforter cover that Mama insisted on buying for my birthday a couple of days ago so that I could start sleeping under good luck. So far, the comforter is a dud. After reading the fine print in the SUMaC materials, I realized that if my fifteenth birthday had been just a month later, I wouldn’t have been old enough to attend.

“Yeah, they’ll fly by.” Janie nods her head hard so that her curls spring up and down like bungee cords. “It’s not like
we’re going to be here anyway.” Her manicured fingers run through my matted carpet. I know she’s just trying to fluff me up, too. But sumac’s yellow oil seeps into my head, and my brain develops a severe allergic reaction:
Let me stay! A summer of Tonic Soup isn’t so bad!

“Hawaii and basketball camp aren’t exactly in the same league as SUMaC,” I say. “SUMaC” spews out of my mouth the way Steve Kosanko and Mark Scranton do: worse than disgusting, repulsive, something to be squashed immediately. I flatten the wispy strands of carpet next to my hips.

Laura and Janie exchange a look.

“I saw that,” I say, triumphantly, pointing an index finger at each of them, my personal Pep Team. “You know it’s true.”

A thump, thump, thump pounds down the hall, and Abe pokes his head into my room, spinning a basketball in one hand. Summer show-off, all he’s got on his schedule is
manga
comics, basketball, computer games and packing.

“Oh, my God!” he squeals dramatically, and I hate to admit it, sounding like a baritone version of Janie. “A whole month without The Three Stooges talking to each other at least five times a day. How are Laura, Curly and Ho going to survive?”

“Don’t you have some comic book to read?” I ask Abe before I slam the door on his still-smiling face. “Yuck,” I say, shuddering. “Maybe math camp isn’t such a nightmare compared to a summer with
him.
”

“Well, you can vent all about it.” Janie hands me a pink journal with giant, green polka dots on it. On the first page, she has inscribed: “Patty + (insert hunkalicious math camper’s name) = Summer Fling. Nothing but the Truth by Patty Ho.”

“No way!” My smile disappears into the null set when the doorbell rings, and Mama yells up the stairs, “Anne here! Time to go!”

The only things flinging
in my summer are bodies, hurtling out of Mama’s way as she barrels through the packed airport terminal like it’s Sunday at a Chinese market, thronging with equally pushy shoppers. Her mission: get to the front of the line first. Who cares if it means taking out a businesswoman, harried dad and a little kid or two?

“Watch where you’re going!” snarls a lady, baring teeth that have been bleached an hour too long. She rubs the thin arm that Mama nearly dislocates. Naturally, Mama pays her about as much attention as she pays her own clothes. Not a nanosecond.

“Sorry,” I tell the woman, smiling apologetically at her. But she ignores me, teen Asian flotsam and jetsam in the wake of the Mama tidal wave.

“Get some manners. We aren’t in China,” the woman mutters before stomping off as far from the rude immigrant as she can get.

Like me, Abe hunches into himself. Disappearing is easier for him than me; he can basically hide behind my gargantuan suitcase. But you can’t disguise a huge, hulking Asian elephant any more than you can me. Amazingly, Anne doesn’t duck-and-hide like we do. She simply follows in Mama’s footsteps, my mother who has now cut in front of an old man in a wheelchair, narrowly avoiding a collision.

“God, what did you pack?” huffs Abe.

“Stuff.” I mentally inventory all the outfits and matching
shoes that Laura and Janie picked out for me to borrow and bring. Anyway, why is Abe complaining? He’s been pumping iron for two years, figuring he might as well grow wider since he wasn’t growing any taller. What, exactly, are those muscles for, if not to carry heavy things?

“You pack it, you carry it.” Abe drops the ancient suitcase onto the dirty airport carpet. “Anne is.”

Yeah, well, Anne considers a book a fashion accessory, and her beat-up, ripped backpack the must-have handbag of every season. So obviously all she needs is a tiny duffel bag.

“Hurry!” Mama yells, motioning to us impatiently. She is the angry general of our regiment gone AWOL. Punishment by embarrassment awaits the poor defectors. People turn to look at her, then us. Mortified, Abe moves away from me, suddenly riveted by the arrival and departure times at a nearby kiosk.

I struggle with the suitcase that Mama herself used when she left Taiwan seventeen years ago. Sweating, I stumble forward.

Thank God for stanchions
because even Mama realizes that while she can bash through a line of people, she can’t cut through metal and rope. A screaming toddler lies on the ground behind us, his hands and feet flailing, which is what Mama looks like she wants to do. She sighs heavily, jittery for having to stand still for once. Not a good sign.

Her silence is golden for all of three seconds before the barrage of last-minute instructions.

“You have airplane ticket? Registration paper?” demands Mama, staring at me like she expects me to have forgotten every thing.

I nod and nod like I am a Patty Ho bobble head doll.

“Remember, Auntie Lu lives in Palo Alto. You call if need anything. You have phone number, right?”

I nod again.

Yes, I have the phone number of Mama’s only sister in America. The last time I saw Auntie Lu was when I was nine. There are only two things I remember from her visit. The first is her present, dried cuttlefish that I nearly choked to death on. And the second is her fight with Mama over a man named Victor. I woke up the next morning, thinking I had dreamed about the yelling, but Auntie Lu was gone. So I’m not sure whether Auntie Lu is a stranger I happen to be related to. Or a strange relation.

Regardless, Auntie Lu is on my Do Not Call list. Just the thought of a Mama clone hovering over me for a month makes me vow never to contact her.

“You have cell phone?”

The Patty Ho bobble head nods again.

“But no call unless emergency. Too expensive.”

Save the dime, Mama.
I can already hear my summer telephone conversations with her:

Mama: You study hard?

Patty: Uh-huh.

Mama: Math camp so expensive.

Patty: Uh-huh.

Mama: You friends with nice boy?

Patty: (Silence)

And then all I hear is a click on the other line. No good-bye. No I miss you. Just a dial tone of disappointment.

It takes all of
a half-second for the destructive force of nature that is Mama to blow away any semblance of customer ser vice. The check-in lady, a friendly grandmother in a uniform, beckons us with a warm smile and one plump hand. I almost expect her to push freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on me until Mama leads the charge to the counter.

“
Aiyo,
why so slow?” demands Mama.