Tonight is no exception. As I deliver my last line, the room bellows, “Bravo!” The alumni clap, while the parents’ eyes go wide. I can tell what they’re thinking—Wow. I want my kid to speak like that girl. Maybe if they come to this school, they will. One by one, they whip out their checkbooks.
“Danielle De La Cruz.” Mrs. Mandalay beams. She looks at me and nods, pleased. “We’re so proud to have students like Dani at our school, thanks to the generous donations to our annual fund!”
The crowd cheers. As Ming steps onto the stage with her violin and fills the room with the soothing sound of Brahms, the crowd takes out their phones and snaps pictures of the talented young violin prodigy.
When Ming finishes, the room erupts in thunderous applause. Ming bows and walks over to the mic with her violin. Slowly, she begins her speech, one that I’ve heard many times before, describing how she was a poor girl in a Chinese village with a love for violin, an instrument her parents neither understood nor knew how to support, when Mrs. Mandalay offered her the opportunity to come to America.
Ming looks to our headmistress. “Thank you, Mrs. Mandalay. You gave me the chance to be who I am,” she says with a smile. She delivers the line with the perfect combination of emotion, and the crowd eats it up. Mrs. Mandalay puts a hand over her heart. I make a mental note to ask Ming later, does she really mean it? Or is it just part of the performance?
Afterward, Mrs. Mandalay moves on to the live auction, and Ming and I walk offstage as parents happily drunk bid on useless items like a personalized walking tour of the city led by a high school student. I fight the urge to slump down on one of the chairs and kick off my heels, but I know I can’t. We all have our roles. Mine is to smile and say thank you.
Mr. Connelly walks over and gives me a hug. “You were great,” he says to me. I introduce him to Ming, and he congratulates her as well, telling her how proud and honored the faculty is to have her at the school. Before he leaves, he leans in and whispers into my ear, “Get used to it. You’re going to have to do a lot of these when you get into Yale.”
I smile. I turn to Ming after he’s gone and ask her if she’s seen Zach. Ming rolls up the long sleeves of her formal velvet dress and shakes her head.
“Hey, did you mean what you said about Mrs. Mandalay changing your life?” I ask her.
She nods.
“Because your parents didn’t understand why you play the violin?”
She shakes her head. She leans over, as if to tell me a secret, then hesitates. I furrow my eyebrows, What is it?
“No, because I’m gay,” she finally says.
Five
Claire
I glare at my Chinese teacher in class. Her lack of ethics has doomed me to a lifetime of American burgers.
At lunch, my friends crowd around me, analyzing the pros and cons of going, while I look over at Teddy. He’s sitting at the senior table with his friends, but he’s not talking to them. His rice sits untouched while he scrolls on his phone.
What are you thinking? I text.
He looks up at me but doesn’t text back, instead he puts his phone away. He’s mad. He hasn’t said a word to me since I told him the news this morning.
I wait for him after school, and we walk the long way home, where the Old Northern Gate was. Shanghai used to have many gates. The gates separated the concessions in Old Shanghai. There’s the former French concession, where the French dignitaries used to live. There’s the British and American enclaves, ceded as a result of the Opium War.
I think about that, about all the concessions I’ve made over the years, pieces of me carved out to please my parents. Maybe this is just another one. I’d like to think that, like Shanghai, eventually I’ll get it all back.
I look over at Teddy. Say something. We cut through People’s Park. He stares at the umbrellas on the ground, fingers squeezed into his pockets. It’s a marriage market day. The sidewalks are lined with umbrellas. On each umbrella, there’s a piece of paper taped to it advertising an unmarried girl. They call them “leftover women,” meaning women over thirty who have not yet married, a fate considered worse than death. Desperate mothers crowd the parks trying to marry off their girls by umbrella—no doubt, my mother’s worst nightmare.
“You’re gonna go and fall in love with one of those big-nose Americans,” Teddy finally says.
His voice is raw and vulnerable. I had no idea he was hurting this bad.
“I won’t!” I promise.
“And it’ll be so unfair because they won’t even appreciate how pretty you are,” he continues. “All Chinese girls look the same to them! They’d be just as happy with ugly Yan!”
Yan’s a girl in our school who has tiny eyes and single eyelids. I have double eyelids and long lashes, the source of envy from my classmates. What my classmates don’t know is I used to have single eyelids too, until my mother took me to Korea, at my grandmother’s suggestion, to have my eyes done when I was ten. I bet Yan could look cute too if she went to Korea.
“Nothing’s going to change,” I assure him. “We’ll Skype every day. Six a.m. California time, nine p.m. China time.”
He shakes his head like he doesn’t believe me. He parts his lips, and I think he’s going to tell me to try harder to stand up to my parents, but instead he kisses me hard on the mouth. His lips are hungry, his hands traveling fast down my cheek to my neck.
“Whoa,” I say, pushing away from him. I try to catch my breath. The umbrella mothers give Teddy a dirty look.
“C’mon, I want you to remember me,” he says.
I shake my head at Teddy. “No,” I say. Not like this. “And what do you mean remember you? I’m still going to be with you!”
“You say that, but you won’t,” he says. “You’ll meet some other guy and you’ll . . .”
I take a step toward him. Our hands touch.
“I won’t,” I say.
A man selling roses on a tricycle squeezes by us. Teddy looks down at the umbrellas and mutters, “Maybe we should just break up.”
“What?”
“Well, you’re going away and I’ve got the gaokao coming up,” he says.
I can’t believe it. And to use the gaokao of all things to break up with me.
“Fine. You want to break up? Let’s break up.” I let go of his hand and start running.
Teddy calls out for me. “Claire, wait—”
But it’s too late. I race across the street and hail a taxi, the tears pooling in my eyes.
Two days later, there’s a big black box waiting for me on the dining room table. I’m hoping it’s from Teddy, apologizing. We haven’t spoken since the day at the park, though I’ve spent hours glued to his WeChat, going through old pictures of us.
“It arrived this afternoon,” Tressy says, setting down a plate of fried chicken.
I pop a piece of chicken in my mouth. “You preparing me for American food?” I ask. Tressy’s been my nanny and our housekeeper since I was five. She’s from the Philippines and is the only reason I speak good English.
The deliciousness of the chicken wing—golden, fried to perfection—catches me off guard. Another reason I can’t go—Tressy’s too good a cook.