Chapter 8: The Class Dog

Chapter 8: The Class Dog

The yellow pencil slid down the front of the navy blue three-ring binder and stopped at the edge of the desk. I spent most of the first day of third grade preoccupied with that pencil, picking it up and setting it back again, watching it slide over and over.

The year was 1998 and I was a 7 year old child preoccupied often with questions. I didn’t know the word for it then, but I kept trying to catch the exact moment that was “now.” Every time I thought it, the moment had already passed. I wondered why I couldn’t remember anything from before I was three, and whether the few scraps I did recall were just dreams. I had tinnitus from a high fever as a toddler, and I wondered if that buzzing was the sound of my brain itself, humming along. I would stare at my hands, watch the edges blur, the background shimmering behind them, and wonder if it was just the light, or something strange about the universe. I was forcefully taken back to reality when I heard Ms Chambers, my third grade teacher, suddenly say “Mr Xiao are you still with us? Please pay attention” and the rest of the class laughed at me.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my names. In Chinese, my dad named me Chopin, because he wanted to give me the gift of music. And also, as he liked to tell his former classmates, he wanted to be “Chopin’s father”. My Chinese name is literally “Chopin” because the first syllable in Chinese just happens to be our surname. At first when my parents enrolled me in preschool and then kindergarten, my legal name was spelled “Bang” because in pinyin, Chopin is Xiao Bang, and in America, names are reversed. At some point my parents might have explained my name to my kindergarten teacher, because she would call me Chopin and even taught me to spell it. By the third grade I realized that this name was a unique one. But no one ever pronounced it correctly, either calling me “chop in” or “show pan” with an ugly, vulgar sounding hard emphasis on the second syllable. Every mispronunciation was another small laugh at my expense, and I learned quickly how a name could make you feel like a joke. I hated hearing it. I hated saying it, and I would grimace every time I had to introduce myself.

Later, as I started junior high, my dad changed my first name to Brian, keeping the first letter B to match my Chinese name the way most Chinese children do when they anglicize their names. We kept Chopin as my middle name. My dad remarked, if somebody misspelt my name, at least we get “brain” and he would rather people assume I was smart rather than stupid, for a change. Perhaps my name was another reason I was singled out at an early age, the Chinese kid with the strange, not even Chinese name who could barely speak English. It also did not help that on the first day of school I wore a knockoff Nike shirt my dad bought in Shanghai with the big swoosh logo and a giant logotype that spelled “MIKE”.

Waipo and Waigong, my maternal grandparents, came to stay with us that year. The house was a bit crowded. They stayed in my bedroom while I moved to my parent’s room, sleeping in a twin bed at the corner. I remember the day they arrived from the airport and the feeling of strange familiarity and elation as I found that I recognized their faces that I barely remembered from two summers ago, and the way my Waipo laughed as I hurried up the carpeted stairs on all fours. The house became an intensely warm and lively home full of love, the most family we’ve ever had under a single roof. I felt loved like never before at home, yet later that year this point became a source of deep shame. My teacher, talking to my dad on a conference night, would refer to me as a spoiled “little emperor”, doted on and showered with too much attention for his own good by two sets of grandparents. It was also the year I noticed how often Americans liked to ask me “are you an only child?”. I never understood this obsession with other people’s siblings. It was the first time I felt so loved at home, and the first time I learned that too much love could be seen as a flaw. Why did they not understand that with my parents often busy and with my having so few friends, living in a house full of family felt to me like finding a river in a desert? A child freely given love should never be made to question it.

That year I shared a desk with a girl named Kelsey. She was blonde and had a huge smile, speaking with a slightly twangy accent, especially when recounting stories of her family taking her to Knott’s Berry Farm every so often with a season pass. That year my mom went to the Asian American Expo and took home souvenirs including a small set of red and blue ballpoint pens hidden inside a plastic triangle. Each pen could be disassembled to a cap, a shaft, and an inkwell. One day, Kelsey asked to borrow a blue pen and I pulled a prank on her by lending her the blue pen with a red inkwell inside. She found it funny, and the rest of the week we would amuse ourselves by unscrewing the pens and switching them around. Pretty soon whenever Ms Chambers wasn’t looking we would often trade drawings under the table.

To a third grader, using a computer for the first time felt like magic. One of my favorite parts of school that year were the digital media sessions in the library once a week. These sessions were led by a younger teacher in his late twenties named Mr Burns. He let us play games like Math Blaster and Reader Rabbit in addition to teaching us how to use the internet. Mr Burns often made small talk with me, telling me fun facts about space and animals, and I would often bug him with fresh questions about whatever book I found in the library the previous day. One time he crouched down and excitedly showed me a cool website he discovered with a funny name called Google. They’ll be big one day, he said.

I loved Mr Burns. He was the first teacher who ever made me feel like my curiosity wasn’t too much, that my endless questions about the world were worth answering. Years later I found him on Facebook. He never added me back. Just messaged me saying I reminded him of Jack Black. I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought he really saw me, but even that turned out to be temporary.

One day, a strange boy named Andy fought with me on the playground. He acted normal in the classroom but everyday during recess he acted like a dog. Andy crawled on all fours up to me as I sat on a bench and tried to bite and scratch me, growling menacingly. I tried to kick him away and we ended up in a brief scuffle before he pattered off. I sat there with my arms crossed, deeply annoyed. Two other kids nearby told me they didn’t like him either because he was always starting fights for no reason.

