“Don’t ever do that, kid,” my dad said, lowering his hand to the restaurant table to emphasize the seriousness of his message with a gesture, just as he emphasized the seriousness of transgressing this command even once by the way he placed his stress on the word “ever.”
I was completely startled to get this chewing-out: at about seven years of age, I thought I had a pretty clear idea of which things were acceptable behavior in the eyes of my parents, and which things were unacceptable infractions.
And this was clearly a serious infraction. But I hadn’t even figured out what it was yet.
Children often have an uncanny understanding of their parents’ thoughts and priorities. “Not standing out” wasn’t something that had “flagged” for me as a high priority of my dad’s yet—unlike Margaret in the novel “Our Missing Hearts”:
…Like her parents, she strove for unremarkable, anchoring herself firmly in the hill of the bell curve. To be noticed to was to invite predation; better to blend seamlessly into the foilage. She earned average grades, met expectations but seldom exceeded them, caused no trouble and set no examples…
—Celeste Ng
And I think: Well, that wasn’t like my parents / like my dad at all. He was in awe of greatness. I would hear it in his voice when he talked about Shakespeare or Newton, see it in his gestures when he motioned with his head towards the calculus books on a shelf, and, drawing in his breath, he’d say, “The calculus. If you get to that, oh boy… you’ll be beyond what I can teach you.”
So I knew the ways he was looking to see remarkable things out of his daughters: Go ahead and be exceptional in your academics. Go ahead and be unusually-mature. Take pride in your work. Be exceptional in the level of effort you put forward. In those things, stand out.
But “just go with the flow” or “don’t rock the boat” were also values of my dad’s. However, that approach was reserved for certain contexts. Social contexts, mainly.
Years later, he would tell me that he would often try to just be “a face in the crowd,” adding, “That’s a good movie: ‘A Face in the Crowd’—have you ever seen it?” And when you read a bit about what it was like for the Baby Boomers growing up, it makes sense. You would feel it tangibly: classrooms, already full, having extra seats pulled in to accommodate more students. Those in charge could not-so-subtly indicate that if you cause any trouble, they can boot you out, as there is an ample supply of other students who are willing to cooperate.
But the characters in the Celeste Ng novel had a more all-pervasive fear: Set in a world where people who looked like them were in peril and wouldn’t have their rights protected too carefully by anyone, “Our Missing Hearts” paints a picture of terror that would send any family scrambling to lie low to avoid notice—though they couldn’t exactly succeed in that. Your face, your appearance, isn’t quite a thing that you can pick up and put down at will.
A lot of the barrier is fear. Questions like “What do you think you need to do to be safe?” determine so much about when “blend in” is the approach, and when the approach is “stand out.”
So maybe my dad’s fear for me was that, among groups of people, I wouldn’t be aware will of the group—or that even if I was aware, I wouldn’t mold my own choices to match up with the group norms. And that it would cost me.
So, going back to those moments with my family at the restaurant—I didn’t need to worry that I’d never find out which action of mine had upset my dad: he wanted to make sure I’d know. It was the choice where I’d picked toast for my side order when everyone else picked to have a biscuit—or maybe I thought “I’ll have a biscuit” when everyone else had picked toast—it doesn’t matter now.
Everything up until then had seemed perfectly pleasant to me. (In the first place, we were on a trip, and even then, eating out was a somewhat rare thrill for my sister and me.) And I think I know what had made me drop my guard. I think the waitress must have focused on each person, as she went around the table, asking what side we would each have. And when she asked me “What do you want?” that had set me into a pleasant reverie of questioning, “Well, what DO I really want?” (I was an honest child.) Or maybe I had started to ask a “would it be too much trouble?” question—started to question whether it was okay to change my mind about the order, and she thought she’d encourage me with a, “Just decide what YOU want—that’s all that matters; we can get it for you, no problem!”
But that wasn’t all that mattered: the language of silent resonances that were present around our table was just inaudible to her.
How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. …Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.
—Celeste Ng, “Everything I Never Told You.”