We Spent Our Childhoods Being Told

We spent our childhoods being told by books and by movies and by cartoons that if we were just good enough, true of heart enough, curious and eager enough, bright-eyed enough – everything that children in storybooks are and everything that’s overlooked in real children – we would stumble across lands populated entirely by talking animals, discover underground caves full of treasure, have our cuts and bruises healed by magicians, fly through the air on the back of softly scaled dragons, and maybe, just maybe, become the ruler or leader of a land full of tiny thankful creatures; elves, maybe, or gnomes.

We tried to be true of heart, and curious, and eager, and all those things; we looked in the unlikeliest of places, hoping for magic. Mysterious doors set in the sides of buildings without porches – only invisible flying people must use these! Rabbit-sized holes in the sand at the city beach – must be sandcrabs who’ve eaten growth powder! Dog-shaped clouds – some very tall giant must be up there shaping them!

And as for the good enough part, and the true of heart part – we even did these, though more grudgingly, and certainly in private. No kid wants another kid to see him being a goody-goody, so I don’t know what anyone else did, but I would go outside after rainstorms and move the worms from the sidewalk so they wouldn’t dry out in the sun. It must have been years before the inkling slipped from my head that someday, while I was sleeping, the Worm King (complete with crown) would appear on my bed, awaken me, and proclaim me savior of WormLand. I would travel down into the dirt with the Worm King and pass vast chambers of bowing worms on my way to the throne they’d been saving just for me.

Then I would be shown a feast of feasts – a sumptuous, mind-boggling feast of foods never before seen by man (but somehow suitable for his digestive system) and let alone to sleep the rest of the night on a mattress made from layers and layers of the finest silkworm’s silk.

What did I get, though? What did we all get? Silk mattresses from the worm king? Dragon rides over the South Pacific? A gift of our very own invisible wings? Sumptuous feasts and cross-species storytelling?

No. We got adulthood. We got our parents telling us there was no Santa Claus once we were deemed too old for him. We got our stuffed animals being stuffed into plastic bags and given to the Salvation Army. And being true of heart, being eager, being curious, suddenly became being idle, being lazy, wasting time. Digging holes in the sand to find sandcrabs just wasn’t cute anymore, and it wasn’t tolerated until we had finished our math homework.

What kind of child-rearing philosophy is this, anyway? Whose idea was it to use magical creatures and stories as bait to create good, giving, open-hearted children, and then whisk them away and hope that the goodness would remain on its own? Did no one think bitterness and disillusionment would go along with the whisking away? That they would blame the world for misrepresenting itself? Did no one wonder how the children would feel as thirty-year-olds when they went to a beach and realized there was no reason to dig down into the sand? These thirty-year-olds will drink instead; down their piña coladas and doze and try to tan and think about swimming but only that, think, because there’s so many reasons not to, you know? Wet hair, wet clothes, sand sticking wetly to skin, and then sandy clothes. You’d have to take a shower or something. Too much trouble.

No, I get the original idea. I understand the motivation and I can understand how whoever thought it up thought it would go. As our minds matured, we were supposed to transfer our imaginations into something more honed and practical. We were supposed to appreciate the value of ordinary things without sticking long, trailing tale tails on them. They expected us to think: ‘I wonder what made that burrow under the roots of that tree. Hey! I should become a naturalist!’ Or, ‘That door that’s half-underground sure is bizarre… hey, I should become an architect and find out why anyone would build such a thing!’ Our thoughts were supposed to start gravitating towards what we will spend our practical adult life doing. They were not supposed to continue in the ‘perhaps that large burrow leads to an underground kingdom or a parallel universe’ vein.

The jump, though, seemed jarring to us. There’s nowhere that feels right for the sudden jump to straight logic and no lingering doubts. When I was fourteen I still winced at handling my stuffed animals in such a way that, were they alive, would kill them. I didn’t drop them on their heads, I didn’t throw them, I didn’t stuff them into suitcases, and I didn’t roll over on them in my sleep. I didn’t launder them or allow anyone else to launder them. Sometimes I would try, because my adult’s mind was butting in, telling me that I should be able to do these things without cringing, but my hands, my body, wouldn’t obey. There was still an off chance in my heart that they were alive and they were begging me mutely, like a pet, to take care of them and not to hurt them.

