Jordan Sonnenblick Zen and the Art of Faking It

  Zen and the Art of Faking It

Jordan Sonnenblick

Scholastic Press New york

To my darling helpmate, Melissa, who has the patience of a Zen Master

Table of Contents

Title Folio

Dedication

a note to the reader

welcome to nowheresville

exist yourself

buddha meets howling monkey

i become one with my buddha nature

sitting master, freezing rock

the right path

non the true tao

no-heed

the wednesday programme

wash your bowl

calls and misses

signs and wonders

2nd helping

face-to-face, toe-to-toe

twigs

1 paw washes the other

service for seven, and a hundred feet in the air

got zen?

slam, dunk, crack—office one

slam, dunk, scissure—part two

return to sender

the revenge of peter jones

san lee: male child outcast

launder your basin some more

having changed, you pass through

a quick word from the writer:

Copyright

a Note to the reader

Have yous ever switched schools? I have, and let me tell y'all—a school is a schoolhouse is a school. Every middle school on God's green earth smells exactly the same, considering damp lockers, industrial cleaning fluids, and puke are universal. The lunch is the same: How many means can you lot flavor a freakin' Tater Tot? The guys are the aforementioned: like a testify on Animal Planet without the cuddle factor. The girls are the same: Martians with man hormones. And the teachers?

Please.

So when I dragged my feet in their rotting sandals through the gray midwinter slush and upwardly the poured-concrete stairs of Harrisonville Middle School for the starting time fourth dimension, I knew exactly what I was getting into.

Sure I did.

welcome to nowheresville

So. Eighth class. Second semester. New country. Math was math—algebra, of course. They e'er stick the Asian kid in the algebra class. Science was scientific discipline. Fortunately I know how to scroll a stupid trivial metallic car downwards a ramp and use a stopwatch, so no problemo there. In English, all I could effigy out the first twenty-four hours was that the teacher was nuts—then again, aforementioned stuff, different fourth dimension zone. Gym, tiffin—I honed my skills at standing and sitting in the corner. I as well continued my long-standing tradition of eating zippo but pasta and fruit in the cafeteria—I'd never been to a public school that knew how to cook actual meat. Oh, I nigh forgot home economics. Brownies. Made with applesauce. No wonder America's kids have lost their style.

It wasn't until the last class of the day that I even woke up. At present, dorsum in Houston, we had been studying U.S. history for the whole twelvemonth. Simply in Pennsylvania, for some odd reason, this one school had a special "Ancient World immersion grant," which meant two things:

one: Nosotros'd be spending 5 months doing the exact aforementioned thing I'd done in seventh grade. Well, I guess yous can never become enough pyramids, right?

two: I'd miss the whole second half of my country'south past. Which kinda stinks—I'd been looking forward to learning how that whole revolution thing had turned out.

Anyhoo, I walked into social studies class alone that twenty-four hours, hovered by the door until I could meet which seats would be empty, and so eased my way along the wall and into a chair just every bit the instructor started clearing his throat to get the grade quiet. Lucky me—the chair turned out to be missing half of one back leg. I striking the flooring with a lovely BANG, and the whole course turned in fourth dimension to enjoy the view of my books, pens, pencils, and transparent backpack tumbling down all over me.

Yay.

The instructor came hurdling over and reached downward a hand to pull me upwardly. I couldn't help only notice he had a twinkle in his eye. An honest-to-God heart twinkle: How weird is that? You lot hear the cliché all the time, but in this instance, it was literally true. The guy had a white beard on a chubby beet-red face and those sparkling eyes. My arm was being yanked out of its socket by Santa Claus. A little pretend voice in my head was telling me, Stay down! Stay down! Merely Santa would not exist denied. When he wasn't delivering packages down chimneys, this guy must have worked out like an Olympian.

