Re Jane by Patricia Park Page B

went light, airy. “Jane! What a wonderful opportunity this will be for you. You’ll finally meet the man behind the words. I hope you have some good questions planned!”
    I hadn’t made it much past those first few pages of
Could You Please Pass the Smelling Salts
?
    Beth got up from the table and returned with a legal pad and a pencil. “If I’m remembering correctly, Sam is allergic to garlic. . . .” And she set about sketching a holiday menu plan.
    That menu plan consumed Beth both day and night: thick cookbooks showed up in all corners of her office, opened to recipes for spice rubs and purees marked in different-colored pens, a million tiny Post-it flags waving from their pages. Crumpled legal-pad sheets overflowed from the recycling bin and littered the floor of her study. Beth’s attic was becoming a madhouse.
    On Thanksgiving morning Devon and I were dispatched downtown to the Chinese bakery. “So I guess you really like moon cakes, huh,” I said as we boarded the subway into the city.
    Devon wrinkled her nose. “I
used
to,” she said. “I’ve only told Ma like a thousand times I don’t anymore. But Dad says it’s just because she’s up for tenure next year. Then after that she’ll be back to normal.”
    What kinds of conversations did she and Ed have when Beth wasn’t around? Just as Ed and I were meeting for late-night sandwiches, Devon and Ed must have had their own set of secrets they kept from Beth. I felt a pang of something inside—jealousy? selfishness? I shook my head clear of such petty thoughts.
    We got off the subway at East Broadway and joined the jumble of pedestrians on Canal Street. We dodged men pushing hand trucks stacked with boxes of produce. In the restaurant windows, hanging duck carcasses glistened from their hooks. We cut through the shouts and murmurs of shopkeepers and customers mid-negotiation.
    â€œIt always feels weird to be walking around here,” Devon said, clutching my arm so we wouldn’t get separated in the crowds. I thought of Northern Boulevard and the Koreans spilling out of shop doors and churches. “All the real Chinese kids live here.”
    â€œAs opposed to fake?” I said.
    Devon looked sheepish. Yet we both knew there was a difference. “It just doesn’t feel the same with my CAAA-NY friends.” CAAA-NY was the New York chapter of the Chinese-American Adoptee Association, to which the family belonged. “It’s like we all go to Lion Dance class and we meet for Lunar New Year, but sometimes it feels like we’re just doing it because, like, we’re supposed to.”
    â€œHave you tried talking with your mom about it?” I asked.
    â€œMa’s already got so much on her plate right now, I don’t want to bother her.” She hesitated before adding, “Plus, she’s so
clueless.
”
    I wondered if, for Devon, “clueless”
was synonymous with “lacking
nunchi.
”
    As we continued down Canal, Devon told me that a bunch of the kids from her Chinese school—the “real” Chinese—were going to apply to Hunter College High School. “Have you ever heard of it?”
    Eunice Oh had gone to Hunter for junior high. She’d attended Chwae-go After-School Academy since the second grade to prepare for Hunter’s entrance exam. Your fifth-grade standardized test scores determined whether you were qualified to take the exam, and you had your one shot in the fall of sixth grade to pass the exam. The school was grades seven to twelve.
    â€œYou’re thinking of applying?” I asked Devon.
    She nodded slowly, the way she did when she was in serious mode.
    We’d reached the bakery at that point, and the bell chimed as we pushed the door open. “&%$*%#@,” the shopkeeper said to us.
    â€œSorry, I’m not Chinese,” I said. My automatic response whenever I was greeted in