Even when we were children, eight or nine, we would have to psych ourselves up with a healthy dose of group insanity to be able to play the game where we toss our dolls into a moving ceiling fan to see where they’d be flung. And afterwards, we would all be depressed, preoccupied. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was waiting for them to leave so I could apologize to my dolls.

I miss having that now, that intense unconditional respect for helpless creatures or invisible kings. I miss it being revered as a quality and I think it still should. We’re not really supposed to have respect for anything intangible, with the notable exception of God. It’s not frowned upon, exactly, but it’s seen as kooky and a little bit stupid to be superstitious or to expect to find unknown magic everywhere we look.

To have respect for people and things, not in spite of, but because of the fact that we have absolute power over them – this fades in adulthood, and must be engineered to fade in adulthood. If it didn’t, where would we find our slaughterhouse workers? How would we make our engineers designing oil lines to slash through old-growth forests?

We wouldn’t. The slaughterhouse workers would secretly pardon animals whenever they could; pigs and cows would constantly be found running free in nearby forests. They might only do it because they thought the pigs and cows might come back with their friends and provide them with lifelong meat and milk, but they would still do it, because that’s what happens in fairy tales: save someone’s life and they’ll reward you handsomely. Whether that someone is an animal or a human or even an inanimate object, you will be rewarded.

The engineers assigned to the pipeline task would see agonized faces on all the trees, all the animals fleeing their habitat, and they would up and quit, only to be scarcely seen from then on. Well, of course! They’d have a cozy mansion sky-high in the highest branches of the redwoods and millions of sparrow and squirrel friends to cater to their every need.

And, tell me, what good would that do society?

Inadvertently I reminded my mom that I used to lie to her all the time by bringing up corn on the cob.

"What do you think he'll really like me to cook, though?" she asked me, referring to my boyfriend, and dinner.

"Well," I said, "his mom's allergic to corn, so I guess he's never really gotten to eat corn on the cob very often. You could make that."

"We could eat it with chopsticks, just like what's-her-name's family, that girl you were friends with back in... middle school? Elementary school?"

"What girl? You mean Yexin?"

"Yeah, Yexin."

"Her family didn't eat corn on the cob with chopsticks. What are you talking about?"

"You told me they did."

"I did? When?"

"When you were a kid. You came back from dinner at their place once and said that they made corn on the cob and ate it one kernel at a time with chopsticks. You were really excited about it."

"Ummm... I made that up."

"No, you didn't! I remember you telling me."

"And I remember making it up. How could you eat corn on the cob with chopsticks, anyway?"

"I don't know. I guess you couldn't. Why would you make something like that up?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know??"

"No."

It always really bothered my mom that I did that. Once, I guess (this is all via her, because I don't remember) I came home from kindergarten and wove her a long, complex yarn about some kind of kindergarten drama that unfolded all over me that day - it had kids making fun of me, and teachers yelling, and construction paper everywhere, and crying - and when she went in to talk to my teacher about it she found that it had never happened. Not only that, nothing close to it had happened. The day in question was an especially normal day.

I guess that when I came home that day and she asked me that omnipresent question: "How was school today?" I didn't want to say 'Fine' like every other day. I would have rather had a story. Even now the act of saying 'Fine' as a response to anything puts me in a bad mood - 'How are you', 'How's your day going', etc. It's boring. It's small talk and it means absolutely nothing. Not just something shallow, even, but literally nothing. Nobody ever says 'it's going terrible' or 'I'm feeling a bit off today' (even my officemate, who's British, just responds with 'fair to middling' no matter what the situation is). People are always saying 'How are ya!' to me by the water cooler and it makes me visibly cringe, because obviously I am a complete sociopath.

