Word: chai
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When May-Lee Chai first moved to the tiny South Dakota town of Vermillion, she was amused to find that her family could stop traffic just by walking down the street. "Cars and pickups slowed, sometimes in both lanes, and the passengers turned to stare out the windows," she recalls. At first she thought that the Chais, as strangers, were natural objects of curiosity to their new neighbors. "I didn't know then, because I was 12, that they were staring because they had never seen a Chinese man with a white woman before...
...They did more than stare. Over the next few years Chai, her younger brother, their Chinese father and Irish-American mother were insulted, harassed and ostracized. Their house was shot at from passing cars, and their pet dogs gunned down on the lawn. Her father ultimately resigned his academic job in frustration over narrow-minded colleagues. "It felt as though we were being punished for crimes we hadn't realized we had committed," Chai writes in Hapa Girl, her searing memoir of growing up half-Chinese in the American heartland. "There were many people who wanted my father to suffer...
...Chai's father, Winberg Chai, was a respected professor of Asian studies whose own parents had left Taiwan for New York when he was a boy. He married Carolyn Everett, a beautiful California artist and, in 1979, accepted a vice presidency at the University of South Dakota. It was an opportunity to move his young family from the crime and crowding of greater New York to the healthier and supposedly friendlier air of rural America. As for race, writes his daughter, "we had imagined the segregated past was just that, past...
...vibrant plumage of parakeets and fighting quails, while the air is filled with the bright chatter of songbirds, the favored pets of Kabul residents. Handcrafted bamboo and wire cages, festooned with glass beads, dangle from every doorway, and the fragrance of cardamom-laced green tea beckons passersby into tiny chai shops. As bird enthusiasts compare notes on how best to train a pigeon to turn on command, it's easy to forget that Kabul is only just emerging from the depredations of a brutal regime that banned bird fighting, music, even kite flying...
Naturally, the odd undergraduate at 1369 also hangs out with a pretty hilarious assortment of amiable fashionistas, soccer moms stocking up on Chai, and Cambridge crazies...