Open Mic (2 page)

At the Renham Galleria food court, Henry made it a point to eat pizza (even though the slices were always a little cold) and avoided the comic-book store and gaming depot. The cool white boys in his grade sat with their equally cool girlfriends, whose dyed hair always came out kind of blue-looking instead of the intended black, and ate the teriyaki combo #3 from Chang Gourmet after spending hours reading manga and trading used video games.

Another problem, at least as Henry saw it, was that people could tell from a mile away that he was Asian. So Henry started wearing white baseball caps with the brim pushed down low, trying to hide his jet-black hair and smaller, upper-eyelid-deprived Asian eyes. One weekend, after watching an episode of some Nickelodeon show where the star had bright blond hair and was beloved by everyone, he ran out to the store, bought a bottle of Color-Me-Blond, and dyed his hair. At school on Monday, he hated himself for not thinking through his decision. Kids kept asking him if “the carpet matched the drapes,” which Henry didn’t quite understand, given that they’d never before seemed interested enough to inquire about his house, though deep down he had a feeling it had something to do with the fact that his newly blond hair clashed with his still-black eyebrows.

Kids also teased Henry by pretending to talk in broken English, even though he had a perfectly good American accent. He decided he had to make it even more obvious that he didn’t speak the way they thought a Korean would. The following weekend, he decided to adopt a southern accent, so he rummaged through his parents’ old DVD collection. Unfortunately for Henry, the one movie the Lees owned that took place in the South was their boxed set of
Roots,
an epic TV miniseries about slavery. That Monday students were more confused than convinced by his new accent.

“Late for class again, Ching Chong?” a kid asked as Henry struggled to open his lock.

“Never you mind, boy,” Henry replied in his best
Roots
voice. “I hear tell the teacher’s fixing to be late for class on account of the coffee machine in the lounge being done busted, so he gone have to get his coffee from down yonder in the cafeteria where done —”

“Chinese sure sounds a lot like English,” the kid said. “What the heck did you just say?”

Dashing off to class, Henry tried to get a laugh by insulting the teacher in his new voice. “Lawd almighty, I done hear tell you smells right like a hawse,” he told her. Sadly, his classmates didn’t understand what the heck he was saying. The teacher must have, though, because she gave him three days of detention.

For the rest of the day, Henry simplified his southern accent by sticking the word
ain’t
into every other sentence. Nobody paid much attention. Obviously, his linguistic efforts were failing to convince anyone that he was a white boy whose daddy owned a plantation.

When Henry’s mom picked him up after school, Henry was so depressed that he didn’t see her pull up. She rolled down the driver’s side window and hollered, “Henry! You get in car, now!”

“Yeah, Ching Chong, you get in car, now!” the other kids hooted.

Henry hurried to the car, embarrassed by his mom’s broken English. The next afternoon, even though he lived several miles away, Henry walked home after detention. His mom saw him walking down West Renham Road and slammed on the brakes.

“What are you doing? Traffic is dangerous! Get in car now!” she shouted.

“Thought I’d save you some gas,” Henry said, looking around feverishly before diving into the backseat.

Thanks to the unchangeable shape of his eyes and his parents’ undeniable Asian accents, Henry realized he was never going to convince his peers that he was white. It was going to take a miracle for things to turn around, but luckily for Henry, a miracle was waiting for him in study hall the first day back from winter break: Marcy Spetucchi, the most popular girl in the eighth grade. And although she had never said a word to Henry before, when Marcy saw Henry sitting there all alone, she asked him out of the blue, “You’re good at math, Ching Chong. Can you help me with my homework?”

Up to this moment, Henry had always gotten frustrated when classmates asked him for help on math homework, but this time, he agreed. Marcy was too pretty to deny. As he taught her how to do math, making up rules and formulas as he went along, he realized that he’d finally stumbled upon the solution to his social woes. He’d been going about it all wrong, it turned out; rather than trying to convince everyone he wasn’t Asian, the key was to become über-Asian. Wasn’t this proof? For the first time ever, Henry Choi Lee was hanging out with the most popular girl in school.

