CHAPTER 1 Origin Story
WHEN YOU HAVE A NAME LIKE ALEJANDRA KIM, teachers always stare at you like you’re a typo on the attendance sheet. Each school year, without fail, they look at my face and the roster and back again, like they can’t compute my súper-Korean face and my súper-Spanish first name. Multiply that by eight different teachers for eight periods a day, and boom: welcome to my life at Quaker Oats Prep.
I mean, Alejandra is like the “Jessica” of Spanish girl names—basic as all hell. It’s not like my parents named me Hermenegilda or Xóchitl. And yet people still find a million and one ways to butcher my name. I’ve been called:
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Alley-JOHN-druh
Mr. Landibadeau, our college guidance counselor, who apparently never took Spanish 101. (Hello, the “j” is pronounced like an “h.”)
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Alexandra
Mr. Schwartz, sophomore year, who ironically “Ellis Islanded” me even though he teaches US history.
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Ah-leh-CHHHHHAN-durah!
Ms. Sanders, junior-year physics. Technically this is correct—the third syllable is pronounced like the “Chan” in “Chanukah.” (Hanukah? Hanukkah? You get my point.) But Ms. Sanders was trying so hard to sound muy auténtica, which was almost as bad as if she’d just Ellis Islanded my name in the first place. You know, like those annoying people who go to a bodega and order a “CWAH-sson,” when the rest of us commoners just say “cruh-SAHNT.”
But if you’re the one ordering croissants from a corner bodega, that’s the least of your pretentious problems.
For the record, I just pronounce it “Ah-lay-HAHN-druh.” But I usually tell people to call me “Ally.” I say it the easy gringo way: “Alley.” As in alley cat, alleyway, back-alley. That’s what everyone at Quaker Oats Prep calls me.
Our school’s not actually named Quaker Oats. It’s officially Anne Austere Preparatory School, named after a Quaker from the 1600s who was literally burned at the stake for trying to better humanity. But everyone just calls us Quaker Oats. We’re not like Brearley or Chapin or Dalton. We’re more “progressive” (read: “hippie” and “weirdo”). We’re like the minor leagues for the big Quaker colleges like Whyder and Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr. Laurel Greenblatt-Watkins, my first and best friend here, says we’re a hotbed of granola crunchiness in the middle of Chinatown. I don’t know what to think. I’m just a scholarship kid (90 percent). And Ma never lets me forget about that 10 percent we owe each year.
Back in my neighborhood in Queens, they call me “Ale.” Except when Ma gets súper pissed, then it’s all, “Alejandra Verónica Kim, ¡andate a tu cuarto!”
Papi always used to call me “Aleja-ya.”
If I were Dominican or Puerto Rican or Colombian or Mexican, then at least I’d have some solidarity in New York with “mi gente,” my people. Which might sound vaguely racist, but it is what it is. But my parents are Argentine, and there aren’t a whole lot of us here. Both sets of my parents’ parents were Korean immigrants who were aiming for America-North back in the day but washed up in America-South.
Sidebar: The Korean name for America is Mi-Guk—Beautiful-Country. For South America, it’s Nam-Mi—South-of-Beautiful. Which is all kinds of linguistically fucked up.
It sounds random, how a bunch of Koreans ended up in Argentina. The short answer is immigrant labor exploitation. They were sent over to farm and “populate” Patagonia, but the land was basically a barren desert. The Koreans were like, yeah, nope, and hightailed it to Buenos Aires, where they settled in a villa miseria called Baekgu and sewed clothes all day.
Every time I get upset about something first-world, like how they forgot the ketchup packet with my fries, I have to stop myself and remember: Papi grew up in literal miseryville. He worked in a sweatshop, forced into child labor by his own parents.
That’s what happens when you’re the kid of immigrants: your whole life is one big guilt trip.
Nothing about my family is “normal.” Not even the Spanish we speak, which is all weird and Porteño—aka Buenaryan. Apparently there’s a hierarchy within the Latinx community where everyone thinks Argentines are snobby, white European wannabes looking down their noses at the rest of Latin America with their hoity-toity accents and weirder verb conjugations and stubborn refusal to use normal words like “tú”—you. Instead Argentines say “vos,” which was súper trending in Spain in the 1500s but has since fallen the way of the pay phone and the postage stamp.
