I stare at the world map in my room. London, Paris, Venice, Marrakesh, and Tokyo. Oh, the places I’d go if I had the money to travel. I put it on the list of things I would do once I graduated high school and college, finally able to bring Rich Yan into reality.
For now, I need to pretend that I already live her life.
Winter descends on the city, obliterating the lukewarm memory of fall. I’m no closer to finding the identity of Natalie’s bully. My weeks have been filled with SAT prep. I drill practice questions with Yuey in the New York Public Library in Chinatown, trading my thin autumn coat for a thick burgundy one. I’ve grown closer to the Shanghai elite despite our polarizing lives. There’s something about her that sets her apart from the slick artificial coating that glistens on the rest of Two Bridges’ students. She’s blunt and brutish at times, carrying herself with the air of someone who will always be protected by money her whole life.
I see glimpses of it when we eat together. It’s in her wanton bites of meat or the way she casually slurps her noodles. Or the way we always get dessert, erasing the question of ‘if’ and replacing it with ‘when’ we will eat something sweet. It’s refreshing, the way she doesn’t pretend to be someone else.
I almost want to tell her my secret. I picture her accepting me as I am, envisioning Natalie’s attempts at sabotage failing because my friends love me too much to discard me for my poverty. But then she’ll say something about the waitstaff, making a comment about their clothes, and I remember that we’re worlds apart.
Like all of my other friends, Yuey cannot fathom how Poor Yan lives. Believe me, I’ve tested her, asking questions to see how far her empathy could stretch. What I found was that my friend was a living paradox.
She’s socially aware, having grown up seeing the intense class divide in Shanghai. She knows about the housing crisis and that her family makes their fortune because of the short supply of apartments in her homeland. She tells me all the time that she’s lucky that the Wangs own so much property. She’s also smart and curious, reading and quoting the likes of Marx and Mao when she participates in history class.
But ask her about the same social structure in America and she stumbles. She sees the United States like her parents do, as one big ripe oyster filled with riches. She doesn’t understand how poor people can exist here, not when she’s heard so many rags-to-riches stories. Sometimes, she even asks me why people here don’t just work harder to get themselves out of bad situations. She says this often about the waiters and waitresses serving us food, polite to their faces and condescending behind their backs.
I tell her that everyone’s situation is different and that a lot of people here stay on the streets because of mental illness. She replies that her parents say that things like depression and anxiety are excuses, and really, that Americans are lazy and self-indulgent because we all think that we’re special from the moment that we’re born.
“I’m not talking about you,” she clarifies. “You’re ABC, which is different. Your Chinese is good, and you get good marks. But if you went to school in China, your grades would be higher here.”
I shake my head at how eerily similar she sounded to my relatives. I wonder if I had grow up in China that, I would have come to the U.S. just as insufferable as she was in these moments.
Other than these hiccups, I find Yuey to be more tolerable than Maia and Ainsley, who each have their own absurd explanations for why the poor stay destitute. Yuey knows what it means to grow up as a girl in a patriarchal culture, underestimated and unwanted. We’ve complained about our families and sighed over the way our classmates stumble over our ethnic names. I sit patiently as my peers attempt to pronounce the double consonant ‘Ng’ of my last name, ready to tell them to pretend that there was an ‘i’ in front of the name to get their throats to make the right sound. I say nothing about the royal origin of the last name, a quality that my ‘Ng’ shares with Yuey’s ‘Wang.’ It makes me think that on a higher level, she and I were destined to meet.
Who else can understand the way we receive love through food and money? Around her, I can slip into another tongue, a more familiar world.
Not that I don’t speak in Chinese with Ainsley. What we share is Chinglish, the Singaporean dialect of Mandarin Chinese. But my mouth doesn’t always make the right noises and more often than not, I default to English around her. It’s not the same, but it brings me slightly closer to her than to Maia.
If Yuey thinks that poor people don’t work hard, then Ainsley believes they aren’t smart enough. According to her, intelligence is the most defining trait of mankind. She says this sole quality sorts the poor and the rich in society, leaving stupid people at the bottom to do menial labor and smart people at the top for more ‘meaningful’ work. Why else would her family make more money than everyone else if they weren’t mentally superior to the rest of the world?
Her argument is sound if I pretend that generational trauma and systemic barriers do not exist. I am tempted to believe it’s why I’m even in the same school as her, that I was smarter and I worked harder than everyone else vying for the scholarship.
But I am in Two Bridges because the school needs to fulfill a charity quota. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t poor or if my family didn’t demonstrate need. My existence in the same space as Ainsley negates her dystopian worldview.
I feel the urge to out myself from sheer anger. How dare they think that all poor people were stupid and lazy? I’m willing to bet that if Ainsley or Yuey grew up in my shoes, neither of them would have made it this far.
What did any of my friends know about what it was like to struggle?
I take a deep breath, trying to exhale my resentment through my nostrils. I blame the heat in my room, cranked up to excruciatingly high temperatures by the landlord, and the fact that all of my friends were on vacation.
Yuey was back in Shanghai to see family again. Ainsley flew to South Korea, supposedly for a consultation on her makeover. Maia was in Dubai for leisure. That left me stuck in New York, facing the pressure to show them that I was having just as good a time as they were.
I think about faking a trip for social media. I plan to scroll through Pinterest for aesthetic vacation photos, put a filter over the images, and post as if I were on vacation. To avoid suspicion, I want to throw in some pictures from Google. All of the photos that I pick will be strategically cropped. I won’t say where I’m going because searching up the city would instantly give me away.
I scroll through my phone, trying to ignore how pathetic my plan sounded in my head. I barely posted on social media. Even with Maia’s encouragement, I only have two posts on my profile. I didn’t have to do this. Rich Yan’s facade depended on how little my peers knew me. Who was I if not their mysterious but equally wealthy friend?
I don’t manufacture a post. I decide that would bring too many unwanted questions. Instead, I fake my camera roll, preparing photos to show when I let it slip that I went hiking in Japan while they were away.
With a photo editing app, a few selfies in the snow, and food pictures in a discreet Japanese cafe, I was ready to go. I remind myself that less is more, limiting the endeavor to five photos. I’m careful with the timestamps, making sure that I don’t create my hiking photo at midnight when the midday sun is hitting my face.
The whole thing takes longer than my science project. In between building molecules, I play with the photo editing, adjusting lighting and cropping my face out at the right angles. When I finish, my eyes burn from staring at the screen for so long.
I collapse on my bed, wondering if everything that I did to convince my friends that I was just like them was worth it. I only had one more year left at Two Bridges. After that, I would be shipped off to college, free from the burden of having to pretend every second of my life.
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