Candleblog

Exactly five years ago, The first Candleblog post ever was published. Over the next day or two I’ll be republishing some of my favorite posts from the last five years. Here’s a goody from 4/16/04 — when the blog was one day old…

Ellen Kwon

In early September 1983 I was new at South Burlington High School having moved to the Burlington, Vermont area from Ithaca, New York earlier that summer. I was placed in an Earth Science class like most freshmen but I had just taken an Earth Science class in Ithaca, as an 8th grader, using the exact same textbook they were handing out in this high school class. I mentioned this to my teacher and she mentioned it to my guidance counselor and he suggested I skip Earth Science and go straight into Biology—with all of the sophomores.

The next day I was introduced to my new Biology classmates and ushered to my desk by Ms. Capen. After the day’s lesson plan had been described, Ms. Capen took time out to recognize that there were, in fact, two new students in the class.

Before I continue, it’s necessary for me to reveal that at the time this was happening, I was reading a Pocketbooks Star Trek novel. I mention this as evidence of the fact that I was a geek—and not even a cool geek, reading Catcher in the Rye or some other literary work for the socially awkward—it was a freaking Star Trek paperback.

So Ms. Capen looks at the back of the class where her two new students are: me, with my knapsack and my lame Member’s Only jacket and my geeky book; and Ellen Kwon, a very pretty Asian American girl seated directly in front of me.

“As you may have noticed,” Ms. Capen told the class, “we have some strange faces in class today.”

I’m still not sure what the hell I was thinking, but here’s what I did: I said, “Yes, can’t you tell?” and then I brought my hands up to my eyes and using each index finger, stretched the outside tip of each eyebrow up and back, which made me look like Mr. Spock, an alien—get it? “Strange faces.” Unfortunately, from the perspective of my classmates, and particularly Ms. Capen, who was looking right at me, the gesture also made it look like I was trying to look like Charlie Chan or some other Asian caricature—like I was making fun of Ellen’s ethnicity.

About 30 seconds later I realized what I had done. It was too late. I was pretty sure Ellen hadn’t seen it but I KNEW Ms. Capen had. She was already moving on—no doubt trying to distance herself from the awkwardly racist moment. I couldn’t say anything. I was mortified. Ms. Capen never seemed to like me very much. I have always assumed this incident was the reason.

I remember the moment that I made the offending gesture pretty clearly. It was an adrenalin-inspired wild attempt to say something casually humorous—to break the ice, as it were. You know, “look at me, I’m a Vulcan. You get it? From Star Trek? Guys?”

Oh well.