Ode to Henry in Sixth Hour; And On Being Asian

Mrs. Carlson called him Henry. The problem here is that English requires names be capitalized; you can’t tell that capital-H Henry is meant to be a proper noun on its own and not simply, the grammatically correct way to write a name. Try other language manipulations; a Henry, the Henry, doesn’t work either—there is no plural, no species. Just plain Henry. Just the one.

Marketing YouTubers mark the rise of a pop star with how recognizable their hair is; I guess it’s true to a certain extent because it’s all I can think about right now, in this second paragraph in which I feel obligated perhaps by writing convention to describe him. Frazzled orange-gray, like it’s charged with static from the follicles, from the root, like the detonating cords of dynamite sticks. No one in Newspaper particularly looks like a mad scientist but if there were one it would be him. I am trying to find examples for the whole show-not-tell shtick but from memory it’s just an ink smudge out-of-focus; when you zoom in on a painting and realize the perfect shine of the girl’s pearl earring is just a fleck of white paint. I only have cheap metaphors. Imagine the “old soul” down to the hair, down to the bone. If the font Courier New was a human being. That is Henry, in flesh, in essence.

Friday, we were making banners for our Newspaper groups to hang up around the Newspaper classroom that was the lunch line area while the school kitchens were being renovated. I was outlining a typewriter onto the cloth from a piece of online clipart. The spacing between the keys was off. Something was asymmetrical—the eraser shavings only stuck gray lint onto the banner fabric. Henry peers over; “It looks like my typewriter at home.”

What. “You have a typewriter?” Was that not only in cliches and that disastrous Taylor Swift lyric?

“Yeah, from East Germany. I got it off the side of the road.”

“How did you know it was from East Germany?”

“I looked it up from the model. It’s from an East German manufacturing company.”

I can’t, I don’t think, for the life of me write dialogue, but every day in sixth hour is something like this. Half of Thursday's banner-planning was spent translating various versions of “Long live newspaper” and “Glory to Chariots” into Latin for the motto; but before Google Translate was open we had Henry, who knew Latin “for very niche situations” from a middle school Roman architecture book. Of course he only listens to music circa 1980; that’s par for the course, but I ask for a synonym and half my SAT vocabulary flashcards roll off his tongue. A class where I can, bizarrely, debate about thesauruses and typewriters and Chappell Roan’s voice; not so much a homecoming as a strange lucid dream where the physics aren’t quite right but running feels like flying, anyway.

*

I chose Newspaper over AP Econ, in a burst of impulse and neurons firing and blood rushing to the head. Spurred by Rob abetting me with promises of it being “chill” and Julia’s long answers over GroupMe DM’s and I guess a little of ChatGPT’s echo chamber. In any case from the beginning of the world to now I ended up rushing to the counselor’s with the bathroom pass during APUSH, heart beating with disproportionate force for the Act of changing my schedule. I witnessed the click of the button in the dim room that did it. Came back to the APUSH fluorescents and a tingling in my fingers. Brain, senses, dramatic as always. But there is something colossal, anyway, about it, that anything you do blows that golf ball of fate a few fractions of a degree from the smallest of instants ago, that you are engineering yourself.

I didn’t know what kind of person would take Newspaper until I saw all the girls sitting on the couches, or until I met Shae and overheard her telling Henry about a novel she was writing. I realized that since coming back from China last year I hadn’t done more than dip my toe into waters outside the East Asian circles. My father’s biggest gripe with letting me come back was the US education system; not rigorous, so euphemistically, not soul-crushing enough compared to what I could get in China. And it’s true that in sophomore year I was happiest in my AP classes and agonized about the rest. I feel those uncomfortable jolts of model-minority elitism now, still, when my non-Asian friends ask about my schedule and trading test scores. I was surprised when I learned Henry was taking regular English 12 instead of the AP. I was surprised when I learned Shae wasn’t taking Lang. The assumption and projection of my default settings onto the world, color-graded by the second-gen immigrant worldview that shapes everything I see.

And most of the time it’s not so much elitism as the uncomfortable concession that stereotypes are still gold pans with kernels of truth. Because it’s true that there is some exclusivity between “circles,” Venn diagram sections, whatever you call it, some divide between groups such as, and I’ll throw out the most cursory example, “Asian” and “white.” And when I overhear talk about APs or SAT scores or majors I don’t know how to feel about it all over again. At Kenyon, what you would consider to be a prestigious writing camp, the Asians I talk to all tell me they want to do STEM; writing is subordinate, an unfortunate growth spurt that will even out once they’re older. The white kids all go to boarding schools and their parents went to liberal arts colleges and they want to study English. There is still some fault line. There is still something generational that keeps its chokehold on the present.

