Nonfiction First Place, 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest
1. Pray for parents smart enough to pass the toefl so an American university will accept them on a full scholarship. Supposedly, there’s a trick to acing the multiple choice: choose the option that sounds most like the question, where words seem to blend, letters seem to dissolve, definition and pronunciation shape-shift—the dove, similar to the pigeons that grandpa soaked in red vinegar and fried in pork fat, and yet dove is what they did last summer at the river when they’d run out of money for red bean popsicles. Pray they are smart and lucky, that they listen to English on the radio every night, that the influences of Anglo-Saxons and Norman French and Latin will seep into their heads, maybe rationalize the etymology, make English easier to understand.
2. Be patient. Let the parents have a first child, a daughter. You don’t need to be first. First is the worst, so the saying goes. They’re going to America anyway, so they’ll have no trouble skirting the single child policy. They’ll leave their first daughter in China with ye ye nai nai because who can study stereochemistry while entertaining a baby. The first daughter will be treated like a doll, picked up and carried everywhere, fed only what she approved. She will only eat the fatty skins from duck, the muscle and breast too difficult to digest. She will drink soy milk, not cow’s milk—too expensive, rationed for pregnant ladies. She will get sick all the time. Like a bamboo shoot suffocated by trees and starved of sun, she will grow.
3. Now they will have you. You don’t need to do anything, just amass cells and be born when the family has reunited in the same country, the same state. Where milk in cartons or jugs or gallons is abundant, where companies provide free baby formula, where it’s time to consider houses and school districts, where it’s easy to self-insert into Disney princesses whose heads sprout blonde or red or brown locks because you are the lucky one, American born, never displaced, the dark strands from your head a mirage.
4. Follow in the steps of your older sister. If she could get this far with English being her second language, if she could break into an Ivy League on scholarships and leave you in the echoes of high school teachers wow, you’re that sister then you can do it too. A few tricks: sometimes teachers use old AP exams for in-class exams, so if you’ve done them all, every exam from 1954 to now, there’s a guaranteed full score.
5. Don’t date. Or do date your Science Olympiad partner who might have ADHD and you only see as a friend, so you’ll crush his heart later and think it’s still okay to message like nothing happened, because nothing happened, not to you. This is a learning experience: better be clear with the emotions; don’t stay quiet and avoid the problem by feigning too-many-APUSH-DBQs to review. Or by feigning a stomachache, which you’ve done so many times you think you know how to induce a real stomachache.
6. Maybe try the dating thing again. You are presented with a promposal, a Kaneki Ken pillow, which you accept gladly only to turn down prom. He’s cute, but this is high school. It’s an emotional and social investment that doesn’t justify the time lost from watching anime or going over the degree course requirements PDF to verify, once again, that you can graduate university in three years rather than four.
7. By now you’re in college and you’ve forgotten most of the Chinese drilled into your head at Saturday Chinese school, days filled with rote memorization and hallways scented with brown sugar bubble tea and fried chive pancakes from the particular week’s vendor. Keep forgetting. You won’t need it. The world will adapt to you, to English.
8. Make some selective friend choices in college. The engineering department seems full of Asian guys, a sizable portion of whom are international. They act like everyone else, but when the semester ends and they invite you to Happy China for dinner, they roll up in a BMW 5 Series, leased, because next year an Audi will take its place in the rotation. Your sister has to tape the trunk of her twenty-year-old Nissan Altima down, a hand-me-down from your parents who’ve since bought a new Honda Accord, another vehicle that’d probably be fine after taking a bullet.
9. Go to a dance because your mother’s dreams were crushed when you skipped prom all those years ago. When the guy from your software development senior capstone class asks you to E-ball, the cute term organizers used for engineering ball, say yes. You buy a twenty-dollar dress from Amazon and cram your feet in wedges and try to figure out where to hook your keys—maybe on the shoe buckle. E-ball is at the museum, so even if things get awkward, there’ll be things to distract. The guy is from Beijing, but he speaks fluent English. He talks about Jay Chou and hot pot and how there are too many homeless people in New York City and the meaning of life. Continue to probe, but share little. That can come later, over Facebook Messenger.
10. When he asks you out on the day of graduation, since both of you are graduating in three years, with the same majors, heading to big tech companies in the same area, say yes. This is the best choice.
11. Move in together after realizing you never stay the night at your place anymore, and yet you’re still paying the rent. Get introduced to all the hot pot restaurants in the area: Little Sheep, Haidilao, Boiling Point, Mumu. Learn how to make frozen tofu, how to buy the right soup bases for hot pot at home, how to delay the Instant Pot for just the right amount of time so there’s congee piping hot in the morning, how to grow endless scallion to top dishes for the vibrant sprig of green. You exclusively speak English with each other; his English improves and your Chinese deteriorates.
12. Learn what an OPT is: Optional Practical Training for F-1 students. Learn about the H-1B visa lottery: random selection once a year, with a three-year extension. Try to empathize when he can’t understand why illegal immigrants can stay in the country and those who earn six-figure salaries can get kicked out by random chance. But you have a home and parents in Beijing, you should not say. Right now, you are a peacekeeper, a gentle creature, a wife-in-training. Words like “deserve” and “fair” and “right” mean nothing, you chant to yourself quietly and tell him it’ll be okay.
13. As two years pass by and both of you get promoted and the Restricted Stock Units come in droves, start holding back your luck. You were too lucky growing up. It must be returned now. He misses both H1B lotteries, and with one chance left, he might need to work from another country for a year. It’s too much for him to handle; long-distance is the final blow to a relationship, he says, and you think about how your dad was in America and mom was in Europe for graduate school, and how your sister grew up knowing only the prune-like faces of ye ye nai nai.
14. There’s an easy solution, you like to say. You say this all the time when people over-complicate situations. Someone just needs to implement the feature, to clean the bedroom, to hang the clothing under the sun, to scrape off burn marks from the electric stove, to double-check receipts after every purchase. There’s an easy solution. A fast track to green card. Someone just needs to do the work.
15. Get married sixteen days before your birthday. Somehow it means more, that you get married while some of your peers are still in school. A wife at twenty-two rather than twenty-three is one more year’s worth of wife experience, not sixteen days more. You’ve always been efficient like that.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, the Cincinnati Review, Hobart, New Orleans Review, the Offrings, Passages North, the Rumpus, West Branch and elsewhere. Her work is included in Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021, was a finalist in Best of the Net 2020 and long listed in the Wigleaf Top 50. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
SPOT IMAGE CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA
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