Mismatch Page 2

  Sue laughed. Then she asked, “What do you think about sports? Do you play on any teams?”

  “Nope,” said Andy. “I avoid sports because I’m afraid of hurting my arm or finger. It would screw up my future as a violinist.”

  Sue noticed that Andy didn’t sound at all embarrassed when he said he was afraid of getting hurt. Most boys would rather die than admit that.

  “So you plan to be a professional musician?” she asked.

  Andy hesitated. For the first time, Sue saw him looking a little unsure of himself. “I want to, but . . . I’ve got a problem with stage fright,” he confessed. “Every time I have to play a solo, I freak out inside.”

  “You did great when you were auditioning for that solo,” Sue said, remembering how confident he had seemed.

  “I’m okay once I get started,” said Andy. “But I’m always afraid that one day I’ll be too scared to get started!”

  Sue laughed. “It’s never going to happen.” Without thinking about it, she reached over and put her hand on his arm. Then, suddenly, she felt embarrassed. Andy had never made any kind of romantic gesture toward her. She felt awkward touching him first.

  But Andy just smiled and put his hand on top of hers. “What about you? Don’t you ever get nervous when you play?”

  Sue shook her head. She seldom got really uptight about a recital. Music wasn’t her whole life, the way it was with Andy. She had other interests. “I love music, but I love other things, too. You know what fascinates me? The history of warfare. Weird, huh?”

  “Hey, my mom is a history teacher!” said Andy. “She teaches at Buchanan Middle School.”

  They talked about their families. “I have an older brother, Tom,” said Andy. “He’s a freshman at Oregon State. He’s pretty cool. We don’t talk much, though, now that he’s in school.”

  “I’m number two in my family, too,” said Sue. “My sister, Rochelle, is a senior at Lakeview.”

  “Guess I’ll be running into her,” said Andy.

  Sue looked down at her sandwich. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Andy meeting Rochelle. What if her sister learned that Andy was Japanese and told her mother? Or worse yet, what if Rochelle blinded Andy with one of those killer smiles?

  As they were leaving the sandwich shop, Andy stopped at the door. “There’s a new anime movie starting in the city on Friday. Want to go? I can pick you up at six o’clock. There’ll probably be a long line for the seven o’clock show.”

  Sue pulled her sweater a little tighter. She so desperately wanted to say yes . . . but how would her mom react when Andy showed up on their doorstep? “Uh . . . uh . . . thanks a lot, Andy, but this weekend is kind of busy. I’m afraid . . .” Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t look at him.

  He stared at her. “Sure, no problem,” he said finally.

  He was hurt. Sue wanted to hug him and tell him she was protecting him, not rejecting him. Her mother would say something nasty that would ruin the whole evening. Sue had to figure out how to tell her mother and grandmother about Andy. And she had to do it soon.

  2

  Andy shuffled around his living room in a daze. He had been so positive that Sue liked him. So why had she turned him down when he asked her out? He remembered Sue talking to that Ian guy at lunch, making jokes about their math class. Maybe she liked him better. Andy scowled. What was so funny about math, anyway?

  Then Andy remembered the shy smile that lifted a corner of Sue’s mouth when the two of them talked at Hero’s. He thought of the way her eyes sparkled when they talked about a piece of music they both liked. He thought of the way she had put her hand on his, protectively, when he told her about his stage fright. She cared about him. He and Sue had something going, he was sure. But as soon as he’d invited her to go out with him, she’d gotten weird.

  Andy decided that after school the next day, he would come right out and ask Sue why she couldn’t go out with him.

  All the next day, Andy rehearsed the conversation in his head. He wanted to be sensitive, but he also wanted an honest answer. At the bus stop after school, he saw Sue standing with another girl who looked a bit like her but was prettier—and seemed to know it, too. Maybe it was her sister. What did Sue say her name was? Rochelle, that was it. Andy decided to go up and get introduced.

