Differentiating Equations
Writer: Meilan Steimle
“I’m Chinese,” I say, when it is my turn.
The teachers look skeptically at my brown hair and pinkish skin. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I say, frowning. My mother is Chinese and most everyone else in the class is Chinese. How could I not be?
First published in HELM: Revolution
Reflexive property: Meilan = Wasian (White + Asian) Kid
Pretty self-explanatory.
German-Irish Dad + Cantonese Mom = Wasian Kid
In the Chinese zodiac calendar, each year is assigned a different animal in a twelve-year cycle, and according to Chinese astrology, each animal confers specific personality characteristics on those born in that year. My family is hardly superstitious, but we still identify with our animal, whether it be dragon or ox, albeit with the same seriousness that most Americans regard their horoscopes.
On February 3, 1999, my family gathers at Hunan Garden restaurant for my Red Egg and Ginger party, a celebration of the one-month anniversary of my birth. Since I am born in early January, before Chinese New Year, a problem presents itself: following the American calendar, I should be a rabbit, but according to the Chinese lunar calendar, I am a tiger. Consequently, the zodiac-themed gifts, which are piled in vibrant, satin pouches on the cake table, are a hodgepodge of tiger and rabbit jewelry, fiery orange stripes lying next to the soft grays and taupes of the rabbit. Where the tiger is ferocious and independent, the rabbit is gentle and centered on social harmony. So, which am I, a tiger or a rabbit? I’m one month old and already having an identity crisis.
At the party, a good time is had by all. My father’s side of the family is less familiar with Hunan cuisine, but they love the copious amounts of sodium. There’s a picture from the party that I look at from time to time. My paternal grandmother holds me, eyeing the German chocolate cake to her left, the fuzzy auburn halo of her hair clashing with the red painted eggs in the background.
***
I first become conscious of my biracial ethnicity in pre-kindergarten when we sit in a circle and share our cultural heritages. “I’m Chinese,” I say, when it is my turn.
The teachers look skeptically at my brown hair and pinkish skin. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I say, frowning. My mother is Chinese and most everyone else in the class is Chinese. How could I not be?
Property of inequality: Meilan + math < success
It turns out that Chinese blood doesn’t necessarily equal brilliance in math.
“Meilan is having some trouble with simple multiplication,” my math teacher says. From the throne of her desk, gray fingernails tapping a sonata on the brown veneer, she is queen. I am flanked by my parents, giants squeezed awkwardly into the constraints of third-grade furniture. My teacher raises an eyebrow at me through silvery glasses, and I gulp and shift my gaze sideways, where fanciful, pastel Easter bunnies frolic across the slate walls. She continues to explain my various shortcomings with simple calculations, and heat smolders behind my eyes and spreads to my nose, where it burns. I lower my head into my hands, squeezing my eyes shut, and my teacher’s nasal voice is muted by my new mantra: I am not good at math.
Simplifying polynomials: find the greatest common factor
In 1994, Crystal Children’s Choir was founded by a small group of immigrants with nothing in common but their love of music and their Taiwanese heritage. Fifteen years later, the only thing that’s changed is the number of choristers.
Being one of the only Wasians in a choir that’s often mistaken for a Chinese tour group has its perks; I usually show up on the website (Crystal Choir welcomes diversity!), and teachers remember my name (the white girl!) before most of my friends’. Still, it can be annoying when one of the teachers tells a story in Chinglish and all I observe are flamboyant hand gestures and the occasional squawk about eating at “Mac-uh-dah-no’s.” Sometimes, when I have to ask yet again for a translation of the conductor’s stage directions, a little resentment settles in my stomach. I’m not Chinese enough for this choir.
