Nice To Meet You Again

“And this is your Uncle Felix. And your Tita Luz. And your Tita Reyna. And your Auntie Baby. And your Kuya June.” I didn’t think I was really related to any of these people, but I just went with it. Cheek kissing them, them face sniffing me, me smiling without knowing who I was really speaking with and repeating my age and the fact that I was doing well. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to stop watching my cousins play video games, if I was in the middle of being chased, or even if I was literally trying to nap. When I heard the doorbell, my body instinctively turned from whatever I was doing and moved toward the front of the house. When I heard my parents say that so-and-so had arrived, my voice went on autopilot and greeted them as though it were a long-time reunion.

“Eight, nine, grains of rice?! You want to spend that many days in purgatory?!”

“Oh no, the children in Somalia are crying because they wish they had the food you want to throw away.”

“Was it bad? Are you saying I cannot cook? No? Are you sick then?”

Different relatives or family friends normed the idea that I had to finish my food. I didn’t even question whether I’d clean my plate. Even if I had eaten before going to a friend’s house, I still ate when I got there without even considering whether I even wanted to eat.

This was more than not being able to stop endlessly scrolling on social media. I took direction blindly and then rolled with inertia. It was not so much a restriction of choice as it was a way for me to relinquish the responsibility of making my own decisions. With this attitude, I couldn’t be blamed for changing course, or God forbid, for choosing to live according to what I wanted to do or how I thought. Playing the part of a good daughter, a good sister, a good cousin, a good student, a good neighbor, meant that life was predictable. It was safe.

And with my routine in order, Lien literally weaved a new pattern in my life’s design. Beyond the out-of-the-blue online messaging, she physically made space for herself in my conversations—and eventually, my dorm room, and most importantly, my worldview.

During the spring of sophomore year, Lien was selling Krispy Kreme donuts for an Alternative Spring Break fundraiser. One evening, she knocked on each door so loudly I could hear the crescendo of her solicitation as she got closer and closer to mine. With my roommate napping, I panicked, unsure of whether I should pretend to not be there. Will this be a short enough interaction to not wake my roommate?

I opened the door to an animated Lien. She wasn’t in seller mode. That was just her face, her vibe.
“Oh, hey!” Lien said as if she and I were childhood friends. “Soooo, I know you can smell these delicious donuts and are wondering how you can get some…” She opened the lid, shoving the box towards me and wiggling it between the doorframe and me to make the door open wider. Little did she know that my left foot was anchored on the other side of the door. I didn’t want to prolong the conversation.

I attempted a courteous decline. “I’m okay,” I started. But I ended up with an awkward rant. “That’s a lot of donuts. If I bought a box, I’d probably eat a dozen in one sitting while thinking about the homework I should be doing. I mean, eating a Krispy Kreme is like eating air. And I wouldn’t even notice how many I was eating.” I was only a couple inches taller than her, but Lien’s skinniness emphasized my much rounder body type.

Lien nodded vigorously and furrowed her eyebrows in concerned sympathy. Making another attempt, she said, “The beauty of the way I’m selling these is that you don’t have to buy a whole box! You can get a half dozen. Or just five.”

I thought to myself how funny the situation was. Lien’s tactic for my not wanting to devour a dozen donuts was to sell me slightly fewer donuts.

She continued, “And it’s not for me; it’s for an Alternative Spring Break. I’m co-leading a group to Natchez, Mississippi, to help a shelter for abused and neglected children. These kids don’t have much, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Well, our group has nothing either…but we can give our time and…” Lien began to look around the hallway. She was losing interest in her own pitch but caught herself after I turned to see if my roommate was still napping. “You can help change that! We can raise the money to get over there and…”

She talked about her trip at a pace that rivaled Gilmore Girls dialogue, but I tracked it. There was something about Lien’s positivity that made me want her to keep that confidence in change going. It was like I was her sales coach and wanted to see her make the sale. Except I also didn’t want to be the customer. So I nodded along and gave her my best listening expressions, smiling to let her know I was with her.

Eventually, I pretended to look around for money, as though she had made a clutch point and I was coming around. And, like a terrible reverse con artist, I pretended to struggle to find money, as though it was simply the lack of cash on hand that would foil the transaction.

“Sounds awesome. Buuuuuut unfortunately”—I deliberately withheld my words, as though I was distracted by my search for funds—“I don’t think I have any money on me. Maybe just coins lying around.” I closed the door as I spoke to signal the end of the conversation.

Lien grabbed the part of the door frame near my head, sticking her hand in the tiny crack left between the door and the frame. I remember getting a split second’s worth of adrenaline, thinking I was about to wreck the poor girl’s hand.

“Great, I’ll take it!” she half-shouted. Whether she was calling my bluff or genuinely believed I had loose change around, I’ll never know.

“Aww, dude, I don’t really know where my change is.” I rocked from side to side, continuing my low-energy search. There was nothing around me. I’m not sure what I could have even pretended to be looking at. I wondered if I looked like a drunk groupie dancing to music only in my head. It was a terrible attempt. I wanted this to be over.