  When Sue saw him approach, she looked nervous. Before Andy could speak to her, he heard a voice behind him. “Hey, Andy!” It was Laurie Harris, his stand partner in the orchestra. “I don’t see you much after rehearsals anymore. I was hoping to get a little help from you on the Schubert piece. I’m having real trouble with measures fifty-six and fifty-seven, you know?”

  Andy felt guilty. He and Laurie were good friends, and they had even gone out a couple of times. They had never gotten really serious, but they’d stayed on good terms. He often went over hard passages in the music with her. A bus came and went as he stood discussing the music with Laurie. By the time he was finished, he turned around and found that Sue had gone.

  At dinner that night, Andy was still wondering what Sue’s problem was. He was beginning to like her a lot. It wasn’t that she was all that incredible to look at. That girl she was talking with at the bus stop—her sister?—was prettier. Sue was a bit skinny, not rounded out like the other girl. But he liked the curtain of shiny black hair falling over Sue’s cheeks as she sat with bent head, and her sudden smile when she lifted her head and looked up. Her smile was full of mischief, and he knew that they had the same sense of humor. He liked her soft voice. There was a musical lilt to it. She was a nice change from all the loud girls with their shrieking giggles.

  “From your expression, I’m guessing that your practice went well yesterday afternoon,” said Andy’s mother, interrupting his thoughts. “So you aren’t having any trouble with your solos?”

  Andy blinked. He realized that he must have been sitting there beaming like an idiot while he thought about Sue. “Solos? Oh yeah, I’m getting through them pretty well, I think. The other soloist is doing okay, too. He’s really good!”

  “He’d better be good, since he’s the concertmaster,” said his father. “Frankly, I think you’re just as good as he is. But since he’s a senior and you’re only a junior, the conductor probably feels that you’ll get your chance next year.”

  The best violinist in the orchestra was appointed concertmaster. The concertmaster before this one had been a Chinese American boy, and Andy thought he was a really good musician. After graduating from Lakeview High, the boy had gone on to study at Juilliard, a famous music school in New York.

  “Why do so many Asian kids play string instruments? ” Andy wondered out loud. “But then our concertmaster this year is Caucasian.”

  “Perhaps more Asians play string instruments because manipulating chopsticks at an early age develops the small muscles of your hand,” suggested his father. “That gives you the fine control you need to stop the string accurately on the violin.”

  “That can’t be the reason, Dad,” said Andy. “You use chopsticks with your right hand, and you stop the strings of the violin with your left hand.”

  “I seem to remember seeing a number of white boys playing the bass fiddle,” said his mother.

  “You’re right,” Andy admitted. “Maybe boys think that the bass fiddle is okay because it’s so loud and powerful. But they feel like sissies playing the violin.”

  “Asian kids are not afraid of being called sissies,” said his father. “They have more self-confidence.”

  Andy wasn’t sure about that. Some Asian boys, like himself, were resigned to being called nerds anyway, so what did they have to lose by playing the violin?

  Andy knew that his father was very proud of his musical talent and had high hopes for him. Andy’s grandmother was a good pianist, and whenever they visited his grandparents in California, Andy always begged her to play for him. But his father, to his own disappointment, did not have a gift for music. Neither did Andy’s older brother, Tom. Andy was the only one
with real musical talent. He did not want to let his father down.

  Besides, Andy loved the violin too much to give it up just because somebody might call him a sissy. And he believed that this was true of all music lovers, whether they were black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or Martian.

  “Want to go to Hero’s again?” Andy asked Sue the next Monday. He tried to sound the same way he always did after rehearsals and pretend that the movie invitation hadn’t happened.

  Sue hesitated for just a second, then said quickly, “Sure, I’m starved—as usual.”

