“We gotta be careful here.” Tim gestured toward the Wildcats’ dugout, where Mikey had his video camera set up on a tripod. “This is gonna be on TV.”
LORI CHANG smiled quizzically as I approached the mound, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine why I was paying her a social visit in the middle of the game.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, sounding a little more worried than she looked.
Lori was one of only three girls playing in our Little League that season. I know it’s politically incorrect to say so, but the other two, Allie Reagan and Steph Murkowski, were tomboys — husky, tough-talking jockettes you could easily imagine playing college rugby and marching in Gay Pride parades later in their lives.
Lori Chang, on the other hand, didn’t even look like an athlete. She was petite, with a round, serious face and lustrous hair that she wore in a ponytail threaded through the back of her baseball cap. Unlike Allie and Steph, both of whom were fully developed in a chunky, none-too-feminine way, Lori had not yet reached puberty. She was lithe and curveless, her chest as flat as a boy’s beneath the stretchy fabric of her Ravens jersey. And yet — I hope it’s okay to talk like this, because it’s true — there was something undeniably sexual about her presence on the baseball field. She wore lipstick and nail polish, giggled frequently for no reason, and blushed when her teammates complimented her performance. She was always tugging down her jersey in the back, as if she suspected the shortstop and third baseman of paying a little too much attention to her ass. In short, she was completely adorable. If I’d been twelve, I would’ve had a hopeless crush on her.
Which is why it was always such a shock when she let loose with the high hard one. Unlike other pitchers her age, who struggled just to put the ball over the plate, Lori actually had a strategy, a potent combination of control, misdirection, patience, and outright intimidation. She tended to jam batters early in the count and occasionally brushed them back, though to my knowledge she’d never actually hit anyone. Midcount she often switched to changeups and breaking balls, working on the outside corner. Once she had the batter appropriately spooked and thoroughly off-balance, she liked to rear back and finish him off with a sizzler right down the pipe. These two-strike fastballs hopped and dived so unpredictably that it was easy to lose track of them. Some of the batters didn’t even realize the ball had crossed the plate until they heard the slap of leather against leather and turned in angry amazement to see a small but decisive puff of dust rising from the catcher’s mitt.
I had no idea where she’d learned to pitch like that. Lori was a newcomer to our town, one of those high-achieving Asian kids who’ve flocked here in the past decade (every year, it seems, the valedictorian of our high school has a Chinese or Korean or Indian last name). In just a few months, she’d established herself as an excellent student, a gifted violinist, and a powerhouse on the baseball diamond, despite the fact that she could usually be found waiting tables and filling napkin dispensers at Happy Wok #2, the restaurant her parents had opened on Grand Avenue.
“There’s nothing wrong,” I told her. “Just keep right on doing what you’re doing.”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You came all the way out here to tell me that?”
“It’s really not that far,” I said, raising my mask just high enough that she could see I was smiling.
BY THE end of the third inning, Lori had struck out eight of the first nine batters she’d faced. The only Wildcat to even make contact was Ricky DiSalvo, Carl’s youngest son and the league leader in home runs and RBIs, who got handcuffed by a fastball and dinged a feeble check-swing grounder to second.
Lori’s father, Happy Chang, was sitting by himself in the third-base bleachers, surrounded by Wildcats fans. Despite his nickname, Mr. Chang was a grim, unfriendly man who wore the same dirty beige windbreaker no matter how hot or cold it was and always seemed to need a shave. Unlike the other Asian fathers in our town — most of them were doctors, computer scientists, and businessmen who played golf and made small talk in perfect English — Happy Chang had a rough edge, a just-off-the-boat quality that reminded me of those guys you often saw milling around on Canal Street in the city, making disgusting noises and spitting on the sidewalk. I kept glancing at him as the game progressed, waiting for him to crack a smile or offer a word of encouragement, but he remained stone-faced, as if he wished he were back in his restaurant, keeping an eye on the lazy cooks, instead of watching his amazing daughter dominate the Wildcats in front of the whole town on a lovely summer evening.
Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, I thought. Maybe they don’t like to show emotion in public. Or maybe — I had no idea, but it didn’t keep me from speculating — he wished he had a son instead of a daughter (as far as I could tell, Lori was an only child). Like everybody else, I knew about the Chinese preference for boys over girls. One of my coworkers, a single woman in her late thirties, had recently traveled to Shanghai to adopt a baby girl abandoned by her parents. She said the orphanages were full of them.
But if Happy Chang didn’t love his daughter, how come he came to every game? For that matter, why did he let her play at all? My best guess — based on my own experience as a father — was that he simply didn’t know what to make of her. In China, girls didn’t play baseball. So what did it mean that Lori played the game as well or better than any American boy? Maybe he was divided in his mind between admiring her talent and seeing it as a kind of curse, a symbol of everything that separated him from his past. Maybe that was why he faithfully attended her games, but always sat scowling on the wrong side of the field, as if he were rooting for her opponents. Maybe his daughter was as unfathomable to him as my own son had been to me.
LIKE MOST men, I’d wanted a son who reminded me of myself as a kid, a boy who lived for sports, collected baseball cards, and hung pennants on his bedroom walls. I wanted a son who played tackle football down at the schoolyard with the other neighborhood kids and came home with ripped pants and skinned knees. I wanted a son I could take to the ballpark and play catch with in the backyard.
But Jason was an artistic, dreamy kid with long eyelashes and delicate features. He loved music and drew elaborate pictures of castles and clouds and fairy princesses. He enjoyed playing with his sisters’ dolls and exhibited what I thought was an unhealthy interest in my wife’s jewelry and high heels. When he was seven years old, he insisted on going out trick-or-treating dressed as Pocahontas. Everywhere he went, people kept telling him how beautiful he was, and it was impossible not to see how happy this made him.
Jeanie did her best to convince me that it wasn’t a problem; she cut out magazine articles that said he was simply engaged in harmless “gender play” and recommended that we let him follow his heart and find his own way in the world. She scolded me for using words like sissy and wimp, and for trying to enforce supposedly outdated standards of masculinity. I tried to get with the program, but it was hard. I was embarrassed to be seen in public with my own son, as if he somehow made me less of a man.
It didn’t help that Carl had three normal boys living right next door. They were always in the backyard kicking a soccer ball, tossing a football, or beating the crap out of one another. Sometimes they included my son in their games, but it wasn’t much fun for any of them.