Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

  By 1958, our family was eking our way toward one day becoming middle class. We had acquired some of its symbols, the nonessential luxuries, like a piano and TV set. My mother had received her license to work as an X-ray technician and quickly found a better-paying job. My father worked in a manufacturing factory as an engineer, and he did God’s work by serving as a guest minister at churches where the regular pastors were on vacation. The neighborhood we had moved to was more convenient than the last; the candy store was two blocks away, the school was just beyond that, and the library was two blocks in the other direction. Our home was perfect, according to a child’s point of view. My parents had a small bedroom and my brothers and I shared the bigger one in back, where we slept in bunk beds. The TV was in the living room, which was a little inconvenient because we could not watch it when one of us had to practice the piano. The kitchen was the largest room and served as the heart of our home. On one side were the fridge and grooved counter that sloped toward the sink. The stove lay across from that, as did a longer counter and built-in cupboard with doors, which I was tall enough to open. That was where we kept the box of Wheaties we ate for breakfast when we did not have Chinese rice porridge. We ate at a chrome and yellow Formica table with six matching chairs. A small sepia portrait of Jesus hung on the wall. His blue eyes were aimed upward toward Our Heavenly Father, and at every meal, we murmured the same prayer to him all in one breath: “Bless Oh Lord this food we are about to receive and keep us ever mindful of the needs of others, in Jesus Christ, Amen.” We always had six chairs at the table; the empty one was for “Christ, the unseen guest at every meal.” Christ also watched Peter and me do our homework there. He watched my father write his guest sermons. He watched my mother study to get her license as an X-ray technician. He had watched my little brother make all kinds of messes with crayons and crumbly food. That table was a hub of immigrant industry.

  During Chinese and American holidays, my mother and aunt would layer the table with Chinese newspapers, then set a wooden cutting board on top, and that’s where they sat and talked as they gutted fish and pulled out black intestines from the backs of shrimp. They sliced slivers of gingerroot, pickled radish, and garlic. They rolled out perfect circles of dough for dumplings. My mother spoke Mandarin with my father, but she and my aunt gossiped and argued in Shanghainese, and often at high volume. Meals were endless anticipation, mess, and tension. When it was time to cook, my mother spread newspapers on the floor by the stove to catch any beads of oil that popped out when damp vegetables hit the hot pan. She abhorred grease, but you could hardly tell the difference between clean and filthy on that kitchen floor. The linoleum was a wreck in progress—cracked, scuffed, warped, and coming apart at the seams. The floor under the stove and sink, as well as the curved moldings in corners were blackened with a shellac of grease that had built up and hardened over decades of bad housekeeping. Those greasy dark corners served as the hiding spot for “ugly bugs.” Likely they were cockroaches. My mother’s limited English vocabulary included flies, spiders, and ants, but not all species of bugs that skittered across the ugly linoleum or marched in single file up walls. I can imagine her yelling to my aunt in Shanghainese: “Over there! Use your slipper to kill it.” Then she would have made my aunt go outside to clean her slipper. Killing bugs was another humiliating task you had to do as an immigrant.

  The rats also liked the kitchen, as well as our bedroom. Our floors, it seemed, were one big welcome mat to vermin. They chewed through the baseboard next to our bunk beds and also through the wall next to the kitchen sink. The holes were big enough for Peter and me to put our fists through. We had already seen what a rat could do. One had climbed up to the counter next to the stove and tunneled through an entire loaf of Kilpatrick’s bread, heel to heel, leaving only frames of crust. My mother mashed up what remained, rolled that into balls, and stuck a bit of meat inside—tiny pigs in a blanket for rats. Our father, the defender of fingers and toes, showed us how to set this tasty food offering on a trap so that when that rat took his first bite it would be his last. He placed the traps by the sink and stove. We were excited to see what would happen to our bread thief. What we saw that night was a lesson in cruelty. I don’t think any parent should ever express delight when showing a child the crushed body of a creature with bugged-out eyes and blood running out of its mouth and nose. Our parents assured us that we now had nothing to worry about. But the rats continued to pay us visits. One day my father found a hole in the grassy strip between our house and our neighbor’s. He pushed a hose into the tunnel as far as it would go and let the water run for hours. I pictured in my mind’s eye a vast cavern below with desperate rats swimming hard to keep their whiskers dry. Whatever happened, the rats did not call on us after that.

  If my mother were still alive, she would probably recount many more horrors than just grease, bugs, and rats. She would have told you all the reasons she wanted to move to another house, a clean one, sooner rather than later. She also would have said it was only for the sake of the children that she was willing to endure that awful place longer than she wanted. Our family couldn’t move to a new house until Peter and I completed the remaining school year.