"How-do-you-do, there!" he boomed. So he paused and twinkled as I tried to be subtle about brushing pencil shavings out of the hair to a higher place my left ear. I figured the punch line was coming: "Dainty of you to drop in—-har-har…" Or, "Whoa! Bartender! I'll have whatsoever this child is drinking!" But afterwards a beat, all Santa said was, "Y'all must exist San Lee. I got a note that y'all'd be coming some time this week. I'm Mr. Dowd. Welcome to Harrisonville! You came at just the right time. We're starting a new unit today, on…"

I tuned out the educational droning and checked out my classmates. Some of them had that look I'd seen in 5 other states—plus an airbase in Germany—like, The new child fell. Cooooooollllll! Others just looked through me, like, This new person does not matter in my picayune Pennsylvania globe. And one daughter, with an unruly Aztec temple of chocolate-brown pilus and a Beatles T-shirt, peered over a pair of tiny purple-tinted glasses and gave me a smile that I felt all the mode down to my soggy socks. She had these shocking grey optics that locked right onto mine, angular cheekbones, and super-perfect teeth—which added upwardly to a pretty intriguing look. Unfortunately I got then distracted by Beatle-girl's face up that I must have missed a adequately intense death-stare from the guy to her right.

Oh, well. At least there was one man in this burg. Two, if you believed the friendly Santa guy was for real. I saturday down, and class started. Mr. Dowd made everyone copy downwards a chalkboard full of notes about Buddhism. It looked remarkably like the chalkboard full of Buddhism I had copied down on the first mean solar day of a unit of measurement dorsum in Texas. I muttered under my jiff, "One moon shows in every puddle; in every pool, the ane moon." My favorite teacher always, Mrs. Brown, had said that, whenever I'd commented on how my school in Houston was only like the school before that in Alabama. Evidently it was the kind of thing that Zen masters went effectually saying in Japan hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Mr. Dowd was staring at me. "Alibi me. Did yous say something, Mr. Lee?"

Y'all had to love his polish use of the rhetorical question play a trick on. I felt like blurting out, No, the fat child in the corner is a ventriloquist and I'1000 his new dummy. Duh! But my mom had told me not to draw attention to myself, that this schoolhouse was the stop of the line for me. And then I played nicely with others. "No, sir."

He did the twinkle thing over again. "That's funny. I could have sworn yous'd just murmured a actually impressive quotation about the universal nature of reality. Guess it'southward just the wax buildup in my ears playing tricks on me. Anyway…"

As Mr. Dowd launched into what I imagined was a breathtaking lecture on the diverse branches of Buddhism, I plant myself glancing over at Beatle-daughter. She was chewing on the eraser end of a pencil, concentrating intently on Santa Dowd's every word. Come up to recall of it, and then was almost everyone else. Maybe his lecture actually was breathtaking. The guy next to Beatle-daughter flicked his optics over to me, and this time I caught the intensity, and the message: Dorsum off!

I busied myself with decorating the cover of my new notebook. First I drew three interlocking yin–yang symbols. Then I wrote underneath the middle one, one-half in outline and half regular: THE LAUGHING ARCHER. That was the name of this actually cool cloak-and-dagger band in Houston that used to play all-ages shows in our neighborhood. The words accidentally filled upwardly the line that said Proper noun, but since you always put your name in the heading on every folio in every school notebook in the globe anyhow, that didn't seem

similar a huge trouble.

It's funny how innocently things first out.

be yourself

Before the matter with my dad got actually ugly, he used to have me on these picayune outings. He went through phases, which makes sense in retrospect. So, in Houston, nosotros went bayou angling in a piffling flat-bottomed rowboat. In Alabama, it was jogging every Sunday after we got done with services at the Euphrates Baptist Church. Come to think of it, I guess going to the Baptist Church was part of that stage too. In Connecticut, nosotros were Methodists, and I call back when I was really little in California we might have been Unitarians for a while.

