Chapter 5: Exile

St. Barbara was a Catholic church with an elementary and middle school attached. It boasted a large Vietnamese congregation and, consequently, many Vietnamese students. Many of these kids would go on to high school with me—a high school that was very different from St. Barbara.

The Vietnamese majority made the transition to St. Barbara easier, but it also made the future transition to high school more jarring.

St. Barbara’s school campus sat inside the parish's property. It was small but never felt overly claustrophobic. I met students there who would remain in my life for years to come, forming deep and meaningful friendships with intersecting stories.

I entered the school not knowing what to expect. I had braces on my teeth and fat that still clung to me—a testament to my failing P.E. grade. My hair remained in a flattop cut because my mom refused to allow a different style. Peach fuzz had appeared on my lips, but I didn't know what to do with it because my dad never taught me how to shave.

I wore the required green polo uniform and gray slacks. I had on sneakers but was quickly informed I needed black dress shoes—my parents hadn't read the uniform code properly. The green was ugly, and the pants fit weird, but I didn't mind. At least I looked like everyone else—I didn't have to wear clothes my mom picked out for me.

Everyone wore the same thing. That part I could get used to.

And the girls did look good in the plaid uniform skirts. If I admitted that out loud, though, my mom would have called me a pervert again. So, I kept that part unvoiced.

I don't remember much about P.E. class at St. Barbara. What I remember was what happened before it.

We went into the only boys' restroom in the entire school and began changing. Self-conscious of my flabby body, I went into a stall while the other boys changed outside, laughing and joking.

I heard the stall next to me open and close. Then the boys started howling and hooting.

"Swirly! Swirly! Swirly!" they yelled. Were they talking about me? The entire frame of the restroom stall dividers began to rattle. "Swirly! Swirly! Come on, piggy! Swirly!" I opened my stall door and saw the kids banging on the stall next to mine. Somehow, they got it open.

"Come on guys! Not today!" a voice pleaded, but it was too late. I didn't see it happen—just heard the toilet flush, followed by laughter as they exited the restroom. I peeked around the corner.

I didn't even know what a swirly was until that day.

A boy my age but much shorter was wiping his glasses, his face dripping with toilet water. He was round, clearly overweight, with a face that was essentially a circle, flushed red as he stood there.

He laughed nervously and said hi to me as he dried his face. He pushed his glasses back on, the frames also two circles to match his face.

"Are you okay?" I asked, concerned and relieved it wasn't me.

"Yeah, it's all in good fun," he said, a smile still on his face. But I could tell he hadn't had fun.

I made a mental note: these kids weren't like the Vus at all.

"My name is David," he said.

"I'm Jackson," I replied, not sure if I wanted to be seen with a kid who had just been given a swirly. Did that make me a target? What made someone a target for swirlies?

Later that day, I walked into homeroom class and my breath caught. A girl sat there, lounging lazily and speaking with another classmate.

She wasn't pretty in any traditional sense. She was Vietnamese but her skin was pale, almost white. Her eyes were even more "Asian" than most, slitted and almond-shaped. Yet she had an air of confidence about her as she smiled at me. Despite her lack of traditional attractiveness, I was drawn to her.

I wanted her to like me. With just a smile, she held immediate power over me.

"Hi, there," she waved me over. "You're the new kid, right? My name is Mai. And this is Kevin."

"Hi," I said dumbly. Kevin, another Vietnamese kid who was short and dark-skinned, nodded at me.

"Sup," he said and fist-bumped me.

What I didn't know then was that Kevin and Mai were part of a popular group—kids who didn't hang out with kids like me. They were sizing me up, and after having "felt me out," decided I wasn't cool enough for their group.

I would've thought they could tell that from my hair and fat. Apparently, they needed to talk to me first.

If you'd asked me then, I would have said I had a crush on Mai that year. But in retrospect, she was a symbol.

I didn't know her the way I knew Vanessa, even if I didn't know Vanessa all that well. Vanessa and I had hung out in the same social circle and spent four years in classes together. We had history. I even had a quiet but intense competition with her for a few years over who would be the fastest typist in our class.

If my memory serves me, I had won—but barely.

I had been to Vanessa's house. We had chatted often on AIM. She knew I liked her. There was a quiet friendship underneath the social awkwardness of my affection for her.

I did not know Mai. But in a way I didn't understand at the time, she represented something. She was a symbol not of romance but of social dominance, freedom, and ease. She floated around social circles, her smile not a sign of kindness but of self-confidence.

My crush on her wasn't one of romantic longing but existential longing. And that type of longing—the longing to belong—would play a much more powerful role later in my life.

I decided at that moment I would not be associated with David, even if I wouldn't be associated with Mai and Kevin.

