American Panda Read online

  “Imagine everyone’s faces when I walk into Chow Chow wearing this,” she said to herself, but loud enough that I heard. “Mrs. Pan will be so jealous!”

  I laughed despite myself and thought I could soar no higher, but then she paid, ripped the tag off, and wore the shirt out.

  On our way back to Burton Conner, my mother’s bright pink MIT shirt lighting our way, I stopped at the parabolic benches, two concave stone parabolas spaced a few feet apart. Since the benches matched the rest of MIT’s funky eclectic architecture, their unique sound properties were a secret from most passersby.

  I positioned my mom at the focal point of one of the parabolas, her front to the concrete seats.

  “What’s this?” she asked. Her words, traveling as sound waves, hit the bench, concentrated, and shot back to us, amplified. Her jaw dropped as her hand flew up to cover her open mouth.

  “Gia xiláng,” she whispered in amazement, so softly I wouldn’t have been able to discern her words had we not been in the whispering gallery. She didn’t speak Taiwanese often—only to my father when they wanted to talk about Xing and me without our knowing what they were saying—and it caught me off guard.

  Suddenly I was happy and sad at the same time, like oil and water in my brain. Where had this side of my mother been my whole life? Had she appeared now because I was in college? Or had she been there all along, but I had been too busy or selfish to spend time with her?

  She turned to me so our conversation wouldn’t be amplified. “How does this work?”

  “Sound is a wave, an invisible vibration that travels through a medium such as air, and because of the shape of the benches, the sound waves are concentrated and reflected.” I tried to use the simplest words I could, but they clearly went over her head. I switched to Mandarin, but it wasn’t just a language problem.

  Even though she didn’t understand, she nodded at me, one sharp movement. “I’m so glad you’re here. You fit. You’ll do well. I know you’ll get into the best medical school and become the best doctor.”

  They were simultaneously the best and worst words. I tried to focus on the pride in her voice and eyes, but instead, my stomach shot into my intestines.

  By the time we returned to Burton Conner, we didn’t have to wait long for my father to pull up. From the SUV’s trunk, my parents pulled out a giant cooler plus several plastic bags filled to the brim. And these weren’t flimsy grocery store bags—they were behemoth ones bought for nickels in Taiwan and lugged back home across the Pacific.

  “I did your laundry and brought you food for the week,” my mom explained.

  Gratitude welled into a lump that stuck in my throat like a Codd-neck Ramune bottle from my childhood. “Thank you so much, Mamá.”

  She waved a hand through the air. “It’s so you can devote all your energy to studying.”

  My family did not mess around when it came to academics. My yéye had passed away during my father’s studies in graduate school, and his family didn’t tell him his own father had died until the semester ended. It was the reason I lived in perpetual fear that my parents were sick or dying and they wouldn’t tell me until it was too late.

  After the clothes were put away, we stood awkwardly, crammed into my tiny room with our arms folded over our chests. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

  “Well, I guess we should let you study,” my mother said.

  I laughed. “You guys drove all the way here. Let’s go get dinner together.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have homework to do?” my father asked.

  “I’m all caught up.”

  He nodded, and off we drove to Chow Chow, no discussion needed to decide our destination. I forced myself to ignore my craving for pizza.

  When we parted later that night, a small piece of my heart broke off and went home with my mother. Would I ever see this version of her again? Somehow, as the physical distance between us increased, so did her hold on me.

  Voicemail from my mother

  Mei! You’re still pinching your nose, yes? It’s already naturally big, so don’t worry—you will make money in the future. But it doesn’t look good. Pinch it twice a day, twenty minutes, so it’s slimmer. More feminine. You know what? I’ll bring you a clothespin. This is your mǔqīn.

  CHAPTER 5

  (Of course there is no chapter four. Mǎmá Lu would faint at having the number four—which in Mandarin sounds like the word for death, therefore making it unlucky—as a chapter number.)

  RASH DECISIONS

  THERE COMES A TIME WHEN every parent must have the ever-important sex talk with their child. Unfortunately for me, my version consisted of the following: Sex is a crime before marriage and an obligation for a wife, and, Do not get a Pap smear or use a tampon because you will deflower yourself prematurely. How will your future husband know your looseness is from that tool they use, not another penis?

