The Impotence of Being Ernest Pt 3
Just a reminder for all you New Yorkers out there. The final screening of The Motel's two-week engagement at Film Forum will be tomorrow Tuesday July 11. Please come see it on the big screen before it goes away.
But back to the matter at hand. I was informed by an old high school friend that he didn't quite remember my recounting of the school play in the same way -- for some reason he is convinnced that he was the one that stole the show. I was sad to have to correct him. My interpretation of the Indian Chief was the finest performance on the Classical High School stage in all history. Sadly, I do not have any direct proof, but I can firmly stand behind that fact.
In the interest of accuracy, I just want to state for the record now, that everything I am writing here is true. The only thing I have done is change the names of the players so as to protect the innocent.
Okay, enough jibber jabber, here's part three. (You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here):
I was cursed by two things early on in life: low self-esteem and the ability to write. The first (low self-esteem) was easily traceable to so many influences -- no real role models, always feeling like an outsider, being one of the only Asian kids in my school, etc.
The second though, my curse of being able to lock myself in a room for long periods of time and write, had no real roots. I hated reading. According to every standardized test, I should be an awful writer. I am terrible at spelling, vocabulary, analogies and reading comprehension (all of which is proven by this book). I was barely literate; my favorite books were the Henry Higgins and Beezus novels by Beverly Cleary. I have no idea why the act of writing felt so natural despite my illiteracy.
I didn’t discover writing until I took a creative writing class my senior year of high school. Volumes of work began pouring out of me. Maybe the two curses are related – a life of bad self-image leads to a desire to release as many brain farts onto a page as possible.
Growing up in Rhode Island, I always thought I was the only Asian kid around. There was Yoshi Hiro in second grade who spoke no English and was one of my best friends despite my dad refusing to buy a Japanese car for decades until his frugalness outweighed his memories of occupation. Yoshi left by third grade. The only other person I remember who came close was my best friend Kipper who was Native American. Everyone thought we were brothers because of our shared olive complexion. After Junior High though, Kipper and I slowly grew apart. He went on to the not-so-good public high school and I went to the better-but-in-truth-not-actually-good high school.
When I went back for my ten year high school reunion, I noticed something odd. I actually wasn’t the only Asian kid. I was just the only Asian kid in my clique. In fact, there were actually lots of us, but each one of us was the token Asian kid in our respective groups. There was Alvin Chong who had unusually big teeth and hung out with the Guido jocks. There was Heather Morimoto who was the brainy overachieving Asian girl from the gifted program that got lumped in with the rest of us at public high school. There was Miki Something-unpronounceable who I think was some flavor of South East Asian and whose parents owned the China Inn. She was a floater but mainly hung out with the working class kids from East Providence. (And now that I think about it, may have been part of the prototype for Chritine in “The Motel”)There was also Tommy Ribiero who was the happa Korean kid from the bad side of the good tracks. I used to be friends with him back in grade school because his mother knew my grandmother. He was the product of a Portuguese American GI and a Korean war bride. There was also Ernestine Baboyan who was Filipino (back in high school I wasn’t sure if Filipino was actually Asian anyway). She came from the good side of the bad tracks.
If we token Asians had actually formed our own group in high school, we could have ruled the school. But just like the Asian American community now, we were all splintered with our own agendas. We all wanted to be individuals that conformed to other individuals like us. In retrospect, I doubt it would have been much of an incubator for future role models. The years after high school, I had heard rumors of Tommy becoming a security guard at the mall and then also living in a pup tent under some freeway overpass with his little brother Joey. I heard Alvin had fallen asleep at the wheel sometime during college and killed a man on a back road. I believe he served time for involuntary manslaughter. I have no idea what happened to the girls mainly because Asian girls in the burbs want nothing to do with Asian boys anyway. I googled Heather once and found out she went on to Harvard and became a doctor of course. I remember seeing Ernestine at the reunion. I think she was excited to see that I had married a Filipino girl, but all of a sudden I fell right back into my own self-hatred. We barely said a word to one another.
