Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China by Tony Brasunas

Author:Tony Brasunas [Brasunas, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, China
ISBN: 9780991166213
Publisher: Torchpost
Published: 2013-12-10T21:00:00+00:00

The following week brings the year near its close. I give exams. I sit on the breezy hallway outside my classroom and call my students out one by one. Jenny, the nervous-looking girl who was the first waitress in our tiny café all those months ago, is first again, and she sits opposite me. I speak very slowly. “What...is... spaghetti?”

Her eyes shift blankly.

“Remember…?” I ask. “Food?”

“Um, yeah.” She blinks again.

“Spaghetti?” I repeat. She shakes her head. I try “Airport?” Nothing. “We spent one class on skits about an airport?” Nothing. “Skit?” She giggles the giggle that signifies embarrassment. I sigh and mark down a C-.

I duck my head back into the classroom to call the next student. Sandoh crouches on one leg on his chair, clapping his hands, and Leon and David Beckham are goading him on in Cantonese. I remind myself that I don’t need to control everything, that it’s just a few of them, the “naughty” ones Keroppi wrote about. The grades I’m giving might count, or maybe my students know that they won’t. “These are your final exams!” I remind them anyway. “You should study now while you wait.”

I call Money next. She’s one of my best ninth graders. “What is spaghetti?” I ask.

“Spaghetti is a type of noodle,” she answers. She knows skit, directions, commercial, and a dozen other words. Money. I get to mark an A next to a name.

Sandoh is next. “It’s a food from France,” he says, about spaghetti. He knows roller coaster and kiss, but not dessert. Far smarter than he looks, he was probably bored all year. I mark down a B.

There are a few other pleasant surprises, too, but I give only two more A’s in this class, fewer than I did for the oral reports. Most of them have learned little, but a few actually have taken something in, and for a moment this blows my mind—that I helped someone, that I got through somewhere, that I played a part in increasing human knowledge. Perhaps I could have done more. I could have learned earlier to trust my intuition, to follow my instincts, to make it all up as I go along. May I become—I pray to the ceiling fans—one of the students who has learned.

June 24

It’s my birthday, and everything is over, everyone is gone. I’m 23. Three days of steady rain have washed the city clean. Yes, it’s raining on my birthday, the day I bought my train ticket to embark on this unscheduled dream into the heart of China. Maybe rain bodes ill, maybe I’ll meet my maker on the road, maybe this birthday will be my last. Maybe Chinese superstitions are rubbing off on me.

For now, the end. I recall like it was yesterday strolling through this campus, thinking, “46 weeks to go.” Yes, they have gone, and now they end, rushing to a close as I knew they would—yes, the way childhood did and college did. I knew it, I expected it, yet still it’s amazing—nothing ever happens in the future or the past, only now.

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