During one late night rehearsal, the unseasonable humidity seeps into my cheeks and neck, reducing a perky ponytail into the drooping ear of a basset hound. I race around the courtyard, chasing my friends, hearing the squishing in my shoes with every damp step. As I sprint ahead and tag a boy, my 10-year-old lungs and equally mature sense of social propriety dovetail in a bellowing scream of “YOU’RE IT!” There is silence for a moment as my friends wince at the echoes of my shriek, and then everyone begins to laugh.
“That’s her white part coming out,” quips the boy I just tagged.
Our giggles and breathless energy intermingle in the evening air, and I laugh the hardest.
At this moment I recall my mother's stories of her childhood in Los Angeles: the oppressive summer heat pooling into sweat stains on her T-shirt and the insensitive white classmates in their saddle shoes and Keds who jeered “Ching Chong Chinaman” across the tanbark. She had recounted how she and her siblings would frustrate them by pretending not to hear their taunts, later laughing at their ignorance.
Tonight's revelry is so different from the sweltering afternoons of my mother’s childhood. I know I have great pipes; why else would I have been chosen for the solo in “Hot Cross Buns”?
Less is More: when 90% > 100%
“And don’t forget to use the finger!” my mom calls across the house as I head upstairs to start my math homework.
Shortly after the conference with my math teacher, my mother takes it upon herself, with all the ferocious resolve of a Chinese matriarch, to mold me into a mathematical superstar. Once she has determined that my troubles lay in the details of arithmetic (seeing “13” where the problem reads “12,” forgetting to carry the “1”), she devises a brilliant plan to remedy them: the finger. What starts as a simple method of running my index finger along the numbers so as not to lose track of them becomes my mother’s mantra, countering mine: “use the finger,” as if every utterance will add another percent to my grade.
Over time, I begin to despise “the finger,” the phrase losing its meaning through overuse. Pretest: “Remember to use the finger!” Posttest: “Did you use the finger?” Bad grade: “I thought I told you to use the finger!” Good grade: “See what happens when you use the finger!”
***
It is a balmy, California afternoon, and I sit alone, puzzling through algebraic word problems.
The jaw is one of the most powerful muscles in the human body, the passage reads, as if including background facts in the word problem will distract from how inherently frightening algebra is. Under the right circumstances, humans can bite off their own tongues! If Daniel takes two bites to chew through a banana, and an apple is three times as tough to chew, how many bites does it take Daniel to chew the apple? I daydream about gnawing off “the finger” to a bloody stump and presenting it, wrapped in graph paper and decorated with pieces of protractor, to my mother.
I take a break, and, on a whim, google “Wasian.” What comes up is a slew of articles, forums, and websites lauding the general attractiveness of my ethnicity. Half-Asians are the most attractive ethnicity, professes a (in retrospect, extremely creepy) message board with an album of bikini-clad Wasian women, some with bunny ears, posted below. Cute Asian faces with curvy bodies? writes one commenter. Count me in!
I smile as my self-esteem rises. I am not just a mathematically-challenged middle schooler, I am part of the Half-Asian Master Race, as one commenter eloquently puts it. For the first time, being Wasian seems like something special. I’ll always be considered pretty, I think with a smirk. With or without five fingers on each hand.
Inductive reasoning: from specific to general
Fox News would have me believe that New York, like my native California, is a melting pot encouraging cultural awareness and political correctness. This is not the case at Riverside Country Day School.
When my choir class travels to New York to perform at a music festival, we stop at a local middle school, and I gape at the utter… whiteness of the student body. Cackling voices echo around the auditorium where we are waiting to perform. I look out at the roiling sea of ruddy skin and freckles, yellow and brown curly hair, and feel utterly foreign.
For context, I attend a school that is 40% Indian, 40% East Asian, and 20% other (that’s where I am). Consequently, though I have been to several Diwali festivals and K-pop dominates my iTunes library, I’ve never been to a football game where the players were any bulkier than the flutists in the marching band.
“I’ve never seen so many blondes together in my life,” I whisper to my roommate, Tiffany.
