baldwin

Siamak Vossoughi

I never saw anything like it. This kid Baldwin made a whole classroom of white kids feel bad because he was so happy about being Chinese. Baldwin Fong. He couldn't sit still about it. I'd be in there reading them a story and at the mention of the first character, he'd ask, "Are they Chinese?"

"No, they're not Chinese," I'd tell him.

"I am!" he'd say, and he'd get up and dance next to his chair.

The other kids looked at him and wondered what they had to dance about.

I went to the library and got a book with Chinese characters. That kind of excitement deserved to be reciprocated. As soon as I held up the cover of the book, he yelled, "They're Chinese!" Then he stood up next to his chair and danced. "So am I," he said, "I'm Chinese too." He smiled at his classmates with forgiveness and sympathy.

What was wrong with me? I thought. Why hadn't I been that excited to be Iranian when I was a six-year-old boy? I blamed my parents. I could have done it. I could have convinced other six-year-olds that being Iranian was the greatest thing ever. What did they know about Khomeini and hostages? I watched Baldwin and rued my missed opportunity.

Still, it had to be sincere. When his parents came to pick him up from school, I studied them to see how they did it. They were quiet and nice. They offered no clue. The boy was just crazy about who he was.

Once when I watched him dance next to his chair, I wondered if he knew that this thing had the potential to turn. I wondered if he knew that the white kids had the numbers plus a lot more on their side, and maybe he was trying to get ahead of it. More power to you, Baldwin, I thought.

For now, I watched as eighteen white kids walked desultorily out to recess, unsure of what they could do that was as clean and purposeful as Baldwin's movement in the world. Ellie Hanbrook and Helene Plum sat on the bench and watched Baldwin go to work in the sandbox.

"Do you two want to join him?" I said.

"No," Ellie said, as though Baldwin were a million miles away.

I hated to see any kid treat recess half-heartedly, but I looked at Baldwin digging a tunnel under his mountain and I thought, You mean to tell me that I could have made two white girls in my first-grade class so unsure of where they stood relative to my love of self that they would have sat through a whole recess? It was certainly no good to think like that. It was certainly no good to imagine exactly which two white girls I might have done that to back then. But if somebody were to ask me, I might suggest Erin Perricone and Kyla Amundsen, only because of who they would become a few years later.

"How about hula-hoop catch?" I said. I picked up a hula hoop and rolled it so it spun back to me. This intrigued them. They got up to join in.

"See?" I said to Erin and Kyla. "No hard feelings."

A week later I saw Ms. Kelty, their teacher, consoling Ellie as she cried outside the classroom.

"Why is he the only one who gets to be Chinese?" Ellie said between her tears.

"His family is from China," Ms. Kelty said.

"It's not fair!"

My god, Baldwin, I thought. You did it. You reached the mountaintop. Where was he going to go from here? I worried about him. Was Ellie Hanbrook going to remember how she'd cried over not being Chinese a few years from now and turn the tables on him? She was a nice kid and I didn't think so, but it was cause for concern.

The next time I saw him at recess, I asked him if he would teach me to count to ten in Mandarin.

"Sure," he said.

"Let's go by the swing," I said, "That's where I learn best."

We stood by the swing, where Ellie was waiting in line. She looked over as Baldwin started.

"He's teaching me to count to ten," I said.

"In Chinese?"

"Yes."

"Mandarin," said Baldwin.

She came over and learned too.

"I have to check on something over by the slide," I said.

I walked over to the other end of the yard. Baldwin happily taught her how to count to ten for the rest of the recess. "See?" I said to Ellie and perhaps to Erin Perricone, "He's generous with his gladness. That's how it is to love who you are and let anyone join you there."

I realized that I had been bracing myself for the moment when somebody would tell Baldwin he had to turn down his joy, that he couldn't be so happy that it made white girls cry. It hadn't happened yet, but I was on alert for it.

In the teacher's lounge I smiled and joked with everyone, but I secretly studied the white teachers to see who might be the one to do it. I was ready for it. I was ready to tell them that when I was a kid, the way that Erin and Kyla had treated me wasn't from a joy in who they were; it was a joy in what I could never join, which really didn't deserve to be called joy at all. Baldwin's joy was necessary; If the white kids didn't know how to be as happy about who they were as he was, it was because white wasn't made of who you were. It was made of who you weren't. There's a feeling in that. But it's not joy.

You think that at thirty-eight you've worked this stuff out so that the white girls you remember from elementary school don't come roaring back when you see a kid get it right like Baldwin, but I'd learned to appreciate how everything came roaring back in the schoolyard, from the past and sometimes from the future too.

I dreamed that the other teachers could see it on my face. That they could see me thinking­­–Nobody had better say one word to Baldwin about standing up and dancing about being Chinese, even if it makes every white girl in his class cry.

Nobody did, as far as I knew. Each day I came to work ready for it, but Baldwin still danced about being Chinese. I had a lot of excess energy in me at the end of each day from being ready to defend his dance, so I started stopping off at Mario's on the way home for a drink. One usually turned into two, and then I started looking for my own dance.

One night the television at the bar showed a cooking show where the chef was Iranian.

I got off my stool and danced.

"What was that?" Mario said.

"I'm Iranian."

"You're going to dance about it?"

"I have to."

I told him about Baldwin, how he'd kept his dance going through first grade and how I wanted him to never lose it.

"What if I danced every time an Italian came in here?"

"That would be fine."

"Some of them are rotten."

"Some Iranians too," I said.

"What do we do about the rotten ones?"

"I'll ask Baldwin."

"Let me know what he says."

In the spring a Chinese girl joined the first-grade class. Annie Lin. She was a quiet kid and entirely unprepared for the attention she received from the girls in the class. Baldwin just basked in her presence, as if she was proof he was right all along.

At recess all the girls gathered around her to see if she would play with them. I looked over and saw Baldwin in the sandbox, unaware of his effect. I resolved to be as cool about my accomplishments as he was.

"All right," I said to the girls. "Let Annie decide what she wants to play. Annie, what would you like to do?"

She pointed to the monkey bars.

Six girls turned into tour guides of the play structure then, explaining to Annie the best ways to climb up to the bars and the best spots to hang upside-down. I watched them and went over my whole life, just like I did a hundred times a day in the schoolyard, sometimes in the blink of an eye. I considered stopping in at Mario's tonight and telling him that there were no rotten ones, Italian or Iranian or anything else. It was true, and it also happened that it wasn't true at all.

I walked over to the sandbox.

"What are you building, Baldwin?"

"Have you ever heard of the Great Wall of China?"

He looked at me like I was old enough that maybe there was a chance I had heard of it. 

"Yes."

"That's what I'm building."

"What else do you know about the Great Wall of China?" I said, employing progressive-education techniques.

"It was built to protect China from invaders."

"Yes," I said, "and I heard that it's so long that you can see it from space."

He looked up at me then like he couldn't imagine anything more irrelevant about a thing than whether or not it could be seen from space, when everything worth knowing or doing or dancing about was right here on earth.

Siamak Vossoughi is a writer living in Seattle. He has had some stories published in Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Chattahoochee Review, West Branch, and Gulf Coast. His first collection, Better Than War, received a 2014 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and his second collection, A Sense of the Whole, received the 2019 Orison Fiction Prize.