“The Philippines,” I said as I stood and pulled at my shirt lest the horizontal stripes appear uneven. “Would you like to stand up, Marco, and tell the class where you’re from?”Īll I kept thinking was that I hated what I was wearing: corduroys far too flared at the hem and a shirt with stripes that seemed misaligned because one stripe was not at a perfect horizontal with the pant waist. “This is Marco Tan,” she said and she smiled. Crayola drawings of cats and dogs, twirling smoke emanating from house chimneys, and figures that I supposed represented parents and siblings were posted on a wall in between the entrance and the windows. The students’ desks were arranged in rows. The classroom consisted of white walls and a white ceiling, a floor murky gray, and the teacher’s desk in front of a blackboard. She stood in front of the class to introduce me. Baxter was dressed in purple polyester pants and shirt. Derrière bulbous as that of a lady bug, dark hair short and curly, Mrs. Baxter, assigned an in-class exercise that required our being divided into groups. Rodney was the first to extend a welcoming hand when the teacher, Mrs. She dressed in tee shirts torn at the hem and that sported rock band logos, and her favorite expression was “piss lick.” ![]() All this gave him the air of a middle-aged man trapped in the body of a prepubescent. His most distinguished characteristic was a pumpkin round nose with hair that protruded from the nostrils. Andrew walked with a slouch, had moppy hair, and spoke with a drone baritone. I had two desk partners: Andrew and Billie. Matt was a dark-haired boy, tall and broad shouldered, who thought Dolly Parton was the most beautiful woman alive. In any case, Squirrel talked with a lisp and he fretted over his height, often wondering if at 13 or 14 he would experience a growth spurt as his older brother had. From what I observed, guys used it primarily to reference a lack of coolness. He was close friends with a short blond boy who was called by his last name of Squirrel, although behind Squirrel’s back, Rodney called him “gay.” I’m not sure that, at 12 years old, we knew what sexual practices the word gay connoted. Rodney looked like Lisa Whelchel, everybody’s Mouseketeer crush at the time – kittenish eyes, eyebrows so heavy that they appeared colored on by a felt pen, and a shoulder-length bob, the ends of which he had a habit of incessantly patting. Lack of cultural and racial diversity notwithstanding, my sixth grade class at Bancroft Elementary consisted of a motley bunch of 20 students. So there I was in Walnut Creek, California, the new kid enrolled in the middle of the sixth grade and thus the subject of scrutiny by two boys I did not dare turn my head to look at. ![]() Image courtesy of But decisions my parents made for the welfare of the family could not be contested for long. ![]() To our expressions of reluctance, my father had said, “This is for you, so that you can experience more of the world.” With the move to America, my brother resented the loss of his car my sister was heartbroken she’d no longer have shopping trips to Hong Kong I missed my weekends eating rice and pork loaf by the pool, sun soaked in trunks that were growing increasingly tighter on account of my expanding girth. The Bank of America had promoted my father to a vice presidential position that required him to set up office in its San Francisco headquarter, and he and my mother decided that the suburbs would provide the best schooling for their children. What truly mystified the boys and girls at Bancroft was why this foreigner from a non-existent country, who was rumored to possess the nomenclature of an ancient explorer and the habits of an English duke, was in their midst. I could have descended upon them from another planet, only to 12-year-olds in 1979, anything other worldly would have been less strange: Mork from Ork made us laugh together with a fellow earthling named Mindy, and planet Krypton was the home of our favorite superhero. As evidenced earlier by a girl who had mimicked dabbing her nose with a powder puff when I had first sneezed into my hanky, a handkerchief to the students at Bancroft Elementary was something flashy, a decorative article of clothing such as a walking cane and Edwardian boots more befitting a dandy than a boy from American suburbia. I wanted to blow my nose, but I couldn’t take out my handkerchief from my pocket without the risk of a derisive comment. The coldness of the January air was giving me the sniffles. After class one day, I overheard two guys talking about me behind my back.
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