Also, Argentines use the word “che”—hey—a lot, which is how Ernesto Guevara got his nickname.
Anyway, Ma and Papi knew each other as kids back in Baekgu, but they re-met here in New York as adults, and the rest, as they say, is historia.
Che, that was exhausting. What’s kind of annoying is how people—adults especially—always expect you to lead with your Origin Story like you’re in a Marvel comic, sans the súperpowers. Like, ooh, tell me the exotic story behind your name/face/race/peoples. Walk me through that radioactive spider bite that transformed you into the Súper Freak you are today. (Peter Parker, by the way, is also from Queens.)
I am 94.7 percent sure they wouldn’t do that if I looked like my ancestors had stepped off the Mayflower.
CHAPTER 2Quaker Oats
ANYWAY, IT’S THE FIRST DAY BACK at Quaker Oats after the summer break, and everyone is súper excited for Senior Elective in Creative Writing. I’m just medium-whatever. I’m taking this class mostly because I need an elective during Taupe period. Quaker Oats does not believe in numbered periods, lest they create hierarchies in time. As our motto says, “We privilege all shades of learners.”
Quaker Oats invites experts in different subjects to teach electives to us high schoolers. Usually they’re adjunct professors from Columbia or NYU looking for a side hustle. Word on the street is that either we pay handsomely or they’re just underpaid.
So we’re all sitting in the classroom, awaiting the arrival of our elective lecturer: a novelist named Jonathan Brooks James. I don’t know if it’s a first-middle-last name situation, two first names and a last name, or two last names. I think about asking Claire Devereaux, who’s sitting next to me.
Claire leans over my desk. “God, wasn’t Becoming Brooklyn, like, perfection? We’re so lucky to get him.” Before I can answer, she adds, “Oh, right, Ally. Reading’s not really, like, your thing.”
Everyone at Quaker Oats has a “thing.”
For Claire Devereaux, it’s being editor in chief of Ennui, our literary journal.
For Laurel, it’s social activism. She wants to be the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Even my best friend back in Jackson Heights, Billy Díaz, has a “thing.” It’s “trying to get people to stop acting like assholes on the street.” Which I guess translates to “making the world a slightly less crappy place.”
I don’t have a “thing.” I’m “thing-adjacent.” Which means I usually just support Laurel’s things. We spent the last three years
making tons of flyers that people only pretended to pay attention to.
I want to tell Claire I didn’t think Becoming Brooklyn was perfection. It’s about a guy who lives above a tortilla factory and is tortured by writer’s block, corn odor, and a Manic Pixie barista. I didn’t understand why it went on for 734 pages when I kind of got the point by page 2. But what do I know? Becoming Brooklyn got nominated for a National Book whatever.
Also, Claire’s blond hair keeps whipping my desk, and it smells expensive, like non-drugstore shampoo. I get tongue-tied around her—not because of a girl crush, but in, like, a feudal caste kind of a way. She’s tall, waifish, and bland-pretty in the face, like a Madewell model. I’m more like the invisible ethnic assistant at the photo shoot who’s supposed to fetch her organic alkaline water.
Claire snaps her attention to the front of the classroom—“Oh my God, that’s him!”—and in walks Jonathan Brooks James, en carne y hueso. That is, in the flesh.
Jonathan Brooks James looks like a Jonathan Brooks James, or how anyone with those three names might look: preppy as all hell, right down to the loafers without socks. His skin and hair are the same sandy color, which only makes his blue eyes pop—like round bits of glass washed up on Rockaway Beach.
But the more I look, the more he also seems different from his boyish author photo. His face is puffier and more ragged, like he got into a fight with himself.
“Get out your notebooks and pens,” he says. No Good morning, no Hello my name is, no Welcome to the first day of class.
Everyone whips out their laptops.
“Anyone who pulls out an electronic device will automatically fail this class.”
