wanting to be

showing you some of me so that you might see some of yourself

I was always kind of a wannabe. Or so I was told by a guy friend who was told by a rich, smart, very controversial girl at my high school. That was the one time someone was mean to me, and it was through a game of telephone, but I have never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten it because it meant that she saw right through me. My parents were lower-middle-class-at-best, first-generation immigrants in an upper class neighborhood made up of second and third-generation immigrants (homes were worth $1MM in the early 2000s). We were a generation behind in the assimilation process. (Wasn’t assimilation just the textbook version of wanting to be?) As Hua Hsu writes in his memoir, Stay True, even if the divisions between the two waves of immigration weren’t immediately visible, they were obvious. We had the most money we’d ever had since the Communist Party seized my grandmother’s estate—and I was still wearing hand-me-down Hollister. And money, as any adult who’s ever been a teenager knows, is the main road to acceptance.