when shrimp chips get a flat tire
After her weekly grocery runs, my mom takes a trip to the dingy, too-brightly-lit Korean market fifteen minutes away from our house. She always comes back with kimchi and a pink and yellow bag of shrimp chips, ones that stink like the fish aisle at H-Mart. The smell worms its way around the entire house, much to everyone’s chagrin.
“Put those away,” I yell over the sound of the obnoxiously red KitchenAid mixer I’m using to bake cookies.
“You’re mixing the dough too much,” my mom says, inspecting the beige clumps in the metal bowl and munching on the shrimp chips loudly.
I shrug. “It’s good enough for me.”
Wrinkling my nose and pointing to the shrimp chips, I ask her, “Are those even any good?”
She nods, narrowing her eyes and says,“they’re good enough,” with an edge of sarcasm, snatching the bag from the counter and marching off to her office.
I often imagine adults, at some point in their lives, staring at their bank account or their spilled bag of shrimp chips or the flat tire in their garage and asking themselves what the hell just happened. I imagine them starring at the tire, get that knot in their stomach, the tightness in their throat, and blink their eyes to confirm that yes, it is in fact true that they have no way to get to work this morning.
I’ve taken to checking my grades on a daily basis, as most kids at my school do, to ensure they are within the range to get into Harvard and Princeton and MIT, because that’s obviously what I’m supposed to do. And recently, I’ve taken to expecting the borderline failing grades in my STEM classes. What the hell just happened, I mutter to myself, clicking out of the 70% figure staring back at me, my stomach knotting and my throat tightening and my eyes blinking, as if my car had just gotten a flat tire.
After I close the tab to my chemistry grade book, I stare at the metal clock above the doorway to the dining room, watching the black hands of the clock tick by. I am going to be asked about what I got, I know that for sure. I decide I’ll respond with a simple “fine” and let my peers reason with that. If they inquire further, I’ll say “It was lower than I wanted but fine” and pray they don’t know me well enough to know it was lower than what they expected.
In the same way many adults despise going to work in the morning, I start to hate my math and science classes and dread attending them. The little voice that always lurks in the back of my mind asks me what the point of it is. To get it on your transcript, I reason. Not because I’ve always loved Chem and Math, not because I’m good at it. At some point, after seeing myself fail in these classes time and time again, to go one step forward and two steps back, I want to give up.
At this point, I suspect one would expect a motivational story about how I “persevered in the face of peril!” and “excelled in the classes, getting a one way ticket to Harvard!”
But instead, I find myself wondering if any of it is worth it: to see the grades on a transcript that could possibly define the rest of my life, to have the time in swimming I want, to receive Distinction marks on piano just so I can get into a top school and impress everyone around me.
Thinking about it now, I think I took it a little overboard with the “I’m gonna go to the olympics!” business. No one in my family told me what I have to do; I just assumed that I would be a disappointment to them if I don’t. I chose to base my self–worth on the first letter of the alphabet, and I chose to hate myself because of a singular curvy letter on my report card.
If school was the drive to somewhere and my chemistry grade was the popped tire, I had thrown myself onto a highway full of cars.
I wear my personality like I wear my clothes: baggy and big enough to hide what I don’t want anyone to see. My mom often tells me stories of younger children who approach their own parents and tell them how inspirational I am, how they want to be me when they grow up. “I don’t think they want that,” I say jokingly, pulling the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, a bad habit that stretches out my clothes.
Junior year marks the start of the college admissions process, something I had been thoroughly dreading since I was a freshman and learned that I have to write essays? But lately I have found myself worrying not about the essays or grades, but if everything I’m doing is enough. I know kids in my grade whose families donate millions of dollars to universities every year, whose mothers are CEOs, and who have started businesses. How can I, a second-generation black girl from Arlington, compete with generations of compounded wealth and legacy? Will I ever be good enough? is the question that has infected my mind.
What is good enough?
I suppose I should treat my grades like my cookies, or my driving, or like the stinky shrimp chips that forever haunt me; I would never base how good a person I am on my clumpy cookie dough. I guess I’ve had to learn that self worth isn’t based on one aspect of my life, just like the taste of shrimp chips isn’t based on its smell. And besides, I’m going to need to get the tire fixed whether I throw myself into the highway or not.
Anyway, I tell myself while stirring yet another batch of cookies, if those shrimp chips are good enough to impress someone, I sure as hell am.