Joss and Gold

Seven

Seven Meryl had the lowe" opinion of Jru;on-an overred kid, she taunted Chester whenever his name came up. But Chester had steered by Jason's star ever since he'd returned home to Connecticut from Malaysia, confused and knocking at loose ends, then found his way to Columbia. There, Jason's course on ethnocentrism and Asian culture had allowed him to distance himself from the violent repugnance that had inexplicably filled him as soon as he arrived that steamy August and found himself among neighbors who talked and walked and ate with knives and forks just like he did. For a month, among the stately white-painted colonials of his hometown, he sweltered in a heat wave more debilitating than what he had experienced in the tropical enclosures of Malaysia. But he could not talk to his parents about his time in Malaysia coherently because of the tone that crept into his descriptions. He had worried over his tone even as images of Abdullah's and Samad's beaming faces smiling good-bye at the airport dodged in and out of his conversations. He put away the two Marks and Spencer sweaters his students at the Vocational High School had given him on his last day. All he could remember was their schoolboy pallor, the zany accent of their English as they shyly sang, "For he's a jolly good fellow." He had had enough of difference for a lifetime, he thought, and when his father pressed him for stories he shrank inside CIRCLING and tried to muffle the memory of all those multihued skins, the black, brown, and yellow and the creamy-white of the Eurasians. His mother thought his mumbling evasions were because he missed his friends-perhaps, although she feared and never raised the subject, a native woman. But his father suspected his surliness, the way he left the boxes of souvenirs unpacked, refused to send the dozens of rolls of film for developing, and would not organize his slides for one private showing for them. "Didn't have a good time, did you?" he said after the first week. But that wasn't true either. Jason knew the reason. That is, he knew about differences , about how beyond a certain point the individual could not adapt out of his particular culture. He knew that an individual was not all there was; that a man was a product of other men; and that a man was capable of doing and feeling things essential to his group although accidental to his being. It was a relief sitting through Jason's lectures. The oppressive sensation he had suffered as he struggled to reconcile himself to living with Abdullah's and Samad's soft wrist motions, the odd-shaped noses sitting on his Eurasian friends' almost Caucasian faces, and the unsettling smells of Indian sweat, Chinese soya sauce, and Malay spices-an oppressiveness he had not dared express for fear of being condemned as superior , gradually dissolved during Jason's delicate explication of the laws of difference. To be white, to know one was white, to find anything else peculiar and uncomfortable, was no sinit became, in fact, the basis for curiosity and inquiry, one's fate. This truth made it easier for him to walk down Broadway, past toppled garbage cans and loud salsa music. It made it easier for him to stop by the black peddlers hawking African beads and batiks and copies of The Autobiography ofMalcolm X on the sidewalks, to buy a shell necklace for Meryl. Ignoring the roisterous, clashing voices and colors outside the unwalled boundary of the campus for the books that taught him to study people rather than get mixed up with them, Chester was able also to carry this truth with him during his six-month stay in Bali. It made him comfortable in a way he had not been in 153 JOSS and GOLD Malaysia. He was there to study difference, not overcome it, and he could finally relax with the natives, knowing guiltlessly that he was not one of them. Monday was always one ofJason's days at home. He had been a fixture at Columbia for a long time. Having studied with Ruth Benedict as an undergraduate, he had returned to teach after four years in India studying the hill tribes in Tamil Nadu-a personal triumph. Jason had penetrated a field then exclusively and...