Jimmy Yang: How to American

Mom had an especially hard time assimilating to America. Her English wasn’t very sharp and the language barrier kept her from getting the jobs she wanted. She took a job as a menial bank teller in a Chinese bank twenty miles away, barely making minimum wage. Aside from hanging with some family friends, she never found her footing in the community. Mom was often quite lost during English conversations; she’d just politely nod and smile. When a foreign person doesn’t understand something, instead of saying, “Pardon me” they’ll just nod their head and smile “yeah, yeah, yeah.” Behind that cordial smile, I knew she felt terribly uncomfortable.

Mom got a job offer from Shanghai two years after we moved to LA. It was a general manager position at a chic clothing store opened by a famous Chinese artist. It was exactly the kind of job she loved and thrived at back in Hong Kong. It’d be a sizable pay raise from being a bank teller, and some much needed income for the family. But this would also mean she’d have to move to Shanghai, without us. We had a serious family discussion on whether or not she should take the job and go to Shanghai. I still remember that day vividly. Dad is an old-school guy. He wanted her to stay because there was nothing more important than keeping the family together, but I knew her mind was already made up. She said to me:

“Jimmy, ah, I’m just going there for work. I will always come back and visit.” The thought of her being a visitor in my life was devastating. I cried.

“Mom, I don’t want you to go. But do whatever you want.”

I stormed into my room and buried my face in my pillow. She left for Shanghai a week later, and she lived there for the next ten years.

I was sad, angry and confused. Deep down I understood why she left, but it was way too much for a fifteen-year-old to process. Mom’s decision to go to Shanghai was the first time the four of us had ever been separated. Being the youngest in the family, it hit me especially hard. I was raised to be the obedient Chinese boy, but my mom seemed to have chosen the American independent spirit to pursue her dreams. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. It took me a long time to come to terms with her leaving. I felt hurt, I felt resentful and I felt abandoned by my own mother. The first night after she left, my brother was out with his college friends, so it was just my dad and me at the dinner table. It felt awfully empty. The usually joyous and rowdy family dinner table was completely silent. My dad tried his best to help me cope with this, in his matter-of-fact way. “It’s just me and you now. Mom is not coming back. Get used to that. Eat.” I couldn’t swallow a bite that night.

Mom would call us to check in every night when it was daytime in Shanghai, but I didn’t want to talk to her. My dad literally had to press the phone to my face so I’d say hi and bye. She came back for a month every year but I couldn’t really enjoy that time, knowing she was just going to leave again. The world didn’t look quite the same anymore. The contentment I found at home was gone. My family, the only thing I could count on to be a constant in my life, had changed just like everything else. I couldn’t be the obedient Chinese family boy anymore, even if I wanted to; I had no choice but to grow up and be an independent American man.

90210

After graduating from John Burroughs Middle School, I was on track to go to Fairfax High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My dad might be foreign, but he knew the LAUSD was a cesspool full of gangs, metal detectors and teenage pregnancy. So in an act of brilliance and desperation, he used my grandpa’s address to register my school district, so I could go to the prestigious Beverly Hills High School, the alma mater of Hollywood stars like Angelina Jolie, Betty White and John Travolta.

I didn’t care about all the posh stigma of Beverly Hills; I was just glad that I got a second chance to establish who I was in a brand new school district. In John Burroughs, I’d solidified myself as the foreign kid who didn’t know how to sag his pants. Now I had a chance to use the American training I’d learned in middle school to show everyone I knew all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance like it was a Britney Spears song.

Beverly Hills High was nothing like the TV show 90210 . First of all, not everyone was white and they didn’t look like they were thirty-five. Most people picture Beverly Hills High as this glamorous high school with beautiful teenagers who have very cool adult problems; in reality, it was just a public school with a ton of Persian kids who drove Beamers. It was also a predominately Jewish school, which was awesome because we had all the Jewish holidays off as well as the Christian holidays. While other kids were praying and fasting during their days off on Rosh Hashanah and Passover, I was happily playing Grand Theft Auto and eating pork chops.

In high school, everyone was part of a clique, and they had a specific hangout spot at lunch. The cool athletes sat in front of the swim gym, the skaters sat on the front lawn and the Persians with Phat Beamers roamed the cafeteria. It was like the scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone introduces all the groups. As a matter of fact, research for Clueless was done at Beverly Hills High School, and our real English teacher Mr. Hall played the principal who introduces Brittany Murphy in the movie. That was his claim to fame in Hollywood and everybody in school thought Mr. Hall was a big-time celebrity. As the new fish that didn’t come from the Beverly Hills elementary school track, I was once again among a sea of strangers. I didn’t know anyone going into my first day of high school and I didn’t belong to any of those cliques. With no place to hang out at lunch, I just stood with my back against the lockers, hoping nobody would notice me, quietly eating my weird Chinese lunch that my dad had packed for me. My usual lunch was Chinese food my dad made from the night before packed into a Tupperware; anything from pork belly with pickled vegetables to eel braised in soy sauce. Once a week, my dad packed me a hot pocket. It wasn’t your normal American Hot Pocket with ham and cheese; it was a hot pouch filled with sticky rice bought from the Chinese grocery store. It looked like astronaut food but it smelled like the back alley of Chinatown. To be honest, it was pretty delicious, but the sticky rice pouch definitely didn’t help me look like a normal cool American kid. I badly wanted to find an identity so I could belong. Is there a group for short kids? Is there a group for kids who used to play Ping-Pong? And as much as I didn’t want to be the foreign kid again… Is there a group for foreign kids?

An old but energetic Chinese art teacher in Beverly High named Po Lau hosted the school’s Chinese Culture Club. It wasn’t really a club with a mission statement; it was just a bunch of Chinese students gathering in Po Lau’s classroom playing cards and video games at lunch. As much as I wanted to be American, the Chinese Culture Club became my lunchtime refuge. I hung out with Po Lau and the only three other Chinese kids in school, eating our weird Chinese lunches every day. It felt like visiting my uncle’s house in Hong Kong. Po Lau would even heckle us with his terrible jokes in his thick Cantonese accent:

“Hey, where is your playing cards?”

“We are playing with them right now, Po.”

“You have the red cards and black cards, right?”

“Yeah…”

“But where is your green card?!”

He folded over laughing at his own shitty punch line, while we shook our heads in embarrassment for him.

The Chinese Culture Club was a nice safety net, but it felt like a regression. I didn’t want to spend the next four years of high school hibernating with three other Chinese kids inside of a dank classroom; I could have done that back in Hong Kong. I wanted to have the all-American high school adolescent experience. I wanted to play in the homecoming football game, I wanted to take a road trip in my dad’s car and I wanted to go to prom with a white girl. I didn’t care about hanging out with the cool kids, but I was tired of being the foreign kid. All I wanted to be was a “normal” American kid.