  None of that was useful, well, ever. So when a burning itch hit me down below, I had no idea what the problem could be, and my only solution was to scratch it by squirming.

  Around three in the morning, my chair was about to lose its upholstering. The itch was so intense I’d even endure the cow’s hoof to cure it. I had no choice but to—God forbid—look at it. I knew I had to get over my uneasiness with nether regions before becoming a doctor, but I thought I had more time. It wasn’t that I was afraid of my body—more like I didn’t know what to do with it.

  I closed the bathroom door and dragged the trash can in front since there were no locks. Then I undressed and took a deep breath. With my right foot propped on the sink, my hands grasping the wall, and a flashlight between my teeth, I tried to get a look at my vagina in the mirror. Well, not my vagina exactly—more distal, in the crease and spilling over onto my inner thigh.

  The door opened.

  The germ-ridden trash can careened into me, and I lost my balance. The flashlight fell from my lips, my scream echoed down the hallway, and I crumpled into a heap on the floor. Shockingly, my first thought was not my nakedness; it was the dirty communal bathroom floor.

  I glanced through my sprawled arms to see a stranger peering in concern. A boy. Of course. Now my nakedness took top billing.

  “Get out!”

  “Sorry! The doors—they don’t lock!” His arm was draped over his eyes, but his tinted cheeks screamed, Yes, I saw your lady parts!

  I picked myself up and slammed said door. “No shit, Sherlock! Why’d you kick it in?”

  “I thought it was stuck!” Pause. “You, uh, might want to get that checked out. It’s pretty red.”

  “Oh my God, stop talking!”

  My cheeks flushed the same shade as my rash. I wanted to chuck the flashlight at the mirror to shatter the maladjusted girl staring back at me.

  With my pants only half zipped, I flung the door open, flew past the boy whose face would be forever burned into my memory, and made my way straight to the MIT medical clinic, or “MIT Medical,” as we called it.

  Two hours into my wait at Urgent Care, I had fully zipped my pants and ticked through a list of possible diseases crawling on my chair. I scooted my butt to the edge, which made the itching worse. When my squirming attracted the attention of my neighbor, I scanned the room, wondering how many of my fellow waiting room patrons knew what was going on in my head—or worse, down below. What did they think I was in for? Anxiety meds? Something to help me sleep because I was an overstrung Asian? I fumed at the stereotypical assumptions, then hated myself for being the one who’d come up with them.

  I watched a bug-eyed boy scan the room with shifty glances as if he were guilty of something. My guess? Something totally awkward straight out of American Pie. His eyes caught mine once, then stayed away.

  I watched two frat guys, not because they were attractive, but because it was impossible not to stare at a car wreck. Their voices projected the names of all the girls they’d “banged” this week, making it clear that their mothers were their only female visitors. My gu
ess? They were waiting for a friend to recover from alcohol poisoning.

  “Me-eye?” The nurse looked up from her clipboard. “Is that supposed to be Mia? Mia Lu?”

  I raised my hand like a nerd, taking the name butchering in stride thanks to a lifetime of practice. At least Mia was a pretty name—poor Tze-Hsing Nguyen was always demoted to Huh?

  I tried to settle onto the exam table, but the paper crinkled with every wriggle, demanding unwanted attention. My thighs locked together even though I knew I would have to flash my goods in a few minutes.

  “What brings you here today, Mia?”

  “I, uh, have a rash.” I pointed to my vagina. “It itches. And it’s red.” Or so I was told.

  The nurse asked the usual questions and left me to change into the dreaded hospital gown, which provided as much coverage as my discount mobile carrier.

  Then the awaited knock at the door.

  Please be a female. Please be a female. Please be a—

  “I’m going to look at your rash,” said the male Indian doctor with a heavy accent. Without meeting my eye, he unceremoniously pushed my gown aside and looked for a second. Just one.

  “It’s herpes,” he said to the nurse, still avoiding eye contact.

