Chapter 11: Shades of Grey

Chapter 11: Shades of Grey

Back in the second grade, as my grandpa would pick me up from school, he would sometimes ask my teacher “good or bad day?” to get a gauge on how I was getting along with others. There were often more bad days than good. By the beginning of fifth grade I was labeled a “bad” kid so often that I began to see life in terms of binary; as there was black and white, there was good and I was bad.

My fifth-grade teacher was an Asian man. At nine, that surprised me. By then I had already absorbed the idea that certain kinds of people belonged to certain jobs, and “elementary-school teacher” wasn’t one I associated with someone who looked like me. I hadn’t yet learned that that surprise says more about the world than it does about me.

He was young, probably around 30 years old, with a slightly stern looking square shaped face and very full, intense eyebrows. He wore short sleeves on that first day and I noticed his athletic looking arms and wondered if this man was even stronger than my dad. I had never seen him at school before and it was most likely his first year teaching. Because his face looked like mine, I thought he was Chinese at first, and tried speaking to him in Mandarin but he didn’t understand, telling me that he came from a much smaller country close to China called Laos. Because his surname was very long and hard to pronounce, he simply asked us to call him Phouang.

Phouang walked around the classroom and showed us where things were. As he presented the bookshelves with the classroom collection paperbacks, he noted that he had also wanted to share a scrapbook of his, to anyone interested. He had gotten married over the summer and the scrapbook contained pictures of his honeymoon. I was curious at first because he and his wife had gone to Catalina Island, which I heard of from Lars and Alfred. Just starting middle school, they were to go on a trip there later that year. I wasn’t sure whether to look away or keep staring. It felt like seeing something private and sacred.

Phouang had written little captions beside all the photos. They were incredibly loving and affectionate with little arrows drawn from one photo to another, with cute words, surprising me. I did not doubt that my parents loved each other but neither them nor my grandparents expressed affections verbally. I did not realize that men could be this way, different from the heroes I’ve seen in action movies: soft-hearted, kind, and tender even when outwardly they looked strong and unyielding.

It felt strange to be wanted. Even in the minor comforts of a small routine. This year instead of hiding in the classroom, I hung out with Patrick on the playground every recess and lunchtime. Most days we would talk while kicking a ball around. Other lunches spent on the swings or sauntered out to an abandoned part of the playground with old decrepit wooden equipment. We called it the “wood chuck”. It was quiet and far away, like a secret clubhouse only we knew about.

This flavor of friendship felt very new to me. In earlier years I’d assumed that if you didn’t have anyone to play with during recess, then you didn’t really do anything. This was my first time learning that simply having conversation could be the backbone of a friendship. Language had been a constant obstacle in my early childhood. I still had a very slight accent at the time but I noticed it was beginning to fade. There were often times that I had something to say but just couldn’t get the thoughts out. Those were the times Patrick would slow down and patiently help me find the words.

After my dad learned that I had actually made a “best friend” at school, he wrote a letter in very polite, formal English to Patrick’s dad telling him that apparently we’ve become very good friends and it would be a good idea to set up a play day outside of school. The next Saturday, Patrick came over to our house for the first time.

After a morning of playing Super Nintendo, my mom called us downstairs to eat lunch. She had made several stir fry dishes that she usually made when we had guests over. As we walked down the stairs, I felt a wave of anxiety as I suddenly remembered the numerous lunchbox moments from second grade and the various looks of disgust my classmates made when they saw my lunchbox. Patrick’s eyes went as big as saucers as we sat down and I held my breath for a terrible moment.

“Wait”, he said. “You guys get to eat Chinese food… every single day?” He called me one of the luckiest people he knew. It was easy to like Patrick. Harder not to compare our worlds. For a while I didn’t know what to say. I realized I have never truly tasted my mother’s cooking until I saw it through his eyes.

Before I ever visited Patrick’s family, I had never been to an American person’s home. As my mom held my hand when we walked up the steps to their front door, I was expecting a set piece out of a tv show or Hollywood movie, which was not too far from the truth, I realized, as Patrick showed me around a home that his mom decorated meticulously with obsessive attention to style. They lived in a beautiful house. I felt like stepping into a story, both impossible and ordinary.

For lunch, Patrick, I, and his younger brother Riley ate spaghetti and cookies that their mom made. Until now, I had only ever had packaged cookies or spaghetti in school lunches. It was my first time having either of these foods freshly made. As we spent the day playing Super Smash Brothers on their Nintendo 64, I felt fascinated by how it seemed whenever Patrick, Riley, or their adopted brother Aidan wanted to play video games or jump in the pool, they simply did it. They didn’t have to beg for permission. Their mother didn’t assign them extra homework in the form of math drills or essays in both English and Chinese. They seemed so carefree, as if joy was not something you needed to earn.

It was easier to spend time with Lars and Jade than it was with Lars and Alfred for some reason. Alfred wasn’t really a mean kid, but the boys seemed to play off of one another, each wanting to feel stronger than the other by seeing who could be more cruel to me. There was a time during a family picnic when I heard them behind me say “hey, let’s try that headlock move on him”. It sounded like nothing good but before I could react, I was roughly grabbed by the neck and my head forced down near my knees. I remember the sting of humiliation and the hot tears I held back. I was barely able to choke out a plea for them to stop. Perhaps they understood that this was a tad too far. But for a long time, whenever Jade wasn’t around, I would keep my distance from Lars and Alfred when they were together.

