chinese school dropout...

i sat in my little wooden chair with my wrinkled notebook in my lap, under the table, frantically trying to finish my chinese homework as the teacher began choosing the student who would go around collecting them. teacher's pets. disgusting. ok, i'm a hypocrite. in 'regular' school (this is chinese school) i played the part of the teacher's pet. i was the smallest in the class, as per usual, and i was the only chinese girl in the class. so i used it to my advantage, letting the teacher believe that i was the disciplined, sweet little asian girl that all little asian girls should be. hey, it's not my fault she bought into the stereotype. besides, it worked. and, i even got a free snack out of it. lemon cookies that crumbled and melted all over my teeth leaving a sugary film over them.

but, every saturday at chinese school, my guise was up. i was the delinquent in the corner scrambling to finish my chinese writing homework. scribbling the characters down as fast as possible. the problem was, in chinese calligraphy, things need to be precise. each detailed dash, slash, and cross is to be exact to create one uniform character that measures the same in height, width, and length each and every time you write it. it's an art form. and i was basically jackson pollock-ing it. a dirty mess of scrambled lines, crooked dashes, and lost dots scattered about, and not one character contained in the one inch by one inch box provided.

i was busted.

violent red slashes marked entire pages of my homework. like a bloody gash across the face of a gladiator. it seemed to scream across the table as soon as i opened it. calling all the other students' eyes to it like an awful traffic accident. their over-achieving eyes widened in terror. i slammed my flimsy notebook shut, the red rushing to my cheeks. if only they knew i was the teacher's pet during the week, they would not dare judge me.

a week later, i am sitting in the back part of our bronco, a.k.a 'the trunk', hunched over with my erratic pencil re-doing the same homework that got murdered the previous week. i look up at the approaching new york skyline, and pray that the holland tunnel is backed up something awful. some stillness would really do the trick right now. no luck, the tunnel is in the clear and my blotched calligraphy is starting to look like 49 miniature Rorschach inkblot tests. 49 distinct blots to say, "you are psychotic if you think you will ever pass second grade chinese school." the blots were right. i stayed back in second grade chinese school, and eventually dropped out long before i ever reached the halls outside of primary chinese school. you could say i was a chinese school dropout.

back then, chinatown was different. it had the smell and grime of greasy chinese food all over the streets. i strolled past the school last week and it looks different. cleaner. i thought for sure it would look grimier, and, wow, was that church always there? the hallways were always dark in the school and the bars on the windows made it seem more like a dungeon than a place to further my chinese education. a stroll pass the noodle shops and everything seems to look wiped down. the windows that used to have meat drippings splashed across it are now filled with zagat rating cards and laminated food critic reviews. the cooks who used to have blood and guts caked onto their aprons, are now in button down shirts. i peak inside the restaurant and there are more tourists than locals. chinatown has reinvented itself as the more astute version of the old. it's more tourist-user-friendly, with a museum (the MOCA- Museum of Chinese in America), tons of souvenir shops, and garbage cans on every corner for visitors from all over the world. every silk scarf, red lantern, and tofu shop precisely placed to paint the perfect picture inside that little chinatown box.

i'm not sure why, but i felt ripped off. this unwarranted nostalgia for the dirty tip-toe-around-fish-guts-in-the-gutter chinatown. i had no right to these feelings. i only came out here on saturdays (until my poor calligraphy showing forced me out) and chinese new year (to light firecrackers and run for my life as the dancing lions paraded down the crackling streets), it's not like i grew up here. i didn't have any memories of daily activities in these crooked streets. it's not my home. it's not my upbringing. yet, that feeling of loss was still there.

because what little i did have, was a sense of part of my history here. the part where i looked around and saw the other side of life beyond the suburban nj neighborhoods of colonial homes and split-level houses in different colors with sprawling green yards and abandoned bicycles in the driveway. the part where we got to slurp down oily shrimp and pork dumplings at dim sum. the part where i bought chinese comic books. the part where full-sized chickens hung from the restuarant windows. the part where everyone spoke cantonese. coming to chinatown was entering a different world. a world that was contained inside a split level in suburbia. a bumpy hour-long ride in the bronco trunk, and new york offered up it's dirt to me. gave me the permission to scribble and scrape my way around the culture that ran deep in my parents but only sprinkled on me occasionally. it was chaotic. it was smelly. it was dirty. but it was great.

so maybe i did suck at chinese school, but i still like chinatown as messy as my calligraphy... and i'll keep looking for it. next stop, flushing, queens... the 'real chinatown' in new york now.