I Am Not Jessica Chen(2)
I’m simply not that good.
Not in academics. Not in extracurriculars. Not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. It doesn’t matter if I crammed my brain to the point of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into my classes, painted until the skin on my hands blistered and split open. Here is incontrovertible proof. Something in me is missing. Lacking.
“Jenna! Are you ready to go?” Mom always sounds like she’s yelling from across a crowded marketplace. I startle at her voice, then, stomach churning, slam my laptop shut. Wipe roughly at my eyes. Ignore the dangerous ache building at the back of my throat. “I already told your uncle and auntie we’ve left the house.”
A recent memory resurfaces: my mom resting her chin against my shoulder as she watched me send my applications off, one by one, exhaling alongside the whoosh of every email. Later, she had spent hours in the kitchen making eight-treasure rice, adding in so many extra red dates and nuts the top layer was almost completely covered. To celebrate all your hard work, she’d said, smiling. It’s going to pay off, I can feel it. We’ll have a bigger celebration once you get in.
“Jenna? Did you hear me?”
The wasps inside me grow louder, their buzzing incessant.
“I—I’m ready,” I call back, even as I reach for my coat as slowly as possible, comb my hair back strand by messy strand, take the stairs one step at a time, delaying the inevitable.
How am I supposed to confess to my parents that everything they’ve done for me—leaving behind their old lives, moving across the world, spending what should’ve been vacation money on overpriced textbooks, waking up at dawn to drive me to tutoring centers, all so I could have a better education—was for nothing?
By the time we pull into my uncle’s driveway, I still haven’t figured out how to tell them.
Maybe, I muse to myself, my head resting against the fogged-up car window, it would be better if I burst into tears. Told them through hysterical sobs. Maybe then they would at least feel sorry for me, and spend most of their energy consoling me, instead of scolding me, or wondering where they went wrong. But they’ve already been understanding enough. That’s the thing. Each time a new rejection letter from Yale or UPenn or Brown popped up in my inbox, or in our mail, they’d be the first to squeeze my shoulders and say, It’s fine, we’re still waiting to hear back from the others. Except I’d seen for myself the growing concern in their eyes, how it’d spread over their aging features like a shadow; I bet Jessica’s parents had never looked at her like that before in her life.
Besides, what could my parents say this time around? There are no good schools left. The only ones we haven’t heard back from yet are my safety schools, the kinds of schools I was embarrassed to even be applying to. Of course Jessica hadn’t applied for any safety schools at all, because she didn’t need them. Her getting into the Ivies was already a foregone conclusion, a fate carved into stone for her probably since she was still in the womb. She’s just that good. That unreasonably, unfathomably perfect.
And I can never be her.
It’s such a suffocating thought—that everything I will ever feel and know and accomplish must begin and end with my own mind.
“It’s so beautiful,” Mom remarks as she steps out of the car, taking in the full view of Uncle’s house. She makes the same comment every time we come here, and every time, it’s true. I climb out after her and stare down the wide, windswept driveway, lined with magnolia trees, their petals flushed pink and smooth as wax, their slender branches reaching up toward the vast late-afternoon sky. And beyond that, the three-story house rises like a white-painted castle, with its massive floor-to-ceiling windows and ivy-crawled walls and marble balustrade balconies. It’s the kind of house that comes with its own name, dated back to the pre-WWI days and stamped in gold over the front door for all guests to see: Magnolia Cottage.
Once, when our mutual friend Leela Patel had come over for a study date with the two of us, she’d raised her brows, both her jaw and her bag dropping to her feet. “That’s your house, Jessica?” When Jessica nodded, with her signature small, humble smile, Leela had whistled. “Damn. I always thought a bunch of rich white people lived here.”
We’d all cracked up laughing, not because it was that funny, but because it was so accurate. My uncle and auntie might have moved over to America from Tianjin just three years before my parents did, but they seem to fit in better than we ever could. Every day, while my dad drives across town at dawn to set up air conditioners and inspect switchboards and my mom balances on her too-tight heels behind a reception desk, Jessica’s parents list off tasks to their assistants and close seven-figure deals from inside their spacious private offices. In the summers, when we budget for a two-day road trip to the closest beach, Jessica’s family flies business class to a luxurious resort in Italy. Jessica’s parents have everything: their lavish house and massive garden and high-end clothes. And they have Jessica.
My parents? All they have is me.
I swallow the bitter thought like poison and hurry to help Mom with the wontons. She’s packed five whole Tupperwares of them, all freshly wrapped and uncooked and stuffed with our special pork-and-shrimp filling.
“Is . . . there a festival going on that I don’t know about?” I ask, surveying the food.