Claire seems chagrined as she shoves her computer back in her bag. I’m the only one who already has paper and a pen on my desk, because I am analog like that. My laptop—a hand-me-down from my cousin Michael Oppa—is too clunky to carry on the subway every day and only keeps its charge for five minutes.
“To write fiction, you must create something from nothing,” Jonathan Brooks James says. “You cannot be afraid of the blank page. So freewrite for twenty minutes. And not some clichéd bullshit like ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ so don’t even ask.”
Good, because then I’d have to write about my uneventful days working at Tía Yoona and Gary Gomobu’s dry cleaners on the Upper East Side. Tía Yoona is Papi’s older sister. I work at the store to help pay off my tuition and to have extra money for books and field trips and things. While the rest of my classmates spent their summers off volunteering on a blueberry farm in Maine or auditing college classes at Bennington or the Sorbonne or on an anthropological expedition to Cairo or the Orkney Islands. Most days at work I pray to God I won’t run into any kids from school.
Being “monied” isn’t just about shopping sprees in Beverly Hills or ski trips to the Alps. That would be tacky and gauche—a demonstration of “conspicuous consumption.” For us Oatties, it’s all about experiences. (That’s what we call ourselves: Oatties. Cute, right? Kind of not really.)
Claire raises her hand. “Hi, Jonathan Brooks James. I’m Claire Devereaux, EIC of Ennui. I’m such a fan of your work. We’d love to do a feature interview with you, but let’s pin that discussion for later. I just have one clarifying question for this assignment. Is there a more specific writing prompt you could give us? Like, should we write about three objects in the room, or employ poetic imagery…?”
He gives her a blank stare, and she falters. I have never seen Claire Devereaux falter before.
“No, just write,” he says.
So we “just write.” I write about how my fingers are c
ramping around my pen. I write about how my shoulders are hunched over as my fingers are cramping around my pen. I start to write about the subway ride to school—but then I cross that out and go back to the hunched-over shoulders and cramped fingers.
Basically, it’s a whole bunch of nothing.
Jonathan Brooks James pulls out a stack of typewritten pages from his beat-up leather bag and makes big X marks on the pages and sighs a whole lot. I can hear his sockless feet squelching inside his loafers.
The twenty minutes are up.
Finally, Jonathan Brooks James takes attendance.
Chelsea Braeburn.
Joshua Buck.
Maya Chang.
Claire Devereaux.
He rattles down the list. When Jonathan Brooks James gets to the “K”s, I can feel the familiar tightening in my chest. He stares down at the attendance sheet, pauses. Oh great. It’s happening again. I quickly raise my hand to get this over with—
But Jonathan Brooks James doesn’t even bother to say my name. He just smirks right over it. “Talk about multi-culti. You’ll have no trouble getting into college,” he says, looking straight at me.
Oh no, he didn’t.
Wait, did he?
My cheeks are on fire.
But he says it in that off-the-cuff, snarky hipster, Am I rite? way, which makes me feel uncool if I don’t laugh along.
So I laugh along.
Whatever, it’s No Big Deal, because people are dying in Syria and starving in North Korea and there’s an opioid epidemic and there are much worse things than a stupid microaggressive comment.
And because I laugh along, I’ve basically sanctioned that it’s okay. The whole classroom kind of titters. No one speaks out.
I wish Jonathan Brooks James had straight-up bungled my name, like my teachers before him did. Just like every day I wish I had a normal name, like Jane or Anjali or Jiyoung. A name that at least looks like what I’m supposed to be.
CHAPTER 3Kraft on Wonder
AT LUNCH, I FIND Laurel Greenblatt-Watkins. Our spot is the southwestern corner of our rooftop campus, away from the north-end sports kids who say they’re applying to the SLACs (small liberal arts colleges, aka the Holy Grail) but are probably secretly applying to the Ivy Leagues. Only at Quaker Oats would applying to the Ivies be something you’re embarrassed about—like it’s some frank admission of your deepest, darkest capitalist desires. (Brown and Dartmouth being the only acceptable exceptions.)
Laurel and I are kind of on the fringe of the artsy-fartsy kids at the south end, most of whom dress in all black and wear chains on their pants because the whole 1990s-grunge-goth thing is making a comeback. Kids who are applying to the Carletons and Kenyons and Hampshires.
