From his badge, I could see that he was an MD, and from his demeanor, I already knew. Older and distinguished-looking, a believer that his special status in the hospital confers special status in the world. There were so many like him. Those who didn’t bother with seminars about wellness or conference introductions, because how many conferences had they gone to already, and no complaints from any woman thus far.
The barista remade the drink. The doctor huffed off.
* * *
—
I’D NEVER SET OUT to be a gunner but once the label came up, it stuck. That I was considered the new breed of doctor made me feel like a product rolling off an assembly line to displace prior models. Medicine was getting more competitive because it was opening up to all. So by the slow force of natural selection, that doctor from the atrium café would be replaced by someone younger, better, and with knowledge more up-to-date. A question that I used to get asked was whether I was pushed into medicine, like all good Asian kids, and to this, I usually said nothing. How unscientific it was to generalize about any population and I wasn’t even the most reliable source. My parents hadn’t necessarily pushed me, though they also didn’t stand in my way. What they did, out of pure honesty, was to remind me that there was no safety net, so whatever I chose to do, I had to do it well, I couldn’t half-ass it or expect to be bailed out. Follow through, my father’s advice. Stay the course.
When Reese and the director asked about my father, whenever anyone asked about my upbringing, I avoided saying too much so as to not inadvertently reveal that we’d been poor. Admitting to that had its consequences. It meant admitting to having felt less, and thus having too much to prove. A listener might think, Yes, that explains a lot, that explains a lot about you.
At every secondary school we enrolled in, Fang and I had qualified for free lunch, which our mother refused to sign us up for. No such thing as a free lunch in this country, and a Chinese saying that means the same: meat pies are never going to fall from the sky. Besides, a program like that was welfare, and being on welfare gave someone else a chance, later on, to tell you that your success was not your own.
Fang figured it out quick. The popular kids had money, or their parents had money, which gave these kids the illusion that they did too.
Our first place in Wichita had a capacity limit of three. We were told that we would be evicted with a fourth. Not the fondest memory of my father followed, but an indelible one, the four of us sneaking into a Super 8 motel for which he had paid the price of only one guest. Once the receptionist told the other receptionist, a security guard came to block our path. We were asked to leave even before my father started flipping them off. For a small fee, an older Chinese couple with no kids took us in for a month, before my father decided we were moving to Scranton. The room was in the back of their one-story ranch, hidden from view by a tall evergreen bush they planted by no coincidence after we arrived. We were forbidden from walking where we could be seen or using the kitchen during the day.
I was never hungry, never without clothes or proper shelter, but the second the woman saw me go in the bathroom, she started pounding on the door. It was either that or the projects, and we were not going to live in the projects.
A good memory. A fond one. The most frugal member of our family and yet my father would end up doing the most unfrugal of things. Spend a week’s worth of dishwashing money, for instance, on what he promised to be a surprise. We wondered what it could be. Maybe bed frames, since we had been sleeping on floor mattresses all this time. Weeks passed and we forgot about it. Then on our last day of school, the first of summer, he and my mother picked us up in a lime-green Mustang, rented for the afternoon. There was nothing more American to him than American cars, American muscle, because inside a car like that, even the weak could feel strong. We blasted the radio and went to the nearest Wendy’s drive-through. My father pulled the car beyond the intercom and I stuck my head out of the rear window to place the order. Everything on the value menu and two cups of hot water. Yes, just hot water. My father drove us to a park and we ate in the car. Then he drove around an empty parking lot as fast as he could, while my mother kept hitting him in the arm and telling him to slow down. Bystanders must have said, Whatever the story is there, those people are reckless and certainly living beyond their means. They then told their kids, Kids, this is why the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich.
Probably that day was one of the times my mother reminded me that a woman needed power, and power came from money, so a woman needed money.