My Reflection In The (Super) Bowl

Blurb: A post-Hunsford exposition of Darcy’s self-realization, with Chinese characters. Darcy is William Deng Fei, born in Beijing and educated in the US since high school. Georgiana is Gianna Doherty (born as Deng Jia), who was given up for adoption at birth due to the one-child policy in China. Bingley is Chase Lin Chao, a coworker and friend of William’s at Google.

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“Ge (big brother)?” Gianna’s FaceTime habits caught me by surprise, especially when it had only been two months since I’d reconnected with her. Somehow, I’d expected her to take some time to warm up to me, but she had readily adopted that term of address the minute we got our DNA test results back. Lately, she’d taken to FaceTiming me for half an hour every night from her dorm at college and spending any weekends that didn’t involve concert prep at my place. “What are you doing for Super Bowl Weekend?”

“Nothing special, why?” The truth was, almost all my weekends were the same whenever I was at home in Boston. I’d get my hot pot or dim sum fix in Chinatown with Chase and the guys, pick up fresh groceries at Copley Square Farmer’s Market and C-Mart, send my Mercedes to the car wash, exchange a week’s worth of shirts for freshly pressed ones at the laundry, spend a couple hours going through work e-mails and debugging code, and then if I had any time left over, I set aside exactly one hour per day to indulge in Mandarin-dubbed Korean dramas before spending the rest of it improving my mind through reading. Adventure, to my mind, had always been overrated, even during my teenage years, which were now fading fast into ancient history. “It’s just another weekend for me.”

“You mean, you don’t watch Super Bowl? How could you not, when you’ve lived in America since you were fourteen?”

“No, I never did. Because it’s folk entertainment.” The minute the words left my mouth, I regretted them, for it never was my intent to hurt the feelings of a college freshman. Furthermore, Gianna wasn’t just any random freshman; she was a freshman at Harvard with a seat at the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra that I’d coveted in my time, plus she was my own biological sister to boot. Belatedly, I remembered this wasn’t the only time I’d put my foot in it where American football was concerned. Back in the early years of my Google career, when I was based in Mountain View, I’d remarked to my fellow SDEs (software development engineers) that the NFL was for philistines, and Chase had needled me for weeks afterward about the damage control he had to do on my behalf.

“Well, what kind of sports do you watch, then?” Gianna’s face had fallen at my insult to the Super Bowl, but she was simply too kind in forgiving my faux pas and patiently persevering in getting to know me anyway.

“I try to watch at least one PGA Tour event in person a year. The next time you come over, I’ll show you the baseball cap Tiger Woods autographed for me.” I also had a stack of souvenir polo T-shirts, one for each of the tournaments I saw; anyone could buy a Patriots or Red Sox jersey at the mall, but a zip-T with “Pebble Beach” embroidered on it wasn’t exactly something you could pick up at your friendly neighbourhood Target or Wal-Mart.

“Wow, I’d love to see it,” came Gianna’s eager reply. “But can I expand your repertoire a little? You’re missing out on so much fun if you’ve never done Super Bowl Sunday, because it’s not just about the football, but also the halftime shows and the commercials are so awesome, you could talk about it to your friends for days afterwards. It’s a real bummer the Patriots are out this year, but Peyton Manning is such a hunk, so I guess that kind of makes up for it since I like him better than Tom Brady anyway. This year is the first time I can’t be at home on Super Bowl Sunday with my family, but now you’re family too, so maybe we could pick up some chicken wings and tortilla chips and start a new tradition.”

As always, Gianna had that knack of turning me into putty without ever meaning to do so; I might not have been personally responsible for turning her over to the orphanage, since I was only twelve years old at the time, but I felt equally culpable no matter who in my family had done the deed. We were responsible for her growing up wondering why her birth family had abandoned her, and I was the only person with the ability to give her closure and reparations. So, I could never deny her anything she wanted in the name of family togetherness; even though I thought snacking on chips and fried chicken sounded like the epitome of unhealthy eating, it simply couldn’t be helped that her adoptive family had ingrained such habits in her since childhood. After all, they were white and owned a fish-and-chip restaurant in Cape Cod, so you probably couldn’t get more Middle America than that.

