Jimmy Yang: How to American

“Don’t fuck with this kid, he’s fucking Bruce Lee.”

From that day on, nobody said one more word about my mama ever again.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL HUSTLE

In second-period science class, I sat across from Juan Menjivar. He was like the Mexican Bart Simpson, a notorious troublemaker. He wasn’t the nicest kid per se, but he was fun to be around. He would always make fun of people and disrupt the class. The teachers thought he was a nightmare, but I’ve always seen him as a friend; in fact, one of my first friends in America. I became friends with Juan when we struck a business deal early in the school year when he sold me his lunch tickets. Juan had government-issued lunch tickets; they are basically food stamps for students from underprivileged households. Each ticket could be exchanged for a free lunch that normally cost five dollars and Juan would sell his tickets for three dollars. He would go up and down the lunch line every day and ask, “Does anyone need a ticket?” I always thought you’d be a fool not to buy from these lunchtime pushers. You got the same exact lunch for a two-dollar discount. Even my mom would think that was a good deal. So I quickly raised my hand and said, “Yeah, I’ll take one.” Juan became my lunch ticket dealer for every lunch in John Burroughs.

A few weeks went by and I thought I should strike a long-term deal with Juan to lock in my savings. So I proposed to Juan, “I’ll buy your whole week’s tickets, and I’ll pay you ten bucks for them on Monday. This way, you don’t have to come out here and work every day. You can just have ten bucks every week and enjoy your lunchtime.” Juan tried to make some calculations in his head but he soon gave up; the American public school system has failed him. He said, “Okay, ten bucks, but you have to give me your chocolate milk every day.” Without hesitation I said, “Deal.” I didn’t care much for my Alta Dena boxed milk anyway and I could use the extra dollar I saved to buy whatever soda I wanted. That was the first open-trade agreement between China and Mexico on American soil.

I was owning these publicly educated kids in the lunchroom and I was owning the public school curriculum in the classroom. Soon I became an honors student at John Burroughs. I didn’t think I was particularly special; the American education system was just particularly easy compared to the high-pressure educational system in Hong Kong. In the States, most kids are still learning the multiplication table in seventh grade. In Hong Kong, we’ve all learned algebra by sixth grade. Aside from English, every subject in the US was at least two years behind compared to Hong Kong. My family came to this country hoping for the best college education, but we didn’t realize how pedestrian the public school system was leading up to it. I didn’t mind that at all. I figured I could just cruise through school and score some easy As. I was like a twenty-year-old Dominican baseball player using a fake birth certificate to play in Little League. But my parents had other plans. They wanted me to be on the fast track; they wanted me to be in the so-called Magnet Program. So my dad went to have a chat with the principal. Dad took me to school and he brought all my textbooks. He stormed into the principal’s office and slammed the textbooks on the principal’s desk.

“My son has learned this already. He is smart. You need to put him in the smartest classes.”

The principal was intimidated by this middle-aged Asian man with a comb-over. She responded:

“Your son is on a good track, he is already in the advanced math class.”

“That’s too easy, when can he learn calculus? What about game theory?”

My dad had this weird obsession with game theory, an advanced mathematical prediction model. To him, that was like the Holy Grail of high-end math. I did end up learning it in college, but I’ve forgotten all about it because like most things they taught me in school, it was completely useless. The principal said, “the highest-level math class we have is algebra, the best I can do is put him in the algebra class.”

Dad turned to me and asked, “Do you already know algebra?”

I hesitated for a second. Then I replied, “No, not really.”

I lied. I had already learned algebra in Hong Kong, but I wanted to continue my scam through the American school system. I soon became an honor student, and my dad proudly rocked a MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT IN JOHN BURROUGHS MIDDLE SCHOOL bumper sticker on the back of his Pontiac Grand Am. I would say that’s a win-win.

Scammer of the month.

Good grades were nice, but I wanted much more than that. I wanted to be accepted by my peers; I wanted girls; I wanted to experience the American teenage life.

I had gone to an all-boys school from first to seventh grades in Hong Kong, so I’d had literally zero interactions with the opposite sex. Now I was thrown into a brand new country, with a different language, white girls who were six inches taller than me. Multiply all that by the awkwardness of puberty, forget about it. I had no chance. I was more lost than a dog watching Game of Thrones . There was this really cute girl at John Burroughs named Ally, or so I was told. She was a tall skinny white girl who looked like Molly Sims, every Asian man’s dream. She was the all-American beauty. I stared at her every day during lunch, wishing I had enough courage to just say hi to her. She would sit by the basketball courts with her friends and I would stand twenty yards away at the lunch tables, secretly admiring her. It kind of sounds creepy now, but I was in eighth grade; it was super cute.

Juan would egg me on. “Just go talk to her, man! It’s not a big deal.” It was the biggest deal in my mind; it was life and death. “Just go!” He pushed me in the back and I stumbled two steps forward. I was so scared that I quickly cowered back to my safe distance. I firmly stood my feeble ground. Juan continued, “Okay fine, I’ll go talk to her, and tell her ‘Jimmy really likes you.’” I grabbed his arm so hard he could have dislocated his shoulder. “No!” I shouted. That was perhaps my only chance, and I was too scared to even have a friend talk to her for me. And for the rest of the school year, I stared at her from a distance as if I had a restraining order. And for the rest of my teenage years, I dreamt about having a girl like Ally.

I kept my easy-grade scam going and graduated John Burroughs with straight As, and I got my lunch on a government discount through Juan. I survived my first year in America by constantly assimilating and adapting. It was exhausting. But my family was the one constant that kept me sane. Whenever I felt lost in school, I could always count on coming home for a home-cooked Shanghainese dinner. It was a blessing to have a buffer year at middle school before being judged by the unforgiving teenage peers in high school. It was a year of American cultural boot camp, a year for me to learn English, a year for me to assimilate. I went into high school with my pants sagged, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and ready to catch some footballs. ’Murica!

My nuclear family has always been the rock in my ever-changing life. We settled into our new lives after our first year in America. My dad had gotten a steady job as a financial adviser, my mom worked as a teller for a Chinese bank and my brother got into UCLA. On the surface, everything was seemingly working out perfectly for this immigrant family. But while I was trying to fit in in school, my parents were dealing with their own struggles as adult immigrants. My dad landed a job as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, but it was a commission-based job. He didn’t know many people here in America yet, let alone people who would trust him to invest their money. He always acted like everything was fine, but I could hear the arguments between him and my mom about the mounting credit card debts. I felt responsible being a vestige in that household, and I stopped asking for the newest Jordans or the newest video games. I’d rather wear flip-flops to school than be homeless.