"Eleven Reasons Why Asian Americans Are (Very) Good At Math" by Grace Chao
Because we can’t—we won’t—fail at anything we do.
Because knowing the value of a derivative is critical. The derivative is almost always close to zero for us and limitless for everyone else. Kung-pao chicken (without MSG!): a thousand golden years; jacquard mandarin collars and kimono sleeves (without Asian bodies!): a never-ending waterfall of good for- tune and prosperity; two-second punchlines (only Asians included!): priceless.
We deploy complex eye-to-nose-to-mouth ratios to tell all our beige faces apart. We start practicing from birth.
Asian Americans, especially children, are even better at fractions and subtraction. The number of birthday parties we have been invited to, as one Asian child out of 160 total children attending Hillcreek Elementary in Austin, Texas, is zero out of twenty, and don’t forget the pizza party where the mom and dad took everyone to watch Mulan. We keep telling our- selves that 1999 was twenty-two years ago, which everyone says is more like eighty-eight years ago, so can’t we forget about it already? It’s called the order of operations, everyone says, or thinks if they don’t say.
Because there is no time for sex, and all the free time we have must be saved for studying math, which is why we’re so good at it. We grew up learning that Asian men don’t have sex, and Asian women have lots of it, but only as dragon-lady prostitutes or super docile bound-up duct-taped fawns, which doesn’t really fit our style, thus we only have time for surprised/amused sex.
Again, you only get wizard-crazy at math after days and weeks and years of practice, and Asian Americans are professionals at doing the same thing again and again and again, including starting over. We shoveled twenty pounds of rocks 400 times a day, and when laying 700 miles of train tracks from California to Utah wasn’t enough, we left for eighty years and returned to wash suits and fry rice and start multi-billion-dollar apps. We stitched on our puffy Uniqlo zip-ups, “HOW ’BOUT NOW?”
Also, between 1883 and 1965 (see above), we had more than enough years to brush up on linear algebra and combinatorics and differential equations in case anyone wanted to test us when we came back. We had so many years to study that half of us died. Turns out, everyone just wanted to copy our answers.
Because our dark-haired fathers, wooden rulers snapping in tanned fists, forced us to be great at it.
Speaking of basics, knowing how to count is extremely important. That is why we know exactly the number of Asian Americans who have been nominated for a best actor Oscar (1), the number of Asian Americans who have ever won a supporting actor Oscar (2), the number of major Hollywood releases with an Asian principal cast (2)—well, looks like you don’t really have to know how to count when calculating Asian American-Hollywood affairs, unless it is the number of times Asian men have been christened “Dong” onscreen. More useful to remember the real names in this case: Steven Yeun (alive), Haing S. Ngor (murdered), Miyoshi Umeshi (also dead).
When we DO have to count, no one will do the counting for us. The government, local or national, will not count the number of people who look like us who are being spit on, robbed, stabbed, or murdered per year, in 2021 or one hundred years ago, so we must count the runny faces and bloody bodies ourselves: 3,800, 3,801, 3802, 3,803… then drink two glasses of oolong tea to hydrate. Also, biology or whatever you need to know to create mega-mutant viruses is getting a bad rap when paired with Asians, so math—the more advanced, the more impressive—is a welcoming guise.
Let me tell you: all Asian Americans are good at math because math makes sense. Math is truth: four plus four equals eight, and we can find the volume of a cylinder by multiplying pi by radius squared by height, whether the cylinder is a bottle of Taiwan beer or a grain silo we spot on a road trip or the amount of air that our black-haired, beige-skinned, dark- eyed bodies are allowed in an expanse that is rarely ours. Math is what is left after we have lifted away the layers of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology, psychology being the process that rockets through our brain when we ask, why is it O.K. that the progressive-looking comedian at the Comedy Cellar can still point at our faces and ask if our mother is a tiger and if our cocktail is sporting a tariff and if we met each other on Asian-Swipe, oh how hilarious because he made up that app the moment he saw us as he climbed onstage; why is it O.K. that the family that arrived second is seated first at the restaurant our older sister picked out on the night of her college graduation, a microbiology bachelor’s and an art history minor, who cares if we saved money or years for this day; why is it O.K. that our father, age sixty years, American for thirty-five, is made to stand in an interrogation room in the San Francisco Airport for an hour, no chairs and no phones, no matter that the metal detector picked up radiation in his blood from a procedure to passage four stents into his afflicted heart and there are hospital records to prove it, so what if he can also speak English to explain it; why is it O.K. that the women and men, of all ages, at the Comedy Cellar are still snickering, giggling, guffawing, silent, staring deep into their drinks, weeknights, weekdays, weekends? Math does not budge, math does not favor. Math will never leave. When we have stripped the scarves and coats of the store, office, street, and school, untied our shoes, and opened the bright wooden door to home, we see what is left and what is true: our mother, father, sister, brother, waiting, room warm, dinner ready, faces and full hearts screaming, We know.
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Grace Chao lives in San Francisco. Her stories have appeared in Necessary Fiction and Z Publishing’s America’s Emerging Writers anthology series. She attends the University of Oregon’s creative writing MFA program.
