Bubble Tea Girl

Chapter 3

I walk into the rooftop bar at 8:05 p.m. fully expecting to meet up with Calvin and Andrew to already be there. It was a place called Bar Rouge, and it was a breath-taking outdoor space overlooking the Shanghai skyline. The waiter leads me to a red couch beside a bar with sexy red uplights that's reserved for the Suzuki-Jones party.

Oh, it's just typical that Calvin is late again! I should have known when he said eight; he meant closer to nine.

There's upbeat music playing that I recognize to be from one of Richie Ren's hits. I never liked him as an actor, but I like the music here, overlooking Huangpu River. Fluorescent river cruise boats floated by, cutting across the neon reflection of skyscrapers in the peaceful waters. It's jarring to sit here and take in the sight of the round Oriental Pearl Tower rising in the distance like an image out of a sci-fi movie.

Whenever I see a skyline, my eyes automatically wander to One World Trade because it is my high school at the foot of that landmark. It feels odd to me to look at a skyline without that familiar spiral skyscraper.

As I sit and wait for the boys to show up, a middle-aged man in a pink shirt shows up and sits down beside me. He sets down a Tsingtao beer on our table, and man spreads himself across the entire couch.

"Excuse me," I stutter. "This table is reserved." I don't know if he speaks English, so I point furiously at the reserved sign.

"I know," he replies in Mandarin. "I'm the one who reserved this table. I'm Su Wei; I work in Internal Medicine at Shanghai International Hospital."

"You're in the Acupuncture class?" I ask awkwardly in English even though by continuing the conversation, I'm admitting that I understand Chinese.

"No," Su waves his hand as though I made a joke. "I worked with Dr. Lauren Jones on a collaborative project involving Acupuncture and treatment of Lupus a long time ago. I'm the one who told her about this class for her son and his friend."

He talks so fast that I can barely keep up. I did catch the name of Andrew's mom, so I think I get the gist of the conversation. I should have guessed that Calvin found out about this class through Andrew! They are best friends, as I recently found out since they're sharing a hotel room. I found out about this class through Calvin's Facebook. For some reason, I thought it was part of the study abroad broacher that our AP Biology teacher handed out for everyone who isn't doing an Intel Westinghouse project this summer.

Darn it, now Calvin must know that I'm here because I'm stalking him! I'm so embarrassed I consider leaving right there and then.

"You're Chinese, aren't you?" Su asks as he takes a slug of his green beer. Tsingtao — I thought only my grandfather drank that. "You look like a zhōngguó rén."

I nod because I wish he would stop trying to coax me into speaking Mandarin. The only Mandarin that I know, I learned from watching Wuxia Television Serials, and I have never spoken it in my life. Shanghainese, on the other hand, I spoke fluently, but my vocabulary was that of a small child because I've only used it with my parents. Although I can easily order food or ask to go to the restroom, I don't think I could have an adult conversation in it.

"Do you want one?" Su offers to order me a beer, but I shake my head.

"I'm so jet-lagged that if I drank anything, I'll go straight to sleep," I joke and pick up the ice water the waitress left in front of me. The water tastes less crisp than the tap water in New York. Maybe it's because it's not fluorinated or because the air is so humid here that even my taste buds are functioning differently. With every breath, it's like the air is thicker, wetter, more sticky. Just as the music vibrates with longing and sadness, the very air seems to blanket me with some sort of heavy meaning that I can't unravel.

"Where are you from?"

"New York City."

"Welcome home," Su says and gestures to the skyline. "It must be nice to finally be back, in your jiā xiāng."

I nearly spit out my water at the thought.

"This isn't my home; I'm from New York," I explain to him. "I'm here to visit."

"But your parents are from here," he mutters in an unimpressed tone like he's explaining things to a two-year-old.

"Yeah. I've been in America since I was six." I've never given it much thought, but yes — my ancestors probably lived in this land for the last five thousand years. That is, except for my grandmother, it's a family secret, but she is actually from Beijing. She doesn't like it when we talk about that. She wants to think she's Shanghainese through and through. My mom sometimes fearfully confesses this to her closest friends, like she's worried by having some Beijing blood we're less fully Shanghainese. Heck, this is a city that has its own secret language to keep outsiders out.

"Then you're home," Su says and laughs disdainfully. "I remember when I worked in New York for two years, I couldn't wait to get home. I can only imagine how relieved you are to get back here — among your people — after all those years among those foreigners."

We stare in silence after that as Su's beeper goes off and he takes a call from his resident. My own people, his words echo in my head as I stare into the skyline and try to pretend not to overhear his conversation about how many units of blood to transfuse to a granny who had a bloody bowel movement. Yeah, it's gross, and I'm sure any other high school student would have found an excuse to take a walk out of earshot by now, but my mother is a nurse, so I'm used to overhearing medical conversations.

It's not Su yelling detailed directions into his phone about collecting stool samples that bothers me. It's the idea that I'm finally home, to a place that I barely remember leaving. I picked Shanghai because it's the only place in the world my mother would let me go without adult supervision for a summer. I have relatives here, that's true, but this place is as strange to me as any other city in the world even though I was born here.

When I first left here when I was six, I was so homesick I used to write letters in my diary to the friends I left behind. Those were letters that I never got to send, not because there wasn't even an address to send them to, but because I could only write in English. It's the only language I know how to express myself on paper in.

It's a disturbing thought, but I immediately try to put it out of my mind by scrolling through the photos of Calvin and my friends back home on our last day of school just a couple of weeks ago. Yet the doubt continues to eat at me. What if I'm not just here to chase a hottie bad boy like some love-crazed Asian-American Felicity Porter? What if I came back for another reason, as well? A subconscious reason? A desire to tie up loose ends?

Welcome home; Su's words echo through my mind. I feel guilty as those words sink in. It's as though somewhere out there New York City is shaking its head knowing that I'm cheating on it.