The commercial, the one that went viral, aired the Wednesday before the big day, and Gianna wasted no time in WhatsApping it to me, with the message “SQUEEEEE…” and a flurry of heart emojis after it. Ostensibly it was about a horse and a dog, which of course would make it irresistibly adorable to the entire teenage female population, but I knew better than that, the song was clearly about a woman. Even I couldn’t possibly delude myself that I was special enough for the universe to target me in such a pointed way, but this ad, the one that happened to be trending all over social media in the runup to Super Bowl weekend, was practically designed to call out my situation with one particular woman.

Well, you only need the light when it’s burning low

Only miss the sun when it starts to snow

Only know you love her when you let her go

Only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low

Only hate the road when you’re missing home

Only know you love her when you let her go

And you let her go

This song called out the one thing about my behaviour that Elizabeth Bennet had mercifully left out of her rapier-sharp digs at me: my ingratitude. I should have been thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with one of the most talented young software engineers of my acquaintance. After my sheer good fortune to get both the relocation to the Boston area that I requested and a promotion to program management at the same time, I should never have abused the title of “manager”, especially when it was effectively a courtesy title since none of the engineers officially reported into me. Furthermore, had I been more circumspect about my opinions of Elizabeth’s coding habits and her family situation, I might at least be able to have her friendship, instead of sparking off an embarrassing public spectacle in the middle of the Google cafeteria that, most likely, neither of us will recover from.

Why had I ever bemoaned that she came from “middle America”, with a family that (surprise, surprise) was hedonistic enough to multiply faster than they could grow college funds for their daughters? Even Jay Chou, the undisputed king of Mandopop, considered marrying a girl of Western lineage to be a matter of prestige; at the age of thirty-five, well beyond the point when anyone might consider him a sworn bachelor, he’d announced his engagement to Hannah Quinlivan, a half-Australian, half-Chinese-Korean beauty almost fifteen years his junior. I should be so lucky to find someone with beauty, brains and youth (and I did), and yet, as the song said, I’d let her go.

She’d called me a misogynist when I’d called her family situation tragic, a strangely circular situation that now came back to bite me. For it might be true that in China, a family with five daughters would indeed be tragic – it spoke of the desperate wish to have a son, gone unfulfilled. And my family had committed the ultimate act of misogyny by sending their second child, still their own flesh and blood, away because she was a daughter, and violating the one-child policy would bring heavy fines and penalties upon them. Had she been a son, would my parents have kept her and paid up the fines? I’d never know, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.

Well, I could start anew by being grateful for the one thing I’d been given a chance to repair: my relationship with Gianna. I could let her make my home her own, a safe refuge in a town where, for the first time in her short life, she was living away from the only family she knew. I could start out by trying to meet her halfway in understanding the culture she was brought up in, while sharing with her the one she had been born to.

On Super Bowl Sunday, I let her lounge on my couch on a cozy pile of pillows, munching companionably on chicken wings and chips while she explained the plays to me and I facepalmed along with her at every missed opportunity for the Broncos. To put it mildly, this certainly wasn’t Peyton Manning’s day at all. And at half-time, that infernal ad aired to the sound of our sighs in perfect unison: she in adoration, and I in agony.

“Take it that the Patriots were avenged, and maybe we’ll feel better,” I said, to cheer Gianna up. “And now, let’s go get a dinner that’ll warm us both up.”

Of course, I took her to my favourite hot pot restaurant. Skimming the layer of chili oil off the top of the bowl of soup I’d ladled out for her, Gianna picked up a piece of meat from the bowl with her chopsticks, put it all into her mouth, and tried to hide her grimace as she gulped down a few mouthfuls of water.

“Ge, you really should eat more healthily,” she said. “This soup is so oily, it can’t possibly be a good idea to drink too much of it.” Pausing for a while, she took a mouthful of rice, then nibbled more circumspectly on the second piece of meat she picked out of the soup. “But this is actually quite delicious, even though those peppercorns need some getting used to,” she added. “Thank you.”

“Anytime, Xiao Jia*,” I replied. And for the first time since that debacle with Elizabeth, I smiled.

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*Xiao Jia means “little Jia”, since Jia is Gianna’s Chinese name, and “xiao” (meaning small) is an affectionate diminutive you would use to address a younger relative.