You Must Remember This

Chapter 32: Luck Be A Lady

John realized halfway through Mrs. Huang's lecture that in the shuffle of seats that took place at the beginning of the period, a procedure that occurred whenever she suspected her students of excessive fraternization, he was sitting where Ernest used to sit. The vase of flowers constantly replenished last year had disappeared over the break, and with the custodial work that always happened over the weekends, what were the odds that he was sitting at that same desk which seated a dead man? Any special protection that the vase and Mrs. Huang's watchful eye afforded probably didn't last over weekends. This conundrum did not seem to occupy his group partners' minds, but why would it? They didn't know him. John's unique brand of melancholy clashed with Mrs. Huang's ever energetic temperament; he was one of the few students who had stuck with Chinese for all four years, most of his classmates being freshmen and sophomores, and so Mrs. Huang relied on people like him to be academic role models. Mrs. Huang had finally learned John's name, and after spending a few weeks trying to discern some identifying trait to create a nickname (Beth was the diligent one, and Juliet was "her little angel"), settled on "the philosopher"; this came from reputation alone, as Mrs. Huang avoided all philosophical talks unless they served to commend Frank: she had overheard Juliet call John that once and thus stuck with it.

But where was Ernest? Mrs. Huang thought it bad luck to keep any of Ernest's old papers, and once had presented all of them in a file folder to his parents with apologies. His name undoubtedly existed still in her gradebooks, not that John would ever be able to access them. It was like he had never existed at all, that he was a convenient fabrication to give John's inner monologue a devil's advocate and convince himself he wasn't crazy. John did not think Ernest had any distinguishing physical attributes; he looked, actually, very much like many of the other students, and while John's train of thought lingered there, he realized that he looked much more like an outcast. It did not help that he still talked with a curious accent that everyone with whom he talked placed as originating from a different part of China. John had hoped by now that he'd have blended in with the crowd, but a few weeks in and he was clearly still the foreigner—and not in a way which inspired pity from Mrs. Huang, one which made him sad he couldn't understand the students gossiping behind his back.

John knew that Frank had most likely gone through a similar experience, and asked him offhandedly before school one day:

"Am I one of them? I'd like to think we're beyond tribalism that isn't school-sanctioned."

"It's a reasonable question, Frank," John insisted. "You took the AP test last year. I see you chat with Mrs. Huang in the hallways. So I think it's reasonable to ask if beyond your comparative fluency, if you feel like they've accepted you as one of them."

"Culturally, besides eating a lot of Chinese food, my family isn't Chinese at all—why would we be? The closest we get to representing any particular ethnicity besides 'cosmopolitan San Franciscan' is having a British flag in a box somewhere. That gap isn't bridged simply because I speak with a good accent. You could ask the same question of Mr. T, who is far more fluent than I possibly would ever be in any reasonably common variety of Chinese—or any language—that you could think of: just because he's an omniglot doesn't miraculously place him in every single culture. He's no more Chinese than either of us."

"So how then would I go about absorbing more of that culture then, so I'm not missing out on aspects of class just because I lack that shared cultural heritage?"

"I don't know, John, go to Chinatown? Eat more Chinese food? Watch Stephen Chow films? This is a question best asked of Mrs. Huang, but I think the answer you'll find is that with greater fluency you'll find you get some of those answers."

"You're contradicting yourself, Frank. Language doesn't lead to culture, yet you understand culture better from language? You can't have it both ways." John was hoping for a magic bullet that did not boil down to studying more. Frank was smart, he knew a solution to everything. Surely there was a "good person" solution to this, like anything else.