  My school was a Gothic brick building with massive double doors that opened into a long, hard-tiled hallway. I can still see it. The ceiling was as high as the one in our church. The windows, doorways, chalkboards, and display cases were wood framed. My desk was wooden as well, marred with indentations from decades of students forcefully copying their handwriting exercises. The once stiff pages of books about Dick, Jane, and Sally had become as floppy as cloth and were flecked with dried snot. My class, including myself, comprised the multiple ethnicities of lower-income neighborhoods: black, Hispanic, Chinese, Japanese, and white.

  Shortly after the school year started, the principal walked into the classroom with a lady and introduced her to our teacher. The lady was younger than the principal, but she carried the aura of someone more important. The principal treated her in the deferential manner my parents showed when meeting doctors. Yet the principal called her “Miss,” which was probably a reason I thought she was young. Something about her look was special—not like a famous movie star—more like the models in the “better dresses” section of the Sears Roebuck catalog. She was slender and taller than the teacher. Her jacket and slim skirt were nicer than the principal’s outfit, and much nicer than the dress the teacher wore. Her hair was short, but not in the mannish style of my mother’s physicist friends from Shanghai. I would describe it now as being similar to Audrey Hepburn’s chic 1950s pixie hairstyle. That was the lady who would later visit my parents in our living room.

  The principal said something private to the teacher and the teacher called my name and told me to go with the lady in the suit. I was surprised, and a bit tentative at first. She did not explain why I had been singled out. It was clear, however, that I was not in trouble. In fact, since the lady seemed important, by going with her, some of her importance fell like fairy dust onto me. The lady took me to a windowless room, big enough for only a small table and two chairs facing each other, one for her, one for me. I do not recall how she explained what the test was for. In fact, I doubted she used the word test. I imagine she said we were going to do different kinds of puzzles. She broke a paper seal and opened a booklet of perhaps twenty fresh-smelling pages with pictures. She told me to choose a word that described the picture. If I did not know, I should just move to the next one. She left the room. At first, the games were easy. But after a while, I did not know the answers. I might have guessed at a few. After fifteen minutes, the lady returned and took that booklet away, then gave me a new one and explained what I should do with the next set of puzzles. I don’t remember anymore the contents of those tests, only the feelings of shame that I did not know the answer. There were more booklets, more puzzles. At the end of all the tests, the lady said we were done and she thanked me. I returned to the classroom and found that the teacher now treated me d
ifferently. When we took turns reading, she had me go last, and when she did, it was as if she knew I would read it the right way. She praised me for pronouncing the words correctly and for saying them with great expression.

  Sometime after that, the woman visited my parents, and that was the day my parents said I was smart enough to become a doctor. Later in the school year, I was surprised to find that the woman had come to our classroom again. She took me to the same small windowless room. By then, I knew that these puzzles and guessing games were actually some kind of test and it mattered that I do well. For the next five years, she would come visit me at the beginning of the school year and at the end before the summer recess. Since we moved often, she must have had to do a bit of detective work to track me down. In the second grade, she followed me to a school in Hayward. In the third grade, it was a school in Santa Rosa. In the fifth, it was in Palo Alto. Each time I left the classroom, I felt proud. Each time I returned, I felt I had let her down and it worried me that she was discovering I was less smart with each passing year. Perhaps she regretted saying too quickly that I was smart enough to become a doctor. I worried that my parents would find this out. In 1964, at the end of the fifth grade school year, she told me we were finished with our work together and that she would no longer see me. I felt sad. We had had a bond based on my knowing what she had wanted me to do. Being singled out twice a year had made me special in front of others.

  That was supposed to be the end of my vignette about a parent’s hope and a child’s worry over something a mysterious lady said fifty-nine years ago. But as a result of writing about this memory, I started thinking about those tests from a more objective point of view than the painful one of yesteryear. In the absence of facts, I recalled as much as I could about the woman, the little rooms, and the tests. At one time, I knew her name and it was frustrating that the grease on the kitchen linoleum is still there, but the name of someone who had unknowingly played a major role in how I would see myself was now nameless—Miss Somebody, whose last name had fallen into a mishmash pile of seldom used and now lapsed facts.

  Based on everything I could remember about her—her clothes, the way the principal treated her, and her no-nonsense demeanor—she clearly had to have been a trained professional in education or research, and that being the case, it was unlikely that a professional would have made a prediction about a child’s future based on a single test. That would have been irresponsible. The woman I met on those ten occasions never talked to me about my future. She never even said that I was particularly good at numbers compared to other skills. When I was with her, she did not step out of the boundaries of the task at hand. She did not exclaim over how well I did on a specific portion of the test or that I should try harder in other areas. She never mentioned that I might become a doctor. In fact, she did not seem the kind of person who would have remarked on anything personal—like “My, how tall you’ve grown,” or “Your dress is so pretty.” The woman I remember was friendly, but not overly warm. She would have said, “Do as many questions as you can. But don’t worry if you do not know an answer.” When she said we would no longer meet, she did not seem sad. So what had she said to my parents that would have made them think I was going to be a doctor? I imagine now my father saying to her with good humor: “So does the test result mean she will become a doctor or a bum?” I can imagine the young woman answering vaguely to remain professional, “She can grow up to be whatever she wants to be.” To my parents’ way of thinking, whatever I wanted to be was whatever they wanted me to be. That’s how I think it went, something like that.