My father tells me Kenyon was something I could do for fun but to still keep my options open, be open-minded but the undertone is be cautious. At Kenyon, Ian with the jarringly blue eyes has read every William Carlos Williams poem and knows what ars poetica means as soon as our instructor says it. Saskia from The Something School in New York has the best jackets and the best literary analysis; Riley who looks exactly like Inside Out Riley was published in the Stone Soup magazine at eight years old. In sixth hour, Rob and Henry talk across from me about focus value and frame rates on the new newspaper camera. I could have taken AP Econ instead of doing mental gymnastics running around the score in the GPA calculator; I could have taken AP Bio for the drug-relief stupor of another STEM whatever on my transcript. But I am here, and I understand that this is a world that I am peering through from a two-way mirror.

*

Science and the humanities. STEM majors and the unemployed. At college info sessions I skip lunch for, the admissions director takes a deep breath to brace us for that novel, revolutionary concept, the interdisciplinary major.

I care for science as philosophy; concepts like symmetry and time and congruence. I think almost every day about Newton’s determinism physics, where everything has a reason, and history’s pivot into quantum mechanics that says well to Hades with that and reality is literally just a deck of cards playing probability games. But I care about the broad strokes and not the pixels. Imagine crouching at a computer toiling away at code fifty hours a week for your day job. Or pouring liquid from test tube A into B a thousand times to prove a hypothesis everyone worse and better in your field has spent decades on. And it’s not as if I haven’t tried. I nepotism’d myself into “researching” with one of my father’s professor friends. All I still remember now is wanting to gouge my eyes out as Mohan, the grad student who kindly tolerated me for two weeks, moved a little glass slide from one microscope to another machine as we waited for the sensor to collect the data onto a computer. Trying to ask non-stupid questions and be deeply interested in what seemed to me to be tedium. “I wished I could desire something simply because I was told to desire it.” Maybe I am too pretentious. No better than the critic in that reading passage who lives in the abstract and never the now.

*

The last spell of misfortune came when I found my passion, temporary or fickle as it may be. When sixth hour wiped my mind awake with promises of interviews and stories and journalism. When I decided on a whim to interview Mrs. Chang from AP Chinese and stumbled upon a landmine of fulfillment and meaning.

In our unfinished Lang exit ticket on Thursday our claim was that true freedom comes from resistance. As Thoreau says, to obey your conscience and your only obligation which is to yourself. Pure allegiance to yourself, without which you are made a puppet in the politics of other people’s lives. The unfinished synthesis: the price of anything less than resistance is internal conflict, drowning like Nicole Dennis-Benn in the illusion of choice and no choice at all.

If a plant cannot live according to its own nature, it dies; and so a man.

It doesn’t change that my mother almost swerved off the road when I blurted in a burst of disarmament that I wanted, maybe, to major in English. Her tone the same as a burglar alarm. I changed my mind—you can study anything but English. Even Political Science. Or that at the MIT information session at Detroit Country Day School I felt like something was crawling under my skin, and when Patricia agreed that I did seem like I would do law I felt oddly disappointed. But Henry has an account for the international database of typewriters. Shae is a hundred pages into a novel about Orpheus and Eurydice. Rob plays keyboard in a garage band and filmed a documentary for the school district and tried to set up Mr. Verhelle with someone while they were in Denmark. Is it rebellion or is it authenticity? What is the man, what is his nature? It doesn’t change that the air is charged with some buzz and spark and hum when something is in alignment, planets or electrons or ballerina lines, Halley’s comet or Edison’s last gamble with light or the Coda as the stage swan is airborne, something is there, something is right.

Sooner or later I always come back to people. The memory silhouette of a person. Henry’s hair and eyeglass frames. In Olivia Gatwood’s poem about waitresses in the recession, Sarah going to law school, Tammy Sue with her own framing business. In my poem about youth suicide in Chinese schools, my classmates Su Jingya with her hair dyed against the dress code and Yao Mingyu whistling by holding his hands together. The show-not-tell. It all comes back to humanity. Even the planets, the titanic star giants are made of elementary particles. The individual, the grains of sand, still.

My mother says language is the medium, and why would you ever study only the tool without the substance. An archeological site with the bones dug out already. But the medium is an art. Is both form and function. Nothing has ever brought me so close to the abstract, to those theoretical dimensions distorted beyond imagination, where mathematicians and philosophers alike followed the crumbs to the altar; beauty and truth and freedom.

When I write about English versus STEM, because I will always write about it, I always, always end on hope, let the girl float into the air, the Pink Pony Club ending guitar riff where the notes burst into chariot slash stepping stones slash escalator into heaven. I am the walking starry-eyed, idealistic, dramatic, love letter to that plague. Neck craned toward the sky while hands reach downward into wells, convinced the moon isn’t really that far away. You are not the exception. And yet in the trenches the narcotic thrill of language. Getting up from bed for the thousandth time to jot down some idea fragment or vague fuzzy image. Lucid dreaming, truly. Ariel learning to swim as a human for the first time. There is something evolutionary, colossal about it. And if a plant can live according to its nature it lives. And lives.