“Oh, no. Don’t even worry about it. I can wait. You seem cool, and I want you to be able to have some of these beauties. They’re really good. I want everyone to get some of these boxes so my team can go to Mississippi, but I keep eating them so I’m the one that keeps buying them. Just look at them, tempting us, look at…” Lien kept talking, peppering self-deprecating jokes between more explanations of why the trip was cause-worthy. She was good at carrying on the conversation without me.

As I rummaged around my room and lifted objects to demonstrate effort, I checked again to see if my roommate was still napping on the top bunk. The place was only illuminated by a beam of hallway light and the dim glow of my computer monitor. Is this song and dance really necessary just to avoid spending a little money? Yes. Will Lien realize I am putting on this show? Maybe. But I’m not about to let her have a sales victory just because of a persistence tactic.

Lien interrupted my fake searching. She said, “You have a nice place. I like what you did with…” She tried to wedge her face through the door opening so that more light creeped into the room. “…that…card table?”

My roommate and I lived a low-budget lifestyle and proudly took everyone’s scraps to fill out the room. We used an unwanted mahjong table with legs too tired to stand up straight. The AC unit didn’t fit properly in its hole, so we used the pieces that stuck out to hang clothes. Later, I would learn that Lien was weirded out by the used 1970s decor because she thought it was our taste.
While I continued to look, therefore no longer holding the door, Lien began to let herself in. Nervous that she would take a self-guided tour, I grabbed all the coins from a sauce cup, exactly where I knew my loose change would be, and darted back to her.

“Hey, so, I have…” I fumbled with the coins. It was as if I’d forgotten how to do basic math. “…maybe $3.70?” I was a little upset that I had that much change. I really didn’t want the donuts.

Lien responded, “Oh, that’s okay. You can still get a couple donuts. I’m rounding up for you!”

Obviously, she thought my contribution was less than impressive. “Okay, thanks, bye!” And with those last words, Lien thwarted my ability to turn her away, handed me a couple of donuts, and then sped off to walk down the hall to her next sales victim.

Unsure if I made the right move during that last bit of conversation, I slowly closed the door. At the same time, I looked up to see if my roommate had awakened. If she hadn’t, maybe I’d nap myself. Nope, she was still asleep.

The short-lived silence was broken, and Lien walked backward in real-life rewind. “Hey!” She overpowered my careful tucking in of the door, almost hitting it with her face. “What do you think of the roomie situation next year?”

I was taken aback. Between our first encounter and this one, our two mutual friends, Margaret and Jenny, had invited us both to live with them, along with Carol, a senior who got a good lottery ticket and could get us into a coveted five-person suite. I knew Lien the least of these friends and didn’t expect her to talk to me, let alone ask me about my thoughts on how we were going to split up the suite. In fact, I assumed that since I didn’t know Lien well, we obviously wouldn’t pair up in one of the rooms together.

“Carol’s getting the single, and Margaret and Jenny seem like really good friends, right? So, maybe those two should share a double, and you and me should share the other room. You’re cool, and they’re already so close, so I figured we should make that happen.” Lien was a salesperson no matter what she talked about.

I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I was flattered to be asked, but on the other, I wasn’t sure we shared the same lifestyle. I think Lien saw me as most did: quiet and committed to school clubs. I knew very little about her: she was known for impulsively inserting herself into conversation and pursuing what perhaps others wanted to do in the moment but edited themselves against.
“Um, wow. Bold. I don’t even know you! And you are. So. Very. Loud! Besides, I know Margaret and Jenny, and I’d feel a lot more comfortable living with someone I knew.”

Of course, I couldn’t say that to her. That’s just what I was feeling. We were supposed to get lunch the following week and pull names out of a hat for that. I could have told Lien that Margaret and Jenny probably would have been open to rooming with either one of us. What I actually said was something like, “Yeah they’re pretty chummy.” It would take several more years for me to stop giving in to my people-pleasing ways, not just with Lien, but with anyone.

Lien kept that momentum going. She said, “Yeah, let’s just room together. Cause we’re cool and not clingy, and we can be the cool room in the suite.”

Like all my interactions with Lien thus far, I just wanted to get out of the moment. My then-pushover personality went for the compromise. So I said, “Okay, cool. We can tell them next week when we do that pre-roommate lunch thing. See what they say.”

Lien closed out the conversation: “Awesome, this is gonna be great.” She fist-pumped with her left arm and hand and elevated one box of donuts up and down with her right. That now totaled three things she had gotten from me.

In retrospect, I felt really good that someone as popular as Lien wanted to live with me. It built up my confidence. It was like being picked first by the captain of a sports team. But in the moment, I knew we used dorm spaces for different purposes. I didn’t want to be sexiled from our room when I was already a bad sleeper. I didn’t want to have music and late-home arrivals dominate the soundscape.

Lien was breaking all the social rules I thought everyone knew. And I let it happen. But as an undercover optimist, I thought I’d be more assertive with Lien once we got to know each other.
I was naive.

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