  A strange garbled noise escaped from my throat before I managed to rasp, “That’s impossible.”

  He ignored me and threw several packs of surgical hand scrubs onto the table. “Use those. Then see a gynecologist.”

  “I can’t have herpes. It’s physically impossible. Unless I got them from a toilet seat, or the bathroom floor . . . or a pair of pants”—I glanced down at the brand-new jeans I had on—“but according to the latest studies, that’s not possible.”

  The doctor gestured for the nurse to explain why I was wrong, then left the room.

  “Don’t worry. There’s patient confidentiality,” she said, monotone. “We won’t tell your parents you’re sexually active. Now, would you like a pregnancy test today?”

  My voice rose. I wanted the itching to stop, but more so, the nonsense. “Wouldn’t herpes hurt? This isn’t painful, only itchy. And since when is herpes treated by scrubbing it? None of this makes sense!”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed. There’s no judgment here. Now, pregnancy test?”

  I shoved the hand scrubs into my bag and hopped off the table. “No thanks. You’d probably tell me I’m pregnant.”

  “Then you need a test. If you’re pregnant, we can help you. There are people you can talk to.”

  Grabbing my clothes in a huff, I stormed out in just my gown, my inner volcano—aka Lu-suvius—bubbling ominously.

  Across the hall, I pushed the bathroom door open. And there, crouched over the toilet, her arm disappearing into the hole, was a slim Asian female in a white coat.

  “What the hell?” I took a second to compose myself, then said, “May I ask why you’re fishing for poo?” I desperately wished this wasn’t something I’d have to do in the future as a doctor. Was this really the best way to retrieve bowel samples? Just the thought made me need to bend over the toilet myself.

  “I dropped gauze in here,” she said in a you’re-clueless tone.

  “Are you kidding me? Just flush it.”

  She regarded me as the weird one just as a nitrile-gloved hand emerged with the evil gauze. “I can’t do that. It’ll clog the toilet.”

  “How is that any different from toilet paper? And don’t you regularly flush much larger things? If not, we really must write the author of Everyone Poops. They’ll have to rename it Everyone Poops . . . Except ”—I glanced at her name tag—“Dr. Chang.”

  She dumped her gloves in the biohazard bin. “Huh. You’re right. I never thought about that. Maybe that’s why the janitor stopped responding to my emails about retrieving stuff from the toilets. It’s just that, my parents always told me anything foreign in the toilet would clog it, including tissues, cotton swabs, gauze. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  I waited for her to say something else, something that would clarify things a little more, but she just walked past me, completely silent, her head lowered and shoulders hunched. Since I knew that level of embarrassment intimately, I let her pass without meeting her eyes.

  After changing and leaving the flimsy robe in a heap on the floor, I slunk home, a spitting image of the mysterious Dr. Chang.

  Voicemail from my mother

  Mei! I heard from Mrs. Ahn who heard from Mrs. Lin that Ying-Na just got her third sexual disease. Glad you will never have to worry about this. Focus on studies, not boys. Because you have Eugene. Well, if you nab him soon. Call your mǔqīn so we can set that up. Remember, only cats, no pandas.

  CHAPTER 6

  FUTURE MEI

  TWO FLIMSY ROBES IN ONE week.

  “Dr. C. will be right in to see you,” the nurse said, flashing me a smile before she closed the door. Well, this appointment was already looking better. As was my rash, though it hadn’t totally disappeared yet.

  There was a timid knock at the door, so quiet I barely heard it.

  My eyes widened when I saw the gynecologist, who pushed her glasses to the bridge of her nose, then stuck a limp hand out. I was still frozen as she said, “Chang. Dr. Chang. Tina Chang. No, just Dr. Chang. But, um, I guess you knew that.”

  Apparently her posture the other night hadn’t been from humiliation; even now, as the authority figure, she was the epitome of subservience, hunching so much she appeared to be trying to hide herself. Or maybe she was thinking about how I had caught her with her hand in the toilet.