Although we don’t dress like that. I just wear T-shirts and jeans, and Laurel is súper into sustainable clothing. She usually wears a flowy poncho thing and culottes, hand-sewn by sex trafficking survivors from Bhutan and Nepal.
I haven’t seen Laurel all summer. She was away at Middlebury, studying Arabic. Laurel’s a polyglot. English, of course, and French lessons since she was a kid, and Latin and Greek at Quaker Oats, and even the Trinidadian Creole she learned from her caregiver. She had to sign a pledge that she would not read, write, speak, or listen to any other language but Arabic all summer. It’s kind of funny picturing Laurel doing this on a leafy campus in the middle of lily-white Vermont.
Laurel sent me long letters over the summer, which I promised I’d have translated by Mr. Malouf, who owns the 99-cent store down my block. I didn’t tell her I stopped after the first one. I mean, Mr. M’s busy, he’s got a business to run. I wasn’t going to interrupt him so he could translate her letters about the
“very good!” classes and the “not so very good!”–smelling dorms.
Laurel has no problem plunking herself down on our Astroturfed corner, but I put a piece of loose-leaf paper down on the ground before I sit. I mean, this is New York City. There’s pigeon poop and smog from all the cars backed up on the Manhattan Bridge and who knows what else. (Not that a sheet of loose-leaf paper will be much help.)
Laurel unboxes her lunch. “Whatcha got today?” I ask.
She shows me. Laurel—or rather, Laurel’s family’s caregiver—packs her lunch in a glass container, and she schleps that thing in an insulated canvas tote on the train each day. Today it’s quinoa with roasted-black-garlic hummus. For dessert she has three kumquats and two squares of Valrhona dark chocolate. For snacks she carries celery sticks in a cloth-mesh bag, which I don’t have the heart to tell her stinks like an unventilated subway car.
I show her mine: Oscar Mayer ham and Kraft American “cheese product” on squishy white bread encased in Saran wrap by yours truly, and a baggie of Utz potato chips, all tossed into a humble white plastic grocery bag that says thank you across the front like ten times. I make my own sandwiches for school now. Papi used to make my lunches for me.
You can tell a lot about an Oattie by what they eat for lunch. You have tennis captain Maya Chang, who alternates between green juice and cauliflower rice. Josh Buck gets McDonald’s as an “ironic attempt to connect with the everyman,” but by the way he mainlines his Big Macs, it’s not ironic at all; it’s straight-up love. Chelsea Braeburn, whose moms own the Michelin-starred restaurant Pomegranate, is always complaining about her “leftovers” of braised oxtail or duck confit. (A first-world problem if there ever was one.) But one day in precalc, Chelsea’s lunch spilled in her bag and it stunk up the classroom, and I kind of felt bad for her.
Then there’s Laurel with her vegan-adjacent boxes prepped by her Trinidadian caregiver, and me with my Kraft cheese on Wonder white.
You are what you eat at Quaker Oats.
“You’re so funny, Ally,” Laurel says, “with your über-Americana provisions.”
According to Laurel, to be “too American” is a bad thing. Funny how all my life that’s all I’ve ever tried to be: too American, like I have to prove to the rest of the world that I am from here.
I guess when you’re white, you get to take being American for granted.
“I’m being ironic,” I say, and we laugh, but of course it bothers me a little the way Laurel scrutinizes my lunch. She’s the only one who knows I’m on scholarship, although I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone else here. Quaker Oats, unlike other “mainstream” prep schools, isn’t about owning cool stuff or dressing in name brands. Some kids show up wearing the same tattered rags every day, but then you go over to their house after school for an eco-sustainability project, and it turns out they live in a multimillion-dollar brownstone in Cobble Hill.
“So how was the famous Jonathan Brooks James’s class?” Laurel asks me, taking a bite of quinoa. She has AP Comp Gov during Taupe period.
“It was okay,” I say. “We didn’t really do anything.” I tell Laurel about his “just write” exercise and how Claire Devereaux thinks we’re lucky to get him.
“Hmph, she would,” Laurel says. We don’t like Claire Devereaux. ...
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