***

Eighth grade marked a return to my mother's overbearing control. I had been given some freedom in junior high, where I could use my computer to chat on AIM for as long as I wanted. I could ride my bike or skateboard and disappear for hours without question, as long as I didn't ask permission first.

I hadn't been hit for some years.

All that changed with my failing grades and supposed perverted desires.

My mom held tight control over my life. I was dropped off at school and picked up from school. Where Irvine Middle School told us we were adults who wouldn't be hand-held, St. Barbara treated us like children to be monitored.

While I had been allowed to leave school and walk home as young as first grade, St. Barbara required a parent or designated guardian to sign us out of class.

Homework was written down on a piece of paper every day, and parents were required to sign it to acknowledge completion of each assignment.

And my mom was once again quick to hit me. In the middle of a conversation, if I said something she didn't like, her hand would fly out and smack me across the face without warning. If she was upset enough, she would throw whatever was in her hand at my head.

It was a year of exile—exiled from AIM, from my friends, from my school, from normalcy, from any semblance of autonomy.

I hated that year. It was quite possibly the worst year of my life.

Not because of anything dramatic, but because of the small ways in which I felt aimless, wandering in the desert of my life. Circling around and around, not knowing when I would feel like a person and not a pariah in my own home.

***

If I felt othered before, I felt even more othered at St. Barbara. Everyone had known each other for years. They had grown up there, attending kindergarten through eighth grade together. They were all Catholic, culturally if not personally. They all went to the same parish. Their parents knew each other.

I remember going to my first Catholic mass. The church building wasn't especially grand for a Catholic one, but it seemed so to me. The ceiling was high, the incense smell foreign, the back-and-forth liturgy mind-boggling. A giant statue of a crucified Jesus loomed over the entire space.

He was White, as he often was, nailed and bleeding on a giant cross. He looked down at me, sad-faced with the weight of the world's sins.

I found myself comparing him to the picture framed in the Vus' home. It looked like him. But where Jesus was serene with his halo behind his head at the Vus', this Jesus was dying.

I shook my head as we left mass. I turned to a friend—a familiar face of someone I had known back in elementary school before he transferred to St. Barbara.

"Dude, Michael, you believe this stuff?" I asked, laughing. He looked at me, his face without a hint of amusement.

"Yeah, I do." I blinked at him, and we both let the conversation go.

It was the first time I had ever been confronted with a peer who said they believed in faith. I had assumed that he, like me, merely saw his religion as his parents' religion. My parents said they believed in Buddhas and reincarnation. His parents in God and the resurrection.

But how could kids like us—raised in America, taught science and biology—believe in something as silly and intangible as faith?

***

"Try this, it's so cheesy!" Michael said, offering me a bite of his macaroni and cheese at lunch. I took a bite, feeling that the cheese, while abundant, wasn't necessarily overwhelmingly cheesy. It was just extra craft cheese.

"Yeah, man. That's super cheesy," I lied.

"My mom added extra cheese. She's the best." He indicated toward his mom working at the lunch line. She volunteered to help with the school. How weird. My mom would never have done anything like that.

I looked at my lunch pail—embarrassed to open it. It had spilled, the container smelling and staining with the distinct scent of fish sauce.

A bunch of other Vietnamese kids sat around us, all chattering away. David had a sandwich—sourdough, meat, and cheese. Plain, but I would rather have had that. The other kids all had lunches they had purchased from the cafeteria.

I looked at my lunch pail again. Finally, I opened it. I was hungry. The smell wafted into the air—fish sauce, garlic, and shrimp. I opened the lid to the container and began to eat. The taste was salty, garlicky, and distinctly familiar in the unfamiliar territory of St. Barbara lunchtime.

At Irvine Middle School, I always ate lunch from the cafeteria. We received it for free as a low-income family. In private school, you had to pay for lunch. And my parents weren't about to pay for lunches.

That meant an embarrassing number of Vietnamese meals with their pungent stench.

A white girl—I can't remember her name other than she was blonde with pinky rosy cheeks and baby fat that still hadn't left her face—crinkled her nose as she peered at my Tupperware container.

I don't recall much about her. I do remember she wasn't particularly mean. But her face, the way she scrunched it up as she stared at my food, made her normally kind demeanor even more painful.

"What did shrimp ever do to you? Looks like you massacred a whole school of them," she said as she got up and walked away.

I sat there, staring at my food, no longer hungry. I didn't want to eat this. Maybe at home when it was freshly cooked and no one was there to criticize it.

But sitting there among all the other kids, I closed the lid to my food. I would not eat what my parents packed me.

Discreetly, I would empty the contents of my food containers every day so my parents thought I was eating.

In reality, I merely sat at lunch each day without food. Because I would rather do that than have another person laugh at me for what my parents packed.