Hapa Girl: A Memoir

25. The End of Staring

Once I had left home at age eighteen, I did not come home for Thanksgiving, although I did return for Christmas, when the dorms closed and all students were forced to leave campus. At home, I worked on the farm again and in my mother’s photography studio, but after my freshman year I also made sure that I applied for summer jobs and internships so that I wouldn’t have to come home for more than a few weeks. I went on two study-abroad programs and did not return for any holidays while I was out of the country. I lived in France, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan. During the summer, I worked as a copyeditor for a newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri, and as a reporter in Des Moines, Iowa, for the Associated Press, with whom I would eventually become a full-fledged newswoman. I returned to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, after martial law had been declared across the country, despite my mother’s fears. In the meantime, my family was left to cope with their trials without me. Since I’d stopped coming home, they had to pare down the farm. They sold the cows, then most of the meat chickens without ordering a new batch, and finally the layers were allowed to grow old. One of my brother’s new dogs killed quite a few of them, and my family decided to let the egg business fall by the wayside. They sold the goats 25 The End of Staring that my mother had loved so much. After my senior year in high school, they had given up on pigs entirely. My brother started college locally, where he was at first mistaken for a Native American student. The head of the local Bureau of Indian Affairs called my brother into his office one afternoon. “So, Jeff,” the man smiled pleasantly, “what tribe are you?” But my brother didn’t have a tribe and had to find his own way to fit into the university. There were enormous fights, one involving a fraternity house of drunken pledges, but my brother was able to make new friends, from Iowa and other neighboring states, young men who hadn’t been raised to fear people who looked a little different from themselves. There were still some shootings, although by now most people in town and on the neighboring farms knew my family so well that they didn’t feel as threatened as before. My mother’s beloved dog, Tiger, was killed in the driveway one June. He had been a Mother’s Day gift from my brother. For my part, I had merely sent a card to her from another country, I forget which one, and it had arrived late. Eventually, however, all the administrators who had despised my father, who had been jealous of him, who had resented him, left the university, and the new administration began to give him credit for the innovations that he had suggested, which were finally being implemented . When I was a junior, in 1988, my father found a new job as an administrator at the University of Wyoming. My family packed all summer long—I only vaguely remember their letters and postcards. I wasn’t there to help, of course. I was in Kansas City for my newspaper internship. Then, by the time they needed to move to Laramie, I had returned to China for my study-abroad program. Because of the tight schedule between the end of my job and my flight out of the country, I hadn’t lifted a finger to help them. I remember the first letter I received from my brother from “our” new home in Wyoming. He wrote to me in Nanjing, a letter that began: “Dear May-lee, You won’t believe this!! Nobody stares at us here. Dad and I went all over town, and nobody stared.” 196 • Chapter 25 At first, my parents were still very worried, because they had still been unable to find a buyer for the South Dakota farm. And then, by a stroke of luck, their carpet cleaner won the Iowa State Lottery and was able to pay cash for the farm, no need for any bank loans. They had to sell it for ten thousand dollars less than they’d paid, despite all the improvements—the barns, the screen porch, the new plumbing, the additional...