After school that day, he accompanied his one sort-of friend (a pale, perpetually bloody-nosed kid named Sam, who lived down the street) to the mall, where they happened upon a group of kids from a rival middle school talking smack with kids from Renham.

Henry decided to test his new theory. He stalked over to the fight, crouched low, and started growling and shoving air around with his hands.

At first his classmates looked as stunned by his maneuver as their rivals, but then one of them moved closer to Henry. “You mess with us, you mess with the Karate Kid,” he said.

“Yeah, Henry could kick anyone’s butt at Farnham,” another one added. “He’s got a fourth-degree black belt in kung fu.”

“For real?” one of the Farnham middle-schoolers asked.

Henry nodded and kept yowling. For the first time, he saw his classmates beam at him.

“Why’s your nose bleeding?” the rival kid asked Sam.

“He got out of line,” Henry muttered ominously.

The Farnham kids backed off, and his classmates gleefully patted him on the back. As Henry fist-bumped them one by one, he wondered why he’d hated stereotypes so much. What was so wrong with people mistakenly assuming he was a genius? That he was good at math and science? That he was a martial arts master? Obviously the key was to prove that he was the most
Asian
Asian student in the history of middle school.

That weekend he did research online on how to be Asian and began crafting a persona that incorporated all the major elements of Asian-ness imaginable. His first move was to use tai chi and meditation.

In gym class, Mark Porter shouted in pain as his back seized up from trying to do a pull-up. As he writhed around like a grub on the cushioned mat while the rest of the class and the gym teacher stared at him in fascination, Henry gravely walked to Mark and stood over him. He clapped his hands loudly once to get everyone’s attention, then proceeded to rub them really fast like he was trying to warm them up. Mark looked up at Henry, puzzled but still making appropriate sounds of pain.

“I will now use tai chi to help your back feel better,” Henry said, and closing his eyes, he proceeded to move his arms in a dance-like motion à la Mr. Miyagi, pretending to shoot waves of
chi
into Mark’s back.

A moment later, Mark stopped groaning. “I think I feel something,” he said, keeping his eyes on Henry.

“Usually you do tai chi on yourself, to relieve stress,” Henry explained, “but if you’re really one with the life force, it’s okay to use it on others. What I’m doing here is re-directing positive energy to your back while at the same time pulling away the . . . er . . . evil energy.” Henry shook his head slightly as he concentrated with his eyes closed.

“It’s working!” Mark said.

Henry opened his eyes. Everyone, even the gym teacher, was looking at him like he was some kind of Zen wizard.

By the next morning, circles were forming around Henry wherever he went. Students wanted to see him perform tai chi again, but they were hesitant. Finally, a kid asked if Henry could help his strained wrist feel better.

“I only have a certain amount of
chi
to work with each week. Maybe next week,” Henry said.

“But —” the student protested.

“I said be ready for you next week!” Henry shouted, imitating the angry Chinese dry cleaner who yelled that exact same grammatically incorrect sentence at his dad any time Mr. Lee tried to pick up his dress shirts.

Some of the students didn’t believe in Henry’s magical tai chi abilities, so in homeroom, he decided to prove them wrong. Extending a stiff index finger, he zapped one of the beta fish in the bowl on Mr. Parson’s desk with a dollop of invisible
chi.
Nothing happened.

“The fish is fine,” a skeptic noted.

“Not so, young grasshopper,” Henry said, lightly patting the kid on the back. “I just used
chi
to scramble its internal organs. You’ll see: in a few days that fish will be dead.”

Sure enough, a few mornings later, the students arrived to find one of the beta fish lying sideways at the top of the water. Everyone was officially convinced that Henry was a tai chi master. No one seemed to remember that before Henry’s zap, beta fish seemed to die every few days since they didn’t have long life spans to begin with.

The kid with the wrist injury approached him again for his services.

“It seems pretty serious,” Henry said, feeling the kid’s wrist. “We might need to do some acupuncture. I don’t have my needles with me. Why don’t you go sharpen a half-dozen pencils, and we’ll see what we can do about this wrist pain you speak of.”