Lars was one who I had a very strange friendship with. There was an ambivalence that extended even into adulthood. He had his nasty moments just as there were times he acted closer than a brother. Lars’ father had been extremely strict with him, possibly the most stern father out of our four families, expecting the best grades and highest standards. Lars would tell me of awful punishments such as kneeling on the bathroom floor with the lights off. Perhaps this home environment was why Lars began to develop a dishonest streak. When we were children he would often twist my words and accuse me of saying things I didn’t say, to laugh when I got in trouble. It frustrated me that the brother who protected me on the playground could also be my bully.

That year, Lars began to spend afternoons at my house, at my mom’s afterschool program. I would often grab sodas from the garage to sneak him and we’d snack in the other room away from the other children and tell dirty jokes. At first, I wanted to call sodas “fizzy drinks” because I had read the British term somewhere in Harry Potter, but I mispronounced it as “fuzzy” instead. Pretty soon, as a joke we called them “fuzzies”, and eventually “fuzzy wuzzies”. He was unpredictable: one moment laughing with you, the next moment turning the group against you. He wasn’t just cruel or kind; he was both, sometimes in the same day. That unpredictability was what made him so hard to understand.

One of my favorite memories of Lars and Jade was the Grand Canyon trip our families took that year. For some reason, Alfred’s family did not come with us. Lars had brought a Backstreet Boys CD that he spent the first half hour listening to on his walkman, eventually giving it to our parents to play in the car, a large GMC van they rented for the trip. My parents had not brought their own music and we ended up listening to that album on repeat the entire four day trip. The three of us children were so tired of the music that we began making up our own lyrics, Jade singing her parody of I Want It That Way by singing “I wish you’d go away..” or Lars with his song, “Show Me the Meaning of Having Money”. On the way home, our parents let the three of us hang out in the back of the van. Instead of sitting in the actual seat, Jade flopped herself onto the part of the wheelhousing that came up into the interior, saying she was getting a butt massage. Lars and I made a mess seeing who could spit sunflower shells the farthest. In those moments, their laughter felt like forgiveness for everything that came before.

Beginning from fifth grade, Milly would often get dropped off at my house in the morning and attend my mom’s Chinese lessons after school before getting picked up to go home. However, we would often not get along. It started with the backpack. Every morning, I would bring Milly the backpack her mom advised her to leave at our house for the night. Maybe I still had a bad reputation at school as a problem kid, and maybe I didn’t understand at that age the stress faced by girls who become hypersensitive to social standing among peers. She would ask me to hurry and hand it to her, looking from side to side to make sure no one was watching. “Retard”, she said once, under her breath, as she hurried away. And I didn’t like seeing Milly so much either, feeling like a piece of my difficult school life had to follow me home.

There were times when I teased Milly too. One Halloween, as we walked to school together, she admitted feeling bad that she didn’t have a costume that year. She began grabbing leaves and branches from nearby trees and sticking them in her hair. I remember a month later Patrick and I taunted her and called her “tree”, me laughing so hard the juice I was drinking dripped out my nose. Yet, despite our rivalry, Milly seemed to be the classmate I related to the most, as she was extremely quirky and unafraid to show it. For example, one time Phouang stopped the class to ask her to spit out her gum. After spitting something in the trash, she quietly grumbled “..wasn’t chewing gum. It’s just paper.”

She was the person my age I spent the most time with. When each student was given boxes of candy bars to sell for a fundraiser, it was Milly, not Patrick, that I got together with. We sold candy outside a grocery store that day, arguing as always. I couldn’t see it then, but it was the start of something that would outlast every quarrel: a friendship that would grow into family.

Phouang was a very different kind of teacher. He taught us about current world events such as the breakup of Yugoslavia those years. He had us debate one another on the viewpoints of Bush vs Gore during the presidential election, even asking students to read the newspaper out loud in class and facilitate discussions on bias. He talked at length about a far away place called Cambodia and the actions of a group of bad people called the Khmer Rouge. Evil, he said, was real, but so were the people whose actions turned toward or away from it. The world, he wanted us to see, was made of shades of grey.

One day I fought with a boy named Michael over a ball that Patrick had borrowed. Michael tried to take Patrick’s ball and return it to the shed. I was worried Patrick might get in trouble for returning after recess empty handed and yelled at Michael. After school, Phouang asked me to stay and talk to him, a request that filled me with dread. As I sat down he spoke slowly and calmly to me explaining that I misread the situation. He referred to Patrick as “your friend” with a gravity as if he knew the responsibility I felt toward Patrick. “I understand you’re angry, but you must calm down enough to listen”. I nodded, realizing this was the first time a teacher had spoken with me and not at me.

Every now and then, our class would change seating layouts. One month Phouang sat me next to Mark, a boy I didn’t get along with the previous year. It felt awkward at first but before long the two of us began to joke around often. I noticed he also liked to play with glue, letting it dry on his hands before peeling it off and fidgeting with it. Phouang noticed and took the glue away from us. He looked amused as he did so.

One day as I helped him tidy up after school he mentioned my friendship with Mark, asking me if I noticed I could still make friends with people who I didn’t like at first. “Mark decided to be your friend because he saw the real you”, he said, mentioning that he had heard stories about my problems from the previous years. “I guess I was a bad kid”, I said. Phouang looked very serious and put down the chair he was moving. “There is no good or bad”, he said. “Good is just a thing we choose every day.”

When I was 31 years old, I got married. As I placed newly printed photos into a scrapbook, I thought of Phouang and his honeymoon pictures. I thought of the year I realized that cruelty and kindness weren’t opposites, they could exist in the same people. I thought of the teacher who taught me not just how to be a man, but how to be a good man. I thought of the lessons of gentleness and grace he gave me. But by the time middle school began, I had already forgotten them.