Now that I'm not in kindergarten, I obviously know that I have more than those two options (saying 'Fine' or making up a long, complicated, and completely untrue story). There is always the option of taking the truth and telling it like a story. This isn't hard for me; I've never had a day in my life that I felt could be summed up by 'Fine' - there's always the tiny victories, like a bus coming as soon as you round the corner to the stop, or a man yelling 'you dropped your wallet!' after you as you pedal away from a stop sign, instead of just stealing it and leaving, or the weather warming to 68 in the middle of winter - or the tiny battles, like locking yourself out of your house on the day you have to rush home and get ready for a fancy dinner. These are all true and have happened, and have story-worthy details that I've forgotten only because it's been awhile (except for the fancy dinner one, which happened on Valentines Day). I try to stick to these kinds of true stories now that I am 23 and should know better than to constantly lie to people I love.

But sometimes you just want an explosion, you know? Sometimes you want to have run into your favorite celebrity at the beach. It's not even the attention - I can live without attention; in fact, I prefer it - but rather the thrill of telling it, of inventing it convincingly as I go along.

My mom used to tell me - she said my kindergarten teacher told her to say it - that if I wanted to tell her a story like that, it was okay, as long as at the end I said 'just kidding' or something similar. I remember very clearly having none of that. It sucked all the fun out of it. I said, 'okay,' and just kept doing it my way. My mom, rather than recognizing me as the lying little brat I most certainly was, took me at my word, and believed my stories from there on out. Because of this, we're constantly running into things like the corn on the cob story where I have to, once again, remind my mother that hardly anything I said to her as a kid had any basis in reality. It's sad. More accurately, in a detached way it's sort of sad. I don't feel it myself at all, because it's how my reality has always been, and hard as I try, I can't feel anything wrong about it, even though I can recognize it objectively as something that's probably sad for her. Strange.

In third grade, I was really popular. It was a fluke, of course. I was not popular in second grade and I was not popular in fourth grade. But in third, I was a princess. I could do no wrong, which was lucky since I wore turquoise stirrup leggings, giant T-shirts, and star-sparklies in my fluffed-up hair to school every day. I guess that was supposed to be hot in 1993. What else must have been hot?
Knowing my multiplication tables faster than anyone else in class, saying the answers too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the linoleum.
Doing real gymnastics on the bars in the playground, even mid-winter, and ignoring everyone else.
Having two best friends who constantly fought over me and wrote notes like: "You are my best friend. Am I your best friend? Check yes or no. Be honest and you can't say maybe I don't know or anything like that."
Not being able to run the mile, or even walk it, to be honest, even though I could do about a hundred cartwheels or backbends on command.
Being really, really tall and skinny and knobbly and pale and awkward.

The point of all this is to say that nobody has any idea what the hell is supposed to be hot at any given time, least of all me. Usually, I am routinely taken in as a human being by other human beings, and either discarded or given more thought. In Indonesia, everybody gave me more thought. I was a bule, and that merited LOTS of thought. I was probably the only one they were going to see for a few years. So, okay. I understand that.

But occasionally I am in the States, looking the same as always, acting the same as always, gangling awkwardly around town and talking really quietly and unassumingly acting rude just by having an expressionless face, and people suddenly start being really interested in me. All at the same time. People start asking me out. And having asked me out, they immediately attempt to make out with me.

I find this situation extremely uncomfortable. I expect that girls who somehow manage to be attractive to people all the time, and not just randomly placed occasional times, know how to deal with this smoothly and effectively, and escape the situation still friends with the attempted maker-outer. I do not. As sexually liberal as I think I am, I just hardly ever particularly want to make out with strangers I just met, and, even worse, I find it amusing as hell when they try, and I have to escape, snickering like some kind of overgrown mutant 7-year-old and making impossible all possible future contact in the process.

This isn't entirely true. I probably would be more receptive to strangers if I thought that they had even the slightest interest in my personality. Who in the world has ever succeeded in impressing a girl by greeting every story she has to tell, everything she has to say, with a prolonged silence and then either a 'this happened to ME' or a 'Hey, do you wanna make out?' Has anyone ever succeeded by doing this? If so, I'd like to hear about it. Do other girls just get magically more and more receptive the more ways you underhandedly try to make out with them without possessing any conversational skills - or any sort of communicative skills, unspoken or otherwise - or any sort of PERSONALITY - whatsoever? No, I want to know. Perhaps they just give up trying to fight the onslaught.

Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm raving, and that I'm likely just suffering from American-dating-practices-culture shock or something. But sometimes I wish I were dumber, and couldn't see through people as well. How do those girls who are in-demand all the time handle knowing that everyone is plotting anything - anything! - to get them into bed? It's a very fucking disconcerting feeling!

Soon, though, I will randomly become not-hot again, through no effort or realization on my part, and this will cease.

I'm staying in my childhood house, and in my childhood house, you can often find me sitting exhausted and enthralled on the attic floor surrounded by invitations to 10 year olds' birthday parties from 1994, and yellowed drawings of gymnasts, and refrigerator magnets with pictures of Kermit the Frog on them, and the old notes my mom used to put in my lunch box with the hard boiled egg and the salt packet, and other such things.

The one thing I thank my parents the most for is teaching me to read and write when I was three. Most people don't have a written record of their thoughts when they were that young. I do. It's mostly incomprehensible to other people, and to me as well, a fair amount of the time, and often suggestive that bizarre and unexpected events, furniture, objects, teachers, and family friends played a gigantic part in my life. Rollerskates come up a lot. Two couches come up even more, always on opposite sides of the room. Black cats, mountains, and Christmas trees are next, followed by birds carrying letters in their beaks, angry female babysitters with long braids, and large pianos.

Three is so young it's like reading something written by a complete stranger, one with no linear thought processes. Often, once upon a time there was a little girl who lived inside her house and there was a lion outside her house ends with an ice cream truck encounter and, for good measure, a Christmas tree. (I guess not so much has changed; I still can't write stories that stay on focus beginning to end, but at least I don't... thrust ice cream everywhere, although, as I will soon prove, I do thrust sushi everywhere.)

The first nonfictional somewhat linear journal-like thing I wrote down was around my 5th birthday. Every year for my birthday we'd go get sushi at the same sushi plane we'd been getting sushi from since I was 2. I'll let my 5-year-old self tell it:

Today we went to Kuny's for sushi for my birthday. Kuny is Japanese. He always cuts my sushy into little pieces. When I grow up I want to marry Kuny, and eat sushy every night!

(And there is a drawing of Kuni and me and sushi at the bottom. We both have arms coming out of our heads and legs coming out of our arms. The sushi, however, is drawn very carefully.)

The other day my dad and I went to Kuni's. We arrived as they were just opening. Kuni was standing at the bar without his chef robes or hat on yet. He looked as naked in his T-shirt, to me, as any newborn baby, as he bowed to us and we bowed awkwardly, as always, back at him. My dad always shoots streams of friendly English at Kuni about how awesome his food is, to which he responds in streams of friendly-sounding Japanese and free noodle rolls and extra fatty tuna. He must understand English, as he's been here for at least 20 years, but he never speaks it.

There are two ways I know that he remembers me. One: if I try to order something that's not, technically, on the menu, but that I have been eating since I was a toddler, and the waitress says they don't have it, Kuni shakes his head wildly and waves his arms at her until she writes down my order as I originally said it. Two: he still cuts my sushi into tiny little toddler-sized pieces and serves it to me with a straight face. No matter where I'm sitting at the bar, even if I'm in front of another chef, Kuni prepares my sushi.

Whenever I see the gray hair poking out of Kuni's chef's hat or notice the age spots on his hands, I feel sad in a way that has no explanation, really, and no parallel. I feel the completely irrational feeling that when Kuni dies, I will be significantly more alone in the world. To feel that way about someone you've never spoken a word to is an odd thing. I hate to see him age. He has always looked about 30 to me. He's probably 60. I hope he lives to be 160. I wouldn't want to raise my children in a Chicago where they couldn't get their first taste of solid food in the form of raw yellowtail cut into a baby-sized bite. Would you?