  But Andy could see that she was still uncomfortable. After they were seated with their food, he decided he had to find out what the problem was. But first they had to get through the messier part of their sandwiches. When the worst was over for Andy, he wiped the tomato seeds from his chin and cleared his throat. “Can you tell me why you can’t go to a movie with me, Sue? Of course, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

  Sue was silent for a minute. Her head was bent, and her shiny curtain of straight black hair covered her face. Andy could tell, though, that she was very tense. Her fingers clenched her sandwich so hard that some of the innards got squeezed out.

  Andy decided to try again. “I like you, Sue, and I want to go out with you. And I think you kind of like me, too. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  Finally Sue raised her head. This time her eyes were not sparkling with their usual smile. “Andy, I can’t go out with you because your family is Japanese, and mine is Chinese.”

  Andy’s mouth dropped open. Of all the possible reasons, this was one he had never expected. “Are you kidding? But . . . but . . . we’re both Americans!”

  “I can’t change my heritage, and neither can you, Andy,” Sue said softly. “As soon as I entered Lakeview High, the other kids looked at me and said to themselves, ‘Hey, we’ve got a new Asian girl in our class.’ ”

  “And that bothered you?” demanded Andy. “You want to look like Ginny, with blond hair and blue eyes?”

  Sue shook her head. “You got me wrong. I’m happy to look totally Asian.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” asked Andy. “We’re both Asians, so what’s keeping us from going out? If anything, that should make things easier!”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Mia and Ginny,” said Sue with a sigh. “They think we’re made for each other, because we both have straight black hair and eat with chopsticks.”

  Andy had to laugh. “I still don’t get it. Okay, so we both use chopsticks. What does that have to do with going out?”

  For a moment, the old humorous sparkle had returned to Sue’s eyes, but now she became serious again. “I told you already. The problem is that my family’s from China, and yours is from Japan. Some of my relatives think that makes us enemies.”

  Andy stared at Sue, trying to make sense of her answer. He knew that in the 1930s, Japan had invaded China and occupied a large part of the country. And he knew that the occupation had been terrible. But he couldn’t believe that something that had happened almost seventy years before could stop him and Sue from going out. The invasion was ancient history!

  He took a deep breath. “Look, Sue, some of the musicians in our leading orchestras come from Germany, and some of the other players are Jewish. Their families must talk about how the Nazis in Germany murdered millions of Jews. But this doesn’t prevent them from making beautiful music together!”

  Sue got up and picked up her viola case. “We can still make beautiful music together, Andy, and eat at Hero’s.”

  Andy gathered his things and followed her to the door. “So, okay, your relatives think of the Japanese as enemies. How about you?”

  Sue shook her head. “Of course I don’t! You ought to know that by now!”

  “I don’t get it!” said Andy. “If you don’t think I’m your enemy, then why are you letting your family keep us from going out?”

  “But . . . I . . . I . . .” Sue stopped and took a breath. “It’s easy for you to tell me I should stand up to my family. What about you? Would you still go out with me if your relatives told you not to?”

  Andy blinked. What did his relatives think of the Chinese, anyway? It was a question he had never asked himself.

  Just before she reached the bus stop, Sue turned around. “Why don’t you ask your relatives how they feel about the Chinese?”

  Andy decided to do what Sue suggested that very evening. He had never talked to his parents about how they felt about different cultures—not in so many words, anyway. He knew his father had had some bad experiences in different countries as part of his business travels, but he was pretty sure his dad blamed those on individuals, not on whole cultures. “Dad,” he said at the dinner table, “you spent a couple of weeks in Beijing last year. What did you think of the Chinese people you met?”

  His father was adding some soy sauce to the wasabi for his sashimi. He stopped mixing and looked up. “You’ve heard me talk about the trip. Beijing was filthy, simply filthy! Except for the big boulevards. The smaller streets were run-down . . .”

  Andy’s mother broke in. “That’s all right, Don, you’ve told us all we need to know about the filthy streets.” She looked at Andy. “Your father didn’t have a very good time on the trip. You know that already, so why bring it up?”