We watch in silence as a chubby, towheaded boy yawns, his chin gathering in rolls at his neck like fondant folding over itself.
“Behold,” says Tiffany in mock wonder. “It’s your people.”
I glance around at my fellow choristers, who are giggling loudly amongst themselves in a mass of glossy black heads and uniform yellow shirts, and I let the ecumenical brown of my hair fall in a veil around me.
“Hey!” I turn to see a boy with a complexion similar to uncooked dough squinting at me through my curtain of hair. “Where in China are you guys from?”
I blink blankly at him. “We’re from California.” I’m not sure what I am supposed to feel: amusement as his mouth gapes open like he is trying to swallow his embarrassment, annoyance that he assumes every group of Asians is from China, happiness that he lumps me in as Chinese, or sadness that he lumps me in as Chinese. How can he and Tiffany both see me as different from themselves?
Inverse logic: “If p, then q.” “If not p, then not q”?
“Ni hao ma, Mei-Lan?” asks Simon, the aging owner of Hunan Gardens, his skin lined and wrinkled like the crumpled graph paper in my backpack.
“Wo hao,” I say clumsily. I’m sure my accent is abysmal, but Simon doesn’t mention it. To him, it probably sounds like the Chinese equivalent of “Mac-uh-dah-no’s.” “Why are you at the front desk today? Don’t you usually work in the kitchen?”
“Jarvis is taking care of it.” Simon’s smile stretches across his face when he mentions his son. “He’s growing up. I wanted him to go to college, but he didn’t like it. He’s really good in the kitchen, maybe better than me.”
As a thirteen-year-old, I don’t quite relate to Simon’s parental pride, but when I watch Jarvis emerge from the kitchen, balancing two circular platters tangentially on his arm, I think I understand.
Pan-fried noodles, wavy like sine curves, sizzle and pop like it’s Independence Day. I crunch on them with my cousin, six-year-old Chen Li, who was adopted from China. “We should go to China,” she says while gesturing with a piece of orange chicken perpendicularly impaled with her chopstick. “So the whole family can see where our ancestors lived!”
“Not everyone in our family is Chinese,” I remind her.
“Who isn't?” asks Chen incredulously. The restaurant lights glint and reflect off of her hair, shining in orange streaks down her back.
“What about your dad?”
I find great amusement in the way Chen Li’s face slacks with shock. “Really?” She looks disbelievingly at her ethnically British dad, with his sandy hair and narrow nose. It has never occurred to Chen that her father is different from her. She wasn’t taught specifically about race, so she didn’t give it any more thought than variations in eye-color.
When we prepare to leave later that evening, I hear Simon conversing with a young boy in fluent Mandarin. Someone must have studied hard at Chinese School, I think sourly, remembering miserable afternoons in front of a chalkboard more gray than green with a teacher who taught entirely in Chinese. When I turn around, I’m stunned to see that Simon is talking to a Caucasian boy wearing a Tigers baseball cap.
“How long did you live in China?” asks Simon, switching to English.
“My whole life,” the boy replies. “We just moved back this year. I went to an international school, but I’m pretty culturally Chinese.”
Embarrassingly and irrationally, a part of me is jealous of this boy I’ve never met. How is even he more Chinese than I am? If this white boy can unapologetically identify with being Chinese, why can’t I?
Three points determine a plane
Heat steams off of the worn steps of Tiananmen Square and condenses on the lateral faces of my tangerine parasol. People shimmer and flicker through the Forbidden City like holograms, wavy and insubstantial, there one minute, ghosts the next. The dizzy haze rises through layers of stone and history and coils around us like the spiraling tails of the dragon statues decorating the compound. Here, in the mist of human discomfort, tourists and natives alike blur together. To distract myself from the burn of my shoulders, I think of a beautiful site we had toured earlier in the day. The Temple of Heaven, which was constructed completely without nails, is perfectly balanced, both graceful and architecturally sound, a transcendent example of art and math combined.
