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| Patty Chang Anker |
My first day in Mr. Weinstein’s fourth grade science class at P.S. 95 in the Bronx, he introduced me as the new student from Toronto. “So, what do you think of the Blue Jays?” he asked. I sat at my desk watching the other students watch me, and wondered if it was a trick question. “They’re terrible,” I replied. He broke out in a big smile and the rest of the class just about cheered. Whew. Right answer.
It was one of many trick questions I got as the new kid, harder than “Hey Chinese girl, can you speak English?” but a lot easier than “Are you a virgin?” when I had no idea what the word meant. I was an easy target, an innocent in a sea of street-wise 9-year-olds, but even I knew better than to root against the home team.
We became Yankee fans right away. My dad, a Chinese immigrant who worked tirelessly to improve his English to improve his job prospects, wanted us to fit in. He read the New York Times in the morning, watched Walter Cronkite in the evening. And every chance he could from April to October, he listened to Phil Rizzuto call America’s favorite pastime on the radio.
He would lie in bed, eyes closed, concentrating on the play-by-play. My mom, sister and I gave him, the lone man and sports fan in the home, little access to our only television. Who would, when there was Love Boat to be watched? But once when we took pity on him and offered a turn, he declined. “I like the radio,” he said.
I watched him listen to the game. “Here’s the pitch, and the swing and…” and for the moment the ball was in the air he was motionless, at the mercy of the announcer, “and it’s a fly ball to left field.” Exhale and relax. Held by a stranger’s voice, both hypnotic and thrilling.
But as dislocated as I felt, there was one tremendous advantage in America. My birthday.
Yankee Stadium on July 4 was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. In the best birthday present of my life, my dad took us to the night game, where everyone was happy to be alive. “New York crowds are livelier than Toronto crowds,” he observed. That was an understatement. The whooping, the rumbling, the music made us grin ear-to-ear. We got to see the players we’d only heard about, we ate hot dogs and did the 7th inning stretch. After the game, the fireworks were so close my dad thought sparks might fall on our heads.
My parents always told me that America was a great country, a place where people are free. Outside the stadium, in the dirty, crime-ridden streets of New York in the early 1980s, it was harder to see. But inside the stadium, bombs bursting in air, we sang the national anthem with our whole hearts, we cheered for the home team like everyone else. Go Yankees! We belonged.
Last year we treated my dad to a game at Yankee Stadium on his birthday. We chose a day game so the little ones in our clan could go. Surrounded by grandchildren, their eyes wide with excitement overlooking the field, he looked as content as could be. The crowd roared approval. And grinning ear-to-ear, we did too.
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Patty Chang Anker is a writer whose work has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Huffington Post and iVillage, and the blogger behind Facing Forty Upside Down (www.upside-down-patty.blogspot.com). She is married to a Mets fan and no longer lives in the Bronx. Sigh.
I met Patty when she was a student journalist and I was a guest editor on the staff of a newspaper project at the 1991 annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association. Earlier this year, we reconnected on Facebook.
Tomorrow: The Situation | Nancy Rommelmann
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