For one summer in 1987, in a youth recreation center in Lincoln, Nebraska, I became an addict of air hockey, a game of fast collisions made possible by levitation. All day I hovered over the immovable table, listened for the hum of it coming alive at the beginning of each game, and waited for air to gush upward from the many pinprick holes dotting its metal surface. Here was the magic of levitation: the air streams lifted up the puck just enough that it was skating on air, and could be driven with furious speed into the goal pocket with a satisfying crunch. Then I would snap the puck flat against the table as if it were an oversized poker chip, and begin again.
The rec center had the standard assortment of facilities, including an outdoor pool. But I somehow discovered the air hockey table, the way—I liked to imagine—a music prodigy crawled toward a violin before she could walk. My wrist reverberated from the impact of the puck against the mallet, and my heart clenched like a fist every time the puck slammed against the table’s inner rim, making a sound somewhere between a twang and a clack. I planted my feet at the table for hours, and I managed to defeat, one by one, sturdier American kids who would have beaten me in any other game except this one.
I was twelve years old, and it was the first summer since I left China—or more accurately, was plucked away, I felt, from the household of my favorite uncle in Shanghai. There, as part of a six-person, three-generation family living in one apartment, I slept on a sofa near the balcony door, from which drifted in the bellows of ship horns on the nearby Huangpu River emptying into the sea. This sound, along with my grandmother’s snoring at the other end of the room, triangulated my position in the known world. I slept secure in the knowledge that I understood where I was and who I was. This, of course, ended when I had to leave and join my parents who’d already settled in Nebraska for my dad to get his doctoral degree. By the time he met me at the airport, they had already picked out for me a school, a pair of shoes to grow into, and an American name.
I no longer remember where the rec center was relative to our home, or even how I got there. The young addict I already was, I noticed only that natural light streamed in from the left side of the air hockey table. From that vantage point, again and again, I found a sweet spot on the side of the table that, if I bounced the puck off it—swinging my forearm out just so—nine times out of ten it would score, having traced out a trajectory that was too fast to see but which I could replay clearly in my mind’s eye.
The angle of incidence is always equal to the angle of reflection.
I learned this in a Chinese science textbook standardized for my grade level, a copy I requested from my uncle. I devoured this textbook and others like it, in order to keep up with the Chinese school curriculum, a parallel universe I thought I was absent from only temporarily, because I was sure that being in America was but a hiccup in my destiny, that shortly after this diversion I would return to my rightful place in the world—in fact, the only place, I was sure―where I could be happy. It’d be another two years before what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 made it impossible for me to expect that my dad would return.
Before all that took place, in 1987, I was perched precariously in between everything: between one school and another, between nostalgia and engagement, between two languages. I had passed an ESL course but could not yet formulate in English, as a fellow émigré would articulate to me decades later, that arriving in America made her feel as if vital parts of her had been “hacked off.” Nor was English fluency the only problem. I wrote long letters to my uncle in Chinese, but didn’t know how to raise the questions I really wanted to ask: “How can I keep my parents from drifting apart?” “What happens if my mom goes away and doesn’t come back?” Instead, I retreated into decorous observations, the kind I thought far-flung correspondences ought to have. “I discovered that our goldfish is attracted to music,” one of my letters said.
When an incident needs reflection, the angle is the most important thing.
To compensate for the fact that I was no longer part of a large family, I gravitated toward two sisters who lived upstairs from us in our building. The Shen family, too, hailed from Shanghai, but seemed to embrace everything about their new lives in America. Their apartment was architecturally identical to ours but had a luster and glamour ours lacked. They invited me upstairs to watch movies like Amadeus, and to this day I associate its plot of envy and murder with the warmth of being in the midst of a family whose parents laughed with each other. As for the two sisters, Christina was already a freshman psychology major; Vicky was two years older than I was, and I wanted to impress her the most. She had a manicured, jaw-skimming bob that I found inconceivably classy, and a soft-featured face I found impossible not to stare at. Plus, the way she spoke—slowly, surely—told me she was not devastated by anything.
I, on the other hand, was devastated by everything. As the summer began, I phoned Vicky one day and asked her to go swimming. She told me to hang on, and even though she covered her phone’s mouthpiece, I could still overhear her explain my phone call to Christina nearby. She’d have to go with me this time, Vicky told Christina, because I’d already invited her out “too many times” for her to say no. It was then I understood that the Shen sisters didn’t need me the way I needed them; they were their own solar system, and only occasionally pulled me into a heady orbit around the sun.