Any, information technology's easy to get sucked into all the craziness just from trying to describe what happened with my dad, but I'll try to stay on topic—in every state, I've noticed that's the most important thing about writing for the standardized test. Then: In California, the phase was archery. Dad and I would load our bows, our quivers full of arrows, and this big collapsible metal easel with a target on information technology into the back of the Volvo station wagon (or perhaps California was the purple minivan), and fix off for this gigantic field backside a hunting-supply store. When we start started the archery affair, Dad bought ane of those five-color five-circumvolve targets to shoot at. I liked that target, because yous got to practice math: The yellow bull's-eye was worth nine points, the red band around information technology was worth 7, the blue ring was five, black was iii, and the outer white ring was one. Y'all got vi arrows, for a high score of fifty-four. This was second form, and doing all that addition fabricated me feel smart. Too, I was dying to shoot a perfect score, and then I was psyched to become every week. I noticed that most of the other guys there had targets shaped like animals, though, and one Sunday when Dad unloaded the easel, our target of circles had been replaced by a realistic portrait of a immature male deer. I was pretty displeased with this switch from practicing accuracy and computation to puncturing Bambi, so I asked my dad why we had gotten rid of the old target. He made a sweeping gesture toward all the hairy, grizzled-looking guys surrounding the states with their paper zoo of cruelty, and said, "When in Rome, practice as the Romans do. Think that, OK? When in Rome, practice as the Romans do."

I could have spoken upwardly, I know. I could take argued the point or begged for my quondam target dorsum, or something. Simply even and then I knew how my father got if you lot challenged him. So I turned back toward that easel and started aiming for the lungs.

On my second solar day of schoolhouse, I was still trying out who to be in Pennsylvania: a skater, like I'd been in Cali? A Bible-thumper, like I'd been in Alabama? A rich preppy kid, like I'd been in Houston? A macho pretend-jock, like I'd been in Germany? People were always telling kids to be themselves, just either they didn't mean information technology or they didn't tell y'all how to go near doing it when everyone else was trying to push button and pull y'all into line.

I was sitting in English class, concentrating on squidging the freezing-cold slush between my socks and my sandals by flexing my toes, when the instructor pinned a badly laminated rectangle of shocking-pink paper above the chalkboard. It was all wrinkly, similar she'd accidentally gotten information technology jammed into the machine sideways, yanked it partway out, and so allow it go back through. Come to recall of information technology, that's what her outfit looked like too: the absentminded librarian wait. She said it was the Quote of the Day; you could definitely hear the uppercase letters too. What it said was ane of those tired old sayings that pop up in the margins of every middle schoolhouse agenda book: IF A Human DOES NOT Continue Step WITH HIS COMPANIONS PERHAPS Information technology IS BECAUSE HE HEARS A Different DRUMMER. LET HIM Step TO THE MUSIC HE HEARS, HOWEVER MEASURED OR FAR AWAY. I knew from an one-time English classroom'due south bulletin lath that Henry David Thoreau had said information technology. I also knew it was the exact reverse of everything my dad had e'er told me to act like.

Standing out? Forget near it.

The teacher launched into some long, drawn-out chestnut most Thoreau getting in trouble for his beliefs, which kind of reminded me of my dad. So I tuned out, grabbed one of my notebooks, and started making a list of possible identities for myself. When I had a bunch of candidates, I butterfingers each one until my chart looked like this:

Identity Pros Cons

—JOCK? (girls like) As well much work. Also, I am spaz.

—SKATER? (cheap clothes) Likewise cold. As well, I am spaz.

—PREP? (good parties?) Likewise expensive.

—GOTH? Mom would impale.

Makeup expensive.

Also, piercings painful.

—EMO? See Goth.

Decisions, decisions. I was ill of pretending to exist like everyone else—the artificial slang, the Net research on sports I didn't intendance well-nigh, the countless watching of MTV and so I could acquire song lyrics, dance moves, cool wear brands. My dad's way hadn't been working out so well for either of united states of america, plus he was gone. Perchance it was fourth dimension to pretend something completely dissimilar. I didn't actually hear the beat of a different drummer, merely possibly I could pretend to exist unique.

Be unique? It was so crazy it just might piece of work. But what was unique about me? I was poor. I was Chinese. I was adopted. I had a screwed-up family. I feared bugs, particularly spiders. None of those attributes necessarily jumped upward and screamed, "Wait! I'm a STAR!" I tried to come up with some amazing talent I might possess, simply because of the whole change-interests-every-yr thing, I only had a collection of semi-lame half-talents. And neither "You should come across me near play violin!" nor "Bank check out my stunning ability to juggle two objects!" sounded like the slogan of a successful middle schoolhouse maverick.

