Fulfill Your Destiny
“I’m so proud of you!”
I’m so proud of you. Those are words I’d never heard from my mom in my thirteen years. She was taught by the brutal society from which she came that saying positive things to someone would somehow jinx them, so finding something, anything, to criticize immediately would spare them the delay of the inevitable. Plus, I already know that I am inherently broken and nothing I can do will fix it, so she must do her duty to constantly remind me of my brokenness as my punishment. On this day, she certainly didn’t disappoint.
I entered the code on the gray pad next to the garage door and walked through the garage into the laundry room. I’d just come back from karate class, and this would be my first time seeing my mom that day. My parents both left for work in the morning before I had to get up for school, and in the afternoon my dad would arrive home from work first, between 4:30 and 5:00pm. That day I had my 5:00pm karate class, so my dad would drop me off there and then go to the Metra station a few miles away to pick up my mom, who took a suburban train line to and from work downtown, 30 miles away. He’d take her home and leave her there to start getting dinner set up, usually by heating up some soup and meat/potatoes dish my live-in grandpa had cooked for the week, and throwing together a simple green salad with oil and vinegar, large enough for multiple helpings by multiple people. Then he’d go pick me up from karate and take me home. I’d normally pile a little bit of everything on a floral ceramic plate with gold trim and head upstairs to my room to spend the rest of the evening by myself.
But this day was different. Through the laundry room door I marched into the kitchen in my black, well-worn, too-short gi, and purple belt. My mom was standing behind the peninsula cabinet, chopping white onions for the salad. I told her to stop and dragged her over to the fridge, where on the door I’d hung my first 7th grade report card. Twin Groves Junior High School gave out letter grades as well as percentages, so it was particularly exciting to see my hard work for what it was. I didn’t work particularly hard until then — I’d been a gifted kid who got good grades by just showing up and doing the bare minimum. And I had a hard time in third grade with my math teacher, who was frustrated that I wasn’t in the advanced math class across the hall simply because I flatly refused to do any homework. I argued that I aced all the quizzes and tests and therefore clearly understood the material without needing to practice it over and over at home, but they all insisted that I had to do it. By 4th grade, I started to do it. By 5th grade, I’d learned to be a quiet, complacent student and just accept boredom. But in junior high, everything changed. Now I wanted to make sure I was in the advanced math and reading classes so that I could test into the advanced math and reading classes in high school and then get a full ride to a very reputable college, and then get a high-paying job, and then marry a man with white skin and at least a Jewish mother with some kind of acceptable career aspiration, and have many Jewish babies and keep my figure, and fulfill my destiny. I had a lot of expectations to meet, so I’d better get started now.
So when my first junior high report card came in and I saw a row of 100s and one 99%, I was elated. My mom had been on my case since my refusal-to-do-any-homework phase, accusing me of being lazy. I’d gotten pretty good grades once I started to do my homework, but because I didn’t put in much more than the minimum, I had some Bs in there — the worst nightmare of many an immigrant parent. This was my first time getting all nearly perfect grades, and it was all because of my own work. I was damn proud. And I knew my mom would be too.
While my dad slurped his large bowl of soup at the round wooden table covered in an adhesive paper with a brown and white geometric pattern, I thrust my report card in her hands and said, “See? Look at that.”
She looked the paper over for a few seconds and, without looking up, pointed to my reading grade and asked in her highly educated accent, “What’s this 99?”
“I did my best in reading.”
“But where did you lose the point?”
“I don’t remember. Probably some question I read wrong on a test.”
“But you have 100 everywhere else. Why 99? Why not 100?”
My dad never even looked up from his soup. I took my report card, folded it up, and went upstairs with my plate of food. I didn’t even stop to acknowledge my grandpa sitting on his bed watching tv when I walked past his room. I entered my room, shut the door behind me, and bent down to place the plate on my beige carpet floor. I opened my bifold closet doors and retrieved a folder from the top drawer of a short, white chest of drawers I’d had since I was a toddler. That was the only place it would fit in my room, and my parents refused to get rid of perfectly good and functional furniture. The folder was glossy and had an orange and brown angular patterned background with a photo of the cast of the live-action Flintstones movie, with the title of the movie above it. I’d had that folder since I was in third grade, when the movie came out. I didn’t even particularly like that movie or ever watch it again, but the folder was still in good condition, and since third grade it had been the home of items I was proud of, but that my mom wasn’t. I stuffed the report card alongside my collection of achievement certificates from karate (we got one every time we received a stripe or belt) and pencil cartoon drawings I loved but my mom refused to display because they weren’t “finished” unless they were colored in.
Why not 100? Your best isn’t good enough and it never will be. Keep trying anyway and accept your punishment and your destiny.