That year, the world started to blur. Over the course of a few weeks, everything around me softened, as if I were making my way underwater. My parents took me to the doctor and I got my first pair of glasses. The sharpness felt strange at first and the pinching on my nose uncomfortable, but I liked how glasses covered part of my face. I hated my small eyes, mocked by other children who constantly told me to “open them”, and I hated the dimples that dug into my cheeks whenever I smiled. In the mirror I didn’t see a child at all. I saw an old man’s face, wrinkled and misshapen.

Kelsey was sitting on top of the monkey bars when she called out to me at recess one day. She waved and smiled at me, asking me to pass her the red ball that I was playing with. I ran up and tossed it at her, but instead of catching it, she ducked and the ball sailed over the fence in a high arc, bouncing twice the street. I watched, distressed, as it rolled a few feet before falling down a gutter. I felt terrified, thinking I was going to get in trouble and sent to the principal’s office, this time for destroying school property. I yelled and cried, jumping up and down unable to find the words. Back in class as Ms Chambers reviewed worksheets in the back of the room during art time, Kelsey held my hand under the table and whispered in my ear, I’m sorry, I didn’t do it on purpose, I hope you can still be my friend. I realized that she was the first girl I ever liked, but the following year when I looked for her on the playground I learned that she moved away.

Maybe it was the ADHD, or maybe it was just me. At that age my emotions came on strong and unfiltered. When I was happy, I laughed loudly. When I was sad, I cried. In quiet rooms, I was often the one who just couldn’t sit still. Oftentimes during math quizzes, I would finish early because my mom had given me so many math drills at home. I could also read at a slightly quicker pace than other children because I spent most of my Saturdays at the library with my grandpa. At that age I could never fully express myself even though I was extremely talkative, often getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing. Yet, whenever I read silently, the words felt like they could truly belong to me.

In class I either finished my work quickly or drifted off into daydreams, never in between. I stared at the afterimages left by fluorescent lights, tilting my head side to side to shake the colors from behind my eyelids. I leaned back in my chair, wondering what it would be like to live in a house built upside down. Later that year, Ms. Chambers asked my dad if he would consider holding me back a grade. He refused.

Yet for several weeks after recess, Ms. Chambers sent me to Mr. Butler’s class down the hall, a room full of children who groaned instead of spoke, some drooling over the tables. I sat up very straight, feeling alert and terrified, clutching my pencil as if that alone kept me separate. I rubbed my eyes, questioning if this was real, hoping that it wasn’t. Mr. Butler had me water the plants around the school with a metal bucket, work that made me feel both important and banished.

Because of that lost time, Ms. Chambers kept me after school every day to catch up. Some days until five or six. She even drove me home herself in her red, beat-up, Jeep Grand Cherokee. Once, on a rainy morning, she appeared at our front door. She said she had seen my grandfather walking me every day, and didn’t want him to carry an umbrella in the cold.

That spring we had to write stories on a strange plastic keyboard with a tiny LCD screen, the kind that looked like an old calculator. It only showed two lines of text. I hated it. On paper I could see everything at once; on this, my words disappeared and I constantly forgot my own train of thought. I typed slowly, never finishing. At the end of class one day, Ms Chambers turned red as she reviewed my work. “You had two hours. This is all you wrote?”

There was a period of time she gave me a notebook to keep in the corner of my desk. Every instance Ms Chambers thought I was disruptive or misbehaving, she would dictate to me what to record in the notebook. Pretty soon the pages were filled with my own lines describing my transgressions. One day as we were in our silent reading session, I looked about the room after I had finished the story and relaxed until I heard Steven suddenly say Chopin you’re not done you skipped pages! Take out your notebook and write that you’ve been skipping pages. I insisted that I indeed finished the reading and it was none of his business what I did when I heard Justin from behind me telling me to take out that notebook and write that I am a liar. At that point I became angry and stood up, as Ms Chambers came over someone yelled write down that you’re rampaging in the classroom too!

I loved Ms Chambers. As a child I basked in her warmth as she was the first teacher who seemed to notice and care about me. I remembered the way she smiled when she picked me up in the rain, how she touched my head gently, though she would never quite look me in the eye. In hindsight I came to recognize this pattern, how certain people love the children they see as broken or malformed. It is not the kind of love that lifts you up. It is the kind that quietly keeps you in your place. For years I believed she was one of the most loving teachers I ever had. Maybe she was. Maybe that was the saddest part.

At the end of the school year our principal retired. We all gathered in the cafetorium for an assembly as students presented him with gifts and speeches expressing gratitude. My classmate Oliver wrote a poem. We’ll grow up, he assured him. We’ll all grow up and Chopin will be good. My classmates turned to look at me as he recited that line.

They were mostly nice to me, the other children. They laughed when I made jokes, but when I spoke they often smiled a little too hard. Like I was a cartoon. I think they liked me, just not the way you like a person. As I heard Oliver mention me in his poem and my cheeks flushed very red, I looked over at Andy and realized that really, I was the class dog. On the last day of school I wondered a final question: was it better to be a mistreated boy or a cherished pet? I could not give myself an answer.