I thought about it the rest of the day. This was much harder than figuring out how to follow the crowd. Being different, or at to the lowest degree pretending to be dissimilar, required creativity. Which I obviously didn't have, or I wouldn't have to INVENT a way to stand out in the first place. Like Beatle-girl: You took one await at her and knew she was hearing a different drummer. Maybe fifty-fifty a different kazoo. For all I knew, she might have been waltzing to the color of a dissimilar smell. She was out in that location anyway.

Example: At lunch in the cafeteria, Beatle-girl had come in two days in a row, dragged a stool over just past the cashiers at the end of the food line, fix an open guitar case in front of her, and started playing a beat-upwardly quondam acoustic and singing folk songs. And she was really, really good! Her fingers flew over the strings, and her voice rang out sweetly fifty-fifty among the clanking anarchy of the lunchroom. She started both times with a song I'd never heard earlier, but after the 2nd mean solar day it rang out in my head:

My brothers and my sisters

Are stranded on this road;

It'due south a hot and dusty route

That a 1000000 feet have trod,

Rich man took my home and collection me from my door

And I ain't got no home in this earth anymore.

In some of the schools I'd attended, Beatle-girl would have been totally ignored. In others, she would accept been a laughingstock. In one or two, she might have fifty-fifty wound up with a guitar case full of sloppy-joe goo. But here, some kids stood and watched her act, and some dropped their dejeuner change into the case every bit they came off the line.

I was so inspired that on Day Two I even left the safe little corner seat I'd staked out betwixt the chessgeek and clarinet-player tables and walked up to watch. Her hair was a drape over her confront, and every one time in a while between lines, she'd endeavor to blow a few strands out of her eyes. So she'd do a little shrug when the drapery airtight over her glasses again.

It suddenly occurred to me that I loved this girl. I mean, her guitar had a gigantic sticker on information technology that said, THIS Car KILLS FASCISTS. OK, I was admittedly a little fuzzy on what a fascist was, strictly speaking. And I didn't know her name or annihilation. And she was evidently begging for spare modify in a middle school deli. But come on—Beatle-daughter kicked serious butt.

Practiced thing I had probably won her heart by tumbling backward over my own chair at our first coming together. Chicks dig that kind of suave and manly display. Now all I had to do was talk to her, and she would most likely just melt into my muscled arms. My boilerplate artillery. OK, my totally hairless, scrawny-chicken-look

ing artillery.

But outset I had to figure out who I was this yr. And it had to be good.

After iii songs, Beatle-girl must have realized she needed to spend some of our luxurious twenty-iv minutes of lunchtime eating, considering she abruptly stopped playing, jumped upward, grabbed the coins out of her case, and placed her fascist-killing machine in at that place. When she was done flipping the footling latches on the case, she dragged her stool and the instance to the edge of the nearest table. I vaguely attempted to make eye contact, if staring intently at her sandals as she strode correct past me into the lunch line counts as an effort. Hey, she wore sandals, just similar me! We were practically cosmic twins!

I was still standing there, nigh the cashiers, trying to recollect of a great footwear-related pickup line, when Beatle-daughter reemerged from the steamy kitchen with a hideous-looking wheat-type wrap, bursting with massive tufts of bean sprouts. The grim food choice well-nigh forced me to turn my back on her as a potential life mate, but and so she redeemed herself by grabbing a pack of chocolate cupcakes from the little shelf at the finish of the counter only as she got to the cashier. Interestingly, she paid with a 20.

Only every bit I was adding this info-asset to my scanty shop of Beatle-daughter data, she looked right at me and spoke: "Woody."

I had no idea how to reply to this, although I tried my best: "Uh, Buzz?"

"No, I mean my name is Woody. Y'all're the new boy, right? In my social studies class?"

I was thinking, No, I've been here since sixth course, only nobody noticed, even though I'm the but Asian kid in the whole freaking school! But I was definitely learning how to seize with teeth dorsum the sarcasm, so I said, "Yeah, that'southward me. San. San Lee."

She only looked at me expectantly, like she was waiting for me to flare-up into a furious tap-trip the light fantastic number. And then I said, "I came here from Houston. Yesterday was my kickoff day."

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