If Vicky did go swimming with me that summer, I can no longer recall it. In my memory, while other children splashed in the pool under the unstinting sunlight, I was inside, riveted by the clang of the puck against the rim of the air hockey table, by the grammar of its trajectory, a grammar I could master. My moves became so fast and efficient that I could drive the puck into my opponents’ goal pocket with a direct shot. Each time I scored, I didn’t do fist pumps, didn’t whoop, and it didn’t occur to me to offer a friendly “good game” to the other players, who never put up a fuss and simply left the table and lined up for their next turn. When a game was won, the air stream would shut itself off, its hum and whirr would stop, and I would let that silence sink in and wait for the next game to begin.
It is my writer’s instinct—now on the leeward side of adolescence—that makes me want to approach my twelve-year-old self from the vantage point of an omniscient narrator zooming in from outside: through the sunlit treetops, through the window pane, before eventually landing on the floor with the kids running around killing time. When this happens, the viewfinder would lock onto a gangly girl with her feet planted shoulder-width apart, a stance designed to endure. Her hair has not been groomed by an adult woman for some time but is stubbornly kept long. Her lips are pursed together, not in concentration but in a refusal to speak. For to speak, to deploy gestures of conviviality, would mean putting down roots in this place, and that she does not want. The girl knows, without really knowing she does, that the gossamer threads we put out into the world turn into filaments, and filaments into tendrils, and what people call destiny is really the outward contours of these tendrils as they exert their tug on us, to pluck us away from some places and to plop us down in others.
The omniscient narrator waits for her turn in line, and when it comes, watches the girl as she snaps down the puck to begin.
Recognize me?
The girl does not seem to hear. But the omniscient narrator knows that she only needs to be there long enough to say a few things.
In four-months’ time your dad will drive you out of here to move to a city in Texas, says the omniscient narrator. That’s where he’ll start a new job.
The girl scores her first point. The omniscient narrator continues talking.
When the car pulls away from your apartment building, you will cry out loud. Alone in his own way, your dad doesn’t know how to comfort you, any more than you can explain that the reason you cry is that you think you will never see Vicky Shen again. That part will turn out to be true. But when you get to Texas you will meet first Aline, then Monica, and you will find a pen pal, Jeremy, with whom you will fill up pages of notebook paper dispatched in hand-illustrated envelopes. These letters will follow you to San Francisco, where you will learn to love the sea.
The omniscient narrator takes a breath and holds down the puck on the table, which continues to whirr.
But before that, when you are not yet fourteen, still half a continent away from the sea, there will be a social studies teacher, Coach Wilson, who will one day out of the blue say to you, as he is passing back your homework on the Alamo: “When you grow up, you are going to be a beautiful woman.”
You don’t understand why he is saying this, a non sequitur tossed out as if he’s taking stock of the weather. But because at that point you feel the opposite of beautiful, you hold on to those twelve words like a magic parasol.
In the years hence, as you become less innocent of motives, you will comb through everything you remember of Coach Wilson, his tone as he uttered these words, his behavior toward you and everyone else, then and thereafter. Still, when you finish scrutinizing them for possible nefarious motives, you will find no signs of impropriety in his words or deeds. And you are left with no option but to be grateful. For an act of careless generosity.
Someday. Beautiful.
This, too, will be only a temporary solace, because at that moment you conflate being beautiful with the end of all your problems, including the indifference of Vicky Shen, but what of it? The solace, at that moment, counts for everything. You will almost forget this place entirely—everything besides the orientation of this air hockey table and the angle of the light. You will forget everyone you played against, myself included. Such details will be wiped clean as you shed one layer after another of your former self, and as you wrap yourself up in the words and antics of your adopted language. You will acquire the patina of nonchalance that attracts fun-loving friends, until you are able to cheerfully recite the trajectories of your globe-trotting and wait for your listeners to say “wow,” until all that remains of this summer is a muscle memory of swinging your forearm out—just so—to score that perfect banked shot: clack—crunch. And what a relief this turns out to be, to let our muscles do the thinking—incident, angle, reflection—even as we are bounced from city to city, from household to household, skimming from one longing to another, more diffident longing.