  Andy’s father, who worked for an electronics company, had gone to China on a business trip the previous October. He had come back in a foul mood. The deal he was negotiating had gone through, he said, but the terms were not as good as he had hoped.

  Andy remembered that what had made his father even angrier was coming back with his best suit so dirty that he had to pay the dry cleaner extra for getting it back into shape. “My Chinese guide took me on a tour of the Forbidden Palace, and on the way out, we took a back exit and went through a narrow alley,” his father said. “The Forbidden Palace is supposed to be the most elegant building in the country. And you know what happened?”

  Andy knew what happened. He had heard about the incident many times already. “Right outside the gate,” snarled his father, “I tripped on some bricks and fell on a pile of smelly rubbish!”

  “I bet the rubbish was organic, at least,” murmured Andy’s mother.

  That didn’t help. His father just got angrier. “And the next day, a man in the street hawked and spat on my shoe!”

  Andy knew the rest of the story, too. His father was so disgusted that he promptly threw away the shoes and bought a new pair at a Beijing department store. But the new pair didn’t fit well, and his feet hurt for the rest of the trip.

  “I know all about the spitting and the pile of rubbish,” he said impatiently. “What I’m asking is how you feel about the Chinese people.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” said his father. “The Chinese are a dirty people! I bet they don’t bathe more than once every other week, if that.”

  Andy frowned. A dirty people? He’d always thought his parents weren’t prejudiced, but that didn’t sound fair.

  Andy’s mother laughed. “Remember the story I told you about Queen Elizabeth the First? Some of her subjects thought she was strange because she took a bath once a month, whether she needed it or not!”

  Andy tried to laugh, too. “They probably thought that since she was the queen, she could afford to waste water!”

  “As for the rest of the people,” continued his mother, “they probably bathed only twice in their lifetime: once as a newborn, and once when they died and their corpse was being laid out.”

  Andy’s father didn’t laugh. “Queen Elizabeth lived hundreds of years ago,” he said. “I’m saying that the Chinese are a backward people because they don’t bathe as often as we do—and I’m talking about today!”

  “Don, you have to be fair,” said Andy’s mother. “We Japanese have a tradition for taking frequent baths because Japan is a volcanic country with many mineral springs spouting hot water. The ancient Romans were big on baths,
too, because Italy was volcanic and hot water was plentiful.”

  “That’s the trouble with you historians,” grumbled Andy’s father. “You like to talk about ancient Romans and Queen Elizabeth the First. I’m talking about the people in Beijing today!”

  “Maybe there just isn’t enough hot water for the people to take baths every day,” said Andy, trying to be fair.

  “That proves my point!” said his father. “China is a backward country, just as I said! We Japanese became modernized years before the Chinese. We opened our country to the West in the middle of the nineteenth century. We invited Western engineers, scientists, and doctors, and we soon had railroads and electric lights. We built up a modern army and navy that defeated the Russians! What about China at that time? They had those fanatic Boxers who believed they were invulnerable to bullets, and their women still had bound feet!”

  Listening to his father, Andy felt depressed. He was disappointed in his dad. At this rate, he didn’t think he would be able to introduce Sue to his parents anytime soon.

  His mother was different. Her grandparents had moved to America, so she was a third-generation immigrant and thought like an American in most ways.

  Andy’s father, however, was a Nisei, a second-generation American. Like many other Nisei, he had been sent by his parents to a Japanese high school. Andy thought this was why his father was more Japanese in his opinions—including his attitude toward the Chinese. Andy knew that people in Japan sometimes called the Chinese dirty or backward, but Japan was half a world away. How would Sue feel if she were to hear his own father ranting about how backward the Chinese were?

  Andy tried again. He remembered another thing his mother had told him. “The Chinese weren’t always backward. Mom says the Japanese didn’t have writing until it was introduced from China.”

  His father was sipping his bean paste soup, but before Andy finished talking, he sputtered and his face grew red. The soup spilled all over the table.

  “Get some paper towels, Andy,” his mother said.