The kid raced off without a moment’s hesitation, and Henry was taken aback. Wasn’t the threat of getting punctured by pencils enough to deter this patient? The kid returned, clutching a handful of newly sharpened pencils. “Um, wait — are those lead pencils?” Henry stalled. “Yeah, no, that’s not going to work. Let’s just stick with the tai chi.”

Pretending to know stuff was exhausting. Henry almost fell asleep in English class. The teacher shouted for him to wake up, and Henry, startled at first, glanced at his peers before explaining, “I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating.”

The teacher rolled her eyes, and Henry leaned over to James Murphy to whisper, “I used my meditation to visualize tomorrow’s multiple-choice quiz. Choose
B
when you don’t know the answer.”

This, of course, hadn’t come from meditating. The “
B
strategy” was something he’d learned about multiple-choice questions when his parents had forced him to take a PSAT training course the summer before.

The best part about amping up his Asian-ness was that he got to spend time with Marcy Spetucchi. Because he was bad at math, Marcy didn’t learn how to do the problems correctly. When she failed her next quiz, Henry shrugged and said, “I guess you’re going to have to work harder at it.” She begged Henry to be her full-time math tutor every day after school. “You’re not like the other boys,” she said, smiling shyly at him.

Two more failed quizzes later, and Marcy finally realized the real reason he was different from the other boys: he was really, really bad at math, and something of a compulsive liar. She promptly fired him. Or dumped him. Depending on whom you asked. However, others had noticed them spending time together, and by the end of the year, people seemed to see Henry in a new light. In fact, nobody called him Ching Chong anymore!

Summer came and went with more SAT prep. When Henry got to Renham High, he was ready to take his role of Super Asian Man to the next level. Unfortunately, he ran into a problem. There was one other Asian student in the high school, Timmy Nguyen, valedictorian of the senior class, which changed everything. The whole student body now regularly mistook Henry (mistakenly or intentionally — what difference did it make?) for this Nguyen fellow, even though the senior was Vietnamese and looked nothing like Henry (the guy even had a full mustache and Henry hadn’t started shaving). Upper-class nerds shoved Henry into the lockers, assuming that (a) he was Timmy, or (b) he was a curve buster just like Timmy, even though Henry was bombing his classes and hurtling toward a decidedly un-Asian low GPA. His own former classmates from middle school ignored him again, since being unquestionably Asian was not considered cool at Renham High.

One weekend Henry’s parents rented the movie
The Departed,
in which two white actors — Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon — played foes. As they watched the crime drama together, Henry was stunned to discover that his parents had mistaken the two actors for the same person. They were convinced the movie was a psychological thriller about one white guy who had multiple personalities warring with each other in his head.

“Hold on,” his dad said, pointing at the screen for the dozenth time. “Is he the good cop now or the bad cop?”

Suddenly Henry was beyond mad — his white classmates thought all Asian guys looked the same, and his parents thought all white guys looked the same, too? Was he the only person on the planet who noticed that people of the same race weren’t all twins or clones? “You guys are racist!” Henry shouted, and ran upstairs to his room.

His father eventually followed him upstairs and sat next to Henry on the edge of his bed. It was equally uncomfortable for them both. When his father asked what was wrong, Henry explained everything: from when he’d first started school in Renham to now, when everyone was mistaking him for Timmy Nguyen.

Mr. Lee thought about this for a minute before responding. “Well, things could be worse,” he said. “For instance, take this Timmy Nguyen person. Imagine the poor guy, being mistaken for
you.
”

This failed to cheer Henry up, so his father thought about it some more.

“Maybe if you give classmates something to identify you, they don’t think you’re someone else,” he said. “Besides, you need do more extracurricular activities so you stand out to admissions committees at Ivies.”

Clearly his father was still trying to get Henry to become the cliché Asian son he’d always wanted, but Henry decided to take his advice anyway. The next morning, when his homeroom teacher asked for a volunteer to help a classmate read a scene for drama-club auditions, Henry raised his hand. After hearing Henry’s line reading, the classmate encouraged him to try out for the play.

At the audition, everyone was stunned at how good an actor Henry was.

“Do you have any experience?” the drama teacher asked.