  She was all business, no conversation—surprise, surprise—and immediately following the introduction, she pushed my gown aside. My leg muscles tensed instinctively, but the damn stirrups kept them in place even after Dr. Chang wheeled over a giant magnifying glass.

  Diagnosis: allergic reaction. Embarrassment level: as high as when my mother talks about her period in public.

  But despite the mortification, I relaxed because the Mǎmá Lu in my head had finally stopped chattering. Up until now, it had been a nonstop stream of: Eugene does not want a wife with herpes. How will I ever marry you off now? I told you not to sit on public toilet seats.

  As Dr. Chang rattled off a list of potential sources—new lotion, perfume, body wash—I shook my head repeatedly while trying to puzzle out the answer myself. After running through a mental list of yesterday’s events, it hit me. “I never washed my new jeans before wearing them,” I told her.

  Dr. Chang delivered a monotone rundown of the treatment—apply over-the-counter hydrocortisone cream and wash the contaminated pants—followed by, “Questions?” in a tone that implied no questions allowed.

  Ignoring her obvious desire to wrap up, I asked, “Do you like it? Being a doctor? I’m premed.”

  “Yes. Being a doctor is a great job. Respectable. Stable.”

  I examined her in a new light, the future version of myself. “But how do you like it?”

  “It’s great.” Her tone remained flat, same as all her other sentences, making it impossible for me to interpret her true feelings. She could’ve been ecstatic or miserable or anywhere in between.

  She stuck a palm out, signaling an end to the conversation.

  Desperate for answers, I extended the handshake longer than allowed by societal norms. “Did your parents pressure you to be a doctor?” She tried to pull away, but I tightened my grip, crossing into freak territory. “Are you happy? Is there something else you wanted to do more? Please. Just those questions.”

  She sighed, giving in. “I liked math, but there are no job prospects with that.” Mustering all her oomph, she yanked her hand free in one aggressive swoop, then left, again with no good-bye.

  I sat for a minute staring at my sweaty palm, now empty. My body shuddered even though the room was perfectly warm. I know you’ll get into the best medical school and become the best doctor, I heard my mother say in my head.

  I dressed in a haze, and then, because I couldn’t ge
t her sad aura or hollow eyes out of my head, I tracked down Dr. Chang’s office. One meek knock later, I was in her cramped, cluttered space.

  She looked up from her paperwork briefly, then lowered her head again. No words. Not even an eyebrow raise or muscle twitch or frown.

  I swallowed. “I was wondering if I could shadow you today for your last few patients.”

  She remained bent over her work, and I felt the need to fill the silence. “It’s just . . . I’m desperate for some answers, and I thought you might understand.” I took a breath. “I’m worried I don’t have what it takes to be a doctor. I, um, don’t really like germs.”

  Her eyes finally met mine through her thick glasses. “You’re too young to be worrying so much. Just enjoy college, and by the time medical school comes around, you’ll be ready. If I can do it, you can too.”

  “I want to know what I’m getting into,” I said, when I really meant, I’m terrified I won’t be able to get over my squeamishness. “Please. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  With a sigh, she snapped her folder closed and walked out of the room—still no words. I followed behind, not sure if I was supposed to until we stopped at the front desk for me to sign a privacy agreement.

  As I followed her to the next patient, I wondered if the lack of conversation would turn out to be a blessing or a curse. After the knock, I came face-to-face with Valerie, the junior from my floor who had laughed during my BB-8 fiasco.

  “I’m Dr. Chang. Tina. Dr. Tina Chang. The nurse tells me you think you have a yeast infection, which you described as white and flaky, like cottage cheese?” She tapped the stirrups and rolled a massive light over.

  If I hadn’t been so disgusted, I might have reveled in witnessing my bully under such compromising circumstances.

  Valerie pointed a rigid finger at me. “She goes.”

  I held my hands up in submission. “Fine with me.”

  After darting out of the room, I tried (and failed) to quell my turning stomach. It’ll get better with experience, I lied to myself as the nausea turned into fear. But what if it doesn’t? What if I can never eat cheese again? I love cheese! My stomach cartwheeled. What if one day I vomit into my patient’s vagina?