  But now an obvious question emerges: Why had I been given that test in the first place? Why not the other students in that classroom? It might have been that the teacher chose me as a student who would be cooperative. Yet that would not answer why I was tested not just once, but ten times and in different schools over the years. I was likely part of a longitudinal study of some sort, and perhaps something to do with minority children in low socioeconomic urban areas. I would have qualified on both counts: rats in the kitchen, greasy linoleum, and my mother and aunt arguing loudly in Shanghainese. I guessed that the study might have related to racial bias in IQ tests. Those tests were starting to be criticized for being advantageous to the white middle class. Extrapolating from there, I figured that a study to correct racial bias would have involved a large pool of students and would have been conducted by a team of people. The young woman who saw me yearly was probably one of many research assistants. Or perhaps she was a doctoral student, doing research with a handful of kids for her thesis. That made sense. She might have been working on her doctorate when I first saw her. When she finished, she no longer had to see me.

  I had come up with a reasonable hypothesis, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman and the tests. They had steered the course of my life. If you bound those booklets together they’d be part of a bildungsroman of my self-esteem. I exaggerate only slightly. It occurred to me I might be able to find clues about the study by searching the Internet. It was a long shot. Fifty-nine years had passed, and if the study had been for, say, the young woman’s doctoral thesis, there would likely be no record of that. I chose what I thought were the best search words: “longitudinal IQ study Oakland first grade 1958.”

  In milliseconds, the first item to appear was this:

  CHILDREN WHO READ EARLY,

  TWO LONGITUDINAL STUDIES, 1966

  “… by D Durkin—1966—Cited by 1305—Related articles

  The first study, begun in September 1958, was based on a sample drawn from 5003 first graders in Oakland, California …”

  Dolores Durkin—that was her name. Of course. For five years, I called her Miss Durkin. She was Dolores Durkin of Teachers College, Columbia University, and she could have correctly been addressed as “Dr. Durkin” in 1958, since she already had her doctorate. That accounted for the respect shown by the principal and teacher. And I was right that the test was given as part of a longitudinal study—but it was not about IQ, race, or socioeconomic group. In 1958, the Oakland School District screened 5,003 children entering the first grade and identified 49 kids who had already learned to read. Decades after taking that test, I finally knew why I had gone into those windowless rooms. I could read.

  I was dumbfounded. The test had nothing to do with being smart enough to become a doctor. The child in me felt sickened by the deception. It was far worse than discovering Santa Claus was my Chinese father. This lie had followed me throughout my life. As a child, I had never questioned my parents’ report of their meeting with Miss Durkin. I had not rebelled against their expectations, not openly. And it would serve as my template for both success and failure throughout childhood. As time went by, I was certain that the test result had been wrong. My IQ was not as high as had been reported. I would fail the expectation. I thought about that test whenever my report card showed I had done better in math than in English. I thought about it when a girl in my class, who was younger than I was, received a better report card. I thought about that test when I was twelve and a girl who was ten and very smart said with great confidence that she was going to be a doctor. I thought about that test when a neurosurgeon told us that Peter had a brain tumor. I thought about it when another neurosurgeon five months later told us my father had a brain tumor. I thought about it when I graduated from high school a year early, at age seventeen, and went to college, where I finally had the courage to drop out of pre-med at the end of my first year. I chose instead to major in English literature because I loved to read. When I told my recently widowed mother I was not going to be a doctor, she was disappointed but she did not fall to pieces. By then, many things in life had failed her. I promised I would get a doctorate instead. Later I thought about that test when I decided to quit the doctoral program in linguistics at UC Berkeley, ending my chances to be called “Dr. Tan.” I thought about that test once more when I received an honorary doctorate and was finally able to hand my mother the diploma, giving her
the chance to call me “Dr. Tan.” By then, she took it all with good humor. She was exceedingly proud of my accomplishments and I had also fulfilled her immigrant dream. I had bought her a house.

  I have continued to be influenced by that former expectation with every book I have ever written—when I realized at the end of writing it that it was not the book I had hoped to write. I have thought about it whenever someone showers me with praise and cites all kinds of pie-in-the-sky beliefs about my abilities. I go instantly deaf. I feel sickened by grandiose expectations. I would rather disappoint people immediately than carry the burden of their false preconceptions. Miss Durkin’s test has been with me for fifty-nine years. And now, to know that all she was interested in was the fact that I could read would have been hilarious if I had not suffered so much from the lie. My parents likely thought it was harmless. Why not tell her she’ll be a doctor to give her some motivation? They did not think of the consequences.