I grew up in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Lawrenceburg is a small suburban town in the tri-state area by Kentucky and Ohio with a population of three thousand people – all mostly white. When I first moved there the only people who weren’t white were me, my family, and another family of Chinese descent who owned a buffet downtown next to a Kroger’s.
I moved to Lawrenceburg when I was six from the Philippines with no coherent prior knowledge of the English language. I knew useless phrases though, such as the phrase, I have no idea, because I heard it once on a TV show on the Disney Channel. I didn’t know what it meant but I knew how to say it and I guess that was enough because if a situation did arise when someone asked me something in English, then at least I could say that. Looking back at it now, I think every immigrant child moving to America should learn that phrase because it helped me a lot when I started school.
What’s your name? I have no idea.
Are you new here? I have no idea.
Why is your skin brown? I have no idea.
To tell you the truth, I have no idea if those were actually the questions people asked me because I didn’t understand English during the time when they asked it. All I knew was that I was doing something right.
Eventually I learned English by reading books, but I have to admit that I started my relationship with literature with a lie. In the first grade, I was so excited to be the first one in my class to finish a chapter book so I skimmed a Junie B. Jones novel and told everyone I read the whole thing word for word. It wasn’t like I was lying – because I technically did finish it – but I must admit that I understood nothing. Being the first person in the class to finish a chapter book made me a celebrity. As my reading points racked up so did my status as teacher’s pet, so I couldn’t help but thank myself for my little white lie.
Everyone in my new school was fascinated that I was from Asia and that I knew another language. Forming a line towards my desk during free time in Mrs. Stevenson’s first grade class, one by one the white children would ask me what their name was in my native tongue. Even at that age I knew that names were names, and you simply pronounced them how you wanted to. But I went along with it anyway because this was an easy way to make new friends.
“What’s my name in your language?” asked Kylie Highwell.
I pretended to think about it for a second and I even made her spell her name on a piece of paper for me to carefully examine.
“Hmm. Your name is JoyJoy.”
This continued until everyone got their “exotic” Asian names. What I was really doing though was just finding words I knew in English already and repeating them two times. I learned about the word “joy” from a Christmas card I saw in a Walmart. I felt like a fucking oracle.
During my time in Lawrenceburg Elementary School I won the Spelling Bee three years in a row, and I owe it all to children's’ authors Barbara Park, Beverly Cleary, and R.L. Stine. I could tell the parents were shocked that a girl who didn’t know English just a couple months ago beat their kid in spelling the word “equipment,” because the doctors in my mother’s hospital she worked at were all talking about it. My mother told me a doctor went up to her, asked her if she knew about that weird girl who beat her kid at the Spelling Bee, to which she replied with “Yes, that’s my daughter.”
When I won my first Spelling Bee my mother gave me $100 as prize money. I deserved it after practicing night after night, asking for definitions and origins, and writing imaginary letters into my palm as I envisioned the letters forming inside my head. Sometimes if I thought about a word too much I would start to sweat. Spelling is a sport and to this day I can still attest to that.
But back to the prize money. When you’re six years old with a hundred dollars in a town like Lawrenceburg, you go ballistic in a Walmart. I bought three Barbies, a McDonalds happy meal, and a Baby Alive, which was a baby doll so realistic that if you fed her through her mouth, a tube acting as her throat would send that food down to her butt like poop. You had to feed and change her every three hours. Looking back at it now, I think this toy was just a capitalistic ploy to lure little girls into the chains of domesticity. But this was what I bought with my prize money.
The second time I won the Spelling Bee, Peighton McCarty pissed her pants in her seat during the final round. As she got up we all saw the pee drip down her skirt, and when it was my turn to speak into the microphone, my black leather boots squeaked in contact with the urine. When the final round came and there was only one chair to be sat upon, I had to sit down in her piss. When I won that day my mom gave me an extra hundred for being brave.
The first time I ever tasted American junk food was when I was jet lagged from my 16-hour flight from Manila to LAX to Indianapolis. Unable to adjust to the time zone, I snuck out of bed in the middle of the night and found a family sized bag of Doritos in my kitchen. I killed half the bag and fell asleep with a six year old tummy full of nacho cheese flavored Doritos. I consider this my first true American meal.
I hated pudding. All the kids at school liked pudding except for me. I hated pudding mostly because of the way the kids at school said pudding. As a very technical six-year-old who followed the rules of linguistics, I learned that in English, the letters “n” and “g” together make the sound “ng.” I made sure to learn this distinction because the same letters together in Tagalog make the sound “nang,” and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself as someone learning a new language. But the white kids at school pronounced “pudding” like “puddeen” and that pissed me off.
During lunch one time in the cafeteria I thought Riley Boster knew Tagalog. We were having a debate about something I can’t now remember and in disagreement, she said “Nu-uh.” In Tagalog there’s a similar word that sounds like “Na-ah” which means “here,” or “existing.” When I asked her if she knew Tagalog she said “Well, I do now.”
My first ever crush was on a kid named Jake Batchelder. He had the cutest dimples and the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever laid eyes on. The first time we made eye contact was during bathroom break and when our eyes met we both smiled sheepishly at each other. I avoided him for the rest of the year because that’s what I did to boys I liked. I searched him up on Facebook recently and found out he got a girl pregnant at sixteen and now works at a local hardware store. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t avoided boys I liked.
It was there in Lawrenceburg Elementary School where I made my first and only friend who was a boy. Not a boyfriend, because I wasn’t allowed to have one yet (side note: I’m still not allowed to have one yet), but a guy friend. A friend who was just a guy. His name was Austin and he was a cute little kid with perpetually flushed cheeks who liked to race me to see who was fastest. He didn’t ask me to be his girlfriend like what all the other kids were doing to each other – he just asked me to race him and that’s all. I hated running but he taught me that if you really pushed through during sprints, that even for a second you could be faster than the person you were racing against. We raced on the outskirts of the grass playfield, away from the playground and the concrete tops. We raced with our shoes off, barefoot across Indiana green grass under Indiana blue sky. We collected rocks that looked weird and gave them names. We played leapfrog and did cartwheels and spun around in circles for no reason.
Austin moved away in the middle of the school year without any warning and I never saw him since. I wonder what he’s doing now.
At the ripe age of six I brought to life the immigrant vision of the American Dream. I was a little kid hot shot who won spelling bees and colonized the colonizers by giving them new names. I faked my way up the top of my class and ate Doritos at midnight. Not bad for a kid who literally had no idea.