“Excuse me!” The Chinese girl who is squinting through blue contact lenses calls out to me in English as broken as her peroxide-blond hair tips. “Can I take a picture with you?” After I’ve nodded awkwardly, she hands her phone, ensconced in a tiger iPhone case, to my mom. “Halfies are always so cute!” she says as my mom snaps the picture.
***
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says a casual friend, shaking her hands in shock after I recount the story in Crystal Choir. “You’re Wasian?! I thought you were just white.” I nod, and she grins. “That’s so cool! Can I, like, be your best friend?”
Isosceles triangle: two equal sides on a stable base
Sometime in my eighth grade quest for “self-definition,” I stumble on a blog about people of color in the media. Am I a woman of color? I send a question to the moderator of the blog. A few hours later, I receive a response.
“If you can pass as white, then no, because you have white privilege,” she has written.
What follows is thirty minutes of scrutinizing my nose in the mirror until my breath fogs up the glass. Can I “pass”? It is obvious that I look more white than Asian, but could I not be a woman of color just because of how I appear? To me, the words “woman of color” evoke thoughts of my mother and Rosa Parks: strong, successful women triumphing over adversity. The words “white privilege” conjure up images of bullying and separate water fountains. Staring at my blurry face, I scowl. How can it be fair that half my heritage be denied based on my skin tone?
Later, I semi-jokingly lament to my mom about how I have to admit to having white privilege. She looks at me like she should know me but doesn’t.
“Well, of course you do,” she says. “Would you rather be discriminated against for how you look?”
I deflate, and I realize that I’ve just done what all the minority-rights bloggers say is the worst crime a white person can commit: whine about the tribulations of being white. I look white, so I have white privilege. I look white, so I am not a woman of color. I look white, so I am not Chinese. Heat gathers behind my eyes, and then I feel hot all over, like the oppressive summers in Los Angeles and the sizzling noodles at Simon’s and the steaming steps of Tiananmen Square. Hot like shame.
But to my surprise, my mother goes on.
“I was teased in elementary school for being Chinese,” she says. “But when I went to college, people said that I wasn’t Chinese enough.”
I stare at her. My mother, the full-blooded Chinese woman, wasn’t Chinese enough?
She continues. “I don’t speak Chinese. I don’t eat Chinese food, and I didn’t marry someone Chinese, so people would say I’m not that Chinese because I don’t ‘act Chinese.’” She pauses. “Who you are isn’t about labels or behavior. It’s something inside of you. I don’t need to use chopsticks to prove I’m Chinese.”
A smile begins to creep onto my face.
“Besides,” she says, “forks are faster.”
sin x / x: Meilan approaching 1
At the end of my freshman year, my family gathers once again at Hunan Garden. It’s changed a lot since I celebrated my Red Egg and Ginger Party here more than 15 years ago. Simon, who still asks me “ni hao ma?” has crumpled into an old man with a sloped back, his hair streaked with white.
A few weeks earlier, my family, dedicated patrons that we are, received a flier informing us that Hunan Garden was being replaced by Mandarin Roots, a Chinese-Californian fusion restaurant run by Jarvis. So here we are at the opening, sampling pork quesadillas with mango kimchee emulsion and beef sliders with Laotian chili aioli.
The decor is also different; the traditional, circular tables with spinning lazy Susans have been replaced by sleek rectangular ones, and new chairs are covered in tiger-print upholstery. Simon scurries around the restaurant, grinning, chatting with diners, and bragging about Jarvis’ culinary training at famous restaurants throughout the U.S. I suppose that some may contend that Asian culture has been lost; a once purely Chinese restaurant has shed tradition for the 21st Century. But I look at Simon and I know that there’s nothing politically incorrect about happiness.
It’s funny, but math is my best subject now. Somehow, in the seven years from third grade to now, the seemingly impossible happened: I changed. I was just too wrapped up in who I thought I was to realize it.